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Video surveillance firm VideoIQ is set to announce on Wednesday morning a $10 million Series B funding round.

Lehman Brothers Venture Partners is leading the round, and current investors Matrix Partners and Atlas Venture are participating.

The funding will be used to help VideoIQ expand to new markets and continue product development of its IP video surveillance and video analytics products, the company says.

Bedford, Mass.-based VideoIQ was spun out of GE Security in 2007 and is headed by Scott Schnell, a former RSA executive.

Amazon has invested an undisclosed amount in Animoto, a site that enables people to easily create videos from their photos and music.

(Credit: Animoto)

Animoto.com, which launched in August, has more than 160,000 registered users, with 7.5 percent of them paying a $30 annual fee to be able to create longer videos. The company also has a Facebook application, which launched in March and has more than 750,000 users.

The Amazon funding doesn't exactly come as a surprise given the links the companies have. Animoto uses Amazon's Web Services and was a featured presenter at an Amazon event in September advertising its services.

And last month, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos talked about Animoto during a presentation at Y Combinator's Startup School at Stanford University.

Animoto says it will use the money to hire people in its New York City and San Francisco offices, establish a video creation platform, develop new products and continue innovating in the area of "cinematic artificial intelligence."

"We also plan to upgrade our fridge from PBR to Coors Light," the company said on its blog. "Life is good."

Yes, it is.

Search engine Blekko, which is so stealthy it doesn't have a public Web site yet, has raised a second round of funding of $3 million, TechCrunch reported.

Last year, Blekko raised $2 million from Baseline Ventures and two ex-Googlers. They joined in this round, along with Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, SoftTech VC and Western Technology Investment.

Blekko was founded by Rich Skrenta, who founded news aggregation site Topix and co-founded Netscape's Open Directory Project.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is working with three other companies to launch a $150 million venture capital fund that will invest in companies developing new applications and services for mobile devices.

Electronic publisher Thomson Reuters and venture capital firms JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners have joined RIM to establish the fund. RIM said the fund won't be restricted to investing in BlackBerry-specific applications. It will also invest in start-ups as well as relatively mature software developers.

Specifically, investments will focus on services and applications such as mobile payments, advertising, retailing, and banking. It also will support companies developing applications for social networking, navigation and mapping, media and entertainment, lifestyle and personal productivity applications, and enterprise applications.

The fund will be co-managed by Canadian firm JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners.

The venture fund is part of RIM's bigger strategy. For one, the company wants to move more computer users from desktops to handheld devices. Earlier this month, it announced a partnership with enterprise software firm SAP to integrate all of the company's corporate software onto BlackBerrys.

The fund will also help the second prong in RIM's overall strategy, which is to expand its user base to the mass market. The company makes the bulk of its revenue from corporate customers, but over the past 18 months it has also targeted consumers with new devices and partnerships with companies like Facebook. The new venture fund should help spur more innovation among developers.

"The mobile world has evolved well beyond phone calls and simple messaging to become an empowering and liberating platform that connects people to everything that matters most to them," Jim Balsillie, co-chief executive officer at RIM, said in a statement. "And the BlackBerry Partners Fund is being formed to help fuel innovation and activity in the mobile ecosystem."

Thomson Reuters is one of the world's largest electronic news publishers, providing information to lawyers, doctors, and financial professionals. Many of its customers are already BlackBerry users. The company sees mobile devices and applications as a critical piece of its own strategy.

"Thomson Reuters is committed to supporting the development of next-generation mobile applications that will provide our professional and business customers with anywhere, anytime capabilities," Devin Wenig, CEO of the Markets Division of Thomson Reuters, said in a statement. "The ability to make business-critical decisions with intelligent information available on mobile devices will give our customers a clear competitive advantage."

Entrepreneurs got some answers Thursday from investment bankers and institutional investors during the AlwaysOn Venture Summit in Half Moon Bay, Calif.

For starters, companies looking to cash in via an IPO, or acquisition, are finding that it's usually through the acquisition route, said Paul Deninger, vice chairman of Jefferies & Co.

Over the past five years, mergers and acquisitions have provided 80 to 90 percent of all equity returned to investors of venture-backed technology companies, compared with 30 to 40 percent in the early 1990s, he noted.

And that trend concerns Deninger, who compared the situation to venture capitalists "eating their young."

"The venture (capital) industry is headed into a wall. All the best companies are being sold," Deninger said. "For seven straight years, the number of companies going public has declined. That means the number of (prospective) buyers is also declining. Eventually, the VCs will have fewer companies that they can sell their companies to."

Companies that are hot IPO material and have breakthrough technology are likely to see Glen Kacher, Integral Capital Partners managing director, in attack mode.

"The deals we are most excited about are deals that will change the industry," Kacher said, noting he will aggressively pursue an investment in these companies prior to their IPO pricing.

Start-ups that fail to attract strong investor interest are not totally out of luck, institutional investors said. In fact, Paul Wick, managing director of J. & W. Seligman & Co., is one who will scope out "cold" IPOs, seeking to snap up the shares at a discount to the IPO pricing range.

That discount, at times, can be in the 10 to 15 percent range for investors in a "cold" IPO, said Leslie Pfrang, managing director of Deutsche Bank Securities. And in those situations, Pfrang will "lock arms" with a smaller core of investors, who Deutsche Bank Securities has a greater familiarity with, she said.

Pfrang, along with other panelists, offered some practical advice to entrepreneurs before they shoot off their mouths on a road show to attract investors.

"Our advice to management is keep your presentations short and let them ask you a lot of questions, be conservative on your models, and don't be overly promotional," Pfrang said. "Tell them about your potential and opportunity and don't disparage the competition."

Indeed. Trying to do a snow job on potential investors by claiming there are "no competitors" is likely to leave entrepreneurs with no money, panelists noted.

"The arrogance factor has got to go," Kacher said, noting he often hears from entrepreneurs that they have such a unique company that there are no competitors, but a quick look at the company's prospectus tells him otherwise.

And be prepared for the pointed questions during the road show, noted John Rende, portfolio manager with Weintraub Capital Management. One chief executive who was queried by Rende may have wished he had.

As part of his due diligence on the company, Rende learned through a simple Internet search that the chief executive was facing a massive lawsuit stemming from a marriage to spouse No. 5, while still married to spouse No. 4.

"Toward the end of the road show, I asked this person if the lawsuit would be a distraction for them," Rende recalled. "This person became defensive and the meeting ended at that point. I wanted to see how this person would respond to deep questioning. The wrong response is not shaking your hand when the meeting is over."

The online advertising market just continues to heat up.

Online ad marketplace AdBrite has received $23 million in Series C venture funding. The money comes from current investor Sequoia Capital, as well as from DAG Ventures and Mitsui Ventures. AdBrite launched a real-time auction model this year and was named the third-fastest growing young tech company in North America by Deloitte's Rising Star program.

The news follows an even larger funding announcement from rival online ad network Specific Media. Earlier this month Specific Media closed $100 million in Series B financing with private equity firm Francisco Partners.

The funding announcements come as big companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are making acquisitions of ad firms in the hopes of getting a bigger piece of the growing online advertising pie.

In 20-plus years in high tech, I've witnessed and done some really stupid things.

I'm talking about things that were embarrassing, unethical, incompetent or just plain dumb. This kind of stuff can get you fired, sued or even arrested. In a worst-case scenario, it can cause the demise of a company.

Keep in mind that some of this stuff is politically incorrect, racy, or even illegal, which is precisely why it's so dumb. So if you get offended by that sort of thing, be forewarned. Also, some of these things didn't exactly happen "in the workplace," but rather elsewhere with co-workers. Close enough.

Top 10 dumbest things I've seen or done in the workplace:

10. In 1982, a design engineer who worked for me at Texas Instruments once came into work--where we worked on defense programs that required a security clearance--tripping on acid.

9. An unknown practical joker put a whole dead fish in a filing cabinet at chipset maker Opti Technologies. We eventually found the source of the stench, which had permeated the entire building. The file was labeled "FISH."

8. In an open cubicle area, a senior manager actually did a derogatory imitation of a black slave, saying "yassuh massa" to another senior manager. An African-American employee worked in the cubicle next door. Amazingly, nobody was sued.

7. Microprocessor upstart Cyrix's CEO insisted on selling processors for $1 more than comparable Pentium processors from Intel. When that failed, he decided to launch Cyrix-branded PCs. The CEO eventually "resigned."

6. Trying to format a floppy disk in a hurry, I accidentally formatted the hard drive of my boss's Compaq Portable II (this was 1987). He lost all his data. He was really pissed, but he didn't fire me. Thankfully, hard drives were only 40 megabytes back then.

5. The CEO of Stac Electronics elected to compete with Microsoft instead of licensing Stac's data compression technology to the software giant. To be fair, it did seem like the lesser of two evils at the time. Stac won a subsequent patent infringement lawsuit but ultimately didn't survive.

4. After National Semiconductor acquired Cyrix, National's CEO tried to introduce me at a companywide quarterly meeting. Unfortunately, I wasn't there. It didn't seem that important to show up, at the time.

3. A sales manager at NEC used to repeatedly throw his letter opener at employees as they left his office. The wall by his office door was riddled with knife marks. He later brought a gun into work and was terminated.

2. After-hours at a tradeshow in Atlanta, several male executives of a public company took female employees--at their request--to a gentlemen's club. Again, there were no lawsuits.

1. During a pitch to a venture capitalist, I gripped a mechanical sample of a MEMS subsystem--made of silicon--too tightly, and it shattered in my hands. Reliability was supposed to be a key selling point.

What incredibly stupid things have you witnessed or done at work? You might want to be careful about naming names.

This morning, venture capital firm Bay Partners announced that it is kicking off AppFactory, a special funding program for Facebook developers.

Bay is a typical Silicon Valley venture firm, operating three large funds. AppFactory will draw resources from the latest, a $300 million pile of cash and commitments that Bay will funnel, in chunks as small as $25,000, to promising Facebook developers.

Unlike its larger and more traditional technology investments, Bay will not run its AppFactory candidates through weeks or months of due diligence. At the funding levels it's thinking about, it's not worth the effort. In part, "we'll rely on instinct," Bay's Salil Deshpande told me.

AppFactory will also offer Facebook developers easy access to people its connected with at supporting companies like Amazon, whose Amazon Web Services server farm can be employed to run Facebook apps. Bay also hopes its Appfactory developers will form a community and help each other out.

Bay's move is smart. There's no question that Facebook is a very important Web platform. While it's not like the Web itself, which is open to all comers and not controlled by any one company, one could compare the Facebook platform to eBay. It's a platform that's easy to build businesses on.

The exposure, of course, is that Facebook will not be run as a platform. "A lot of companies get it wrong," Desphande told me. "Facebook is just getting started. They are going to have to make the investment and behave properly." However, if Facebook gets it right--and indications are, so far, that it will--apps on the platform can take easy advantage of the built-in, interconnected user base.

If you're got a killer idea for a Facebook app, and skills to begin development on it, check out baypartners.com/appfactory and apply.