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Spiceworks, a startup that develops a social IT management software, has raised $16 million in Series C funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners with Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures participating. This brings the startup’s total funding to $29 million.

Spiceworks develops a desktop software suite that helps a company’s IT staff collaborate with each other and manage “everything IT.” The IT management software, which is free and ad-supported, is currently being used by 850,000 IT professionals at small to medium businesses in 196 countries to inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on and run a help desk for their IT networks. Currently more than 25 percent of all businesses with greater than 100 employees rely on Spiceworks to manage their IT operations.

The compelling part of Spicework’s software is that it includes a social network for IT pros that they use to help each other out that includes a crowdsourcing troubleshooting platform. Its product roadmap is visible to all members, who can vote on which features they want to see next. The application features a network map that visually shows every computer and network device on a company’s IT network, along with their relationships and bandwidth consumption.

Spiceworks also recently added a host of plug-ins and social media widgets, letting users keep track track of alerts, tickets, new software, and new hardware, as well as inventory summaries. Spiceworks also lets users add themes and skins to the desktop, create customized user portals, and lets users drop in news widgets from RSS feeds and social networking widgets for Twitter, Digg, Facebook, and MySpace

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Private equite firm TA Associates announced this morning that it has signed a definitive agreement for a majority investment of over €60 million in eCircle, a decade-old email marketing service provider headquartered in Munich, Germany.

Founded in 1999, eCircle specializes in a range of digital marketing solutions, but it’s mostly known for its high-end email marketing software and related services. The company says more than 550 enterprise clients, including Argos, Nintendo and Samsung, are currently using its eC-messenger Web-based email marketing software, and the company has a transmission volume of over 5 billion emails per quarter.

eCircle has over 200 employees, spread across offices in Germany, the UK, France and Italy.

After test-piloting a textbook rental program at three campus stores, Barnes & Noble College is rolling out the program more broadly to 25 U.S. colleges. Students will be able to rent textbooks from their campus bookstores, online, or from Barnes & Noble stores on campus. Students who want to rent online will be able to do so through their campus bookstore websites, such as Ohio State’s or the University of South Carolina’s.

Barnes & Noble is playing catch-up to Chegg, a startup which offers textbook rentals online to any student across the country. Chegg has raised $144 million in venture capital, dominates the budding textbook rental market, and is often whispered as a future IPO candidate. It claims on its Website that it has already saved students $100 million. Barnes & Noble, meanwhile is taking a campus-by-campus approach. The match-up is reminiscent of the battle with Amazon. Barnes & Noble is responding, but perhaps too slowly. Going from 3 to 25 campuses is not much of a competitive response.

Meanwhile, another startup, BookRenter, today announced new partnerships which expand its rental library to 3 million textbooks. It serves students across 5,000 campuses in the U.S., and says that it’s business is growing 300 percent a year.

Campus bookstores still have a lock on a lot of textbook purchases because professors order their books through those stores. But the rise of these rental options has students asking themselves why should they pay $150 for a textbook when they can rent one for $25 instead? As more students do the math, Barnes & Noble had better hurry up and roll out textbook rentals across all college campuses.

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