There’s been lots of attempts to convert doctors to electronic medical records and it’s a key part of health care reform. However, a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that as of 2009 less than half of all doctors had moved to an electronic system by the end 2009.

Practice Fusion is a start-up founded in 2007 that aims to make the move to electronic records easier for groups of nine doctors or less. The company announced a $23 million round of funding led by Founders Fund, with participation from Artis Capital Management and Glynn Capital Management, as well as returning investors Morgenthaler Ventures and Felicis Ventures. The round brings the company’s total funding to $30 million. 

While most electronic medical record systems cost about $50,000 per physician, cloud-based Practice Fusion is free. The company makes its money conducting analytics on the health data store in the system. Doctors can use the system to securely chart patient visits, review their records, schedule appointments and write prescriptions, and do all the other routine medical administrivia that is usually done on paper. More than 75,000 healthcare professionals are using Practice Fusion, and the system stores data on 9.5 million patients through Practice Fusion’s network. The network is adding doctors at a rate of 350 a day.

This is the latest deal for Founder’s Fund and its founder Peter Thiel, notable as Facebook’s first outside investor. The fund’s other investments include Mint, which was acquired by Intuit in 2009, Yammer, Spotify, SpaceX, and Palantir Technologies.

Parker recently proposed to Alexandra Lenas, a New York-based singer/songwriter, “his rep” told People.

Parker, popularly known for being played by Justin Timberlake in “The Social Network,” has something like a four percent stake in Facebook, meaning the -illions to his name begin with a b.

Parker is credited, both in fictional and non-fictional retellings of the story, for helping Mark Zuckerberg retain lasting control of Facebook. Parker has also played significant roles at Napster, Plaxo, Causes.com, Founders Fund and Spotify, and may be considering putting together a bid for Warner Music Group.

The company now occupies a top-floor office–complete with wraparound views and a deck–that was, in fact, recently left unoccupied by the departure of a Japanese hedge fund, said Causes co-founder and Joe Green when NetworkEffect visited him there this week.

It’s a bit incongruous, but Green says the rent is cheaper than a crappy office near Twitter’s in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood, the far hipper place to house a start-up these days.

Causes has, since 2007, been trying to facilitate activism and philanthropy by connecting users to non-profits and one another. Backed with some $16 million in funding from venture capitalists like NEA and Founders Fund, Green wants to make the non-profit world more of a marketplace, where organizations compete for givers’ participation and dollars.

Charity–worth $300 billion annually in the U.S., compared to $12 billion for the music industry–is the “last industry not revolutionized by the Internet,” Green said.

Causes has always been tightly linked to Facebook (Green shared a dorm room with the founders at Harvard), and is “in many ways one of the great survivors of the Facebook platform,” said Green, having grown to 150 million users originally as a Facebook app and now as a Web site powered by Facebook Connect.

Of those 150 million users, about 1 million have ever made a donation on Causes, and 12 million have signed a petition. Causes would obviously like to figure out ways to get more people to participate meaningfully.

In many ways, the trajectory of Causes mirrors that of social games, the most successful category built on top of Facebook to date. They are both inherently viral, built around users inviting their friends.

But in some ways games are actually beating Causes at its own game. Zynga on Monday announced it had raised $3 million for recovery efforts for the recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami, from a combination of virtual goods bought by its players and a physical bracelet bought by fans of Lady Gaga. Zynga has raised more than $10 million for charitable causes since 2009.

Causes, meanwhile, has raised some $30 million since 2007, and $800,000 this month for tsunami relief efforts in Japan.

But it’s a bit unfair to just compare dollars to dollars. Causes enables users to connect to more than 25,000 different non-profits and participate by doing things like signing petitions rather than just donating money. It’s a richer experience than buying a virtual doodad.

Even so, it’s obvious that games have figured something out. So Causes recently enlisted three social game monetization partners: TrialPay, SocialVibe and SupersonicAds. The companies offer Causes users video ads that pay out $0.10 to a chosen cause every time a user watches.

So instead of giving money, users can “give a minute” to charity. In early tests, Causes users have exhausted the company’s video ad inventory on a daily basis.

Enlisting simple online actions that trigger a charitable donation isn’t a new concept–see, for instance, Freerice.com–but it’s interesting that Causes is going directly to social games’ transactional advertising providers.

“We’re not trying to become a gaming company, but there’s some interesting similarities there,” said Green.

The funding is particularly notable because Topsy is part of the much-maligned Twitter ecosystem. The San Francisco-based company’s search index consists of more than eight billion tweets.

Perhaps the only other Twitter ecosystem start-up of Topsy’s magnitude is UberMedia, which has raised some $21 million in VC funding and gobbled up various Twitter clients. Twitter blocked some of the company’s apps for three days last month, saying they violated multiple
policies.

Twitter competes with both start-ups, offering its own search site and software clients for various platforms.

Besides running its search site, Topsy also provides analytics tools for marketers and widgets for publishers including IDG Media, The Huffington Post and Discovery Communications. The company brags that its search is super speedy (capable of processing over 1 million documents per second) and smart (ranking results based on social graph analysis, which Google and Bing are only starting to do).

Vicarious is designing artificial intelligence software intended to learn to “see” and recognize objects and things just as the human brain does from the time of a baby’s birth. This is much more complicated than designing a program to recognize a shape, say a shoe, and then find many other similar shapes, according to Vicarious.

The company just raised its first institutional funding led by Founders Fund with participation from Felicis Ventures; Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook; Adam D’Angelo, co-founder of Quora and former CTO of Facebook; and Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir.

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This research paper was produced by two social-computing researchers at HP Labs: Bernardo Huberman and Sitaram Asur. It’s titled “Predicting the Future With Social Media” [PDF here], and it looks at Twitter as a means of predicting the box-office success of newly release films based on the number of people tweeting about them and the sentiments contained in those tweets.

They argued that Twitter was a far better predictor of box-office success than the motion picture industry’s “tracking” reports that studios have used for years. In fact, the two researchers said at the time that Twitter could predict with nearly 98 percent accuracy whether a movie would be a hit or a flop in its first weekend of release. For the study, they mined nearly three million tweets referring to 24 different movies over a time period of three months.

Fflick does some sentiment analysis of its own, but uses that data to help Twitter users decide whether they are going to buy a ticket to a movie based on whether their Twitter friends liked it. Could it be that Google wants to mine that same sentiment data to help movie studios predict box-office sales?

As I said, this is only a theory–one that I admit I’m stretching to the max. I can’t find any connection between the two researchers and Ffflick’s four founders, or its investors, which includes the Founders Fund, though there needn’t be one for my theory to be close to the mark. Fflick was started in August of last year, about five months after the paper was published. And the paper itself was widely covered at the time, in particular by the Los Angeles Times.

Since neither Google nor Fflick is commenting on this deal, which is supposedly still pending, I thought it was worth suggesting as a possible motivation on Google’s part.

Electronista thinks it may have something to do with forecasting popularity on Google’s forthcoming YouTube movie project and the need to predict.

I did check in with the paper’s principal author, Huberman, by email to ask what he thought. His reply: “Sentiment analysis of tweets is great for marketing studies and Google wants to go there since they have search going on with Twitter.” Time will tell if this is what Google has on its mind.

Asked whether creating a real-time search engine is a viable start-up business, Campbell answered quickly: “No.” His company’s pivot is the latest of multiple efforts in the space; last year, OneRiot gave up its search business to pursue real-time advertising, and Ellerdale sold to Flipboard to help add relevance analysis to its social magazine app.

The exit of Collecta and its competitors from real-time search is remarkable given they had swarmed to the space only a couple of years ago.

In 2009, many entrepreneurs and their investors bet that real-time search was the next frontier, recognizing that search engines were having trouble handling the onslaught of status updates and fresh information streaming onto the Web from Twitter and elsewhere.

Given the companies’ emphasis on speed, perhaps it’s not surprising that they failed and moved on so quickly.

Campbell would not say how many employees Collecta had laid off as part of the change, but he maintained the company has plenty of money in the bank from the $4.7 million it raised last spring from Dace Ventures and True Ventures. Mashable reported earlier today in its story about the Collecta changes that co-founder Jack Moffitt is no longer with the company.

Campbell said Collecta will apply its “very serious technology” to other real-time projects, but it will not become a real-time ad engine like OneRiot.

Who’s left in real-time search? There are still a few, including Wowd and Topsy.

Topsy’s tweet search is much more comprehensive than Twitter’s own, and it serves half a billion queries per month, mostly through its API, Topsy co-founder Rishab Aiyer Ghosh told NetworkEffect via email today. And while Google and Bing also index tweets (and Bing has an extensive relationship with Facebook), they have not fully incorporated social updates into their core search engines.

“With TweetMeme, CrowdEye and Collecta all pivoting out of it, Topsy may be the only real-time/social search engine left,” Ghosh said. He maintained that there’s still an opportunity to build an independent real-time search engine “done right,” despite the competition dropping like flies. Topsy has raised $15 million in funding from investors including BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners and the Founders Fund.

That doesn’t mean Mr. Thiel is giving to traditional causes. Instead, his Thiel Foundation supports futurism and liberty through organizations such as the Sens Foundation, which is focused on regenerative biotechnologies, and Imitatio, which concentrates on a theory that people imitate others and desire objects that others own, thereby spurring competition and violence. Underlining his unconventional approach, Mr. Thiel recently sponsored a program to give $100,000 each to 20 students to forgo college and instead spend their time on innovative projects.

Last week, the 43-year-old held an event dubbed “Breakthrough Philanthropy” in San Francisco to build awareness for some of those causes. His efforts come as Bay Area tech entrepreneurs such as Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and others announced last Wednesday that they had agreed to give the majority of their wealth to charity.

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Topguest, a check-in loyalty service that was founded just five months ago, has gotten $2 million in Series A funding, as well as nabbing well-known Facebook investor Peter Thiel as an adviser.

Investors in the round include: Thiel’s Founders Fund, as well as angels such as Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Jeff Clavier and Naval Ravikant.

Topguest is exiting its beta phase today with partners that include Virgin America, Hilton, Wyndham Worldwide, Kimpton and others.

Using Topguest, those companies can offer deals, making large travel and hospitality loyalty programs social by plugging them into smartphones and geolocation.

Users check in with their existing services–such as Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook Places and Gowalla–in order to get benefits such as air miles for your Virgin Elevate account and hotel points for Hilton HHonors.

Topguest is competing in a crowded market, where a lot of such services are offering many kinds of deals.

The San Francisco start-up is most like another service aimed at retailers called Shopkick, where you get points when you check in to its mobile app.

Topguest said the differentiator is that it links into geolocation services already in use, instead of requiring another different check-in and offers points in already existing loyalty programs.

Dave Morin

All three companies make mobile apps (primarily on the iPhone) that allow users to take and immediately share images with friends. It seems kind of simple and mundane, but all these smart people seem to think photo-sharing is the future.

Morin and Path are the most convincing about there being a larger idea behind what they’re doing. San Francisco-based Path is stubbornly focused on close personal connections–a.k.a. real friends.

Unlike every other social site, where there’s an implicit pressure to collect as many friends and followers as you can (and at the same time increase the site’s user numbers), Path is only for the people you really know and trust.

In order to force and foster that kind of sharing, Morin’s team has left out many of the social Web features we’re used to. Users can do only two things on Path: Share photos and view them.

There are no reciprocal friend relationships, no likes or comments, no fun photo-editing filters, no publishing photos to services like Facebook and Flickr, no editing something after you post and no global user search (you have to know the email or phone number for anyone you want to add).

And there are additional restrictions. Users can only ever share with a maximum of 50 people (though they can follow more than 50 people, if invited). Every single post has its own privacy settings–you can share with either only the people tagged in it, or only your share list. If you get sick of someone who’s sharing with you, you can “pause” that person until further notice. Users who don’t have iPhones can view photos on the Web.

The most interesting feature for me is that users see which of their contacts have viewed any one photo. So on Path, you can’t lurk in peace. People know when you’ve seen their posts. This might be a little creepy, but it also could cut down on those annoying awkward conversations that sometimes happen when you’ve seen someone post about something online and then they start telling you about it in person.

Photos are tagged with the location where they’re taken automatically, and users can add people and tags. If someone else takes a picture at that same location, tags that have been previously used near that place recently will be at the top of the list.

The idea is those tags will be used to help users relive their memories stored on the service. So, for instance, someone Morin shares with could retrace his “path” of wine tasting in Napa by zooming in on a map of the pictures he posted from California wine country.

But the thing is, if you want to go try Path (which you’ll be able to do in the U.S. and Canada as of 9 pm PT tonight by going to Apple’s App Store, and in the rest of the world within a few hours), it’s going to seem rather empty at first. You’ll have to seek out friends to share with from scratch–but even worse, nobody will be sharing with you until they decide to add you.

Unlike just about every other social service, Path is not really viral. At all. So even though it’s interesting, its numbers are highly unlikely to correspond favorably to those of competitors like Instagram. And after all, how many mobile photo-sharing apps are you really going to use?

“We really prioritize slow organic growth over hyper-viral growth and going after influencers to build this really steep graph,” said Morin, who formerly helped lead Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect before leaving the company in January. “We are building Path to be a 30-year brand.”

He added, “Many of the photo-sharing apps are photo-blogging apps and popularity contests. On Path, you should always feel comfortable being yourself.”

This antiviral stuff almost seems like overkill, but Morin grounds Path’s feature decisions in the theories of the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar (known for the oft-cited “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 acquaintances, he also proposes that 40-60 people is the outer bound of our personal networks) and Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who talked about the difference between experience and memory in a well-received TED Talk on happiness).

If this hyper-personal stuff works, I think Path could potentially create a third major category of social network, distinct from the kind of relationships found on the two current giants, Facebook and Twitter. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves–and c’mon Dave, you should really let people comment on and like their friends’ photos.

Path was co-founded by Morin, Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, both formerly of Napster. The staff also includes Mallory Paine, who helped engineer the iPhone photo and camera apps for Apple, and Matt Van Horn, who formerly did business development at Digg. Fanning is chairman and landlord of the company but is working on his own other projects day-to-day.

Path has already raised a jumbo seed round with Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and Betaworks. The company also provided us with an extensive list of individual angel investors: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, Keith Rabois, Dustin Moskovitz, Marc Benioff, Gary Vaynerchuk, Steve Anderson, Tim Draper, Joi Ito, Fadi Ghandour, Matt Cohler, Sam Lessin, Bill Randuchel, Karl Jacob, Paul Buchheit, Ruchi Sanghvi, John Couch, Michael Parekh, Claudio Chiuchiarelli, Maurice Werdegar, Don Dodge, and Chris Kelly.

Bit.ly has now raised about $14 million in a couple of years, but so far has only a nascent revenue stream: About 4,000 different companies have white label versions of Bit.ly’s URL shortener (the New York Times, for instance, uses Bit.ly to create addresses like this: http://nyti.ms/bm8lk2). But only some of them pay for that service, at a rate of $1,000 a month.

The real business, which Betaworks CEO John Borthwick says the company will begin to build out with its new money, is turning Bit.ly’s data set into money.

People clicked on six billion Bit.ly links last month, Borthwick says. And he imagines that all sorts of folks, from Google (GOOG) on down, would be willing to pay to license the data.

It’s worth noting that Yahoo (YHOO), among others, has been doing some tire-kicking around the service–maybe more, depending on whose story you’d like to listen to.

Other investors in this round include OATV, Mitch Kapor, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Joshua Stylman, Peter Hershberg and David Shen. The New York Times (NYT), as I have previously written, picked up a piece of Bit.ly this summer as partial payment for its work in in News.me, a yet-to-be-launched social news service for Apple’s (AAPL) iPad.

Yammer, the enterprise equivalent of Twitter, said it had grabbed another $10 million in financing.

But the question for the San Francisco-based microblogging service for businesses and closed groups is: “What are you working on?”

Yammer has both free and a paid–the gold level is $5 per user, per month–versions and is essentially a useful productivity tool.

Emergence Capital took the lead in the Series B round for Yammer, along with ubiquitous Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway and previous investors.

Yammer previously raised $5 million from Charles River Ventures and The Founders Fund.

Here’s the release:

Yammer Secures $10 Million in Series B Funding from Emergence Capital and Previous Investors

Investment To Fuel Product Innovation and Sales Coverage

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., February 3, 2010–Yammer, Inc., the leader in Enterprise Microblogging and Real-time Communications, today announced that it has received $10 million in its Series B round of funding. Emergence Capital leads the round; with general partner Jason Green joining Yammer’s Board of Directors. SV Angel, led by seasoned Silicon Valley investor, Ron Conway, is also participating as are previous investors, including Charles River Ventures and Goldcrest Investments from Dallas.

Yammer launched its solution in September 2008 and has experienced rapid user adoption with over 60,000 organizations globally having adopted the solution. Drawing on this momentum, Yammer will use the proceeds to accelerate product innovation and increase sales coverage.

“Yammer is revolutionizing the way employees communicate and collaborate, filling a need that email has failed to deliver,” said Jason Green, general partner at Emergence Capital. “Yammer has a passionate and proven executive team, a compelling freemium business model, a loyal customer base and a huge market opportunity. We are thrilled to be joining them in the next phase of their rapid growth.”

Companies and organizations of all sizes across a wide range of industries benefit from Yammer. They use Yammer for a multitude of reasons, including improving workforce productivity, connecting a geographically dispersed team, getting new employees up to speed, and increasing the flow of content and knowledge.

“Yammer is focused on improving the way employees communicate and stay connected to critical information about their company and job,” said David Sacks, founder and CEO at Yammer. “We’re pleased with the rapid growth and market adoption we’ve achieved and are poised to accelerate it with exciting enhancements to our product and with broadened sales coverage. We’re eager to work with Emergence Capital and leverage their expertise in building world-class Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies and are gratified that proven technology investors such as SV Angel and Charles River Ventures are also participating in the funding.”