According to numerous sources close to the company, Yahoo is offering to pay $30 million to $40 million for the maker of address book apps and plugins.

That’s below the more than $40 million raised by the San Francisco-based startup from a variety of venture capitalists, including First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Launched in 2008, Xobni — which is “inbox” spelled backwards — received its initial round of funding in 2006 from Y Combinator.

Sources inside Yahoo said that, as envisioned at the current acquisition offer, Xobni common shareholders might not get any of their investment back over preferred ones, which might hold up or even scotch any deal. Yahoo could certainly offer more, although sources said that seemed unlikely.

As with most of these purchases, any deal might also simply fall apart. But other sources noted that the company has been shopped to several different companies and that Yahoo has offered the best price and is the most natural home for it, given its strong email offerings.

Sources said the deal was of particular interest of Yahoo co-founder David Filo, who still plays a key tech role at Yahoo and has worked previously with Xobni’s CEO Jeff Bonforte. Before he headed Xobni, Bonforte was VP of social search and the real-time communications for Yahoo.

Bonforte would certainly be a nice re-hire for the Silicon Valley Internet giant, which is in need of leadership in the key communications area.

AllThingsD.com had previously reported on Yahoo’s interest in Xobni. It has been mulling the company — as well as a spate of others all over the tech landscape — for a while.

As Liz Gannes noted, Xobni “could be a fit for Yahoo’s mail and productivity tools, as it neatly creates automated profiles for each email contact with correspondence history and social network data.” Its products have expanded from just an Microsoft Outlook plugin to supporting Google’s Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Apple’s iCloud, and it also offers Smartr Contacts apps for Android and iPhone.

If the deal is complete, it continues Yahoo’s buying binge under CEO Marissa Mayer, who appears to be using M&A as a talent recruitment tool — essentially, if you can’t hire them, buy their company.

Among her recent purchases are a spate of mobile app companies, for which she has only spent $16 million in total, with the exception of Summly for a lot more. And, of course, she also bought Tumblr for cool $1.1 billion.

Airware, a startup that is creating a software platform for commercial drones, said it had raised $10.7 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Google Ventures also participated. As part of the deal, Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon will join Airware’s board.

The Newport Beach, Calif., company said it would use the money to expand staff for its universal development platform as the market for non-military drones expands.

Airware founder and CEO Jonathan Downey said that uses of drones will be increasing for a wide range of purposes, from checking infrastructure to monitoring mining operations to preventing poaching.

In an interview, Downey said that he expects to compete with a range of ex-military efforts, but that the most successful companies will be those that provide a platform to allow for the widest range of innovations.

“This is going to be about a lot more than we know or can guess,” he said. “The industry is at its very beginnings.”

Dixon agrees. “Hardware is the new software,” he said about the investment in Airware, which he said he discovered after attending conferences about the fast-moving drones business, noting that the overall field of robotics has “overpromised and underdelivered.”

Airware came out of both the Lemnos Labs and Y Combinator incubators and had raised seed financing from First Round Capital, Firelake Capital, RRE Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Promus Ventures and several Y Combinator partners.

On Deck announced this morning that Google Ventures has led an additional $17 million investment with participation from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Industry Ventures. Other investors in the round include Institutional Venture Partners, RRE Ventures and First Round Capital.

That round comes on top of a $100 million round of debt financing raised last year from Goldman Sachs and Fortress Credit Corp., and a $15 million Series C led by SAP Ventures in 2011.

So far, On Deck has funded more than $450 million in loans to small businesses. Its borrowers, CEO Noah Breslow told me yesterday, tend to be small: Restaurants, auto body shops, doctor’s and dentist’s offices, construction contractors. Most of them have 200 employees or less. “Our customers tend to be businesses that do a large number of small-ticket transactions,” he said.

Launched in 2006, On Deck has turned out to be sort of a right-time, right-place story. Commercial banks were being tightfisted with loans, even to healthy businesses. But they also tend to be challenged by the time and effort that goes into underwriting a smallish loan that the borrower only needs for a short period of time.

Where banks tend to focus more on the personal credit rating, the On Deck software gathers live digital data from a business’s operations in order to help evaluate the business’s health. The point is to use that data that banks and other potential investors usually don’t see, as a tool to realistically evaluate the risk of making a loan that goes beyond the simple credit rating of the business owner. On Deck then takes it a step further and actually makes the loan.

Breslow said loan volume is up 100 percent over last year, and is on track to grow again by 140 percent this year. By the end of the year, it will have loaned more than $1 billion to small businesses.

