Remedy Health Media, a New York-based health information company, has bought HealthCentral, a start-up that offers online clinical and patient tools, community and content in a variety of topic areas.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the Arlington, Va.-based HealthCentral has raised $50 million from investors such as the Carlyle Group, IAC/InterActiveCorp, Polaris Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. Allen & Co., which was HealthCentral’s financial adviser for the transaction, was also an investor.

The market for online-based information about health has been a fast-growing one, but it’s still a nascent arena.

Here’s the official press release:

Remedy Health Media Acquires HealthCentral: Creates Industry-Leading Health Information and Technology Platform

NEW YORK, NY – Remedy Health Media, America’s fastest-growing health information and technology company, today announced its acquisition of HealthCentral, a leading provider of online clinical and patient community resources and tools that help millions of patients and caregivers take control of their health and improve their well-being. The acquisition brings together two companies with the shared mission of empowering patients and caregivers with the information and applications needed to efficiently navigate the healthcare landscape to receive better health outcomes. The acquisition is expected to close this week. Terms were not disclosed.

“This acquisition means Remedy now provides the health information industry’s leading portfolio of digital, mobile, and point-of-care information and technology products,” said Remedy Chief Executive Officer, Mike Cunnion.

HealthCentral’s CEO, Christopher M. Schroeder, adds, “This combination creates real opportunities for innovation in an industry segment that is growing rapidly and seeking new solutions. All of us at HealthCentral are very excited that the union of the two companies and the strength, scope, and reach of the new Remedy will be a unique force for better health and wellness.”

With the addition of HealthCentral, Remedy Health Media creates a market-leading platform for healthcare audiences seeking proprietary information and technology to manage their health concerns on their terms as well as marketing partners who want to connect with patients and caregivers on a number of platforms: online, in doctors’ offices, pharmacies, and through their mobile devices. The new Remedy Health Media will influence more than 150 million consumers annually. The company’s reach now includes 23 million unique monthly visitors to its health websites, more than 17 million patients and caregivers at pharmacy counters nationwide, a 20-million member customer database, and a network of more than 600,000 physicians.

“With the acquisition of HealthCentral, we’ve dramatically increased our online reach, sales capacity and our ability to create industry leading health information and technology applications,” notes Cunnion. “The combination creates exciting opportunities to provide even more value to our audiences, customers and strategic partners.”

Remedy Health Media is a Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS) company; a leading global private investment firm focused on the information, education, media, communications and business services industries. “Communications growth will be driven by the convergence of technologies in digital and mobile platforms,” said David Bainbridge, Managing Director, Veronis Suhler Stevenson. “Nowhere is this more evident than in the health and wellness sector where the ability to access accurate information is paramount.”

HealthCentral is backed by leading interactive media and technology investors IAC/InterActiveCorp, Polaris Ventures, Sequoia Capital, The Carlyle Group and Allen & Company. Notes Alan Spoon of Polaris Ventures, “We are thrilled to join forces with Mike and the Remedy team. This combination is a unique opportunity to create the largest and most innovative platform for health seekers looking to take action on their terms, and connecting them with our partners and clients.”

Schroeder will remain involved in the business as a consultant to Remedy and the board of directors, and has been named an Advisor to Polaris Ventures.

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.

You can probably forgive his enthusiasm. You see on the same day Egnyte, which sells what it describes as a hybrid cloud storage service for enterprises (more on that in a moment) landed a $10 million B-series funding round from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, joining prior investors Floodgate and Polaris Venture Partners. The investment is coming from Kleiner and from its iFund, the $200 million fund set up in partnership with Apple to encourage development of software and other things around the iPhone and iPad. That fund is managed by Matt Murphy. All this amounts to something of a conversion for Jain. We talked yesterday about Egnyte and its mission, and why he loves the iPad now.

NewEnterprise: So what is Egnyte?

Vineet Jain: When I started Egnyte, we launched our first product in March of 2008. We were looking to build a product for the small-medium business space. The problem we were trying to solve was to replace that physical file server, with all its associated overhead and other things that you need, like VPN for remote access, and external FTP for sharing large files. We combined all that that into an integrated platform. And quiet frankly when we first launched it, the word “cloud” wasn’t so hot. We called it an on demand file server. We didn’t even know we were building a cloud product.

But it’s not all cloud-based right? You call it “hybrid cloud storage.”

Correct. We realized early on that the cloud-based system can only go so far for something as data intensive as your entire file system, with huge amounts of data and lots of employees accessing it and probably from multiple locations. There’s three fundamental problems with that. One is latency. We were trying to replace something that has traditionally run on the local area network with something that’s in the public cloud. The other problem is offline access. What happens if for a few minutes my office loses connectivity, or the provider can go down? The third problem, which is more psychological, is the fear of going totally in the cloud, which is paramount for larger companies. There’s a sense of losing control of the data. So as a combination of these problems, after 14 months we introduced a product we called the local cloud.

I’ve heard of private clouds, but what’s a local cloud?

It sounds a little like an oxymoron. When you use cloud file storage solutions like Drop Box or Sugarsync, they don’t really scale beyond more than five employees because you can’t be replicating the same file 20 different times, and clogging up the networks and eating into hard drives. So we built this product for off-the-shelf network attached storage devices from Netgear and others like it that converted them into a group solution. We called it the office local cloud. Then last year, we built a generic engine, where a company would cloud-enable hardware from Dell and Hewlett-Packard or NetApp by deploying a virtual cloud appliance using VMWare. We called that the enterprise local cloud. But all in all, our view of the world is that for large enterprises, the hybrid cloud is the way to go because of the way the Internet is today.

So I see that your vision is working with a lot of large customers. Your Web site names customers like Intel, Cisco Systems, Ikea, Sears, Lexmark.

What’s interesting is that we don’t sell to the CIO or the IT heads of these organizations. They’ve actually come to us over the Web. The point is that we’ve managed to attract customers a much larger class of customer who wouldn’t normally sign up with a pure cloud-based solution. I’ll give you an example. We’re working with a company called Sugar. They’re growing like crazy. They came to us saying their servers were running out of steam. They started with 200 seats, but plus one local cloud appliance in their San Francisco office, and within a few months they added another in New York. If we didn’t have a hybrid approach we wouldn’t be attracting these customers. Our average revenue per user has gone up from $35 and now its closer to $57.

So it’s basically a combination of storage in the cloud and storage that’s on premise?

Correct. Here’s another example. We’re working with an investment company in the UK. They use about 140 people using it. But there were 30 people who worked in the finance department who were dealing with extremely large Excel files. They couldn’t edit these files live over the cloud because of the latency problems. Once they deployed a local cloud instance in each of their offices, they had an interesting dynamic where these 30 people are working with the locally stored versions of those large files. They get synced up into the cloud, and it’s a bi-directional sync, and the rest of the company is happily working off the files they need that are stored in the cloud.

So basically the ones who need the local storage get it and the ones who can work well enough with the cloud without experiencing latency can do that? And its all transparent however you use. The experience is the same?

Right. Both instances are synced up real-time. Not just the data but also folder access permissions. So if you have read-only access for some folder, you get the same level access whether its local or in the cloud. We replicate that without the user being aware of it.

So you’ve just announced an application for iPad 2?

I have to admit, I didn’t anticipate how popular the iPad would become in the enterprise. It’s been a real surprise. We’ve had a basic iPad app for awhile. In the last six months our customers have demanded the same level of access on the iPad that they get on the desktop. They want the whole thing. I was shocked. But I realized I’m an outlier. We had a client, an advertising firm, that wanted to do a 2,500-seat deployment with us. But they wanted a large part of their employees to be able to use mobile devices including the iPad. And they demanded that it had to work with all types of users including regular employees to administrators and business partners.

So is it safe to say you’re an iPad convert?

Absolutely. I was totally wrong about it.

It might also be a business. That’s the hope of investors who have just plowed $1.6 million into the six-man operation, which launched a few months ago.

First Round Capital and Lower Case Capital are putting new money into the company, along with existing investors Mitch Kapor and Polaris Venture Partners, who previously invested $300,000. Stickybits is also touting the arrival of semi-celebrity angel investor Chris Sacca.

Again, explaining Stickybits takes a bit of work, and it may be easier if you’re drinking beer instead of coffee. Time.com did a fairly concise job, though: Using an Apple (AAPL) iPhone or Google (GOOG) Android, “users can scan barcodes, attach a piece of information–either a video, note or audio recording–and receive a notification whenever someone else scans the same object. Stickybits also produces unique, one-off barcodes of its own that, when attached to a postcard, for example, add digital memory to static objects.”

So that sort of sounds fun, and there might even be some commercial applications: You can see how marketers might want to play around with tagging the bar codes on the stuff they sell, etc.

Founder Billy Chasen, a graduate of the Betaworks start-up incubator, says the company intends to court those commercial customers, via privileged access to its API, as well as a dashboard they could use to manage their bar codes.

But Chasen says his company won’t be consumed with consumer marketers. “It’s not going to turn into something where it’s just a tool for brands,” he says. “We want it to be fun.”

Cool! In the meantime, Stickybits is generating a couple dollars by selling those personalized barcode stickers. I bet someone has already slapped one on a bong.

After all, the Emeryville, Calif., online seller of art and decor items has generated more than $100 million in annual revenue for the past four years, including $140 million in 2009.

Yet its new chief executive, Geoffrey Martin, and the company’s venture backers, Polaris Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital, believe Art.com could be much bigger. The reason? Martin estimates that more than $20 billion is spent annually in the United States on art-related items, such as posters, prints, photographs, reproductions, decorations and frames.

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A new Silicon Valley business incubator called The Start Project has recruited a high-profile group of entrepreneurs as advisers, which it announced today on its Web site.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, former Google (GOOG) exec and angel investor Chris Sacca, as well as Whiskey Media’s Mike Tatum and Jeffries & Co. Managing Director David Liu, have all agreed to help the company’s start-ups before and during their creation.

The Start Project is the brainchild of serial entrepreneurs Narendra Rocherolle of 83 Degrees, who co-founded a range of companies, and Josh Felser of Spinner and Crackle.

Polaris Venture Partners is also involved, lending office space in San Francisco and possible investments in whatever innovative ideas bubble up, with a first-look option.

“We can do a lot of stuff, such as pairing a CEO with an adviser with an amazing track record,” said Rocherolle in an interview with BoomTown. “It’s kind of a Justice League for start-ups.”

The Start Project’s description of itself on its Web site reads:

“The start project is a collaborative effort to bring great ideas to market. While the founders have a history of successful exits (over half a billion dollars), they are now focused on the initial stages of business creation including: idea generation, software development, product vision, team building, and investment.”

Today, All Things Digital debuts a new feature called “Almost Famous” in our Voices section.

No, it is not about Kate Hudson and nascent rock stars.

Well, you might meet geek rock stars to be.

Focused on innovative, interesting or just plain odd start-ups, we thought it was a good way for ATD readers to get a gander at some up-and-coming ideas and trends.

We cover start-ups, of course, on the site, but–given that we have a small staff that breaks a lot of big-company news–not on a regular time frame.

So, while we are no good at predicting what will work and what will not and who will make it and who will fail, every Friday, Drake Martinet will be paying a video interview visit with, asking some questions of and gleaning a few pertinent stats about a wide range of companies.

Here’s our first effort: Chris Wetherell, creator of Brizzly, a Web-based social media reader.

The San Francisco start-up, which just rolled out support for Twitter lists last night, is also just wrapping up a new $600,000 round of funding, according to Jason Shellen, CEO of Thing Labs, from which Brizzly sprang.

Brizzly had already raised $1.5 million from Polaris Venture Partners last year. Now it is getting more cash from investors such as Ron Conway to further its software and other efforts.

But don’t rely on BoomTown for info about Brizzly–check out Drake’s take.

He fails miserably, of course, to reach my levels of jittery and nausea-inducing shooting, by sticking the camera in my face and asking me what I think of the, surprise, online video business.

Tables turned, I embrace the opportunity and blather on.

He posted it on his VCMike’s Blog here, but you can see the video below:

And here is me interviewing Hirshland in July about blogs, social networking–and, of course, the hot-and-hyped Facebook–and some video-content plays:

I met Hirshland when he was working in Congress on tech issues such as the Microsoft antitrust case, but he moved onto Intel and then venture investing and now focuses on funding companies, well, that Microsoft might be interested in buying. He also has a blog with a pretty good name: VCMike’s Blog.

Here’s the video where he talks about the consumer market, where Hirshland likes blogs, social networking–and, of course, the hot-and-hyped Facebook–and some video-content plays: