Fluidigm tried to have an IPO a year ago but pulled it due to the weak market.

The Santa Clara, Calif. company says it will use the extra $112 million (!) to meet the demands of its rapid growth. Chegg applies a Netflix-like model (where you check out the books you need at the beginning of the semester then send it back to Chegg at the end) to textbooks, which supposedly allows students to cut their costs by 60 to 75 percent. Chegg says it’s used by hundreds of thousands of students at 6,400 colleges.

The company also says it wants to use the new funding to improve customer service and striking more deals publishers, booksellers, and colleges.

Insight Venture Partners led the new round, and also provided the credit, while the debt comes from Pinnacle Ventures and TriplePoint Capital. The company has now raised a $84.2 million (not counting credit and debt), most in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Competitors include BookRenter.

That’s evident in the funding announced today by Immunet, a cloud antivirus startup that has raised $2 million in funding from Altos Ventures and TechOperators. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Immunet launched its first product, Immunet Protect, in August. The product harnesses the growing power of sharing networks to create a community of people who can collectively improve each other’s security.

Upon installing Immunet Protect, users immediately become protected members within the “Immunet Community,” which is now 20,000 users strong. The community leverages the collective knowledge of threats and how dangerous each one of them is. It thus can bring the highest-level threats to a user’s attention more quickly than client-based antivirus solutions. Other companies are adopting this kind of approach as well.

The company was founded by Oliver Friedrichs, a former Symantec research executive. He left the big company in the summer of 2008 to found Immunet. He decided to address something that the big vendors hadn’t moved quickly enough to address: how to use the combination of cloud computing, collective intelligence and community-based trust networks to fight off the dramatic increase in malware threats.

The solution is clever. It leverages the idea of safety in numbers. Every time someone in the Immunet Protect network encounters a virus, the threat is identified, logged, and blocked on a centralized server platform. Instantaneously, because of the way Immunet works, everyone in the network can be protected from that identified virus.

The San Francisco company also announced a $5.5 million second round of funding led by new investor Physic Ventures, with participation from New Island Capital and existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. GoodGuide previously raised $3.73 million.

At first, GoodGuide’s concept — building a comprehensive database that can provide authoritative information about a product’s health and ethics — might sound rather obvious, but the company says it’s actually pretty difficult to track down all the data. Presumably, that’s why I don’t know of any direct competitors (as opposed to ethical retail sites or shopping guides focused on specific markets).

The barcode scanner works best with the improved camera on the iPhone 3Gs. I just tested it out on my 3G, and while it took some getting used to (you have to hold both the camera and the product still for several seconds while it scans the code), it works. GoodGuide says it already has 62,000 products and companies in its database, and if users start scanning products that aren’t there yet, the company will know what to add next.

There are several other barcode-scanning apps out there, most notably ShopSavvy, but they’re mostly focused on general product information.

Milpitas, Calif.-based FireEye is working on a platform that can fight off “botnets,” which are fleets of zombie computers that have been taken over by criminal hacker rings. The technology being developed can support the “missions of the U.S. intelligence community.”

Terms were not disclosed. While there are many anti-malware and anti-botnet technologies out there, the bad guys are constantly evolving their attacks, giving openings for startups to find a foothold in the market. T. J. Rylander, a partner at In-Q-Tel, said that FireEye’s approach to detecting and defeating malware is unique and “potentially game changing.” It uses a blend of “heuristic virtual victim machines” to capture and replay suspicious web traffic activity. The system is good at detecting “zero day” attacks, meaning viruses that exploit vulnerabilities that were previously unknown in systems.

The company is already backed by Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, JAFCO, SVB Capital, DAG Ventures, and Juniper Networks.

Placecast, which previously raised $4 million, pushes advertisements from major brands to the consumer’s phone depending on their physical location, but allows users to opt-in to the system. Here’s a scenario: You’re shopping and have opted in to receive advertisement alerts from your favorite store, say GAP (you can do this by visiting the retailers store, website, or even Facebook page). You’ve parked your car and happen to be walking just a few blocks from a GAP — bang — your phone goes off and there’s a “30 percent-off” message from GAP on t-shirts.  While some might think this would be annoying, remember you did opt in.

For retailers, the service gives them an opportunity to combat dropping foot traffic at stores and energize regional specific marketing campaigns. Focusing on Fortune 500 retailers and brands, Placecast has several well recognized partners, including: Yellowbook, FedEx Office, Avis and Budget Rental Cars and Hyatt Hotels.

Placecast recently comissioned a survey by Harris Interactive that determined that 27 percent of consumers would be somewhat interested in receiving cell phone alerts about sales, assuming it was an opt-in system. As for what alerts they would be interested in receiving, the majority noted either restaurants, events or weather.

Similar companies like Useful Networks and Creativity Software are also providing global brands  – Burger King, BP, Samsung, Pearson and Walt Disney  – with location-based systems.

Round two funding included Quatrex Capital and current investors Onset Ventures and Voyager Capital.

The devices could make it a lot easier to watch PC-based Internet videos, flash media, digital photos and games on a TV. Based on the Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) wireless standard, the new chips can be embedded into notebook computers or netbooks, which are smaller than laptops and are meant for surfing the web. The modules can wirelessly transfer data from the computer to the TV screen, which would also have a wireless module attached to it, at high speed. It would be fast enough to smoothly transfer HD video, the Herzlia, Israel-based company says.

The modules (pictured) are pretty small and can transfer HD video wirelessly throughout a home. The notebook computers with the WHDI modules are expected to be on the market in 2010. Amimon’s WHDI wireless chips use the 5-gigahertz radio spectrum to transfer data wirelessly.

Amimon raised $10 million in funding in July.

Amimon’s latest chips can transfer full high-definition video, which is defined as video in the 1080p format running at 60 frames per second. The previous chip set could only do 1080i video at slower speeds. The new chip set is compliant with the WHDI industry standard and is expected to ship in customer products in 2010.

Amimon’s second-generation technology operates in the 5-gigahertz band, transmits data at 3 gigabits per second, and has a range of about 100 feet. It can pierce through walls and is very responsive. Since a rival technology, ultra wideband, has pretty much died on the vine, Amimon doesn’t have a ton of competitors.

SiBEAM is one rival that is using a different technology, based on the 60-gigahertz band of the radio spectrum, with higher speeds but shorter ranges. SiBEAM says it can transfer data at 4 gigabits per second. Another new rival is Quantenna, which uses the Wi-Fi protocol 802.11n to transfer video wirelessly.

Amimon plans to use the money to expand its production and worldwide operations. Investors include round leader Stata Venture Partners and all prior investors: Argonaut Private Equity, Cedar Fund, Evergreen Venture Partners, and Walden Israel and Motorola through their strategic venture capital arm, Motorola Ventures.

Amimon was founded in 2004 and has raised $50 million to date.

The computer does this by imitating the brain’s low-power energy consumption and compact size, and it has an intelligence level that approaches the smarts of a cat. Big Blue will announce the development at the SC 09 supercomputer conference in Portland, Ore.

IBM Research’s cognitive computing team has made progress with what it calls “large-scale cortical simulation” and has created a new algorithm, or math formula, that synthesizes brain-like data. Both of those steps are necessary in creating a brain-like chip. We wrote about this effort, headed by Dharmendra Modha, last year when IBM announced its start.

The scientists at IBM Research-Almaden and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have performed the first near-instantaneous simulation of the brain. The simulation is more sophisticated than that of a cat’s brain and has a billion “spiking neurons” and 10 trillion individual learning synapses, which are akin to the connections between brain cells.

And, working with researchers from Stanford University, IBM scientists have developed an algorithm that exploits the Blue Gene supercomputer to measure connections within the human brain without being invasive. The technique uses magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging to map the way the brain is wired. By doing this, IBM has taken a step toward unraveling how communications happen within the brain.

The advances will provide a way to study how the brain works and to move closer to the goal of building a chip that simulates that. If it can do so, and that is of course a big if, then IBM may depart from the way that computing has been done since John von Neumann figured out how to build computers back in the 194os.

The researchers believe that as the amount of digital data grows, and the world becomes more instrumented and interconnected, there will be a need to create faster, more efficient computing systems with a higher level of intelligence than those we use today. For all the sophistication of today’s supercomputers, they can’t do a lot of things, such as recognizing patterns, as well as humans do. Other researchers, such as Numenta founder Jeff Hawkins agree with that and are also trying to create brain-like computers.

“Learning from the brain is an attractive way to overcome power and density challenges faced in computing today,” said Josephine Cheng, IBM Fellow and lab director of IBM Research – Almaden, in a statement. “As the digital and physical worlds continue to merge and computing becomes more embedded in the fabric of our daily lives, it’s imperative that we create a more intelligent computing system that can help us make sense the vast amount of information that’s increasingly available to us, much the way our brains can quickly interpret and act on complex tasks.”

The IBM team built a cortical simulator that incorporates a number of innovations in computation, memory, and communication as well as sophisticated biological research. After completing the first part of the research, IBM and its university partners were given a $16.1 million grant from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to create a prototype chip that can simulate the brain’s functions. The idea is to create something that is as smart as a mammal.

The overall research team includes researchers from several of IBM’s worldwide research labs and scientists from Stanford University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center and University of California- Merced.

Wald is also the Program Chair of the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab. His prior positions include Managing Director at Competitive Insights and the Zeno Group. He also founded Zingdata, which Knowledge Networks acquired. He said in an interview that he is bullish on Chile and that there are “so few venture firms focused on Latin America but a lot of ideas coming out of the region.”

Austral’s founder and managing director Gonzalo Miranda also has Bay Area ties, as he earned his MBA at the University of California Berkeley. He now manages Austral’s $30 million fund raised from Chilean private investors and from a low-interest loan from the governmental Chilean Economic Development Agency, known as CORFO in Spanish, which was created in part to spur a venture capital industry there. In its short life-span, Austral has made six investments in the $1 million to $5 million range in early stage companies in technology and clean energy among other fields.

Miranda said the government investment has spurred venture capital activity in Chile. He estimates the country has 12 active funds participating with CORFO with approximately $300 million available to invest. Many are originally private equity firms but in order to receive CORFO funds, they have to demonstrate venture capital activity. About two thirds of Austral’s funds have come from the CORFO program.

Is the government involvement a good thing? After all, governments across the world have spent millions trying to replicate Silicon Valley, and few if any have succeeded, as Josh Lerner details in his new book about government-funded entrepreneurship, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”

Latin American governments in particular are known for throwing credits and money at failing companies and industries when allowing a proper death would often do them and the countries more good.

But Miranda said in an interview that, “the VC industry would not exist in Chile without CORFO,” and that “it’s not just about the money.” He argues that what is distinct about CORFO is that, “it is promoting the emergence of general partnership, and trying to create a critical mass of people who understand entrepreneurship and venture capital.”

At the same time he believes that the government’s role has to be temporary. In fact he says that most likely in the next fund that Austral raises, it will not take CORFO money. “Now we can take care of ourselves,” he added.

Another CORFO defender is Cate Ambrose, director of the New York-based Latin America Venture Capital Association. Chile has consistently ranked first in its annual Venture Capital Scorecard for the region (Venturebeat reported the results of the 2009 scorecard earlier this year).

Ambrose said that the CORFO program “is not industrial policy. CORFO backs fund managers and not companies or industries.”

As to whether or not Miranda is a sound manager, here is more detailed information on two of his firms’ investments, starting with its first investment in a US company.

For Seattle-based Bio-Architecture Labs, which received $3 million from Austral in July, technology plus seaweed may be the answer to energy problems. The company is developing microbes that will ferment seaweed into ethanol. It claims to have innovative computer modeling and a novel biosynthetic pathway to convert renewable feedstock into fuels. Both were developed at the University of Washington by Dr. David Baker and Dr. Yasuo Yoshikuni.

The company claims it can produce ethanol 40 percent cheaper than when it is made from Brazilian sugarcane. And in the future it plans to produce diesel, jet-fuel, and specialty chemicals.

Bio-Architecture Labs now has a Chilean subsidiary run by American Lance Ayrault, formerly with International Biomass Projects and also CEO of Flexcar.

According to company documents, it has already conducted a pilot study with the University of Los Lagos in Chile. It found that seaweed can be farmed there and converted into fermentable sugars for $0.08 per kg of sugar. When factoring in anticipated revenue from byproducts, that price would drop to $0.02 per kg of sugar. It believes it can be competitive with petrol at $25-30 per barrel.

Ayrault said in an interview that Chile’s advantages for this project are its long coastline and experience in aqua-farming and its academic expertise. He said that the company previously tried to raise money in the US but its choice of Chile to pilot its products turned off investors. Although last month, collaborating with Du Pont, it received a $9 million grant from the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

Another Austral investment is Scopix, a Chilean company in retail analytics. It has developed video analytics for retail stores’ camera systems that measure various customer service indicators such as store personnel performance and queue lengths. It provides feedback in real-time, for example with what it calls “in-store alerts” to store managers’ mobile devices. It claims that it can help retail companies make money by having more efficient customer service. (Scopix, by the way, has a current partnership with Cisco Systems’ IP Video Surveillance — Cisco has provided the company with some $200,000 in hardware equipment to demo its technology.)

Scopix received $2 million from Austral and plans to have a Bay Area presence by next March.

It is the eleventh fund in the firm’s history, and its largest.

Managing partner Promod Haque says the new money will help the firm expand — in terms of geography, industry, and the type of deal it gets involved with. The fund is so much larger than Norwest’s $650 million tenth fund because many of the new strategies that Norwest started pursuing in the last few years are bearing fruit.

Geographically, the firm has been expanding beyond the United States, with offices in India and Israel, as well as investments in China. It’s also adding health informatics and medical devices to the already varied group of industries it invests in. And it’s looking to expand beyond its traditional early-stage focus into growth investments in later-stage companies.

In each case, Norwest has added staff to make the expansion happen, and Haque is emphatic that Norwest isn’t abandoning any of its existing investment areas. For example, growth equity investments are a natural next step as its portfolio companies mature, but Norwest also has two first-round deals in the works.

“We’re not changing emphasis, we’re adding some stuff,” he said.

Norwest has invested in 450 companies in its 48-year history. Recent successes include Rackspace, the hosting company that went public last year, and LifeSize Communications, which was recently acquired by LogiTech.

The investments were led by Intel Capital, which is the investment arm of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker. The investments show that Intel hasn’t flinched from its goal of supporting startups during the recession, said Arvind Sodhani (right), president of Intel Capital, at a press conference at Intel’s 10th annual CEO Summit in Huntington Beach, Calif. As proof of that, he noted that Intel has made 10 follow-on investments on its previous investments.

The new investments include U.S.-based Joyent (cloud computing) and Active Storage (RAID storage systems for Apple users), Korea-based Crucialtec (optical modulation technology), Taiwan-based Gudeng Precision Industrial Co (semiconductor front-end equipment manufacturing), Japan-based V-cube (Web-based videoconferencing systems), China-based Phoenix New Media (Web information portal) and United Arab Emirates-based NeuString (telco pricing analytics software).

Sodhani said that Intel’s investments are aimed at its strategic goals of increasing demand for Intel products. Intel typically invests in first, second or third institutional rounds of startups. But Sodhani said the compay will also invest in seed stage and pre-IPO companies. Sodhani said more than 400 of the 1,050 companies that Intel has invested in since 1991 have had exits, either through IPOs or mergers. To date, Intel Capital has invested $219 million.

The follow-on investments by Intel include Argentina-based Vostu (social gaming), Israel-based Safend (endpoint security provider), China-based China Digital Video Limited (video equipment and network solution provider), U.S.- and China-based Verisilicon Holdings (design foundry), U.K.-based picoChip (baseband silicon for 3G femtocells and WiMAX infrastructure), India-based Financial Information Network & Operations Pvt. Ltd. (biometric smartcard enabled banking solutions), India-based Wortal, Inc (local entertainment events portal, Buzzintown.com) U.S.-based Sendmail (messaging infrastructure provider) and Zend Technologies (PHP Company). Intel Capital also recently announced a $50 million investment in Clearwire.

About 36 percent of Intel’s investments go into overseas companies. Here’s Intel’s descriptions of the seven companies that received new investments:

Joyent, Inc. (Sausalito, Calif.) provides cloud computing infrastructure and services to help customers rapidly and efficiently develop, deploy and manage Web applications and sites, and to improve datacenter performance. Joyent’s unique cloud computing technologies produce unprecedented performance, utilization rates, savings and security. Joyent will use the funding to accelerate its product development and for increased global expansion.

Active Storage (Los Angeles) provides a robust media storage platform for Apple-based infrastructures. The company’s hardware RAID solutions are aimed toward the business and creative industries, particularly video post-production, broadcast, publishing, education and science. The company intends to focus this round of funding on R&D and sales and marketing.

Crucialtec (Cheon-Ahn City, Korea) is a manufacturer of specialized input devices that utilize optical technology for mobile phones, smart phones and IPTV remote controllers. Crucialtec’s Optical Trackball enables users to enjoy the full internet experience with mobile products as they do with a PC. Intel Capital’s investment will help with the development of a new generation of mobile solutions for the global market by providing Crucialtec with additional working capital.

Gudeng Precision Industrial Co (Taipei, Taiwan) is a semiconductor front-end equipment manufacturer that helps customers enhance product yield and reduce production cost by providing customized products with innovative design concepts. Presently, Gudeng Precision is the world’s leading photomask and wafer handling total solution provider, and the company’s products are accepted and certificated by worldwide tier-one customers. Gudeng Precision will use the funding to expand business in China and enhance working capital.

V-Cube (Tokyo) develops and markets Web-based videoconferencing systems. Its flagship “nice to meet you” service enables one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many interactive real-time communications and on-demand services over the Internet. Currently, V-cube is the largest service provider in Japan for Web-delivered visual communications. The investment will be used to further optimize the service for access from mobile Internet devices and netbooks, and to stream high-quality video over WiMAX wireless broadband networks.

NeuString (Dubai, UAE) delivers predictive analytics software and consulting services to mobile network operators, helping companies to achieve greater financial performance. The NeuString Optiprizer software allows operators to optimize pricing, reduce leakage and get real-time reporting on operational metrics. The investment from Intel Capital will be used for sales and marketing build-out and new product development.

Phoenix New Media (Beijing) provides dedicated and comprehensive portals to well-educated Chinese audiences of over 100 million. The portals, which are available on internet and mobile platforms, provide news and information generated from in-depth interviews, commentary columns, and social networks. The key features offered by Phoenix New Media help address Chinese netizens’ diverse needs on information, expression, interaction and entertainment.