One Kings Lane, an e-commerce startup that operates a private sales website dedicated to home furnishings, decor, and related products, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with First Round Capital and angel investor Reid Hoffman participating.One Kings Lane was started by Susan Feldman and Alison Gelb Pincus, who took notice of the success of the online private sale model (see Amazon's $3 billion interest in Vente Privée) and applied it to their passion: home furnishings and decor.

  There were quite a few memorable presentations during 2008's TechCrunch50 (that's the conference before last). But if you had to pick one, there's a good chance you'd think of Tonchidot, the startup behind the Sekai Camera. Tonchidot captured the audience's attention with a totally zany presentation and answered judges' questions with non sequiturs like "Look up, don’t look down!" The result was hilarious, but there were some who wondered if the technology behind the company was the real deal. Rest assured, it is. And the company has closed a $4 million series A funding round led by DCM, with existing investor ITOCHU Technology Ventures (ITV) also participating.The Sekai Camera service launched in Japan a few months ago, and has already become a national hit as the top app on the iPhone app store. The service leverages augmented reality and adds a social layer to it, allowing users to add virtual items in the real world (you hold the device up to your face as a viewfinder, then look at the world around you as tags pop up).

  PicScout a startup that produces image tracking technology for stock photography agencies, professional photographers and others is adding the CEO of Creative Commons, Joi Ito, to its board of advisors. PicScout originally started off as a content copyright enforcer, hunting down unlicensed images on the web with its flagship ImageIRC technology. The company also launched PicApp, a flash-based image provider that offers legally licensed images from large databases for free. The company makes money by including ads as part of the embedded picture viewer.

  High Gear Media, a publishing company focused on automotive digital media, is having a great year. The Palo Alto, CA-based vertical content startup raised a second round of funding last Summer to the tune of $5.5 million and has been growing like a weed.Today, the company's announcing that Chas Edwards is joining its board of directors. Edwards is the former Chief Revenue Officer of Federated Media who in May 2009 left the digital advertising network to become the money guy at Digg.

  When Brightcove released a major upgrade to its online video platform last month, one of the new set of features was better analytics. It turns out that Brightcove's new video analytics suite is powered TubeMogul. Professional video publishers who use Brightcove can now measure things like the geographic distribution of their viewers, how many seconds they watch each video, their drop-off rate, number of unique viewers, number of new viewers, as well as total video plays. The two companies have also signed a joint R&D pact to develop new video analytics products exclusively for Brightcove. TubeMogul will also become a marketing partner for Brightcove's paid video hosting, streaming, and advertising services. About 125,000 people use TubeMogul's free video analytics. Many of them are online video professionals Brightcove is hoping to turn into paying subscribers for its new "low-end" $99/month plan.

  Last month we broke the news that MySpace was acquiring music service iMeem, and that an agreement had been signed between the two companies.All of that was accurate, including the $1 million fire sale price. But despite reports to the contrary, while the deal was signed it never closed (which explains why MySpace hasn't announced it).Sometime between signing and closing some problems came up in due diligence, we've heard. Specifically that some of the hard assets that MySpace was acquiring, hundreds of servers, were leased rather than owned. Meaning that MySpace couldn't buy them.The two sides have feverishly been renegotiating the deal, say our sources. At this point a deal may still be done in the next day or so at an even lower price than the $1 million. Or the deal may be terminated altogether (we're hearing it's likely some sort of deal will still happen).

  The first time you go surfing, it's a pretty significant achievement to just stand up on the board and ride a wave. Most people never leave their stomachs, or when they do, they fly face first into the wave. Google Wave, it seems, is not entirely dissimilar.On its Google Wave Blog today, the company announced a very significant milestone for the young service: A million invites have been sent out. The single biggest complaint about Google Wave so far has been the lack of access to it as everyone who wants to see what all the fuss is about. So Google has opened up the floodgates today and apparently let in everyone who previously requested an invite (though they are still requiring the invite request here). But a million invites is hardly a million users, and certainly not a million happy riders.

  Sometimes you have to apply the smell test to what your sources are telling you, and the rumors we're hearing about Apple's purchase of music service LaLa are definitely smelling a little off. $80 million for LaLa? That isn't what we're hearing.LaLa was purchased for $17 million by Apple, according to our sources with indirect knowledge of the deal. And the company supposedly had $14 million in cash in the bank, meaning the actual purchase price was really $3 million.That's in line with recent competitive sales like iLike ($20 million) and iMeem ($1 million). LaLa had plenty of cash in the bank, but they were burning $500k/month, say our sources. There's just no reason Apple would pay $80 million for the company.We also believe that LaLa was acquired mostly for the star engineering team and the awesome recent Google deal more than for the product. iTunes in the cloud isn't something we should hold our breath for. $3 million for top-of Google music results and a top team of engineers makes a lot of sense. $80 million not so much.

  Tomorrow, the makers of Firefox will be launching the third version of Thunderbird, its open source and free email application that is produced out of Mozilla Messaging, which is a subsidiary of Mozilla devoted to producing innovation around communication and the internet. Thunderbird 3, which is available in 50 languages and is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, has made more than 2,000 improvements and fixes to the new email client. Thunderbird 3 will be available to the public mid-day tomorrow here. One of the main improvements to Thunderbird 3, says Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher, is the client's search capacity. The new search interface contains filtering and timeline tools to try to help users pin-point emails by words, correspondents or attachment types. Thunderbird 3 also includes tabbed email, which lets users view emails and folders in tabs within the client, similar to the way that you manage tabs in Firefox. Tabs are remembered in the client, so you don't have to keep re-saving tabs.

  We've just gotten our first look at Assistly, a new startup that's looking to provide businesses with a robust platform for engaging customers on everything from Email to Facebook and Twitter. We first caught wind of Assistly back in October when its founding members left AOL in tandem, but until now the company remained firmly in stealth. Today it's launching a new 'sneak preview' version of its site at Assistly.com, and they've given us a handful of screenshots to showcase some of the features we can expect. The company is also announcing that Mark Cuban and David Liu are officially coming on as advisors.CEO Alex Bard says that Assistly looking to capitalize on some key trends: first, that more and more businesses are establishing themselves on the web, and that consumers now have louder voices than ever with their presences on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs which makes customer service more important than ever. Bard says that existing customer service solutions are either old and difficult to use, or are new and easier to manage but lack much depth. Bard says that Assistly is looking to provide a platform that combines the best of both worlds, offering a robust customer service with self-service ease of use.

  Ned Desmond has gone fishin' and he wants you to Go FISHn too. Today, Desmond launched a fishing site for the Facebook age. You can sign in with your Facebook ID, share fishing stories and photos with your friends, ask questions to fishing pros and the community, and review all the gear in your tackle box.Go FISHn is an enthusiast site for people who love to fish—and there's an estimated 30 million recreational anglers in the U.S. alone who spend about $45 billion a year on gear, supplies, and trips. "Nobody has done a good job in enthusiast sites," says Desmond, who is the former president of Time Interactive and was once my boss (we launched a magazine together). There are other social networks for fishermen such as Angling Masters, Fishing Files, and the Fishing Network where people can share fish tales and photos. But they seem to be modeled more after MySpace than Facebook. Go FISHn isn't trying to create a new social network. "People fish for the challenge, but also for the companionship," says Desmond. Go FISHn starts out by connecting you to your fishing buddies on Facebook (and, yes, it has a Facebook Fan page as well).

  When Microsoft laid off Microsoft’s Director of Business Development Don Dodge last month we called it a huge mistake. He was Microsoft's "ambassador" to startups and largely responsible for the success of the Bizspark program (the Bizspark program gives Microsoft products for free to startups, and also funds a number of tech blogs through sponsored posts).Eleven days after Dodge was let go he was a Google employee.Now Microsoft is looking for his replacement, it seems. From a job listing (we're trying to confirm with Microsoft now that it's authentic):

  With all of the news surrounding Google's newest additions to its search technology, Google's latest upgrade to Google Analytics has been overshadowed. Analytics is the search giant’s free software product that allows website owners and publishers to get detailed statistics about the number, whereabouts and search behavior of their visitors (and much more). Today, the product is being upgraded to become even more customizable. The most noteworthy new feature is the ability to leave annotations or notes within in analytics charts, helping to explain sudden spikes or drops in traffic. Annotations lets analytics users to leave shared or private notes right on the over-time graph in an effort to let users bring intelligence to data.

  It's one thing for Google to talk about how cool its new Goggles service is, and to show it off in staged demo videos — it's another to see it in action. Our own Jason Kincaid was at Google's Search Event in Mountain View today and got a chance to get a real world demo of Google Goggles. The service, which is currently an application for Android, is impressive.Watch below: