Facebook’s initial public offering just keeps growing. The social network announced this morning via an amended S1 filing that it will add around 84 million shares to its IPO, an increase of around 25 percent.

Come Friday, when the company is scheduled to begin trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol “FB,” Facebook will be floating around 421 million shares. The company’s stock is expected to receive its official pricing on Thursday, and Facebook says it will be in the $35 to $38 per share range.

If Facebook’s stock gets priced at the $38 high-end, its IPO would raise over $16 billion, and would make it the largest technology public offering ever, Forbes points out. AT&T Wireless, the current technology IPO leader, raised over $10 billion in 2010.

The additional shares are coming from current Facebook investors Peter Thiel, Tiger Global Management, and James Breyer from Accel Partners, and not from Facebook itself. For that reason, the added shares won’t increase Facebook’s valuation.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s voting power will be reduced from around 57.3 percent to about 55.8 percent due to the new shares. That’s not ideal news for Zuck, but as long as he maintains his majority voting power, he’ll still be able to rule the company as he sees fit. The additional shares likely were a bid to appease the company’s existing investors.

Facebook yesterday added an additional $50 million shares to its IPO, with the caveat that they were part of an “over-allotment” option. We also heard yesterday that General Motors is planning to stop running ads on Facebook, after determining that they were ineffective.

“I think given the amount of money available, the shortage in Silicon Valley is in technical talent,” says Geurike, “I have no doubt that some European startups with strong talent and the right startup know-how will be able to out-execute Silicon Valley companies.” One of Geurike’s new tasks at EarlyBird will be to help European companies break into the U.S. market.

Geurike, who is German but studied engineering at Stanford and is based in Palo Alto, wants to support other European founders who could make a global impact. “My goal is to help portfolio companies to become a success on a global scale,” he explains.”I will probably end up working most closely with one or two founders who decide their best opportunities for global impact come from leading their business from Silicon Valley, while keeping most of the staff in Germany, where it is easier to attract and retain technical talent.”

I asked Geurike how European startups compare to their Silicon Valley counterparts. “European founders tend to think more about revenue early on. That can be an asset, but also somewhat limiting. However, given the greater impact you can have these days with modest or no funding, I think European entrepreneurs can break free of these constraints, and smart money will find them.”

Berlin has long been a startup hotspot and pulls in founders from all over Europe drawn by the cheap living costs, vibrant culture, and expanding startup scene. The founders of audiophile social network SoundCloud, for example, which recently raised $50 million, are Swedish. Ashton Kutcher’s latest Berlin investment Gidsy was started by a couple of brothers from Amsterdam. Kutcher, at least, makes following the smart money to Berlin look like fun.

Dan Loeb’s Third Point is bulking up its stake in a few other technology companies besides Yahoo, according to an SEC filing. The firm, which edged Yahoo chief executive Scott Thompson out of office earlier this week, are now gobbling up shares of Apple, Cisco, and Google.

According to the filing, Third Point now has 360,000 shares of Apple stock, amounting to $217 million, 5 million shares of Cisco, and 280,000 shares of Google. The company also snapped up a couple more Yahoo shares, totaling its stake to 70.5 million (or a little more than $1 billion).

Third Point’s Loeb has been the driving force behind Yahoo’s recent CEO debacle in which Thompson was found padding his resume. The story unfolded after Yahoo publicly told Loeb that he was too inexperienced to sit on the board as a director. Loeb had suggested himself and three others be tapped for the positions and did not accept a compromise Yahoo executives extended because it didn’t include bringing him on.

After a couple weeks of investigation, Thompson stepped down from his CEO role and soon thereafter revealed he has cancer. Yahoo director Patti Hart also stepped down, as she was the one who vetted Thompson and failed to look into a falsified computer science degree, which later made its way to Thompson’s Yahoo bio.

With Loeb on a spending spree, companies may be concerned with the pressures that he and his firm are seemingly happy to apply.

via Bloomberg; Stock ticker image via Shutterstock

If you’re hankering more funding news throughout the day, you can subscribe to our Deals Channel RSS feed by either clicking the red RSS icon at the top of this page or adding the Deals Channel feed link to your favorite reader. And as always, send funding news our way at tips@venturebeat.com.

Qualtrics says your research is wrong, raises funding to fix it

Qualtrics received $70 million in its first round of funding from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital today. The company’s main product allows customers to survey anyone on the Internet, asking for any kind of data that isn’t restricted by a certain database’s parameters.

Lenddo uses social influence to bump up your credit score

Lenddo raised an $8 million first round of funding Tuesday. The company helps people around the world build credit with small loans and a social-based Klout-like scoring system. Accel Partners, Blumberg Capital, Omidyar Network, iNovia Capital and Metamorphic Ventures participated in this round of funding, as did angel investors Geoff Judge, David Kidder, Scott Heiferman, and Barry Silbert.

Solar company Solexel raised $25 million

Solexel has closed a $25 million round of funding from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, according to a form D filed with the SEC. The Silicon Valley based company produces high-efficiency solar panels.

Simplee manages your healthcare costs

Health care cost management startup Simplee has raised $6 million in funding. Simplee works with insurance companies to manage health care costs and insurance claims. The Social+Capital Partnership led the round, with participation from Greylock Partners.

SoMoLend closes $1.17M seed round

Social and mobile lending company SoMoLend has raised $1.17 million in seed money. Instead of borrowing from a bank, SoMoLend facilitates borrowing from friends, but you’ve got to pay the money back. CincyTech led the round, which participation from Queen City Angels, the North Coast Angel Fund, Blue Chip Partners, Shaker LaunchHouse, Eldar Investment LLC, Clarion Direct Investment LLC, Clifford Holekamp, Elizabeth Crowell, Bruce Terry, Bob Baron, Cheryl & Carlin Stamm, and many others.

Teen texting on bench image via Flickr user Ming Xia / Sarah Mitroff

Cull TV, a site that features curated playlists of music videos from indie artists, has been acquired by social video network Twitvid, the companies announced today.

Cull TV is sort of what the internet version of Mtv would probably look like if it was still about music instead of godawful teen reality shows staring quasi-famous celebrities. The site’s user interface is focused on a full “lean back and watch” experience, similar to watching a TV channel. Videos are curated by members of the community as well as an in-house team, but  you can also create your own music video channel stream by adding videos that you’ve watched on the site or elsewhere. The site has over 2 million videos in its library and features 25 standard channels. Cull TV is primarily for discovering new content, which is why its a perfect fit for Twitvid.

“Cull TV is an intelligent, connected social service that can curate content in a different way than what we’re doing on Twitvid,” said Twitvid founder Mo Al Adham in an interview with VentureBeat.”We plan on adding that technology and know-how from (Cull’s) team into the site over the next few months.”

Twitvid relaunched from a complimentary video site for Twitter into a completely new social video network back in December 2011, as VentureBeat previously reported. Users can check their stream of video content from sites like YouTube, Vimeo and others that are shared by friends on various social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. Twitvid users can also create their own custom channel of content that others can tune in to watch. The site currently brings in over 15 million unique visitors per month.

As part of the acquisition deal, Cull.tv will remain in operation for now, but its future hasn’t been determined, Al Adham said. And while Twitvid will gain a strong community of music video watchers from the new acquisition, it’ll also get Cull TV’s underlying curation technology. Twitvid’s stream is already optimized for video content, but it’ll probably gain a greater degree of sharing and discovery functionality.

Founded in 2009, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup previously raised a $7 million round of funding from Azure Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson in September 2011. Financial terms of the Cull TV deal were not disclosed.

Venture capital has always been geographically concentrated, resulting in the emergence of a few hubs of VC and entrepreneurial activity and support services — Silicon Valley being the best example.

But the majority of US entrepreneurs have not been able to benefit from the venture capital industry because they live in the wrong parts of the US. This wasn’t an issue in the early days, when VC was novel. But over time, this geographic concentration has become a limitation.

Let’s put some numbers to this: In 2010 (the most recent full year the National Venture Capital Association provides numbers for), the VC industry invested $3,945 per person living in the Silicon Valley area compared to $43 per person in the rest of the US, including the other VC hubs like Boston and New York.  That’s a 91:1 ratio.

Go to Michigan and the amount is $15 per person per year. Now we’re talking 263:1. If I was a gambling man, I wouldn’t bet on a startup in Detroit getting venture funding. Better to relocate the family to a VC hub.  Or find another option.

Millions of talented entrepreneurs live in the “wrong parts” of the US, where they have very little chance of getting venture capital.  A few hundred (or thousand) of them just might have the spark to cause inspired innovation and bring employment to thousands, perhaps millions.

The argument has been that entrepreneurs also need expert advice and resources to excel and that it must all be local.  I agree that mentoring, support, and resources in addition to capital are vital. I just don’t buy the local part. What portion of the communication between a VC and his or her portfolio companies was done in person 50 years ago? And what portion of the same communication is now delivered through the Internet?  Email, video conference calls, remote screen sharing, group document editing, and other technologies have all changed the way we collaborate.

The truth is that a mentor can add a lot of value in assisting an entrepreneur anywhere in the US, or worldwide for that matter.

The Internet has shown itself to be very good at providing the platform on which formerly local services can be provided virtually anywhere.  eBay did this with auctions, Amazon with books, and Facebook with friendship.

Crowdfunding for entrepreneurs has the potential to deliver capital, mentoring, and resources virtually anywhere. The opportunity is large:

The US VC industry ranges from $20 to $30 billion of invested capital per annum, according to the NVCA, and it’s concentrated where most entrepreneurs are not. Imagine if we take the $43 per person of VC invested per year outside Silicon Valley and double it to $86 by bringing the capital and mentoring and resources to entrepreneurs across the US. If that were done, the amount of new capital deployed would be $13 billion per year.

That amount of money can fund an additional 6,500 startups per year at the $2 million level.

Crowdfunding can be an $8 billion to $100 billion industry in six years. This will not come at the expense of the current VC industry; it will complement and extend its reach.

This is market expansion, and it will redefine venture capital to break out of its historic limitations. At least for entrepreneurs who  live in the wrong place, which is most of us.

Rod Turner is a serial entrepreneur who has played a key role in building Ashton Tate (dBASE), Symantec Norton, Knowledge Adventure, Mobile Automation, and ArtSlant. He has two IPOs under his belt and has sold three startups to public companies. He is now focused on the launch of his newest initiative, crowdfunding site START.ac.

The Internet is abuzz over the appearance of 50.6 million extra Facebook shares potentially up for sale, as listed in the company’s seventh amendment to its S-1 document.

Potentially is the key word as these shares are simply part of an “over-allotment option” that Facebook may or may not sell through its offering. The inflated 388,027,654 share count is listed front and center in the S-1, but it comes with an all important caveat. The footnote clearly states that the number, “Includes additional shares that the underwriters have the option to purchase to cover over-allotments, if any.”

Facebook amended its S-1 early Tuesday to include an offering price range between $34 and $38, a maneuver likely made in response to high demand for its shares. The company is still officially selling 337,415,352 shares through its offering, but could sell an additional 50.6 million shares for a total of 388,027,654 shares.

The amendment also formally confirms that Facebook will be listed on the NASDAQ under the “FB” ticker symbol, and indicates that the Instagram buy may not close in the second quarter as previously stated.

The over-allotment option, informally known as a “greenshoe,” has actually been listed in Facebook’s offering since it first revealed how many shares it would sell. The option allows Facebook’s underwriters to sell the additional shares, set aside specifically for this purpose, if demand exceeds expectation. Underwriters can also buy back the stock at the offering price if it trades lower than priced.

So with Facebook’s IPO, which is said to be oversubscribed, the underwriters would use the over-allotment option of 50.6 million extra shares to stabilize the offering by increasing or decreasing share supply based on demand. Should Facebook and its underwriters exercise the over-allotment option, the social network will raise as much as $14.7 billion through its offering at the $38 price point.

Facebook will open on the NASDAQ this Friday, May 18 at a valuation likely between $92 billion and $103 billion. The company is doing a remote ceremony with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and team ringing the opening bell from Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. Thursday, after market close, Facebook will release a final amendment to its S-1 to include its official opening day stock price.

Photo credit: CapturedElegance/Flickr

I have a secret. In college, sometimes students pay each other to do their homework. I know! The research takes a lot of time, and in the end often you still don’t have all the information you need. Researching tool Qualtrics helps students and enterprises alike find not just some data, but all the data relevant to their project.

“In 2002 I couldn’t convince anyone to do research online,” said Qualtrics chief executive Ryan Smith in an interview with VentureBeat. “So we started in academia for five years and we dominated it.”

Just like in college, others are willing to pay you to do that data analysis for them. The company received $70 million in its first round of funding from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital today. Since its founding year, 2002, Qualtrics has grown to be profitable and have over 4,000 customers including big enterprise clients, as well as over 600 academic institutions. The company was founded when a couple of students realized they needed a better way to get their research done. Smith stressed that his product is for the intern all the way to the professional researcher. For much of Qualtrics’ life, the company had only one product: the ability to fill out a survey of your knowledge needs and get back an answer.

“Part of the problem I see is that people believe they’ve got the right data,” said Smith.

This product, which is the company’s main bread and butter, allows customers to “survey” anyone on the Internet, asking for any kind of data that isn’t restricted by a certain database’s parameters. Instead of coming back with a long list of data that needs to be made sense of, the program will provide you charts or graphs, information you can immediately absorb and use. The company just released two new products, one called “Site Intercept” that allows you to see when and how someone is using your site to push them content or ask them for information about a product. The second, called Qualtrics 360, provides analytics.

“People talk about big data right now and tend to get focused on the data center,” said Accel Partners partner Ryan Sweeney in an interview with VentureBeat. “We at Accel believe there’s as much of a data issue occurring outside the enterprise as well.”

Sweeney explained that this was the biggest round Accel and Sequoia had jointly participated in, but it wasn’t an easy road to get there. Smith and his co-founders simply weren’t interested in taking on venture capital. The company had been bootstrapped since its early days and become independently successful.

“We’ve been kind of scouted for quite some time by venture firms and it’s been a process,” said Smith. “We really were interested in making sure that one and one equals five and we really saw they bought into the vision that we have.”

Smith also appreciated that the venture firms were excited about having the company in Utah, outside of the big silicon city. Qualtrics will use the funding to hire on 250 employees, build out the Site Intercept and 360 products, as well as push forward with international expansion.

Ryan Smith photo via Justin Hackworth, screenshot via Qualtrics

It’s not an acquisition per se, but Facebook has just snapped up the seven-person team behind photo-sharing app Lightbox.

And yes, Lightbox is another mobile-focused company — the latest in a string of mobile acquisitions by the social network.

As Facebook leads the charge with regard to mobile web standards and development, it’s bringing on more and more people, teams, and products that have specific mobile web core competencies. Lightbox is one such team.

On the startup’s blog, we read that the Lightbox devs had been focusing particularly on Android and HTML5 mobile development, making them a perfect fit with Facebook’s current direction and focus.

Lightbox was founded in late 2010 and has taken a total of $1.2 million in funding from such big-name Valley entities as SV Angel (Ron Conway), 500 Startups (Dave McClure), Index Ventures, Accel Partners, and many others.

The Lightbox product will be shut down June 15, and bits of the startup’s code base will be made available on GitHub. Existing users are being asked to download their photos from the service before it’s shut down. Facebook will not take any of the original Lightbox product or user data.

Facebook named mobile as a weakness and/or risk when its S-1 was first filed. Since then, the company has snapped up mobile-focused startups Glancee and TagTile.

And of course, there was the splashy, $1 billion acquisition of Instagram. That deal is likely undergoing some FTC scrutiny based on the pricetag alone, and Facebook no longer expects to close the deal before Q2 ends.

In addition to all these acquisitions, Facebook has given its own mobile apps a big, photo-friendly facelift just days before it is scheduled to go public.

We’ll see if all this mobile activity will inspire investor confidence. The truth will lie in the IPO numbers at the end of the week.

Facebook users don’t trust the company with their private data, rarely click on display advertisements, and split on the social giant’s investment status prior to the impending IPO, according to a new poll conducted by CNBC and the AP.

Shockingly, the poll data only confirms what we already know — Facebook users are wary of Facebook.

According to the poll results, 59 percent of people distrust Facebook on user data, 57 percent of users said they never click on display ads, and 26 percent said they only rarely click ads. For a company that derives over 80 percent of its revenue through ads that are powered (in part) by that private user data, this could be an issue for Facebook. The company has also done a poor job of monetizing ads via mobile devices, which is increasingly how users are accessing the site.

Facebook has plans to grow its Facebook Credits business as well as making the site a platform for financial transactions, which poll respondents were also wary of. The poll indicated that 54 percent of users don’t trust the site enough for these types of purposes. Honestly, I think this is an area where Facebook will grow despite the current emotions of people who still associate the site with trivial things like social gaming and keeping up with people you knew in the first grade. Once upon a time, the majority of people were also just as wary about using their credit card to buy things from online retail stores. And as Amazon, eBay, and others have proven, this is no longer the case.

As for Facebook’s overall valuation, the poll respondents are divided on both the company’s $100 billion valuation as well as if it’s a good investment, with people under 35 taking a more favorable stance. But not everyone is convinced Facebook’s stock will hit a home run.

“My opinion is that the IPO is taking place too late for future investors to see any benefit, so I’m basically watching it as if it’s a cash-out event for early-round investors,” writes investment blogger Lucas Krupinski. Basically, that means the stock will do great if you bought it prior to going public, but after IPO day everyone will likely dump it. However, that doesn’t say much for its long-term value.

Facebook no longer expects its $1 billion acquisition of photo-sharing startup Instagram to close by the end of the second quarter, according to the latest version of Facebook’s S-1.

The social networking titan is facing much scrutiny this week as it readies for its IPO on Friday. The S-1 document, as revealed earlier, indicates Facebook has offered up a potential 50.6 million extra shares with a price range of $34 to $38 per share.

Facebook’s buy of Instagram was seen as a hasty by some who questioned whether Instagram was worth $1 billion. But Facebook’s biggest risk in its IPO is mobile penetration and making sure it can generate revenue from its mobile experience. Instagram, with its more than 40 million users and strong interest from iOS and Android owners shows Facebook is thinking about mobile. Facebook also overhauled its mobile apps yesterday.

The last S-1 issued by Facebook suggested that the Instagram buy would close in the second quarter of 2012, with language saying:

This acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including the expiration or early termination of all applicable waiting periods under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvement Act of 1976, as amended (HSR), and is currently expected to close in the second quarter of 2012.

The just-released S-1 filing says:

This acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including the expiration or early termination of all applicable waiting periods under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvement Act of 1976, as amended (HSR), and is expected to close in 2012.

While timing the Instagram deal might not be as smooth as Facebook wanted, there’s almost no doubt it will be worth it to the company to have more opportunities to sell ads to mobile users.

Mark Zuckerberg photo: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

The venture-backed financial services industry continues to evolve and grow at a rapid pace as investors continue to fuel industry change. There are several recent VC investment trends in financial services, including trying to capitalize on the social media phenomenon, as well as online services that help later-stage start-ups gain liquidity outside the sometimes difficult IPO process and market.

Recent History

Payment Cards: Though mobile payment technology is up and coming, VC investors continue to show interest in smart card payments. Alpharetta, Georgia-based Paymetric, for example, raised $12 million in venture capital in 2009 and 2011. Paymetric employs SAP to integrate smart card and token e-payments in enterprise systems.

Presque, Maine-based MiCash raised $1.7 million in capital in an undisclosed 2008 round of funding for its smart cards, which can be used to make bank ATM withdrawals, as well as make electronic cash purchases across a growing network of retailers.

Personal Finance: Washington, D.C.-based HelloWallet raised $3.6 million in a 2010 Series A funding round. The company provides an online financial advisory service that includes money and investment management, as well as a financial products and services comparison shopping engine.

Chicago’s YCharts combines financial markets data and proprietary, high-end company and stock market analytics with graphical data visualization that aims to provide online investors and traders with sophisticated, in-depth investing tools that are intuitively easy to use. The company followed up a 2010 Series A round of funding with a Series B round in 2011.

Business Finance: New Orleans-based The Receivables Exchange has raised more than $40 million for an online system and service that provides small and medium-sized businesses access to competitively priced working capital by bringing factoring services traditionally provided by banks online.

Trends

Financial services startups are rapidly incorporating social media and networking into online financial services, as well as continuing to try to enhance the quantity, quality, presentation and ease of use of company and financial market data, research and analytics.

On the infrastructure side, efforts to expand smart card e-payments systems and networks and integrate them with enterprise systems are ongoing. VCs are showing interest in start-ups that have developed online comparison shopping systems for financial products and services, while mobile banking systems are continuing to emerge.

Most recently, with the passage of the JOBS Act, the crowdfunding potential of early-stage startups received a significant boost. While there is significant disagreement among knowledgeable observers about the potential effects on the technology startup ecosystem from this legislation, it is likely that startups requiring smaller amounts of money (less than $1 million), with easily understandable business plans and shorter time frames to achieve market traction, will benefit most from these new sources of capital.

Charts

After a dip in activity during 2009 as a result of the severe recession, the number of financial services companies receiving venture capital funding has increased dramatically.

California and the mid-Atlantic regions have accounted for the lion’s share (54.9%) of companies funded. Surprisingly, the Northeast, despite its concentration of large financial firms, only accounted for 10.9%.

Aggregate funding amounts dropped in 2011, even as the number of companies funded rose significantly.

VC investments in an increasingly broad and diverse online financial services industry held up well even in the midst of the 2008-2009 recession and near collapse of the U.S. financial system. Deal numbers hit a five-year peak in 2011. The total dollar amount invested however, even though it has averaged well over $400 million over the past two years, has yet to reach the levels seen in 2007 and 2008.

VentureTrends is a research service of VentureDeal, a national venture capital database based in Menlo Park, Calif.

Top photo credit: Darwin Bell/Flickr

If you’re hankering more funding news throughout the day, you can subscribe to our Deals Channel RSS feed by either clicking the red RSS icon at the top of this page or adding the Deals Channel feed link to your favorite reader. And as always, send funding news our way at tips@venturebeat.com.

Quora nabs $50 million to answer your questions

Question and answer site Quora raised $50 million at a $400 million valuation. The site hopes to gather as much information as possible to create a large database of information, similar to Wikipedia. Facebook board member Peter Thiel led the round, and former Facebook employee and partner at Northbridge Venture Partners Jonathan Heiliger participated.

Behance shows off your creative side and a new investment

Creative work portfolio-building startup Behance has grabbed $6.5 million in its first round of funding. Behance is a marketplace for creatives — artists, graphic designers, web designers, writers, and the like — to showcase their work for companies that are looking for talent. Union Square Ventures led the round, with participation from angel investors including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Path’s Dave Morin, Yves Behar, Chris Dixon, Dave Tisch, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Alexis Ohanian, and Garrett Camp.

Starboard Storage Systems manages your crazy data, gets funded

Mixed data workload manager Starboard Storage Systems has raised a $13 million second round of funding from German venture capital firms JP Ventures GmbH and Grazia Equity GmbH. The company works with unstructured, structured, and virtualized data, also known as mixed data, which is often hard for IT departments to manage.

Business intelligence startup InsightSquared grabs $4.5 million

InsightSquared has closed a $4.5 million investment from Bessemer Venture Partners, NextView Ventures, and Salesforce.com. The company helps small and medium businesses gather insights from their data from places such as Salesforce or Quickbooks.

Woman with question marks image via Shutterstock

Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever founded Quora after leaving Facebook in its early days. The site is a slicker version of Yahoo Answers and allows multiple people to edit answers for helpfulness and accuracy. Quora hopes to gather as much information as possible to create a large database of information, similar to Wikipedia. The company competes with a ton of other question-and-answer services, such as the Ask Reddit subreddit, Ask on Google+, and even Facebook Questions.

The funding round came largely from the Facebook family. Facebook board member Peter Thiel led the round, and former Facebook employee and partner at Northbridge Venture Partners Jonathan Heiliger participated. Benchmark Capital also contributed to the round.

Founded in 2009, Quora raised $11 million at a $86 million valuation in 2010. Since then, it’s released an iPhone app to find location-specific answers.

Question mark image via Flickr user Michael Coghlan

Still reeling from a disastrous fourth quarter, Groupon beat Wall Street’s expectations and reported $559.3 million in revenue and $39.6 million in operating income for the first quarter of 2012. Monday’s earnings report is Groupon’s second since opening on the NASDAQ in November.

The company, which now has 36.9 million active customers, reported earnings Monday after market close and said that revenue increased 89 percent year-over-year. The company’s operating income of $39.6 million compares with a $117.1 million operations loss in the first quarter 2011. Groupon also reported gross billings, or the total collected from sold Groupons, of $1.35 billion for the quarter, which is more than double its gross billings of $668.2 million for the same period last year.

“We are pleased to report a record quarter that demonstrates our progress in unlocking the opportunity in local commerce for merchants and customers worldwide,” CEO Andrew Mason said in a statement.

The company performed especially well in Q1 in North America, where revenue grew 75 percent year-over-year. Groupon, Mason said in a call with investors, was able to leverage “smart deals” technology to provide better targeting and deliver performance improvements in North America. The personalization technology is in the process of being rolled out to international markets, Mason said.

Groupon said it served a total of 100,000 unique merchants in the first quarter and surpassed 1.5 million Groupons sold via Groupon Now during the quarter.

Analysts predicted a strong quarter for the deals company and pegged revenue at $530 million and operating profit, or earnings after operating costs, at $32.7 million. Groupon beat their estimates, and the company’s net loss for the quarter improved to $11.7 million (from $146.5 million in Q1 2011), or a loss of $0.02 per share.

In late March, Groupon revised its fourth quarter earnings to report revenue of $492.2 million (down $14.3 million from its original report) and an operating loss of $15 million for the quarter. Wall Street was stunned by the news and punished the company with a downward spiraling market capitalization. Groupon said at the time that it still anticipated pulling in between $510 million and $550 million during the first quarter of 2012.

Last week, Groupon made its punchcard-alternative Groupon Rewards loyalty program available to all U.S. businesses. Mason has touted the program, previously piloted in Philadelphia, as one of four key initiatives that will transform the deals giant into an “operating system for local commerce.”

Valued as high as $17.8 billion on its first day of trading, Groupon’s market capitalization plummeted to around $6 billion in recent weeks but has today jumped back into the $7 billion to $8 billion range. The stock got off to a strong start Monday morning and was trading up as high as 20 percent in anticipation of today’s earnings report. Shares are up more than 13 percent in after-hours trading at the time of this report.

Groupon said revenue for the second quarter of 2012 is expected to be between $550 million and $590 million, and operating income should be between $25 million and $45 million.

For a look at how Groupon’s stock compares with Yelp and Pandora, two other consumer internet companies that recently went public, have a look at the chart below.

GRPN data by YCharts

Photo credit: swanksalot/Flickr

Troubled wireless-startup LightSquared filed for bankruptcy Monday, according to documents filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.

LightSquared listed debt and assets of over $1 billion in the documents. The company filed under Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which allows it to continue operating without having to pay debt owed to creditors. The company previously tried and failed to negotiate with its lenders for an extension of time for repaying its massive debt, with LightSquared founder Philip Falcone even agreeing to step back.

LightSquared’s business strategy involved building out a high-speed wireless network that would generate revenue by selling network access to outside companies, such as Walmart, Best Buy, and others. But over the last several months, the company has run into many problems.

Those problems began in February, after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rejected LightSquared’s plans to launch its LTE network due to concerns that it would interfere with both commercial and military GPS technology. Because of this development, Leap Wireless has decided to buy future LTE connectivity for its Cricket prepaid service from Clearwire, another troubled wireless company (of which Sprint is the largest stakeholder). Earlier this year, LightSquared client FreedomPop also decided to go with Clearwire. But by far the biggest setback for LightSquared came in March after its $9 billion 15-year agreement with Sprint-Nextel to build and host its LTE network fell through.

Falcone’s New York-based hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners has invested about $3 billion in LightSquared to date, and stands to lose the most if the company ends up completely dying. LightSquared still owns a valuable portion of spectrum, which it can sell off off to recuperate some of those losses.

Via Bloomberg

On IPO day, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be staying local and the social network will ring the opening bell remotely at its 1601 Willow Road, Menlo Park campus, VentureBeat has confirmed with a source familiar with Facebook’s plans.

“News Alert: Facebook to ring opening bell remotely from Menlo Park HQ – Zuckerberg will stay at Menlo Park headquarters $FB,” CNBC tweeted Monday.

VentureBeat has independently confirmed that the details of the tweet are accurate and that Facebook is still determining how much of an executive presence it will have at the NASDAQ in New York.

The remote bell-ringing decision is not unique in the consumer Internet space. Social gaming company Zynga, which went public on the NASDAQ in December, rang the bell remotely from its San Francisco headquarters and celebrated opening day with an elaborate exchange-style setup.

Facebook is anticipated to make its debut this Friday, May 18. The social network is currently finishing up the last leg of its investor roadshow, which started last week in New York with a mini kerfuffle over Zuckerberg’s hoodie and demeanor.

The company also recently amended its prospectus to warn investors that mobile is a bigger risk than first anticipated. Recent comScore data also suggests that, because U.S. Facebook users are now accessing the social network more from mobile devices than computers, mobile users are becoming a problem of financial significance for the company.

Still, according to some reports, the offering is already oversubscribed and the social network will stop accepting orders tomorrow.

Behance is a marketplace for creatives — artists, graphic designers, web designers, writers, and the like — to showcase their work for companies that are looking for talent. Anyone can create a portfolio to show off their work on the site. The company also helps creative professionals promote their work and manage the responses they get from potential employers, like a LinkedIn for artists.

In fact, LinkedIn has partnered with Behance to help its users show off their talent on a Behance profile. The Rhode Island School of Design also works with Behance to show off its students’ work.

The previously bootstrapped company has attracted funding from Union Square Ventures, its lead investor on this round. Noted angel investors also participated, including Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, Path’s Dave Morin, Yves Behar, Chris Dixon, Dave Tisch, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Alexis Ohanian, and Garrett Camp.

Behance has grown quickly and has reached 2 million projects on the site, according to a company blog post. The company also boasts that users’ projects have received one billion views, with 75 million views in the last 30 days alone.

The funding will likely go towards hiring more team members, since Behance’s website makes it clear it’s looking for new talent. Behance also has plans to grow the business beyond its bootstrapped days.

Behance is based in New York City.

Shutterstock, a stock photography service, filed paperwork today with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an initial public offering worth $115 million.

Shutterstock provides organizations with royalty-free stock images and photography that can be used for advertisements, artwork, promotions, and general editorial purposes. The company, which has 550,000 paying customers, currently has more than 19 million images available in a variety of sizes and file types, such as the larger .tiff and vector images that print publications need. [Disclosure: Shutterstock provides VentureBeat with a limited number of images for free.]

Shutterstock’s total revenue has grown from $61.1 million in 2009 to $83.0 million in 2010 and $120.3 million in 2011 — representing a compound annual growth rate of 40.3 percent since 2009, according to the S-1 filing.

The company will use money from the IPO for operational purposes, as well as possibly acquiring other companies that are strategic to its current business. Shutterstock’s stock will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol of SSTK.

The exact number of shares and price per share for the IPO have yet to be determined. For the transaction, the company has hired Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank Securities, and Jefferies, with  RBC Capital Markets, Stifel Nicolaus Weisel, and William Blair acting as co-managers.

Image via Oleksiy Mark / Shutterstock

Zynga acquired Wild Needle, a casual game company that had backing from Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson, according to TechCrunch.

We’ve heard that the purchase price was $3.8 million, but the companies involved still haven’t acknowledged the deal. Wild Needle was formed in 2010 to focus on games for women. In addition to Playdom’s co-founder, it was also backed by Shasta Ventures.

The company launched Shoptown Hero as an iOS game last year, and pulled it down from the App Store a month ago. TechCrunch said the deal was a talent-focused one for Zynga, which has been acquiring a number of small teams in order to get access to talented game developers.

Thompson scored big time with Playdom, which Disney bought in 2010 for up to $763 million. He was also an investor in Funzio, which Gree acquired for $210 million.

When he talked to us about Wild Needle, Thompson said he was putting money on the idea that mobile is becoming a larger opportunity. His company was one of the game startups that had a “mobile first” strategy.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Wild Needle raised $2.5 million in funding from Thompson and Shasta Ventures. Thompson said that he didn’t need the money to start the company, but he did want access to Shasta’s managing director, Robert Coneybeer, who joined Wild Needle’s board. Wild Needle’s other top executives included Heidi Carson (vice president of product), Chris Kirmse (vice president of engineering), and Minglei Xu (software architect).

In other news, TechCrunch also reported that Zynga’s next game, Big Harvest, is in testing in the Philippines. The game may be a sequel to FarmVille.

Graphics chip maker Nvidia has teamed up with Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures to acquire a set of patents developed and owned by IPWireless.

The deal shows that the patent wars are a grim reality and big companies have to arm themselves with intellectual property in order to ward off lawsuits. The deal includes 500 patents in the wireless communications area, including “essential concepts” in Long-Term Evolution (LTE), LTE Advanced and 3G/4G technologies.

The deal closed April 30. Terms were not disclosed. The acquisition of patents was split between Nvidia and Intellectual Ventures, with Nvidia licensing rights to the patents it did not acquire. IPWireless also gets a perpetual, royalty-free right to use the patents.

“This acquisition complements our ownership of extensive fundamental patents in graphics, visual and mobile computing,” said David Shannon, executive vice president and general counsel at Nvidia. “These patents, acquired in collaboration with Intellectual Ventures, will help support our rapidly expanding efforts in the mobile business.”

Intellectual Ventures was started by former Microsoft executive Myhrvold to collect patents and license the technology to inventors. It earned itself a bad reputation as a “patent troll” by filing a lawsuits against tech companies. But the deal with Nvidia appears more defensive and will likely help the reputation of Intellectual Ventures.

“Through this acquisition, IV was able to acquire a portfolio that is both strategic and relevant in a variety of technology areas,” said Loria Yeadon, executive vice president of the Invention Investment Fund (IIF) at Intellectual Ventures. “It was a pleasure working with Nvidia to develop a customized structure to complete this deal in a relatively short period of time, while also helping Nvidia to meet its strategic goals. This investment provides efficient access to important inventions and standards-essential patents and reinforces our leadership role in building an active market for invention.”

“Retaining access to this patent portfolio allows IPWireless to continue developing its market-leading products and serving its customers now and in the future. In addition, IPWireless will continue investing and innovating in 4G LTE and other areas of wireless IP,” said Bill Jones, CEO of IPWireless.

So I won’t eat my hat.

The last time I dismissed a rumor about Meebo — yes, that rumor back in 2008 that Meebo was being valued at $200M by investors during an investment round — I foolishly promised to eat my hat if the rumor was true. Well, that rumor was true, and I ate said hat. More on that in a second.

