The Leap Motion sensor, positioned in front of a MacBook.

The San Francisco-based start-up has also just announced a partnership with Asus to distribute Leap’s technology with some Asus notebooks and PCs, following Leap’s retail launch in the first quarter of this year.

The Leap is a tiny, three-inch sensor device that’s placed in front of the computer keyboard to track gestures and reflect the movements onscreen. As I’ve written before, Leap acts sort of like a super-precise Kinect, where the user’s fingers act as controls; waving them just a few inches in front of the screen allows the user to input, create, shape or play.

Last fall Leap, which was co-founded by Michael Buckwald and David Holz, and has recently hired former Apple exec Andy Miller as president, announced plans for an app store where Leap users can purchase and download apps. In December, the company shipped 10,000 developer kits to spur the creation of these apps.

The company said in a prepared statement that it planned to use the funding for manufacturing the Leap ahead of the product’s retail launch. “Leap Motion plans to make hundreds of thousands, to millions, of devices to meet unprecedented global demand.”

Coinciding with the funding, former eBay VP and current Trunk Club COO Rob Chesney joined TaskRabbit’s board, along with Founders Fund’s Bruce Gibney.

Five-year-old TaskRabbit has competition, both direct and indirect (for instance, Done in New York (which our own Lauren Goode reviewed positively) and Exec in San Francisco). With this latest round, TaskRabbit is establishing itself as the best-funded company in the space it helped create — with a total of $38 million raised to date.

But lots of venture capital money isn’t necessarily all positive; for one thing, TaskRabbit clearly isn’t getting the kind of billion-dollar valuation VCs are handing out to its start-up peers like Airbnb. Plus, the company actually raised more money in its last round: $17.8 million just this past December.

What’s the latest at TaskRabbit? The company says its numbers of tasks and bookings are skyrocketing. In recent months, TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque reclaimed the title of CEO from hired exec Eric Grosse, and the service launched an on-demand delivery trial.

Getting paper out of the health care process is widely seen as a key step in getting some control over constantly skyrocketing costs, by increasing efficiency. Though there is some debate on the issue.

One company I’ve been following intermittently in the space is the start-up Practice Fusion. It provides a free Web-based system for storing and retrieving health records, and is available to doctors and health clinics.

A little more than a year ago, I noted that Practice Fusion had raised $23 million in a Series B round of venture capital funding. Today it announced that it has landed a $34 million C round led by Artis Ventures. As is typical in VC deals, prior investors are also chipping in. They include Band of Angels, Felicis Ventures, Glynn Capital, Ali and Hadi Partovi, Founders Fund, Morgenthaler Ventures, Scott Banister, SV Angel and Ghost Angel.

The round brings Practice Fusion‘s total capital raised to an impressive $64 million.

The company is moving along in other ways. When I last looked in on it, there were 75,000 healthcare professionals using Practice Fusion, and its system stored data on 9.5 million patients. Today, those numbers have swelled to 150,000 health care professionals and 40 million patients.

Part of the motivation for health care providers to switch to using digital health records (Why does everyone insist on calling them electronic?) is the federal funds that come with it. Since doctors’ offices are often small businesses, they can get some government help to defray the costs of making the transition. Doctors and clinics using Practice Fusion have received a total of about $30 million worth of those funds.

As I said, there is some debate about the overall benefit derived from moving to digital records. In March, a study published in the journal Health Affairs found that doctors who had digital access to testing results tended to order more tests, not fewer. This is key, because one of the conventional arguments about digital health records has been that it discourages repeat tests that result from paper-based errors or lost records. A lot of people had problems with that study, however.

Another handful of other studies questioning the benefits came out in January. Though as Steve Lohr of the New York Times points out here, the debate is less about whether it makes sense to move to digital records, and more about how and at what pace.

The pace seems just fine for Practice Fusion: Remember the 40 million patient records it has on its network? That amounts to about 10 percent of the U.S. population, and is double the size of the combined patient populations of the Kaiser Permanente and U.S. Veterans Affairs systems. That makes it an emerging power in the business of electronic (I still want to say digital) health records. This latest investment will only accelerate that.

Ajay Royan, Mithril co-founder and managing general partner

Mithril is aimed at fast-growing companies that “prefer to remain private as they mature.”

Thiel is the largest individual investor in Mithril’s $402 million fund, and he will lead the firm’s investments along with Ajay Royan.

Royan was previously managing director at Clarium Capital, Thiel’s hedge fund, which has had a rocky record. Thiel also runs the early-stage VC firm Founders Fund. And a third Mithril partner is Jim O’Neill, who was previously at Clarium and is also co-founder of the 20 under 20 Thiel Fellowship.

