Specifically, Kaplan said his new company The Melt will offer be a “next generation fast, casual restaurant.” Users will be able to order grilled cheese sandwiches and soups via the Melt mobile website. Then they receive a QR code, redeem the code in any Melt restaurant, and receive their freshly made order in minutes.

This may seem like more of a lark than a serious business, but it sounds like Kaplan is really trying to invent a new model for the restaurant business, one that uses mobile technology for an experience that’s fast and flexible without sacrificing quality. There are ambitious expansion plans, too. The Melt will open five restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area between August and November, and Kaplan wants to open 500 locations in the next five years. The company has even raised venture funding from famed firm Sequoia Capital — Kaplan wouldn’t specify how much, but he said it was enough to open 20 stores, which cost between $500,000 and $1 million.

And why grilled cheese? Kaplan said it’s because “grilled cheese makes you happy.” This seems like a good fit for the San Francisco startup crowd, at least — I still remember the excitement with the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen opened in San Francisco’s startup-heavy South of Market neighborhood.

Speaking of the Flip, Kaplan also talked a little bit about Cisco’s decision to shut down the product. Kaplan left the company before the announcement, but he said that he wasn’t surprised — after watching Cisco’s stock price and participating in conversations with analysts, Kaplan said, “It was very clear that there would be a lot of pressure to focus on the core business.” As for why Cisco didn’t just sell the division, Kaplan speculated (and he emphasized that it was just speculation) that Flip technology has been incorporated into other Cisco products, so it would be too complicated to “unwind” anything related to Flip from Cisco.

Tags: D9

Companies: Cisco, Sequoia Capital, The Melt

People: Jonathan Kaplan

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

The financing includes money from m8 Capital in the United Kingdom and Founders Fund (the investment fund which includes PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel) in San Francisco.

Garriott has vowed to create the same kind of fun games on Facebook as he did at earlier stages in his career. Earlier this year, Garriott said in an interview that Portalarium is aimed at exploiting the business opportunities in the “third age of video games.”

For those of you who didn’t grow up playing games, it may help to know that Garriott was present for the first age of video games, with the debut of great single-player games such as  Ultima, which was followed by many sequels. In 1997, under his alter ego Lord British, Garriott extended his role-playing fantasy world to the online multiplayer game Ultima Online. Garriott considers the rise of Internet-connected games to be the second age of video games. Garriott tried to exploit that age with Tabula Rasa, one of the most ambitious sci-fi online games, but that title met with an untimely death after six years of effort.

The third age began with the explosive growth of simple, quickly played social games like Zynga’s FarmVille on Facebook. In an interview at the Dice Summit game conference in Las Vegas, Garriott said he knows he is late and the gold rush into social games has happened without him so far. Portalarium launched two simple casino games on Facebook so far in order to test the company’s theories about player engagement, or the trick of getting gamers to play games for a long time.

“We are delighted to join Richard Garriott and the Portalarium team in creating the next great gaming company,” said Joseph Kim, general partner at London-based m8 Capital. “Richard is one of the giants of the industry. He’s a proven entrepreneur and has been a driving force at each of the industry’s major turning points.”

Kim said he liked Garriott’s vision for the future of mobile and social games. Ditto for Brian Singerman of the Founders Fund.

In the past year, Portalarium has released two games — Port Casino Poker and Port Casino Blackjack –  on Facebook and the hi5 social network. According to AppData, those games have just a small number of users. But Portalarium says that those are evergreen products that were created to quickly build out the company’s backend server technology and start interconnecting a player network across platforms and social networks. Port Casino Poker recently launched Apple’s iPad and both iPhone and Android versions are coming later this year.

Fred Schmidt, chief executive of Portalarium, said that the connection with m8 Capital will help the company shape its European strategy while the Founders Fund (which backed Facebook) connection is helping the company connect to the social media scene in Silicon Valley. Portalarium was founded in 2009 and has 12 employees.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To participate in our Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup, click on this link.

Tags: Port Casino Blackjack, Port Casino Poker

Companies: Apple, Facebook, Founders Fund, M8 Capital, Portalarium

People: Richard Garriott

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

AdGrok’s advertising platform simplifies the process of running internet marketing campaigns for small businesses that aren’t very familiar with the web. And while those campaigns focus on Google Adwords, the new focus will be on developing Twitter’s “monetization platform”.

“When Twitter approached us and asked if we’d be interested in working on their monetization platform, we realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we just couldn’t pass up,” McEachen said.

At this point its unknown what shape that platform will take, but its a good bet that it will have many of the same features and statistics found in AdGrok’d “GrokBar”, except tailored to promoted and featured tweets.

As mentioned in a previous report, the purchase of AdGrok may signal that Twitter is ready to start formulating what kind of data is relevant to performance rather than rely on third-party services to do it. One thing that is very certain is that Twitter is looking to create a much more involved advertising platform for clients wishing to promote their messages through Twitter.

Effective immediately AdGrok is closing the service to new customers and will stop charging all current clients. The service will officially be taken offline June 30, and its existing databases will be deleted. Although the company does note that all past performance data and such will still be available to view through Google Analytics.

Twitter purchased the Y Combinator-backed startup for less than $10 million, according to rumors covered by TechCrunch.

Tags: acquisition

Companies: AdGrok, Twitter

People: Matthew McEachen

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

The Los Angeles-based company bills itself as an open source alternative to ad serving products like Google-owned DoubleClick. In February, it launched its latest product, OpenX Enterprise, which includes both an ad server and an ad exchange. At the time, chief revenue officer Jason Fairchild described OpenX Enterprise as the company’s first product to really beat the competition on technology, not just price, for example by giving advertisers a more holistic view of their ad inventory.

OpenX says that revenue has grown nearly 600 percent in the past year, and it notes that it’s growing internationally thanks to partnerships with Dentsu-cci in Japan and Orange-France Telecom in Europe.

The company has now raised more than $50 million. The new round was led by SAP Ventures. Other new investors include AOL Ventures, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, and the Sumitomo Corporation’s investment vehicle Presidio Ventures. Past investors Accel Partners and Index Ventures also participated.

In a press release, chief executive Tim Cadogan said:

Having new investors representing one of the world’s largest enterprise companies (SAP), one of the world’s largest internet pure-plays (AOL) and two of the most important global Asian trading firms (Mitsui and Sumitomo) all coming together to invest in the global technology platform company we are creating is — we believe — a compelling and powerful mix.

Tags: ad exchanges, ad servers

Companies: Accel Partners, AOL Ventures, Index Ventures, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, Openx, Presidio Ventures, SAP Ventures, Sumitomo Corporation

People: Tim Cadogan

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Helping consumers easily find new applications that interest them is increasingly important to developers and businesses looking to distinguish their product from competitors

And considering the multitude of apps emerging from Apple’s app store, the Android Marketplace and Amazon, there is a large opportunity to make money from an app discovery platform like Appsfire.

Appsfire, which is available for both iOS and Android devices, seeks to provide some clarity to the sea of new apps. It works by scanning a user’s catalog of downloaded applications and then generating lists of recommended, featured and hot apps based on their interests. The company’s first discovery app launched last year and now has over 2 million users.

The company’s new funding will likely go towards hiring additional employees (it currently has seven) and branching out onto other mobile platforms, according to the Giagom report.

Tags: app discovery, apps

Companies: Appsfire, Idinvest

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Helping consumers easily find new applications that interest them is increasingly important to developers and businesses looking to distinguish their product from competitors

And considering the multitude of apps emerging from Apple’s app store, the Android Marketplace and Amazon, there is a large opportunity to make money from an app discovery platform like Appsfire.

Appsfire, which is available for both iOS and Android devices, seeks to provide some clarity to the sea of new apps. It works by scanning a user’s catalog of downloaded applications and then generating lists of recommended, featured and hot apps based on their interests. The company’s first discovery app launched last year and now has over 2 million users.

The company’s new funding will likely go towards hiring additional employees (it currently has seven) and branching out onto other mobile platforms, according to the Giagom report.

Tags: app discovery, apps

Companies: Appsfire, Idinvest

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Helping consumers easily find new applications that interest them is increasingly important to developers and businesses looking to distinguish their product from competitors

And considering the multitude of apps emerging from Apple’s app store, the Android Marketplace and Amazon, there is a large opportunity to make money from an app discovery platform like Appsfire.

Appsfire, which is available for both iOS and Android devices, seeks to provide some clarity to the sea of new apps. It works by scanning a user’s catalog of downloaded applications and then generating lists of recommended, featured and hot apps based on their interests. The company’s first discovery app launched last year and now has over 2 million users.

The company’s new funding will likely go towards hiring additional employees (it currently has seven) and branching out onto other mobile platforms, according to the Giagom report.

Tags: app discovery, apps

Companies: Appsfire, Idinvest

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

While AdGrok aims to simplify search engine marketing campaigns, the platform could be adapted and used by Twitter to help monetize promoted and trending tweets.

Purchasing AdGrok could alleviate some of the criticism many have had toward Twitter, which lags far behind the competition in developing a clear advertising strategy for the site.

However, buying AdGrok could also signal that Twitter is ready to start providing statistics and relevant data to its users, which has traditionally been handled by third-party services like Hoot Suit, bit.ly and several others. The company has already started to distance itself from third-party services by apparently developing its own photo sharing feature and improving notification support — so, adding its own statistics wouldn’t be a complete surprise.

The deal has yet to be confirmed by either company, but TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis points out that the last person Twitter corporate development executive Jessica Verrilli followed on Twitter was AdGrok co-founder Argyris Zymnis.

Tags: acquisitions, advertising

Companies: AdGrok, Twitter

People: Argyris Zymnis, Jessica Verrilli

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

While AdGrok aims to simplify search engine marketing campaigns, the platform could be adapted and used by Twitter to help monetize promoted and trending tweets.

Purchasing AdGrok could alleviate some of the criticism many have had toward Twitter, which lags far behind the competition in developing a clear advertising strategy for the site.

However, buying AdGrok could also signal that Twitter is ready to start providing statistics and relevant data to its users, which has traditionally been handled by third-party services like Hoot Suit, bit.ly and several others. The company has already started to distance itself from third-party services by apparently developing its own photo sharing feature and improving notification support — so, adding its own statistics wouldn’t be a complete surprise.

The deal has yet to be confirmed by either company, but TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis points out that the last person Twitter corporate development executive Jessica Verrilli followed on Twitter was AdGrok co-founder Argyris Zymnis.

Tags: acquisitions, advertising

Companies: AdGrok, Twitter

People: Argyris Zymnis, Jessica Verrilli

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

While AdGrok aims to simplify search engine marketing campaigns, the platform could be adapted and used by Twitter to help monetize promoted and trending tweets.

Purchasing AdGrok could alleviate some of the criticism many have had toward Twitter, which lags far behind the competition in developing a clear advertising strategy for the site.

However, buying AdGrok could also signal that Twitter is ready to start providing statistics and relevant data to its users, which has traditionally been handled by third-party services like Hoot Suit, bit.ly and several others. The company has already started to distance itself from third-party services by apparently developing its own photo sharing feature and improving notification support — so, adding its own statistics wouldn’t be a complete surprise.

The deal has yet to be confirmed by either company, but TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis points out that the last person Twitter corporate development executive Jessica Verrilli followed on Twitter was AdGrok co-founder Argyris Zymnis.

Tags: acquisitions, advertising

Companies: AdGrok, Twitter

People: Argyris Zymnis, Jessica Verrilli

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals