VentureBeat

Ever hear a catchy tune but not know the name of the song or the artist? Midomi, a web site and mobile service, lets you play a recorded song or sing a snippet of it yourself, and then it matches that information to its library of more than 17 million song samples. Then, you can listen to the recommended samples and go buy the song on iTunes or watch related videos on YouTube.

Midomi’s parent company, San Jose, Calif.-based Melodis, has just raised $7 million from TransLink Capital, JAIC America and Global Catalyst Partners, on top of a previous $5 million in funding.

This, I had to test for myself. Using the Midomi iPhone application, I warbled in my rendition of the perennial karaoke favorite Unchained Melody (the high part, you know, “I neeeeeed your loooooove”). Midomi matched my emotional outpouring to works of Stevie Wonder, The Flaming Lips and a bunch of songs that weren’t in English, but no Righteous Brothers. So I tried out something more within my voice range — the classic hit House of the Rising Sun — and the service worked.

Midomi originally launched last year to mixed reviews (see comments on our original story).

Midomi’s not alone in trying to do this form of music search. Rival Shazam matches recorded tunes you play with its own library, but for better or worse doesn’t let you sing the tunes yourself. Both companies also have iPhone apps — Shazam has the 27th most popular free iPhone app, while Midomi comes in at 71st. Shazam has also recently raised $6.6 million in funding, on top of previous funding that the company told us was in the “multiple millions.”

Uploading photos to web sharing sites — as fast as you can take pictures — is kind of a new obssession for the digerati. Eye-Fi is riding that wave with memory cards that have built-in Wi-Fi antennae that can upload photos to photo-sharing sites.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has raised $11 million in a second round of funding. The lead investors include Translink Capital and LMS Capital. Existing investors Opus Capital and Shasta Ventures also participated. To date, Eye-Fi has raised $17.5 million. The VCs note that the service is dead simple; you just take photos and they’re automatically uploaded to a service of your choice.

Jef Holove, chief executive of Eye-Fi, said that customers have uploaded more than three million photos to photo-sharing sites since the company launched its memory cards in October 2007. Holove said the company will use the money for product development as well as international expansion. Translink has expertise in Asian markets, while LMS focuses on Europe. That is why Eye-Fi chose to work with them.

“We were also looking for someone who understood consumer devices and had experience in businesses that combined services and devices,” Holove said.

Holove said that the economic environment isn’t good for raising money now, but he said it isn’t so bad for companies with solid execution. Eye-Fi products have been a success because they can upload to a variety of photo services, such as Flickr or Kodak’s site. Many of the cameras with built-in Wi-Fi services — from companies such as Kodak, Nikon, Sony and Panasonic — can only upload to one site. And while surveys confirm that users want to upload from cameras directly to the Internet, fewer than 1 percent of digital cameras have Wi-Fi capability.

The Eye-Fi card uses a tiny Wi-Fi networking chip from Atheros Communications. Wireless networking chips are so advanced that Atheros can essentially put an entire Wi-Fi 802.11g radio on a single chip.

The Home version of the Eye-Fi card sells for $79. That one can upload pictures wirelessly to a computer. The $99 Share version can upload pictures to web sites from a home Wi-Fi connection, while the $129 Explore version can upload from any Wi-Fi hot spot. The Explore version can also geo-tag the pictures, or put location information into the picture.

Eye-Fi was founded in the summer of 2005. Since the launch, the company has formed partnerships with Nikon, Lexar and more than 20 online photo destinations; and expanded its online and brick-and-mortar retail distribution to include national chains such as Circuit City.

DeCarta, the creator of a popular platform for managing location-based (LBS) data, has raised $20 million in additional funding. That includes financing from the Hotung Group and TransLink Capital, as well as existing investor Norwest Venture Partners and a previously announced $6 million from the T-Mobile Venture Fund.

The location-based market still looks like it’s heating up — for example, location-based social application companies like Loopt and Whrrl have been getting a lot of attention, especially with the release of the iPhone 3G with GPS support. Loopt even won the best application award at our MobileBeat 2008 conference last week. But at the same conference, Rich Wong of Accel Partners noted that it’s an extremely competitive market, and “there are a lot of bodies on the beach.”

DeCarta benefits from the excitement without competing with the application companies directly. Instead, it provides the layer between the geospatial data provided by companies like NAVTEQ and applications created by customers like Loopt and real estate search startup Zillow. The platform takes the raw data and translates it into something that’s easily searchable. The company also has deals with carriers including AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. Chief executive J. Kim Fennell told me DeCarta’s biggest competition will probably come from companies like Apple and Nokia, who are rumored to be developing LBS platforms of their own.

The latest funding comes quite close to the $21 million goal that we previously reported, and brings deCarta’s total third round financing to $35 million.

ConSentry, a Silicon Valley startup that says its Internet network switches are more efficient than those of giant incumbent Cisco, has raised a $21 million round of funding.

Switches are components that route traffic from through the wider Internet network.

However, large corporations that buy switches to route their traffic often demand security feature to control access (sometimes called Network Access Control). As networks have become faster, security has become more of a challenge, Consentry said.

ConSentry’s switches are designed from the ground up to include NAC that can continuously control the access levels of users on a network, even at hard-wired LAN speeds. Contractors using a company’s network, for example, would have their privileges set when first logging on, but the network would continously monitor their behavior — not allowing suspicious behavior during the session.

NAC is a growing market, with more customers demanding high-level security for their networks. ConSentry made news earlier this year, when two schools each replaced several dozen Cisco switches with ConSentry products.

Smaller competitors also focusing on NAC include Rainier.

The $21 million funding is Consentry’s fourth round. It was led by new investor Teachers’ Private Capital. Other funds participated, including previous backers Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, INVESCO Private Capital and DAG Ventures, and new investors Translink Capital and NCD Investors.

Consentry, based in Milpitas, Calif., has almost 100 employees, and has taken about $72 million in funding to date.