BankSimple, the not-quite-a-bank provider of front-end services for a number of treasury-focused banks, raised $2.9 million in its first round of funding. First Round Capital, IA Ventures and Village Ventures led the round.

Again, BankSimple is not a bank. It’s a provider that manages user experiences for banks. Chief executive Joshua Reich likened it to the way gift-card operators work.

The company partners with banks that are exclusively interested in the back-end parts of banking — managing treasuries and regulatory compliance — and outsource the consumer interface and customer service out to other companies.

Users of the service receive a BankSimple debit card — which allows for overdraft protection and free ATM usage. BankSimple also allows users to deposit checks with a smartphone, something USAA has done for some time now.

As payment for running its services, BankSimple receives a fraction of the income generated from the difference between each bank’s loan payment rates and savings interest rates. Reich wouldn’t disclose what percentage of the difference BankSimple receives.

BankSimple has not launched, but Reich said the company had attracted interest from 20,000 potential users. Reich also said the company had attracted interest from some banks that are interested in outsourcing their customer service, but declined to give specific names.

[Photo: alancleaver_2000]

Tags: Bank, fees, gift cards, online bank, overdraft, treasuries

Companies: BankSimple, USAA

People: Joshua Reich

This morning at a press conference in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Ping, a social network for music that will be bundled into the next version of iTunes, its music software.

After ten iterations of iTunes, Ping marks Apple’s first step into the social realm. Jobs played it off as a simple way to discover music by following friends and artists. But he also called it a “Facebook plusTwitter for music.” With Google, Apple’s new archenemy in the mobile world, eyeing its own version of Facebook and Twitter, it’s likely that Ping is a part of much larger strategy for Apple.

iTunes has always been a hub for Apple, bringing together its devices like the Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, with content: music, movies, TV shows, apps and books. But while it’s great software, it has always lacked something that is a major part of the way we consume content: people.

Others have been quick to notice the gap and jump on it. Last.fm, for example, launched a social network around music many years ago which tracked and shared music you listened to on iTunes with friends. MySpace offered a way to connect people around content like music and artists, and grew into a social network of mammoth scale. While Apple products like the iPod have been a popular way to experience content in the past, the discovery of that content has often taken place elsewhere — the places where our friends hang out online.

So, Ping looks to bridge the gap between what iTunes has to offer — music — and where people discover those offerings — namely social networks.

But music is no way near the end-all-be-all for iTunes: The store sells everything from movies to TV shows, podcasts, books/audiobooks, and apps today.

This means that Apple would be short-sighted in looking at Ping as just a music-discovery tool. More likely, it sees it as a way to get serious about social, something it has never paid much attention to. It’s mastered the technology, the content, and now, it is going after the most important layer: people.

Today, on its launch date, I can follow my friends and artists on Ping, see the kind of music they’re consuming, and what they have to say about it. But in the future, it’s inevitable that I’ll also be able to see the movies and shows they’re watching, the books they’re reading, and the apps they’re using. In other words, it’s a social network based around content and consumption, not status and comments.

This should be news to Facebook and MySpace. The former has tried to be a neutral platform for sharing content, while MySpace, with an early lead in Hollywood’s movies-and-music scene, has tried to reinvent itself around the “socialization of content.” But with 160 million users and millions of songs, movies, shows, apps, and books, Apple has a far more direct connection with content. On Apple’s products, people don’t just talk about content. They consume it. And, intriguingly, they pay for it — something that social networks have struggled to capitalize on, often by sending people to iTunes to buy content, in exchange for a share of the sale.

There are implications for other players besides Facebook and MySpace. When giants fight, startups get trampled. Blippy, a service that tracks purchases, lets you see what others are buying on iTunes. Miso and Tunerfish, two startups in the social TV space, let you track what friends are watching. If Ping were to start tracking activity other than music, there would be little incentive to use such services.

Apple must surely be thinking it’s time to cut out the middlemen. Who needs partners when you’ve got 160 million friends?

Tags: digital music, itunes, online music, Ping, social content, Social networks, social sharing

Companies: Apple, Blippy, Facebook, last.fm, Miso, MySpace, Tunerfish

People: Steve Jobs

SunPower's installation at the DOE headquarters

Solar energy company SunPower Corporation has landed a sweet array of installation contracts for U.S. government entities, amounting to about 20 megawatt’s worth of new solar projects for groups such as the Navy.

The company declined to release how much these contracts are worth financially, but to give some idea of their impact, SunPower is saying the new business will generate 1,000 local jobs during their construction.

One of the plums SunPower scored was being one of five solar companies awarded what’s called an “indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity contract” by the Navy, which has five years to disperse $200 million. SunPower will be tapped to design, build, operate and maintain solar power systems for Navy and Marine Corps installations in the southwest U.S.

This follows the group’s announcement earlier this month that they’d won a contract to install a 15-megawatt project at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, Arizona, to be the largest solar power installation at government facility.

In a company-issued statement, director of federal accounts Karen Butterfield said: “SunPower has the experience and credibility to successfully navigate the federal procurement process and deliver reliable, high performance solar systems that meet agency requirements. With the addition of a U.S.-based panel manufacturing facility this year, we have also bolstered our ability to serve this growing demand.”

Other projects noted in the contracts:

-A two-megawatt solar power system at a new “ultra-low energy office complex” and two parking lots at the Department of Energy’s new Research Support Facility on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory campus in Golden, Colorado. Funding will come from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and the project is expected to finish in 2011.

-The General Services Administration (GSA) will use the SunPower’s T5 Solar Roof Tile system in their General Emmett Bean Federal Building in Indianapolis, with the project set to complete in January. The finished product would be the largest solar power system on a GSA facility.

SunPower is the latest in a series of companies who’ve benefitted from government spending in the greening of federal buildings: Lumenergi closed a $12.7 million second round funding led by Braemar Energy Ventures last week. The company makes energy-efficient networked lighting systems currently popular with new government construction – with contracts awarded at federal buildings in New Hampshire and Nevada.

Image courtsey of SunPower Corp.

Tags: government, Solar, solar energy

Companies: Lumenergi, Navy, SunPower, U.S. government

For once, people are talking about Six Apart, a blogging pioneer which hasn’t otherwise generated much chatter recently. Rumors are flying that the company’s in the midst of some kind of a deal — though we hear executives at Six Apart are denying anything’s afoot.

The most specific rumor we’ve heard is that Six Apart is looking at deals in Japan, a market it entered in 2003 and where it remains the dominant blogging platform. And sure enough, Six Apart has hired GCA Savvian, a boutique investment banking firm with offices in both Tokyo and San Francisco that’s well-known for its Internet startup deals.

No deal appears to be imminent, since GCA Savvian’s banker for Six Apart, Steve Fletcher, and Six Apart’s lead dealmaker, Andrew Anker, are both on vacation.

Six Apart, whose name was inspired by the close birthdays of its founders, the husband-and-wife team of Ben and Mena Trott, was among the first companies to commercialize the then-nascent business of blogging when it launched in 2001. It sells the Movable Type software and subscriptions to its hosted TypePad service.

But it’s since moved aggressively into the business of selling advertising both on its own sites and its publishers’, a hybrid model similar to companies like Federated Media and Glam Media. It markets itself as a social advertising network second only to Facebook in reach, with an audience of 90 million monthly visitors. In June, it signed up enthusiast-content network Whiskey Media and women’s lifestyle site BettyConfidential.com as ad-sales clients, and acquired NaturalPath Media, a green-focused ad network.

Six Apart has done complex deals before. In 2007, it sold online community LiveJournal to a Russian company, SUP, with which it had a business partnership. One possibility: Since Six Apart’s blog software remains popular in Japan, could it sell it to Nifty, an Internet service provider with which it has long partnered to provide blogging services in that country?

It is likely that Six Apart’s investors are growing restive for a deal. August Capital led a $10 million round in 2004, and participated in a $12 million round in 2006. Most venture-capital firms like to see their portfolio companies sold within seven years of their initial investment. In theory, a deal in Japan could generate cash to buy out early investors — or help fund Six Apart’s push into the advertising business.

There’s nothing to suggest a deal is even close. But if Six Apart made a move, that sure would be something to blog about, wouldn’t it?

[Photo: Hans_van_Rijnberk]

Tags: blog software, blogging, Movable Type, Typepad

Companies: GCA Savvian, Nifty, six apart

People: Andrew Anker, Steve Fletcher

Motorola has acquired a new set of app development tools in the form of Y Combinator startup 280 North.

A Motorola official confirmed to TechCrunch that Motorola acquired the web-app developer to “help facilitate the continued expansion of Motorola’s application ecosystem.” The deal was reportedly worth $20 million.

280 North developed the Objective-J and Cappuccino app development platforms, designed for those with more limited and focused programming experience. The platforms were showed off in the company’s 280 Slides app.

These app development tools could be another way for Motorola to differentiate its devices from other Android phones. Device makers are already trying to do this by developing their own “flavors” of the basic Android operating system, including Motorola’s own MotoBlur.

Those major handset manufacturers are founding members of the Open Handset Alliance, which was created to help promote an open set of tools available to all developers in the form of the Android operating system.

The deal was closed earlier in the summer, according to the Motorola official cited by TechCrunch and Barron. 280 North had initially raised $250,000 in a 2008 Angel investment fundraising round, giving a pretty sizable exit for its current investors if the TechCrunch number is accurate.

I’ve reached out to both Motorola and 280 North for confirmation and details, and I’ll update if I hear back.

Tags: Android, cupp, development, droid, OHA, Open Handset Alliance, web apps

Companies: 280 North, Google, HTC, motorola, Samsung

Infoaxe, a startup that helps helps users find better search results based on their Web history, just announced that it has raised $3 million in a first round of funding.

The Sunnyvale, Calif. company’s main product is an add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer. (They’re reportedly developing one for Chrome too.) Whenever a user enters a query into a search engine, the add-on runs a parallel search of pages they visited in the past. To illustrate the need for a product like this, cofounder Jonathan Siddharth pointed to a study showing that 40 percent of the searches on Yahoo are actually revisits, where users were trying to find a site that they’d visited in the past.

For example, if you find the LinkedIn profile of someone that you’d like to get in touch with, you might try to bookmark the page or email a link to yourself — especially if they’ve got a common name, so a regular Web search brings up too many different people. With Infoaxe, that LinkedIn profile would pop up once you searched for that name again. Or if there’s a restaurant that you like, but it shares its name with restaurants in other cities, then you might have to type in the name and the city every time. With Infoaxe, once you’ve visited the restaurant’s website or listing on another site, it will show up at the top of later searches.

Beyond the add-on, Infoaxe offers other services such as the ability to see sites your friends have visited, as well as a real-time search engine. Between 1.5 million and 2 million people have downloaded the add-on, and the site has more than 4 million registered users, Siddharth said.

The funding comes entirely from Stephen Oskoui, founder and chief executive of Internet advertising company Smiley Media. Apparently Oskoui persuaded the investors who put up Infoaxe’s $900,000 seed round — Labrador Ventures, Band of Angels, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Amidzad Partners — to sit out this round, though they may invest again in the future. (Amidzad is an investor in VentureBeat.)

Infoaxe is almost profitable already through search advertising, Siddharth said, but it will use the new funds to expand its workforce by hiring engineers and product designers.

Tags: search add-ons

Companies: Infoaxe

People: Jonathan Siddharth, Stephen Oskui

Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Oracle sues Google over Android — Oracle announced this week that it has filed suit against Google for alleged patent and copyright infringement. The business software giant, headed by Larry Ellison, said that the suit concerns intellectual property related to the Java programming language.

HP’s PR nightmare spreads across the Internet with nude photos of Jodie Fisher — The PR nightmare that Hewlett-Packard sought to avoid showed no signs of petering out as Playboy posted nude photos of Jodie Fisher, the woman who brought down HP chief executive Mark Hurd.

Console game sales shrink slightly in July, but StarCraft II makes PC game sales soar — Overall U.S. console game sales shrank 1 percent in July, continuing a weak trend that has persisted for much of the year. But sales of StarCraft II, which went on sale on July 27, were so strong that PC game sales rose 103 percent during the month.

Former softcore porn actress saddened that HP’s Mark Hurd lost his job over their relationship — Speaking of Jodie Fisher, this post covered her confirmation Sunday that she was the mysterious marketing consultant whose relationship with Hewlett-Packard chief executive Mark Hurd led him to lose his job.

With Skype, Marc Andreessen is the new king of Silicon Valley — HP’s CEO ouster. Facebook’s coming war with Google. Skype’s IPO. What do these headlines have in common? One man: Marc Andreessen.

And here are five more posts we think are important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Irrational Games’ secret Project Icarus is unveiled as BioShock Infinite — Irrational Games revealed its mysterious Project Icarus is actually BioShock Infinite, the next game in the popular BioShock game franchise.

Why Starbucks keeps seeking Internet froth — Starbucks is declaring itself a “content curator” with its new Digital Network, an assemblage of free news, music, and other content available to customers using its now-free Wi-Fi network. We investigate why the ubiquitous coffee chain keeps trying to reinvent itself as an Internet startup.

Bay Area soon to be home to 5,050 more EV charging stations — In the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most progressive regions when it comes to advanced transportation, the Air Quality Management District is funneling $5 million into an initiative to roll out 3,000 home chargers, 2,000 public chargers in commercial areas, and as many as 50 rapid charging stations along nearby highways.

ComiXology scores another digital comics hit with Scott Pilgrim — Digital comics startup ComiXology’s latest partner is Oni Press, publisher of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley. The company launched an iPad and iPhone Scott Pilgrim app just ahead of the release of the movie adaptation Friday.

New Apple TV renamed iTV — gains apps, restricted to 720p HD video — In May, we reported that the next Apple TV would potentially retail for $99 and run on iPhone-like hardware with iOS. Engadget has received information on the project, which apparently has been renamed iTV (the original name for the Apple TV).

Tags: electric vehicles, ipad, iPhone, iTV, Scott Pilgrim, Starcraft II

Companies: Apple, comiXology, Google, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, Skype, Starbucks

People: Bryan Lee O’Malley, Jodie Fisher, Marc Andreessen, Mark Hurd

CloudCrowd, a startup that outsources labor to an online community of workers, has closed a $5.1 million first round of funding. Draper Fisher Jurvetson led the round, and CloudCrowd CEO and co-founder Alex Edelstein participated as well. The company plans to use the funding to focus on business development and to expand its Zen brand, which already includes EditZen and TranslationZen, editing and translation services respectively.

CloudCrowd currently has more than 35,000 workers who have completed more than 1.5 million tasks since the site launched in October 2009. The company breaks projects down into simple tasks, then matches the tasks with qualified workers, often through its Facebook app. Both businesses and consumers use the online platform, though the translation service, which charges users $19.95 to have a page translated within 24 hours, is used most often by businesses.

Clients include the University of Southern California, which has used the service to connect with alumni and former athletes, and San Francisco’s Lombardi Sports, which has outsourced the production of an online catalog. CloudCrowd also works with Fortune 500 companies in eCommerce and search. The company last raised $1 million in October 2009.

Companies: CloudCrowd, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, EditZen, Facebook, Lombardi Sports, TranslationZen, University of Southern California

People: Alex Edelstein

Oracle announced today that it has filed suit against Google for alleged patent and copyright infringement.

The business software giant headed by Larry Ellison (pictured) said that the suit specifically concerns intellectual property related to the Java programming language, IP that Oracle purchased through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. In a press release, Oracle spokeswoman Karen Tillman said, “In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property.”

I’ve embedded a copy of Oracle’s complaint below, which includes more details about the company’s allegations. From the complaint: “Google’s Android competes with Oracle America’s Java as an operating system software platform for cellular telephones and other mobile devices. … Google has been aware of Sun’s patent portfolio, including the patents at issue, since the middle of this decade, since Google hired certain former Sun Java engineers.”

A Google spokesman told me that the company hasn’t been served with the complaint yet, so it can’t comment. There’s a good chance that Oracle raised the issue with Google before filing suit, so it may be worth quoting the boilerplate language in Google’s latest earnings report about how Google is involved in legal claims “from time to time,” but that the company believes “the resolution of our current pending matters will not have a material adverse effect on our business.”

[via Business Insider]

Oracle Google Complaint

Tags: Android, Java

Companies: Google, Oracle, Sun Microsystems

Advanced battery maker A123 announced more than its quarterly earnings yesterday. In addition to posting a lackluster $22.6 million in revenue, the company spun off a new energy storage startup called 24M Technologies to work on more unorthodox lithium-ion architectures.

The company also tempered the good news, noting it has lost its contract to supply batteries to electric Fiat/Chrysler vehicles to a lower bidder. This is a big hit for the company, which is trying to compete in a big pond with few high-level deals of its own. While it has plans to deliver batteries for Fisker Automotive’s plug-in luxury Karma (it took a stake in the company), it lost its bid to build battery packs for General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt, which would have established it as a formidable presence in the industry.

That said, the dissolution of the deal seems to say more about Chrysler than A123. The automaker has been struggling with its green agenda for a while now, scrapping its line of ENVI plug-in vehicles in favor of an all-electric version of its Fiat 500 minicar. But little progress has been made, and few cars are slated to be produced.

A123 is famous for breaking the seal on cleantech IPOs last September, when it saw its share price skyrocket nearly 50 percent on its first day. Since then, public sales in the sector have been middling at best — with the exception of Tesla Motors’ $226 million IPO at the end of June. Since its debut at $13.50, A123’s stock has been on the decline, closing 18.3 percent down today at $8.53.

It’s facing some tough competition from giants like LG Chem, which scored deals to supply batteries to both General Motors and Ford, and Panasonic, which is serving up batteries to Tesla and its partnering manufacturer Toyota. The big guys have the advantage of achieving scale for cheap — something A123 will need to do in order to survive.

The decision to spin off 24M Technologies suggests that the company will also be exploring new battery structures in order to give it an edge. In particular, the new entity will be working on lower-cost flow batteries, large cells that circulate electrolytes through various tanks to store power. So far, they are best suited to grid-scale storage, and could potentially help store energy generated by solar and wind installations, making them more reliable for everyday use.

A123 says it decided to create 24M as its own company so that it could get the attention and funding it needs to accelerate flow battery development. A123 will hold stock in the company and control one board member, hoping to see it through to commercialization. As a result, A123 says it will focus less on the grid, and anticipates that transportation batteries will make up as much at 70 percent of its business.

In addition to Fisker, the battery maker — which also competes with Johnson Controls and venture-backed Valence Technology — also has a contract to supply batteries for hybrid-electric trucks made by the Eaton Corporation.

Tags: advanced transportation, automotive, batteries, electric vehicles, energy storage

Companies: 24M Technologies, A123systems, Chrysler, Fiat