Updated 11/11 with clarification
What does 1 billion sound like? At Seattle startup Hark, it’s this clip of Harry Potter deploying the “expelliarmus” spell to disarm an enemy.

Expelliarmus!

That little incantation marked the 1 billionth play of a sound bite on Hark, which has amassed a huge catalog of snippets, speeches, and quotes on its YouTube-for-audio site.

That’s a pretty big sonic load since the end of 2008, when Hark (formerly called Entertonement) switched on its public website. The company has cataloged a fun rundown of facts and figures on its blog today to commemorate the 1 billion listens mark. Here’s one that really tells the tale for me: Hark’s gone from this initial test sound of a crow caw to serious clips like President Obama’s entire 2009 address to Congress about health care policy.

Hark relies on both crowdsourced sounds and professional clips to build its library of sounds. It wasn’t always that way, but after seeing a flood of fan uploads of clips from the movie “The Hangover,” Hark went to the studio and cut a deal to get official sound uploads to feed that demand.

Those partnerships have grown, positioning Hark among a group of Seattle tech companies that are working with Hollywood to help the entertainment industry harness digital content.

Hark splits ad revenues with studios on those official sections of the site, and has upgraded from just audio snippets into pages that also feature photos, cast information, and other content. Hark also has partnered with public radio’s StoryCorps project, hosting pages where users were encouraged to upload their own stories tied to the “National Day of Listening.” [The partnership with StoryCorps has been clarified from the original version.]

David Aronchick

All of this has made Hark into a quietly profitable company—CEO David Aronchick says Hark moved into the black in the fourth quarter of 2010, and has sustained that performance this year.

He declined to discuss revenues, but said Hark hasn’t needed to raise venture capital since its $4.5 million round from Redpoint Ventures in 2007.

“I’m not anticipating needing to take any money, even to do growth,” Aronchick says. ”We’re just having a bang-up quarter.”

I’ve always wondered how sustainable audio-only could be as a standalone media site, given the additional power of video (along with the fact that people already post sounds without videos to YouTube). Aronchick says there’s no need to choose between the two.

“I think what you’ll see and what you have seen to date is the platform for every modality,” he says. “You would never say that text goes away because there’s pictures, or audio goes away because there’s video. Each unit has its place.”

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The West Coast roll-up of Boston-area tech companies continues.

On the heels of Oracle’s acquisition of Endeca this week, networking and communications giant Cisco Systems said today it plans to acquire Boxborough, MA-based BNI Video for $99 million in cash and retention-based incentives. Cisco is one of the startup’s investors. The deal is expected to be complete by the end of this year, at which time BNI’s employees will join Cisco’s service provider video technology group.

BNI Video started in early 2009, originally known as Beaumaris Networks, to develop technology for video service providers. About a year ago, my colleague Erin reported on the company’s software, which is aimed at helping cable companies compete better with Internet video providers.

The startup’s cloud-based software manages how cable content is organized on the back end so that consumers can search and browse their programs across various Internet-connected devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The company is led by CEO Conrad Clemson.

BNI raised nearly $17 million in venture capital over two rounds, from Charles River Ventures, Comcast Interactive Capital, Cisco, TIme Warner Cable, and Castile Ventures. So this looks like a pretty healthy return for the startup’s investors. BNI had 50 employees as of a year ago.

San Jose, CA-based Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) says it plans to use BNI’s technology to advance its own Videoscape TV platform, which lets service providers deliver video to Internet-connected devices. Cisco recently acquired ExtendMedia and Inlet Technologies in the video sector, and also previously bought Starent Networks and LineSider Technologies in Massachusetts.

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Rhapsody, the online-subscription music service that spun out of RealNetworks last year, is acquiring online music pioneer Napster from retailer Best Buy.

Seattle-based Rhapsody didn’t say how much it is paying for Napster, and it wouldn’t say how many U.S. subscribers it may add through the acquisition, but the company did say Napster was its closest competitor in terms of paid subscribers: “They are, by a big margin, the second-largest paid premium service out there,” spokeswoman Jaimee Minney Steele says.

And that figure could grow even further. Steele tells Xconomy that Rhapsody also has an option to acquire Napster’s foreign operations, which includes subscribers in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada.

That would instantly make Rhapsody an international music-streaming business, at a time when the company is facing encroachment from European streaming startup Spotify (and a bunch of domestic upstarts, like Rdio and MOG.)

Rhapsody executives planned to fly to Europe on Tuesday as the company starts its due diligence on potentially acquiring the international subscribers as well, Steele says.

And if that happens, it might make sense for the Napster brand to live on—although Rhapsody plans to “sunset” the cat-logo Napster name in the U.S., it isn’t known whether the company might keep that branding for any non-U.S. subscribers.

“Rhapsody is not an international company at this point, so we don’t have any branding in the United Kingdom or Germany or any of those markets,” Steele says. “We obviously want to capitalize on any goodwill they have over there, so we’re obviously looking at it.”

One thing that neither brand has is a free tier, which is a major marketing difference with Spotify’s freemium model.

Best Buy (NASDAQ: BBY) bought Napster in 2008 for $121 million.

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What does “Jersey Shore” star Snooki have to do with the future of online media? Plenty, it turns out.

That’s one of the surprising things I learned recently chatting with Ben Elowitz, the CEO of Seattle-based Wetpaint, a well-financed startup that’s about a year into its newest mission: Trying to reinvent how content is created and delivered online.

Elowitz is probably best known as a co-founder of online jewel-seller Blue Nile (NASDAQ: NILE). But at Wetpaint, he’s been applying some pretty heavy-duty data analysis to the previously guess-and-shoot business of supplying people with entertainment news.

That’s where Snooki comes in. Wetpaint has found that, all other things being equal, putting the diminutive party girl in the headline of a story about her addictively crass MTV reality show gives a piece of content a 10 percent traffic bump over a headline that features another cast member.

Editors and writers have been guessing at these kinds of things for ages—ever hear the term “if it bleeds, it leads”? But learning how to write punchy headlines has always been more of an art than a science. And with the business models behind media decaying before our eyes, there’s an imperative in learning how to do things a new way.

Wetpaint set out to tackle that problem by starting essentially from scratch, and bringing a heavy technology focus to understanding its audience. From focus groups to one-on-one audience sessions to real-time tracking that shows which articles are getting shared, the company is obsessed with finding just the right combinations in a socially wired world.

And it’s attracting eyeballs. “In less than a year, we’ve gone from zero to over 3 million uniques a month, all targeted females 18 to 34,” Elowitz says. “That’s a lot faster than Groupon went in their first year.”

To do it any other way, Elowitz says, would essentially mean being out of touch with your audience—a risk media probably can’t afford to take.

“Not online—audiences are too fickle. There’s too much information,” he says. “It made sense when you had one brand and you could put a 700-page Vogue on the newsstand and have it take up this visual space with few other options and competitors. But online, when everything’s a Google search or a Facebook click or a type-in term away, there’s too many other competitors crowding it for anyone to be so haughty.”

Media purists love to hate this kind of obsession with traffic and virality, arguing that it will dumb everything down to simple goofy stories that give real news and information short shrift. But Elowitz’s work has attracted the attention of big media brands like The Associated Press, where leaders are looking for new insights into how content moves online.

Here’s a few of the top themes we explored in our recent sit-down, from capital-J journalism, to Google and Facebook, to disrupting advertising:

DOCTOR vs. DJ
“In media, you have this choice of being a doctor, who writes a prescription that’s good for the patient, or you could say, ‘Hey, our job is to be a DJ and we play what the people want to hear. And they’re really different mindsets,” Elowitz says. “The challenge of hard, investigative journalism is not exactly the same as that of entertainment media, right? But I think one of the natural things is, if you can figure out how to engage an audience in some of the lighter categories, you can use the success there to fund the really noble and important things in investigative journalism.

“I’m sure there are other things we learn about the audience that are important for news and investigative journalism. But at a minimum, you can also say that when news isn’t sustainable no one wins. And pop culture is about what do people want to know about.”

The implications for hard news aren’t merely a thought experiment, either. Wetpaint’s experimental team has run some tests on how possible it could be to harness high-level Web knowledge to actually deliver quality news content.

“We look at Twitter and Facebook not just as distribution, but as content sources, too. So we can see what’s important and what are the tweets that are catching on. And we’ve even gone so far as to … Next Page »

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PopCap Games is an undeniable Seattle success story. The company, started by three twenty-somethings in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, has evolved from a freemium version of “Bejeweled” into an international, multi-platform publisher with $100 million in revenue and 400 employees.

This year, with the casual games industry reaching mass-market investment potential, PopCap announced that it was aiming for an initial public offering to move to the next big phase in its history. Of course, IPO plans can mean a company is interested in being acquired, and the rumor that PopCap was in the middle of a $1 billion buyout from Electronic Arts dominated the region’s headlines this past week.

To follow up, I talked with a couple of industry analysts to help chew over the logic of an acquisition vs. going public. Personally, I’m still not sure which course would make the most sense for PopCap, if you take at face value the company’s statements about wanting to continue its course for years to come. The whole thing still hasn’t been confirmed, denied, or proven out with real-world results as of this writing.

Also making news around town:

—We rounded up the roughly $70 million in equity financing deals for Washington state companies in May, with three entrants getting $10 million or more: IT management company ExtraHop Networks, blood-stopping drug-maker Profibrix, and tax software startup Avalara.

—Xconomy’s Bruce Bigelow parsed the data from a new international survey of venture capitalists, which had some interesting predictions. By two-to-one margins, the roughly 165 U.S. venture capitalists surveyed said they expect investments in cloud computing and new media or social networks to increase over the next five years. Among the sectors expected to stay level or decline were biopharma, semiconductors, and telecoms.

—Speaking of cloud computing investments, we saw a handful of deals announced involving Bellevue, WA’s Ignition Partners. Two of them—deals with ScaleXtreme and Bromium—specifically included new Ignition managing director Frank Artale, a former Microsoftie who has returned to the Northwest after stints with Citrix Systems, Accel Partners, and others. The third Ignition cloud deal was with StorSimple.

—Anybody sick of daily deals yet? Yes? Not e-commerce king Amazon.com, which rolled out new markets for its house-brand online discounts service, expanding to its hometown of Seattle (and environs) from the original testbed of Boise, ID. Amazon’s offering, called AmazonLocal, is powered by LivingSocial, the No. 2 national deals site, which counts Amazon as an investor. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) says it’ll supply its own deals eventually, but it’s unclear when that’ll happen.

—And finally, social gaming startup Giant Thinkwell announced a $600,000 seed investment and rolled out its first official celebrity game, Mix-N-Match with Sir Mix-A-Lot; audio snippet sharing site Hark showed off a redesign for its premium multimedia collections; and social GPS startup Glympse raised $7.5 million led by Menlo Ventures and Ignition Partners.

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Seattle’s Hark, an entertainment website that lets users search, play and share audio snippets from movies, TV shows and other pop culture sources, is showing off a new design for its top-tier content. The new approach includes an upgraded display with an easier way to sift through quotes from a particular source, and more prominent buttons for using social channels like Twitter and Google +1.
The look is somewhat similar to YouTube’s, with options for additional plays in a ribbon across the bottom of the screen. Hark CEO David Aronchick says the new “Curated Collection” is in a beta mode right now, testing with the classic film version of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” before rolling out to other offerings.
As we detailed last month, Hark is among the Seattle startups that are trying to build bridges to the entertainment industry, capitalizing on the Seattle area’s strengths to help Hollywood embrace the digital age.

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Seattle social-game startup Giant Thinkwell, a TechStars company hatched at a Startup Weekend last year, is getting ready to roll out its first official celebrity-branded game, featuring Seattle hip-hop legend Sir Mix-A-Lot.

Word comes via Twitter, where folks are passing around an invite by Giant Thinkwell to help build social-media buzz for the game, called “Mix-N-Match with Sir Mix-A-Lot.”

We’ll have to wait until June 21 to see what the product looks like, but the prizes are said to include something that should bring a smile to northwesterners of a certain age: A ride down Broadway in Mix-A-Lot’s Lamborghini.

You see, long before he was a household name for the goofy club hit “Baby Got Back,” Mix-A-Lot made an early name with such classics as “Posse on Broadway,” which name-drops crucial Seattle landmarks like Dick’s Drive-In.

As we detailed last month, Giant Thinkwell is among the growing group of Seattle companies that are building bridges to the entertainment industry with the technology and gaming know-how concentrated in the Puget Sound region.

Giant Thinkwell’s original Startup Weekend pitch revolved around John Stamos’ “Uncle Jesse” character from the TV show “Full House,” but a deal couldn’t be struck with Stamos. It sounds like Sir Mix-A-Lot found the whole idea to be swass.

