And if you combine the two? You get Vungle, a barely hatched start-up that just raised a $2 million seed round.

Vungle’s pitch is straightforward: They help app developers make video promo reels for their stuff, and turn them into “in-app” ads (you can see a sample below). There are a whole lot of ways to buy in-app advertising for other apps already — it’s a big chunk of the mobile ad business right now — but the Vungle guys argue that they make it easy. And that unlike iAd, AdMob, Millenial, etc., it’s all they do.

Fair enough. No way to really tell now, as the company is only in “alpha,” with a handful of paying customers that include Path, the buzzy next-gen social network, and Pocket Games, a game developer. A more open beta comes this summer.

At least as interesting as the pitch is the backstory, which has co-founders Zain Jeffer, 24, and Jack Smith, 23, leaving London on a whim to join the AngelPad start-up factory last fall, then finding themselves in a whirlwind round of financing. For instance, they pitched Crosslink’s David Silverman at his home on a weekend, and got a commitment a day later.

Multimillion dollar seed rounds would have been unheard of a couple years ago. Now they’re increasingly commonplace (here’s one for $4.2 million), at least for a certain class of incubator-blessed start-ups. And they’re part of the reason that you’re hearing lots of bubble talk right now.

For the record, the Vungle guys say they had no intention of raising so much out of the gate. But “as soon as you tell people you don’t want money, that’s when they want to give you money,” Smith says. Among those chipping in: Google Ventures, AOL Ventures, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, Charles Hudson, Maynard Webb, Scott McNealy and Tim Draper.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

If there’s one thing the co-founders of YouTube don’t need, it’s money (Chad Hurley and Steve Chen each made an estimated $300-plus million from selling to Google). But, in the form of their new company, AVOS Systems, they do seem to see the value in plugging into the venture capital system — and back into the Google system in particular — by accepting a Series A investment today from Google Ventures, NEA, Madrone Capital and Innovation Works.

On the VC side, the deal is obviously more about the team than about its current products. AVOS has been working on the challenge of reinvigorating Delicious, which it bought from Yahoo, and now is planning an upcoming digital magazine called Zeen.

AVOS said that Alex Kinnier of NEA, and Gideon Yu — who is now president of the San Francisco 49ers and was formerly at Khosla Ventures, YouTube and Facebook — would be joining its board.

Wittlebee, a monthly kids’ clothing club that was incubated at Los Angeles area “technology studio” Science, has gotten $2.5 million in funding.

Much like another Science start-up, Dollar Shave Club, Wittlebee ships a custom box of high-quality kids’ clothes to members.

The seed round of funding was led by Rincon, with participation from SoftTech, Google Ventures, Matt Coffin, Crosslink, and Morado.

Wittlebee’s CEO and founder Sean Percival said the money would be used to create a private-label clothing line.

Wittlebee uses stay-at-home parents, who have used the site, as customer service reps. The start-up sends a new order of children’s apparel each month, including onesies, t-shirts, leggings, socks and pants, upping the sizes as the kid grows.

In other words, kind of like a never-ending online Gap.

Here’s the official press release on Wittlebee’s funding:

Wittlebee Raises $2.5 Million Seed Funding Lead By Rincon

Children’s clothing membership service to begin manufacturing private label designs to keep up with growing customer demand

Los Angeles, CA. April 4, 2012 — Wittlebee (www.Wittlebee.com), the affordable children’s clothing monthly membership service backed by technology studio Science Inc., today announces the company raised $2.5 million in seed funding leady by Rincon, with participation from SoftTech, Google Ventures, Matt Coffin, CrossLink, and Morado. Jim Andelman, co-founder and General Partner at Rincon, joins Wittlebee’s board alongside Michael Jones, founder and CEO of Science, and Sean Percival, Wittlebee’s founder and CEO.

Since launching less than two months ago, Wittlebee has experienced accelerated growth, in part because of Science’s track record of quickly scaling ecommerce businesses. The company will use the new investment to build out its executive team and user acquisitions.

Upon joining Wittlebee, customers are connected to a team of mom stylists who work with families to compose boxes of high-quality children’s clothing to meet individual children’s needs. Active kids in warm climates like Miami may receive appropriate t-shirts, shorts and socks whereas infants in Albany receive long-sleeve onesies and cozy pajamas.

“Wittlebee’s recent growth has been tremendous,” said Percival. “Our customer feedback is overwhelmingly positive; we are speaking to an audience of 20,000 highly engaged moms across social media who tell us they’re delighted we’re saving them time and money for all their children’s clothing needs. We plan to use Rincon’s investment to create Wittlebee’s private label clothing line that will truly showcase our commitment to high-quality practical children’s apparel.”

In the coming months, customers will receive a selection of parents’ favorite well-known brands in addition to Wittlebee’s private label. Manufactured both locally in Los Angeles and abroad, the new line represents customers’ wish-list of kids’ must-haves, from high-quality soft fabrics, to a wide color palate, to unique graphic designs. After months of research and testing apparel options through Wittlebee’s social networks, the resulting Wittlebee bespoke label will be a timeless array of apparel basics to carry kids through seasons, activities and all their lifestyle needs.

“For every investment decision we make, we care most about customer value proposition, team, and business model,” said Jim Andelman, Managing Partner at Rincon. “We’ve been tremendously impressed by parents’ positive response to Wittlebee’s offering: they love the selections, they save money and you can’t beat the convenience of clothes showing up right to your door. The e-commerce space is exploding in LA, and we’re very excited to be at the forefront with Wittlebee.”

