VentureBeat

Two Seattle-based VC firms, Maveron and Voyager Capital, have recently brought on new partners to extend their reach to the south.

Maveron, which hit a homerun with an early investment in eBay, but has yet to match that success, has expanded its San Francisco office by making Amy Errett (pictured above) a partner. Errett is the former CEO of lesbian lifestlye and travel company, Olivia, and Maveron recruited her six months into her stint as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Trinity Ventures.

Meanwhile, Voyager Capital has made moves to the south, as well, bringing on a new partner, Diane Fraiman (right), to open an office in Portland, Oregon and adding another, Daniel Ahn, as a managing director of its franchise in Menlo Park, Calif. — home of the big Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

Maveron’s Errett comes with a solid track record but a bit of baggage. From 2002 through 2007, Errett helped grow Olivia from $5-25 million in revenues, but she was forced out. She subsequently filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the company’s founder, which is still ongoing.

Voyager’s new partners have backgrounds that are a little less colorful. Diane Fraiman is a long time marketing executive, most recently at JanRain, which runs myOpenID. Daniel Ahn (below) has spent the last nine years at Woodside Fund, and made several investments that look like they’ll be bought or go public at some point. We’re hearing Analogix Semiconductor, where Ahn was the early investor, is about to announce something soon. He also invested in Berkeley Design Automation, which we’re also hearing may announce something shortly.

Ahn wouldn’t comment on why he left Woodside, but we talked with various folks about the firm, and it appears it is strugging with a generational shift. Another younger partner, Tom Shields, the a capella singer of “Here comes another Bubble” also left recently. It appears the father-son relationship of Vincent and Tom Occhipinti is a strong influence at the firm. We’ve put in a call to the firm find out more, and will update if we hear more.

APX, a Silicon Valley company that certifies carbon and emissions offset certificates, and which is well-placed to support carbon-trading markets when they emerge, has gotten backing from Goldman Sachs in a $14 million investment, VentureBeat has learned.

Carbon trading is a growing business that could someday come to resemble the world’s largest financial markets.

Today’s emissions markets are generally small and fragmented. In regional U.S. energy markets, utilities are already required to buy electricity from alternative energy sources like geothermal, solar or wind. To prove their use of alternative energy, they’re required to file a certificate tracking their acquisition of the energy units. So this is the beginning of a “transfer” regime that could grow into more.

Meantime, carbon offsetting markets that corporations buy credits from are currently voluntary, but in anticipation of future government regulation, they often require similar certifying schemes. However, the source of offsets can vary widely, from alternative energy generation to tree planting projects.

APX acts as part of the intermediary chain between buyer and seller, doing the work of tracking serial numbers on these certificates and the accounts they go into. It’s not glamorous, but having an efficient, scalable back-end will be one of the requirements for building a multi-billion dollar market, as emissions trading may well become.

Such details aren’t always automatically addressed as part of creating a new system. In fact, when California was looking at creating a regional registry in 2006, APX was the only qualified bidder, according to Dr. Reiner Musier, the company’s chief marketing officer.

As today’s small, scattered emissions trading markets grow, they may come to resemble the complex business and regulatory ecosystems of the futures and equities markets, which include various behind-the-scenes businesses similar to APX. Another indicator that some very serious businesses are becoming involved is one of the new investors in the company’s latest funding: Goldman Sachs, a heavyweight in the New York financial markets.

The funding we’re reporting was previously announced by APX as an undisclosed round. It appears to have been about $20 million, although the company may have only raised about $14 million to date (it declined to comment on the amount). Besides Goldman Sachs, previous investors Bechtel Enterprises Holdings, Kinetic Ventures, ONSET Ventures, Technology Partners and Woodside Fund also took part.

APX, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., currently handles tracking for five regional markets in the United States, as well as the Gold Standard, an international carbon trading standard. It makes a small set fee off each certificate that’s traded, and thus its success is relative to the volume of the markets. In the interest of helping these markets develop, the firm also advises newly forming markets on how to set themselves up.

Here’s the latest action:

1. Bubble Video singer gets $3M
2. Bahu, a social network for European high schoolers
3. Vinod Khosla upset with California regulations
4. Technorati revises its front page yet again
5. Smilebox, a software download for sharing photos, videos and other media, raises $7 million
6. Microsoft announces display advertising on MSN Mobile
7. Competitious relaunches as RivalMap, gives you dashboard to track your competitors
8. Worst case scenario: The next Great Depression
9. Verizon to take over all your Internets

YouTube takes down “Here comes another bubble” video — Remember the fun video that circulated Silicon Valley last week, about us being in another bubble? Well it has just been taken down after someone told YouTube it violated some sort of copyright. Too bad, because the snippets in the video were so brief it’s hard to understand how any of it could be considered a rip-off. Kara Swisher posts about it all here. In fact, this weekend, we bumped into one of the singers in that video, Tom Shields (pictured left) of the Richter Scales, and he was pretty bubbly himself that the video had already got more than a million views (it hit Yahoo’s front-page); the take-down request certainly didn’t come from his side.

Speaking of Tom Shields, he just got $3M for YieldEx — While Shields’ video got hit with the take-down notice, the a capella singer has other things to be thankful for. Shields recently left his role as venture capitalist at Woodside Fund, and has founded a new company called YieldEx, which is still early, but aims to help Web site owners maximize their ad revenue. He’s mum on the details, but VentureBeat hears he has $3 million, mostly from Woodside. (See Shields’ blog here).

Bahu, a social network for European high schoolers — The Paris social network has gotten a first round of financing from Lightspeed-Gemini Internet Lab. The amount of the round was undisclosed. The site appears to have more MySpace than Facebook (it wants users to be able to promote their music, artists and writing). It said it had two million unique visitors in September.

Vinod Khosla upset with California regulations — The aggressive investor in clean-technology companies says that some of his solar and other companies are contemplating moving out of state. Details here

Technorati revises its front page yet again — Technorati, the blog search engine company, apparently doesn’t know what it wants to do. It keeps changing its face, and now looks quite similar to Techmeme, a site that focused on ranking popular blog and mainstream tech news. Technorati has raised a total of $21.6 million in venture capital across three rounds of financing. Techmeme has raised next to nothing.

Smilebox, a software download for sharing photos, videos and other media, raises $7 million — Smilebox is a Redmond, Wash. company that lets family and friends share your media inside digital scrapbooks, slideshows and photogreetings via email and blogs. It features designs from folks like Hallmark, Making Memories and others. The round is its second,and comes from Bessemer Venture Partners. It reports 1.3 million monthly users. Details here.

Microsoft announces display advertising on MSN Mobile — Paramount Pictures and Jaguar Cars North America are among the first companies to launch a campaign on the service, Microsoft said. Technology for it comes from ScreenTonic, a leader in mobile advertising in Europe that Microsoft acquired.

Competitious relaunches as RivalMap, gives you dashboard to track your competitors — We’ve covered Competitious in the past. Yesterday the company announced a new release, called RivalMap. It gives a web-based tool to manage information and knowledge about their competitors. More details at http://www.rivalmap.com and a video tour here http://www.rivalmap.com/tour/video. The company told VentureBeat several months ago it had raised angel funding. It is now looking to raise venture funding/

Worst case scenario: The next Great Depression — A diseased housing market and a weak dollar have economists and Federal officials chewing their fingernails, as evidenced by the latest quarter-point rate drop in interest rates, designed to stimulate the economy by making borrowing cheaper (thus encouraging spending). Predictions of recession are also on the rise, but just how bad could it get? If you’re prone to worrying, don’t ask Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, who thinks we might be on our way back to the Great Depression. Better drop the Web 2.0 stocks and start investing in those canned food startups, if he’s right. More on his ideas from GigaOm.

Verizon to take over all your Internets — Verizon, which is one of the country’s major internet service providers, has deepened its re-direct scheme, where it seeks to exploit mistakes by users when they are typing in words by redirecting them to pages filled with ads where it can make money. The ISP is now hijacking valid attempts from users to reach web pages through simply typing in a domain name, e.g. simply typing ‘google’ in the site bar. They’ve also made the opt-out process nearly impossible, according to ClickZ. The re-directs lead to pages with Verizon’s own advertising. This comes after Verizon was forced to stop its earlier “Site Finder” initiative.