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With an established moviemaking hub so close in Vancouver, B.C., Seattle is probably never going to be ground zero for a lot of Hollywood productions. But this area’s entrepreneurs, with rich DNA in digital media, gaming, and e-commerce, could certainly make some waves by helping the entertainment industry navigate the digital era.

In this piece, I took a look at four such startups in the Seattle area who are trying to do exactly that. They range from a veteran entrepreneur with established success in L.A., to a group of Startup Weekend vets hammering away in the TechStars incubator.

Dave Long, who is on his second go-round with Hollywood, said the entertainment world has taken notice of the spark in Seattle: “I’ve had big executives say ‘Hey, what’s in the coffee up there? It seems like there’s a lot of creativity up there.’”

Elsewhere on the Seattle tech beat in the past week or so:

—The University of Washington‘s Foster School of Business unveiled the winners of its annual Business Plan Competition, a massive undertaking that whittled more than 100 entrants down to five finalists in about two months—with a goal of nurturing some new companies along the way. The top award-winners had nothing to do with consumer Internet plays (refreshing in the world of startup competitions), focusing instead on clean water, better food and advanced medical diagnostics.

—Could it be the start of a new stream of wireless entrepreneurs? A pair of former T-Mobile software architects, who just started their new company Mobilisafe this year, announced that they have already raised $1.2 million from Madrona Venture Group and Trinity Equity Partners. (T-Mobile, of course, is in the middle of a huge acquisition bid from AT&T). What’s Mobilisafe do? It’s still in stealth mode, but generally focuses on helping business IT departments handle the security risks posed by the growing number of personal mobile devices.

—One of the quickest startup acquisitions around was Google‘s recent purchase of Sparkbuy, the consumer electronics shopping site led by entrepreneur Dan Shapiro and crew. At the time, Xconomy (and many others) instantly figured this was an “acquhire” by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), since Sparkbuy had barely been out in the wild for two months with its service, which was promptly shut down by Google. Despite how it may look like a talent acquisition, Shapiro and Google told The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley that there’s a lot more to the story.

—In perhaps the funniest guest post of all time, Kirkland attorney Keith Cochran lays out an 11-song AC/DC playlist that also serves as a guidebook for entrepreneurs. Really? Really. And although there’s plenty of fun involved, Cochran delivers some sage advice, as with this gem from the “Hell’s Bells” entry: “The slightly playful grimness is a useful reminder: Anyone working in the entrepreneurial world will encounter the finality of failure.”

—VentureWire chimed in with a report that Boston-area VC firm Polaris Venture Partners was shuttering its Seattle office. Seattle has been the base for firm co-founder Steve Arnold, a former Microsoftie who is on the boards of some local companies. We couldn’t reach anyone at Polaris for comment, so stay tuned.

—In the world of cleantech, the Portland, OR-based venture firm Pivotal Investments released its new class of Pivotal Leaders—a cross-disciplinary group of cleantech leaders who are selected by their peers as top minds in the region spanning Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia.

—Cleantech and waste management startup Harvest Power, which has branches in Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., announced $6 million in financing. The company’s headquarters are in Waltham, MA, but co-founder Jan Allen is based in Seattle—he recently spoke at our latest Xconomy event, which focused on the future of alternative fuels.

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When Dave Long first started pitching movie studios on a new way to market their old titles, he encountered a fair bit of skepticism. After all, what could a boardgame entrepreneur from soggy Seattle possibly teach Hollywood about selling its own stars?

Nearly 10 years later, the “Scene It?” brand—which builds trivia games around movie and TV clips—has been adapted to iconic titles like Seinfeld, South Park, James Bond, and Harry Potter. The company that Long co-founded, Screenlife, was acquired by Paramount in 2008 and has sold some 20 million games worldwide.

And Hollywood’s major players, Long says, have a different feeling about visitors from up north. ”There is a little mystique around Seattle,” he says. “I’ve had big executives say ‘Hey, what’s in the coffee up there? It seems like there’s a lot of creativity up there.’”

That kind of reception from entertainment bigwigs is helping to fuel an emerging cluster of Seattle companies that are taking innovative approaches to selling entertainment’s products and personalities. These entrepreneurs are building on the area’s traditional strengths in digital media and gaming, with hopes of helping the entertainment industry navigate the fundamentally shifted economics of the digital age.

The roster includes Hark, a startup that aims to spread bite-size chunks of content through the social sphere; Hypershow, a quietly profitable company enabling richly layered digital movies; and Giant Thinkwell, an incubator-stage company that wants to help celebrities of any stripe reach their fans through quirky social games.

Dave Long is back on the job as well. His new company, Exponential Entertainment, is working with the studios to develop promotional digital games—and this time, they’re starting with some major first-run movies.

Building bridges to the star-studded streets of Hollywood still has its challenges, even in a highly networked age. It’s simply harder to build relationships and keep your finger on the pulse of an industry when you’re hundreds of miles away from Sunset Boulevard.

But there are also advantages to being based in the Northwest, says David Aronchick, the founder and CEO of Hark.

“It’s far more cost-effective to work out of Seattle, and you obviously have an incredible depth of technical talent here that allows you to execute very quickly comparatively, and do some really cool things,” he says. “We’re not unique, but we certainly have a lot of cross-pollination because we’re a very migratory city. We pull in a lot of people from all over the place, especially people from on the West Coast. And this is a great place to set up shop.”

Here’s a deeper look at the startups I identified as part of Seattle’s emerging entertainment innovation cluster. I didn’t include folks who produce entertainment-themed content of their own, like the blog publisher Wetpaint, for example. The focus here is mostly on companies that are aiming for business partnerships with the entertainment industry.

Also purposely left off the list was a major name—the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb, which is owned by Amazon.com and headquartered in Seattle. Although it might seem kind of odd to think of … Next Page »

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Seattle-based PopCap Games said today it has acquired social gaming firm ZipZapPlay, based in San Francisco. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but ZipZapPlay has 17 employees (led by founders Curt Bererton and Mathilde Pignol) and gives PopCap a social-game studio presence in the Bay Area. The studio will report to Jon David, PopCap’s vice president of social games development. PopCap has been moving strongly into social-network games, with Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz, and says it is the third largest Facebook game developer, after Zynga and Electronic Arts.

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The Seattle tech scene got its first entrant in what looks like a coming wave of initial public offerings when Zillow made its intentions official, filing paperwork with federal regulators Monday for a future stock sale. In its filing, the online real-estate listing and mortgage database said it would seek about $52 million from the stock market—not a huge sum for an IPO, but significant for the area’s entrepreneurship and investing community nonetheless.

Zillow has seen increasing competition in the online real-estate sector, including vocal San Francisco-based startup Trulia, which recently boasted that it was assembling an “IPO-ready management team.” HitWise reported that Zillow’s traffic ranked No. 3 among real estate websites, one spot ahead of Trulia and just behind Yahoo—where Zillow’s listings appear under a partnership.

There was plenty more action elsewhere on the Seattle tech beat:

—PopCap looks like it’s also ready to hit the public markets. The Seattle casual game company recently went on a media and investor blitz in New York, talking up its growth, revenue, and position in the hot gaming market. We gleaned a lot of interesting bits from the various interviews that PopCap gave, including an assertion that it generated $100 million in revenue last year, an increase of about 20 percent from the year before. The company’s leaders also discussed difficulties in getting investors to understand the difference between its development compared to a console game publisher, and the attractiveness of hitting the public market before social-game giant Zynga.

—Speaking of Zynga, I headed over to the San Francisco company’s new Seattle office to look at the digs and hear some remarks from founder and CEO Mark Pincus on the company’s plans for its new Northwest beachhead. In one word: Hiring. The maker of addictive Facebook-based games like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars” was not shy at all about inviting techies in the packed crowd to send in their resumes—Pincus gave out his e-mail address and spent quite a bit of time talking one-on-one with people afterward about jobs.

—Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen continued drumming up interest in his new autobiography, “Idea Man,” with an interview on 60 Minutes that delved into some of the early Microsoft stories and Bill Gates arguments detailed in the excerpt published recently in Vanity Fair. For a guy who hasn’t … Next Page »

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PopCap, the Seattle-based maker of popular online and casual games like “Bejeweled” and “Plants vs. Zombies,” is coming off a very newsy week as it tries to build buzz among investors ahead of a possible initial public offering later this year. Of course, if PopCap actually files an IPO prospectus with securities regulators, the company would have a legal duty to keep quiet—so it’s clearly getting the hype-building done now.

First, we saw CEO David Roberts giving Reuters some more detail on the IPO plans. Roberts pegged the target date as the fall, specifically between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, provided the market doesn’t stumble. Roberts added that he thought it would be attractive to go public before Zynga, the red-hot maker of “FarmVille” and other social-game hits, gobbles up all kinds of mindshare on Wall Street.

PopCap also laid out some selective financial numbers in its media media blitz. The company said it hauled in about $100 million in revenue last year, which represented growth from about $80 million in 2009 and $50 million in 2008. Digital sales account for about 80 percent of the company’s business, with the balance from retail stores.

Reuters reported that PopCap “is auditioning bankers, who are giving “test road shows” and presenting slides to potential institutional investors to gauge the viability of the IPO.” And Roberts said he’s heard pitches from both the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ about potentially listing the company, although he said NASDAQ, the trading hub of more smallcap tech companies, “is more likely.”

Business Insider followed up by publishing some of the slides from PopCap’s presentation about itself, showing that the mobile platform has kept relatively steady. About one-third of the players of PopCap games have used the mobile platform in the past five years. In that same time, console and online play have grown to make up for a decline in desktop gaming. Another slide said PopCap’s monthly social-game revenue has doubled since last August, to about $2.5 million.

In an interview with Games.com—which noted that the company was on an “NYC media tour where they’ve been outlining their plans to make a splash on the stock market”—PopCap co-founder John … Next Page »

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Seattle-based MOD Systems, which makes technology to deliver movie and music files through self-service kiosks, is putting some workers on unpaid furlough as it attempts to raise more money. The news comes via TechFlash, which says it confirmed the furloughs with CEO Anthony Bay today. TechFlash also notes this SEC filing from early last month that said MOD Systems had raised about $500,000 of a planned $8 million financing. MOD has been through rough waters recently: Co-founder and former CEO Mark Phillips was convicted of federal fraud and money laundering charges last month, and the company said late last year that it was cutting about a third of its workforce.

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I guess this means it’s game on in Seattle for tech-company hiring gimmicks. The folks at Cheezburger Network, fresh off a new acquisition and $30 million in venture financing, put together a quick marketing stunt today outside Key Arena, where Amazon.com was having a big company meeting.

About a half-dozen Cheezburger employees, including CEO Ben Huh, were handing out burgers from Seattle institution Dick’s, along with doughnuts from Top Pot and job fliers, telling the Amazon techies to spread the word to any friends who are looking for a job. Cheezburger, for those who don’t know, maintains a line of quirky entertainment and humor sites, including Fail Blog and I Can Has Cheezburger. The company has about 60 employees now, and is seeking to grow by about a third.

Check out the video for Huh’s rundown on the job categories Cheezburger is looking to fill and where, since they just opened a New York office. (Also note how one person looks pretty puzzled by the business card, but brightens up considerably once the burger is handed over.)

Cheezburger was able to get a hold of about 200 burgers in the roughly half-hour window they gave the people at Dick’s to fill the order, and supplemented it with about 20 dozen doughnuts. The noontime Amazon crowd ran through it pretty quickly.

There’s a bit of seriousness behind the goofball factor in peddling junk food to techies. We’ve previously covered the Seattle area’s tight market for tech talent, a dynamic that’s stoked by a combination of relatively flat college enrollment slots, an expanding tech sector, and the arrival of more companies from Silicon Valley who are looking for talent up north as their own job market heats up.

“It is really hard,” Huh says. “Just because we got a VC round doesn’t mean we’re going to just hire everybody we can find. We still want to keep the quality up.” That highlights another conundrum some commenters on previous stories have mentioned: All these tech companies say it’s increasingly difficult to fill jobs, but they can also sound pretty selective about who they want to hire.

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The Cheezburger Network‘s bid to dominate meme-dom took another leap forward this week with the acquisition of Know Your Meme, a site that attempts to trace the histories of passed-around bits of Internet pop culture that are the fodder for Cheezburger’s humor sites. But the purchase of Know Your Meme, said to be in the seven figures, is significant for more than adding context to a moment of funny: The acquisition also plants the Cheezburger flag in New York.