But first, why a Google acquisition of Meebo makes sense:

In the early days, Meebo grabbed a huge number of users with its early web-based IM client, because the service let users chat across different chat platforms like MSN, AOL and Yahoo. Meebo stocked up with talented developers, and raised a treasure trove of funding. But failing to find a way to make money from its large reach, Meebo started pivoting in 2009. It released a horizontal tool bar that web site publishers could place on their sites to promote social sharing, allow real-time notifications — and most importantly overlay advertising. That bar got decent distribution, but it wasn’t very customizable, and hasn’t stayed up with design best standards. In fact, it has become really annoying for some: Last month, Gizmodo called the bar and its distracting ads “awful,” and told readers how to disable it. After the negative publicity, big site Boston.com scrambled to take Meebo down from it ssite.

So while Meebo isn’t exactly spreading like wildfire anymore, there are reasons why Google might like to buy it.

In 2010, Meebo gained Google’s favor by helping push a web standard called XAuth , which let users come to sites and use whatever social network they liked, not just the all-pervasive Twitter and Facebook. At the time, this helped publishers promote second-tier players like Google, which was trying to promote Google Buzz. Google later scrapped Buzz, and last year launched Google Plus, a more ambitious social network that is now arguably Google’s most important initiative.

Meebo has also continued to explore ways to deliver to users content and advertising that are relevant to their interests — whether through the Meebo bar, or through other features like Meebo’s Mini Bar and Bookmarklet. The Bookmarket aims to let users share interesting content to friends, and to see similar content from their friends. Meebo boasts on its front page that it is helping users create “interest profiles.” Of course, targeting — and socially driven targeting at that — is exactly what Google needs to boost its Google Plus efforts. And it’s also something that Meebo doesn’t seem ready to pull off by itself, given Facebook’s dominance in this area. Add to that Meebo’s team of 173 people, many of them engineers, but many also many with solid media and marketing backgrounds attractive to Google’s advertising DNA. It looks like a very nice match.

Indeed, this deal makes a hell of a lot more sense than that other big rumor about Meembo– the so absurd that it prompted me to pledge to eat my hat. That was mid-2008, so long ago, it was a different age, one where hype still reigned, but one where we clearly entering a major downturn. But yet, in mid-2008, we began hearing that investors were planning to pump in $25 million into Meebo at a pre-money valuation of $200 million. How, I asked at the time, could that be possible given that Meebo had shown no way of making money, and we were entering a time of  investor sobriety. Well, it turned out that Meebo managed to grab the last $25 million exuberant money left. Just a few months later, the tech economy fell off the cliff, prompting Sequoia Capital’ famous RIP presentation, where Silicon Valley’s famous venture capital firm warned of the biggest recessions in history and told companies — one of them was Meebo — that they had better start cutting costs to get ready for it.

In that light, then, the $100 million being rumored for the acquisition would be a disappointment for Meebo and its investors. The investors who came in during that heady 2008 round buying Meebo shares at a $200M valuation — JAFCO Ventures, with Time Warner Investments, KTB Ventures — will probably lose money. Meebo did raise another $27.5 million in 2010, meaning it has raised at least $65 million, and that’s probably what has kept it going for so long.

Geeknet announced today that it is considering selling off some of its iconic tech properties, including software sites SourceForge and Freecode as well as curated technology news site Slashdot.

The company’s board of directors said it’s reassessing its media business initiatives in an effort to make Geeknet’s stock more valuable. The announcement also comes a week after the company reported losing money for the first quarter of 2012 with a net loss of $2.1 million.

Geeknet’s properties, which also include retail site ThinkGeek, took in 46 million unique visitors in March — meaning it doesn’t fail to gain traction with its main audience.

That said, it’s a bit baffling to think about the logic behind Geeknet selling Slashdot, especially considering all the spin-off sites it launched recently. Last month it debuted business intelligence-focused site SlashBI, followed by yesterday’s launch of its cloud-focused SlashCloud site for IT professionals. The company has also recently beefed up the main Slashdot site as well, with a new video game section as well as video channel Slashdot TV.

“We are focusing more investment in GeekLabs to deliver more unique and innovative products in ThinkGeek and our Media team has launched a number of new initiatives designed to improve traffic, monetization, and international revenue as the year progresses,” said Geeknet chief executive Ken Langone in the announcement. “Our primary objectives are unchanged, and we remain focused on delivering growth in revenue, profits, and cash from operations in 2012.”

To assist with its strategic view of these properties, Geeknet has retained DeSilva+Phillips Corporate Finance as a financial adviser. The review may not result in a sale, the company points out. However, it’s apparent by the release that if the price is right, they will end up selling.

Smoking-hot mobile video-sharing startup Viddy has closed a $30 million financing round and is fast-approaching 30 million registered users.

If you’ve taken a two-month hiatus from the Internet, then you’ve most certainly missed Viddy’s overnight comeuppance. The one-year-old company makes an iPhone-only application for shooting 15-second clips that can be enhanced through video effects called “production packs.” In just over two weeks, Viddy has rocketed from 10 million registered users to more than 27 million and is adding 500,000 new folks to the fold each day.

The company secured its newest millions from NEA, Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, and Battery Ventures, Viddy CEO and co-founder Brett O’Brien told VentureBeat. It plans to use the cash pile to hire more engineering talent, push out products more aggressively, expand internationally, and spend on scaling growth.

Today’s announcement confirms whispers that were circulating about a looming round. The startup wouldn’t go on the record with a valuation, but earlier reports pegged its post-money valuation at between $300 million and $370 million.

“We have a big vision, big ambitions,” O’Brien said of the company’s big round, which only trails its first $6 million round by three months. “And to accomplish … those things more quickly, and manage growth, it made sense to take on additional partners.”

Additional partners is right. Viddy, basking in the limelight, has attracted a “who’s who” list of celebrity and technology investors, partners, and members. Biz Stone, Shakira, Will Smith, and Jay-Z are all backing the company in some form. And on the user front, A-listers such as Rihanna, Snoop Dogg, Katie Couric, and Mark Zuckerberg are all Viddy-ographers.

“Personal video sharing is clearly an enormous opportunity and we think Viddy is positioned to be the breakaway leader,” NEA general partner Pete Sonsini said in a statement to VentureBeat. “Viddy has tremendous momentum and a growing, engaged community generating original content, a major differentiator, and we’re excited to partner with the Viddy team.”

O’Brien spoke of the proliferation of smartphones, continual enhancements to mobile phone cameras, and the rise of 4G networks as converging factors helping Viddy succeed. He said the startup’s almost unbelievable user growth is due to four factors: a great product, celebrity users, integration with Facebook, and constant placement atop Apple’s App Store charts. Of course, he added, it doesn’t hurt that people already know Instagram, which makes the Viddy experience feel familiar to new users.

“Our goal is to entertain and connect people around the world through mobile,” he said. “There’s an extraordinary opportunity for us to … enable consumers to take videos worth sharing.”

With video-shooting and sharing still restricted to iPhone users, the company believes its rapid growth is sustainable as it moves to other platforms. Viddy, O’Brien said, has a working prototype of an Android release, though he isn’t ready to discuss launch timing.

As noted above, Viddy’s service and success closely parallels that of Instagram, which was snatched up by Facebook’s Zuckerberg for about a $1 billion in cash and stock shortly after hitting 30 million users and launching on Android. Will Viddy follow in Instagram’s footsteps here too? Nope, not happening, O’Brien said.

“We’re focused on building an extraordinary company independent of anyone else’s interest,” O’Brien said.

“So you wouldn’t sell to Facebook if Zuck offered you a $1 billion?,” I countered.

“That’s not what we’re interested in right now,” O’Brien said. “We’d just like to stay focused and continue to execute.”

We’ll see about that.

Drawbridge grabs cash for better social ads

Drawbridge announced a $6.5 million investment today. The company wants to make mobile ads as sophisticated and targeted as their desktop counterparts. Prominent firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital led the round.

Mixpanel’s unique analytics attract a new investment

Y Combinator startup Mixpanel just raised its first institutional round of funding. The company dives deep into pageview and visitor engagement analytics, offering real-time “micro” stats. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and additional angel investors, including PayPal Co-founder Max Levchin, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, and Yammer chief executive David Sacks, participated.

Coupa gets money for its expense reports

Mere months after closing a $12 million investment, Coupa has closed its fifth round of funding for $22 million. The company did not disclose its valuation. The company’s software can track any payroll-related spending and procurement. It handles invoicing, inventory, budgets, and expense reporting. New investor Crosslink Capital led the round. Existing investors Battery Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, El Dorado Ventures, and Mohr Davidow Ventures participated.

Moviepilot.com gets funding for fanboys

Movie site for fanboys, Moviepilot.com raised $7 million in second-round funding. The company scours the Internet for movie news and helps movie studios promote their latest flicks. DFJ Esprit led the round.

Google Apps security company BetterCloud raises its seed round

BetterCloud announced it has closed a $2.2 million investment. It offers cloud management services aimed at Google Apps, such as security and group management. The seed funding comes from angel investors and chief executive David Politis.

This CRM raised $6.8M

Future Simple, the company behind Base, has raised $6.8 million. Base operates similarly to Salesforce by storing business contacts and leads. Index Ventures led the round, with Social+Capital Partnership, OCA Ventures and the I2A fund participating.

Drumbi grabs funding for a customer service automated system (exclusive)

Hate those machines you get when you call a customer service line? Drumbi is creating one of those, but it claims it will do a much better job. It also promises to cut down on those excruciating wait times. The company raised $2 million at a $8.5 million pre-money valuation from Quest Software.

Turning webcams into credit card scanners, Jumio nabs funding

Online payment and ID company Jumio has raised funding. The company did not officially disclose the funding amount, but it’s said to be $3.3 million from Citigroup, according to VentureWire. Jumio turns web and smartphone cameras into credit card and ID card processing machines.

Another credit card processing startup, Flint Mobile

Like Square, Intuit, and Pay Pal before it, Flint Mobile raised $3 million to process credit cards with your phone. Flint Mobile is shunning a square, triangle, or moon-shaped dongle in favor of using a smartphone camera to process payments. It will make money by way of transaction fees; 1.95 percent plus $0.20 per transaction for debit cards and 2.95 percent plus $0.20 per transaction for credit cards. Storm Ventures led the round.

Bloc is going to make a web developer out of you

Web coding online school Bloc has raised $250,000 in seed money to transform you into a web developer in eight weeks. For three grand, you’ll be able to write Ruby on Rails code with the best of ‘em. In time the company will also offer iOS develop classes and HTML/CSS design programs. Robert Hutter at Learn Capital led the seed round, in the form of a convertible note.

One million dollars goes towards 3-D fashion games for women

Frenzoo raised $1 million today to create 3-D fashion iOS and Android games for women. It’s first game, Me Girl, features 3-D-like avatars that girls can dress up and play with as supermodels. Efficient Corporate, Siemer Ventures, K5 Ventures, and Metaverse Services participated in the round.

Hey, you’ve got a loyalty program in my point of sale system

Mobile loyalty program startup RewardLoop has raised $1 million in funding. The company’s system connects to point of sale devices to offer loyalty programs and printed receipt offers. Madrona Ventures led the first round of funding for RewardLoop.

Money exploding from computer image via Shutterstock 

Twitter has snatched up the talent behind social marketing automation company RestEngine.

“We’re very excited to announce that the RestEngine team is joining the Twitter flock! Just over two-and-a-half years ago we founded RestEngine to help social app publishers send targeted one-to-one emails based on a subscriber’s social graph,” the company said in an announcement on its website. “We’re thrilled to now focus our email skills and marketing automation know-how on a much larger scale at Twitter.”

RestEngine is said to be especially adept at helping developers with targeting, filtering, and personalization, areas that Twitter has shown plenty of interest in of late. Earlier this month, Twitter released a new Discover tab to better predict stories people want to see. And, of course, the information network has a big business interest in improving how it targets ads — ahem, “sponsored” content — to its users.

Three of RestEngine’s four-man founding team are migrating to Twitter. Co-founder Joe Waltman is going on an entrepreneurial hiatus, according to TechCrunch. TechCrunch calls the deal an acquisition, but we’re going to peg this as an acqui-hire. Here’s why: Twitter made no noise about its get (not even a tweet), the RestEngine service appears to be shutting down, neither Twitter nor RestEngine is lobbing around the “acquisition” word, and one of RestEngine’s co-founders is flying away.

Twitter has made a few other buys this year. The information network purchased social news aggregator Summify in January and blogging platform Posterous in March. The former seems like it would tie in nicely with RestEngine’s personalization capabilities.

Photo credit: FadderUri/Flickr

Groupon made its Groupon Rewards loyalty program available to all U.S. businesses today in an effort to counter claims that its deals are bad for business.

Groupon Rewards is the deal provider’s mostly-automated alternative to the store punchcard. Merchants offer rewards in the form of exclusive Groupons to repeat customers who spend above a certain amount using a credit card on file in their Groupon account. The program was previously being piloted in test markets such as Philadelphia.

With the program, merchants set their own spending requirements and rewards, and they receive payment analytics to assess the probability of their campaigns. For consumers, Groupon automatically tracks their spending at participating businesses and notifies them when they’re eligible to redeem a free Groupon reward.

The Rewards rollout comes amidst troubled times for the once celebrated deals provider. Wall Street has been unforgiving of the still-young company following repeated accounting mistakes, disappointing earnings, shareholder lawsuits, and a board shake-up. Valued as high at $17.8 billion on its first day of trading, Groupon’s market capitalization now stands at $6.34 billion.

But fear not, CEO Andrew Mason said in a letter to stockholders earlier this week. The company is a leader in the local commerce space and is cooking up four key initiatives, one of them being Rewards, that will surely make it the “operating system for local commerce,” he said.

And just how significant is Groupon Rewards to a company turn aound? Very, at least in Mason’s eyes. In the past two months, roughly 30 percent of merchants eligible to participate have signed up for the Rewards program, Mason said. “Though the preliminary dataset is small, pilot results show that Groupon Rewards customers are more loyal than other customers.”

Analyst, frequent Groupon detractor, and VentureBeat contributor Rocky Agrawal isn’t yet convinced that Rewards will do anything to help Groupon recover.

“It’s too soon to say how Groupon Rewards will perform. But it is an incredibly crowded space, with companies like Facebook, Foursquare, American Express, and Google all having their own offerings,” Agrawal said in an editorial critiquing Mason’s outlined business prospects. “Rewards will have much smaller take rates than the daily deals business.”

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Farmeron hopes to replace overwhelming spreadsheets used by most farmers to track farm operations data. The software has been used by farmers in Southeast Europe since its launch in November 2011.

Lee Hower of NextView Ventures and Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC today led the round, with participation from Reshma Sohoni of Seedcamp, Dave McClure of 500 Startups and Robin Klein of TAG. The full press release is below.

Farmeron Raises $1.4 Million in Seed Funding

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA / OSIJEK, Croatia – May 8, 2012 – Farmeron Inc., one of the world’s first agricultural SaaS companies to bring the modern farmer’s fragmented sources of production data to the cloud, announced the close of its $1.4 million seed round co-led by Lee Hower of NextView Ventures and Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC today. Already being used by farmers in fourteen countries since launching in November 2011, Farmeron is bringing modern analytics to both small and large farms, in part due to the expanding global reach of AngelList and the founders’ unique story.

Founder Matija Kopic’s inspiration for Farmeron began on the large crop farm in Croatia where he was born and raised. Kopic watched his father struggle daily to manually maintain an overwhelming amount of farm production data essential to the farm’s management, and he recognized that even the best farmers were overwhelmed, using thousands of spreadsheets with dedicated analysts to manage their complex operations. “Even today, the process is so inefficient that an average modern dairy farmer owning 300 milking cows must spend at least 90 minutes per day creating manual data records and calculating production metrics to analyze the farm’s efficiency and profitability. This generates hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs. Without having the proper data management infrastructure, farmers easily miss hidden knowledge in raw production data, leading to misguided interpretations of their production cycles and associated costs,” said Kopic.

Kopic noted that while technological advances in farming hardware have increased the amount of low-level raw production data available (often being collected on single-animal level), disparate data sources on the modern farm add to the complexity without an easy way to aggregate, display and analyze this data. By integrating Farmeron, currently a livestock production SaaS solution that integrates different data sources existing on a modern farm into a single cloud database, with advanced farming machinery (e.g. milking machine), time-consuming data retrieval, recording and management is cut by 60 %.
Kopic’s global aspirations for Farmeron led him to seek funding from leading investors in the US and Europe. His pursuits brought the team from Croatia to London, where Farmeron has won Seedcamp’s investment, and eventually, to Silicon Valley. In addition to NextView Ventures and SoftTech VC, Farmeron’s previous investors Reshma Sohoni of Seedcamp, Dave McClure of 500startups and Robin Klein of TAG also participated in the $1.4M seed round. Naval Ravikant of AngelList is leading the group of angels backing farmer hackers in their latest round. Back in the summer of 2011, Dave McClure spotted Farmeron soon after Kopic created his AngelList profile. Kopic also met AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, who took notice of Farmeron given its status as one of the first Eastern European startups on AngelList in addition to the founders’ story of being a farmer hacker. The attention of these two early investors helped pave the way for the Croatian startups journey to the US. Other prominent angels – Evan Nisselson of LDV Capital, Niko Hrdy and Taavet Hinrikus – also participated. Funding will be used to hire key management team members and to staff sales and support teams both in US and Europe. Farmeron’s software development team is located in Osijek, Croatia.

Lee Hower of NextView Ventures: “While at first glance an investment in Farmeron may seem unusual for early stage seed investors like ourselves, agriculture & food remains one of the most important global industries. Farmeron presented a unique and untapped opportunity for a cloud-based SaaS solution as over 164 million farms worldwide now have internet access coupled with the increasing demands for agriculture to become more efficient as the world population has crossed over 7 billion people.”

Since initially launching its first web farm management tool in November 2011 to handful of farms in Southeast Europe (primarily Croatia), Farmeron has spread to more than 450 farms in 14 countries in the last five months. These early beta customers have allowed Farmeron to learn about specifics of agricultural production across markets. Furthermore, Farmeron has already begun to compile a centralized dataset to mine new knowledge about production practices across different farms and markets. Farmeron also recently closed a major distribution partnership with Germany-based Neelsen Agrar GmbH, one of the world’s leading animal husbandry and farm logistics companies that is active in developing and operating dairy super farms. The deal provides Farmeron with additional distribution to farmers in more than 30 countries served by Neelsen Agrar GmbH.

Drawbridge has just exited stealth mode, and it announced a first-round $6.5 million investment today. The company wants to make mobile ads as sophisticated and targeted as their desktop counterparts.

The company hails from ex-Googler and first female engineer at AdMob Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan. While my eyes tend to glaze over at the mention of a new advertising company, Sivaramakrishnan may be on to something with her idea to improve mobile ads. As more and more people are becoming glued to their iPhones, advertisers can’t afford to miss out on those eyeballs.

“Today, targeting in mobile display advertising is more about the device than the audience behind it,” said Sivaramakrishnan in a statement. “Consumers now have multiple touch points across various screens. The Drawbridge platform makes it possible to understand behavior on any device and use those insights to effectively reach mobile audiences.”

Drawbridge isn’t alone in its quest to cash in on mobile ads. InMobi offers targeted mobile ad services, Samsung is planning to launch its own ad network, Apple has iAd, and Google’s got its head in the mobile ad game. Sivaramakrishnan is relying on her ad technology to rival competitors, a tactic that’s grabbed the attention of big-name investors.

Using machine learning tactics, Drawbridge aims to create highly personalized ads to work across Android, Windows,  Blackberry, and iOS phones. The goal is to capture better audience information so advertisers can produce relevant ads.

Prominent firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital led the round. The two-year old company will use the money to launch its first ad services.

The Washington Post’s social advertising firm SocialCode has hired 15 engineers from Digg today, confirming rumors last week that the community news site was due for a shakeup.

Digg entered into serious negotiations with the Washington Post about selling the entire company nearly a month ago, as VentureBeat previously reported. However, it looks like the post was only interested in the site’s talent, leaving its brand name and underlying social news aggregation technology still available for a sale. Digg was also reportedly pitching the sale of the company to other big news publications, such as CNN.

The SocialCode firm is dedicated to helping advertisers create communities out of their social media following — something the Digg engineers are quite familiar with. As part of the talent deal, the former Digg employees will assume leadership roles at SocialCode. The company’s VP of Ad products Alan Lippman will assume the position of chief scientist at SocialCode, while software dev Will Larson will become SocialCode’s director of engineering.

It’s worth noting that the Washington Post didn’t poach Digg’s staff. The move was endorsed this morning by the startup’s CEO Matt Williams in a blog post, which means Digg is on its way to getting completely dismantled. Without engineers, we probably won’t be seeing any new features on the site or integration with other services. Essentially, Digg’s days are numbered.

Image illustration by Tom Cheredar