Ticketing startup Eventbrite announced today that it has raised $50 million to finance its growing ambitions in the ticketing market.

The San Francisco company started out aiming for a different audience than existing ticketing giant Ticketmaster, offering an easy way for small event organizers to sell tickets. My most common usage of Eventbrite has been for tech conferences and meetups. But the company has turned its focus to larger events, and last summer it sold 60,000 tickets for a Black Eyed Peas concert — its largest event ever, according to The New York Times.

Eventbrite says that with the new funding, it will continue to aim for bigger events, build more analytics and social media tools, and invest in its mobile products. In addition to established companies like Ticketmaster, Eventbrite is competing with newer startups like Ticketfly.

More than 10 million people have attended events ticketed by Eventbrite, and it’s on-track to process nearly $500 million in ticket sales this year, the company says. The new round was led by Tiger Global Management and brings Eventbrite’s total funding to $79.5 million. Past investors include Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, and Tenaya Capital.

[image via Flickr/Rhys's Piece Is]

Tags: ticketing

Companies: Eventbrite, Tiger Global Management

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Popular flash sales site Gilt Groupe announced today that it has raised another $138 million in funding, and is now reportedly valued at around $1 billion.

The round exceeds earlier reports that pegged the New York City company’s new funding between $80 and $100 million. Japanese telecom Softbank invested $62.5 million, while separately contributing enough funding to Gilt Groupe Japan to take a 50 percent stake in the company. The remaining $75.5 million came from previous investors General Atlantic and Matrix Partners, as well as new backers Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Associates, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth, Pinnacle Ventures, TriplePoint Capital, and Eastward Capital.

Gilt Groupe says it now has more than 3.5 million users. It’s pretty obvious by now that there’s a lot of cash flowing into online shopping (deals sites Groupon and LivingSocial have both raised big new rounds), but Gilt Groupe made its name by focusing on luxury products and services, something that has carried over when it expands beyond flash sales, for example into Groupon-like deals at Gilt City.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, chief executive Kevin Ryan said the company will bring in $500 million in revenue for the year ending in June. And while he said there are no specific plans to go public, this will probably be Gilt Groupe’s final round of funding.

Companies: Gilt Groupe, Softbank

People: Kevin Ryan

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It seems that there’s still room for independent mobile advertising networks. Mobile advertising company JumpTap announced today that it has completed a $25 million financing round. The capital will be used to recruit new employees and for product and technology development. The company recently hired high-level executives to support growth in the future.

The funding comes from existing investors including AllianceBernstein, General Catalyst, Redpoint Ventures, Summerhill Ventures, Valhalla Partners and WPP. There were also unnamed new investors involved.

JumpTap claims that over the past 18 months it has experienced accelerated growth with significant increases in mobile ad network traffic, client ad campaigns and deeper reach into major verticals such as automotive, entertainment, consumer packaged goods and financial services. The network reaches 83 million consumers each month, a 30 percent increase from last year.

The company has already hired 35 new employees this year including chief media and revenue officer Todd Anderman, who was previously the digital content head of U.S. publisher Hachette Filipacchi Media. In September 2010, the company hired new CEO George Bell from venture capital firm General Catalyst.

There’s a lot going on in mobile ad networks nowadays. Online marketing company ValueClick acquired mobile ad network Greystripe in April for 75 million. Google purchased previously AdMob for 750 million and Apple acquired Quattro Wireless for $275 million.

Tags: Financing, mobile ad networks

Companies: AllianceBernstein, General Catalyst, Jumptap, Redpoint Ventures, Summerhill Ventures, Valhalla Parntners, WPP

People: George Bell, Todd Anderman

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

A cool iPad app can go a long way these days. Flipboard announced today that it has raised $50 million in venture funding at a $200 million valuation, according to BoomTown.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Flipboard has created a beautiful app for viewing social media using a book’s page-turning metaphor. It shows that taking advantage of a touchscreen interface to create a simpler way of doing something that can already be done elsewhere is a valuable contribution, particularly if users adopt it.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” said Flipboard chief executive Mike McCue told BoomTown.  “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

Much of the funding came from New York-based Insight Venture Partnres. Previously, Flipboard raised $10.5 million.

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Apperian, which develops the EASE mobile application that lets employees quickly access and download company-built applications on the iPhone and iPad, announced today that it has raised $9.5 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and other venture capital firms.

Apperian lets users quickly access any application built or deployed by their company, and they can log in with a corporate email and password. The list of apps available to them is customized by the company — users in a sales group can only see sales applications, for example. They can also access the company help desk through the application. Apperian users can also download company applications without having to sync the iPhone with a computer, like typical enterprise applications require.

While apps developed by a company for the iPhone and iPad do not typically appear on the Apple App Store, they still have to go through an approval process like other apps. Many companies have already begun their transition to tablets for field work and other corporate necessities. About 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 100 list have already begun testing or deploying applications for Apple’s iPad tablet.

Part of this latest round of funding came from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ iFund, a $200 million investment fund geared toward mobile startups. North Bridge Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round, bringing the company’s total funding up to $11 million.

Tags: enterprise, enterprise app store, enterprise application, iPad, iPhone

Companies: Apperian, Apple

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Low-cost online storage provider Egnyte announced today that it has raised $10 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Egnyte is an online file server that any company can wrap in its own brand — a white-label service — that is dirt cheap for smaller and mid-sized companies. For companies with less than 20 employees, it can cost a flat $10 per month — and it goes up to around $100 a month for a company with 1,000 users. That’s compared to other enterprise services that usually charge for each user — like online storage provider Box.net.

Each tier is based on a different amount of storage — from 20 gigabytes of online storage to 1 terabyte. It offers the usual set of collaboration services, like tracking changes to files and communication tools. Egnyte also gives users a desktop folder that automatically syncs up with the remote server, so users don’t have to worry about using the web-based server.

The company also has mobile applications on the iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and phones running Google’s Android mobile operating system. Egnyte also launched a second version of its iPad application today that focuses on offering more security features — often a sore point for companies that are reluctant to move their information and services to remote servers run by companies like Egnyte and Amazon.

Egnyte is going up against some pretty significant players in the space, including Y Combinator-backed Dropbox — which does appear from time to time in the enterprise — and online storage and collaboration service Box.net. Like both of those services, Egnyte uses a freemium model with a free trial. But unlike those services, the Egnyte’s storage is dirt cheap.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company raised $6 million in an earlier institutional fundraising round led by Polaris Venture Partners and Maples Investments. Egnyte also raised an unspecified amount of seed funding. The newest round brings Egnyte’s funding to $16 million.

Tags: cloud storage, enterprise cloud storage, file server, online storage

Companies: Egnyte, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

GE wants a slice of the burgeoning green-data-centers pie — and it’s willing to spend half a billion dollars to get it.

The company, which manufactures everything from wind turbines to electric car charging stations, announced today it has acquired power conversion technology company Lineage Power for $520 million from Gores Group, an offering that GE says will help it leverage huge opportunities in telecom and making data centers more efficient.

In 2006, the government reported that data centers consumed 1.5 percent of all electricity in the U.S., costing $4.5 billion, and projected that energy use could nearly double by 2011, costing $7.4 billion a year. Kevin Skillern, who heads up GE’s energy venture capital investments told us he believes the rate is higher – three to four percent of U.S. energy output a year. GE has backed other green data center technology companies like JouleX and SynapSense in the past, but this acquisition is a major move into the sector.

Lineage Power makes energy efficient power conversion technology that converts the AC electricity delivered from the grid to DC electricity to power the servers and equipment in data centers. It also makes DC-DC power modules for telecom purposes and helps companies set up energy systems. Some companies have been demonstrating data centers running on all-DC power as of late, as a way to save energy.

Lineage Power had revenues of approximately $450 million last year and counts Verizon among its customers. It also appears to have a small fuel-cell business.

Tags: AC, data centers, DC, energy efficiency, green data centers, power conversion

Companies: GE, Gores Group, Lineage Power

People: Kevin Skillern

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

TargetSpot, a provider of advertising for online radio services, announced today that it has raised $8 million in its most recent round of fundraising.

The network is geared toward music radio services like CBS Radio and Yahoo Music. Advertisers can purchase 5-, 15- and 30-second spots for online radio networks through TargetSpot. Those ads are streamed through TargetSpot’s software to each online radio service. The company has its own advertising serving technology and gives each advertiser the tools to drop an ad directly into one of their distribution partner’s audio streams.

In addition to running the ads, TargetSpot is able to track what kind of listener is tuning in and can tailor the ad accordingly. TargetSpot can track where the listener is geographically, what kind of radio service they are running and what type of music they are listening to, and hand that information off to advertisers that want to develop a better targeted advertising package.

TargetSpot CEO Eyal Goldwerer estimates there are roughly 70 million people listening to online radio services. That number probably isn’t too far off, as Pandora announced it passed the 50-million user mark last April and there are a host of other music-streaming services like Grooveshark and MySpace Music on top of that.

The company plans to use the newest funding to expand its analytics suite and make it easier for advertisers to deliver better targeted advertising, Goldwerer said. He also said the company planned to increase the size of its sales force.

The New York, N.Y.-based company was founded four years ago. It acquired Ronning Lipset Radio, another advertising firm, to become one of the largest radio-centric advertising firms in 2008. Its investors include Union Square Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, CBS Radio and Milestone Venture Partners.

Tags: advertising, online radio

Companies: Bain Capital Ventures, CBS Radio, Milestone Venture Partners, MySpace Music, Targetspot, Union Square Ventures, Yahoo Music

People: Eyal Goldwerer

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Salesforce, a developer of customer relationship management (CRM) software, announced today that it has acquired email contact manager Etacts for an undisclosed sum.

Etacts works as a plugin for Google’s Gmail and a web application. It scans email messages and determines which contacts are the most important. It then reminds users to keep in touch with those people and to respond to email messages from them. Users can set custom reminders for when Etacts should send notes to keep up the relationship — which can be once a week, month, quarter or year.

The announcement came after Etacts said it was discontinuing its service come February next year. That means that Salesforce is probably looking to integrate the Etacts tools directly into its CRM software suite.

Etacts also operates with phone records for users willing to share their calling history. The service can display all your recent email and phone conversations. The idea is to help both individual employees and executives manage the deluge of email messages they receive on a daily basis a little more efficiently, and to single out the most important relationships so those never dissolve.

Salesforce seems to have a lot of love for companies that have gone through Y Combinator. The CRM software developer also bought Heroku, which develops and deploys web-based applications that rely on the programming language Ruby on Rails, for $212 million. Given that the company specializes in providing some good tools to help manage business and customer relationships, the acquisition is a no-brainer.

Aside from having the Y Combinator pedigree, Etacts has raised money from some pretty high-level angel investors. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company launched in February this year and raised $700,000 in a seed funding round from the likes of Ron Conway, former Netscape CTO Eric Hahn and actor Ashton Kutcher.

Tags: cloud computing, Contacts, customer relationship management, email management

Companies: etacts, Heroku, salesforce

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Well, that was quick. Aol announced today that it is going to buy about.me, a service that helps people create a profile page, just four days after the site went live.

About.me lets its users create a “splash page” that points to the rest of their content on the Internet. That can include LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and Flickr photo streams. The idea is to let users have a landing page they can hand out to friends and other contacts that points to each user’s whole presence on the Internet.

Each landing page is highly customizable. Users can upload a high-resolution photo of themselves — or anything else — to use as a background. They can also change the fonts and make other specific tweaks. The site also includes a number of analytics tools to go with each profile. Users can track how many people visit and link to their landing page.

The site went live for everyone last week after collecting around 400,000 beta users. Another 20,000 people signed up as soon as the service went live as well, according to TechCrunch. The sign-up procedure is pretty quick and it only takes about a minute or two to get a profile up on the web.

About.me’s acquisition comes at a time when Aol is trying to re-invent itself as a large producer of content, rather than an Internet service provider. The company has begun quickly offloading weaker assets like Bebo andpicking up content providers like tech blogging site TechCrunch. The moves are part of new-CEO Tim Armstrong’s vision to make AOL the largest producer of content on the web after a number of failed attempts to diversify the company’s revenue.

“Aol is doing what great, sustainable business do every so often – they’re reinventing themselves,” about.me co-founder Tony Conrad said in a blog post detailing the announcement.

Conrad isn’t a stranger when it comes to dealing with Aol. He sold his last company, blog content engine Sphere, to Aol for $25 million. The financial details of the about.me deal weren’t released. Its investors include Aol Ventures, True Ventures, Freestyle capital and a number of others. The site has raised $425,000 in angel funding to date.

Tags: connected profiles, profiles

Companies: about.me, aol

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals