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Last year, GetGlue cleared the two-million-user mark, and just a few weeks ago it announced a bunch of new app updates to allow for easier ways to interact with other users, find social conversations users want and check into content. Right, check into content — GetGlue allows users to check into TV shows, movies, books and music, and to view recommendations, communicate with other users, pick up rewards and discounts, and share what they’re watching or listening to or reading, both in GetGlue itself and across other social networks.

The company said the funding will go towards technology development and new hires: developers, a designer, an engineer, a senior product manager and a marketing manager.

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Unruly plans to use the funds to expand globally — it already has offices in London, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Sydney, and in a phone conversation today, CEO Scott Button cited Miami and Toronto as a couple of other cities the company’s eyeing. In general, he said, Unruly’s looking to reach into continents it hasn’t reached before. The company has “great relationships in North America and Europe, but not [Asia-Pacific],” he explained. “It looks very different over there,” because of a social media landscape that isn’t dominated by Facebook hegemony. Being present in varied geographical locations is important, he said, because “we’ll build up local media relationships on the ground. Our model is to hire teams that are embedded locally.”

Founded in 2006, Unruly Media has executed over 1,400 video ad campaigns, and its “greatest hits” roll boasts the Old Spice “Man Your Man Could Smell Like,”  the T-Mobile “Life’s for Sharing,” the Coca-Cola “Happiness Factory” and the Evian “Roller Babies” campaigns. The company claims 2.7 billion views in 2o10 and over 8 billion in 2011, and it projects 20 billion in 2012. That’s a lot of visibility, but because of the nature of its business, a lot of people probably didn’t hear the company’s name at all until earlier this week, when it was implicated in what we could call the Google Chrometroversy. In a sentence or two, it’s like this: On Monday, while most nine-to-fivers were out of the office, SEO Book and Search Engine Land pointed out a Google search for “Google Chrome” pulled up over 400 pages of content bearing the phrase “this post is sponsored by Google” — disclosure that Google requires for any sponsored posts — and that one of them failed to include a required “do not follow” link back to Google Chrome. Turns out digital media agency Essence Digital was working with Google on a Chrome video ad, and Essence brought in Unruly to carry out the campaign. The whole Chrometroversy hinged on the fact that Google had penalized other companies — including J.C. Penney, Forbes, Overstock and BeatThatQuote.com, a company Google owned and subsequently banned – for improper disclosure. And Unruly naturally caught some of the heat. It wasn’t the best timing for a black eye, as today’s funding announcement demonstrated. But Button was adamant that Google had acted properly, Unruly had acted properly and that the rumblings would die down shortly. “If it were any other brand, there would be no story here,” Button said. “The narrative is, ‘Will they, won’t they?’ Well, they have. Google’s behavior here has been exemplary.” In fact, Google went ahead and demoted Chrome’s PageRank for 60 days. And criticism of any links in the video ads, Button said, is unwarranted. “Because [the video] is embedded in Javascript, it’s completely benign.

“It’s really unfortunate,” Button said of the rogue blogger’s failure to insert a “do not follow” link. “We should have caught it through manual vetting.” As it is, he said, Unruly’s platform is set to scan websites for these kinds of issues. “That’s one of the reasons our platform is so strong and so safe,” he said. “We’ve always been on the leading edge of best practice, and best practice evolves constantly.”

In retrospect, it appears the Chrome blog flap didn’t indicate a broader, systemic issue, and as we’d mentioned earlier, it’s crummy timing for Unruly to implicated just as the company was set to announce its plans for global expansion. In this case, the only thing unruly about the video ad platform was its name.

• Denver, Colo. pay-per-click advertising marketplace Trada has evidently raised $9 million in funding. While Trada hasn’t announced yet, Colorado publication Daily Camera said it had gleaned that figure from documents the company had filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

• Mashable and Global Point Research are using Twitter to try to predict the outcome of the Iowa Republican caucus. Looking at data collected from “positive sentiment on Twitter” last week, the study points to a huge surge in Rick Santorum support… kind of like the one the media’s talking about right now. Hmm…

• According to a recent survey from Poll Position, 56 percent of Americans don’t think we’ll ever have a paperless society. However, 20 percent were either undecided or had no opinion, which seems like a strangely large slice of the pie…  Perhaps we’re biased, but does 56 percent seem a little high to all of you?

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Shortly after Outbrain’s news hit, we received a tap on the shoulder from the folks at nRelate, who pointed out they’re doing pretty much the same as Outbrain and reporting a comparable click-through rate (5.7 percent) only with less funding — yet with more publishers at the same time. “We raised $500,000. That’s less than 1 percent of [Outbrain],” nRelate founder Neil Mody explained in a recent phone conversation. “But we have about one-tenth of their impressions.” That’s close to 450 million impressions per month, he clarified. Since we spoke with Mody, his company’s released some more impressive figures: Its year-end report for 2011 showed 994 percent growth in its active sites (up to roughly 17,500, as of the Dec. 2o report), and over 1,000 percent growth in click-throughs, widget impressions, impressions per second and clicks per second.

The difference is that Outbrain works with big-time media (CNN, MSNBC, Reuters U.K., Newsweek, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, USA Today, Fox News, Sky News, Hearst, Future Publishing, Hachette Filipacchi Media, Mashable and AllThingsD and so on), while nRelate started out focused on blogs, helping pretty much any takers syndicate their content. It’s a market where, in terms of sheer dollars, the stakes are lower, but there actually are stakes. WooThemes, creators of WordPress themes, polled WordPress users recently and found that 77 percent of respondents made money off of their sites and 31 percent earn a living off of them. (The survey’s results are served up in a detailed infographic.) The money’s coming from somewhere, even for those using a free blogging platform like WordPress.

“The really big websites have the technology and the money,” Mody explained, “but everybody’s valuable. What I found myself doing on the web was reading smaller publications — mostly bloggers’ content.” And although there’s a different kind of exchange going on here than there is in standard advertising — publishers are essentially advertising their content via their peers (“I ask people, ‘What’s the last ad you remember from searching the web?,’” Mody said. “No one has ever given me an answer. But do you remember the content you saw in the last day?”) — there are implications for the ad industry at large. Mody explained his company is getting interest from larger publishers now — Conde Nast already uses it — because, as he put it, “I think what they like about our network is that we’re hitting these niche sites. They’re getting a type of user that’s not just reading those mainstream sites. It’s a whole different level of engagement.”

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That’s a crazy amount of growth for a company most people outside the tech world have never heard of, but Outbrain’s presence is extremely broad. The company creates widgets that online publishers can add to the bottom or side of a post, recommending other content the reader might want to check out. There’s a set of links to other pages within the same site, and there’s a set of off-site links (paid for by Outbrain’s buyers, and publishers can share some of that revenue when they send their readers to another site). What Outbrain does is popular both as technology and as a business model, and today its widgets are found on 3 billion pages throughout the internet, building up an estimated 23 billion links per month. You’ve seen Outbrain’s work on the websites of CNN, MSNBC, Reuters U.K., Newsweek, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, USA Today, Fox News, Sky News, Hearst, Future Publishing, Hachette Filipacchi Media, Mashable and AllThingsD, among others.

At the same time, Outbrain announced Index Ventures partner Dominique Vidal would be joining the Outbrain board of directors. In the past, Vidal’s been the CEO of Yahoo! Europe, and he co-founded the retail price comparison search engine Kelkoo.

It’s been a good day or so for multi-million dollar funding. For one thing, mobile local advertising network xAd announced $9 million in funding yesterday, led by Emergence Capital Partners, and with an assist  from Silicon Valley Bank and existing investors SoftBank Capital and Palisades Ventures. For another, hyperlocal data company PlaceIQ announced it had raised $4.2 million to build up its index of location profiles,  with U.S. Venture Partners in the lead, and Valhalla Partners joining prior investors IA Ventures and kbs+p Ventures. Something to keep in mind if you’re still looking for something to give that special someone — er, startup — this holiday.

We’ve covered BlueCava extensively, but once more, with feeling — originally developed as a piracy deterrent for the music industry, BlueCava’s device fingerprinting gathers non-personal data (IP address, browser version, time zone, installed fonts, browser plug-ins, etc.) shared between browser and publisher, encrypts it, analyzes it to determine its “reputation” and then gives it a unique ID that can be used for targeted advertising (including adding a device ID to consumer data from first parties) and fraud prevention.

Even if a user switches browsers or dump his/her cookies, BlueCava’s system can figure out it’s the same device and update its records. In addition, BlueCava manages the sale of behavioral and other data (such as financial transaction data for preventing fraud) associated with device IDs on its Reputation Exchange. If you’re freaked out about this, here’s a link to manage your preferences, which include opting out completely.

I’ve written a few times that device fingerprinting could prove to be a simplified tool for bringing transparency to data transfer agreements between pubs and consumers — basically, the long-heralded opt-in system.

Think about it this way — a pub could corner off some of its content and tell users they have to pay with either cold hard cash or data for advertising purposes. For those that choose the data route (which would probably be the majority — pay money for online content? HA!), a company like BlueCava would identify the device and associate an ID with it. Tracking cookies for behavioral targeting? Where we’re going, we don’t need tracking cookies. It’s arguable that the device IDs could come in quite handy for internal analytics as well.

