The fairly high-profile start-up, which was co-founded by Kim Kardashian and raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz, got its start as a subscription service.

For $40 a month, women would receive a pair of shoes, based on their preferences.

The catch, however, was that if you failed to log in and tell ShoeDazzle that you weren’t interested that month, they would charge you anyway. The model was reminiscent of mail-order CD clubs that drew you in with the offer of 10 albums for one cent, but then signed you up for a monthly shipment unless you opted out in advance.

Under the changes announced today, ShoeDazzle members will only be charged if and when they make a purchase — no matter if it is once a month or once every six months.

Everything else remains the same, so members will continue getting an email offering a monthly selection of shoes, selected according to their personal preferences. The shoes will also continue to be made specifically for ShoeDazzle from a variety of manufacturers in China.

Without the commitment of  having to log in every month, the site could appeal to a wider audience. Today, ShoeDazzle has 10 million members, up from three million a year ago.

“But that isn’t enough,” Strauss said in an interview. “We want tens of millions.”

As part of the changes, ShoeDazzle will also add new categories to the site, including apparel and lingerie in addition to shoes, and some handbags.

“The feedback that we’ve been getting is that when they see the shoes on the model, they want to buy the whole outfit,” Strauss said. “We want to increase our share of the closet.”

Six months ago, Strauss joined ShoeDazzle from Provide Commerce, where he was CEO. Provide Commerce is known for operating sites such as ProFlowers and RedEnvelope. ShoeDazzle’s founder, Brian Lee, is now chairman. In addition, Kardashian, who helped launch ShoeDazzle, is playing a less active role in the company today, but continues as a spokeswoman.

Apple and I’m not sure why.

– Ben Horowitz, co-founder and GP of Andreessen Horowitz, at Business Insider’s Ignition West conference Wednesday, when asked what he would do if he could take all of his firm’s money and invest it in either Google or Apple

The capital comes from new investors New Enterprise Associates and Telefonica, one of the world’s largest mobile operators, as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures and others. So far, Boku, which works with wireless carriers for online buying and direct billing through wireless accounts, has raised a total of $75 million since its launch in 2009.

Boku will use the funding to expand the recently announced Boku Accounts service, the company said in a statement. The funds will also help with the continued expansion of the company’s global infrastructure. The San Francisco-based start-up currently operates in 67 countries around the globe, and works with 260 mobile-network operators.

As my AllThingsD colleague Tricia Duryee puts it, a lot of companies believe that the mobile payments industry is set to take off over the next few years, with Boku being just one of them. But with so many approaches being explored, it’s not clear which solutions consumers will end up adopting.

Some — like Google, which has introduced Google Wallet, or Isis, a joint venture between wireless companies — believe near field communication technology is the future of people paying with their mobile phones. This is unlike what start-up Square is doing — allowing contractors and small businesses to take payments via their iPhones or iPads using a small, square dongle.

Some credit card companies, including Visa, are developing their own form of the digital wallet; while online payments giant PayPal has recently said that the digital wallet for consumers is something that lives in the cloud and should be device-agnostic, not tied to any one type of smartphone.

Last year, PayPal joined forces with Zong, a Boku competitor, through a $240 million acquisition.

PayPal is also getting into direct payments at point-of-sale systems in stores. So far, it’s offering customers the ability to pay by punching in a PayPal account number or by swiping a PayPal card at 2,000 Home Depot stores across the U.S. This is a potential threat to traditional credit card companies, such as Visa and MasterCard, as PayPal has the ability to undercut the fees that merchants pay to accept the traditional networks’ cards.

With Boku Accounts, Boku is actually working with a credit card company — MasterCard — by giving clients the ability to use a MasterCard magstripe to pay. Customers can also pay at NFC-enabled terminals with an NFC sticker on their phones, or they can pay with their wireless phone number at participating merchants.

Boku has said the advantage of this system is that merchants don’t have to “re-terminalize” — install an entirely new payment terminal — in order to accept Boku payments.

In an effort to minimize the impact of massive layoffs that Yahoo’s top management has been planning, according to sources close to the situation, one of the latest ideas to save costs and presumably jobs by new CEO Scott Thompson is to sell off much of its advertising technology platform, including Right Media.

And among the possible buyers Thompson has been targeting in recent visits: Google and Microsoft, as well as Silver Lake, the private equity firm that had once been talking to the Silicon Valley Internet giant about making a large investment in the company.

(That particular deal has gone south, but there is always yet another scheme on the horizon at Yahoo!)

The concept behind such a sale, according to several sources inside and outside the company, is to turn a cost center into a revenue source, with Yahoo essentially outsourcing a business that was a cornerstone of its strategy. A negotiable number of employees affiliated with those units would then move over to the new owner.

The most ideal plan, said sources, would be to sell Yahoo’s whole advertising technology “stack,” including the Right Media Exchange, a marketplace for advertisers, publishers and ad networks to trade online ads. Yahoo bought it for $700 million in 2007.

According to info on the company’s site, it has “300,000 active global buyers and sellers and more than 11 billion daily transactions.”

Also part of the possible package is APT, a system Yahoo has built to make buying and selling online advertising easier. In addition, Yahoo’s technologies for display-ad serving have been mentioned as a possibility for sale.

It’s unclear what the potential sale means for the new ad strategy that U.S. boss Ross Levinsohn and his lieutenant Jim Heckman have been pursuing since last summer. That plan included its own acquisition of ad network Interclick and an attempt to sync up with rivals AOL and Microsoft in an effort to fend off Google and some third-party players, like ad networks.

But the reason for contemplating much a major move — which has been considered before, but never has been seriously offered — are obvious: While Yahoo once dominated this arena, it has steadily lost ground, especially to Google. The search giant has made almost all of its money in search-related ads, but has been moving aggressively via its DoubleClick and other ad-serving entities into higher-level ads.

Microsoft has also been trying to compete, as has AOL, but it’s getting to be an expensive race, and one where Yahoo would have to make major investments to once again gain momentum. Building up this business again had been the aim of co-founder Jerry Yang, who wanted to go big in the arena in a number of ways before he left the company earlier this year.

But those days seem to be over at Yahoo.

“A lot of what has happened so far under Scott [Thompson] has been trying to find more revenue anywhere it can be generated, and get out of businesses that are not growing,” said one person. “Right now, it’s a lot about what we shouldn’t do rather than what we should.”

That has meant visits to see both Google and Microsoft about possible deals by Thompson, with the involvement of CFO Tim Morse and Chief Product Officer Blake Irving.

Thompson (pictured here) has also recently been talking to Silver Lake about the ad-platform sale, in a deal that might include the Andreessen Horowitz venture fund. This would be a different kind of transaction, said sources, in which a separate company would be formed, with Yahoo owning a piece and contracting with the new entity to provide ad technology.

All this activity is related to the layoffs in the works of perhaps thousands of employees, which were to have been communicated to the company this week.

Sources said those have been delayed for some weeks for several reasons, including whether to consider more deeply if certain larger business units can be spun off, sold or somehow transformed. (To be clear: Major layoffs are still being planned, but now might take place in two parts, said sources, in what is a quickly changing and volatile atmosphere at Yahoo.)

Another area being looked at, said sources, is Yahoo’s search advertising partnership with Microsoft, which has not been as successful as had been expected. While Yahoo has been working with the software giant about improving the results, Thompson has apparently been contemplating other possibilities, including working with Google (calling all regulators!) and/or laying off up to 900 employees who work on the company’s search offering.

Any of these moves could, of course, cause a firestorm of controversy, which Thompson appears to not worry much about. He was the driving force in Yahoo’s patent lawsuit against Facebook earlier this week, which is largely attracting a negative reaction across the tech landscape.

A number of prominent voices have spoken out against the legal action, including well-known VC Fred Wilson, who yesterday penned a poisonous blog post, titled “Yahoo Crosses the Line.”

It ends thusly: “I am not writing this in defense of Facebook. They can and will defend themselves. I am writing this in outrage at Yahoo! I used to care about that company for some reason. No more. They are dead to me. Dead and gone. I hate them now.”

Ouch!

Also weighing in publicly via Twitter was former Yahoo director Eric Hippeau, who was one of the company’s first investors, which is embedded below:

Pathetic and heartbreaking last stand for Yahoo bit.ly/yirCcj It’s all over. I loved you very much.

— Eric Hippeau (@erichippeau) March 13, 2012

Double ouch!

All I can say is that Thompson certainly has a lot of gumption. That has actually been his M.O. from the start, said several sources, with the former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit and dark horse cold-emailing his way into the Yahoo CEO job.

True story: He had not been among its list of possible candidates — largely because he had been placed in his job at eBay many moons ago by Heidrick & Struggles, which was conducting the Yahoo CEO search, and that’s a talent acquisition no-no to poach someone you placed.

That did not stop Thompson, who thought he might be good for the job and reached out directly to board members at the end of the selection effort, which then led to the search committee and soon enough to the job in what was a very quick vetting and secretive (although not secretive enough!) hiring process.

Since then, Thompson has been on a tear, from working on a restructuring to trying to assuage activist shareholder Dan Loeb to helping put the kibosh on its Asian stake sale talks to suing Facebook. And now this sale effort, too.

If the peripatetic Thompson — who might need a dose of Ritalin before this thing is over — wanted to get noticed by the tech powers that be: Mission accomplished!

“He’s definitely someone who appears to have decided on shooting the moon with a lot of these actions,” said one person close to the situation, referring to the move in the card game of Hearts, which is a risky gambit to capture every penalty card worth 26 points in order to win. “I just hope no one loses an eye in the process.”

(That would be triple ouch, by the way.)

No comments all around, but everyone was certainly cordial on this rainy morning.

While politics is NationBuilder’s initial focus, it’s already being used by filmmakers as well. The company helps customers run their Web sites, with tools for both content production and user engagement and retention. For instance, one feature offers a “political currency” system that assigns point values to all sorts of actions on each site.

NationBuilder costs $19 per month for communities with fewer than 10,000 users, and more for larger communities, like that of Newark mayor Cory Booker and Newt Gingrich’s New Hampshire primary campaign. It currently has 500 “nations” with 2 million supporters.

NationBuilder was founded in 2009 by Jim Gilliam, a remarkable guy who started online movements around his own double lung transplant and documentaries for Brave New Films.

Gilliam said his main competition is consulting firms that build sites for politicians, often with a focus on Democrat or Republican candidates. These products tend to be expensive and get obsolete fast, and campaigns that want to experiment with new things like texting their supporters have had to invest in separate tools. Plus, tools aimed at getting someone elected are often different from those aimed at helping someone govern. Not so with NationBuilder.

In addition to Andreessen Horowitz, whose Ben Horowitz is taking a seat on NationBuilder’s board of directors, other prominent folks getting involved in NationBuilder include Causes founder Joe Green, who is joining as president, and investor Sean Parker, who is also now on the board. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes was a NationBuilder seed investor, while Parker is heavily involved in another online politics start-up called Votizen. Green, Parker and Hughes were all involved in the early days of Facebook.

Horowitz said he believes NationBuilder does fit the “software eats the world” thesis, even if politics might seem a bit far afield from his firm’s expertise. What he’s particularly interested in is NationBuilder’s focus on activism and participation. “NationBuilder solves the hard part,” Horowitz said. “People are excited, but then what do they do?”

After discussion with the team, you determine that there are two options: Release on time with reduced features, or delay by six to nine months with the full 1.0 feature set. The company co-founder/CTO is adamant that eliminating any of the v1.0 features will result in an uncompetitive product and that releasing “a piece of crap” will undermine the credibility of the company.

Product management advocates releasing something in Q2, provided that the next release follows within nine months. Prior to now, everyone agreed that product management is responsible for release decisions. Your CTO team wants to make an exception to the rule, claiming that this is a strategic decision and can’t possibly be left solely to product management.

According to product management, while the first release will fall short of what was promised, the three most important customer-facing features are able to be released on time. In his view, the minimum viable feature set has been met, and getting something out sooner is the best approach.

SpiderNet still has about a year of cash in the bank, so could theoretically weather the delay, but getting any sort of customer traction before requiring additional funding will be very difficult. Do you side with your co-founder/CTO and wait six months, or do you press the company to release a minimally viable product by the end of Q2?

What now?

Product Release: The Minimally Viable Product

There’s not a technical team on the planet that does not wish to build the greatest product known to humankind — a product that has more features than all the incumbents, will truly revolutionize the market, and be released sooner rather than later, to catch the impending market demand for the technology. Rarely do such wishes come true.

The reality is that building and releasing a market-ready software product takes time and iteration to get right. Whether the product is SaaS or on-premise, the learning curve to get the feature set correct, understand the ideal customer and teach the company how to launch a product takes time, and it is extremely rare for a company to go from no product to ideal product in one grand motion.

While it is easy to advise a stepwise approach, the reality is much more difficult. Engineering teams want to release great and complete products, you don’t want the company to be embarrassed with a half-assed attempt, and the company vision often dictates a much more robust offering than you have the time or money to produce.

I am a huge advocate of the MVP. Having barely lived through the alternative — the uber, world-eating product that never releases — I believe that creating a viable yet less grandiose product of value along the path to something larger is a far more prudent approach. Releasing an MVP puts a product in the user’s hands for feedback, teaches the company how to release a product (which goes far beyond simply finishing the bits), and starts to create a value proposition within a targeted market segment. Two cases in point: Dropbox’s approach to product development and Zynga’s release of FarmVille. When a company tries to build its grand vision upfront, the result is often a broken Swiss Army knife of features that never gets traction because the product doesn’t work completely and can’t compete effectively.

That said, the MVP only works if the following conditions prove true:

• The product actually contains the top three to five compelling features required
• The product is bomb-proof and has the highest attention to quality

Fewer features, yet higher quality, usually wins. Low quality loses in all cases, regardless of the feature set.

SpiderNet
In the SpiderNet case, I would thus advocate taking the MVP approach, despite possibly upsetting the CTO. For all the reasons mentioned above, I would try to educate the CTO and engineering team that getting something out the door is important and critical for the company’s success: Important for feedback, important for the company, and important for SpiderNet to raise another round of funding. Furthermore, the six- to nine-month delay might turn into a year or longer, given the unknowns. Finally, I’d want to make sure that the three to five features are really the ones required by the customer and then, as a team, pick a release date that the company strives to meet. Full steam ahead.

Cisco announced the appeal in a post to Cisco’s corporate blog by Cisco’s senior VP for video and collaboration, Marthin De Beer. In it, Cisco argues that the EU should reexamine the deal because Skype doesn’t work with other video and audio calling systems that use industry standard technologies, such as Cisco’s.

“Imagine how difficult it would be if you were limited to calling people who only use the same carrier or if your phone could only call certain brands and not others,” De Beer wrote. “Cisco wants to avoid this future for video communications,” and so has filed the appeal. Messagenet, a European IP calling service, joined Cisco in filing the appeal. Both had commented to the European Commmission during initial hearings on the deal before it was approved.

Cisco doesn’t want the merger rescinded, but rather wants the EC to impose some interoperability conditions on Microsoft. Part of Microsoft’s plan with Skype has been to combine it with its Lync video and voice calling software for businesses. Both Lync and Skype use their own proprietary calling technologies, and so aren’t compatible with other video and calling services.

Sources familiar with the matter say Cisco had sought to work with Microsoft to ensure that its videoconferencing gear would work with Skype, but was unsuccessful in reaching a deal.

Skype has about 700 million users worldwide, and before Microsoft acquired it, had sought to go public in April. For calendar year 2010, it reported revenue of $860 million and a net loss of about $7 million. Successful mainly with consumers who like its free service, the company had begun to work on a strategy meant to bring the service to enterprise users, but had suffered some service failures that gave its target corporate customers pause. The Microsoft acquisition, announced in May, happened at just the right moment.

When the deal was announced, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Skype would, in time, be integrated with other Microsoft products, including the Xbox gaming console, Windows Phone for smartphones, and even its Hotmail Web email service.

Cisco’s videoconferencing business is a force primarily among large companies. It has 50,000 companies who use its gear, but it struggled to create a consumer-focused service, and shuttered its Umi product last year amid a wider corporate restructuring.

Microsoft wasn’t immediately available for comment on Cisco’s move, but I’ll add anything I get from it as soon as I have it.

Update: And here’s the official response from Redmond: “The European Commission conducted a thorough investigation of the acquisition, in which Cisco actively participated, and approved the deal in a 36-page decision without any conditions. We’re confident the Commission’s decision will stand up on appeal.”

Here’s the full text of Cisco’s post announcing the appeal:

Video to Video Communications is the Future

In the past decade video communications has moved out of the realm of science fiction to become commonplace in our homes, at work, and on mobile devices. Yet we remain some distance from the goal of video calls being as easy and ubiquitous as phone calls are today – across any network and between all devices.

Imagine how difficult it would be if you were limited to calling people who only use the same carrier or if your phone could only call certain brands and not others. Cisco wants to avoid this future for video communications, and therefore today appealed the European Commission’s approval of the Microsoft/Skype merger to the General Court of the European Union. Messagenet, a European VoIP service provider, has joined us in the appeal.

We did not take this action lightly. We respect the European Commission, and value Microsoft as a customer, supplier, partner, and competitor. Cisco does not oppose the merger, but believes the European Commission should have placed conditions that would ensure greater standards-based interoperability, to avoid any one company from being able to seek to control the future of video communications.

This appeal is about one thing only: securing standards-based interoperability in the video calling space. Our goal is to make video calling as easy and seamless as email is today. Making a video-to-video call should be as easy as dialing a phone number. Today, however, you can’t make seamless video calls from one platform to another, much to the frustration of consumers and business users alike.

Cisco believes that the right approach for the industry is to rally around open standards. We believe standards-based interoperability will accelerate innovation, create economic value, and increase choice for users of video communications, entertainment, and services.

The video communications industry is at a critical tipping point with far reaching consequences. Just three years from now the world will be home to nearly 3 billion Internet users, the average fixed broadband speed will be 28 Mbps, and 1 million video minutes (the equivalent of 674 days) will traverse the internet every second. As video collaboration becomes increasingly mainstream, multiple vendors will have to work together to enable global scale and broad customer choice.

For the sake of customers, the industry recognizes the need for ubiquitous unified communications interoperability, particularly between Microsoft/Skype and Cisco products, as well as products from other unified communications innovators. Microsoft’s plans to integrate Skype exclusively with its Lync Enterprise Communications Platform could lock-in businesses who want to reach Skype’s 700 million account holders to a Microsoft-only platform.

At the heart of this opportunity is a question about the model for interoperability. One approach allows each vendor to decide how they will interoperate. Another approach aligns the industry around open standards defined by non-partisan governing bodies. The answer will be critical to whether and how quickly video calls become “the next voice.”

When vendors implement their own protocols and selectively interoperate, they push the burden of interoperability to the customer. We respectfully request that the General Court act on our concerns and for the European Commission to ensure the proper protections are put in place to encourage innovation and a competitive marketplace.

On Monday, the company is officially taking the wraps off its plans. Nicira — which I’m told is pronounced like “nice era” — aims to be the vendor of a new networking technology that’s built specifically for the age of cloud computing.

One of the most important enabling technologies of the age of the cloud is something called “virtualization”: As computers have gotten more powerful, thanks mainly to the progress of Moore’s law and ever-better chips — a single computer can, with the aid of software like that created by VMware, act like it’s 10 or 20 or 40 different computers, all at once. Each “virtual machine” has, to its user, all the properties of a physical computer, and ensures that a single machine is used in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible. Customers who use cloud services can quickly “spin up” new virtual machines as needed to meet new demands, usually within minutes.

But generally speaking, networking hasn’t kept up. The pipes through which bits pour in and out of data centers have gotten faster, but they haven’t gotten much smarter. Where cloud servers are flexible, precise and easy to manage, networks are, by comparison, blunt instruments. Meeting new demand means adding new capacity, and that usually means adding new hardware to the mix, and that usually takes weeks, if not longer.

If you’ve ever wondered if it were possible to “spin up” a virtual network as readily as you do a virtual machine, wonder no more, for that is precisely what Nicira wants to offer you, without the addition of a single new piece of hardware, but rather only some software that runs on your existing server. You don’t even need to have especially advanced networking hardware.

Its the kind of thing that could give big enterprises some new flexibility in managing their network infrastructure, particularly as need and demand peaks and drops, whether by the day or because of a seasonal change that happens just once a year.

The company already has customers: AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, Rackspace and the Japanese telecom giant NTT are all using Nicira, the company says.

Nicira calls its product an NVP, or network virtualization platform, and it is being described as the sort of advance that comes along perhaps once every quarter-century. That’s a bold claim, but the argument on which the company is making it holds water. On a day-to-day basis, where you deploy an application in a data center is as much a function of how much networking capacity you have available as it is one of computing capacity.

Virtualization on servers allows you to spread a single app over as many physical machines as needed, but the network connecting those machines is what it is, and if it isn’t up to snuff, you can either enhance it by adding new routers and switches, or live with it. The result is that you can’t be as flexible with deploying apps as you’d like, and that certain machines end up being underutilized by as much as one-third, which is costly over time. You end up having to buy more servers, then pay to run them and cool them.

The Nicira NVP, as CEO Stephen Mullaney told me, “decouples” a virtual network from the physical network hardware. “All of the intelligence, all of the control, all of the services now get done in the virtual space.” The result, what was once a dumb networking pipe carrying bits into two different virtual machines running on the same one, can now be programmed to act in vastly different manners, according to rules in the virtual realm. In much the same way a single computer gets turned into a dozen, a single network can be subdivided and act like a dozen individual networks. Or the reverse: Several networks can be cobbled together to act like one. And a virtual network can be created on the fly in minutes, just like a virtual machine.

A network you can deploy in minutes saves a lot of money, because it allows you to move quickly as your networking needs change. Most big companies who demand the heaviest network loads have agreements with their service providers — usually big telecom companies — that a request for new capacity requires a week or more, because it requires the physical presence of technicians who have to install and provision new gear. But what if you can reconfigure your network in 30 seconds to meet the needs of some new application? That’s exactly what eBay’s Cloud Architect JC Martin found he could do after installing Nicira’s software on the company’s servers. EBay is a Nicira reference customer.

Other reference customers had other interesting experiences and uses to report. Japan’s NTT uses cloud data centers to run some 10,000 virtual desktops — think PCs that are all virtual machines — and found that it was easier to quickly switch between data centers during the rolling blackouts that have become the norm since that country’s earthquake last year.

There is, of course, a great deal more technical detail, but the point you have to get is that this company is out to disrupt the networking industry in a way that it hasn’t been disrupted in a long time. The traditional solution to networking problems is more, better, faster hardware, and companies like Cisco, Juniper, and Hewlett-Packard, among others, are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to sell more of that hardware.

But what if you could look a sales rep from one of those companies in the eye, and tell them that their latest million-dollar router or switch isn’t needed? Once upon a time, before the days of virtualization, if you needed a new server, you had to buy one and have it installed somewhere. Now you can, in most cases, rent space on one within minutes, or literally provision another with a few clicks of a mouse. It changed the expectation and much of the calculus of the IT industry. Many companies never buy their own servers at all, and rent space from cloud providers like Amazon, Rackspace and Joyent.

Exactly what a similar disruption might mean for networking vendors is a little hard to imagine, but if the folks at Nicira are right about the potential this technology of theirs has, it looks like that disruption is coming, one way or another.

And the idea is catching on. While the company doesn’t say exactly how many customers it has, it did disclose today that the number of companies using Okta has tripled in the year and change since AllThingsD first talked to Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, a former engineering VP at Salesforce.com. Also, the number of total users has multiplied by a factor of six. New customers include Nestlé Purina, SRS Real Estate Partners, ShoreTel, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Engis Corporation, Informatica and LegalZoom, among others.

Okta is also staffing up. Today it announced it has hired two new executives, one from BMC Software and the other from the Hewlett-Packard-owned IT security firm ArcSight.

Adam Aarons is joining Okta as senior VP of sales. His last gig was VP of sales at BMC. He got to BMC via its acquisition of BladeLogic. He’s been doing enterprise software sales for 15 years.

Hector Aguilar will be Okta’s new VP of engineering. He’s ArcSight’s former CTO and VP of software development. He joined ArcSight early, and did some of the early R&D work that led to its growth and ultimate acquisition by HP. He’s been doing networking and security development work for more than 16 years, and has a few patents to his name.

When we last heard from Okta, the outfit had just landed a $16.5 million B round from Greylock Partners and Khosla Ventures. Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri, also a Greylock partner, joined Okta’s board as part of that deal. Prior investors include Andreessen Horowitz, which led Okta’s $10 million A round.

That was July. Wednesday, Domo will announce that it has raised another batch of money, and is bringing in a new investor. The company has closed a $20 million round led by Institutional Venture Partners.

IVP, which had invested in Omniture and so has a history with James, is joining an all-star cast of investors including Benchmark Capital; Andreessen Horowitz; Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel; and Hummer Winblad, plus a bunch of personal investments. The round — which is being described as an A-1 round, brings Domo’s total capital raised to date to $63 million.

IVP general partner Todd Chaffee said Domo is an example of a dynamic management team going after a high-growth market. “We know Josh has the experience to build Domo into a disruptive and dominant player in a growing $10 billion market,” he said in a statement. Aside from Omniture, IVP has backed HomeAway, MySQL, Twitter and Zynga.

James wouldn’t tell me the implied valuation, but he did concede that it’s upward of “a couple hundred million.” And if that’s not surprising enough, what’s equally surprising is one possible use for the money: Acquisitions. Well, maybe.

“Let’s just suppose, and this is 100 percent supposition,” he told me over the phone Tuesday, “that we want to buy someone. We’ve thought about it. We’ve had potential targets cross the email threads. It’s not the right time to do that stuff just yet. But it’s nice to know we have the flexibility when the time comes.”

So where’s Domo, the business intelligence software-as-service play he was building? It’s running as a demonstration with a few early customers, he says. And he’ll have more to say about it publicly in about three to four months.

“We have a few thousand people who say they want to see a demo, and we’re working through that list,” James says. “The feedback has been more positive and at a higher rate than I would have thought possible. I think we’re going to have to figure out how to do a lot of installations all at once.”

That’s what we call a good problem to have.