VentureBeat

Fulcrum Microsystems has created an alliance for its partners to adopt its chips more quickly and has raised $29.2 million in venture capital.

The Calabasas, Calif., chip company has now raised nearly $100 million in five rounds since its founding in 2000. That’s a big chunk of change and it has been able to do so because its esoteric chip architecture has paid off, said Mike Zeile, vice president of marketing, in an interview. The result are faster, low-power chips that are useful in networking and storage equipment in data centers.

The company uses a form of computing dubbed “asynchronous,” a technology invented by its founders — Uri Cummings and Andrew Lines — while they were at Caltech. That means the chips are unlike others in that they have no crystal clock that keeps the timing consistent throughout the chip. Rather, the components on the chips can operate on their own at faster speeds and are synchronized or coordinated only as needed.

At first, it was a struggle to prove that the asynchronous technology could work. Fulcrum had to adapt its designs so they could work in the most modern chip factories. When it launched its first Pivot Point chip in 2004, customers didn’t quite know what to do with it.

“We had a hammer and we used it for everything,” Zeile said.

Then it adopted a hybrid approach that combined both asynchronous and synchronous components on the same chip, Zeile said. The chips have found homes in high-speed communications equipment in enterprise data centers as well as devices at the network’s edge.

Today, at the Interop show in Las Vegas, Fulcrum announced its ControlPoint Developer Alliance with nine companies to enable communications equipment providers to create switching technologies with Fulcrum’s chips more easily. The companies include Continuous Computing, Green Hills Software, Liquid Computing, Nimbus Data Systems, Open Grid Computing, Panasas, Quadrics, SMC Networks and XORP. Zeile said this will create an ecosystem that will improve chip adoption.

“We give them off-the-shelf software so they can get up and running,” Zeile said.

The investors include Granite Ventures, Infinity Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Palomar Ventures, and Worldview Technology Partners. Also included is an unnamed strategic investor.

The company has 65 employees. It has more than 80 designs under way at 50 or 60 customers. Its primary competitor is Broadcom, which makes synchronous-only chips.

OnStor, a Campbell, Calif. company offering data storage for large companies, is the latest hoping to exploit a turn in fortunes in this once-dead sector. It has just gotten $27 million in more funding from venture capitalists who now have pumped $105 million into the seven-year-old company.

Storage companies are once again filing to public, despite very questionable fundamentals for many of them — but their private investors see a window of opportunity to finally get the companies off their hands. OnStor revealed its revenue growth to VentureBeat (see below), and it’s impressive. However it is still not profitable, it says, something it says will change over the next year.

Q1 2006 = $743,925 Q1 2007 = $3,778,911
Q2 2006 = $952,008 Q2 2007 = $4,322,575

Let’s rewind to 2002. This sector was filled with “walking dead” companies in this sector. After the bubble burst, Internet companies were reeling, the last thing peopled needed was more storage. Or if they did, they didn’t need 165 storage start-ups supplying it. That’s the number of companies venture capitalists funded in the preceding five years, as we cited at the time (sorry, article is long since buried in the Mercury News archives). VCs had pumped in about $2 billion into these companies amid a frantic lemming rush, and now if those companies weren’t dying, they were slashing their workforces in a desperate will to survive.

The need for storage always remained. Big corporations need help storing and securing the vast amounts of data they compile from managing business processes, from supply chains and inventory to customer relations.

Back to 2007. The public markets are doing well (or at least were doing well, until the shocks of recent days), and some storage companies are going public after hunkering down for years. And yet, some of the look worrying still. Isilon Systems, a similar company to OnStor, which went public in last year after $70 million in backing, has suffered recently, announcing greater than expected losses..

OnStor says it has 300 customers. Like other older start-ups, it’s discovering new sales pitches for new times. For OnStor, it’s the “greening of the data center,” in other words, making a company’s data infrastructure more efficient and thereby using less electricity helping save the environment. It does this better than big incumbents like NEC and Netapp, it says.

OnStor says its “storage arrays” offer a 95 percent power savings, 90 percent fewer devices to manage and 90 space savings (!). We haven’t verified this, but it’s a nice pitch, huh, given that many large corporations are issuing “green” mandates to do their part in fighting global warming.

The funding comes from Sand Hill Capital and existing investors Foundation Capital, Mayfield Fund, ComVentures, and Worldview Technology Partners. They’ve called this a “mezzanine” round, a term used as a clear signal to the market that this is the last round before going public.

The Taneja Group, a third party research group, is about to finish a white paper for OnStor about the greening of the data center.” It’s due out any day, and we’ll be interested in seeing what it says.

Delivery Agent, a company that lets you purchase products you see on your favorite TV shows, has won a major deal with Viacom and raised $18.5M in a third round of funding.

If you like the jeans that Meredith was wearing in the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy, you can go to Delivery Agent and buy them immediately. It’s the latest way media companies are seeking to use new interactive technologies to squeeze value from product placements in movies, television shows and now – they hope – online videos. The Viacom deal gives Delivery Agent, of San Francisco, four years of exclusive access to the product placement data from Viacom’s MTV, VH1, CMT, and Logo networks.

The financing round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and included WorldView Technology Partners and Cardinal Venture Capital. All three had participated in Delivery Agent’s previous $11.5M round. Total invested to date is $35M.

Delivery Agent’s service helps TV or movie producers create an index of products appearing in their movies and shows. The index then becomes accessible on Delivery Agent’s retail site, SeenOn.

You can find and buy practically everything any major character wore on any episode this season on a list of shows from NBC, ABC, E!, Bravo, and others. To buy Meredith’s jeans, for example, you go to SeenOn.com and select ABC and Grey’s Anatomy from a list of networks and their shows. You then can browse by character (Meredith) and episode (“Desire”), and select the jeans from the displayed results (see screen shot below).

The Viacom endorsement gives Delivery Agent a stamp of credibility as it competes against Entertainment Media Works, which raised $4M earlier this year, and operates StarStyle.com, a direct competitor to SeenOn.

Delivery Agent also wants to sell you this stuff at the moment you see it. To do this, Delivery Agent has developed a proprietary video player that synchronously highlights products as they appear on the screen.

To get a taste of this, take a look at this “Shopisode” trailer for Jackass 2. As the video plays, product advertisements pop up on the right hand side. The ads show the product, its name and its brand logo. In the course of the eighty second trailer, eleven products pop up, ranging from Snapple to Speedo. For now, this functionality is only available in Delivery Agent’s Shopisode video player, but the company foresees a future in which any major network or movie studio will be able to plug-in and make their online videos “shoppable.”

If this sounds terrifying, you might have to get used to it – or just go without watching commercial video on the web. Most people are aware that when they watch 24 and see Macintosh computers throughout C.T.U., it’s likely that Apple has paid for this experience. With technology like the Shopisode player at their disposal, it becomes plausible for advertisers and content producers to place products in every nook they can find.

Delivery Agent will first target “hardcore consumers” who they think will watch a show once for the content and a second time to shop for the products they saw. For this to take off, however, video content producers will have to train their audiences to accept a different breed of advertising that is intrusive in a whole new way. But with these producers fed up with the commercial-bypassing power of DVR and the advertising market scrambling to find some brilliant way to monetize online video, Delivery Agent may offer one method for the two parties to align.