Mobeam Adds $1.5M To Se...

Mobeam , the San Francisco-based startup whose technology enables mobile phones to interact with laser scanners at the point of sale, has added another $1.5 million to its Series A round. The company had previously raised $4.9 million in October 2011 . The round includes new investor DFJ Athena, a Korea-focused venture fund affiliated with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and brings in new funds from existing investor and board chairman, Ben DuPont. Also announced today, DFJ Athena’s founder and managing director, Perry Ha, will join Mobeam’s board of directors. The funding follows the company’s announcement in December of a partnership with Procter & Gamble for a pilot program which brings a fully mobile couponing system to U.S. consumers. The technology developed by Mobeam involves a patented way to beam barcodes from a phone’s screen which can be read by normal laser scanners like those found at the point-of-sale. Due to the way mobile handset screens are constructed, they can’t be read by the commonly used scanners found at checkout. Mobeam’s technology instead uses the LEDs already present on many mobile handsets to transform barcodes into beams of light that any laser scanner can read. Mobeam says it’s using the new funding to help establish its technology, called light-based communications (LBC), as a new industry standard. It’s also planning to advance its business development efforts with major retail and consumers brands for mobile couponing and other initiatives.

Lead Management Company...

Leads360 , a consumer sales automation and telephony platform, announced today it has completed a $15 million round of new funding. The round was led by Volition Capital and saw participation from existing Leads360 investor Rustic Canyon Partners. The company plans to use the funding to expand its product lineup, pursue strategic relationships and raise awareness about its platform. Despite how the name sounds, the company doesn’t actually sell leads – it sells software and services to manage the leads an organization already has. Founded in 2004, the L.A.-based startup has now managed over 40 million prospects for over 2,000 clients, including many among the Fortune 1000. Over the past three years, Leads360 reports seeing 40% to 50% revenue growth, and claims to do a better job than CRM systems with specialized customizations at managing consumer sales. With the Leads360 software, businesses can set follow-up reminders, track appointments, manage new leads alerts, prioritize quality leads, and track key performance metrics in order to calculate ROI by lead source. In addition to its standalone software, Leads360 also offers Leads360 for Salesforce , which integrates into Salesforce’s existing CRM system, and Leads360 for iPhone , which lets you manage leads in real-time, while on the go.

WeedMaps Buys Medical M...

In the small but budding legal medical marijuana industry, WeedMaps has the munchies for acquisitions (sorry, I couldn’t resist). Fresh off its $4.2 million Marijuana.com bong hit in November, WeedMaps’ parent company, Canada’s General Cannabis , announced today its acquisition MMJMenu . Terms were not disclosed. It was an asset-sale, though, so it probably wasn’t much. General Cannabis, which is publicly traded over the counter in Canada (OTCBB: CANA), (OTCQX: CANA), reported $10.4 million in revenues for the first nine months of 2011, and it only had $1.4 million in cash. WeedMaps accounts for 82 percent of its revenues. MMJMenu provides back-end enterprise software for medical marijuana dispensaries. The software handles everything from patient management to inventory control to checkout at point of sale. Medical marijuana dispensaries re highly regulated. Emblazoned on MMJMenu’s homepage is its key selling point: mmjmenu is the best choice for medical marijuana business owners that want to stay compliant with state laws & regulations. WeedMaps is the “Yelp for medical marijuana dispensaries.” Now it will be able to offer these businesses enterprise software as well as advertising services. MMJMenu claims “hundreds” of medical marijuana business customers “in California, Colorado, Michigan, Montana, Washington as well as in Canada.”

Facebook Speeds Develop...

“Consider that many Facebook engineers spend their days developing PHP code in an endless edit-reload-debug cycle. The difference between 8-second and 5-second reloads due to switching from HipHop interpreter to the HipHop Virtual Machine makes a big difference to productivity.” That’s how Facebook explains the significance of its new PHP executor, HipHop Virtual Machine, announced today . It’s 60 percent faster than the HipHop interpreter Facebook currently uses, with a 90 percent reduction in memory cost. HHVM will improve the performance of Facebook’s code and speed up the development process without forcing Facebook to switch off of PHP, which its engineers are trained in. Facebook originally  deployed its open source HipHop for PHP in February 2010 to convert PHP into C++. This allows it to save CPU cycles on its web servers. However, it made it difficult to optimize code and required a HipHop interpreteter that took “a lot of effort to maintain”. So over the last year it developed HHVM to replace that interpreter. Now, ”as compared to HipHop interpreter, the HHVM bytecode interpreter is approximately 1.6X faster for a set of real-world Facebook-specific benchmarks.” However, we’ve received reports that Facebook’s old HipHop interpreter was relatively slow to begin with, compared to a native PHP interpreter. For more technical details, check out the in-depth blog post about HipHop Virtual Machine. Eventually, Facebook may run all its PHP through HHVM. First, it is working the kinks out of the HipHop translator. As HHVM is deeply integrated into the source code of  HipHop, which is available on GitHub , Facebook hopes “that the PHP community will find hhvm useful as it matures and engage with us to broaden its usefulness through technical discussions, bug reports, and code contributions.”

Shopping Discovery App ...

The newly launched shopping discovery app Zoomingo announced today it has secured $1.3 million in funding from early-stage VC firms Naya Ventures and Benaroya Capital along with several prominent angel investors. Previously self-funded, Zoomingo says it will use the additional capital to enhance its current mobile application, build a retailer platform and grow its community through expanded outreach to customers and retailer partners. With this funding, Dayakar Puskoor, managing director of Dallas-based Naya Ventures, will also join Zoomingo’s board of directors. For background, Seattle-based Zoomingo was founded by language learning service Livemocha’s co-founders,  Shirish Nadkarni  (Zoomingo CEO) and  Krishnan Seshadrinathan  (CTO). Nadkarni said he had the idea for the service when he noticed that his wife (an avid shopper, he says) was having trouble locating nearby sales using her mobile phone. So many of today’s apps focus on barcode scanning, deals and offers or price comparisons, but none simply rounded up all the nearby sales at local retailers in one easy-to-access mobile application. Hence, Zoomingo. The app pulls in sales data from major retailers using a combination of manual and automated means as well as crowd-sourcing via its “Deal Scouts,” who are positioned in several major U.S. cities. Zoomingo now provides access to 70,000 retail outlets in the U.S., and growing. The app is available on both  iPhone  and  Android .