The reason? A scary vulnerability in Java that was detected over the summer, and which Oracle has subsequently fixed, is being exploited by people who create the malware and crimeware that causes so many headaches for home users and corporate IT departments.

The risk is especially acute at large companies with big fleets of desktops and notebooks to manage. If you’re a home user, the patch is easy to install. But most employees don’t have administrative privileges on their work desktops or notebooks, so someone from the IT department has to come and install the patch for them.

That’s a big, time-consuming process, says HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7, a Cambridge, Mass-based company that specializes in helping companies stay ahead of new computer security vulnerabilities. He’s also the chief architect of Metasploit, which Rapid7 owns.

One of the reasons this particular vulnerability is so bad is that even after it was detected and fixed, it wasn’t fully understood how dangerous it is, Moore says. Crimeware creators somehow figured it out ahead of most security researchers, and started adding code to Web sites designed to take advantage of it. And that’s especially dangerous at this time of the year, when people are shopping online both at home and the office. “It’s kind of like a perfect storm,” Moore told me yesterday. Add to that the fact that many companies have IT staff taking vacation during the holiday season, and the timing couldn’t be worse.

Enterprise is historically bad at patching Java vulnerabilities anyway, because it doesn’t have the same automatic update tools that Windows or Adobe Flash does. “The tools for patching Java aren’t that great,” Moore told me. “A Java update just isn’t treated with the same fervor as a Windows update.”

So how bad is this one? The National Vulnerability Database rates it a 10 out of 10 on the severity scale, and also rates it as “low” on the access complexity scale — meaning it’s really easy for the bad guys to carry out an attack using it.

Security blogger Brian Krebs discovered the vulnerability being “weaponized,” that is, built into the software that computer criminals buy on the black market. For instance, those who have bought something called the Blackhole Exploit Kit, a $4,000 software toolkit used to target Windows machines, are getting automatic updates that include tools to take advantage of the Java vulnerability.

What to do until you can get all your machines updated with the latest version of Java? Simple, really: Disable it and block it at the firewall, until all the machines on the network that need the update have it, Moore says.

Rapid7, incidentally, is a security company on the rise. Just last month it raised a $50 million series C round of funding, led by Technology Crossover Ventures and joined by previous investors Bain Capital Ventures; Tim McAdam, a TCV partner, joined Rapid7′s board.

How ironic. There’s a ton of cash being thrown around to find a better way to pay for things.

Consider the growing list of participants hitching a ride on this money train: Square is trying to create a better register, Google is attempting to build a better wallet, and then there are competing and overlapping efforts being made by the wireless carriers, handset makers, banks, financial institutions and others.

For example, here’s a company doing something as simple as creating a more high-tech credit card, one that doesn’t require customers or retailers to buy new equipment.

Pittsburgh-based Dynamics is announcing a $35 million round of financing — an amount CEO Jeff Mullen is quick to point out is bigger than Square’s last round of $27.5 million (not including a last minute addition by Visa). UPDATE: Before the ink was even dry on this one, Square announced late this evening that it has raised $100 million in a round led by Kleiner Perkins.

Dynamics’ round was led by Bain Capital Ventures with existing investors, including Adams Capital Management and a number of undisclosed angels also participating. The company’s first round raised in 2009 totaled $5.7 million.

While Dynamics isn’t a household name and doesn’t have the same visibility as Square or Google, it has received accolades for its technology. In January, Dynamics won best in show at this year’s CES in the personal electronics category.

So, what does it do?

It is making a more intelligent credit card.

Although it looks the same as the plastic cards you carry around in your wallet, it behaves much differently. Packed inside are a bunch of batteries and miniaturized electronics that can be used to program several credit card numbers and wiped clean if lost. It comes packaged in the same svelte form factor as a Visa or MasterCard, and don’t worry, it’s also waterproof.

A button on the card allows users to toggle between various cards, like a debit, credit or corporate account. Another model enables you to keep your number hidden until a security code unlocks it, and a third model retains information about your rewards points, so they can be spent at the point of purchase without having to wait for a gift card to be sent to you in the mail.

It may not sound as fancy as waiving a mobile phone in front of the register to pay, or even using an iPad as a register, but Mullen argues it’s more practical because it doesn’t require consumers to get new phones or retailers to upgrade their credit card terminals. “Our solution doesn’t require any change to the existing infrastructure,” he said.

The additional financing will be used to double the company’s staff from its current headcount of 30. It will also be investing in manufacturing to increase capacity since all three models are currently in trials, including a deployment with Citi. It is also working on developing cards for Europe, where RFID is a predominant technology.

It is also adding mobile payments to the company’s road map, even though Mullen is not a big believer in the technology. Because of the hardware limitations, he thinks it will take longer for it to be adopted widely.

He declined to say whether the solution would use near field communication chips or some other technology. “Dynamics wants to be the innovation leader for an industry that’s never had innovation. We want to innovate in all areas of tech,” he said.

Mullen said the goal is for the banks to be able to save money or generate new revenue to offset the additional costs of producing a more high-tech piece of plastic. One way is through preventing fraud, another way is by eliminating the cost of mailing gift cards to consumers who would like to redeem the points they earned on rewards cards.

In practice that looks a little like this: Someone browses online for a particular product — perhaps a bike trailer. Later, when they are on a separate site, they see the same trailer being advertised in an ad. [See photo below.]

The second round of funding was led by Bain Capital Ventures. To date, TellApart has raised $17.75 million.

The company was founded in 2009 by former Google product and engineering executives Josh McFarland and Mark Ayzenshtat.

Other investors include Greylock Partners and several well-known angels, including Ron Conway, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman and OpenTable’s former CEO Jeff Jordan.

The new financing will go toward supporting additional customers.

The company says it has the ability to “tell apart” the best customers from the rest. By identifying the most likely customers to target, it says it can generate an average 7.5 percent user click-through rate and an average 4.5 percent conversion rate from the ads it places on other sites.

By retargeting, TellApart claims its clients end up seeing an average of three to five percent lift in revenue.

TellApart only charges for its platform when a prospective customer clicks on a TellApart ad and makes a purchase.

Customers include Diapers.com, eBags, Drugstore.com and Hayneedle.

Think of it as the Netflix for fashion.

The 18-month-old company lets you rent high-end dresses and accessories for special occasions. It even gives you the prepaid envelope to send it all back when you are done–no dry cleaning necessary.

If you didn’t know better, you would have thought Rent the Runway starred in the hit movie “Bridesmaids.” That’s because there are dresses for most occasions, even a wedding that you aren’t willing to break the bank over.

Rent the Runway was founded by two Harvard Business grads, Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss, and is announcing today that it has raised $15 million in venture capital from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The funding follows a first round by Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital totaling $16 million. Aileen Lee, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, will join Runway’s board.

On the site, women browse from 25,000 dresses from 95 designers, such as Dolce and Gabbana and Vera Wang. Next, they enter a date for the event and their dress size. After that, you make a reservation, and can even get a back-up size free, so you don’t have to worry about it fitting on the big night.

Rental prices vary depending on the price of the dress. For example, a knee-length dress from Sachin + Babi rents for $125 and retails for $660. But a $2,250 peach-colored dress from Nina Ricci rents more than twice that at $300. In general, the colors and styles seem endless.

The investment will allow Rent the Runway to offer a wider selection of brands and price points. It also will go toward some of the less glamorous work, such as beefing up its back-end systems to handle future growth and pay for new warehouses outside of New York City (coming in January 2012).

If the model doesn’t already sound like the mail-order DVD rental business, the company is willing to draw the comparison itself. In a release, it said it will also be personalizing the shopping experience “using proprietary algorithms rivaling that of Netflix.”

So far, the company claims to already have more than one million members.

Part of its business proposition is also exposing women to new brands.

In that way, Fleiss, the company’s president, says the company can be used as a marketing and customer acquisition channel for its partnering brands. In a release, she said, “Ninety-eight percent of our customers are trying brands they’ve never before worn. We are introducing experiential brand marketing into the fashion industry–not just a onetime transaction–which is the power behind Rent the Runway.”

The acquisition for Zynga, which is also aggressively hiring, marks its 14th in the past 12 months. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In this case, Zynga is acquiring the company’s games in addition to its employees. With other recent acquisitions, Zynga was only interested in the talent. For instance, in March, it “acqhired” six employees from Boston-area Floodgate Entertainment.

It’s unclear what will be the fate of DNA’s games, which attract a fairly small audience on Facebook, or roughly 288,431 daily users and 2.4 million monthly users, according to AppData.

DNA games, which is based in San Francisco, was funded by Battery Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures, and raised around $2 million in venture capital. It was founded in 2009 by Jon Lee and Shaun Haase.

