Some interesting developments in ad distribution and video this week. Needham, MA-based Extreme Reach, the maker of a video-ad platform for TV and Web, has secured more money for its growth and has made an important acquisition.

Extreme Reach said today it has closed a $9 million credit facility with TD Bank. The company also has acquired Spotlight Business Affairs, a commercial talent rights management and payment firm, for an undisclosed sum. The details sound kind of gnarly, but basically the deal means the company’s ad distribution system will be in compliance with existing talent and rights agreements.

The idea behind Extreme Reach, which started in 2008, is to help video advertisers and agencies distribute ads to TV stations, cable networks, and Web publishers—all with cutting-edge cloud-based storage and processing technology. Last September, I reported that Extreme Reach was growing fast and looking to raise a big financing round. Chief executive John Roland said at the time that the company was very profitable and had grown from 17 employees to about 90 in the previous two years, with 20 more hires and geographic expansion imminent.

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Beware of CEOs who dress like their company logo. Beware of Jason Baptiste.

Just kidding. Baptiste is one of the most intensely likable startup founders around (emphasis on intense). His company, New York-based OnSwipe, is trying to take the tablet publishing world by storm. And not just with its aggressively stylish magenta-and-black color scheme.

OnSwipe makes a software platform for publishers to display their content and ads on tablet Web browsers, starting with the iPad. If that sounds a bit similar to Google Currents, the mobile publishing app that the Web search giant unveiled last week, well, Baptiste doesn’t seem too worried about the competition. In response to an article saying that “Google Currents might be OnSwipe’s nightmare,” Baptiste tweeted: “I fear Currents like Twitter feared Buzz and YouTube feared Video.” (OK, he doesn’t lack for confidence.)

We caught up with Baptiste earlier this month in Boston, where he spoke about the deeper ideas behind OnSwipe at Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference (you can see photos here—Baptiste represented New York with flair). He also shared some broader views on the future of Web content and advertising, and argued for OnSwipe’s vision of browsing via tablets and touchscreens.

“Instead of a world with ugly text-like ads, we’re going to see a world with beautiful full-page, magazine-like advertising that will finally fill the gap” in the $50 billion in ad spending that’s expected to move from print to digital media, Baptiste said after his talk.

In a short video interview produced by my colleague Lilly O’Flaherty, Baptiste talked a little more about OnSwipe’s specific goals and challenges. You should check out the video below, but here are three highlights to whet your appetite:

1. “The tablet is the TV of this generation.”

2. “It’s not going to be 300 channels or 3,000 channels, it’s going to be millions of channels.”

3. “If Google gained its distribution by powering search, OnSwipe wants to gain distribution by powering [tablet browsing] experiences.”

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David Rosenblatt has taken a seat in the chief executive’s office again, this time at online luxury marketplace 1stdibs in New York. Rosenblatt, former CEO of DoubleClick, was appointed CEO of 1stdibs on Nov. 3 in conjunction with an undisclosed investment from Benchmark Capital. Rosenblatt says this is 1stdibs’s first outside funding since its founding in 2001.

1stdibs sells high-end antiques, estate jewelry, and furniture from dealers. “Our customers are decorators and prosumers [professional consumers],” Rosenblatt says. Others are welcome to shop at 1stdibs—if, for example, they are ready to drop $18,900 for a set of Harry Winston Tahitian pearl, diamond earrings.

Rosenblatt says he was drawn to the market opportunity that 1stdibs has as a seller of hard-to-get luxury items. He will remain as chairman of Group Commerce and retain his seats on the boards of Twitter and IAC. Matt Cohler, general partner with Benchmark, also joined the board at 1stdibs in conjunction with the investment.

Rosenblatt was CEO of DoubleClick, a provider of online ad management … Next Page »

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New York’s interclick (NASDAQ: ICLK), an advertising technology company, agreed to be acquired by Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) for $270 million in cash, according to a press statement on Tuesday.

Five-year-old interclick developed a platform to help advertisers process large volumes of data from multiple sources to better understand and target their audiences with online display and video ad campaigns. According to an interclick spokesperson, the company’s management will remain onboard after the acquisition is complete. Yahoo is offering $9 cash per share for all outstanding shares of interclick. The deal is expected to close by early 2012.

The acquisition by Yahoo is a bit of a coup for interclick, which is rapidly making a name for itself in the online advertising sector. In October, comScore said interclick ranked No. 16 among ad-focused Web properties in the U.S. for the previous month. Yahoo Network Plus was No. 2 behind Google Ad Network in the same ranking.

Interclick has been growing quickly on its own. In an earnings statement released in August, interclick estimated its 2011 revenue would be about $142 million, up from its previous guidance of $140 million. Interclick reported a profit of $4 million on revenue of $101.2 million for 2010, up from a profit of $502,000 on revenue of $55.3 million in 2009.

Though its technology whetted Yahoo’s appetite, interclick has had to defend some of its practices in court. In August, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed, with prejudice, several claims against interclick that alleged the company’s online advertising practices violated a variety of state and federal laws. Last December, Sonal Bose filed a lawsuit, which included claims of privacy violation, against interclick and sought class action status. Bose alleged interclick monitored her Web browsing and misappropriated personal information via code within online advertisements; however, she dropped the privacy violation claim in March.

Michael Katz, CEO of interclick, said in a statement, “We have said from the beginning, interclick has always taken consumer privacy very seriously and these claims were brought without merit.”

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New York’s Solve Media, funded by AOL Ventures, New Atlantic Ventures, First Round Capital, and others, is putting Web advertising in hard-to-miss places. The two-year-old startup combines ads with the verification systems users must respond to when joining websites or requesting lost passwords. Solve Media’s CEO and co-founder Ari Jacoby says the idea is to change the way the public interacts with online ads by incorporating them into such access points. “You have to instill brand memory,” he says.

So far Solve Media has raised nearly $6 million, according to Jacoby, from backers that include angel investors Brian O’Kelley, CEO of AppNexus, and Roger Ehrenberg, founder and managing partner of IA Ventures. Jacoby says advertisers such as Toyota and Microsoft and websites such as AOL’s MapQuest use his company’s system to increase brand awareness among users.

Jacoby is putting a different spin on the verification method called CAPTCHA, which requires people to type in text to prove they are breathing, carbon-based life forms rather than spam bots. (CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.) Such tests require people to interpret distorted, yet readable, letters and numbers that a computer could not. This is not the same as entering a personal password for security purposes, but it is frequently used to ensure that a living person … Next Page »

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[Updated 9/20/11. See below] The Silicon Valley vs. Boston tech scene discussion is a tired one, I know. But today we’ve seen a number of Boston-area companies make a splash with some significance to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here we go with the highlights:

—Burst Media, the Burlington, MA-based online ad distributor now owned by Blinkx (a San Francisco video search company), has rolled out four online community channels to help advertisers target gamers, moms, sports fans, and (dare I say it) fashionistas. The new sites—called Giant Realm, MomIQ, Stadium, and Ella—encompass thousands of independent Web publishers and their audiences. The company calls this “a significant first step in the realignment of Burst’s publisher strategy following its acquisition by Blinkx.” It’s also yet another example of tech companies trying to figure out how to distribute better-targeted ads to specific types of consumers.

—Bluefin Robotics, the maker of autonomous underwater vehicles in Quincy, MA, has acquired the assets of Hawkes Remotes, a spinoff from Hawkes Ocean Technologies, a Bay Area developer of deep-ocean explorer vehicles. Terms of the deal weren’t given. Bluefin Robotics, which is owned by Battelle (and not to be confused with fellow MIT spinout Bluefin Labs), says it plans to work with Hawkes’s remotely operated machines to extend its current product line to the oil and gas industry.

—TalkTo, a Cambridge, MA-based mobile software startup, presented at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco yesterday and was selected as one of six semifinalists to compete today. TalkTo makes a mobile app that lets people text any business—like a restaurant or hotel (to book a table or room) or a store (to ask about product selection)—and receive a text response, even if the business doesn’t know about TalkTo. I’m not quite sure how this works yet, but it sounds like a clever way to spread awareness of the app. It’s also yet another tool that local merchants will have to figure out if they want to use to communicate with customers.

Reached by e-mail, co-founder and CEO Stuart Levinson wrote, “TalkTo could be a very big deal because it’s a completely new way to communicate with businesses. Consumers have never been able to do this before. Instead of calling (which you can also do through the app), you suddenly have a second option—text.” He added, “How often do you think of calling a place only to realize it’s closed? So you make a note in your calendar to call the next day, or you try to remember and forget. Why not just send a text as soon as you think of it? When the business opens, you’ll get a text response.” [This paragraph was added on 9/20/11---Eds.]

—Tasted Menu, a Boston-area food tech startup, announced its beta launch today. The idea is to get people to rate the quality of specific restaurant dishes and share photos of them online. The startup, which is backed by angel investors, faces plenty of competition from companies like San Francisco-based Foodspotting and Boston-based Locu (formerly Goodplates, which was working on a dish-rating app).

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Attention, techies. Want a deep dive into the future of the Web, search, and online services? Then sit down with Qi Lu, the president of Microsoft’s online services division, if you ever get an opportunity.

In the meantime, you can check out this video from Lu’s talk at Microsoft New England Research & Development Center in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA, back in May. Microsoft organized the event in partnership with Xconomy, and we all had a blast talking with Lu and listening to his insights.

Lu was personally recruited by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in late 2008, after spending a decade at Yahoo. He was brought in to revitalize Microsoft’s online efforts in search and advertising (including Bing), Web software, services, and infrastructure.

In his talk, Lu laid out what Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is currently working on in the area of Web software and services, and how it all fits into the landscape of big trends like social media, daily deals, and mobile apps.

“The question for all of us is, what’s the structure of that new Web? What are the things that connect all those apps together? That’s where we see a great opportunity for Microsoft to take a leadership role,” Lu said.

“The Web has far outgrown its intellectual heritage. It’s a digital society. We need a richer, better way to navigate the Web, discover, and interact in a lot more compelling manner,” he continued.

You can also read about Lu’s thoughts on Microsoft’s recent $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, as well as my writeup of some takeaways from Lu’s talk, which also includes an in-depth Q&A he did with Xconomy about Microsoft’s Web strategy. Some of the highlights include how search is a gateway to other online services, how Microsoft is positioning itself with respect to Facebook, Apple, Groupon, and (of course) Google, and how the company’s pace of innovation is crucial to its future.

Check out the video below for some highlights from Lu’s talk at Microsoft NERD.

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Who are the most influential people on Twitter and Facebook? Who has the most friends and followers across the various social media platforms? Who cares?

Advertisers and brands, that’s who—and an increasing number of businesses of all types. (Not to mention all the narcissists and self-promoters out there, but let’s forget about them while we still can.)

If Google mapped the Web to determine which pages were most important, social media analytics companies are trying to do something similar for the social graph, the map of connections between people in social networks. One emerging goal: to identify the top influencers online, and do something about them.

OK, “social media analytics” is a fancy way of saying “who’s popular and what are they talking about?” It’s like high school all over again, except now brands are trying to make money off of insights gleaned from what used to be private conversations.

A cluster of Boston-area companies is riding that wave—and contributing some interesting new approaches. Local techies say social media has become too big to ignore for many companies—and also mainstream enough to be a powerful tool, not just for promoting businesses, but for understanding customers better and managing PR situations (see Netflix, Anthony Weiner, and so forth). While the business case for social media analytics is still evolving, there have been some notable acquisitions around North America in recent months, including BackType (bought by Twitter), PostRank (Google), and Radian6 (Salesforce.com).

The early crop of companies has focused on trying to monitor and summarize large amounts of online chatter—by analyzing the sentiment of consumers or measuring how much they post, for instance—but there’s still a big need for “adding context to that data” and “making it actionable,” says Roy Rodenstein, a tech angel investor and entrepreneur. That means identifying which trends in online conversations are significant and suggesting what next steps to take, he says.

Enter SocMetrics, a Cambridge, MA, startup co-founded by Rodenstein, along with Rebecca Xiong and Jason Toy. (Xiong and Toy pronounce it “Sock-metrics” while Rodenstein says the first syllable like the one in “social.”) SocMetrics determines each social-media user’s influence in a given topic based on how many of their top peers are connected to them, how topically relevant their posts are, how much activity they drive, and so on (across blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, Reddit, and other platforms). Using those metrics, the company gives each person an “influencer” score (between 0 and 100) in specific topic areas—so far there are more than 100 categories, including food, travel, moms, weddings, fashion, and, for you techies out there, things like startups, technology, security, CRM, B2B, and cloud computing. (In the “startups” category, Dave McClure, Eric Ries, and Dharmesh Shah score a 99, while Rodenstein himself rates a modest 70.)

The service differs from Klout, the San Francisco startup with a similar-sounding … Next Page »

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Whether you’re part of the Boston-Cambridge technology community, or just an interested observer, you’ve probably been to the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (known affectionately as NERD) at least a few times in the past year. But do you know what Microsoft is actually working on there? I didn’t.

Until last week, that is, when I visited Microsoft Research New England, one of the main groups at NERD, housed near Kendall Square. The tower at One Memorial Drive rises majestically from the banks of the Charles River, but it guards its secrets closely. Jennifer Chayes, the managing director of Microsoft Research New England, which occupies the 12th floor, reveals the projects her group is working on slowly. But she does reveal them.

OK, it’s an open research lab with hundreds of visitors and collaborators from academia and industry, so secrecy isn’t the culture here—at least, not amongst the research community. But from the lab’s opening in 2008 until now, Chayes, an expert in discrete mathematics, networks, and game theory, has said very little to the technology and business media about what her teams have been working on—and what it all has to do with Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) business. And that’s just fine, because I’m about to tell you.

Microsoft Research New England is three years old this month. Although the full-time research staff has doubled in size since inception, it’s still a fairly small operation—12 staff researchers (including deputy managing director Christian Borgs), another dozen postdocs, a half-dozen software development engineers and support staff, and any number of students and interns. Their research breaks down into six main areas—computer science (including algorithms, cryptography, machine learning and vision, and security), computational biology, economics, mathematics, networks, and social media. (Microsoft declined to say how much it has invested in the lab so far.)

It’s not a typical lineup for a Microsoft research lab, of which there are six worldwide, including the mother lab in Redmond, WA. “Our lab has gone into certain areas that haven’t been nearly as emphasized by the other [Microsoft Research labs]. Most of them are fantastically strong in mainstream computer science disciplines,” Chayes says. “One of the reasons for opening the lab here was because we wanted to help advance the state of the art at the boundaries between computer science and other fields. And Cambridge is a place—of course it’s very strong in computer science—that’s phenomenally strong in other fields.”

Take empirical economics. Susan Athey, the renowned Harvard economist (and Microsoft consultant), heads up a year-old group in the lab that’s focused on analyzing huge datasets that Microsoft has access to—things like online advertising trends and performance, search-engine user behaviors, Xbox Live networks, e-mail and instant-messaging patterns, healthcare trends, and so on. Chayes pitched the idea for the economics group to CEO Steve Ballmer in December 2009, and he said to go for it.

The group’s goal is to find patterns in databases that could make various systems more efficient. Little did they know this would lead to the lab’s first technology to become a Microsoft product. … Next Page »

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Google confirmed yesterday that it has signed an agreement to acquire Admeld, the New York-based online display ad yield optimization startup. The news came in a blog post cross-posted to the DoubleClick Publisher Blog and the official Google blog. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed; the purchase price of roughly $400 million reported earlier by TechCrunch remains unconfirmed. Google said it was buying Admeld in order to help make the “mind-numbingly complicated and inefficient” process of display ad management easier for online publishers.

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Here’s a quick snapshot of a local tech company that lots of people talk about, but not usually in much depth. Probably because it focuses on helping online advertisers understand consumers, but it’s not for consumers.

Boston-based DataXu has been growing fast over the past year, and now has offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago—and soon, London and Asia. The four-year-old startup, which was stealthy until 2009, is coming up on 100 employees. When I spoke with CEO Mike Baker last September, DataXu was positioning itself as one-stop shopping for advertisers who want real-time data and insights on consumer behavior across Web, mobile, and video.

This week, the company has been touting its latest offering, called DX Brand, a software platform that helps advertisers measure things like brand awareness, recall, sentiment, and purchase intent among consumers online, which traditionally has been hard to do on the fly. It then turns those insights into predictions about how and where to place specific ads to optimize campaigns in real time. I caught up with Baker by phone to get a broader update on the company, whose overall mission hasn’t changed much in the past year.

“In this crazy digital world where the consumer is in control, how do you find the right audience for your product and engage them? You have to reach them wherever and however they are,” says Baker, who was previously with Nokia, Enpocket, and GrandBanks Capital.

There are plenty of other digital ad-optimization platforms, of course, but Baker says DataXu’s real-time decision-making and allocating of ad dollars “hasn’t been possible before” at Internet scale. The company’s technology is based on decision-support algorithms developed by aerospace engineers at MIT.

What’s interesting now is that DataXu and other ad-tech companies are trying to ride a wave of advertisers who are beginning to take the collective $80 billion a year traditionally allotted to TV ads, and spend more of it on Web and mobile ads. That wave has been slow to develop in recent years but might be gaining some momentum.

“We’re starting to sell to a segment of customers we haven’t done business with before—luxury car makers, cereal advertisers, frozen pizza, categories of goods very familiar on TV for brand marketing,” Baker says. “This digital migration is starting to heat up. It’s going to get really interesting.”

Baker wouldn’t give any specifics on company revenues or growth, but he said DataXu is “well ahead of our financial plan” and is “not looking to raise money.” He said the company is “looking very strong” from a cash-flow perspective and will be focusing on its international expansion for the rest of this year.

DataXu announced an $11 million financing round in March of last year from investors including Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Menlo Ventures. That was on top of a $6 million Series A round in 2009.

More recently, DataXu received $10 million earlier this year from an undisclosed investor, according to a MoneyTree report that I previously wrote about. The company, and one of its previous investors, declined to comment on the transaction—so it’s hard to know if it might represent an inside financing round, a buyout, or a new, stealthy strategic investor.

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Microsoft’s biggest acquisition to date was on display this week, in Boston. I’m not talking about Skype. I’m talking about Qi Lu.

Lu, the president of Microsoft’s online services division, was in town on Wednesday to meet with employees at the firm’s New England Research and Development Center (NERD) in Cambridge, MA, and, in addition to private meetings with local companies and universities, to give a public talk that was co-hosted by Xconomy.

For those who don’t know, Lu was brought in at the end of 2008 by CEO Steve Ballmer to spearhead Microsoft’s fast-growing online efforts—including Bing, MSN, and mobile advertising. Before that, Lu was a senior exec at Yahoo for a decade, where he ran engineering for the search and advertising group. He had previously worked at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and Carnegie Mellon University.

So Lu is basically The One, charged with bringing the world’s biggest software company to a more competitive position in the digital, online, and social era (no pressure). And he was quite a steal—especially compared to the $45 billion that Microsoft offered to pay for all of Yahoo in early 2008.

This week, when he was in Cambridge, Xconomy sat down with Lu for an exclusive interview. Between that and his talk at the NERD center (see photo below), we learned a great deal about Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) evolving strategy in search and the Web—and where the company sees itself playing across the various fields of consumer online services. We’ll have a separate story on that soon.

But first, we had to get Lu’s take on the big news of the week, and what everyone was buzzing about—Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, the Luxembourg-based Internet phone and video firm (which has a big Silicon Valley presence). Skype will become a separate division within Microsoft; it won’t be integrated into Lu’s online services division. Partly because it isn’t in his direct purview, Lu didn’t go into much detail. But from the high-level comments he made during our interview, and at his public talk, it sounds like there are plans to use Skype’s technologies across a wide range of Microsoft businesses.

“This acquisition is very strategic,” Lu told us. “Certainly we are very confident that … Next Page »

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Got five minutes? Here’s an eye-opening example of how markets are analyzed, how VC deals are won, how startups are built—and a little bit about what might have been.

New York-based 5min Media, a video syndication company, started in 2007 as a portal for how-to videos, and became a top video-content aggregator before getting bought by AOL (NYSE: AOL) for $65 million last September. (Some people think of 5min as the “other” deal that AOL announced on the same day as its TechCrunch acquisition, even though 5min had a bigger financial value.)

Boston-based Spark Capital led 5min’s $5 million Series A financing round, which was announced in January 2008. The startup was originally based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and was led by co-founder and CEO Ran Harnevo. It ended up taking just under $13 million in total VC/angel money, and was guided in part by Alex Finkelstein, a general partner at Spark.

Finkelstein talks fast and makes deals faster. He says he usually knows within five minutes (which is appropriate) of being in a room with an entrepreneur whether he wants to make an investment or not. But that’s after doing months of market research, of course.

Here’s the 5min story, in Finkelstein’s words:

“My thesis was that how-to videos would get the highest CPMs [advertising cost per thousand impressions] on the Internet, given that someone watching a how-to video is a super-defined niche demographic, right around the purchasing decision, and has intent. So my idea was, as opposed to producing this content, could you go out and aggregate content under really, really attractive terms?

“I spent 12 months flying around and put a list together of the top 100 DVD content owners in the country for how-to videos. The top guy was in Salt Lake City, he had 200 how-to-play-every-sport-at-every-level DVDs. Each DVD had 40 individual task-level how-tos on them. I signed him up to a very attractive contract. I found two guys locally doing the same thing in the music space, and did that with those guys. At the end of that process, I cold-called 5min. It was four guys at Israel at the time. They had the exact same vision, which was not to produce content but to aggregate it under very attractive terms and then to syndicate it all over the Internet.

“They were about to sign a term sheet the next day [with another VC firm]. We convinced them not to sign the term sheet, and to fly from Israel to Boston, which they did the next day. We led the $5 million A round into that company, and it was acquired around three years later by AOL.”

Still, a VC (and startup) can always do better. In 5min’s case, Finkelstein notes that the company probably could have sold for double the amount today, given the tech environment is much frothier now than it was in September.

Which leaves the rest of us wondering what that really says about the market. But our five minutes are up.

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Meet Dr. Qi Lu (see photo, right). I have met him before, but it was at a backyard barbecue, and I didn’t want to grill the man about the future of search and the Web in that setting. But this is different.

Lu, the president of Microsoft’s online services division (his first name is pronounced “chee”), will be in Boston on May 11, and he’s stopping by the company outpost in Kendall Square to give a talk on Microsoft’s vision for the future of the Web and search. He’ll also sit down for a brief Q&A with yours truly, and we’ll take questions from the audience.

It’s all happening at Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (NERD), starting at 6:15 pm (doors open at 5:30) on the 11th. The event is free, and you can register here.

Lu is the man who was brought in to revitalize Microsoft’s Internet efforts in late 2008. Among his many duties on the senior leadership team, he oversees the company’s digital advertising efforts across search (Bing), portals (MSN), mobile, and other platforms. He has some pretty deep ideas on where search and Web technologies are headed—and where the real business opportunities are. Before coming to Microsoft, Lu spent 10 years as a senior exec with Yahoo, and also worked as a research staff member at IBM.

I’ve been wanting to ask him about how Bing is doing against Google, and what Microsoft’s strategy is in emerging areas like location-based advertising, video search and ads, local deals, and social media. (And also which innovative areas startups and entrepreneurs should be looking at.)

So bring all your questions too—and we hope to see you on May 11.

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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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Seattle-based online real estate website Zillow has acquired San Francisco-based Postlets, a startup that syndicates property listings across about a dozen sites. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and Zillow wouldn’t comment on any possible layoffs as part of the acquisition.

Postlets says it has more than 500,000 registered users generating more than 350,000 sale and rental listings nationwide. It operates on a “freemium” model, providing basic services for no charge and collecting fees for pro-level accounts.

Zillow has been reported to be mulling an initial public offering. The company, which has collected close to $90 million in financing, said last year that it was profitable.

“Ask anyone in the industry, and they’ll tell you that Postlets is a great tool for agents looking to promote their listings and manage their online presence, for free,” Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff wrote in a blog post this morning. He added that Postlets will continue its current partnerships to distribute listings across 13 websites.

Postlets’ co-founders, Asher Matsuda and Raymond Chen, are joining Zillow as full-time employees. Postlets also said in its own blog post that it would retain a free service after the acquisition. The two companies had been working together already— Postlets announced in January that its listings were being syndicated on Zillow.

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Seattle-based advertising company Mpire has a three-fer today: It’s raised another $3 million, named a new CEO, and is making the switch to its AdXpose platform very official by changing the name of the company. Mpire—now known just as AdXpose—told Xconomy about a year ago that it was ditching its previous Widgetbucks advertising network to focus on the AdXpose technology, which is dedicated to “optimizing” ad spending online. Basically, that means making ad campaigns perform more effectively, while protecting brands from fraud and from appearing next to inappropriate content such as porn. ApXpose says the $3 million financing, led by existing investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson, will help it add staff and open more offices. Presiding over that growth will be Kirby Winfield, who now serves as CEO. Winfield previously was the company’s president and chief revenue officer.

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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 Vurve, which makes software that helps small businesses manage online advertising campaigns on Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and other sides, said in a blog post today that it has closed a $4.5 million Series A financing round led by Spark Capital. Dave McClure’s 500 Startups also participated, along with True Ventures. The company’s seed-round investors include Gordon Chaffee, Esther Dyson, Vish Makhijani, Ash Patel, and Joshua Schachter.

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What do you get when you mix a digital media and marketing entrepreneur with a banking and real estate executive? Answer: Clovr Media, a Boston company that’s officially launching today with $1.5 million in seed funding from Kepha Partners and CommonAngels.

Founded by Tom Burgess, the former CEO of Third Screen Media, and Doug Spear, the former CEO of CSpot Networks, Clovr makes a software platform that enables banks and financial institutions to reach consumers through “card-linked offers” embedded directly in Web banners, text links, and mobile and video advertisements. That means you can click on a banner ad—potentially on Facebook or anywhere on the Web, not just on a bank or credit card site—and automatically get $25 off a Canon printer at Best Buy, say, when you use your registered card to buy it. (Clovr stands for “card linked offers with virtual redemption.”)

“We’re bringing card linked offers into the digital media space,” says Burgess, Clovr’s chief executive. “We create what the banks call ‘loyalty 2.0.’”

Indeed, Clovr sits at the intersection of two broader trends: more individualized digital rewards and loyalty programs, and more transparent analytics that let advertisers track exactly how well their online campaigns are performing. Other companies working in this area include Cardlytics, Edo Interactive, and OfferIQ, which all have slightly different approaches.

Clovr says one of its differentiators is that it has broader consumer reach—its offers aren’t tied to financial website ads or a specific card. Another advantage is that its platform allows a greater number of brands—tens of thousands, Burgess says—to benefit from card-linked offers. That’s because Clovr’s offers work at the individual product level (Bic pens), not at the merchant level (Staples).

The startup’s success will depend largely on the value of its software platform for banks and advertisers. Banks need to find ways to make money through loyalty programs instead of interchange fees. Advertisers should be able to use Clovr to tell whether a banner ad on Google, say, performed better than one on Facebook—by following through all the way to the point of store purchases. Clovr charges a per-transaction fee for advertisers and splits its revenue with banks.

“We can track the user and see transactions on a credit card. We’re partnered with a bank. We know when you went through a point of sale,” Burgess says. “Advertisers see 100 percent attribution.” As for any consumers worried about privacy, Burgess says the banks will retain all private information behind their firewalls.

Clovr has eight employees plus a half-dozen developers and contractors. The company is moving from Waltham to downtown Boston this week. At this point, Burgess says, the goal is to launch the website (which is live as of today) and introduce the Clovr platform. It’s still too early to announce any retail or financial partners, he says.

Burgess sounds like an entrepreneur who never forgets where he came from—which is good, since he’s built companies that have sold to the likes of Monster.com (CollegeLink) and AOL/Time Warner (Third Screen Media). “Six or seven months ago, we were two guys and a PowerPoint,” he says. “We went back and built something. Now we’ve come back to the market.”

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