VentureBeat

Comcast acquires Fandango, the online movie ticket company

HowStuffWorks, an Atlanta company, has raised $75 million in private equity from Capital Research & Management and Chilton Investment Co., to build out its instructional video site.

See story here.

It hosts videos on everything from how credit cards work to how Asimov the robot works. Also, any company will have products it wants to demo, and HowStuffWorks wants to host it in an easy place for people to get to. Often, corporate videos get lost within large corporate sites.

The company was founded by North Carolina University professor Marshall Brain in 1998, and was purchased by the Convex Group in 2003. Brain remains at the company, but Jeff Arnold, a founder and former CEO of WebMD Inc., is chairman and chief executive.

HowStuffWorks raises whopping $75M for instructional video site

See our story here.

Aggregate Knowledge raises $20M to boost sales for Web sites

Newswire Venture Capital

Nanochip, a Fremont, Ca. maker of Flash memory chips used in storage devices such as USB flash drives, has raised a $4.8 million in an appendage to the company’s third round of funding started last year.

It’s products are known as NAND chips (see more here for definition). VentureWire reported the news this morning (sub required).

Both Intel Capital and JK&B Capital, which particated in the third round last year, participated this time. Nanochip said it plans to raise $5 million more. From VentureWire:

The fabless semiconductor company is developing a technique for making NAND flash memory chips that, unlike all other chips of that type, is not dependant on lithography. Nanochip’s technology will be able to make chips with a 10nm to 20nm domain size, compared to the 70nm NAND chips that are currently offered by Samsung Electronics Co. and Toshiba Corp., the market leaders, Knight said. Nanochip’s smaller product will be able to hold more memory on the same amount of space.

Nanochip has been working away for more than a decade, has now absorbed $38 million in capital, and says it will release its product sometime in late 2009.

Nanochip raises $4.8M more for Flash memory chips

Right Hemisphere, a Fremont, Ca. company that sells visual technology that began by letting you touch up animated characters in movies, said it has raised money from SAP Ventures, the venture capital arm of large German software firm, SAP.

We wrote about the company three years ago, when it first moved to the Bay Area, from New Zealand.

Munich Venture Partners, a German venture firm, also participated in the investment, which was characterized as an appendage to the company’s second round of venture capital.

Right Hemisphere’s software has extended beyond its origins of animation, and includes a product data management and lifecycle management platform, to allow collaboration within large companies.

The company says its customers include DaimlerChrysler, Bell Helicopter and Sikorsky.

From the statement:

“With an open, automated approach to sharing and publishing 3D product information, Right Hemisphere is adding great
value by eliminating the time-consuming downstream process inefficiencies that traditional PLM solutions have failed to address,” said Nino Marakovic, a partner at SAP Ventures.

Previous investors include Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, and NVIDIA — when the company raised $12 million in 2005, and $4 million in 2003.

Right Hemisphere raises capital, to sell 3D collaboration tools to businesses

AirTight Networks, a Mountain View, Ca provider of wireless intrusion prevention technology, has raised $14.5 million in a third round funding.

A total of $36.75 million has been invested in the company since 2002.

The round was led by CMEA Ventures, and existing investors Blueprint Ventures, Granite Ventures, Siemens Venture Capital, Trident Capital and Walden International participated.

See the statement here.

AirTight Networks, wireless intrusion prevention co., raises $14.5M

Outspark, a Seoul, Korea company that hopes to help publish Asian multiplayer online games in English, said it has raised a $4 million first round of financing from Altos Ventures and Doll Capital Management (DCM).

Outspark hopes to distinguish itself by offering Asian game developers a platform and other services for the complicated translation process. Han Kim, partner at San Francisco’s Altos Ventures, said the driving assumption is that Asia now has more experienced and sophisticated game developers, something Kim says he has witnessed first hand.

“We just saw tons of inefficiency,” he said, referring to the tough time developers in Asia and U.S. have developing trust in each other during the translation process. Outspark’s team has hired people who can operate comfortably in both cultures, he said.

Outspark raises $4M to bring Korean games to U.S.

Catamount Ventures, an early-stage venture firm, has raised a $82 million third fund, and said that it plans to expand into clean technology, it told VentueWire (sub required).

Catamount raises $82M fund, will dabble in clean tech

Biotech Roundup: Heart-disease biomarkers, drugs that go too far, “non-profit” drugs

Cautionary tales: An occasional look at events with potential long-term impact for biotechnology

Personalized medicine takes a hit -- Scientists have spent more than a decade scouring the human genome to identify genetic alterations that might predict your risk of developing, say, heart trouble or cancer. Now, however, a new study (subscription required) Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that many of these disease "biomarkers" identified so far may be little more than junk. (For a lay review of the report, click here.)
The main problem here is that "personalized ... » Continue reading

David Hamilton 04.12.07

Yoono takes aim at Clipmarks

(updated version)

Yoono is the latest start-up to offer a "web clipping" feature to let you manage your reading and collaborate with others.

For those who've never heard of Yoono, it is a French company that offers a social search engine. It gives you downloadable toolbar that, with varying degrees of accuracy, displays websites, blogs, and news articles related to the Web site you're visiting at the time. When we last wrote about them, in early December, they were claiming 200,000 users, but according to them, the winter months went by and that figure tripled--a ... » Continue reading

Dan Kaplan 04.12.07

Roundup: Sabio, Photobucket cont, Technorati, Choicestream, PersonalBee and more

Here's the latest:

Thanks for patience -- First, VB just changed servers. We understand there are a few formatting problems on our front page, feed hiccups and issues with our search engine. We'll working to fix them.

Sabio Labs raises second round -- Sabio is a secretive Palo Alto, Calif. start-up building a new design process for analog chips. It's likely up to something significant, because Andy Bechtolsheim, the brilliant engineer and co-founder of Sun Microsystems has led a round of investment into the company. Investors in the earlier, first round include individuals like Art Reidel ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.12.07

Brazil’s great stem-cell experiment

[Editor's note: David Hamilton, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, has covered the biotech sector for years and we're delighted to have him as a contributor on news and trends in biotech, health and science (we've already run a few of his pieces). Biotech and health start-ups haven't been a VentureBeat focus, but they're important. We plan to create a separate forum for his work, and point to his more important stuff from VentureBeat.]

The world's biggest clinical trial of stem cells is underway in Brazil, the WSJ reports, an effort that could shake up ... » Continue reading

David Hamilton 04.11.07

MySpace stuffs Photobucket

Updated with second response from Photobucket

Photobucket, the popular photo storing service, recently unveiled new advertising features -- as it reportedly seeks to sell itself for hundreds of millions of dollars.

However, MySpace, pissed off by the new features, and perhaps a bit perturbed by the Palo Alto, Ca./Denver-based Photobucket's momentum (see our post here), has shut down links by MySpace users to their videos and slideshows hosted at Photobucket.

This isn't the first time MySpace has shut down links from other services, but the latest move poses a major problem for Photobucket -- ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.11.07

Facebook’s redesign, drops “that Guy”

Facebook released its anticipated redesign today. Features include individual pages for networks, an "Inbox" more closely resembling email, and a new navigation scheme, as expected.

Facebook is also becoming more corporate. Notice the familiar Facebook "that Guy" logo has been dropped, leaving only the Facebook name. The copyright reference to "Mark Zuckerberg" at the bottom of pages has also disappeared.

The redesign incorporated feedback from users, which included requests for increased stats on network pages. Network pages, which cater to specific campuses, geographies and other groups, now include stats like ... » Continue reading

Michael Foroobar 04.11.07

VentureBeat undergoing maintenance, may be unstable today

Thanks for your patience.

Matt Marshall 04.11.07

Aggregate Knowledge raises $20M, to boost sales on Web sites

Aggregate Knowledge, which tracks Internet user surfing patterns within a site in order to sell them more, has raised $20 million in venture capital, as expected.

We reported about Aggregate Knowledge's progress in February, including early details of this round. Venture capitalists valued the company higher than $70 million (post-investment), the company's chief executive Paul Martino confirmed. DAG Ventures led the round, and was joined by Kleiner Perkins. Martino, an affable fast-talker, also co-founded social networking company Tribe.net. Unlike that company, which struggled, Aggregate Knowledge is making millions of dollars after less than two years ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.10.07

2 Comments

Roundup: Frontline, Breitbart, Maxthon, Clipsearch, Yahoo-Viacom, Salesforce-Koral

Here's the latest action:

Big names support Frontline Wireless, which wants to end-run carriers -- James Barksdale, former chief executive of Netscape (left, top), and John Doerr, a big-name venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins (left, bottom), are the latest to back Frontline Wireless, the company we wrote about last month, which wants to bid for radio spectrum dedicated for public safety but which can also be used for profitable wireless offerings.

The long-wave spectrum will support wireless Internet devices, and spectrum ownership is a great way to bypass dealing with the monolithic carriers. Ram Shriram, ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.10.07

Google’s next advertising deal, DirecTV

VentureBeat is hearing that Google is negotiating an advertising deal with DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite broadcast service with 16 million subscribers.

Dish, the nation's second largest satellite TV company, announced a deal with Google last week. (VentureBeat was first to report the Dish deal a month ago).

This is just the latest move by Google to sew up the entire advertising world. Google is pushing into newspapers, magazines, radio, cable and now satellite.

The DirecTV deal is taking more time than Dish's to close because DirectTV is managing ... » Continue reading

Matt Marshall 04.10.07