Cloudkick, a developer of web applications that help manage cloud computing environments, announced today that it has agreed to be bought out by cloud computing provider Rackspace for an undisclosed sum.

Rackspace is one of several companies that run public cloud servers. That means application developers and companies can offload programs that require a lot of heavy-duty computing firepower onto remote servers like the ones Rackspace provides. It’s an increasingly popular trend as it lets smaller businesses and developers have access to some pretty powerful hardware without having to buy servers and databases and set them up.

Cloudkick basically gives developers and companies using applications on cloud computing servers a dashboard that shows how they are performing. The core product is free, but Cloudkick recently started charging for premium tools. The idea is to help manage cloud computing applications and squeeze out a little more efficiency in order to cut down cost. It’s important because a lot of public cloud providers charge per gigabyte of storage or for a certain amount of time spent using the servers — so, literally, every second counts.

If the success of services like Rackspace and Amazon’s EC2 weren’t enough to show how popular cloud computing has become, how about this: Cloudkick is only two years old. The company was originally incubated in Y Combinator and pretty quickly raised about $3 million in venture capital funding. It has a number of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list as its clients.

Cloud computing might not be the sexiest field in the world, but it does something a lot of technology fails to do — it just works. It works well enough that Rackspace is willing to take a chance on a company that’s just two years old, and it works well enough that a company like Salesforce will pick up a three-year-old company that will help cloud computing development for more than $200 million.

Only time will tell whether Marc Andreessen’s vision of everything but love notes existing in the cloud will ever come to fruition. But, for the time being, the cloud is proving to be pretty powerful.

Tags: cloud computing, efficiency, public cloud

Companies: Amazon, Cloudkick, Heroku, Rackspace, salesforce

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Spoken Communications, a provider of speech recognition software for call centers and the like, announced today that it has picked up $4 million in its most recent round of funding to help promote its virtual call centers.

If you’ve ever called a customer help desk that asks you a question directly, you’ve experienced a voice-assisted call center. The software basically detects what the person on the phone is saying and moves through the menu. In theory, it’s a good idea — although in practice it’s usually unwieldy and frustrating.

Spoken Communications is working on refining its software to make that experience a bit less painful. It’s also planning on using the funding to promote virtual call centers so employees on a help desk can work from home. A customer needing help can call into the call center, navigate the menu, and then be connected to someone who can help through the a cloud-based software service.

Whether you love them or hate them, call centers probably aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Customer service still needs a human touch. But most companies that at one point had physical call centers have shifted those services to cloud providers. That means they can distribute the calls anywhere across the country to any Internet-connected phone line.

Spoken Communications was founded in 2005 and is based in Bellevue, Wash.

[Photo: blatch]

Tags: call center, cloud computing

Companies: Spoken Communications

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Zipcar, a car-sharing service that lets people rent cars by the hour, announced today that it has raised an additional $21 million in its seventh round of funding led by Meritech Capital Partners.

The service is available in most cities, where cars are strewn across the city in special parking spots. Users sign up for a subscription, and then schedule a time and a car to pick up. They receive a card that activates the car and are free to drive it during their scheduled time.

What’s slightly peculiar is why the company felt it needed to raise additional venture capital funding. The company filed to go public earlier this year in order to raise $75 million. The funding was intended to help spin up their operations and pay off debt.

It seems the company’s been on a bit of a spending spree, which may be hampering its ability to pull in a decent income. Zipcar most recently picked up London car-sharing service Streetcar and acquired a minority stake in Spanish car-sharing service Avancar. Zipcar also acquired American rival Flexcar in 2007.

All the expansions have so far been funded with a healthy dose of venture capital. To date, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company has raised $59 million to finance its operations. Zipcar will use the funding to expand its fleet and strengthen its balance sheet ahead of its initial public offering.

Then again, Zipcar has been losing money for some time now. It lost around $14.5 million in 2007 and 2008, and around $4.5 million last year. It lost about $5 million in the first quarter of this year. Its revenue has been steadily increasing, though. It made about $58 million in 2007, about $84 million in 2008, and brought in $131 million last year. So when the company does go public, it’s going to probably try to pad its balance sheet to appeal to investors.

Former AOL CEO and co-founder Steve Case will join the Zipcar board as part of the deal. John Mahoney, former CFO of office supply chain Staples, is joining the board as well. Pinnacle Ventures also participated in Zipcar’s most recent round of funding.

Tags: car-sharing

Companies: Avancar, Flexcar, Streetcar, Zipcar

People: John Mahoney, Steve case

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Salesforce announced today that it has acquired Heroku, which develops and deploys web-based applications that rely on the programming language Ruby on Rails, for $212 million as part of its Cloud 2 suite of cloud applications. The company made the announcement at the Dreamforce 2010 conference in San Francisco.

Heroku helps developers streamline their Ruby on Rails web-based applications. Once a developer builds their app, they can launch it on Heroku, which then adjusts things like computing capacity and storage as needed. The community has more than 1 million developers and around 105,000 applications. Last fall, it started integrating with other services. For example, a company could launch their application on Heroku and then monitor it using services from another Rails startup, New Relic.

The company also recently raised a round of funding worth $10 million in May and has raised $15 million total after it was incubated by Y Combinator. The round was led by Ignition Partners, with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal Capital.

It’s a pretty sizable exit for a company that was founded in 2007, and another testament to how important cloud computing has become for a public company like Salesforce to pay out more than $200 million. It’s also another indication of a shift in Salesforce’s strategy to focus more on developers, as Heroku specializes in removing headaches for developers working with Ruby on Rails. Salesforce already works with VMforce, which similarly helps Java developers run their applications natively on Salesforce’s cloud application environment Force.com.

Tags: acquisition, cloud computing, ruby on rails

Companies: Heroku, salesforce

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Monetate, a provider of website testing and ad targeting services, announced today that it has raised $5.1 million in its first round of funding.

Targeted advertising seems to be the hot trend now. It can become a bit of a logistical nightmare to figure out which ads are “good” and which ones aren’t when the attention span of web surfers is so short.

Monetate lets companies field test their ads and figure out which ones work best. The web-based service lets its users add a line of java to their site that transmits data on clicks and advertising effectiveness to the Monetate platform. The service catalogs all that information and then tells its users which ads work best and which ones need improvement. The business-facing part of the service is an analytics suite and dashboard that lets marketers launch targeted advertising campaigns quickly.

The Philadelphia, Penn.-based company was founded in 2008 and has around 30 employees. It became cash-flow positive in 2009 and provides its services to retail websites like Urban Outfitters and The Sports Authority. It raised money through an earlier seed funding round, but wouldn’t disclose how much. The most recent round of funding was led by First Round Capital and Floodgate Fund.

Tags: advertising, marketing, targeted advertising

Companies: First Round Capital, Floodgate Fund, Monetate, The Sports Authority, Urban outfitters

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

10gen, developer of the open-source software for databases called MongoDB, announced today that it has raised $6.5 million in its third round of funding from Sequoia Capital.

MongoDB is billed as a software set for managing large-scale databases for web sites. The software allows companies to manage their content and events, and also includes an analytics suite that tracks site usage.

Its users include a number of prominent startups like check-in service Foursquare and Bit.ly, which allows web surfers to shorten long links into more manageable lengths for micro-blogging.

The New York, N.Y.-based company launched MongoDB in 2007 and makes its money by providing commercial support for bigger businesses that employ the database software. It also manages the open-source community for the MongoDB software set that sees around 90,000 downloads each day.

Prior investors Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures also participated in the most recent round of funding. That brings its total funding up to $11.4 million. Flybridge Capital Partners led an earlier round worth $3.4 million, and Union Square Ventures led 10gen’s first round with $1.5 million in funding.

Tags: database, mongoDB, Open source

Companies: 10gen, Bit.ly, Flybridge Capital Partners, Foursquare, Union Square Ventures

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Yammer, which develops and distributes an enterprise-focused social network similar to Facebook, announced today it has raised an additional $25 million in funding to help expand globally and triple its engineering team.

Yammer recently revamped its business micro-blogging software to behave more like a Facebook for enterprise users and has seen a lot of success as a result. It’s now one of the flagship collaboration programs that help large businesses and companies that have employees strewn across the country communicate more effectively. The company has around 1.5 million corporate users, and around 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the service. More than 100,000 companies total use the service in 136 countries.

The enterprise network provider has seen such explosive growth that it’s even making traditional collaboration software powerhouses sweat a bit. Salesforce originally provided its customers with a micro-blogging service called Chatter and charged everyone else $15 a month to use it. But the company did an about-face and is now offering the service for free to compete with Yammer. Kevin Spain, a partner with Emergence Capital and an investor in both Yammer and Salesforce, earlier called on Salesforce to unleash its micro-blogging service for free in order to successfully compete.

“The fact that Salesforce has to copy Yammer even though it has 2,000 sales reps is like Goliath dropping his sword and armor and chasing after David with a sling-shot,” said David Sacks, CEO of Yammer. “This funding will make sure they don’t catch up to us.”

With Yammer, it’s free to join, and the company makes money off subscription models for premium services and off IT servicing, Spain said. A number of Yammer’s features are held behind one of two pay walls — a “silver” model that costs businesses $3 per user per month, and a “gold” model that costs them $5 per user per month. But because the service is free to use initially, it’s able to spread virally as employees begin using it on their own within companies. That means Yammer has virtually no marketing budget — it grows organically, much like Facebook and other social networks have.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based company has raised $40 million to date. The most recent round was led by U.S. Venture Partners. Yammer’s existing investors, Emergence Capital, Charles River Ventures and Founders Fund, also participated. U.S. Venture Partners Principal Mamood Hamid will join Yammer’s board of directors as part of the deal.

Yammer launched in 2008 and very quickly hit the 1 million user mark in July. The company is led by David Sacks, PayPal’s former chief operating officer. David Stewart, former senior director of product at social networking game company Playdom, and Mark Woolway, a former managing director at Clarium Capital, are also joining Yammer as executives as of today.

Tags: collaboration, enterprise social network, social network

Companies: salesforce, Yammer

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Hatsize, a service that helps companies demo and test new technology, announced today that it has raised $5 million in its first round of funding to execute its plans for aggressive global expansion.

The company’s cloud-based service hosts demos for new technologies. So instead of a company having to send out representatives or potential customers having to take the time to set up a new product — such as a new type of database or customer resource management software — vendors and prospective customers can use Hatsize’s program to handle all the heavy lifting.

There are a number of potential uses for the service, but the largest is providing companies with demonstrations and setting up training sessions for complex programs and hardware — like those found in medical services. Businesses have already logged more than 1 million hours using the web service.

Hatsize became profitable in 2005. Its only other funding came from a seed funding round in 2001, when it raised $700,000. The Canadian company was founded in 2000 and has between 30 and 50 full-time employees. The most recent round of fundraising brings Hatsize’s total funding up to $5.7 million.

[Photo: TechCocktail]

Tags: cloud computing, collaboration, DEMO, training

Companies: Hatsize

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Joshua Schachter, the founder of social bookmarking startup Delicious, is working on a stealthy startup called Tasty Labs, and the company just raised $3 million in funding from two big name firms — Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

his new company came to light earlier this month. Union Square’s Albert Wenger (formerly president at Delicious) announced today that he has invested in the company, along with Andreessen Horowitz and a group of angel investors. A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that funding round totaled $3 million, and that Wenger has joined the Tasty Labs’ board of directors.

So what does Tasty Labs do? Wenger isn’t saying, and the Los Altos, Calif. company’s website isn’t saying much either. The website says that it won’t offer pet food reviews, won’t create open source operating systems for unmanned aerial vehicles, won’t be a marketplace for used satellites, and that it aims to put “the useful back in social software.”

Hopefully, we’ll find out what actually means soon.

Tags: social software

Companies: Andreessen Horowitz, Tasty Labs, Union Square Ventures

People: Albert Wenger, Joshua Schachter

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

I’m not a particular fan of gift cards. There are few things worse than getting a gift card for Christmas to some store I’ve never heard of — or worse, one I hate. Hopefully that’s about to change with Plastic Jungle, a provider of a marketplace for trading and selling gift cards.

Plastic Jungle announced today that it has raised $10 million in its third round of funding led by Jafco Ventures to help consumers redeem $30 billion in unspent gift cards.

The company allows gift card recipients to sell those cards for up to 92 percent of the card’s value and get it back in cash. The average payout for gift cards to any given person is around $96, according to the web site. Gift cards have to have a minimum of a $25 balance to trade in. The amount of cash paid out is dependent on how much demand there is for the cards. For example, Target gift cards pay out 90 percent of their flat value, while cards to clothing retailer Macy’s pay out 80 percent of the card’s value.

Plastic Jungle users can also buy other gift cards on the market at discounts of up to 30 percent when compared to the costs in stores. Gift cards to Target are sold at a 4 percent discount, while gift cards to Apple’s iTunes store are sold at an 8 percent discount. The site reports that it saves its users an average of $68 when they shop using gift cards purchased through its marketplace.

The marketplace doesn’t just pay out in cash, either. It can pay out in credits at other e-commerce and social gaming sites. That includes Facebook Credits and cash that can be placed in a PayPal account.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company’s other investors include Shasta Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Jafco Ventures, First Round Capital, Bay Partners, Harrison Metal and Western Technology Investment. The company has raised a total of $23.4 million, including a $6 million round led by Shasta Ventures and a $7.4 million round led by Redpoint Ventures.

Tags: e commerce, gift cards

Companies: Plastic Jungle

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals