Our infotech coverage at Xconomy San Francisco was on the thin side last week, mainly because I spent the week in Boston organizing and emceeing Xconomy’s annual mobile technology conference, Mobile Madness. Here’s the brief rundown:
—Three Bay Area organizations—Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Salesforce.com—led a large Series D financing round for Cambridge, MA-based HubSpot, which helps companies maximize revenue from inbound Web traffic.
—Startup guru Steve Blank told me that it’s time to build entrepreneurship schools with curricula that emphasize the special skills needed by startup entrepreneurs—skills not currently taught by traditional business schools, in Blank’s view. In a separate commentary, Blank described a graduate entrepreneurship classes he’s teaching right now at Stanford.
—Y Combinator-backed startup AdGrok opened its AdWords management interface to the public. The tool gives e-commerce companies and Web publishers easy ways to optimize the way they buy keyword-based search advertising on Google.
—Freelancer Elise Craig profiled Beautylish, a community site about make-up backed by Ron Conway, Max Levchin, Steve Chen, and other Silicon Valley luminaries. Beautylish brings together cosmetics reviews, tips, ads, and videos into one site that co-founder Vu Nguyen describes as a “virtual make-up counter.”
—YouTube, the San Bruno, CA-based video subsidiary of Google, bought New York-based video promoter Next New Networks.
—In other deals news, Vurve raised $4.5 million, Gigya raised $6 million, Samplify raised $11.2 million, RelayRides raised $5.1 million, LearnBoost raised $1 million, Intermolecular raised $15 million, RadiumOne raised $21 million, VigLink raised $5.4 million, and StumbleUpon raised $17 million.
