Online ad network Traffic Marketplace has acquired Rocklin’s Livemarkets for an undisclosed sum. Livemarkets provides a technology that gives banner ads click-to-chat features and allows consumers to have a real time chat with a salesperson.

Freepath’s newest software is now available freely as part of a public beta. Freepath 2.0 allows users to create a multimedia presentation easily by building a playlist of media, documents, web content, and PowerPoint slides. Presenters can then show a fullscreen slideshow on one monitor or a projector while keeping the playlist open on another screen.

Freepath has also launched myFreepath, a service that allows Freepath users to share playlists and content with other Freepath users. John Stone, Freepath’s CEO says this makes it easier to share rich media presentations without requiring someone to “save, convert and embed files while dealing with multiple tabs on their desktop.” Freepath, he says, allows them to “select content from their Freepath playlist and share it on demand in its native format.”

Freepath 2.0 runs on Windows XP and Vista.

Freepath is located in Folsom and is funded with $1.5 million Velocity Venture Capital, Strategis Early Ventures, Sacramento Angels, and Sierra Angels.

Locally founded Engine Yard, a provider of Ruby on Rails hosting has closed a series B round of $15 million from New Enterprise Associates, Amazon.com, and existing investor Benchmark Capital. NEA led the round, and partner Peter Sonsini is joining Engine Yard’s board.

The money raised in this Series B will help Engine Yard develop a platform for cloud computing clusters and to continue funding the development of Rubinius and Merb, their open source projects.

In January 2008 the company raised a $3.5 million Series A round from Benchmark Capital. The quick turnaround to a Series B comes because the company wanted to raise money before they needed it, says Engine Yard’s CTO, Tom Mornini. The company’s board was concerned about the tightening market for venture capital, and decided to raise enough cash to carry them for some time.

The company is growing quickly. When we profiled Engine Yard in January of last year, CEO Lance Walley said they had 34 customers. Mornini tells me they currently host more than 400 companies and experienced 40% growth in the first quarter of this year.

With the new funding, Engine Yard plans to start deploying their managed hosting clusters on existing cloud hosting providers. Mornini wasn’t able to say which providers, but with Amazon as an investor, it’s safe to say that EC2 is a likely target.

The addition of Amazon as an investor is an interesting move. Thanks to Amazon’s cloud infrastructure services EC2 and S3, the company is widely seen as a leader in the emerging cloud computing market. They’ve been criticized, however, for not providing uptime guarantees, service level agreements, or managed services. This investment now ties them to a company that’s providing fully managed services for cloud deployments.

The size of Amazon’s investment was not disclosed and neither company is talking about any specific plans for working together.

The company currently hosts their clusters in traditional data centers, placing racks and server hardware in data centers around the country. Mornini says they plan to continue to use this infrastructure for clients that require physical hardware. Many clients, he says, are unwilling to move their data into the cloud, often citing security or regulatory concerns.

I attended Golden Capital Networks’ Yolo venture community launch yesterday in Davis. The event started with a startup seminar, aimed at helping new entrepreneurs understand what goes into starting a business and ended with a reception launching the venture community.

The seminar was an interesting format, with several area business school professors giving short lectures on different areas of entrepreneurship ranging from how to innovate to financial planning to pitching to investors. The presentations were so constricted by time, however, that few of the topics were explored in enough depth to be useful.

The general level of knowledge in the room was somewhat surprising. Most of the attendees are truly new at this. One gentleman began explaining his concept for a business that involved pooling money from lots of individuals to invest in new companies. He was obviously quite proud of his idea, and apparently unaware that the venture capital business isn’t a new concept.

There’s obviously a need for this sort of content. Few, if any, of the attendees appeared to have previous experience starting a business, so it was helpful to have a professor explain to them what a market feasibility study is and how it can help them. Unfortunately, since all of the presentations were from academic types, there was very little real-world experience. One presenter suggested that people get NDAs signed before they discuss their ideas with anyone.

At the Yolo Venture kickoff reception, I was struck by how many attendees were government types. At least half the people in the room were from economic development organizations. Talking to a few people about SacStarts, they seemed genuinely confused about how a startup community could exist without some sort of public assistance.

I’ll be attending the New California 100 on June 17th at UC Davis. This event put on by the Golden Capital Network will showcase Central Valley startups and bring entrepreneurs together with influential Central Valley companies and civic leaders.

The day will kick off with a panel on seed stage investing in the morning, and follow with sessions where local startups will show off their companies to panels of VCs and angel investors.

Registration is $195 for the full conference and $300 for the conference and dinner.

Earlier this year, SF based Skorman Productions began offering free adult education classes at Borders Books through a pilot program in three Sacramento area stores.

The classes were a great success, with great attendance, lots of variety in class types, and good customer feedback. Borders, however is discontinuing the program, saying that the classes were disruptive to their business. Employees were spending so much time preparing the store for classes that customer service suffered.

Yesterday's Open Coffee was the best yet. About a dozen people stopped by, including a number of new faces. Sargent's looks like it's going to stick for a while as a location. Nice central spot, plenty of nearby parking, and a great staff all contributed to the success.

If you aren't stopping by Tuesday mornings for coffee, you're missing out.

We're heading downtown, folks.

The coffee and staff are great at Habit, but the wifi is getting worse by the week. that's no environment to work in. So we're on the move.

For the next few weeks, let's try True Love Coffee on K St in downtown Sacramento.

Update: Well that was a bust. True Love doesn't open until later in the morning. Carson suggested we try Sargent's on Alhambra. So starting next week, that's where we'll be.

Local startup Time Tracking Buddy provides a tool that tracks what documents you work on to provide professionals with detailed reports on their billable time.

Time Tracking Buddy screen Using Time Tracking Buddy’s Windows software, you can associate files or folders with one of your billable clients. When you’re working on a document that you’ve added as a client file, the software keeps track of how long you’re actively using the file. You can then run reports tracking how much time was spent, helping you fill out invoices and timesheets.

The company has launched a private beta of their software. To join the beta, send an email to beta@timetrackingbuddy.com or visit their beta page.

I’ve been using the Mac software from competitor Rescue Time for several weeks. Rescue Time can track URLs that you visit and allows you to use tags to classify URLs and programs, sorting your usage by tag. After using it for a week, I found myself surprised by what I was really doing with my time each day. Rescue Time, however, is not able to distinguish individual documents. Any time spent in Microsoft Word is simply reported as “Microsoft Word” with no details about which document you’re using.

Time Tracking Buddy is able to report on which documents you’ve been working with, making it worth looking into for professionals who bill by the hour or for individuals working on multiple projects who would like to see where their time is really going.