VentureBeat

Updated

Zemanta says it can make the arduous job of blogging a little easier by suggesting relevant content worth linking to or adding to your posts. It looks like well-known blogger and venture capitalist Fred Wilson has been making good use of the tool — Wilson’s firm Union Square Ventures just announced it’s investing an undisclosed seed round in the startup. [Update: Zemanta now says the financing was for nearly $750,000.]

Wilson describes Zemanta as “AdWords for content creators.” Like AdWords (Google’s advertising program), Zemanta’s technology scans the words on a page and makes suggestions about what’s relevant — except in Zemanta’s case, it isn’t recommending ads. Here’s how it works: Every 300 words into a post, Zemanta analyzes the content of your post, then recommends other blog posts, articles, images and videos via a sidebar. It even automates most of the process of linking, posting and crediting outside content. It works as a plug-in for blogging platforms such as WordPress and Movable Type; plus, if you’re using a platform that isn’t supported, it works as an extension for the Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers.

Overall, the product sounds like a great idea — linking and adding other media can feel like time-consuming distractions when I’m writing VentureBeat posts, so anything that helps is welcome. In fact, I just downloaded Zemanta and look forward to giving it a shot. Adaptive Blue offers a competing product called SmartLinks. As the name implies, however, it’s limited to links. [Update: In the comments below, Wilson argues that the products are actually complementary, not competing. In fact, he says Adaptive Blue's chief executive introduced him to the Zemanta team.]

Zemanta is based in London and Slovenia. It previously raised $1.5 million in venture backing, but Union Square is its first US investor.

You’ve probably noticed that the comments on this site aren’t your typical WordPress-run blog default comments. Instead, they’re run by a third party startup called Disqus. We use this because not only does it offer nice avatars and threaded comments, but also because Disqus is expanding conversations beyond a simple stand-alone comment on one site into truer interaction throughout the web. A new version launching today is a continuation of that trend.

Disqus version 2 eliminates what was the biggest knock on the service: That it took the comments off of your blog and put them on its own site. This was problematic for some site owners because many rightfully wondered what would happen to those comments if their site ever stopped using Disqus. Since they were on Disqus’ servers, they could have been lost forever. More troublesome was that comments using the old Disqus plug-in weren’t able to be crawled by Google bots as they were JavaScript-based. Anyone who cares about search engine optimization (SEO) of their site would not like to hear that.

Disqus had an application programming interface (API) version that solved many of these issues, but its new developer API is much more robust. Comments are now entirely SEO-friendly and there is an automatic data sync between Disqus servers and your site’s local database. This is true for all comments both old and new that were made using Disqus.

But this effort to make the service more portable and open is just one part of the version 2 update. The main thing was to “make everything easier and faster to access,” Disqus co-founder and chief executive Daniel Ha (no relation to VentureBeat writer Anthony Ha) told me.

Along these lines, Disqus’ main site has also gotten a revamped look and feel. The navigation is cleaner and admin capabilities are more logical.

One of the goals of the redesign was to make the site “less like profiles and more like comment blogs,” Ha explained. That is to say, make author pages a more appealing place to go to in order to see what people you are interested in have been saying. After all, comments are content just as much as anything else on the web.

Links on both the site and in alert emails also will now link back to the blog or site itself rather than back to Disqus. Many site owners didn’t like that Disqus was seemingly driving traffic to its own site previously, but Ha told us it was an initial programming oversight and not any kind of traffic scheme.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another player has entered the battle to dominate the Internet infrastructure known as the cloud: An open-source cloud company called 10gen just raised $1.5 million from Union Square Ventures.

The New York startup’s platform sounds similar to Google App Engine — namely, it’s an environment to build, host and scale web applications in the cloud. It’s a big day for 10gen; not only did the company announce its funding, it also released its software development kit, and made its source code available through an open source license.

There’s a lot of attention on the cloud computing space right now, and plenty of competition, too. In addition to Google, Amazon offers a popular hosting service. (Coincidentally, this weekend’s problems with Amazon’s S3 storage service took down parts of Union Square investment Twitter, which is already notorious for its scaling problems.) Even if you just look at open source, there’s some interesting startup competition, like Enomalism. GigaOM published a roundup of open-source cloud computing companies last month.

So why invest in 10gen? Google is a probably not the easiest competitor to take on, particularly when it comes to cloud computing. But 10gen has some real advantages, argues Union Square partner Albert Wenger. He says the company answers the call he made last September when he declared, “I want a new platform.” For one thing, Wenger presents a brief but compelling list of the App Engine’s shortcomings. Some of them are probably temporary (like the fact that App Engine is currently limited to Python), but others are harder to dismiss. If a company sees itself as a Google competitor, will it feel comfortable letting Google host its code? Since 10gen doesn’t have to protect other interests, developers can feel more comfortable trusting the startup with their code.

It’s been in the works for several months, but Twitter has finally announced its new round of funding.

The new round was led by Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital and Jeff Bezos of Bezos Expeditions (and also chief executive of Amazon). Existing partners Union Square Ventures and Digital Garage participated as well.

Sabet has also accepted a seat on Twitter’s board of directors.

In a post on the matter, co-founder Biz Stone writes:

Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model. However, our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision of Twitter as a global communication utility. To reach our goal, Twitter must be reliable and robust. Private funding gives us the runway we need to stay focused on the infrastructure that will help our business take flight. We will continue hiring systems engineers, operators, and architects, as well as consultants, scientists, and other professionals to help us realize our vision.

After months of reliability issues, Twitter’s performance has improved in recent weeks after bringing in outside help from Pivotal Labs to work on its architectural issues. It also now has a rolling shutdown system in place that will cut off certain site functionality as needed to maintain stability.

Perhaps most importantly however, Twitter is now keeping its users in the loop when problems arise on its Twitter Status Blog.

While we’ve been quick to point out the difficulties Twitter has been having, I’ve remained excited about its possibilities as a mass communication platform. We’ve seen its power in action during recent ecological disasters and even in times of personal peril, such as when an American was imprisoned in Egypt.

That individual is now trying to work with Twitter to create a Twitter emergency broadcast system of sorts.

With the right pieces in place, I believe Twitter will continue its march towards the mainstream. Not that it really matters, it’s useful with or without mainstream usage. That is why I believe that the only thing that can kill Twitter, is Twitter itself. It has the right combination of users, simplicity and developers building apps on top of it, that no one is going to come along and replace it — that it unless it cannot in any way shape or form be relied upon.

It came close to that precipice, and some users left or were boycotting. But if Twitter is able to right the ship, which it appears to be doing, those users will come back — and many new ones will follow.

Terms of the round have not been disclosed yet, but we have inquiries out to all parties [updates below]. The round was previously rumored to be for $15 million.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha and Chris Morrison. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

update: Existing investor Chris Sacca tells us that Twitter has decided not to disclose the amount of this round. He assures us however that the valuation is “very strong,” and that the existing investors are happy.

Naturally, we spoke about this over Twitter.

update 2: We also received word from Biz Stone that the specific numbers are being kept private between Twitter and its partners.

update 3: And as if on cue, Twitter has been down on and off much of this morning, users report. I see it is down right now. Let’s chalk it up to excitement over the funding.

Outside.in, a site for community news and discussion, has raised an additional $3 million and appointed a new chief executive.

The Brooklyn, New York startup named Mark Josephson, former president of marketing company Seevast Corp., as its new CEO. Josephson doesn’t appear to have experience in local news or local content, but that may not be a problem, since sites like Outside.in are still experimenting to find the best approach. His most relevant experience may be his time as general manager of the New York Times-owned advice and information site About.com.

Steve Berlin Johnson, Outside.in’s co-founder and former chief executive, will continue to serve as executive chairman.

There have been some notable failures among companies trying to create local news hubs, including Judy’s Book and BackFence. But co-founder John Geraci has said those sites launched too early. There’s definitely a good opportunity for sites that take advantage of people’s interest in local news, the one kind of news that’s pretty much guaranteed to be relevant (not to mention a great opportunity for targeted advertising). When Outside.in launched more than a year ago, we thought it was was a strong contender, and in March it announced an even smarter approach — a personal portal called Radar, which sorts content based on its relevance and distance to the user. (Without Radar, Outside.in is divided into mini-sites, sorting news and posts by city and neighborhood, which is a less fine-tuned approach.)

The company declined to provide a specific traffic numbers to give us a sense of its traction, but it did say the service now covers 11,680 neighborhoods.

This recent round brings Outside.in’s total funding to $5.4 million. The round included a new investor, the New York City Investment Fund, as well as existing investors Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, Betaworks and angel investors led by George Crowley.

Updated

There’s another company jumping on the video comments bandwagon. Disqus, the startup whose system powers comments for more than 13,000 blogs (including VentureBeat), is adding video through a partnership with Seesmic.

You can see the system at work on Fred Wilson’s blog. There aren’t any particularly fancy or groundbreaking features yet — Disqus’ Daniel Ha (no relation to the writer of this post) says the company wanted to keep things fairly straightforward so it would be “as seamless as possible to go from text to video” and not scare users away.

Fair enough, but do people actually want to leave video comments? TechCrunch has had video comments for a while, but they don’t seem to get much use. Wilson’s firm Union Square Ventures is an investor in Disqus, yet his post — which begins, “First, let me say I am not sure about the utility of video comments” — doesn’t sound completely sold on the idea either.

Ha, however, says that video commenting can take off if it’s marketed to people in the right way, which hasn’t happened yet. This announcement sounds like a small step in a bigger push toward more adoption.

“This new release is admittedly for the early adopter crowd,” Ha says. “We want to get a feel for how they would be using this and their willingness to let go of old standards.”

I’m not convinced yet — it seems like simple text-based comments are just so much easier and more effective. But then, I’m an old-fashioned text guy myself. We’ll keep watching; maybe people will start using the video system for interesting ends.

The new service, which Mashable broke last week, could at least lead to a higher profile for relatively unproven video company Seesmic.

Update: And now you’ll get to see the new feature in action on VentureBeat — we’ve enabled video comments. Have at it!

Covestor, an investing community site, has raised $6.5 million in its second round of funding. The London and New York-based company plans to build out its asset management platform, which helps its users make investment decisions.

Covestor targets both average investors and professional fund managers. The site mines information from real portfolios on online stock brokerages, giving a holistic view of different risk levels and investment strategies. In all, it tracks 150 variables

The fund management platform is what Chief Executive Rikki Tahta believes can allow the average user to make better decisions than the pros. Tahta has compared Covestor.com to Facebook, in that it wants to bring a sense of trust and real-world verification to the online social investing community that is missing in other investment sites.

The site claims the number of ‘money managers’ it hosts is ten times the number of managers that work for any single professional firm in the world, including giants like UBS or Goldman Sachs, whose consumer investing divisions Tahta thinks are in direct competition with his company.

Covestor’s business model is a bit less certain: The company plans to let fund managers earn revenue by charging minimal fees to the investors who follow them, just as real fund and hedge fund managers do, while the company will keep a portion for itself.

Well known venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson, who happens to be an investor in Covestor through his firm Union Square Ventures, writes that social platforms such as Covestor “might be the best option for investors looking to generate outperformance in the market.” He shares his stock portfolio performance (not good; see left).

While Wilson has put his proverbial money where his mouth is, whether Covestor can separate from the growing field of social investment sites including Zecco and Cake Financial remains to be seen. Back in February, we made up a list of 11 contenders for the social investing market.

Union Square Ventures, New York-based Spark Capital, and European firm Amadeus Capital all participated in the round, which will place Todd Dagres of Spark and Albert Wenger of USV on the Covestor board. USV participated in the first company’s first $1 million round of funding. The company is based in New York City.

Disqus, a company that provides a commenting plugin for online publishers, has released a range of new features designed to integrate it more tightly with its partner sites.

When I first covered the San Francisco company last August, I was a little skeptical about its ability to differentiate itself. But it has. I’ve found it to have a more intuitive interface than rivals like SezWho and Intense Debate (our coverage) — it provides very obvious threaded comments, user profiles, and a way of voting on others’ comments.

The biggest change today is that the company is phasing out its forums, which were located on its home site. Instead, it is offering a “community page” on its home site that displays useful additional information about the partner site, such as who the top commenters are, and what the most commented-on stories are.

Disqus has been busy. It has signed up a number of well-known individual bloggers, including the infamous Fake Steve Jobs (the blog’s community page here), Mathew Ingram, Dave Winer, and others. It has also reached into more mainstream audiences, appearing on political sites like PoliticalWire, The Moderate Voice, and even The Harvard Crimson, Harvard University’s student newspaper.

In total, Disqus’s plugin is on more than 4,000 blogs, it has around 60,000 total commenters and handles an average of around 5,000 comments per day.

The company has also been steadily improving its spam-filtering software. Comment spam from splogs and other jerks on the internet are a big problem, as those who read past VentureBeat articles will see.

For a first-hand account of Disqus in action over the last eight months, read Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson’s post here, on the firm’s official blog. Wilson was one of the first people to try Disqus out, on his personal blog A VC, and he was clearly impressed by what he say.

Disqus has raised half a million from Union Square, angel investor Howard Linzon’s investment company, Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners, and individual angel investors Naval Ravikant and Aydin Senkut (full disclosure: Senkut is also an investor in VentureBeat).

The so called “semantic web” is on its way — or, according to Adaptive Blue CEO Alex Iskold, already here, and just waiting for the right applications to exploit it.

With the latest release of his company’s application BlueOrganizer, a FireFox plug-in that provides a way of browsing the web with more intelligence at your fingertips, the wait is about over.

BlueOrganizer lets you do things like right-click on words on a page to pull in more information about the words, even supplying links about where can buy it (if it is a product), or book a ticket (if it is an event).

Indeed, the semantic web is all about making data understandable so that computers can help make connections meaningful to humans, and Adaptive Blue focuses on specific niches in order to make the process of building those connections easier.

BlueOrganizer’s approach is to organize data on a page by categories of consumer interest, like blogs, books, movies and restaurants.

If you had the plug-in and I made a mention in this post, for instance, of the book “A Thousand Blazing Suns” by Khaleid Hosseini, BlueOrganizer would highlight the name, provide further information and links to buy the book, learn more about it or share it with others.

We’ve written about this application before. New to the application, however, is the ability to access info like a name and address that has been microformated, meaning it’s tagged within the HTML created by the page designer. Right click anywhere within it and you’ll be able to automatically map the location or check out nearby restaurants.

Or, for a person, right-click on their name and be able to shoot off to their Facebook or Twitter profile, look them up on Wikipedia if they’re famous, and so forth.

Iskold calls it a “top-down” approach to the semantic web. Rather than tagging data before it’s placed on the Internet, BlueOrganizer looks at what’s already present and uses it to help people in their ordinary browsing activities.

In the process, it’s re-structuring the way its users navigate the web by providing a browser-based overlay to websites that users navigate by, rather than the links alone within pages.

For the most part, the new additions to BlueOrganizer are logical extensions to what already existed in the program (which we’ve previously written about). The six-person team has been periodically putting out new releases that progressively make the plug-in more powerful.

AdaptiveBlue competes with a number of other startups that tag data, although many have an opposite approach, counting on web designers to include them in the code of the page. Other, larger rivals will probably eventually include a larger semantic web startup like Twine (coverage here), although its implementation is somewhat different, or PeoplePad, a stealth startup we recently wrote about with secretive plans to do something that sounds quite similar to BlueOrganizer.

The company took $1.5 million from Union Square Ventures in early 2006, and is currently considering another round.

Etsy, a site for buying and selling hand-made crafts, has raised $27 million in a round led by Accel Partners, with Accel’s Jim Breyer joining the company’s board of directors.

Think eBay’s e-commerce site, but for arts and crafts, and also more tastefully designed. Etsy’s crafts range from handmade furniture to bracelets (sample below).

The vision behind the company is that it can help small-time craftspeople find customers and make a living, while reducing society’s reliance on mass-produced consumer goods. “We believe that the world cannot keep consuming the way it does now, and that buying handmade is part of the solution,” founder Rob Kalin writes in this post about the funding, and the company’s future plans.

Etsy charges sellers a $0.02 listing fee per item and 3.5 percent commission on any sale, as well as letting sellers pay a small fee to showcase their goods in prominent locations on the site. It is making money and at break-even.

The site also offers a feedback system, a Paypal payment option, online forums, online sessions on craftsmaking aired live from the company’s headquarters, and even street teams that help reach out to local users.

It has around 650,000 registered members, including 120,000 craft sellers, and lists nearly 1 million items. Most site visitors are in the US, Europe and down under, by the looks of this map (pictured) on the company’s site, although it has sellers in more than 127 countries. The site had more than a million unique visitors in December, according to Comscore.

Previous investors Union Square Ventures and Hubert Burda Media joined in this round. The company received angel funding from Flickr co-founder Catarina Fake and other individuals. Previous funding totaled $5 million. Note: Investors have apparently been drooling over the company for years.

Here’s the latest action:

1) Apple releases the Air, Twitter left gasping
2) Facebook-based gaming site Zynga launches
3) CNET defies Spark / Jana alliance with poison pill
4) Grayboxx rolls out local search nationally
5) Overlay.tv gets $4.5M for in-video ad links
6) Portfolio magazine cozies up to Open Social
7) Oversee draws $150M for domain auctions
8) A video primer on data portability
9) Notes on the upcoming 700mhz auctions

Apple releases the Air, Twitter left gasping — As usual, Steve Jobs used his keynote speech at the Macworld conference to introduce a new Apple product. This time it was the ultra-thin Air laptop, which will probably help continue the Mac’s trend of stealing market share away from Microsoft. Coming in at just three pounds and three quarters of an inch thick, it will also be the thinnest laptop on the market, at least according to Jobs. More tech specs here. The keynote also helped point out the limits of Twitter. The messaging service was on fire, with Mac fans firing off one-liners about developments — too many, apparently, because the service went down because of the load, confounding several live-bloggers, including Valleywag.

Facebook-based gaming site Zynga launches — Casual gaming startups like Kongregate and King.com are amassing large userbases, but can a gaming startup survive on Facebook and other social networks alone? Investors including Peter Thiel and Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures think so, having just sunk $10 million into a company called Zynga that offers versions of popular games like Texas Hold’em and Battleship on Facebook. The company’s founder, Mark Zingus, told the New York Times that Zynga is already doing well enough to support its staff of 27 people with revenue from its games — despite the fact that the their sole source of revenue is other developers who run ads for their applications on Zynga’s games.

CNET pops the poison pill — CNET showed its willingness to fight Spark Capital and Jana Partners, the leaders of a group of investors trying to take it over. CNET has adopted a “poison pill” plan, in this case a shareholder’s rights plan that attempts to discourage the two from buying more than 15 percent of the company (they currently hold just over 10 percent). The company also instituted new severance packages for its (allegedly underperforming) senior execs, just in case. Expect lengthy negotiations between the independent board that instituted the new rules and Spark/Jana, which want to fire the aforementioned execs and run the company according to its own ideas.

Grayboxx rolls out local search engine nationally — Grayboxx, a local search engine and reviews site that launched last October for 100 towns and cities, has expanded its service to cover the entire United States. The company is almost entirely automated, although it just added a feature to allow user reviews. We also covered it before its launch.

Overlay.tv raises $4.5M, readies release of video advertising service — A first round of $4.53 million has gone to Overlay.tv, which will launch its service on Valentine’s Day. In a nutshell, Overlay can add hyperlinks or images into videos leading back to other websites. For example, a video of M.C. Hammer dancing might include a video link on top of his legs, leading to a site where you could buy balloon pants. Regular users will also be able to put overlays on videos leading back to links of their own choosing. Overlay is based in Ottawa, Canada. Update: Backers are Celtic House Venture Partners, EdgeStone Capital Partners and Tech Capital Partners.

Portfolio cozying up to Open Social — A day or so ago we reported that famously stodgy media giant Conde Nast is moving its teen destination, Flip.com, to live entirely on Facebook and other social networks. Now Portfolio magazine, another Conde property, is planning on joining up with Google’s Open Social (coverage of OpenSocial here), as well as spreading its content to sites like LinkedIn. Although left behind for several years, “old media” is slowly learning to play the internet game (witness as well the growing online success of standbys like Time Magazine and the New York Times).

Domain name company Oversee draws $150M — Private equity firms have continued to take an interest in the domain name business, most recently with Oak Hill Capital pouring $150 million into Oversee.net, a monetization platform for domain owners and the new owner of domain auctioneers Moniker and SnapNames. Oversee will likely use the money to consolidate its growing hold on the domain name auction business.

Data portability 101: The video tutorial — A picture is a thousand words, but a video might help you keep from falling asleep, when learning about topics like data portability. Helpfully, ReadWriteWeb has a brief update post containing a video explaining the basics. We’ve also written on the portability group Facebook and Google recently joined, here.

FCC’s 700mhz auctions approaching fast — January 24th marks the date of the 700mhz spectrum auction, and AT&T, Verizon and Google are getting ready to square off in the competition for the most desirable blocks. Unfortunately for the FCC, the main bidder for one of the other blocks, Frontline Wireless, recently shut down, and it’s possible that nobody else is interested. For more info on the spectrum and auction rules, check out Ars Technica, while GigaOm has a helpful table of the different spectrum blocks.

Here’s the latest action:
1. Medio’s roar turning to a squeal?
2. Sprint changing WiMax plans?
3. AOL rumored to be considering buying ad targeting network Quigo for $300 million
4. Bug Labs, for open-sourced electronic devices
5. Semantic search engine Hakia releases social networking tool
6. The amazing $200 Ubuntu Linux “green” PC at Wal-Mart
7. Cisco does its 125th buyout
8. Facebook’s stock has appreciated 33-fold, and then some
9. Internet Brands going public with growing losses, declining sales?
10. Shopstyle signs deal with In Style Magazine

Medio’s roar turning to a squeal? — We’re wondering what will happen to Seattle’s Medio, the company that provides mobile search technology to telecom giant Verizon, now that Google is reportedly close to signing a deal with the giant carrier to offer customers a GPhone. This which would carry a Google operating system, based on Linux and offering a host of Google applications including search. The Mercury News carried a profile story on Medio Tuesday, in which chief executive Brian Lent (pictured top left) boasts Medio has a broader reach than Google, citing its partnership with Verizon. The article appeared the day before the deal negotiations between Google and Verizon leaked. Obviously, Medio won’t get kicked off of Verizon’s phones overnight. The GPhone hasn’t even arrived yet. Still, the Merc piece is a notable read, explaining how Lent knew the Google co-founders at Stanford, but initially shrugged of the promise of search; he even turned down the No. 1 employee position at Yahoo. Verizon, in turn, may be flirting with Google for the following obvious: Apple iPhone has become a raging success, after Verizon turned down the chance to be the iPhone carrier partner. As Techdirt points out, Verizon and Google have a tough history, including the standoff over the 700 MHz spectrum debate and network neutrality. But the GPhone, that might paper over the differences.

Sprint Nextel changing WiMax plans? — Sprint may be rethinking its plans to offer high-speed wireless Internet service using WiMax technology, possibly merging its wireless broadband unit with start-up Clearwire, according to the WSJ.

AOL rumored to be considering buying ad targeting network Quigo for $300 million – But its just a rumor. Details from Kara Swisher.

Bug Labs, for open-sourced electronic devices — You’ve heard about all the open-source software. Well, New York’s Bug Labs is offering open source for hardware, drawing on outside developers to help fashion the building blocks of these personalized devices that will be easy enough for non-techies to assemble. It is backed by Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Robert Young, founder of open source company Red Hat. More about BugLabs here. It has similarities with Ponoko.

Semantic search engine Hakia releases social networking tool — Called Meet Others, it lets you meet people who typed in the same search query. Now that is geeky.

The amazing $200 Ubuntu Linux “green” PC at Wal-Mart — The price of this computer is truly in the basement. It runs OpenOffice software and comes pre-configured with links to all of Google’s online applications. See Wired story for more details. It stands in stark contrast to Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop for the poor, began at a price of $100, but which now has crept upward to….$200. So apparently, there’s no need for the poor laptop any more. The developing world may as well order a Linux version straight from Wal-Mart.

Cisco does its 125th buyout –Cisco, the giant networking company, proves you can grow and prosper through non-stop acquisitions. It has paid $100M for Securent, a company that monitors access to a company’s data and communications regardless of vendor, platform, or operating system. Securent was founded in 2004 by Rajiv Gupta after raising capital from Greylock and Onset (via Alarmclock ).

Facebook’s stock has appreciated 33-fold, and then some – Many of us reported how the Microsoft deal to invest in Facebook at such a high value ($15 billion) makes Facebook’s private shares expensive. This, in turn, makes it tough to recruit motivated employees, because it means there’s little room for the stock to appreciate — at least for several years until Facebook starts making some money. NYT’s Miguel Helft has done a good job at exploring just how far the stock has risen.

Internet Brands going public with growing losses, declining sales? — We don’t get this one. The El Segundo, Calif., company has filed to raise $45 million in an IPO. But the company, whose sites include CarsDirect, WikiTravel, FlyerTalk.com among others, swung to a loss of $2.4 million in the first nine months of the year, and saw is revenues decline too. This, after buying 35 start-ups last year, enough to jolt any company. Buyer beware. It is backed by IdeaLab.

Shopstyle signs deal with In Style Magazine — ShopStyle, the fashion-focused shopping search engine that Sugar recently acquired, has announced a partnership with the popular In Style Magazine. Sugar has said its efforts to create a woman-centric network, a la Glam, was not working out, and has been looking into other means to generate revenue. Combining ShopStyle’s search with the editorial sensibilities of In Style’s fashionistas could prove lucrative for both companies. Under the terms of the deal, Sugar will receive a cut of revenues, as well as its CPCs.

Here’s the latest action:
1) Brightroll raises $5M for video ads
2) LGC Wireless acquired for $169M plus
3) InterviewUp, answers for job interviews
4) Alibaba.com to go public
5) Yahoo’s CMO leaves, without explanation
6) Tesla’s shocking $1M crash tests
7) Tumblr, Collective Media, Veeker, MobileEye, BioFuelBox, GameLayers, Shooner, all raise cash
8) Boston’s Entrepreneur site

Brightroll serves billionth video ad, raises $5 million – The mark comes less than six months after serving half that number. The San Francisco company, which helps large ad agencies and brands sell video ads across leading web sites, has also raised $5 million from new investor KPG Ventures,
True Ventures and Adams Streep Partners.

LGC Wireless acquired by ADC Telecommunications – As we reported last week, LGC Wireless has been bought. Now its official by who. ADC picks it up for $169 million plus about $20.5 million in debt. LGC’s technology strengthens cell signal coverage in buildings, airports and other indoor areas. LGC Wireless had sales of $83 million in year ending Sept. 30. The 11-year-old company had raised $93 million in funding. Investors included Rembrandt Venture Partners, the Mayfield Fund, Allegis Capital, Crystal Ventures, Intel Capital, Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. and Dali Hook Partners.

InterviewUp is Q&A site for job interviews — The site is designed to help interviewers collect challenging questions and interviewees find good answers. We’re not sure the world needs another Q&A site, but a post discussing Google’s interview questions scored over 1500 diggs. If InterviewUp can deliver juicy tidbits like these, it has a shot. For more.

Yahoo’s chief marketing officer Cammie Dunaway leaves – She was head of the customer experience division, and there was no reason given for the departure (details here).

Alibaba Group, 39 percent owned by Yahoo, plans Alibaba.com IPO for Nov. 6th in Hong Kong – The IPO is expected to be the biggest ever by a Chinese Internet company, raising as much as $1.5 billion. Earlier story here from WSJ.

Collective Media, another online ad network, raises funds –The company says it reaches 120 million unique users per month. The round was led by Greycroft Partners, with iNovia Capital participating. More here.

Tumblr, offers you a lean Web site — The New York company offers you a personal site where can collect, share and discuss what headlines and other things found online. It lets you pull in your Twitter feeds, too. Other than that, its has few frills. It has raised $750,000 in a first round of funding from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.

Veeker, a mobile video and picture messaging startup, appears to be stuck — The San Francisco start-up raised $2.5 million from Labrador Ventures, but is struggling amid competition.

Tesla’s $1M crash tests — Ouch, at $1M each, no wonder executives at Tesla were gasping at the cost per crash for the testing of the anticipated all electric sports car. Apparently, though, the cost per crash is now a mere $300,000 (Earth2Tech).

Goldman Sachs invests $100M in Israel MobileEye, for driving tool — MobileEye’s technology calculates the speed and distance of a vehicle in front of a car, and alerts the driver when other vehicles are too close. The company raised the money at a pre-money valuation of $500M, reports Israel’s Globes. MobileEye, which has already raised $50M, plans an IPO for next year. The company says that it will have $10M in sales this year and that it will become profitable in 2008. Here’s its statement.

BioFuelBox, biofuel refining startup, raises $9.46M in first round — Backers of the a Hollister, Calif. start-up include Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DFJ Element. PE Hub has the scoop, reporting that the company’s technology is a “bio-refinery in a box — a modular, containerized innovation that produces biofuel cost-effectively and easily.”

GameLayers, a passive multiplayer online game maker, raises $500,000 — The San Francisco company is backed by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Joi Ito and Richard Wolpert, reports PEHub.Schooner Information Technology, secretive finance company, raises $3.33 million — The company plans a $15 million total first round, according to regulatory filings cited by PE Week. The round was led by CMEA Ventures. The Oakland, Calif., company is led by Richard Busch, formerly with Sun Microsystems as research director of computer system architecture and analysis.

Social networking site for VCs launching next month in Boston – TheFunded lets entrepreneurs talk about VCs. Next month, the New England Venture Network will launch venturenetwork.vc, a place for VC’s to talk about deals. A deals section will feature a Craigslist-like listing of investment opportunities, including a place for VCs to post about companies that are looking for funding, that they chose not to invest in. A questions section will let analysts query VCs. A jobs section will let VCs advertise openings at portfolio companies. Via The Boston Globe.

[Update 12/11: Twitter filed regulatory papers saying it had raised $4.8 million in a second round of funding, and that it possibly raise a total of $5.4 million]

Confirming what we first reported earlier this week, the fast-growing Twitter messaging service has raised a new round of funding.

The San Francisco company, which has become popular among people wanting to update online what they are doing at any given point of time, has announced the lead investor on the deal, which we hadn’t known earlier: Union Square Ventures, of New York.

The amount was undisclosed. Other investors include CRV, Marc Andreessen, Dick Costolo, Ron Conway, and Naval Ravikant, among others.

Union Square’s Fred Wilson blogs about it here.

This is an well-timed present for Evan Williams, owner of Obvious, the original parent of Twitter and now large stakeholder, who is getting married tomorrow.

Wesabe, a Web site that lets people manage their finances, and network with network with others for advice, has raised $4 million in a first round of financing.

We first wrote about the Berkeley, Calif. company in November.

The financing was led by Union Square Ventures, of New York, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, of San Francisco, which provided the company