For more on Wittlebee, please visit www.Wittlebee.com.

The e-commerce giant (a term typically reserved for Amazon in these woods) is one of the larger examples companies from the Bay Area that are setting up shop here and looking to soak up some of the Northwest’s rich engineering talent.

Other companies with satellite offices in the Seattle area include Google, Facebook, Zynga and Salesforce.

“I’m surprised I ended up at eBay, but the story is compelling,” said Ken Moss, who was hired in November to be eBay’s VP of managed marketplaces technology; Moss is GM of the Redmond office.

A long-time Microsoft employee whose claim to fame includes inventing the Pivot table in Excel, Moss more recently co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology and later on stock market prediction.

He said eBay’s dedication to the region is one of the biggest selling points for recruitment.

Most of the 75 employees that currently work there were hired over the past few months, and a small team has been here for seven years. Among the newbies I met were a number of Microsoft veterans who had been there for 12 to 15 years.

Moss says he will report directly to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges, which is “a signal to the whole company that diversified development is for real.”

“We are first-class citizens,” Moss said, referring to sometimes strained relationship between remote workers and a company’s headquarters.

Eric Brill, VP of eBay’s research labs, is also based in the Redmond office, and has been working part-time there since joining the company in 2009.

Moss said eBay will be looking to hire a range of technologists, from college graduates to senior leaders, including developers, testers, researchers, data miners and other positions.

While I was at the office on Tuesday, the mountains were peeking out from the clouds and were easy to spot from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fourth floor. It was easy enough for everyone to have a window seat in the open-floor plan.

Although the employees just moved in on Monday, a sign outside the building already announced eBay’s presence. Inside, workers were busy putting the final touches on the space to make it feel like eBay. Primary colors of red, blue, yellow and green highlighted the office walls; with a bit of Seattle flair, conference rooms were named after Northwest tribes such as Puyallup and Quinault (and other names that might be difficult for San Jose-based employees to pronounce).

But missing were some of the perks that some recruits expect these day — no shuttles to and from work or fancy cafeterias, for instance. 

In fact, eBay has a long way to go to compare with what Google has done here. Since entering the market seven years ago, Google has hired more than 900 employees, spread across two locations, a spokesperson confirmed.

One office is in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood; the other is on the Eastside.

The two offices are geographically divided by Lake Washington, which can be crossed by one of two floating bridges — or by boat, if you are crafty enough. The traffic bottlenecks make for a horrendously notorious commute, so having two locations that straddle both sides is a huge perk — like having offices in both San Francisco and San Jose.

Because of Google’s size here, many of its perks are similar to its Mountain View headquarters, including free meals prepared by chefs, frozen-yogurt bars and other, mostly food-based, luxuries.

In eBay’s case, the new digs are located deep on the Eastside, a couple of miles past Microsoft in Redmond, and roughly 15 miles from Jeff Bezos’s empire in downtown Seattle. Recently, Amazon relocated its headquarters to a brand-new campus in South Lake Union, a neighborhood being revitalized by former Microsoft executive Paul Allen.

Other outside companies that have also established sizable tech centers here include Facebook and Zynga. A couple others have gained offices through acquisitions. Electronic Arts, for instance, now has a large office here, after acquiring PopCap; EMC now has big expansion plans here, after purchasing Isilon.

And Geekwire, a Seattle-based technology blog, is good at keeping an ongoing tally, including recent moves into the area by Jawbone and SweetLabs, a San Diego-based start-up, based by Intel Capital and Google Ventures.

Two years ago, Facebook opened an office in the heart of downtown Seattle. It plans to move soon to a 27,000-square-foot space that will have room for about 135 employees. The 70 or so engineers in the office today have worked on projects such as video calling, the Facebook iPad app and other big issues, such as security.

Last April, social game maker Zynga opened an office in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, hoping to absorb some of the game talent here, spawned from Xbox and Nintendo, and cloud-computing knowledge from Amazon. It has 50 employees today, but declined to say how many it planned to hire in the near future.

As with most of these companies, eBay believes it can find a diversity of talent here that can’t always be easy to hire in the Bay Area.

As a Seattle native, and having covered tech here for the past 12 years, including an eight-year stint at the Seattle Times, I might not be the most unbiased on the subject. But I’ve seen first-hand the breadth of talent here, from Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile and many others, including a strong start-up pool.

Despite that, the local tech community often suffers from an inferiority complex when it compares itself with the Bay Area, which is much larger. Still, it seems that Silicon Valley companies are finding a number of excuses to travel north to drink from the area’s plentiful tech waters.

A new iPhone app called MovieGoer aims to help people find movies through their friends, go to movies together and submit quick video reviews from their phone.

MovieGoer is the first product from Nettle, a La Jolla, Calif.-based start-up funded by Google Ventures, 500 Startups and Advancit Capital (Shari Redstone’s new early-stage investment firm).

“The theatrical business of movies is booming internationally, and flat in the U.S., but crying out for innovation,” said Nettle CEO Brian Dear in an interview today. He said MovieGoer’s mission is to help people enjoy more movies.

MovieGoer is trying to be both a public and private social network, said Dear, who previously founded Eventful. So users might make plans with their close friends but publish their 15-second mobile video reviews to a larger audience.

Users can also follow movies, cast and crew and other users to get updates about upcoming films. Dear said MovieGoer may make money through analyzing demand and also through offers from studios and theaters.

Another start-up working on similar ideas is called Can’t Wait and was in the last Y Combinator class.

The shell company has grown through acquisition, picking up eight sites in the past two years, including RetailMeNot.com and Deals.com in the U.S., and VoucherCodes.co.uk in the U.K. In all, the company claims to attract 100 million unique visitors a year, most of whom are seeking discounts on anything from a gallon of milk to a pair of shoes.

This year, WhaleShark expects to be profitable on revenues exceeding $70 million.

The company’s CEO, Cotter Cunningham, told AllThingsD in an interview that the company is a classic roll-up. Its first $150 million in capital was spent on acquisitions, and that’s how it intends to spend its next $150 million.

Investors in the round include J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Institutional Venture Partners. Existing investors include Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Adams Street Partners and Google Ventures.

To date, the company has raised nearly $300 million in two rounds.

“We are actively pursuing a number of acquisitions, and it will take us another year to spend the money,” Cunningham said.

The coupon-clipping business, while ancient, has gotten its sexy back in recent months, thanks to the success of Groupon and the consumer’s general shift in thinking to look for deals online rather than in the Sunday newspaper. VCs have recognized this behavior change and have gravitated to it like a teenager to Justin Bieber.

CouponCabin.com of Whiting, Ind., raised $54 million, Coupons.com secured $230 million in two megarounds, and CouponTrade.com has secured a more modest $2.4 million in capital. I’m sure there are many more that I’m forgetting.

Cunningham says a number of things are driving the trend, and while Groupon’s popularity has helped, WhaleShark is not a daily deals site.

“Groupon went out and created a whole new market with a big sales force,” he said. “They’ve done an amazing job of creating a new market focused on an interesting aspect of the coupon that didn’t exist two or three years ago. Our focus is more on taking the existing couponing model and moving it online.”

Essentially, it’s the newspaper circular that WhaleShark is going after. ”I’m a huge fan of newspapers, but yes, ultimately that’s what we are doing,” Cunningham ’fessed up.

Today, it has aggregated about half a million coupons, from 130,000 merchants, on its site. Many of them are uploaded by consumers, who received a free shipping code in an email from the Gap or Old Navy. Customers have self-reported to WhaleShark that they save about $20 on average per transaction.

The business won’t require even half the sales staff of Groupon. Today, WhaleShark has about 100 people at its Austin headquarters, and 40 people in the U.K. Cunningham anticipates adding 50 to 75 employees in Austin, and doubling numbers abroad.

The company earns a commission from about 10 percent of the offers it distributes on the site. Additionally, it hopes to support the sites through advertising as it attracts a large audience.

[Photo credit: sdc2027.]

They’ve created a fictional mobile app called Jotly that promises would-be users: “Everything about your life is exciting. To everyone.”

With Jotly, you can rate a parking meter, a leaf, the quality of a hiding spot … Well, you could if this were real and not a parody of an overpromising private beta with rounded corners and promises of free iPads.

Firespotter Labs co-founder Alex Cornell said in an email that Jotly is meant to “poke fun at the increasing granularity of apps these days, and the proliferation of oversharing.” He admitted that Google Ventures-backed Firespotter’s main product to date — a restaurant recommendation app called Nosh — fits pretty squarely into that description and said, preemptively, “we have thick skin.”

Krishna Yeshwant, a Google Ventures partner, and Geoff Duyk, a TPG partner, have also joined DNAnexus’s board of directors.

Andreas Sundquist, the CEO of DNAnexus, told me that one of the big advantages of having an investment from Google is access to its computing infrastructure and some of the 20 percent time from Google employees.

Google, he said, will collaborate with DNAnexus to provide access to a huge archive of publicly available DNA information. The archive will take over where the federal government’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is leaving off, after being shut down because of budget cuts.

DNAnexus and Google have teamed up to take over that database and will continue to provide access — for free — to medical researchers. It will now live in Google’s cloud, and researchers will now have a new, easy-to-use interface for accessing it. It represents the largest single dataset ever put on Google’s infrastructure by a third party.

Don’t mourn the government effort. DNA databases are probably better handled by the private sector, Sundquist says, mainly because sequencing a genome, which used to require NASA-sized multibillion-dollar budgets that only big governments can sustain, is no longer so complicated or expensive.

“The reason we started the company is that we started to see that DNA sequencing was getting about 10 time cheaper every 18 months,” he told me. “Ten years ago it cost about $3 billion to sequence a human genome. Now you can do it for about $4,000. It’s like Moore’s Law on crack. In a few years it will be less than $1,000.”

That kind of cost reduction means there’s likely going to be an explosion in the amount of DNA information collected, the kind of surge that Google is uniquely capable of scaling up to manage. “We’re moving from a world where practically no one has their DNA sequences to a world where nearly everyone does, and it just becomes a part of your medical record,” Sundquist says. “The question is, how do you manage all that. It’s one of the biggest and most complex sets of data in the world.”

Answer: The cloud. Think of DNAnexus as sort of a Salesforce.com for people who need access to DNA information. The data will live in the cloud, and researchers will have access to it through a software-as-service model. “DNAnexus is really a DNA data management and analysis platform in the cloud,” Sundquist said. “We’re trying to build database technologies that unlock the possibilities of DNA-based medicine in the cloud.”

Who would pay for it? Anyone who needs DNA sequencing work done: Medical researchers, drug companies, medical doctors. DNAnexus will do the heavy lifting associated with getting the sequencing done. Beyond that, it will manage the ever-growing trove of DNA data and provide all the computing tools that those customers need in the course of doing their work, via a SaaS platform. It already has customers in academia, at places like Stanford University and Harvard University; at pharma companies; and even practicing medical pros in their day-to-day practices, using DNA information to improve their health care and diagnosis problems.

What does Nettle do? That’s not clear yet. The company plans to launch “a next-generation social/local/mobile application and website for the global entertainment market” next month, starting with an iPhone app.

Dear, who is CEO of La Jolla, Calif.-based Nettle, elaborated that it is focused on “a very specific consumer vertical.”

Dear founded Eventful, an event aggregation site, in 2004, but resigned as chairman last year after being inspired to do something on the mobile Internet, he said. His co-founder, Dan O’Neill, who is CTO of Nettle, previously co-founded music company Trusonic.

The funding comes after a $100,000 fellowship grant to Airy’s founder, Andrew Hsu, from Peter Thiel’s much-publicized and politicized “20 under 20″ grant program, in which the PayPal co-founder paid 20 young entrepreneurs to leave or forgo college in favor of starting companies.

The announcement also makes Hsu the first alum of Thiel’s program to get a business idea venture funded.

Airy’s mission, according to Hsu, is to “make games that parents can feel good about handing to their kids … and that don’t suck.”

The games, which will initially teach English, math and memory building, will be targeted at the 5 to 13 age range, which is coincidentally about the same age Hsu was when he started studying neuroscience at the University of Washington.

It’s somewhat ironic that the first funded Thiel fellow has spent almost half his life in college.

While Hsu said that Thiel’s cash was “nice to have,” he said he knew he’d have to raise a lot more to build out his vision for cross-platform learning games.

Hsu said Airy’s first products would be offered initially on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platform, with the hope that the games will evolve “into a larger platform where social learning can take place.”

The funding is intended to alleviate founder stress and encourage faster product progress, said AngelPad’s Thomas Korte. Competing program Y Combinator has a similar deal to give participating companies $150,000 from DST investor Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, the so-called “Start Fund.”

Korte said the AngelPad money is not the same: “It’s different. It’s a real investment from a VC firm, rather than just plain capital or quote-unquote free money.”

Korte acknowledged that having funding from the get-go will put more pressure on the companies in his program to make a return for their investors. “It’s probably more of a sense of responsibility,” he said.

AngelPad is two weeks away from starting its third class of 15 start-ups, but has left one spot open for a company that may be enticed by this new funding offer, Korte said.

Korte declined to specify which VCs are putting up the money, but said they focus on investments in B2B, mobile and e-commerce, like AngelPad.

Though AngelPad has a close relationship with Google Ventures, a spokeswoman for Google Ventures said that the firm was not one of the two participants in the new funding program.

Pixazza is dead. Long live Luminate.

Well, from a brand perspective, at least, as the image advertising start-up changes to an easier-to-say name and also launches a new platform for image applications.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up — which is backed by Google Ventures, CMEA Ventures, August Capital, Foundation Capital and Shasta Ventures, as well as by angel investors Ron Conway, Gideon Yu and Maynard Webb — aims to do for Web photos what the search giant did for text.

The new name for the company that called itself “AdSense for images” pretty much speaks for itself.

In addition to Luminate’s previous sharing, commerce and advertising apps, the company will offer information, navigation and public service apps, which you can see below

Luminate says its interactive images are viewed three billion times per month.

Here’s the official press release for the name change, as well as the image app platform:

PIXAZZA, INC. REBRANDS ITSELF AS LUMINATE, INC.

New Name Better Reflects Vision For Making All Online Images Interactive

Company Enables Images at Rate of 30 Billion Image Views per Year

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — July 27, 2011 — Pixazza Inc., the worldwide leader in making images interactive, today announced its new company name — Luminate, Inc. With its new services and the introduction of a groundbreaking new platform (see separate release: Luminate Launches World’s First Platform for Image Apps), the company opted to rebrand itself with a name that better reflects its bold vision of making every image interactive.

“We started the company to change the web by offering information relevant to online images, engaging consumers in a novel way while offering advertisers and publishers additional revenue streams,” said Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Luminate. “We’ve since developed the technology and scale to enable images to do even more. Moving forward as Luminate, we will continue to elevate the role of the image and dramatically improve the web experience.”

Rapidly scaling to accommodate the new demand for interactive images, Luminate now reaches more than 150 million unique visitors per month.

Its publisher network also has grown to more than 4,000 publishers, and the company enables images at a rate of 30 billion image views per year. This is significant because just as page views are commonly used to measure web site traffic, Luminate tracks image views, which count the number of times a web publisher serves up a Luminate-enabled image. It is a clear marker of audience interest.

The name change and announcement of the Luminate™ platform for image apps, comes on the heels of an innovative partnership with Hearst Digital Media. The company’s explosive momentum has also been a draw for top talent including CRO and head of publisher development, Chas Edwards, formerly of Digg; Terry Murphy, CFO, formerly of LiveOps. Luminate also added Elliot Schrage, the Vice President of Global Communications, Marketing and Public Policy at Facebook, as a strategic advisor to the Luminate Board.

Please visit www.luminate.com to learn more about how Luminate is changing the way consumers, publishers and advertisers use and interact with online images.

LUMINATE UNVEILS WORLD’S FIRST PLATFORM FOR IMAGE APPLICATIONS

Company Brings Images to Life with Image Apps Designed to Create Rich Consumer Experience

Luminate Transforms Images Into a Canvas to Shop, Share, Comment, Examine, Curate, Search and Socialize

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — July 27, 2011, Luminate, Inc., formerly known as Pixazza, Inc., today unveiled a groundbreaking new platform for image applications. For the first time ever, consumers can launch applications within the individual images on their favorite websites.

With this exciting new platform, Luminate opens a new world of image apps, breaking down a wall and bringing flat, static images to life. Online images become more than visual stimuli — they become a gateway for accessing rich and relevant content across the web. The apps available on the Luminate™ platform will allow consumers not only to conduct their favorite everyday online activities such as shopping, sharing, commenting and navigating directly from the images, but can also facilitate entirely new services made possible by the development of apps specifically for images.

“Image apps transform images from static pixels into interactive experiences,” said Luminate CEO Bob Lisbonne. “Just as phones evolved from merely voice calls to smartphones with apps, now consumers can enjoy relevant apps inside every online image. The explosive use of images fueled by mobile, social, and cloud computing trends sets the stage for Luminate’s pioneering new image apps platform.”

How It Works:

When a consumer sees the Luminate icon in the corner of an image, it indicates that the image is interactive. Consumers simply mouse into the image and choose from a variety of image apps. They can easily share an image or specific points within an image with their friends, discover statistics about their favorite athletes, see where to purchase similar products to those featured in a photo, uncover the latest information about a particular event, reveal geo tag or Wikipedia information, read more content about the people or places featured in an image, listen to music or see a movie trailer related to an image.

Image Applications:

Image applications will span a number of key categories including: Commerce, Information, Social, Organization, Advertising, Navigation, Public Service, and Presentation. Luminate’s platform currently offers such applications as: unique Twitter Share, Facebook Share, and Email Share apps that give consumers the power to select precisely what they want inside an image and share it with others; an information app called Annotation that allows publishers to quickly and easily tag any spot within an image and add information relevant to that image; a commerce app called Products, which enables consumers to mouse over the image and interact with tags on the picture; and an Advertising app that offers publishers a seamless way to place relevant advertisements within an image.

Luminate plans to roll out new applications frequently to address the varying needs of consumers, publishers and advertisers. Its platform is designed to ultimately enable the development of any conceivable app that is relevant to a particular image. It is this capability that will help define the future of web images.

This cutting edge platform for image apps comes from the company that pioneered the use of images as real estate for delivering ecommerce and advertising three years ago as Pixazza, Inc. With the introduction of the new platform, the company has been rebranded as Luminate, Inc. (see separate release: Pixazza, Inc. Rebrands itself as Luminate, Inc.) as it takes the next step in executing its vision to make every image on the web interactive.

The Luminate Approach:

What makes the Luminate platform so compelling is its breakthrough ability to link images with applications and content beyond the website where the image is viewed. To create the best possible consumer experience, Luminate focuses on all of the data relevant to a particular image or part of an image. Luminate has long employed a unique recognition system that combines visual algorithms with human crowdsourcing. With its new platform, the company has multiplied the sources and ways to uncover information about images. In addition to the data derived from its team of experts, the company can avail itself of information from end users and publishers with the goal of creating a richer, more immersive experience for the end user. Luminate has the most sophisticated system in the industry for tagging relevant content.

“The reason images remained stagnant for so long is because it is remarkably difficult to contextualize their composition and link them to other pieces of relevant content across the Internet,” said James Everingham, CTO of Luminate.

“We were the first to develop the technology to overcome these complexities, turning images into an even more valuable asset. With our platform and the introduction of image apps, we believe that the entire Internet can become connected in a more meaningful way.”

To learn more about how Luminate is changing the way consumers interact with images, please visit www.luminate.com.

Read It Later, which helps users save and sync articles and other material across multiple devices for consumption when they have time, raised the funding in the face of increasing competition from Apple’s upcoming iOS 5 “Reading List,” RockMelt and long-time rival Instapaper.

Founder Nate Weiner said that’s why he raised the funding: after he received acquisition interest from three companies earlier this year, he realized he wants bigger and better things for Read It Later than just being a feature of other people’s products.

“Any of the products that launched this year that are very similar to us tried to pick me up to help them launch that, but nobody had the same vision that I did,” he said.

Read It Later is about “truly ubiquitous content-shifting,” Weiner said. “The future isn’t one consolidated device; it’s screens everywhere.”

And even though his start-up may be small — it now has five employees and 3.5 million registered users — it is available in more ways than any of the competition. Read It Later has official apps on the iPhone, iPad, Android, Firefox and Web, plus many more apps created with its API and 250 more apps with Read It Later integrations including the official Twitter apps. The company currently makes money with optional paid versions but will likely offer subscriptions instead, according to Weiner.

Weiner said that less than one percent of current Read It Later users use the tool to save articles with Safari only, which is the sole functionality Apple will offer in iOS 5. He’s betting that multi-platform and multi-screen content reading and watching is a big opportunity.

On that note, YouTube is already the No. 1 most-saved domain in Read It Later, Weiner said.

