The Mountain View, Calif., company is trying to eliminate the need for loyalty punch cards in a very low-tech way — in other words, no fancy iPads or mobile applications.

Investors in the round include Lightspeed Venture Partners and DCM. Other investors include Y Combinator, Mayfield Fund, and angel investors Chamath Palihapitiya and brothers Hadi and Ali Partovi.

FiveStars says instead of expecting retailers or consumers to adopt new technology, the product integrates into a merchant’s point-of-sale system, which is that big clunky box sitting on countertops. The approach is similar to how a grocery store loyalty card works. When users swipe a FiveStars card or enter their phone number, the merchant is able to give the customer discounts on individual products, or freebies sometime in the future when a certain spending threshold has been hit.

In an interview, co-founder Victor Ho said FiveStars is a little more slick that that.

For example, Ho said, the system can automate check-ins into Facebook on behalf of the user, or send email or text message blasts to customers. A user’s profile can also appear on the point-of-sale system, including a picture. Additionally, consumers will like it because it works across hundreds of merchants — not just one.

“A lot of players buy an iPad or other technology, and yet they don’t have these capabilities,” Ho said. Since many point-of-sale systems are full-blown computers, he added, “it takes them two minutes to get [FiveStars] up and running.”

Ali Partovi, who also invested in Dropbox and Facebook with his brother Hadi, said it was the no-frills approach that attracted him to FiveStars.

“You don’t even have to have an email address, so essentially the power of it — even if it’s not as slick — is that everyone can participate,” Partovi said. “With other solutions, some of the consumers are excluded until they buy a smartphone or have an email address. I do think the future will involve the smartphone and cooler technology, and that’s the future I’m investing in, but getting there requires a solution today that can have 100 percent penetration.”

Prior to starting the company, Ho and his co-founder Matt Doka were working for McKinsey & Company in New York, building out loyalty programs for large retailers, including Macy’s. The two then headed west to participate in the Y Combinator class of 2011.

Since officially launching in 2011, FiveStars has signed up 400,000 customers across 11 states; those customers have purchased 3.5 million items and are on track to spend more than $50 million at participating locations this year — those same customers are earning about $100,000 in free rewards every month.

At those rates, FiveStars believes it is ahead of the competition.

A similar service, called LevelUp, claims to have about 200,000 active users, who are spending some $2 million a month on its network. And Chicago-based Belly, which has an iPad solution, recently claimed to have 1,400 merchants and more than 200,000 active users. Many other services exist, including ones from Pirq and Groupon.

Ho says the FiveStars offering is appealing because it is integrated into the computer systems that so many retailers paid big money to own. It also doesn’t require the consumer to download any apps — or to remember to use them. Current customers include local Baja Fresh, Tutti Frutti, It’s a Grind, Round Table Pizza and Metro PCS locations, as well as hundreds of local independent retailers around the country. Merchants pay a monthly fee for access to the platform.

Ho said the money will be used to expand aggressively into new markets, and to build out other features, such as an NFC-enabled mobile application. The company has 55 full-time employees.

Here’s the full release:

FiveStars Raises $13.9 Million From Lightspeed Venture Partners and DCM

Market-Leading Loyalty Service Has Tracked More Than 3.5 Million Items Purchased by Repeat Customers at Local Merchants

Mountain View, Calif. – August 2, 2012 – FiveStars announced today that it has received $13.9 million in Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and DCM to support the company’s product development and growth into new markets. The company also announced that it has tracked more than 3.5 million items purchased by repeat customers at local merchants, making it the leader in the $60 billion retail loyalty market. FiveStars is the first loyalty solution on the market to integrate directly into over 90 percent of existing point of sale (POS) systems, making it easy and affordable for merchants to connect with customers based on their in-store, online and social behavior.

“Every consumer knows a few local gems — the places where we love to eat, drink, and shop. With FiveStars, you earn rewards by frequenting the places you love,” said Victor Ho, CEO and Co-founder of FiveStars. “Meanwhile, every merchant knows that the best marketing tool is word-of-mouth and repeat business from loyal customers. FiveStars enables merchants to amp up these age-old techniques in a world that’s increasingly networked, social and mobile.”

FiveStars offers consumers a single card that they can use to earn rewards for everything from yogurt to yoga, without the hassle of carrying different cards for different stores. For merchants, FiveStars is an inexpensive and easy-to-use solution that integrates with over 90 percent of point of sale systems.

FiveStars cards are accepted at local merchants and retailers around the country, including SUBWAY, Round Table Pizza, Metro PCS, and Baja Fresh locations.

“I’ve tried several different customer loyalty programs and nothing comes close to FiveStars. 2,200 customers sign up for the program within the first three months,” said Nichole Garcia, a franchisee of Tutti Frutti, the specialty frozen yogurt chain with 584 locations worldwide. “On average, those customers are visiting 15% more often and are purchasing 1,100 cups of frozen yogurt every week! Best of all, we’ve been able to do all of this without offering deep discounts; it’s real profit I can count on month after month.”

“Five Stars’ point of sale integration allows retailers to deploy loyalty solutions in a frictionless way and offer the most personalized marketing programs,” said Peter Nieh, Managing Director at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “We believe that FiveStars has the team and technology to disrupt this market and look forward to working with them as they grow.”

Through integration into the POS, retailers also receive real-time tracking and analytics on customer spending habits, to help them customize promotions and rewards. FiveStars requires no extra equipment, such as iPads or smartphones, and includes fraud prevention tools as well as integration with email, text and social networks like Facebook.

“Studies have consistently shown that it is far more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to deepen the bond with an existing one. It is imperative for merchants to identify, engage, and reward their most valuable customers,” said Jason Krikorian, General Partner at DCM. “By connecting customer loyalty to the cash register, FiveStars can truly help retailers deliver better customer service, increase customer loyalty, and ultimately drive increased sales and profits.”

FiveStars cards are currently available at leading retailers and local merchants across the country. FiveStars was founded in 2010 by Victor Ho and Matt Doka, both of whom advised Fortune 500 executives on loyalty while working at McKinsey & Company. FiveStars has raised $16 million in funding to date. Other investors include YCombinator, Mayfield Fund, and angel investors, Hadi and Ali Partovi, and Chamath Palihapitiya. More information is available at: http://www.FiveStarscard.com/.

Murphy has spent the last eight years at Riverbed, and before that spent about seven years at places like Mercury Interactive, EMC and BlueArc. He’s joining Nicira just as it’s getting off the ground for real. It has been hiring an impressive roster of people away from companies like Cisco and Juniper for several months.

Nicira is backed by investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and NEA, plus personal investments from VMWare founder Diane Greene and venture capitalist Andy Rachleff. I first noticed it when it hired Alan Cohen away from Cisco as its vice president of marketing.

It aims to be the vendor of a new networking technology that’s built specifically for the age of cloud computing. While the pipes through which bits flow in and out of data centers have gotten faster, there’s a need to make them smarter and more flexible, not unlike virtual servers in that data center. Adding Nicira’s software to a server creates the ability to “spin up” virtual networks as readily as you might virtual servers in order to meet surging demand. Nicira calls it an NVP, or network virtualization platform. AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, Rackspace and the Japanese telecom giant NTT are all using Nicira, the company says.

The partnership and funding is a huge vote of confidence for the brand, which up until today only existed on the Internet.

If you haven’t seen the ads and don’t already know, Bonobos is known for “better-fitting” men’s pants, and while I’ve heard many men say it’s true, it’s apparently hard to explain why — sort of like why the company is named after a kind of over-sexed chimpanzee. Wait, maybe it’s not that difficult to understand. Ahem.

To be sure, the company has a large selection of nice pants.

Bonobos said the round of funding was led by Nordstrom, along with full participation from existing investors, such as Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

In a statement, Andy Dunn, founder and CEO of Bonobos, said “We understand there are people who still want to touch and feel clothing before they purchase. We realized we needed help expanding beyond our web-only roots.”

Since launching in 2007, Bonobos has expanded to offer a full clothing line for men. Beginning in April, Nordstrom will carry the top two product lines of Bonobos, including chinos and cotton trousers. The brand will launch at 20 of Nordstrom’s stores and within the Men’s Shop on Nordstrom.com.

“Our investment with Bonobos will enable Nordstrom to participate in the young company’s phenomenal growth, and we look forward to what we can learn from each other as we build the business together,” said Jamie Nordstrom, president of Nordstrom Direct.

Last March, Nordstrom acquired HauteLook, an online retailer that offers flash sales.

Like Bonobos, several venture-backed companies have cropped up over the past couple of years that encourage men to shop more online, such as Indochino, J. Hilburn and TrunkClub. In December 2010, Bonobos raised $18.5 million.

On Monday, the company is officially taking the wraps off its plans. Nicira — which I’m told is pronounced like “nice era” — aims to be the vendor of a new networking technology that’s built specifically for the age of cloud computing.

One of the most important enabling technologies of the age of the cloud is something called “virtualization”: As computers have gotten more powerful, thanks mainly to the progress of Moore’s law and ever-better chips — a single computer can, with the aid of software like that created by VMware, act like it’s 10 or 20 or 40 different computers, all at once. Each “virtual machine” has, to its user, all the properties of a physical computer, and ensures that a single machine is used in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible. Customers who use cloud services can quickly “spin up” new virtual machines as needed to meet new demands, usually within minutes.

But generally speaking, networking hasn’t kept up. The pipes through which bits pour in and out of data centers have gotten faster, but they haven’t gotten much smarter. Where cloud servers are flexible, precise and easy to manage, networks are, by comparison, blunt instruments. Meeting new demand means adding new capacity, and that usually means adding new hardware to the mix, and that usually takes weeks, if not longer.

If you’ve ever wondered if it were possible to “spin up” a virtual network as readily as you do a virtual machine, wonder no more, for that is precisely what Nicira wants to offer you, without the addition of a single new piece of hardware, but rather only some software that runs on your existing server. You don’t even need to have especially advanced networking hardware.

Its the kind of thing that could give big enterprises some new flexibility in managing their network infrastructure, particularly as need and demand peaks and drops, whether by the day or because of a seasonal change that happens just once a year.

The company already has customers: AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, Rackspace and the Japanese telecom giant NTT are all using Nicira, the company says.

Nicira calls its product an NVP, or network virtualization platform, and it is being described as the sort of advance that comes along perhaps once every quarter-century. That’s a bold claim, but the argument on which the company is making it holds water. On a day-to-day basis, where you deploy an application in a data center is as much a function of how much networking capacity you have available as it is one of computing capacity.

Virtualization on servers allows you to spread a single app over as many physical machines as needed, but the network connecting those machines is what it is, and if it isn’t up to snuff, you can either enhance it by adding new routers and switches, or live with it. The result is that you can’t be as flexible with deploying apps as you’d like, and that certain machines end up being underutilized by as much as one-third, which is costly over time. You end up having to buy more servers, then pay to run them and cool them.

The Nicira NVP, as CEO Stephen Mullaney told me, “decouples” a virtual network from the physical network hardware. “All of the intelligence, all of the control, all of the services now get done in the virtual space.” The result, what was once a dumb networking pipe carrying bits into two different virtual machines running on the same one, can now be programmed to act in vastly different manners, according to rules in the virtual realm. In much the same way a single computer gets turned into a dozen, a single network can be subdivided and act like a dozen individual networks. Or the reverse: Several networks can be cobbled together to act like one. And a virtual network can be created on the fly in minutes, just like a virtual machine.

A network you can deploy in minutes saves a lot of money, because it allows you to move quickly as your networking needs change. Most big companies who demand the heaviest network loads have agreements with their service providers — usually big telecom companies — that a request for new capacity requires a week or more, because it requires the physical presence of technicians who have to install and provision new gear. But what if you can reconfigure your network in 30 seconds to meet the needs of some new application? That’s exactly what eBay’s Cloud Architect JC Martin found he could do after installing Nicira’s software on the company’s servers. EBay is a Nicira reference customer.

Other reference customers had other interesting experiences and uses to report. Japan’s NTT uses cloud data centers to run some 10,000 virtual desktops — think PCs that are all virtual machines — and found that it was easier to quickly switch between data centers during the rolling blackouts that have become the norm since that country’s earthquake last year.

There is, of course, a great deal more technical detail, but the point you have to get is that this company is out to disrupt the networking industry in a way that it hasn’t been disrupted in a long time. The traditional solution to networking problems is more, better, faster hardware, and companies like Cisco, Juniper, and Hewlett-Packard, among others, are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to sell more of that hardware.

But what if you could look a sales rep from one of those companies in the eye, and tell them that their latest million-dollar router or switch isn’t needed? Once upon a time, before the days of virtualization, if you needed a new server, you had to buy one and have it installed somewhere. Now you can, in most cases, rent space on one within minutes, or literally provision another with a few clicks of a mouse. It changed the expectation and much of the calculus of the IT industry. Many companies never buy their own servers at all, and rent space from cloud providers like Amazon, Rackspace and Joyent.

Exactly what a similar disruption might mean for networking vendors is a little hard to imagine, but if the folks at Nicira are right about the potential this technology of theirs has, it looks like that disruption is coming, one way or another.

I’m told Nicira has just made another key hire, again from Cisco Systems. Bruce Davie, a longtime Cisco employee and a Cisco Fellow, has joined Nicira as its Chief Service Provider Architect.

Davie is pretty well known in networking circles, and is one of the co-inventors of MPLS, or multiprotocol label switching, which is a fundamental basis for the high-end business class Internet service that many carriers deliver.

Davie joined Cisco in 1995, and has been a Cisco Fellow since 1998. Since 1997, he has worked in the Internet Technologies Division at Cisco, and leads a group that represents the company before the Internet Engineering Task Force. If there’s anyone who truly understands how the Internet’s pipes really work, he’s probably among them.

Before Cisco, Davie worked at Bellcore, a.k.a. Bell Communications Research, the old research and development arm of the regional phone companies, or “Baby Bells,” that resulted from the 1982 court-ordered breakup of the old AT&T. Bellcore is still around; it eventually became Telcordia and ended up in the hands of Swedish telecom concern Ericsson, in a deal that closed earlier this month.

Davie has a B.E. from Melbourne University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Edinburgh University. He is the author of three books on networking, and lots of technical papers. He is also an active participant on both the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Research Task Force; a senior member of the IEEE; and has, in recent years, been a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Davie would appear to be the eighth person at Nicira (by my likely incomplete count) with a Cisco connection. Its CEO is Steve Mullaney, a veteran networking executive who has worked at Palo Alto Networks, ShoreTel and Cisco. Its CTO and co-founder, Martin Casado, did his Ph.D. on the technology the company plans to bring to market. Its other founders, Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker, are electrical engineering profs at Stanford and Berkeley, respectively. Last January, the outfit also hired Rob Enns, a veteran of Juniper Networks, as its VP of engineering.

There’s still no official word about what Nicira is doing, but all these hires are making it look ever more interesting by the day. Nicira is working on technology aimed at “virtualizing the network.” Data center networks today are too inflexible, complex and costly, especially in the age of the cloud, when everything is on-demand, flexible and cheap. Nicira’s Web site says the product is a software solution that runs on existing networks, requires no new hardware and is aimed directly at large-scale cloud data centers. Interesting, indeed.

