On a dismal day in Boston, here are a few tech-related company financings worth mentioning (one in mobile/social, one in video, and one in education):

—BetterLesson, a Cambridge, MA-based startup that helps teachers organize and share lesson plans and curricula online, has closed a new $1.6 million financing round from Highland Capital Partners, General Catalyst Partners, New Markets Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, and angel investors. BetterLesson says it has built up a Web community of tens of thousands of K-12 educators. Any education company led by a Teach For America alum (founder and CEO Alex Grodd) is worth paying attention to, I say.

—Earlier this week, Wikets, a social commerce and recommendations startup, said it raised a $1.5 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, and angel investors, according to TechCrunch. (Xconomy reported on the round back in June, but without information about the investors.) The Boston-area startup, which is working on its mobile app, is led by founders Andy Park, Vijay Manwani, and Ravi Reddy.

—PeerApp, a Newton, MA-based online video delivery firm, raised $8 million in growth financing led by Summit Partners. Cedar Fund, Evergreen Partners, Pilot House Ventures Group, and other investors also participated in the round. PeerApp started in 2004 and is led by CEO Robert Mayer, a former EMC exec.

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What the heck is social video analytics and advertising?

Whatever it is, Visible Measures has closed a Series D financing round worth $13 million, based on the strength of its software platform in that field. The Boston company, which started in 2005, has raised a total of more than $45 million to date. DAG Ventures led the latest round, and new strategic partner Advance Publications (which owns Conde Nast) and previous investors General Catalyst, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Northgate Capital also participated.

The concept behind Visible Measures is to help advertisers and publishers track online video performance—how Web viewers interact with videos, which segments they watch, when they share it with others (hence the social bit), and more broadly how the content spreads across video sites like YouTube and AOL. At stake is billions of TV advertising dollars that many predict will shift to online as the audience for Internet video grows and software tools allow for better ad targeting.

Visible Measures has nearly 80 employees, according to CEO and founder Brian Shin (see photo above). The team is split between Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Ottawa, Wyoming, and London.

The company operates at the intersection of entertainment, digital media, software analytics, and advertising. Other firms with complementary or related approaches in video and ads include Akamai, comScore, Quantcast, Bluefin Labs, Brightcove, DataXu, Extreme Reach, and Wistia.

It was refreshing to hear Shin speak at a FutureM event last week about how he didn’t have it all figured out back in the early days of Visible Measures.

“We said, ‘Let’s try this advertising thing,’” he said. “When you’re trying to create a new market, there aren’t a lot of great examples. You have to have advisors, people you trust, to help you grow.”

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Extreme Reach is going through some extreme growth—and it’s about to get very interesting, very fast. The Needham, MA-based video-ad distribution startup is rumored to be raising a large investment round, one that could fuel its rise to become one of the Boston area’s top software startups.

OK, advertising tech companies can be deadly boring to write about, but Extreme Reach isn’t one of those. For starters, its chief executive envisions a future in which you will walk down the street and see JumboTrons playing all sorts of video ads, “Blade Runner”-style. Naturally, he wants Extreme Reach to provide the technology to deliver those ads to every screen. And it’s not just JumboTrons—it’s also TVs, laptops, mobile devices, and whatever they invent next to distract us from real life.

“We really want to lead the market in fusing online advertising and TV,” says co-founder and CEO John Roland.

Xconomy first profiled Extreme Reach back in 2009, when the firm was just getting off the ground with its product. Roland and the founding team came from FastChannel Networks, an ad-tech company acquired by DG Systems in 2006. Extreme Reach is essentially using cloud-based technologies to go after a “superset of the same business” as FastChannel, which is now called DG FastChannel (and is a competitor to Extreme Reach, particularly in TV ad distribution).

But the recent performance of Extreme Reach warrants a major update here. The company has been “very profitable for the past 18 months,” Roland says. And check out this growth curve: $2 million in revenue in 2009, $7 million in 2010, and on target for $20 million in 2011, he says. The startup has gone from 17 employees to about 90 in the past two years, spread roughly evenly across Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle. And it’s looking to hire about 20 more staff, and to open offices in new cities over the next couple of months, Roland says.

This trajectory has “big expansion venture round” written all over it. Extreme Reach previously raised a total of $12 million from Greycroft Partners, Village Ventures, and Long River Ventures. But the company has only used about $5 million of that, Roland says. He acknowledges that the team is “considering” raising a $30-50 million round, but he declined to give any more details about prospective investors and so forth.

It sounds like the company is preparing to go big—and it could have a huge impact on the advertising and video tech cluster, especially around Boston, which is home to many complementary companies such as DataXu (ad analytics and optimization), Brightcove (video hosting), Nexage (mobile ads and publishing), Celtra (mobile ads and analytics), and Nanigans (social ad optimization), to name just a few.

Extreme Reach’s competitive advantages include its relationships with ad industries and its “domain expertise around video,” says Roland. Technologically, the company uses cloud-based Amazon Web Services and Nirvanix to store and serve video ads.

Roland calls the ad distribution sector “a very big space with a lot of room for different players.” But he acknowledges that he would like to see Extreme Reach “be the one place to go—the central clearinghouse” for video ads to be distributed. We’ll be watching to see if the company’s imminent expansion is successful in that regard.

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This month’s NY Tech Meetup, held on July 5, brought more than 750 spectators to the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts eager to see some of the latest ideas from local startups, including one group that came out of stealth that same day.

Though the event was themed as the “Now Neighborhood,” the nine startups offered a mix of ideas that included a different way for retailers to offer loyalty-based discounts and a three-dimensional model of the human body that … Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based Brightcove, the digital media and video hosting firm, said today it is planning to move from One Cambridge Center to Atlantic Wharf on the Boston waterfront in April 2012. The company, which was founded in 2004, has signed a 10-year lease for an 82,000-square-foot office space at 290 Congress Street. Brightcove has 280 employees and plans to hire 120 more to fill out the new space, according to a report in the Boston Globe. The firm, perhaps best known for its video-hosting Web platform, has focused more on mobile video in the past year or two. Brightcove joins Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Heartland Robotics, and other companies that recently have moved, or are in the process of moving, from Cambridge to Boston.

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New York’s Health Guru Media raised $6 million in a funding round that includes new investor Western Technology Investment, according to a press release. Other investors in the round included Castile Ventures and Village Ventures. Health Guru hosts health and diet video content online after pivoting in 2006 away from its initial incarnation as the William Shatner Sci-Fi DVD Club. The videos include commentary from nutrition experts and physicians. Thus far Health Guru has raised $12 million including the latest round, according to VentureWire. Previous investors in the company include Long River Ventures, Granite Point Capital, and The Berkshires Capital Investors.

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It’s not every day I get to dine with the CEO of a public company worth $5 billion. Last month I sat down with Andy Ory, founder and chief exec at Bedford, MA-based Acme Packet (NASDAQ: APKT), for an in-depth chat about his company’s strategy and outlook in the area of networking technology.

The setting was The Friendly Toast in Cambridge, MA. Ory has a soft spot in his heart for the Kendall Square area—back in the late ‘80s, he worked at Boston Technology, the voice-mail pioneer whose office was next to where Friendly Toast sits today. (If you ever get a chance, ask him about the story of using the local pay phone for product testing.)

Over a BLT and huevos rancheros (if I recall correctly), we talked about everything from Ory’s startup lessons to big-company concerns and business regulations, from Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype to how Acme Packet is like Cisco back in 1993. (Ory is speaking tonight at a Boston-area event with Founder Collective’s Eric Paley; he will talk about Acme Packet’s story and his broader experiences in building companies.)

Ory is a leading light in the tech entrepreneurship scene. Before founding Acme Packet in 2000, he cut his teeth at Boston Technology and then founded Priority Call Management, which sold to LHS Group for over $160 million in 1999. Over the past decade, he and his team have built Acme Packet into a leader in session border control—technology that helps telecom network operators and big companies manage voice-over-IP (VoIP) and other communications and services over the Internet in an efficient and secure manner.

Yet things have not always been rosy for Acme Packet, which went public in 2006 and now has roughly 700 employees (about 450 in Bedford). The company’s stock fell below $4 in late 2008, before rebounding and rising strongly in the past year and a half, to around $70 in recent months. I wanted to hear about that dramatic comeback too.

Ory didn’t disappoint as either a lunch companion or an interview subject. It helps that he is a charmer and a natural-born storyteller. Consider how he explains where Acme Packet sits today:

“Imagine you were visiting a company back in 1993 called Cisco Network Systems. ‘What do you guys do?’ We make a router. You might say, ‘what’s a router?’ It’s a piece of hardware and software. The reason is enterprises are converting their infrastructure to IP [Internet protocol] because of e-mail. If enterprise A wants to send e-mail to enterprise B, they need a router between them. Well, you might say, ‘what percentage of enterprises are going to do e-mail?’ And they’d say, every single one on the planet. ‘And how many e-mail messages fill up a router?’ To figure out how many routers you’re going to sell. What was really interesting is, when you connect all these networks together, a network effect ensues. Of course I couldn’t say to you, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Napster—I wish I could have,” Ory says.

“Now let’s fast forward 18 years and you’re visiting my company,” he says. “We make a session border controller. Enterprises and service providers are converting their service infrastructure to IP so they can do voice over IP. When they want to make a VoIP call from one enterprise to another, they need a session border controller to connect those two enterprises. So you’d say, ‘what percentage of enterprises and service providers are going to do VoIP?’ And of course my answer is, every single one. … 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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Successful businesses take pride in knowing their customers, listening to them, and exceeding their expectations. They evolve their products, services, pricing, terms, and distribution based on what the market is looking for and how the landscape is changing—not on what worked in the past. This quality has never been more important than in the past two years of jarring recession and slow recovery.

Yet most businesses are not prepared for a momentous shift in their customers’ behavior, one that transcends any particular product or industry. This shift affects not only customers but employees, suppliers, partners, and investors—in fact, every audience companies need to reach, motivate, influence, and satisfy in order to survive and thrive.

We are changing the way we consume information, more profoundly and rapidly than most of us realize. The explosion of online and mobile video is the catalyst, and the future of corporate communications clearly will hinge on the ability to exploit this shift smartly enough to gain and keep the attention of the people whose impressions, decisions and behavior determine a company’s fate.

“Enterprise Television” will be the 24×7 media identity of successful businesses. With video as the dominant vehicle for nearly all communications, Enterprise Television can significantly increase the ability to:

• Market and sell products and services;
• Increase employee engagement and commitment;
• Build and enhance brand identity and loyalty;
• Project and protect corporate reputation and image; and
• Pro-actively manage and contain all forms of crisis.

The numbers are astounding. In November 2010, 172 million Internet users in the U.S. spent an average of almost 30 minutes per day watching online video. That’s 40 percent more time per day than in 2009. Also during November, Americans viewed 5.4 billion online video ads, which reached 49% of the total U.S. population. YouTube, the most popular online video site, is experiencing more than two billion playbacks a day (150 million of those through smart phones and other mobile devices), as 35 hours of new content is uploaded to its site every minute. The number of people watching video on their mobile phones is growing at a 40 percent annual clip. As broadband pushes rapidly into even more homes, businesses and wireless communications networks, these trends will only keep rising. Cisco, the leading provider of the communications gear that keeps the Internet humming, estimates that within four years, 90 percent of the traffic moving across the Web will be video.

The opportunities for business leaders and marketers may sound familiar: reaching audiences on their terms, targeting them more narrowly and efficiently, and reaping the benefits of interacting with them constantly. Sounds like the call of the Internet, right? The dominance of online video will enable these benefits, to be sure, but also will introduce an entirely new level of possibilities—for good or ill.

Consider GE. An iconic brand with a history of polished marketing campaigns, GE wanted younger audiences (its future customers, investors, and employees) to relate to its Ecomagination green initiatives. Rather than producing slick ads and buying expensive spots on traditional … Next Page »

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San Mateo, CA-based VideoSurf said today that it has raised $16 million from Pitango Venture Capital and strategic investors, bringing its total financing to $28 million. Using a patended computer vision algorithms to identify Web video content, Videosurf has built a search index that it says is used by 12 million visitors per month. VideoSurf CEO and co-founder Lior Delgo said the new cash “gives us the resources to scale the company as we continue to hire the best talent and invest in our technology.”

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San Francisco-based Affine Systems, which uses computer vision technology to identify the content of online videos and help advertisers match ads with related content, said yesterday that it has raised $5 million in Series B funding. New investor Crosslink Capital led the round, which was joined by existing backer Highland Capital Partners. The company has raised $8 million all told. “We plan to use Crosslink Capital and Highland’s investment to scale our operations and bring advertisers the tools they need to be confident that their ads will be shown in connection with the most relevant and appropriate online videos,” Affine CEO Mike Sullivan said in a statement.

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File this under “one to watch more closely.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Sunnyvale, CA-based Zediva today launched a service aimed at disrupting the DVD rental market currently dominated by companies like Netflix and Coinstar’s Redbox. For $1.99 per DVD, Zediva members can watch a movie that’s physically playing on a DVD player at Zediva’s data center and streaming remotely over the Internet to a computer, tablet, smartphone, or set-top box. (The movies are streamed in the form of Adobe Flash files, meaning Apple iOS devices are left out.) The arrangement allows Zediva to get around the 28-day waiting period imposed on Netflix and Redbox before they can rent out newly released DVDs. “Zediva is designed to allow anyone to enjoy new releases at an affordable price point,” Zediva founder and CEO Venky Srinivasan said in a statement. “Our mission is to provide immediate access to the most current and popular blockbusters.”

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San Bruno, CA-based YouTube, the online video network owned by Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), has acquired New York-based Next New Networks, the startup’s departing CEO Fred Seibert confirmed in a blog post yesterday. The four-year-old startup, which helps package and promote video content from independent producers, “will become a core component of YouTube Next, a new team that will focus on supercharging content creator development on YouTube, driving deeper expertise in partner audience development, and incubating new ideas that can be shared with the broader community,” Seibert wrote. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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Santa Clara, CA-based Rovi (Nasdaq: ROVI), a provider of entertainment guide information and copy protection technology, announced yesterday that it has acquired San Francisco-based SideReel, a startup that provides personalized guides to online television content. Rovi said SideReel’s data will complement its new AllRovi film and music search and recommendation service. “By adding the SideReel.com website to our online portfolio, we believe Rovi can be the go-to source for finding and enjoying online content,” said Rovi vice president of marketing Dave Jordan in a statement. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Xconomy profiled SideReel and its founder Roman Arzhintar last month.

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Palo Alto, CA-based Auditude, which makes tools to help track and manage Internet video advertising campaigns, said today (PDF) that it has collected $11 million in Series B venture financing. The round was led by new investors Granite Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank, and included existing backers Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures. Granite Ventures managing director Chris Hollenbeck has joined Auditude’s board of directors.

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Menlo Park, CA, startup vChatter, which runs video chat services that randomly link users on Facebook, Bebo, and the Web, said today that it has raised an additional $350,000 in seed funding from individual investors, bringing its total capitalization to $600,000. The company markets itself as a PG-rated alternative to ChatRoulette, the once-trendy social video service plagued by a subpopulation of anonymous male users who prefer to be seen—to put it delicately—from the neck down.

When vChatter debuted last May, “They weren’t controlling the naked guys very well” on ChatRoulette, CEO Will Bunker says. That created an opening for another service that would connect people seeking short one-on-one video conversations with (fully clothed) strangers, a pursuit that Bunker says is an increasingly popular leisure-time distraction. (VChatter discourages lewdness by tying users to their public identities within Facebook or Bebo.)

But even if more recent efforts to sanitize ChatRoulette succeed, there’s still room for more than one video chat service in the social-networking world, Bunker says. “There are a lot of businesses that aren’t one-winner-take-all,” he says. Since people using ChatRoulette or vChatter never know who they’re calling, he points out, the network effects that lead users to clump up on services like Facebook are absent. “I think the underlying need to communicate with human beings is hard to overestimate—it’s just part of who we are,” Bunker says. “So all I’ve got to do is put together an interesting and unique way of serving that need, and I think it could be really big.”

So far, vChatter has about 4 million regular users, says Bunker. They use the service three to four times per month, on average, and spend about six minutes per visit. The service is accessible from inside Facebook or Bebo, or from vChatter’s website, where users can log in using their Facebook credentials.

Silicon Valley standards would say $600,000 isn’t a lot of money, even for a Web startup, but that’s all the company needs for now, given that it can outsource much of its development work to engineers in India and rent bandwidth and processors so cheaply from Amazon Web Services, according to Bunker. “A few years ago, I couldn’t have imagined doing it this inexpensively and getting to millions of users, but damn, it’s gotten cheap,” he says.

Bunker is known as the co-founder of the dot-com-era online dating site OneandOnly.com, which later became Match.com. The largest investor in vChatter’s latest fundraising round is Dave Kennedy, Bunker’s co-founder at OneandOnly.com, who put in $100,000. Individual investors from Colorado, Illinois, and Texas also chipped in. “It’s been friends and friends-of-friends,” says Bunker. “People love this idea. They say it’s the best idea I’ve had since [online] dating.”

Despite his training as an industrial engineer and experience in go-go Silicon Valley startups, Bunker has a country-boy demeanor. He joined the Dallas-area computer industry scene in the early 1990s, launching OneandOnly.com with Kennedy in 1995. By 1999 it had become the biggest dating site on the Web.

Ticketmaster bought both OneandOnly.com and Match.com in 1999, slapped Match.com’s brand name on OneandOnly.com’s technology, and promptly … Next Page »

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Interesting news from the video world today. Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies says it has been working with Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) for the past year to make its video-processing software run on the chip giant’s new “Sandy Bridge” microprocessors, which blend traditional processing with graphics capabilities. The two companies are demoing the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas later today.

Financial details of the partnership weren’t given, but it’s a big deal for Elemental, whose software until now has run only on Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) graphics processors (GPUs). “We’ve got a viable second source for GPU-powered video processing. This will allow more flexibility and choice for our customers,” says Elemental co-founder and CEO Sam Blackman, in an e-mail.

If all goes well, it sounds like the Elemental-Intel partnership could improve the efficiency of delivering video to different kinds of devices. As Blackman sees it, the new technology “will continue to drive down the cost of creating the many different flavors of video streams required for adaptive bit rate delivery today.”

He adds, “At CES we are expecting to see the introduction of many new tablet, connected TVs, and mobile devices—if history is any guide, each will require additional resolutions, bit rates, and formats of video. To make delivering video to the ever-expanding universe of devices cost-effective for our customers, faster and more efficient architectures are critical.”

Elemental Technologies was founded in 2006 and is venture-backed by Voyager Capital, General Catalyst, and Steamboat Ventures. The company has raised $14.6 million in venture financing.

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CastTV, a four-year-old video search site in San Francisco backed by investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Ron Conway, and Marc Andreessen, has been acquired by Tribune Media Services of Chicago, according to an announcement yesterday. Tribune sells access to a database of TV and movie information that’s used in media guides published by Microsoft, Google, TiVo, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Amazon, The New York Times, and other companies. Tribune said the CastTV acquisition would enhance this database and give customers “access to all the metadata necessary to create entertainment-discovery guides that direct consumers to programs available on linear, on-demand and online video platforms.” Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

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