VentureBeat

Yahoo is set to announce the acquisition of open-source email provider Zimbra, a company that has made headway providing services for other big companies such as Comcast. The news was first reported by AllthingsD, but there was no price mentioned. It’s rumored to be $350 million, according to Techcrunch.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Zimbra’s clients include ISPs and a number of colleges. It was backed with $30.5 million in three rounds from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Partners, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich.

The great thing about Zimbra is its flexibility (see past coverage). Its Ajax interface allows nimble switching between calendars, contacts and other features, including mashups so that addresses within emails can pop up as Google maps — although those who have used the service say the user experience is mixed. It kept promising a consumer version, but until now hasn’t delivered it, thus limiting its popularity.

Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures, in particular made a killing. They each owned a quarter of the company after investing about $9 million, the firms told Dow Jones.  They each receive roughly $90 million with this deal, giving them a ten-fold return in four years.

This is the latest result that helps Redpoint redeem itself. The company launched with great fanfare near the top of the bubble in 2000, but didn’t produce anything until about a year ago.

Accel invested later, in a $15 million second round in 2005 and Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, Inventures Group and Presidio STX invested as part of a $14.5 million third round last year.

Dell said it has agreed to buy Zing Systems, a Mountain View, Calif. company that provides wireless download technology for mp3 or digital players. The terms were undisclosed.

Dell said it bought the company (see statement) to help its consumer business, but did not specify what devices would be supported with Zing’s WiFi access technology.

Although Zing doesn’t solve the wireless download problem for Apple’s iPod/iPhone, it does it for other mp3 or digital players, such as the Sansa (image left) from Sandisk, and Stiletto satellite radio players from Sirius. We covered the company’s launch here.

It had raised $13 million earlier this year from IDG Ventures Boston and Redpoint Ventures, for a total of just under $20 million in backing.

Obopay, the Redwood City, Calif. company that lets you send payments to people from a mobile phone, has raised $29 million more in a third round of funding.

The service launched last year, and it’s not clear how much traction it has. The funding announcement was made quietly, after the fact (see wording), quite low-key given the intense competition the company is facing in mobile payments. There are at least eight other players, ranging from Google and PayPal, to smaller players like Kushcash (coverage here), Paymate (coverage here), Danal, PaymentOne, Payoneer and Vivotech (all covered or mentioned here). Granted, they each have their own strategy and focus.

We previously wrote about the company here, mentioning its BREW technology. It previously raised $17 million

Richmond Global Cellular led the round, which included AllianceBernstein L.P., Citi, Societe Generale and others. Previous investors Qualcomm and Redpoint Ventures also participated, the company said.

In May, Google Checkout announced its support of mobile payments. Last month, PayPal launched its mobile payment version, however only announcing it officially this Tuesday (see eweek article).

You might think that by now, VCs would use business plans from new social network companies as kindling.

But Hollywood-based Buzznet, a network devoted to allowing indie music fans to bond over the bands they love, has raised $6 million in its second round of funding from Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners. It was valued at more than $20 million, post-investment.

The site is different than music networking sites such as Last.fm . Instead of focusing on online radio, it lets fans post boilerplate social network content like photos, videos, comments and blogs — on a bands’ actual Buzznet profile pages. In some cases, the band members respond. On MySpace, the content on a band’s page is entirely controlled by the band.

Buzznet is aware that it’s not the next MySpace or Facebook, but is taking a different approach, targeting what it calls a “passion group”–in this case indie music junkies–that will generate content itself and keep coming back for more. The company says it hooked over six million active users generating 100-150 million page views per month, a 300 percent increase since the beginning of this year. According to HitWise, in terms of percentage growth, this makes Buzznet the fastest growing social network on the web.

However, looking at the site, we don’t understand why. From the front page on, it’s chaos, with flashing banner ads on the right and shifting photographs on the left. The further down into the site you dig, the more chaotic it becomes. Profile pages are packed with inelegantly placed photos and videos, and a band’s bio is squeezed into a little scrollable text box.

We talked to Buzznet’s Chairman, Tyler Goldman, and he described the site as a “Wikipedia for music,” but with so much visual clutter on every profile page, actually gleaning anything meaningful about a band was a difficult task. Tyler said that the company expects to monetize with advertising, and they did manage to score a deal with Honda for the Honda Civic tour, but that involved creating a totally different site. The company is confident it will succeed where everyone else has failed and convince advertisers to hawk their wares amidst user-generated content. They raised this recent round to build out a top-notch ad sales team to do the job.

Unheard of mobile service company Mig33 is showing explosive growth — by offering a simple way to text, IM and make cheap voice calls.

The company has gained four million subscribers in less than eighteen months, mostly in South East Asia, many of whom are using it as their only way to access the Web. Significantly, this is not a technology company. It is using standard technology, and following through with a clean execution.

Tomorrow (Monday) it announces it has raised $10 million from Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures, two well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Technology Venture Partners also invested.

Its traction is impressive considering the company has paid less than $20,000 in marketing costs — according to chief executive Steve Goh.

Customers can use it on standard phones, to text and IM for free, and to share information in chat rooms. Mig33 gets paid when customers buy a pre-paid phone card, to use for voice services. While the voice calls themselves are made over the Internet (VoIP), and so very cheap, Mig33 takes a small cut for the service. The company did not specify how big its cut is. The company has just moved to Burlingame, Calif., from Australia.

While other companies offer various aspects of its service — eBuddy offers mobile chat, for example — Mig33’s advantage is that you don’t have to close your voice or text application to access its IM service. You can do all three in one session. See screenshots below. The service is downloaded via an SMS message, making it simple — and viral.

In most of the more than 200 countries where it operates, users don’t rely on the same sort of entrenched mobile carriers we are used to here in the U.S. In many countries, many people rely on pre-paid cards for making calls.

Mig33’s parent is Project Goth.

One notable trend is that most of its Mig33’s users are using the company’s own IM service, instead of opting to use more popular IM services, such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, or MSN, which Mig33 does let its users choose. More than 75 percent of subscribers are choosing Mig33’s IM services. They’re sending more than 15 million messages a day. Mig33 also offers users a way to create a profile and to share photos.

Filling out its portfolio of online office applications, Google has acquired wiki company JotSpot for an undisclosed amount.

Co-founder Joe Kraus (pictured here) says he “couldn’t be more excited,” and we can understand, given his rocky ride several years ago at search engine Excite.

Kraus had been badly burned, and we could sense in Joe an intense, but quiet determination while building Jot that he was going to do this one right.

Way back in 1993, Kraus was 23 and a senior at Stanford, when he and five others co-founded Excite. Excite went public and was valued at $183 million in 1996, and was acquired AtHome in 1999 for $6.5 billion in stock. Pretty giddy times.

But then things went poof. ExciteAtHome imploded when the Bubble burst, after some major strategic and management blunders, let alone the market problems — many of them out of Kraus’ control. It shut down, and its assets sold for $10 million.

We don’t know how much Jot was sold for, and it’s probably not for much, but was almost assuredly for a profit — otherwise Kraus wouldn’t have sold. Kraus had raised more than $5 million from Redpoint and Mayfield.

It is also a victory because Jot was founded in late 2003, after other wiki companies like Socialtext. Socialtext is struggling.

We’d tried various wiki software programs, and ended up selecting Jot for our internal project to launch VentureBeat this year — and even paid for it — mainly because its user interface is intuitive and friendly.

From Joe’s blog:

Three years ago my friend Graham Spencer and I set out to start a new company….. We brainstormed scores of ideas, debated late into the night and ultimately exchanged a mountain of email and documents. We realized we needed a tool to help us organize our thoughts or we’d quickly become overwhelmed. So Graham set up a wiki. I was hooked because it immediately changed the way we worked together. Everything was kept in one place, not locked in email threads or on different computers. We could both make changes to the same document, without having to know HTML (well, without me having to know HTML). After twenty minutes of using a wiki, I was convinced that they were like the Internet in 1993 — useful, but trapped in the land of the nerds (which both Graham and I proudly inhabit). So we set out to start JotSpot as a way to bring the power of wikis to a much broader audience.

Updated

Zimbra, the open source messaging software company, has just announced that it has sold four million Zimbra mailboxes, an impressive milestone for the three year old San Mateo company.

Zimbra, you’ll recall, gives you an email platform that implements the latest AJAX majic. It started last year by letting you do things like pull up Google maps by scrolling your mouse over an address written in the e-mail, or pop up your calendar when you mouse over a date in an e-mail, or a day of the week — avoiding the need to clunkily switch back and forth from your e-mail and your calendar.

It is one thing to look good, quite another to execute. Since then, it has come out with Zimlets, which let developers do even more. This has proven unexpectedly popular with Internet service providers, Satish Dharmaraj told us today. “I can’t believe what we sold this quarter,” he said. He wouldn’t provide revenue numbers.

He said service providers are hosting Zimbra’s email service for individuals and small and medium sized companies.

The providers like Zimbra because it is “skinnable,” meaning it can be tailored for a consumer feel, or for a business feel. Service providers can choose to monetize the email service by running Google Adwords or Adsense, for example. Zimbra gives them a way to make a cut if a user clicks an ad from within their email to buy an iTunes song for 99 cents, or a book from Amazon. Like Gmail, Zimbra indexes every word within an email, and so knows what is being written, and can offer relevant advertising or other services — depending on what the service provider wants.

Before and after Zimbra’s launch, there have been numerous companies seeking to improve on Microsoft or other email services.

Zimbra’s product is compatible with Microsoft Outlook and other popular e-mail platforms, such as Apple Mail. Zimbra really runs the back-end of the e-mail service, making it a competitor to Microsoft’s e-mail server offering, called Exchange. But Zimbra can keep the familiar “front-end” part of Microsoft’s e-mail platform, which users interact with, called Outlook.

Zimbra has been selling its high-end “enterprise” mailboxes at $28 a pop, but these are meant to compete with Exchange and have the bells and whistles. Most of Zimbra’s uptake has come through service providers serving individuals, however. Those service providers can have up to 20 million users, and Zimbra gives them a major discount based on volume. (In other words, you can’t multiply 4 million by $28 to get Zimbra’s revenue; not even close.)

Besides service providers, Zimbra adopters have included dozens of universities and other companies, such as Digg.com and Times of India (the announcement lists many more). As noted before, Zimbra has raised at least $30 million from Benchmark, Accel, Redpoint and others over three rounds.