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.

This time the target is Cotendo, a company that uses a network of 30 data centers distributed around the world to put video content physically closer to consumers, and thus speed up delivery, especially to mobile devices. The acquirer is Internet concern Akamai, which says it will pay $268 million, plus the assumption of unvested options.

Cotendo had been reported to be the subject of a bidding war between Akamai and rival Juniper Networks. Breathless reports at the time, sourced to enthusiastic Israeli newspapers, valued Cotendo as high as $350 million. The deal will close during the first half of 2012.

Even at the lower price, the deal marks a nice exit for several U.S.-based venture capital funds. Cotendo raised $7 million from Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital in 2009, and then another $12 million in a round joined by Tenaya Capital last year. In June, it took a $17 million strategic investment from Juniper and Citrix Systems.

Cotendo had grown into an Akamai competitor, with a reputation for being faster at some things than Akamai, and also cheaper to boot. That made it an obvious Akamai target, given its history of acquiring rivals — usually after suing them. In 2005, it took out Speedera Networks for $130 million, after a contentious patent lawsuit between them. Akamai had sued Cotendo last November. So the next time Akamai sues someone, set your stopwatch, because the defendant may be the next one to be acquired.

Akamai’s statement on the deal is below:

Akamai to Acquire Cotendo

Combined technology and teams expected to help accelerate pace of innovation in cloud and mobile optimization

CAMBRIDGE, MA and SUNNYVALE, CA – December 22, 2011 – Akamai Technologies, Inc. and Cotendo announced today that the two companies have signed a definitive agreement for Akamai to acquire Cotendo.

Helping to mitigate the challenges of operating in a hyperconnected world, Akamai provides a secure platform over which businesses can engage users across the Web, mobile, cloud, or a mix of public and private network environments. Cotendo offers an integrated suite of Web and mobile acceleration services. The combination of the two companies’ technologies and teams is expected to increase the pace of innovation in the areas of cloud and mobile optimization.

“As we look to accelerate growth across the dynamic landscapes of cloud and mobile optimization, we are excited to be joining forces with Cotendo,” said Paul Sagan, president and CEO of Akamai. “Cotendo’s technology, partnerships and people are a strong complement to Akamai. Together, we believe there is tremendous opportunity for our combined technologies as enterprises embrace the move to the cloud and seek solutions for an increasingly mobile world.”

“The Cotendo team is very proud of our accomplishments in delivering proven and effective solutions for accelerating Web and mobile assets. By combining our innovative technology and employees with Akamai, we expect our customers and partners will gain access to a comprehensive, global platform and wider portfolio of leading-edge services supported by some of the most experienced providers in the industry,” said Ronni Zehavi, CEO and co-founder of Cotendo. “We look forward to working with Akamai in an effort to create the strongest offering in the industry.”

Founded in 2008, Cotendo is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, with a technology center in Israel. Cotendo currently has approximately 100 employees, with over 50 based in Israel.

Under terms of the agreement, Akamai will acquire all of the outstanding equity of Cotendo in exchange for a net cash payment of approximately $268 million, after expected purchase price adjustments, plus the assumption of outstanding unvested options to purchase Cotendo common stock. The closing of the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, is expected to occur in the first half of 2012.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based Edmodo has one of those growth curves that grab investors’ attention. It’s now at five million users, up from 500,000 a year ago.

Edmodo supports a range of classroom-specific activity, from internal message boards to online quizzes and grading, both on the Web and mobile devices. The Edmodo interface looks a lot like Facebook — or especially an enterprise collaboration tool like Yammer.

At the moment the service is completely free. Edmodo Chairman Rob Hutter told AllThingsD the company doesn’t have any immediate plans to bring in revenue. The VC funding is meant to fuel continued growth and hiring.

This is the first joint investment for Hoffman and Cohler, who are both newly minted hotshot venture capital partners, and who previously worked together at LinkedIn and in some capacity at Facebook (where Hoffman was an early investor and Cohler was an early employee). Other Edmodo investors include Union Square Ventures and Learn Capital.

Kleiner Perkins has nabbed former Twitter engineering head Mike Abbott, who left the social communications company less than two months ago to be an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital.

(Well, that didn’t last long, Mike, but maybe the food was better at 2750 Sand Hill Road than at 2480 Sand Hill Road.)

In an interview this morning, Abbott said that he hopes to stay a VC for 20 years (yipes!), since it allows him to work closely with a wide range of entrepreneurs and also get a broad view across a spectrum of businesses.

“I am really energized about what’s been happening in a lot of places like software,” he said. “From my experience, I think I bring a lot of differentiation for the companies Kleiner is invested in.”

And tech cred too. “We think engineers will be thrilled to have access to Mike and he’s a magnet for talent,” said Kleiner partner Ted Schlein, who compared him to all the comic-book heroes, The Avengers, in one person. “Mike is multi-faceted.”

Abbott was indeed a high-profile hire for Twitter a little over a year ago from Palm, where he served as head of its software and services, in charge of its webOS mobile platform.

He was brought in to provide a level of discipline and reliability to the Twitter communications platform and service, which had been plagued by persistent outages that made the Fail Whale infamous.

Abbott will focus on social, mobile and cloud investments at the well-known Silicon Valley venture firm while working on a team that includes high-profile players Mary Meeker and Bing Gordon.

Here’s the official press release:

Michael Abbott Joins Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as Partner

Engineering Leader to Help Social, Mobile and Cloud Entrepreneurs Build Teams and Ventures

MENLO PARK, Calif., December 1, 2011 – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced that Mike Abbott, former vice president of engineering at Twitter, has joined the firm as a partner on its digital team. Abbott led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft. With a deep background in social and mobile applications and infrastructure, Mike is also an expert in enterprise infrastructure and cloud computing and “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software, and advised Cloudera and Jawbone.

“I’m excited to join KPCB’s partners to build new ventures faster,” said Abbott. “The partner mix of founders, operators and investors is ideal for entrepreneurs racing to scale at this disruptive time.”

“Mike is an exceptional and well-respected leader with an outstanding track record shipping great products,” said Ted Schlein, partner, KPCB. “Mike’s deep expertise from Palm and Twitter will help social, mobile and cloud entrepreneurs win.”

Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, said, “Mike is a huge engineering talent and will be a terrific asset to Kleiner’s technology companies. He was instrumental in helping us scale Twitter’s architecture to support incredible growth ̶ from 100 million daily Tweets in January 2011 to about 250 million daily tweets today.”

In less than a year and a half, Abbott grew the Twitter engineering team from 80 to more than 350 engineers in an intensely competitive recruiting market. Abbott’s team rebuilt and solidified Twitter’s infrastructure. Prior to joining Twitter in 2010, Abbott led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform. Abbott was previously the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. Prior to that, he co-founded Passenger Inc. and founded Composite Software. Abbott has advised and invested in numerous software companies such as Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Saynow and Jawbone.

Mike Abbott is just the third senior KPCB partner added in three years, joining Bing Gordon and Mary Meeker, each with exceptional records serving mobile, social and cloud entrepreneurs. KPCB’s digital team also bolstered its infrastructure expertise with the recent addition of Ray Bradford from Amazon Web Services, where he helped grow the company’s cloud database business.

It wouldn’t be a bad exit for a bunch of U.S.-based venture capital funds, either. Cotendo raised $7 million from Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital in 2009, and then another $12 million in a round joined by Tenaya Capital last year. In June, it took a $17 million strategic investment from Juniper and Citrix Systems.

Cotendo is an Akamai competitor. Its content delivery system uses a network of distributed servers around the world to put content physically close to consumers, and it specializes in speeding up delivery to mobile phones and tablets, which is a lot like the business Akamai is known for. The thing about Cotendo is that it has a reputation for being faster at some things than Akamai, and also cheaper.

Akamai has been known to buy competitors. In 2005, it took out Speedera Networks for $130 million, after a contentious patent lawsuit between them. Part of the story driving the Akamai takeover chatter is the fact that Akamai sued Cotendo last November. Akamai CFO J.D. Sherman will be speaking at a Credit Suisse conference in Phoenix on Wednesday. Maybe he’ll shed a little light on the situation.

Meanwhile, analyst Brian Marshall of ISI likes the idea of Juniper acquiring Cotendo in a joint deal with AT&T. Since AT&T is a big Juniper customer, accounting for about 8 percent of sales, and AT&T is also a big Cotendo customer, it would mean good things for Juniper’s relationship with AT&T. If the numbers being reported are correct, it would amount to about 10 percent of Juniper’s cash on hand, which was about $3.4 billion as of the quarter ended Sept. 30. It would be a much bigger deal for Akamai, which had $688 million in combined cash and short-term investments as of the same date.

Raj Abhyanker

Abhyanker alleges that he pitched a neighborhood site to Benchmark in 2007 and said at the time he would call it Nextdoor if he could buy the domain. Benchmark conducted due diligence on the deal and indicated it wanted to invest.

But the prominent Silicon Valley firm then pulled out, according to Abhyanker, who filed with the Superior Court of California in San Jose.

At fault, according to Abhyanker, are Benchmark and Nextdoor, as well as Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, who was at Benchmark at the time and had agreed at least informally to advice Fatdoor.

After the Benchmark funding fell through, Abhyanker was fired as CEO and Fatdoor changed focus to eventually become a local deal aggregator called The Dealmap. Earlier this year, The Dealmap was bought by Google, along with its one granted patent and more than 40 patent applications that name Abhyanker as the lead inventor.

Abhyanker — who is now a practicing patent attorney — is faulting Benchmark for getting him kicked out of the company he co-founded, because the VC firm’s failure to invest made Fatdoor’s investors lose confidence in the start-up’s original concept, and because the Fatdoor board used a CEO headhunter to find his replacement that was recommended by Benchmark.

Nirav Tolia

This all came to a head because Nirav Tolia — who was a Benchmark enterpreneur-in-residence later in 2007 — in October launched a local social network called Nextdoor that is funded by Benchmark.

Reached for comment, Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia said Abhyanker’s charges are without merit.

“I have never met this person, and the idea and naming of Nextdoor was originated solely by the employees and founders of our company,” he said.

Indeed, Abhyanker’s complaint makes the assumption that Tolia has been working on Nextdoor since 2007. Abhyanker omits any mention of Fanbase, the Benchmark-funded sports directory Tolia started out of his stint as a Benchmark EIR that launched in 2009.

Nextdoor is a pivot of Fanbase, using the company’s remaining funding and the same team, Tolia had told AllThingsD when the neighborhood site launched last month.

Tolia on Thursday said he had received an email from Abhyanker last month after Nextdoor launched, asking to be named to Nextdoor’s founding team.

The email, which Tolia forwarded to AllThingsD, says:

“I am wondering if you would be open to me being in your founding team, in exchange for me filling a part time general counsel, business development vp, and/or board role, and perhaps a small angel investment in cash, resources, and space.”

In addition to Benchmark, Nextdoor and Tolia, Benchmark partners Kevin Harvey, Peter Fenton, Mitch Lasky and Bill Gurley are named in the complaint.

Also named are Bret Taylor and Jim Norris, the FriendFeed founders who helped launch Google Maps and were Benchmark EIRs at the time and had allegedly committed via email before the Benchmark deal fell through that they would be Fatdoor advisors.

Abhyanker claims that Taylor and Norris specifically appropriated his idea for neighborhood-level privacy controls, a feature of Nextdoor that Tolia himself attributed to “an early Google Maps employee” in a recent interview with the San Jose Mercury News. Update: Tolia said he was referring to Prakash Janakiraman, his co-founder at Fanbase and Nextdoor who formerly worked at Google on Maps. Tolia also noted he joined Benchmark four months after Abhyanker made his pitch.  

The evidence for that accusation seems a bit vague, but is particularly notable because Taylor is now Facebook’s CTO.

A spokeswoman for Benchmark said the firm does not comment on pending legal matters. Taylor said he was not aware of the lawsuit and he has no comment.

Asked to clarify why the complaint doesn’t mention Fanbase, Abhyanker said through a spokesman: “Upon reason and belief, Fanbase was just a holding company to bid themselves time until everyone forgot about our Fatdoor/Nextdoor.”

Stamped-COMPLAINT – Abhyanker v. Benchmark Capital Et. Al. – FILED-PUBLIC

Asana, the high-profile group collaboration start-up founded by former Facebook execs, is moving out of private beta after a year, and will launch to the general public.

Currently in use by thousands of users at hundreds of beta companies, Asana said it will now put its efforts at tweaking the product to a wider test.

In Sanskrit, “asana” means “sitting down,” and refers to strong but relaxed postures in yoga, presumably so frustrated workers can achieve a digital form of nirvana.

The product can be used for free by teams of fewer than 30 users.

“Our beta users have helped us in shaping our prioritization in the workspace,” said Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

Moskovitz said that the company — which raised $9 million in venture funding two years ago, and $1 million before that from Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and angel investors — is not in need of more funds and will not yet release a paid product.

Co-founder Justin Rosenstein added that one future direction will be the growth of the mobile application arena for Asana, which already has offerings.

Here are some screenshots of the Asana offering:

Neighbors have lots of things to talk about — yard sales, crime, recommendations for local service providers, public works projects, safety issues, block parties and lemonade stands, gripes and gossip. There are online places to do that, like email lists, message boards, blogs and newspaper Web sites — but to date there hasn’t really been a successful local social network.

The ambitious Nextdoor has been in tests for the last year and has 176 active neighborhoods throughout the U.S. Spearheaded by Epinions founder Nirav Tolia, it is backed by Benchmark Capital and Shasta Ventures.

Tolia said in an interview with AllThingsD last week that Nextdoor has become essential in some test neighborhoods — for instance, some teachers in Woodside, Calif., apparently told parents this fall to sign up for Nextdoor to receive community updates.

Why won’t Facebook conquer this particular social space? Because, Tolia concluded, answering his own rhetorical question, “your neighbors and friends are different people.” Nextdoor is also built with the assurance that all participation will remain private and trusted (that is, to whatever extent you trust your neighbors).

If you go to Nextdoor today, hoping to sign up in your neighborhood, you may not find much. The company has instituted a high barrier to entry for each new local network, in an attempt to ensure they each get enough members to become active from the start.

Nextdoor communities start when someone who lives in a neighborhood registers, draws the neighborhood boundaries on a map and then gets 10 more people to verify in the next 15 days that they live within the boundaries.

Community members then verify themselves through a variety of methods, including entering the code they receive on a Nextdoor postcard sent to their home address. People outside the community can’t register or view any content.

Users can post their email, phone number, photos and names of family members — whatever they feel comfortable sharing. They can put up local reviews, list items for sale, or just spew what’s on their minds. Eventually they will receive local offers, should Nextdoor get to the point that it needs to start making money, Tolia said.

Nextdoor is actually an extension of Tolia’s last company, Fanbase, a “Wikipedia for sports” that grew to 10 million users but didn’t turn out to be as impactful and interesting as he had hoped. That company raised $12 million from Benchmark Capital and Shasta Ventures, which Nextdoor continues to use.

For a comparison between Nextdoor and another approach, see also Will the Local Social Network of the Future Be More Like Facebook or Twitter?

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.

According to sources close to the situation, Twitter VP of Engineering Mike Abbott has left the company.

He is apparently interested in doing more investing.

[UPDATE: Twitter confirmed the departure in a statement, noting that Abbott was joining Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur in residence. Benchmark’s Peter Fenton is on the Twitter board.

“We can confirm that Mike Abbott is no longer with Twitter. Mike will be available to assist the company in his new role as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital. We thank Mike for his leadership in growing an outstanding team of engineers from 100 to 400 that have successfully taken on the unique challenge of making Twitter reliable and stable. While Mike led the engineering team, Twitter grew from handling 55 million tweets a day to 230 million. Twitter is focused on aggressively moving forward to fulfill the profound opportunities that are in front of us.”

Said Fenton:

“What Mike Abbott accomplished at Twitter is nothing short of heroic, when Benchmark introduced him to the company we felt he had the courage and entrepreneurial drive to build a strong engineering foundation. Today we applaud him for that extraordinary accomplishment. As we continue to work closely with the team at Twitter, we’re delighted to welcome Mike to Benchmark as an entrepreneur in residence. Mike will not only continue to lend his considerable talents to supporting the team at Twitter, but as a true entrepreneur at heart, will undoubtedly be an incredible asset to our entrepreneurs and our portfolio overall.”]

The move feels sudden, but sources said it has been brewing for a while and happened several days ago.

Abbott was a high-profile hire for Twitter a little over a year ago from Palm, where he served as head of its software and services, in charge of its webOS platform.

He was brought in to bring a level of discipline and reliability to the Twitter communications platform and service, which was plagued by persistent outages that made the Fail Whale infamous.

In large part, Abbott has done that, as Twitter has grown significantly. It now has 230 million tweets per day, he said in a recent interview.

Twitter does not have a replacement as yet, sources said.

Why walk away from a company that by all accounts is humming on all cylinders, with stock that has, since its 2004 IPO, zoomed from $13 a share to $120?

“I wanted to see if I could build my own company” was the reason he gave Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Having been on the ground floor in an engineering capacity at two companies over 16 years — the first was E.piphany — he wanted to build something of his own. “I’m a builder of things,” he says.

Today he’s taking the first step in that direction: Weissman has joined Benchmark Capital as its Entrepreneur in Residence.

Benchmark makes sense for Weissman, given its investments in enterprise and data-focused start-ups like Domo; Hortonworks, the former Yahoo team devoted to Hadoop; and Engine Yard.

That’s a pretty good indication of the kind of company he’d like to get involved with by way of Benchmark. Weissman describes himself as a “data guy,” and he was deeply involved in building out the architecture of Salesforce.com. As such, he’s a big believer in the Salesforce state religion of a “multitenant, shared computers, shared everything” view of the cloud, and the way data — and services around it — gets delivered.

There are obviously lots of things happening around ways to handle data and databases.

“There’s lots of new ways of doing things — Hadoop and NoSQL and things like that. Basically, there’s a lot of new companies and young developers who, because of the scale of data they’re working with, the relational database just wasn’t cutting it,” he says. “And while I love the relational database, I’m really intrigued by some of the new technologies. Many aren’t ready for prime time, but a lot of enterprises are interested in them, just the same.”

How does it intend to do that? By integrating real locations into the experience.

Last month, Red Robot Labs unveiled its first location-based game, called Life is Crime, which required players to commit virtual crimes at various landmarks in Seattle.

The experiment took place over the weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo, where competing players “committed” more than 20,000 crimes at the convention center and “hospitalized” more than 1,000 criminals, “trafficked” $1 million in contraband and “robbed” a total of $35 million.

The round of funding was led by Benchmark Capital with Shasta Ventures, and existing investors Rick Thompson, co-founder of Playdom, and Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook executive, also participating.

Red Robot Labs said it aims to grow its game studio and develop its gaming platform. It will also form third-party studio partnerships.

The nine-month-old company was founded by Mike Ouye, who previously headed up monetization and revenue for Playdom, which was bought by Disney, and Crowdstar, an independent social games company. The other co-founder-slash-investor is Palihapitiya, who is also the founder of the Social+Capital Partnership, a venture fund focused on the social and technology spaces.

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.

Whether or not to sell any of their shares in Twitter is the big decision facing stakeholders of the microblogging service right now, as the second $400 million part of the company’s recent funding by Russia’s DST Global is completed in the next several weeks.

That includes everyone from early angel investors to those who bought it on the secondary markets to Twitter’s 600 employees, all of whom can sell a portion — up to 20 percent, sources said — of their holdings.

It’s all part of a recent $800 million mega-funding by Twitter, valuing the San Francisco company at $8.4 billion.

While $400 million went to Twitter, the second tranche of $400 million of the total was targeted to cash out current investors and also employees of the company.

Current investors include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and several other venture firms, as well as a spate of prominent angel investors, such as Ron Conway.

Whether DST — as well as other smaller buyers, including early Twitter investor Chris Sacca and T. Rowe Price, according to the tender offer — gets them and others to sell enough shares is the big question, especially since few want to get caught in what one shareholder called the “Facebook idiot box.”

That would be referring to those who sold their investments in Facebook two years ago, when the social networking giant allowed its employees to sell 20 percent of their stakes to DST.

The financing was part of a $100 million add-on to a $200 million investment in the social networking company by the aggressive Russian investor.

At the time, the tender offer valued Facebook at $6.5 billion for the common stock, or $14.77 a share.

Of course, Facebook is worth upward of more than 10 times that now. Oops!

That’s why high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, for example, is not selling out any of the shares it bought earlier this year in an $80 million transaction in private secondary markets.

Reasons to sell, of course, are also compelling.

Some investors might want to lock in upside, especially if they think the latest valuation is too high.

For venture capitalists in the company, some might want to return a win to their limited partners, while Twitter employees might want to put a down payment on a house after years of toiling in the start-up.

Others might also be worried about Twitter’s prospects going forward and might determine that the recent round was the high point of its market value. Twitter has indeed struggled to find a sustainable and lucrative business model, focused on advertising.

In addition, although it has recently stabilized, others might worry about Twitter’s management changes over the last year, as co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams have departed. Twitter creator and other co-founder Jack Dorsey is now running the company’s product efforts, with CEO Dick Costolo (who looks a lot like that Woody Allen shot above from the classic movie, “Take the Money and Run”).

Then again, that was exactly the take on Facebook several years ago, so it is now a case on all sides of seller beware.

Twitter declined to comment and I have not heard back yet from DST about the status of the transaction.

Investors in the round include Benchmark Capital and Omidyar Network. The San Francisco company also said its co-founder Daniel Hoffer will be taking over as President and CEO.

In order to raise the round, Hoffer explained that the company’s new legal status is listed as a B Corporation, which allows it to sell a stake in the company while also striving to have a higher transparency and social responsibility when compared to other entities.

CouchSurfing is a lot like it sounds.

It enables people to find a place to crash for free when traveling around the world, but Hoffer says it’s much more than that. He describes it as a social network that allows like-minded people to meet and learn about each other. Examples range from organizing a picnic in the park to a party at someone’s house, or a trip to Mongolia, where a farmer will give you a place to stay in a yurt and teach you the local customs.

Matt Cohler, general partner at Benchmark Capital, has joined its Board of Directors, along with Todor Tashev, investment partner at Omidyar Network, as a board observer.

CouchSurfing’s round of capital follows the $112 million investment in Airbnb, which operates in a similar space of connecting strangers online to swap housing — although it charges a fee.

Hoffer said the company’s status is changing, but the mission is not.

The capital will be used for rolling out new features that the seven-year-old non-profit with only 25 employees was not able to support before, including a much-needed mobile application.

Up until now, CouchSurfing has not charged users to find accommodations, nor has it advocated that guests pay hosts for their stay. Instead, it has primarily been making money by charging for identity verification, so that two strangers feel more comfortable with each other.

It will also be looking into new revenues streams. “It’s important for us to collect revenue in a way that’s comfortable to our community,” Hoffer said. “We are looking at premium offerings as one possibility. It’s important to us that core surfing and hosting remains free.”

Hoffer expects to hire a dozen engineers shortly to accomplish its list of objectives.

Following Airbnb’s massive round of funding, questions arose on its ability to safely connect people online as it scales after one customer had an extremely bad experience when her apartment was robbed.

Hoffer said that their service is designed so that people stay with people when they are home.

“Even our profiles are designed to facilitate meaningful connections, so when couch surfers stay with each other, they know each other in a more meaningful and personal way,” he said.

Photo Credit: C.M. Keiner.

After our grand tour of Asia last week — with stops in Korea and Japan — it seems like a perfect time to update the speaker list for our upcoming AsiaD conference in Hong Kong in October.

As Walt Mossberg and I said, we are trying to mix both U.S.-based speakers with a pan-Asian selection of speakers from across the region, and the new additions are just that.

For the international confab — this one will be held Oct. 19-21 — we’ve already announced a great lineup, including Alibaba’s Jack Ma; Google Android head Andy Rubin; Twitter inventor and product guru, as well as Square co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey; Nvidia founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang; and Asus Chairman Jonny Shih.

Now, to add to that terrific lineup:

Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai is widely considered the second in command at the consumer electronics giant Sony, in charge of its key computer entertainment division, as well as now serving as executive deputy president of the whole company. In that role, the dynamic exec is at the nexus of the Japanese company’s efforts around tablets, smartphones, gaming and more. As Sony struggles to reassert its dominance over the arena, Hirai will be a key player in that effort.

Bradley Horowitz — as head of product management for Google+, the search giant’s aggressive effort to break Facebook’s hammerlock on social networking — has a perfect perspective to talk about the fast-growing area and where it is going globally. With locally-based social companies springing up all over Asia, can Google establish one the whole world will use? It’s an important question and Horowitz’s job No. 1.

At Microsoft, Andy Lees is leading one of the software giant’s most important initiatives, as president of its Windows Phone division. His come-from-behind job includes mobile software and hardware, as well as its key partnership with Nokia. With Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android far in the lead, Lees will need to win in markets globally, especially in Asia.

Peter Chernin is one of Hollywood’s top players and execs. The former top News Corp. exec is now a movie producer — his first effort, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” is a big hit. But he’s also been increasingly active in media investing in Asia of late, and has a lot to say about the global nature of entertainment in the digital age.

John Roese heads the North American R&D team for Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant making everything from heavy-duty gear for networks to mobile phones and tablets. The former CTO of Nortel, he’s heading up global development of Huawei’s cloud services for both businesses and consumers. Roese will also talk about the phenomenon of a Chinese-owned company emerging on the world technology stage.

Even in the midst of an economic downturn, there is no denying that it has been a golden time for Silicon Valley start-ups, which have enjoyed unprecedented growth and funding in the Web 2.0 era. But as they seek to expand beyond the U.S., a critical move for them all, we’ve assembled a panel of entrepreneurs to discuss it, including:

Brian Chesky is the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, the popular online vacation rental site that recently got a huge dose of funding and an equally large amount of controversy. How Airbnb can take the company to the next level, including across the world, while dealing with the kinds of challenges the small management team has to face, will be an interesting topic for discussion.

After stints as president of Asia Pacific and Latin America operations at Google and co-founder of the online personal finance company Yodlee, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is trying her hand at a small start-up again. She’ll talk about how the recently funded Joyus, a new premium video commerce site trying to pioneer a new way to shop online, plans to expand globally.

Finally, longtime tech exec David Goldberg is now running one of tech’s most successful start-ups at SurveyMonkey, the dominant online survey company. With stints as founder of music site Launch Media, which was bought by Yahoo, and as an Entrepreneur in Residence with Benchmark Capital, he is the perfect person to explain what it’s like being an entrepreneur today in Silicon Valley.

We have even more speakers for AsiaD we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks, so get ready for what’s next.

The Tel Aviv company’s Android-based service augments traditional text messages with a variety of icons accompanying common words. Over time, the company also wants to let users add their own icons and download others.

The company is trying to capitalize on the popularity of services like the Emoji character service in Japan, as well as the burgeoning global market for text messages.

“Zlango is aiming to become the Emoji of the world,” CEO Roni Heim told AllThingsD. “We localize what we are doing in every country. This is only the beginning of the beginning.”

The key question, though, is whether the company can get a critical mass of users to adopt the service, especially given that it is Android-only for now, though an iPhone version is planned for early next year. Those that are sent messages but don’t have Zlango get a standard text message, along with a Web link to a page that includes the full message with those adorable little icons.

Among those betting it can attract a following are backers Benchmark Capital and DAG Ventures, among other investors that have poured a collective $9 million into the 30-person company.

Benchmark general partner Michael Eisenberg agrees that finding enthusiastic users will be the company’s challenge, but notes that the service has an edge that should appeal.

“What we’ve seen internationally — and I think the same thing will happen in the U.S. — is that you will see clusters of people pounding on this thing,” Eisenberg said.

Among the best arguments for the service’s success is the fact that it will be free in the U.S. and has managed to get users in Asia and elsewhere to pay a monthly subscription fee. The company currently has about four million unique users each month. Here, the company hopes to make money through a combination of advertising and premium services, such as future theme packs that add, say, vampires or gangsters.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110721/omg-what-are-those-cute-icons-in-your-text-message-lol/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110720/twitter-poised-to-close-a-two-stage-800m-funding-with-half-used-to-cash-out-investors-and-employees/ http://allthingsd.com/20110720/twitter-poised-to-close-a-two-stage-800m-funding-with-half-used-to-cash-out-investors-and-employees/#comments Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:42:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=100662

In a move reminiscent of one done by Facebook in 2009, Twitter is close to completing an $800 million funding deal that will include a second part in which around $400 million of the total will be used to cash out current investors and also employees.

According to several sources close to the situation, the complex transaction could be completed within two weeks.

Along with basic funding needs, this is largely being done this way to give those with stakes in the San Francisco microblogging company an ability to monetize their privately held common stock and also to do this selling in a more organized — and legal — manner.

That is especially important since the company is not likely to go public for at least a year or more. And, while it could also be sold to a bigger company such as Google, that is also not in Twitter’s immediate future.

Before this secondary follow-on, the first part of the deal will be a $400 million investment for preferred shares by new and also existing shareholders, as was reported by the New York Times last week.

That round will indeed value Twitter at $8 billion, as the Times reported, which is a higher number than in other earlier reports.

This is more than double what Twitter was valued at when it got $200 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins in December at a $3.7 billion valuation.

Once the latest investments are complete, Twitter’s total cash haul since it was founded five years ago will be $760 million.

Key new moneybags are expected to be Russian investing heavyweight DST Global, which has invested in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon; as well as the digital growth fund of J.P. Morgan and perhaps others.

Current investors include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and several other venture firms, as well as a spate of prominent angel investors.

The latest funding is an important one for Twitter and will up the pressure for its management, including CEO Dick Costolo, to really get its business growing in terms of revenue and profits.

Twitter is still struggling with coming up with a truly lucrative business model, and its execs have presented a number of them, such as promoted tweets, largely based on advertising.

It reportedly has $200 million in annual revenue from its efforts, which is still small in comparison to other Web 2.0 start-ups.

Interestingly, that was a similar situation to where Facebook found itself two years ago, when it allowed its employees to sell 20 percent of their shares.

That financing was part of a $100 million add-on to a $200 million investment in the social networking company by DST. At the time, the tender offer valued the company at $6.5 billion for the common stock, or $14.77 a share.

Of course, Facebook is worth upward of more than 10 times that now, so any Twitter sellers might want to consider their options carefully.

It is not clear exactly who can sell their Twitter shares, and in what amount, in the new deal. When Facebook did a similar move, for example, its top leadership could not sell any of their stakes.

A Twitter spokeswoman would not comment about any fund raising.

But, interestingly, in an onstage interview at a Fortune magazine tech conference this week, Costolo criticized stock trading of the shares of popular start-ups on secondary exchanges as a “distraction.” Like other companies, he said, Twitter had instituted stricter policies to limit the ability of its employees and investors to trade on those markets.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110720/twitter-poised-to-close-a-two-stage-800m-funding-with-half-used-to-cash-out-investors-and-employees/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110613/omnitures-former-ceo-10000-says-you-cant-guess-my-new-companys-name/ http://allthingsd.com/20110613/omnitures-former-ceo-10000-says-you-cant-guess-my-new-companys-name/#comments Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:03:48 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=86266 Remember how Josh James, the former CEO of Omniture, left Adobe to start a mysterious new company, for which he was found to be raising a boatload of venture capital money? Of course you do.

When we last looked in on his efforts to fund this new venture, James had raised $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz, and had also gotten a commitment from Ron Conway’s SV Angel, both as part of a seed round worth more than $5 million. On top of that, he’s already pretty far along in raising a Series A round, and Benchmark Capital had already committed up to $30 million.

Remember also that though he had acquired Corda Technologies, a company based in Lindon, Utah, near his home, he said that company was to be the basis for the new one, only with a much bigger vision? The thing is, he hadn’t decided on what to name the new venture.

Well now, he’s apparently decided on the name, but he’s just not ready to tell the world yet. Instead he’s going to let you guess. And there are clues. He’s announced on his personal blog a contest to work out the name, and to guess it you have to figure out a mathematical equation. A $10,000 prize goes to the first one with the answer, as explained in the fine print from James’s personal site. Send your answers to info@corda.com.

The $10,000 prize for solving the math equation and puzzle will only be awarded to one person, as determined at our sole discretion. The recipient will be the first person who we determine has found the answer key, signed a non-disclosure agreement, and then finished the equation and puzzle and demonstrated proof of his or her solution after obtaining the key.

Think you’ve got the brains to do it? Well here it is, smarty pants. Get to it. Or maybe, just maybe, there are some clues you can find in James’s recent video interview with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. Probably not, but it’s worth watching all the the same.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110613/omnitures-former-ceo-10000-says-you-cant-guess-my-new-companys-name/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110503/exclusive-opentable-ceo-jordan-likely-to-head-to-silicon-valley-vc-firm-andreessen-horowitz/ http://allthingsd.com/20110503/exclusive-opentable-ceo-jordan-likely-to-head-to-silicon-valley-vc-firm-andreessen-horowitz/#comments Wed, 04 May 2011 05:28:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=43519

Jeff Jordan, the president and CEO of OpenTable who unexpectedly stepped down from his job today at the online restaurant reservation leader, is set to take a job at a major venture firm in Silicon Valley.

Sources said Jordan has spoken to several major VCs about moving to their firms recently.

While Benchmark Capital was a big funder of OpenTable before it went public in 2009, sources said the likeliest home for the well-known Internet player–Jordan has also been a major exec at eBay–is Andreessen Horowitz.

The move would be a coup for the firm, which has been busy adding partners since its founding only a few years ago by Web icon Marc Andreessen and his longtime business partner Ben Horowitz.

Jordan’s announcement that he was leaving OpenTable today during its first-quarter earnings call caused the stock to decline precipitously today, even though he said he would remain active as executive chairman.

CFO Matthew Roberts was named as his replacement.

Explaining the move, Jordan said:

“I’ve been managing Internet businesses since 1999. That’s 12 years of being in the tornado, and it’s pretty exhausting. I’ll be looking at the next challenge, but in terms of operating an Internet business, I’ve scratched that itch very well.”

It’s an itch that he will be scratching as a VC apparently and likely at one of tech’s hottest firms, which has investments in everything from gaming phenom Zynga to social buying service Groupon to microblogging start-up Twitter.

A spokeswoman for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment and Jordan has not responded to an email query.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110503/exclusive-opentable-ceo-jordan-likely-to-head-to-silicon-valley-vc-firm-andreessen-horowitz/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110427/exclusive-whats-former-omniture-ceo-josh-james-doing-since-leaving-adobe-raising-money/ http://allthingsd.com/20110427/exclusive-whats-former-omniture-ceo-josh-james-doing-since-leaving-adobe-raising-money/#comments Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:30:13 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=5486 It’s not unusual for founding CEOs to hang around only for a little while after their companies have been acquired. Even so, Josh James, the founder of the Web analytics powerhouse Omniture, seemed eager to hit the road faster than most. After Adobe Systems acquired Omniture for $1.8 billion in September of 2009, James resigned the following July.

What’s he been doing since then? Gearing up for another venture, I’m told. Some time last year, James, flush with the $80 million and change he made from Adobe as one of Omniture’s biggest shareholders, hit the eject button on his gig as an Adobe exec and acquired/bought out Corda Technologies, a business data dashboard start-up based in Lindon, Utah. Corda forms the basis of James’ new venture, but its vision is substantially bigger, I’m told.

Until recently, James has been bankrolling the venture out of his own pocket. But in recent weeks he’s been raising money for a seed round. And as seed rounds go, it’s unusually large. I don’t know a precise amount, but it’s somewhere north of $5 million and less than $8 million.

I’ve confirmed that Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital fund run by Netscape creator Marc Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz, the former CEO of Opsware–the software company they sold to Hewlett-Packard–have ponied up about $1 million, betting that James can strike gold once again.

Corda specializes in pouring all types of company performance data into a dashboard for executives. It will have a new name, still undecided. In fact, the Corda Web site doesn’t even mention the fact that James has acquired it. Still, James has started assembling a team in Utah.

His acquisition of Corda and his an offer to hire a former Adobe employee caused a legal spat between James and Adobe, as reported by The Salt Lake Tribune. Adobe claimed that James violated non-compete agreements he signed when he left the company in buying Corda and hiring trying to hire away a former Adobe employee. The Utah case is over, ordered stayed by a judge, while a case that James and Corda brought in a Santa Clara County court in California against Adobe alleging unfair competition is still pending.

Update: Since I first published this story we’re learning more about who’s investing in this still-unnamed Josh James-helmed venture. A source familiar with the matter says that aside from the $5 million-plus seed-round, which should be announced officially within the next few weeks, James is already pretty far along in the process of raising a Series A round that will be announced later in the year. A source familiar with the situation says that Benchmark Capital–which has backed companies like Mint, the personal finance site acquired by Intuit last year, and others as varied as eBay, Instagram and Jamba Juice–has committed up to $30 million to the new company.

A Second Update:I’ve just confirmed that Ron Conway’s SV Angel is investing in the seed round.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110427/exclusive-whats-former-omniture-ceo-josh-james-doing-since-leaving-adobe-raising-money/feed/ 2