The big picture is great. But at Xconomy, we also like the smaller details, which often fill in or round out the big picture—and make everything more clear. So it is when it comes to company financing rounds. We always bring you stories about the main venture deals in the region and a list of the biggest rounds every month. But starting last month, we also began bringing you the most interesting small financings in high-tech, life sciences, and energy.

These are the under-the-radar deals between $100,000 and $1 million that are routinely left out of most reports. But yet, especially in these days of bootstrapping and Web 3.0 and virtual companies, they can illuminate important companies—and trends—that might otherwise be missed.

We found 11 of these smaller deals in New England for October (see list below), thanks to ChubbyBrain, a New York information services company that tracks angel, VC, and other investments in private firms via regulatory filings, user submissions, and other sources.

Virtually all of last month’s under-the-radar financings were in Massachusetts, though one was for a Connecticut firm (unlike last month, we turned up none in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, or Vermont). Seven were equity financings, and four involved debt (the data doesn’t cover the investors or the stage of financing). But beyond that, there is incredible diversity in what these firm do: infertility treatments, medical devices, Web marketing, computer storage, chip design, energy efficient vehicles, mobile marketing, and more.

We’ve written about a few of these companies before. Levant Power was a finalist for this year’s $200,000 Clean Energy Prize after winning the transportation category. The company is working to perfect an energy-recovering shock absorber for large trucks, military vehicles, and hybrid gas-electric cars. It’s a cool technology, and I’m hardly shocked to see it attracting some funding. We’ve also covered Isabella Products, which puts out Vizit, a device that Wade wrote “masquerades as a digital photo frame but is actually a sophisticated, two-way photo management device connected to a nationwide cellular data network.” These kinds of interactive digital photo frames face lots of competition, though, so we’ll have to see what develops, so to speak.

I’m probably most intrigued by VisEn Medical. Its board chairman is Ed Kania, co-founder and managing partner of Flagship Ventures here in Cambridge, MA. Also on the board is Per Lofberg, CEO of Merck Capital Ventures—so it has some real heavyweights behind it. The Woburn, MA-based company, which says it has some 75 patents or patent applications in its portfolio, develops fluorescence technology for non-invasive in vivo imaging. The company took in more than $12 million in Series B financing in 2007 and early 2008 (the round was expanded). Meanwhile, I’m not sure what I think of ShopText, a company I’d never heard of before but which led the pack with $900,000 raised. The Norwalk, CT-based company helps serve up coupons, free samples, merchandise promotions, tickets, and so forth over mobile phones. I hate the idea, but I love it, too.

Here are those, and the rest of October’s New England under-the-radar deals:

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When Tom Clancy introduced a panel discussion yesterday at a forum on analytics software, the founder of San Diego’s Tao Venture Partners said the forum was “founded four years ago by people who had an interest in seeing San Diego get established as a leading cluster in the analytics space.”

The forum, which is sponsored by the San Diego Software Industry Council, offers an annual snapshot of local developments in a booming industry that has become crucial to business intelligence, data storage and management, and complex decision-making.

Since Robert Hecht-Nielsen founded HNC Software here in 1986, the number of companies that focus on analytics software in San Diego has mushroomed, with more than 100 companies specializing in neural networking, data mining, pattern recognition, and related algorithms and technologies for analyzing data. Yet Clancy and local experts who discussed “opportunities in analytics” lamented that San Diego’s standing as the birthplace of some key companies and technologies has gone largely unrecognized. Among the examples cited:

— HNC, which specialized in technology to analyze credit card transactions, was acquired for $810 million in 2002 by Fair Isaac and Co. and integrated with the Minneapolis, MN-company’s credit-scoring business.

—Urchin Software, a suburban San Diego Web analytics company that developed an assortment of tools for measuring website usage, page views, and other statistics, was acquired by Google in 2005 for an estimated $30 million. Seven months later, Google renamed its Urchin business Google Analytics, and made analytics tools available to Web users for free.

—WebSideStory, a San Diego company that developed website traffic analysis tools, rebranded itself as Visual Sciences in 2007 and was acquired later that same year for $394 million by Utah-based Omniture. (Last month, Omniture was itself acquired by San Jose, CA-based Adobe Systems in a $1.8 billion deal.)

—Carlsbad, CA-based analytics software developer Keylime Software was acquired for $9.5 million in 2003 by Pasadena, CA-based Overture, an advertising distribution network that was later acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion.

Such deals reflect a surging awareness of the value of data, says Stephen Coggeshall, a co-founder and chief technology officer for San Diego-based ID Analytics, which uses advanced analytics to search credit databases for telltale signs of identity theft. In terms of technology innovations that will likely lead to forming new companies, Coggeshall says … Next Page »

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KESDEE calls itself world’s largest eLearning company for money managers. The San Diego company provides state-of-the-art financial education and training for professionals, and it is taking its digital headstart to new levels.

KESDEE plans to move its courses to mLearning—as in mobile learning—which means its 700 accredited eLearning courses on such topics as banking, insurance, and risk management will become available on cell phones. The company is researching and developing this transition to small screens—it’s both a challenge and a great opportunity for the global startup, as the Internet becomes increasingly mobile and hundreds of millions of people will access the Internet only with their mobile devices. “It’s difficult to do, but we want to move fast. We want to become a dominant niche player in this market. We want to be Nike, not Wal-Mart,” says CEO Swarna Jessica Srinivas, a 26-year-old Harvard graduate who uses “Go for the Moon” as her personal motto.

Swarna Srinivas

The company’s all-digital financial courses are fun in a way that few have seen in education. There’s interactive simulations, engaging graphics, and quizzes preparing for real-life situations—even in topics like Anti-Money Laundering or Trading Operation Controls or Asset Liability Management. “We provide eLearning, not eReading. We think eLearning is done by individual choice and so must keep the student interested in the topic,” says Srinivas.

KESDEE is an acronym for Knowledge, Economy, Skills, Development, eLearning, Excellence. It’s an energetic and disciplined company that provides 2,100 hours of e-courses for financial industry professionals. KESDEE went to the Internet right from the start in 2001, when their eLearning platform was developed. “We are purely digital, no bricks and mortar. We want to be in the heart of cyberbusiness, and our advantage is in web-based delivery. Our dream is to see ‘KESDEE Inside’ in all eLearning, just as there was ‘Intel Inside’ earlier in PCs,” says Srinivas.

The company was founded and is completely self-funded from the asset and liability management training programs of chairman S.L. “Sam” Srinivasulu, Srinivas’ father, who has doctorate in financial risk management from the University of Michigan. He prefers to stay in the background and calls himself retired. Daughter Sarwan Srinivas runs the company. She started to promote its services to Spain and Portugal when she was 19 years old.

In addition to its San Diego headquarters, KESDEE currently has a 70-person development center in Bangalore, India, and an office in Mexico City with 25 employees who translate materials into Spanish and localize them. The company is planning to establish customer support centers in China, Vietnam, Brazil, and other countries. “This year’s most significant challenges are scaling up, scaling up, and scaling up,” according to Srinivas.

KESDEE differs from its eLearning competitors like Skillsoft with an all-digital, web-based approach and by focusing only on financial courses. KESDEE customizes and tailors content for various corporate clients, and even allows clients to brand its courses as their own (just as long they remember that small ‘KESDEE Inside’ thing.) The three largest customers are the Federal Reserve Board, Citigroup, and Standard Chartered Bank. Others include PriceWaterhouseCoopers, IBM, and many major international banks. KESDEE uses blue chip clients as an ad for their next prospect and concentrates on producing educational content—they call this their disruptive business strategy and disruptive technology.

The courses are also available for individuals. An accredited risk-management course costs $400.

Beyond that, Srinivasulu is not keen to provide much financial information about KESDEE itself. He says KESDEE is profitable. Thousands of professionals have taken their courses, but only the company knows how many licenses it has sold.

How has the economic crisis affected KESDEE? Characteristically, CEO Srinivas says it’s both a tough time and an opportunity. “Many businesses have realized that they don’t need their own financial-education department. On the other hand, many institutions are cutting down spending, too.”

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San Diego-based TweetPhoto is taking social media a little bit further towards “Web 3.0″ time. TweetPhoto today launched a social-networking photo-sharing service, which uses Twitter and Facebook and automatically geo-tags photos sent from GPS-enabled cell phones. You can check my TweetPhoto of  Bird Rock in La Jolla here. The service also provides information on who has looked at a certain pic. The site requires users to give their Twitter username and password.

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In Finland I am a reporter for Ilta-Sanomat, Helsinki’s second-largest newspaper. I write about Finland’s Nokia a lot, so I may have a different perspective on Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chipset maker.

For us Finns, Nokia is a larger-than-life, close-to-home success story. We speak the same strange language and it’s our only global giant. In the United States, which is the leading market for mobile phones, Nokia lost its No. 1 ranking in cell phone sales when the clamshell design and thinner cell-phones became popular. Then came the iPhones. Nokia wants to change this situation and resume its leadership position in the U.S. market.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) got new hope to fulfill its ambitions last month, when Qualcomm and Nokia announced a joint “Plan to Develop Advanced Mobile Devices.” A statement issued by the two companies on Feb. 17th didn’t provide many details about this collaboration. Qualcomm’s Steve Mollenkopf says in the statement, “This new level of cooperation would bring exceptional leaps in mobile performance to people around the world.”

Only last year Nokia and Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) settled a nasty patent fight. In Finland, Qualcomm was viewed by many as being very aggressive in its licensing demands. But this new collaboration benefits both organizations: Qualcomm gets its first deal with Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones; Nokia gets a fresh opportunity to reclaim its leadership in the U.S. market. Their mutual goal is to research and make the next-generation phones, which means iPhone killers.

One place where this collaboration may be playing out … Next Page »

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