Here’s the latest: Thanks for patience — First, VB just changed servers. We understand there are a few formatting problems on our front page, feed hiccups and issues with our search engine. We’ll working to fix them. Sabio Labs raises second round — Sabio is a secretive Palo Alto, Calif. start-up building a new design process for [...]

Reunion is a social networking company that looks decidedly old-fashioned, compared to glitzy (or garish, some would say) sites like MySpace. And yet its simplicity, like that of Facebook, is apparently part of its success. It now has 28 million registered users, and is adding one million users a month — and by that measure, it [...]

Project Agape, as we mentioned earlier, is a site that wants to empower people to further their political or social cause using the Internet. The site remains secretive for now, but we spent some time with co-founders Sean Parker and Joe Green last week, and got a sneak peak at what they are doing, including a [...]

Latest action: VC firm Sequoia Capital backs Will Ferrell and Adam McKay comedy video site — Called FunnyOrDie.com, the site features a two-minute clip that won a reported 1.5 million page views in less than a week. StumbleUpon to be acquired? — Several folks (Techcrunch/GigaOm) are reporting that San Francisco social Web site StumbleUpon is in [...]

Google has bought online video-conferencing software company, Marratech, the latest in a barrage of software application announcements by the online giant. Google announced the acquisition on its blog, saying the Sweden-based Marratech will be great for Google’s own workplace because Googlers “thrive on casual interactions and spontaneous collaboration.” Video-conferencing is a logical next move for Google, [...]

NearbyNow, the Los Altos, Calif. shopping mall search engine company, announced it has raised $5 million from DFJ and Draper Richards. We reported this two months ago (see story).

YouSendIt, a Mountain View, Calif. service that lets professionals deliver large files over the Internet, said it has raised $10 million in a second round of venture capital financing. The funding comes at a time when dozens of companies are helping speed up the delivery of files in multiple ways. “There are a zillion of them,” [...]

San Francisco’s CastTV, a site that says it can search video better than leading players like Yahoo and Google by turning up Javascript-hidden files and other information, has raised $3.1 million from well-known venture capitalists. Video search is a huge potential market: Lucrative advertising can be displayed by the search results. Predictably, a gaggle of [...]

Respected Formula One car designer Gordon Murray is working on a secretive car company, and the from the few clues we’re getting it will use shape and materials design to make cars more efficient. The company, based in a suburb an outside of London, UK, is called Gordon Murray Design Ltd., and has gotten more than [...]

Going.com, a Boston-based networking site centered around urban events, has grown rapidly since it launched in June of last year. The site, which tomorrow changes its name to Going (away from HeyLetsGo.com), says it has 220,000 unique monthly visitors to the site. The numbers, while not mind-blowing by any stretch, are enough to look around and [...]

A secretive Hayward, Calif. company has just announced it will build the largest solar power “farm” in North America, using solar cells manufactured in Silicon Valley. The site, near Sarnia in Ontario, Canada, will be enough to power between 10,000 and 15,000 homes on sunny days, drawing on a monstrous 40-megawatt capacity. The company, called OptiSolar, [...]

Vudu, a Santa Clara, Calif. company promising a better way to bring video to your television instantly, has emerged from secrecy today — with a story given exclusively to the New York Times. The company, which does not yet have a Web site and hasn’t launched yet, says it improves upon TV set-top offerings being developed [...]

Pure Digital, the San Francisco maker of low-cost camcorders, releases tomorrow (Tuesday) a new line of devices that let you upload video directly to YouTube. Called Flip Video camcorders, they are the first that easily let you upload directly to YouTube. We reviewed Pure Digital in October, when it released a device that let you upload [...]

San Jose company, ProVina, has raised $4 million to market Winepod, a web-based software and wine unit that lets people make their own wine. This is a wonderful idea, because it appeals to the multitude of wine snobs, as TheAlarmClock puts it — a potentially huge market. It saves you the bother of buying land and [...]

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 [...]

