Apache Hadoop-based management service Cloudera has raised a new $40 million funding round, just ahead of its Hadoop World 2011 conference tomorrow.

Cloudera provides its own take on Hadoop’s powerful open-source data management software and couples it with IT support and management. Using Hadoop, enterprises can store and process huge amounts of unstructured data. But Hadoop can often be unwieldy and difficult to manage, so Cloudera helps make it possible to manage that data effectively.

“Any company with a data-intensive environment is probably using Hadoop in some form,” Cloudera COO Kirk Dunn told VentureBeat. “Whether those companies have sought out Hadoop training or management solutions, we’re the company people are looking to and the leaders in this space by any metric.”

The new $40 million funding round was led by Frank Artale of Ignition Partners with participation from existing investors Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel.

“Cloudera is the defining company in the big data industry and the popularity of Hadoop is increasing every day,” said Artale, in a statement. “The Big Data space is moving fast — we looked at many investment opportunities and chose Cloudera due to their clear leadership. The team and its technology are the best in this business and we are excited to be part of it.”

Cloudera also announced today that it has partnered with storage and data solutions company NetApp. The two companies have created the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop, which combines Cloudera’s wide-ranging Hadoop distribution with a NetApp-constructed RAID architecture. It’s a big deal for enterprise customers seeking to put more power behind Hadoop and customized data processing and management efforts.

“This gives NetApp’s customers the ability to process new data and existing data and that data together, which hasn’t been possible before,” Dunn said.

Cloudera is on a roll when it comes to funding, and its total raised, including today’s round, now stands at an impressive $76 million. It raised a $25 million round a year ago with funding led by Meritech Capital Partners and previous investors Accel and Greylock. Before that, it raised $6 million in June 2009 and $5 million in March 2009.

Filed under: deals, enterprise

Infographics startup Visual.ly has raised a new $2 million round of funding, the company announced today.

Visual.ly is building a service that will allow people to create beautiful, custom infographics using information from various databases and APIs. The service will be automated, which means users only need to specify the kind of information they want to visually display to produce an infographic. The company produced an example of what the service can do with its Twitter Visualization Project in July.

With the rising demand for timely, relevant infographics among news publications and communications organizations, Visual.ly is filling a need in the marketplace. Right now, most organizations that produce quality infographics have to hire out a designer and dedicate resources to gathering information — a process that can be both costly and time intensive.

“There are no tools for this type of thing. People are either creating really bad-looking visuals using Microsoft Applications [such as the native Windows app MS Paint] or they’re hiring a graphic designer, which takes time and money — it’s a hassle,” Visual.ly co-founder and CEO Stew Langille told VentureBeat. “So, we’re trying to create a tool that we can license out to the industry.”

Langille, who previously worked at money blog Mint.com, said Visual.ly’s service is trying to help digital news media outlets evolve in the same way that Gannett-owned USA Today’s visually stimulating weather infographics did in the early ’90s and the way Wired’s innovative graphic design did just under a decade later.

Visual.ly’s new round of funding was led by Crosslink Capital, SoftTech and 500 Startups, with participation from Kapor Capital, Giza Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Mark Goines, Josh James and others. The startup intends to use the additional capital to grow its development team and hire additional data visualization specialists.

The startup already has several partnerships for the Alpha release of its service. Visual.ly has produced infographics for several of its media company partners, such as The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, AskMen, CNNMoney, The Economist, NASDAQ, National Geographic and the Wall Street Journal.

Over 26,000 companies signed up for Visual.ly’s beta testing, which is tentatively scheduled go public in late December. But if that isn’t enough to gauge the high level of interest from people, the company also revealed that it has created over 300,000 infographics, doubled the index of infographics hosted on its website and has more than a million monthly page views.

Check out a demo of the service embedded below.

Filed under: deals, enterprise, media, social

Good news for the hordes of students hopelessly addicted to Facebook and Farmville.

Grockit, a company that applies social networking and gaming mechanics to studying, just closed another $7 million round of financing to fuel its international growth.

The startup lets students work on sample test problems together and rewards them with points and badges to boost motivation. It’s been on a bit of tear recently. After launching in 2008, as a social-study platform for the test-prep market, it expanded into the k-12 market over the last two years. Since the beginning of September, it’s been integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph API to give students access from within Facebook. It’s also introduced a one-for-one program called “Grockit for Good” that matches each account purchased with one year of free access for under-served students, added a VP of engineering, and teamed up with the Gates Foundation and the Kauffman Foundation to launch the Startup Weekend EDU series.

Grockit has seen a lot of adoption in India — the team tells us 25% of students in India who took the GMAT used Grockit to study — and it plans to use a good portion of the new funds to fuel growth in new markets. It will also continue to develop social and gaming mechanics to fuel user engagement.

The round was led by existing backer Atlas Ventures but included two new heavy-hitters in the education-technology world: NewSchools Venture Fund and Michael Moe from GSV Capital. Benchmark Capital and Integral Capital also participated.

One potential challenge for the company is creating enough high-quality content to achieve the same educational rigor as traditional study programs. Grockit seems to be expanding into virtually every k-12 subject and will increasingly do battle with big text-book publishers and test-prep companies slowly getting into the digital game, not to mention other edtech startups like Knewton. Grockit licenses much of its content from other publishers, but also allows its partners to author original content. Eventually, founder Farb Nivi tells us, partners will be able to attach Creative Commons licenses to their original content. That paired with some smart distributed editing (see Grockit’s guest post on Mechanical Turk for how they manage low-level copy-editing) could facilitate a growing base of quality questions to rival competitors.

The company has raised a total of $24.7 million in angel and VC investment. Its early angel investors included Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga and Reid Hoffman.

Filed under: deals, VentureBeat

Open-source software provider Red Hat is planning to acquire online storage vendor Gluster Inc. for $136 million, the company announced Tuesday.

Red Hat said it’s purchasing the privately owned Gluster to boost its cloud computing offerings — specifically, Red Hat wants to offer data storage for email and social media information to its enterprise customers.

Red Hat plans on incorporating Gluster’s products into its existing product line, which the company will eventually offer to clients through a subscription payment model, according to Red Hat.

Founded in 2005, Sunnyvale, California-based Gluster previously obtained a $8.5 million second round of funding from Index Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. Gluster has a list of high-profile customers, including Deutsche Bank, Samsung, Autodesk and Barnes & Noble.

The acquisition deal should close later this month, according to Red Hat.

Filed under: cloud, deals, VentureBeat

SweetLabs has raised $13 million in funding to bring the one-click app experience to the desktop computer.

The San Diego, Calif. company makes an app platform called Pokki, which lets developers create and distribute rich connected desktop apps using standard web languages such as HTML5. e also runs the Open Candy ad network, which offers recommendations to users when they are downloading and installing apps. Open Candy has powered more than 400 million desktop app installs since the product launched in 2008.

SweetLabs launched Pokki for beta testing in June. The idea is to create an easy-to-use app platform that is similar to the app experience users enjoy on smartphones and tablets. The company will use the money to expand that platform. SweetLabs will also expand its Ope nCandy ad network.

Intel Capital led the round. The investment fits with Intel’s strategic goals, since SweetLabs aims to reinvigorate the PC for the age of apps. Existing investors Google Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated. Darrius Thompson, chief executive, said that the PC is the largest platform for applications, but it is the most underserved when it comes to apps.

Filed under: deals, VentureBeat

Wikets, a soon-to-be-released iPhone application that recommends places and products to friends, announced a $1.5 million seed round from Andreessen-Horowitz and Battery Ventures today. But will yet another recommendations product survive when reviews and opinions already litter the Internet?

I imagine these recommendation apps to be like little bodies treading water in the Internet ocean. Apps like Where exist in rafts, websites such as Yelp are the ships that float on their own, and companies that provide exit strategies or funding are the lifeboats searching the scene for people to pick up.

Not every treading body drowns. Wickets is hoping a classic approach to recommendations will help it edge out competitors, openly acknowledging that the space is crowded.

“We are doing it the old fashioned way. Our goal was to come up with a way users can put their best recommendations at their friends’ fingertips,” said Wickets chief executive and co-founder Andy Park in an interview with VentureBeat.

Wickets works by allowing you to follow other Wikets members and see their recommendations in a stream. Recommendations are made by searching a particular place or company, finding the product and adding your two cents right on its page. You can save recommendations in wishlists and define a wishlist by topic. Commenting is also enabled on the various reviews.

Based on how many people “re-recommend” what you’ve already recommended or add your review to their wishlist, you get points, which can result in gift cards. The company is not releasing the names of all of its retail partners, but does say the first gift cards awarded could be from Amazon, iTunes or other large scale retailers.

Park says that the app solves two problems: having to find a product and send an email or text regarding the product, as well as time spent waiting for a recommendation when requested from friends. The app solves these issues by attaching a review directly to the product or place page and, in theory, your friends’ recommendations will already be available on the app, so you won’t have to query the person directly.

This requires that people actually use the app, however. The app can’t reach its full functionality until a majority of your own friends are using it. So how will Wikets get people to use the app? The company believes Facebook and Twitter connect, a prompt to find friends, and a natural desire to meet people will bring in the required amount of users.

By “natural desire to meet people,” Park means that because you can see friends-of-friends’ reviews, you will want to get to know those people as well. For example, if you’re with someone who mentions a restaurant your friend reviewed, you can offer to invite that friend along since you know they like the place. It’s a little intangible, however, and hard to measure if downloads will directly correlate to people meeting each other.

User acquisition is a big problem for app companies today, which have turned to gamification, or a rewards system such as Wiket’s as a way to lure people. A number of crowdsourced products such as CrowdTwist, BunchBall and Needle are all doing this. But as any gamer knows, getting rewarded is great, but its entertainment value will die if the means by which you get rewarded is boring.

Parks did, however, say that he is saving specific strategies for the app’s launch.

The growth of a company like this is very much up in the air, especially as funding becomes less and less of an indicator that a company is worthwhile.

Matt McCall of Chicago venture firm New World Ventures told VentureBeat, “There are just way too many companies getting funded.”

For now, however, Wikets has been pulled out of the ocean to develop its app with capital from investors Battery Ventures and Andreessen-Horowitz. It is using the funding to launch the application, which went into full development after the company closed on the round in May.

Prior to the round, Park knew Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz when his former company BladeLogic was a competitor of their Opsware, both optimization focused data centers. BladeLogic went public in 2007 and was sold to BMC Software in 2008. The teams grew mutual respect over the years and are collaborating this time around.

Wikets plans to launch the iPhone app in October, as well as announce its strategy and partners further. For now, the seed round will keep the project afloat.

[Photo courtesy of Andrew Doran/Shutterstock]

Filed under: deals, mobile, VentureBeat

CareCloud, a Miami-based company that provides cloud-based practice management tools for healthcare providers, just raised $20.1 million from Silicon Valley-based Intel Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.

“They must believe in us if they’re willing to spend money on frequent cross-country flights for meetings,” laughs Albert Santalo, CEO and founder of CareCloud in an interview with VentureBeat.

CareCloud creates apps that help medical professionals run their businesses. Those apps include a community collaboration and communication platform to securely share patient information, a medical practice management system for billing and scheduling as well as a revenue cycle management app. Soon CareCloud will provide electronic medical records.

With the new funding, CareCloud will focus on producing more technology to serve the needs of healthcare providers.

“This industry is one that tends to lag behind the general tech industry,” says Santalo. “We believe a big part of what we have to do is continue innovating. To do this we will increase our geographic footprint and expand our sales and marketing teams.”

There are currently 85 employees at CareCloud, but Santalo says he plans on having more than 100 by the end of 2011.

CareCloud, which launched in 2010, is exceeding $500 million in accounts receivables under management for physicians and healthcare providers.

“The cloud is the place where all of the people in healthcare are playing a roll,” says Santalo. “We use it to connect all of the different players. Healthcare at is core is a social industry, but there’s wasn’t a good infrastructure to connect everyone.”

Santalo believes one of the reasons Google Health was shut down this year is that it didn’t strive to be social.

“It’s difficult to build a consumer-side platform and swim upstream,” he says. “The platform has to be built by the people providing the care. Also, it’s hard for a company like Google or Microsoft to be so many things. Healthcare requires a company that doesn’t care about anything else that’s going on.”

CareCloud has received multiple awards in the last year, including being named a winner at IBM’s SmartCamp Silicon Valley and a runner-up at the IBM SmartCamp World Finals in 2010. It was at the SmartCamp competitions that CareCloud connected with Norwest Venture Partners and Intel Capital.

“The funding environment is interesting now,” says Santalo. “You read that investment dollars are flowing, but only the best companies and entrepreneurs are the ones getting funding these days.”

Filed under: cloud, deals

Online doctor appointment startup ZocDoc on Thursday announced that is has raised an additional $25 million in third-round funding from Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs.

ZocDoc is shaking up the businesses of scheduling doctor appointments, as well as making doctors more accountable by having patients publicly rate them. The company makes its money by charging doctors $250 a month to list their practice. It lets patients find a doctor easily, set up appointments and rate their experience. Well-rated doctors then attract more patients and attention from ZocDoc’s more than 700,000 monthly users.

The $25 million from Goldman adds to DST Global’s $50 million investment from early August to create a monster $75 million third round. The company said the most recent funding will help “speed its expansion into additional regions.”

ZocDoc’s service is now available in 11 metropolitan areas in the U.S., with six of those areas launched in 2011. The service is live in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco and Washington D.C.

Before the third round of funding, ZocDoc had raised around $19 million, with investments coming from the likes of Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund. All together, the hot startup has attracted about $95 million in funding.

Have you used ZocDoc to book an appointment or rate your doctor?

Filed under: deals, VentureBeat

Twilio announced today 500 Startup‘s Dave McClure (pictured left) and SV Angel‘s Ron Conway (pictured below, right) started a second $250,000 seed fund for startups built on top of Twilio.

“We’re giving access to some of the best angels in Silicon Valley,” Twilio chief executive Jeff Lawson told VentureBeat. “Getting a seed investment from Ron Conway and Dave McClure speaks a lot and gets entrepreneurs up and running.”

Finding funding in Silicon Valley can be difficult given the number of startups on the same search in such a small radius. Twilio wanted to call out the developers who were smart and business savvy enough to run their own companies on top of its platform.

This year’s round will be particularly enticing for startups, because any funding given by McClure will be matched equally by Conway. For example, if McClure invests $50,000, the company will receive a total of $100,000 with Conway’s involvement. The fund caps at $250,000 and will be distributed by the discretion of the investors.

“I think the Twilio platform continues to grow bigger and bigger,” McClure told VentureBeat. “We see [Twilio] being one of the more interesting platforms for developers.”

This is not the first Twilio Fund to be announced. Lawson explained the first fund came about last year when he saw a tweet from McClure saying he had invested in his fourth Twilio-based startup that day. Lawson approached McClure and suggested a dedicated fund. Thus far, the first fund has invested in 10 startups and is continuing the search as six more startups pitch for funding at the Twilio Conference this week.

“We found some great companies the first time around and I’m hoping we find some more,” said McClure.

McClure was inspired by three past Twilio fund investments to start the second fund: employment tool Proven, customer relationship manager Volta, and automated sales caller FastCall411.  McClure was also impressed with GroupMe, which wasn’t in the fund, but was recently purchased by Skype based on the strength of its group messaging capabilities.

McClure explained not all chosen companies will enter his incubator 500 Startups, but he welcomes them.

McClure also readily welcomes Ron Conway to the fund. “I’m really happy to have Ron and SV Angel on board. They’ve also been pretty aggressive and innovative in going after some early stage companies,” he said. “Ron has been around the industry for 15-20 years. I have tremendous respect for him.”

According to Lawson, McClure has led the charge on the past Twilio fund and was very elemental in decision-making.

Both McClure and Conway invested in Twilio, McClure in the company’s 2008 seed round and Conway in 2010.

[Photos courtesy of Joi/Flickr]

Filed under: deals, dev

DataStax, which sells products built on top of the open source “NoSQL” data store Apache Cassandra, just announced a $11 million investment from Crosslink Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.The company also announced a new enterprise product which will be available in Q4, 2011.

NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, CouchDB and Cassandra have a number of advantages over traditional relational databases of the type proved by Oracle and Microsoft. Instead of rigid schemas, NoSQL databases have flexible ones which can be updated easily, data access is faster and they often scale better to store very large amounts of data.

Cassandra, which is used by web giants like FaceBook and Twitter, uses a peer-to-peer architecture which has no single point of failure. It’s designed specifically for high-availability applications which cannot afford to lose data even if an entire data centre went down. You wouldn’t be happy if Facebook lost your account data or Twitter your follower list, now would you?

Cassandra can also store different types of data at the same time: structured (similar to that stored in a relational database), semi-structured (data in a format like an XML documents which contains tags or other markers to separate semantic elements) and unstructured data. Cloud or on-site servers can be used to host Cassandra.

DataStax’s CEO Bill Bosworth sees the traditional relational database vendors like Oracle and Microsoft as the main competition. It’s still a big shift, in terms of mindset as much as anything else, for a company to move from a relational database to a NoSQL database. “We want to make it easy and efficient for people to adopt this new technology.” said Bosworth. “It’s a philosophical shift that you have to make but once you make it, you start to see solutions in entirely different ways.”

I asked him about what pushes companies to make that leap.”The top reason would be scale.” said Bosworth. “The second reason would be data type.’I have semistructured and unstructured data I want to work with as well’. The third reason would be change. ‘I want that flexible schema.’” If the existing database uses lots of procedural logic, however, migration will be more complex.

There’s also the cost factor. Bosworth gave the example of a customer called Constant Contact which had been considering using a relational database for a new project and estimated that it would take 9 months and cost $2.5 million. With Cassandra, they were able to get up and running in 3 months at a cost of $250,000. DataStax currently has around 100 customers.

DataStax also announced that it will release a new enterprise product in Q4, 2011 which will include the existing OpsCentre web-based monitoring product and Hadoop and MapReduce (distributed computation of large data sets stored across a cluster) functionality on top of Cassandra. DataStax will charge a per node subscription fee for the product. The new funding will mainly go towards the development of that product and expanding sales efforts.

DataStax was founded in 2010, has 30 employees, is based in the Bay area and received $3 million in from Lightspeed Venture Partners prior to the current round.

Filed under: deals, dev, VentureBeat

Crittercism, a platform that allows developers to track support issues in their mobile apps, announced today at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2011 conference that it is launching to the public with funding from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and others.

Crittercism’s technology is easily integrated into any mobile app and connects to a cloud-based service for monitoring apps. The company has focused on iOS for some time, and today it also announced that its SDK will also be available for Android apps.

During beta testing, Crittercism saw over 700 developers implement its technology, and it has been installed over 1 million times since it launched on iOS in January, CEO Andrew Levy told VentureBeat in a chat last week.

“Mobile app users had no recourse when an app crashed or misbehaved and were left with no other option than to leave a bad review in the App Store,” Levy said in a press release. “Crittercism gives a voice to an app’s user, keeps them engaged, and provides tools for a developer to diagnose, fix, and communicate the issue back to its users.”

The company is an alum of startup incubator AngelPad, just like task manager startup Astrid, which also announced funding from Google Ventures today. Crittercism says the funding helped it to make the transition to Android.

The company has also received funding from Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, AOL Ventures, and early Facebook engineer Lucas Nealson.

Filed under: deals, mobile, VentureBeat

Typesafe, a maker of software development tools for the Scala programming language, has raised $3 million in a first round of funding.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company is also introducing today its open source Typesafe Stack, which integrates the most recent releases of the Scala programming language, Akka middleware and development tools. That makes it easier to develop software with Scala, which takes advantage of multicore hardware and cloud computing. Scala is used by some of the world’s highest-trafficked web properties such as Foursquare, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Multicore processors and cloud computing offer a lot of benefits for speeding up performance and allowing lots of users to use software at the same time. But it requires programming tricks to take advantage of them. That’s where the open-source Scala comes in. Scala is the foundation for building apps that are used by millions upon millions of users.

Greylock, the investment firm whose roster includes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, made the investment. Cambridge, Mas.-based Typesafe makes money via commercial support and maintenance options through a subscription service. Martin Odersky, chief executive of Typesafe, created the Scala (which stands for scalable language) programming language in 2001 at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and launched it seven years ago. It runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine and is interoperable with Java.

“The previous generation application architecture came from sequential computing and it is running out of steam,” said Odersky. “With Typesafe, we’re introducing a modern software architecture that is designed for parallel and distributed computing, bringing huge advantages in scalability and reliability.”

Greylock partner Bill Kaiser, who made his bet on open source as an early investor in Red Hat, said that computing is entering the era of “big cores,” meaning lots of cores, or computing brains, on a single chip. And there are lots of chips inside servers, which are the computing machines inside data centers that keep huge internet web sites running. Kaiser said Scala is the only proven alternative that can handle the challenges of multicore and cloud computing. Typesafe, Kaiser says, can take Scala to the mainstream and thereby help protect the billions of dollars that corporations have invested in java.

Chris Conrad, engineering manager at LinkedIn, says Scala is a powerful programming tool that offers scalability and efficiency. He is glad to see the creators of Scala launch Typesafe so that they can invest in the next generation of the programming language.

Alex Payne, former platform lead at Twitter and chief technology officer of online banking firm BankSimple, said that Scala played a critical role in improving the scalability and reliability of Twitter’s backend services (which have had to handle huge computing loads as more and more users sign up for the service).

The company named Java creator James Gosling and Java concurrency expert Doug Lea to its board of advisors. Willy Zwaenepoel, a parallel computing expert, has also joined the advisory board. Odersky co-founded Typesafe this year with Jonas Bonér, creator of Akka. The company has 12 employees.

Tags: cloud computing, Open source, Scala

Companies: Typesafe

People: Alex Payne, Doug Lea, James Gosling, Jonas Boner, Martin Odersky, Reid Hoffman, Willy Zwaenepoel

Social enterprise network startup Magnet Systems announced today that it has pulled in $12.6 million in a first round of institutional funding. The round was led by well-know tech venture capital outfit Andreessen Horowitz.

The company said it will use the money to “fight for the best people possible” to help it develop a platform for creating business applications with attributes like those of social networks like Facebook.

Palo Alto, Calf.-based Magnet was founded by Alfred Chuang in 2008 and currently has 17 employees. The company said it aims to make the public cloud less of a conundrum for companies worried about the security of how their information is stored.

Chuang, a former Sun Microsystems engineer who was also the CEO and “A” in former software startup BEA Systems before it was snapped up by Oracle in 2008 for $8.5 billion, says Magnet’s key technology is a platform dubbed the Workplace Interaction Network (WIN).

WIN is designed to help companies become social from the start, by automatically linking up existing social networking connections their employees have within the company, as well as with their customers, clients and partners.

Chuang wrote in a blog post that the social aspect of enterprise is a key factor that can no longer be ignored by managers or large corporations:

“Now … about enterprise social computing … it’s almost impossible to believe, but after hundreds of millions of people worldwide have embraced social applications in nearly every aspect of their personal lives, businesses are still resisting social applications.  In fact, many enterprises have not made any significant investment in social applications despite obvious use cases for customer service, HR, marketing, product development, recruiting, sales, training and much more.

While the power of social networking to facilitate information sharing, knowledge transfer, team building and wealth creation is on display all around us, there has been almost no innovation in enterprise social computing.  This defies all logic and common sense when we see the tremendous success of consumer platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and YouTube.

Whether companies like it or not, their people are working and communicating through blogs, online communities, personal relationships, pictures, referrals, videos, websites and countless other vehicles.  Unfortunately, traditional enterprise applications aren’t designed to capture, organize and prioritize the knowledge and connections that reside in these unstructured assets.”

As such, Magnet has been operating “Sales WIN,” which Chuang has called Magnet’s attempt to “educate ourselves and learn stuff fast…to make our platform do what it does quicker,” in beta since October and has several unnamed customers, he told the Wall Street Journal today. Chuang added that he is still “figuring out” how to charge customers, because “operating in the cloud changes how software is capitalized and how revenue is recognized.”

WIN , which has yet to debut,  will eventually be rolled out in configuration that costs businesses a yet-to-be-determined amount but will be free to developers, with sections of it available as open source code.

For their part, Andreessen Horowitz said it was delighted to be involved, with founder Ben Horowitz blogging:

“The transition from today’s Web back-end architectures to tomorrow’s cloud computing will result in profound benefits. Over time, every existing application will be rewritten to take advantage of the cloud and these benefits. In addition, an incredible new class of never-before-possible applications will be developed.”

Warburg Pincus Managing Director Bill Janeway is also putting more money into this Series A round, as is Chuang himself.

Companies: Andreessen Horowitz, Facebook, magnet systems, Twitter, Warburg Pincus, Yelp

People: alfred chuang, Ben Horowitz, bill janeway

Many venture capitalists like to say they invest in people, not ideas. That seems particularly true in the case of Milk, Kevin Rose’s new mobile development firm, which just raised $1.5 million in angel funding.

Rose, of course, is famous for founding social news aggregator Digg, but he resigned earlier this year, after the company launched a controversial redesign and seemed to stagnate. He reemerged in April with Milk, which he said consists of a small team that will experiment with different app ideas, hopefully launching four-to-six ambitious apps in a year.

The funding was first reported in TechCrunch and confirmed on the San Francisco company’s Twitter account. Investors include Digg backers Mike Maples, Jr. (of Floodgate) and David Sze (of Greylock Partners), as well as Ron Conway, Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Ev Williams, Joshua Schachter, Ashton Kutcher, Philip Kaplan, Chris Sacca, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Hsieh, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, and others. (Yes, it’s a crazy list.)

The “development lab” model seems to be a nice career path for entrepreneurs who have launched one or two successful companies and now want to create cool new products without the headache of running a mature company. AdMob Omar Hamoui recently announced his own project, Churn Labs, which has backing from Sequoia Capital.

Tags: mobile apps, mobile development

Companies: Milk

People: Kevin Rose

Pixable, a New York City startup offering a new way to explore your friends’ photos, just announced that it has raised $3.6 million in a second round of funding.

The company has released several apps, but its focus seems to be on Photofeed, an app that launched earlier this year (Pixable launched the iPad version at the DEMO conference). Photofeed is supposed to help users explore photos that their friends have already posted on Facebook, using Pixable’s “WonderRank” technology to prioritize images that would be most personally interesting based on factors like Facebook Likes and what kind of photos users have liked in the past.

Pixable says Photofeed has now sorted 10 billion photos for its 500,000 users. It has plans to expand beyond the Web and iPad to iPhone and Android devices, and to add video browsing too.

The new round was led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Highland Capital. Pixable previously raised $2.5 million from Highland.

Tags: photo sharing, Photofeed

Companies: Highland Capital, Menlo Ventures, Pixable