Skip to main content [aditude-amp id="stickyleaderboard" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1702,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"A"}']

Roundup: The VC Carwash, Popsugar, Khosla’s latest, Facebook opens, Decentral.TV, Blotter

Roundup: The VC Carwash, Popsugar, Khosla’s latest, Facebook opens, Decentral.TV, Blotter

Siteler Wash, a high-end car wash start-up, get’s $1.5 million — Dave Whorton, a former protege of Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, and partner at TPG Ventures, is now at his own firm Tugboat Ventures, and has invested $1.5M in Mountain View start-up Siteler Wash to wash Mercedes and Porsches of executives. Siteler schedules car washes with large companies — on-site while execs work. Siteler charges $9 for a basic car wash and up to $300 for a full detailing. We won’t pour any cold water over Whorton’s tugboat — yet ;) — it might prove a good idea. (AlarmClock)

PopSugar, a network of four blogs targeting young, hip woman, adds a social network component — It says it is getting 13 million monthly page views and 1.5 million unique visitors. It is a San Francisco based company. (Techcrunch)

Kergy is the latest Silicon Valley start-up in alternative energy field
— It is a Menlo Park start-up, which has raised $3.3 million in a first round of funding from the great Silicon Valley clean energy proselytizer Vinod Khosla and his team at Khosla Ventures (No website; just a regulatory filing, cited by PE Week)

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1702,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"A"}']

Decentral.tv, a stealthy start-up raises $2.3 million for social networking on television — This is a four-month-old start-up, based in San Rafael, that founder Daniel Graf says will push something called “interactive broadcast broadband communities.” Vague, but let’s see what happens. The first round was led by DFJ, though BW may have mixed things up by calling board member Howard Hartenbaum a DFJ partner (he’s actually with Draper Richards). It is true, though, that Hartenbaum was the first guy to get to Skype in the early days. (BW article here, which also has a few more details on Celiro, the quiet mobile company which we first mentioned here).

Facebook opens APIs — The popular college social networking site, which long pursued a policy of closed order — compared to the more open, experimental MySpace — has taken on a new face. It has opened up its platform so that outside developers can build products that integrate with it easier. Its release of a so-called open application programming interface (API) already has a bunch of action happening. Details here.

AI Weekly

The must-read newsletter for AI and Big Data industry written by Khari Johnson, Kyle Wiggers, and Seth Colaner.

Included with VentureBeat Insider and VentureBeat VIP memberships.

Dapper launches blog rater — Dapper is run by Jon Aizen, who lived in San Francisco until a couple of years ago, and is now in Tel Aviv, has unveiled a new service that gauges blog popularity. The service, which requires you to put a piece of code on your blog, is called Blotter.

The new Google Talk features — file sharing, voicemail and music status — are finally open to everyone. We reported about these a couple of weeks ago, when they were being tested. (Details here)

MuleSource, an open source software for “middleware”, raises $4 million from Hummer and Morgenthaler — The software, which specializes in integrating existing computer applications, and thus called “middleware,” is the latest open source play. It launches in September, but does face competition.

VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Learn More