Online storage has became a commodity. It’s very much like an online backup, where we, as the end users are always prone to a lot of catastrophes such as theft, disaster or plain data loss. There is a newly launched startup called Dropbox that offer a no-nonsense service in this field which provides online storage, synchronize, and sharing to the end-users without any charge.

Dropbox offer an easy and inexpensive way that make sure your data is always safe. It is also allows for unlimited number of computers and the other great feature is that it make your online backup of your data very simple, in an instant manner since Dropbox synchronize your data from your PC with your Web account even without you lifting a finger.

After you signing up to Dropbox, you’re entitled to a free account with a maximum storage space of 2GB and 10 invites that can be sent to your buddies. I encouraged potential users to sign up for a free account through Dropbox Web site and later take a bold move to install a desktop version of the Dropbox package, approx. 14MB to their PCs (currently they supported Windows, Mac, and Linux). After you’ve installed the software package, you can link your PC to your own Dropbox account that stored your data in Amazon Web Services. By the time, you’ll notice that you will have two accounts, one to be appeared on your default download location, in my case, i.e. My Documents and another one is on the Web.

What’s good is that Dropbox offered a simple Web interface. You’ll notice there are “Files,” and “Photos” buttons on your left-hand sidebar, which you’ll find all the relevant files, or photos on your Dropbox Web account. Besides, there is an “Upload” button, it is served as a tool to alleviate the challenges when you can’t install the Dropbox client, in some situations where your employer not allowed you to install software; You can upload your data one by one to your Dropbox Web account. In addition, Dropbox also offered an easy-to-use Dashboard, you can find all your latest activities are being recorded under the heading of “Recent Events.”

Online storage has definitely become more appealing for end-users if they are allowed to create folders, share files or folders with buddies, and Dropbox understand all these specific needs. Alongside these features, Dropbox also allowed one to view the revisions of her file, download file, copy, move, rename or delete the file under her own wish. At the same time, whatever you’ve make changes to your Dropbox Web account, it will be affected to your own Dropbox client. It is an automated synchronization, the software works quietly in the background. For the security, all the users’ data are encrypted and compressed using 256-bit AES encryption for data backups and industry standard 128-bit SSL technology for data transmission.

The Dropbox service is inexpensive, you’ll always be able to buy a 50GB Dropbox for $9.99/month, or $99.99/year if you feel the initial 2GB is not enough.

To know more about Dropbox, it was founded by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi in 2007 and received seed funding from Y Combinator and $1.2M in a Series A funding from Sequoia Capital.

Reuters is reporting that AdBrite had raised another $23 million in a round C financing from existing investor Sequoia Capital, alongside with new investors that are DAG Ventures and Mitsui Ventures. Currently, AdBrite is the third-largest ad (advertisement) provider in US, just behind Google and Advertising.com in term of page views, and its ad products more or less as reputable as Google AdSense. Though this funding is expensive for the investors, it is a key decision for venture capitalists to keep on commit to this ad provider as both the growth outlook for this burgeoning ad industry and AdBrite were very good at this moment. With AdBrite currently serve their inventory of ad on over a billion of pages a day, from a conservative view, investors could actually get back their capital in near future.

In the past twelve months, AdBrite has been very aggressive in the industry by launching few initiatives such as real-time auction model, sell ad on Facebook, as well as offered the full page ad. AdBrite previously raised $4 million in Series A financing in 2004 and $8 million in round B in the year of 2006. With this round C financing, they have successfully raised a total venture capital of $35 million.

TokBox has raised $4 million from a renowned venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and some high-profile angel investors, among them is Jawed Karim, co-founder of YouTube. When a startup received funding from Sequoia Capital, due to the Sequoia Capital’s unique ability in evaluate a new startup, people normally recognized that the startup might well meet the users’ needs and succeed in the market. In fact, this startup has created massive buzz recently and The New York Times reported that Sequoia Capital is investing $4 million in TokBox in an effort to make the site the Web’s next big communication tool.

TokBox is a free chat video chat service, and its main use is to let users to conduct video communication in an easy way without much hassle, and thus no registration or download of their client software, installation or configuration needed in order to use TokBox. Users can use TokBox via a Web browser or through a module embed onto their blogs or social networking sites. Moreover, a single click on the start button can start the video communication through a Flash interface. Though it is still in testing phase, video chat is currently a little bit noisier, their system will be improved when they successfully integrate the TokBox with Adobe Flash Player 9 in the near future.

My sense is that TokBox is pursuing the strategy of “get big fast.” I believed they will use the fund they raised to acquire more users and develop better technology. In the technology settings, this kind of product can’t prove to the users that they’re a “not me-too” product on the Web as there are a lot of players are now offering the similar video chat tools. Imaging the degree of Windows Live users that live chat with their friends with a Web cam on a regular basis, will they switch to this product? However, with the strength of TokBox’s backers, I started to think that if they’re investing in something, it will works, then the real question to this startup is, what is the actual product concept they’re selling, and are the investors looking for the short-term profitability or the long-term profitability of this startup.

Update: TokBox has raised an additional $10M in a Series B funding from Bain Capital and Sequoia Capital in August 2008.

Based on a simple concept that brand advertising on the Internet should be effective, AdBrite, dubbing itself “the Internet ad marketplace” has rolled out full page ad. The full page ad (advertisement) is a brand new advertising format available in AdBrite’s platform, and according to AdBrite, this type of advertising format enables brand advertisers bring the same kind of full page advertising seen on newspapers and magazines over to Web sites. For most publishers, they now have another option to monetize from the advertisement besides the text, banner, and interstitial. The full page ad will only appear on a publisher’s site after the visitor viewed the site for a while or it appear after the visitor has clicked on a predetermined number of links on this particular site, implied that if the visitor views the full page ad during a session, the advertising won’t get on her nerve. However, each full page ad is shown only once per session, and the detailed real-time measurement on average viewing times for each ad variation will be given by AdBrite to the advertisers.

Meanwhile, the full page ad is already running on 5,000 sites in the AdBrite network, including major publishers like Excite and iMeem, to smaller “long tail” content sites like Fanpop and Egotastic. On the other side, Sanyo, Pennzoil and Live Nation are the among the advertisers that launched this new creative full page ad format. For those who are interested on this full page ad, there is more information on the “Demo” page.

AdBrite is based in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2002 by Philip Kaplan and Gidon Wise and is backed by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

Sipera, a company that provides product and solution on VOIP security has raised $10 million in a round C financing from venture capitalists (VC) Duchossois Technology Partners, alongside with existing investors Austin Ventures, Sequoia Capital and STAR Ventures. According to their press release, this round of financing brings Sipera a total amount of VC funds to $29.5 million. Sipera will use most of this fund toward expansion in sales and support, technology improvement and etc. VOIP security market, which did not accepted favorably five years ago, is now a hot business opportunity due to the rising popularity of VOIP services nowadays. As suggested by several market research reports that I came across, VOIP services is expected to achieve a phenomenal growth over the next few years and the market size is estimated approx. $6 billion by 2010. Maybe the fact of the breathtaking pace of all these VOIP vendors, most of the vendors in this field have caught the eyes of the VC. Rebtel snagged $20 million in September last year, Truphone raised $24.5 million in January, and Jajah got $20 million in a round C financing (PDF) also in this year, just to name a few. It is significant that a VOIP security vendor Sipera has been able to raised nearly $30 million funding since its first inception in the market less than 3 years, albeit that I still can’t figure out how much is their actual sales revenue.

Sipera is founded in year 2005, with headquartered in Richardson, Texas, and a development center in Hyderabad of India. One of its key products, i.e. Sipera IPCS 310 has won the 2006 Innovation Award winner from an Technology Marketing Corporation’s TMC Labs division.