As the business grows, On Deck has gathered a lot of data on its applicants. And as so many companies are starting to realize, that aggregated data is yielding some interesting insights. Stay tuned for more on that later this year.

First reported by ReadWrite, the deal will bring Mashery’s 125 employees into Intel’s services division. APIs are the keys to working with different cloud services and software. For developers, access to an API is usually the first step to building enhancements and ancillary services and features, or getting two services working together.

Mashery had raised more than $34 million, according to Crunchbase, the most recent of which was a $12 million venture round led by OpenView Ventures and Cisco Systems. Prior investors include First Round Capital and Formative Ventures. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The deal represents another example of Intel’s shift toward software development and away from a pure focus on building chips. In 2010 Intel acquired the software security firm McAfee for $7.7 billion. The idea behind that deal was to marry Intel chips that go into PCs and servers and other devices with McAfee’s various security capabilities.

The software and services group, which includes both McAfee and Wind River Systems, which Intel acquired in 2009 and which is run by Renée James, is a relatively small unit within Intel. In 2012, the company reported sales just under $2.4 billion, or about 4.5 percent of revenue. The group reported an $11 million operating loss according to Intel’s latest 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

This level of engagement is at least one motivation behind a new company called Handshakez that today will announce it has landed a $3.6 million Series A round of funding led by Austin Ventures, with First Round Capital, Floodgate, CrunchFund and Valhalla Partners also participating.

CEO Jason Wesbecher explained it to me like this: Interactions between a seller and a customer are moved out of the normal channels like email and into a private collaborative space on the Web, called a “room.” Every interaction is measured and assigned a value that gets reinterpreted as a “temperature.” As you might expect, the warmer the temperature in the room, the better the relationship is. A “hot” room might signal that it’s time to raise the level of the relationship with a customer, while a “colder” room might signal that the customer needs more attention.

All these temperatures can then be shared within Salesforce.com and create an additional signal on the status of the customer relationship, Wesbecher told me. “If you think about how companies like Marketo and Eloqua and HubSpot have done on the lead-scoring side, we pick up where they leave off,” he said. Sales managers like it, Wesbecher says, because the data inside Salesforce.com can be kind of subjective: People on sales teams might underreport the nature of their relationship with the customer, or they might make it look better than it is. “This eliminates the subject nature of the forecast by adding a consistent and objective measure,” he says.

Wesbecher said Handshakez is closing the round earlier than expected. “We weren’t planning on doing an A round before this summer, but we saw some great momentum in the fourth quarter of 2012, and decided to add a little rocket fuel,” he said.

He’s a veteran marketing exec with stops at Jive Software, Siebel Systems and Tibco on his resume. The other co-founders are Michael Osborne, the chief revenue officer, who led Bazaarvoice through its IPO last year; and Scott Brittain, the CTO, a former VP at Appconomy and SolarWinds.

Customers of Handshakez so far include Corel, which saw the size of its deals grow by 45 percent, and Punchh, a social loyalty platform aimed at restaurants, which reported saving 10 hours a week on sales administrative work. Another customer, AlterPoint, a network governance provider, says it saw its renewal rates increase by 10 percent.

Members of the Dorm Room Fund Philadelphia team

That’s what First Round Capital has already done with its Dorm Room Fund in Philadelphia, and the firm’s Phin Barnes said it was working well enough that this week the second Dorm Room Fund will launch in New York at Columbia, NYU, Princeton and the Cornell Tech campus.

And there are more programs to come, said Barnes, describing Dorm Room Fund as “a way to delay making a choice” between dropping out of school to start a company and staying in school while pursuing entrepreneurship.

First Round Capital doesn’t take a proprietary interest in the startups, though it hopes to see a financial return as the sole investor in the fund.

The Philadelphia-based Dorm Room Fund has made four investments since late last year, with one of them announced so far: A screen-sharing customer service tool called Firefly.

Investors in the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company include First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners, as well as a handful of angel investors, including Dave Tisch of Box Group, Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg (co-founders of Invite Media), Jason Finger of Seamless and Jim Moran of Yipit.

The service does not send prepared meals to the home. Instead, it sends all of the ingredients necessary to make a recipe, including the meats, grains and sauces. The service costs $9.99 per person for each meal.

Blue Apron’s service, which is available in the eastern U.S., is targeting anyone who wants to cook more, but doesn’t have the time to shop or plan. Less than a year after launching, it is already shipping about 6,000 meals a week, said Matt Salzberg, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

“Aside from the convenience and cost-effectiveness to cook this way, it is an incredible learning experience that can teach you new foods that you haven’t cooked before,” he said.

Blue Apron is part of a crop of online food delivery services that are targeting busy professionals. A recent story in the New York Times reviewed five providers, including HelloFresh, Blue Apron, Plated, ChefDay! and FreshDirect. It said that Blue Apron scored high for having very fresh ingredients and clear recipe cards, but found that sometimes the concepts were a little too adventurous, such as pickled daikon and ground-lamb kebabs.

In a story by my colleague Lauren Goode, she found that there are some flaws with the services. For instance, not all of them are offered in all U.S. markets, and there’s sometimes no ability to alter recipes in case of food allergies.

Salzberg, who was previously a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners, said Blue Apron will be using the funding to expand nationwide over the next several months and to increase marketing. It will also be looking for ways to accomodate customers with specific dietary restrictions.

“We think our business has the opportunity to be a very large business. It’s one of the few markets that is applicable to everyone on the planet,” he said. “Everyone cooks, and everyone eats.”

Institutional Venture Partners led the round, with existing investors RRE Ventures, SAP Ventures and First Round Capital also participating.

To date, the New York-based company has raised $75 million in equity, and even more if you count the $100 million in debt it secured from Goldman Sachs and Fortress Credit in August.

On Deck said it will use the capital raised today to fund additional growth, which includes new product development and getting the word out to more merchants about the company.

On Deck lends between $5,000 and $150,000 in short-term loans to small businesses, ranging from auto repair shops to bridal boutiques. It vows that the loan application process can take as little as 15 minutes because it uses technology on the back end to evaluate a company beyond its credit scores.

Other lenders provide loans online, but most are targeting other online entities. For instance, some of the companies that have entered that space include Kabbage, which has raised $56 million in capital, and more recently, Amazon.com.

Since 2008, On Deck says, it has deployed $400 million to thousands of small-to-medium-sized businesses.

The Philadelphia-based company, which applies image recognition to track pictures posted on Pinterest on behalf of brands, has now raised $3 million in Series A funding led by NEA with First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures (the three also provided seed funding for the company, back in 2011, when it was doing something completely different, an “Airbnb for parking and storage” called Storably).

Curalate’s investors, of course, aren’t putting more money in based on the name alone. They’re pleased to see that in the year since Curalate launched it has signed customers including the Grammys, Whole Foods and Gap.

Curalate provides both analytics and marketing tools. It tells brands which pinned content referred what traffic, and helps them run Pinterest contests.

CEO Apu Gupta says the company’s approach of using image recognition is better than those of keyword-based competitors, because only 10 percent of Pinterest posts include the name of a brand explicitly. Plus, as much as 48 percent of the most popular Pinterest pins are linked to expired pages on retailers’ sites.

“Our software reads the pixels in the image,” Gupta said. “We ignore the URLs, we ignore the words, and we say, let’s match up these images like a giant game of memory.”

Okay, but Pinterest itself just introduced commercial accounts in November and, at the time, the company’s platform manager, Cat Lee, told AllThingsD that the company definitely planned to go more deeply into analytics. The company also doesn’t have a clearly defined platform strategy or formal relationships with many of the people in its ecosystem, including Curalate. Isn’t competition from the platform itself a big risk?

Gupta and his new board member, Patrick Chung of NEA, had a few answers for that. First of all, if you look to Twitter as an example, even though it offers basic analytics, there has still been room for Radian6 and Buddy Media.

Secondly, as Chung put it, Curalate doesn’t just exist flat on Pinterest’s platform — it “creates a layer of data that doesn’t belong to anyone but Curalate and its customers.” And third, Gupta said, Curalate will soon integrate Instagram tracking and analytics.

That will change soon, Aereo says: The startup plans to roll out 22 more U.S. cities this year, starting in “late spring.”

That expansion will be funded by a $38 million B round that the company is also announcing. It’s an inside round, led again by Barry Diller’s IAC, along with previous investor Highland Capital Partners.

Other early backers, including FirstMark Capital and First Round Capital, are also back. The company has raised $63 million to date.

Aereo grabs over-the-air TV signals and routes them to users over the Internet, so they can watch broadcast TV whenever and wherever they want, via devices like PCs, iPads and Roku boxes.

It doesn’t pay for access to the broadcasters’ programming, but it is spending plenty of money on a court fight over that issue. It will also have to spend a chunk of change for each new city it opens in, both for marketing and to build out an array of tiny antennas it uses to pull down the TV signals.

Aereo’s expansion won’t change its operating plan, which means that it will only let users watch “in-market” TV. That is: If you live in New York City, you won’t be able to use Aereo to watch a Bears game airing on a Chicago station.

