The Good NET Guide

Yodle, the New York-based startup that helps local businesses advertise more efficiently on the web, has secured $10 million in Series D financing led by JAFCO Ventures and joined by Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth, and DFJ. This latest round brings Yodle’s total financing to $38 million.

Yodle also released figures indicating the startup’s growth over the past year. In 2009, Yodle grew its revenue by 135 percent. The startup also expanded its local advertising network to over 75 hyper-local web publishers. The company, which started out in 2005, is a lead generation company focused on aiding small businesses advertise their wares in search results for all major search engines. If customers have a website, the ad will point directly to it and Yodle will track and optimize actions starting from clickthrough to phone calls, etc. If there’s no web presence yet, the small business can opt to work with Yodle to create a custom so-called AdverSite which acts as a basic call-to-action website or landing page for the advertisers.

Yodle recently filed suit against three former employees alleging that the men ‘hacked’ into its computer systems and stole trade secrets and proprietary data, some of which was sensitive information about current and potential future customers. The company says it will use the funding for product development and continued innovation.

Twitter app directory oneforty has raised $1.6 million, according to an SEC filing. Of that, a previously undisclosed $375,000 is in the form of convertible debt already raised in a couple of angel rounds last year (which are converting to stock). So the company was able to raise $1.25 million in new money, and the filing indicates that the total offering amount will be $2.4 million, meaning that more might be on the way before the current Series A round is complete.

Oneforty currently lists more than 2,000 Twitter apps and ranks them based on both their popularity on the site and across the Web. The company makes affiliate revenues for paid apps (mostly on the iPhone), but could eventually charge app developers for featured spots on its homepage. Rumors surfaced in October about Twitter buying the service, but that never happened. Oneforty was part of the Boston Techstars Class of 2009.

Contacted for comment, oneforty CEO Laura Fitton (aka @pistachio) said she couldn’t speak about the funding beyond the information in the filing, but that her charity raising money for Charity Water this year and the NHL is donating two tickets to the Winter Classic at Fenway Park in Boston. No, I don’t know what that has to do with her funding either.

Update: The likely venture investor is Flybridge Capital Partners, since general parter Jeff Bussgang is listed as a director on the SEC filing.

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During and after Twittergate, when a hacker broke into a few hosted email accounts and obtained a number of internal documents, I had an opportunity to spend hours speaking to the actual attacker and document how he carried out the attack. The article was called The Anatomy of The Twitter Attack, and today we unfortunately find ourselves with a sequel to that post as the Twitter DNS servers were compromised last night and the site was redirected to a defacement page.

Unlike last time, on this occasion I have not had the benefit of speaking directly to the attackers, but have spoken to a number of people within the underground security scene familiar with matters and have constructed other parts of the story from public sources. The incident last night was perpetrated by a group called the Iranian Cyber Army – and we have been told that this group is working with the Iranian government. The attack occurred at the same time as a number of other diplomatic incidents, including the escalation of diplomatic hostilities between Iran and the US/EU as well as an incursion by Iranian troops into a disputed border area containing an oil field.

The defacement was carried out by hijacking the servers hosting the DNS records for the twitter.com domain (this is the server that maps the domain name to an IP address). The attackers modified the DNS records to point to an IP address with a web server hosting the defacement page. The twitter.com domain (registered with NetworkSolutions) was not hijacked, nor were its records altered.

The DNS records for Twitter are hosted at Dyn. A company that provides DNS hosting for over 100,000 domain names and provides other services for companies. We have been told, but have yet to confirm, that the account password recovery feature was used to reset the password for the Twitter account at Dyn. When we checked the password recovery page, it contains a request to contact Dyn directly – there is no form of any type. We have not been able to confirm is there was an automated process at this page which has since been taken down.

To reset the password to gain access to the account hosting DNS records, the attacker had access to the email address associated with the account. Twitter hosts all email on Google Apps for Domain, which played a central role in the previous attack on Twitter not because of any vulnerability within the application itself, but because of a lapse in password policies which lead to a minor account being compromised, which lead to other accounts being compromised.

The attackers gained access to the Twitter account at Dyn, and changed the DNS records for Twitter.com to point to an IP address that was on the anonymous Tor network. The attackers seemed to have changed all the records at Twitter.com, including sub-domains used for the API, the status page, etc. but because of varying caching levels and the fact that some clients were using a direct IP address not all services were affected immediately.

For most users the main Twitter web application was displaying the defacement page for just under an hour.

This type of attack is not very sophisticated, but it is extremely effective. It was not a direct vulnerability with the DNS server but rather with the accounts system and email addresses. While the Twitter application was not compromised, desktop applications and websites that directly send a users username and password back to Twitter over plain HTTP would have sent this information to the attackers IP address, from where it could easily have been harvested.

The solution to similar problems revolves around the management of account passwords, especially with critical services such as DNS hosting. Further, since the status page for Twitter was hosted on the same domain as the main site, it was also inactive during the period of time that the defacement was up on the site and for a short time afterwards while Twitter responded to the attack.

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Service-now.com has raised $41M of a $66M funding round, the company disclosed in an SEC filing today. The company was founded by Fred Luddy in 2004 to provide on-demand Enterprise IT services and 2009 has been a boom year for the company. Service-now.com specializes in cloud-based Software as a Service (Saas) IT service management solutions. They cover everything from licensing compliance to the service desk all with a built in analytics system.

On July 21 of this year a company press release detailed some of the company’s accomplishments including: recurring revenue of more than $28 million, 105 percent growth in recurring revenue and a variety of accolades. We’re awaiting word from Service-now.com about the funding. In the meantime we can deduce that some of the funding is probably from Sequoia Capital. Douglas Leone, who may have already been an investor, has become a director and the page of Partner Patrick Grady has been updated to reflect a new involvement with Service-now.com (Nov 30 and now).

Interestingly, the company did not gain much capital from the funding. The SEC filing notes that $37M of the funding was used to repurchase shares of the Service-now.com’s common stock held by its CEO Frederic Luddy and CFO Andrew Chedrick. That is ~90% of the money received in the tranche and over 55% of the total round. From time to time discussion flares up about the idea of founders taking money off the table in funding rounds. It appears investors Sequoia Capital and JMI Equity were okay with it in a big way this time around.

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Popular online event site Eventbrite has raised $6.4 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. The company has confirmed the funding, and says Sequoia Capital is the new investor. Sequoia partner Roelof Botha joins the board of directors.

This brings the event site’s total funding to over $8 million. Previous big-name investors include Bebo co-founder Michael Birch, Jeff Clavier, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, and Flixster co-founder Saran Chari.

Eventbrite provides online event management and ticketing services for any type of event. Eventbrite is free if your event is free. If you sell tickets to your event, Eventbrite collects 2.5% of the ticket price plus $0.99 per ticket sold.

The startup competes in a crowded space, which includes Amiando and TicketLeap. But the startup’s model has proven to be popular for event organizers. In fact, TechCrunch uses Eventbrite for many of our events.

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Rearden Commerce, the under-the-radar automated online assistant that helps people organize travel needs and other services, has raised another $40 million in a Series F funding from JPMorgan Chase. This latest round brings Rearden’s total funding up to $240 million since the company’s launch in 2000. JPMorgan Chase is a marketing partner and a pre-existing investor. Greg O’Hara and Rick Smith, both general partners from One Equity Partners, JPMorgan Chase’s private equity fund, will be joining Rearden’s board, although the funding comes from Chase Capital Partners.

Unfortunately, the funding is bittersweet for the company because it coincides with a round of layoffs. Rearden let go roughly 60 employees from a staff of 335 employees (or 18 percent), following a round of layoffs last November of around 10 percent (or 40 employees) of the company’s staff.

At this point, with so much capital invested in the company, the best hope for Rearden investors to see a returns is if it goes public. Rearden is hoping for an IPO, but before it files it wants to hit profitability, and therefore it is cutting its way there. Public investors are going to want to see evidence of sustainable profits and clear revenue growth. Investors generally prefer companies that are hiring to keep up with growth than cutting back to hit their numbers.

Rearden is better known in the corporate world, offering its services to more than 5,000 corporations, up from 1,700 in May, 2008, with over 2 million individual employees using the service. American Express resells the service to its business customers. Last year, Chase also signed on as a reseller and marketing partner, offering the Rearden’s personal web concierge service to its bank cardholders.

Rearden offers enterprises an automated personal assistant that helps their employees organize any sort of travel-related task. They can set their profile up with the types of restaurants they like, whether they like aisle or window seats, and their preferred car provider, and Rearden will book all aspects of their trip for them. Rearden also launched a mobile version of its service that will sync up with their calendar, message them with alerts and allows them to make changes to their itineraries and bookings. The service also keeps track of reward miles and points from airlines, hotels, and rental cars, and lets employees use those points to book additional travel and other services. The service will even keep track of travel credits and apply them to future trips.

The company had a banner year in 2008, raising $100 million in funding, growing the company’s client and user base and expanding into the mobile space. The site also acquired Global Ground Automation to assist with limousine and other ground transportation reservations, and ExpenseWire to simplify expense reporting for users. Rearden is still planning to target consumers directly, after promising to roll out a consumer-facing service for the past few years.

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Tweetdeck, one of the most popular Twitter clients, has raised $3.2 million (2 million British pounds) in a previously undisclosed round of funding, according to angel investor John Borthwick. He revealed the funding at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp, during a panel discussion bewteen Michael Arrington, and investor Ron Conway.

Tweetdeck, which recently launched a TechCrunch-branded version, raised a small round of angel funding in January, estimated at $300,000. TweetDeck is available for Mac, Windows and Linux, it just requires Adobe AIR. The company has been working on getting more services integrated into its client. Last week, it launched an iPhone app that has been gaining popularity quickly.

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Mo’Minis, an Israeli-based startup that provides developers a platform to create mobile games and entertainment applications, has secured $1.5 million in Series A funding from BRM Capital. The company says that the funding will be used to improve the current development platform, strengthen its community of developers and close strategic partnerships with distributors operating mobile carriers worldwide.

Launched in 2008, Mo’Minis raised $400,000 in seed money from private investors. Mo’Minis’ platform allows advanced as well as non-skilled developers to create rich media casual games from scratch, without the need of programming, and have them seamlessly supported on a wide range of mobile handsets. Furthermore, developers can collaborate, share game assets with Mo’Minis developers’ community members and can monetize their games through Mo’Minis various distribution channels.

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BlueStripe Software, a company that sells application service management software, secured a $8 million in Series B funding from Valhalla Partners and Trinity Ventures. The company secured $5 million in Series A funding in 2007 from Trinity Ventures. BlueStripe says it will use the funding to expand business operations, create new products and further sales and marketing efforts.

Founded in 2007, BlueStripe helps enterprises stage, deploy, and manage business applications in the server environment. BlueStripe’s flagship product, FactFinder, gives businesses the intelligence to manage business‐critical applications during physical to virtual (P2V) conversions, new application roll-outs, and production deployments.

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