Today, Amplify, which is to be based in a large, historic Venice Beach building, is announcing its plans to incubate and accelerate L.A. tech talent.

Amplify’s investors include Mark Burnett (“The Apprentice” and “Survivor”), Brian Grazer (“J. Edgar” and “24″) and Jarl Mohn (E! Entertainment and MTV); plus, lots of more traditional tech investor types like Accel Partners, BV Capital, Greycroft Partners, Rustic Canyon and Tomorrow Ventures have added to a total of $4.5 million to invest in new companies.

Amplify founder and leader Paul Bricault said he actually tried to start something similar way back in 1999, when he was at William Morris. More than a decade later, he’s finally making it happen, having spent part of the last year visiting other start-up accelerators and learning from what they’re doing.

“L.A. is so dramatically underserved,” Bricault said.

Well, it used to be quite underserved. Today, other newish L.A. accelerators include MuckerLab, Start Engine, UpStart.LA, Science and Launchpad LA.

Bricault said he plans to collaborate with others in the local start-up scene. Plus, he counted 18 start-up accelerators in New York City alone.

Amplify is taking less of a strict class-and-curriculum approach than some other accelerators, instead accepting new companies on a rolling basis. Perks for participants include as much as $50,000 in funding and a three-year hiatus on city taxes.

Sean Parker and Jim Breyer with Techonomy host David Kirkpatrick

“A lot of those early-stage investors, they’ll fund literally anything” Parker said, calling the phenomenon “the assembly line approach to investing,” where an idea comes in and an investment comes out. Meanwhile, later-stage investors are themselves funding early-stage investors to access their deal flow.

Breyer, who is a Facebook board member and an investor in Parker’s pre-launch start-up Airtime, agreed with Parker and said the early-stage frenzy “will end badly.”

Breyer noted that the “spray-and-pray” mentality is especially prevalent in Silicon Valley and somewhat present in New York City and Beijing, but thankfully not in the rest of the world.

The two men’s comments came as part of a discussion about jobs and the social impact of technology at the Techonomy conference in Tucson, Ariz.

Parker admitted that the icon of rapid-fire angel investing, Ron Conway of SV Angel, is a close friend and an investor in every company he’s started.

But that doesn’t mean the world needs more Ron Conways, Parker said. “It’s fine if there’s a few guys doing this, but there’s so much capital now in the early stage.”

Parker contended that the Internet is becoming a mature business, where power consolidates among big players like Facebook, Google and Apple — making it harder for young companies to knock them off. “For young entrepreneurs, it’s really not helpful for some guy to come along and write you a check,” he said.

Photo credit: Bill Gross

A day after teaming up with the storage concern NetApp, Cloudera announced today that it has landed a $40 million series D round of venture capital funding from Ignition Partners, in a round led by its partner, Frank Artale. Previous investors include Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel. Cloudera says it will use the funds to expand its marketing and sales operations. By my count, the round brings Cloudera’s total capital raised so far to $76 million.

Cloudera has been on a roll — it’s the Hadoop outfit that many companies are turning to when they decide to tackle their big-data problems. Among its customers are eBay, AOL, Facebook and Groupon. While Hadoop itself is free for anyone to download and install from the Apache Software Foundation, Cloudera provides support and training, and an enterprise-ready version of Hadoop that has been tweaked for easier deployment in big companies.

And that’s not all the new money sloshing around the world of Hadoop, the open source project with the cute cartoon elephant as its mascot. (Hence the money-origami elephant pictured above.)

Accel Partners, which led Cloudera’s last round, is launching a $100 million “Big Data Fund,” with Cloudera as a partner. The point, Accel partner Ping Li told me, is to fund companies working in what he calls the “big data stack,” whether that’s in infrastructure like storage or security or management, or building applications that run on Hadoop. And the opportunities for that are multiplying, he told me.

“We’re seeing an undercurrent of picks-and-shovels kind of innovation around solving big data problems,” Li told me in an email. The volume of data is exploding at such a rate that it’s breaking traditional data-management technology like relational databases. It’s a problem that touches practically every industry. The fund will be overseen by several Accel partners based in the U.S., Europe, China and India.

Hadoop, whose mascot is a cute cartoon elephant, is open source software based in part on a technique called MapReduce. Initially developed at Google, it makes big jobs involving the processing of large sets of data manageable. And while anyone can go get the open source software for free and put it to use, the number of start-up companies trying to build a business around helping other companies use Hadoop effectively is multiplying. A team of Hadoop engineers recently spun out of Yahoo as a start-up called Hortonworks, and another Hadoop outfit called MapR landed $20 million in venture capital funding in August.

To me, the best-known among the Hadoop start-ups is Cloudera. Backed by $36 million in investments from Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel, Cloudera has probably got the biggest head start among the Hadoop companies. Its customers include eBay, Groupon and AOL.

Cloudera is also the company behind the Hadoop World conference that begins tomorrow in New York; as such, the eyes of the Hadoop — er, universe — will be paying attention to what goes on here.

The first bit of news is that Cloudera will be teaming up with the storage concern NetApp, which is announcing a turnkey product called the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop. (One of these days people will dispense with using the word “solution” in this way. Alas, not yet!) Basically, the idea is to make Hadoop and Cloudera’s subscription support service easy to deploy from within NetApp storage hardware. NetApp will become a Cloudera reseller.

One problem companies deploying Hadoop often run into is the need for more storage, says Jeff O’Neal, senior director for data center solutions at NetApp. “When you deploy Hadoop in the traditional way, the ratio between computing power and storage is locked, and here we’re opening that up.”

Why pick Cloudera, when NetApp could have just as easily slapped on a freebie Hadoop installation and sold it alongside its own hardware? Speed. Cloudera, O’Neal says, can help customers get their Hadoop installations up and running faster than they otherwise would. “We can take weeks or even months out of the cycle of getting the infrastructure up and running,” O’Neal says.

The deal will also get Cloudera exposed to some new high-rolling customers where NetApp has some strengths, says Kirk Dunn, Cloudera’s COO. NetApp, for one thing, does a lot of business with federal government customers in the areas of defense and intelligence, and their data needs aren’t getting smaller. “The workloads are big. The velocity of data coming at both the compute and storage racks are significant,” Dunn says. So is the size of the data. Consider, for example how the military and intelligence community are creating more satellite imagery than ever before; then consider that all that data has to be sorted and analyzed in an efficient way. Outside of government, banking and financial institutions want to sift through the increasing stream of information on people and companies to determine risk.

The amount of data that companies are generating is huge. Five or six years ago, the average large corporation had maybe 360 terabytes of data lying around, Dunn says. Cloudera has some customers that are generating about that much new data nearly every day, he says, and it’s not slowing down. “The problems only get more vexing as time goes on. They sure aren’t getting any simpler,” he says. After years of helping those companies and governments store all that data, NetApp is uniquely positioned, Dunn says, to go back to those organizations and sell them on the idea of mining that data for useful information. “For NetApp, this is as basic as motherhood and apple pie.”

The most recent round was led by Accel Partners. Existing investors New Enterprise Associates and FirstMark Capital also participated.

“That’s pretty huge for us,” Lot18’s founder Philip James said in an interview. “We are a year old. We launched on Nov. 10, and it’s a little bit of a surprise that we raised an A, B and C in such a short period of time.”

James said the funding was justified because Lot18 is growing so quickly.

In the past year, it has expanded to 90 employees, added 600,000 members and sold 500,000 bottles of wine. In addition, the company has added two new product categories, “Gourmet” and “Experience,” which sell food and travel, respectively.

James said it is Lot18’s goal to be the leader in the epicurean space — and to be all about eating and drinking.

On a standalone basis, that makes it similar to Gilt Taste, which is a full-priced online gourmet store owned by e-commerce company Gilt Groupe, which dabbles in everything from discount to full-price fashion and daily deals.

Also in the space is Wine.com, which has been selling wine online since 1998 and has a selection of hundreds of thousands of bottles. It also operates WineShopper, a members-only daily wine deals site.

James said he doesn’t anticipate getting into other categories, such as fashion or home accessories, as many other sites in the category have. He also says international expansion is not on the immediate roadmap, since shipping alcohol faces so many regulations.

Lot18 is a marketplace, so it does not own any inventory or warehouses; its cost structure is a little different from some of the others. Instead, the company’s headcount is a considerable expense, as are its marketing costs to get new members — just like Groupon. In addition, it subsidizes shipping, since wine is so heavy and fragile.

As the company grows, those costs continue, but there’s also a chance they may fall, as volume discounts on postage start to apply.

The company offers between 10 and 20 new products a day, from wines to travel and food. Users sign up to receive a daily email; James said that if people don’t make purchases, or even read the emails, the frequency drops. Its top-tier users have an open rate of more than 50 percent.

“We are blurring the line between content and commerce,” he said. “It’s for people who care about what they eat and drink. Even if they don’t buy it, they like learning about it.”

And unlike other companies, it’s not all about the discounts.

“The value proposition is curation, access and value,” James said. “When I think of flash sales, I think of discounts on products I already know. When something is artisanal, and it comes from a small, family-owned business, it’s about introducing people to brands they don’t already know.”

The $30 million round follows a $10 million second round in May, and a first round of $3 million. Quidsi founders Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara, who sold their company to Amazon, are also investors.

The second round of funding was led by Battery Ventures. The company previously raised money from the fbFund, a $10 million seed fund and joint venture run by Facebook, Founders Fund and Accel Partners.

Nisan Gabbay, founder and CEO of Sociable Labs, said Sociable is exploring what social commerce means, and from what he’s determined so far, he doesn’t believe it means people shopping on Facebook.

Rather, he thinks the most value lies in connecting to friends on actual retail sites to share recommendations.

For instance, it would be helpful if people could see which of their friends are registered to run in a 5K when signing up for the race, or if anyone they know has stayed in a particular hotel in Miami before using a travel site to book a room.

Sociable’s beta customers include Active.com, Chegg.com, Backcountry.com, Rue La La, HauteLook and Sole Society.

“Facebook is focused around entertainment, but it’s not about discovery or an immersive experience,” Gabbay said. “I find that the right experience is to offer the feature set where they already shop online, and by adding social features and the graph into that experience.”

Currently, most social commerce experiences are tied to the “like” button.

You can like a product and have it show up in your news feed on Facebook. But that information is not useful to your friends until they are shopping for something similar, at which point it may not be easy to find.

“Not everything can happen on Facebook,” Gabbay said. “Your friends don’t want to see what you are buying until they are making a decision.”

Privacy protections will obviously be key with this sort of integration and long-term cataloging of consumer purchases. But after a quick look at how Sociable is integrated on Active.com, a Web site dedicated to sports events, it doesn’t feel invasive. It’s information that friends would normally share on Facebook, but which would instantly get lost in the stream of news.

Sociable Labs will charge its lowest-paying customer $50,000 a year for services and licenses. The company currently has 25 employees, and plans to use the funding to deploy the software more broadly and market it, now that it is coming out of beta today.

I was on the phone with its two founders: Alon Maor, CEO; and Dan Sahar, VP of marketing. They had just started telling me about how they plan to sell network appliances that network operators — like, say, Comcast or Time Warner or Verizon — might put on their network in order to help them meet the growing demand for video content. The aim, Maor told me, is to get the most popular content as close as you can to the customer.

The first thing that popped into my mind was creating an appliance that sits on the network; close to, but not in the customer’s house. Maybe in the nearest network hub or central office. It turns out I was right. Then I wondered aloud what Qwilt might be using as storage technology. Could it be, maybe … flash memory? The chips that have so revolutionized the data centers of companies like Facebook and Apple and the banking systems of Credit Suisse, among others, when put to use by the likes of Fusion-io and Violin Technology?

Why yes, it does use flash memory, they told me, making them the latest member of the steadily growing “Flash Madness” club, which gives me yet another excuse to use the image taken from the cover of Flash Comics #1, circa 1940. For reference, the other members are Fusion, Violin Memory and Pure Storage.

Maor and Sahar laughed on the other end of the line at my guesses. “Would you like a job in our engineering department?” Sahar kidded me. I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t done guessing things like how Qwilt does what it does. “You must use some kind of algorithm to figure out what’s popular,” I said. Right again, mostly. The interview hadn’t been going for as much as five minutes, and I hadn’t even asked a single question and pretty much had it all figured out.

Well, not everything. There was the small matter of funding. Qwilt has raised $24 million in two rounds from Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and the Crescent Point Group, a fund based in Singapore. Maor is a Cisco veteran who got absorbed into that company following its $200 million acquisition of P-Cube. Before that, he was an engineer at Seabridge, which is now known as Nokia Siemens Networks. Sahar was director of marketing at Crescendo Networks, now part of F5 Networks. Tom Dyal, a Redpoint partner, is on Qwilt’s board.

Video is so popular with consumers that Internet services providers are struggling to get their networks scaled up to meet the demand, Maor says. The traditional way to solve that problem when everyone is watching the same show on Hulu, or the same movie on Netflix, is to just add routers and pray. That’s expensive. What if you could add some extra piece of gear that works with the existing network infrastructure? If you could figure out what was the most popular show in a particular neighborhood, make a copy of it right in that very neighborhood, and deliver it from there rather than all the way back from Hulu’s or Netflix’s data center, you’d lessen the network’s burden.

So that’s exactly what Qwilt does: It has three patents pending on processes for determining what video applications are being used on a network, and for figuring out what content is most popular in a particular area. So if you’re in a neighborhood full of “Jersey Shore” fans, the Qwilt box would figure that fairly quickly, and keep copies of it close at hand so that everyone gets their required daily dose of Snooki.

Also on Qwilt’s board is Rich Wong of Accel; Peter Wagner, an independent board member who has previously worked at Accel; Ohad Finkelstein, a partner at Crescent Point; and Giora Yaron, the former chairman of Mercury Interactive, which is now part of Hewlett-Packard. Also investing is Rob Glaser, the former CEO of RealNetworks.

Got all that? I told you it was an easy interview.

The anecdote appears in a new profile of Dropbox in the latest issue of Forbes, which also disclosed that the service is on track to hit $240 million in sales this year, even though the vast majority of its users pay nothing to use it.

But the meat of the story comes further in: Dropbox just closed a massive $250 million Series B round of funding, at an implied valuation of $4 billion, from Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners and Valiant Capital Partners. Early investors Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Hadi and Ali Partovi also participated in the round, bringing Dropbox’s total funding to date to $257.2 million. Houston’s stake, Forbes says, amounts to 15 percent of the equity, which would be worth about $600 million.

Houston may yet live to regret turning Jobs down. The Apple CEO proposed another meeting that never happened, then managed to single out Dropbox for disparagement as part of his iCloud keynote in June. That got the attention of Houston, who quickly fired off a memo to his team that included a list of once-hot companies that later crashed: MySpace, Netscape, Palm and Yahoo. Apple — which once viewed Dropbox as the sort of “strategic asset” for which it keeps its $70 billion war chest stuffed — is now the competition.

Of course I have something to say about the news yesterday that AOL would be a key investor in a new early-stage venture fund being started by TechCrunch’s perpetually petulant editor Michael Arrington — with a big, fat and decidedly greasy assist from a panoply of Silicon Valley’s most powerful VC firms and angel investors.

Arrington has previously called me “chief whiner” — oooh, buuuurn, although fair enough, since I have compared him to an egomaniac turtle named Yertle in the past — about my nagging him over the importance of upholding standards of fairness and ethics in journalism.

So as not to let him down, let me begin the whining.

First, my initial reaction when I first heard about the deal: Ugh. Sigh. Hopelessly corrupt. Now 100 percent more icky! A giant, greedy, Silicon Valley pig pile.

I was upset.

By early evening, after my kids told me to chillax, my dark mood had changed to accept that the transaction — however profoundly distasteful to me — was part and parcel of the insidious log-rolling, back-scratching ecosystem that has happened in every other center of power in the universe since the beginning of time.

And so it goes in Silicon Valley.

In fact, the creation of a $20 million investment kitty that Arrington has dubbed CrunchFund is simply the formalization of a long-standing arrangement that has already been going on since he founded his popular tech blog.

That is to say, in which the basic standards of journalism are first warped by calling it newfangled truth-telling and then endlessly corroded by using a wily and unusually aggressive combination of favors and threats to extract, from start-ups and VCs in need of press, both exclusive access and information.

And now, inevitably, money.

This could have been a lot cleaner, of course, by Arrington simply resigning from TechCrunch, becoming a VC and perhaps starting a new blog where his agenda is much clearer, from which he could huff and puff away as he does with much entertaining gusto at real and (mostly) imagined slights.

There is certainly precedent for VCs blogging, including Fred Wilson, Brad Feld and Ben Horowitz. And, despite my criticisms about ethics, it is clear that Arrington is a talented writer whose unique voice would be even stronger if it was truly seen as separate from what has become a news organization.

But because of his obvious need to be the center of attention — requiring the ermine kingmaker mantle and foisting his patented I’m-here-to-tell-it-like-it-is attitude on us all — that appears to be impossible.

(By the way, I await Arrington’s usual inane rant about the fictional conflicts of interest related to my gay Google marriage anytime now in 3 … 2 … 1, always and purposefully leaving out the pertinent facts that I can only wed one person, get no financial benefit and am also a prominent critic of the scary search behemoth, while he can make a badillion questionable and grossly tangled investments.)

Personal annoyances aside, what’s most interesting here is the group of Silicon Valley power players who lined up to bow and scrape and then hand over a small pile of dough to the blogger who would be king.

They include: Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners, Austin Ventures and Accel Partners, as well as individual investments from partners at Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, entrepreneur Kevin Rose and DST Global’s Yuri Milner. And, of course, the inevitable Arrington BFF Ron Conway.

Holy googa mooga, that would be, well, everyone, except Ashton Kutcher and Justin Timberlake (who will surely appear soon enough).

As one person also pointed out to me, I don’t recall this many competing VCs investing in one company, let alone another venture fund.

It goes without saying that the reasons they all decided to jump in this fetid pool with abandon are quite varied, if all entirely compromised.

One investor told me — off the record, naturally — that he thought it would be an interesting experiment to see what happened and so he wanted in, especially since everyone else was doing it.

Another well-known VC said that there is no downside to being financially affiliated, especially in attracting talent to its start-ups, with Arrington and, by extension, TechCrunch.

The well-respected Reid Hoffman of Greylock was the only one brave enough to talk on the record, explaining the reasoning pretty clearly:

“Techcrunch will get some real deal flow from entrepreneurs that we would otherwise not see, because they have established a prominent position as the SV/Tech industry information feed. As many tech entrepreneurs read it — both within Silicon Valley and globally — and view the information news feed to be their target for announcing themselves to the world, Crunchfund will have access to deal flow to these diverse and early stage companies. Some of these companies will be the kind of early stage companies with billion-dollar potential that Greylock invests in.”

There you have it: No one can afford to be out of the deal flow in these times, even if it means cutting corners.

While TechCrunch’s owner, AOL, said Arrington will no longer be managing editor, with only writing duties at the site he dominates and with no editorial control, Hoffman’s use of TechCrunch for CrunchFund was accurate, because in the eyes of many they are interchangeable.

That’s due to the fact that Arrington still breaks or is clearly the source for important stories on the site and, more importantly, is the big swinging dude who attracts all the eager entrepreneurs to the party. He is the fulcrum of that site, even as it has grown.

And so it will remain, I am guessing, no matter how much AOL insists it will not be so, because the easy questions pile up quickly:

Will Arrington keep doing what are clearly news stories, for example, even though he protesteth too much — as he did in the New York Times yesterday — that he is not a journalist?

And, if so, is it right for him to do so given his insider status, creating a nonparity of sourcing and crystal clear conflicts of interest?

Most of all, can he resist his palpable love of news-breaking and scoops, even if he gets them in ever more unseemly ways?

As if to make it all pretty, Arrington told reporters yesterday that he has put a clause in his limited partnership agreement so he can report on anything he likes, and in any way, about his investors and their companies, however confidential, except those he invests in.

O joyous day! Freedom of the press is preserved and our sacred First Amendment can breathe a sigh of relief, now that it is enshrined in an unholy blogger-VC LP agreement.

After pausing for a moment so that Thomas Jefferson and Edward R. Murrow can stop spinning in their graves, you can go down this road for many increasingly bumpy miles, which only becomes more twisted and confusing as it continues.

I finally talked to one investor in CrunchFund, who said simply and honestly: “It’s not that much money, so who cares?”

Indeed, who does care anymore about crossing what had long been very bright lines in journalism and, if you want to get all cosmic, in life?

Obviously, most of all, not AOL, or its CEO Tim Armstrong, or its head of content, Arianna Huffington. The pair, for whatever reason, decided to make a startling exception for Arrington from a rule that explicitly bars reporters at its media units from investing in the companies they cover.

That happened after he recently did a complete 180 from a previous decision to stop investing and jumped right back in, leaving Armstrong and Huffington to clean up the ethical mess.

They only made it worse, with their decision to throw journalism under the bus by letting Arrington do as he pleased, while touting how important it was for other content sites at AOL to remain more pure.

In the spirit of full disclosure, these kinds of ethical lapses are endemic these days in journalism. Case in point: The appalling phone-hacking controversy taking place at News Corp.’s News International unit in Britain.

While I cannot speak for Dow Jones, I can say that the behavior in another News Corp. property certainly takes its toll on those who adhere to higher standards at the company, especially when it comes to morale.

Thus, I can imagine how others feel at AOL — including those you-know-who-you-are silent ones at TechCrunch — who can’t and, more to the point, wouldn’t make the deals Arrington has been allowed to get away with.

It is not a good feeling, I can assure you.

And, while I have not spoken to her about it, I’d imagine that Huffington cannot be thrilled to be pushing for better journalism at AOL and trying to burnish her cred by hiring some top reporters, while also having to deal with this.

That’s okay, because Armstrong was perfectly willing to do the awkward pretzel-twist needed to explain away the controversial situation, also in an interview with the Times:

“TechCrunch is a different property and they have different standards. We have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch, which is different but is transparent about it.”

In this case, Tim, I am sorry to inform you that transparency is a complete canard and is more likely to end up covering up a lot more transgressions than it ever will reveal.

And, essentially and lazily sloughing it off by saying, “That’s just Mike being Mike,” is not going to cut it, at least not with me.

Not that any amount of tsk-tsking about it matters, I suppose, as Arrington finally gets his fervent Pinocchio-on-a-star wish to be a real-boy VC, can add yet another tainted buck to the pile of billions his venture pals already have, and just call it another typical day in Silicon Valley.

Still, when you are the designated whiner-in-chief, it is pretty much all one can do.

Joyus, a new start-up which is launching an invite-only public beta of its new premium video commerce site today, has raised $7.9 million in venture funding to pioneer a new way to shop online.

Accel Partners and Harrison Metal are the lead venture investors, along with angel investments from Current TV’s Joel Hyatt and Wal-Mart execs Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman.

The Palo Alto, Calif., Joyus, which is helmed by former Google exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, is attempting to create a new paradigm in shopping online by focusing on well-produced videos that yield sales immediately to makers of products.

If you think about a link-laden infomercial, you’ll get a general idea of what is being created by Joyus.

The company will start off with a focus on high-end women’s goods, which was jump-started by the April acquisition of Splendora, an innovative fashion and lifestyle site with more than 100,000 followers.

The result are sales that feature expert videos, which Joyus has been testing since the spring. So far, said Singh Cassidy in an interview on Friday, the conversion to sales has been up to seven percent, a high number in direct response marketing.

“We are trying to increase customer engagement with the products, while also providing an easy ability to purchase,” said Singh Cassidy. “It’s not something that has been done in this way before.”

Indeed, until now, product videos have usually been an online adjunct to a brand-focused campaign, rather than a buying opportunity. And some companies have interactive images that link to products, though no video.

Singh Cassidy said the video sales platform Joyus has been building can eventually be used by publishers and marketers of all kinds, well beyond the first effort focused on women’s soft goods, such as skin care products.

“This is not a fashion Web site with video,” she said. “It’s a whole new way of doing commerce online.”

Here’s the official press release for the Joyus funding and launch:

JOYUS ANNOUNCES TRANSFORMATIONAL NEW VIDEO SHOPPING EXPERIENCE

The world’s first premium video commerce site receives $7.9M led by Accel Partners

PALO ALTO, CA, August 1, 2011 — JOYUS today announced the private beta launch of the world’s first premium video commerce experience at Joyus.com, offering women a new, transformative way to shop online.

The company also announced its closing of a first institutional round of funding bringing total capital raised to $7.9M. Lead investors Accel Partners and Harrison Metal join angel investors Joel Hyatt, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of CurrentTV, and Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, SVPs of Global Ecommerce at Walmart. Accel’s Theresia Gouw Ranzetta and Harrison Metal’s Michael Dearing will join the JOYUS board of directors.

JOYUS was founded in January 2011 by Founder & Chairman Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, former President of Asia Pacific and Latin America Operations at Google and Co-Founder of the online personal finance company Yodlee. Singh Cassidy is joined by Co-Founder and VP of Product Diana Williams, formerly Director of Product Management (Fashion) at eBay; Chief Curator Gina Pell, Founder and former Content Chief at Splendora, a pioneering fashion and lifestyle website with over 100,000 followers acquired by JOYUS in April 2011; and CTO and VP of Engineering Sin Mei Tsai, previously from Efficient Frontier and SendMe Mobile.

While the e-commerce 3.0 space has seen an influx of interest over the past 2 years, overall penetration of e-commerce remains low at 7.9% of total U.S. retail sales, particularly for key categories such as apparel and lifestyle products, according to Internet Retailer.

“Until now, no one has been able to solve some real problems that exist in e-commerce today, especially in the soft goods category,” says Singh Cassidy. “JOYUS is addressing these issues by leveraging the power of video from discovery all the way to purchase. Imagine a video that helps you discover, use and buy the products you’ll love online, seamlessly. That doesn’t exist. JOYUS is a revolutionary step that we think will transform the shopping experience for users online, starting with female shoppers.”

Accel’s Theresia Gouw Ranzetta agrees. “Accel looks to partner with entrepreneurs who are gamechangers. Sukhinder and her team have created a new model for online shopping in JOYUS, using shortform video to drive product discovery, sales and customer loyalty,” says Ranzetta. “We see video being used by other e-commerce retailers to showcase products, but no one is integrating it as powerfully into the shopping and brand experience as JOYUS. This is a real differentiator that we believe will attract new retailers who are looking to market their products in a new and engaging way online.”

Early retail partners already are seeing strong sell-through on JOYUS videos. “Our experience with JOYUS has been great,” says Catherine Chow of Azalea Boutique. “The JOYUS platform allows us to reach a broader audience of passionate, fashion savvy women with our new, in-season inventory. We see video on JOYUS being an exciting new component of our online marketing strategy.”

JOYUS has been testing its video sales platform with its first customers since spring; according to Singh Cassidy, early data on the site shows conversion to sales is highest when viewers watch between 2:30 to 3:30 minutes of a JOYUS video. These and other early JOYUS analytics suggest video can increase not only engagement, but sales online via direct response marketing.

In recent months, all manner of apps and devices have sprung up that use smartphones and their many sensors to perform a host of medical tasks. And the trend hasn’t gone unnoticed on Sand Hill Road. There are apps that let the iPhone and other smartphones help scan inside a child’s ear, measure blood pressure and even check for malaria.

Azumio, whose app lets an iPhone or Android device act as a heart-rate monitor, announced Wednesday that it has landed $2.5 million in series A funding from backers including Founders Fund, Accel Partners and Felicis Ventures.

The app, Instant Heart Rate, works by having a user put his or her finger over a phone’s camera for 10 seconds. It boasts more than eight million downloads, and the company sees a virtually limitless market for that and other programs.

“Our customer is everyone with a heart,” CEO Bojan Bernard Bostjancic said in an interview.

Azumio is the latest in a growing category of medical devices that attach to or work in conjunction with an iPhone or other smartphone. The mobile health-and-fitness category is also exploding with devices like Fitbit and Jawbone’s forthcoming UP product.

Indeed, the Food and Drug Administration said earlier this month it was exploring new regulations for evaluating mobile apps.

While some are focusing on devices that plug into or communicate wirelessly with a smartphone, Bostjancic says Azumio is focused for now on uses that require only a smartphone and its built-in sensors.

“With the app, you can reach just a huge audience,” he said. The heart-rate monitor uses a smartphone’s camera to determine one’s heart rate by measuring the differences in light absorption as blood is coming in and out of the tissue in the finger.

Bostjancic said that there are other sensors in the phone that can help us be more aware of what our body is or isn’t doing at any time. In large part, he said, most chronic diseases are caused by lifestyle. That’s a problem, given how detached most people are from what is going on with their bodies. Technology is part of the problem, but also part of the solution.

Azumio, he said, “would like to put you back in touch with your body.”

Next up for Azumio are apps that perform stress checks. Bostjancic notes that stress is often the trigger for all manner of lifestyle-related disease.

“We would like to address this by quantifying the level of stress,” he said.

Bostjancic also sees an opportunity to partner with or acquire other companies in the field, noting that others are looking at sleep and other factors that contribute to the lifestyle-related chronic illnesses Azumio is addressing. Among the devices he says have caught his interest are those that monitor sleep, since sleep apnea is associated with higher risk of cardiac problems.

“We could coordinate the data from different measurements,” he said.

“This is something that even six months ago was unthinkable,” said Wibe Wagemans, the former Microsoft Bing executive who now heads the Finnish company’s brand marketing efforts.

Speaking at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco, Wagemans surprised everyone — including the panel moderator and Rovio investor Rich Wong — by suggesting that the company might be looking for investment beyond the massive venture round completed earlier this year.

“We’re always looking for money,” he said.

Wong probed Wagemans for details on that.

“Can you expand on that, I wasn’t aware of that,” said Wong, whose Accel Partners led Rovio’s venture round earlier this year.

“We’re always on the look out for good money,” he said, noting the company is in a fast growth phase. (I caught up with Wagemans later and he reiterated that they are serious about raising more money, but said there is no rush to do so.)

The Birds are indeed expanding quickly. The company has its first book in the works and just added flip-flops to its merchandise collection. Meanwhile its games are now on Roku boxes and coming soon to Facebook.

Wagemans noted that the company found out it was the third most copied brand in China, just behind Hello Kitty. “We want to be the most copied brand in China,” Wagemans said.

As for the company’s plans to support future efforts from Nokia, Wagemans noted that Microsoft just released the Windows Phone 7 version of Angry Birds and there are already versions for MeeGo and Symbian.

“I’d love to see from Nokia some other options like a Plan B for the future,” Wagemans said. That said, Rovio isn’t trying to take sides in the mobile platform wars.

“The major opportunity for us is to be agnostic,” he said.

I love the smell of blog wars in the morning!

Acting as Facebook often does to Google, a new site started by former Engadget editor Josh Topolsky just hired away yet another passel of tech journalists from the giant gadget news and reviews organization.

Editorial movement is not uncommon on tech news sites, but this level of it from one site to another is somewhat, um, aggressive.

Engadget, which is owned by AOL, is one of the largest tech-focused sites on the Web. Topolsky left his editor-in-chief job there in March.

By April, he had grabbed eight prominent Engadget staffers who had left the huge tech site amid editorial tensions, in order to start a new competing gadget property for the well-funded sports content start-up SB Nation.

Now, sources said, Topolsky has added Thomas Ricker, an Engadget senior editor, who had run its European coverage; Sean Hollister, a senior associate editor, who ran its West coast team; and Joseph Flatley, an associate editor.

Also hired: Thomas Houston, editor-in-chief of Switched, an AOL tech site that was recently subsumed into its Huffington Post Media unit; and Dieter Bohn, who was editor-in-chief for the Smartphone Experts network of sites, including Crackberry and others.

And other possible new hires soon from Engadget: Another European editor, Vlad Savov, and writer Jacob Schulman.

The Topolsky-helmed site is still unnamed but is now operating as This Is My Next. It already has 16 writers, compared to Engadget’s two dozen, and is set to debut in the fall with a new name.

It will be the first content expansion at the Washington, D.C., SB Nation, which completed a $10.5 million Series C round, led by Khosla Ventures, in the fall.

Before that, SB Nation had already raised about $13 million in total venture funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company and Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as from angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

Another AOL link: SB Nation was founded by former AOLer, CEO Jim Bankoff, who had bought Engadget for AOL many years ago.

Engadget Editorial Director Josh Frulinger said that the impact of the talent drain on Engadget — mostly from This Is My Next raids — has been small, since the site has also been aggressively hiring.

“We’re past the people leaving and into celebrating what we’ve accomplished in six short months, and we welcome any new competition,” he said. “Dana Wollman, Brian Heater, Myriam Joire, Zach Honig, Joe Pollicino, Richard Lawler, Michael Gorman, Sean Buckley, Joseph Volpe, Brad Molen, Terrence O’Brien, Amar Toor and Sharif Skar — all brought on in the past six months — are your Engadget stars of tomorrow.”

To prove it, AOL said unique visitors for Engadget in June were up 1.1 percent from May and will be up again for July. In recent reports, the site had 14 million unique monthly visitors.

The funding came from new investors Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures along with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bill Campbell, First Round Capital and Ron Conway, and brings Accel’s Jim Breyer and Khosla of Khosla Ventures in as board observers.

RockMelt has been especially embraced by young users, said CEO Eric Vishria. Fifty-six percent of active RockMelt users are age 24 and younger, and most of them use the browser’s chat feature on a daily basis.

Rockmelt has for most of its short life been known as a “social browser,” given its deep sharing and chat integration, especially with Facebook. But the company’s ambitions are broader than that, Andreessen — co-creator of the first Web browser — said in an interview.

“When we created the browser 15 to 20 years ago we had no idea what the killer apps would be,” Andreessen said. “Had we known about these things we would have built it very differently.”

The first killer app for the browser — for function — was search, Andreessen said. I asked Andreessen if he thinks the current ubiquitous browser business model — revenue sharing from search toolbars — will change if user activity becomes less about search and information retrieval.

“I think search continues to be very important,” Andreessen said. “Google had a billion uniques last month. But social is next.”

After search and social, Andreessen said, he envisions a half dozen more killer apps for the browser — basically, all the stuff we do online all day. Some examples might be daily deals and phone calls. “How much better could it be if that were built straight in?” Andreessen asked.

But back to RockMelt’s other challenges: What about the not-so-little issue of competition from other browsers? Khosla said in a separate interview, “When a browser changes from an information retrieval tool to a social media tool it’s probably some new company that’s going to figure it out … When shifts happen I sincerely believe start-ups are the best at entering the new market.”

Facebook and RockMelt recently worked together to create a custom Facebook experience when the site is visited from the browser. As for potential competition if Facebook were to build its own social browser, both Andreessen and Khosla shrugged it off. Khosla’s take: “These things [browsers] are not easy to do.” Andreessen’s: “I’m in a conflicted situation as a Facebook director so don’t want to speak on Facebook’s behalf. But as a RockMelt director, RockMelt is thrilled with our relationship with Facebook.”

Vishria said the new funding will be used for marketing, business development and hiring. Mountain View, Calif.-based RockMelt employs 40 people now, which he expects to double within the next year.

RockMelt’s first round of funding came in September 2009, just over a year before it put out a product.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

To get things going, I used that old trick of word association, channeling a technique perfected –aptly, for the location — by Sigmund Freud.

The panelists — who included Google’s Nikesh Arora, LinkedIn Chairman and investor Reid Hoffman and Accel Partner’s Jim Breyer — had to give lightning observations on Facebook, Google, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Nokia, New Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch and smartphones.

The results were very interesting and very different, as you will see here below in a chart of it, posted recently by DLD on its Facebook page (click on the image to make it larger):

And here is a digital version of its whole DLD book that the chart was in:

Already, the idea is starting to pay off.

Since then, the company’s game network (plus aspiring social network) called Moshi Monsters has registered 50 million users, mostly between the ages of 6 and 12 years old, and is adding a new player every second. It’s also on pace to generate $100 million in gross retail sales this year.

At E3 last week, I caught up with Mind Candy’s CEO Michael Acton Smith to hear about how he believes he can leverage the company’s social game roots to build a Facebook alternative for kids under the age of 12 and create an entertainment brand worth billions.

Acton Smith’s ambitious plans include bringing the monsters and other characters from the online virtual world into the physical world.

Mind Candy, which is based in London and has offices in New York, plans to officially announce tomorrow the availability of plush stuffed toys and mini-figurines based on the characters from Moshi Monsters. The toys will be sold exclusively at Toys “R” Us online and in stores nationwide starting in July.

The launch of toys in the U.S. follows the popularity of Moshi Monster-branded toys, books, video games, trading cards and a magazine in the UK and Australia, where the game is more popular. Of the 50 million users, only 15 million are in the U.S. today.

Acton Smith’s ambitions are like Harry Potter or SpongeBob SquarePants on steroids.

In addition to toys, he says they are working on music, live tours, a Moshi film and a videogame for the Nintendo DS.

In the game, players choose from one of six virtual pet monsters to name and take care of. They also get to personal and decorate a page and can post notes to a friend’s pinboard, which is a lot like the wall in Facebook. Subscriptions cost $6 a month, but not all users pay.

The company, which has 50 employees, has raised $10 million in venture capital from Index Ventures and Accel Partners.

Here’s a video interview with Acton Smith from the floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center at E3, where his Jimi Hendrix-type attire easily stood out from the rest of the hardcore gamers: