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YieldBuild offers software that lets a web publisher optimize text advertisement placement and formatting, so the ads will receive the maximum number of click-throughs. In other words, it helps publishers make more money.

Optimizing text ads without this type of software typically involves a lot of manual effort — compiling data from across ad networks on a site, running tests on format changes, etc. And, even after optimization, readers may stop clicking once they get used to the new setup.

Instead, YieldBuild’s algorithms automatically gauge ads’ performances and make constant adjustments to their color, placement, and positioning. VentureBeat’s Dan Kaplan came away impressed by YieldBuild’s results (and its private list of clients) when he took a look at the company last fall.

Text-ad optimization generally seems to be showing promising results, judging by the investment dollars being pumped into startups offering this service.

San Francisco-based YieldBuild has just raised $6 million in a round led by Storm Ventures, with existing investor Hummer Winblad Venture Partners participating. Meanwhile, rival Pubmatic raised an $8 million round at the beginning of this year (our coverage) while rival Rubicon Project raised $15 million a month ago (our coverage).

In a classic case of entrepreneurial iteration, YieldBuild actually started life as HubPages, a service that offers hosted pages where people can write and share their own stories. YieldBuild grew out of the company’s efforts to optimize Hubpages’ ads.

It previously raised $2 million from Hummer Winblad.

This may well be the year that the leaders in the mobile advertising space emerge, and startup Ad Infuse has taken on another $12 million to try to ensure its place at the table.

As we reported in an October story, Ad Infuse is distinguished by its focus on targeted user data. Stats like age, gender and geographical location are used to determine the best ad to serve to any particular mobile user, a method the company says will greatly boost CPMs (the amount paid per thousand views of an ad).

That data had better prove to be a meaningful differentiator for Ad Infuse as the mobile ad space heats up. AdMob, which experienced excellent growth in 2007, gets by with barely any targeting, but has served up stunningly high volumes — over 15 billion impressions to date, according to the counter on its webpage.

Ad Infuse can’t compare in terms of raw numbers, but hopes it can sell highly targeted audiences to large advertisers like Unilever, which teamed up with the company to run ads for Axe Body Spray to young males late last year. Part of the latest round of funding will go to bulking up Ad Infuse’s sales team, who will help foster more such partnerships.

CEO Brian Cowley gave us some statistics during an interview: Ad Infuse roughly doubled the number of partnerships and advertisers it had during the fourth quarter of last year, as well as boosting revenues 325 percent and doubling average CPMs to $20, and appears to be continuing its growth in the current quarter.

Even with a positive growth story, the future is still looking uncertain for Ad Infuse — as well as AdMob, AOL Third Screen Media, Google, and newer startups like Smaato, which just took a $3.5 million round of its own. However, the dust should begin to clear by the end of this year, and let us see who the likely survivors are.

The $12 million funding was provided by SoftBank Capital, and previous investors ComVentures (now Velocity Interactive Group) and Storm Ventures also participated. Ad Infuse has taken a total of $17.5 million to date, including its seed round.

For years, companies like Cisco, and all the little piranha start-ups nibbling at Cisco, have sought to make communications simpler for companies and their employees.

Adomo, of Cupertino, Calif., is the latest Silicon Valley start-up attempting to give employees a way to bring together voice and email messages on a single networked “platform.” It comes at a time when there are more opportunities than ever to open up such platforms to integration with other social web services — which could make employees more productive. Whether or not Adomo exploits this or not, remains to be seen.

It has raised a new round of $15 million from Menlo Ventures and Storm Ventures.

Adomo lets companies integrate their existing phone systems with internet phone systems (VoIP) and other business communication software, such Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. You can choose to get your messages and email on your PC or mobile phone, or both. You can do things like receive emails with audio files of your phone messages, with subject lines that include the name and number of the caller. The company matches up callers with company and personal address books, so you can learn more about who’s calling and figure out who you need to call back, first.

Adomo clients — Fortune 5000 companies in finance, health care, manufacturing and other industries — have customized, complex amalgamations of communications software that their IT departments have pieced together over the years. So-called “unified messaging” has the potential to make these companies’ employees more efficient through streamlining their communication processes.Competitors like Cisco offer complete telephony hardware and software packages for hooking up internet-based phones within organizations. But this may require replacing existing telephony system. Adomo’s modular software can provide a similar service more cheaply and easily, chief executive Mathew Frazer tells us.

Interestingly, the company also says it will begin offering more communication software on top of the messaging system. The company didn’t give us any specifics but it’s worth noting that consumer-facing web services are beginning to merge with business software. For example, business software company Oracle has joined Google’s new OpenSocial initiative, a developer platform. Here, a third party could build an application that runs inside of Oracle as well as other OpenSocial partners, such as business social network LinkedIn.

While OpenSocial is still in the early stages of development, an application that automatically shows an employee LinkedIn data within Oracle software could help the person to make connections with people they might not otherwise find.

Adomo has an interesting opportunity to tie big business communication together with these social web services. If employees could match their messages in Adomo with their contacts in related software provided by Oracle and LinkedIn, they might make useful connections even more efficiently.

Adomo says it will use the funding to expand product development, marketing and sales efforts.

This is the company’s second recapitalization, as VentureWire notes (subscription only), which means it has apparently struggled and had to revalue itself. It raised nearly $8 million between 1999 and 2002 from individual investors, strategic investor Hexagon and Bridge Venture Fund III, an angel fund.

Since its first recapitalization in 2002, it had previously raised $20 million from Menlo Ventures, Storm Ventures and private individuals.

Qwaq, a Silicon Valley company seeking to let company work groups collaborate in a 3D online virtual environment, has just raised $7 million in financing.

Virtual collaboration might sound fanciful, but increasingly experts are saying this is where the office environment is headed. Well-known venture capitalist John Doerr is just the latest to speak of a 3D “radically immersive” Web and to say that he is looking to invest in it, though he is not the backer of Qwaq. In the latest online 3D environments, users can turn to each other and carry one-one-one conversations, or one-to-many conversations, just as in real life. Qwaq tries to extend that vision, but is still in early stages.

We’ve played with Qwaq, and here’s how it works:

You enter a virtual room, occupied by other users and objects like tables and posters on the walls (see screenshots).

Many of those objects are your standard desktop items. A big square poster on the wall, for instance, might be a Word document or Excel spreadsheet. When you click on the spreadsheet with your cursor from across the room, or access it via toolbar command, it’ll expand to fill your screen.

You see what the other users are doing in real-time, as they move around and modify objects, such as the aforementioned Excel spreadsheet. If you are editing that spreadsheet, you can also see another user’s person as they modify each cell.

There are some less obvious examples of objects. One the company showed me was a 3D diagram of a molecule that a biology team could study. Another was a virtual representation of a patient’s head, which could be used for illustration at a meeting of physicians in their virtual conference room. You can also place “real world” objects into your room, like fans or house plants, for ambiance.

You can chat with the other users, add or subtract objects, or move through different rooms as desired. There’s not much lag, and your computer doesn’t have to be all that powerful.

Qwaq is just one of several companies pursuing this vision, although it is the first solely focused on large company (enterprise) collaboration to get venture backing. Tixeo, of France, is another start-up focused on the same market. A range of other companies are offering tools or other initiatives to set up virtual worlds, though they vary in their focus on letting corporate groups collaborate. They include Second Life, VastPark, ProtonMedia, Forterra Systems and Multiverse Network.

Here’s why Qwaq’s efforts are significant.

Online collaboration tools are increasingly in use, but typically are limited in their use (Google Docs, for example, allows real-time collaboration, but with no way for group communications). Qwaq is more flexible. It provides a way to share any program file or resource across computers. Placing everything in a virtual environment allows for a larger number of objects than a straightforward desktop interface. Say you’re working with a project team on a collection of a dozen different files and documents. By virtually looking around the room, you can see who is working on what, and what’s available to be worked on, more easily than you can with most other collaboration programs.

Chief executive Greg Nuyens talks a lot about “intuitions” in a 3D environment: Our sensory apparatus are much better for operating in a 3D world. It lets us use our brain, our visual cortex, as well as sound as a cue to activity. All of this is under-used on the desktop. (With Qwaq, you can choose whether or not you hear people talking in the program, and there are sounds for various actions.)

This is just the beginning of virtualization. Business computers tend to be less powerful than home computers (which are often equipped for gaming). Second Life has thrived, in part, because it is best used at home with computers having better graphic cards and memory. Qwaq has thus been designed with a simpler interface. Over time, Qwaq aims to handle and represent more tasks.

The company won’t say how many users it has, but the number is small. The company charges between $30 and $60 per user per month.

The financing round is the company’s second. It was led by Alloy Ventures and Storm Ventures. Previously, Qwaq raised less than $1 million in from KPG Ventures.

Ad Infuse is ready to serve you targeted ads on your cellphone — and may surprise you with how much it knows.

The company can pinpoint a user’s age, gender, income level, and location, among other things. Advertisers pay handsomely for such information, sometimes more than the going rates for banner ads on the internet.

In their race to become early winners, companies like AdMob (our coverage) and Third Screen Media have also been working on their targeting strategies. But they have been focusing more on getting advertisers and carriers on board to develop the market, where Ad Infuse is preoccupied only with targeting.

Ad Infuse works by taking its data directly from carriers, who are happy to provide the customer information they have on hand for use in advertising, provided they receive a cut of the profits. That leaves less of an element of black magic to targeting than on the web. See our coverage on NebuAd to understand — no need for deep packet inspection here.

Although other companies could copy its method, Ad Infuse is keeping other tricks up its sleeve to help differentiate itself from AdMob, which already claims to show 1.5 billion mobile ads each month.

One such trick is Ad Infuse’s proprietary method for figuring out information about users on group plans or pre-paid phones, who generally don’t have to tell the carriers about themselves.

Based on data about who the purchaser of a pre-paid phone is calling, Ad Infuse can infer who they probably are — for example, picking out a teenager or business man based on whether they’re calling other teenagers or business men. After a handful of calls are made, Ad Infuse can begin making assumptions. Other information could be picked up based on the carrier’s tracking of what websites a phone is browsing.

The company also does some broader market analysis on the likelihood of particular customer groups purchasing from advertisers, in an effort to lure uncertain companies to the medium. So far it’s partnered with advertisers like Infospace and the New Yorker magazine, and displays ads on operators including Helio and Swisscom (in Europe).

Will consumers balk at having their personal info being picked over? Founder Carl Ludwig thinks mobile users will be less sensitive about privacy issues on phones, which they presumably know and accept are under the complete control of the carriers.

The information Ad Infuse receives is made anonymous to the company through a “black box” placed with the carrier that strips out the most personal information, like names, and allows Ad Infuse to focus on matching particular demographics with ads.

Ad Infuse took its seed funding round in 2005, and another $5 million in June 2006, from Storm Ventures and Comm Ventures. It’s in the process of raising another round.

Mobio, a Cupertino start-up, is distinguishing itself by creating simple, useful services for the mobile phone.

We wrote about the company when it released its movie service — which lists movie reviews, times and maps.

Today, Mobio kicks off a 100 more services, many of them handy for kicking round town. There’s everything from OpenTable, flower-buying, dating services to flight-time checks.

Mobio is just the latest mobile company to ditch your stupid, slow cellphone Web browser. Forget it. As long as you’ve got a Java-enabled phone, you can download Mobio’s software and surf Web info from within the phone application (Mobio launches compatible with 20 phones, which accounts for about 60 percent of the market). It effectively lets you crawl the web, only in a more efficient mobile style, free of keyboard.

Take for example the OpenTable application (see screenshots at left). You select OpenTable from main the menu. Then you can use a search bar to find a restaurant in your locale. The Mobio app tells you if a table is free • the same information you’d find on the OpenTable Web site.

Mobio does all this by using a so-called “mediating” server. In the background, while you are using your phone, the server connects with the various Mobio services (OpenTable, etc), drawing information from them, to deliver to you if you select it. Mobio’s proprietary protocol communicates between the device and the server.

The first application is written in Java. Mobio is rolling out Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry and BREW versions over the course of this year, Ramneek Bhasin, CEO of Mobio, tells Venturebeat.

Mobio focuses on local content. The services are designed to be accessible with three clicks or less.

There are lots of other features we haven’t mentioned. Let’s say you like wine. You can go online before shopping, and configure your Mobio account so that it draws wine tasting notes from a wine connoisseur’s public Kaboodle account. Then, as you shop, Mobio draws info from that account, and serves it to your phone, and you can peruse the notes as you shop — or impress your girlfriend while picking out wine during dinner.

It’s all free. You enter some basic personal information to register before downloading the service.

Mobio has raised $9 million from Interwest and Storm Ventures, among others.