Mobile social gaming startup Frengo launched last month, offering a bunch of games that you play via SMS or the Web on your mobile phone. It offers fantasy sports leagues such as Fantasy Football, betting games about winners of sporting events like “College Hoops Pick ‘Em”, and posting of comments and pictures to MySpace — so [...]

Unheard of mobile service company Mig33 is showing explosive growth — by offering a simple way to text, IM and make cheap voice calls. The company has gained four million subscribers in less than eighteen months, mostly in South East Asia, many of whom are using it as their only way to access the Web. [...]

Tumri, an online ad network, today releases a service called Tumri Publisher to give publishers more control over ads displayed on their site. Tumri Publisher allows users to create custom, branded ads called AdPods based on product category. For example, a blog about books could choose to only display book ads from Amazon.com. It also lets [...]

Weebly, the free AJAX website creator, has just raised a $650K angel round and launched a way for you to create blogs from within your site. The move pits the young San Francisco company, which has garnered about 25,000 users, against entrenched players like Google’s Blogger, Automatic’s WordPress and SixApart’s TypePad — each of which have [...]

Olive Software appears to have survived a tough rejection by Google last year. The Santa Clara, Calif. company helps transfer off-line content into a format which Google can search. It converts PDF documents, microfilm and any other files to XML. Google courted the company aggressively, and did so much analysis of the company’s technology that some [...]

The Samwer brothers, the well-known European trio of entrepreneurs, have invested in Frazr, an exact duplicate of Twitter. They have thus embarked on a reputation of backing blatant rip-offs of successful U.S. companies. They backed Studi-VZ, the Facebook in Germany, for example, in 2005, shortly after Facebook became a major success. See the images below to see [...]

Internet TV company Joost has raised $45 million in a whopper round of venture financing, giving it a significant war-chest to spend just as its product hits the market. Lead investors were Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. CBS Corporation, Viacom and the foundation of Chinese billionaire Li Ka-shing also participated, according to the company, in a [...]

Technorati Inc., the San Francisco company that offers a blog search engine and other services, has raised another $1 million, but still has not articulated a clear strategy. The latest capital adds to the existing $10.52 million already raised as part of its third round of financing, started last June. DG Incubation, operator of Technorati Japan, [...]

Jott, the convenient voice-to-text service we reviewed favorably in March, has raised $5.4 million in its latest round of financing. Jott, of Seattle, allows you to call a number, record a message, and then have that message translated into text and e-mailed to you or one of your contacts. Bain Capital of Boston led the round with [...]

Bambi Francisco, the former MarketWatch columnist who left last month amid a stir to form her own video company, has finished raising a round of capital. The round includes Richard Rosenblatt, the former chief executive of Intermix, owner of MySpace, Georges Harick, a former Google engineer who helped develop Adsense, and Matthew Hill, early investor of [...]

Tesla Motors, the San Carlos, Calif. maker of a high-performance electric car, has raised $45 million more in financing. The new backing for the car, due out later this year, is led by Technology Partners, a Palo Alto venture firm that has focused on green investments, and Tesla’s own chairman, Elon Musk. Also investing are Palo [...]

(Update: Separately, Nuance has agreed to buy VoiceSignal Technologies for $293 million, signaling further consolidation in the mobile voice search industry after Tellme’s acquisition by Microsoft.) Time Warner’s AOL has gobbled up Boston-based mobile advertising startup Third Screen Media, signaling the beginning of consolidation in the industry. Third Screen is just one of many start-ups founded in [...]

Kyte.tv, the San Francisco company that lets users manage their own TV channels online or on a cell-phone, has raised a second round of financing in the “single-digit” millions of dollars. Swiss carrier Swisscom and German media group Holtzbrinck Ventures has invested in the round, Chief executive Daniel Graf told VentureBeat. He would not disclose the [...]

ULocate, a Framington, Mass. start-up focused on giving you mobile information based on your location, has raised $11 million more in a second round of financing. ULocate offers more than a dozen widgets that you can drag and drop onto your mobile phone — giving you things such as directions, ski reports, brewery finders, and [...]

Latest action: Evite vs. Socialzr continued — The bad blood between Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster and now founder of online event service Socializr, and the lawyers at Evite, is worse than we realized. The bitterness started during the Friendster days, and worsened when Evite threatened to sue Socializr, saying the start-up had copied Evite’s [...]

New York company Veotag has raised an angel round of $750,000 to build out its nifty video time-stamp tagging feature. By time-stamp tags, we mean that Veotag lets you list the different events or subjects appearing in your video — according to the exact time they appear in the video. The concept is instantly understood by [...]

Fabrik, a company that offer online storage and easy sharing of big files, has just closed a $24.9 million deal and added Ross Levinsohn, former President of Fox Interactive Media, to the board. Its financing came primarily from 3i, with a small chunk from ComVentures. As noted before, Fabrik competes in an increasingly [...]

Updated Forget the historical record, which says that the majority of mergers fail financially (pick your reading form any of these articles). The Internet advertising sector is in all-out merger mode, with new online start-ups emerging daily causing angst among the big guys, pushing big players to gobble up other big guys or the best of [...]

Microsoft Corp has purchased online advertising company aQuantive, for about $6 billion in cash, and is paying a significant premium to to do so. The move comes amid a torrent of acquisitions in the advertising industry, now in the midst of profound change. Players are engaged in frantic land-grab, as traditional advertising dwindles and advertisers move [...]

Terrapass, a Menlo Park, Calif. company that lets people calculate the greenhouse gas emissions caused by daily activities such as driving, and then pay to offset them, has raised another round of funding. Despite no prior backing, the company is growing very quickly, now boasting 50,000 adherents. It has become a leader of the movement to [...]

(Update: This just in: Texas Pacific Group and Goldman Sachs’ private equity arm have agreed to acquire Alltel, the wireless phone company, for $27.5 billion, the largest telecom buyout ever. There’s a frenzy of activity in the private equity world, and we’re likely seeing its peak.) This isn’t a venture capital story, but is significant because [...]

Santa Barbara-based IntroNetworks has raised $2.7 million in a first round of capital to develop a social-networking service for companies and events. There are a ton of these business-oriented social networks, from Visible Path, to Five Across and Facebook’s corporate offering — along with blogging and wiki software, all making headway in replacing or supplementing [...]

Here’s the latest action: Peak coal? — You’ve probably heard of the concept of “peak oil,” which refers to that point in time when we extract more oil than ever before, but after which we begin a long, steady decline as oil gets harder to locate. Increasingly, experts argues we’re nearing that point. Until now, though, [...]

SnapLogic uses open source and simple HTML and RSS to attack the huge problem of integrating data from multiple sources. So far, the tools required for such integration have been complex. SnapLogic uses simple Web protocol to go after a market estimated by some to be $13.6 billion by 2008. As an example, SnapLogic can [...]

San Francisco company World Golf Tour has just released its sophisticated online golf game. After trying it out, our guess is this will attract a significant following. Don’t be surprised if the well-heeled venture capitalists on Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road stop returning calls. They have an excuse to be playing this game: It showcases the [...]

Rooftop Media is a company that publishes video video of stand-up comedy performances in clubs around the nation, featuring artists who may not make it to the big leagues of Comedy Central. The San Francisco company said it has raised a $2.5 million first round of funding led by Azure Capital Partners. The site isn’t open to [...]

Ruckus, which provides college students free unlimited PC and laptop download access to more than two million songs, has raised $10 million in a second round of financing. The service is apparently making headway on competitor Napster, which offers a similar service. Earlier this month, Penn State dropped a partnership with Napster, in favor of Ruckus [...]

You might think that by now, VCs would use business plans from new social network companies as kindling. But Hollywood-based Buzznet, a network devoted to allowing indie music fans to bond over the bands they love, has raised $6 million in its second round of funding from Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners. It was valued [...]