At least it should be, based on the $35 million that investors just plowed into Outbrain, the content recommendation engine that works with AllThingsD and lots of other publishers. Index Ventures led the round, joining existing investors Carmel and Lightspeed; the New York-based company has raised $64 million to date.

Outbrain makes money helping funnel traffic from one publisher’s site to another. It gets paid whenever someone clicks on its sponsored listings (those are the ones labeled “From the Web” at the end of this story), and gives the originating publisher 60 percent of the revenue. Publishers (again, like AllThingsD) also benefit, because Outbrain provides recommendations for other stories that will keep readers on the original site.

Like most of the Web, this is a business that’s supposed to work at scale, and Outbrain says it has that now, generating 200 million clicks a month. Earlier this year, Outbrain bought former rival Sphere from AOL.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/The Bezz)

LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy

According to sources familiar with the company, the funding will be used for day-to-day expenses and to fuel its expansion efforts. The funding was confirmed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission today.

Both existing shareholders and new investors participated in the round.

J.P. Morgan was one of its latest investors. LivingSocial’s previous investors include: Amazon, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Revolution Fund, Grotech Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners.

The round will give LivingSocial enough financial flexibility over the next few months to decide when the timing is right to file for an initial public offering.

Most notably, a source tells us that all of the funding will go toward the company’s operations without previous investors or anyone from the management team cashing out. That is much different from Groupon’s last round, where nearly all of the $1 billion was paid out to management and other shareholders.

In April, the company raised $400 million at a $3 billion valuation. To date, the Washington, D.C.-based company has raised close to $776 million.

Earlier last month, the leader in the space, Groupon, successfully raised $700 million in its public debut; however, its stock has struggled to maintain its opening price.

Hadoop is an open source technology known for its cute cartoon elephant mascot (hence the photo). It has its roots at Google and was inspired by MapReduce — one of the fundamental technologies that makes the Google search experience what it is — and was created at Yahoo, which donated it to the open source community by way of the Apache Software Foundation. That means it’s free.

It’s used by companies as varied as Facebook, Groupon and AOL to turn workloads involving huge sets of data into manageable tasks. It’s so popular, in fact, that several companies have sprung up hoping to turn a profit by helping other companies run Hadoop, in much the same way that Red Hat makes money by helping companies run Linux.

I’ve written here in the past about Cloudera, and Yahoo’s Hadoop team recently spun out as Hortonworks (again with the elephant references).

Now there’s another Hadoop company on the scene — MapR — and it has just secured a $20 million round of venture capital funding led by Redpoint Ventures, with Lightspeed Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates also participating. This comes on top of a strategic relationship with storage giant EMC, in which the hardware maker is offering MapR’s Hadoop distribution with some of its systems.

So what does MapR aim to do? Create an industrial-strength version of Hadoop that’s ready for the enterprise. I talked with CEO John Schroeder. “We created a reliable and dependable platform that’s built for high availability so clusters don’t fail. And we also added data protection, so you can back up your data and recover to a point in time that works in large clusters,” he said.

MapR also tuned its version of Hadoop for speed. It’s not uncommon, he said, for MapR to run two to five times faster than other distributions on standard benchmark tests. As you might expect, faster is better. You can arrive at your analytical answers sooner, or run more workloads on larger data sets, or you can run the same ones on cheaper hardware. So Schroeder is only half kidding when he says it’s “cheaper than free.”

I talked with Satish Dharmaraj, a general partner at Redpoint, and asked him what he sees in MapR. The market for “big data,” he says, is real. “It’s pretty clear to us that the MapReduce method of crunching big sets of data is the easiest and most cost-efficient way of doing things, and it’s disrupting the analytics and software industry in how they process big sets of data.”

Dharmaraj also likes the team. Schroeder was previously CEO of Calista Technologies, which he sold to Microsoft, and before that, CEO of Rainfinity, now part of EMC. His co-founder and CTO is M.C. Srivas, who ran one of Google’s search infrastructure teams, and so has an intimate familiarity with the original MapReduce to which Hadoop is so closely related. Srivas was also chief architect at Spinnaker Networks, now part of NetApp; before that, he ran the engineering team at Transarc, now part of IBM.

Finally, Dharmaraj likes MapR’s approach. “Hadoop is great, but it’s an open source project, so there’s nobody really building all the things around it that an enterprise would need, like disaster recovery. It’s also really fast. Jobs that take 30 hours on other versions are taking five hours,” he said. “That, to us, makes this the first version of Hadoop for the enterprise.”

According to multiple sources close to the situation, Ning has been talking recently to a large pool of companies about selling itself, including Google and Groupon, as well as to a number of private equity companies.

Interest has been both incoming to and outgoing from Ning.

The talks around the fate of the high-profile social networking platform — co-founded by Silicon Valley icon and investor Marc Andreessen — are still early and might not result in a sale, although a number of sources said the company was being valued at up to $150 million.

That price is well below previous loftier valuations for Ning and would mean only a break-even for investors, who have put close to $120 million into Ning since it was founded in 2004.

Among its investors: Andreessen, LinkedIn Chairman and investor Reid Hoffman, Legg Mason, Allen & Company and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

There are no bankers involved in the preliminary efforts, in which Andreessen has been involved, although discussions with Google and Groupon have been substantive in nature.

Several other companies — including AOL, Demand Media and Go Daddy — have also been approached or are kicking tires at the site. Most would be interested in Ning’s technology for creating premium social networks.

Ning bills itself on its site as “The World’s Largest Platform for Creating Social Websites.”

The sales effort grew out of a parallel one to possibly raise more money for the start-up. Sources said there was some incoming interest, so talking to a larger pool of buyers was undertaken recently.

Such a move would be an interesting one for Ning, which has undergone a series of ups and downs over its history, including dramatic management and business plan shifts.

Its most recent plan has been to go all-premium, trying to find a way to turn the start-up into a profitable enterprise.

That’s worked out well, the company has previously said, with strong growth. Since its business shift a year ago, Ning has said, it has had 400 percent year-on-year revenue growth, going from 17,000 to more than 100,000 subscribers and with 60 million monthly active users.

Ning’s shift has been under the leadership of Jason Rosenthal, who had been COO of Ning until he replaced its founding CEO, Gina Bianchini, in early 2010.

Ning has also recently tried to get into the highly competitive mobile social communications arena, with a service called Mogwee. The traction for the product does not appear to have been significant.

Ning’s Rosenthal declined to comment about any sales efforts when reached by me today.

It is in stealth mode no more. The company today took the wraps off at least some of its plans and revealed the closing of a $9.2 million Series A funding round that also includes investments from Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Levine is joining Bromium’s board.

Its founders are Gaurav Banga, the former CTO of Phoenix Technologies; Simon Crosby, the former CTO of the Data Center and Cloud Division of Citrix; and Ian Pratt, the current chairman of Xen.org and another Citrix veteran. Both Pratt and Crosby joined Citrix after it acquired the open source virtualization company Xensource in 2007.

Bromium is turning out to be a bit of a reunion of former Xensource execs: Frank Artale, a managing director at Ignition who was also a Xensource exec, is joining Bromium’s board as well.

So what does Bromium plan to do? It won’t say, but I got a few hints from Simon Crosby, Bromium’s CTO. “The timing of this is perfect to what is going on right now with all the attacks that have been going on recently,” he said.

The attacks against EMC’s RSA security products, and also on Google’s Gmail, he says, were carried out via the client — that is, end user devices like a PC, a smartphone or a tablet. “Bromium believes that getting to a secure era in cloud computing requires securing both the client and the cloud.”

And how to get there? Again, he wouldn’t say exactly, but he did point the way: Virtualization. The technique of creating numerous “virtual” computers that run concurrently on a single physical host computer has been a fundamental development in the evolution of cloud computing. “Everyone I think knows that virtualization can help with security, but no one has really delivered an elegant solution that enhances security through the use of virtualization,” Crosby told me. “This is where I think we can strike a blow for the good guys.”

For another hint, look at Intel’s recently closed acquisition of security software concern McAfee. “Intel gets that security needs to move closer to the hardware, and we would agree with that,” Crosby said. McAfee’s CTO, George Kurtz, is on Bromium’s board.

Bromium marks the second security start-up that Andreesen Horowitz has invested in recently. The other was Silver Tail Systems. And it probably won’t be the last. As AH founder Marc Andreesen said in his appearance with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D9, he loves security. Why? “The threats keep morphing.” Indeed they do.

Banjo and similar companies like Sonar.me are building on top of the small but growing treasure trove of location info from sources like Foursquare, which make user check-ins available to developers through APIs.

Banjo users can see updates from their friends and other people nearby on social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook Places. Banjo itself is not a check-in service, but rather a layer on top of these other social networks.

Banjo users don’t have to be in the near vicinity of other users to see their updates, and they don’t necessarily have to be their friends. They can see the locations of the nearest 16 people to them at any one time.

If you’re in the middle of nowhere, the list of 16 people might include someone miles away. Banjo CEO Damien Patton says this “elastic radius” is a key feature of his service, because Banjo won’t have the loneliness problem of other location aggregators like Color.

And Banjo users can key in any random place to find out what’s going on there. So if you’re going to Paris next week, you could see what people there are doing and saying now, while you’re planning your trip.

It will be interesting to see how users of location-based services react to services like Banjo. Even though their updates may be semipublic by design, users don’t necessarily realize who can see where they are, and how that data can be transformed when it’s aggregated and mapped. We discussed that issue in a video interview with Patton that’s embedded above.

Banjo, which will be available for both iPhone and Android at launch, is backed by BlueRun Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Patton, a former Nascar mechanic and manufacturing entrepreneur, attracted the attention of VCs last summer when he won a Google-sponsored hackathon with an HTML5 location-based graffiti app called SweetGeo.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110622/new-banjo-social-discovery-app-uses-other-peoples-check-ins/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110513/shoedazzle-walks-away-with-40-million-from-andreessen-horowitz/ http://allthingsd.com/20110513/shoedazzle-walks-away-with-40-million-from-andreessen-horowitz/#comments Fri, 13 May 2011 22:45:20 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=5400 ShoeDazzle, a two-year-old company building a subscription-based e-commerce business, has raised $40 million in capital.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, which contributed $30 million. Other participants included existing investors Polaris Venture Partners and LightSpeed Venture Partners.

John O’Farrell, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz will join the board.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company sends members a monthly selection of shoes, handbags and jewelry based on their preferences. They can choose to buy one item every month for $39.95, or they can skip a month. The packages are sent in the mail in a pretty box tied up with a ribbon. If subscribers don’t do anything, and forget to pick an item or opt out, they will be charged and have $39.95 in credit.

So far, the service has attracted three million subscribers.

The company was founded by Brian Lee, along with fashion celebrity Kim Kardashian. To date, the company has raised $60 million in capital.

Lee said the cash will be used for launching new product categories and expanding into international markets. In a couple of months, it will launch in the U.K., and then Asia and South America. Today, it operates in the U.S. and Canada. Lee also expects to grow the size of the company from its current base of 135 employees.

A “tiny” amount of the round was used to cash out the stock of the founders, Lee said. Lee previously co-founded LegalZoom.com.

O’Farrell said that they’ve been looking to invest in a new e-commerce company for awhile, and that ShoeDazzle stood out from the pack. “It has a strong financial model and delights customers with fashionable products.” And, he notes, it’s a business that can make significant profit.

ShoeDazzle’s business model is a little different and is a bit similar to the old CD clubs, where members would get a new album in the mail every month based on a particular genre. However, subscribers can easily skip a month if they don’t like any of the products. It also has strong ties to Facebook, where it has nearly a million fans.

The entire product line is branded “ShoeDazzle,” and is sourced by the company directly. That’s one of the aspects that O’Farrell really liked. “One of the key things in e-commerce is inventory management and the supply chain. ShoeDazzle is able to have really high quality products at acceptable prices and still get margins,” he said.

Already, there are companies following in ShoeDazzle’s footsteps. In March, Nordstrom-owned HauteLook launched Sole Society, a monthly shoe club.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110513/shoedazzle-walks-away-with-40-million-from-andreessen-horowitz/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20110418/exclusive-wal-mart-paid-300-million-plus-for-kosmix/ http://allthingsd.com/20110418/exclusive-wal-mart-paid-300-million-plus-for-kosmix/#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:46:25 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42783

According to sources close to the situation, Wal-Mart Stores paid just over $300 million in cash for Kosmix.

The six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company–which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic–has raised $55 million from a large group of Silicon Valley venture firms.

The acquisition by the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant was announced earlier today.

Wal-Mart did not disclose terms of the deal, which is focused on building out its social and mobile e-commerce offerings.

The price for Kosmix is a pricey one to do so, but traditional retailers need to jump into the digital market now dominated by app-happy, smartphone-wielding customers.

Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs, the company said.

Kosmix was founded by the team that sold pioneering e-commerce company Junglee to Amazon in 1998.

After that, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman raised $55 million in funding from Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, and angel investors Jon Miller and Ed Zander.

As eMoney’s Tricia Duryee wrote earlier today:

The company may be best known for powering TweetBeat, which it defines as a real-time social media filter for live events. It also operates Kosmix.com, where people go to discover social content by topic, and it operates RightHealth, which it claims to be one of the top three health and medical information sites by reach.

One interesting aspect of the deal: Accel’s senior partner Jim Breyer–who was not the principal VC in the Kosmix investment–is on the board of Wal-Mart. Presumably, he recused himself from the decision.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110418/exclusive-wal-mart-paid-300-million-plus-for-kosmix/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110418/wal-mart-acquires-kosmix-to-move-into-social-and-mobile/ http://allthingsd.com/20110418/wal-mart-acquires-kosmix-to-move-into-social-and-mobile/#comments Mon, 18 Apr 2011 17:18:05 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=4574 Wal-Mart is buying Kosmix, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic.

The company did not disclose terms of the agreement, but said the acquisition would be instrumental in building out both its social and mobile initiatives.

Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs and continue to be based in Silicon Valley, the company said.

Wal-mart said the @WalmartLabs team will work on building out its social and mobile commerce strategy to link together its bricks and mortar stores with e-commerce. Today, Wal-mart operates physical stores in 15 countries and e-commerce businesses in nine countries.

Kosmix was founded by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who sold their first company, Junglee, to Amazon.com in 1998.

The six-year-old company Kosmix has raised $55 million in funding from Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dag Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Jon Miller, and Ed Zander.

In explaining what the company does on its Web site, it writes: “On any given day, people share 830 million items on Facebook, upload 6.1 million photos to Flickr, add 2.1 million minutes of video to YouTube and send 65 million tweets. Kosmix cuts through this noise to find content that matters to you.”

It’s not particularly clear how Kosmix leads to better mobile and social interactions. The company may be best known for powering TweetBeat, which it defines as a real-time social media filter for live events. It also operates Kosmix.com, where people go to discover social content by topic, and it operates RightHealth, which it claims to be one of the top three health and medical information sites by reach.

The transaction is subject to the customary closing conditions; the company anticipates it will close during the first half of this year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110418/wal-mart-acquires-kosmix-to-move-into-social-and-mobile/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110328/flixster-update-warner-bros-very-interested-as-yahoo-drops-outs-of-bidding-for-social-movie-site/ http://allthingsd.com/20110328/flixster-update-warner-bros-very-interested-as-yahoo-drops-outs-of-bidding-for-social-movie-site/#comments Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:47:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42066

Recently, BoomTown reported that Flixster–the popular social movie site whose brands include the Rotten Tomatoes premium reviews site–was in early acquisition discussions with several suitors.

Now, said sources, Warner Bros. appears to be the frontrunner in various talks to buy the entertainment site, while Internet giant Yahoo has dropped out due to price concerns.

The reason for interest from the Time Warner-owned studio, said sources, is due to a spate of recent digital efforts, including its expansion of a movie rental experiment on Facebook.

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka wrote last night:

Facebook users watch “The Dark Knight” on the social network for $3. Now it has added five more movies, and is asking more money for three recent releases: It will cost you 40 Facebook Credits–the equivalent of $4–to rent “Inception,” “Life As We Know It” and “Yogi Bear” on the site. The first two “Harry Potter” movies, however, are at the original price.

Flixster has a strong presence on the Silicon Valley social networking giant, which could make it a good vehicle to attract people to the movie rental effort, as well as a popular mobile app.

Interestingly, Rotten Tomatoes was once owned outright by another traditional media giant: News Corp.

It is now only a minority shareholder, after trading Rotten Tomatoes for a 20 percent stake in the combined entity a little over a year ago.

News Corp., which owns 20th Century Fox Studios, is not bidding for Flixster, several sources said.

The price being discussed for the San Francisco-based start-up is between $60 million and $90 million.

Any acquisition negotiations could always fail, of course. In fact, Flixster held advanced discussions in late 2007 with IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Flixster trades all kinds of recommendations, ratings and news and even posts user-generated movie reviews on its Web site and via widgets on social networking sites, mostly on Facebook, and on mobile devices.

Co-founded in 2006 by CEO Joe Greenstein and CTO Saran Chari, Flixster has raised $7 million in venture funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures, as well as garnering angel investments, such as from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

The combination with Rotten Tomatoes and its more robust Web presence made a lot of sense. It features mostly premium content, including professional reviews, trailer videos and news.

The site is famous for its clever fresh and rotten tomato rating system for movies.

I have not received a response from emails sent to Flixster and Warner Bros. requesting comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110328/flixster-update-warner-bros-very-interested-as-yahoo-drops-outs-of-bidding-for-social-movie-site/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110316/100-percent-fresh-exclusive-flixsterrotten-tomatoes-in-acquisition-talks-with-yahoo-and-others/ http://allthingsd.com/20110316/100-percent-fresh-exclusive-flixsterrotten-tomatoes-in-acquisition-talks-with-yahoo-and-others/#comments Wed, 16 Mar 2011 07:02:34 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41652

Flixster–the popular social movie site whose brands include the Rotten Tomatoes premium reviews site, as well as BuddyTV–is in early acquisition talks with several suitors, including Yahoo, said sources close to the situation.

The price being discussed for the San Francisco-based start-up is between $60 million and $90 million, said several sources, in talks that are “substantive.”

Nonetheless, any acquisition negotiations could always fail. In fact, Flixster held advanced discussions in late 2007 with IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Along with Yahoo, which is interested in bringing in a strong team to bolster the entertainment offerings of the Silicon Valley Internet portal, sources said several media giants are also eyeing Flixster in order to strengthen their ties to entertainment consumers. Likely candidates in this regard include Disney and Warner Bros.

Interestingly, one of Flixster’s big shareholders is News Corp., which traded its Rotten Tomatoes unit for a 20 percent stake in the combined entity a little over a year ago.

But its minority stake gives News Corp. little influence over Flixster’s fate, although its IGN gaming unit head Roy Bahat is on the Flixster board. News Corp.–which has been shedding Web properties, such as its current effort to sell MySpace–is not bidding for Flixster.

But the interest in the site by Yahoo and others is obvious.

Flixster has attracted a huge online audience, which trades all kinds of recommendations, ratings, news and even post user-generated movie reviews on the Web site and via widgets on social networking sites, mostly on Facebook. Its recent mobile app efforts have been successful.

Co-founded in 2006 by CEO Joe Greenstein and CTO Saran Chari, Flixster has raised $7 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures, as well as garnering angel investments, such as from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

The combination with Rotten Tomatoes and its more robust Web presence made a lot of sense. It features mostly premium content, including professional reviews, trailer videos and news.

The site is famous for its clever fresh and rotten tomato rating system for movies.

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment and I have not received a response from emails sent to Greenstein.

Until he does, here’s my video interview with Greenstein, Chari and COO Steve Polsky, in which they talked about the deal to combine Flixster with Rotten Tomatoes:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110316/100-percent-fresh-exclusive-flixsterrotten-tomatoes-in-acquisition-talks-with-yahoo-and-others/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101203/livingsocial-groupon-riding-deals-frenzy-but-will-it-last/ http://allthingsd.com/20101203/livingsocial-groupon-riding-deals-frenzy-but-will-it-last/#comments Fri, 03 Dec 2010 22:26:21 +0000 Tomio Geron http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=33538 Just a couple of years ago, the idea that start-ups offering modest local business discounts would be the hottest properties in the tech world would have brought snickers.

Now, Google may be on the verge of buying one of those companies, Groupon Inc., for $6 billion or so, and another one, LivingSocial Inc., just bagged a $175 million investment from Amazon.com Inc.

Snicker no more. Daily deals are big money, and big money is required to gain dominance.

“The size of the round is enormous because the size of the opportunity is enormous,” said Jeremy Liew, managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners, which added $8 million of its own to the round.

The Amazon investment, as well as the potential acquisition of Groupon by Google, signals the quick explosion of and high expectations for an online-to-offline local small business advertising industry that just three years ago did not exist.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101203/livingsocial-groupon-riding-deals-frenzy-but-will-it-last/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101202/livingsocial-gets-175-million-amazon-investment-like-boomtown-said/ http://allthingsd.com/20101202/livingsocial-gets-175-million-amazon-investment-like-boomtown-said/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:59:09 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38037

Amazon will invest $175 million in LivingSocial, the No. 2 player in the fast-growing social buying space.

(The press release is below.)

BoomTown reported yesterday that the massive investment was in the works.

The online retail giant’s big bet on the Washington, D.C.-based start-up comes in the wake of ongoing acquisition talks between Google and Groupon, the category leader in the local deals business.

While it appears to be a reaction to those discussions, sources said Amazon and LivingSocial have been talking for some time about a variety of deals between them.

Sources said the Amazon investment put a very hefty valuation of over one billion dollars on LivingSocial.

Interest in LivingSocial has heightened of late, given the $6 billion in cash, stock and earnouts that BoomTown has reported Google is considering ponying up to purchase Chicago-based Groupon, and grab ahold of its 12 million users across the globe and $500 million in annual revenue.

But LivingSocial–which has been thriving even in Groupon’s flashier shadow–has 10 million subscribers worldwide in more than 120 markets and five countries, including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia.

And, as LivingSocial noted when it announced its acquisition of Australia’s Jump On It recently, it is currently booking an average of more than $1 million a day and is projected to book well more than $500 million in revenue in 2011.

And that is what has attracted Amazon, which has almost no profile in this lucrative local space, despite some attempts at its own solution. It bought a small and quirky daily deals site, Woot, for $110 million in June.

But sources said that, rather than sell, LivingSocial management wanted to keep the company independent, and thinks a sale of Groupon will give it a huge opportunity for growth.

Why? Well, even though Groupoogle or Goopon are fun to say, the inevitable regulatory review could drag on, resulting in a slowing down of innovation in the bigger Google culture and the distinct possibility of newly rich Groupon execs flying the coop (in private planes).

More investment money should help LivingSocial move ahead faster. Sources also said there is likely to be deep integration between its and Amazon’s services.

LivingSocial announced in April that it had raised $14 million in a Series C round, after grabbing $25 million in a Series B venture funding only a month before. And it has raised $10 million on top of that since 2008.

Sources estimated at the time that the valuation for LivingSocial was several hundred million dollars.

The newest round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; earlier investors include U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and former AOL head Steve Case.

Lightspeed also invested $8 million more on top of Amazon’s funding.

Here is the official press release:

LivingSocial Announces $175 Million Investment by Amazon.com

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2, 2010 /PRNewswire/–LivingSocial (www.livingsocial.com) has secured a $175 million investment from Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN). LivingSocial has also secured an additional $8 million investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners. LivingSocial will use this investment to maintain a steady drumbeat of worldwide launches and overall business growth while continuing to serve more than 10 million subscribers across the U.S., Canada, UK, Ireland and Australia in more than 120 locations. Because of LivingSocial’s rapid expansion, the company is currently booking revenues of more than $1 million a day on average and is projected to book well over $500 million in revenue in 2011.

“To be the biggest player in the local commerce space there is no one better to work with than Amazon,” said Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO of LivingSocial. “As the social shopping space continues to heat up, LivingSocial is committed to staying focused on providing the high level of quality that consumers and merchants have come to expect when working with us.”

As the online source to find amazing experiences at an unbeatable value, LivingSocial lets anyone experience the hottest restaurants, shops, activities and services in their area. The company has dedicated area experts on the ground in every location working directly with business owners, and constantly researching the best in local adventures to bring a savings of 50% to 70% for consumers.

Recently, LivingSocial expanded its business by acquiring adventure company Urban Escapes, and launching three new verticals including LivingSocial Family Edition, Campus Deals and LivingSocial Escapes, a travel site that offers unbeatable savings on curated adventures. In addition, the company continues a regular flow of launches–on average one per day–and has expanded its reach in Australia with a controlling stake in Jump On It, making it live in five countries.

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