VentureBeat

Fitbit, the maker of a small device that tracks how many calories you’ve burned, has raised $2 million in a first round of funding. The San Francisco company was a hit among judges when it launched at the TechCrunch50 conference, and it plans to start selling its devices in early 2009.

There are other portable weight loss devices out there — for example, Weight Watchers offers its own mobile application. What’s exciting about Fitbit, however, is the extent to which the company says it will automate the process. You just clip the device to your clothes, and it tracks things like how many calories you burned through exercise and how well you slept. (Unfortunately, things are a little less automated on the food side; it looks like you’ll need to manually enter the foods you’ve eaten into the Fitbit website.) Then you can view your health reports on the company’s site, and adjust your behavior accordingly.

The Fitbit Tracker will cost $99, and will be available for sale initially on the company’s website, says chief executive James Park. There are plans for a roll-out to retail stores later in the year. If the economic downturn continues, Fitbit may have picked the wrong time to launch a device that some might see as a luxury or a novelty, but Park says the company has kept the Fitbit Tracker relatively affordable.

The round was led by True Ventures, joined by Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC and a group of undisclosed angel investors.

Even though social networking companies serve tens of millions of users, there’s still bizarrely little advertising on the most popular sites. Many big agencies and brands have experimented, but they’re still looking for better ways to target the users they want.

The latest company hoping to serve these advertisers is Appssavvy, a startup that sells direct advertising space on social media applications like Flixster, MesmoTV, and Playfish — most of which have a presence on major sites like Facebook. The company announced today that it received $3.1 million in second round funding.

New York-based Appssavvy joins a field of peers hoping to score social media ad dollars. Companies like SocialMedia, Lookery and Social Cash have also been selling advertisers on new and innovative ways to add branding to social networking sites. But Appssavvy likes to distinguish itself as a consulting firm, working with its clients to devise a more custom, targeted end product.

Examples of Appssavvy campaigns include Sony’s sponsorship of Facebook’s Wedding Book application to promote its film “Made of Honor,” a custom Facebook application built for Kohl’s back-to-school season, and ads for the TBS show “My Boys” on the MesmoTV application… on Facebook. Okay yes, all of their examples are from Facebook, but Appssavvy says it can also hook brands up with apps for the iPhone, MySpace, Hi5, etc.

Despite the seemingly thin client base represented on the startup’s site, it did land a deal with NBC Universal at the start of the month that gave it exclusive ad-sale rights on NBC News’ iCue website. iCue is a social network targeted at students that lets members watch NBC archive footage, join related discussions, and play relevant learning games.

Even if Appssavvy can bag other big names, it still faces a tough market for social media campaigns, which have yet to gain major traction on Madison Avenue. In fact, one study suggests that half of these campaigns are already set up to fail.

Still, that didn’t dissuade Appssavvy’s recent investors. The round was led by True Ventures and also included About.com founder Scott Kumit.

Giga Omni Media, the company that owns news blog GigaOM and its related sites, announced today that it has raised $4.5 million in additional funding.

The last few months have been busy for Om Malik’s fledgling media empire. He acquired mobile blog jkOnTheRun in July, followed by TheAppleBlog just a few weeks ago. He also promoted chief operating officer Paul Walborsky to chief executive, and announced some new syndication deals, including one with The New York Times (where VentureBeat will also be syndicated). More surprisingly, Malik also announced that he has become a venture partner at True Ventures, GigaOM’s main venture backer. (Despite Malik’s assurances, the role seems like a bit of a distraction, and a complication for GigaOM’s venture coverage.)

Malik says the new funding will go towards expanding the company’s events and briefings, as well as adding to its portfolio, which means starting or acquiring even more blogs. The money also gives Giga Omni Media a bit of a cushion in case the economic downturn continues. The round was led by new investor Alloy Ventures, with True Ventures participating, along with angel investors Rakesh Mathur, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajamaran.

This is pretty heartening news. Sure, Malik is ostensibly our competitor, but he was also an early inspiration for VentureBeat. It’s nice to see a blog network growing aggressively despite the economic chill, in contrast to the cutbacks at other sites.

Anyone who sits in front of a computer every day — all day — realizes how many ways there are to get distracted. There are games, instant messaging software, music — hell, I even have fun using the calendar application when I’m procrastinating from doing work. Then there’s the Internet. If it wasn’t invented as a time suck, it has grown into just that. RescueTime is a startup that aims to evaluate and help you manage the distractions.

The core idea is simple: If you see how much time you are wasting, you’re probably going to correct it. Using a small application that runs in the background on your computer, RescueTime monitors what you do and sends data such as what applications you have open for how long and what sites you are looking at in the web browser up to its servers. When you then login to RescueTime’s site, you can get detailed analysis complete with charts and graphs for any day, any week, any month, any year or forever.

People into stats will love this. People into productivity may love it even more.

I say that because while it’s easy to have a company goal that states that you will make people more productive by using your application, that isn’t always the case. But RescueTime has some data to back it up.

Using two full months’ worth of data from both business and personal accounts across its entire user base, RescueTime saw the amount of time spent on applications and sites that were labeled in their database as “work” rise nine percent from week one to week eight. RescueTime founder Tony Wright thinks the difference would be even more pronounced if compared with how people were using their computers before RescueTime came into existence.

Now, you might think that people can just cheat the system and label a site like Facebook as “work.” That may be true for personal accounts (though I’m not really sure why you’d want to cheat when you are trying to get real data), but for business users, the manager on the account does the labeling.

“I often liken it to seeing a breakdown of spending from your credit card statement for the first time… Once you actually start paying attention to how you spend a resource, you spend it quite a bit more mindfully,” Wright told me. “I think it’s mind-boggling that businesses work very hard to track every dollar to the penny, but haven’t the slightest clue where they are spending their time. RescueTime gives ‘em a way to do that without actually compromising individual privacy.”

I’ve just started using RescueTime myself. The early data I’m getting back is very compelling. (Said as I slowly close my calendar application.)

The company has just raised its first round of funding, as TechCrunch noted a couple days ago. The $900,000 round was led by True Ventures. It was joined by angel investors Tim Ferriss (author of the 4 Hour Work Week), Mike Koss (an early pioneer at Microsoft), Chris Sacca (a former Google executive) and Mike Seckler (formerly the founder of Employease).

RescueTime is one of the companies that has risen from the Spring 2008 Y Combinator Demo Day.

TextDigger, a semantic search startup that launched early last year at DEMO, has been much quieter in the interim than other companies in the space like Hakia, Powerset and Radar Networks / Twine. But now the company has come back to light, at least for us — a filing document reveals that the company has finally landed venture funding, raising $3.8 million so far.

A year or two ago, it wasn’t uncommon to hear the term “Google killer” applied to companies like TextDigger. Expectations have since fallen somewhat, and most of the semantic startups have struck out in directions other than plain-vanilla web search.

TextDigger landed on media services — no surprise, given that it was founded by former CNET employees. The company tells me it’s making the most progress with automated tagging and keyword generation, which help websites become more structured and show up higher on search rankings. Another product, a related search technology that helps visitors navigate a site, has also gotten interest.

The products are completely developed, they say, and open to any publisher that wants to sign up. TextDigger makes money by charging for all three offerings, following a trial period; related search is charged per 1,000 queries, while auto-tagging and keyword generation are charged per query or tag. It will add self-serve tools this summer to help streamline and automate the process of signing up for the services.

It’s encouraging to see TextDigger making some progress, and figuring out how semantic tech can feed hungry (investor) mouths. But notably, it hasn’t entirely given up on the idea of web search. Although the search segment of their website is closed to the public, when I asked whether the company had given up, a company exec responded that working on search and navigation on other sites would ultimately improve their web search, writing, “If and when we launch a public Web search, at a later date, it will certainly be much better for having incorporated the fruits of our labors in these other service areas.”

By contrast, Hakia, which launched around the same time (our first coverage on the two was in the same article), has continued to make web search the core of its business, with new offerings like vertical search technology.

However, Hakia is also looking to other businesses for its revenue right now; earlier this year, it began licensing itself for enterprise search applications. And today, it’s announcing a new push to syndicate its engine onto other web sites, along with some bells and whistles like XML feeds. It’s offering up to 30,000 searches per day through a web site for free, before it begins charging.

It should be interesting to see how these two companies progress compared to each other, since they appeared at nearly the same time, with a similar pitch, but have since taken on very different strategies.

TextDigger’s $3.8 million round was led by True Ventures, with participation from the Exis Trust and CNET, which provided the San Jose, Calif. company’s $1.5 million seed round, and also uses the technology on its own website.

MindBites is an online video site in which regular people share the knowledge they have in a particular field. For a small fee a user can then download or stream a video and learning something new.

I sat down and spoke with MindBites chief executive Jason Reneau at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, TX, where his company is based. Reneau was excited about the place video sharing sites such as YouTube have taken us in terms of digital self publishing. With mass adoption taking hold, he felt MindBites is coming along at just the right time to fill a certain roll.

”People have so many interesting things to share — and they want a way to do it,” Reneau told me. After watching a video in which a man named Mr. Howling Wolf teaches knife throwing (see a preview below), I am certain Reneau is right. The real question is, will people pay to watch when there is so much free content out there?

The site utilizes a credit system for users to purchase videos. All of the videos are one credit currently and a credit varies in price from $1.69 to $1.99 depending on how many credits you buy at a time. This price structure is similar to the one Apple has in place for TV show and music videos on iTunes. For every video sold, a dollar goes back to the video’s author — which they can choose to keep or give away to charity.

Each video can be previewed on the site (a 60-second clip), and if a user buy the video they can either watch them via a Flash player on the site or download the file that will play on any media player including an iPod.Competitors in this field include VideoJug, ExpertVillage and Howcast, but Reneau thinks there is enough room for all of them as there is currently a $10 billion industry for learning new things.

We’ve all seen instructional videos before, there is something inherently bland about them. MindBites hopes to change that by infusing the more personal styling of Internet video with teaching. There are also some very specific videos that no one is likely to make a professional how-to guide for, such as fixing a treadmill. Oh yes, and knife-throwing.

The MindBites site has been live for a few months following a soft launch, but has had no promotion for it yet. Today marks its official launch as well as the announcement of a funding round of just over $1 million led by True Ventures. John Burke of True Ventures has joined MindBites Board of Directors as well.

BrightRoll, a company that provides high volume, targeted and branded video advertising has created the first high-definition ad network. Utilizing the widespread availability of broadband connections and HD-compatible LCD monitors on computers, the company expect this to be a quickly growing market. However, with major online video players such as YouTube shying away from HD-quality video, is the Internet ready for HD-quality advertisements?

BrightRoll chief executive Tod Sacerdoti believes so, and made it clear when he spoke with us today. Right now, “60-70% of users we see could accept HD-quality ads based on their signal strength,” Sacerdoti said. For those who don’t have the appropriate connection speeds, the company uses its signal detection to dial-down the ads to a lesser quality.

Sacerdoti made the important point that these HD ads are not meant for every publisher right off the bat. Certain areas such as television, movie trailers, and DVD releases could obviously benefit from having their content shown in HD, but for others it would be less meaningful. Sacerdoti also noted that many high-end commercials are already shot in HD and so they would naturally be ready for an online HD-quality video ad network such as the one BrightRoll is offering.

While staying away from HD-quality for now, YouTube did recently enable the ability to see high quality (read: not quite HD) videos. Another company, Dailymotion, recently launched HD content for its online video site, suggesting the market for better-quality video on the web is growing (our coverage).

BrightRoll is based in San Francisco and launched in 2006 with $1 million in funding (our coverage). The company’s investors include True Ventures. Some of its clients include HP, Visa, Warner Brothers and Wal-Mart.

Automattic, the company that owns the popular Wordpress blogging software platform, has raised $29.5 million from existing investors and a new partner, the New York Times. Some companies had offered to buy it, founder Matt Mullenweg writes.

The San Francisco company started out as an open source code project at WordPress.org, which provided software that anyone could download and then host on their own server (what VentureBeat currently uses). More recently, it also began offering free blog hosting at Wordpress.com (which VentureBeat is planning to switch to), where it also sells a set of premium web services, such as Akismet, its spam-blocking software.

Om Malik has the scoop, including more details on the San Francisco company’s growth over the years.

Today, Wordpress hosts 2.2 million blogs today. Paying Wordpress customers include CNN, Fortune, Fox and the New York Times.

Automattic had a big year in 2007: 1.8 million new registered users joined Wordpress.com, 25 million posts were created, and it grew to reach over 100 million unique users worldwide. Meanwhile, the open source Wordpress.com code has been downloaded 5,880,790 since Automattic started, with 3,852,554 downloads in the past year alone, Mullenweg writes.

The New York Times partnership, besides the investment, includes a plan for the Times to expand its “existing blogging infrastructure” and “create new ways of connecting Wordpress bloggers with the New York Times and its readers,” Automattic chief executive Toni Schneider writes.

The company plans to continue improving its anti-spam service and build out its wiki and forum features.

Automattic also won two Crunchies on Friday — awards that a few other blogs and ourselves gave to startups: They included “most likely to succeed” as well as “Best startup CEO” for Schneider.

The financing was led by existing investors Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, and Radar Partners.

GigaOm, a popular Silicon Valley technology blog network, has raised another round of funding from True Ventures, with angel investors participating.

Founder Om Malik says the money will be used to build out the editorial operation as well as hosting more events. For example, GigaOm blog NewTeeVee, which covers the online video market, will do a repeat next year of the industry conference it hosted yesterday.

The angel investors include Rakesh Mathur, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who have experience developing contextual content discovery software. GigaOm is looking to incorporate that type of technology, Malik writes, saying he is saving the details for later.

Besides the eponymously-named flagship blog GigaOm and NewTeeVee, the network also includes WebWorkerDaily, FoundRead and Earth2Tech.

There were some reports that GigaOm raised $1 million in this round, but Malik says that it was more than that. The company previously raised several hundred thousand dollars.

The mother-focused site BabyCenter, owned by giant J&J, has acquired Maya’s Mom, a Palo Alto, Calif. social networking site for mothers.

This is the first sign of consolidation in the inflated sector of Mom 2.0.

A host of sites, from Minti to Mommybuzz, MothersClick, CafeMom and Momjunction have launched recently, raised cash, or otherwise moved aggressively to tap this niche. Internet sites focused on women are enjoying a boom, as more women come online: See our coverage of the mom sector here. CafeMom raised $5 million just last week.

Maya’s Mom was smart, raising a light round of angel funding from well known tech players, including Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Yahoo exec Jeff Ralston, Tickle founder James Currier, True Ventures and more. Raising minimal cash makes it easier to accept an acquisition offer. Sites raising lots of cash find it difficult because their investors set their expectations for a large return, and hold out for a price that may never come.

As we wrote at the time, the company describes itself as a cross between Yahoo Answers and Facebook. It is centered around the asking and answering of questions related to parenting.

The price is undisclosed. BabyCenter will use the company’s social networking technology across its own site, though Maya’s Mom will remain separate.

San Francisco-based VodPod is another also-ran online video site that’s growing.

Vodpod lets you collect videos from around the web and organize them on your own VodPod page, then share them with others. Typically, a user will pick a theme for their collection, or “pod,” such as the Turkish music video pod example shown at bottom.

The most interesting part: You can then embed your video pod on a separate site. The NewTeeVee blog has a good example.

Vodpod traffic — from both its home site and from embedded collections — is near a million visitors a month; registered users number over 50,000. This growth, says company founder Mark Hall, suggests there’s too much hand-wringing about there being ‘too many video sites.’”

The growth appears to reflect what YouTube is also experiencing: The more users create collections, the more people sign up after checking out those collections, and so the virtuous cycle hopefully continues until the market is saturated.

Still, Vodpod’s traffic is tiny in comparison to YouTube and some other sites. Stiff, increasing competition is driving other video sites to adapt their businesses. Even healthy levels of traffic don’t guarantee decent revenue. Sony’s Grouper/Crackle online video-sharing site, for example, is moving from video sharing toward a new model: It wants to be a studio for talented new actors, animators, etc. (coverage here). Crackle wasn’t making money, even though its traffic was growing. So its goal is to make video hits — and then to distribute them through Sony, making money that way.

VodPod started last fall with the bet that the online-video market was still wide open, and that they have a better tool for collecting and sharing videos. San Francisco’s True Ventures invested an undisclosed amount in June. (True also invested in NewTeeVee’s parent, GigaOm, so there’s a sort of cross fertilization here.)

BrightRoll, a San Francisco company that places relevant advertising in vidoes, has launched with an expected $1 million in funding (we’d reported this when the company was still called PostRoller).

Announcement is here, with full list of investors, which includes True Ventures, and several Silicon Valley angels.

A number of big players are serving pre-roll advertising in videos, for example Ad.com, Broadband Enterprises and Tremor. But few of them are using technology that lets publishers specify the video’s subject matter in their ad tag requests. This helps BrightRoll automatically match the video content with relevant advertisers.

Click on the image above for an example of the post-roll and pre-roll ad (which is an interesting Metacafe video in itself, of a pelican eating a pigeon). Metacafe is one of more than 35 customers the company has signed up, says BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti. These also include Streetfire.net and BlipTV. BrightRoll assesses the kind of site, and the type of video being shown on it, when matching ads.

The company has three employees.

BrightRoll takes 50 percent of the ad revenue, but charges less depending on volume. He’ll never compete with a Valueclick, or sell ads to CNN. However, Sacerdoti said he wants to sign up networks of sites, so that he can run a relevant advertisement across, say 25 entertainment sites. The trick is getting a large enough network to make this pay.

updated

Maya’s Mom, a start-up based in a Palo Alto garage, has launched the latest site for parents to trade tips about how to care for their kids.

There are numerous other sites doing very similar things. Minti.com launched last year, and got $1.19M in venture capital earlier this year. It appears to have stolen an early lead, and has found all kinds of ways to integrate with other popular Internet sites. There’s Mommybuzz, which is very difficult to look at because its color is jarring, and requests an immediate login.

Maya’s Mom is one of two Silicon Valley newcomers. The other is San Francisco’s MothersClick, which emerged this month, founded by a first-time mom. They’ve both decided to focus on what they see as the three main features popular among parental advice sites.

These are: (1) A forum for questions and commentary from parents, which is the Maya’s Moms’ central feature, (2) a listing of kids activities, and (3) a place to look up “groups”

The main difference between these two is on the homepage. Maya’s Mom presents you with its main features from the outset. It is open, without registration required. MothersClick, meanwhile, requires you to register, and requests you to choose a geographical area before you select a group. It is too early to tell whether these extra steps will help or hamper MothersClick — since some will presumably like the registration requirement, and others won’t.

We talked with Maya’s Mom founder and chief executive Ann Crady a few days ago. She just finished raising an angel round yesterday from a group including Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Yahoo exec Jeff Ralston, Tickle founder James Currier, Presto’s Raymond Stern, Wink’s Michael Tanne, angel investor Jeff Clavier and True Ventures.

She describes it as a cross between Yahoo Answers and Facebook. It is centered around the asking and answering of questions related to parenting. Lower on the site, it lists kids’ activities. If it can guess your location, or if you give your location to the site, it will show you activities in your region. Right now, its strength is in the Bay Area, and it plans to build from there.

While generally open to anyone, it does give parents the option of sending questions privately to trusted friends.

Investor Jeff Clavier said he invested in the site because, like his other investment in Dogster, it has the potential to be a “passion centric community” site. He calls it the “Dogster for moms.”

Crady previously ran business development at Yahoo’s Search and Marketplace Group, and before that was at 1stUp. She was also a corporate securities lawyer at Wilson Sonsini. She has a daughter named Maya (they are pictured above), and she is a member of various parental groups in the Bay area.

A partial screenshot of the homepage is below: