TagMan, the global leader of Tag Management, announced that it has received $5 million in its second round of venture capital funding. Prominent digital media investment firms Greycroft Partners and iNovia Capital led the Series B round.

This latest funding takes TagMan's total funding to date past the $10 million mark and follows a $2.3 million Series A round in January.

Totango, provider of a real-time customer usage analysis platform for SaaS applications, has announced that it has secured $3.8 million in Series A financing led by Pitango Venture Capital which joined existing investor Gemini. The company also launched the public beta of its online service, which provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies insight into how their customers or prospects are using their services. While Totango's longer-term vision encompasses addressing the entire customer lifecycle, its initial offering focuses on sales, allowing sales teams to increase their effectiveness based on what prospects are actually doing on the service.

Increasingly companies interact with their customers online, including the delivery and the use of products. Totango is leading a new wave in software that analyzes in real-time customer and prospect usage within SaaS applications to provide sales people invaluable information in qualifying prospects and managing customer conversations.

CloudShare, an app that allows users to demo software in the cloud, has raised $10 million in new funding led by Globespan Capital Partners with existing investors Sequoia capital, Charles River Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds participating. This brings CloudShare’s total funding to $26 million.

CloudShare is a collaborative tool for IT environments, allowing users to share, interact and collaborate in enterprise IT environments, for any length of time. Organizations can instantly deploy multiple, independent copies of their existing demos or training environments from CloudShare’s platform.

CloudShare Pro’s environments are pre-configured to include servers, networking, storage and pre-installed operating systems and application licenses, including those for software vendors like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. And the company offers a lightweight version for small businesses.

Bessemer Venture Partners have called up to back San Francisco cloud based communications provider Twilio, with a $12m Series B funding round. Also participating were Union Square Ventures, 500 Startups and several individual Angel investors.

The Twilio system allows net programmers to easily mash up pay-as-you-go telecoms, including text and other phone-based applications, into their websites.  Twilio’s SaaS platform does all the communications work, presenting developers with simple plug-in and standard APIs. Developers like it: over 20,000 customers are using Twilio – including Ebay, Media Temple, Salesforce, Sony and Survey Monkey.

SaaS startup New Relic has received an additional $10 million in venture capital for its application performance management (APM) offering that targets both data centers and the cloud. Tenaya Capital and Allen & Co. led the Series C round, with existing investors Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures also chipping in. The round brings New Relic’s total investment to $20 million, proving the importance of management and monitoring as companies adopt cloud computing, as well as the power of the SaaS 2.0 model.

What separates New Relic from other APM providers is that its RPM service monitors live software from the inside instead of simply monitoring external web application metrics. RPM comes in five editions, ranging from the free Lite version, which gives basic monitoring capabilities, up to the Enterprise version, which provides a range of capabilities to discover and cure performance issues. According to founder Lew Cirne, the internal view helps customers identify problems early and avoid “the thorniest issues,” citing the recent Foursquare outage as a problem that might have been avoided if the company could have been proactive in addressing the problem.

Formerly, New Relic supported only Java and Ruby web applications, but as of today, it also supports .NET and PHP applications. This is nothing new for cloud-based services, which tend to start with a focused offering and expand their customer bases as they grow by adding additional language support. Even larger companies like Google and Salesforce.com took this approach with their cloud offerings. More applications mean more money, after all.

New Relic’s already-expansive footprint would seem to underscore the value of its service and of the SaaS model. The company counts just about every cloud provider as a technology partner (Joyent and Heroku offer it as an add-on in their offerings), and the company has experienced 200 percent growth annually since launching in 2008. Cirne says the company presently has 5,600 customers running the service in production, with 900 of them paying New Relic directly. Among them are large enterprises running New Relic within their data centers.

Spotlight, a Web-based ticket management solution, announced Tuesday that it has secured a $2.5 million Series A round of funding, led by Point Judith Capital. Also participating in the round is Brian Bedol, the executive responsible for founding sports television channels Classic Sports Network and College Sports Television (now known as ESPN Classic and CBS College Sports, respectively).

Joining the Spotlight board of directors will be Sean Marsh and David Martirano, both co-founders and general partners at Point Judith Capital.

To avoid any confusion, Spotlight is not in the same space as many of the most commonly talked about ticketing startups--FanSnap, MogoTix, SeatGeek, Ticketfly. Directly competing with the space’s 800-pound gorilla, Ticketmaster, those services are predominantly aimed at getting the cheapest tickets for entertainment events in the hands of consumers.

Spotlight is all about the enterprise.

Partnering with leagues, teams, companies, ticket aggregators like Stubhub and Ticket Liquidator, event providers, and brokers, Spotlight provides a Web-based SaaS that helps customers keep track of their tickets, suites and events. Once a company, for example, adds tickets to the software, Spotlight automatically updates schedules, venue maps, locations and other information for the event.

Spotlight will automatically update any events for the NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, NASCAR, PGA, Minor League Baseball, concerts, and theater. In addition to the high-profile events, customers can also add custom events like a company meeting or theme park passes.

Additionally, Spotlight customers receive access to hundreds of company reports, like Used vs. Unused Tickets, monthly inventory statistics and ROI analysis. They even claim to help companies save on taxes.

Over 1000 companies, including NBC Universal and Motorola, and 20 professional sports teams, including the Miami HEAT and Chicago Bears, currently count themselves among Spotlight’s customers.

Each of Spotlight’s three co-founders started their work in online ticketing at StubHub, one of today’s best-known marketplaces for buying and selling tickets for live entertainment events. At StubHub, CEO Joe Greiner and President Tony Knopp jointly managed the corporate sales department and COO Aric Haut served as sales manager.

If anyone knows how much the enterprise needs some ticket management software, some StubHub veterans are probably the right guys.

SOURCE: Vator.tv

Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association have released a report today indicating that U.S. venture capitalists expect their market to contract but anticipate growth in emerging markets, including China, India and Brazil, over the next five years. The 2010 global venture report surveyed over 500 VCs worldwide.

According to the survey results, more than 90 percent of U.S. survey respondents, as well as VCs in Europe and Canada, expect the number of venture firms to decrease between now and 2015, while a majority of venture capitalists in China, India and Brazil anticipate adding more venture firms in their respective countries during the same time frame.

U.S. VCs have a depressed view of the industry thanks to a weak IPO market and unfavorable tax and regulatory policies. More than half the U.S. respondents also believe that limited partners will be less inclined to invest in U.S. venture capital funds in the next five years.

Crowdcast, a provider of social business intelligence (SBI) solutions, has raised $6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Alsop-Louie Partners.

The company’s name is a combination of the words ‘crowd’ and ‘forecast’, and its self-declared goal is to help companies find out what their people really know about their businesses, in order to make better strategic leadership decisions.

Here is a great article brought to my attention by Jeremy Beck from Scio Consulting. The article is written and published by VC firm Trident Capital. Enjoy!