VentureBeat

Docstoc, a site that’s billed itself as the “YouTube for professional documents”, has raised $3.25 million in a second round of funding. It’s also rolling out a new plan that allows document providers to run banner ads.

The Beverly Hills startup competes against companies like Scribd to help users post and share documents online. While Scribd launched first, Docstoc tries to stand out with its focus on professional documents. For example, when the service launched in October, we found that it was possible to post Excel files to Docstoc that that were rejected by Scribd. Since launching officially, the site has grown from more than 7,000 users to 85,000. Apparently, Docstoc has been used at big news sites like The Huffington Post — we’ve used it at VentureBeat, too.

Docstoc is also launching a content partnership program, which is basically a way for someone to run ads with the documents they’re sharing through Docstoc, free of charge. Previously, lawyers, for example, who posted sample legal documents on Docstoc could advertise themselves through profiles that are displayed above their documents, but now Docstoc is offering full banner ads (see screenshot below). It’s a good deal for advertisers, since you know exactly what content your ad will run next to, and it also gives you more incentive to share documents on the site. (On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that a banner ad will be much more convincing than a really helpful document and an informative profile that links back to your site.) Partners can also use Docstoc to sell premium services and reports.

The new round was led by Rustic Canyon Partners.

The green building sector has been awash with VC cash in recent months: Despite there only being a few dozen startups in the nascent field, investors have started paying close attention — helping several raise new rounds of funding.

Newark, California-based CalStar Cement has received $3.4 million from several investors, including Foundation Capital, while Serious Materials landed a hefty $50 million second funding round, led by New Enterprise Associates, Rustic Canyon Partners and Foundation Capital. The Sunnyvale-based startup had earlier capped a $5 million first round. Los Gatos-based Calera, which is developing a cement capable of sequestering carbon dioxide, is backed by Khosla Ventures.

New Jersey-based Hycrete, which produces an admixture (or liquid solution) that is used to waterproof concrete, completed its second round in 2006. Just one more, CEO David Rosenberg says, could take it to profitability; in late February, he said he was seeking $10 - 20 million. Its investors include RockPort Capital Partners and NGEN Partners. Hycrete’s admixture was one of the first to receive a cradle-to-cradle certification through McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, a green product and design firm. The designation “cradle-to-cradle,” coined by architect William McDonough and Michael Braungart, refers to a product that can be completely recycled or re-used. It was also selected as a Technology Pioneer at this year’s World Economic Forum.

A mixture of sand, aggregate, cement and water, the admixture acts as a replacement for the external membranes that are typically used to keep water from seeping into concrete. When it is mixed into concrete, it links up to metallic ions and behaves like a hydrophobic solution (like oil) — repelling water. Because it doesn’t require volatile organic compounds (VOCs) or other harmful chemicals, the corrosion-resistant concrete can safely be recycled and reused in other projects. Conventional forms of concrete, which use permanently bonded waterproofing membranes, are sent to landfills.

Hycrete’s technology has already been used in more than 75 projects worldwide — including several Marriott and Hilton hotels and condos and apartments in Seattle. Other applications include mixing it into roofing material to make green roofs — roofs covered by lawns — or into drywall to stop moisture seepage.

The admixture reduces energy waste, cuts costs and lets builders receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) points. Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, the LEED accreditation indicates a building has successfully adopted a suite of rigorous green building standards. The rating is seen as a boon by companies seeking to bolster their environmental credentials and is increasingly being implemented in new construction projects. Hycrete’s product helps builders reach that goal faster.

updated
1) Online advertising up 28 percent
2) Yahoo confirms $160M acquisition of Maven
3) AOL to launch mobile soc-net platform
4) Starbucks to offer somewhat-free WiFi
5) Topanga, next-gen lighting, funded by Khosla
6) Stealth division at EA making social games
7) Bored.com sells for exciting $4.5 million
8) DanceJam gets another $3.5 million
9) Uncomfortable ads from Facebook
10) Initial review of Android: Not ready yet
11) Motorola and Nortel consider unit merger
11) The long wait for cleantech permitting

Online advertising up 28 percent at end of year — The total US ad spend in the fourth quarter grew almost 28 percent over the same period last year, according to the latest numbers from IDC. The firm also found that Google’s market share declined toward the end of the year.

Yahoo has confirmed its acquisition of Maven Networks – We reported on the deal several days ago, but Yahoo announced this morning the specific price, which we’d only guessed at earlier: $160 million. That’s a big win for General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners and Prism VentureWorks, which together had invested around $24 million, and apparently had invested most recently in 2006 at at a pre-money valuation of just $30 million (which means they’ve made very nice money). As Dan Primack notes, this is great for GC, which originally invested in 2003 at a $7.5 million pre-money, though interestingly, GC has also pumped a ton of money into Maven competitor Brightcove – including a recent round at around a $210 million post-value.

AOL to launch mobile social networking platform — AOL plans on releasing a mobile software platform for social networking, which will initially work across most of the major device operating systems. The platform will have its own XML-based markup language and server, and be open to developers.

Starbucks begins offering (somewhat) free WiFi — Starbucks will drop T-Mobile and take on AT&T as the partner for its 7,000 United States locations. The upshot: If you’re an AT&T broadband subscriber, WiFi at Starbucks is now free; if not, access is still cheaper. Prices for WiFi in all locations have been steadily dropping, which probably sounds like another nail tapping into the coffin to startups like Fon, which plan on creating large networks of WiFi hotspots.

Topanga high-intensity lighting funded by Khosla — Topanga Technologies is based in Topanga, California. If only everything in life were so simple. We don’t know much more than that it makes high-intensity, discharge lighting, as it’s currently in stealth mode. Khosla Ventures disclosed the investment this morning, alongside its announcement that it hired Ford Tamer.

Stealth division at Electronic Arts making social games — A division called EA Blueprint will make games for distribution on online platforms including social networks, according to a story on Gametap. Blueprint will work together with small developers to create games, some of which will be “brand extensions” of existing EA games. The company, however, declined further comment.

Bored.com sells for exciting $4.5 million — The domain name game is as flush as ever, with the sale of Bored.com having just brought in $4.5 million through auctioneer Moniker. No broken records here, though — Sex.com brought in $12.5 million two years ago. Fittingly enough, the sale price for Business.com fell somewhere in between sex and boredom. (Update: See comments below for more color on the various sale prices.)

DanceJam gets another $3.5 million for dance, jam — DanceJam, which hasn’t even launched yet, has gotten tons of publicity because its founder is MC Hammer, not to mention that Michael Arrington is an investor. That means the site, a community for dancers to upload clips of themselves dancing and rate others, had better be good when it finally does launch. The $3.5 million was provided by Softbank Capital, Rustic Canyon Partners and some new angel investors, according to TechCrunch.

Headhunting ad for Yahoo employees shows up on Yahoo profile – First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman placed an ad in Facebook, asking Yahoo employees if they might like to leave their increasingly troubled parent to found startups, and he showed evidence that suggested more employees are clicking through than several months ago — a sign of a potential mass exodus at hand. However, turns out the more recent ads — the ones drawing more clicks — were made more enticing because they showed photos of Yahoo employees. This distorted the entire experiment. The ads managed to find its way onto one satisfied Yahoo employee’s profile, occasioning an interesting exchange. “I don’t want my colleagues to think I’m leaving Yahoo, so … I’ve pulled my “Facebook fandom” for First Round Capital,” writes the disconcerted Yahooligan. The ad raises yet more questions about how Facebook can gracefully pipe ads through social network connections. More at Valleywag.

Hands-on review of Google Android in use in Barcelona — Gizmodo has a quick review of a mobile unit with Google Android installed from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. From the post: “While the Android platform is solid enough for development and testing, it seems we are far away from seeing actual products getting into the market.”

Motorola and Nortel consider merging wireless units — A combined wireless-infrastructure division between Motorola and Nortel would generate $10 billion in annual sales, part of a proposed restructuring of Motorola under consideration by new CEO Greg Brown. The two company’s units make networking equipment for wireless carriers. The broader plan involves breaking Motorola up into parts, and spinning off the struggling handset-making unit.

Setting up wind turbines? Be prepared for a wait — These lines make the Soviet Union look like child’s play: Developers applying for wind projects in Minnesota face a 612 year waiting list, according to EcoGeek. That’s an extreme example of the bureaucracy that come with issuing permits for new cleantech projects.

PlayFirst, the publisher of the popular online game, Diner Dash, has raised an eye-opening $16.5 million in its third round of financing.

The company stands out because it’s one of the first mainstream American online game publishers to embed micro-transactions, small payments for access to new game content, into its game. The marquee title, Diner Dash: Hometown Hero involves controlling a waitress who runs around a restaurant trying to keep her customers happy. PlayFirst offers one playable restaurant and a standard avatar for free, but to soup up your avatar or get access to new restaurants, you pay small bits of cash.

Until Hometown Hero, the only way to play Diner Dash games was to drop $20.

The company is also announcing a partnership with widget-maker RockYou, to distribute one of PlayFirst’s games on Facebook.

The micro-transactions move has paid off: The company says it has doubled its revenues since 2006 and that Hometown Hero is on track to outsell its predecessors by a significant margin. The forums are more active, and 50 percent of the transactions involving the game are micro-transactions of $5 and under.

With this investment, the company intends to accelerate development of new games, extend its reach into consoles like Nintendo DS and Xbox360, and expand into international markets, especially those in Asia. The partnership with RockYou gives the company access to the so-called “social graph,” but the implications of this aren’t clear, and even PlayFirst says it is not exactly sure where this will lead.

However, PlayFirst says it will be releasing a steady stream of apps each quarter, starting with simple game widgets and expanding into richer content, but declined to offer details.

DCM led the investment, and previous investors Mayfield Fund, Trinity Ventures, and Rustic Canyon Partners participated in the round. The company has now raised a total of $26.5 million.

Citysearch, an online guide service about local US businesses, has partnered with MerchantCircle, in an effort to hold their own in the increasingly competitive area of local reviews.

The move comes as Citysearch is under attack from newer, fresher sites like Yelp, which offers reviews about locales and is appearing as high, if not higher than Citysearch in search engine results.

Citysearch, a division of IAC, has a large collection of local data that includes 14.5 million business listings, more than 600,000 user reviews, and ratings on more than two million business locations in the US. It has been growing through acquisitions, having purchased local review site Insider Pages earlier this year (our coverage).

MerchantCircle, which has already received funding from Citysearch, has been growing fast. It launched in June of 2006 with 5,000 merchants using its services — today it has 300,000. The Los Altos, California company lets businesses create a homepage with basic business information (including photos and videos), create online coupons, send email newsletters to customers and more. The company tells us its most successful feature is its reputation manager, a tool that automatically aggregates reviews and directory listings about a company from around the web.

The partnership will allow MerchantCircle to aggregate Citysearch data, and take advantage of Citysearch’s local ad network. Citysearch will use MerchantCircle’s software.

Of course, these companies are competing against many other also trying to provide local information more efficiently.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are all working on local search offerings. Google, for example, has both local search and local mapping services that many find useful. Then there are startups like local-review site Yelp and local search engine Grayboxx. Then, there are companies like accounting software company Intuit, which are trying to buy their way into local business. Earlier this week, Intuit purchased business web services company Homestead.

The Citysearch-MerchantCircle partnership will run deep. MerchantCircle will offer Citysearch marketing programs to its members, MerchantCircle will use Citysearch’s local and national ad-sales teams to help sell ads on its site to advertisers, and IAC will get a seat on MerchantCircle’s board.

Besides Citysearch, MerchantCircle has also taken on funding from Rustic Canyon Partners, Scale Venture Partners and Disney’s Steamboat Ventures.

Online advertising remains hot. But with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo fighting to serve advertising to large companies and publishers, smaller business clients are left neglected.

MerchantCircle, a controversial Silicon Valley company helping thousands of small businesses market themselves online, has raised $10 million in financing to pursue these small businesses further.

It has also arranged a credit line with Square 1 Bank to acquire other rivals in the sector.

The Los Altos, Calif. company has been accused of aggressive tactics. First, it lures small businesses to sign up as customers by creating profile pages for them MerchantCircle encourages the companies to “claim” these pages, by registering at the site.

Next, if the businesses don’t sign up at MerchantCircle, the company cold-calls them. MerchantCircle does offer a real service: It helps small businesses create a more robust online presence for a fee, ranging from $29 to $99 monthly, for example tracking reviews written about them at major review sites and other business listing portals. MerchantCircle alerts them when someone leaves a review about them. Merchant circle also offers them ways to advertise online with search engines (it helps them band together to get better deals too, for example, rounding up landscaping companies and working with them to create ads more cheaply at sites like Webvisible, using economies of scale). Finally, if a small business creates an online coupon on their MerchantCircle profile page, MerchantCiircle publishes that action on the pages of other local companies (see example of this in screenshot below of a profile page). This creates peer pressure, so that other companies see the actions of their peers, and are encouraged to do the same.

The strategy has worked. It has 250,000 small business customers, after 16 months of work. The latest investment is an endorsement too: Investors include Rustic Canyon, Scale Venture Partners and Disney. IAC was a new investor, which Smith said he welcomed for its expertise at doing acquisition deals. It raised $4.2 million two years ago (see our coverage).

Ben Smith, who founded Merchant, has returned as chief executive. He had previously left to become chairman, but returned to the helm this month after the company declined an offer to be acquired. Smith decided to embark on an acquisition strategy, instead. He declined to say how much the credit line is for.