Digiday’s Jack Marshall had an interesting piece recently talking about how the lack of cookies for mobile devices has turned targeters to UDIDs, but a) Apple is cutting off that spring and b) device fingerprinting can offer a lot more consumer insight. Online, device fingerprinting might also prove a far more efficient way of handling online data for pubs, brands and consumers. BlueCava’s investors seem to think so.

“BlueCava’s technology platform is opening up new and exciting ways for brands and publishers to more smartly interact with their customers online,” commented Marsh Marshall, managing director of Putney Capital and new member of BlueCava’s board.

LocalResponse aggregates actual check-ins from location-based social networks such as Foursquare with implicit check-ins based on natural language processing of shared activities and geo-location tags. Brands can then reach out to their “checking-in” consumers through the platform with offers, discounts, etc. in real-time over Twitter. The company reports an average click-through rate of 40%.

“We’re super excited to have investors who believe, in making the holy grail of location-based advertising come true,” commented CEO and cofounder Nihal Mehta, who we profiled last year. “Tweet that you’re excited to watch X-Factor, and don’t be surprised to see an X-Factor ad on a digital billboard near you. Take a picture at a Yankees game and get an offer for a free beer from a nearby vendor. Check-in to a local retailer, and get an offer from them unlocking their latest promotion. It’s all on the table now.”

More than 40 major brands have used LocalResponse’s service, including Coca-Cola, General Motors and Verizon. In addition, the LocalResponse platform serves as a resource for merchants to identify and communicate with their best customers and social influencers.

E-commerce company Rearden Commerce pulled in $133 million in financing from existing investors American Express and JPMorgan Chase, as well as rookie Citi. Rearden will put the funds toward building out its Deem e-commerce platform. In addition, the company acquired HomeRun.com, a group-buying service as well as a white-label deal platform for consumer websites.

Paid search pro Adchemy raised $61 million Series E round of funding led by Microsoft with additional participation from August Capital and Mayfield Fund. In addition, Microsoft Advertising will begin deploying Adchemy’s IntentMap for Microsoft adCenter customers. Adchemy will use the funding to expand its 160-person staff with 50 t0 8o more employees. Last September we covered the company’s public launch of its WordMap product.

JustFabulous brought its funding total to $62 million with a Series A round of funding led by Gilt Group investor Matrix Partners. The online fashion retail platform will put the monies toward its subscription e-commerce business, which Tricia Duryee of All Things D explains in greater detail.

Consumer data management platform Krux Digital has raised $11 million in a Series B round led by Accel Partners and IDG Ventures. Krux plans to build out its engineering and sales teams in the Bay Area and New York City as well as to accelerate the expansion of its European business.

Creative customization platform Sailthru is $8 million richer thanks to a Series A round of financing led by RRE Venutures with additional participation from AOL Ventures, DFJ Gotham Ventures, Hatteras Funds, Lerer Ventures, Pilot Group, and Thrive Capital. The company will use the cash to boost its presence in the e-commerce, flash sales and publisher markets. Its technology enables brands and marketers to automatically send personalized content to users through email, websites and advertising channels (think display).

Apparently I wasn’t the only one excited — SoftBank Capital and Fairhaven Capital just led a $6 million in a Series A round of funding for CrowdTwist, which included participation from kbs+p Ventures, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and several individual investors.

Working with brands such as JCPenney and LiveNation, CrowdTwist reports boosting average time on site by 250%, average page views per visit by 450% and average purchase size by over 30%. In addition, the company touts its analytics, which enable clients to identify their chief cross-platform influencers as well and identify audience segments most receptive to marketing.

Though the company’s roots are in marketing street teams, CrowdTwist is one of many interesting digital advertising platforms I’ve run into lately that get serious results from incentivizing user action (SocialVibe, Live Gamer and e-Miles come immediately to mind). When we met, Fain stressed that virtual rewards were not payoff enough to get substantial consumer engagement through gamification and loyalty strategies — they must have tangible rewards.

“Virtual goods won’t sustain an audience,” he said. “Rewards in a loyalty program have to tie back into reality.”

I heard some very different views at the Gamification Summit last week — stay tuned.

Through its ApTimizer offering, Apsalar increased app developer revenue by delivering targeted offers and product recommendations. In addition, Apsalar offers publishers two free mobile analytics products: ApScience turns app user data into actionable knowledge and integrates targeting and optimization tools to boost revenue, while ApFeedback supplies in-app surveys for improving user experience.

In addition to boosting sales and marketing efforts, Apsalar is expanding its team, first by naming Anton Commissaris chief revenue officer. The 15-year veteran of Internet, mobile and software initiatives was a founding member of Mint.com’s executive team and, following Inuit’s acquisition of Mint.com, rose to the position of director of revenue and business development for Inuit’s Consumer Group.