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.

To have a successful API, you have to have a robust, data-driven community. For those not familiar, RunKeeper is an app that tracks your exercise by distance, heartrate (with a monitor) and other metrics. The company has a variety of other apps in activity tracking and nutrition such as strength and weight tracking apps among others (see the company's portfolio here).

RunKeeper has never paid a cent for user acquisition. The company firmly believes in the power of community and the viral acquisition of users interested in keeping track of their exercise routines. In that case, the company is almost the opposite of similar products provided by giants like Nike, which pays (and pays well) for brand and loyalty acquisition. RunKeeper did not touch its last round of funding for several months and continued its steep growth trajectory.

The company is built on reporting, data and analytics tied to its social channels and community. This is what made it possible for RunKeeper to create an API it released in June that developers can help grow the ecosystem by building on top of. This is the appropriate way to create and API and one that can lead to tremendous growth (see Facebook). Think of it like a tree. There are many companies that occupy the top levels of a tree, shouting down products, SDKs and APIs on users that may or may not be willing to use them. The API is the trunk that ties the top of the tree to the bottom.

RunKeeper created its data and community by putting roots into the ground and making the foundation very strong. The API is then a step to grow a trunk that can eventually lead to the company occupying the upper level. Developers have been building apps off the API for several months.

"There is a lot of mileage in tapping into the fitness community," said Sarah Hodges, the director of online marketing at RunKeeper. "The social component does not exhaust itself."

$10 Million, Now What?

This may sound silly, but the newest round of funding is not going to fundamentally change RunKeeper. It moved to a freemium app earlier this year, it will not begin paid user acquisition and there are no crazy pivots or branches off the tree coming soon. This is the prototypical growth series of funding. More infrastructure, more employees (RunKeeper has 14 openings right now), more office space. It has created all its products, data analysis tools and sales channels in house. There are no gimmicks with RunKeeper.

What is the roadmap? More of the same. It is kind of boring to say but RunKeeper plans on fostering its developer ecoystem through the Health Graph API which in turn helps with brand integration and partnerships into the platform (for instance, Nike could be a brand partner and not a competitor).

"We are going to focus on the core product," Hodges said. "That means engaging, retaining and acquiring users and letting developers build for us."

Engage, retain, acquire. It is the ABCs of app building. With its community and API (and now a cushion of cash to give it security), RunKeeper is doing it the right way.

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.

52% of companies that disclosed funding disclosed $1m in funding or less.  85% less than $5 million.  32% disclosed between $1m and $5m, the most popular category.  10% disclosed $10m in funding or more.  The most funded of the group is content security firm WebSense, which reported more than $50m in funding.

How does this compare to the Launch conference last week, which argued DEMO was too pricey for bootstrapped startups to launch at? Though the data is incomplete (we could only find funding data for 7 of 37 companies at Launch), it's worth at least a passing mention that the Launch companies that disclosed any funding on Crunchbase have raised an average of $2m each.  That's roughly in the same sweet spot as DEMO.

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 release also tries to answer a number of frequently asked questions regarding the investment, which are included below:

Why did Facebook raise this money?

DST and Goldman Sachs approached Facebook to express their interest in making an investment, and Facebook decided it was an attractive opportunity to bolster its cash reserves and increase its financial flexibility with limited dilution to existing shareholders.

Why did Facebook choose to raise $1 billion in the overseas offering?

Under the transaction's terms, Facebook had the option to accept between $375 million and $1.5 billion from the Goldman Sachs overseas offering, at the discretion of Facebook. While the offering was oversubscribed, Facebook made a business decision to limit the offering to $1 billion.

What are Facebook's plans for the proceeds of this transaction?

There are no immediate plans for these funds. Facebook will continue investing to build and expand its operations.

Does this investment mean that Facebook will have more than 500 shareholders?

Even before the investment from Goldman Sachs, Facebook had expected to pass 500 shareholders at some point in 2011, and therefore expects to start filing public financial reports no later than April 30, 2012.

When it was announced that Facebook raised $500 million earlier this month, ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick took a look at the deal and offered "4 Key Take-Aways from Goldman's Huge Facebook Investment". They still hold true and offer some perspective on what $1.5 billion for Facebook really means.

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.

The closest competitor in the market, LivingSocial, recently raised $175 million, a figure now dwarfed by Groupon's latest round. DealBook reports that Groupon may be trying to get while the getting's good:

Groupon, say analysts, may be moving quickly to take advantage of the market's momentum and the excitement around fast-growing Web companies.

"It's smart to strike while the iron is hot, and they're the most visible and fastest growing player in their market," said [Greg Sterling, an analyst and the founder of Sterling Market Intelligence]. "To wait a year would inject a level of uncertainty for the proposition of going public."

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.

You see, what appears to be a pretty straight forward running app is actually just the wedge to a much bigger opportunity. By leveraging many of the trends we've been tracking under the theme of the quantified self we see a huge opportunity in data being collected from a whole new wave of sensors such as phones, watches, shoes, video games and many that aren't even on the market yet. FitnessKeeper has the opportunity to layer social dynamics, expert advice, community and game mechanics to create value from this data and we think that's exciting.

The value of measuring almost anything, of course, is in being able to track changes. Apps like this are both enabling of and dependent upon peoples' willingness and ability to change their lives over time.

RunKeeper says it has millions of users, that previous investors participated in this round of funding as well and that it has now raised a total of more than $1.5 million.

"We're growing very quickly and we're very happy with the uptake," Trada founder and CEO Neil Robertson told ReadWriteWeb. "Google Ventures looked at our businesses and the assessment was that our growth was interesting to them."

New Cash, New Goals

The $5.75 million C round brings Trada's total fundraising to just under $8 million. Robertson says the company has been extremely tight budgeted thus far, spending just $2 million over the last two years. The sudden influx of cash will give the company breathing room to expand and try some new things, he says.

First, the company plans to help provide improved and tailored services to both its large agency customers and its smaller business customers. Secondly, it will expand internationally to run campaigns in more countries. Currently, Trada accepts international customers and experts in the U.K., Australia and Canada, but has yet to brand out to non-English speaking countries.

Lastly, as part of the company's long-term goals, Trada is looking to extend its crowdsourced PPC ad model to other forms of online advertisements. Robertson says the company started with PPC ads because of the obvious crowdsourcing benefits to keyword campaigns. Now the company realizes that other ad styles - including display, banner, mobile and video ads - can also work on this model. The company also expects to allow for campaigns on newer ad platforms, like Facebook and Twitter in the near future.

The Google Bump

Google piece of the funding comes from Google Ventures, the company's investment arm. Rich Miner, one of the original co-founders of Android, has been on boards with Robertson in the past and now manages the Google Ventures fund. Miner joins Robertson and Foundry Group's Seth Levine as members of Trada's board.

While the connection between Google and Trada is an easy one to make, Robertson says that not preferential treatment is given to any of the search giant's investments. As Robertson added, Google likes to make sure that "all boats rise with the tide" when it comes to its investments. The relationship will also not affect or limit the services which Trada offers to its customers, said Robertson.

The fresh cash certainly puts a smile on the faces at Trada, but out of everything, Robertson is most excited for the crowdsourcing community at large.

"We're really happy to have another significant venture firm taking a position in the crowdsourcing ecosystem," said Robertson, who heads an information group of similar companies known as the Crowdsortium. "It's a good sign to see larger tech companies in the evolution of this industry."

Photo by Flickr user horiavalan.

"Squarespace has been a profitable business since its first year of operation. This investment will not change that, but it will allow us to be much more aggressive in our quest to both create an incredible product and bring that product to market."

Squarespace founder Anthony Casalena.

Squarespace managed to quickly make a name for itself over the last few years. Some of the company's current customers include ABC News Radio, Bob Woodruff and Don Imus. The company's services make it easy for customers to set up their own blogs and manage their online content. Unlike Wordpress.com and similar free blogging platforms, Squarespace has always gone after paying customers that are looking for a professional and an easily customizable publishing platform. Subscriptions to Squarespace start at $8 per month.

As part of this investment, Index Venture's Dom Vidal and Accel Partners' Andrew Braccia will join Squarespace's board. In addition, Getty Images CEO Jonathan Klein will join the board as well.

Whether or not you believe that venture capital is broken, the necessity of funding startups still exists. One alternative to traditional funding models is "crowdfunding" - crowdsourcing the fundraising process.

Like crowdsourcing, crowdfunding is based on the idea of the "wisdom of crowds." And crowdfunding contends that "the crowd" can be a better source for financial support than traditional funding avenues. As these traditional avenues are often criticized for being based on "who you know" as much as "what you do," crowdfunding promises fundraising that is more transparent, more collaborative, more accessible, and more global.

Disrupting the Relationship Between Investor and Entrepreneur

But as it is a different funding model, crowdfunding means a different sort of relationship between the investor and the entrepreneur. With many (but not all) crowdfunding sites, startups retain full ownership of their projects. Investors receive credit on the website, and sometimes a thank-you gift (a commemorative t-shirt, a free subscription or software copy, and the like). But there are no stock certificates, no seat on the Board of Directors, no equity.

While crowdfunding does provide entrepreneurs with needed funding, startups who raise money this way might miss out on some of other things that investors bring to the table, including business advice and connections. But arguably this is a vicious circle: In order to get that investor backing and to take advantage of investors' connections, you often need pretty strong connections in the first place. According to John Rooney, CEO for the startup Jakaya, which is seeking funding for its collaboration tool via IndieGoGo, finding investors can be very challenging for those outside the tech world's "inner circles."

Crowdfunding, with Due Diligence

GrowVC is one crowdfunding site that aims to foster both the startup and the investor community. GrowVC is run on a subscription-based model, where subscribers make the decisions about what gets funded. Unlike some of the other crowdfunding services, GrowVC does due diligence on the companies that are listed there.

And this diligence is often pointed to as a flaw of the crowdfunding process. While a startup might be able to raise money using crowdfunding sites, these services do not necessite that these companies have a business plan or a viable product.

This is among the criticisms lobbed at what is perhaps crowdfunding's most well known success story, the Diaspora Project. Although Diaspora was able to raise well over its initial $10,000 goal using the popular Kickstarter crowdfunding platform - it's actually raised more than $200,000 - this is still no guarantee that Diaspora can build a viable alternative to Facebook. And while Diaspora certainly capitalized on the anti-Facebook sentiment, arguably its project would have not received such a positive response had it not been for the press coverage they've received. Several other alternatives to Facebook, for example - many of which actually have a product - also appear on crowdfunding sites, but have received neither the press nor the money that Diaspora has.

"Fund us if you believe in us," says Jakaya's John Rooney. And while "believing in a startup" is a prerequisite before any investor writes a check, crowdfunding does offer a chance for startups to expand that investor base outside the traditional investment circles. And as there can't possibly be as many VC managers as there are good ideas, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The anonymity that is at the core of BlockChalk's feature set leaves the service open to abuse. As BlockChalk works with its new venture backers, it will be interesting to see if the service will stick to this approach or if BlockChalk will move to a more traditional model.

The service is currently most popular in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, but it is not clear how many active users BlockChalk current has.

The New Frontier for Location-Based Networks: Your Neighborhood

As the company's founders note in today's announcement, BlockChalk wants to "help people connect with their neighbors and mobilize their local communities." A number of other ventures, including DeHood, have launched neighborhood-focused LBS apps recently. Most of these have a relatively clear business model (mostly focused on working with local businesses and providing coupons to users). BlockChalk doesn't have a clear business model yet.

Ogmento has partnered with well-known corporations like PBS, Orange Telecom and Penguin Publishing to produce AR applications. They are currently working with companies in various fields to produce some new intriguing apps, including the soon-to-be-released Put a Spell game that is designed to help children learn to spell. Kids will be able to interact with a 3D panda bear model which will instruct them to place physical cards into an AR scene in order to spell words.

For Chart Venture Partners, Ogmento is another company in a line of emerging technology investments. Chart has previously invested in companies such as FortiusOne, which develops geospatial imaging technology, and RemoteReality, makers of 360-degree live-video devices. As Ogmento co-founder Brian Selzer points out, having experience with these companies makes Chart a good fit for Ogmento.

"Given Chart's investment activity in hardware and software areas related to AR, they understand the true potential of this technology. Adding a partner to our management team is an exciting endorsement of our business," said Selzer.

Personally, I find Ogmento's initial games to be quite inspiring. The Put a Spell game is an excellent use of AR technology to engage kids in learning, and their Sketch AR experiment, which will produce AR models based on live drawings, is an innovative turn for AR development. The thought of kids using AR to instantly bring their doodles to life in 3D is truly fascinating. I'm excited to see other kinds of interesting products Ogmento can come up with now that they have a good chunk of change to work with.

At the same time, though, the latest data from Hitwise shows that visits to Twitter's main domain have slowed down markedly over the last few weeks. This number doesn't take users into account who access the site from third-party applications, but it does show that a smaller number of users are going to the main site, which indicates a slowdown in new user adoption. Hitwise's Bill Tancer also found that fewer users are searching for Twitter on search engines. Hitwise's Clickstream report also shows a drop-off in new users that are coming to Twitter since April.

In April, of course, Oprah famously joined Twitter and the hype cycle around the service was in full swing. It looks like normality might be setting in now and growth is indeed slowing.

The question, of course, is if this is just a temporary slowdown or part of a larger trend. Maybe everybody who was going to join Twitter has already joined and the rest of the potential users are simply happy to use Facebook instead?

For now, we want to congratulate Twitter on closing this round, which will give it a chance to improve its technology and grow its team. At the same time, though, we also hope that Twitter will finally release some details about how it plans to make money in the long run and validate this valuation.

This kind of valuation is going to give Twitter a long runway before it actually has to make money, but at the same time, it also makes it unlikely that anybody is going to acquire Twitter in the near future.

We will obviously keep an eye on this developing story and will update it once we get more information.

Image used courtesy of Flickr user tao zhyn

For the quarter ending this past June, we compared the findings of three research firms that reported on the money invested in Q2:

• July 21, MoneyTree (PricewaterhouseCoopers, with data from the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters): $3.7 billion, with 612 deals,
• July 18, VentureSource (DowJones): $5.27 billion, with 595 deals,
• July 14, ChubbyBrain (a New York City-based startup partnering with ReadWriteWeb): $5.329 billion, with 613 deals.

VentureSource and ChubbyBrain seem to agree on the top line number. But MoneyTree's number is what most people report, and that is about $1.5 billion different.

As the old saying goes, "A billion here, a billion there. Sooner or later it adds up."

Disclosure: Our VC Funding Report

ReadWriteWeb has an interest in this. We sell a report for $299 that has details on the 240 deals done this quarter in the Internet, mobile, and SaaS space (not clean tech or bio tech), and this is powered by data from ChubbyBrain. So we are biased. But it also means that we are engaged and have been looking at this fairly deeply.

Who Cares?

We also think that accuracy matters, and we are trying to figure whom accuracy matters to. We see three main types of participants in the industry:

1. VCs. They need accurate data for their own fund-raising. They have to be able to benchmark their own funds relative to the broader market.
2. Entrepreneurs. Data on what funding deals are being made, and why, helps them figure out how much to raise, when, and from which VC.
3. The startup "community." This is a catch-all for everyone else, who tend to align to either VCs or entrepreneurs. Journalists, the non-aligned fourth estate, want reliable data to key off interesting stories.

Why does this matter? The startup community matters to the health of the overall economy. As the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA, the trade association of VCs) likes to point out:

"Originally, venture-backed companies have created companies that accounted for 10.4 million jobs and over $2.3 trillion in revenue (based on 2006 data)."

So a headline like "VC Investments Falling Off Cliff in the US" really impacts a lot of people. That is the kind of headline that most journalists/bloggers wrote in April 2009, based on data reported by those trusted sources.

We wrote a really boring headline:

"VC Investment in Internet Deals Did Not Fall Off a Cliff."

That's a lousy headline for generating page views. It's a story about "the dog that did not bark."

The point is that headlines drive business behavior to wild excesses on both the down-cycle bust and the up-cycle boom.

Just good reliable data would help.

Innovation Is Global, But It Keys Off US Data

At ReadWriteWeb, we love to track innovation from far-flung corners of the world, and we see the globalization of innovation as a critical trend.

So we want to be able to report on financing trends for early-stage Web technology startups across Europe and Asia, in addition to the US. And we expect any research process to be able to scale to that challenge.

But the reality today is that, globally, entrepreneurs and VCs key off US data. If they were to key off bad data, that would matter to everyone.

Why This Matters

Driving with one's eyes in the rear-view mirror is dangerous. We take action based on what authoritative sources tell us is happening today, and we base our assumptions on what that means will happen next and plan accordingly.

In reality, these sources tell us what has happened in the past, and they may not even tell us that accurately.

When we at ReadWriteWeb look at the macro picture, we favor a contrarian view simply because the reality we see today is often not what the headlines trumpet. When the markets were in the late stage of a boom, we were sounding the warning signals.

When the markets were melting, we began to see surprising signs of life in the early-stage Web technology world we live in.

Whether you are an entrepreneur or an investor, knowing what the crowd is thinking -- and what the headlines are trumpeting -- is valuable. Even more valuable are the underlying facts and trends that may be missing from those headlines. In the disconnect between the two often lies a lot of opportunity.

We hope to ignite a debate that leads to greater accuracy and transparency of these numbers.

Its two newest sites are focused on pets and celebrities.

GiantRedCarpet.com curates tweets from silver screen luminaries such as Ben Stiller, George Clooney, our own Wil Wheaton (he'll always belong to the geeks), and, obviously, the ubiquitous Ashton Kutcher. So you can follow him without, you know, following him. It also gathers updates from "gadfly" Perez Hilton, several athletes, director Kevin Smith, and a surprisingly diverse collection of musicians from Ashlee Simpson to Yoko Ono. I guess what they say is true: Everybody really is doing it.

ThePetFeed.com is simply freakin' strange. We've heard before about people who set up Twitter accounts for their animal companions. This site is their mothership, an aggregation of the passing thoughts of cats, dogs, birds, rodents, and one lonely capybara (go ahead, click the link, you know you have no idea what a capybara is).

After a long and thoughtful pause, all we can say is good on you, SawHorse.