Meanwhile, Instapaper, which is iOS only, has more of a focus on content discovery and offline access, Weiner argued. Versus thought leader Marco Arment, the man behind Instapaper, “We’re the quiet giant,” Weiner said. “We’re twice as large.”

The new funding will be used to pay for hires, Weiner said. He’s also rented the company’s first office in downtown San Francisco. “This is the cheapest business in the entire universe, just saving links,” Weiner said. “The office rent is more than our server cost.”

It’s a big change, Weiner added, from Read It Later’s first office — his Minneapolis bedroom, where he had to take the door off the closet in order to fit a desk.

Photo of Nate Weiner courtesy Emily Steffen.

That’s because Rich Miner’s day job these days is heading the East Coast wing of Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Internet giant. And as a money guy, Miner said that, until very recently, the money was still in making apps for the iPhone.

“There were just that many more handsets out there,” Miner said, speaking on stage at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. “That has clearly flipped.”

Miner said that Android, which was little more than some demos and PowerPoint slides when Google acquired it, is now a major player and, in many ways, a better option for start-ups. In part, he said, that’s because it is easier for users to develop and test applications because it supports side-loading of programs so that companies can test out and refine their ideas before launching them.

Miner has plenty of money to put where his mouth is. His Google-backed fund has $100 million to invest each year, Miner said, with investments so far in areas as diverse as automotive to clean tech to Internet companies. At the event, Miner announced that Google Ventures has invested in two mobile companies, Crittercism and Astrid.

Miner said that the goal of Google Ventures is to make money, not to push Google’s various platforms and strategies. That said, Miner said his tie to Google is a big advantage, giving him a Google badge, a deep rolodex and “Google Goggles.”

“We can see the world through Google’s eyes,” Miner said.

Of course, things weren’t always that way for Miner.

He noted that Android wasn’t originally looking to sell itself to Google. The small self-funded start-up was just going around raising money, pitching companies on the value and importance of having an open smartphone operating system. Miner said that Larry Page immediately latched on to the idea, while then-CEO Eric Schmidt and Sergei Brin were less focused on mobile at that point.

Since then, Miner said, Brin and Schmidt have become experts in wireless.

“All three came to be champions,” he said.

According to AngelPad founder Thomas Korte, whose start-up incubator has turned out a little more 20 companies, a significant number of AngelPad companies have taken funding from Google Ventures, though many of them remain unannounced.

That relationship is not an accident; Korte and the other AngelPad advisers were all formerly early Google executives. Meanwhile, Google Ventures has become a way for long-time Googlers to stay at the tech giant while changing careers and getting more involved with young tech companies.

Plus, Google Ventures has a very hands-on approach, said Korte, which appeals to many start-ups. And Google Ventures continues to add new partners and associates with valuable start-up experience, such as Sam Schillace, the founder of Writely, which became Google Docs, who now holds the title of “Googler in residence.”

Unlike many AngelPad start-ups, Crittercism’s and Astrid’s founders are not former Googlers too.

VentureWire reported yesterday that Google Ventures has made something like 60 investments since it started two years ago, though only 32 of them have been announced.

Crittercism and Astrid are both interesting in their own right, and are not that similar when it comes to what they actually do. (Though they both have cute mascots/logos, which are pictured at left and above.)

Crittercism offers a support platform for iOS and Android apps, allowing developers to get crash reports and other diagnostics as well as solicit feedback from within their apps. It’s free for apps with fewer than 100,000 monthly active users.

The San Francisco-based company has raised less than $2 million from the iFund, Google Ventures, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, AOL Ventures and angels.

Meanwhile, Astrid is a productivity app for Android — and soon iOS — that generates sleek to-do lists. It has been downloaded 1.5 million times in the past year and has 250,000 monthly active users.

Astrid’s seed funders include Google Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and Jack Herrick of wikiHow and Jump Ventures.

While the two events are a coincidence, it demonstrates the intense interest to figure out a way to connect shopping more closely to your interests and the people you know.

The company launching its beta site today is Copious, a San Francisco-based start-up that envisions connecting buyers and sellers using information from Facebook and Twitter to strip away some of the anonymity that is found on sites like eBay and Craigslist.

Meanwhile, eBay VP and head of eBay North America Christopher Payne is delivering a keynote today at Internet Retailer in San Diego to talk about some of the features eBay is launching later this year.

So far, eBay’s social efforts have been limited.

eBay launched Group Gifts last year, which helped various people pitch in money using PayPal to buy a gift together for someone, and last month, it hired former Yahoo exec Don Bradford to lead the company’s social commerce efforts.

However, unlike Zynga, which is known for such titles as CityVille and FrontierVille, Kabam is building social games for the hardcore gamer looking for a little more grit and challenge.

Today, it’s driving a stake into the ground by announcing it has raised $85 million in a fourth round of venture capital. What’s more, the round closely follows a $30 million third round of funding raised in January.

To date, Kabam has raised $125 million, which still doesn’t compare to the roughly $1 billion raised by Zynga, which is now also rumored to be filing for a public offering any day.

“We are targeting a different segment,” said Kevin Chou, Kabam’s CEO. “It’s the hardcore gamers, who are spending their time on social networks, and discovering the games that Kabam makes. It’s very different from the social games that are out there today. We are seeing incredible growth and excitement in our business.”

The company has grown from 25 to 400 employees in the past 16 months and expects to release at least four more game titles this year. The funding will be used for international growth and to make more acquisitions following the purchase of a company called WonderHill in October.

The funding was co-led by Google Ventures and Pinnacle Ventures. Also participating was Performance Equity and SK Telekom Ventures, as well as previous investors Canaan Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Intel Capital.

While Kabam’s games fit the typical profile of social games on Facebook because they are free to play and are supported by virtual goods, the plots and competitive nature are more reminiscent of games on the Xbox 360–and less like Zynga.

“You aren’t buying a decorative stadium or stable,” Chou said. “You are buying things that are giving you a competitive edge against the other players in the games.”

The round of funding is large compared to other social game companies in this space that have recently announced rounds. Also this week, CrowdStar, which is arguably the largest independent social game company after Zynga, raised $23 million, and Finland-based Supercell, which also says it is making hardcore social games, raised $12 million.

Some of Kabam’s more popular titles that are available today include Dragons of Atlantis and Kingdoms of Camelot.

Chou said ultimately they might be going after a smaller audience than Zynga, which attracts 250 million players a month and a mass market, but the players are more dedicated.

He said 83 percent of their gamers are also playing console or PC games and that 55 percent are now spending less time on other platforms because of their games. In addition, social is a critical component. Up to 70 percent of their players say that the most important feature of their games is being able to form alliances with players, who are either friends on Facebook or those they can connect to anonymously.

Walker wouldn’t specify what exactly he’s working on except to say it’s likely to be communications, consumer and mobile products.

Google Ventures, which is hosting Firespotter at its on-campus incubator, has already ponied up $3 million in Series A funding. Though Google Ventures is not the same thing as Google proper, it’s a bit of a coup for the company to hang onto one of its acquired entrepreneurs, rather than having him turn elsewhere for his next project.

Recently, BoomTown took a walk down digital Memory Lane with Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Pixazza, the photo-tagging service that has nicknamed itself “AdSense for images.”

That’s because Lisbonne used to be a big wheel at Netscape Communications, the iconic Internet browser company that truly changed the digital world–before crashing and burning in a very public way.

We talked about the old days, of course, but more about the new days and his business focused on putting all kinds of advertising within online images.

The Mountain View, CA, start-up–which is backed by Google Ventures, CMEA Ventures, August Capital, Foundation Capital and Shasta Ventures, as well as by angel investors Ron Conway, Gideon Yu and Maynard Webb– aims to do for Web photos what the search giant did for text.

At least that’s the hope.

Pixazza is selling itself as a win-win for online publishers–who certainly could use one.

Essentially, the company lets publishers match and link images of products or places with its network of advertisers, via a single line of code.

When users on that site mouse over the photos, they get rich information about pricing and more, as well as a clickable way to purchase the items.

Quite possibly annoying, but Pixazza is growing quickly anyway, with the company claiming 20 billion image views per year and reaching 70 million unique visitors a month on sites deploying its technology.

There are rivals in the space, of course, such as GumGum and Vibrant, but Pixazza does come armed with $18 million in venture funding, as well as that relationship with Google.

Here’s Lisbonne talking about it all in a video interview I did at Pixazza’s Silicon Valley HQ:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110322/pixazzas-bob-lisbonne-talks-about-adsense-for-images/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110316/soundtracking-gives-music-its-own-check-in-app-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110316/soundtracking-gives-music-its-own-check-in-app-video/#comments Wed, 16 Mar 2011 19:31:29 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4332 It used to be the smallest unit of personal expression online was a blog post. Then it got easier: A status message or a location check-in. And recently even easier, with mobile photo uploads. On that continuum, perhaps the next step is using an app like the newly launched SoundTracking to automatically detect and share with your friends and followers the song you’re currently experiencing.

Sharing a single song is intimate in the sense that it says something about your personal taste, but the amount of work and preparation it takes to post is next to nothing.

SoundTracking, the first application from a small start-up called Schematic Labs, was rushed to launch last week after it came out that AOL was launching a competing app (though the new AOL Play is Android-only, while SoundTracking is iPhone-only). Oddly, AOL Ventures is an investor in SoundTracking, but that’s a different unit of the company. (Other investors are True Ventures, Google Ventures and angels.)

Probably the easiest way to think of SoundTracking is a social version of the ambient song recognition technology many are familiar with from apps like Shazam and SoundHound. Or, you could compare it to Foursquare, but with check-ins for music rather than locations.

It’s not like the idea of detecting and publishing what music a user listens to is new; Last.fm, for instance, has been doing it for years. But there’s a sense that by building something to be mobile and social “from the ground up,” every technology concept can be reborn.

At SXSW, I ran into Schematic Labs co-founder Steve Jang, who was previously head of marketing and business development at Imeem, the spectacularly failed music start-up. Jang said Schematic Labs isn’t going to be a music-focused start-up, but rather plans to develop similar apps for categories like shopping and movies.

In a video interview, Jang explained to NetworkEffect how the app works and how he plans to make money from it.

Another social music app that launched at SXSW is Roqbot, a sort of virtual jukebox allows users to collectively set the playlist at a party or public venue by contributing music picks from their iOS or Android phones.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110316/soundtracking-gives-music-its-own-check-in-app-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110308/lead-generator-hubspot-grabs-32-million-from-salesforce-com-sequoia-and-google-ventures/ http://allthingsd.com/20110308/lead-generator-hubspot-grabs-32-million-from-salesforce-com-sequoia-and-google-ventures/#comments Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:27:37 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41406

Another day, another honking big funding for another online start-up (and yet another broken embargo too!).

It’s like Groundhog Day in Silicon Valley as usual.

Today, Cambridge, Mass.-based HubSpot wins tech’s version of the lottery, grabbing $32 million from Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures and also Salesforce.com.

It is unclear what the valuation for HubSpot is now, although it is likely high given it has raised $65 million now.

HubSpot makes marketing software for businesses, who use it to find prospects and generate leads, along with tools to analyze the process. It claims it has “4,000 customers, over 50 percent market share, five million leads managed, and 70 million page views tracked monthly.”

The Series D financing included HubSpot’s existing venture investors–General Catalyst Partners, Matrix Partners, and Scale Venture Partners–and part of it will be used to cash out existing shareholders. In previous rounds, the start-up has raised $33 million.

Here is the official press release:

Sequoia, Google Ventures, and Salesforce.com Invest $32 Million in HubSpot
Marketing Software Company Attracts New Strategic Investors

CAMBRIDGE, MA–(Marketwire – March 8, 2011)–Today, for the first time ever, Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures and Salesforce.com all invested together in one company, providing HubSpot with a Series D round of financing through a $32 million investment. HubSpot provides all-in-one marketing software used by over 4,000 businesses to get found by more prospects, convert them into leads and sales, and analyze the entire marketing process.

“The fundamental way that people shop, learn, and buy has changed radically in the last few years. HubSpot helps transform the way businesses market from outbound marketing (cold calls, email blasts, and direct mail) to inbound marketing (Google, blogs, social media, mobile, etc.),” said Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot.

Sequoia Capital has a long history of partnering with founders to help them build long-term, multi-billion dollar companies, including Google, LinkedIn, AdMob, YouTube, Yahoo!, Apple, and Oracle. “We back companies that are transforming their industries,” said Jim Goetz, General Partner at Sequoia Capital. “HubSpot is the emerging category leader in the SaaS marketing sector. Their customer base exceeds that of all the other relevant marketing software companies combined, including Eloqua, Marketo, Genius, and Manticore.”

“Today, every company needs to succeed in search, social, sales, and marketing–I can’t think of a more powerful trifecta than Google, Salesforce.com, and HubSpot. With 4,000 customers, HubSpot is already a clear marketing leader–now, with this new infusion of capital and recognition by Google’s venture arm and Salesforce.com, HubSpot has a great opportunity to separate itself from the pack and become the leading marketing platform in the small and medium business space,” said Brent Leary, co-founder of CRM Essentials.

Google Ventures Partner, Rich Miner (formerly co-founder of Android) said, “We agree with HubSpot’s belief that search engines, social media, and mobile devices have fundamentally changed how businesses should market themselves. We’re thrilled to support their efforts to help thousands of small and medium businesses reach potential customers.”

Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot commented, “We founded the company based on a simple premise: Businesses want an easy-to-use, complete and integrated marketing platform that helps them get more leads and customers. We plan to use this new capital to further invest in this ambitious vision and further our existing lead in the marketing software category.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110308/lead-generator-hubspot-grabs-32-million-from-salesforce-com-sequoia-and-google-ventures/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110304/relayrides-puts-underemployed-cars-to-work-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110304/relayrides-puts-underemployed-cars-to-work-video/#comments Fri, 04 Mar 2011 19:36:16 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3989 RelayRides helps car owners lend their personal vehicles to local borrowers for an hourly fee. Will there will ever be a day when this idea doesn’t strike many people as insane? Unlikely.

But RelayRides CEO Shelby Clark thinks what he’s doing could be part of a larger societal shift towards access and away from ownership, starting with Netflix and extending to larger items like cars. RelayRides also connects people online to have an offline impact, a concept Clark had previously worked on as an early employee at Kiva.

In fact, RelayRides isn’t the only peer-to-peer car-sharing start-up, but it is well-positioned given $4.5 million in Series A funding from Google Ventures and August Capital, and having secured a $1 million insurance policy, and in light of recent California legislation changes that ensure insurance protection. The service is tiny, though; it has 1,500 members and less than 100 cars in Boston and San Francisco.

Clark explained in a recent interview that his company is like Zipcar without the overhead. RelayRides does put a lot of time and energy into installing an access device in every car in the system, and “hands down, the biggest challenge” was to secure the big insurance policy, Clark said.

Car owners choose their schedule, price (between $5 and $15 per hour) and parking place, and borrowers reserve online and then access the cars with key cards. Don’t call them “renters”–RelayRides employees have to put a quarter in a jar if they say the “r” word. The company prefers to think of its users as a neighborly community, and is working to make its site more social. RelayRides pockets 15 percent of each transaction and pays another 20 percent towards insurance.

But that’s not to say RelayRides car owners can’t make a nice bit of money by loaning out their cars rather than letting them sit idle. The company’s biggest moneymaker, a 2005 Honda Civic, brings in $600 per month, Clark said.

Have there been accidents and damages during RelayRides exchanges? Yes, but nothing serious–the biggest and only insurance claim to date was an axel broken by hitting a curb, and Clark’s team scurried into action to fix the car and find the amicable owner another one in the interim.

NetworkEffect visited RelayRides’ brand-new San Francisco office this week and took a video of Clark explaining the “sharing economy.”

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