Smaller deals were the rule last week, but this first one marked an exception.

—Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: ESLR) of Marlboro, MA, inked about $1 billion worth of new long-term sales deals. The company, which was formed in 1994 to commercialize “string ribbon” solar-cell manufacturing technology invented at MIT, now has long-term agreements with eight customers worth a combined value of nearly $2 billion.

—Burlington, MA-based medical imaging firm HyperMed closed a $4 million round of funding from Greenwich, CT-based GBP Capital.

—Dialysis products maker NxStage Medical (NASDAQ: NXTM) of Lawrence, MA, announced it plans to raise $43 million in a private placement of its common stock and warrants. The deal will be closed in two tranches—a $25 million first tranche to be completed on or before May 28, and an $18 million tranche expected to close during the third quarter, pending stockholder approval.

—Boston’s Spark Capital made a cool $9.7 million—a 48 percent return on its four-month investment—when CBS bought CNET Networks for $1.8 billion.

—Woburn, MA’s Wilson TurboPower got $500,000 from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative to fund the development of its industrial heat exchanger, which is expected to lower the cost of electricity generation from biomass and fuel cells.

—Business database firm ZoomInfo of Waltham, MA, spun off its ad-service unit, which targets ads to Web users based on sophisticated guesses about their job titles and roles. The new business demographics or “bizographics” firm, called Bizo, will be based in San Francisco.

—Waltham, MA-based Atlas Venture co-led an $8 million Series A investment in Boulder, CO-based Miragen Therapeutics. Colorado-based Boulder Ventures was the other founding investor in the firm, which was launched to use the hot new science of microRNA to develop treatments for heart failure and muscle disease.

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A few months ago, when we zoomed in on ZoomInfo, the Waltham, MA-based business database company was beta testing an ad-targeting service designed to quickly identify website visitors and serve up ads customized for people in their specific job categories.

It’s all about business demographics, or “bizographics.” As Wade wrote, “In a way, ZoomInfo’s service is similar to the consumer-oriented ‘behavorial targeting’ services offered by Tacoda and Revenue Science. But there are two big differences. ZoomInfo’s service is aimed at people in business roles. And thanks to its profile database, ZoomInfo can target Web surfers based on a highly informed guess about their job title and responsibilities—not just based on which websites they’ve visited recently or what subjects they search for…”

Yesterday, ZoomInfo officially spun off its ad service business unit as its own bizographics company, dubbed (perhaps you guessed it) Bizo. Former ZoomInfo GM and SVP of advertising Russell Glass is Bizo’s CEO. Unfortunately, for those wanting to see more New England startups, Bizo is based in San Francisco.

“In a nutshell, we knew there was a big advertising opportunity in the B2B space, and we thought ZoomInfo was in a great position to take advantage of that given our knowledge of business people and companies,” ZoomInfo president Bryan Burdick told me yesterday. Burdick says the response to the beta test was extremely promising—and informative. One of the things the company learned, Burdick says, was that bizographics was a “different kind of opportunity than [our] core business. So at the end of the day we felt that it was really better suited as a separate company that could grow along its own trajectory.” He says Bizo was spun off to shareholders and funded with a debt financing from ZoomInfo.

Why California? “The primary reason is that from a technology perspective there’s a lot of talent out there, particularly in the engineering side, for individuals that have great experience in building highly scalable ad networks of this type,” Burdick says. The San Francisco area is also home to several potential publishing and advertising partners, he says.

ZoomInfo will continue with its core business of scouring the Web for information about people and companies, which it organizes into free and premium databases used by sales, marketing, and recruiting professionals to identify business opportunities and talent.

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