Ten months after announcing its first round of capital, Shopify has secured $15 million to continue to fuel its growth.

And it might just need that extra padding, since eBay announced — at a big, splashy event last week — that it had entered the same space.

Shopify creates tools and templates to power online storefronts that sell merchandise ranging from stuffed Angry Birds to the latest in protective cases for the iPad.

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Felicis Ventures and Georgian Partners. The first round for $7 million was closed in December.

Tobias Lütke, Shopify’s CEO and co-founder, told me that over the past year the company managed to blow through its two-year plan in six months. Shopify has grown from 10,000 storefronts to 16,000 in 80 countries and has more than doubled its staff to 80; it expects to have 130 employees in the next year.

Lütke declined to provide any specific figures, but back in December he said Shopify was processing more than $100 million in revenues from all of the sites combined.

Along with supporting the growth, Lütke said, some of the capital will go toward unspecified acquisitions.

One acquisition is already making a big contribution: Shopify purchased a company that supported e-commerce on an iPhone application, and already 5 percent of sales on all of the sites it supports come from Android, iOS and mobile Web (not including tablets, because Lütke doesn’t believe those are mobile devices).

The funding will also go toward the Shopify Fund, a $1 million kitty that will finance developers to create e-commerce widgets that plug in to Shopify’s architecture. So far, a number of plugins have been developed, starting with QuickBooks, Mail Chimp and Hubspot.

Shopify was founded in 2006 as an online storefront selling snowboards and other winter apparel. That’s when Lütke figured out how difficult it was to start an online store — he decided to shut down the storefront and focus on reselling the software it had built for Shopify’s own use.

Other merchants Shopify works with include Tesla Motors, Amnesty International and the Foo Fighters.

Last week, eBay unveiled X.commerce, which is designed to help any size retailer — from family-owned stores to Toys “R” Us — stay current as shopping goes online and mobile. The platform has been slowly coming together over the past year as eBay has made several acquisitions, including the purchase of Magento, one of Shopify’s main competitors.

It is eBay’s goal to provide a package of e-commerce services to retailers for free, and use it as a lead-generation tool for its more high-margin services, like PayPal and GSI Commerce.

Shopify charges a flat monthly fee depending on the size of the retailer, and also charges developers a percentage of each application sold on its platform, just like eBay.

Aaron Levie, the 26-year-old CEO of Box.net, said the expansion round brings in strategic partners like Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures, as well as venture-capital firms such as New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners, along with former investors including Andreessen Horowitz. In total, Box.net has now raised $162 million.

Box.net, founded in 2005, gives businesses a secure way to share content online and on mobile devices.

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That’ll buy a lot of digital pushpins.

(UPDATE: Pinterest and Andreessen Horowitz confirmed the new funding, which is $27 million. The firm’s Jeff Jordan will join Pinterest’s board.)

In an interview, Jordan said that the amount of interest in Pinterest — get it? — was a big reason for the deal.

“People love the product, even though it is only in beta so far, with consumers who use it voraciously,” he said. “It’s elegantly social.”

Co-founder Ben Silbermann said the focus at Pinterest — which has only eight employees — was to “provide users with a place to discover and share in an inspirational way … we want to help people get in touch with their interests in real life.”

The start-up, which has no revenue to speak of yet and is still in invite-only mode, has become the hottest start-up of late in Silicon Valley, given its quick growth and compelling idea that has been called “experiential shopping.”

To me, it is just a really cool way of finding stuff of all kinds — from kids’ toys to inspiring quotes to travel tips — using a very savvy crowd of users via social visual bookmarking.

It’s kind of like Oprah on steroids, with users creating and sharing virtual collages on the handsome and easy-to-use site. Others can than “re-pin” them and great stuff rises in rank.

The site has previously raised $10 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, valuing the company at $40 million.

The new round was led by venture-capital firm August Capital, with participation from Insight Capital and existing investors including Jafco Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Bessemer Venture Partners, said Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik. The round, which Fertik said was oversubscribed, brings the company’s total capital raised to more than $65 million. It was the company’s fourth round of institutional financing, otherwise known as a Series D.

Fertik said Reputation.com decided to raise more money because it is planning a big push into a new line of business. To date, the company has offered several services that help consumers manage their privacy, information and reputation online. Now Reputation.com has also built a dataset business–essentially, the start-up has collected data on individuals and layered that information with its own technologies–which allows the company to come up with assessments on people, among other things.

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Thirty-six U.S. venture-capital funds raised more than $7 billion in the first quarter of 2011. That’s up 76 percent, by dollar commitments, compared with the first quarter of 2010, which saw 44 funds raise $4 billion, according to Thomson Reuters and the NVCA.

Bessemer Venture Partners VIII raised $1.6 billion during the quarter, while Sequoia Capital 2010 raised $1.3 billion and J.P. Morgan’s (JPM 46.97, +0.13, +0.28%) Digital Growth Fund raised $1.2 billion.

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Greg Coleman, the online advertising sales exec who keeps making bank after bouncing from top Web jobs, has a new one.

The former Yahoo, AOL and Huffington Post sales leader has just taken over as president of Criteo, a “personalized retargeting” company–essentially, it delivers highly targeted ads to consumers.

Coleman said in an interview with BoomTown last night that he will be focused on expanding Criteo’s U.S. business.

“Performance advertising is a huge opportunity in a high-growth arena,” he said. “I couldn’t pass it up.”

While the 300-person company has offices in Silicon Valley and New York, its HQ is in Paris.

So, Coleman (pictured here)–who has grabbed huge sums of exit cash, first when AOL management changed and then when AOL bought the HuffPo–now gets to visit the City of Lights all the time.

Zut alors! As I have previously written, I’ll have what Coleman’s having.

Toby Coppel, an investor in Criteo who is also on its board, worked with Coleman at Yahoo.

Criteo has raised almost $24 million from Coppel and other investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners and Index Ventures.

Its competitors are other start-ups, such as MyThings.

Here’s the official press release on Coleman’s new job:

CRITEO TAPS GREG COLEMAN AS PRESIDENT

Former Huffington Post president and Yahoo! sales chief will take retargeting leader to the “next phase of phenomenal expansion”

PALO ALTO, CA – (April 7, 2011)–Criteo, the global leader in personalized retargeting, today announced that Greg Coleman, former president and chief revenue officer of The Huffington Post and EVP global sales for Yahoo!, will join the company as president. Coleman will oversee global operations and lead the U.S. expansion of the company, whose platform for delivering personally relevant ads to Internet users has enabled the largest e-commerce marketers to post significant incremental sales for the past three years.

“Greg is a visionary who raises the bar,” said JB Rudelle, CEO of Criteo. “With his experience and relationships, we will extend our e-commerce solutions to new clients, deepen our engagement with existing customers, and bring industry appreciation of retargeting to new levels.”

Coleman has caused explosive sales growth for several of the world’s most influential media and technology companies. As the president and chief revenue officer of The Huffington Post, he built a $30 million ad business in one year. As EVP global sales at Yahoo!, he assembled a pre-eminent sales team that grew ad revenues from $600 million to more than $6 billion. As president of U.S. Magazine publishing for Reader’s Digest Association, he turned advertising from an afterthought to more than 25% of corporate profit. Coleman’s experience has translated to the top-ranked class for three years running at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

“Performance advertising is marketing’s new frontier, and it’s still wide open,” said Coleman. “Technology and sales will determine leadership. Criteo has the premier technology for personalizing the advertising experience. The company originated the worldwide market, is the leader in Europe, and has a secure foothold in the U.S., because the technology is the most reliable and scalable. I’m here to spur the next phase of phenomenal expansion.”

Criteo tripled operations in 2010, grew to 300 employees and served more than 50 billion personalized ads on behalf of more than 1,000 e-commerce companies across 20 countries globally–driving an 11x increase in incremental post-click revenues for clients. Criteo technology enables merchants to win back the consumers who leave their websites before completing purchases, and gives advertisers a single source for complete retargeting campaigns–design, buying, serving, optimization and reporting.

By colleagues’ accounts, Coleman has the assets to increase Criteo’s momentum. Former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau calls him “a true innovator” and says he “created the model for selling social marketing.” And former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel calls him “the most wired, successful and liked sales executive in Internet marketing.”

“Greg creates unique partnerships with advertisers and merchants,” added investor and Criteo board member Toby Coppel. “He can make Criteo the industry standard.”

That creates an interesting opportunity that the Boston-based startup Apperian has been working on. Companies often have their own custom-made applications that they need to distribute to hundreds or thousands of employees, but they’d rather not do so via the iTunes App Store, where Apple has control and the power to approve all applications. No, instead companies need their own internal App store.

That’s exactly what Apperian has built. It’s called EASE–for Enterprise App Service Environment–and it gives enterprises the ability to create apps that can be distributed and managed and updated throughout a company.

After two years of operation, Apperian will announce today that it has landed a $9.5 million series A led by North Bridge Partners and joined by Bessemer Venture Partners and the Kleiner Perkins iFund, the $200 million fund focused on investments in the iPhone-iPad universe. Apperian is, I’m told, its first enterprise investment. Before this round, the company was funded by about $1.9 million in seed funding from CommonAngels and LaunchCapital. Michael Skok, a partner at North Bridge, and Bob Goodman, a founder partner at Bessemer, will be joining Apperian’s board.

One of its founders and its current Chief Strategy Officer is Chuck Goldman, who spent eight years as the Director of Field Engineering and Professional Services for Apple. His job was helping companies integrate Apple gear–first Macs but then later the iPhone–into their corporate infrastructure. (A 2008 BusinessWeek cover story I worked on focused on Apple’s somewhat reluctant embracing of its newfound popularity within corporations, which has only accelerated since then.)

I talked with Apperian CEO David Patrick yesterday. Initially, the plan was to build apps for corporate customers. “About halfway through we realized there was a huge interest among our customers in building apps internally for specific internal use, especially on the iPad.” That led to EASE, which is essentially a cloud-based platform that allows companies to build, deploy and manage iPad and iPhone applications. Customers can create their own branded app store-like environments.

And there are many customers: Procter and Gamble, Cisco Systems, NetApp, and Estée Lauder among them. All of them, Patrick told me, have built their own internal app stores that authenticate employees and serve up apps that are used for company-specific work without any need to host them in Apple’s public-facing app store. “You can literally push out an application to 5,000 users in a matter of seconds,” Patrick said.

Cisco builds its own internal sales force automation apps, Patrick told me. Cosmetics giant Estée Lauder uses the iPad at its retail counters to help suggest Clinique skin care products to customers. (Apperian also built this app.)

It’s a big turn of events from when the company first started, Patrick said. “We started working on EASE about 15 months ago, and we showed it to companies who asked why they’d ever want it,” he said. “They were providing email and calendar access and that was the extent of their commitment to the iPhone and the iPad. By summer, after the iPad first launched, our phone was ringing off the hook.” CIOs at big companies quickly got iPad religion when all their senior executives and board members walked in the door with iPads. “They could read all the documents on the screen, and it wasn’t long before they wanted their corporate apps, their business intelligence and SAP reports on the iPad too.”

Serguei Beloussov, the company’s founder and outgoing CEO, will continue his full-time role as executive chairman of the board and chief architect.

Steen joined Parallels from Microsoft, where he was VP of Small and Medium Business and Distribution at Microsoft. Before that, he ran Microsoft’s business in Norway and in Russia.

Parallels is a privately held company that’s been around since 1999, that counts Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Almaz Capital Partners as its investors. Its rise generally coincided with Apple’s migration to using chips from Intel on the Mac. By giving new Mac users an easy way to run Windows on their computers, it gave people accustomed to Windows, or who needed to continue to use a particular application on Windows, little excuse when the opportunity came to switch to the Mac.

But what I didn’t know is that Parallels is also a player a big player in selling software to service providers. It sells Plesk, a popular server automation tool, and it’s also a player in the server virtualization business.

I talked with Steen about all this last week.

NewEnteprise: Birger, I’m a Mac user and so of course I know about and even use Parallels once in awhile. But I had no idea Parallels was so closely involved with Web hosting and cloud providers. How big is that business?

Birger Steen: We’ve been working with service providers since 1999, and then over the last 10 years you’ll find companies like Rackspace and Media Temple and some of the biggest hosting providers are customers of ours. In most cases they run some version of our virtualization technology.

So when people think of virtualization of server, they think of VMWare. How are you different?

Partly it’s a different technology. Our technology virtualizes in a different way that’s uniquely suited to service providers that have large numbers of systems that they want to run with as much efficiency and density as possible. We have a market share of about 37 percent in that market.

And you also sell the Plesk control panel software for servers.

Control panels are very complementary to server virtualization. In the same way that control panels let you contol the computing resources on a desktop Windows machine or a Mac, you need to do the same thing on a server. If you were to rent the server from Rackspace or some other service provider, you need something to control it remotely and manage the resources. That’s the other business we’ve been in for about 10 years. As the hosting business became more complex, that product had to become more complex. A lot of our service providers sell servers to customers who then turn around and re-sell them to other end customers. So the control panel now manages resources at the reseller level, and the end-customer administrative level, and then at the end-customer user level. That’s become a very interesting business. It’s very fragmented with lots of companies reselling services from larger companies. Today we have something like 5,000 customers that are everyone from the smallest local hoster with a few servers, all the way up to some of the biggest telco companies in the world.

So what are your priorities this year?

We’re going to continue to drive hard on the Parallels desktop product, particularly on the Mac. It has a huge group of fans and we want to continue developing it. The first group of users were a lot of people who were devout Mac users where someone just had to use Windows or another OS some of the time. What we see now are a lot of users who are not switching to the Mac so much as they are adding Apple hardware. It’s a a market where people are using many different technologies and we want to continue to make that easy. We also want to continue to build out our international markets. We’re really strong in Germany, where we sell our product attached to 25 percent of the Macs sold there, whereas worldwide we’re hovering at about 5 to 6 percent. So there’s room for a lot of upside there.

So your business is profitable, and you’re growing fast. What kind of an exit do you anticipate for your investors? Will you take Parallels public?

We’re building the company to become a lot bigger, and to grow for a long period of time. We certainly aspire to have a both all the corporate processes and infrastructure that a public company would have. I’d ask our investors at Bessemer and Intel what they’re thinking. But I certainly have a long-term ambition for this.

AngelList ran the numbers this week and found that venture capitalists are actually more active than angels on its year-old service.

Essentially, AngelList facilitates introductions between people with money and people who want to raise money. Founders Babak Nivi (pictured) and Naval Ravikant screen potential deals and send them to potential investors. Currently, 725 angels and 557 venture capitalists subscribe to their matchmaking service. (Nivi counts 378 of the VCs as multi-stage investors, and 179 as seed-fund investors.)

Interested investors reply to get “intros” with posted companies, and potentially invest in them. AngelList doesn’t formally track the investments that occur due to those intros, but Nivi estimated that the service has helped orchestrate funding for 219 start-ups from 384 investors.

AngelList counts about half of the investors in each category as active participants. Active seed fund investors have taken 5.6 AngelList intros on average, active multi-stage VCs have taken 5.4, and angels have taken 5.

Of the VC firms, General Catalyst Partners has the most intros, at 64 spread among five partners. The rest of the top five are Atlas Venture, Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital and Charles River Ventures.

Some examples of recent AngelList VC deals include Storenvy and Kleiner Perkins, LawPivot and Google Ventures, LearnBoost and Atlas Venture, and MightyMeeting and Charles River Ventures.

Nivi estimated AngelList plays a role in “a good chunk” of seed financings in New York, and a smaller portion–maybe 10 percent–in Silicon Valley.

But it’s hard to say. While AngelList may be a mostly open book, angel investing transactions are usually much less public.

As AngelList has expanded, it now facilitates funding rounds from seed stage to Series B. Nivi said he sees the differences between rounds lessening as fundraising becomes more efficient and fluid.

That’s in part because Web start-ups are breaking from the pack more quickly than ever.

As Nivi put it, “If those companies experience a breakout, they often skip A and go straight to higher-priced rounds, so VCs that were traditionally players at Series A almost have to invest at the seed level.”

In other words, go seed or go home.

The funding comes from Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Charles River Ventures and New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

To date, the Baltimore-based company has raised $65 million. But that hardly seems sufficient when fighting Goliaths like Apple and Google, which both made multimillion-dollar acquisitions last year in the space.

Previously, CEO Paul Palmieri said it was Millennial’s intention to stay an independent company, and therefore aim for an IPO. Is $65 million enough?

The funds will be used for acquisitions in 2011, and to invest in the company’s international business, which is considered smaller than its competitors’, such as Google’s. So far, it has built a team in London, and has begun to expand to the Asia-Pacific region.

Market share statistics are notoriously poor in the space, but in December, IDC estimated that Millennial was the largest independent mobile ad network at 15.4 percent, trailing behind Apple with 18.8 percent share and Google/AdMob with 19 percent share. Millennial’s share was estimated to be larger than Yahoo’s 10.1 percent share.

Millennial declined to give specific numbers, but said it achieved “operational profitability” in 2010, and tripled its revenues during the year.

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital and Felicis Ventures.

Shopify has more than 10,000 stores actively selling products on its platform, which provides features such as custom themes to create a storefront, an iPhone app that helps track orders and easy integration with PayPal or credit cards. Competitors in the space include BigCommerce and Yahoo Merchant Solutions.

Tobias Lutke, Shopify’s CEO and co-founder, said the funding will help the company expand the team from 30 employees and add mobile capabilities to its products. Lutke says mobile phones are playing a huge role in this year’s holiday shopping season, and that they can do a lot more “cool stuff” going forward.

The Ottawa-based company was founded five years ago originally as an online storefront selling snowboards and other winter gear. Lutke said that’s when he realized how difficult it was to start an online store. Shopify has now shut down the storefront to focus on reselling the software it has built for itself. He hasn’t raised any money before because the company has been profitable to date.

Shopify is now processing more than $100 million in revenues, and beyond Angry Birds developer Rovio and DodoCase, it counts General Electric, Tesla Motors, Amnesty International and the Foo Fighters as customers. Lutke: “People are becoming extremely savvy about selling online. The time it takes to get up and running is always decreasing. It’s an amaizing thing.”

Aydin Senkut, founder and managing director of Felicis Ventures, said: “We have conviction that e-commerce is a key area, and some areas of e-commerce have not seen a lot of innovation…and I was blown away at how beautiful and practical Shopify is. They’ve been bootstrapping and have had a lot of traction. I was very impressed with the company.”

All I know is that you definitely don’t see this sort of thing when times are tough: Investors with open checkbooks, piled into a room to show off for start-ups and hoping to land the next Twitter, or Foursquare, or Tumblr. Or at least the next GroupMe.

That’s the agenda for next week’s “VC Demo Day,” hosted by AOL and a bevy of VCs and angels in New York. I dropped by the first one of these, in July, and I can’t tell if any checks got written as a result of the pitch sessions.

But it’s definitely a good place to bump into a lot of deal-hungry investors. If you’re into that kind of thing.

On Wednesday’s agenda: Presentations from Polaris Ventures, Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Village Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Rho Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Flybridge Capital and GRP Partners.

Also, free beer. As I recall, the last one had a keg of something pretty good.

The New York-based company is still closing the round, but I’m told existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Spark Capital will re-up, and that Softbank Capital NY will also come aboard. There’s at least one other significant investor likely to join, but I don’t have their name (feel free to tell me, though–I keep all correspondence anonymous: peter@allthingsd.com).

OMGPOP has raised $6.5 million during its four-year history, which saw it start out as a sorta-dating site. But for the past few years it has focused squarely on free-to-play casual games, and has recently been trying to generate revenue via a freemium model, as well as some forays into advertising.

And like many casual games start-ups, it is getting a big boost by integrating its games into Facebook. It integrated with the social network this summer, and CEO Dan Porter says that move has doubled the company’s user base from three million to six million. Porter declined to talk about funding news.

Interest in casual games has sparked a flurry of deals in the past year, including Electronic Arts’ purchase of Playfish, Disney’s purchase of Tapulous and DeNA’s purchase of Ngmoco. But the big player remains Zynga, which is both tightly integrated with Facebook and often described as an obvious IPO candidate.

Sources tell me that Khosla Ventures is leading a new round that will add another $10 million to $12 million to the start-up’s bank account. General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Ron Conway, who put $2 million into the company a year ago, are reinvesting.

I’m told that Gideon Yu, the former CFO of both Facebook and YouTube, is steering the investment for Khosla.

Hunch was co-founded by Caterina Fake, who founded Flickr and sold it to Yahoo (YHOO) in 2005, and Chris Dixon, who built SiteAdvisor and sold it to McAfee (MFE) in 2006.

Hunch is still a modest-sized site–its internal numbers put it at 1.2 million unique visitors–but Fake and Dixon are well-regarded entrepreneurs. And while they don’t like to be compared with Aardvark, which has a vaguely similar concept, the linkage does have some upside: Last month, Google (GOOG) bought that site for $50 million.

I asked Fake, Dixon and Yu for comment. Until I hear from them, you can read up on Hunch in Kara Swisher’s story from last month. Or you can watch this interview.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100312/hunch-gets-it-right-adds-a-10-million-b-round-led-by-khosla-ventures/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100305/an-apple-app-star-explains-why-he-wont-work-with-android/ http://allthingsd.com/20100305/an-apple-app-star-explains-why-he-wont-work-with-android/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:35:39 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17041 Smule’s Jeff Smith is one of the app revolution’s success stories. His start-up has generated some of the biggest hits at Apple’s iTunes app store, from novelty items like Sonic Lighter to more ambitious stuff like Leaf trombone.

The biggest hit so far: An ambitious novelty called “I Am T-Pain,” which allows users to record songs using the rapper’s sort-of-trademark “autotune” voice processor. If you don’t know what that means, best to check it out here. (Or check out the demo clips of T-Pain and other Smule apps at the bottom of this post.)

All this success has translated into real money–more than four million paid downloads, at something like $2.50 a pop. And this has allowed Smule to quickly raise $13.5 million in venture money from the likes of Shasta Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.

I assumed that some of that money would be earmarked for moving apps to other mobile operating systems, particularly Google’s (GOOG) Android OS. Nope, says Smith–he’s working exclusively through Apple (AAPL).

Smith is part of a small but vocal chorus of app developers who say they don’t want to move to Android, even though it is growing quickly. His complaints: He doesn’t like the way the store merchandises its wares, and he doesn’t want to have to create different apps for each handset Android supports.

In fairness, Apple has its share of vocal app developer critics as well, and that group got louder this month during the iPorn imbroglio.

And if you wanted to be overly cynical, you could point out that Smule has been a featured Apple partner for some time. Smule’s products have gotten stage time during Apple product announcements and have been highlighted in the company’s press releases.

But Smith isn’t betting the future on Apple, either. His business plan involves generating revenue from other places besides the iTunes app store. I’ll let him explain in this interview, which we taped during Billboard’s Music & Money event yesterday.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100305/an-apple-app-star-explains-why-he-wont-work-with-android/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100223/millenial-media-acquires-tapmetrics/ http://allthingsd.com/20100223/millenial-media-acquires-tapmetrics/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:56:08 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=24738

Although it has also been rumored to be an acquisition target, after the recent sales of AdMob to Google (GOOG) and Quattro Wireless to Apple (AAPL), mobile advertising firm Millennial Media is doing some buying of its own.

That would be its just announced acquisition of TapMetrics, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics firm.

Baltimore-based Millennial is one of the larger mobile ad networks in the U.S., but will surely need more scale in the current period of consolidation if it is to stay independent.

Millennial has raised just over $37 million in venture funding, including a $16 million round in November, from firms such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Charles River Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

Terms of the transaction to buy TapMetrics–which has only raised a seed round–were not disclosed.

Here’s the official press release:

MILLENNIAL MEDIA ACQUIRES TAPMETRICS
Adds Deep Cross-Platform Mobile Analytics Capabilities to Existing Developer Program

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, and BALTIMORE, MD, February 23, 2009–Millennial Media, the largest independent mobile advertising network, announced today that it will acquire TapMetrics, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics firm, focused on application usage and behavior.

TapMetrics software suite provides detailed analytics to enable developers to better manage their application sales and revenue in a sleek, intuitive dashboard. By adding TapMetrics, Millennial Media will offer developers more capabilities across mobile platforms:

• Real-Time, Highly Detailed Analytics
• User Interaction Information
• Feature and Version Adoption
• Device Types
• Crash Reporting
• Competitive Ratings System
• Buzz Tracker & Reviews

“The market has recognized Millennial Media as the leader in mobile advertising. As a result of their deep commitment to advertisers, they deliver the best business partnership and monetization for mobile companies–particularly developers,” said Chris Brown, Co-Founder and CEO, TapMetrics. “What is exciting to us is that Millennial Media now has the only scalable solution for developers that doesn’t contain an operating system bias, making Millennial Media the natural partner for us.”

“When we raised our growth round of financing in November, we stated that we would make investments to accelerate our growth,” said Michael Avon, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Millennial Media. “We are acquiring TapMetrics, because the company shares our approach to serve the needs of developers, regardless of mobile platform. In addition, TapMetrics’ data and analytics capabilities complement our company’s own focus and development plans. We continue to actively evaluate other potential acquisitions to further expand our business.”

Millennial Media operates the leading mobile advertising platform worldwide. Since adding $16M to its strong cash position in November, Millennial Media has expanded its offerings to key customer segments, to include OEM and platform partnerships that seek to access its strong base of developers and publishers. Additionally, Millennial Media’s employee base has grown by more than 20%, as it continues to expand operations in the U.S. and Europe.

On February 16, 2010, the company released other key 2009 year over year mobile advertising growth figures, including:

• Brand business grew 756%; Performance business grew 171%
• Average deal size increased 353%
• Non-U.S. impressions increased 175% year over year
• 357% increase in Apple OS impressions
• 90% increase in RIM OS impressions
• 81% reach of the Mobile Web users

For more information on growth statistics, please visit www.millennialmedia.com/research and download the full 2009 Year in Review.

Millennial Media is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland; and has offices in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, and London. TapMetrics will continue to be based out of its San Francisco headquarters. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100223/millenial-media-acquires-tapmetrics/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100203/venture-capitals-most-trafficked-web-sites/ http://allthingsd.com/20100203/venture-capitals-most-trafficked-web-sites/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:30:21 +0000 Scott Austin http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=20882 Venture capitalists often invest in start-ups whose business models are dependent on Internet traffic, or in companies whose technology is geared toward delivering those eyeballs. But how good are VC firms at bringing in their own Web site traffic?

Larry Cheng, a partner at Volition Capital (formerly Fidelity Ventures), has ranked 150 venture firms based on their Web sites’ average monthly unique visitors for the fourth quarter, as scored by Compete. This is the second list of its kind compiled by Cheng, who has previously ranked individual VC blogs using the same data.

So who’s at No. 1? It’s not Sequoia Capital, perhaps the best-known venture firm, which ranks at No. 2 with 22,441 uniques. Nor is it the venerable Bessemer Venture Partners, famous for publishing an “anti-portfolio,” coming in at No. 3 (14,825).

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100203/venture-capitals-most-trafficked-web-sites/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100128/threes-a-trend-first-facebook-then-zynga-now-yelp/ http://allthingsd.com/20100128/threes-a-trend-first-facebook-then-zynga-now-yelp/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:00:41 +0000 Scott Austin http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=20617 Yelp Inc. now has another thing in common with social-networking site Facebook Inc. and online gaming company Zynga Inc. Besides being a fast-growing, venture-backed Internet company, the local-business review site has opted to receive an investment from a private equity firm that gives its employees a chance to partly cash out–and the company more breathing room to remain private.

In a press release that just crossed the wire, Yelp said it received $25 million in Series E funding from Elevation Partners, the private equity firm known for its connection with U2 lead singer Bono and its investment in smartphone maker Palm Inc. (PALM). The Yelp deal also includes a provision in which Elevation Partners would buy up to $75 million of stock from “vested employees and other eligible shareholders.”

Yelp, which The Wall Street Journal and others reported had received an acquisition offer worth at least $500 million from Google Inc. (GOOG), has previously raised $30 million from venture firms including Benchmark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and DAG Ventures.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100128/threes-a-trend-first-facebook-then-zynga-now-yelp/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091124/vc-backed-co-pushes-envelope-with-postmarked-email-service/ http://allthingsd.com/20091124/vc-backed-co-pushes-envelope-with-postmarked-email-service/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:04:40 +0000 Tomio Geron http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=18359 With more people emailing and fewer people sending physical mail in recent years, the U.S. Postal Service is taking steps to move into the digital world–and using a venture-backed company to do so.

Goodmail Systems Inc. has partnered with Epostmarks Inc. to launch a product, Postmarked Email, that has the approval and protection of the U.S. Postal Service.

The deal will essentially make emails handled by this service the legal equivalent of physical mail. That’s important for businesses that are seeking to cut the costs of physical mail while also improving communication with customers and become more environmentally friendly.

Goodmail, which has raised about $45 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, DCM, Emergence Capital Partners, Omidyar Network and Softbank Capital Partners, isn’t the only venture-backed company working with the postal service. Earth Class Mail Corp. covers different terrain–it doesn’t deal with email, but it provides users with access to their physical mail online. Earth Class Mail has raised more than $20 million from Ignition Partners, Alliance of Angels and Keiretsu Forum, according to VentureWire archives.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091124/vc-backed-co-pushes-envelope-with-postmarked-email-service/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090310/investors-bet-5-million-on-casual-game-site-omgpop-hope-users-start-paying-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20090310/investors-bet-5-million-on-casual-game-site-omgpop-hope-users-start-paying-up/#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:00:05 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=5057 Web start-ups that plan to make money from advertising are having a rough time raising money. But Web start-ups that say they’ll make money by charging customers? Still possible.

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.

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