In its first C-level hire from outside the company, Eventbrite has brought in experienced finance exec Mark Rubash as CFO. The San Francisco-based self-service ticketing platform has hired the former Shutterfly CFO — who also held top finance jobs at eBay and Yahoo — to focus on scaling and expanding its business model and global growth.

And while CEO and co-founder Kevin Hartz declined to say in an interview whether the move was Eventbrite’s first major step toward a possible IPO, he did underscore the need to gird the company’s management for future expansion.

Recently, the company said it had sold $1.5 billion in gross ticket sales since it was founded five years ago, with total tickets sold topping 100 million. Eventbrite said that it had sold $600 million of that in 2012 alone, hawking 36 million tickets in 179 countries for such events as San Francisco’s iconic Bay to Breakers footrace.

That kind of hypergrowth requires some more experienced management, “independent of any public offering process,” said Hartz.

“We had an opportunity to bring in a great operator to help us become a multi-category e-commerce marketplace,” he said. “Mark has deep experience in building marketplaces of buyers and sellers.”

Indeed. At eBay, Rubash had global purview over eBay finance, investor relations, accounting and more, while he ran Yahoo’s global finance for its paid search, display advertising and e-commerce units. He has also worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and at companies such as HeartFlow, Rearden Commerce and Critical Path.

“It’s a real alignment of what I am passionate about, with a team I really enjoy,” said Rubash. “With the mass of transactions growing on a global basis at Eventbrite, it’s the kind of challenge that is really hard to resist.”

Eventbrite’s investors include Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Tenaya Capital, with about $80 million in funding raised since 2006.

Marin, which was founded in 2006 by CEO Christopher Lien, has not reported a profitable year. It had revenue of $42.5 million in the first nine months of 2012, up from $24.7 million for that period in 2011.

The company has raised about $100 million from backers including Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Temasek Capital, Focus Ventures and Crosslink Ventures.

San Francisco-based Marin helps advertisers analyze and manage campaigns on Google, Baidu, Bing, Facebook and Yahoo. Customers cited in its filing include ModCloth, PriceGrabber and Razorfish.

Because of the range of data it sees, Marin can do things like provide analysis and forecasting for mobile click-through and conversion rates.

The IPO is being underwritten by Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Wells Fargo and Stiefel.

But Visible Measures makes money doing something else. For the last year, it has been running a Web video ad network, where it charges advertisers each time someone chooses to watch one of its spots.*

Now it has more money to build that business out. The Boston-based company has raised a $21.5 million round, led by previous investor DAG Ventures, along with earlier backers like General Catalyst and Conde Nast parent Advance Publications. Some new money also came into the company via Common Fund.

That brings total funding for the 7-year-old company to more than $65 million; CEO Brian Shin says a “little bit” of the new round went back to existing equity owners via secondary sales.

*In the Web ad world, that’s called the “cost per view” model, and while it seems completely commonsensical, it’s a relatively new idea. The business-as-usual version: If a publisher/network can prove that someone saw an ad, whether they wanted to or not, they get credit for the view. Hence: Lots of crappy pre-roll ads, and even crappier “auto-play” ads. This is when it’s good to point out that the video ad business is ridiculously primitive.

Fresh from presenting at Allen & Company’s highly exclusive Sun Valley conference earlier this month, CEO Nirav Tolia told AllThingsD that the new funds would be used to continue growing the company over the next four years, with no immediate plans for big purchases.

Nextdoor’s major focus is on the “local,” a concept trumpeted by Benchmark partner and Nextdoor investor Bill Gurley (seen most recently in a well-reasoned post on his personal blog). As Tolia describes it, we use Facebook for friends, LinkedIn for business and Twitter for interests. Nextdoor fills in the smallest and yet most personal of cracks — the neighborhood.

The site is essentially home to thousands of smaller social networks, each one focused on a specific neighborhood (drawn out by Nextdoor using district maps and other publicly available data). Users within each neighborhood can communicate with one another on topics that are most relevant to them, be it a local bake sale or alerting one another to suspicious activity in the neighborhood.

