For years, the applications were traditional on-premise software — you’d run it on a server or a series of desktop machines wherever the people who used them happened to be. And the biggest players were — or rather, still are — Oracle, by way of its takeover of PeopleSoft, and SAP. But when these apps started to migrate to the cloud and be available on demand, things started getting interesting. Companies that used them started to love the functionality, the ease of use, maintenance and support, and also the lower cost, and they started voting with their purchase orders in favor of the cloud.

That’s when the established on-premise suppliers got grabby. Last year, the race to roll up the cloud players started in earnest when SAP spent $3.4 billion for SuccessFactors. Not long after that, Taleo, another cloud player, went to Oracle for $1.9 billion. And Salesforce.com nabbed Rypple. Meanwhile, a bunch of former PeopleSoft execs are building Workday into a credible threat to all of them.

So this makes today’s news from SilkRoad — yet another player in the cloud-based HR application business — all the more interesting. The company announced a $35 million Series C led by Keating Capital and NTT Finance, joining existing investors Intel Capital, Crosslink Capital, Foundation Capital, Azure Capital and Tenaya Capital. Customers include McAfee and International Paper.

Another reason for all the heat being generated by this low-profile sector: The market research firm IDC reckons that, by 2015, companies will spend north of $8 billion on human-capital management tools.

The company says the funding will support its international expansion plans, especially internationally. Its products currently support 18 languages, and there are plans to add to those.

Instead, the Burlingame, Calif., company was going to focus on building games for smartphones.

Now CrowdStar, known for titles such as Top Girl, Social Girl and Modern Girl, is announcing that it has raised $11.5 million in a second round of funding to fuel its mobile ambitions.

Investors in CrowdStar’s second round are Time Warner, Intel Capital, YouWeb, The9 and NV investments. To date, the company has raised $35 million in capital.

With the new funding, the company said it plans to pursue mobile games targeting the female audience and focusing on shopping and fashion. The games will be distributed using Facebook’s social graph, the Gree social gaming network and Apple’s Game Center.

“This funding round validates our pivot to mobile social games,” Relan said in a release. “We’re going for a bigger market with lower production and acquisition costs compared to social games on the web.”

This summer, CrowdStar will launch a brand-new Girl franchise game on Gree’s emerging mobile social network. Just yesterday, Gree announced it had acquired mobile social game maker Funzio for $210 million, showing its committment to signing up new games to the network. CrowdStar is also distributing games on Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

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.

The investment marks MasterCard’s first in the mobile payments space, and follows similar moves by both Visa and American Express.

Neither company is releasing terms of the round, but mFoundry said MasterCard was the lead investor. Intel Capital, Fidelity Information Services and Motorola Mobility also participated. Previous investors include PayPal, Bank of America and Ignition Partners.

Consumers will most likely recognize mFoundry for developing the Starbucks mobile application, which displays a bar code that can be scanned at the register to make payments from a prepaid account.

MasterCard’s SVP of Mobile James Anderson said he was more interested in mFoundry’s relationships with 600 banks and credit unions.

For the past five years, the company has been focused on the mobile banking space, by developing applications for banks that enables users to check their balances and conduct other financial services from their phone. He said millions of customers at banks, such as Citi and Bank of America, use the applications three to four times a week on average.

Going forward, MasterCard wants to work with mFoundry to enable those applications to make payments at the register using MasterCard’s near field communication (NFC) technology called PayPass.

Near field technology allows a consumer to tap their phone at the register to pay for items. By integrating with these banking applications, the purchase could be deducted straight from a person’s bank account, and without the need to carry around a wallet.

MasterCard is also working with Google Wallet and ISIS, the wireless carrier-led initiative, but it views this partnership as a third approach. “Some consumers will see value in Google; others will want to use their telco provider, and then some will trust their bank,” Anderson said. “At some level those options will be competing, but we believe the choice is up to the customer.”

MFoundry’s CEO and founder Drew Sievers said the relationship is not exclusive, so his company will be free to work with Visa or others, but MasterCard will naturally have a head start since they will be the first ones integrated into the application. Deployments will occur as soon as the middle of next year.

MasterCard is not the only payments provider making investments in the mobile payments space.

Earlier this year, Visa made a large investment in Square, and American Express has opened up an office in San Francisco and created an intimidatingly large $100 million investment fund to make sure it doesn’t miss out on any opportunities.

Sievers said for companies in the mobile banking and payments space that are gaining traction, there’s not only venture capitalists eager to invest, but a ton of companies looking for strategic investments.

In fact, he said, “there’s fewer opportunities to invest in than there are companies willing to invest.”

Here’s USV principal’s Fred Wilson’s comment, via email: “Union Square Ventures is very fortunate to be able to add Andy Weissman to our partnership and we think he is a perfect fit for the entrepreneurs we want to work with and the sectors we want to participate in.” (More below.)

That will cause a small ripple in startupland, because Weissman was the one steering Betaworks’ investment portfolio. His partner John Borthwick handled the operational parts of the business, which has founded and/or nurtured startups like Summize, TweetDeck, Chartbeat and Bitly.

With Weissman’s departure, Betaworks’s focus will change. “Though we will continue to do seed stage investments, our primary focus will be on building the core capabilities of the companies that we acquire and grow in-house,” Borthwick said told his employees via email today. Betabeat first reported the news.

What Borthwick didn’t explain in his email is that he and Weissman had previously planned on raising a “sidecar fund” that would essentially split Betaworks into two businesses: An operating company run by Borthwick and an early-stage VC shop run by Weissman.

But that plan was discarded this summer, at least in part because of opposition from Betaworks’ investors, who include RRE Ventures, Intel, AOL and the New York Times. Investors argued that they had put money into a company where investing was only a component of the plan, not a full-time occupation; by raising a new investment fund, they argued, Betaworks would essentially be competing against some of its backers.

People familiar with the company say that the plan’s collapse didn’t lead directly to Weissman’s departure. But the backstory does provide context to his move to become a full-time venture capitalist.

When Weissman lands at Union Square, he’ll have plenty of money to work with. The firm, which has made a series of lucrative bets in high-profile Web 2.0 start-ups including Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare and Tumblr, is in the midst of raising a new $150-$200 million fund.

Four-year-old Betaworks, which now has more than 80 employees, ought to have plenty of money to work with, too. In addition to the $28 million it has raised to date, the company has also been able to turn some of its investments into cash via secondary market sales.

Most notably, it has recently sold Twitter shares it acquired in 2008, when the company bought search engine Summize. That alone should provide a nice cushion for Betaworks if it needs it: Twitter’s value has shot up from $100 million to $8.4 billion over the last three years.

And speaking of ripples, here’s one I’m guessing Weissman may enjoy:

The announcement by Intel Capital late Wednesday is the latest in a series of funds that it has dedicated to spur technologies that could help broaden the market for Intel chips. In this case, Intel said it plans to invest in companies working on technologies–such as sensors and touch-related hardware and software–that could enhance Ultrabooks.

Intel is quick to acknowledge that the Ultrabook effort was in large part inspired by Apple Inc.’s iPad tablet and particularly its sleek MacBook Air. The latter was recently updated with Intel’s latest microprocessors and has been selling much more briskly than most laptop PCs running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system.

“To date if you wanted that sleek design you had to buy a Mac,” said Greg Welch, director of Intel’s Ultrabook group, in an interview last week. “There are people who want a PC in that form factor.”

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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.

Founded in 2008, it was one of the first gaming companies to feed off of Facebook’s social graph, which allowed companies to endlessly post messages on players’ walls to get the word out about their games.

Flash forward to 2011 and the frothy days are over.

Facebook has scaled back the amount of viral activity allowed, due to all the complaints, and now the Burlingame, Calif.-based company has decided to raise $23 million in capital to fuel its next stage of growth.

The round is a big deal for the fifth largest game company on Facebook because it represents its first ever. That’s quite the accomplishment given its position compared to others.

For instance, CrowdStar registers roughly 29 million users a month vs. Zynga, which enjoys the top position by a wide margin with 248 million users. Electronic Arts, which purchased Playfish for $275 million in 2009, has 32.7 million monthly users, according to AppData.

As a YouWeb incubated company, CrowdStar previously had raised no formal capital. Contrast that to Zynga, which has raised somewhere around $1 billion if you count a nearly $500 million injection that has not yet been officially announced.

The company’s first round was led by Intel Capital and Time Warner, along with participation from China’s The9 and NVInvestments. Vivi Nevo, the largest individual shareholder in Time Warner with lots of ties to Hollywood, also invested.

“We’ve built six to seven substantial properties that have done well and we got the audience when customer acquisition was fairly easy,” said Peter Relan, the company’s CEO and co-founder. “We were able to be profitable and fund the growth to 100 people organically.”

Relan declined to specify the company’s valuation or its revenues, which he said was in the “tens of millions.” No matter how much it is, it’s not enough to support his lofty ambitions for 2011.

By the end of the year, the company plans to double the number of employees it has to 200, hiring game developers, artists, producers and business analysts. It also wants to expand to mobile and other social networks around the world. Relan says the goal is to double the company’s revenues with only 50 percent coming from Facebook by year end.

“We are a Facebook social games company turning into a multi-platform global company,” he said. “It’s a very profitable business, but it can’t fund all that growth.”

CrowdStar said that it will launch four to five more games this year, two of which will be on mobile and the rest on Facebook. Additionally, it will launch two to three of its current game titles overseas this year in a few countries.

Relan said by pursuing both mobile and international growth, he’s confident that he’ll find audiences that are equivalent in size to Facebook. He’s targeting such social networks as Renren in China, The9, a game network in China, and OpenFeint’s social network on mobile phones.

Relan said he carefully picked the mix of investors.

Intel will be active in the tablet market, which may be a big market going forward for social gaming, and Time Warner will be able to contribute as social games increasingly integrate brands, such as GagaVille on FarmVille, and Playfish’s integration of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver in Restaurant City.

Last year, there were rumors that Microsoft was interested in purchasing CrowdStar.

Relan declined to comment on those rumors but said he’s thrilled to be an independent company. “We’ve been independent and historically we’ve never even had an investor to tell us what to do. We are a fiercely independent and motivated company that really enjoys the cultural freedom of creativity. We can do what we want, and that’s a rare luxury.”

By staying independent and by not raising money before, Relan also says he maintained lots of financial flexibility.

“With Zynga setting the trend, it’s a great thing to follow on. There will be people who think it is too inexpensive–I don’t know if it is–but it’s a great thing to be seen as inexpensive.”

Last week I talked with David Young, co-founder and CEO of Joyent, an Amazon rival with 30,000 customers around the world. His criticism of Amazon in this instance is rather harsh. The way the Amazon cloud is built, he said, virtually guaranteed that a service outage such as this would happen. While on one hand he gives Amazon high praise for “evangelizing the cloud computing model,” with the other he disparages it as “the Atari of the cloud.”

“Amazon does not represent the cloud,” Young says. “These guys are booksellers who got in the cloud business. That’s like Nordstrom’s getting into the cash register business,” he told me. “They may be the market leader, but there’s a bunch of us who are building things in such a way that we don’t see these downtimes.”

It’s hard to miss Amazon’s outsize influence. Though Amazon Web Services amounts to just a fraction of the company’s overall revenue, it is the market leader, controlling about 60 percent of the market with Rackspace, IBM, Joyent and Terremark, recently acquired by Verizon.

Joyent, which is privately held and backed by investments from Greycroft Partners and Intel Capital, would never have suffered an outage, Young claimed, because of the way it is built. Amazon, on the other hand, was never designed for what he calls persistent computing that customers need to be available all the time. The problem, he said, started in Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage, which is vulnerable to being overwhelmed by demand, something he likened to a run on a bank, where depositors panic and rush to withdraw the cash from their accounts.

Essentially, he said, Amazon became a victim of its own popularity, unable to meet the demands placed upon the EBS storage infrastructure by the network, causing in the end a cascading failure. The company has blogged about its theory in greater technical detail here.

Meanwhile, there were Amazon customers who managed to keep their services up despite the crash, and they were comparing notes today. Don MacAskill, CEO of the photo-sharing site SmugMug, blogged about how designing for failure allowed its service to remain live during the crash. Others tweeted, like Mathias Meyer of Basho Technologies, who noted that having their service running in more than one Amazon region helped avert failure.

There were others. Donnie Flood, VP of engineering of Bizo, an advertising service aimed at business executives, said that the company used all of Amazon’s regions except its most recently launched one in Japan, and combined that with a global Domain Name Service system that would direct traffic to the nearest Amazon region. When Amazon’s U.S. East region went down, all traffic in the U.S. was routed to its Amazon instances running in Amazon’s Western U.S. data center. “We were able to stay up fully the entire time,” Flood said.

Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery, a cloud-based manager of software APIs, said that his company had additional cloud infrastructure in place from Internap that took over when Amazon failed. Neither Michels nor Flood said he was likely to move the services currently hosted with Amazon to another provider.

Amazon hasn’t made any public statements about what happened, beyond those made in its status dashboard, and it hasn’t responded to any of my messages seeking a comment on any aspect of this. The company reports earnings tomorrow, so expect some questions on the conference call about Amazon’s terrible, horrible day that stretched into nearly a week.

According to sources close to the situation, Intel Capital and Advance Publications will lead a $30 million investment round in Kno, the high-profile student tablet start-up.

In addition to the funding from its venture capital arm, Intel itself will consult with Kno on its tablet design. Kno, which is getting out of the hardware business, will now focus on its software to manage the devices that are aimed at the college market.

Intel will not manufacture tablets either. Instead, its engineers will consult with Kno on power management, graphics, display, systems integration, which it does for a variety of its customers.

Along with Intel Capital and Advance, current investors will also participate in the round, said sources. But Intel Capital and Advance, the owner of the Condé Nast publishing empire, make up a big part of the funding.

Sources said Intel Capital’s investment is $20 million and Advance and others make up the rest of it.

BoomTown reported in February that the much-funded and high-profile Silicon Valley start-up–aimed at making tablet computers focused at students–was considering selling off the entire hardware part of the business.

Sources said Kno execs have recently decided that the quicker-than-expected uptake in tablet production by a multitude of powerful device makers had made its efforts to package a seamless offering less critical.

Instead, the company will now focus on its robust software and services to offer students on the Apple iPad, as well as upcoming tablets based on Google’s Android mobile operating system and others.

The move is a dramatic shift for the company, which had not shipped significant numbers of the touchscreen device as it has long touted.

In fact, Kno said in November that it would ship a $599 and $899 version of the tablet by the end of the year.

The lower price was for its single-screen device, while the clamshell double-screen version was more expensive.

And, although it has been reported no pre-orders were fulfilled, Kno did indeed ship several hundred of them, built by China’s Foxconn, before stopping doing so earlier this year.

Many have been dubious about Kno’s ambitious hardware efforts.

That’s because marketing a new and complex product like the Kno takes a lot of effort and cash, especially since it is an increasingly competitive market for mobile and portable computing products that includes Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Amazon, Dell and many others.

Before this $30 million, Kno has raised another $46 million in funding to add to an earlier $10 million round.

Sources in February said that the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company considering going back out to raise even more.

Its current backers include prominent venture players like Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, along with angel investors Mike Maples and Ron Conway.

Sources said the shift to deliver textbook and other student-related delivery system would be a better path for all that investment money, since Kno has established a wide range of partnerships with colleges and universities.

In addition, Kno co-founder Osman Rashid has a lot of experience in digital education market. He was also the co-founder of Chegg, the textbook rental business that is reportedly aiming for an IPO soon.

BusinessWeek was first to report that Intel Capital was making the investment in Kno, but the post did not mention Advance’s involvement or that Intel itself was licensing the hardware design business from Kno.

Serguei Beloussov, the company’s founder and outgoing CEO, will continue his full-time role as executive chairman of the board and chief architect.

Steen joined Parallels from Microsoft, where he was VP of Small and Medium Business and Distribution at Microsoft. Before that, he ran Microsoft’s business in Norway and in Russia.

Parallels is a privately held company that’s been around since 1999, that counts Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Almaz Capital Partners as its investors. Its rise generally coincided with Apple’s migration to using chips from Intel on the Mac. By giving new Mac users an easy way to run Windows on their computers, it gave people accustomed to Windows, or who needed to continue to use a particular application on Windows, little excuse when the opportunity came to switch to the Mac.

But what I didn’t know is that Parallels is also a player a big player in selling software to service providers. It sells Plesk, a popular server automation tool, and it’s also a player in the server virtualization business.

I talked with Steen about all this last week.

NewEnteprise: Birger, I’m a Mac user and so of course I know about and even use Parallels once in awhile. But I had no idea Parallels was so closely involved with Web hosting and cloud providers. How big is that business?

Birger Steen: We’ve been working with service providers since 1999, and then over the last 10 years you’ll find companies like Rackspace and Media Temple and some of the biggest hosting providers are customers of ours. In most cases they run some version of our virtualization technology.

So when people think of virtualization of server, they think of VMWare. How are you different?

Partly it’s a different technology. Our technology virtualizes in a different way that’s uniquely suited to service providers that have large numbers of systems that they want to run with as much efficiency and density as possible. We have a market share of about 37 percent in that market.

And you also sell the Plesk control panel software for servers.

Control panels are very complementary to server virtualization. In the same way that control panels let you contol the computing resources on a desktop Windows machine or a Mac, you need to do the same thing on a server. If you were to rent the server from Rackspace or some other service provider, you need something to control it remotely and manage the resources. That’s the other business we’ve been in for about 10 years. As the hosting business became more complex, that product had to become more complex. A lot of our service providers sell servers to customers who then turn around and re-sell them to other end customers. So the control panel now manages resources at the reseller level, and the end-customer administrative level, and then at the end-customer user level. That’s become a very interesting business. It’s very fragmented with lots of companies reselling services from larger companies. Today we have something like 5,000 customers that are everyone from the smallest local hoster with a few servers, all the way up to some of the biggest telco companies in the world.

So what are your priorities this year?

We’re going to continue to drive hard on the Parallels desktop product, particularly on the Mac. It has a huge group of fans and we want to continue developing it. The first group of users were a lot of people who were devout Mac users where someone just had to use Windows or another OS some of the time. What we see now are a lot of users who are not switching to the Mac so much as they are adding Apple hardware. It’s a a market where people are using many different technologies and we want to continue to make that easy. We also want to continue to build out our international markets. We’re really strong in Germany, where we sell our product attached to 25 percent of the Macs sold there, whereas worldwide we’re hovering at about 5 to 6 percent. So there’s room for a lot of upside there.

So your business is profitable, and you’re growing fast. What kind of an exit do you anticipate for your investors? Will you take Parallels public?

We’re building the company to become a lot bigger, and to grow for a long period of time. We certainly aspire to have a both all the corporate processes and infrastructure that a public company would have. I’d ask our investors at Bessemer and Intel what they’re thinking. But I certainly have a long-term ambition for this.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company, led by Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins, has now raised close to $56 million in total.

The latest round was led by Intel Capital and includes participation from previous investors Sutter Hill Ventures and Bridgescale Partners.

While Digital Chocolate is no Zynga–which is close to completing a funding round of $500 million, valuing the company at $10 billion, according to BoomTown’s Kara Swisher–it has still managed to build a pretty sweet business as a cross-platform game developer, spanning both mobile and social.

Today, Digital Chocolate is the 12th-largest game developer on Facebook, with 17.6 million monthly active users playing such titles as Tower Bloxx, MMA Pro Fighter, NanoStar Castles, NanoTowns and NanoStar Siege, according to AppData.

The company also reports that it has achieved more than 100 million mobile downloads, and that it supports multiple platforms, such as iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and an upcoming slew of tablets.

Digital Chocolate says the capital will be used to improve its cross-platform capabilities and its geographic reach.

But if that’s the case, how are you going to decide what to watch? The world of Internet video is exponentially bigger than the 500-channel universe you already have, and usually ignore, via your cable box. Who’s going to help you navigate that?

Lots of people, it turns out. In fact, that’s one of the most popular ways to attack the Web video business: Try to create what will turn out to be the Web’s version of TV Guide, and make money by selling content or advertising once you’re big enough.

That’s really what Boxee is up to, if it can get scale. Ditto for Clicker. And Google TV and Apple TV, really. And really, if you think about it, that’s what Hulu would like to do, if Jason Kilar could get his way. Etc.

Here’s yet one more competitor: Shufflr, a newish start-up run by Bangalore-based Althea Systems. Althea has rounded up $3 million via a Series A round from Intel Capital, and is using the money to build out its product, a browser that works on laptops and, soon, phones running Google’s Android platform.*

Shufflr’s pitch is pretty simple: They sort through lots of video feeds–from everyone from YouTube to Comedy Central to Blip.TV–and offer up suggestions about what you’d like to see.

They’re based in part on what you’ve said you like on Twitter and Facebook, and in part on what your friends have said they like, by forwarding a link. And Shufflr plays the video for you–using the original distributors embedded advertising–on its own player.

It’s an interesting concept, but the problem with all of these machine-based recommendation engines is that they’re more clumsy than you’d like.

Shufflr, for instance, can figure out that I like “comedy,” but then it spits up everything that anyone has ever thought is funny. And there’s a whole lot of not-funny stuff there. At least in my humble opinion.

I think that’s not that much of a problem when you’re sitting on a laptop, idling for a few minutes between meetings and just want to watch…something. If you don’t like it, you flip away very, very quickly

But on your couch, which is the use case Shufflr is pushing here, I think your standards are higher. Or different, at least: I’m happy to flip through dud channels on my own, but if some software suggested stuff that I didn’t want to see, I’m not sure I’d stick with it very long.

And I’m sure that, statistically, I’m much more likely to enjoy something that one of my Facebook friends likes, or that someone I follow Twittered about. But that’s a very big group, and the truth is, I probably only care what a very small number of them say about what to watch on the Web. (I’m still angry at Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone, for instance, for raving about “Kick-Ass,” which I ended up renting on VOD. You owe me $4.99, dude.)

But that’s the problem that most recommendation sites and engines have, no matter what the topic is: You really don’t care what everyone you know says about everything–you care what a few people say about something very particular.

In any case, Shufflr is less than a year old, so they’ve got a bit of time to get better. But they’d best do it quickly: Plenty of other folks are trying to crack the same code.

Here’s a demo video, followed by a video Q&A I did with co-founder Rajnish (that’s his full name):

Shufflr – A Social Video Browser from Shufflr on Vimeo.

*Shufflr runs on Adobe’s Flash, which is why it won’t be available on Apple’s iPad/iPod/iPhone platform for a while–the company will need to spend a little time porting its software into an Apple-approved version.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101116/another-tv-guide-for-web-video-but-shufflr-wants-your-friends-to-do-the-work/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100224/through-intel-venture-firms-send-message-to-washington/ http://allthingsd.com/20100224/through-intel-venture-firms-send-message-to-washington/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:00:57 +0000 Tomio Geron http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=21645 Intel Corp.’s (INTC) announcement of a new $3.5 billion venture alliance to invest in U.S. start-ups puts a nice face on the chip giant and the venture industry. It conjures up an impressive vision of an industry coming together and committing to a major new initiative.

Except for one thing–it’s not new money. The 24 venture firms that have signed on have not raised new capital, and they’re not pooling their capital into a new fund. While $3.5 billion is a nice big, round number, it simply represents the total amount that this small but prominent slice of the venture industry already planned to invest in U.S. companies.

In fact, there’s nothing forcing the venture firms to invest that amount during this two-year period. They’re simply giving their word.

Intel itself says it’s committed to investing $200 million in U.S. companies over the next two years–not an insignificant amount. But it likely would have invested that total without this announcement. Last year Intel invested $327 million through its Intel Capital venture arm, about half of which went to North American companies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100224/through-intel-venture-firms-send-message-to-washington/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080801/google-ventures/ http://allthingsd.com/20080801/google-ventures/#comments Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:00:17 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=2929 A Google VC arm?

Sounds like another one of those poorly conceived “20-percent time” projects, doesn’t it? Historically, corporate venture capital portfolios have a very mixed record. There are the adepts of the discipline–Intel Capital (INTC) and Johnson & Johnson Development Corp. (JNJ), for example–that have done well for their parent companies. And then there are the maladroits like Dell Ventures (DELL) and Applied Materials Ventures (AMAT) whose crowning achievement was their ignominious retreat from corporate VC in 2005. A risky and often thankless proposition, running a corporate VC shop. “… Venture investing is not the best use of a corporation’s capital,” says venture capitalist Fred Wilson. “It is inevitable that it will produce sub-par returns at best and significant losses at worst.”

So why bother? Well, if you’re a company that takes the long-term view, as Google (GOOG) does, you’re likely more concerned with long-term strategic goals than short-term financial ones. So why not take some of the vast wealth you’ve accumulated in pursuit of those long-term gains, invest it in some start-up’s new ideas and innovations and incubate them–short term? The start-up company might be the next you, right? And if it is, you acquire it (presumably, your VC investment deals include first-acquisition rights). And you do so at a price lower than the one it would fetch after taking funding from traditional VCs. Then you bring the Google hive-mind and infrastructure to bear on the start-up’s innovations and bring them to market or use them to enhance your own product and services.

If the start-up turns out not to be the next you, you don’t follow up on your initial investment–saving yourself the grief of a dud acquisition.

Essentially, you transform the emerging technology market into one vast Google Labs from which you have pick of the litter. How’s that for a 20-percent time idea?

[Image Credit: VC Wear]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080801/google-ventures/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20080801/google-ventures-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20080801/google-ventures-2/#comments Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:00:17 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=2929 A Google VC arm?

Sounds like another one of those poorly conceived “20-percent time” projects, doesn’t it? Historically, corporate venture capital portfolios have a very mixed record. There are the adepts of the discipline–Intel Capital (INTC) and Johnson & Johnson Development Corp. (JNJ), for example–that have done well for their parent companies. And then there are the maladroits like Dell Ventures (DELL) and Applied Materials Ventures (AMAT) whose crowning achievement was their ignominious retreat from corporate VC in 2005. A risky and often thankless proposition, running a corporate VC shop. “… Venture investing is not the best use of a corporation’s capital,” says venture capitalist Fred Wilson. “It is inevitable that it will produce sub-par returns at best and significant losses at worst.”

So why bother? Well, if you’re a company that takes the long-term view, as Google (GOOG) does, you’re likely more concerned with long-term strategic goals than short-term financial ones. So why not take some of the vast wealth you’ve accumulated in pursuit of those long-term gains, invest it in some start-up’s new ideas and innovations and incubate them–short term? The start-up company might be the next you, right? And if it is, you acquire it (presumably, your VC investment deals include first-acquisition rights). And you do so at a price lower than the one it would fetch after taking funding from traditional VCs. Then you bring the Google hive-mind and infrastructure to bear on the start-up’s innovations and bring them to market or use them to enhance your own product and services.

If the start-up turns out not to be the next you, you don’t follow up on your initial investment–saving yourself the grief of a dud acquisition.

Essentially, you transform the emerging technology market into one vast Google Labs from which you have pick of the litter. How’s that for a 20-percent time idea?

[Image Credit: VC Wear]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080801/google-ventures-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080623/veohs-dmitry-shapiro-speaks/ http://allthingsd.com/20080623/veohs-dmitry-shapiro-speaks/#comments Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:30:11 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=2210

Recently, while I was at a conference in Los Angeles, I caught up with Veoh Founder Dmitry Shapiro.

BoomTown will be focusing a lot on online video this year and Veoh is one of the several online video-sharing sites–a group of smaller players that includes sites like Joost, Hulu, Dailymotion, Vimeo and others that I like to call not-YouTube.

But there are pluses to not being the Google-owned (GOOG) video behemoth, in that major entertainment companies who want to figure out how to put their content online aren’t wondering all day long whether to hug or sue you (or both if you are Sumner Redstone).

Today, for example, the Los Angeles-based Veoh announced that the ABC (DIS) television network would put full episodes of its hot prime-time shows–such as “Ugly Betty” (love it) and “Desperate Housewives” (not so much)–up on the site on a non-exclusive basis.

While Veoh has a lot of short, user-generated material, it has also made a push to get more professional material from big media companies like CBS (CBS)–which wins kudos for being the most promiscuous of networks–on its service.

Interestingly in this deal, media connections seem at play here: Disney-owned ABC is giving over content to Veoh, which has former Disney poobah Michael Eisner as one of its principal investors.

The traffic-type deal is typical–Veoh gets paid to send audience to ABC’s site or gets it to use ABC’s really nice player, and ABC tries to monetize it. Veoh currently says it has 28 million unique monthly visitors.

Of course, Veoh is also trying to figure out that nettlesome monetization issue that all online video sites face, which centers on building audience with the attractive big media content and then getting them to watch other ad-supported fare on its site.

But, as with all video sites, it is still in the early stages and, thus, Veoh got another tidy pile of new funding just two weeks ago to help it muddle through.

That would be $30 million more to add to the kitty of about $40 million previously raised.

Along with existing investors–Shelter Capital Partners, Spark Capital, Goldman Sachs (GS), Eisner’s Tornante Company, Tom Freston’s Firefly3, Time Warner (TWX) Investments and Jonathan Dolgen–Veoh’s latest round included Intel Capital, Adobe Systems (ADBE) and also media and tech investor Gordon Crawford.

I talked to Shapiro, who now serves as Veoh’s chief innovation officer, about the money and more here:

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080623/veohs-dmitry-shapiro-speaks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080604/yahoo-players-burkle-icahn-crawford-and-also-the-web-make-some-news-some-not-so-good/ http://allthingsd.com/20080604/yahoo-players-burkle-icahn-crawford-and-also-the-web-make-some-news-some-not-so-good/#comments Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:06:10 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080604/yahoo-players-burkle-icahn-crawford-and-also-the-web-make-some-news-some-not-so-good/ You would have to have been under a rock not to have heard about the controversial piece in Vanity Fair magazine this month about the escapades of former President Bill Clinton since he left office.

Called “The Comeback Id” (oh, how pun-ny!), the article has gotten a lot of attention for pointing out the rampant speculation that Clinton’s well-known penchant for marital infidelity had returned.

And the reason for that disturbing development, besides Clinton himself? The piece actually placed a good bit of the blame on Clinton’s close friend, grocery magnate and billionaire Ron Burkle (pictured here), who also has been one of the key directors at Yahoo (YHOO) in its takeover fight with Microsoft (MSFT).

It’s a wonder Burkle can focus on the turmoil at Yahoo, given how busy he appears to be in the article corrupting Clinton both personally and–worse–professionally, via some questionable investments the pair had made through Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies.

Writer Todd Purdum paints a decidedly unattractive picture of Burkle, noting even the tasteless nickname of Burkle’s plane these days, in a portrayal so rough that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s tough treatment by the press recently looks like a walk in the park.

Well, almost.

In what amounts to a rant by Carl Icahn (pictured here), The Wall Street Journal gives the billionaire investor lots of room to kvetch about what he thinks of Yang, including asserting that he will oust the Yahoo founder if he wins his proxy fight against the company.

“I am amazed at the lengths that Jerry Yang and the board went to entrench themselves in this situation,” said Icahn.

Apparently, Icahn was the only one who didn’t get the memo that Yahoo has been consistently obstreperous about Microsoft’s many overtures, since–well, let’s do the exact calculations–forever. And a day.

Still, Icahn perseveres and hangs this old entrenched management chestnut on a lawsuit that was recently filed by shareholders that points to the massive and costly severance plan Yahoo sneakily put into place as a ploy to fend off Microsoft.

“It’s no longer a mystery to me why Microsoft’s offer isn’t around,” Icahn said. “How can Yahoo keep saying they’re willing to negotiate and sell the company on the one hand, while at the same time they’re completely sabotaging the process without telling anyone.”

How? By Yang opening his mouth, that’s how, and then doing nothing much.

As a student of this lugubrious style of Olympic dithering, I would point Icahn to Yang’s 100-day Sacred Cow VisionQuest, well before this soap opera got started.

You need to catch up pronto, Carl!

And speaking of people irked by Yang of late, investor Gordon Crawford (pictured here) also made some news yesterday with his investment in Veoh Networks, part of a $30 million round that included Intel Capital and Adobe Systems (ADBE).

Existing investors in the not-YouTube video service–Shelter Capital, Spark Capital, Goldman Sachs (GS), Michael Eisner’s Tornante Company, Time Warner Investments (TWX) and Jonathan Dolgen–also ponied up more money.

Crawford, the SVP of Capital Research Global Investors, manages a massive portfolio, and it is one of Yahoo’s biggest shareholders.

And, unlike Veoh, Yahoo is an investment Crawford has not been happy with recently.

“I am extremely angry at Jerry Yang and at the so-called independent board,” he said in an interview a month ago. “I’m hoping that there is such an outpouring of outrage that the board is embarrassed into revisiting this thing, but I’m not optimistic about that.”

And by independent board, by the way, he meant directors like–you guessed it–Ron Burkle!

At least Burkle’s not to blame for the so-so, lots-and-lots-missing–Google? What Google? (GOOG)–piece in the same Vanity Fair issue, an oral history of the Internet.

Called “How the Web Was Won,” it makes the founding of the world’s most important medium seem awfully dull.

I’d recommend instead–as any sentient being would–the cover story on Angelina Jolie, with this sharp quote from her: “In my father’s generation, the product was 80% of what you were putting into the world, and your personal life was 20%. It now seems that 80% of the product I put out is silly, made-up stories and what I’m wearing.”

Or not wearing, in the case of the pictures of Jolie in this article.

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