The service manages all of the emails you receive regarding e-commerce purchases, including shipping notifications, tracking numbers and return policies to make them easily accessible.

Despite the somewhat obscure idea, the year-old company is getting two big votes of confidence today: It has raised $9.4 million in venture capital, and it is rolling out a partnership with Yahoo Mail.

“We are making online shopping simpler by giving you one private and central location to keep track of all your orders from across the Web,” said Scott Brady, CEO of Project Slice.

In addition to aggregating e-commerce receipts, it will also let you quickly find receipts from physical retailers.

Brady said increasingly companies such as Apple, Patagonia and Nordstrom are experimenting with allowing customers who visit a store in person to receive their receipts by email.

“Most of the growth isn’t coming from e-commerce,” he said. “It’s coming from bricks and mortar retailers that are offering digital receipts. In the past 60 days, there’s been a wave of merchants, like Patagonia and Whole Foods, that are testing it. You can imagine what your inbox will look like.”

The company’s first round of capital was led by DCM and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other investors include Michael Birch, Floodgate, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and Rick Thompson.

Initially, the service is being rolled out to Yahoo Mail as part of the latest version of the email application. The application called “All My Purchases” can be found in the side bar.

For now, the company is focused on getting consumers to adopt the product and then will figure out how to monetize it later. However, you can imagine that in the future having a database of spending habits could be valuable to the right advertisers.

The successful IPO comes despite the fact that 1) Renren is not profitable, 2) it has only 31 million active users and declining growth numbers in light of increased competition, and 3) the company lowered its growth numbers since first filing to go public and the head of its audit committee resigned from the company’s board earlier this week after allegations of fraud at one of his other companies.

But did we mention? China! Social network! SocialnetworkChina!

Shares of Renren opened at $14 and were trading above $18 the rest of the day.

Investors in Renren, which also offers group buying deals and games, include Softbank, DCM and General Atlantic, and the company is also allowing Alibaba Group, China Media Capital and CITIC Securities to buy $110 million worth of shares today through a private placement. The company had revenues of $76.5 million in 2010 with a net loss of $61.2 million.

Image credits: Stock chart via Marketwatch; Renren growth chart via RedTech Advisors, which has a PDF report on the company here.

The round was led by Keytone Ventures of China and DCM, and will be used for expanding in the U.S., Europe and Asia as it tries to build a hub where it connects both game-makers and players on the phone. The company, which is headquartered in Beijing and has offices in Menlo Park, Calif., has built a platform that can host mobile games on behalf of mobile developers who can tap into its social network.

So far, it has attracted 15 million users, and since launching the platform last year, has gained access to 350 applications. Games on the network include Paper Toss and a bunch of branded games, like Papaya Blackjack, Papaya Pet and Papaya Farm.

In a similar vein, Japanese-based Gree acquired San Francisco-based OpenFeint last week for $104 million, plus invested additional capital for growth of the OpenFeint platform. And, last year, Japanese-based DeNA purchased San Francisco-based Ngmoco, which is also working on a mobile social network on Android.

PeerPong “wound down just this past month,” Choy told NetworkEffect, and a couple other members of the PeerPong team joined Formspring as well. To be clear, Formspring did not acquire PeerPong, but at least three of its employees moved over together.

TechCrunch reported Choy’s hiring today, but glossed over the mention of PeerPong. Choy said PeerPong had six employees before it closed.

A cached message from the PeerPong home page reads:

We’re Sorry, but PeerPong is in end of life mode.

When we launched Peerpong.com in early 2010 we believed we could use advanced semantic technology to let people access expertise across social media. We succeeded in finding and indexing over five million people by their knowledge and expertise whether on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin, and helped answer questions from hundreds of thousands of users from these ridiculously smart people over the last year.

Unfortunately we find ourselves in a tough position where the service alone can’t support our business goals and sadly need to discontinue the site. I want to thank everyone who committed their time and effort to Peerpong, including the many members who had great answers for all types of questions, from technology to food to dating, and to the Peerpong team directly for the many months trying to unite NLP/semantics with an engaging user experience. There’s no pithy comment to summarize the experience of trying to make something incredible and falling short, only deep gratitude and few, but significant regrets.

Ro Choy – CEO

PeerPong had raised $2.8 million from Partech International, DCM, First Round Capital and Charles River Ventures after being incubated at Partech under the name Muchobene. PeerPong, which Choy joined as CEO in January 2010 after leaving social app maker RockYou, promised to help connect users to subject matter experts through social media.

Earlier this year, PeerPong was experimenting with a so-called pivot to offer a new service called Rendezvous that would have semantically analyzed users’ Facebook profiles to find events and people they might be interested in. But that didn’t work out either.

Formspring, meanwhile, says that as of this week users of its service will have submitted three billion answers to each other’s questions.

Backers include Chinese Internet firm Tencent, Japanese social network GREE, and KDDI, Japan’s second largest mobile operator. The A-Fund, as the effort is known, will be managed by DCM and is already working on closing its first couple of investments.

In an interview on Thursday, DCM general partner David Chao said that the opportunity Android presents is unprecedented.

“This is the equivalent of when Microsoft came up with Windows to combat the pioneering stuff that the Macintosh came up with,” Chao told Mobilized. “We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of Android becoming a dominant operating system in terms of mobile and connected systems.”

Of course, DCM is far from the only venture firm focused on Android, nor is the new fund the only one focused on Google’s operating system. Accel’s Rich Wong, for example, has been a huge proponent of Android and backer of firms that are focused on that platform.

Still, Chao said there are still product areas and regions where Android-based efforts are underfunded. In particular, he mentioned that companies in Japan and China as well as those focused on digital media and tablet applications are among the spots in need of further investment. The A-Fund, he said, is open to companies of all sizes and in all regions. It’s also open to companies doing services and hardware and not just those making applications.

“We absolutely do not want the world to think this is just an app fund,” Chao said.

Although the focus of the fund is on spurring the Android-based economy, Chao said the fund doesn’t mandate that those it invests in focus solely on Google’s operating system. However, the ideal companies, he said, are “Android-heavy” ones whose ideas haven’t been possible in more restrictive ecosystems, such as the one surrounding Apple’s iPhone.

“We are looking for companies that truly take advantage of the openness of Android and companies that are obviously relatively potentially frustrated with the other platforms,” Chao said.

Although it has now been a couple of years since the launch of the G1, the first Android phone, the operating system has posted significant gains in recent months and is expanding its reach later this year, in particular as devices as low as $50 or $75 arrive in developing markets. Android-based devices are expected to make up 40 percent of the smartphone market this year, according to IDC.

In about a month, the company expects to announce additional investment partners outside of Asia, as well as the first companies in which the fund is investing.

“We are closing three or four deals as we speak,” Chao said.

(Android pop image courtesy of Flickr user asirap)

Add that to the $8 million AdKeeper rounded up earlier in 2010 from investors including DCM, Spark Capital, First Round Capital, and the New York Times, and you get a sense of the ambition involved here. CEO Scott Kurnit thinks he’ll end up creating a new kind of advertising platform — if Internet users cooperate.

The concept is pretty simple: Web visitors click on ads they like, and store them in a digital locker so they can check them out later. Advertisers will pay AdKeeper a premium.

If it works, it could be huge, but that assumes consumers play along. More than that, really: AdKeeper expects consumers to change their behavior, and start embracing Web ads instead of ignoring them.

Google works brilliantly because it can show searchers relevant ads. But the overwhelming majority of Web surfers ignore conventional display ads — the kind that AdKeeper wants to work with. So who’s going to save ads they’re not looking at in the first place?

Kurnit’s short answer is that he expects marketers to start making ads people will want to hang on to. For a longer answer, check out this AdAge interview. He’s an excellent salesman, and does a good job of banishing the CueCat comparisons I keep thinking of. For now.

This is normally the part in a funding story where a startup talks about its impressive growth in users/traffic/ad impressions or something. But AdKeeper can’t do any of that, because it’s not on any ads yet. Kurnit says that should happen by mid-February.

Instead, the company points to a long list of advertisers, like Pepsi and AT&T, that have said they like the idea. It also points to market research it commissioned which it says shows a majority of Web users would like to save their ads.

And perhaps the company’s biggest selling point is Kurnit, who built About.com during the first Web boom and sold it to Primedia for $700 million in 2001. The company, a forerunner to Web story mills like Demand Media, ended up at the New York Times, where it still makes up a big chunk of the paper’s online business. And its success made Kurnit wealthy and well-respected.

How well-respected? Enough to round up endorsements from people who might not be convinced about AdKeeper, but like its CEO quite a bit.

Here’s the response I got from a member of Kurnit’s advisory board when I asked them to explain AdKeeper to me: “Not sure I get it myself. But I love Scott!”

The Beijing-based company has raised $20 million from DCM and Sequoia Capital China in its first round of venture funding. The capital will enable the company to expand its business offering brand-name clothes, accessories, makeup and home furnishings through time-sensitive online discounted offers.

The company has 1.5 million members across China and is one of a handful of start-ups taking the model popularized in the U.S. by companies such as Groupon Inc. and Gilt Groupe Inc., European companies like Spanish internet retailers BuyVip GmbH and Privalia Venta Directa S.L., or the French site Vente Privee, which is backed by Summit Partners LLC.

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With a couple of downloads and the camera application on a smart phone, users of Tonchidot’s software can view information on their phone screen about their physical location, drawn from geo-tagged content submitted by users. They can also battle virtual monsters or defuse virtual bombs in real-world environments. Tonchidot’s technology combines the “check-in” elements of companies like Foursquare Inc. with social games similar to those of Zynga Game Network Inc.

Honda says his favorite Tonchidot game is called Sekai Hero, in which he checks in to a location to collect points with his pink-haired monk avatar. He can also fight monsters that might be lurking in the location’s augmented reality space. “I play quite a bit,” he said. “My wife is actually fed up with me.”

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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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Yet another Web 2.0 wunderkind got itself more shelter from the economic storm–widget maker RockYou announced today that it has nabbed a $17 million investment from two Asian firms, SoftBank Group and SK Telecom Ventures.

The investment will be added to $35 million from the Redwood City, Calif.-based start-up’s C round in June. Overall, RockYou has raised a total of $67 million from investors, including DCM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International and Sequoia Capital.

It is unclear if the company’s valuation is at the previous $400 million level or not.

In a video interview with BoomTown on Friday (see below), the company’s co-founders, CEO Lance Tokuda and CTO Jia Shen, said the money would be used to expand into the Asia-Pacific market, including onto Xiaonei, one of China’s largest social-networking sites.

As part of the investment, SoftBank–which has major Web investments all over Asia–and RockYou, the company said in a press release, “will also set up a new joint venture company that will develop widget and application products and services for use on PCs and mobile devices in the Asian market, in particular the Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Chinese markets.”

Well, that’s a horse of a different color, what with most Web 2.0 outfits pulling in their horns of late.

Indeed, RockYou said it would also use the money to open offices in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit and look at making some opportunistic acquisitions, as well as adding to its advertising sales force and developing more brand and vertical channels.

The company’s NYC sales office, previously a one-man shop, is expanding, adds MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka. It hired two people since August and still has one position open and plenty of applicants, says sales boss Paul van de Kamp.

Why all the frenetic activity from RockYou, which says it had over 100 million monthly uniques with over eight billion page views from its popular third-party applications like Super Wall?

Well, a few good reasons, such as: the need to keep up with its key competitor, Slide, which raised its own huge war chest; to find new audiences away from the two top social-networking site, Facebook and MySpace, from which it gets most of its traffic; to improve its products, in order to get better ad rates; and, most of all, to weather the current econalypse in the ad sector.

While RockYou’s execs believe the ad market for widgets and social networking is on the rise in comparison to other kinds of media, it will still be a glum outlook for everyone for a while.

Tokuda and Shen talk about that, as well as the investment, in the video here, and below that is a video I did a year ago with the pair: