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Boston-based health and fitness application RunKeeper made big news on Monday with $10 million in funding from a variety of venture capital companies. RunKeeper needs no introduction: it was one of the first health apps in the Apple App Store, has six million users and growing and has a CEO in Jason Jacobs that is full of energy and enthusiasm in building his company and a community of fitness geeks.

Fitness geeks may be the most appropriate term to use when describing RunKeeper and its staff. The startup is fundamentally a data driven company and service. It is also a grassroots community built upon users pushing each other to be healthier, happier people. RunKeeper may be the perfect example of how to build a lean startup through and app, grow it from the ground up and be successful.

BetterWorks, a young Los Angeles-based employee rewards company, is announcing a $8 million Series A round of financing from Redpoint Ventures. BetterWorks' total funding, after an early round of financing from angel investors, now stands at $10 million. Paige Craig, CEO and co-founder of BetterWorks, says the company plans to use the financing to scale out to into the top 20 U.S. markets, and add social features to the platform by the end of August.

In 1996, Josh James founded Omniture, a Web analytics company that sold to Adobe in 2009 for $1.8 billion. After selling Omniture, James founded a startup that's been in stealth until today. The new company, Domo (formerly called Shacho), is a business intelligence software-as-a-service and has received $43 million in funding, including $33 million from Benchmark Capital. According to a previous announcement, the angel investors included Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, Ron Conway/David Lee and Andreessen Horowitz.

So what's the product that's being announced, now that this is out of stealth? I'm not sure.

Over the next two days at the DEMO conference in Palm Springs, California, more than 50 companies will take the stage and introduce their product in six minutes flat. It's a format that has become an industry standard, with conferences like TechCrunch 50, TechCrunch Disrupt and LAUNCH following in its footsteps.

A continual criticism of DEMO over the years, however, has been that the price of entry is simply too high. At nearly $20,000, the cost of getting on stage at one of the world's pre-eminent tech conferences can be prohibitive to say the least, so we decided to take a look at how funding broke down for the $1,000,000 in presentations we're seeing over the 48-hours.

There's a lot of data available online - about companies, about entrepreneurs, about investors. An excellent source is CrunchBase, a free and editable directory. Crunchbase has a wealth of information, but according to Sri Harsha, that information is under-utilized. While there's a page for a company or organization, there isn't a way, in Harsha's words to see "the big picture."

In some ways, the Q&A site Quora has become so popular among technology folks for that very reason. It helps provide people with more information and answers about angel investment. But Harsha has created another tool - Fundastic.info, using the data already available through the CrunchBase API to help visualize investment information.

If you thought Groupon's $950 million was big, hold on to your hats. Facebook has announced that it has raised $1.5 billion in funding at a $50 billion valuation.

According to the release, the company has received $1 billion from Goldman Sachs Overseas Offering today, which, when combined with the previous $500 million, equals the $1.5 billion investment. Read on for details and a Facebook-led Q&A on the deal.

The New York Times' DealBook blog is reporting tonight that social buying site Groupon "is pushing ahead with plans for its initial public offering, a debut that could value the company at $15 billion or more." The site previously turned heads when it rejected Google's $6 billion acquisition offer and spurred many to begin discussing the dreaded "B-word" - Bubble.

Crowdfunding your startup through sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGO has become an interesting, and in many cases, quite viable way of financing your project. A number of individuals and companies have been able to raise pretty substantial amounts of money through these services, going well beyond what they initially set as their funding targets.

Most notably of late, was the success of Lunatik/TikTok iPod Nano wristwatch, which set the record for the most money raised via Kickstarter to-date: almost $950,000 from over 13,000 backers. Not too shabby considering Scott Wilson and his MINIMAL design studio set out to raise a mere $15,000 in order to get licensing and manufacturing for the project under way.

The website FormDs.com has posted a very interesting map with a breakdown of investment dollars over the course of the past year. The map caught the eye of Boulder-based venture capitalist Jason Mendelson - not surprisingly, as the map points to Colorado as one of the most entrepreneurial states.

FormDs.com bases its findings on the filings, as the name suggests, Form D, an SEC requirement when startups and other privately-held companies raise venture capital. By tracking these filings, the site is able to get a decent glimpse into not just to whom but to where the money is headed.

RunKeeper, an app described with terms like mobile, social, fitness and quantified self, has raised $1.1 million from forward-looking investors O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), the organizations announced this morning.

RunKeeper lets users track their exercise experiences over time and share their performance metrics with friends. The service is a strong example of trends that O'Reilly AlphaTech is investing in and that the tech world in general is looking forward to: the tracking, quantification, benchmarking and socialization of previously off-line activities. Usually called "the Internet of Things," in some cases this paradigm extends to human activity as well.