I was on the phone with its two founders: Alon Maor, CEO; and Dan Sahar, VP of marketing. They had just started telling me about how they plan to sell network appliances that network operators — like, say, Comcast or Time Warner or Verizon — might put on their network in order to help them meet the growing demand for video content. The aim, Maor told me, is to get the most popular content as close as you can to the customer.

The first thing that popped into my mind was creating an appliance that sits on the network; close to, but not in the customer’s house. Maybe in the nearest network hub or central office. It turns out I was right. Then I wondered aloud what Qwilt might be using as storage technology. Could it be, maybe … flash memory? The chips that have so revolutionized the data centers of companies like Facebook and Apple and the banking systems of Credit Suisse, among others, when put to use by the likes of Fusion-io and Violin Technology?

Why yes, it does use flash memory, they told me, making them the latest member of the steadily growing “Flash Madness” club, which gives me yet another excuse to use the image taken from the cover of Flash Comics #1, circa 1940. For reference, the other members are Fusion, Violin Memory and Pure Storage.

Maor and Sahar laughed on the other end of the line at my guesses. “Would you like a job in our engineering department?” Sahar kidded me. I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t done guessing things like how Qwilt does what it does. “You must use some kind of algorithm to figure out what’s popular,” I said. Right again, mostly. The interview hadn’t been going for as much as five minutes, and I hadn’t even asked a single question and pretty much had it all figured out.

Well, not everything. There was the small matter of funding. Qwilt has raised $24 million in two rounds from Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and the Crescent Point Group, a fund based in Singapore. Maor is a Cisco veteran who got absorbed into that company following its $200 million acquisition of P-Cube. Before that, he was an engineer at Seabridge, which is now known as Nokia Siemens Networks. Sahar was director of marketing at Crescendo Networks, now part of F5 Networks. Tom Dyal, a Redpoint partner, is on Qwilt’s board.

Video is so popular with consumers that Internet services providers are struggling to get their networks scaled up to meet the demand, Maor says. The traditional way to solve that problem when everyone is watching the same show on Hulu, or the same movie on Netflix, is to just add routers and pray. That’s expensive. What if you could add some extra piece of gear that works with the existing network infrastructure? If you could figure out what was the most popular show in a particular neighborhood, make a copy of it right in that very neighborhood, and deliver it from there rather than all the way back from Hulu’s or Netflix’s data center, you’d lessen the network’s burden.

So that’s exactly what Qwilt does: It has three patents pending on processes for determining what video applications are being used on a network, and for figuring out what content is most popular in a particular area. So if you’re in a neighborhood full of “Jersey Shore” fans, the Qwilt box would figure that fairly quickly, and keep copies of it close at hand so that everyone gets their required daily dose of Snooki.

Also on Qwilt’s board is Rich Wong of Accel; Peter Wagner, an independent board member who has previously worked at Accel; Ohad Finkelstein, a partner at Crescent Point; and Giora Yaron, the former chairman of Mercury Interactive, which is now part of Hewlett-Packard. Also investing is Rob Glaser, the former CEO of RealNetworks.

Got all that? I told you it was an easy interview.

Three of Silicon Valley’s more prominent venture firms — Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and the Founders Fund — are nearing the closing of new funds that will total almost $2 billion.

This despite a bad economy, turbulent markets and lackluster venture returns of late. That said, limited partners looking for an investment edge apparently seem to still be adding more dough to the VC kitty.

Sources familiar with the fundings, in fact, said the raises have been much easier than previous ones.

Khosla has raised almost $2.4 billion since 2009, including $1.3 billion in 2010. Its fourth is now nearly completed, at just under that, which the firm had previously signaled in regulatory filings it planned to raise.

The third fund has been spent on cleantech companies, but also on early-stage high-profile Internet start-ups such as Square.

Redpoint will focus its fund — which sources said was $400 million — on growth opportunities.

Its last fund in 2010 was $400 million, too. It has invested that money in start-ups, such as Jumptap, Kabam and Pure Storage.

Lastly, the Founders Fund — with high-profile partners Peter Thiel and Sean Parker — is aiming at a $350 million fund with a $150 million “cushion” to raise more. Its last fund of $250 million was raised last year.

Founders Fund has recently made investments in Path, Azumio and Topsy.

Of course I have something to say about the news yesterday that AOL would be a key investor in a new early-stage venture fund being started by TechCrunch’s perpetually petulant editor Michael Arrington — with a big, fat and decidedly greasy assist from a panoply of Silicon Valley’s most powerful VC firms and angel investors.

Arrington has previously called me “chief whiner” — oooh, buuuurn, although fair enough, since I have compared him to an egomaniac turtle named Yertle in the past — about my nagging him over the importance of upholding standards of fairness and ethics in journalism.

So as not to let him down, let me begin the whining.

First, my initial reaction when I first heard about the deal: Ugh. Sigh. Hopelessly corrupt. Now 100 percent more icky! A giant, greedy, Silicon Valley pig pile.

I was upset.

By early evening, after my kids told me to chillax, my dark mood had changed to accept that the transaction — however profoundly distasteful to me — was part and parcel of the insidious log-rolling, back-scratching ecosystem that has happened in every other center of power in the universe since the beginning of time.

And so it goes in Silicon Valley.

In fact, the creation of a $20 million investment kitty that Arrington has dubbed CrunchFund is simply the formalization of a long-standing arrangement that has already been going on since he founded his popular tech blog.

That is to say, in which the basic standards of journalism are first warped by calling it newfangled truth-telling and then endlessly corroded by using a wily and unusually aggressive combination of favors and threats to extract, from start-ups and VCs in need of press, both exclusive access and information.

And now, inevitably, money.

This could have been a lot cleaner, of course, by Arrington simply resigning from TechCrunch, becoming a VC and perhaps starting a new blog where his agenda is much clearer, from which he could huff and puff away as he does with much entertaining gusto at real and (mostly) imagined slights.

There is certainly precedent for VCs blogging, including Fred Wilson, Brad Feld and Ben Horowitz. And, despite my criticisms about ethics, it is clear that Arrington is a talented writer whose unique voice would be even stronger if it was truly seen as separate from what has become a news organization.

But because of his obvious need to be the center of attention — requiring the ermine kingmaker mantle and foisting his patented I’m-here-to-tell-it-like-it-is attitude on us all — that appears to be impossible.

(By the way, I await Arrington’s usual inane rant about the fictional conflicts of interest related to my gay Google marriage anytime now in 3 … 2 … 1, always and purposefully leaving out the pertinent facts that I can only wed one person, get no financial benefit and am also a prominent critic of the scary search behemoth, while he can make a badillion questionable and grossly tangled investments.)

Personal annoyances aside, what’s most interesting here is the group of Silicon Valley power players who lined up to bow and scrape and then hand over a small pile of dough to the blogger who would be king.

They include: Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners, Austin Ventures and Accel Partners, as well as individual investments from partners at Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, entrepreneur Kevin Rose and DST Global’s Yuri Milner. And, of course, the inevitable Arrington BFF Ron Conway.

Holy googa mooga, that would be, well, everyone, except Ashton Kutcher and Justin Timberlake (who will surely appear soon enough).

As one person also pointed out to me, I don’t recall this many competing VCs investing in one company, let alone another venture fund.

It goes without saying that the reasons they all decided to jump in this fetid pool with abandon are quite varied, if all entirely compromised.

One investor told me — off the record, naturally — that he thought it would be an interesting experiment to see what happened and so he wanted in, especially since everyone else was doing it.

Another well-known VC said that there is no downside to being financially affiliated, especially in attracting talent to its start-ups, with Arrington and, by extension, TechCrunch.

The well-respected Reid Hoffman of Greylock was the only one brave enough to talk on the record, explaining the reasoning pretty clearly:

“Techcrunch will get some real deal flow from entrepreneurs that we would otherwise not see, because they have established a prominent position as the SV/Tech industry information feed. As many tech entrepreneurs read it — both within Silicon Valley and globally — and view the information news feed to be their target for announcing themselves to the world, Crunchfund will have access to deal flow to these diverse and early stage companies. Some of these companies will be the kind of early stage companies with billion-dollar potential that Greylock invests in.”

There you have it: No one can afford to be out of the deal flow in these times, even if it means cutting corners.

While TechCrunch’s owner, AOL, said Arrington will no longer be managing editor, with only writing duties at the site he dominates and with no editorial control, Hoffman’s use of TechCrunch for CrunchFund was accurate, because in the eyes of many they are interchangeable.

That’s due to the fact that Arrington still breaks or is clearly the source for important stories on the site and, more importantly, is the big swinging dude who attracts all the eager entrepreneurs to the party. He is the fulcrum of that site, even as it has grown.

And so it will remain, I am guessing, no matter how much AOL insists it will not be so, because the easy questions pile up quickly:

Will Arrington keep doing what are clearly news stories, for example, even though he protesteth too much — as he did in the New York Times yesterday — that he is not a journalist?

And, if so, is it right for him to do so given his insider status, creating a nonparity of sourcing and crystal clear conflicts of interest?

Most of all, can he resist his palpable love of news-breaking and scoops, even if he gets them in ever more unseemly ways?

As if to make it all pretty, Arrington told reporters yesterday that he has put a clause in his limited partnership agreement so he can report on anything he likes, and in any way, about his investors and their companies, however confidential, except those he invests in.

O joyous day! Freedom of the press is preserved and our sacred First Amendment can breathe a sigh of relief, now that it is enshrined in an unholy blogger-VC LP agreement.

After pausing for a moment so that Thomas Jefferson and Edward R. Murrow can stop spinning in their graves, you can go down this road for many increasingly bumpy miles, which only becomes more twisted and confusing as it continues.

I finally talked to one investor in CrunchFund, who said simply and honestly: “It’s not that much money, so who cares?”

Indeed, who does care anymore about crossing what had long been very bright lines in journalism and, if you want to get all cosmic, in life?

Obviously, most of all, not AOL, or its CEO Tim Armstrong, or its head of content, Arianna Huffington. The pair, for whatever reason, decided to make a startling exception for Arrington from a rule that explicitly bars reporters at its media units from investing in the companies they cover.

That happened after he recently did a complete 180 from a previous decision to stop investing and jumped right back in, leaving Armstrong and Huffington to clean up the ethical mess.

They only made it worse, with their decision to throw journalism under the bus by letting Arrington do as he pleased, while touting how important it was for other content sites at AOL to remain more pure.

In the spirit of full disclosure, these kinds of ethical lapses are endemic these days in journalism. Case in point: The appalling phone-hacking controversy taking place at News Corp.’s News International unit in Britain.

While I cannot speak for Dow Jones, I can say that the behavior in another News Corp. property certainly takes its toll on those who adhere to higher standards at the company, especially when it comes to morale.

Thus, I can imagine how others feel at AOL — including those you-know-who-you-are silent ones at TechCrunch — who can’t and, more to the point, wouldn’t make the deals Arrington has been allowed to get away with.

It is not a good feeling, I can assure you.

And, while I have not spoken to her about it, I’d imagine that Huffington cannot be thrilled to be pushing for better journalism at AOL and trying to burnish her cred by hiring some top reporters, while also having to deal with this.

That’s okay, because Armstrong was perfectly willing to do the awkward pretzel-twist needed to explain away the controversial situation, also in an interview with the Times:

“TechCrunch is a different property and they have different standards. We have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch, which is different but is transparent about it.”

In this case, Tim, I am sorry to inform you that transparency is a complete canard and is more likely to end up covering up a lot more transgressions than it ever will reveal.

And, essentially and lazily sloughing it off by saying, “That’s just Mike being Mike,” is not going to cut it, at least not with me.

Not that any amount of tsk-tsking about it matters, I suppose, as Arrington finally gets his fervent Pinocchio-on-a-star wish to be a real-boy VC, can add yet another tainted buck to the pile of billions his venture pals already have, and just call it another typical day in Silicon Valley.

Still, when you are the designated whiner-in-chief, it is pretty much all one can do.

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.”

Next we saw Violin Memory — which makes flash-based storage arrays that are intended to make enterprise applications run faster — land $40 million in venture capital funding.

Now we see a third player entering the “flash madness” narrative. Pure Storage is coming out of stealth today, announcing its plans to sell flash-based storage arrays. It is also announcing that it has landed a $30 million C-round led by Redpoint Ventures, with Samsung Venture Investment joining. (Yes, that would be the venture capital arm of the South Korean electronics giant that happens to be the world’s biggest manufacturer of flash memory.) Greylock Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures also participated. The latest round brings Pure’s total funding raised to date to $55 million.

So what is Pure Storage all about? I met up with CEO Scott Dietzen last week and got the download.

The fundamental problem with enterprise storage is that hard drives just can’t keep up with everything else that’s gotten faster in the data center. Flash memory is fundamentally faster, it uses less energy and it takes up less space. We all know this.

The problem with flash is that it has always tended to be more expensive than hard drives. Today, you can buy a one terabyte hard drive for $100 or less. But just try getting that same amount in flash memory and see if the price isn’t, well, a lot higher.

The same principles apply in the data center. CIOs would love to convert to flash-based systems, as long as they’re reliable and affordable and work with the applications and other hardware they already have.

Pure Storage is essentially promising to deliver just that, Dietzen says. The company’s first product is an all-flash storage array that is 10 times faster and 10 times smaller than hard-disk-based systems. It’s called the Pure Storage FlashArray, and it is being aimed at mainstream enterprises in a manner that’s easy to deploy.

Pure’s founders are John Colgrove — one of the founding engineers at Veritas, now part of Symantec — and John Hayes, a founding engineer at Bix, which was ultimately swallowed up by Yahoo. Dietzen hails from Yahoo as well, by way of its acquisition of Zimbra, where he was CTO.

An early key hire was Michael Cornwell, who was lead technologist for flash at Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle). Cornwell also worked at Apple, where he was Manager of Storage Engineering for the iPod division, and oversaw that product’s transition to — you guessed it — flash memory. Remember the first iPod nano? That was his baby.

Another key name: Greylock venture partner Frank Slootman, the former CEO of Data Domain, is on Pure’s board.

So what’s so special about a storage array built on flash memory? “Disks get slower every year,” Dietzen says. “Intel says processors have gotten 175 times faster over the last 15 years.” Disks just keep getting more data packed onto them, which doesn’t really make them any faster. The mechanical arm inside the disk that grabs data from the platter really can’t go much faster. “Disks today are comparably slower than tape was 15 years ago,” he says.

This creates a problem. Storage needs are going up, but hard drives are slowing data centers down, preventing them from reaching their full potential. It’s only because of cost — about $5 per gigabyte — that hard drives are still appealing. Enterprise-grade flash, on the other hand, tends to cost $40 to $100 per gigabyte, and because flash is historically less reliable, you have to buy double what you really need.

Pure’s play is to get over the cost hurdle. Dietzen says the company can get the cost down to $5 per gigabyte and less.

How does it do that? By reducing the amount of data you actually store. What happens in enterprise environments is that various bits of data get copied and recopied, over and over. Imagine a big filing cabinet with 50 copies of each document scattered around in different folders, when you really only need one. Suddenly the size of that file cabinet need not be so big. The same applies in data storage: Why bother having 10 copies of the same block of data, when one or two will do?

Using a technique known as deduplication, a system can eliminate all those unneeded copies and thus streamline the whole operation. Deduplication, combined with compression, was the primary principle behind Slootman’s Data Domain, which is now part of EMC.

But deduplication is expensive on hard drives, and really doesn’t make sense. Because the mechanical arm in a hard drive is always searching around for where its next needed block of data is to be found, if you employ deduplication, you end up with a bunch of reference signs telling the arm where to go, Dietzen says. The end result is that the disk has to spin more, not less. Flash memory chips don’t have that problem. “We make that process fast, because there’s no performance hit to the deduping process,” he says.

On top of that, Pure has created some algorithms that make the process a lot more granular than on hard-disk-based systems, by working with smaller disk-sector sizes. How small? He wouldn’t say exactly.

Unlike other storage companies — like, say, EMC — Pure’s array, Dietzen says, is built from the ground up for running flash. “The disk-centric companies are slotting flash into places where disks used to be, but they’re not changing the software to take advantage of the flash, to protect the flash from uneven wear and other things.”

A few early companies have tried the hardware, among them the law firm of Fenwick & West, whose CIO Matt Kesner is quoted in Pure’s press release as saying that the data used for various workloads was reduced from 50 to 90 percent.

One key thing that’s going on in the data center these days is virtualization — running several virtual computers within one single physical computer. When you run a lot of virtual machines, you have a lot of data that, like the paper in that big file cabinet, is essentially the same. Dietzen says that Pure’s flash array is able to eliminate a lot of that data. “Even if those virtual machines are a mix of Windows and Linux, there are a lot of commonalities between them,” he says. It’s not uncommon to see the data footprint for virtual machines reduced by a factor of 15 or 20 to one.

And that has caused some interesting reactions among early customers trying out the array. “Some people try it and are shocked when they put 15 terabytes on it and see there’s only one terabyte and think we’ve lost a lot of their data,” Dietzen says. “It’s a little scary at first, but then they run all their workloads and see all the data is there.”

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.

At least, they hadn’t until the summer of 2009 when Saraf took a trip to Switzerland with his family. Throughout the trip he allowed his then six-year-old daughter, Mahi, to play games on his Android phone. Of course, when he got home, Mahi wanted to keep playing the same games on the family computer–a Windows PC. And, with that, Saraf and team had their idea.

Now, they are ready to share their idea publicly. BlueStacks plans to show off its technology at the Citrix Synergy conference on Wednesday, as well as detail its ambitious plan to convince PC makers to load their software on new computers, ideally enabling tens of millions of Windows computers to run Android apps over the next couple of years.

The company plans to announce the first deals with computer makers next week at the Computex trade show in Taiwan. BlueStacks is also announcing it has nabbed $7.6 million in Series A funding from investors from Ignition Ventures, Radar Partners, Helion Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Under the covers, BlueStacks uses virtualization, though the goal is to make all the techy stuff invisible to the user, so that all they see is a Windows PC that can also run Android apps.

Sharma, the company’s CEO, told AllThingsD that the company thinks it will find eager customers among PC makers looking to stand out from one another, while reacting to the rise of the iPad and Android.

“All of them are suffering because the iPad came out,” Sharma said. “They don’t really have an answer. The answer most of them come up with is lets make an Android tablet.”

However, Sharma said he questions how many they will sell, particularly if they don’t have anything to stand out from the pack.

Of course, any system running BlueStacks’ software is, at its heart, a Windows machine with all the pros and cons that entails. That means it won’t have the battery life or instant start-up of an Android tablet or iPad, but it also can run all of the Windows apps, in addition to those for Android.

As for BlueStacks’ business model, Sharma said the company is focused on getting as broad distribution as it can, but is seeking payment for each PC that ships with its software. Though the deals vary, he said it is more than $10 per PC, though he wouldn’t be more specific.

“It’s not in the single digits,” he said.

In the initial release, BlueStacks software will support version 2.2 of Android, also known as Froyo, though it should be upgradeable in the future. The company also hopes to offer a version that existing PC owners can download to run Android on their PCs.

The idea of mixing mobile operating systems with Windows is not new, though others are taking somewhat different approaches. HP, for example, has said it plans to start enabling the WebOS used on Palm phones to run on the company’s Windows PCs. Meanwhile, Lenovo has shown a convertible tablet that runs Android when used as a tablet and then runs Windows when a keyboard is plugged in. In that case, though, it has two separate computers and the cost of the product is roughly the same as a PC and Android device combined.

ThredUP works by sending USPS flat-rate boxes out to its members, who fill them with clothes for kids of the same size, gender and season. Then they list them on thredUP for another family to claim, which pays $5 plus $10.95 shipping. The San Francisco-based company says it will soon swap its millionth item.

ThredUP is part of a trend toward what some call “the sharing economy” or “collaborative consumption,” along with other companies like AirBnB and RelayRides.

Here’s the release:

thredUP Adds $7M Series B round to support rapid user growth

San Francisco, CA – thredUP Inc, the nation’s leading online platform for swapping kids clothes, toys and books, today announced that it has completed a series B round of funding, bringing total committed capital to $8.7M. Redpoint Ventures led the round with Trinity Ventures and former eBay CEO Brian Swette participating. Tim Haley of Redpoint Ventures will join Patricia Nakache on the thredUP board.

This new funding comes just one year after thredUP’s launch and significant company milestones. thredUP will swap its millionth item this month and is now adding over 1,000 moms a day.

“We’ve spent the past year building a remarkable swapping experience for moms across the country. thredUP couples the simplicity of traditional hand-me-downs with a massive online network like eBay. We connect strangers in meaningful ways, to share things they no longer need and become better citizens of the planet,” said James Reinhart, CEO at thredUP. “We’re excited to have such a great group of investors on board who share our vision. I think this infusion of capital will help us bring thredUP to the homes of millions of families everywhere. We’ve just scratched the surface of what the peer-to-peer space can become.”

thredUP will use this new funding to expand its development team, refine the core product offering and grow its membership base. The company plans to expand swapping categories such as toys, books and maternity. The team is also exploring international opportunities and loyalty partnerships with major retailers. This funding comes just in time for significant customer acquisition pushes around ‘green’ summer reading and back-to-school campaigns.

thredUP’s swapping platform brings a new level of affordability, convenience and eco-consciousness to a highly fragmented, billion-dollar market. thredUP connects thousands of moms across America to swap gently used children’s goods online. For the first time, parents can exchange boxes of stuff their kids no longer use, for boxes of stuff they actually need – all without leaving the house.

About thredUP
thredUP.com is the brainchild of co-founders James Reinhart, Oliver Lubin, and Chris Homer. Both Reinhart and Homer are recent graduates of the Harvard Business School and all three developed the idea in the Spring of 2009. The company is based in San Francisco, CA and is advised by current Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and former eBay CEO Brian Swette. ­­­­­

Here are three companies you’ll likely be hearing about again:

In recent weeks multiple people have told me about Bubbli, saying it’s a see-it-to-believe-it experience. At TED on Wednesday, the company gave the first public demo of its augmented reality application, which creates navigable photos.

Basically, Bubbli enables you to take a picture with your phone camera that shows not just what’s directly in front of you, but also what’s all around, above and below you. Then, other people can navigate the view of the world captured by that “bubble” by holding their own phones in front of them. When their phone is moved up or down or left or right, they see what you would have seen in that same direction.

At least, that’s how I think it works. The Bubbli demo was a bit raw, in part due to connectivity issues.

Bubbli co-founder Ben Newhouse gained recognition for building the Yelp Monocle feature, which was the iPhone’s first augmented reality app. It uses the phone’s built-in compass to overlay Yelp restaurant ratings onto a camera view of the surrounding area.

Bubbli, which is funded by August Capital, describes its goal as to “build the matrix by defining a new medium to express the physical world around us.”

Meanwhile,

Bluefin Labs co-founder Deb Roy used his full-length speaking slot to describe the process of surveilling his house with video cameras to capture the process of his son learning to speak. In order to analyze more than 90,000 hours of video, his MIT team created machine learning systems that helped trace the evolution of his son’s learning moment by moment.

Roy has now taken a leave of absence from MIT to extend these machine-learning techniques to social media discussions of television programs. His company, Bluefin Labs, raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures.

In a previous conversation with NetworkEffect, Roy told me that Bluefin now analyzes 30 television channels 24/7 and computes their intersection with Twitter Firehose data, Facebook updates and blog posts in real time. Bluefin’s customers are big brand advertisers, agencies and media companies, who want to better understand how ads and programs resonate with online audiences.

TED attendee and financial commentator Paul Kedrosky was effusive about Roy’s talk on Twitter, calling it the best ever.

“Epic, moving and wondrous. Generated biggest standing O in ages,” Kedrosky tweeted.

And on Tuesday,

Push Pop Press showed off a reimagined digital version of former Vice President Al Gore’s book “Our Choice” built for the iPad and iPhone with interactive infographics, videos and voice overs. For instance, one demonstration of wind energy generation can be manipulated (as pictured) by a user blowing on the device’s screen. That was a big crowd pleaser.

TEDsters (you’ll notice they’re an effusive bunch) called the demo “mind-blowing” and “amazing.”

I’ve written before about how Push Pop Press is highly anticipated given its founders’ background. Mike Matas, who showed off the app on stage at TED, was formerly a design prodigy at Apple.

Caveat: I am not at the conference myself, but have a press pass for the live stream. TED continues through Friday, and session videos will be posted online in the coming weeks.

Photo credits, via TED:

Mike Matas in Session 3: Mindblowing, on Tuesday, March 1, 2011, at TED2011, in Long Beach, California. Credit: James Duncan Davidson/TED

The lightweight blogging company Posterous volunteered to open its books recently, coughing up every product stat NetworkEffect asked for during a recent visit to the company’s oversized San Francisco Mission District office situated below a yoga studio whose clientele is way more clompy-footed than I might have thought.

The Posterous team, led by CEO Sachin Agarwal, was pimping its new groups product, launched Dec. 15, that’s kind of like a nice-looking Web interface for an email product like Yahoo Groups, turning messages into blog posts and smoothing photos and other attachments into easily viewable form. Used mostly for private communication (like a neighborhood group or a small business team), the groups tool supports users who participate by email without opening a Posterous account.

First of all, Posterous Groups is still quite small: Posterous has 12.3 million total blogs, and only 134,000 of them are groups. About 3,000 groups are created per day, or about 20 percent of total daily sign-ups.

Overall, Posterous has 9.2 million monthly visitors on its own site and on custom domains, according to Quantcast, which measures the service directly with its permission. That’s up from 6 million in September, but still quite a bit less than competitors like Tumblr and WordPress, which have 59.6 million and 517 million people, respectively.

The new groups product sends a ton of email (with user permission, and with the help of SendGrid): 230,000 messages per day. Half of Posterous group distribution is over email rather than the Web, and 30 percent of users are not registered.

As I mentioned earlier, most groups–76 percent–are private. And a quarter are for corporate groups–an alternative to business collaboration tools like Yammer. Business groups have an average of 15 people, while family groups have about 10.

As for revenue numbers? Negligible. The company is only starting Google AdSense revenue sharing and talking about business accounts.

Posterous has raised about $5 million in funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures, SV Angel, Founder Collective, Lowercase Capital and Y Combinator.

That’s in part how Yang explained recent bets on Formspring, which he described as a “more engaged” version of Twitter; Scribd, which he said is evolving into a digital publishing platform; and the gamer video producer Machinima.com, which has already become “much more mainstream than people think.” Yang is also an investor in Clicker, Bluefin Labs and Oodle.

Yang, who previously backed hits such as TiVo, Myspace, Ask.com and Excite, talked to NetworkEffect about what he’s looking for now. The three big categories are social media, gaming and the digital living room. Yang said he’d love to see a good social music start-up (he deeply regrets not investing in Pandora), as well as a set-top box that’s a viable “combination of broadcast and broadband.”

Here’s a video from our interview last week of Yang talking about potential investment prospects:

Yang and I also spoke about the frothy funding environment, which he said is driving up the amount Redpoint pays to be involved in any one deal.

To some extent, venture capitalists have less control than ever over the early-stage consumer Internet start-up market. Companies are cheaper to build; accelerators, angels and online resources get entrepreneurs through the early days; late-stage investors pick off companies increasingly sooner; and secondary markets wreak havoc with traditional concepts of liquidity.

With Demand Media and LinkedIn filing to go public, it might seem like a return to a situation where VC expertise is valuable, but Yang said he doesn’t expect those two IPOs to have a significant effect on what he does. “The most exciting companies are still private,” he said.

Yang said that despite discussion internally, Redpoint has not invested in shares of private Internet companies traded on secondary markets, or participated in the recent massive late-stage deals for companies like Twitter and Groupon. Redpoint competitors like Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz jumped into those rounds despite multibillion-dollar valuations.

VCs have actually become the largest single category of buyers on SecondMarket, accounting for about 40 percent of transactions in the fourth quarter, according to the marketplace’s recent stats.

Yang is skeptical. “What do venture capitalists know about being a momentum hedge fund?” he said.

Plus, despite his interest in the sector, Yang thinks social media ads will be worth only around $50 billion by 2020, which doesn’t seem like enough to support current valuations for companies like Facebook.

Yang did sound a bit wistful, saying Redpoint had at various points declined to invest in many of the consumer Internet start-ups that are today’s heavyweights. “We passed along the way because we thought valuations were out of reach,” he said, “and it turns out we weren’t right.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/redpoints-geoff-yang-prefers-early-stage-risk-to-late-stage-valuations-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110131/intonow-its-shazam-plus-foursquare-for-tv/ http://allthingsd.com/20110131/intonow-its-shazam-plus-foursquare-for-tv/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:00:13 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2983 IntoNow, a new iOS app launching today, identifies television programs by just hearing snippets from them. It’s similar to the Shazam mobile app that many people know and love, which IDs an ambient song by recording it and quickly matching it to an archive.

IntoNow users can “check in” to a particular episode once it’s been recognized, like one would check into a restaurant on Foursquare. The goal is to enable conversations around the watercooler and on social networks by helping users connect around what they’re watching and discover new things to watch.

It’s common knowledge that the only thing people love more than watching TV is talking about it, but none of the many “social TV” start-ups–GetGlue, Miso, Philo, Comcast’s Tunerfish etc.–has emerged as a clear leader. Unlike the competition, IntoNow isn’t trying to provide a platform for conversations, but rather to show what people are watching.

Still, it’s not clear people want to download an app to tell themselves and their friends what they’re already watching on television.

IntoNow can recognize both live television and five years of archived U.S. TV airings. It constantly analyzes satellite feeds and matches them to TV listings to have current data.

Adam Cahan, the CEO of IntoNow, says his company’s TV recognition technology–which it calls SoundPrint–is akin to a GPS, which takes the hassle out of figuring out exactly which restaurant you’re at and matching it to something like Foursquare’s database.

Cahan’s company was very recently spun out of Auditude, a company where Cahan was also CEO. IntoNow’s seven employees and its technology were all formerly part of Auditude, actually. That company, which just raised $11 million from investors including Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures, has shifted away from video identification to video advertising management. IntoNow has yet to raise its own funding, but Greylock and Redpoint already have equity in the start-up.

In addition to creating a feed of what episodes they’re watching, IntoNow users can share on Facebook and Twitter, look up programs on IMDb, add shows to their Netflix queues and purchase episodes on iTunes.

The name “IntoNow” comes from the expression “What are you into now?” IntoNow hopes other companies will build SoundPrint audio recognition into their own social TV products. SoundPrint has 2.6 million airings in its catalog, is constantly recording 130 channels and needs four to 12 seconds of audio to make a match.

While it’s only iOS for now, IntoNow and SoundPrint are in development for Android and Web-enabled televisions.

IntoNow eventually hopes to help content owners validate that their watchers are participating with live content, and help the TV industry measure advertising and viewership metrics without relying on a panel.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110131/intonow-its-shazam-plus-foursquare-for-tv/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110118/scribd-raises-13m-more-for-web-docs/ http://allthingsd.com/20110118/scribd-raises-13m-more-for-web-docs/#comments Tue, 18 Jan 2011 20:02:57 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2453 Scribd has raised $13 million in a Series C funding led by MLC Investments of Australia and SVB Capital, and including previous investors Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group.

The Web-hosted document company, founded as a sort of YouTube for PDFs in 2006, now has raised a total of $26 million.

Based in San Francisco, Scribd says it has more than 60 million monthly visitors, and attributes recent traffic growth to its social sharing initiatives on sites like Facebook. In addition to pure hosting, it offers users nifty OCR technology that translates document images into searchable files for free.

Scribd is planning a major mobile expansion for 2011, and said it would use the funding toward that effort as well as for other product and revenue projects.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110118/scribd-raises-13m-more-for-web-docs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110111/q-how-much-did-formspring-just-raise-a-11m/ http://allthingsd.com/20110111/q-how-much-did-formspring-just-raise-a-11m/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 05:01:07 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2279 The return of anonymity on the Internet was all the rage in 2010. But as some shooting stars like Chatroulette falter, Formspring is working to evolve its anonymous Q&A service into something more lasting and useful.

Not to say Formspring is making a business out of Web Q&A–yet. But Wednesday it is announcing a Series A round of $11.5 million led by Redpoint Partners. And it’s also releasing a self-service product called “the Respond button” that allows publishers to solicit responses to their content through a simple integration with Formspring’s API.

The Series A round, which also included Baseline Ventures and others, comes on the heels of Formspring raising $2.5 million from a large group of angels and Polaris Ventures last March. That prompted the company to move its headquarters to San Francisco from Indianapolis, where it had spun out of online form provider FormStack.

Of all the various Q&A startups, Formspring’s product is probably the closest to personal blogging. A user signs up for an account and then visitors can ask her questions, usually about herself.

$14 million is a ton of money, especially for a site that’s only a year old with no revenue. But Formspring CEO Ade Olonoh said the company now has 20 million registered users and 10 million daily answers to questions from its community, something he contended takes a lot of infrastructure and additional developers to support.

The new Respond button product will be free to publishers, but it will require users to log into a Formspring account to participate. Launch partners include the Huffington Post and AskMen (pictured).

Previously, Formspring questions existed in a world unto themselves of mostly casual conversations about users’ favorite movies and the like. Olonoh described the Respond button as a paradigm shift because it will introduce topic prompts from outside content.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110111/q-how-much-did-formspring-just-raise-a-11m/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101210/hey-startups-these-guys-have-checkbooks-just-ask-them/ http://allthingsd.com/20101210/hey-startups-these-guys-have-checkbooks-just-ask-them/#comments Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:19:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=26899 You can debate whether we’re in a “bubble” or simply seeing “storm clouds.” Or perhaps we’re just in the midst of some harmless exuberance, egged on by Facebook and Google‘s apparent willingness to buy everything, at nearly any price.

All I know is that you definitely don’t see this sort of thing when times are tough: Investors with open checkbooks, piled into a room to show off for start-ups and hoping to land the next Twitter, or Foursquare, or Tumblr. Or at least the next GroupMe.

That’s the agenda for next week’s “VC Demo Day,” hosted by AOL and a bevy of VCs and angels in New York. I dropped by the first one of these, in July, and I can’t tell if any checks got written as a result of the pitch sessions.

But it’s definitely a good place to bump into a lot of deal-hungry investors. If you’re into that kind of thing.

On Wednesday’s agenda: Presentations from Polaris Ventures, Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Village Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Rho Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Flybridge Capital and GRP Partners.

Also, free beer. As I recall, the last one had a keg of something pretty good.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101210/hey-startups-these-guys-have-checkbooks-just-ask-them/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101208/salesforce-acquires-hosted-apps-platform-heroku/ http://allthingsd.com/20101208/salesforce-acquires-hosted-apps-platform-heroku/#comments Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:55:37 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=345 A day after launching a hosted database service, Salesforce.com announced this morning that it will pay $212 million in cash for the privately held Heroku, a hosted service for applications written in Ruby on Rails, the open-source Web-development language.

Launched in 2007 with seed funding from Y Combinator, Heroku landed $10 million in a B Round led by Ignition Partners in May. Other investors include Redpoint Ventures, Baseline Ventures and Harrison Metal Capital.

Heroku has made a name for itself as a hosting service for Facebook applications. Its most widely cited customer is Cardinal Blue, whose Facebook apps include Travel Balloon and QuizCreator. Other Heroku customers include Clobby, a group chat application, and FlightCaster, which makes a handy application that predicts flight delays.

Heroku founder James Lindenbaum said in a blog post that Heroku will remain independent. Parker Harris, Salesforce’s EVP of technology said of Heroku on the official company blog: “This is the platform as a service I would have wanted to build apps on had it existed in 1999.”

By acquiring Heroku, Salesforce is getting into the business of development in Ruby on Rails, a widely used open-source Web development language that’s been used to build Web brands such as Twitter, Groupon and Hulu.

Heroku employees will get about $27 million worth of Salesforce shares, and Salesforce will pay about $10 million for unvested Heroku shares. All consider its a big acquisition for Salesforce, which had about $770 million in cash and short-term investments in the bank as of the quarter ended Oct. 31. However, the market seems to like the deal, as Salesforce shares are trading up 2.5 percent, or $3.63, as of 6:45 am PT.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101208/salesforce-acquires-hosted-apps-platform-heroku/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101202/password-manager-lastpass-acquires-xmarks/ http://allthingsd.com/20101202/password-manager-lastpass-acquires-xmarks/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:10:01 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37969

LastPass, a cross-platform password manager, has acquired the social bookmarking and browser synchronization service Xmarks.

The San Francisco-based Xmarks has been in the midst of some tumult of late, as it closed down in September and then quickly opened back up again in an effort to keep its service running for a large group of active users.

That happened after user outcry, spurring the company to try to stay afloat.

SInce then, Xmarks has been trying to land itself safely.

The start-up had multiple offers to keep the operation running, as well as pledges from almost 30,000 fans willing to pay $10 to $20 a year for a new “freemium” business model.

Enter LastPass, based in Vienna, Va., whose CEO Joe Siegrist said in an interview that he wanted to help keep the service operating.

“They had a large dedicated audience, but their free offering and advertising model was not working,” he said. “We really want to figure something out that could keep it going.”

Siegrist said LastPass offered a robust free service, but relied on a small group of users who pay to upgrade to a premium offering.

The browser add-on for cross-platform synchronization operates in the cloud.

And that is going to be the fate of Xmarks–which had been called Foxmarks initially.

It had been seed-funded in 2006 by well-known entrepreneur Mitch Kapor and also got an additional investment from First Round Capital.

Xmarks garnered another $5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures in 2008,

That year, it also hired Silicon Valley entrepreneur James Joaquin as CEO, whose job it was to carve out a business with Xmarks’ assets, including using its mass of data.

Xmarks had certainly been growing its user base and bookmarked Web addresses strongly, via a browser widget that recorded bookmarking information.

Earlier this year, it tried out an advertising product called SearchBoost, which gave advertisers additional analytics about their ads, as well as organic search results.

But all that ultimately did not translate into a viable business for Xmarks.

“We think this will make a great ending and beginning for Xmarks,” said Joaquin.

Both Xmarks and LastPass declined to provide financial details of the transaction.

Here is the blog post by LastPass and Xmarks about the integration:

Today we’re excited to announce that Xmarks has been acquired by LastPass, makers of a leading cross-platform password manager. It’s a great opportunity that ensures the survival of Xmarks as the same service that you know and love.

In the last few years, we’ve attracted over 4.5 million users syncing more than 1 billion bookmarks across 5 million computers. Most importantly, we’ve provided a simple solution to help people easily access their bookmarks, wherever and whenever they needed to. We’ve had thousands of users tell us that Xmarks has become an integral part of their browsing experience. You can rest assured that LastPass will continue to build upon the service in the coming months.

We’re also committed to keeping Xmarks free while implementing a viable long-term plan. Xmarks is transitioning to a “freemium” business model, the same model that allowed LastPass to grow into a thriving, profitable business. The browser add-on and the vast majority of what users have enjoyed remains free. Users can then opt to purchase Xmarks Premium for $12 per year, which includes new enhanced features like Android and iPhone mobile phone apps, priority support, and more. The Xmarks and LastPass Premium offerings are also available bundled together at a reduced subscription rate of $20 per year. For those of you who pledged your financial support, you can make good on your pledge today and upgrade.

The restructuring of the Xmarks offerings will accelerate the introduction of new features and service improvements. The two services will continue to require separate downloads and will be administered through two distinct extensions and websites, although there are plans to integrate them in the future.

We believe the acquisition will prove to be a success because of the common mission shared by LastPass and Xmarks. Xmarks complements LastPass’ vision of secure, universal access to the information that gives you entry to your digital life. By joining LastPass, Xmarks will also be able to accelerate the introduction of new features and developments. As the ultimate cross-browser, cross-platform team, Xmarks and LastPass will work together to help more people simplify their digital lives and access their data from anywhere, at any time.

We’re excited to join forces with LastPass and be a part of a team that will continue to provide the best data-syncing tools out there! We hope you will support both of these great services through your business and your Premium subscription. For more information, please see the FAQs.

The Xmarks & LastPass Teams

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/password-manager-lastpass-acquires-xmarks/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101116/gravity-wants-to-instantly-personalize-any-content-site/ http://allthingsd.com/20101116/gravity-wants-to-instantly-personalize-any-content-site/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:45:44 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=441

Today Gravity is unveiling its plans to be an information filtering service. The idea is to combine social and semantic understanding of users to identify content they are likely to be interested in.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company is demoing this idea as a personalized newspaper app called The Orbit (to be released soon). The Orbit takes a user’s Twitter account and computes the topics a person is interested in and the network she is connected to. For any one Web page, Gravity might look at how recent it is, how popular it is, how relevant it is to a person’s interest and how many of that person’s friends have shared it.

Eventually, said Gravity CEO Amit Kapur, the company wants to offer personalization services to publisher sites. So when I go to the New York Times with Gravity enabled, for example, I would be able to get a view of the site’s content that’s weighted to what I am likely to be interested in.

I think that’s an awesome idea (though I do appreciate the roles of editorial curation and serendipity in bringing me my news). This is similar to what Facebook is trying to do with its controversial Instant Personalization product, where a user logged in to Facebook arrives at a new site that already knows who his friends are.

The problem is, what Gravity is setting out to do–both the natural-language processing and computational side, and the nitty-gritty of integrating into other peoples’ Web sites–is really freaking hard. And, no offense guys, but the Gravity team’s big experience to date was working at Myspace–not exactly a pinnacle of technical achievement.

When the company briefed me on what it was doing, it prepared a poster-size personal interest graph based on analysis of my Twitter account (that’s it at the top of the post; click to enlarge). Well shucks, guys–it seems to be just a bunch of words and topics I’ve mentioned in Tweets over the last few years, connected by lines. Doesn’t really convince me that you understand that much about me and what I want to read.

Still, Gravity has quite a bit going for it: A good idea, and $10 million from top investors at Redpoint Ventures and August Capital, plus advising by machine learning and computational linguistics professors at Stanford and UC Berkeley.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101116/gravity-wants-to-instantly-personalize-any-content-site/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101115/music-video-for-database-start-up-that%e2%80%99s-how-couchone-rolls/ http://allthingsd.com/20101115/music-video-for-database-start-up-that%e2%80%99s-how-couchone-rolls/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 08:08:31 +0000 Deborah Gage http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32520 How does a small Bay Area start-up whose business revolves around arcane coding compete for developers with the likes of Facebook and Google?

By making a rap video, of course.

CouchOne Inc., an Oakland, Calif-based company that makes a database built on open source software called CouchDB, produced the video partially on a whim and partially to bring attention to the start-up, which raised a $2 million Series A round last year from Redpoint Ventures and is in the process of raising a Series B.

The video, “I Use CouchDB,” stars CouchOne co-founder Chris Anderson and the company’s office manager, Claire McCabe, as a cool-looking pair whose stresses melt away when they replace their clunky SQL database with CouchDB. The video intersperses shots of the company’s product in use with scenes of Chris and Claire rolling through the streets of Oakland, Claire at one point riding on a car hood.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101115/music-video-for-database-start-up-that%e2%80%99s-how-couchone-rolls/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100928/the-long-goodbye-xmarks-tried-to-sell-twice-before-closing-down-with-class/ http://allthingsd.com/20100928/the-long-goodbye-xmarks-tried-to-sell-twice-before-closing-down-with-class/#comments Tue, 28 Sep 2010 12:15:39 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=34297

Yesterday marked the end for Xmarks, the Mitch Kapor-backed social bookmarking start-up that was founded in 2006.

What was most remarkable to BoomTown was the classiness and honesty of the goodbye, especially in Silicon Valley, which is loath to call a failure just that.

That was certainly clear in a terrific blog post about its history, titled “End of the Road for Xmarks,” written by its CTO and co-founder Todd Agulnick.

After noting Xmarks’ substantive growth as a browser synchronization service, he wrote:

“Tomorrow, however, will hardly be anything but typical, for tomorrow one of our engineers will start a script that will email each of our users to notify them that we’ll be ceasing operations in around 90 days.”

In the fascinating post, Agulnick did note that the company came close to selling recently. Actually, I heard it had gotten close twice and to no avail.

The San Francisco-based company–which had been called Foxmarks initially–had been seed-funded by Kapor, the well-known tech entrepreneur, and also got an additional investment from First Round Capital.

Xmarks garnered another $5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures in 2008,

That year, it also hired Silicon Valley entrepreneur James Joaquin as CEO, whose job it was to carve out a business with Xmarks’ assets, including using its mass of data.

Xmarks had certainly been growing its user base and bookmarked Web addresses strongly, via a browser widget that recorded bookmarking information.

Earlier this year, it tried out an advertising product called SearchBoost, which gave advertisers additional analytics about their ads, as well as organic search results.

But all that ultimately did not translate into a viable business model for Xmarks.

At the time of launching this money-making effort in April, Kapor said that after growing its user base of actives, this was the next logical step for Xmarks.

“This is the effort to move from that category to the category of sustainable enterprises,” he said. “And that is certainly a good thing.”

But, as Agulnick concluded:

“We built it and it put it front of potential advertisers. Many were interested, but ultimately the feedback was negative: our user base was too small to be worth their time and attention.”

After thanking investors, employees, users and others, Agulnick ended:

“In the words of Douglas Adams, so long and thanks for all the fish.”

Indeed.

Looking back to happier times, here is a video interview I did with Joaquin in late 2008 about Xmarks’ prospects:

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