Zynga said DNA’s team will be the basis for a studio focused on creating new games. Lee will be a general manager, reporting to Mark Skaggs, Zynga’s SVP of product development.

The idea piggy-backs on other loyalty programs already in the market, such as those of credit card companies that offer discounts when customers visit certain hotels or rental car companies.

But with Clovr’s platform, advertisers and brands can enable consumers to associate coupons directly with a credit card.

For instance, a banner ad could offer a 10 percent discount to an electronics store. Instead of printing out a coupon, the user can opt to link the deal to a credit card. The discount is activated only if the consumer uses that credit card at the register.

Since coming out of stealth mode late last year, Clovr has been fine-tuning its approach to the market.

Initially, it envisioned working directly with banks to make the service available to customers. But since advertisers want a large audience to target, the company’s co-founder and CEO Tom Burgess said today, the company realized it had to make the platform more widely available.

To that end, it partnered with credit card processing companies to enable 99 percent of debit or credit card holders in the country to participate in the offers. Burgess said that Clovr is now entering beta and that its first offers will start appearing in May when it is commercially available.

Clovr is part of a new market that is leveraging old technology called Card Linked Offers, or CLOs for short.

Coincidentally, one of Clovr’s biggest competitors is also being backed by someone Burgess knows all too well.

Yesterday, Clovr’s close competitor, Offermatic, announced it had raised $4.5 million in a first round of funding. Investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ron Conway and Omar Hamoui.

Hamoui was the founder of AdMob, the mobile advertising company purchased by Google for $750 million in 2009. And Burgess was the founder of Third Screen Media, a mobile ad network that was acquired by AOL in 2007.

Today, Offermatic is Burgess’ West Coast competitor, much like AdMob was his West Coast competitor when both he and Hamoui were executives in the mobile advertising space.

A third company competing in the space is Atlanta-based Cardlytics.

Burgess said there’s one main difference between Clovr and Offermatic. Clovr is a platform that any ad network can use. It does not have a sales team and is not offering deals directly to consumers.

Offermatic launched its beta in December, and sends discounts to consumers based on their spending history. Similarly, it links a consumer’s credit and debit cards to its system so that people receive the discount automatically.

To be sure, all three companies are trying to solve the problem of low redemption rates of physical coupons or vouchers.

Clovr’s second round of funding was led by Bain Capital Ventures. Clovr Media seed investors Kepha Partners and Common Angels also participated. In total, the company has raised nearly $10 million.

But that explosive growth–-Forbes called Groupon the “fastest growing company ever“–-has presented several challenges.

One of them is fending off the many “clones” that have sprung up to copy Groupon, some of which have nearly identical designs and layouts as Groupon’s site. Some legitimate venture-backed start-up contenders have also launched, such as Washington-based LivingSocial Inc., which raised $14 million in Series C funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in April, and New York-based BuyWithMe Inc., which in July raised $16 million in Series B financing led by Bain Capital Ventures. And publicly traded companies such as Travelzoo Inc., OpenTable Inc., and The Knot Inc. are also jumping on the trend.

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Apple ended up paying around $80 million for the company, according to multiple sources. That’s less than half what investors valued the company at in 2008, but it’s more than the $35 million the company raised throughout its life. Which means that some investors could get their money back and more.

But not all of Lala’s investors. Warner Music Group (WMG), for one, ended up getting back about half the $20 million it put into Lala, I’ve confirmed with people familiar the company.

That’s consistent with the $11 million write-down Warner took on its stake back in March. But it’s also confusing. Most venture deals include a clause that gives investors the right to get their money back–often with a premium–before anyone else gets paid following a sale. So any price of $35 million or more should have paid back the music label in full.

I’ve asked Warner for comment, but haven’t heard back. I’ve also reached out to co-investors Bain Capital Ventures and Ignition Capital. Apple (AAPL) spokesman Steve Dowling offered up his now-standard line on the deal: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans.”

Warner executives can at least say that they did better on Lala than they did with Imeem, a rival digital music service. Warner lost all of the $15 million it put into that one, which is being acquired by News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace.

And the Warner guys can also tell themselves that employees from a company they once backed are now working at Apple, which can’t hurt.

Meanwhile, the Lala team, which should begin reporting to Apple today, gets credit for selling the company at any kind of premium at all. It’s not a home run, but it’s much better than it could have been.