Speaking of which — here’s the Aereo expansion list, which includes Chicago and 21 other cities. Assuming, of course, that the courts don’t shut the company down before they get a chance to get going: Boston, Miami, Austin, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Detroit, Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Tampa, Cleveland, Kansas City, Raleigh-Durham, Salt Lake City, Birmingham, Providence, and Madison, Wis.

And here’s a statement from Diller: “Free over the air television has been core to communications in the US since its beginning. Aereo is a superb technology allowing consumers to use the modern tools of the Internet to receive this, and other programming, with a great user interface and navigation that is easy and inexpensive. I continue to be excited by the possibilities and fully support its expansion.”

Absolutely not, says managment guru Tom Peters. Via Twitter, he announced his disappointment:

Aargh. Hate hate hate to see Zipcar swallowed by Avis!! Greedy VCs looking for quick payback, I presume???

– Tom Peters (@tom_peters) January 2, 2013

After getting some pushback from start-up folk like First Round Capital’s Chris Fralic, kbs+’s Darren Herman and angel investor Jerry Neumann, Peters concedes that maybe this wasn’t the case here, and that he doesn’t really know or care much about Zipcar the company, but he really thinks most VCs suck.

So let’s stipulate that some VCs are fantastic human beings and others are not. But let’s also point out that Zipcar’s three primary VC backers — Benchmark, Greylock and AOL co-founder Steve Case’s Revolution investment group — seem to have been Zipcar believers, not Zipcar flippers.

Zipcar went public in April 2011, when it priced at $18 a share and popped to $26. At the end of 2011, Benchmark still had 66 percent of its original stake, and Greylock and Case hadn’t sold a share (click charts to enlarge).

Neither Benchmark nor Greylock seem to have sold anything since then, while Case ended up betting $8 million more on Zipcar in August 2012.

Case’s summer investment now looks pretty good, since he was buying stock on the open market for an average of $7.80 a share, and Avis is going pay him $12.25. But Case, Greylock and Benchmark still missed many other chances to sell off their Zipcar stakes at much higher prices.

In November 2011 — more than half a year after the Zipcar IPO, when most lockups traditionally expire — Zipcar was trading at $20. If its VCs were looking for a quick payback, that would have been the best time to bail out.

Here’s the annual holiday video lunacy from First Round Capital, which is always fun to watch, especially if it’s super awkward to see venture capitalists cavorting all around in costume.

And cavort they do in this mash-up of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” and “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, which are the two infectious musical hits of 2012.

(Last year, it was Rebecca Black’s “Friday” as the muse. Forgot her? Me too!)

First Round features their companies in its yearly video effort, using the song and dance.

Enjoy:

Venture capitalists often tell entrepreneurs that, beyond investing, a VC can provide a lot of value by giving advice or making valuable introductions.

Here’s one I hadn’t seen before: VCs promoting their portfolio companies to friends, families and associates as places to do their holiday shopping.

First Round Capital is launching a special site today, where more than two dozen of their investments are listing holiday deals for Cyber Monday. Companies participating include One Kings Lane, Kiwi Crate, Birchbox, Dog Vacay, Warby Parker, Fab.com, Threadflip and Hotel Tonight. The offers range from free shipping to $50 or 15 percent off, depending on the kind of products and services for sale.

First Round Capital is heavily invested in e-commerce, so it knows all too well what the holidays can mean to a young company trying to grow its revenue.

This year is promising to be a monster online shopping event, with record-setting days already taking place. The day after Thanksgiving, called Black Friday, turned into an online feeding frenzy, with consumers spending $1.04 billion, an increase of 26 percent over last year. Amazon saw the most action, as was expected, followed by Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple.

If First Round Capital’s companies can capture just a slice of that discretionary spending, it could mean a couple of good months to top off the year (which leads to higher valuations and happy investors). First Round Partner Josh Kopelman wrote a brief blog post directing people to visit the site, adding that the companies “will be shipping hundreds of thousands of products this holiday season to customers all over the world.” You can bet we’ll see other partners tweeting it, Facebooking it and sending it out via email, as well (not to mention tipping off the media).

But, for once, as part of announcing its fourth round of capital today, Flurry is talking about how well its own business is doing — and things aren’t too shabby.

In an interview, Simon Khalaf, Flurry’s president and CEO, said the company’s revenue is on track to hit $80 million to $100 million this year, up 300 percent over 2011. The company is also cash-flow positive, and is on track to go public as soon as next year.

Crosslink Capital led the $25 million round, with participation from existing investors, including Menlo Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, InterWest Partners, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and Draper Richards.

Khalaf said Flurry selected Crosslink, in part, because of the firm’s experience in taking companies like Pandora and Omniture public. In all, the company has raised $51.6 million.

While many people may not have heard of Flurry because it is not a consumer-facing product, it is crunching numbers behind the scenes of some of the most popular apps running across Android, iOS and a number of other platforms. Today, 250,000 apps use its analytics tools for free, or are tapping into its ad network, called AppCircle, which helps developers acquire new users.

Khalaf said that two things are driving the company’s growth right now: The adoption of smartphones and tablets on a global scale, and a growing number of applications that need its services. In more mature markets, like the U.S., it’s mostly the growth of tablets. “It’s the trend that’s replacing laptops and 13-inch TVs and the gaming console and the magazine rack — all at the same time. It’s infinite growth,” he said.

Today, 65 percent of the company’s revenue comes from the U.S., with the bulk of international revenue coming from Europe. Next, Flurry plans to expand to Asia and Latin America. Its advertising platform reaches more than 700 million monthly unique visitors, and with the adoption of more devices, Khalaf estimates it will soon hit more than one billion.

Currently, the bulk of the apps using Flurry’s platform include gaming, social networking and dating, but increasingly, he expects that to change, with more interest coming from the traditional entertainment industry.

While there are many opportunities for growth, the CEO admits that there are still challenges ahead — the primary one being what kind of ad formats will be dominant on mobile. Since smartphones have smaller screens, banner advertisements don’t always work as well. Khalaf said Flurry is having some luck with video advertisements, but a lot of work still has to be done in figuring out the best way to catch a user’s attention.

“We can find really cool ad units that can engage consumers,” he promises.

Here’s the full release:

Flurry Raises $25 Million Series D to Solidify Mobile App Measurement and Advertising Leadership

San Francisco, CA — November 2, 2012 — Flurry, a leading mobile app measurement and advertising platform, today announced that it has received $25 million in an oversubscribed Series D round of financing led by Crosslink Capital. The round of funding, which included full participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, InterWest Partners, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and Draper Richards, brings the company’s total funding to $51.6 million.  Nick Mignano, Partner at Crosslink Capital, will join Flurry’s board of directors.

Flurry will use the financing to accelerate the adoption of newly introduced platform products Flurry AppSpot, its supply-side platform, and Flurry Ad Analytics, its advertising effectiveness solution. Flurry will also use funds to grow its team and expand internationally.

“Flurry is powering a new wave of digital advertising with big data for the mobile app economy in an exciting way,” said Nick Mignano, Partner of Crosslink Capital.  “The scale at which the company is operating in terms of data volume, ad serving and revenue generation impressed our team. This enables one of the most innovative uses of data for business customers since our private investment in Omniture in 2006.”

Flurry has grown significantly over the past year, quadrupling the number of data points it measures, now over 32 billion per day.  Each day, the company measures 1.9 billion application sessions across more than 250 million unique smartphone and tablet devices. Over the last year, Flurry has doubled the number of applications using its services from 120,000 to more than 250,000.  In total, more than 80,000 companies now use Flurry services across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, HTML5 and JavaME platforms.

Flurry AppCircle, the company’s data-driven ad network, has grown by more than 3 times in volume over the last year. AppCircle now delivers over 120 million completed monthly advertising conversions, including first-time app downloads, user app re-engagements and completed video views.

“Flurry is excited to welcome Crosslink to our board as we expand the reach and adoption of the Flurry platform,” said Simon Khalaf, Flurry president and chief executive officer.  “Flurry is a unique, mobile-first company playing at the intersection of big data, mobile applications and digital advertising. We look forward to using this new round of funding to significantly accelerate our growth in one of the fastest growing technology markets in history.”

Florent Peyre, the co-founder and president of CasaHop, a home-swapping site, has left the company.

After getting the New York-based company off the ground earlier this year, Peyre confirmed that he decided to move on, but will continue as an adviser. No word on what he is doing next.

The social travel site, which is following in the footsteps of other sites like Airbnb, launched in May and had raised about $1.2 million in funding. The impressive investor list includes Lerer Ventures, First Round Capital, Betaworks and many other angels.

Peyre, whom I interviewed in this video in June, founded the company along with Paul Berry, the former CTO of Huffington Post. Prior to joining CasaHop, Peyre was the VP of Business Development and Strategy at Gilt City, Gilt Groupe’s daily deals business.

Starting today, Cabana will be joining Twitter’s platform team, where it will be building tools “to help third-party developers create new experiences on Twitter,” according to a blog post.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but given that Cabana will be shutting down its mobile app development tools on Dec. 1, it sounds like Twitter was more interested in the team than the actual product. It’s worth noting that while HTML5 was once hyped as the way to solve fragmentation in mobile, the trend has shifted back toward native applications since they provide a better user experience — at least for now.

Cabana’s technology was used, in part, to turn Facebook fan pages into mobile apps. The San Francisco-based company’s list of investors includes First Round Capital and other high-profile angels, including Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca and Dave Morin. The Cabana co-founders are Reeve Thompson and Jeremy Gordon.

Twitter confirmed the acquisition and provided the following statement: “Reeve Thompson, Jeremy Gordon and their team have created a product that makes it easier for people to build rich mobile apps. At Twitter, they will join our platform team and build tools to help third-party developers create new experiences on Twitter.”

Intuition and the general state of the economy would tell you that small businesses are still challenged, some would say by over-active government policy; others would say by a lack of access to capital. Small businesses have, in recent years, had a hard time getting banks to finance loans, mainly because banks look at small business loans as more akin to personal loans, and thus consider the owner’s personal credit information rather than the state of the business itself.

Last year, I wrote bit about a start-up intending to change that. On Deck Capital created a technology platform aimed at making it easier for lending banks to gather the data they need to properly vet a loan candidate, and for helping that business make payments.

On Deck today announced that it has raised nearly $100 million in new funding. The funding is being led by Goldman Sachs and Fortress Credit Corp., which have committed an $80 million debt facility. Meanwhile, SF Capital and Lighthouse Capital Partners have put in $17 million in venture debt loans. The capital is giving On Deck more capacity to make loans, and demand has been healthy. The company delivered more than $100 million in loan volume over the last 10 months.

Prior investors include SAP Capital, Contour Venture Partners in New York, First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures and Village Ventures.

In a big leap into a new but adjacent market, Silicon Valley digital education start-up Kno said it is entering the K-12 space, expanding from its college-only focus.

Its first step will be a partnership with major textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which provides nearly half of such content aimed at children from kindergarten through high school.

Enhanced digital versions of those textbooks cost $9.99 or less — Kno gets a piece of each sale — and can be used via an Apple iPad app and also on the Web. Kno said its platform will also be available soon on Google Android and Microsoft Windows 7.

I did a video interview today with Kno co-founder and CEO Osman Rashid at the global HQ of All Things Digital about the effort, which is a big jump for the company that started off trying to make its own tablet device.

Armed with a pile of venture funding, it has pivoted drastically — Apple and then Google completely blew its stillborn hardware efforts up — into creating an educational software platform.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has raised about $70 million from a range of prominent backers such as Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, along with investors Mike Maples and Ron Conway.

It’ll need more deals to make up that tall valuation, of course. Kno said hopes to strike similar deals with the two other big textbook publishers, McGraw-Hill and Pearson, so it can offer most of the books used by schoolchildren.

It’s definitely an interesting time for electronic books in general and the education market in particular, as many efforts are being made to provide all kinds of educational tools online.

The e-book arena here is increasingly competitive, with big companies such as Amazon and even Apple interested in the important space.

Here’s my chat with Rashid about it all, as well as some screenshots of the new offering:

And here’s the official press release:

KNO LAUNCHES K-12 DIGITAL TEXTBOOKS, EMPOWERING PARENTS

TO GO DIGITAL AT HOME

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Kno Partner to Introduce Enhanced K-12 Content at Introductory Rental Prices From $9.99 or Less

Santa Clara, CA — August 7, 2012 – Kno, a pioneer in education software, today announced that the company is entering the K-12 education market through a new partnership agreement with global education leader Houghton Mifflin Harcourt [HMH]. Previously only available to college students, Kno will offer interactive K-12 textbooks for the iPad, the Web, Android and Windows 7.

The agreement marks a turning point for elementary and secondary education by giving children and parents the resources and power to supplement classroom learning through enhanced digital content at home. Just in time for the back-to-school season, parents can now rent digital textbooks for their children, including subjects aligned with Common Core standards, for a one-year rental rate of $9.99 or less per book.

“Even if the schools have not adopted digital textbooks, we wanted to give parents the option to have their kids’ same textbooks available at home,” said Osman Rashid, CEO and Co-Founder of Kno, Inc. “With digital books priced at $9.99 or below, parents can now finally stop their kids from carrying their heavy backpacks to and from school for less than $60 for the school year by supplementing classroom materials with interactive textbooks that can be used at home and on the go.”

The Kno digital textbook app is available today for the iPad and Web and will be available for Android tablets and Windows 7 in time for back to school. With Kno’s app, parents can enhance their children’s learning experience with more than 70 interactive features that bring academic content to life, making learning more engaging and fun. All of the app’s features are engineered to help students retain information more easily and ultimately help improve their grades and comprehension of material.

“By offering digital access to enhanced K-12 content on the go and at home, this collaboration will empower parents to get more involved in their children’s education. We know parental involvement is an important factor in student achievement, and we’re proud to be the first content provider to bring Kno’s technology to the K-12 world,” said Tim Cannon, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Alliances for HMH. “HMH aims to make quality content available to the widest possible audience with the mission of changing people’s lives by fostering passionate, curious learners. This partnership with Kno supports that goal.”

The interactive features that allow students to engage with the content better and study more efficiently include:

* A digital Journal that automatically saves a student’s notes and highlights them in a study notebook.

* Automatic Flash Cards of key terms in a book to help students study more efficiently and better retain information.

* 3D models that bring difficult chemistry concepts to life to make them easier to understand.

* Quiz Me feature, which automatically turns any diagram in a book into a multiple choice quiz for easy self-quizzing before tests.

* SmartLinks that deliver instructional videos, images, and photos to formulas and concepts in a textbook in real-time for easy reference.

* Coming soon, an analytics feature that will enable active engagement between parents and students to better measure reading progress.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120806/in-major-expansion-kno-adds-k-12-to-digital-education-platform-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120801/smartling-speeds-up-web-localization/ http://allthingsd.com/20120801/smartling-speeds-up-web-localization/#comments Wed, 01 Aug 2012 21:39:30 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=236787 Last year in the wake of the shootings in Norway, I wondered aloud about the language gap that exists on the Web, and as if on cue, I was introduced to Smartling.

The company bills itself as a Translation Delivery Network, which is a fancy way of saying it uses the cloud to give Web sites the tools they need to easily serve up their pages in pretty much any language. Customers include Foursquare, Scribd, SurveyMonkey and, as you can see from the short video below, Vimeo.

Today, Smartling debuted a slick new way to work with translations. It’s called the Smartling Translation Management System, and it uses an API to grab content from all kinds of different file formats and display it so that translators can work with it in context. So when you have a slogan or phrase that appears in one place on a site, you can see the translation into another language in the same place on the site as it would appear translated. There are also new features for managing different projects and different sites.

The point of it all is to speed up the deployment of localized sites, which has always been sort of a haphazard and labor-intensive process. Last year, Smartling landed a $10 million Series B funding round from IDG Ventures, with prior investors U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock and First Round Capital also participating, which came on top of a $4 million Series A.

And as I said, Vimeo is a customer, and used Smartling as a way to help its users localize in Spanish. Here’s a short video about that.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120801/smartling-speeds-up-web-localization/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120630/eric-schmidt-backs-waywire-a-media-site-for-teens-that-is-part-twitter-part-youtube/ http://allthingsd.com/20120630/eric-schmidt-backs-waywire-a-media-site-for-teens-that-is-part-twitter-part-youtube/#comments Sat, 30 Jun 2012 21:25:17 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=226362 A new start-up coming out of stealth today — backed by big names like Oprah Winfrey, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, First Round Capital and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors — hopes to create a platform for teens to share important and relevant information about their lives.

Think of it as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook with a purpose.

In other words, #waywire wants to be a media company where teens and young adults can share user-generated content, kick off a debate and spur discussion.

“There’s a big void out there,” said #waywire’s Founder and CEO Nathan Richardson. “There’s a lot of people using social utilities to say things, but very few places are bringing context around it.”

Richardson said his company is targeting millennials — a generation of people who grew up completely wired and never read news from a paper, make calls from a landline or take pictures that require developing.

“There’s an opportunity to give them the way to give them a place to upload user-generated content that matters to them and marry it with curated content to give context and then anchor with original content,” Richardson added.

One of those contributors will be Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, who is also one of the company’s founders.

In an interview, Booker joked that you can follow him on Twitter at your peril, because he sends so many tweets. He said the idea for the company started to jell earlier this year as he sought other ways to shift America’s public conversation away from “divisiveness” and toward “solutions.”

Mayor Booker plans to contribute content for the network, but since he’s already got a day job, he will not be part of company’s management. To keep everything separate between his role at the company and his role as a public figure, he will keep his stake in #waywire in a trust while he’s in public office.

The New York-based media site is coming out of stealth on Monday to announce that it has raised $1.75 million in capital to get off of the ground. The site will launch in beta this summer, but will start accepting registrations as soon as Monday.

Joining Booker as co-founders are Richardson and Sarah Ross. Most recently, Richardson was president of Gilt City; before that, he had a variety of media roles, including CEO of ContextNext Media, head of Dow Jones online, and general manager of Yahoo Finance. Ross comes to #waywire from Katalyst Media, TechCrunch and Yahoo.

Here’s the full release:

First Round Capital and Innovation Endeavors Lead Seed Funding Round in New Social Artery #waywire

NEW YORK, NY, JULY 2, 2012 — #waywire, a social artery for video news, inspiration and leading voices, today announced it has closed a seed capital round led by First Round Capital and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, along with Troy Carter and a group of angel investors. #waywire is focused on providing a network that will serve to fundamentally alter the tone and content of public dialogue around some of society’s most pressing issues. The network will provide original, syndicated and community created video content, allowing today’s digital generation to develop informed opinions on topics and then engage in positive debates and discussions.

“As soon as I was exposed to the #waywire concept, I knew there was something truly different here,” said Howard Morgan, Managing Partner of First Round Capital. “Most people agree that there is a real problem with the tone of our public dialogue. #waywire will work to change that by building a network that latches onto the attitudes of the digital generation and deliver rich content that helps to educate and inform as well as provide a forum to express opinions.”

The company was co-founded and is led by Chief Executive Officer, Nathan Richardson along with Sarah Ross another #waywire co-founder. Richardson brings an extensive track record of building and leading successful online properties including prior positions as president of Gilt City, CEO of ContentNext Media, head of Dow Jones online and General Manager of Yahoo! Finance. Ross comes to #waywire with digital experience from Katalyst Media, TechCrunch and Yahoo! Inc. Howard Morgan, of First Round Capital, will join the #waywire Board of Directors.

“There are networks to connect friends, and there are simple ways to share news articles or stories, but there is a definite opening in the social spectrum for a network where people can go and learn about issues that truly matter to them and engage with peers and experts on a wide range of topics,” said Richardson. “This existing gap contributes to the divisions that impact our national dialogue. We think #waywire can help address this problem by providing millions of people – especially the young, digitally savvy generation – a network for video news, inspiration and leading voices.”

Also among #waywire’s co-founders is Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, N.J. The idea behind #waywire came from Mayor Booker and grew from his desire to shift America’s public conversation away from divisiveness toward a debate focused on achieving solutions. The Mayor plans to contribute original content to the #waywire network where he will discuss America’s most significant challenges with a variety of thought leaders from diverse backgrounds. Mayor Booker will not be part of day-to-day management of #waywire and will have no editorial involvement in the network. His ownership stake will be maintained in a trust while he remains in public office.

“When I experienced the possibilities of social media and video, I saw the beginnings of an answer to a problem that is facing America. I believe #waywire can be a network for people everywhere to move away from partisan grandstanding toward a productive national debate about solutions to the problems we are all facing,” said Mayor Booker. “It is also extremely important to me that we not only begin to convene an online dialogue with as many people as possible, but provide a series of face-to-face conversations in live settings.”

#waywire will begin accepting email registrations for the site’s private beta release at www.waywire.com. Additional content agreements are expected in the coming weeks.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120630/eric-schmidt-backs-waywire-a-media-site-for-teens-that-is-part-twitter-part-youtube/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120627/casahop-raises-1-2-million-for-home-swapping-service-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120627/casahop-raises-1-2-million-for-home-swapping-service-video/#comments Wed, 27 Jun 2012 23:30:30 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=225205 Following in the footsteps of Airbnb and other online home rental services, CasaHop has identified a slightly different approach to the market: It wants to connect people over the Internet who are looking to swap homes with others for free.

The social travel site, which launched in beta last month, announced today that it had raised $1.2 million in seed funding.

Lerer Ventures led the round with Andre Balazs, First Round Capital, Betaworks with angels including David Tisch, Bob Pittman, Jonah Goodhart, Dave Morgan and Nicholas Negroponte also participating.

The founders of the company are Paul Berry, the former CTO of Huffington Post, and Florent Peyre, the former VP of Business Development and Strategy at Gilt City, Gilt Groupe’s local deals business.

In an interview at Lerer’s New York offices, CasaHop’s President Peyre discussed how the site is different from Airbnb and uses algorithms to connect people who are likely to be comfortable swapping homes with each other because of shared interests or backgrounds, like fans of rock climbing or French Bulldogs, or alumni of the same university.

Here’s a video with Peyre, who describes in detail the concept of home exchanges:

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