Venture Capital Update

Zulily will focus on clothing for moms and children due out in the first quarter of 2010.

RepairPal was founded in 2007 by a group of automobile enthusiasts and entrepreneurs who were frustrated by the expensive and tedious process of fixing and maintaining their vehicles.

RepairPal offers a method of obtaining all the relevant information you need with regard to your car. RepairPal provides impartial, fair price estimates, the most comprehensive auto shop directory, and expert insights and advice from certified mechanics.

SeeWhy wants to convert those that abandon your shopping cart. You have taken the time and effort to get someone to a shopping cart so the more you can convert the better. SeeWhy has a real time event processing architecture. Their "Abandonment Tracker Pro" service automatically follows up on those that abandon by initiating real time emails and follow up calls optimized to the individual visitors behavior and their likelihood to purchase.

Smule, or Sonic Mule, has received a third round of funding. They create interactive applications for the iPhone. They have created top 10 ranking iPhone applications.

Article One Partners deals with validity of issued patents. A common use for this type of service is to validate or invalidate a patent when a law suit presents itself.

Article One Partners has clients, those who want a patent to be either validated or invalidated. They also have what they call advisors, those who work to find prior art in an effort to prove either way. A reward is provided and revealed ahead of time such as $20,000. A submitter of prior art has the chance to earn that reward. The opposite of submitting prior art to possibly obtain a reward is being paid for the effort. The issue is that sometimes it is equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack. Not only that but typically you would only be able to hire one person at a time, by using this method an unlimited number of people can assist.

CloudShare replicates fully functional IT environments in a cloud in seconds. This enables you to give everyone their own copy of the same base system.

You essentially have your own personal data center replica. You can use and modify while you monitor and manage. Users can do anything with the system that they can do on-premises, including saving records, loading data, and even integrating with their local enterprise systems.

This is a great use of virtualization and a cloud.

Pageonce is a smartphone personal information management company which products provide comprehensive and simple ways to manage your life on the phone. The product is named ‘Personal Assistant’ and enables tracking of personal finance, travel, bills, cell phone minutes and shopping. Pageonce products are currently live on all major smartphone platforms, including the Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Android.

They recently obtained their 1 millionith registered user.

Gogii provides a free mobile texting application. The name of the application is textPlus. From one-to-one texting to group texting, this application provides both. There are millions of users and advertisements make it free.

Transaction Wireless is a mobile platform for commerce and also marketing. They provide a mobile gift card platform for retailers to provide and manage customers gift cards wirelessly.

Gowalla is a location based social networking service. They were very smart to not only take investment from traditional venture capitalists but to also take investment from well known individuals that can help market the service such as Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, Jason Calacanis and Chris Sacca.

Gowalla connects you with friends and works as a virtual passport allowing you to "stamp" it when you visit that place. From their press release here are some statistics: 50,000 users have joined the service in ten weeks since launch, and checked in at 150,000 locations in over 8,500 cities representing 100 countries around the world. There are more than 20,000 check-ins daily and its users are adding new locations at a rate of 3,500 or more each day.