Greylock Invests $2.5 Million in 1000Memories (TCTV)

1000Memories has raised a $2.5 million round led by Greylock Partners, with the participation of some high-profile angel investors including Caterina Fake, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Mike Maples, Paul Buchheit and Chris Sacca. Greylock’s David Thacker is joining the board.

1000Memories aims to be a site where loved ones can commemorate the lives of those that have passed away. Several sites have tried to do this, and previous attempts have come off as cheesy or morbid. 1000Memories has struck a chord with its stylish design, and its commitment to always offer the product for free without garish ads.

Obituaries are one of the only bastions of newspaper classifieds that haven’t been disrupted, Thacker says. In San Francisco, a basic obit can cost up of $1,500, and it’s a static, non-collaborative mention that only runs one day.

1000Memories’ timing couldn’t be better. Facebook and other social networks have brought people closer to people they’d fallen out of touch with, providing an efficient medium for communicating a death and for sending condolences and remembrances. And increasingly, those memories are already captured digitally, via photos, videos and emails. And as newspapers become increasingly irrelevant, it’s natural that there’s some solution for celebrating someone’s life online.

So while it’s easy to see that something like 1000Memories should exist in the world, the question is how long it will take to build a laudable service like this into a real business. Co-founder Jonathan Good stopped by our studios to talk about the news– unfortunately he didn’t come prepared with many details on what the funding means for the company or what the money would be used for. He also refused to give us any sense of how big the user base was or even any basic idea of how much the service has grown or how many tribute pages have been built.

It’s a shame, because those are key questions. Customer acquisition will be a challenge for the site, since most people don’t have a death in their families or communities several times a year. Given the emotional investment people make in 1000Memories, I hope the company will be a bit more forthcoming in the future.

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Javelin Venture Partners Closes New $105 Million Fund

Early-stage VC Javelin Venture Partners has closed a second, $105 million fund. The firm expects to use the money to fund around 20 companies over three years in seed and Series A rounds ranging from $500K to $3 million, and will reserve some of the funds for subsequent rounds raised by these portfolio companies.

Javelin was founded by Noah Doyle and Jed Katz, both of whom have experience as entrepreneurs. Doyle founded online loyalty program MyPoints.com and was an executive at Keyhole (which was acquired by Google and became Google Earth). Katz founded Rent.net and Move.com. The firm initially got its start in May 2008, and then relaunched in April 2009 with a fund size of $75 million (it’s now raised a total of $180 million).

Katz and Doyle say that they’re often asked how they differ from so-called “super angels” and explain that they can participate in later-stage rounds that angels typically can’t. But they say they’re different from typical VC firms because they’ve been entrepreneurs much of their careers and that they tend to “run at an entrepreneur’s pace” in terms of reaching decisions quickly. (Of course, many other VCs have entrepreneurial experience and will make similar claims). Katz and Doyle also say that they tend to be very involved with their companies, as opposed to just swinging by for board meetings.

The first Javelin fund has had one exit so far: Scout Labs, which was acquired by Lithium Technologies for $20-25 million last May.

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Constant Contact Buys Social CRM Startup Bantam Live For $15 Million In Cash

Online marketing company Constant Contact has acquired social CRM startup Bantam Live for $15 million in cash, subject to certain post-closing adjustments.

Bantam Live, which has raised $1.7 million in funding, provides an online workspace for business teams that has “social CRM” features, which include a real-time dashboard stream of messaging and workflow activity along with a native CRM application. Members can share information, track activity, and manage contact and company relationships both inside and outside the organization via a real-time activity stream.

Bantam extends a company’s sales outreach and customer relationships out to the social Web. For instance, with Bantam, a user can search Twitter, import a new contact with one click, initiate task workflows with team members to engage this new contact, and then converse with the new contact for lead generation. Bantam also integrates with Facebook as well.

The company debuted its product at TechCrunch’s RealTime Stream CrunchUp two years ago and exited beta early last year.

Bantam’s CEO and founder John Rourke told us that he was pursued by a couple of public companies to be acquired but chose Constant Contact because it was the best fit.

Bantam Live’s technology will help offer a communciations and social CRM product to Constant Contact’s more than 400,000 small business customers, helping them better track, measure and increase customer engagement. Social CRM functionality will eventually be built into all of the
company’s products, including a paid social media marketing offering, which the company
expects to release in the second half of 2011.

Last year Constant Contact acquired social email and messaging manager Nutshell Mail.

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CashStar Raises $5 Million To Send You Gift Cards On Facebook

Digital gifting platform CashStar has raised $5 million today in a Series B round lead by Passport Capital and Allen and Company. In the same space as BlackHawk, First Data, Gift Tango and Swag, CashStar offers SaaS and white-label solutions for big brands who want to implement digital gifting systems.

With “ten times” as many customers as anybody else and partnerships with hundreds of retail brands including Starbucks, Coach, Williams Sonoma, Staples, Cheesecake Factory and The Gap, CashStar helps partners sell tens of millions in giftcards annually. It also offers an extensive range of gift card deployment options, including eGift cards, via Facebook and through your mobile phone.

Companies that partner up with CashStar on digital gifting end up seeing huge returns, for example on Christmas Eve partner Coach saw that gift cards made up 28% of total online sales. Starbucks, which just launched their CashStar eGift program, has yet to implement their deeper Facebook integration, but when it does you’ll be able to complete actions as simple as posting a cup of coffee to a friend’s wall. Home Depot is now experimenting with video gifting.

CEO David Douglas Stone holds that buying a gift is a personal expression, so the format you receive it in also has to be personal and reflective of the times, “Most of the companies that compete in the card market are still living off plastic.”

Stone plans on using the funding to increase the strength of CashStar’s retail network, explore other digital gifting options, increase the mobile CashStar experience as well as to hire more talent. “We’re going to continue to build the market from plastic to digital,” he says.

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