Hipster raised $1 million in funding from these investors:
Mitch Kapor
Max Ventilla
David Tisch
Don Dodge
Paige Craig
Lightbank
Google Ventures
Charles River Ventures
Lerer Ventures
Ludlow Ventures
500 Startups
David G. Cohen

“These days anything of any value that’s sitting behind a log-in can and will be attacked,” said Song in an interview with AnnArbor.com. “We see ways to try to solve that problem at scale both for our small customers as well as our large customers.” Duo Security’s customers include the University of Michigan, Tumblr, and Toyota.

Currently Duo is based in the Tech Brewery startup business incubator in Ann Arbor, but Song believes that they are starting to outgrow its presence there. The company is currently weighing their options on how to handle their growth.

Duo Security was co-founded by chief technology officer Jon Oberheide. Oberheide recently finished his PhD in computer science from U of M.

The Scan web interface allows anyone to generate QR codes without prior development experience. Using Scan.me, businesses and individuals can create QR codes that represent their online presence. Scan’s closest competitor is believed to be QR code generator Paperlinks.

Nimble is a customer relationship management startup company that has raised $1 million in funding from Mark Cuban, Dharmesh Shah, Jason Calacanis, Don Dodge, Google Ventures, etc.  Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara believes that Nimble is a combination of Hootsuite, Yammer, and Salesforce.com.

Using Nimble, instead of having to cc: and bcc: their communications, Nimbler users will be able to use OAuth into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google to bring their contacts and messaging contacts into Nimble.  Nimble will notify you if one of your contacts starts using a different service.  Users will be able to control whether information should be visible or not by setting Nimble defaults to private.

Ferrara will be using the funding to expand their 20 person team and make hire developers and marketers.  About 25,000 customers have joined Nimble since launched in September.

Miso also partnered with cable companies to create second screen experiences. Miso has partnerships in place with DIRECTV and AT&T U-Verse to allow the app communicate with TV receivers to find out what is on TV at any given moment and where they are in the show.

Bain Capital also previously invested in Stamped as part of the Series A investment. Stamped is based in New York. Stamped aims to solve the current problem that recommendation companies have. For example if you see a 3 star rating from 70 strangers, what does that mean? That is the current weakness that recommendation services have.

You can download the app from the App Store now [iTunes link]

[VentureBeat]

The Nest Learning Thermostat uses artificial intelligence to report when to turn down the heat and when to increase the air conditioner so that you don’t waste money. You can also communicate with the Nest Learning Thermostat using your mobile device.

Fadell thought of the the thermostat idea when he was building a green home in Tahoe. He was very involved in the design of the house and wanted it to be as beautiful as the products he worked on at Apple. When the architects showed him the option for thermostats, Fadell thought all of them were ugly.

“What was wrong with them?” said Fadell in an interview with Wired. “They were ugly. They were confusing. They were incredibly expensive. They didn’t have half the features you would expect for a modern thing. None of them were connected, so they didn’t talk to each other. I wasn’t able to remotely control them. In Tahoe, you want to be able check on the temperature of the house or turn it on before you get there. Because it’s really cold in the winter. I couldn’t do any of that, and I was like, Why is this?”

Thermostats had not changed much in many decades and the most popular thermostat was the Honeywell Round. The Round was designed by Henry Dreyfus in 1953.

“Thermostats are made by very large companies with no incentive to innovate,” said Fadell. “Their customers are contractors or HVAC [heating, ventilation, and air conditioning] wholesalers, not consumers. So why spend to make them better? It’s a good business.” Fadell estimated there are about 100 million homes in the U.S. and each one has between one and two thermostats, which means that there is about 150 million thermostats in homes out there. In commercial spaces, there is about another 100 million thermostats. And every year 10 million thermostats are sold in residential spaces.

One of the first engineers that Nest Labs hired was a cell phone engineer named Shige Honjo, a program manager for the iPhone. “Think of all the air conditioning that runs in empty houses — it wastes hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and that’s Alabama alone!” said Fadell when he was pitching another early employee named David Sloo.

Some of the investors in Nest includes Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Intertrust, and Generation Investment Management. Through Generation Investment, Al Gore is an investor in Nest Labs. Gore was inspired by a demo that Fadell gave at TED.

Rocket Lawyer has raised $18.5 million in new funding for their online legal services. The funding comes from Google Ventures, August Capital and Investor Growth Capital. Founder Charles Moore expects to reach 20 million users by the end of this year. [TechCrunch]

[TechCrunch]

Read It Later has 3.5 million registered users, but this number also includes users that are inactive. Read It Later is seeing about 10,000 downloads per day and over 250 applications have integrated Read It Later’s APIs.