Nextdoor has gained significant traction as an alternative to larger social networks like Facebook and Twitter in the nine months since the site launched. The site has grown to encompass nearly 3,600 neighborhoods across 48 states, while retaining strong user-engagement numbers.

Some of the company’s largest challenges lie in its very structure. It is private by design; new users are only able to join the site after verifying by mail that they live at their stated address. And while the site’s initial growth is admirable, it moves at a snail’s pace by Internet standards. It can’t ride the same viral growth curve as a Facebook or a Twitter, as invites are doled out slowly through word of mouth and direct mail, rather than a wave of Web-based promos.

Tolia isn’t concerned about this, citing it as more of a strength than a weakness. The private, non-spammy nature of Nextdoor’s growth is what draws people to it in the first place. It’s sort of a riff on the Kevin Costner movie line: “If you build it” — and build it privately — “they will come.”

The next steps involve continuing that growth throughout the U.S. and exploring partnerships with interested parties like local governments and businesses. And, of course, the long view has Tolia’s sights set on broader horizons, potentially growing the team to support international expansion in the future.

Porrini’s LinkedIn profile confirms the move, and shows that he has taken a job as general counsel and secretary at YuMe, a company that provides video advertising software and services. The company is backed by investments from Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Intel Capital.

HP’s legal office has seen a lot of changes recently, since former CEO Mark Hurd left, ultimately to take a job as President of Oracle. Last December, general counsel Michael Holston, who had previously been seen as a key Hurd aide, left the company. His departure came about three months after the ouster of former CEO Léo Apotheker, and Meg Whitman’s taking over as CEO last year.

In April, HP named John Schultz as general counsel, replacing David Healy, who had the job on an interim basis after Holston.

Porrini (pictured from his LinkedIn profile) had been at HP since 2001. Before that, he worked at Bluestone Software, which HP acquired in 2000. Earlier, he was a partner at the law firm of Pepper Hamilton; before that, he worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Today, Birst will announce that it has taken a $26 million round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. It is Birst’s fourth round of funding, and existing investors including Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures are also participating, but it’s not a traditional Series D. Sequoia is investing with its Growth Fund, and that creates a slightly different investment dynamic, Doug Leone, a Sequoia Capital partner, told me.

Here’s what happened: Sequoia had already invested in Birst with its Venture fund. But over the last year or so, Leone started seeing something interesting. Companies that Leone is involved with, either as an investor or as a director — specifically Aruba Networks and Rackspace — had selected Birst after a business-intelligence bake-off versus other vendors. As a director of those two companies, he was able to see the close-up evaluation they did in making their selection.

On top of that, Leone noticed that Birst kept bringing in more customers per quarter, and that those customers were putting ever more dollars on the table. “We decided to make a preemptive offer with our Growth Equity Fund,” Leone told AllThingsD yesterday. “We saw what we thought was the knee of the curve. We saw quite clearly that we were at the beginning of a phase of hypergrowth for this company.”

The main difference between the venture-capital and growth-equity investments is that growth investments are made in companies that have growing revenue and a proven business model, whereas VC investments are made in start-ups that are just getting off the ground. It’s sort of a statement of faith in where Birst appears to be going. “It’s like a later-stage investment. It’s the last money the company is going to need.”

It’s not a small statement, either. This $26 million round is bigger than its previous three rounds combined, and brings its total capital raised to $46 million.

So what’s it going to do with all that money? CEO Brad Peters said he’s seeing a significant acceleration. Customers like the flexibility of a cloud-type BI solution, even if it’s running on-premise. “We need to get Birst out there. We need to build our sales organization, we need to build our distribution channel.” He also said a big announcement around infrastructure is pending, in order to better help Birst — his words — “catch the big-data wave.”

And will it join the parade of companies going public after Facebook? Not right away, Peters said. “We’re on that trajectory, but it won’t happen this year, or probably next. Maybe just after that,” he told me. “We’re building this to be a standalone, independent company.”

The textbook case for BI is comparing data on marketing spend to deals. If you find you’re spending a lot of money on one type of marketing campaign that seems not to be generating leads and deals, and not enough on one that seems to be working better, you can see the pattern and make needed changes. It’s all about synthesizing raw data and turning it into information you can make a decision on, Peters told me last year.

There’s a lot of venture-capital money flowing into young BI companies. Both Good Data and Domo have raised a lot on their own, and there are probably other companies I haven’t thought of, not to mention the large software players like Oracle and SAP, who do business intelligence, and IBM, which tends to favor the word “analytics” over “business intelligence.” Hewlett-Packard’s Autonomy business unit could also arguably be considered a business-intelligence outfit. Given all that activity, it just might be intelligent to to keep watching this business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The company has hired Robert J. Lawson, whose last gig was as CFO of Codexis, a biofuel company. His resume also includes stops at Intuit and General Electric.

RingCentral is essentially an Internet-based phone service that gives a small company an easy way to seem bigger than it is. Its investors include Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures and DAG Ventures, and it has raised a combined $44 million in capital since being founded in 2003. The company has about 200,000 businesses signed up, and its service is resold by AT&T.

It has been getting early IPO buzz for about a year. And while the company won’t say that Lawson’s brief will include shaping things up for a roadshow, the fact that Codexis went public in 2010 isn’t exactly going to tamp down the expectation that RingCentral could file an S1 before the year is out. Could hiring bankers be next?

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company tries to boost online companies’ revenue by placing targeted promotions and offering incentives at the point of checkout.

It’s a bit similar to how grocery stores try to boost sales by strategically placing tabloid magazines, gum and candy bars at the register to spur last-minute impulse buys.

Instead, TrialPay makes last-minute offers to give people incentive to make a purchase when they are on the fence.

As an example, TrialPay’s CEO Alex Rampell said that when people visit Fandango’s site, they may get an offer for a free movie ticket if they sign up for Netflix. Or, in a Zynga game, you might be offered a virtual bouquet for free, in return for purchasing real flowers on Valentine’s Day.

Visa’s participation in the investment, which is being announced later this morning, is rare. Over the years, the payments company has made a few acquisitions, including PlaySpan, CyberSource and Fundamo, but Visa’s only investment in recent memory was in payments darling Square, which allows anyone to accept payments using a cellphone.

Rampell said that with Visa’s help, TrialPay will be able to expand to offline merchants from working exclusively with online retailers, by giving it a way to track if a person visited a store and made a purchase.

“The question is, how do we send traffic to Starbucks or McDonald’s or any other offline merchant?” Rampell said. “We already have access to people online who are buying or thinking about buying something. It would be great if we could could give you 20 virtual coins if you shopped at McDonald’s. But how do we close that redemption loop?”

Today, TrialPay, which has 130 employees, reaches more than 70 million monthly active users worldwide. In 2011, Rampell said, revenues more than doubled; he declined to offer specifics.

Rampell also declined to provide details about potential partnerships with Visa. Visa also declined to comment.

Investors in the company’s fourth round included new investors Greylock Partners, Visa Inc., T. Rowe Price, DAG Ventures, DFJ Growth and QuestMark Partners. Existing investors also participated. To date, it has raised roughly $70 million.

For more of Rampell’s opinions on how the payments space will evolve, check out his Web 2.0 speech from October:

Wealthfront, the Silicon Valley start-up with more than $10 million in its own kitty, finally officially launched its long-planned Online Financial Advisor product today, with a focus on attracting techies interested in more easily managing their money.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which started off as a social investing site called kaChing, shifted over to the new plan just over a year ago. Its aim now is to try to solve the thorny problem of delivering actionable and easy-to-use tools for making investments online, for those who have some money but little time or expertise.

A lot of companies offer similar tools, of course, including big ones such as Fidelity and Schwab, as well as bigger money-management firms. But Wealthfront’s CEO Andy Rachleff and founder Dan Carroll are promising lower fees and more accurate determination of risk via all kinds of online bells and whistles (see below).

Wealthfront is not charging advisory fees on a customer’s first $25,000 under management, with a fee of 0.25% on assets exceeding that.

Wealthfront is backed by DAG Ventures and well-known investors, including Marc Andreessen and Jeff Jordan.

Here’s a video Wealthfront posted about the service, as well as its official press release:

Wealthfront Unveils Automated Online Financial Advisor Service for Silicon Valley and High-Tech Hubs

Highly Sophisticated Investing Advice Finally Made Available through Simple and Low Cost Web Service

PALO ALTO, Calif., December 1, 2011 – The ability for the savvy tech community to easily access high quality, affordable financial advice is now available with the launch of the Wealthfront Online Financial Advisor. Before Wealthfront, sophisticated investment advice was available only to the wealthy, by expensive financial advisors who often can’t relate to today’s tech-savvy generation who want sound financial advice, made easy and convenient. Wealthfront’s Online Financial Advisor appeals to investors from booming tech communities who favor doing everything online, and are looking for ways to have their new wealth managed for far lower fees.

At the core of Wealthfront’s web service is the industry-standard Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). Until now, the widely adopted investing model has been kept out of consumers’ reach, and was only accessible via expensive financial advisors. Wealthfront automates the application of this intricate investment model, putting the power of MPT directly into the hands of investors online. Moreover, Wealthfront’s pricing structure trumps all traditional financial advisor models. The online service makes it possible to receive a sophisticated, meticulously managed investment plan at a price that is 75% lower than traditional financial advisors. There are no advisory fees on a customer’s first $25,000 under management, and only a fee of 0.25% on assets exceeding $25,000.

“This is exactly what most people in the technology industry need. It’s the kind of advice you’d get if you had Goldman Sachs manage your money and it does away with the hidden fees we in tech despise,” said Piaw Na, a long time, former employee of Google and popular blogger on the topic of investing. “What’s more, the recommendation on the investment mix is provided with a full explanation of what was picked and why, making the whole experience a massive and much needed shift that is especially appealing now.”

Wealthfront’s high quality investing advice is powered by its Precision-Investing Platform™, the breakthrough software behind the service. The Platform uniquely assesses a customer’s true risk tolerance, recommends an optimized portfolio of carefully selected Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) spanning six asset classes, and monitors and periodically rebalances the investment mix to maintain a customer’s desired risk tolerance.

Wealthfront is backed by Silicon Valley luminaries including DAG Ventures and individual investors including Marc Andreessen, Jeff Jordan, former OpenTable CEO and President of PayPal now at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, and partners from Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

“The financial advisor world has long recognized that one day the Internet and software would pose a credible threat to their hold on the sub $5 million category of individual investors,” said Paul Pfleiderer, C.O.G. Miller Distinguished Professor of Finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Wealthfront advisor. “Wealthfront has made accessible what historically had been out of reach or prohibitively costly for a large class of investors. By using a simple, yet powerful engine for accurately assessing risk and return in the MPT context, Wealthfront has established a new standard for quality financial advisement on the web.”

“With the biggest names in venture capital and the brightest minds in software development, we’re ushering in a financial advisor service that’s capable of precisely managing a customer’s investments from $5,000 to tens of millions with a pricing approach unheard of in the financial services industry,” said Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront. “Wealthfront emerges at a time when many tech companies are enjoying record earnings, initial public offerings, and strong acquisitions. This creates masses of people in tech looking to invest for the first time and who want to manage their finances in the same manner they’ve organized every other aspect of their lives, online.”

“The promise of the Internet is to disrupt incumbent providers, enabling new companies to provide high quality services at substantial savings through the innovative use of software,” said Jeff Jordan, Wealthfront board member, former CEO OpenTable and President of PayPal and now General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Wealthfront embodies this promise, democratizing access to high quality financial advice. I believe this will appeal strongly to a generation that has grown up with the Net and use it to manage all facets of their life.”

For more information on Wealthfront Online Financial Advisor, or to create a free account, visit www.wealthfront.com.

Now we have another entrant called Birst, which today will announce what it calls a Business Intelligence appliance. No, it’s not hardware — that’s what I thought, too . It’s actually software that you install locally on your own on-premise servers. And yet it’s still a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. How does that work?

Having already become a player in the basic cloud-based BI business, the company realized that most of the data that makes BI valuable in the first place doesn’t live in the cloud but actually is used with applications that run behind the firewall.

I talked with Birst co-CEO Brad Peters, who told me that the software runs like a SaaS product — you access it through a browser, just like you would any other typical SaaS product, and you get the same benefits, including zero worries about upgrading or adding new features. But you also get the benefit of having it run on-premise behind the firewall. “It’s the exact same experience as with the cloud,” he says.

The whole point of BI, Peters says, is to take data created in various business applications — whether it’s SAP, Salesforce.com, Concur, Omniture, Siebel or what have you — into a dashboard, where it is arranged into a graphical presentation or report that you can then use to make business decisions.

The textbook case for BI is comparing data on marketing spend to deals. If you find you’re spending a lot of money on one type of marketing campaign that seems not to be generating leads and deals, and not enough on one that seems to be working better, you can see the pattern and make needed changes, Peters says. “What BI is really about is taking the raw data and synthesizing it so that business people can act on it,” rather than relying on spreadsheets.

Big companies like SAP and Oracle are in the BI business, too, but their solutions cost a lot of money and are therefore aimed more often than not at bigger companies. Yet Birst has its share of larger customers: Citrix Systems is a Birst customer, as is Rackspace, the Web and cloud services host.

So far, Birst has raised a combined $20 million in two rounds from Dag Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Hummer Winblad. Peters said the company is keeping most of its funding details close to the vest — he wouldn’t say how much Birst’s most recent round was, for example — arguing that there’s been too much attention paid so far to BI start-ups and how much money they’ve raised. “Ultimately, a software company needs to make money, and BI is really hard,” he says. “You can waste a lot of money really easily. There’s been about $300 million raised by companies trying to do BI, so clearly the amount of money raised doesn’t correlate to success.” Those sounds like words to the wise.

Lockerz’s CEO Kathy Savitt said so far $36 million has been raised, but that the total amount should be final in the next 60 days.

The led investor is DAG Ventures, with Lockerz’s previous investors, Liberty Media and Liberty’s CEO, Greg Maffei, as well as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers also participating.

New to the round is Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster. Already, Live Nation has started to work with Lockerz to sell concert tickets for Britney Spears, Rihanna, Blink-182 and others. Members of the Lockerz community can use points they earn to get discounts on those tickets.

Savitt, who started the company in 2009, said it has started to see some significant traction, clocking 46 million unique users a month, who spend an average of 17 minutes on the site, and with most of the users falling between the ages of 13 and 35.

With the round of funding, Savitt said they will be expanding the number of places users can redeem their points, making them more valuable. To date, they’ve only been used in Lockerz’s own shop, but going forward, she said, they can be used for concert tickets, like with Live Nation, but also in restaurants and retailers.

“The whole notion of points is to be a social loyalty currency that would reward engagement in a meaningful way. The first phase offered a limited number of prizes, and then discounts on merchandise, and now we are taking that next step to make it a true global currency, by making them redeemable all over — on Lockerz and off of Lockerz,” Savitt said. “We have a lot coming in the next 60 to 90 days.”

Members of Lockerz can earn points, technically called PTZ, in more than 10 ways, including uploading photos, answering polls, watching videos, listening to music, inviting friends, or just logging in. More information on how Lockerz works and its target demographic of Gen Z can be found in this interview with Savitt from February.

The money will also go toward future acquisitions. Earlier this year it acquired Plixi, a photo-sharing site, and more recently purchased AddToAny, a content sharing site, which will ultimately become Lockerz Share. Savitt said they have a third acquisition coming in the next few weeks in the social content space.

The company has about 65 employees, and previously raised $30 million in capital.

According to sources close to the situation, Wal-Mart Stores paid just over $300 million in cash for Kosmix.

The six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company–which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic–has raised $55 million from a large group of Silicon Valley venture firms.

The acquisition by the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant was announced earlier today.

Wal-Mart did not disclose terms of the deal, which is focused on building out its social and mobile e-commerce offerings.

The price for Kosmix is a pricey one to do so, but traditional retailers need to jump into the digital market now dominated by app-happy, smartphone-wielding customers.

Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs, the company said.

Kosmix was founded by the team that sold pioneering e-commerce company Junglee to Amazon in 1998.

After that, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman raised $55 million in funding from Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, and angel investors Jon Miller and Ed Zander.

As eMoney’s Tricia Duryee wrote earlier today:

The company may be best known for powering TweetBeat, which it defines as a real-time social media filter for live events. It also operates Kosmix.com, where people go to discover social content by topic, and it operates RightHealth, which it claims to be one of the top three health and medical information sites by reach.

One interesting aspect of the deal: Accel’s senior partner Jim Breyer–who was not the principal VC in the Kosmix investment–is on the board of Wal-Mart. Presumably, he recused himself from the decision.

The company did not disclose terms of the agreement, but said the acquisition would be instrumental in building out both its social and mobile initiatives.

Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs and continue to be based in Silicon Valley, the company said.

Wal-mart said the @WalmartLabs team will work on building out its social and mobile commerce strategy to link together its bricks and mortar stores with e-commerce. Today, Wal-mart operates physical stores in 15 countries and e-commerce businesses in nine countries.

Kosmix was founded by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who sold their first company, Junglee, to Amazon.com in 1998.

The six-year-old company Kosmix has raised $55 million in funding from Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dag Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Jon Miller, and Ed Zander.

In explaining what the company does on its Web site, it writes: “On any given day, people share 830 million items on Facebook, upload 6.1 million photos to Flickr, add 2.1 million minutes of video to YouTube and send 65 million tweets. Kosmix cuts through this noise to find content that matters to you.”

It’s not particularly clear how Kosmix leads to better mobile and social interactions. The company may be best known for powering TweetBeat, which it defines as a real-time social media filter for live events. It also operates Kosmix.com, where people go to discover social content by topic, and it operates RightHealth, which it claims to be one of the top three health and medical information sites by reach.

The transaction is subject to the customary closing conditions; the company anticipates it will close during the first half of this year.

The round is from Accel Partners, August Capital, DAG Ventures, First Round Capital and Sherpalo Ventures.

StumbleUpon is on its second run as a start-up. The company raised $1.5 million in angel funding in 2005 and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million in cash. In April 2009 it spun out of eBay with its founders and most of that list of investors providing Series A funding. This new round is being counted as a Series B.

StumbleUpon–which helps users serendipitously find new sites, photos and videos based on recommendations by friends and other users–has become a major traffic provider for blogs. Recent stats put out by the publisher tool provider Lijit had StumbleUpon delivering almost as much traffic as Facebook to sites within its network, and far more than Digg, Twitter and Reddit.

StumbleUpon is now up to 14 million registered users and makes 800 million content recommendations per month.

The company has a not-too-shabby 35 million downloads to date of its Wall product, and is the default media gallery for Google’s Android. But now it’s venturing out into the oh-so-hot mobile media-sharing space (see: Instagram, Path, Picplz) with a photo app called LiveShare–for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7 and the Web–that’s focused on groups.

Cooliris is also announcing today that it’s raised $9.6 million in Series C funding from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (which also recently backed Path), Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture, DAG Ventures and the Westly Group. The five-year-old Palo Alto-based company has now raised a total of $28.6 million and employs 45 people.

Cooliris’s new LiveShare app helps users create photo streams for a particular event or group of people. Everyone who is invited to a stream can share photos, taken on a phone or elsewhere. Cooliris CEO Soujanya Bhumkar said that he thinks this “hyperpersonalized” approach fits with how people think about sharing: With respect to the four aspects of space, time, interests and relationships.

What does that actually mean? While Path pushes users to identify their closest 50 friends for intimate sharing of personal photos and videos, LiveShare gives users the option of sharing with whoever is appropriate for any context.

There are many alternatives to LiveShare, especially for Apple’s iOS platform. Will users want to install yet another app because of its particular set of nifty features and the flexibility of its sharing options? Perhaps not, but people seem to increasingly utilize tools to segment their online identities, so LiveShare could become part of that trend.

There’s also competition from the social Web giant Facebook, which provides a similar way to filter its Web site based on designated friend groups (though it has not disclosed how popular the product is with users). LiveShare, like many social apps, gets its friend network information from users plugging into Facebook.

But Cooliris isn’t starting from scratch with this product. For instance, the company is making use of its existing relationship with Google, so LiveShare will be incorporated into Android’s Gallery. But with nearly $30 million raised, expectations for LiveShare will be very, very high.

Case in point: Mobile payments start-up Boku, a heavily funded (Boku is trying to be PayPal for the mobile phone, which is something, well, the eBay (EBAY) unit and many other competitors, such as Zong, want to do too.

Here is the video of an interview I did at Boku’s San Francisco HQ last week with CEO Mark Britto and Ron Hirson, SVP of product and marketing, both longtime digital execs, about all this and more:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100726/the-boku-founders-talk-about-mobile-payments-competitors-and-more/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20100526/booyah-ceo-keith-lee-talks-about-social-gaming-moolah-and-more-with-accels-jim-breyer-as-sidekick/ http://allthingsd.com/20100526/booyah-ceo-keith-lee-talks-about-social-gaming-moolah-and-more-with-accels-jim-breyer-as-sidekick/#comments Wed, 26 May 2010 12:15:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=28843

Earlier this week, BoomTown motored on down to the HQ of Booyah in downtown Palo Alto, Calif., for a chat with its CEO and co-founder, Keith Lee.

Also there: Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners moneybags who recently joined the board of the mobile social gaming start-up, forking over $20 million in new funding for the privilege.

Best known for its MyTown iPhone app, now with upward of two million users, Booyah is made up of a team of gaming industry veterans, especially from Blizzard Entertainment, which is now part of Activision Blizzard (ATVI).

Started in 2008, the company had previously raised $9 million in venture funding, mostly from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers $100 million iFund, as well as from DAG Ventures.

MyTown, which is about to come out with a new version, is one of the most popular and innovative location-based social games on Apple (AAPL) mobile devices.

That compares with other social check-in services, such as Foursquare (just over one million users) and Gowalla (250,000).

MyTown is slightly different from these services, though, focusing on gaming in its check-ins and virtual goods versus emphasis on a discovery element.

Lee and Breyer talk about all this and more in the video of my interview, which includes a short tour of Booyah’s Silicon Valley HQ (it is soon moving to San Francisco):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100526/booyah-ceo-keith-lee-talks-about-social-gaming-moolah-and-more-with-accels-jim-breyer-as-sidekick/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100517/booyah-moolah-social-gaming-company-behind-mytown-gets-20-million-in-funding/ http://allthingsd.com/20100517/booyah-moolah-social-gaming-company-behind-mytown-gets-20-million-in-funding/#comments Mon, 17 May 2010 07:01:30 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=28410

A mobile social game company called Booyah, best known for its MyTown iPhone app, announced that it has raised $20 million, mostly from Accel Partners.

The giant round is one of many doled out recently for social start-ups, such as Groupon, in which Accel also invested.

Accel’s Jim Breyer will also join Booyah’s board.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has raised $9 million in venture funding until now, mostly from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers $100 million iFund, as well as from DAG Ventures.

Both are participating in the new round.

Made up of a team of gaming industry veterans, especially from Blizzard Entertainment, which is now part of Activision Blizzard (ATVI), Booyah has been on a roll, reaching two million users for MyTown.

MyTown, which is about to come out with a new version, is one of the most popular location-based social games on the Apple (AAPL) mobile devices.

That compares with other social check-in services, such as Foursquare (just over one million users) and Gowalla (250,000).

MyTown is slightly different from these services, though, focusing on gaming in its check-ins and virtual goods versus emphasis on a discovery element.

Here’s the official press release from Booyah:

ACCEL PARTNERS CHECKS INTO BOOYAH: LEADS $20 MILLION FUNDING ROUND

Popular Location-Based Media Company Adds Industry Luminary Jim Breyer to Board of Directors

Palo Alto, Calif.–May 17, 2010–Booyah, creator of the popular location-based mobile app MyTown, has closed a $20 million round of financing and added renowned investor, Jim Breyer to its Board of Directors. Led by Accel Partners, a premier global venture firm with investments in technology-driven social media, advertising and mobile services, the new financing will be utilized to ignite and accelerate the company’s real and digital world offerings. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and DAG Ventures also participated in the round.

Since launching in December, MyTown rocketed upwards of more than 2 million users growing at over 100,000 new users week over week. MyTown passed 60 million check-ins and 250 million virtual item impressions a month. An immersive and addicting experience, users of MyTown spend an average of 70 minutes per day, establishing Booyah as the leader in real-world interactive entertainment.

“Booyah is at the epicenter of the fastest growing markets today–mobile, social, and interactive gaming,” stated Jim Breyer, Partner, Accel Partners. “Not only are they a next-generation entertainment company, but they are bridging the gap between consumers and businesses. The Booyah management team has both the passion and talent to innovate and create a wholly unique experience.”

Breyer currently is the lead & presiding Director of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc, (WMT), a Director of Dell, Inc (DELL), and a long-time investor & board member of companies such as Brightcove, Facebook, Etsy, and Marvel Entertainment (MVL).

“We are thrilled to work with a world-class partner such as Accel Partners with their experience across social, mobile and entertainment,” said Keith Lee, CEO, Booyah. The combination of Jim’s expertise in real world retail and cutting edge digital media mirrors our dedication to creating the most compelling real-world experiences. MyTown is a bold step to achieving this goal and we have very exciting plans in the near future to move far beyond the check-in.”

Unique to Booyah is their ability to blur the lines between the real and digital worlds. With extensive experience in the traditional gaming industry and cutting-edge mobile technologies, Booyah is poised to create new forms of entertainment for the masses and revolutionize the consumer experience. In the massively popular app MyTown users can check in at real-world locations using GPS features to unlock rewards. Players can purchase, upgrade and collect rent on their properties, enjoying MyTown ownership of their favorite real-life places.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100517/booyah-moolah-social-gaming-company-behind-mytown-gets-20-million-in-funding/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/20100119/another-big-bet-on-mobile-payments-boku-raises-25-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20100119/another-big-bet-on-mobile-payments-boku-raises-25-million/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:00:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=15174 Is there big money in mobile payments–systems that let people buy stuff using their phones, charging purchases to their wireless bills? Not yet, perhaps. But investors are betting there will be.

Latest example: Boku, a mobile payment start-up that raised $13 million last June, has added another $25 million via a C round led by DAG Ventures. Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures are all re-upping.

For now, Boku and competitors like Zong are focused on letting people use their phones to buy “virtual goods,” primarily on social games run by the likes of Zynga, Playdom, and Playfish from Electronic Arts (ERTS).

But even if you believe that the virtual goods business is not going the way of Pet Rocks, it is going to be somewhat limited–the most obvious users for this stuff are kids who don’t have their own credits cards–and competition will ratchet up if Facebook decides to finally offer its own payment platform, which seems very likely.

But the amount of money the start-ups are raising indicates that they have much bigger ambitions. They want to turn your phone into a payment system for “real” stuff. Easy enough to see how you could extend this to other digital purchases, like music, video, etc., but there’s no reason you couldn’t buy physical goods this way.

Could happen, too. Though we’ve been hearing about that scenario for more than a decade, and it hasn’t taken off yet.

One near-term obstacle, at least in the U.S., is carrier fees–AT&T (T), Sprint (S) et al generally take up to 50 percent of each transaction that happens on their networks. If the mobile payment business is going to go up, those numbers need to come down.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100119/another-big-bet-on-mobile-payments-boku-raises-25-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090609/metacafe-adds-a-hub-for-tv/ http://allthingsd.com/20090609/metacafe-adds-a-hub-for-tv/#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:45:17 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=12511 Metacafe, seeking to reach more “media-snacking” consumers, is launching a section of its video site devoted to short clips from “Nurse Jackie,” “Weeds,” “Big Brother” and other television shows.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company, which is funded by Highland Capital Partners and DAG Ventures, focuses on what it sees as a middle ground between YouTube and Hulu–short-form videos that are professionally produced or poised to go viral–said its chief executive, Erick Hachenburg, a former Electronics Arts (ERTS) executive.

YouTube has a high percentage of personal or response videos, he said, while Hulu is where consumers go to watch an entire TV episode. Metacafe.com, in contrast, is pared down to channels for movie trailers, sports clips and music videos. It had about 7.3 million unique video viewers in April, according to comScore (SCOR), compared with Hulu’s 40.1 million uniques.

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