One major rival is ReachLocal, which is hiring a massive salesforce to do something similar: Sell online marketing services to small business, including ads beside Google and Yahoo search results, and tools to maximize search engine optimization tricks. That company recently raised $52 million in venture backing to continue to add to its 300 person work force, and may even try to hire as many as 10,000 — all in an effort to compete with YellowPages. Reactions to our story about ReachLocal were almost universally negative (see comments; people thought it was crazy to be hiring so aggressively). The bile may reflect a bias among our Silicon Valley readers in favor of technology. MerchantCircle is a technology company — it has almost no salesforce. It has 10 employees (the marketing calls it makes are outsourced).

Another competitor is Weblistic, which is somewhere between ReachLocal and MerchantCircle on the automation scale. It has a salesforce, but not as big as ReachLocal’s. Weblistic, a two-year-old Fremont Calif. company led by the former chief technology officer of YellowPages.com, is backed by venture capital firm Foundation Capital. It has a low profile; we haven’t mentioned them before.

Indoor building material-maker Serious Materials has taken on a large $50 million second round of financing to launch a line of environmentally friendly drywall, the most common indoor building material in the United States.

The funding will help the company cover the costs of a manufacturing plant, to open next year. The cost for new plants commonly runs into tens of millions of dollars.

Serious will make three product lines: EcoRock, ThermaProof, and Quiet Solution. EcoRock is drywall that produces less carbon dioxide and harmful chemicals to make, ThermaProof provides superior insulation against temperature extremes, and Quiet is a line of soundproof building materials.

We reported on Quiet earlier this year, without mentioning that Serious is the parent company’s name. Marc Porat, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, started it along with a pair of other green building companies, California Cement and Global Homes, which remain secretive.

Porat’s persistent investments into green building suggests he foresees a lucrative market. He isn’t the only one. Khosla Ventures, which invested in California Cement, also recently put money into Calera, which has plans to recycle escaping carbon dioxide into concrete. Gigacrete is another company after the same market.

Other green-building startups range from Solar Cynergy (our coverage ), a decorative LED maker, to the entire gamut of solar cell makers, who rely in part on consumer interest in solar paneling for their homes.

The funding for Serious Materials was led by New Enterprise Associates and Foundation Capital. Rustic Canyon Partners, which provided the previous round of $5 million, also participated.

The mobile email company, Visto, has become one of the most controversial companies in Silicon Valley.

The Redwood City company has reportedly raised another $35 million in venture backing led by new investor Altitude Capital Partners, adding to the whopping $350 million the company has already raised. It is in the red, after ten years, and hasn’t announced a major customer in several months. Its penchant to file lawsuits is also worrying, and we’ve said before that is a reason why bias has crept into our reporting about this company.

Valley gossip site, Valleywag, says the company is on the rocks, but has no facts to back it up. PE Hub’s Dan Primack says the $35 million in cash, raised in December, would seem to contradict that, however there is no one on the record explaining the terms of that cash — and it is somewhat odd it wasn’t announced. Moreover, the company has a large cash burn rate, as Dan points out, caused by service contracts it pledged to.

Now we’re hearing its investors are spreading word that a 2007 acquisition is better than 50-50 odds. Yet we’re skeptical too, given that the company had said it planned to go public last year — and nothing happened (indeed, read that previous link for notes about the company’s questionable marketing). Indeed, with its huge cash burn, it may have to be sold.

Has this company hit the wall? We’ve contacted the company, and will report back if we hear anything.

Investors include Allegis Capital, Blueprint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ePlanet Ventures, GKM Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners, Oak Investment Partners and Rustic Canyon Partners.

Now we’re 90 percent sure global warming is caused by humans, according to a major UN report just released.

[Update: And Exxon is fighting back, reports the Guardian, which writes that the AEI, an Exxon Mobil-funded thinktank, offered payments of $10,000 to scientists for articles that emphasize the report's shortcomings. This, even as Exxon reports record profits.]

Meanwhile, California continues its lawsuit against U.S. and Japanese car manufacturers for contributing to global warming.

And entrepreneurs forge ahead with new ideas. The organic carpet cleaning guys at Naturell are using sea-kelp to clean carpets. It cuts down on indoor air pollution (see Merc story). The Santa Clara company got a boost when search engine Google used it for two years.

And there’s Marc Porat (pictured above), a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who started at Apple, and later spun out General Magic and took it public at $800 million valuation. Now he’s transformed himself into a green entrepreneur. He has launched three companies targeting the green building market, VentureWire reported today (sub required). They are secretive, except for Quiet Solution, which has a Web site, and also a brief overview of Porat’s activities (scroll down)

Quiet Solution, backed by Rustic Canyon Partners, sells soundproofing materials. The other two are California Cement, backed by Foundation Capital, and developing a new process for cement (third leading contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, behind energy and transportation); and Global Homes, backed by Khosla Ventures, which sells sustainable pre-fabricated homes for developing markets.