Not to say Formspring is making a business out of Web Q&A–yet. But Wednesday it is announcing a Series A round of $11.5 million led by Redpoint Partners. And it’s also releasing a self-service product called “the Respond button” that allows publishers to solicit responses to their content through a simple integration with Formspring’s API.

The Series A round, which also included Baseline Ventures and others, comes on the heels of Formspring raising $2.5 million from a large group of angels and Polaris Ventures last March. That prompted the company to move its headquarters to San Francisco from Indianapolis, where it had spun out of online form provider FormStack.

Of all the various Q&A startups, Formspring’s product is probably the closest to personal blogging. A user signs up for an account and then visitors can ask her questions, usually about herself.

$14 million is a ton of money, especially for a site that’s only a year old with no revenue. But Formspring CEO Ade Olonoh said the company now has 20 million registered users and 10 million daily answers to questions from its community, something he contended takes a lot of infrastructure and additional developers to support.

The new Respond button product will be free to publishers, but it will require users to log into a Formspring account to participate. Launch partners include the Huffington Post and AskMen (pictured).

Previously, Formspring questions existed in a world unto themselves of mostly casual conversations about users’ favorite movies and the like. Olonoh described the Respond button as a paradigm shift because it will introduce topic prompts from outside content.

Launched in 2007 with seed funding from Y Combinator, Heroku landed $10 million in a B Round led by Ignition Partners in May. Other investors include Redpoint Ventures, Baseline Ventures and Harrison Metal Capital.

Heroku has made a name for itself as a hosting service for Facebook applications. Its most widely cited customer is Cardinal Blue, whose Facebook apps include Travel Balloon and QuizCreator. Other Heroku customers include Clobby, a group chat application, and FlightCaster, which makes a handy application that predicts flight delays.

Heroku founder James Lindenbaum said in a blog post that Heroku will remain independent. Parker Harris, Salesforce’s EVP of technology said of Heroku on the official company blog: “This is the platform as a service I would have wanted to build apps on had it existed in 1999.”

By acquiring Heroku, Salesforce is getting into the business of development in Ruby on Rails, a widely used open-source Web development language that’s been used to build Web brands such as Twitter, Groupon and Hulu.

Heroku employees will get about $27 million worth of Salesforce shares, and Salesforce will pay about $10 million for unvested Heroku shares. All consider its a big acquisition for Salesforce, which had about $770 million in cash and short-term investments in the bank as of the quarter ended Oct. 31. However, the market seems to like the deal, as Salesforce shares are trading up 2.5 percent, or $3.63, as of 6:45 am PT.

[UPDATE: Google confirmed the deal in a blog post, which you can read below, as well as in interviews BoomTown did today with execs at DocVerse and Google.]

Continuing its acquisition spree, Google has snapped up DocVerse, a start-up that allows users of Microsoft Office documents to collaborate in real-time on the Web, said several sources.

Sources said the price was in the $25 to $30 million range.

Founded by two ex-Microsoft (MSFT) execs in 2008, Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui, San Francisco-based DocVerse has raised only $1.3 million in venture funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal and Naval Ravikant.

It’s yet another shot across Microsoft’s software bow by Google (GOOG), along with a range of other digital arenas such as cloud computing and mapping.

Google has been pushing its own cloud-based Google Docs, but it struggles against the Office juggernaut. Thus, a link with Office via DocVerse is a smart move.

Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager on the Google Apps team said that while some perceive the search giant as trying to compete directly with Office (a claim I openly scoffed at during the interview), Google did hear from customers that it wanted cloud-based functionality with Office.

“We heard from customers that there is a great need for help in the cloud,” he said. “This acquisition helps users move over the to cloud and expands our product.”

DocVerse CEO Sinha said his small company–under 20 employees, who will be moving down to the Googleplex HQ in Mountain View, Calif., immediately–had been talking to Google for a while.

“We were gaining traction in the product in large enterprises…so, it made sense, because we have a vision of a world of Web-based collaboration,” he said.

While Sinha said he admired what Microsoft had done with Office, he noted there is a need for more, and a hook-up with the powerful Google will help DocVerse do that sooner.

“Microsoft is doing a lot of great things for its customers who use its stack of software,” he said. “But we see a whole other world interested in the Web-based approach that is not being served very well right now.”

For its part, Microsoft has committed itself to moving its hugely popular productivity suite–which includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel–into the cloud, in order to protect its software hegemony.

Why? Simultaneous group-editing and collaboration online is clearly the future of Office.

In fact, yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a significant statement related to cloud computing in a speech, noting, “This is the bet for the company. For the cloud, we’re all in.”

In an interesting side note, this is the third company that Harrison Metal has invested in that has been acquired by Google over the last several months. Other sales have included AdMob for $750 million and Aardvark for $50 million.

There had been a post in TechCrunch back in December that the deal was nearly done, but it was apparently not completed until now.

Here is the blog post on the deal from Google:

Google Docs welcomes DocVerse

Friday, March 05, 2010 at 10:48 AM

?The future of productivity applications is in the cloud. We’ve always believed the web is the best platform for creating and sharing information, and Google Docs has already helped millions of people become more productive. But we recognize that many people are still accustomed to desktop software. So as we continue to improve Google Docs and Google Sites as rich collaboration tools, we’re also making it easier for people to transition to the cloud, and interoperate with desktop applications like Microsoft Office.
?
For example, we recently made it possible to use Google Docs to store and share any type of file that you have on your computer, not just the ones you create online. Today we’re excited to announce another step towards seamless interoperability: we have acquired DocVerse.

DocVerse is a small, nimble team of talented developers who share our vision, and they’ve enabled true collaboration right within Microsoft Office. With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications.

A huge “welcome” to the DocVerse team and their customers! Current DocVerse users can keep using the product as usual, though we’ve suspended new sign-ups until we’re ready to share what’s next. Stay tuned!

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Group Product Manager, Google Apps team

Today’s example: OMGPOP, the casual gaming site formerly known as iminlikewithyou, which has raised a $5 million round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Previous investors Spark Capital and Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures re-upped, but not Netscape/Ning/“Project A” investor Marc Andreessen, who took a flier on the company last summer.

The site has raised a little more than $6.5 million to date. A conservative valuation would still make the company worth north of $10 million.

Why is it worth anything? The company, which began life in 2006 as a dating site, has a dedicated user base that logs some three hours a month on the site. But it’s still pre-revenue, as they say.

CEO Dan Porter, who took over for highly visible founder Charles Forman earlier this year (Forman is still at the company, cranking out games), says that will change this spring. He will be selling “premium” accounts/subscriptions, most likely for $5 a month, along with virtual goods (think collectible items, power-ups, etc.).

It’s possible that the site will roll out some kind of advertising at some point–Porter says he’s been testing some ad units with Google (GOOG)–but those would be ancillary dollars (or dimes).

Can that work? Maybe. Casual games–free or low-cost Web games that take little time commitment–appear to be doing well so far in the recession, even as traditional videogame sales falter. And a lot of people are hopeful that the  market for virtual goods–big in Asia, but limited in the U.S. to a handful of games and a few oddities like Facebook’s “gift” items–will finally take off.

Not interested in thinking this one through? Fair enough. Try playing the site’s “Balloono” game, a knockoff of the Nintendo classic Bomberman. I’m waaaaaay older than the site’s core 15-25 demo, but I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time on this one.