Despite all that overlap — and the fact that Mithril is yet another project named after a term from the J. R. R. Tolkien lexicon (see: Palantir Technologies and lots of others) — Royan emphasized in a phone interview that Mithril is a “completely independent new franchise.”

He said he expects a typical investment for the firm to be around $20 million, or as much as $100 million. Mithril’s intended targets are “the non-fashionable companies,” Royan said. Don’t expect social media or cloud investments, he said.

No one authorized to speak for Yammer is talking about this. I will say that a lunch meeting I had scheduled on Tuesday in New York with Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni was suddenly canceled because of what I was told was a “personal emergency.” It could be coincidence, but then again it might not be.

Another bit of color I’ve heard — and again it may not mean anything — is that Yammer CEO David Sacks has invitations out for a big 40th-birthday bash in Southern California this weekend, at which rapper Snoop Dogg is expected to perform. Whether or not Sacks will be celebrating the sale of his company is still uncertain, but there’s a lot about the speculative story in Bloomberg — which cites two people familiar with the talks — that makes sense.

Outwardly, Yammer has looked to be the most promising of the social enterprise software players that are not named Jive. In February, it raised $85 million in a fifth round of funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, at an implied valuation of about $1 billion. Meritech Capital Partners, Jeff Skoll’s Capricorn Investment Group and Khosla Ventures also participated in that round. Prior investors include Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital, Founders Fund, the Social+Capital Partnership and US Venture Partners, and the angel investors are Bill Lee, Max Levchin and the football great Ronnie Lott.

That round of funding came on the heels of the late-2011 IPO of rival Jive, whose market capitalization as of Wednesday’s close was $1.03 billion. Lots of people got rich in that offering, especially founders Bill Lynch and Matthew Tucker, and CEO Tony Zingale.

Jive had followed a fairly specific path to going public, which Yammer could have followed, but hasn’t. For example: Before raising a $30 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins in the summer of 2010, Jive had tapped Zingale, the veteran CEO of Mercury Interactive, who saw that company through its $4.5 billion sale to Hewlett-Packard.

Later, in early 2011, Jive added directors with public company experience to its board; then it set about making some important acquisitions, among them Proximal Labs, an “acqhire” deal; and then OfficSync, a deal that gave it crucial plug-in technology for Microsoft Office.

Yammer has done nothing like this, with one exception: Its April acquisition of the British start-up OneDrum looked an awful lot like Jive’s acquisition of OfficSync. Otherwise, there have been none of the classic pre-IPO signals from Yammer: No high-profile additions to the board, no more acquisitions, no chatter about bankers competing to lead it through the S1 filing and road-show process. When asked about his interest in doing an IPO, Sacks would, in conversations with me, tend to simply avoid the subject. A billion-dollar exit now would seem mighty attractive to Sacks and Yammer’s investors, rather than the uncertainty of an IPO in a shaky market, coupled with a head-to-head-to-head competitive slugfest with Jive and Salesforce.

Then there’s the simple matter of business challenges. Yammer is, by all accounts and its own publicly disclosed stats, having trouble converting its free users to paid status. It is quick to brag about its four million corporate users, but they’re fuzzy numbers. Many start using the service for free, experiment with it, but never turn out to be regular, daily users. Fewer still ever convert to paid status. Yammer has said in the past that its conversion rate is about 20 percent, which works out to about 800,000 paid seats. Getting companies to pony up has proven difficult. Jive doesn’t disclose the total number of seats, but it does disclose how many companies are customers: 676 as of March 31, all of them paying subscribers.

If Microsoft proves to be the buyer, then it would give the Windows and Office giant a key piece of technology to offer its enterprise customers. One big argument for the existence of the social enterprise software business is to attack Microsoft’s outdated collaboration software, SharePoint.

The players are many: Aside from Jive and Yammer, there’s Salesforce.com’s Chatter service, which tends to be strong in sales departments where the mainline CRM service is already in use. Other players include Socialcast, owned by VMware; Moxie Software and Atlassian’s HipChat are others.

Once Microsoft gets its hands on it, two things will be true: Yammer, which is generally seen as still being buggy and in need of a lot of smoothing out of its rougher edges, will need some serious investment. The problem is that, even at a $1 billion valuation, Yammer is small enough that it will disappear inside Microsoft.

The other is that the freemium business model will have to go away. With the possible exception of Skype, it’s just not in Microsoft’s DNA to offer an enterprise product for free and leave it to the users to upgrade to the paid version when it suits them. When the rubber meets the road, many customers may dump Yammer in favor of something else. Those who are serious and willing to pay will consider Jive, which would probably capitalize on the opportunity by offering special deals to customers who switch. Those who demand free will switch to something they can still get for free.

We’ll see if this deal materializes. Bloomberg said a deal could be announced as early as today.

Last week, I visited Los Angeles to get a gander at some of the many digital companies that are doing some interesting things down south of Silicon Valley.

First stop: HipSwap, a community-based marketplace that is now in 14 U.S. cities after initial tests in Los Angeles and New York City.

Its goal is to de-creep the experience — because no matter how it’s done online, local buying and selling still has a lot of glitches. Using a visual approach (think Pinterest), with hipster social hooks (think Airbnb) and focusing on location (hmm, perhaps think Foursquare), complete with delivery in some cities, HipSwap is hoping to differentiate itself from big players in the space, such as Craigslist and eBay.

The app-heavy HipSwap allows anyone with stuff, including boutique merchants with quirky stuff to move, to quickly snap photos of items, price them and then — presumably — sell. Payment is made via PayPal or credit card, with HipSwap in between the buyer and seller, to ease the transaction’s typical awkwardness.

Because it is local, the items are varied, from trendy baby strollers to funky furniture to antique sewing machines. And, because it is in the L.A. area, HipSwap is also pushing celebrity fare, with a charitable “Shop My Closet” marketplace and video series, which recently included Kyle Richards from “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

The Santa Monica, Calif. start-up recently closed $1.1 million seed funding from a number of prominent investors, such as Founders Fund, Greycroft Partners, as well as former Microsoft exec — and early Pinterest angel — Hank Vigil and Mahalo President Jason Rapp.

Here’s a video interview I did with co-founder and CEO Rob Kramer about the interesting retail concept:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120402/l-a-stories-hipswap-tries-to-take-the-creepy-out-of-craigslist/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120229/yammer-lands-85-million-funding-round-from-draper-fisher-jurvetson/ http://allthingsd.com/20120229/yammer-lands-85-million-funding-round-from-draper-fisher-jurvetson/#comments Wed, 29 Feb 2012 19:58:06 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=179333 The rumors are true. But, boy, were they ever off on the numbers. Social enterprise software player Yammer has landed a whopping $85 million in a fifth round of venture capital funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, with Meritech Capital Partners, Jeff Skoll’s Capricorn Investment Group and Khosla Ventures all getting in on the action. The round brings Yammer’s total capital raised to date to $142 million. DFJ managing director Randy Glein will take an observer’s seat on Yammer’s board.

Published reports on Pando Daily had previously suggested that the company was close to landing a round in the $50 million neighborhood, with the implied valuation between $500 million and $1 billion, a range so large you could drive a tank through it. Yammer won’t say one way or another, but it’s pretty safe to say the higher number is the more accurate one.

Prior investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital, Founders Fund, the Social+Capital Partnership and US Venture Partners are all participating again, as are angel investors Bill Lee, Max Levchin and football great Ronnie Lott.

Clearly, the intent here is to raise Yammer’s visibility game a bit, in the face of more visible players in the social enterprise software space — like Jive, which IPO’d late last year, and Chatter, which Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff can’t seem to stop telling people will save the world. Social enterprise software is becoming an increasingly popular and thus competitive business. Jive’s IPO gives it some visibility that doesn’t hurt when it goes to win business from new customers. Chatter tends to be less of a rival, though its strength is in places where Salesforce.com is already well-entrenched, which is the sales department.

One thing that’s going to happen is that Yammer will kick off a large advertising campaign, using print and online ads that aim to tell the world about how enterprise social networks are making companies more efficient in their collaboration.

The other thing is that the drumbeat about a Yammer IPO will start to get louder as the year goes on, though if you ask CEO David Sacks about it, as I have on more than a few occasions, he says very little, and you might be tempted to consider this massive round a case of Jive envy.

Lots of people got very rich on that IPO, and there’s absolutely no reason the same thing couldn’t happen with Yammer: Having launched some years back as a “Twitter for business,” it has evolved into more of a Facebook-like service for getting things done across a company.

Yammer has more than four million corporate users, including employees at more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500. Most of those are simply people inside a company, who signed up for Yammer and may or may not be using it on regular basis. The company has said in the past that it has a 20 percent conversion rate, which works out to about 800,000 paid seats. Part of the advertising campaign may involve trying to kick the conversion rate up a few notches.

Also? Yammer signaled in its press release that it plans on making some strategic acquisitions. This could go two ways. First, Yammer could try and roll up some smaller, lesser-known players in the business and take their customers. Or it could be eyeing some interesting “acqhire” cases, where there are some smart people running early-stage companies that could add some capabilities to Yammer’s. We saw Jive do precisely this, when it acquired OffiSync in May.

The funding comes less than a week after Yammer said it had integrated SAP into its activity streams, making it the first among the social enterprise companies to do so. Sacks has described Yammer as something of a “Switzerland of collaboration,” and has added the ability of something like 15 different enterprise software applications to talk to Yammer, some of them more important than others. That may be so, but given how hot the social enterprise business is getting by the day, it’s starting to look a lot more like the hypercompetitive Coke and Pepsi.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120229/yammer-lands-85-million-funding-round-from-draper-fisher-jurvetson/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120223/votizen-gets-a-celebrity-round-of-funding-to-connect-social-media-and-politics/ http://allthingsd.com/20120223/votizen-gets-a-celebrity-round-of-funding-to-connect-social-media-and-politics/#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2012 05:21:56 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=171430 American politics in the age of the Super PAC is all about money. But meanwhile over on the Internet, connecting and mobilizing networks of people is easier than ever.

(See: the SOPA and PIPA online protests, the Planned Parenthood-Susan G. Komen dustup, the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring.)

Investors, including Internet impresario Sean Parker, think that sounds like an opportunity for disruption. “Politics is one of the few remaining large-scale consumer-facing opportunities on the Internet,” he said in an interview with AllThingsD. “It’s a very interesting moment, where politics is a bit behind the rest of the economy in embracing these new technologies.”

Sean Parker

Parker — who played crucial roles at Facebook, Spotify and Napster, and also co-founded the lesser-known nonprofit fundraising app, Causes — is now hoping to make an impact on politics with an investment in Votizen, a company founded by tech geeks with political stripes.

Votizen spent much of the last two years digitizing 200 million U.S. voting records from magnetic tape, computer databases and spreadsheets. Though it only has tens of thousand of members who have registered and connected to their voter profiles, it is trying to push out products and attract users in time to get involved with this year’s general election.

Parker first invested in Votizen with his venture capital firm Founders Fund in 2010, and also just personally took part in a new $750,000 convertible round with a set of celebrity investors who can raise Votizen’s profile with the push of a tweet button.

They are Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary and Ron Burkle’s A-Grade Investments, and Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter.

Votizen co-founders David Binetti and Jason Putorti

The latest round, which also included venture debt investor Hercules Technology Growth Capital, just closed last week. It brings Votizen to $2.25 million in total funding.

Votizen CEO David Binetti, who formerly founded USA.gov, says he’s aiming to capitalize on peer pressure — in a good way. Instead of money buying votes, Votizen will help friends persuade friends.

People who join Votizen can see voters from their own Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn networks. Then, Votizen will do things like highlight which friends are in swing states or certain political parties, and help users contact them to plead their case.

“Today, people feel rich people and lobbyists get in the way of their interests,” Binetti said. “We’re disrupting the currency of politics with ‘friendraising’ over fundraising. The goal is to make it harder for money to have an effect.”

According to various estimates, online spending in the 2012 election will be somewhere between $1 and $1.5 billion, up from $177 million in 2008.

While voter registration is a matter of public record, personal politics might not necessarily be something everyone will feel comfortable discussing online.

Votizen co-founder Jason Putorti — who was formerly lead designer at the personal finance site Mint.com — said he thinks that people will become more transparent about politics over time. “The new generation knows sharing leads to benefits,” he said.

Outside of election cycles, Votizen intends to help users get involved in ongoing public policy by writing officials and mobilizing groups around issues. Users can also create personal “cabinets” of advisors built from politically savvy people in their friend networks.

Eventually, Votizen hopes politicians and activists will pay to reach people in certain regions or interest groups, similar to the way LinkedIn makes money by charging users to contact people they don’t know.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120223/votizen-gets-a-celebrity-round-of-funding-to-connect-social-media-and-politics/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120216/what-happened-to-the-future/ http://allthingsd.com/20120216/what-happened-to-the-future/#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 07:59:00 +0000 Voices http://allthingsd.com/?p=175749

To many investors, visionary entrepreneurs come off as naïve or worse — isn’t it safer/easier/more profitable to create a(nother) social network for cat fanciers than to try to cure cancer, defeat terrorism, or organize the world’s information?

– Bruce Gibney, in a post on the Founders Fund Web site entitled “What Happened to the Future?”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120216/what-happened-to-the-future/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111206/social-search-start-up-topsy-nabs-cisco-exec-as-ceo/ http://allthingsd.com/20111206/social-search-start-up-topsy-nabs-cisco-exec-as-ceo/#comments Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:48:59 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=150863 Topsy Labs, a start-up that’s building a business around a real-time social search and analytics platform, has hired Duncan Greatwood, an executive from Cisco Systems, as its new CEO. Greatwood had been the founder and CEO of PostPath, a maker of collaboration and calendaring software that was acquired by Cisco for $215 million in 2008.

Topsy’s co-founder and now former CEO, Vipul Ved Prakash, will remain the company’s main technical guru while he becomes CTO, and will run platform and product engineering.

Greatwood’s job will be to scale the company up, which sounds like it will be interesting. I talked with Greatwood and Prakash yesterday, which was Greatwood’s first day on the job.

With so much social data being created on Facebook and Twitter and so many other places, Topsy was built to index it all and make it searchable, and analyze it. “There’s a lot of exhaust that’s being created around analyzing social data that applies to so many businesses, from finance to publishing,” Prakash told me.

Greatwood said that what attracted him to Topsy was the fact that it’s a lot more than a search or analytics engine. “It really lets you extract some deep analytics information from a broad array of data sources,” he said. Think about all the time and effort a company devotes to analyzing who and how many people visit its Web site using products like Google Analytics or Adobe’s Omniture. “At the same time there are probably lots of conversations taking place about that company or just conversations that company would be interested in,” Greatwood says.

Sales are starting to take off, Greatwood says, and though the customer base is small right now, there’s a great deal of interest from the marketplace. “We have a small number of customers, but within that group there’s some very big customers, and they’re driving an acceleration of sales over the past few months.” He wouldn’t divulge many customer names, but one that’s already been disclosed is AOL’s Huffington Post. The plan is to take Topsy’s products to a broader market during the year.

Topsy raised $15 million in a Series C round led by BlueRun Ventures in March with prior investors Western Technology Investments, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund and Scott Banister, the founder of Ironport, participating. Its total capital raised so far is about $30 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111206/social-search-start-up-topsy-nabs-cisco-exec-as-ceo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111204/heres-gowalla-ceos-non-denial-denial-email-to-investors-about-facebook-acquisition/ http://allthingsd.com/20111204/heres-gowalla-ceos-non-denial-denial-email-to-investors-about-facebook-acquisition/#comments Mon, 05 Dec 2011 05:54:43 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=150077 Update: Facebook has confirmed it is hiring Gowalla’s core team, while the Gowalla product will be shut down.

Even Gowalla CEO Josh Williams isn’t pretending a deal for Facebook to buy the location-sharing company isn’t happening, as you can read below in an email he sent to his investors.

Both companies declined to comment on a story on Friday and over the weekend. CNN had the scoop about the social networking giant acquiring Gowalla, which I have taken to calling Not-Foursquare.

That’s because — despite its often clever approach and innovation — it never caught up with the leading social location service.

Gowalla, which changed its approach several times, had been for sale for some time, said several sources.

The Austin-based start-up has raised just under $11 million from a range of investors, including Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, Alsop Louie Partners and the Founders Fund, along with a batch of well-known angel investors.

But let’s put this one to bed with the email that Williams sent out after the CNN story broke Friday, which was read to me tonight, so I might not have all of it perfectly and it is missing a sentence about I-will-smack-the-leaker):

Subject: Rumors and speculation

CNN just broke the news that Gowalla has been acquired by Facebook. This story was leaked from an unknown souurce.

The ink on the deal is not dry, so our holding pattern is that we do not comment on rumors and speculation. I have another email penned that was ready to send you today, assuming you would get this news before the story was officially released.

But now it is all over Twitter, so you have likely heard. A longer email will be sent soon. Until then, I am so very grateful for what you have done to make Gowalla a success.

The second confirmation email has apparently not yet been sent, but I will try to get it when it is, along with the price.

So, until the official official yes, here’s a video interview I did with Williams in April of 2010 about the location “wars”:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111204/heres-gowalla-ceos-non-denial-denial-email-to-investors-about-facebook-acquisition/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111013/knewton-raises-33m-for-remixing-online-learning/ http://allthingsd.com/20111013/knewton-raises-33m-for-remixing-online-learning/#comments Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:00:55 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=131765 Knewton, the educational content “remixer” that adapts its courses to each student (you could say it learns about the learner), has raised $33 million led by Founders Fund and Pearson. The three-year-old company’s new funding is particularly notable for its large size and because Founders Fund Managing Partner Peter Thiel is an outspoken critic of traditional higher education.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111013/knewton-raises-33m-for-remixing-online-learning/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110908/terror-fighting-start-up-palantir-technologies-just-raised-68-million-but-from-whom/ http://allthingsd.com/20110908/terror-fighting-start-up-palantir-technologies-just-raised-68-million-but-from-whom/#comments Thu, 08 Sep 2011 22:16:54 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=118843 Few tech start-ups have a more mysterious brief than that of Palantir Technologies. I first encountered the company while still working for Businessweek and I’ve tried to keep track of it since.

That’s not easy. Given what it does — develop software that essentially helps government intelligence agencies root out and track terrorists and other criminals with sophisticated data analysis technology — it’s generally known for keeping its mouth shut. Its name is taken from the mystical seeing stones in the “Lord of the Rings” novels.

The company takes huge reams of data and subjects it to analysis to find connections between people and entities, and to find patterns that aren’t obvious. It has been used to track suicide bombers in Iraq and to sniff out abuse of government stimulus money in the U.S., and naturally most of its business is with the government, though banks, always on the lookout for fraud, are also said to be enthusiastic customers.

Yesterday, Palantir reported in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it had just raised $68 million in funding, though, as is usually the case with Form D, the filing doesn’t say who it came from. This, of course, would come on top of $50 million that TechCrunch reported it had raised in May, and another $90 million it raised in June.

The idea for what became Palantir emerged out of antifraud work at PayPal, but then grew into something bigger. PayPal alum and Facebook investor Peter Thiel talked Alex Karp (pictured) into the idea of building it into something that could root out terrorists. Thiel and his Founder’s Fund led a $12 million funding round in 2006, some of which came from the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. Thiel led another round in 2008.

I’ve got a call in to Palantir and hope to find out more behind the details in this filing, and will update the post if I hear from them. Until then you can watch Karp’s interview on “Charlie Rose” from 2009, and a Peter Thiel interview with The Wall Street Journal from last month.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110908/terror-fighting-start-up-palantir-technologies-just-raised-68-million-but-from-whom/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110908/what-bad-economy-three-big-silicon-valley-vcs-poised-to-haul-in-2b-in-new-fund-raises/ http://allthingsd.com/20110908/what-bad-economy-three-big-silicon-valley-vcs-poised-to-haul-in-2b-in-new-fund-raises/#comments Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:15:21 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=118408

Three of Silicon Valley’s more prominent venture firms — Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and the Founders Fund — are nearing the closing of new funds that will total almost $2 billion.

This despite a bad economy, turbulent markets and lackluster venture returns of late. That said, limited partners looking for an investment edge apparently seem to still be adding more dough to the VC kitty.

Sources familiar with the fundings, in fact, said the raises have been much easier than previous ones.

Khosla has raised almost $2.4 billion since 2009, including $1.3 billion in 2010. Its fourth is now nearly completed, at just under that, which the firm had previously signaled in regulatory filings it planned to raise.

The third fund has been spent on cleantech companies, but also on early-stage high-profile Internet start-ups such as Square.

Redpoint will focus its fund — which sources said was $400 million — on growth opportunities.

Its last fund in 2010 was $400 million, too. It has invested that money in start-ups, such as Jumptap, Kabam and Pure Storage.

Lastly, the Founders Fund — with high-profile partners Peter Thiel and Sean Parker — is aiming at a $350 million fund with a $150 million “cushion” to raise more. Its last fund of $250 million was raised last year.

Founders Fund has recently made investments in Path, Azumio and Topsy.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110908/what-bad-economy-three-big-silicon-valley-vcs-poised-to-haul-in-2b-in-new-fund-raises/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110822/exclusive-yammer-now-works-with-salesforce-com/ http://allthingsd.com/20110822/exclusive-yammer-now-works-with-salesforce-com/#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:00:18 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=112529 I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The workplace is getting social. Enterprise software companies are taking a page or three from the likes of Facebook and Twitter to create social streams that keep people informed about what’s going on within a company.

One of the social enterprise companies getting a fair amount of buzz is Yammer. Initially known as a “Twitter for work,” it’s now transforming itself into something of a catchall for updates generated by numerous workplace applications.

Today, Yammer will announce that it will work with another application, and it’s a big one: Salesforce.com. The folks at Yammer used Force.com — Salesforce’s development platform — and Yammer’s own API to grab activity stream data from within Salesforce. Sales leads, deals, marketing campaigns and all sorts of other activity that gets entered into Salesforce.com become objects that can appear directly within a Yammer stream, which is essentially as easy to keep track of and interact with as a Facebook stream.

In fact, a Facebook stream is exactly what Yammer CEO David Sacks compares it to. “A few months ago we released an activity stream API that lets any application push activity stories into Yammer, the same way that Zynga can push items like the latest Mafia Wars score into your Facebook stream,” he says.

Yammer did the integration with help from Appirio, a cloud apps developer that gets tapped to do a lot of third-party integration work.

But doesn’t Salesforce already have its own social software? Why, yes it does. Its Chatter.com service launched to much fanfare with a pair of expensive TV ads that aired during the Super Bowl, which in turn kicked off a bit of a skirmish within Google search results that Yammer took part in.