Jajah continues to be the VoIP company with chutzpah. It has just scored a major backer: Deutsche Telekom, which on a revenue basis may be the largest telecommunications company in the world. It’s a big ally for Jajah, the small Mountain View upstart that is barely a year old, but which wants to make a run [...]

LiveScribe, an Oakland, Calif. company, releases tomorrow one of the more wondrous communication features we’ve seen lately. It has developed technology that lets you take handwritten notes from a lecture or interview with a high-tech pen. The pen will remember everything that was being said when you took the notes. So if you’re looking for a portion [...]

Jeff Jordan, a former eBay and PayPal executive, has joined San Francisco online reservation service OpenTable as chief executive. His mandate is to help take the company to the next level, now that it is seating two million diners a month. OpenTable has said very little about its financial performance. In an interview with VentureBeat Tuesday Jordan [...]

Gizmoz, of Israel, launches a service tonight that lets you create avatars that are more realistic and full-featured than those of competitors such as Voki or Meez. You load your own photo, and Gizmoz morphs it into a three-dimensional image. You can dress it with a range of accessories — wigs, clothes, hair, makeup, skin color, [...]

Auction giant eBay has acquired StumbleUpon, an San Francisco company that helps people “stumble upon” and share new sites related to their interests, for about $75 million. In a statement this afternoon, eBay said the acquisition will give it “exposure to a fast-growing community-based service” that has around 2.3 million users, and that StumbleUpon is [...]

Keibi is a new San Francisco company that wants to help social networking sites mange the massive, chaotic flood of user-generated information they get. Pierre Grenier, who worked briefly at fast-growing San Francisco social network Piczo, saw the pain it and other companies had dealing with the “unmanageable” wave of content being produced, including hairy security, [...]

Tumri, online advertising company that lets publishers choose the type of advertisers they want to run in a so-called AdPod on their Web sites, has raised a $10 million second round of funding. Lehman Brothers Venture Partners led the round, which included existing investors Shasta Ventures and Accel Partners. There’s a whole gaggle of new advertising [...]

San Diego-based Slacker, the company that wants to take on the iPod with a new type of music recommendation service, has raised $40 million in a second round of funding. The company, which we first covered in March, is launching in two stages. First, it launched its online player, which we’ve been listening to for several [...]

Brash Entertainment, a new Los Angeles company, said it is launching today with $400 million in financial backing to offer high-quality video games based on movie releases, television and music. This is a massive amount of money, considering that the video games industry is crowded, with both traditional console-focused giants and scores of independent start-up efforts [...]

Tioga Energy, a Sunnyvale, Calif. company that wants to makes solar power financing easier for mid-sized businesses, has raised $10 million in a first round of venture financing. It is just the latest of several players entering the hot solar market to make it easier for companies to buy solar power. Chief executive Paul Detering says [...]

ShotSpotter, a Santa Clara, CA, company that enables police departments and the military to locate the precise source of gunfire, has raised $12 million in its third round of financing. The technology, which is deployed in neighborhoods throughout 15 American cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, and DC, enabled the capture of a top-10 most wanted [...]

VentureBeat talked last night with Roger McNamee (pictured left), asking him why his firm, Elevation Partners, would want to buy into Palm, a company that many people see having a tough time ahead, given intense competition. Some doubt its chances of survival as a standalone company. [See our initial coverage of Elevation’s $325 million in investment into [...]

San-Francisco-based Scribd, the so-called “YouTube for documents,” has attracted a lot of attention — including plenty of suitors from Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms. So it comes as no surprise that, shortly after launch, it has raised $3.7 million from Redpoint and original seed investor Kinsey Hills Group. Co-founder Trip Alder wouldn’t disclose precise valuation [...]

MeetMoi, a clever “location based” mobile dating service, has just raised $1.5 million in a first round of financing. MeetMoi, which got a mention in the Wall Street Journal today (subscription required), lets you find people looking for a date, on-the-fly, wherever you are. You go to MeetMoi’s site, fill in some basic info, upload a [...]

