It’s no secret that many deals have been struck and key relationships formed at TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s former house in Atherton. In case you aren’t familiar, Arrington threw epic parties at his home for the tech community in the early days of TechCrunch. Police were called, booze was flowing, people passed out. I don’t have enough fingers to count how many times I’ve spoken to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or VC who said he or she used to frequent Mike’s house parties back in the day. Clearly this was the place to be for anyone looking to meet their next investor, acquirer, co-founder etc.

And that’s exactly what Box co-founders Dylan Smith and Aaron Levie were thinking when they showed up to Mike’s house in early February 2006 for the Naked Conversations TechCrunch Party. It was in Mike’s backyard where they met then Draper Fisher Jurvetson partner Emily Melton. Beers in hand (actually only Levie was of age-barely, so Smith was drinking water), the pair pitched Melton on their idea. She was so impressed and their passion for what they were building cloud storage, that she immediately introduced them to the DFJ partner covering SaaS and enterprise investments, Josh Stein, who months later led Box’s first round of institutional investment.

Smith and Levie credit this meeting as one of the key turning points for Box to become what it is now—a close to billion dollar enterprise cloud storage company with 11 million users, 80 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers, and $162 million in funding. In the company’s latest funding round in the Fall of 2011, the company was valued somewhere above $600 million, a number that could easily have jumped in the past 9 months. While two teenagers starting a tech company out of a garage isn’t that unique in the Silicon Valley world, Smith and Levie’s ability to create a valuable product from thousands of dollars, and instilling confidence in well-known VCs and companies is.

From Research Paper To Funding

The idea for Box originated from a research project that Levie, who was then a college student at USC, was working on in 2004. Levie’s project examined storage options and in the process of researching his paper he discovered how fragmented the market was. He called up 10 random businesses and asked how they are storing content and data and received ten different answers. Back then, Levie realized in his research that even though there were no iPhones, tablets or Android phones, people still wanted to access data from different places. These places just happened to be extinct technologies now, he adds, joking that the Palm Trio was back then a prime destination to find documents.

“The opportunity I saw was to build something that would change how you want to get your information,” he explains. At the time, many thought Gmail would be sufficient for storing data. But Levie felt there was a real business behind where to store data and this was in the cloud. The name Box came from his vision of storing data in a virtual box in the cloud.

During the Winter Break of 2004, Levie shared his idea with Smith. Both Smith and Levie had toyed around with startups in the past and had dreams of starting their own companies. The boys shared Levie’s passion for the cloud storage idea and by the Spring of 2005, Levie, Smith and his friends were actually developing a product. Box, at the time, was simply an online file storage service where users could pay to store files in the cloud.

This was all happening in between classes, says Smith, who was enrolled at Duke, and in order to fund the early days of Box in 2005, Smith invested $20,000 of money he earned playing online poker. The team actually launched the product in February of 2005 as a simple file storage product for both consumers and enterprises. Levie and Smith sent their pitches to the media and landed coverage on sites like Gizmodo, where they offered free storage incentives for new customers. The fledgling startup quickly accumulated a few customers and began its journey as a real service.

In the summer of 2005, Levie, Smith and the team housed themselves in Smith’s parents’ attic in Seattle and worked on accumulating more customers and developing the product. Smith’s younger brother did tech support, Levie said, and he and Smith tried to raise additional financing in Seattle. But this proved to be challenging at the time. “Seattle was lacking the Silicon Valley-Zuckerberg story. VCs and angels in Seattle were still repairing wounds from the Dot.com bust.”

Smith and Levie decided to take their roadshow national and began contacting angel investors outside of Seattle. One of those investors was Mark Cuban. Levie cold-called Cuban via email about Box, and got a response from the entrepreneur immediately. In the Fall of 2005, Cuban decided to put in $350,000.

Around the same time, Box was scaling fast and it got to the point where Levie and Smith realized that they could no longer attend school and manage the day-to-day activities of Box. Both Levie and Smith approached their parents about dropping out of college in December of 2005. While both Levie and Smith’s parents were supportive, Smith says he his mom was a little bit concerned about throwing the education away. It took some convincing, says Smith, but in the end he promised he would go back and earn the degree at some point.

Once the decision was made to leave their respective colleges, Aaron (then 21) and Smith (then 20) mutually agreed that Silicon Valley was the best place to be. The pair packed their bags and moved to Berkeley, California in early 2006, where Levie’s uncle rented them a small garage. As Smith recalled,  both Levie and him  worked and lived night and day out of the garage, soon joined by high school friends from Mercer Island, Jeff Queisser and Sam Ghods.

As for the product, Levie and Smith began to brainstorm ways in which to get the service to go viral, and decided to open up the file storage service for free. Smith says this was a key turning point for the company, which began soliciting customers with little sales efforts. In fact, Box was getting so much traffic that servers were breaking down. But in terms of the vision, Box was still a consumer and business company. As Levie explains users “interpreted what they were doing with Box in their own individual way. Some people thought it was backup, others found it a way to replace emails,” he says.

Then came that fateful Spring day at Arrington’s house, where Levie and Smith pitched Melton on their company. The boys had already decided they needed to raise a round, and were attempting to make connections with investors on Sand Hill Road, but the in with Stein at DFJ was able to speed up the process.

Stein recalls in one of his first meetings at Smith and Levie’s Berkeley garage, he had to step over enormous mound of stinky laundry, and was legitimately worried about the boys’ health in garage. But besides the pungent odor, he was immediately struck by how impressive the product was for a bootstrapped startup. “You could tell right away that this was a company that was very product-focused. Coming off the heels of storage failures of Xdrive, Aaron had come up with differentiated and distinctive vision for what product should do, what it should look like.” And what also impressed him was Dylan’s detailed insight into the startup’s business operations despite his youth.

At the first meeting, Stein peppered both Smith and Levie with questions about the company, business model and more. By 2 a.m. the next morning, Stein received a multi-page response from the team with thoughtful, detailed responses to each questions. He saw this as a good sign. “There was an intelligence, an energy and drive in Aaron and Dylan that was immediately apparent. That’s not always the case int he valley,” he says.

And when evaluating whether to invest in the company, he thought that the product served a definite purpose in the business world, but had what he called “modest aspirations,” for Box. DFJ signed off on the investment and by July 2006, terms sheets were signed and Box had raised $1.5 million from the firm.

Consumer To Enterprise

Interestingly, it was Stein who helped define a set vision for the company in its early days. Box, at its start, was focused on both consumers and businesses, offering a dead simple way to store files. In 2006, the company continued to iterate on both sides of the business, launching file sharing options for consumers and businesses. But Stein, who was an active part of Box’s business (and served on the board), saw the writing on the wall that enterprise customers were “stickier,” in his words, and pushed the company to “sharpen its focus.”

Even Levie admits that he didn’t grasp how large and substantial the enterprise opportunity was until Stein started pitching him and Smith on a more targeted product. He explains, “Josh Stein started to connect the dots on doing an SaaS enterprise model. We credit him to being able to shine light for us on something we couldn’t see.”

The company began tailoring the product towards business users around 2007, and as Stein says, “engagement went through the roof.”

Another added feature which helped boost enterprise use was security, which was added in 2008. The company found that businesses were willing to pay even more for added security and permissioning. While not the sexiest product feature, the ability to have administrative control over data was really a turning point for product, says Stein. The addition of admin controls and security played into the needs of big companies, and CIOs started to actually pay attention to Box.

It was these offerings that caught the attention of Justin Slaten, Director, Information Technology for Wasserman Media in 2007. “There were lot of companies popping up at time that were consumer facing products in file storage but weren’t focused on the enterprise,” he says. “Box was the first company that was willing to offer a product that focused on business users.”

Nearly six years later, Wasserman is still using Box (along with Procter And Gamble, Pandora, Skype, LinkedIn, Turner and many others). Slaten says that Box is “in tune” with what clients want in a user experience, whether that be collaboration, apps or security. “They are always deploying features that I actually want,” he says.

By 2008, the company still had just a handful of employees but Levie and Smith were both settling into their defined roles within the business, with Levie as CEO and Smith as CFO. As Stein explains, the founders’ strengths were complimentary from the beginning. “Aaron is focused more on the product, design and technology part of the business and Dylan is drawn to the economics and business model. These defined skill sets allowed them to focus on building business and think about it holistically.”

Not only did Smith and Levie work days and nights together, but they were also room mates and actually lived at the offices until 2008. The company eventually moved to Palo Alto shortly after the DFJ funding round, and the Smith and Levie took a loft above the office, which had just a few mattresses on the floor.

Living and working together usually doesn’t work for most founders, especially when they are actually sharing a bedroom. But Smith explains that they developed systems early on to be able to live with each other, calling Levie more of a brother than a friend.

From A Berkeley Garage To A $600 Million-Plus Dollar Business

As competitors started popping up in 2007 and 2008, Box focused on strengthening its enterprise product even further. Box steadily evolved into more than just a file storage platform, becoming a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others. Mobile is another area where Box has been focusing, adopting HTML5, launching iPhone, iPad and Android apps and more.

Along the way, Box realized the market was much bigger than file storage. As it evolved into a collaboration platform, the company realized the enormous opportunity in providing a simple, cloud-based alternative to legacy systems like Microsoft Sharepoint. The company began aggressively campaigning for existing Sharepoint users to make the switch.

Stein says that in 2009, he realized that Box was going to be a multibillion company. “You could see acceleration of taking off. In 2010, the company doubled the amount of sales reps selling the product to businesses and sales and productivity skyrocketed.”

Around the same time, Box raised $15 million on Series C funding from Scale Venture Partners, DFJ and U.S. Venture Partners. A year later, Box landed $48 million in new funding from Meritech Capital Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Emergence Capital Partners, DFJ, Scale Venture Partners and US Venture Partners.

And then the acquisition offers started coming in. As reported last year, the company fielded a $600 million acquisition offer from Citrix, exactly 6 years after raising $350,000 from Mark Cuban.

While Levie tends to shy away from commenting on the acquisition, we heard from sources that it was a hard decision to say no to. There was a lot of money to be made, and it was a risk to keep pushing forward as an independent company.

“I think you get these opportunities once every decade where such a massive change is happening in the landscape that enables a startup to be at the center,” says Levie. “And there is a lot of pressure to make sure you build something successful when making the decisions to stay independent.”

When making the decision to turn down the acquisition, Levie and Smith both had the sense that Box’s story wasn’t finished. The company was still growing rapidly, churn rates were down, and customers were actually renewing for additional  paid plans, all leading to a healthy, fast-growing top line.

Turning down the acquisition was a very clarifying experience for both investors and Box’s founders because it set a clear goal for the company. The expectation was at the time was that if Box stayed independent, the company was going to really go for it, with the goal of eventually becoming a public company.

At that point, it made sense for Box to raise another round, with this one totaling $81 million. Investors included Salesforce.com, SAP Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, NEA, Andreessen Horowitz and DFJ.

As for going public, Levie says that inevitably employees and investors will desire liquidity and being a public company afford this opportunity.

Stein echoes Levie’s thoughts, and believes the company is in a prime position to be a public company. “Enterprise SaaS companies are perfectly suited to be public companies. The company’s gross margins are north of 70 percent and there’s recurring revenue, which is great for the public markets,” he explains. “I think Box is the kind of company we see once every decade at DFJ. I compare it to Salesforce but I think Box is actually creating an even larger category of enterprise software. I think it has the potential to be the next email; basically what company intranets are supposed to be.” he says.

As for revenue, Box is on track to triple revenue in 2012. Last year, Box reportedly brought in around $25 million in revenue, so we’re looking at a $75 million-plus sales number for 2012. Smith adds that the company is growing faster than they ever have in the past.

The Enterprise Culture And The Competition

Running an enterprise company presents its own unique challenges. Levie says one of his biggest challenges is developing easy to use products for businesses, and iterating fast, despite being an enterprise company. “Our engineers have to be consumer internet minds, our products have to be consumer minded, we have to move fast but build software like an enterprise company,” he says.

Levie explains that each week, Box re-releases the site with fixes. He compares this to the yearly cycle for products builds for on-premise companies. But he sees the rapid product iteration of consumer focused companies like Facebook, as the future of enterprise and cloud.

“IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are always going to respond more slowly to market. They haven’t developed a rapid release product development strategy. So how we compete is moving more quickly, and being more agile. We can reach and get end users faster than the bigger player. The next generation of enterprise software companies will be organizations built like consumer internet companies that happen to sell to businesses,” Levie comments.

But the challenge to producing fast, and adding features is taking business customers off guard as well as education. For us to flip a feature through quickly, it has to be additive, Levie says. “We can’t impair the customer’s processes and this is a constant tension.”

Competition has also come recently from Google with the launch of the search giant’s own storage product, Google Drive. Levie doesn’t seem to be too worried to call Google a competitor. “I can’t think of a single startup that won’t have Google as a competitor. For same reason Oracle could never build a great consumer product, I think it is hard for companies like Google to be a leader in the enterprise.”

Another challenge, though unsurprising, is hiring, particularly in engineering and sales. As Box’s COO Dan Levin explains, the company needs to find people who are not only good at their job but also reinforce the entrepreneurial, product-driven, fast-paced culture at Box. He says that Box roughly phone screens 100 people to find ten to interview on site to make 1 to 2 offers.

And Box is continuing to staff up. Levie says the company is looking to boost headcount by 50-75 percent by the end of the year. Currently, Box has 425 employees and just moved to new headquarters in Palo Alto.

The Future

Levie recalls pitching Marc Andreessen a few years ago on investing in the company’s Series D round. He had put up growth projections and goals for Box, and while Andreessen said this data was positive, he asked Levie a thought-provoking question. “How fast does the storage market have to grow to get to these goals?” It’s a question that Levie continually repeats to himself when making projections for the future of Box.

Levie sees Box’s future particularly centralized around creating an ecosystem of apps both on mobile and web platforms. Last fall, Box launched a platform for developers building off of the Box platform, called the Box Innovation Network (/bin). And earlier this year, we learned about Box OneCloud, a mobile cloud and API for the enterprise that allows businesses to access, edit, and share content from their mobile devices.

Box is also looking to use data to help businesses make better business decisions. And adding new applications to the Box platform helps bring more data into the collaboration flow. “We want Box to be the foundation for storage, permissions, collaboration, security, with horizontal apps built on top of the service. We think we can be an important broker for applications to generate business and demand,” says Levie.

Smith adds that Box also plans to build data centers in additional countries in the world, and sees international markets as a huge growth area for the company.

A few years shy of their thirtieth birthdays, Smith and Levie are at the helm of one of the fastest growing enterprise startups in the technology world. And the company is fast approaching a billion valuation, if it hasn’t reached that already. Box’s story isn’t an overnight success but more of a testament to the strength of having two, passion-driven founders who weren’t afraid to cold-call well-known investors, drop out of college to live the startup dream, and squander thousands in poker winnings on a fledgling idea.

Samsung Electronics has acquired mobile entertainment startup mSpot, according to a release issued today. Financial terms were not disclosed, but previous reports point to an acquisition price of $8.8 million. (Update: A source with knowledge of the deal tells us that it was actually between $50 million and $60 million.)

mSpot let users stream and watch full-length movies on their mobile phones and on the web. The company had struck deals with Sony, Disney, Paramount, NBC/Universal, Lionsgate, Warner, Image Entertainment, and Screen Media Ventures to stream full-length movie rentals to users’ PCs and cell phones, allowing you to switch between both devices as you pick up and leave off throughout a movie.

mSPot also offered a cloud-based music service, which let you upload your music to the cloud, and stream this content from a multitude of devices, ranging from PCs, Macs, to the iPhone, iPad and Android. Last year the company launched a Pandora-like radio-service for personal music collections.

It was tough for mSpot to compete with the likes of Apple, Amazon and others in the music, movie and film streaming world so the exit is probably best for the startup. mSpot raised $2.3 million in funding from Trinity Ventures.

Samsung says mSpot’s technology will be used to provide an “entertainment experience of music, video and radio services for users of Samsung devices, while extending mSpot’s cloud and streaming solutions to a broader base of global entertainment fans…mSpot’s entertainment services will be a key integrated offering on newly announced Samsung mobile devices.”

The acquisition includes technology, assets and human resources under mSpot.

Chicago-based Base, a company that develops a cross-platform CRM product, has raised $6.8 million in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with Social+Capital Partnership, OCA Ventures and the I2A fund participating. The startup previously raised $1.1 million in funding.

Founded in 2009 by Uzi Shmilovici, Base is a CRM product that is catered towards small businesses. Base wants to let businesses manage their customers and sales everywhere they are, and offers applications for the Android phone, the iPhone, Mac and Windows. The company also plans to release tablet and Windows Phone 7.5 apps soon.

You can capture, track and visualize your sales leads; manage contacts with notes, tasks and reminders and more.

Shmilovici explains that most CRM products are web-based and don’t offer mobility for users. As mobility becomes increasingly popular in the enterprise, Base wants to be the go-to CRM option for companies that need sales operations to be managed on the go.

“The cloud was only act one of the enterprise software revolution. The end game is to have your data with you on any device, at any time, anywhere you are. This kind of ubiquity, together with a focus on product design and user experience, is what makes the next generation of CRM”, said Shmilovici.

Since the beginning of the year, the company grew its user base by more than 500% and is currently being used by tens of thousands of businesses worldwide.

Mobile payments processing platform Square has been used by a variety of individuals and businesses, from charities to taxis to food trucks to political campaigns. Next up—art fairs and farmers’ markets.

The company says that at Etsy’s New York’s Spring Handmade Cavalcade last weekend in Brooklyn, over 90% of the vendors used Square to accept payments. And this weekend, Square says that many vendors at Unique LA, the largest independent fashion market in the country, will use Square to process card payments. Unique LA expects over one and a half million dollars to be spent in its market over the weekend.

It’s not surprising that Square is being used by independent purveyors at fairs and markets. The company’s smartphone dongle and companion payments app makes taking credit cards easy. The payments app has been a favorite amongst independent workers, merchants and small businesses for the past few years.

As reported a few weeks ago, Square is now processing $5 billion in annual payments (or around $416 million in payments per month), which is up from $4 billion in annual payments in March. And payment volume is up 25 percent over the past month. The company also just started making funds available in merchants’ bank accounts the next business morning (for any sales made before 5 pm), while other merchant processors can take 2 to 5 business days to get merchants their money.

Chicago-based Belly, a startup that is a fast-growing contender in the local business customer loyalty and rewards space, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The company also announced that Andreessen Horowitz partner Jeff Jordan, former chairman and CEO of OpenTable and former president of PayPal, will join the Board. This latest round of funding adds to a seven-figure round raised by the startup from Lightbank, the venture firm founded by Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

Belly wants to reinvent customer loyalty rewards through gamification, digital check-ins and a iPad setup for businesses. But the startup has a slightly different take on how to achieve this. Belly offers a quick-setup, plug-and-play rewards platform to merchants. Part of this is an in-store iPad (which Belly supplies) that is used to validate paying customers right at the point of sale, and serves as a check-in point. Belly will also train employees to encourage them to participate in the program.

Merchants pay a monthly subscription for unlimited Belly cards to hand out to customers, in-store marketing materials and secure access to customer data that reveals sales, points and redemption data, as well as insights into foot traffic and card usage patterns. Businesses can even use Belly data to send out push-notifications about exclusive promotions and other rewards to Belly customers.

On the consumer side, to check in, customers can scan their smartphone at an in-store iPad POS and with each check-in, you get closer to a specific milestone, and reward (as stipulated by the business). You simply scan a Belly card (provided by the merchant), or use Belly’s iPhone or Android Apps on the businesses’ Belly iPad app (which sits next to the register). Once you check-in you accumulate points, and can start earning rewards.

On the Belly mobile apps themselves, you can simply open the app and see a list of merchants that are Belly users by your location. The app completely replaces the merchant card at all of these businesses. With the Belly card, you have one universal rewards card (that is attached to your email) which can be used at all participating Belly merchants.

The premise, says co-founder and CEO Logan LaHive, is that consumers don’t want to carry several different cards, and businesses need a loyalty system that everyone can use. “We’re eliminating overstuffed wallets,” says LaHive.

Jordan has high hopes for Belly, “We are optimistic that the startup has huge potential to revolutionize loyalty for businesses,” he says. “Now customer loyalty programs can be digitized with the web, data analytics, and smartphone. This used to be an inefficient system but Belly makes this is highly efficient and gives merchants great information on who their best customers are.”

He also adds that the talented team, elegant product execution with the iPad, and the backing from Lightbank all made the investment attractive for Andreessen Horowitz. In particular, Jordan feels that the loyalty market is fragmented and Belly is in a prime position to scale its business.

Of course, as CEO of OpenTable, Jordan has insight on how to scale a business catering to small restaurants and merchants. He says that Belly will need to build a sales team, fast. “The key is to get in as many cities as fast as you can,” he says.

Even in the past 9 months, Belly has been scaling fairly fast. Launched in August 2011, Belly has over 200,000 active users who have checked in over 800,000 times. Belly currently partners with 1,400 merchants and adds 100-plus new businesses each week. And starting today, Belly is available in New York and Boston, in addition to its existing roster of businesses in Chicago, Austin, Milwaukee, Madison, Wis., Washington D.C. and Phoenix.

One of the differentiating factors for Belly from its many competitors, says LaHive, (which include LevelUp, Perka, PerkVille, and PunchTab) is that businesses are able to tailor their rewards program.

Currently rewards at businesses range from a comic book store that offers customers a chance to punch the owner in the stomach, to a bakery that rewards customer 10 minutes of all you can eat cupcakes. You can arm wrestle a sandwich restaurant owner or ride along in a food truck that will let its best customers “egg” the truck as it drives by. Dog-A-Holic will post a “Portrait Of You And Your Dog On Our Wall and Red 7 Salon allows customers to “Shave Our Heads With A 1-On-1 Owner Buzz Cut.” Belly works closely with each individual business to ensure the rewards are unique and personalized to that business’ brand and culture.

Another added bonus for businesses is that they can see when each customer is checking-in, how often and more. Businesses can get a clear view of their most loyal and valuable customers. another data area where Belly may expand into is transaction data. Currently the app doesn’t track what the customer actually bought but is looking to integrate with Point of Sale systems in the future.

“We’re moving beyond the buy ten get one free program to work closely with each merchant to try to uniquely appeal to their customers,” says LaHive. “Businesses want to create personal relationships, and take what is offline and put it online, and analytics on how to manage customer behavior, communications tools, email and social media allows these business to have an ongoing relationship with customers.

The new funding will be used to build and staff a larger sales team to expand to other markets. While many of these sales people will be based in Chicago, others will be located in the local markets as well.

LaHive is also focused on product development and will be looking to transition all the startup’s apps to HTML5. The company will also being making a number of speed, and UI improvements as well as redesigning the experience.

As for location, LaHive plans to stay in Chicago. “For an earlier stage startup in Chicago, raising funding from a firm like Andreessen Horowitz is validating,” he says. “We feel that we are best scaled to roll out a quality loyalty program for businesses.”

Exclusive: RichRelevance, a company that powers personalized shopping experience for online retailers, has raised $20 million in funding led by Crosslink Capital with Greylock Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Tugboat Ventures participating. This brings the startup’s total funding to $50 million.

RichRelevance aims to take consumer shopping data and help retailers leverage this information into a more personalized experience. As e-commerce heats up, and big data strategies enter the market, more retailers want to provide customized online shopping for consumers to drive sales.

The company was co-founded by Sundeep Ahuja Tyler Kohn, Michael DeCoursey and Dave Selinger, who helped architect Amazon.com’s recommendation technology. Selinger tells us that in his additional experience at Overstock.com as Vice President of Software Development and Data Mining, he saw how challenging it was for retailers to use data to give consumers a better experience. And at Amazon, where Selinger helped lead the research and development arm of Amazon’s Data Mining and Personalization team, he was able to see the potential value in delivering a personalized UI.

“It’s hard for retailers to get an arm around different data sets and I wanted to help retailers leverage data to make the shopping experience better,” he explains.

RichRelevance offers three distinct ways retailers can add personalization. The first allows retailers to deliver product recommendations via email, or even as users are navigating through the site. RichRelevance takes all forms of consumers, data, including what items you may have licked on, purchase history, shopping cart history, search, and more to help personalize the shopping experience. RichRelevance serves more than 350 million personalized recommendations each day across its merchant networks.

For example, a retailer using RichRelevance could send an email to a consumer with suggestions of what they may like based their interactions with the site, or previous purchases. As Selinger explains, “The goal is to recreate the personal, consumer experience you have with a sales representative in te digital channel.”

The second product RichRelevance offers is focused on personalized advertising. The company will present relevant advertisements to consumers while shopping on retail sites. So brands such as Colgate can deliver an advertisement to a consumer in the midst of making a decision about what’s the right toothpaste. Selinger says the value proposition is similar to ad network. Launched in December 2010, RichRelevance’s advertising offerings are used by 3M, P&G, AT&T, Verizon, Toyota and Cisco. The company claims that these ad products can deliver a 60-100% sales lift for the advertised brand’s products.

Personalized offers are the final product the company integrates, and serves consumers targeted promotions.

In aggregate, RichRelevance’s clients represent more than 30% of online retail and today the company serves six of the top 10 US retailers in ecommerce, as well as seven of the top 50 leading UK/EU online retailers. Customers include Target, Walmart, Sears, Overstock, The Disney Store and others.

The new funding will be used to further develop RichRelevance’s product footprint, expand markets internationally and for research and development, says Selinger.

David Silverman, Partner at Crosslink Capital, tell us that the company has been able to see success because it is a technically savvy business that has taken advantage of a pop in e-commerce. “The innovation level of what RichRelevance is doing is exponentially better than competitors,” he says. “The company has the best technology algorithmically.”

“Data is the currency in today’s omni-channel retail environment,” said David Strohm, partner at Greylock Partners. “Companies like Apple, Google and Facebook have set the stage for what it means to use data to attract and maintain loyal customers. RichRelevance is among this select group of platform companies who can harness data on consumer behavior and insights, specifically shopping and intent data, to change the way that retailers and brand advertisers operate.”

As the e-commerce world becomes even more competitive, retailers are going to have to use their data to help deliver a more valuable experience. And the way to do this is through personalization. Clearly, RichRelevance is in a potentially lucrative position to be one of the go-to technologies to enable this for retailers, who may not be technologically savvy to manage and parse this data into an actual product.

Design-friendly online invitations and stationery startup Paperless Post has raised $6 million in funding from RRE Ventures, SV Angel, Tim Draper and others. This brings the startup’s total funding to $12 million. Previous investors include Ram Shiram and Mousse Partners.

The startup is sort of like the anti-Evite, aiming to allow consumers to create sleek, design-focused, personalized invitations that deliver the same quality as paper stationery. Users can send out invitations for any occasion and monitor as guests receive and reply to their invitations. The New York company was launched in 2009 by brother and sister team James and Alexa Hirschfeld.

The startup offers specialized invitations for specific types of parties (i.e. birthdays, weddings, bridal showers), as well as greetings for occasions (sympathy, birthday, congratulations).

Not all invitations and greeting cards on the site are free; Paperless Post recently rolled out premium designs as well (the platform previously was paid-only). The free product is more simple, explains James, with invitations delivered directly in the email without the trademark envelope opening. Paid invitations include more design value and other features.

James tellus is that he and Alexa started the company because they felt that there was a gap in the online invitation market for a more design-centric, personalized invitation experience. “There needed to be a platform that allowed self-expressions through design without advertising,” he says.

As for the future, the company, which has sent 60 million invitations over the past three years, will be providing more social toolsto enhance engagement between friends connecting over Paperless Post. Alexa explains, “We’re thinking a lot about receiver and what we can build for them.” This includes calendar integrations and more. The company is seeing 100 percent year over year growth.

And she says that the new funding will also be used to move the platform entirely to HTML5. Currently, 30 percent of Paperless Posts’s traffic is mobile.

Paperless Post faces competition from Punchbowl, Evite and others.

Startup Personal, which aims to give consumers control over their digital data, is debuting an iPhone app today, adding to the company’s existing web and Android apps.

Personal is a free web and mobile service that helps you take control of all the digital information about yourself and your life, decide who gets access to it, and use it for your benefit. This information ranges from your passwords, your kids allergies, emergency contacts, credit card info, and more. Basically, any information you may not want to store in email but want to be able to share with your loved ones or friends.

With Personal you can store various information in ‘data vaults’ where you can selectively share certain vaults with people. Of course, all accounts on Personal include a legal guarantee that you own your data in the system. At the very heart of Personal, are what the startup calls ‘gems.’ Gems are nuggets of reusable information that represent the details of your life – your family, pets, car, home, office, food and travel preferences, and more.  You can decide which gems to add to your vault and which to share with others using our grant and request features. And you can download existing data from LinkedIn and Facebook. Personal also has a Gem Gallery, which is where you browse for the gems you need to use.

Using the iPhone app, Personal users can access all of their ‘Gems,” including logins and passwords, grant temporary access to their Wi-Fi info to guests at home or the office so they can quickly log on, give users access to loyalty programs and more.

The bonus of having this information stored in a mobile app is that you can access all of this on the go and share this information from anywhere.

The startup has raised $7.6 million in funding from Steve Case’s Revolution LLC, Allen&Company, and others.

Credit card giant MasterCard is debuting a new study today, called the MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index, which analyzed 34 countries and their readiness to use three types of mobile payments: person to person, mobile commerce and mobile payments at the point of sale. MasterCard actually developed a proprietary algorithm that takes publicly available data as well as MasterCard-owned data to rank countries on their potential to adopt mobile payments.

The study showed that while it is still early stages for mobile payments adoption, Singapore, Canada, the U.S., Kenya and South Korea are the most prepared markets to accept this technology. Additional findings include that young affluent consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 years old are the most willing to use mobile payments as they recognize the value of using mobile payments instead of cash or payment cards. While this demographic was predominantly male in most countries, women showed higher levels of interest in countries such as China, Egypt and the Philippines.

The study also revealed that 9 of the 10 markets with the highest consumer scores are in Asia/Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Of the three mobile payment types, more consumers had actually engaged in m-commerce in 71 percent of the countries surveyed.

In developing economies, consumers are typically drawn to mobile payments for access to the larger economy, both national and global, as well as to a regulated and secure economic infrastructure. Consumers in the developed world are drawn to the convenience of mobile phone payments, says MasterCard.

Partnerships and collaboration among financial institutions, telcos, governments, technology providers and others is also key to reaching critical mass, says MasterCard.

TidePool, a startup that is trying to determine consumer personality from photos, has raised $1.5 million in a seed round led by Mike Hirshland of Resolute.VC and Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal Capital. Participating investors include Jarl Mohn, Tim Draper, Peggy and Jim Davis, and Jeff Lipp.

The startup’s central goal is simple—Tidepool uses a proprietary technology to uncover personality and other psychological characteristics from photos. To begin your assessment on Tidepool, you are presented a number of photos. You are asked to rank photos by which ones you like best. You are also asked to pick between two images that you like, choose different interests (based on pictures) and more.

The startup’s founders, Kabir Sagoo and Dr. Galen Buckwalter (founding Chief Science Officer at eHarmony) tell me that they have developed 60 types of personalities including “maverick,” “producer,” “super sleuth,” “The different drummer,” and others bases on these image choices. You can then sign up with Facebook or LinkedIn and share with your friends.

While the startup simply offers a test and assessment at the moment, the startup wants to be use the technology to make suggestions of who you will get along with based on the personality assignment. Buckwalter and Sagoo admits that there isn’t a lot of conclusive data that validates if this technology is the best way to match personalities, but the startup is in the process of conducting a study to prove its anecdotal findings.

Sagoo explains, “Questionnaires are boring and easily gamed. TidePool brings imagination and creativity to testing…eventually your photos will become a lot more valuable to you when you use TidePool.”

The company is part of Los Angeles-based startup accelerator, Amplify.

Professional social network LinkedIn has just released Q1 earnings. Revenue for the first quarter was $188.5 million, an increase of 101% compared to $93.9 million in the first quarter of 2011. Net income for the first quarter was $5 million, compared to net income of $2.1 million for the first quarter 2011, in increase of 140%. Non-GAAP EPS for the first quarter was $0.15. Analysts expected earnings of $0.09 cents per share, with quarterly revenue in at $179 million. Clearly, the company blew past Wall Street expectations.

“LinkedIn’s solid performance in the first quarter built on the company’s momentum in 2011,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. “We saw strength across all key metrics from member signups and engagement to significant revenue growth across our three product lines.”

LinkedIn says this is the seventh consecutive quarter of revenue growth for the company.

Revenue from Hiring Solutions products totaled $102.6 million, an increase of 121% compared to the first quarter of 2011. Hiring Solutions revenue represented 54% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012, compared to 49% in the first quarter of 2011. Revenue from Marketing Solutions products totaled $48.0 million, an increase of 73% compared to the first quarter of 2011. Marketing Solutions revenue represented 26% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012, compared to 30% in the first quarter of 2011. Revenue from Premium Subscriptions products totaled $37.9 million, an increase of 91% compared to the first quarter of 2011. Premium Subscriptions represented 20% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012, compared to 21% of revenue in the first quarter of 2011.

Revenue from the U.S. totaled $120.8 million, and represented 64% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012. Revenue from international markets totaled $67.6 million, and represented 36% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012.

Revenue for the second quarter of 2012 is projected to range between $210 million to $215 million.

For LinkedIn, it’s been nearly a year since the company’s IPO in May of 2011. And the company has been steadily increasing revenue and profits. In Q4 of 2011, LinkedIn doubled revenue and increased profit, surpassing Wall Street expectations. And the company is currently valued at over $11 billion.

From the product iteration standpoint, Q1 was a slightly slower quarter for the network.

In March, LinkedIn introduced a new version of People You May Know. LinkedIn also launched an embeddable “Follow” button that companies can add to their websites. And LinkedIn made the acquisition of contact manager Rapportive official.

Last week, the company debuted its iPad app, which was a key step in the company’s mobile strategy.

We’ll be following the earnings call in an hour and updating this post with additional details.

Earnings Call:

LinkedIn now has 161 million members, adding 15 million members over the past quarter. The company is seeing the fastest growth in Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Europe.

The company will refresh many of its pillar products this year. LinkedIn is expected to have 5.3 billion professional searches in 2012.

Mobile continues to be the fast growing product for LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has just acquired professional content sharing platform SlideShare for $119 million in cash and stock. We’ve pasted the release below.

SlideShare is a sharing platform for business documents, videos and presentations. SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and video and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. The company also has a huge enterprise following, and companies like IBM and others use the platform to curate content from all of their employees and partners on a branded page.

SlideShare users have uploaded more than nine million presentations, and according to comScore, in March SlideShare had nearly 29 million unique visitors.

SlideShare has raised $3 million in funding from Jonathan Abrams, Mark Cuban, Dave McClure, and Venrock.

The acquisition makes a lot of sense from a product point of view. SlideShare recently deepened its integration with LinkedIn, and the two companies have compared their relationship to Chocolate and peanut butter for professionals. We actually suggested at the time that LinkedIn should buy SlideShare. Perhaps they were listening to us?

LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD), the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with 161 million members worldwide, today announced it agreed to acquire SlideShare, a leading professional content sharing community.

The transaction is valued at approximately $118.75 million, subject to adjustment, in a combination of approximately 45 percent cash and approximately 55 percent stock. Subject to the completion of customary conditions, the acquisition is expected to close during the second quarter of 2012.

Founded in October 2006, SlideShare helps professionals discover people through content, and content through people. SlideShare users have uploaded more than nine million presentations, and according to comScore, in March SlideShare had nearly 29 million unique visitors, ranking it among the most heavily trafficked sites for professional content.

SlideShare is also enabling the sharing of presentations across the Web; nearly 7.4 million presentations hosted by SlideShare are embedded across more than 1.4 million unique domains.

“Presentations are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their experiences and knowledge, which in turn helps shape their professional identity,” said LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. “These presentations also enable professionals to discover new connections and gain the insights they need to become more productive and successful in their careers, aligning perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission and helping us deliver even more value for our members. We’re very excited to welcome the SlideShare team to LinkedIn.”

Rashmi Sinha, CEO of SlideShare commented, “We built SlideShare to help professionals share presentations and connect people through content. What we can build with LinkedIn, the largest professional network on the Internet, is the most natural extension of this vision. I am excited about what we can build together.”

Klout, the startup that measures influence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, Google+ and other social apps, has just released a new version of its API and released a number of new stats about its API usage.

Klout evaluates users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals on social networks. Klout says it now serves about one billion API calls per day, which is 80 times the amount of data we served this time last year. Klout says that in the last three months, API calls have risen from 10.5 billion to almost 30 billion per month. The company now has 6,000 API (up from 2,000 partners a year ago).

The new API, says Klout, is less Twitter focused and more “Klout-focused.” The startup will now translate identifiers from Twitter to Klout IDs to facilitate speed and to incorporate influence from other networks in the future. Klout’s API is faster, and has a new caching system.

While this change has not been implemented yet, Klout will be migrating to an oAuth2-based authentication system for users. Basically, this means users can give +K to influencers across the Web, off of Klout.com, on partner sites.

Back in February, Klout acquired mobile and local neighborhood app Blockboard, as a way to use the startup’s expertise to further develop its own mobile products. And Klout just released its first mobile presence, an iPhone app. Klout recently raised around $30 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins and others, with partner Chi-Hua Chien joining the startup’s board.

Fresh off a $35 million round of funding, mobile payments company Boku is announcing a direct carrier agreement with Sprint that will allow Sprint customers to charge online purchases to their Sprint wireless bill through a two-step authorization process. The agreement was made possible via a partnership with mobile payments operator BillToMobile.

As you may remember, Boku offers an online payments platform that allowed users to pay for online goods by charging the transaction to their mobile phone bill. When a user wants to purchase a virtual item, he can enter his cell phone number on a site, the site sends a text message to the phone, the user confirms the transaction with a short reply, and all the charges show up on his phone bill.

Direct carrier relationships are important because historically, mobile payments companies face the challenge of lofty carrier rates. Wireless carriers have charged roughly 30% to 40% to process transactions made via mobile phone accounts, making it very difficult for mobile payment companies like Boku to scale beyond virtual goods. These transaction costs are passed down to developers using Boku, which are then passed to the consumer. To avoid these costs, Boku has been negotiating direct relationships with carriers as a way of possibly avoiding these costs.

Boku President Ron Hirson tells us the rates in the U.S. are in the “teens.”

With the Sprint deal, Boku now has direct billing partnerships with all of the major carriers in the U.S., including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.

Sprint customers will be able to make purchases online from Boku’s merchant network of Web-based gaming companies, social networks and service providers. Boku’s mobile payments system on Sprint includes partners such as Electronic Arts, Riot Games, Jagex, Stardoll, Kingisle and Gaia.

Boku is also announcing a number of key hires today. Jon Prideaux, EVP for Visa, and Stuart Neal, Managing Director of International Development for Barclaycard, are joining the company’s executive team as Chief Business Officer and Senior Vice President of Business Development, respectively. As we reported a few months ago, Boku recently launched a new NFC payments system with MasterCard.

Currently, Boku, which processes “hundreds of millions of dollars in mobile payments,” works in 66 countries and with 40 currencies, and has deals with more than 250 carriers covering some 3.2 billion consumers.

Fiverr, a global marketplace offering tasks and services for as little as $5, has raised $15 million in funding from Accel Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. This brings the company’s total funding to $20 million.

Merchants, entrepreneurs, contractors and more workers in more than 200 countries use Fiverr to monetize their skills, talents and resources. They can offer “Gigs”, ranging from web design, logo creation and market research, to personal greetings and video animation, in Fiverr. Customers can then access these jobs for services they need rendered. Fiverr helps service-providers collect payments, promote their services, manage orders, exchange files and communicate with buyers.

In January 2012, Fiverr launched Levels, a reputation-based promotion system to help entrepreneurs build their business and earn more revenue. After sellers successfully complete at least 10 transactions, they unlock advanced up-selling tools to offer Gig extras and charge more for their services. Now more than 30 percent of Fiverr transactions are greater than the site’s starting price of $5.

Currently tasks range from $5 to $150, and there are over 650,000 tasks and services listed on Fiverr. Co-founder Micha Kaufman explains that the entire ordering process for a task takes seconds and there have been millions of tasks completed to date.

The company, founded by Shai Wininger and Kaufman, has grown 600% in transaction volume since the beginning of 2011 and currently employs more than 40 people in Israel, the U.S. and Europe.

“Our vision is to turn Fiverr into the eBay for the service economy,” says Kaufman.

The new funding will be used for global expansion, product development and hiring. Fiverr plans to double its team by the end of 2012.

eBay was one of the first e-commerce giants to launch an iPad app following the device’s debut in 2010. As we’ve heard many times, mobile commerce is a huge growth area for eBay and the company is placing some pretty big bets on the mobile shopping experience. Today, the company, which says that its mobile apps have reached 80 million downloads, is debuting version 2.0 of its flagship iPad app, Buy and Sell with eBay, which has ramped up personalization, customization, image quality and more.

One of the major improvements in the app is a visual redesign of the home screen. Now you can completely customize your home screen with your most recent product searches or sales, which can be added, deleted or moved around based on user preferences. Additionally, first time users of the app will login and find their “My eBay Items” already populated to the home screen.

With the redesign, eBay wanted to eliminate the need for users to click to different pages to search, bid, buy, or pay for items. For buyers, users can access daily deals, eBay’s popular items, recent searches and their favorite categories from the homepage.

Users can choose to browse through results from multiple views, flip through multiple images and purchase from the homepage itself. Search has also been improved, allowing users to access advanced search to target results to listings based on budget, category, condition, size, color, or style

Sellers can research sale trends, list items, and make sale, as well as scan an item using the
barcode scanner to pre-populate a listing from the homepage Sellers can also now revise their listings directly from the iPad app.

eBay mobile VP Steve Yankovich tells us that the redesign focuses on ramping up customization and discovery, especially in the homescreen experience. “It’s about picking best way to browse and discover products,” he explains. “This is a dashboard that creates jumping points for everything the buyer or seller cares about.”

UK-based cloud accounting software company FreeAgent has acquired finance-tracking startup 60mo. The U.S. startup’s team will be incorporated into FreeAgent’s new American division. FreeAgent has also received an additional, undisclosed investment from Lightbank, which also was an investor in 60mo. This is Lightbank’s first international investment, says the firm’s partner Paul Lee.

60mo, which we’ve covered here, is an online service that helps businesses manage their finances by importing data from QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and a variety of financial institutions like Bank of America, Chase, and American Express. Once the data is in the system, you can use 60mo to create financial projections, manage your business’s budget and share the data with your accountant or investors — it’s sort of like a Mint for businesses.

FreeAgent will be leveraging 60mo’s expertise in the U.S. accounting software market to adapt its own cloud-based online accounting system specifically for American users. FreeAgent is an accounting SaaS that is designed specifically for freelancers, independent workers, and small businesses.

The company says a dedicated U.S. version of the FreeAgent system will be launched in the coming months. The firm also plans to adapt the UK system’s tax forecasting and tax return-filing capabilities and incorporate these into the U.S. version of FreeAgent in the near future.

Since its launch in 2007, FreeAgent has steadily been accumulating a loyal customer base. The company started 2011 with 4,000 paying subscribers, and finished with 16,000 paying customers.

Visage Mobile, an enterprise mobility management company, has raised $8 million Series C funding led by Motorola Solutions with Worldview Technology Partners, Palisades Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures participating in the round. The startup has raised a total of $16.1 million to date.

Visage Mobile’s SaaS application, MobilityCentral, basically lets businesses have control and visibility over all of the wireless devices and spend within their companies. The service will organize how many wireless devices are being used in your company, which employee is using a device, your company’s monthly wireless spend and how your wireless spending breaks down. Additionally, Visage Mobile helps businesses set policies to govern employee usage of smartphone and mobile broadband.

Visage’s CEO, Bzur Haun, tells us that the company’s goal is to help enterprises “organize disparate data sources to make better decisions around managing mobility.” As he explains, it’s about taking carrier data, device management, usage data, and then analyzing how companies can better spend resources on mobile.

MobilityCentral is now deployed with more than 200 enterprise customers, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Enterprise cloud storage provider Nirvanix has raised $25 million in Series C funding round led by Khosla Ventures with previous investors Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures and Windward Ventures participating in the round. The new investment brings Nirvanix’s total capital raised to $70M.

Nirvanix is a fully-managed, enterprise cloud storage service capable of storing, delivering and processing storage requests. It’s an alternative to Amazon Web Services, or Box.net. The company specializes in storing amounts of large unstructured content files, and offers usage-based pricing across public, hybrid and private cloud storage deployments.

Scott Genereux, President and CEO of Nirvanix, tells us that the platform is specifically designed for millions of users, billions of files and exabytes of data, which helps differentiate its offering from other cloud storage providers. “We’ve architected cloud storage specifically for large, unconstructed data files. The size of deals we are going after relates to the infrastructure we have. This is not consumer-grade storage that we are scaling up. This is very high-end,” he explains in an interview. “Box and Amazon are not architected for enterprise large data sets.”

Genereux was formerly SVP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at QLogic and held executive roles at DataDirect Networks (DDN) and Hitachi before that. He took on the CEO role at Nirvanix in 2010.

For example, a movie studio could upload a film to the cloud (terabytes of data), which can then be accessed in another country for translation. Another differentiator, says Genereux, is Nirvanix’s ability to upload data once and have it be available in all data centers across the world. The Nirvanix geo-diverse namespace creates a logical pool across all deployed nodes in a public, hybrid or private cloud implementation. “Everything is interconnected, so there is real data collaboration on large files,” he explains.

Data recovery is another key feature for Nirvanix. If data stored in a primary location is unavailable for any reason, the cloud software autonomously serves up data to customers from a secondary or tertiary location while the software continuously checks the integrity of files and automatically repairs any potentially corrupted files in the background.

Customers include Cerner Corporation, IBM, USC Digital Repository, National Geographic and Relativity Media, VMWare and Cisco. NBCUniversal uses Nirvanix to store 3 Petabytes of data, including videos, photos, and movies. And Nirvanix actually built a replica of its Cloud Storage Network for IBM to sell as its own public cloud, called the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise.

Nirvanix is for customers used to buying on-premise hardware from EMC or NetApp and want to shift to cloud, Genereux adds.

“We look to bet on fundamental technology shifts that create big markets, and with Nirvanix we see two of these fundamental shifts occurring together: cloud and data,” said Khosla partner David Weiden. “The advantages of cloud computing are becoming more clear all the time, and it is inevitable that storage will also move to this architecture. Data, particularly unstructured data, is exploding in volume and ways to leverage it.”

Genereux says the company booked more revenue in Q1 of 2012 than nearly all of 2011. And he adds that over the past year Nirvanix has secured more petabytes under management than the prior three years combined; and deployed the largest private clouds in the world.

The company plans to use the funding to expand its engineering staff. The company will be opening a cloud competency center in Colorado, which will work on the next generation of solutions and innovations in the cloud storage space. Nirvanix also plans to increase the number of data centers it operates worldwide; adding 6 additional data centers to its current count of nine. And the infusion will be used towards sales and marketing efforts.

Real estate listings site Zillow just reported strong Q1 earnings. The company reported record revenue of $22.8 million, up 103% over first quarter 2011. Net Income came in at $1.7 million, resulting in EPS of $0.06. Analysts expected earnings of $0.03 per share on revenue of $21.5 million.

Zillow is also buying rental marketing software maker RentJuice, as we reported earlier this year. The transaction is all-cash, valued at $40 million.

“Mobile usage and site traffic grew substantially during the first quarter, which led to record revenue and EBITDA levels exceeding our prior outlook, and our sixth consecutive quarter of triple-digit, year-over-year revenue growth,” said CEO Spencer Rascoff in a release.

“We continue to expand our addressable market and competitive advantage as we extend our mobile leadership, launch more services for real estate professionals, and grow our mortgage and rentals marketplaces. In particular, we took a giant leap forward in growing our rentals marketplace with today’s announcement that Zillow is acquiring RentJuice. This acquisition will provide us with a comprehensive suite of business and marketing services for rental professionals, similar to what took us years to build and grow in our parallel marketplace for real estate agents.”

The company says average monthly unique users grew 84% to 31.8 million in the first quarter of 2012 compared to 17.3 million average monthly unique users for the same period in 2011. And Zillow usage on mobile devices continues to grow. For the first time, more homes each month are now viewed via Zillow on mobile devices than on the Web. In March 2012, 155 million homes were viewed on Zillow Mobile, or 57 homes per second.

Zillow recently launched its first dedicated rentals app, debuting on Android.

Zillow’s revenue for the second quarter is also expected to reach record levels of $25.5 to $26.5 million.