VentureBeat

As someone who has been home for one weekend of the past six, I know that traveling can be a real pain. While the Internet has eased some burdens such as scheduling and price hunting, it has also created new ones, such as organizing trip details when plans are often made across several sites. That is where a site like TripIt comes in.

There are a lot of online traveling sites such as Kayak (our coverage), but TripIt sets itself apart by organizing your travel information after you have scheduled it.

Using TripIt is as simple as forwarding the travel itinerary email that you get sent when you book a site online to the email address, plans@tripit.com. Assuming you’ve sent the email from an address you have registered to your TripIt account, the service will then build you a new itinerary within TripIt that adds several useful items such as weather information, access to maps of the area, pictures of the area from Flickr and other features. The great thing about forwarding these plans is that TripIt will take several different details such as a flight and hotel booked on separate sites, and place them together one one page.

“We have so many overlapping applications, and the next frontier is getting them to work better together,” says Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, one of the site’s investors.

The service also has social features that allow you to share plans with friends and find out when someone you know is near you on a trip. In this regard, TripIt is similar to a service like Dopplr, but TripIt has offers organizational tools far beyond that service.

The best feature of TripIt is the ease with which you can access all of your organized travel information on a mobile device. Printing out and organizing multiple sheets of paper for various reservations is a hassle. The recently launched TripIt Mobile eliminates that waste.

This latest $5.1 million series B round was led by Sabre Holdings, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and European Founders Fund. The San Francisco-based company previously raised $1 million last year from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (our coverage).

This new investment will be used to expand development, marketing and support for those users who have signed up with the service. Additionally, with the European Founders Fund on board, TripIt hopes to expand its service globally.

Personal electronic devices with Internet connections are all the rage these days. A small, part touch-screen, part stuffed animal called Chumby is hands down the most endearing of these.

Chumby’s parent company, Chumby Industries, announced today a new round of financing to expand the reach of its cute device. Interestingly, the company is also looking to expand beyond the Chumby into other devices that use screen interaction such as digital picture frames and possibly even LCD TVs.

The Chumby uses widgets that are selected online and sent over the Internet to your device. Given that the device looks a bit like a stuffed alarm clock, it should probably be no surprise that clocks are among the most popular widgets. Yet, the Chumby can do so much more. You can check your Gmail from it, cycle through Flickr photos, and see hot items from the social news site Digg. There are dozens of widgets available across a wide range of categories, and the list is constantly growing.

As an early beta tester of the pre-release, I have grown particularly close with my Chumby. When I’m not using it to display the latest Twitter messages, I have the ‘Kane Approves‘ widget (a looped video of Orsen Welles clapping exuberantly, as in Citizen Kane) in constant rotation. Visitors who come into my apartment often remark that such widgets almost turn the device into a piece of art.

The $12.5 million round was led by JK&B Capital. Previous backers Avalon Ventures, Masthead Venture Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures also contributed to this round. Marc Sokol of JK&B will join Chumby Industries’ Board of Directors.

Chumby Industries is based out of San Diego, CA.

[photo: flickr/parislemon]

The online advertising world continues to get shaken up.

OpenAds, a company based in London, is the latest to drive change, undercutting the old guard with a low-cost offering. It offers Web site owners something called an “ad server,” a device lets them take control of their online advertising management. It provides the technology needed by Web sites to control advertising creative, insert into the right place on a Web site at the right time, and then monitor how the advertising performs.

Today, OpenAds announced it is offering a free hosted version, letting Web companies avoid the need for their own server. It also announced it has raised $15.5 million more in financing to expand.

Ad servers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. For example, they can note if you arrive at a site for the second time in an hour and be programmed to show you a different ad than the one you saw the first time — to improve efficiency (here’s a demo of how it works).

There’s also a huge and growing market for ad management, as more and more people go to the web to research and read.

OpenAds’ server is open source, and therefore so cheap that it is undercutting the incumbents, such as Microsoft’s aQuantive, and giant Doubleclick, the company Google is acquiring. While the basic version is free, OpenAds gets paid by offering support.

The second round of financing is led by Accel Partners, with previous investors Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures participating. It follows a first $5 million round last year.

OpenAds says it is used by more than 30,000 publishers worldwide.

[Disclosure: Satisfaction is led by Thor Muller, who is an advisor to VentureBeat. ]

Satisfaction, a San Francisco company that aims to improve online customer service by letting the customers effectively take over the process, has raised $1.3 million seed funding.

VentureBeat reviewed the company two months ago. Satisfaction creates customer support pages for companies and their products. But it goes beyond the standard customer support pages. It gives companies a way to provide answers — but also lets customers answer the questions. The more popular answers get voted to the top of the pile. If a newcomer asks a question that is similar to one already asked, Satisfaction gives the answers already provided.

The funding comes from First Round Capital, O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, and others including Jeff Clavier, Adaptive Path, Mike Brown, Jason Schultz (EFF)

The company also opened up the site so that anyone can create a customer service site for a company or product (until now it had been in testing, and you had to apply).

The company also has two other new offerings. First, it has released a widget of the customer service page for companies to embed if in their own support pages.

Second, it also lets companies embed a more dynamic FAQ page. Satisfaction assesses the questions that are most frequently asked, and updates the FAQ page in real time — as the issues being asked about change. See below for an example of this being done at a handbag site, Timbuk2.

Wesabe, a Web site that lets people manage their finances, and network with network with others for advice, has raised $4 million in a first round of financing.

We first wrote about the Berkeley, Calif. company in November.

The financing was led by Union Square Ventures, of New York, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, of San Francisco, which provided the company with seed money. Its advantage over incumbent services such as Quicken is that it is online and offers its service is free.

However, the company has plenty of competition offering similar services including online services from mainstream banks. It is unclear how many people are entrusting their finances with Wesabe. The company says it has had “tens of thousands” of people register, and that between 60 and 70 percent of the people have returned to the site at least once after registering.

Competitor Buxfer launched a couple of months earlier, and offers more compelling visual graphics, such as pie charts, while offering similar other basic features such as importing expense transactions and providing ways to tag them. With Buxfer, you can add also your transactions via SMS. It does have some group features, such as ways to split expenses with roommates. There’s also Mint, which still hasn’t launched, but has generated buzz since getting backed by First Round Capital.

Wesabe’s Marc Hedlund tells VentureBeat Wesabe’s primary advantage is the extensiveness of its social networks: It lets people share tips about places they visited while dining, and things such as bank fees and debt levels — which provide ways for people to make better financial decisions, Hedlund said. The company has recently offered a Flash-based bar graph comparing expense categories.