Here’s the latest action, catching up for the past two days: Boring shopping Web sites attract interest — There are so many shopping search engines, we’ve given up trying to count. And yet investors remain interested. Santa Monica, Calif.’s ThisNext, a social shopping Web site, has raised a round of venture debt Western Technology. It lets [...]

Avvo is a new company that lets people find good attorneys, letting them seeing how others have rated the lawyers, and whether they have been disciplined. It lets users rate attorneys too. Avvo is bound to stir controversy. Lawyers given bad ratings are already disturbed. See the story by John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. One [...]

Private equity firm Providence Equity Partners has acquired a two-thirds stake in comparison-shopping site NexTag Inc. for about $830 million, according to the WSJ’s Kevin Delaney. The deal values the San Mateo, Calif. Nextag at about $1.2 billion, and represents an amazingly lucrative deal for NexTag, which is just one of dozens of shopping search engines [...]

Here’s the (updated) latest action: Marc Andreessen getting taste of what it’s like to be a blogger – The Netscape co-founder launched a blog last week. The NYT ran a story about one of his earliest posts. Then he did a good piece about how to hire. And now all the attention has him racing out [...]

Altair, an Israeli company, is joining the race to be at the forefront of what some believe will be telecom’s next hot trend—mobile WiMAX. Altair, which makes chips that work with mobile WiMAX networks, announces today an $18M round of funding. Mobile WiMAX is considered attractive because, compared to Wi-Fi, it offers much greater range and [...]

Telltale, the San Rafael, Calif. company that makes interactive games, including Sam & Max, has raised $6 million in a second round of financing. The three year old company is already profitable, having pursued a strategy of making games much more rapidly and cheaply than the large game producers such as Electronic Arts. Rather than trying [...]

Athersys, a Cleveland, Ohio biotech, went public via reverse merger and raised $65 million in a private placement. The company’s release is here. Founded in 1995, Athersys is active in a bewildering number of areas. Its lead product candidate is an appetite-suppressing drug that acts on a serotonin receptor in the brain called 5HT2c, and in [...]

Cambridge, Mass-based PodZinger, previously branded as a search engine for podcasts, has re-named itself EveryZing, and raised $10 million to expand its services. EveryZing has a video and audio search engine for consumers, which we’ve covered before, but CEO Tom Wilde says that the company is using the money to change focus: EveryZing will use its [...]

Here’s the latest action: Geomas says it has location-based search patent — The London based company says its patent is being infringed upon by some 20 large internet players, and this probably includes Google and Yahoo. Here’s a description of the patent. The company says it raising $20 million to help it extract licensing deals. It [...]

Online video has never been hotter, and investors are frantically searching for new deals — absurdly so. See the piece we just wrote about prolific investor Ron Conway, who says the competition for deals is so intense, entrepreneurs are commanding the “dining room table.” Third rate venture capitalists, in desperation, are bribing entrepreneurs to take their [...]

Amid all the excitement about new solar technology, several promising companies are slipping on their delivery dates. However, most of the companies still say they plan to deliver — it’s just a matter of time before they hit the market Solyndra, a Santa Clara, Calif. solar company (see VB’s coverage), has seen one of its executives, Monier [...]

Veoh, the San Diego video-sharing site backed by former exec Michael Eisner, has raised another $26 million in funding, giving it a massive war-chest exceeding $41 million. PE Hub has the news. The video sharing site came out of testing mode in February, and is different from most sites because it uses peer-to-peer technology (a technology that [...]

(Updated at bottom with more discussion on differences from Digg, others) Thoof is the latest company seeking to offer news readers articles that are relevant to them. The Austin, Tex. company launched today, boasting an approach it says is more useful to the wider masses than competitors such as Digg, Reddit, NewsVine, NowPublic, Topix and others that [...]

Earlier this week, we wrote about setbacks at some Silicon Valley companies with new solar technology. They’re built on real science and work in the labs, but they’re grappling with the real-world manufacturing stage. Infinia, of Kennewick, Wash., is another example of this. It has just raised more cash to help it develop products based on [...]

Social networking, chat, content sharing, and casual games — we’ve seen them all. But Mountain View, Calif.’s HeyCosmo combines these elements, throws in live webcam streaming and ends up with something new. The site makes it easy for groups of up to 10 people with webcams to see and engage each other around activities like playing fake-money [...]

Glam Media, the Brisbane, Calif. network of women’s online lifestyle, fashion and other blogs, said it has overtaken iVillage to become the number one women’s Web property. It is also the fastest growing of the top 100 U.S. Web sites, according to traffic data to be released tomorrow by ComScore for the month of May. Glam’s network [...]

What is it with pet supplies and Internet booms? Forrester Research, a market research company, projects that sales of pet supplies will grow 30 percent this year, down from 81 percent last year, part of a barrage of statistics used by the New York Times to cry out that online sales are now slowing overall. Pets.com and [...]

Updated Less than a month after CBS’s $280 million acquisition of Last.fm, Spain’s 25 year-old media mogul, Antonio Asensio, has led a $25 million second-round investment in Corvallis, Oregon-based MyStrands, a music recommendation site that wants to join the big leagues. MyStrands, like Last.fm, offers a download that plugs into your media player of choice, tracks the [...]

Synthetic Genomics, the company started by controversial human genome entrepreneur Craig Venter, has raised financing at a whopper valuation even before it has produced its first viable product. The company, based in Rockville, Md. is using Venter’s background as an expert in sequencing genes and applying it to finding new kinds of alternative energy sources. The company [...]

Quintura, a company offering a visual search engine, said it has raised “several millions” of dollars in a first round of venture funding from Luxembourg’s Mangrove Capital Partners. With Quintura, you search for a term, and Quintura offers you a “cloud” of words related to your term that helps you refine your search. For example, if [...]

Google has just acquired Zenter, software that aimed to be a web-based Powerpoint-killer. Zenter built the application in just a few months, and the company was one of the more dynamic Y Combinator-backed companies from this past winter: The founders also patented the software they built. It’s little surprise that the company has just been snapped [...]

(Update: Corrected market spending figure to $400 billion) The search engine revolution continues to ripple through to other parts of the business economy. SupplyFrame, of Pasadena, Calif. is the latest to offer a specialized search engine for electronic components — and is also offering useful widgets about those components to embed in spreadsheets or Web sites. It [...]

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 [...]

Getty Images has acquired Pump Audio, of company that has built up a catalog of 100,000 songs from musicians not signed with traditional labels, for $42 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. Getty, of Seattle, Wa., says it is the largest provider of still and moving images. Earlier this year, it bought MediaVast for $200 [...]

updated San Francisco’s Prospser, which appears to have gained a leadership position in person-to-person lending, has raised $20 million in its third round of financing. Prosper is one of three upstarts in the person-to-person lending market, where borrowers request loans and have ordinary people bid to finance them. The market is still relatively obscure, but its participants [...]

4Info, the Palo Alto mobile search company we feared might become roadkill by Google and Yahoo, has surprised with solid progress in serving ads in text messages. It’s on track to serve 50 million ad units for the next quarter, at a whopping $50 dollars per thousand messages (equivalent to $50 CPM in advertising parlance). This [...]

Brad Greenspan, the jilted MySpace executive, makes play at WSJ — Greenspan, who filed a suit against MySpace’s parent company for ripping off shareholders in its sale to News Corp. (the suit was rejected), is now seeking to buy the WSJ’s parent company Dow Jones. Of course, this continues the rivalry between Greenspan and News [...]

Danal, a company that wants to let young people use cellphones to make payments without owning a credit card, is about to launch in the U.S. with a separate subsidiary, according to the WSJ. It lets you buy downloadable music or other digital goods — and charge it to your mobile-phone bills using an authentication code. Danal [...]

updated Education.com, a Redwood City, Calif. company dedicated to teaching parents how to help their kids through school, launches today with $4.5 million in funding. Attempting to build a company around a domain name, instead of the other way around, can be dangerous. As the huge flop of Wine.com has shown — hundreds of millions of dollars [...]

