It was a quiet week for deals in the Northwest, but we dug up some important ones in business software, wireless, and biotech.

—Seattle-based Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) acquisition of Zappos, the online apparel and shoe seller based in Las Vegas, has closed. The deal, first announced back in July, is valued at $1.2 billion in Amazon stock.

—Bellevue, WA-based Onehub has raised $1.3 million in Series A funding from Ignition Partners and angel investors. The company was founded in 2007 and makes Web-based software for business collaboration and file-sharing.

—We took a close look at small financing deals in the Northwest, worth between $100,000 and $1 million, that have flown under most people’s radar in the past month. According to stats from ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information and data services company tracking the innovation economy, the following companies raised a small amount of equity in September: Acucela, Adometry, BallLogic, InEnTec, Inson Medical Systems, Second Porch, Site 9, SynapticMash, Smilebox, Vantos, and WA 32609.

—Seattle-based Kineta, a biotech firm developing drugs to fight autoimmune diseases, has formed a strategic alliance with MPI Research, based in Michigan, as Luke reported. Financial terms of the deal weren’t given, but Kineta said it will receive support for animal studies that will enable the company to begin clinical trials next year.

—Portland, OR-based RF Arrays raised $6.5 million in equity, options, warrants, and/or other rights to acquire securities, according to a regulatory filing. The investors were not disclosed, but New York-based New Science Ventures has previously backed RF Arrays, which develops wireless communications technology.

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Bellevue, WA-based Onehub announced it has raised $1.3 million in Series A financing from Bellevue-based Ignition Partners and angel investors. Onehub makes cloud-based software for collaboration and file-sharing, and was founded in 2007. Back in April, we reported that Onehub had raised $600,000 from undisclosed investors, and in September we mentioned the company was part of Ignition’s portfolio.

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Back in August we wrote about Concord, MA-based EnjoyMyMedia, which was beta-testing a system it’s positioning as everyman’s media-sharing technology. The company describes itself as a mini-TV network; at its site, you can download a program that lets you turn any folder on your computer into a “transmitter” that will “broadcast” any file you put there to friends or family who subscribe to your private “channel.”

This week the company officially launched the service, and added a few features that weren’t there in August—including the ability to watch Flash versions of large video files while the original MP4 or MPEG files download, the ability to track files as subscribers forward them to others, and the ability to scan print items and transmit them with a single click.

EnjoyMyMedia CEO Keith Loris calls this latter feature “a small technical thing,” but says it’s illustrative of the company’s philosophy. “We do not view our mission as file-sharing; we’re trying to help you share your personal life, and a lot of people’s personal lives are not digital,” Loris says. “If you have a desktop scanner, this lets you scan a piece of paper right into your channel, whether it’s the portrait of Grandma on the wall or the picture your kid drew at preschool.”

The Flash feature is another seemingly small but useful enhancement to the service. If you’re trying to share an hour-long video of your daughter’s ballet recital, Loris points out, you don’t want to make viewers wait while their computers download a 1-gigabyte file. EnjoyMyMedia transcodes MP4, MPEG, and other video formats into Flash. The file then starts playing in a subscriber’s browser immediately, regardless of the size of the original file, which continues to download in the background. “It makes long videos really usable for casual Internet users for the first time,” Loris says.

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If you fancy yourself an amateur TV network exec, the Web now has any number of tools to help you create and broadcast your own personal multimedia channel. I’ve tested several, including SplashCast, Vizrea, Veodia, and Bubbleshare, and have several more on my list to try, such as MixerCast, Flektor, Stickam, Ustream, blip.tv, Vpod.tv, Kyte.tv, and Cozmo.tv. But all of these services suffer from what I’ll call a high “geek quotient” that will probably limit their adoption. You have to know something about creating, formatting, and uploading media files in the first place. And then, to embed the channels in your Web pages, it really helps to have an understanding of HTML and blogging tools.

But why should geeks have all the fun? The guys at EnjoyMyMedia (yeah, none of us here much like that name, either), a small, self-funded startup based in Concord, MA, have been working on what they call a “brain-dead-easy” media-sharing system that mainstream netizens can use to broadcast their photos, videos, audio files, and other files to friends and family members without learning a line of code. At the heart of the system is the Really Simple Syndication or RSS standard, which, despite its name, is a somewhat technical way to subscribe to Web content. But EnjoyMyMedia’s software masks the details behind a truly easy-to-master interface and a familiar television metaphor revolving around “transmitters” and “receivers.”

“My 72-year-old dad is a target customer for this, and if you asked him what a blog or a social-networking site is, he would not have a clue,” says Keith Loris, EnjoyMyMedia’s president and CEO. “But if you say I’m going to have a transmitter on my PC and you’ll have a receiver with my channel, he gets it right away, because he watches TV.”

Loris says he and partner Bill Oncay, the company’s chief technology officer, set out to build EnjoyMyMedia two years ago. Their motivation: both had ReplayTV DVRs and were both fans of the fast-paced Fox show 24, but were frustrated because there was no easy way to swap video files if one of them forgot to record an episode. “It was like, why can’t I send this to you?” recounts Loris. “We could have FTP’d it [that is, used the ancient File Transfer Protocol--eds.], or set up a website for temporary storage, and we actually had the skills, but it would have been a pain. That was the impetus—-thinking that there’s got to be a better way.”

The pair designed a PC program would monitor a hard drive for new content, then send the content automatically to another PC, but the transfer mechanism was still a quandary. “At one point we had the bright idea of marrying that with RSS,” Loris says. All Web browsers today allow users to subscribe to RSS feeds, which are essentially notification services that alert subscribers whenever a new media item has been published somewhere on the Web. Loris and Oncay took that a step further, devising a way to create an RSS feed for an individual Windows folder on a user’s computer.

To begin “netcasting” on EnjoyMyMedia, a user simply has to designate a folder on their hard drive as the “channel” for the data to be transmitted, then send invitations through the EnjoyMyMedia website to friends or family members. Subscribers can add channels to the free RSS receiver pages provided by iGoogle, Firefox, Internet Explorer, My Yahoo, Facebook, and the like. Every time the netcaster adds a file to the designated folder, a thumbnail representation of it shows up immediately in every subscriber’s RSS feed. But only when a subscriber clicks on a thumbnail is the file actually transmitted.

By making media-sharing so simple, Loris, Oncay, and partner Warner Jones (the company’s vice president of website products) hope to attract a user base of average families—the kind of people who exchange birthday-party photo prints as a matter of course, but wouldn’t be likely to sit down and spend several hours uploading digital photos to a site like Flickr.

And given this family orientation, the company is putting an emphasis on security—even at the expense of some convenience. “I don’t want a video of my 15-year-old daughter just floating out there on the Web, where who knows who’s going to watch it,” says Loris. Subscribers are required to enter a username and password to view the thumbnails they click; a password is good for 24 hours, after which the viewer must log in again. (Security was once Loris’s bailiwick: He was president and CEO of Softlock, a company that earned fame for providing the digital-rights-management software protection for “Riding the Bullet,” a Stephen King novella published solely in e-book form by Simon & Shuster in 2000.)

EnjoyMyMedia’s basic service is free, and includes a 200-megabyte online locker where frequently viewed files can be stored so that others can download them “on demand,” i.e., even if the netcaster’s PC is off. The company plans to earn revenue by offering larger on-demand lockers—$4.99 a month for 10 gigabytes and $9.99 for 40 gigabytes. Paying users will have advertising-free channels, while people on the receiving end of media posted by free netcasters may see targeted ads.

Other software packages, such as Adesso Systems’ Tubes, also turn Windows folders into vehicles for private file-sharing across the Internet. But most require some kind of software to be installed on both ends of the connection, and that, Loris believes, means that none of these services are as simple or as straightforward as EnjoyMyMedia. “There are companies out there with ‘tubes’ and ‘pipes,’ but what does all of that mean to the average user?” says Loris. “Now, broadcasting—I kinda get that.”

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