The company, which has made a big push into Facebook games in the last six months, says it will use the new money to develop more games for the social network, as well as for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platform.

The new money brings OMGPOP’s total funding to $16.6 million over its four-year history.

Bessemer has an impressive list of e-commerce bets: It was an investor in Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com and Soap.com, as well as in Yelp. And personally Ferrara is involved in other deals, such as Yodle, which helps local businesses market online, and OMGPOP, a social gaming company. Yesterday, it announced an investment in Shopify, which provides tools to help businesses sell products online quickly.

eMoney: So, you’re background is actually in computer programming? Does that help you evaluate deals?

Ferrara: I was a software engineer for many years, using Java and Microsoft languages, and I had the pleasure of authoring an O’Reilly book on Web services [O’Reilly & Associates’ "Programming .NET Web Services"]. I don’t know if it helps me, but it causes me to gravitate toward good technology and product teams.

Your most recent investment is Shopify?

Yes, we just closed last week. I just loved the team and was impressed by the product and the tech DNA that these guys had. It provides a commerce platform that can quickly serve small as well as larger businesses. They have about 10,000 to 11,000 customers as of today–and they’ve watched a lot of small businesses grow into larger enterprises.

My view of this whole small- and medium-sized business space is that they have a lot of the same pain points as large enterprises….Shopify delivers 80 percent of the functionality of larger, more expensive and cumbersome e-commerce software packages at a fraction of the cost. It offers a range of very sophisticated features around inventory management, marketing capabilities, as well as shipping and fulfillment–all of the capabilities you would get in an expensive package. They are democratizing the whole expensive enterprise software functionality.

E-commerce is a mature business that’s been around for a long time. Is there more innovation that’s happening in the space?

I think the market that Shopify is going after is less about taking share from existing players, and more about the next generation of businesses that are getting started today. A lot of those are mainstream local retailers.

Let’s say a trillion-plus has been spent in local retail, and it’s starting to move online, so that’s a big business. It won’t fully move online, but the local retailers need something besides their Main Street shop. Plus, the retailers want to tie in their physical locations, and use phones to manage their store, and take advantage of [Shopify's] technology to manage their business, whether its physical or online.

An Apple store was the first retail experience I had where I could swipe my credit card anywhere in the store–there was no waiting in line at the register.

Why can’t all retail experiences be like that? Shopify is going to do that, by moving everything to the cloud, whether you are going to a physical store, to the Web or on a mobile device. It should be one and the same.

What do you think of the local e-commerce market, especially given Google’s reported $6 billion offer for Groupon?

From what I’ve seen from afar, Groupon seems like a big business. If the rumors are true, it’s interesting to see Google having an interest. I look at them mostly as a self-serve ad company, which is mostly about technology and automation. Groupon has built a big local salesforce–it’s the inverse of Google’s approach.

I think it says a lot about how Google must be thinking about growth opportunities. To get to the local market, you do need the local salesforce. Self-serve works for a portion, but at the end of the day you need a sales channel.

So, you do think Google needs a local salesforce?

I’m guessing, but it strikes me as something that could be very compelling when [Groupon is] combined with [Google's] machinery. You could leverage each other’s data to do better at targeting for serving ads.

What about all the Groupon copycats?

Time will tell. It’s one of the questions I’ve thought about a fair amount. I don’t know. We have not invested, and clearly there’s a lot of smart people who think there are alternatives and a big enough opportunity to support competitors. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s big enough. There’s a number of players doing quite well. It’s a good time to be No. 2 to 4.

The big question is, how valuable will it be for the end-business over time. There’s not a lot of historical information on that.

What’s the role of mobile in e-commerce going forward?

For a lot of the local businesses, [mobile] fits so perfectly, and it’s got to be a huge part of any local product offering. A lot of the local merchants are mobile, as well. They don’t have large staffs to rely on and are wearing lots of hats. They want to provide service to their customers on the go–the iPhone and Android really enable that. That’s why Shopify made an iPhone version that helps the merchants to do that.

On the consumer side, they’ve also seen an increase in willingness to make purchases on mobile. It’s expected to grow exponentially, and we have some pretty good data on Shopify. Purchases on mobile are starting to grow quickly.

What about virtual goods? You are an investor in OMGPOP, a social gaming company.

They monetize and generate a good portion of revenues from virtual goods….One of our former investments is Playdom and they did a fantastic job. [Yes, they did. In July, the Walt Disney Company acquired Playdom for $763 million.]

We are bullish on digital media and gaming. We are seeing more and more game mechanics being applied to other business models. For instance, companies in financial services or online education are having their products include game mechanics to drive behavior and make the product experience more intuitive.

Still opportunities for start-ups, with giants like Amazon around? What would be your advice?

There’s a tremendous opportunity internationally. I think it would be challenging to go head to head with Amazon in certain categories. You can’t differentiate on price, and you can’t differentiate on customer service because they are impressive. This isn’t my area of expertise, but as a firm, we see that there’s a space for international e-commerce companies. They understand the local market and the nuances of the local market, and can be in an area that has been overlooked. If they can get scale, they have a chance.

Or niche opportunities, like Diapers?:

That’s a team that did a fantastic job. They provided a great level of customer service. Whenever I told people we were investors, strangers or friends would say, “I love it.”

The New York-based company is still closing the round, but I’m told existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Spark Capital will re-up, and that Softbank Capital NY will also come aboard. There’s at least one other significant investor likely to join, but I don’t have their name (feel free to tell me, though–I keep all correspondence anonymous: peter@allthingsd.com).

OMGPOP has raised $6.5 million during its four-year history, which saw it start out as a sorta-dating site. But for the past few years it has focused squarely on free-to-play casual games, and has recently been trying to generate revenue via a freemium model, as well as some forays into advertising.

And like many casual games start-ups, it is getting a big boost by integrating its games into Facebook. It integrated with the social network this summer, and CEO Dan Porter says that move has doubled the company’s user base from three million to six million. Porter declined to talk about funding news.

Interest in casual games has sparked a flurry of deals in the past year, including Electronic Arts’ purchase of Playfish, Disney’s purchase of Tapulous and DeNA’s purchase of Ngmoco. But the big player remains Zynga, which is both tightly integrated with Facebook and often described as an obvious IPO candidate.

HP has taken over the gossip site’s home page for the day with an ad that manages to mash up the upcoming SATC film with some sort-of blingy laptops.

Home page takeovers are standard practice for the Web, but Yahoo is particularly proud of this one, because it’s the first time it’s rolled out this particular ad unit, which it built in-house.

Visitors to the site will notice some messaging for HP and SATC (oh – and Windows 7, too) at the top of the screen and in one of the 15 headline boxes that dominate the page, but they won’t see the full-page ad unless they click through.

Yahoo (YHOO) won’t say what it’s charging for its prime real estate, which attracts around 20 million uniques a month. But a good bet would be something in the $80,000 range for the day.

Here’s what OMG visitors will see when the page loads the first time:

And what they’ll see with the ad turned on:

The execution is a little confusing: If you click on most parts of the square, the ad will open up a new window in your browser that takes you to this HP-hosted page. If you want to stay on OMG and see the ad, you’d have to make sure you clicked on the “engage” button.

I’m also not sure how many OMG readers will be enticed to click on any part of the square, period. But Yahoo says that future iterations of the unit will offer advertisers the option to take over the screen for a few seconds without any prompting from users, like some other ads already do.

And repetition is the real point of this exercise: Yahoo is trying to create ad units that seem novel and fresh for visitors (and ad buyers), but are designed to be stamped out over and over again. Interesting to see if this one works.

Who wants to bet on a Web company with lots of users but very little revenue? The same people who bet on it before. Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures have poured another $5 million into Tumblr, which lets people quickly and easily set up lightweight blogs.

Three-year-old Tumblr doesn’t charge its 4.5 million users for the service. It doesn’t sell advertising on the page views they generate. And it is only now beginning to generate “meaningful” revenue, says founder David Karp. (That’s Karp, flanked by two employees, engaged in some kind of new-fangled xtreme sport, on the cover of this week’s New York Magazine)

But this hasn’t dissuaded Spark and Union Square, the sole investors in the company’s C round, as well as its B round in 2008.* The company has raised $10.2 million to date.

So now what?

Karp, who turns 24 this summer, says his company has “carved out a real and substantial niche” in the last year, and he brandishes numbers to bolster his case. The service, for instance, is now generating one billion page views a month. Here’s a chart! (Click to enlarge.)

But until recently, Tumblr’s growing popularity hasn’t done much beyond racking up big infrastructure bills. Now Karp says the company is changing this by rolling out a series of paid services.

The Los Angeles Times has a nice summary of new services, and Karp says there are a “dozen more in the pipeline.” But the short version is that these are primarily bells and whistles–like digital “stickers” you buy for your friends at a buck a pop–that passionate Tumblr users may like, but don’t need.

This is a switch from the company’s earlier plan to bundle lots of must-have features into a “Tumblr Plus” subscription service aimed at its most passionate users.

The new strategy is a little more seat-of-the pants, but the bet is that it may be easier to coax money out of people a couple dollars at a time.

Not coincidentally, this is the same model that’s working out very well for social gaming companies like Zynga, which is also funded by Union Square Ventures (and to a lesser degree OMGPOP, which is backed by Spark).

Zynga is reportedly profitable, and many have it pegged for an IPO in the near future. I don’t see that in Tumblr’s cards, but if Karp and crew were interested, I can see them attracting interest from the likes of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) sooner than later.

Maybe sooner in Yahoo’s case, if it can’t snap up another company whose CEO also graces New York Magazine’s cover this week.

*“Inside rounds” like these are supposed to be no-nos in the VC world because existing investors traditionally want to find new money to validate their wagers. For the counterargument, consult Tumblr investor Bijan Sabet’s blog (hosted by Tumblr, of course).

Alas, the Foursquare conference, hosted by the Quadrangle PE fund, is an invitation-only affair. And the event, which kicks off tomorrow, is closed to the press except for reporters onstage to interview the stars. And those conversations don’t get released to the public.

That’s a particular bummer this time. Because the Quadrangle guys–who have had a rough year–had the foresight to get a lineup that includes GE (GE) CEO Jeff Immelt, who appears to be in the final stages of selling NBC Universal to Comcast (CMCSA) CEO Brian Roberts, who will also be onstage. Sure would be nice to hear what they say.

Another panel that piques my interest, if only because of the title: “Are Popularity and Profitability Correlated?” It features Twitter’s Stone, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. And would-be moguls are represented by a start-up pitch panel that includes Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, the superbuzzy mobile service whose name has nothing to do with Quadrangle’s conference.

So once again, here’s the complete list of those you won’t be hearing from this week as they gather at the Plaza in Manhattan. Unless, perhaps, one of my more ambitious colleagues sneaks in–I’m thinking of you, Bobby MacMillan–and gets us a first-hand account.

2009 SPEAKERS
EMILIO AZCÁRRAGA President, Board of Directors and CEO, Grupo Televisa
DENNIS CROWLEY Co-Founder, foursquare
BARRY DILLER Chairman and CEO, IAC; Chairman, Expedia, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc.
BRIAN DUNN CEO, Best Buy
CHARLES FORMAN Founder, OMGPOP
REED HASTINGS Founder, Chairman and CEO, Netflix
REID HOFFMAN Executive Chairman and Founder, LinkedIn Corporation
CHAD HURLEY CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube
JEFF IMMELT Chairman and CEO, GE
PAUL JACOBS Chairman and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated
OLLI-PEKKA KALLASVUO President and CEO, Nokia
JASON KILAR CEO, Hulu
LESLIE MOONVES President and CEO, CBS Corporation
ANNE MULCAHY Chairman, Xerox Corporation
JAMES MURDOCH Chairman and Chief Executive, Europe & Asia, News Corporation
BRIAN PHILLIPS CEO and Co-Founder, Thread
DAN PORTER CEO, OMGPOP
BRIAN ROBERTS Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation
PAUL SAGAN President and CEO, Akamai
ERIC SCHMIDT Chairman and CEO, Google
IVAN SEIDENBERG Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications
BIZ STONE Co-Founder, Twitter
HOWARD STRINGER Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation
BEN VERWAAYEN CEO, Alcatel-Lucent
DAVID ZASLAV President and CEO, Discovery Communications

MODERATORS
MARC ANDREESSEN General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
KEN AULETTA Author and Writer, “Annals of Communications”, The New Yorker
MARIA BARTIROMO Anchor, Closing Bell; Host & Managing Editor, Wall Street Journal Report, CNBC
JAMES CITRIN Co-Leader, Board & CEO Practice, North America, Spencer Stuart
DAVID FABER Anchor, Reporter, CNBC
MICHAEL HUBER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
BECKY QUICK Co-Anchor, Squawk Box, CNBC
GEOFFREY SANDS Director & Leader, Global Media, Entertainment & Information Practice, McKinsey & Co.
JOSHUA L. STEINER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS Anchor, This Week; Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News

The tweens and twenty-somethings who flock to the site can still keep playing games there without paying. But the company wants to convince a few of them to start shelling out $5 a month for subscriptions that gives them access to bonus goodies and credits they can use for power-ups and other virtual goods. The credits will first be used on the site’s new “Hover Kart” game and will eventually be rolled out it to the rest of its 11-game portfolio.

Virtual goods + subscriptions + online games isn’t a new idea by any stretch. It’s really big in Asia, and there are several companies trying to port the model to the U.S. Some, most notably Activision Blizzard’s (ATVI) World of Warcraft and Disney’s (DIS) Club Penguin, are enjoying success on a large scale. I’m just noting OMGPOP’s foray for a couple reasons:

1) Gotta give the company credit for sticking to its guns, from an intellectual property perspective. The site has no problem taking games that have been successful for other people and offering refurbished versions of its own. “Blockles,” its first game, is a Tetris clone. And Hover Kart, its newest one, is an homage to Nintendo’s Mario Kart, which absconded with many of my hours in the mid-90s.

The folks at OMGPOP (and their backers, which include Twitter investor Spark Capital) think this is kosher because they’re not using the games’ trademarked names or characters–only their game play/mechanics (see: the Scrabble/Scrabulous/Lexulous imbroglio). But they’re already spending money defending a Tetris lawsuit, and it will be interesting to see what Nintendo’s legal team has to say about the new game.

2) Gotta give the company, and founder Charles Forman, credit for evolving. Two years ago, Forman was a Y Combinator graduate running a site called iminlikewithyou that was supposed to be some kind of flirting/dating/Facebook hybrid. It got glowing praise from the likes of Om Malik, but it was hard to see how it was going to amount to a business. So Forman changed direction and turned it into a game site.

Fast-forward to today and it’s still not clear if there’s a successful business yet–the site has sold a couple T-shirts, but that’s about it. But at least you can see how it might work. And compared to a lot of its Web 2.0 peers, that’s saying something.

Today’s example: OMGPOP, the casual gaming site formerly known as iminlikewithyou, which has raised a $5 million round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Previous investors Spark Capital and Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures re-upped, but not Netscape/Ning/“Project A” investor Marc Andreessen, who took a flier on the company last summer.

The site has raised a little more than $6.5 million to date. A conservative valuation would still make the company worth north of $10 million.

Why is it worth anything? The company, which began life in 2006 as a dating site, has a dedicated user base that logs some three hours a month on the site. But it’s still pre-revenue, as they say.

CEO Dan Porter, who took over for highly visible founder Charles Forman earlier this year (Forman is still at the company, cranking out games), says that will change this spring. He will be selling “premium” accounts/subscriptions, most likely for $5 a month, along with virtual goods (think collectible items, power-ups, etc.).

It’s possible that the site will roll out some kind of advertising at some point–Porter says he’s been testing some ad units with Google (GOOG)–but those would be ancillary dollars (or dimes).

Can that work? Maybe. Casual games–free or low-cost Web games that take little time commitment–appear to be doing well so far in the recession, even as traditional videogame sales falter. And a lot of people are hopeful that the  market for virtual goods–big in Asia, but limited in the U.S. to a handful of games and a few oddities like Facebook’s “gift” items–will finally take off.

Not interested in thinking this one through? Fair enough. Try playing the site’s “Balloono” game, a knockoff of the Nintendo classic Bomberman. I’m waaaaaay older than the site’s core 15-25 demo, but I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time on this one.