Deals & More

Pursway grabs $6m to help find companies social influencers

Social networking is filled with people who like to talk. While a majority of the online chatter is simply noise, some individuals, for reasons that vary, have networks of friends, family and colleagues that listen, trust and act on their recommendations. These individuals are known as social influencers. Helping to locate and utilize these social influencers for marketing campaigns, Pursway(formerly Datanetis) announced today that it has secured $6 million in a first round of funding to expand its services... Continue Reading

Intel’s monster of a chip: an Itanium microprocessor with 2 billion transistors

Intel announced its Itanium 9300 series microprocessor today, a high-end supercomputing chip with 2 billion transistors on a single chip.

The number of transistors, or basic on-off switches that control the flow of electrical signals in a chip, is about twice as much as what Intel and other big companies normally put in a chip.

Kirk Skaugen, vice president of Intel’s Architecture Group, said Intel will be able to put eight microprocessors together in a... Continue Reading

Scrapblog raises $2.5M for online scrapbooking

Scrapblog, a website where users can create and share scrapbooks, has received $2.5 million in funding firm Walt Disney’s Steamboat Ventures.

The San Francisco company touts the ease-of-use it offers for creating online scrapbooks. The scrapbooks combine user photos with themes, animations, and text of your choice into a slick-looking presentation built on Adobe’s Flash technology. Once you’ve created one, you can share the content on the site, on social networking sites like Facebook, and... Continue Reading

Job network Doostang hangs tough with the competition, lands $1.25M

Part LinkedIn, part CareerBuilder, job site Doostang claims that its network includes 25 percent of recent graduates from the country’s top 30 universities. And now the Palo Alto, Calif., company has raised $1.25 million of an expected $2.1 million round of equity to expand even more, according to a filing with the SEC.

Doostang, which now claims 600,000 users, distinguishes itself from competitors as a career network for elite job candidates. Not only does it... Continue Reading

Ranker nets $750K in seed money

Up-and-coming list aggregator Ranker.com is announcing another $750,000 in seed financing, part of a planned $1 million second round. The first $1 million came from company founder Clark Benson, who sold eCrush to Hearst Media in 2006. The second round is led by Siemer Venture Capital and includes a group of angels affiliated with eCrush.

Ranker began in 2008 with Benson’s initial capital investment, and launched a beta site in August 2009. The company... Continue Reading

Paylogic lands 3m Euro to expand web ticketing platform in Europe

Dutch ticketing system Paylogic announced today that it secured round two funding of 3 million Euro ($4.2 million U.S.). The new funding will allow for expansion of the platform in Europe, beginning in Belgium and Germany, according to EU Ticket News.

Paylogic offers a hosted platform for event, venue, and promoter websites that allow fans to search and buy tickets.  A fan interested in an upcoming concert, for example, could visit the band’s website and buy tickets through the Paylogic hosted... Continue Reading

CNET co-founder announces AppFund for iPad developers

A pair of Internet entrepreneurs announced today that they’ve launched a fund for developers creating applications for Apple’s much-hyped tablet device, the iPad.

The new venture, from CNET and E Online co-founder Kevin Wendle and MusicNation and Original Signal co-founder Daniel Klaus, is called the AppFund, and the pair says it will invest between $5,000 and $500,000 in each application, depending on the complexity and business opportunity. The AppFund is based in New York City,... Continue Reading

Intel launches new business PC technology, 6-core chips

Intel announced that new business computers are shipping today with its latest technology for corporations. The new Intel Core vPro processors are based on the Nehalem design that debuted in servers last year.

The new Intel Core i5 vPro processors for business desktops have features that are tailored for corporate information technology managers. They have, for instance, built-in security and management features and can run business productivity applications up to 80 percent faster than prior... Continue Reading

LensVector raises $30M for improved autofocus in camera phones

We’ve all gotten used to taking lousy, out-of-focus pictures with our camera phones. But LensVector hopes to change that with its chip-based autofocus technology.

Today, the company is announcing it has raised a round of $30 million, bringing its total raised to date to more than $50 million. Institutional Venture Partners led the round, joining existing investors Menlo Ventures, Samsung, Silicon Valley Bank, Mitsui, and Kodak.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is using the money... Continue Reading

4Home gives you ultimate control over your electronics, appliances — snags $4.3M

4Home, maker of software that allows you to control all the appliances and electronics in your home from a central dashboard (spanning your television, computers and smart phones), has just raised $4.27 million in fourth-round equity, according to a filing with the SEC. Riding the trend toward greater household automation, the Sunnyvale, Calif. company is poised to become a Smart Grid contender as well as a major home media service.

Right now, its offerings are... Continue Reading

Enterprise Twitter-clone Yammer secures $10 million more in funding

Things seem to be going well for Yammer. The  Twitter-for-business service announced that it has grabbed another $10 million in a second round of funding.

Launched in September 2008, Yammer initially appeared to be just a simple Twitter clone that targeted businesses. The company has since gone on to implement many features that Twitter fans would surely appreciate, including a threaded discussion view, built-in file and photo attachments, and tags. Yammer says that over 60,000... Continue Reading

Glam raises $50M at whopping value of $750M, prepares IPO

Glam Media, the fast-growing online media company catering to mostly women, has raised another $50 million from investors — to help it expand before going public over sometime in the next one to three years. More impressively, the company is now valued at $750 million by its investors.

I spoke to chief executive Samir Arora earlier today, and he confirmed the financing amount, including many of the details surrounding the company’s business. Notably, the company... Continue Reading

Yodle bags another $10m for local online advertising

Yodle, a company that helps local businesses advertise online, today announced it has landed round four financing of $10 million, bringing its funding total to $38 million.

According to a company spokesperson, the new round will be used to double the company’s sales team and invest in several new products to increase internal efficiency and provide better marketing tools to clients. The new tools will apparently help to go beyond clickable ads but the company hasn’t... Continue Reading

December chip sales rise, but results for year fall 9 percent

Global chip sales in December rose 29 percent from a year ago to $22.4 billion. That’s a healthy increase as the bellwether industry continues its recovery from the recession.

For the year, however, worldwide chip sales were $226.3 billion, down 9 percent from $248.6 billion, according to the chip industry trade group Semiconductor Industry Association. Chips are used in everything electronic and thus their sales are leading indicators of the health of the tech economy.... Continue Reading

ThisNext buys Stylehive to dominate social shopping

Social shopping startup ThisNext is expanding — it just announced the acquisition of another social shopping site, Stylehive, and has created a new parent company called Curatemedia to manage both sites.

At ThisNext, you can recommend products you like, follow the recommendations of other shoppers, and also “shopcast” your ThisNext recommendations on other sites. Stylehive uses some of the same principles, but unlike the varied, generalist collection of products discussed on ThisNext, it focuses on... Continue Reading

Apisphere raises $4.6M for location-based business apps

Apisphere, a company that makes several business applications that use location data, has raised $4.6 million in funding.

As others have noted, the Berkeley, Calif. company’s funding is particularly noteworthy since most of the high-profile location-based startups to-date, such as Loopt and Foursquare, have focused on social capabilities rather than business. Apisphere’s apps, on the other hand, include tools for location-based mobile advertising campaigns and a plugin that delivers alerts to Microsof’s email and calendar... Continue Reading

First Round lets funded entrepreneurs exchange equity

First Round Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm, launched an exchange yesterday that allows the entrepreneurs they fund to pool and hold small amounts of equity in each others’ companies.

It’s a pretty unusual move that would allow founders to diversify their holdings earlier on in the life cycle of their companies. It could also provide an extra carrot for prospective investment candidates to approach First Round over other venture firms. The firm has spent... Continue Reading

Tora gobbles $36.4 million to provide electronic trading platform for Asian markets

Tora Trading Services, provider of a portfolio of tools investors can use to make well-informed trades on markets in Asia, has brought in $36.4 million in equity and options, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in San Francisco, the company offers five different products to keep track of hedge funds, mutual funds and other investment opportunities with algorithmic precision.

Apisphere channels $4.6M to serve location-based mobile apps

Apisphere, provider of a platform that powers mobile applications to serve content based on where you are geographically, has raised $4.58 million in equity, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in Redwood City, the company provides a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook and for Salesforce.com’s customer relations management system.