Founder and CEO Ben Huh told us the Seattle-based company definitely plans to add more staff to the “Cheezburger East” offices in Manhattan. This was the first big buy we’ve seen Huh make since Cheezburger landed $30 million in investment backing earlier this year, and it appears the guy behind the weird cat photos means business. Other big news from the past week or so in Seattle-area technology business:

—RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) CEO Bob Kimball resigned abruptly on Monday, with no specific reason identified. Kimball was a veteran of the Seattle online media company, which hung around through the dot-com bust and has spent the past year or so trying to slim down and remake itself. Most of the heavy lifting on that score fell to Kimball, who took over the chief executive’s chair from Real founder and chairman Rob Glaser early last year. Kimball said just a few weeks ago that Real had reached the end of its restructuring phase and was preparing to move forward—that restructuring included shedding a good number of jobs and spinning off the Rhapsody music joint venture. At this point, it looks like either Kimball, the company, or both decided that it was a good time to make a switch. Glaser has said he’s not coming back as CEO.

—I dove into the Seattle-area market for tech jobs, and folks who watch that scene closely are ringing alarm bells about the ability of this region to sustain the growth needed to keep companies staffed. It’s particularly worth paying attention to since the college system doesn’t have the capacity to supply people as fast as companies like Microsoft and Amazon need them, which naturally leads to some poaching of the big boys’ talent. This is not necessarily a new dynamic, but it is becoming more amplified as more Silicon Valley companies move northward to satisfy their own hiring needs beyond the Bay Area. Stuck in the middle are smaller companies, particularly those that have made it past the early startup phase and are pushing toward a second round of growth and evolution.

—I had fun sitting down with Seattle startup lawyer Eric Koester for a debrief on the seemingly overnight debut of Zaarly, a kind of reverse-auction service that allows people to tap into mobile networks to supply goods, services, or close to anything else legal that they’d like to pay for (there is a ban on … Next Page »

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File this under “one to watch more closely.”

Before I tell you about the company or its news, consider a few trends. People are watching more videos on their iPads and other tablet devices. Broadcasters, cable companies, and video content owners are starting to focus more on how to deliver TV shows and other entertainment “over the top,” directly to Internet-connected devices. Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is now competing in cloud-based entertainment (online music and video); one of its advantages over Netflix, Hulu, and others is that it’s an early adopter of using graphics chips (GPUs) for cloud-computing applications like video processing.

Speaking of video processing, there has been some interesting activity in that sector. In the last month, North Carolina-based Inlet Technologies was acquired by Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) for $95 million. And the Irish Times reported a rumor that San Francisco-based online video firm Envivio plans to file for an IPO in July (with a valuation between $280-$340 million). That might leave Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies, one of the few independent companies left in the sector, in a good spot.

And Elemental has some news today: PBS, the broadcasting network, is using Elemental’s software, together with a system from Redmond, WA-based RadiantGrid, to convert video files to the right formats quickly and efficiently for distribution. The significance to Elemental is that the startup now counts seven of the 10 biggest media networks as customers, including Disney/ABC, CBS Interactive, and Time Warner Cable.

“It’s a sign you’ve been approved by someone willing to bet on new technologies to lower their cost and provide a better experience for consumers,” says Elemental CEO and co-founder Sam Blackman. He adds that PBS will save millions of dollars per year by switching to file-based video delivery. (If you know what a transponder is, the PBS system can now use one instead of seven of them, Blackman says.)

A quick update on Elemental: The company, which started in 2006 with the idea of reinventing how people watch video online, now has 39 employees, and its revenues this quarter are “very significantly greater” than in the same period last year, Blackman says. He declined to give more specifics about revenue growth or profitability.

Given some of the ongoing consolidation in online video companies, I asked him about possible exits for Elemental—but he didn’t take the bait. “Elemental is completely focused on creating great products for our customers,” he says. “Our focus is on not getting distracted.”

Nevertheless, the market is opening up to the mainstream, which could bode well for a fundamental technology play like Elemental. “The space is definitely heating up,” Blackman says. The trend towards Internet video delivery to devices like tablets, he says, is “a wave that’s growing very fast right now and lifting companies in the space.”

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Hot on the heels of The New York Times’ new metered-access pay plan for digital content, Remond, WA-based OwnZones Media Network is touting an initial $500,000 round of financing. The investors were not disclosed.

The company says it’s building a digital content aggregation service based around charging consumers a monthly fee to access higher-quality material with more targeted, less intrusive advertising.

Now that the Times has taken the big leap, there are going to be scores of publishers in smaller markets looking for a way to charge an online gate fee and drive people back toward the more lucrative printed product. Third-party providers are clearly going to have a niche to exploit there.

As a longtime participant in and student of the news business, I am personally skeptical that we are headed for a widespread “era of paid Internet content,” as OwnZones says. The New York Times can probably pull it off. But most newspapers aren’t The New York Times. Publishers in the middle tier are trying to find a turnstile price for their content, and I think they’re going to be very disappointed at how low it is.

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San Francisco-based social gaming giant Zynga announced today it has acquired the team from Waltham, MA-based game studio Floodgate Entertainment. Financial details weren’t given, but the deal is Zynga’s 10th announced acquisition in as many months (including Cambridge, MA-based Conduit Labs, which is now Zynga Boston). Floodgate is led by a number of employees from the late Looking Glass Studios, including founder Paul Neurath, who is joining Zynga Boston as creative director. Looking Glass was known for creating games such as System Shock, Thief, and Ultima Underworld. Floodgate is known for its casual, mobile, and PC games like MoPets, Flowerz, Madden NFL 2005 and 2006, and NASCAR 07.

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Microsoft Research is having its annual TechFest get-together across the lake, including some pretty cool-looking demonstrations and discussion of what Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) gets for its $9 billion in annual R&D spending. Of course, one of the biggest storylines out of the research shop lately is the popularity of the Kinect motion-sensor for more than just Xbox 360 games.

The Seattle Times’ Sharon Chan—one of the few reporters allowed to cover the Fest this year—reports that senior vice president Rick Rashid says “Kinect is already a multibillion-dollar business.” I guess I’d like to see the income statement on that one. There’s more on the Microsoft Research site.

A few other items to note in the Seattle-area tech scene:

—Seattle-based HomePipe Networks announced $1.1 million in financing led by Mark DiSalle of Scout Analytics. The other investors weren’t named. HomePipe makes networking software that enables users to access content on their home computer anywhere using their mobile phone. The app is available free or for $24 per year at a premium level.

—A new nonprofit aimed at boosting science, technology, engineering, and math education in Washington surfaced this week by passing out $2.4 million in grants to people working in those arenas around the state. Washington STEM said it’s already raised $20 million with a goal of collecting $100 million over 10 years. Big names from the Seattle area are among the contributors, including Microsoft, Boeing (NYSE: BA), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and McKinstry.

—Seattle-based Ookla is showing off a revamped Speedtest site, blending some social and game-type functions with the existing technology for checking how speedy your high-speed Internet really is. The new features include something called Speed Wave, which lets several people sign into a group for longer-range connection analyses and win little badges and other social network-enabled trinkets for participating. These guys made bigger news recently with their comparison test of iPhone speeds on AT&T vs. Verizon.

—Nominations are open for the second year of Pivotal Leaders, a network of community-nominated entrepreneurs and executives who will be voted the most promising candidates to lead new companies in cleantech. The effort is organized by Pivotal Investments, a Portland, OR-based early stage venture fund focused on cleantech and sustainability. Last year’s group of 32 leaders included folks from established companies like McKinstry and Microsoft, but also entrepreneurs.

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When we last checked in with Brayden Olson, it was early fall, and the wunderkind co-founder and CEO of Redmond, WA-based videogame startup Novel was busy telling us about his company’s massively multiplayer online game, Empire & State.

That was all well and good. But the real intrigue behind Novel is its plan to develop virtual-reality simulations for businesses—sort of like “The Matrix” for companies, so they can do things like train employees, test out different management techniques, and evaluate job candidates.

Today the company is taking its first public step in that direction. Novel is announcing a strategic partnership with the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. More specifically, the deal is with the school’s Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking. Financial terms were not given, but the idea is to collaborate on creating “a new category of enterprise simulations products,” according to a press release. And one more thing: Novel has scored a commitment from its first corporate customer to begin using the startup’s business simulations as they become available. The unnamed customer is a Fortune 1000 company in the Northwest.

Olson, in an e-mail, says the UW deal “is an unusual partnership chosen out of specific intent.” UW brings “in-depth material knowledge and research,” he says, while Novel brings game industry expertise and technology. It sounds like the two organizations will work together to collect and analyze data on what kinds of game-like simulations are most useful to companies for things like gauging employees’ leadership abilities and business problem-solving skills.

As far as I can tell, Novel hasn’t developed any full-fledged business simulations yet, but its engineers are on it. Olson added in a statement that the company is working to “forge partnerships and customer relationships that will secure long-term leadership of the enterprise simulations category.” The ultimate goal, he said, is to make the business world “more efficient, productive, imaginative and fun.”

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