Revision3, a San Francisco company creating high-quality video shows on niche topics, has raised $8 million more from investors. Like several other companies, including Podtech (see our coverage) and Next New Networks (our coverage), its seeks to exploit the trend toward niche video viewing. Revision3’s own slant has been toward serial content, with regular hosts of [...]

Lijit, a provider of a more extensive search service for blogs, has said it raised a $3.3M second round of funding. Lijit, of Louisville, Colorado, doesn’t limit readers to searching blog posts. It also provides them results from the host blogger’s own accounts at Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and any other place online they store information. Blogging [...]

Stion is one of the now dozens of companies saying it is developing a more efficient solar power technology. The Silicon Valley company (Menlo Park, Calif.) has raised $15 million in a second round of financing, saying its new material (the company won’t disclose which material it is) for manufacturing cells and modules will have a [...]

CircleUp, a service that lets you send questions by email to groups as large as hundreds or thousands of people, and then collect and organize answers on a single page, has raised $3 million in a first round of financing. The service is a free, useful work tool that helps you avoid having to manually sort [...]

Google confirmed it has acquired voice service start-up GrandCentral Communications. Rumors of the deal surfaced several days ago. As reported, Google’s GTalk hasn’t done that well, in part because of its confusing interface. GrandCentral lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed and managed from the [...]

Trion World Networks, a company promising to deliver new kinds of interactive online games, has raised a whopping $30 million in capital without having launched a single product. The huge financing is a bold bet that an unproven company, formed early last year, can nevertheless exploit a “disruptive cycle” in the media and entertainment world [...]

RippleTV wants to put its network of digital TV monitors in public places across the nation, and has received an additional $10 million to do so. It hopes to replicate the phenomenal success that Focus Media enjoyed by providing doing the same Chinese elevators and office lobbies. Draper Fisher Jurvetson led the round, joined by Trinity Ventures, [...]

Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists continue to pump money into new video companies, even though there are hundreds, if not thousands, of video sites already out there. The latest include National Banana, a site that produces serial comedy videos, and RockinCat, music videos from the Sunset Strip. National Banana’s videos are produced by Hollywood’s Jerry Zucker, known for [...]

Fotoflexer joins the growing ranks of free, web-based photo editors. However, it allows you to make higher-quality edits than what most online competitors offer. You can use it to re-doctor a photo of yourself, to change your eye color, the size and shape of your face — or any body part, for that matter. The Berkeley, [...]

Paris-based Zlio, a company that helps you easily create your own web page “shops” to sell merchants’ goods online, has raised $4 million from Mangrove Capital Partners. See our previous coverage here. The site now attracts more than 2.5 million unique visitors per month. More than 100,000 shops have been created — double the number of shops [...]

Seattle-based Yapta, a service that informs you when the price of plane tickets you want drops, has raised $2.3 million. The company is one of many trying to provide ways for people to save money on airfare, but its approach is a bit different: Yapta lets you bookmark, or “tag” individual flights and will e-mail [...]

VirtualLogix, a Sunnyvale, Calif. company, said it has raised $16 million in a second round of funding to push “virtualization” software to things such as iPods, mobile phones, traffic lights and digital watches. Virtualization allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on hardware devices, allowing companies to make more efficient use of that hardware. This helps [...]

FoneMine helps companies build interactive mobile web applications — including things like a shopping carts, comments , and search — that work across any mobile carriers and phones. So far, companies wanting more than a basic mobile-friendly website have to build a customized back-end, host it, and maintain the code. The Sunnyvale, Calif. company is the latest [...]

Moka5, a Redwood City, Calif. startup that wants to give businesses and consumers a way to carry a virtual computer around with them on an iPod, USB stick or other storage device, has raised $15 million more in a second round of financing. The round was led by Highland Capital Partners and included an additional [...]