Less than a year after announcing its seed financing, Boston-based Clovr Media is changing its name to Linkable Networks and is adding another big-name investor to its roster. The digital media startup is announcing today that it has received an undisclosed investment from Palo Alto, CA- and Shanghai-based Citi Ventures, a unit of Citigroup.

As its new name indicates, Linkable Networks offers technology enabling merchants to directly link offers in advertisements to credit or debit cards consumers have registered in the system for automatic redemption of the deals. The startup’s previous name stood for “card linked offers with virtual redemption.” Consumers can click on Web ads and scan or enter a code from TV, print, and outdoor ads into their mobile phone to redeem the offers to their cards.

Linkable Networks CEO Tom Burgess said the card-linked offer space is a fragmented one, and that the company’s name needed to better reflect how its technology connects consumers with advertisers and banks. “Linkables are what the advertising world started to call our capabilities,” he said in a phone call with Xconomy.

This past March, Linkable Networks inked an $8.3 million financing led by Jeffrey Glass of Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Kepha Partners, Common Angels, and angel investor Mark Wright. The new cash infusion from Citi will go to supporting demand from advertising networks, building out infrastructure, and fueling growth, according to today’s announcement. The startup’s offer platform has been operating in beta mode over the last year and it plans to make a broader commercial push with banks and media partners this fall.

“Having Citi in our investment group is a nice vote of a confidence for our company and for our solution,” said Burgess.

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By early 2009, Widgetbox was a company on life support. The startup ran a platform that allowed developers to build and distribute small software applications called widgets that could be dropped into consumer or enterprise websites. But the three-year-old San Francisco firm was nearly done in by the triple whammy of the recession (which meant there were few paying customers for widgets), Facebook (which had created its own massive market for embedded Web applications, sucking away software development talent), and Apple (which did the same on mobile devices). The company laid off half its staff, and spent the better part of a year searching for a new business model. “To be totally transparent, we had no idea what to do,” says CEO Will Price.

Then, on July 21, 2009—coincidentally, the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon—”I got an e-mail that changed the company,” Price says. The note was from Ryan Roslansky, the director of product management at LinkedIn. Roslansky explained that LinkedIn was planning to start showing display ads alongside its social-networking profiles. But it didn’t want to show standard banner ads—it wanted to offer advertisers a different type of ad unit, something that would be more customized, interactive, and engaging, and would therefore fetch higher rates. Such ads would need to function like mini-websites, but they’d have to be far faster, easier, and cheaper to create than traditional “rich media” ads. Roslansky’s suggestion: Widgetbox already had the technology to do this.

“Ryan said, ‘If you don’t call these things widgets but call them banner ads, you guys are on the cutting edge of what ads are,’” says Price. “So we found ourselves in the display ad market.”

Flite CEO Will Price

It was an epic pivot, and it saved the company. Today the startup is called Flite (it abandoned the Widgetbox name in March), and it’s got a long list of publishers, ad agencies, and brands, including LinkedIn, paying for what it calls its “cloud-based” advertising platform. The “cloud” part is really just the fashionable term these days for what Flite has been doing all along—that is, connecting a gallery of small applications with a back end of data and services. If you see a Web ad for HP, FedEx, or Toyota that has lots of clickable tabs, videos, forms, sliding images, and social sharing links, chances are the ad was authored on, and served up by, Flite’s platform.

Widgetbox ran through $14 million in Series A and B funding before its stall. But with 65 employees and $12 million in new cash from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, and Hummer Winblad, Flite is airborne again. Its main challenge now, Price says, is the “behavior change issue.” Big brands that want nifty interactive ads are accustomed to paying big money to big advertising agencies, who put big creative teams on the case and take six weeks to build one ad. None of that is necessary with Flite’s ad-authoring platform, which makes assembling and staging a new ad as easy as clicking a few buttons. Indeed, the system is designed to be so easy to use that brands themselves can change the content of their ads every day, if they feel like it. “Any technology change that requires a behavior change has a risk,” as Price puts it. “But somebody is going to win this ability for brands to do their own programming.”

Oh, and Ryan Roslansky? His 2009 note and Price’s response was the purest possible example of a startup listening to a customer, even if it was driven by desperation. “I wanted to give him stock, but his general counsel wouldn’t let me,” says Price. Instead, Roslansky serves today on Flite’s “Customer Council,” a group of advisors from top publishers, agencies, and brands.

Flite’s story starts even before widgets. Co-founder Ed Anuff had previously started Epicentric, a dot-com-era maker of enterprise portal software, which grew to more than … Next Page »

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San Mateo, CA-based Adap.tv, which offers server software supporting online video advertising campaigns as well as an online marketplace for advertisers and publishers, said today that it has raised $20 million from a group led by new investor Bessemer Venture Partners. Existing investors Gemini Israel Funds, Redpoint Ventures, and Spark Capital joined the round. The company said the new funds will go toward international expansion, technology improvements, and sales and marketing efforts in the U.S.

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The Book of Odds isn’t betting its future on any one thing, and founder and president Amram Shapiro see that as one of its strengths.

“A lot of websites and startups are one-trick ponies,” Shapiro says. “Everything really has to work or pretty much they’re out of it. We think of ourselves as a 10- or 20-trick pony.”

Those tricks include a website, data service, gaming outlet, book franchise, and risk management tool (it’s just recently started working on the last three). Last year, the Boston-based startup came out of a roughly three-year stealth mode, to roll out its destination website. BookofOdds.com has close to half a million “odds” statements, based on data its staff has pulled from sources like government agencies and surveys. It frames each probability statement with the geography and time frame that the number refers to, the source of the data, and definitions of the terms within. A random example: The odds that a U.S. female 20 or older eats cheese at least once a day are 1 in 3.56.

Its content hinges on semantic technology, supplied by another Boston-area startup, Cambridge Semantics, which helps form relationships among a slew of facts and data. The Book of Odds then takes the information stored in the relational databases to populate its consumer-facing website with the odds statements. The semantic technology ascribes metadata—information about the data—to each statement, so the information within can be pulled apart and reworked for other statements.

Another fun factoid: The odds a female Internet user 18 or older will consider the person she is dating her boyfriend or girlfriend after three to five dates are 1 in 12.5.

As much fun as the random facts about subjects from food to death to dating can be, Shapiro sees his Web service ultimately as a source of measuring risk and a tool for connecting people with information to help improve their odds in areas of their lives like health, careers, and investing. So his team has been building a number of improvements to the site, in a closed beta version, designed to bring greater meaning to the numbers and sources it provides.

“It’s about taking our unique information, and making it very, very easy to find,” he says.

At present, the factoids are all accessible via a simple search bar on the company’s home page, where users plug in a key word (I used “cheese” and “boyfriend” for the statements above). They can filter their results pages through a number of relevant key words, the date of the odds statement, and the likelihood that an event will happen, but Shapiro hopes the impending improvements will give greater context and meaning to the often quirky statistics.

He gave me a sneak peek of the upcoming features, which he expects to go live on the site in a month or so. They frame the odds statements with more specifics, graphics, and comparison data. For example, under the healthcare umbrella, a user can search for the odds of a person getting diagnosed with cancer in a given year. Once they get that answer, they can … Next Page »

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Seattle-based stealth startup 5to1.com received all of a $4.5 million offering, according to a regulatory filing yesterday. The investors were not disclosed, but included on the form as directors were Jim Heckman, the former CEO of Rivals.com, and Michael Barrett, former chief revenue officer of Fox Interactive. According to a story published in TechFlash, 5to1 may be involved in online advertising.

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