After previewing its expansion plans last summer, San Diego’s EvoNexus, the free startup incubator established by the non-profit technology group CommNexus, has opened a newly renovated downtown office space. A dozen early stage companies began moving into the incubator Monday.

CommNexus founded EvoNexus in 2009, when San Diego’s innovation economy was reeling from the Great Recession. The incubator has taken in 14 companies so far, including six that have moved out of the EvoNexus incubator in University City. Office space, utilities, and other services are provided to startups free of charge, and companies leave with no obligations to EvoNexus or CommNexus.

“As far as we know, we’re the only pro bono incubator in the country,” EvoNexus chairman Kevin Hell says in a statement issued late yesterday. “The goal is to grow sustainable tech companies and expand the industry here in San Diego.”

When the EvoNexus incubator first opened in Sorrento Valley, organizers said they wanted to host startups developing advanced communications technologies, including wireless life sciences and smart grid networking.

Since then, CommNexus moved EvoNexus to University City and broadened its criteria. The industry group established the new downtown EvoNexus to host startups that are focused primarily on developing Internet software, Web services, gaming, social networking, and cloud computing technologies. The privately held Irvine Co. made the 15,000-square foot space available to EvoNexus at no cost. The incubator takes up an entire floor of the building at 101 W. Broadway, known locally as the AT&T building.

Hell says he sees parallels in the downtown San Diego locale with San Francisco’s SoMa, the downtown neighborhood South of Market Street that has become a magnet for social media startups and mobile app developers. The nightlife, housing, and amenities available in San Diego’s city center should appeal to young entrepreneurs, Hell says.

CommNexus plans to continue to operate its incubator in University City. The 12 companies in the new downtown space are:

Antengo: Real-time mobile classifieds.

BigSho: Social webcam game show.

Chatmeter: Online reputation management.

Fashioning Change: Shopping experience for eco-friendly apparel.

Saambaa: Social media app for finding things to do.

SwoopThat: Online textbook shopping by course.

TapChow: Cloud-based restaurant experience manger.

Taphunter: Mobile app for locating places that serve craft beer.

UgliApps: Mobile apps focused on food.

Voluware: Saas healthcare information software.

Xpenser: Web-based tracking of business expenses, time, and mileage.

Zambig: Web-based service that provides online outlet for radio ads.

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San Diego’s StockTwits is developing a bit of a Canadian accent, eh, through a partnership being announced today with Toronto-based Q4 Web Systems, which provides online investor relations services for publicly traded companies throughout North America.

StockTwits is an online social media network that enables traders and shareholders to share their market insights, ideas, charts, and news in real time via Twitter. The startup structures financial and investor-related information from its Twitter feed by stock, user, reputation, and other criteria. StockTwits also enables users to save the stocks they follow to their own portfolios and to limit the comments tweeted about each stock to trusted sources.

As I reported last summer, the four-year-old startup has determined that its chief source of revenue also lies with the investor relations and public relations units of publicly traded companies.

By introducing a ticker tag symbol for publicly traded stocks, $(ticker), StockTwits makes it possible for public companies to sign up for a higher level of StockTwits’ Web service and to “claim” their stock tickers. Once claimed, a company’s IR and PR teams can use the ticker tag to distribute corporate information over the Web in real time.

By partnering with Q4, StockTwits plans to integrate its services with the subscription-based services that Q4 provides its corporate customers. Q4 says its website services include more than 30 IR “best practices” modules that help companies properly provide information and other services to investors and shareholders.

“We’re working with them to make it easier for people to use both of our products,” says Francis Costello, StockTwits’ chief operating officer. He tells me StockTwits has more … Next Page »

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San Diego’s MOGL, a Web-based customer loyalty and rewards program for restaurants and bars, says it has raised $10 million in venture funding to fuel its expansion into San Francisco, New York, and other markets.

The Menlo Park, CA, office of Sigma Partners led the Series B round, which was joined by San Diego’s Avalon Ventures and Austin, TX-based Austin Ventures. That brings total funding for MOGL to $12.4 million, according to a statement from the company. Entrepreneurs Jon Carder, Jarrod Cuzens, and Jeff Federman started MOGL in 2010.

The Internet startup offers its customers multiple incentives for returning to member restaurants and bars, using a mixture of technology, games, and psychology. The incentives include a 10 percent cash back each time a customer returns to eat at participating restaurants. A contest  offers monthly cash prizes to the top three most-frequent customers at each locale. Customers also can automatically donate a meal to someone in need every time they spend $20.

MOGL Homepage Screenshot

MOGL says it provides customer analytics and return-on-investment data for participating bars and eateries. In a statement from the company, Sigma partner Peter Solvik says, “The MOGL team has generated an explosive response from both consumers and restaurant partners, while effectively positioning itself as the most innovative loyalty platform of its kind.”

Since it was launched last April, MOGL has signed up nearly 350 Southern California-based eateries and bars, donated more than 27,000 meals to Feeding America, and has rewarded its members with more than $350,000 in cash back to date.

The company also offers a location-based mobile app for iPhone and Android, so MOGL members can easily locate participating restaurants while on the go. The mobile apps also help customers track their cash rewards and jackpot opportunities, as well as the number of meals donated in their name.

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There’s been very little change in top-level internet domains (like .com, .org, .us, etc.) for a long time. But a number of years ago I started thinking about the possibility of having a new .data top-level domain (TLD). And starting this week, there’ll finally be a period when it’s possible to apply to create such a thing.

It’s not at all clear what’s going to happen with new TLDs—or how people will end up feeling about them. Presumably there’ll be TLDs for places and communities and professions and categories of goods and events. A .data TLD would be a slightly different kind of thing. But along with some other interested parties, I’ve been exploring the possibility of creating such a thing.

With Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica—as well as our annual Data Summit—we’ve been deeply involved with the worldwide data community, and coordinating the creation of a .data TLD would be an extension of that activity.

But what would be the point? For me, it’s about highlighting the exposure of data on the internet—and providing added impetus for organizations to expose data in a way that can efficiently be found and accessed.

In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains. But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was some standard way to get access to whatever structured data any organization wants to expose?

Right now there are conventions for websites about exposing sitemaps that tell web crawlers how to navigate the sites. And there are plenty of loose conventions about how websites are organized. But there’s really nothing about structured data.

Now of course today’s web is primarily aimed at two audiences: human readers and search engine crawlers. But with Wolfram|Alpha and the idea of computational knowledge, it’s become clear that there’s another important audience: automated systems that can compute things.

There are product catalogs, store information, event calendars, regulatory filings, inventory data, historical reference material, contact information—lots of things that can be very usefully computed from. But even if these things are somewhere on an organization’s website, there’s no standard way to find them, let alone standard structured formats for them.

My concept for the .data domain is to use it to create the “data web”—in a sense a parallel construct to the ordinary web, but oriented toward structured data intended for computational use. The notion is that alongside a website like wolfram.com, there’d be wolfram.data.

If a human went to wolfram.data, there’d be a structured summary of what data the organization behind it wanted to expose. And if a computational system went there, it’d find just what it needs to ingest the data, and begin computing with it.

Needless to say, as we’ve learned over and over again in building Wolfram|Alpha, getting the underlying data is just the beginning of the story. The real work usually starts when one wants to compute from it—so that one can answer specific questions, generate specific reports, and so on.

For example, in our recent work on making the Best Buy product catalog computable, the original data (which came to us as a database dump) was perfectly easy to read. The real work came in the whole rest of the pipeline that was involved in making that data computable.

But the first step is to get the underlying data. And my concept for the .data domain is to provide a uniform mechanism—accessible to any organization, of any size—for exposing the underlying data.

Now of course one could just start a convention that organizations should have a “/datamap.xml” file (or somesuch) in the root of their web domains, just like a sitemap—rather than having a whole separate .data site. But I think introducing a new .data top-level domain would give much more prominence to the creation of the data web—and would provide the kind of momentum that’d be needed to get good, widespread, standards for the various kinds of data.

What is the relation of all this to the semantic web? The central notion of the semantic web is to introduce markup for human-readable web pages that makes them easier for computers to understand and process. And there’s some overlap here with the concept of the data web. But the bulk of the data web is about providing a place for large lumps of structured data that no human would ever directly want to deal with.

A decade ago I suggested to early search engine pioneers that they could get to the deep web by defining standards for how to expose data from databases. For a while there was enthusiasm about exposing “web services”, and now there are all manner of APIs made available by different organizations.

It’s been interesting for me in the past few years to be involved in the emergence of the modern data community. And from what I have seen, I think we’re now just reaching a critical point, where a wide range of organizations are ready to engage in delivering large-scale structured data in standardized forms. So it is a convenient coincidence that this is happening just when it becomes possible to create a .data top-level domain.

We’re certainly not sure what all the issues about a .data TLD will be, and we’re actively seeking input and partners in this effort. But I think there’s a potentially important opportunity, so I’m trying to do what I can to provide leadership, and further help to accelerate the birth of the data web.

[This post also appears on Stephen Wolfram's blog---Eds.]

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Mingle, a San Diego Internet holding company founded in 2005, says it’s expanding its online recruiting business, Climber.com, with the acquisition of Affinity Circles, a Sunnyvale, CA-based startup built around alumni organizations and other social networks.

While financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, Mingle CEO Michael O’Brien sized the deal for me, saying Affinity Circles had five employees while Mingle now has about 40, following several years of explosive growth. “This is a neat deal for us,” O’Brien says. “It means we’ll probably hire another 20 to 30 people for Affinity Circles in 2012 if we hit all the necessary milestones.”

O’Brien’s move into online career services seems like a logical extension from his previous San Diego startup, financialaid.com, an online student loan services business he co-founded six years ago. Financialaid.com’s founders sold their business to San Diego’s Education Lending Group for $40 million in cash and stock in October, 2004. Three months later, the Education Lending Group was itself acquired for $381 million in cash by the CIT Group, a New York banking and financial services company.

But O’Brien says he didn’t plan to move immediately from student loans to career services. Rather, he says he first started Mingle—and Climber.com was one of its first products. O’Brien says he also put two other Internet companies under the Mingle banner, a student loan business and a natural language search tool, but neither survived. “Our original business plan focused on a single customer acquisition cost with multiple products to cross-sell. Thus, the mingling of businesses,” O’Brien says.

He adds that Mingle has been “operationally profitable” since 2010, after raising about $3 million from … Next Page »

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With the flip of a switch, a Web 2.0 startup that began life in mid-2009 has launched SocialIQ.com, a new beta website that also marks the San Diego company’s change to a new identity. Originally known as Soovox, the company now known as SocialIQ is making a strategic adjustment to align its corporate brand with its Web-based service, which measures users’ online influence.

“With Soovox, we made the mistake of trying to do too much with our limited resources,” says Akram Benmbarek, SocialIQ’s founding CEO. “Today we’re focusing on influence measurement, and helping brands engage their audience through their influential fans.”

With the mid-course correction, Benmbarek says he also wants to raise a round of Series A capital from venture investors—and therein lies the rub. Benmbarek and his team are keenly aware that they are competing with better-known startups like Klout, which measures online influence, and MyLikes, which uses online leaders in social media marketing.

But the evaporation of San Diego’s hometown venture capital has put SocialIQ at a disadvantage, according to Edward Isarevich, SocialIQ’s director of marketing and product development. “While innovating at a greater pace than our competitors in the Bay Area, they are the ones getting the funding,” Isarevich says. “Therefore we are seriously considering moving to the Bay Area, which would be a loss for the local economy.”

Benmbarek expects the choice will become apparent in coming months, as SocialIQ builds out the features and services of its new website, which was launched late Thursday. He has personal reasons for staying here—his wife wanted to live in San Diego when they married—and their family has become established here.

Akram Benmbarek

On the other hand, Benmbarek says he was previously living in Silicon Valley. He says he worked on late-stage financing of technology companies at Advanced Equities Financial Corp. Before that, he was working in wealth management at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and UBS. He says he has raised less than $1 million in seed capital—mostly from angel investors in the valley.

Benmbarek originally called the company Soovox—your voice—with the idea of creating an online social media platform empowering consumers to make their voices heard. The startup officially launched a beta version of its Soovox website in November, 2010. Its proprietary “Social Influence Quotient” (Social IQ) was just one component of its overall service, although Benmbarek says it has been the most important component of the company’s strategy.

The company says its Social IQ is based on a proprietary program that measures a user’s influence—drawing from key social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace—and calculating the user’s Social IQ based on more than 50 variables that “bubble up” into their Social IQ.

In addition, the company intended its Soovox website to become a destination site for consumer brand reviews. The founders created … Next Page »

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Del Mar, CA-based MeLLmo, which provides visualization software that transforms data from spreadsheets and other business software into interactive graphics for the iPhone and iPad, says today it has secured $30 million through a round led by Sequoia Capital.

This is MeLLmo’s first round of institutional financing. The startup had previously raised $20 million from private investors in three rounds, including $10 million that was raised just ten months ago.

In a statement this afternoon, the specialized business intelligence provider says it plans to expand its suburban San Diego headquarters and grow its presence worldwide with offices in Boston, New York City, San Francisco, London, and Shanghai.

The company says in coming weeks it also is planning to launch Roambi Flow. The new product is a Web-based platform for the business market that enables any iPad users to create and securely share all types of business information and intelligence via an intuitive online publication that looks much like a digital magazine-like report.

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After taking $20,000 as the winner of the San Diego Venture Group’s Pitchfest Biz Plan Competition in December, San Diego-based TakeLessons said it has raised $6 million in venture funding led by San Francisco-based Crosslink Capital. SoftTech VC of Palo Alto, CA, and angel investors joined in the early stage round. Founded in 2006 by musician and former CollegeClub.com executive Steven Cox, TakeLessons operates a Web platform that connects people to certified music instructors in more than 2,800 U.S. cities. The company also formed a partnership with electronics retailer Best Buy to provide in-store music lessons.

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[Corrected 8/8/11, 11:35 am. See below.] Eventful CEO Jordan Glazier likes to describe the San Diego Web-based startup as an “eBay for local events and entertainment,” and there are more than a few similarities.

One of them is Glazier himself. Before joining Eventful in 2006, he spent five years as a general manager at the San Jose, CA-based giant. Glazier refers to his time at eBay as a five-year study in the economics of marketplaces, supply, and demand, and he was deeply involved there in developing and managing three of eBay’s biggest business units: consumer electronics; computers; and business & industrial. His predecessor, Eventful founder Brian Dear, also had worked at eBay (as well as San Diego’s MP3.com), and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network is among Eventful’s prominent investors.

Eventful, which began in 2004 simply as EVDB (as in Events and Venues Database), also has long since evolved into an eBay-like online exchange that is both global and local. The company’s Web-based platform hosts roughly 5 million local events at any given time for some 20 million users worldwide. Eventful users can search the website by category, performer, or venue to find events in their local markets. Concerts and shows are the big draw, of course, but the site also tracks sports, political rallies, and other activities. A comprehensive movie section features local movie show times, trailers, reviews, and links to buy tickets.

“It’s the best way to get the word out about local events,” Glazier says. “Every month, 20 million people rely on Eventful’s local markets, which includes 80,000 people in San Diego who are using Eventful monthly to answer the question, ‘Honey, what do you want to do this weekend?’”

[Corrected 8/8/11, 11:30 am to show company raised $20 million, not $30 million.] Today the seven-year-old company has 60 employees—up from seven employees just five years ago—and has tripled its revenue each year for the past two consecutive years. The company has raised a total of $20 million in three rounds (the most recent was in October 2008), and it is not currently looking to raise additional capital. Aside from Omidyar, Eventful’s investors include Twitter co-founder Evan Williams; Zynga founder Mark Pincus; entrepreneur and digital media guru Esther Dyson; telecommunications giant Telefónica; and the venture firms Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson and Bay Partners.

Since Glazier stepped in as CEO, Eventful has expanded its … Next Page »

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After launching its daily deal program in the Bay Area seven months ago, the Active Network is bringing its Schwaggle program to its hometown San Diego market. The San Diego-based company says its area residents will now be able to access local deals on sports and fitness-related products and services and discount registrations for local events, including golf tee times at golf courses. An Active Network spokeswoman tells me the first deals to be offered in San Diego include a 50 percent discount for the City Solve Urban Race and half off at the Nitro Bike Shop.

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Zillow has updated its paperwork for a possible IPO for the second time. The online real-estate company added some traffic numbers for May—as Brier Dudley at The Seattle Times points out, it’s monthly growth of about 10 percent, to 22 million unique visitors for its website and mobile apps. Zillow notes that’s about 102 percent year-over-year. Zillow also has granted more stock options. Its new filing lists 630,912 options of Class A common stock granted May 23, at an exercise price of $1.87, based on a new valuation performed May 20. May 23 was also the date of the company’s first amended version of its IPO paperwork, but these options weren’t listed in that version.

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Seattle startup BigDoor is unveiling a new website advertising platform centered around game behavior, hoping to tie a better profit engine to one of the tech world’s current buzzwords—gamification. BigDoor says its “Engagement Economy” approach is based around having advertisers pay on a “cost per quest” basis, which ties ad spending to user tasks, such as clicking through given pieces of content. Users get little rewards, such as badges, discounts and other trinkets. Chief Executive Keith Smith tells Tricia Duryee at eMoney that he thinks the “cost per quest” unit could be worth between $1 and $2.50.

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Charles River Ventures partner Bill Tai made an interesting analogy between surfing and venture investing for the San Diego audience that gathered last week at the San Diego Venture Group’s panel discussion on the venture outlook for the coming year. The annual event usually draws big crowds, and this year was no exception. Some 350 people attended.

Tai told the crowd that VC investors had an advantage during the glory days of venture capital—10 or 15 years ago—because they could anoint an entrepreneur by simply funding his or her startup. “Syndicates could form and we would essentially own all the surf boards at the beach, which meant that we could limit the number of riders on each wave of new technology.”

But Tai said the tables have been turned on VCs in certain categories, such as the consumer Web and iPhone apps. “Now there are 600,000 new apps a year, and we can’t keep up with those kind of numbers. So now there are 2,000 riders on each wave, and they all own their own surfboards.”

Tai says startups require much less funding in his areas of greatest interest, which are digital media, enabling technologies, and Web services. As a result, more startups in these sectors are self-funded, or they are getting funding from friends, family, or angel investors. Because venture firms are no longer anointing industry leaders, Web-based industries are more fragmented—with a multitude of startups fighting to gain a foothold.

“If there are two areas I’d encourage you guys to focus on,” Tai told the San Diego audience, “it would be around mobility and cloud computing. The cost of building a company is down by a third these days and the cost of building an app is down by 50 percent.”

The proliferation of digital media and Web startups has been fueled in part by the emergence of so-called “super angels,” who invest about $250,000 individually or in syndicates, according to Peter Solvik, a managing director at Sigma Partners, which has offices in Boston and Menlo Park, CA. Some super angels are investing in companies by the score, but as Solvik noted, “super angels can’t afford to keep 200 to 300 companies going. So if you’re not in the top 5 percent of your class, it’s really hard to get a second round of funding.”

Tai’s surfing metaphor was an example of how the venture industry has changed from its glory days. But the overarching theme that Kate Mitchell sounded … Next Page »

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A new San Diego startup, Drop Down Deals, is launching a website today that is intended to complement the free downloadable Web browser plug-in the company officially unveiled last month.

The company has developed a clever approach to help online shoppers quickly identify and apply valid discount coupons to their purchases. In an interview a few weeks ago, CEO Aaron Mendes told me that many coupon codes available may not be valid on websites like RetailMeNot.com, which attracted some 90 million unique visitors over the past year and is expected to generate $30 million in revenues this year, according to ZD Net.

“The coupons change constantly,” Mendes told me. “On any given day, there may be no coupons available for a specific site. Most coupons don’t last more than a month or so anyway. They expire and get replaced.”

Mendes says Drop Down Deals has solved this problem by developing a free plug-in that remains hidden until a user visits an online shopping site for which coupons or deals are available. Then the application opens a drop-down window on the right-hand side of the screen that shows the coupons and coupon codes available for that retailing site.

“We do it by a domain browser that automatically detects what shopping site you’re on and then shows the coupons for that site,” Mendes said. The company says the service works at more than five thousand retailers, including Wal-Mart, Target, Dell, Kohl’s, Hewlett-Packard, Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, Patagonia, and Ralph Lauren—and according to Mendes, “We only display coupons that are valid.”

Mendes says Drop Down Deals also enables users to apply the coupons immediately; it’s not necessary to got to a dedicated coupon site or exit the retailer’s page. “It’s a very simple tool that doesn’t bug users unless they’re shopping,” he said.

With today’s launch of a Drop Down Deals coupon site, consumers will have the choice of browsing through tens of thousands of coupons across … Next Page »

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Kevin Carroll, executive director of TechAmerica San Diego, sent over the list of winners from the 17th Annual High Tech Awards, which were announced Friday. The industry group (previously known as the AEA) bases its awards on such criteria as technological or business innovation, exceptional products or services, marketplace validation, perseverance, and community involvement. Winners in each category are: Anakam (Software); Anonymizer (Internet/Web Commerce); Z Microsystems (Computers); Entropic Communications (Communications); DefenseWeb Technologies (Defense/IT Services); Quantum Design (Semiconductors); RASIRC (Analytical Instrumentation); GenMark Diagnostics (Medical Technologies); Reaction Design (Clean Technology); D&K Engineering (Contract Services); Seacoast Science (Emerging Growth).

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Avalon Ventures, the San Diego-based venture capital firm founded by Kevin Kinsella, has surpassed its targeted minimum fund-raising goal for its ninth venture fund. After closing on a significant investment in the fund yesterday, Avalon Ventures IX now stands at $161 million, according to Kinsella.

These days, it is practically headline news when a San Diego-based venture firm raises a new fund. While the lights are still on at many local venture firms, the partners must be getting their deliveries from Meals on Wheels, because they’re not getting out much.

Avalon, in contrast, has continued to actively invest in new startups, in both life sciences and technology, after closing its eighth fund at $150 million in early 2008. The firm made about two dozen investments over the past two years.

Avalon’s Kinsella, who was a solo practitioner when he raised his first small fund here in 1983, wanted to attract between $150 million and $200 million for Avalon IX when the firm began raising capital in May. With funding now at $161 million, Kinsella says the firm is well past its minimum target of $150 million—”but we still have another large close to go with a couple of existing LPs in a month or two.”

Avalon focuses on early stage investments, which the firm’s four partners tend to identify and develop on their own. Kinsella and partner Jay Lichter manage the life sciences deals, which include recent investments in Avelas Biosciences, aFraxis, Otonomy, and Zacharon Pharmaceuticals. Partners Steve Tomlin and Rich Levandov, who works in Boston, oversee the firm’s investments in wireless communications and Web media applications, which include Zynga, Chumby Industries, E-Band Communications, Cloudkick, and Nabbr.

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If Motorola’s mobile devices spinout establishes its new headquarters in San Diego, as many as 200 new jobs would be created here. That would be good news, of course, for a county where the unemployment rate in August was just reported to be 10.6 percent. We have that and the rest of the BizTech news wrapped up here.

—San Diego is one of three finalists under consideration as a potential headquarters for Motorola Mobility, the Libertyville, IL-based division that Motorola plans to spin out as an independent company early next year. The other two sites are in the San Francisco Bay Area and Austin, TX.

—San Francisco’s Granite Ventures raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding (reported by VentureWire to be several million dollars) for Grid2Home, a smart grid technology startup that moved to San Diego earlier this year from Campbell, CA. The CEO is Rick Kornfeld, a former Qualcomm vice president of engineering.

—Qualcomm said it is renewing its global incentive prize competition for wireless technology startups. The Qualcomm QPrize is offering a total of $750,000 in convertible note financing (meaning the note gets converted to preferred shares of the startup company at their next round of equity financing) to startup companies with the best business plan in North America, Europe, China, South Korea, Israel, and India.

—SG Biofuels, the Encinitas, CA-based developer of Jatropha-based fuels, received $9.4 million in Series A financing from investors that include Flint Hills Resources of … Next Page »

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San Diego-based xplair Technology, which was founded in April, 2009 to provide web-based mortgage management portfolio services and support, today named John Madrid as CEO, effective immediately. Madrid was previously the chief information officer at Vericrest Financial. As CEO, Madrid is responsible for overseeing xplair’s daily operations, focusing specifically on the technological build-out of the company’s primary commercial product, the illumair system for managing performing and non-performing whole loans and real estate assets.

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Over the last week, as summer waves goodbye, the autumn deals have started rolling in. Take a look at the highlights:

—Seattle-based startup DigitalScirocco rolled out of stealth a few months ago, and into a deal with US Presswire last week. The digital content marketplace teamed up with the sports wire service to build out a collaborative sports photo news service. The partnership gives news organizations, bloggers, and personal websites the ability to purchase photos with captions from the US Presswire catalog and republish them online.

—Cequint, a Seattle-based developer of caller ID technology for mobile devices, entered into an acquisition agreement with Virginia-based Transaction Network Services (TNS) worth up to $112.5 million. The deal is expected to close in the beginning of the fourth quarter. The terms state that TNS will purchase the company for an initial $46.7 million in cash plus $3.3 million in stock, with the potential for an additional $62.5 million if Cequint meets future performance targets.

—This isn’t a deal, but it was a big story in the Seattle tech scene this week. After a long silence, local startup online media Intersect came out of stealth and onto the Web. The venture—a self-proclaimed community journalism site—is something in between an online publication and a social network. At Intersect, people can publish and share stories, all marked with time and place stamps, allowing users to create personal storylines and view, through these stories, where they crossed paths with other people.

—Bellevue, WA-based DataSphere Technologies raised a $10 million in a Series C financing round led by Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners to further expand into the local advertising market. The Web technology and ad sales company helps media organizations and businesses build websites, track audience behavior, and manage search and information discovery. DataSphere is also backed by Ignition Venture Partners and a number of media organizations, including Fisher Communications.

—Small-scale hydropower startup Hydrovolts, based out of the McKinstry Innovation Center in Seattle, received a $250,000 investment from U.S.-based civil engineering firm DLZ Corp. to develop a prototype 25-kilowatt hydrokinetic canal turbine. While the investment may seem small, it could lead to big business for the cleantech startup. If the prototype works well, DLZ says it intends to purchase another 400 just like it from Hydrovolts, worth an estimated $20 million.

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Seattle-based web “gamification” company BigDoor Media rolled out a new tool today called Badge-O-Matic to help online publishers integrate game-like mechanics into websites. Badge-O-Matic allows virtual economy administrators to quickly customize and create a series of badges, popularized by applications like Foursquare, that users automatically receive as rewards for leveling up, performing certain actions, and engaging online. BigDoor Media raised $5 million in Series B funding led by the Foundry Group in June.

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