VentureBeat

German skill-games site GameDuell has raised $17 million in a second round of funding from Wellington Partners.

The Berlin-based company has more than 10 million registered members and claims to be the No. 1 game community in Germany. It plans to use the money for an international expansion, including a move into the U.S. which is already under way.

Kai Bolik, chief executive, said in a statement that results in France and Spain show that the company’s marketing strategy is working.

GameDuell creates skill-based online games, which include solitaire, Mahjong, Sudoku, pool and darts. Players can log into the site and play against real players for prizes. But since the games involve skill and not luck, they aren’t considered gambling. Thus, they aren’t restricted in many territories. The site says more than 200,000 games are played each day.

But the market is competitive, since the games are simple and they’re not so hard to clone. Of GameDuell’s competitors, the toughest is WorldWinner, which has the backing of Liberty Media’s TV properties to push users to its site. In the U.S., WorldWinner has been around since 2000. In 2006, it was acquired by FUN Technologies, the owner of SkillJam, for $23 million, and media giant LibertyMedia bought WorldWinner in December.

WorldWinner says it has tens of millions of registered players. It has 100 employees, mostly in Newton, Mass. Peter Blacklow, president of WorldWinner, said on a panel in May that gamers typically spend $400 a month playing the company’s contests. WorldWinner’s commission is 15 percent to 20 percent of that.

GameDuell said it has more than 200 media partners and is Germany’s third-largest online advertiser. It has 80 employees and plans to double its workforce in the coming months. Founded in 2003, the company is run by Bolik and fellow internet entrepreneurs Michael Kalkowski and Boris Wasmuth.

GameDuell received a first round of funding from Holtzbrinck Ventures and Burda Digital Ventures in 2004. Wellington just added LinkedIn cofounder Eric Ly as a partner.

Eric Ly, a co-founder of professional networking site LinkedIn, has signed on to be a venture partner at Wellington Partners. Ly says he’ll be helping the London- and Munich-based firm with its plans to expand into the United States, and into Silicon Valley in particular.

That’s a natural expansion for Wellington, given its interest in technology and the current Euro-dollar exchange rate. But it’s a surprising move for Ly — after all, you’d think he’d have his hands full with his scheduling startup, Presdo, where he is the founder and chief executive. (I’ll be writing more about Presdo soon.) And indeed, Ly says that Presdo is “my life”; his deal with Wellington only commits him to working two days per month.

“The first time they approached me, I said no,” Ly says. “But [General Partner Eric Archambeau] was just very persistent, you know, and I started to see some benefit in doing this part-time, for myself.”

Although Ly says his heart is still in startups and entrepreneurship, the deal gives him a chance to dip his toes into the venture world. Archambeau’s credentials as an investor were a big draw too — before joining Wellington, Archambeau worked at Benchmark Capital and Atlas Venture, and previous investments include eGroups, which became part of Yahoo Groups, and Trading Dynamics, which was acquired by Ariba.

At Wellington, Ly will focus on social media and social networking. With a limited time commitment, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll have a huge effect on the firm’s direction, but his name is an impressive addition to Wellington’s stable of venture partners, which also includes Loic Le Meur, chief executive of Seesmic (a Wellington investment), and former Fireclick chief executive Ram Sranivasan.

Updated

Seesmic, a startup that lets users post short video comments and snippets, has raised $6 million in a second round of funding. The new round was led by Omidyar Network, the firm created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Wellington Partners.

The San Francisco company has been dubbed the “Twitter of video” — through its platform, users can easily record and post short video segments to their blogs, social networks or to the Seesmic site itself. You can also post video comments on blogs (like VentureBeat) whose discussions are powered by Disqus.

We’ve been a bit skeptical about whether this will take off, because it’s not clear that videos are as effective and easy a way to communicate quick thoughts as, say, a one-line text comment on a blog or a short post on Twitter. In comment threads, if people aren’t willing to take the time to watch your video, a commenter can become cut out of the conversation. I haven’t seen a lot of use in VentureBeat’s comments either, although that may be because we haven’t done much to promote it.

Seesmic says the platform provides video to 1,500 sites and blogs.

The company also just released a promising new feature — an embeddable video that can include threaded comments. That means an entire conversational thread can be viewed by playing a single video. This idea has some problems too, because sites may not want to see too many user comments disappearing into one video. But at least Seesmic is trying out different ways to make the commenting process more organic.

The new round brings Seesmic’s total funding to $12 million.

Update: Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur offers his account of how the deal fell into place here. I love the fact that after Seesmic’s first round, Omidyar wrote a comment on Twitter asking, “How come I didn’t get to invest?”

Update 2: To help counter some of our skepticism, Seesmic has sent along some other numbers to show their traction: The site gets 120,000 unique visitors per month, 69,000 video posts per month and around 3,600 new users.

The online event-planning market is mature. Various event web sites have gotten bought, gone out of business, or gone nowhere in the last several years.

However, two companies, Amiando and EventBrite, allow you to sell tickets to events online, and they’ve emerged with a business model: They take a cut of the ticket sale. This differs them from the slew of other sites that helped you organize events, but never made money.

Notably, the two companies have just announced new rounds of venture funding.

The two companies fill the middle ground between the enormous task of building your own ticket-selling software (not very practical, obviously), and using a large-scale ticket-seller like Ticketmaster. In addition, they help you set up websites to promote those events.

Today, Amiando, a Munich, Germany-based service that says it has the “first mover” advantage in Europe, is announcing its first round of financing, from Wellington Partners and Adinvest.

Eventbrite, the San Francisco-based company that’s likely better known to our United States-based readers, announced its first, and undisclosed, round earlier this week from the European Founders Fund. Eventbrite’s chief executive is Kevin Hartz, an early advisor to Paypal and a repeat entrepreneur who is also the co-founder of angel investing outfit Youniversity.

Both services should be familiar to VentureBeat readers. We’re using EventBrite to sell tickets for our MobileBeat conference in July. Amiando, meanwhile, was the online ticket seller for the Crunchies awards that we co-hosted last January.

Amiando, which also offers a widget that lets you sell tickets on your own site, has been focusing on international expansion. Besides English, it already provides the service in German (of course), as well as Spanish and French. It recently announced a distribution partnership for the East Asian market with Web2Asia, a company that provides business development services for foreign companies looking to expand into Asia. The East Asian region, particularly China, has unsurprisingly shown impressive growth potential for events and related services that go along with general economic expansion. China’s event industry for example is growing 20 percent per year, with the second highest number of trade show visitors and exhibitors in the world, according to a 2007 report by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

Anthony Ha contributed to this article.

Vast amounts of power are locked away in the movements of the ocean, but because of technical challenges, the number of startups that have attempted to harness wave power thus far is relatively small when compared to wind or solar.

OreCon is the latest, with plans for a sort of giant, self-contained buoy that floats atop the water, each unit generating a megawatt and a half of energy. The company has raised $24 million, which it plans to use in building a full-scale example.

One of the problems with putting mechanical equipment in the ocean is that the salt and other chemicals in sea water tend to destroy moving parts. OreCon uses a design called the Oscillating Water Column to keep most of the parts well above water level.

In an OWC, which is a well-known setup, the pressure from waves outside the device causes water to rise and fall within it, which in turn pushes air in and out through a turbine, creating energy. They tend to be fairly inefficient, though. (See this brief animation to get a better idea of what happens in an OWC.)

OreCon’s innovation is using what it calls “multi-resonant chambers”. In its proprietary design, the company deploys multiple OWCs around a 40 meter platform that’s tethered to the sea floor a few miles off shore.

The first unit should be deployed somewhere off the coast of England in Cornwall, near Plymouth, where OreCon was founded six years ago. Closer to home, rival designs by Finavera Renewables and Pelamis Wave Power are planned for deployment off the coast near San Francisco.

The funding OreCon raised was for £12 million (about $24 million US dollars). The round was led by Advent Venture Partners, and Venrock, Wellington Partners and Northzone Ventures also participated.

Featured companies: Azaya Therapeutics, Global Care Solutions, Oxford Immunotec, RealSelf.com, Sequoia Pharmaceuticals, Tactile Systems Technology, WellGen, Zeltiq Aesthetics

UPDATED: Expanded items on Oxford Immunotec, Zeltiq, Tactile Systems, RealSelf.com and Global Care.

Oxford Immunotec pulls in $40M for TB tests — Oxford Immunotec, a U.K. biotech focused on new diagnostic tests for infectious disease, raised $40 million in a third financing round. The company’s release is here (PDF). Investors included Clarus Ventures, Wellington Partners, Kuwait-based National Technology Enterprises Company, the Prelude Trust, Quester and the Dow Chemical Company.

The company’s diagnostic tests identify and measure the activity of immune-system “effector T cells,” whose levels generally correspond to the severity of infection. Oxford Immunotec’s first product is a new diagnostic for tuberculosis designed to replace a century-old skin test. The company says its test has been approved in Europe, Canada and more than 40 other countries. The latest funds will support the U.S. launch of the product.

Zeltiq raises $20.3M for fat reduction — Pleasanton, Calif.-based Zeltiq Aesthetics, a stealthy cosmetic-procedures device maker, raised $20.3 million in a second funding round, VentureWire reports (subscription required), citing a regulatory filing. The company was formerly known as Juniper Medical.

Zeltiq is apparently focused on “new technologies for fat layer reduction” that require “little or no recovery time.” The company’s investors include Advanced Technology Ventures, Frazier Healthcare Ventures and family trusts associated with officers of the medical-device incubator The Foundry, including Hank Plain, Hanson Gifford and Mark Deem.

Tactile Systems Tech receives $11.8M for lymphadema treatment — Minneapolis-based Tactile Systems Technology, a maker of computer-controlled pressure garments designed to treat fluid-related swelling known as edema, raised $11.8 million. The private-equity firm Galen Partners led the round.

Cosmetic-procedure review site RealSelf.com takes sub-$1M seed funding — RealSelf.com, a Seattle-based Web site that hosts reviews of various cosmetic procedures, raised a seed round of funding last July and formally launched its service last Friday. The company’s release is here. Investors in the seed round included Zillow CEO Rich Barton, Revenue Science CEO Bill Gossman and Nick Hanauer, a partner at Second Avenue Partners.

For some reason, RealSelf insists on billing itself as a site for discussion of “anti-aging” products, but its focus appears to lie pretty squarely in the realm of what used to be called “plastic surgery” and now is sometimes prettied up with the term “medical aesthetics.” For the record, there is a actual anti-aging movement filled with people obsessing over ways to slow or reverse the hands of time via supplements, hormones and God knows what else. Although many of its practitioners are somewhat nutty, as a movement it has virtually nothing to do with cosmetic procedures such as teeth whitening, laser hair removal and wrinkle fillers, which are topic A at RealSelf.

In an interesting case of cross-item entanglement, though, there seems little doubt that Zeltiq Aesthetics (see two items up) will eventually figure in RealSelf discussions.

Microsoft acquires Thai healthcare IT provider Global Care Solutions — Microsoft, aiming to deepen its hold on healthcare-IT technology, acquired Bangkok-based Global Care Solutions for undisclosed terms. (The release is here.) Global Care’s primary accomplishment seems to have been building a digital patient-management system for Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok, which is best known as a center for “medical tourists” seeking care at low prices. The WSJ health blog has a good rundown on the deal.

OTHER HEADLINES OF NOTE:

• Specialty pharma Ventaira closes down, Battelle reabsorbs assets (release)
• Nutrigenomics firm WellGen gets $9.5M for anti-obesity ingredient (release)
• Azaya draws $4.1M for reformulated drugs (VW)
• Sequoia Pharma appoints Steven Skolsky as new CEO(release)

updated

Wazap is a search engine company focused exclusively on games, and is growing quickly — as you may expect, given the popularity of games.

It’s another of those ideas that seems so obvious in hindsight, you’re left wondering why it hasn’t been done before. It boasts 11 million unique users a month, with 200 million page views. It logged $1 million in revenue last year, it says.

It has just raised $7.9 million in a second round of funding led by Partech International, with participation from Wellington Partners. Wellington led the first round financing of almost $4 million. Wazap’s roots are in Japan and Germany, where it has launched sites. It has launched in China, and launches in the U.S. next month.

It provides search results for games you’re searching (see screenshot of a search for “World of Warcraft” at the German site below). The left arrows point to how similar it looks to Google: sponsored results at the top, and regular results below that. The right arrow points the right hand column, which has things like “related games.”

Wazap also provides news articles, and tips and tricks about how to play games — for example, a video clip demonstrating how a gamer is able to slay a particular dragon.

The company first launched in game-crazy Japan in 2004. Traffic on the Japan site is far ahead of the German site, in part because the Japanese site let users participate in forums early on.

Co-founders Andreas Rührig, 29 and Timo Meyer, 28 have formed two gaming companies before, including Games.de, and sold them for a combined $60 million euros. They’ve brought much of their Games.de team with them to launch Wazap. They’ve hired Thom Kozik, who formerly ran Yahoo Games (which also has a video game search engine), to launch the U.S. version. Kozik is based in Los Angeles.

The company is negotiating deals with portals, such as Germany’s Web.de, to provide search for their games pages, in return for a cut in the ad revenue. Wazap hopes eventually to negotiate rights to operate the entire games pages of large portals — arguing that it will have the large userbase to make those sites more popular.

Wazap is also introducing a specialized site, ezoom, dedicated to the needs of hardcore gamers — such as those who spend hours on World of Warcraft. This will have a tab from the home page.

Notably, the Japan site is getting more traffic from mobile phones than it is from PCs, the company says.