The start-up has gone through multiple iterations, and its most recent was a streaming music service that sold access to songs for 10 cents apiece. But despite a recent promotional deal with Google (GOOG), the company appeared unlikely to succeed on its own.

Silicon Valley chatter is that founder Bill Nguyen, who spent six months in Hawaii this year trying to launch another start-up, and CEO Geoff Ralston had become weary of the same problems that have bedeviled other music start-ups. So they were looking to land Lala at a larger entity.

One thing that helped the company extract a decent price is that it had $10 million cash on hand, say sources who’ve seen the company’s books. That  meant it didn’t have to sell immediately.

But Lala’s real asset was its technology team: In the end, Apple bought the company to get its hands on its engineers, who had built a slick streaming service as well as an iPhone app, which Apple has yet to approve.

If you’re feeling glass-half-empty, you can note that Lala’s $80 million price tag is a big comedown from the $200 million investors thought the company was worth a couple of years ago. But if you’re feeling more generous, you can conclude that any kind of return is worth noting.

The last big exit for a digital music company happened way back in the spring of 2007, when CBS (CBS) paid $280 million for Last.fm. But no one has gotten anything close to that for digital music since then. Imeem is being sold for spare parts, and News Corp. also bought iLike at a steep discount. Spiralfrog filed for Chapter 11 after burning through its cash.

But people are still trying. Pandora Media raised another $35 million this summer after a royalty deal helped breathe life into the Internet radio company.

Meanwhile, venture-backed MOG, whose investors also include some music labels, has just launched a streaming music service of its own. And Spotify, the European music service, has raised a pile of money and generated much more hype, though it has yet to land in the U.S.

Maybe one of them will get it right.

Apparently, not everyone leaves Yahoo (YHOO) to join Microsoft.

On Friday, sources said, it was announced internally at Microsoft (MSFT) that Karl Siebrecht (pictured here), the former president of Atlas at aQuantive, is joining AdReady at the end of the month as president and COO.

AdReady, based in Seattle, bills itself as an “advertising technology company focused on making online display advertising accessible and effective for advertisers of all sizes.”

The start-up has raised a total of $12 million in venture funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Madrona Venture Group.

Aaron Finn is its current CEO and president, but is apparently giving up one title to Siebrecht.

And–probably no coincidence–aQuantive’s former CEO is Brian McAndrews, who is now managing director at Madrona.

But, sources said, Siebrecht was introduced to Finn through David Rosenblatt, an advisory board member of AdReady–and who competed with Siebrecht as CEO of DoubleClick, which was bought by Google (GOOG).

Also interestingly, Jason Kilar, CEO of premium video site Hulu, is on AdReady’s board.

Oh, it is a small tech world, after all.

Microsoft bought aQuantive–which is now called Microsoft Advertising–in mid-2007 for $6 billion and Atlas was one of its units.

BoomTown was as surprised as anyone when longtime Silicon Valley Web music entrepreneur Dave Goldberg said in May that his next move was going to be investing in and running an online survey company with the unusual name of SurveyMonkey.

Most expected the former Yahoo music head to land at an entertainment or media giant, running its digital operations.

But it is at SurveyMonkey where Goldberg has swung himself and he has now made good on his promise to open a Silicon Valley office of the Portland-based start-up.

But Goldberg’s background does not suggest an interest in digital clipboards and checking boxes.

He joined Yahoo (YHOO) in 2001 and headed its global music operations after it bought a company he co-founded in 1994 called LAUNCH Media.

Previous to that, Goldberg was director of marketing strategy and new business development at Capitol Records in Los Angeles.

After leaving Yahoo more than two years ago, he worked for a while as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital and told me he was attracted to the online survey creator most of all for three key reasons:

It’s profitable. It’s an open field. And, it’s much more of a consumer product than people realize.

That’s presumably why he also put up some money to become a minority investor in SurveyMonkey.

It was part of a deal in which Spectrum Equity Investors and others, including Bain Capital Ventures, acquired a majority interest in the company.

Since it was founded in 1999 by Ryan Finley and Chris Finley, who remained minority investors and working at the company, SurveyMonkey has become the largest such survey company online, with competitors that include Zoomerang and Constant Contact.

SurveyMonkey–which has signed up two million users, with six million surveys created and 200 million responses completed–charges a variety of fees for premium versions of its service, sitting between expensive software packages on one side and free, featureless Web surveys on the other.

Here’s a video interview I did with Goldberg last week about all this and more, as well as a tour of the new SurveyMonkey digs in Menlo Park, Calif., in former CBS (CBS) Interactive space:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090817/surveymonkeys-dave-goldberg-speaks-plus-a-tour-of-his-new-planet-of-the-apes-lair-in-silicon-valley/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090420/former-yahoo-music-exec-dave-goldberg-to-head-survey-monkey/ http://allthingsd.com/20090420/former-yahoo-music-exec-dave-goldberg-to-head-survey-monkey/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:41:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=12326 Former Yahoo music head Dave Goldberg–who has been an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital since he left the Internet company more than two years ago–has finally landed at another company, sources said, taking over as CEO of SurveyMonkey.

Goldberg (pictured here) will head the Portland-based private company, which is an online survey creator, including offering analytics of the results.

Sources said he will also become a minority investor in SurveyMonkey, as part of a deal in which Spectrum Equity Investors and other investors, including Bain Capital Ventures, are acquiring a majority interest in the company.

A Federal Trade Commission site on Friday noted that Spectrum had gotten antitrust approval for a transaction, but did not name Goldberg or SurveyMonkey. But it did name SurveyMonkey co-founder Ryan Finley as also getting approval.

Since it was founded in 1999 by Ryan Finley and Chris Finley, who will remain minority investors in the deal, SurveyMonkey has signed up two million users, six million surveys have been created and 200 million responses have been completed.

It charges a variety of subscription fees for its services and is profitable, with an offering that sits between expensive software packages on one side and free, featureless Web surveys on the other.

SurveyMonkey is the largest such survey company online, with competitors that include Zoomerang and Constant Contact.

The move is an unusual one for Goldberg, whom many expected to join or start an online entertainment or music company, given his background.

He joined Yahoo (YHOO) in 2001 and headed its global music operations after it bought a company he co-founded in 1994 called LAUNCH Media. Previous to that, Goldberg was director of marketing strategy and new business development at Capitol Records in Los Angeles.

Goldberg has been on the board of the Generations Network, which owns Ancestry.com and which is a Spectrum investment.

Sources said Goldberg will open an office in Silicon Valley and recruit several dozen new employees to expand the business.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090420/former-yahoo-music-exec-dave-goldberg-to-head-survey-monkey/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20080617/linkedin-raises-53-million-at-1-billion-valuation/ http://allthingsd.com/20080617/linkedin-raises-53-million-at-1-billion-valuation/#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:43:47 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=2159

In a much-expected financing, LinkedIn has joined the big funding club (Slide, Spot Runner) of late, by raising $53 million at a startling $1 billion valuation.

Why go public when you can just pretend?

Actually, unlike a lot of Web 2.0 start-ups, the professional networking site, which had 23 million active monthly members in June, has been profitable since 2006.

According to execs, it has revenues of about $100 million a year, from premium subscriptions and job listings, as well was advertising and corporate sales.

The new slug of cash comes from new investor Bain Capital Ventures, along with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures.

LinkedIn had previously raised $27 million for a total of $80 million. Yipes!

“This additional funding will give us even more flexibility to execute on our vision for millions of professionals to increase their effectiveness by using LinkedIn to build relationships and exchange knowledge, opportunities and advice,” wrote LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye (pictured here) in a blog post tonight.

In an interview with LinkedIn’s founding CEO and Chairman Reid Hoffman (pictured here) today, he told BoomTown that the money raised would be used for corporate development and acquisitions.

“We’ll be doing small technology acquisitions to improve our service,” said Hoffman. He also noted that it was unlikely the company would be doing an IPO in the immediate future, which has been bandied about.

“We have no immediate plans” for a public offering, said Hoffman. “We still have a lot of ground to cover to grow.”

Comparing the the business-oriented LinkedIn professional network with hot social networks like Facebook, Hoffman noted: “They have page views and time on the site and are looking for a scalable economic model and we have an economic model and will focus on growing usage.”

LinkedIn certainly has been growing its coffers. It raised $5.2 million in its first round, $10 million in its second and $12.8 million in its third.

Here is a video of LinkedIn’s investors trying mightily to play down the $1 billion valuation, while also pumping it up.

You gotta love the cheerleading of Greylock’s David Sze, Bessemer’s David Cowan and Mark Kvamme of Sequoia, along with new investor Jeffrey Glass of Bain (who will join LinkedIn’s board as an observer):

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