VentureBeat

Tapioca Mobile, a San Diego company that lets publishers deliver video, images and audio through SMS messages on a cell-phone, has raised seed funding from Silicon Valley venture firm Venrock.

The company was founded this year by former employees of wireless companies Qualcomm, Nokia, and Openwave.

Venrock’s David Siminoff and Neeraj Choubey joined the board.

In a statement, Siminoff said the rise of mobile messaging is “astounding” and rivals the adoption of the Internet a decade ago. Tapioca Mobile gives media companies and advertisers the ability to deliver video and other “rich media” formats, such as images and audio, to cellphone users via the fast-growing Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) protocol available on most mobile devices. MMS enables multimedia files to be attached to text-based SMS messages. MMS does have its challenges (scroll down).

Siminoff was a founding investor in 4Info, a Silicon Valley company that specializes in SMS-based search. Choubey worked earlier at Yahoo’s mobile division and began his professional career in the CDMA infrastructure division at Motorola.

Updated

BlogHer, a site that aims to popularize blogs by women, has raised its first round of capital from Silicon Valley firm, Venrock.

We’ve heard that the amount is $3.5 million, but this number has not been confirmed. The company has declined comment, but Venrock is acknowledging that an investment did take place.

BlogHer functions as an index of women’s blogs, a series of forums, and a destination for editorial content from more than 60 contributors on a wide range of topics. These include astrology, fashion and shopping, feminism and gender, and mommy and family.

The investment comes as content sites for women are seeing extremely rapid growth. Glam Media, another network for womens content, is one of the fastest growing sites on the Web right now. Presumably, BlogHer’s model is the same: Match advertisers with content that they can easily target, for branding purposes.

BlogHer lists blogs of all stripes, from race, ethnicity and culture, sex and relationships, to food and entertainment. The index is over 9,000 deep, and woman-friendly male bloggers are welcome to participate, even if none of them get to be editors.

Bloggers can register and add their blogs, which then get vetted by a managing editor to filter out spam.

BlogHer’s reach expands beyond the blogosphere. Since 2005, it’s hosted an annual conference, and in July of this year will hold another in Chicago. The event is sponsored by the likes of GM, Google, Yahoo and Dove.

We’re tracking and will update as necessary. We’ll add, though, that this deal has the markings of Venrock’s David Siminoff all over it. The early investor in Yahoo recently joined Venrock to invest in media related companies. We interviewed Siminoff a couple of weeks ago and he expressed interest in blog networks with potential to draw significant traffic.

Update: David Siminoff lead the investment

It may take them a while, but the fabulously wealthy from Dot-com boom eventually realize they miss the action.

David Siminoff, the Silicon Valley investor who made billions in the late 1990s by making early investments in America Online, Yahoo and eBay, is the latest to return. The Capital Research investor retired after the boom, and practiced his golf game. Siminoff has dabbled only slightly in the latest Internet wave, backing for example 4INFO, a mobile search service. Now, he’s returning to join Venrock as a general partner, as part of that firm’s new $600 million fund. As Adam Lashinsky notes, he was half of one of the valley’s most prominent power couples during that first boom. His wife, Ellen Siminoff, was an early executive at Yahoo, known for being the doorkeeper for Yahoo’s deals with start-ups. She’s now chief executive of advertising company Efficient Frontier (we’d link to our profile three years ago about the couple, but it’s deeply buried in the Mercury News’s archives).

Siminoff will invest in media companies. He was most recently CEO of Spark Networks, the parent of several online dating sites, including Jdate. Venrock’s latest fund will also target new alternative energy sources, it said. The firm, a 40-year-old venture arm the Rockefeller family, is also spiffing up its brand: It’s dropping the “Associates” from its name.