Houzz has brought home $11.6 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital and other investors, including earlier-stage investors Don Katz, Gary Ginsberg, Oren Zeev and Amos Wilnai. Alfred Lin, a VC at Sequoia and former top executive at Zappos, will join Zeev and others on Houzz’s board of directors.

Co-founder Adi Tatarko said Houzz has increased its traffic tenfold since its last funding round of $2 million in 2010, the site has also introduced e-commerce features to drive purchases of home goods.

Houzz first launched in early 2009, a few years after Tatarko and her husband, Alon Cohen, purchased a home and had a hard time finding the right contractors for home renovations, even with friends’ referrals. (Despite the wealth of options now at their fingertips through their own site, Tatarko says they haven’t yet completed the renovation of their own home.)

Tatarko and Cohen eventually quit their full-time jobs and focused on building up the site to what it is today — a fast-growing (and slightly addictive) home renovation Web site that consumers can browse to create idea books and where designers, contractors and renovation experts can upload their portfolios to in order to attract more clients.

There are now 30,000 professional profiles on the site, Tatarko says, spanning 50 metro areas in the U.S.; Houzz sees more than 50 million page views a month and 2.5 million uniques. Users of the Houzz iPad app, which has been downloaded a million times, browse for one hour on average.

The site also now offers more options for sharing through social media, as well as virtual price tags on certain items — a lamp, for example, or a love seat in a living-room setting — that will direct a user to a place where those items can be purchased.

Houzz is currently free for consumers and professionals using the site; Tatarko says they plan to keep it that way, generating revenue through a direct-advertising model. Houzz, she adds, is on track to become profitable in the next year.

Houzz’s growth comes as the U.S. home remodeling market is seeing signs of recovery. This follows a 12 percent drop in spending between 2007 and 2009, due to the financial crisis, according to a report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Home remodeling fared relatively well compared to new construction in 2009, with remodeling climbing to more than two-thirds of total residential investment; the market for renovations in the U.S. was said to have approached $300 billion in 2010. (The Harvard report does note, though, that all homeowners aren’t kitchen-gutting and paint-slapping-happy: Housing prices are depressed, and a record number of home owners are late on mortgage payments.)

Tatarko says she and Cohen will use the funding to invest in more engineers to continue to build out Houzz.

The contract, I’m told, is worth $7.7 million and covers the first part of a three-phase project called CITIServe, which will ultimately see the consolidation of 50 different municipal data center operations scattered around the city over five years. The city hopes to save $100 million on its IT budget over the five years. Helpful, yes, but it’s not likely to put much of a dent in the city’s budget deficit, which is expected to be $2.4 billion in the fiscal year beginning July 1.

It might not occur to the average New Yorker that the city has so many data centers. It certainly surprised me, though calling them data centers may be overstating it a bit. A few are groups of servers in back offices no bigger than 1,000 square feet. The plan is to get them centralized both physically and from a management perspective. Each agency has its own staff handling the management.

The first things that will be streamlined in this phase of the project are the help desk, hosting, storage, email, virtualization and network for several city departments, though neither IBM nor the city is saying yet exactly which departments are involved. A statement from the city last March said the departments of Education, Buildings, Housing Preservation and Development, Sanitation and Finance would be among the first involved. Finance itself will be a pretty big job. It collects $25 billion in taxes and other revenue, and assesses about a million individual properties collectively worth more than $1 trillion. Then there’s the matter of the 10 million parking tickets the city issues each year.

The agency in the spotlight is the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which will be in charge of managing the migration and then will run the new data centers once they’re operational. The plan is the result of a top-down 30-day study of the city’s IT infrastructure that Mayor Mike Bloomberg ordered last year.

Getting these services centralized will make them easier to protect and reduce the power needed to run them, thus reducing the city government’s carbon footprint, says David Cohn, program manager of the Smarter Cloud program at IBM Research. It’s not uncommon for servers that are set up to run just one application to use only 10 percent of their computing capacity, and then sit idle the rest of the time, burning electricity throughout that idle time.

“Getting a smaller number of systems running more applications and using less power is just the beginning,” Cohn told me. “After that you start developing deeper insight into where all your information is going that you couldn’t get before.”

It’s a positive sign for IBM on the cloud computing front. You may remember that Ric Telford, IBM’s VP of cloud services, said government is a segment it considers a priority this year. If New York successfully adopts the cloud, more will probably follow.

Last night, Trulia sent me a small pile of information about the fast-growth year the real estate search and information site had in 2009, despite the near-complete collapse of the U.S. housing market.

You can read all the stats below in Trulia’s press release–62.3 million unique monthly visitors, visits up 45 percent, page views up 105 percent and one million inquiries sent by home buyers to real estate agents via the San Francisco start-up, which was founded in 2005 by CEO Pete Flint and COO Sami Inkinen.

BoomTown also had a short chit-chat interview about the site’s prospects for the coming year with Flint, whose last success was as part of the team that sold travel site lastminute.com to Travelocity for $1.1 billion in 2005.

“We want to be the first billion-dollar real estate site,” he said, referring to Trulia’s valuation and not its annual revenue.

Currently, Trulia seems to be valued at about $150 million, having raised $33 million overall, with investors that include high-profile Silicon Valley venture firms Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital.

Getting from here to there is definitely going to be a long slog, but Flint said that the “mass of confusion about real estate” will be a key factor in growing the site’s traffic and engagement over time.

Trulia allows people to search for a range of data about homes for sale in particular zip codes or cities nationwide. Its business and that of its competitors are largely based on advertising, selling subscription services and lead generation.

Flint (pictured here) said Trulia execs started focusing on revenue about 18 months ago and should achieve profitability by the middle of this year, after which the company is “poised for significant profitability.”

To goose that in 2010, Flint said the site would focus on three key areas: Expanding local content, such as blogs and information about the local community; mobile apps; and perhaps most importantly, launching a rentals offering.

“We are not about checking out what a neighbor’s house looks like, but on buyer intent and monetization,” said Flint, taking a not-so-veiled swipe at Trulia’s clearest competitor–the larger and better funded Zillow, located in Seattle.

Still, while he predicted that the overall real estate market would remain flat over the next few years, he noted that it was probably a winners-take-all game for the big and innovative niche sites like Trulia and Zillow.

Flint added that he doubts big Internet giants could easily compete, since their focus is so dispersed.

Thus, he would not comment on my recent report that Google (GOOG) and Trulia have been “in on-again, off-again acquisition talks…rumors about Google’s interest in the real estate search market–and specifically in Trulia–have been rebounding around Silicon Valley for the last year.”

“We are going to focus on being a big independent company,” said Flint.

Guess those talks are off again.

In the meantime, here is the Trulia press release:

SMARTER SEARCH AND PERSONALIZATION KEY TO TRULIA’S OUTSTANDING GROWTH AND INCREASED MOMENTUM IN 2009

Mobile and Rich Property & Local Data Provides Enhanced Consumer Experience

SAN FRANCISCO, January 6, 2010–Trulia.com (www.trulia.com ), smart real estate search to help you make better decisions, focused 2009 on providing users with the most relevant and consumer centric experience. As a result, Trulia grew to become one of the Top 5 Real Estate sites on the web according to Hitwise Rankings (November 2009). Last year was Trulia’s largest ever with a total of 62.3 million unique monthly visitors searching for homes, market insights and participating on Trulia Voices.

During the past year, millions of consumers came to Trulia to make sense of the real estate market, spending more time than ever looking at properties and price trend information. Consumer engagement reached record levels: visits grew by more than 45%, total page views grew by 105% and property views grew by more than 130%, according to internal data. On Trulia Voices, consumer questions doubled year over year. Along with increased engagement on Trulia, consumer interest in homes exploded, with nearly 1 million home buyer inquiries sent to real estate agents in 2009.

During the past year, Trulia focused on four key areas for product innovation and enhancements: smarter search, personalization, rich property & local data and mobile. Here is a recap of the key initiatives and highlights from the past 12 months.

SMARTER SEARCH

Price Reduction–A search tool that allows home buyers, sellers, agents, investors and real estate junkies to search for price reductions on Trulia. Users have the ability to receive real-time email updates when homes in their search area have been reduced, or filter their search by the percentage reduced or date of the price reduction.

Compare It!–Allows consumers to compare up to five different properties side-by-side. Users can see all the key attributes of each listing and then eliminate the properties they don’t like and save the ones they do like for future reference. Users can compare key attributes, like price per square foot to the size of the lot, and make educated decisions on what property suits them best.

PERSONALIZATION

MyTrulia–significant enhancements have been added to MyTrulia to make home searches more relevant for every individual home buyer. From saved searches to email alerts, Trulia will immediately notify users if a property they are interested in changes price or is sold. If a similar property comes on the market, Trulia will also notify users of the new home. Trulia also introduced “checklist” to help keep track of all things related to your home buying process and helps you make sense of the entire process.

Local Newsfeed–Trulia’s homepage provide consumers with a snapshot of activity in the neighborhoods they are most interested in tracking with a quick-glance. When a user comes to Trulia, the homepage is updated with price reductions, upcoming open houses, new homes on the market and market data such as average list prices, sales data, foreclosure information and more–only in the areas relevant to that user.

RICH PROPERTY DATA AND DETAILS

Home Price History & Data–Trulia’s product detail pages now includes each homes price history, including sold transactions, listing prices and price reductions. Trulia also added school information and rankings, crime data, competitive mortgage offerings; with a click of a button you can also see all the restaurants, grocery stores, banks and gas stations nearby any individual home.

Neighborhood Coverage–Trulia increased its neighborhood coverage by more than 300%. The expanded coverage improves property search and map displays to help consumers search for and compare neighborhoods, view and track neighborhood market trends, receive advice from local market experts through blogs and Q&A, and find local real estate professionals.

MOBILE

iPhone and iPod touch–the updated Trulia application offers more than 3.5 million homes for sale and has been downloaded more than 300,000 times by real estate enthusiasts, engaged buyers and sellers and real estate agents. The update adds significant new features:

Dynamic Maps–Visual searchers can toggle the map to find homes in areas they most desire. Once the area is defined in the map, a new set of homes that match their criteria is delivered.

Price Reduction Search–With a touch of a button, users can now search for all price reduced homes in their area.

Bigger, Unlimited Pictures–Taking advantage of the fantastic screens on the iPhone and iPod touch, the bigger photos provide searchers with a realistic view of the property.

Augmented Reality Browser Integration–Trulia has integrated with the Layar Mobile Augmented Reality Browser to overlay listings on top of the mobile phone’s camera view. The app allows you to scan all the properties available around you while you look at the actual buildings through your screen.

Trulia for all smartphones–Trulia has also launched a mobile version of its website, m.trulia.com, which delivers all the power and functionality of the web site in a format optimized for mobile handsets. The mobile website works on all mobile handsets from the Blackberry to the Plam Pre and all devices with a web browser, including the iPhone and iPod Touch. Users can search homes for sale, view extensive property details, find price reductions or upcoming open houses, utilize their MyTrulia account, and the Trulia Voices community.

“We dedicated 2009 to delivering a great consumer experience. Looking back on the engagement data makes me believe we are delivering on what the consumer wants. Consumers have told us over and over that they are looking for a real estate site that can deliver relevant and personalized results,” said Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder Trulia.com. “Mobile and local information will be two areas of focus for the coming year. The world is becoming more mobile and real estate information on the go is a very natural combination. On the weekends, 5 to 10 percent of our overall traffic comes from mobile handsets. Deep local information, data and insights is also key to consumers interested in real estate and we will introduce more data and local knowledge during the next year.”

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

According to sources close to the situation, along with its pending bid for Yelp, Google has been in on-again, off-again acquisition talks with Trulia, the real estate search engine.

It is unclear what price Google (GOOG) would pay, but sources estimate that Trulia’s valuation ranges between $150 million and $200 million, although there could be a big premium on that.

Rumors about Google’s interest in the real estate search market–and specifically in Trulia–have been rebounding around Silicon Valley for the last year.

But Google has pulled the trigger on a number of acquisitions of innovative start-ups recently and, sources said, will continue to do so.

Trulia–which is based in San Francisco and allows people to search for a range of data about homes for sale in particular zip codes or cities nationwide–is one of the more obvious candidates for the search giant’s local and mobile efforts.

Its business and that of its competitors–which is largely based on advertising and lead generation–has been growing quickly, despite the economic downturn in housing.

More interestingly, Trulia is deeply integrated into Google Maps, an arena the company recently targeted for growth with a series of announcements about new search features.

Trulia has raised about $33 million since 2005, with investors that include high-profile Silicon Valley venture firms Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital.

Interestingly, Accel and Sequoia recently made bank when Google bought AdMob for $750 million.

Trulia’s clearest competitor is the larger Zillow, located in the Seattle area. But, sources said, Google is more interested in Trulia, given its location in the Bay area and lower valuation.

Zillow has raised about $87 million from Benchmark Capital, Technology Crossover Ventures, PAR Capital Management and Legg Mason.

Redfin, another Seattle-based rival, has raised about $31 million from its own well-known collection of VCs.

This week, Google’s interest in Yelp, the local review site, also became public, in a deal that could cost upward of $600 million.

It is all part of a buying spree that Google has engaged in of late, with six acquisitions costing $1 billion so far.

• 600 MHz Samsung ARM processor
• 256MB system RAM
• a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus
• 32GB of storage
• a digital compass
• FM

These specs were submitted to a rumor site by someone who claims to have a friend inside Apple manufacturing partner Foxconn who has handled iPhone “model MB717LL 9.” As such, they should be taken with a grain of salt, if not an entire salt flat.

That said, the rumors do seem reasonable. A 600 MHz chip is a nice improvement over the a 400 MHz part in the current iPhone, as is the doubling of RAM to 256MB. FM transmission and reception capabilities have been rumored before as has the compass. What’s missing, however, is an improved battery, a better GPU–perhaps the PowerVR SGX that’s been rumored to be heading for the device, a new, more elegant housing less prone to those hairline cracks that seem to plague the current one, and–in a perfect world–an OLED display and a second front-facing camera for video conferencing. Of course if OS 3.0 proves to be even a third as robust as Apple claims, we’ll be so enamored of the device we might not notice any of those things are missing.

• 600 MHz Samsung ARM processor
• 256MB system RAM
• a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus
• 32GB of storage
• a digital compass
• FM

These specs were submitted to a rumor site by someone who claims to have a friend inside Apple manufacturing partner Foxconn who has handled iPhone “model MB717LL 9.” As such, they should be taken with a grain of salt, if not an entire salt flat.

That said, the rumors do seem reasonable. A 600 MHz chip is a nice improvement over the a 400 MHz part in the current iPhone, as is the doubling of RAM to 256MB. FM transmission and reception capabilities have been rumored before as has the compass. What’s missing, however, is an improved battery, a better GPU–perhaps the PowerVR SGX that’s been rumored to be heading for the device, a new, more elegant housing less prone to those hairline cracks that seem to plague the current one, and–in a perfect world–an OLED display and a second front-facing camera for video conferencing. Of course if OS 3.0 proves to be even a third as robust as Apple claims, we’ll be so enamored of the device we might not notice any of those things are missing.