More than ever before, venture capitalists are digging in. To stay competitive and top-of-mind, VC’s are no longer loaning their advice and their capital, but actual “core” services that portfolio companies need. This shift isn’t necessarily new. For example, top VC firms like Kleiner Perkins and Greylock play a hands-on role in helping recruit talent. Recently, we’ve seen firms roll up their sleeves for another core competency: public relations.

More often, I’ll be pitched on a story on a startup by the in-house PR rep for an investment firm that has invested in the said startup. Traditionally, either the startup or an outside PR agency tends to do the outreach when it comes to launches, trend pieces, financings or other news items. And the rise in pitches from the VC firms themselves (as opposed to the startups) got me thinking about the evolution of the role of the VC, specifically in the context of PR. But in the past year or so, we’ve seen a rise in the addition of top PR and communications talent to these firms, specifically to help work with portfolio companies on PR strategy.

One of the first major hires in the industry was the addition of PR honcho Margit Wennmachers, co-founder of one of the largest technology and media PR firms OutCast Communications, to Andreessen Horowitz as a partner. At the time, Marc Andreessen told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher that Wennmachers’ brand building and PR experience would be a valuable asset to the firm and its portfolio. Mind you, Andreessen Horowitz wisely realized only a year after launching the firm that building a VC powerhouse would be more than just writing checks, but also a consultancy of sorts.

David Krane, Google’s former Director of Global Communications and Public Affairs, and one the company’s first PR reps back when it was just a startup, wears two hats at Google Ventures, where he is now a partner. He invests in startups but also helps Google Ventures portfolio companies with PR strategy as well.

in April 2010, Sand Hill VC Kleiner Perkins nabbed former head of communications for Hulu (and previous PR/marketing employee at Amazon and Microsoft) Christina Lee to head marketing and PR for the firm. Last fall, PR guru Kiersten Hollars (formerly of Outcast, Yahoo, Digg, and AOL) joined Wennmachers’ team at Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on scaling the marketing and PR efforts for the then 80 companies in the firm’s portfolio. And most recently we saw Google senior manager in PR Andrew Kovacs jump to Sequoia to help the firm’s marketing partner, Mark Dempster with PR and communications duties for the firm’s companies in the U.S. and Israel.

Clearly some of the brightest and most well-regarded talent in the technology PR industry are no longer just at agencies or in-house. As Emily Mendell, VP of communications for the National Venture Capital Association, tells me, the VC market is extremely competitive for deal flow. “There are a lot of firms chasing for deals in the hottest, early stage startups, and PR representation and communications strategy is just another service these firms can offer while at the negotiating table,” she says.

And technology PR is not an easy task—to do the job well, it requires a technical understanding of the product and the ability to digest and relay this information in a communicable way. Startups realize that having this on-hand at their investment firm is an asset to them, Mendell explains.

And many of the pr execs mentioned above are solely focused on helping portfolio companies as opposed to doing in-house communications for the firms themselves. Lee tells me that part of the trend of more VC firms bringing on PR talent is a reflection of how the role of communications is changing in the tech industry in general.

“Now smart entrepreneurs understand the value in being transparent with consumers, and the role of communications has risen to a strategic level,” she says. “PR is expected to play a big part in building brands and more and more startups are thinking about PR and branding at an earlier stage.”

Kleiner, specifically, is taking a holistic approach to company building, and part of this is providing communications and PR help to startups and companies, she explains.

Of course, there are a range of different ways which VC PR reps can help entrepreneurs and companies from simple tasks such as introductions to technology journalists to actually spearheading PR efforts for a product launch, to coaching companies on branding and messaging strategy to drafting press releases.

Another industry source tells me that while some firms are bringing on PR talent for the use of portfolio companies, others are trying to use PR to boost their own images, and promote their VCs to the press.

One factor that I believe is pushing the trend of building reps and even mini-agencies in-house is the rise in seed stage investing by these VC firms and the competitive market at this level. There are no shortage of VCs and angels that are willing to write checks at the seed level nowadays. Many firms can’t just get deal flow based on reputation alone. But the VC firms ability to be a ‘full-service’ agency can be a factor entrepreneurs consider when sitting down at the table. This is especially important for early-stage companies, who may not have the kind of money to hire a top-tier PR firm to handle PR, says one industry insider.

As mentioned above, part of this full-service package also includes recruiting, which is a trend that has been happening for some time now. Kleiner Perkins partner Juliet de Baubigny has been helping portfolio companies with human capital and recruiting for the past ten years. Greylock recently created a dedicated talent team to help its portfolio companies recruit effectively. Firms like Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia are also aggressively working to help startups network and recruit talent.

Interestingly, this ‘full service’ model has been offered by incubators like Y Combinator, TechStars and 500 Startups though both in-house talent as well as through mentorship. While it’s a stretch to call the VC firms mentioned above incubators, it’s certainly interesting to see the overall functionality of these large firms evolve with the current state of investing.

As firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and others create these full-service VC funds that not only dole out cash but come with in-house PR agencies, marketing resource and talent recruiter, there’s no doubt that this trend will filter down to smaller firms and funds.

SneakPeeq, a social shopping startup that debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, has raised a new round totaling $2.67 million from Bain Capital Ventures; Metamorphic Ventures; Keith Rabois, Tim Kendall, Mike Murphy, and Vikas Gupta.

As we wrote in our initial review of Sneakpeeq, aims to replicate the experience of shopping for items in a retail store. So similar to the way you flip over a price tag to look at the cost of at item at a store, SneakPeeq doesn’t tell you the price instantly when you visit a product’s landing page. You click a “Peeq” button to find the price. The site features daily boutiques that offer discounts on clothes, shoes, home accessories and more from a variety of brands from well-known names like Kate Spade and Puma to smaller designers and purveyors.

At launch in May, Sneakpeeq would actually drop the price everytime you took a “Peeq” at the price of an item, with the discount available only until someone else bought the item. The company has pivoted slightly into more of an action-based shopping network. So basically, by Peeqingm buying, sharing items on Facebook, and more, you earn badges on Sneakpeeq, which can then be applied for discounts on an items.

All items are generally around 10 to 15 percent off, but in order for the price to drop even more, you need to perform some of the actions mentioned above. Founder Henry Kim explains to be that brands and merchants like this action-based system because pricing isn’t dropping for everyone, and is lowered for the people who are actually interacting with and sharing the product. Each boutique has a leaderboard where fans can compete by peeqing, sharing, and buying at products.

Additionally, every member on Sneakpeeq builds a discovery profile through peeqing, sharing and buying things. Users can also see who shares common interests in various product categories including Taste (gourmet foods), Living (home), and Style (fashion and accessories).

Another key differentiator for Sneakpeeq is a new Facebook Open Graph integration with the customized ‘peeq’ button. Basically, as you opt-in to the integration and ‘peeq’ items, this will be show on your Timeline. The integration will also show when a few of your friends are peeqing at a common boutique/product.

Kim says that the startup’s key engagement metric is defined as the sum total of peeqs, loves and shares in a month. When Sneakpeeq launched last year, the startup was at 78,745 engagements per month and in January 2012, saw 600,641 engagements.

In the future, Kim is working to expand gifting options so members will be able to gift products to and share badges with their friends. Video, and mobile technologies will also be introduced in the next few months.

Sneakpeeq is doing something in the social shopping space that could be very important for the next wave e-commerce. The startup is trying to incentivize users to actually engage with products in a social manners, and along the way, express this via Facebook actions.

It looks like Amazon Web Services may be launching a new workflow manager called SWF. First spotted by TechCrunch reader Michael Hood, SWF is listed as a service under AWS’ Free Usage Tier. Unfortunately, clicking on SWF takes you to a ’404′ page.

Upon further digging, it looks like SWF stands for ‘Amazon Simple Workflow Service.’ It basically starts, runs, and retains workflow executions, as well as schedules tasks, adds markers, receives signals, and starts timers for those workflow executions. According to the information listed, with the free usage tier, “1,000 Amazon SWF executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers and 30,000 workflow-days can also be used for free.”

Amazon’s free usage tier allows users to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, and use Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer for free as well. AWS’s free usage tier can be used to run an application in the cloud, including launching new applications, testing existing applications in the cloud, or more. SWF would be included for free in this package.

Obviously, with so little information, it’s hard to determine the exact details of what SWF does or who it will compete with at this point, but it appears to be new. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment and will update when we hear back.

Update: Amazon has taken all mentions of SWF off of the AWS Free Usage Tier Site; and has yet to comment.

We’ve embedded screenshots below:

Professional social network LinkedIn just reported stronger than expected fourth quarter 2011 earnings today. Earnings came in at $0.12 per share. Revenue for the fourth quarter was $167.7 million, an increase of 105% compared to $81.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. Net income for the fourth quarter was $6.9 million, compared to net income of $5.3 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. Analysts expected the company to earn $0.07 per share on revenues of $159.72 million.

Non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $13.3 million, compared to $5.2 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. For the full year 2011, revenue increased 115% to $522.2 million from $243.1 million.

“Q4 once again exceeded our expectations for member engagement and business growth. It was a fitting end to a memorable year in which we reinforced our position as the pre-eminent professional network on the web,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn in a release. “We believe continued focus on our members and technology infrastructure positions us well for accelerated product innovation in 2012.”

In terms of revenue breakdown, sales from Hiring Solutions products totaled $84.9 million, an increase of 136% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. Hiring Solutions revenue represented 50% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 44% in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Revenue from Marketing Solutions products totaled $49.5 million, an increase of 77% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 (and represented 30% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 34% in the fourth quarter of 2010). Premium Subscriptions revenue totaled $33.3 million, an increase of 87% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 (and was 20% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 22% in the fourth quarter of 2010).

By geographic area, revenue from the U.S. totaled $112 million, and represented 67% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011. Revenue from international markets totaled $55.8 million, and represented 33% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011.

LinkedIn is now adding two new members every second, and just hit 150 million members (up from 135 million last November) in over 200 countries and territories.

In terms of guidance, revenue for the first quarter of 2012 is projected to be in the range of $170 million to $175 million and revenue for the full year will be in the range of $840 million to $860 million.

LinkedIn is past the excitement of the public offering and now coming into its own as a public company. As Weiner recently told TechCrunch, “The event itself was memorable, but for us it was really just a stepping stone.” The fourth quarter was relatively quiet with regard to new products compared to past quarters. The network debuted a new version of business card organizer CardMuch (which they acquired in early 2011), and updated Groups with new functionality.

LinkedIn also announced Talent Pipeline, a new product that allows recruiters and hiring managers to manage, track, and stay in touch with active and passive candidates, regardless of source. Talent Pipeline is currently in pilot testing phase with select Hiring Solutions customers, according to the company.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that LinkedIn is slowing down. We hear there’s much more in store for the company for 2012, especially in mobile. Steve Sordello, CFO of LinkedIn, said in the release that the company will “continue to invest in our product, engineering, and sales infrastructure to capitalize on our long-term opportunity” in 2012. It will also be interesting to see how acquisitive LinkedIn is in the coming year. The company just picked up contact manager Rapportive for $15 million.

Here are our notes from the earnings call:

Weiner said that member engagement was at record levels in 2011, and the site passed the 150 million milestone. Member page views grew 77 percent in the fourth quarter and unique member visits to LinkedIn in Q4 grew 67% year over year. 60 percent of LinkedIn members are located outside of the U.S. Mobile account for 15 percent of total visits to the site.

He says there are more than 50,000 developers using LinkedIn APIs to help build and power the professional Web.

In terms of future product strategy, LinkedIn’s approach will focus on simplicity, and we can “expect refreshes of pillar products.” Membership growth is another area the where LinkedIn will focus. And the company will invest in mobile, which Weiner says is the company’s fastest growing service.

LinkedIn ended the year with more than 2,000 employees. In 2012, LinkedIn will be ramping up hiring at the university and college level.

Sordello adds that one-third of members visited LinkedIn during the quarter. The company also added 1,900 enterprises to its premium products client base in 2011.

Q: Jeff-when you think 2-3 three years out what do you see as the future for offering a SaaS platform for recruiting or an ad network, while leveraging data?

A: Our current recruiting process currently already leverages data and is a SaaS product. In terms of marketing solutions, we see similar benefits. Data is one of the most valuable assets for the company. LinkedIn today is doing very well, and 300,000 publishers have the LinkedIn share button on their sites.

Q: How do you monetize mobile?

A: We’re focused on product for now, we’re going to start to run some tests with regard to advertising and marketing in mobile platforms.

Q: Other companies in the hiring space have seen softness in some verticals like finance; can you comment on this? Also can you elaborate on your student growth as well?

A: We haven’t seen any weakness in a particular vertical. The student demographic is our fastest growing demographic. We’re also increasing outreach to university career centers.

Q: Can you talk about hiring solutions internationally?

A: Europe is a year to two behind the U.S. in terms of penetration and Asia is probably 2-3 years behind.

Q: Who are some of your largest hiring solutions companies?

A: We have 70-80 percent of the Fortune 100.

Q: Can you give us additional color on mobile traction? Tablet vs. smartphone vs. iPhone. vs. Android?

A: We announced that CardMuch has generated its 2 millionth card scan a few weeks ago, and growth is accelerating. We’re seeing a sharp rise in activations across iOS platform and Android. Both are growing at healthy rates.

comScore has released its ‘explicit’ U.S. search data for January of this year and while Google and Microsoft Bring’s search share continues to grow, Yahoo’s share dropped both year over year and month over month. This comes after Bing overtook Yahoo in terms of search queries for the first time in December. While Bing grew slightly from December 2011 to January, Google reached its highest share since December 2010 this past month.

Google search queries increased 6% year over year in January, to 66.2%, compared with 65.9% in December 2011 and 65.6% in January 2011. Bing queries increased 21% year over year in January to 15.2%, compared with 15.1% in December 2011 and 13.1% in January 2011. Yahoo queries are on a downward spiral, decreasing 8% year over year in January to 14.1%, compared with 14.5% in December 2011, 15.1% in November 2011 and 16.1% in January 2011. Yikes.

On a combined basis, Bing and Yahoo’s share of searches was 29.3%, compared with 29.6% in December 2011 and 29.2% in January 2011. Clearly, despite the fact that Bing’s technology is now powering Yahoo’s search, the rollup is still not powerful enough to overtake Google search share.

AOL queries declined 6% year over year January to 1.6%, compared with 1.6% in December 2011 and 1.7% in January 2011. And Ask.com queries declined 8% year over year in January to 3%, compared with 2.9% in December 2011 and 3.4% in January 2011.

It’s important to note that this data does not include search queries from mobile devices, which could boost Google’s share further. And these refer to “explicit” US search market share, which includes searches when someone actually types a query into a search box.

comScore also reports that the general search market continued to grow at double-digit rates in 2011, posting an 11-percent increase in 2011. Apparently, this momentum was driven by a 3 percent gain in unique searchers and a 7 percent gain in the number of searches per searcher.

Google’s search query volume grew 10 percent, driven mostly by gains in searches per searcher (up
7 percent). Bing had the highest growth in search query volume in 2011 at 40 percent, propelled by sizeable gains in both unique searchers (up 6 percent) and searches per searcher (up 31 percent).

Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is debuting its newest branded vertical—Foodie.com. As its name indicates, Glam’s newest vertical is aimed at covering all things food, and features a combination of content from food critics, bloggers, chefs, restaurateurs and other “food influentials.”

For background, Glam’s various publishing verticals have a reach of 200 million unique monthly visitors globally, and is particularly popular amongst female audiences. Glam Media has more than 2,500 publishers organized across multiple vertical categories online including Glam.com for Women, Glam Entertainment for Adults, Brash.com for Men and Bliss.com for health and wellness. Glam also announced the acquisition of Ning in September.

As Glam CEO Samir Arora explains, there’s a large opportunity in providing quality content on recipes, restaurant reviews and tends in one place. And food has been one of the fastest growing ad verticals on Glam’s network of sites (Betty Crocker is an advertiser on Foodie.com).

Foodie features content from 100 food authors such as Inspired Taste, Kitchen Confidante and The Bakery Spot and includes more than 1,000 recipes at launch. Foodie also offers a recipe finder app that allows consumers to find and follow top food editors and chefs, and includes vertical recipe search, along with social integrations with Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, Foodie aims to be a social network for food-lovers to post recipes, photos, review other recipes and more.

As a part of the launch, Foodie is also creating a panel of culinary experts, including acclaimed food critics and celebrity chefs to help drive an authoritative perspective on recipes, restaurants, ingredients and cooking techniques. Among the culinary experts who will be a part of the Foodie community include newest Iron Chef winner, top chef Geoffrey Zakarian and the former New York Times and International Herald Tribune food critic and leading food author, Patricia Wells.

Food seems like a logical next play for Glam considering its focus on lifestyle media and content. There are a plethora of food-focused recipe verticals, such as AllRecipes, Food52, Gojee and many others. Glam hopes to differentiate itself by becoming a one-stop-shop for recipes, reviews, quality content and more. Foodie actually resembles more of an online food magazine, but with more social and interactive features.

After spinning off from Expedia and debuting on the NASDAQ in December, trip reviews site TripAdvisor posted fourth quarter 2011 revenues of $137.8 million, a 30% increase over fourth quarter 2010. Full year 2011 revenues were $637.1 million, a 31% increase over full year 2010. Fourth quarter 2011 GAAP earnings per share ) was $0.16 per diluted share compared to $0.14 for the fourth quarter 2010. Net income was $22 million, a 19% increase over fourth quarter 2010.

TripAdvisor, which was founded in 2000, was originally bought by IAC in for $212 million in 2004. IAC spun off Expedia, which included TripAdvisor, in 2005. With 50 million unique monthly visitors and 20 million members, TripAdvisor is the giant in the travel reviews space. The site publishes 25 new contributions every minute and also features over eight million candid traveler photos. The reviews site operates in 30 different countries, including in China under the site Daodao.

“The fourth quarter capped an exciting end to a great year for TripAdvisor, as we grew our valuable
user and content base, extended our platform and product offerings, and completed our spin-off from
Expedia”, said Steve Kaufer, CEO of TripAdvisor. “In 2012 we expect to build upon our success and
continue to drive shareholder value making the necessary investments to accelerate growth and
profitability.”

As we’ve written in the past, TripAdvisor’s main revenue stream is cost-per-click advertising. Revenues from click-based advertising totaled $99.8 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 24% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. Revenues from display-based advertising totaled $22.9 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 26% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010.

Marketing software company HubSpot has brought on a new leader today—Akamai CFO JD Sherman. Sherman has been chief financial officer at Akamai for over 6 years.

Prior to Akamai, Sherman served as the chief financial executive of IBM’s $21 billion Systems and Technology Group. Over the course of 15 years at IBM, Sherman held senior executive positions in Finance, including Vice President, Finance and Planning, zSeries Server Division, and Assistant Controller of IBM Corporate Financial Strategy and Budgets.

He also served as CFO for semiconductor company CommQuest, which was acquired by IBM in March of 1998 for $200 million.

For background, HubSpot’s marketing software customers manage websites and generate leads. HubSpot, which just raised a massive $32 million from Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Salesforce and others, has been on a bit of an acquisition spree and just bought Performable and OneForty.

Sherman’s addition represents more than just a talent win. His experience leading two public companies in the technology space could help HubSpot navigate a future in the public markets. The company says: We have been growing at record pace and want to build a company that can be successful in the public markets.

HubSpot CEO and co-founder Brian Halligan explained: “We always thought HubSpot could be a large, publicly traded company anchoring the software industry in Boston. Hiring a COO with public company experience is the next step on that path…We are on the same fast growth path of all the successful SaaS companies, and need to start preparing for an IPO. I know JD brings the right experience to our management team.”

Texas-based data storage company Pivot3 has raised $23 million in new funding led by Samsung Ventures, with all existing Pivot3 investors participating including Focus Ventures, InterWest Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mesirow Financial, Northleaf Capital Partners and Silver Creek Ventures. This brings Pivot3′s total funding to nearly $100 million.

Pivot3′s storage hardware appliances offer integrated server virtualization for data to enterprise customers. Its RAID-based solutions are generally used to store video surveillance data. The company has over 140 customers including Port of Seattle, the Mall of America, and the City of Trenton.

Pivot3 is also entering into a commercial partnership with Samsung Techwin, the video surveillance and defense company that is a subsidiary of Samsung. It sounds like Pivot3 will be helping store video surveillance data for Samsung.

Brian Kang, managing director of Samsung Ventures America said of the investment: “We chose to invest in Pivot3 because we see them as a leading player in a large and rapidly growing space of strategic importance to our business. The commercial partnership with our Techwin affiliate yields an important second dimension of mutual opportunity for the companies.”

The new funding will be used to fund expansion of its product development, sales and marketing activities.

A new legal startup is launching to the public soon, hoping to shake up the legal documents space. LA-based DocRun is announcing that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from VC Michael Hirshland’s new fund, Resolute.vc, Google’s Don Dodge, and Kima Ventures.

While some details of what DocRun is doing are still unclear, but we know the startup is trying to disrupt the online legal documents and advice space, but by adding quality, personalized documents to the mix as opposed to simply offering form contracts like LLC agreements, rental agreements and more. DocRun wants to provide highly customized, attorney-level, state-specific legal documents at a fraction of what they would cost from a lawyer.

At public launch, DocRun will eventually provide hundreds of personalized documents, including everything from prenuptial agreements to operating agreements to employment agreements, all specially tailored to each individual user using an adaptive Q&A engine.

The startup is the brainchild of CEO Jennifer Reuting, who has actually founded two legal startups previously, InCorp, a registered agent and compliance firm, and MyLLC, and company that helps companies incorporate as businesses. She’s also the author of Limited Liability Companies For Dummies.

There are a number of companies who offer form legal documents on the web including LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer. As Reuting explains, the aim of DocRun is to democratize the legal space by not only providing legal documents to consumers, but also to offer tools that can fully customize personal and business documents.

The startup is in invite-inly alpha right now but stay tuned.

Nettle, a startup that has raised funding from Google Ventures, 500 Startups and others, is looking to make the act of going to the movies a more social experience. With the company’s free iOS app, MovieGoer, the startup wants to make the moviegoing experience more interactive.

The Moviegoer app allows you to view trailers, descriptions of the latest movies out in theaters and critics’ reviews. You can also see what movies are showing nearby your locations. Via the app, you can follow specific movies, sign in with Facebook and Twitter to see which movies your friends are going to, and comment on movies after viewing.

The app also includes a feature called MovieGoer Circle, which allows you to create a close network of friends and family with whom you share all of your moviegoing details. The thought behind this particular part of the app is that you may only value the recommendations of your closest contacts when it comes to choosing and rating movies. As the startup explains, the app wants to create a set of trusted influencers for your moviegoing experience.

Basically, the app aims to be a one stop shop for the moviegoing experience. Not only does MovieGoer include showtimes for movies, but also highlights those showtimes that your MovieGoer Circle are going to. And users can record brief 15-second video reviews using their iPhone.

Co-founder Brian Dear explains that he believes the concept of “check-in” doesn’t work that well for movies because when you arrive at a theatre, usually the movie is about to start, so it doesn’t do much good to tell friends you are there if you expect them to then meet you. What makes more sense in the MovieGoer world is declaring intent, he explains, by saying you want to “go” to a movie hours or days in advance, and recording relevant information (reviews, etc) afterwards.

Other companies playing in the space include Warner Bros.-owned Flixster.

After scooping up rival Cotendo for $268 million recently, content delivery and web services giant Akamai is making another acquisition today—Blaze Software. Blaze’s technology helps accelerate speed of Websites, and optimizes load times while cutting bandwidth costs. Financial details of the dealn were not disclosed except that it was an all-cash transaction.

As Akamai explains, there are more performance bottlenecks for website load and speed times, as richer web applications and mobile web sites become more popular. Blaze’s cloud-based service automatically optimizes the code on a web page during the delivery process to ensure faster transmission of content and a faster rendering of the page, whether served to a PC, tablet or smartphone.

“As businesses provide rich, interactive web experiences online and across devices, it is vital that end users receive a consistently high-performing site,” said Rick McConnell, executive vice president of Products and Development, Akamai in a statement “We believe Blaze has developed a powerful solution for frontend optimization, and that its cloud-based services approach is synergistic with Akamai’s offerings. The team at Blaze will be an important addition to our focus on site acceleration. Our goal continues to be providing customers with the most comprehensive set of technologies to optimize all aspects of their site performance.”

Akamai plans to integrate the technology into its global cloud platform to help its enterprise customer provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere. the company was founded in 2010 and is based on Ottawa, Canada.

Extole, a startup which offers a suite of social media marketing has raised $10 million in Series C round funding, led by Shasta Ventures with participation from existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Trident Capital. This brings the company’s total financing to $22 million.

Extole’s technology makes it easy for brands to power social referral programs, social promotions, social testimonials, and social analytics. Products such as Refer-A-Friend and SocialBuilder are designed to enable brands to leverage referral marketing services and viral Facebook sweepstakes apps to increase sales and brand awareness in a measurable way, such as through likes, recommendations and more.

For example, Refer-A-Friend rewards advocates for promoting a brand to their friends. Customers include Shutterfly, Redbox, Zazzle, AAA, Kate Spade, and SkyMall. Extole was founded by Brad Klaus, former chief exec of Syndero and VP of Sales at Qualys before that.

Last year, revenue grew 400 percent, and is on track for record revenue in 2012. The company will use the new funding to fuel growth, scale operations, and accelerate product and platform investments.

Enterprise software company Jive has just reported fourth quarter results, which represent the company’s first earnings report as a public company. Q4 total revenue came in at $22.5 million, up 53% year-over-year. The company continued to take losses in terms of profit, posting a net loss of $12.7 million for the quarter (GAAP), compared to a net loss of $6.8 million for the same period last year. Non-GAAP net loss for the fourth quarter was $9.1 million, compared to a net loss of $5.7 million for the same period last year. Analysts expected a loss of $0.39 per share and revenue of $21.01 million.

Within total revenue, product revenue was $19.2 million for the fourth quarter, an increase of 61% on a year-over-year basis. Professional Services revenue for the fourth quarter was $3.3 million, an increase of 21% on a year-over-year basis.

Founded in 2001, Jive has been at the forefront of blending social with enterprise software. Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive’s software combines computing with social collaboration to offer fully-featured social networks for businesses. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, communication, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more.

CEO Tony Zingale said in a release: “Jive is increasingly being adopted by large global organizations that are investing in social business to change the way work gets done. During the fourth quarter, we had a record number of wins with an annual subscription value of $1 million or greater, and more than doubled the average annual deal size for new relationships during 2011.”

The company saw record client billings in the fourth quarter of $36 million, up 40% year-over-year, with 2011 total billings of $104.9 million, up 46% year-over-year. The completion of Jive’s IPO contributes to a $180.6 million cash balance at end of 2011, says the company (the IPO brough Jive $131.4 million in net proceeds).

Although the company is still unprofitable, Zingale seemed optimistic when we spoke to him at the time of Jive’s public market debut in December. “We need to break even, then generate positive cash flow and generate a margin that is interesting to shareholders,” he told us. “We will get to profitability at a reasonable timeframe but we have to balance this with investment in the business and growth opportunity in the market.”

Exclusive: WibiData, the big data management startup co-founded by Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia and Aaron Kimball, is announcing $5 million in new funding from NEA and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. Past investors in the company include Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, and SV Angel.

As we’ve written in the past, WibiData wants to help companies manage and analyze complex business data about users so you can predict how they are going to interact with the product in the future. Data such as email records, web histories and other interactions cannot be easily analyzed together, but WibiData aims to solve this problem. Specifically, the technology can be used for personalization for a number of web companies, including consumer web, e-commerce and gaming companies.

Bisciglia says that customers can use the data analysis platform to create personalized products and services. And the technology easily integrates with business intelligence and database offerings. Additionally, the startup’s talent includes Bisciglia’s former colleagues from Google’s personalization team.

The company’s client base counts Wikipedia, Rich Relevance, and Atlassian. For example, Wikipedia uses WibiData to better understand their contributor community, such as analyzing revision histories, understanding individual areas of expertise, and identifying trends in contribution patterns. RichRelevance, which powers personalization for retailers, uses WibiData to manage complex user data, and enable collaboration between their engineering and data science teams.

Under the hood, Wibidata is helping companies leverages Apache Hadoop to manage and analyze large amounts of data. Bisciglia has in-depth experience with the technology as the founder of Cloudera, a developer and commercial distributor of Hadoop, the open source software that powers the data processing engines of the worldʼs largest and most popular web sites. Prior to Cloudera, Bisciglia was a senior engineer at Google where he founded and led Google’s Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, which provides Google hosted computational resources to facilitate education and research to universities around the world.

Bisciglia tells us that WibiData (which was formerly Odiago) is focused on creating a unified framework for engineers and data scientists who collaborate around tools and applications. The product is still in beta, but has already doubled its customer base. “We’re helping deliver personalized products and services in a way that can scale to large volumes of data and be flexible as data evolves,” he says.

He explains that he sees the competition as internal teams who are struggling to close the gap between where Hadoop is a platform and where it comes into real-time application delivery. Bisciglia contends that Wibidata closes this gap, and will recompute recommendations and personalization info on the fly, as a user continues to interact with a product or service offering. This enables companies to personalize the experience in real-time.

The new funding will be used to grow WibiData’s engineering team, open an office, and more.

WibiData is entering the market at a time when big data analysis and personalization are ramping up. As more retailers, e-commerce companies and other technology startups increase personalization, there’s no doubt that a real-time layer to process and analyze user data is going to be in-demand.

Flush with new capital, Klout, the startup that measures influence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, Google+ and other social apps, is making its first acquisition. Klout is purchasing mobile and local neighborhood app Blockboard. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Blockboard develops a neighborhood app through which neighbors can interact with one another. They can report potholes and graffiti directly to the city, alert each other about crime and vandalism through a Blockwatch, post general observations about the neighborhood, ask their neighbors questions, and post pictures of lost and found items. Basically, the app is focused on creating a community within real neighborhood.

Blockboard was co-founded by Dave Baggeroer, Stephen Hood and Josh Whiting , who worked as an engineer at Craigslist and Delicious (Delicious founder Joshua Schachter is an investor in the startup). The company raised a $1 million in seed funding in 2010 from Schachter, Mitch Kapor, the Founder Collective, Battery Ventures, Harrison Metal, Josh Stylman, Tom McInerney, and David Liu.

So how does this fit into Klout? The company says that the technology and team will be used to invest in local and mobile product efforts. Klout has yet to come out with native mobile apps and will be using Blockboard’s expertise in local and mobile to further develop mobile products. Details haven’t been revealed on how the mobile apps will work, but perhaps there will be a local element with the addition of Blockboard.

As Klout writes in its blog post: To keep driving toward our mission of unlocking every user’s influence, we need to make Klout useful and accessible wherever they are – whether they’re at home or on the go.

For background, Klout evaluates users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals on social networks. The company topped 10 billion API calls in December, which is up from 100 million API calls in January, 2011. The company has more than 4,000 API partners, up from around 100 in early 2010. And it has indexed north of 100 million public profiles. Klout also just raised around $30 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins and others, with partner Chi-Hua Chien joining the startup’s board.

Here’s a demo of Blockboard from last year’s Crunch-Up:

Last year, venture firm Kleiner Perkins debuted its plans for a summer internship program to place top engineering talent from colleges at the firm’s portfolio companies. The benefit is two-fold: students get to work at the startup level, are mentored (and have the prestige of Kleiner Perkins on their resume) and startups get access to young engineering talent. Today, Kleiner is debuting the first inaugural class of the fellow program.

As Kleiner explains, the goal of the paid fellowship is to give engineering students the experience of working on tough technical problems at startups. Fellows are placed at Kleiner portfolio startups and are also invited to exclusive events at Twitter and Zynga, where they can network.

In total, 25 fellows were chosen from nearly a thousand applicants from over 100 universities. The universities the class of fellows are joining from are Franklin Olin, Rice, Princeton, UPenn, Carnegie Mellon, Brown, UCSD, University of Michigan, Duke, and University of Kentucky. Sample summer projects include working on an energy efficiency insight algorithm on Opower’s data platform, and developing graph analysis to provide data insight that will drive product designs at Klout.

Kleiner portfolio companies hosting fellows include Klout, Path, Chegg, Nest, Zaarly, One Kings Lane, Opower, Flipboard, Crittercism, Nebula, Zynga and Shopkick.

The Kleiner Fellows program isn’t the first of its kind among venture firms. True Ventures launched the Entrepreneurs Corps (TEC) a few years ago, which also undergraduate students in the fund’s early-stage portfolio companies for paid summer internships. Andreessen Horowitz has also been helping portfolio companies recruit talet at colleges via events.

And I expect we’re going to see more firms launch similar programs for their portfolio companies to access talent. Many of these smaller startups could not afford to recruit at colleges and/or compete with large companies like Google, Microsoft or Facebook for college talent. And the firms are able to help college students gain access to working at lesser known startups.

Spreecast, a social video platform that lets people broadcast together, is adding the ability to embed ‘spreecasts’ on their blogs, free of charge.

The brainchild of StubHub co-founder and investor Jeff Fluhr, Spreecast can be used publicly or privately to create interactive, social online video broadcasts. Up to 4 people at a time can be face-to-face, streaming their conversation live while hundreds of others can watch, chat, and participate by submitting comments and questions to those on-screen. Viewers can also request to join on camera, while producers of the Spreecast can manage the action. Spreecast is also integrated with Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ so that producers and creators can broadcast their conversations to their friends, followers, circles, contacts and connections.

For Spreecast, adding the ability to embed these video broadcasts is another way to let people take part in the conversations happening on the platform. Spreecasts can be embedded with a simple line of code in any blog or post. The embedded video comes in multiple sizes and includes a two-way video screen, built-in chat room, customizable Twitter stream, and Facebook Comments.

We’ve actually embedded a conversation between Chris Kelly, the former Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook, and 4INFO founder Zaw Thet below (which will start as 10:30 PT).

Spreecast has raised $4 million in funding from Frank Biondi, former CEO of Viacom; Gordon Crawford, media and technology investor at The Capital Research Group and Edward Scott, Jr., founder of BEA Systems.

Web app error tracking startup Exceptional has acquired fellow error tracking application and competitor, Airbrake, from web design and development company thoughtbot. Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Simply put, Airbrake tracks errors in web apps. The app will collects errors generated by a variety of applications, and aggregates the results for review by developers. Airbrake’s service is used by a number of high-profile companies including Groupon, eBay Square and AT&T.

Together, the two companies have tracked over 5 billion errors since 2008. With a combined 75,000 customer base and counting, these two error handling companies handle over 30,000 reports per minute.

If you’ve ever set up an automatic ‘Bill Pay’ feature on your bank account to pay off your utility and cable bills, then you’ve taken advantage of a nifty feature called an ‘interbank transfer’, also known as an ‘Automated Clearing House’ payment. Once they’re set up, they tend to be very convenient — the amount of the bill is automatically deducted from your account, saving you the hassle of having to write yet another check (or fill out another online form) each month. Merchants benefit from this system as well, because their fees are significantly lower than those that are charged by the credit card companies.

Thing is, this feature is typically only available for paying bills from big companies — it’s rare to see a smaller online merchant that’s offering these automatic transfers, because the process for them to set it up is complicated and costly. Until now. Y Combinator-backed startup GoCardless is launching today as a UK-based service that allows smaller merchants to easily set up interbank transfers for customers.

Part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2011 class, GoCardless was founded in 2010 by Oxford graduates Hiroki Takeuchi, Tom Blomfield and Matt Robinson. GoCardless is also announcing a $1.5 million round led by Accel Partners, Passion Capital, SV Angel, Start Fund, and Y Combinator. Proceeds will go towards building out the team and product, and expanding the merchant base.

The service is offering a REST API that allows smaller merchants and companies to easily integrate these automated transfers into their sites for one-time and recurring payments. By bypassing the credit card network, GoCardless is able to offer the service for one-third to one-fourth of the cost of most network-based payment options — the fees charged are around 1 percent (but will never reach higher than 2₤ per transaction, no matter the amount).

As the startup explains to me, interbank transfers are commonly used in the UK and Europe to pay bills from giant companies, like your gas or phone bills. But each of these payment applications had to be custom-developed by a consultant, and negotiated individually with each bank — which is an impossible task for most small businesses.

GoCardless has spent the past year speaking and negotiating with banks, doing all the requisite legwork for broad approval. And, aside from the lower fees, another advantage of interbank transfers is that merchants don’t need to worry about credit cards expiring (which is a huge problem with recurring or subscription payments) and there is no need to deal with PCI compliance.

For consumers, GoCardless makes it quick and easy to make payments. After the initial sign up, users can authorize future payments anywhere GoCardless is offered with just one click. The company has also created a dashboard where users can easily manage all of their payments made via their bank accounts, giving them more control over their online spending.

Since launching a beta product in late 2011, GoCardless has already integrated with over 300 merchants and is growing quickly. The startup has over 1,000 merchants in the UK who are on a wait-list. For example, Kashflow, an online accounting service for SMEs, integrated with GoCardless to help its customers collect money. Other users include SaaS companies and those who charge for digital content.

Interestingly, Dwolla is also doing something similar in the US, allowing an easier way to accept payments (and reduce fees) for merchants. One advantage GoCardless has in its favor across the pond is that it is fairly commonplace to pay via interbank transfer in the UK when it comes to major company bills.