It’s not as if Yammer were partnering with Salesforce here. Sacks says that Yammer just, well, did it. “The nice thing about the open API world that we live in is that you don’t necessarily have to seek permission to use these APIs.”

The wider point of Yammer, Sacks says, is to pull social data not just from one application, but from many. Not everyone in a company is going to be using Salesforce.com in the first place. The sales department might, and senior management might, but it’s of little use to, say, the human resources department or the accounting department. So Yammer talks to other applications, too. Case in point: Netsuite. Yammer announced an integration with that cloud-based business management suite of applications in May. It also works with Microsoft’s SharePoint and Active Directory.

And there will be more, Sacks says. “We’re seeing a trend with all these various line-of-business applications to build their own social networks into what they do,” he says. “And we’re already seeing customers and potential customers complaining about this, because they wind up with a dozen different social networks in their company and that defeats the whole purpose.” Yammer, he says, will be the middleman application that brings all those social streams into one place for everyone in a company. The comparison to Facebook is no accident: Yammer’s technology is based on Facebook’s Open Graph protocol.

So what happened to Chatter? Well, ask Salesforce and you’ll see some impressive stats and customer wins. Salesforce says that Chatter is used by 100,000 companies, among them Dell, Qualcomm and Lenovo.

But Yammer’s got 100,000 customers of its own, boasts three million corporate end users, and is adding them at a rate of about 200,000 a month. And there are some pretty impressive names among them, including chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, LG Electronics, eBay and Thomson Reuters. And it got those without having to spend tens of millions on Super Bowl ads. A half-million of those customers are using the paid version of Yammer.

It’s a fast-moving business and there are numerous players. Another big one to watch is Jive Software, which was said last week to have hired bankers for a pending IPO, and which is being valued at $1 billion.

No wonder Yammer has done so well in raising funding. It has brought in a combined $40 million, which was topped off last November by a $25 million round led by US Venture Partners, with Emergence Capital, Charles River Ventures and the Founders Fund also participating. Ron Conway’s SV Angel was an early investor as well.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110822/exclusive-yammer-now-works-with-salesforce-com/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110728/latest-funding-shows-mobile-medical-app-market-has-a-pulse/ http://allthingsd.com/20110728/latest-funding-shows-mobile-medical-app-market-has-a-pulse/#comments Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:30:24 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=103443 Your iPhone can’t act as a defibrillator if you get a heart attack from reading that breakup tweet, but perhaps that is just a matter of time.

In recent months, all manner of apps and devices have sprung up that use smartphones and their many sensors to perform a host of medical tasks. And the trend hasn’t gone unnoticed on Sand Hill Road. There are apps that let the iPhone and other smartphones help scan inside a child’s ear, measure blood pressure and even check for malaria.

Azumio, whose app lets an iPhone or Android device act as a heart-rate monitor, announced Wednesday that it has landed $2.5 million in series A funding from backers including Founders Fund, Accel Partners and Felicis Ventures.

The app, Instant Heart Rate, works by having a user put his or her finger over a phone’s camera for 10 seconds. It boasts more than eight million downloads, and the company sees a virtually limitless market for that and other programs.

“Our customer is everyone with a heart,” CEO Bojan Bernard Bostjancic said in an interview.

Azumio is the latest in a growing category of medical devices that attach to or work in conjunction with an iPhone or other smartphone. The mobile health-and-fitness category is also exploding with devices like Fitbit and Jawbone’s forthcoming UP product.

Indeed, the Food and Drug Administration said earlier this month it was exploring new regulations for evaluating mobile apps.

While some are focusing on devices that plug into or communicate wirelessly with a smartphone, Bostjancic says Azumio is focused for now on uses that require only a smartphone and its built-in sensors.

“With the app, you can reach just a huge audience,” he said. The heart-rate monitor uses a smartphone’s camera to determine one’s heart rate by measuring the differences in light absorption as blood is coming in and out of the tissue in the finger.

Bostjancic said that there are other sensors in the phone that can help us be more aware of what our body is or isn’t doing at any time. In large part, he said, most chronic diseases are caused by lifestyle. That’s a problem, given how detached most people are from what is going on with their bodies. Technology is part of the problem, but also part of the solution.

Azumio, he said, “would like to put you back in touch with your body.”

Next up for Azumio are apps that perform stress checks. Bostjancic notes that stress is often the trigger for all manner of lifestyle-related disease.

“We would like to address this by quantifying the level of stress,” he said.

Bostjancic also sees an opportunity to partner with or acquire other companies in the field, noting that others are looking at sleep and other factors that contribute to the lifestyle-related chronic illnesses Azumio is addressing. Among the devices he says have caught his interest are those that monitor sleep, since sleep apnea is associated with higher risk of cardiac problems.

“We could coordinate the data from different measurements,” he said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110728/latest-funding-shows-mobile-medical-app-market-has-a-pulse/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110406/topguest-hustles-its-way-into-making-travel-loyalty-pay-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110406/topguest-hustles-its-way-into-making-travel-loyalty-pay-video/#comments Wed, 06 Apr 2011 17:17:57 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5210 Topguest co-founder and CEO Geoff Lewis says he figured out a way to hack the near-impossible problem of hiring engineers in Silicon Valley: find them in Australia.

Apparently the U.S. visa process coming from Down Under is relatively pain-free, and at a cost of “a few thousand dollars” Lewis now has four Australians and himself, a Canadian, working on Topguest. “No Americans,” he said as a point of pride in an interview at his San Francisco office this week.

Lewis’ explanation for how a small, less-than-a-year-old start-up with relatively few users can score deals with the likes of Virgin America, Hilton and InterContinental Hotels Group is similar: “Just hustling.”

Topguest ties customers’ geo-located social media activity with existing loyalty rewards programs. “We have no loyalty or travel domain expertise,” Lewis said.

Topguest doesn’t have its own check-in app, but it plugs into users’ Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram accounts to pull in their posts. For instance, getting the most likes on Instagram for a picture taken at a U.S. airport this week will earn Topguest users 1,000 Virgin America Elevate points (the minimum amount needed to buy a flight is 2,500).

In comparison to the fleeting attraction of a nearby special offer on Foursquare, Lewis said, “deals and discounts aren’t loyalty.”

Lewis said Facebook is by far the most-used check-in service by Topguest users, and the company’s recent Instagram integration has doubled unique visitors to its site.

This weekend, Topguest is launching a partnership with Caesars Entertainment Corp in Las Vegas that will earn users rewards points to spend at the company’s 1,000 venues.

Topguest makes money by receiving an activation fee for users who participate in loyalty programs (so far 10 percent of its users have signed up for a new loyalty program), as well as a monthly fee in some cases.

Ultimately, said Lewis, Topguest wants to act as a personalized concierge tool for its users, helping them make travel reservations to earn and spend loyalty points.

The company does have to fend off users who game the system by checking into multiple hotels in order to accrue more points. Lewis said Topguest has banned hundreds of users already for such abuse.

Personally, I might tend toward the opposite inclination and resist publicly checking into places where I plan to spend the night. But earning miles for airport check-ins? Sure, why not!

Topguest raised $2 million in Series A funding last year from investors including Founders Fund, as well as angels such as Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Jeff Clavier and Naval Ravikant. After closing the funding, the company moved from New York City to San Francisco.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110406/topguest-hustles-its-way-into-making-travel-loyalty-pay-video/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110405/practice-fusion-helping-doctors-go-paperless-lands-23-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20110405/practice-fusion-helping-doctors-go-paperless-lands-23-million/#comments Tue, 05 Apr 2011 14:00:10 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4723 Like anyone else who runs a business, doctors want to eliminate paper. And in medical practices there’s plenty of it. The primary feature of any doctors office is the mountain of file folders containing patient medical records, all on paper.

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110405/practice-fusion-helping-doctors-go-paperless-lands-23-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110404/sean-parkers-relationship-status-engaged/ http://allthingsd.com/20110404/sean-parkers-relationship-status-engaged/#comments Tue, 05 Apr 2011 01:46:43 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5164 Rest in peace, Valleywag. Remember when Silicon Valley gossip was so boring it couldn’t sustain a Gawker blog? Now, People.com is breaking the news of Sean Parker’s engagement.

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110404/sean-parkers-relationship-status-engaged/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110329/what-causes-com-has-learned-about-non-profit-fundraising-from-zynga/ http://allthingsd.com/20110329/what-causes-com-has-learned-about-non-profit-fundraising-from-zynga/#comments Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:00:17 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4894 The online activism platform Causes.com recently uprooted itself from Berkeley, CA, a spiritual home of offline activism, to the financial district of San Francisco, a spiritual home of hedge funds and other such ventures.

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110329/what-causes-com-has-learned-about-non-profit-fundraising-from-zynga/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110310/defying-the-twitter-ecosystem-curse-topsy-rakes-in-15m-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20110310/defying-the-twitter-ecosystem-curse-topsy-rakes-in-15m-more/#comments Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:00:41 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4142 Topsy Labs, the real-time search engine, has raised $15 million in Series C funding from BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund, Scott Banister and Western Technology Investments. This brings the company to about $30 million in total funding since it was founded in 2006.

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).

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