Extreme Reach, a video advertising platform, has closed a $9 million second round of funding. The round, which was led by Village Ventures, included $7 million in equity and $2 million in term debt. Greycroft Partners and Long River Ventures also participated.

Based in Needham, Massachusetts, Extreme Reach provides ad agencies, brand advertisers and media companies with a complete system for  managing, delivering and tracking video ads. The company counts more than 12,500 media properties in its network and five of the largest US advertisers as clients.

According to its blog, Extreme Reach tallied over 4,000 broadcast members this month. Other recent announcements include the launch of Extreme Reach Canada and development of a mobile application.

Before founding the company in 2008, Extreme Reach’s CEO John Roland and COO Tim Conley worked at FastChannel Network, another ad distribution company. Extreme Reach raised $2.5 million from the same backers in 2009.

Companies: Extreme Reach, FastChannel Network, Greycroft Partners, Long River Ventures, Village Ventures

People: John Roland, Tim Conley

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Magnetic, a startup that uses search engine data to help advertisers reach the right audience, has raised $4 million in its first round of institutional funding.

New York City-based Magnetic, previously called Domdex, is similar to some ways to a company called BlueKai. Ad networks, ad exchanges, and “demand side platforms” (which help buyers navigate ad exchanges) can buy information from Magnetic’s data marketplace to help them better target their ads. But where BlueKai’s data comes from e-commerce sites, Magnetic’s comes from search engines. So if you search for “cell phones”, advertisers use that knowledge to deliver an ad for a cell phone when you visit another website.

Tying advertising to search terms is nothing knew — that’s the main reason Google continues to rake in cash. But Magnetic takes that concept outside of the search engine itself. Founder and chief executive Josh Shatkin-Margolis said the company’s aim is to bring the power of search data to the media-rich world of display ads.

Magnetic said it currently works with more than 90 ad agencies, networks, and DSPs. The new funding will help the company expand its services, so that it’s not just running the marketplace but also working directly with advertisers and networks to combine ads with search data, and to help manage those campaigns. For example, an insurance company like Geico might decide it wants to advertise to visitors on premium websites after they’ve searched for “car insurance.” Then Geico’s agency would create an ad for Magnetic, which delivers the ad to a network, which in turn uses Magnetic data to show the ad to visitors who are searching for insurance.

The company’s technology also works on mobile phones, Shatkin-Margolis said, but there haven’t been many mobile campaigns looking for this level of targeting yet. That will probably change as the industry matures.

The company has now raised a total of $5.25 million. The new round was led by Charles River Ventures, Ron Conway, and NYC Investment Fund, while previous investors Founder Collective and IA Capital Partners also participated.

Companies: Charles River Ventures, Founder Collective, Magnetic

People: Josh Shatkin-Margolis, Ron Conway

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

As TVs become connected to the web, they’re undergoing a transformation. They can display web pages on the screen. But that’s just the change on the outside. On the inside, they’re becoming computers.

This year’s models of web-connected TV sets come with about 10 million lines of software code, about 10 times the amount in older TVs. Those new TVs have about triple the computing performance of the older TVs, according to Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel, speaking at the company’s analyst meeting today.

The same is happening to all sorts of gadgets, from car navigation devices to smartphones, from home energy management systems to digital signs in stores. Dumb things are getting smarter. That means they will become platforms for ever-changing services and apps.

Intel argues that this transition will play into its hands. Otellini expects that it will be shipping a billion chips a year within five years. Only about 700 million of those will be shipping in computers. Another 300 million will be going into devices where Intel hasn’t played much: smartphones, TVs, car navigation systems, digital signs, portable gadgets, and home control devices.

To succeed, Intel will have to take market share away from the leading low-power microprocessor design firm, ARM, and its many licensees that design chips using ARM’s basic architecture. While Intel has shipped 3.3 billion cores (or computing brains, with multiple cores on a chip these days) during its history, ARM licensees ship multiple billions of chips per year already, thanks to their use as the primary brains in cell phones.

Last week, Intel launched the latest generation of its Atom microprocessors to go after ARM’s core market in TVs, consumer electronics gadgets, tablet computers and smartphones.To break into the market, Intel has created its own operating systems (via its Wind River embedded software acquisition last year as well as its own MeeGo Linux-based operating system) to make it easier for customers to adopt Intel’s hardware designs. MeeGo, built from a combination of Intel’s Moblin version of Linux and software from Nokia, will be used across a number of device categories powered by Atom chips. Atom chips will run not only on MeeGo, but Android, Google Chrome, and Windows devices too.

Intel has launched a big software development training program for the Atom chips. Since the launch of the original Atom chips a few years ago, there are more than 240,000 programmers working on code related to Atom processors, said Renee James, head of software at Intel. Otellini said, “Anyone who wants to compete with us here will have to do software.”

Companies: Intel

People: Paul Otellini

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

MightyMeeting, a mobile meeting app for iPhone and Android platform handsets as well as PCs, today announced it has secured a seed round of funding for $300,000. The seed round comes just 21 days after launching at VentureBeat’s DEMO Spring 2010 event, a relatively short timeframe in which to secure funding by industry standards.

Founder Dmitri Tcherevik (pictured) told VentureBeat the funding will be used to build out the infrastructure and launch a premium service for the company’s business customers. Additional plans include expanding the list of mobile platforms the service supports and partnering with telcos and device manufacturers.

MightMeeting is helping mobile users to organize and search through PowerPoint presentations right on their mobile devices. A user can create an online meeting request, for example, invite others and then walk through a PowerPoint presentation. Each time a change is made to a slide, it changes for the others as well.

The New York City based company met many of its angel investors through Venture Hack’s AngelList, an up-to-date listing of active angel investors around the world. Participants in the seed round included George Zachary (Charles River Ventures), Bill Lee, Shervin Pishevar, Andrea Zurek (XG Ventures), David Lee (XG Ventures), Greg Lee (XG Ventures), Pietro Dova (XG Ventures) and Cooley LLP.

Tags: ipad, iPhone, Meeting, mobile

Companies: MightyMeeting

People: George Zachary

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Digital River (DRIV) said it has acquired Fatfoogoo, a company which might have the best name ever, for about $10 million in cash. Terms call for an undisclosed earn-out based on performance.
Vienna, Austria-based Fatfoogoo is a provider of in-game commerce systems for monetizing online games and virtual worlds.
Digital River had [...]

Article courtesy of BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily

Blippy, a social networking site that lets users share information about what they’re buying, has raised $11.2 million in new funding. The Palo Alto, Calif. company now has a post-money valuation of $46.2 million — pretty good for a service that only opened to the public in January.

The news was first reported in TechCrunch. Cofounder Philip Kaplan confirmed to VentureBeat both the funding and the valuation. New investor August Capital led the round, with participation from Charles River Ventures, which incubated Blippy and led its seed round.

The company’s basic concept, where users can automatically broadcast purchases from their credit cards, has drawn a fair share of skepticism. Is a credit-card statement something people really want to share? It’s still too early to know whether the idea can appeal to a mass audience. Kaplan did say Blippy’s user base is “growing pretty fast.” He declined to provide specific numbers, but pointed to traffic data from Compete showing 125,000 unique visitors in March and steady growth.

Kaplan added that Blippy has been “listening to both our users and non-users” about how to make them more comfortable with the service. The team has already redesigned the site once, and among other changes has tweaked the process so users can approve each purchase before it’s shared. Most users still choose to share their data automatically, he said, though they might only show purchases from a specific credit card or website.

The company also plans to launch an application programming interface soon that will allow developers to use Blippy data in other web applications.

Blippy has now raised a total of $12.8 million. It has 10 employees.

“We’re going to keep things lean,” Kaplan said. “We will expand the team as needed. It gives us the freedom to be able to invest in expanding the site, expanding the services, marketing, business development.”

Tags: oversharing, social sharing, TMI

Companies: August Capital, Blippy, Charles River Ventures

People: Philip Kaplan

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Digital River (DRIV) shares are trading higher this morning after FBR Capital analyst Daniel Ives lifted his rating on the e-commerce services company’s stock to Outperform from Market Perform.

The move reflects his belief that “Digital River is seeing a much improved pipeline of business activity,” and that there is “an improving consumer spending environment.” Ives writes in a research note that DRIV is “very well positioned to benefit from strong secular growth trends within e-commerce and is seeing strong deal activity from new and existing customers that should propel the company into a strong growth/margin profile heading into 2011.”

Ives trimmed his 2010 EPS forecast to 77 cents, from 95 cents, but he lifted 2011 to $1.38, from $1.27.

DRIV this morning is up $1.03, or 3.5%, to $30.54.

Article courtesy of BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily

And now it’s grown from $5 million to $1.6 billion in assets under management, and has offices in Minnetonka, Minnesota, New York, San Francisco, London and Hong Kong. I hope this gives hope to all of you opening up shop in a van down by the river.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

And now it’s grown from $5 million to $1.6 billion in assets under management, and has offices in Minnetonka, Minnesota, New York, San Francisco, London and Hong Kong. I hope this gives hope to all of you opening up shop in a van down by the river.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker