Marketo, LeadPoint, Pontiflex, Tiburon, YuMe, MOG

Lead generation company Marketo raises $8M

by Eric Eldon

Marketo, a company that helps automate the process of turning web users into customers, has gained more than 60 customers since it launched in March, including Thomson Reuters, Trimble, and Acteva. While the company isn’t disclosing revenue, it has raised a second round of $8 million from Storm Ventures, with InterWest Partners participating.

The company provides a sequence of services intended to take online traffic from a product site, an ad or other methods where user interest can be collected, and turn it into sales. Features include the ability to create landing pages, where a user can provide information from the company about the product they’re interested in. Marketo’s software also analyzes potential customers, based on information provided by the customer themselves, and other sources. It connects to other software within a company, like Salesforce (see screenshot below). Once sales have processed, or not, Marketo’s software shows which methods of marketing have proved most successful.

Competitors include LeadPoint and Pontiflex

New CEO For YuMe, The Ad Company You Should Know About But Don’t

by Michael Arrington

Video advertising network YuMe is bringing in a Canadian to run the place: Montreal-born Michael Mathieu, a former President at Freedom Communications, showed up for work today as CEO, we hear.

Founding CEO Jayant Kadambi, who took the company through two rounds of financing and a big partnership with Microsoft, has stepped down to the President position. That Microsoft deal brings YuMe video ads to cover excess inventory across Microsoft sites.

Comscore says 134 million people view their ads monthly.

MOG, platform for music blogs, launches vertical ad network

Today, MOG, a blogging platform and content aggregator for music-oriented blogs, is launching the MOG Music Network, a vertical ad network that targets music-oriented sites and blogs. The company has also added legendary producer Rick Rubin to its board.

But put simply, MOG is in a heated game. The internet is littered with social music sites. iLike,imeem and Last.fm are already quite popular, so getting and maintaining attention amidst the horde is no simple task. Like these sites, MOG offers social networking and music recommendations, but differentiates itself with its focus on written content. It has a manually curated homepage that features news and opinion from the thousands of bloggers (called Moggers) who use MOG to write about and share music. As it launches its ad network, MOG is also opening its homepage to outside bloggers, starting with around 30 it hand-selected...