The Big Picture

Mobile-phone manufacturers face pressure to shrink the size of cellphones while building larger screens that can display video. Light Blue Optics Ltd., a start-up in Cambridge, England, may have an answer with technology that could one day project clear and vivid images from a mobile device onto a wall or table.

Light Blue Optics is developing miniature laser-projection systems that project full-color, high-quality video images onto flat or curved surfaces. The technology could be attractive for mobile-phone makers if Light Blue can figure out a way to further reduce the size of its projection systems, which currently are about the size of a deck of cards.

Investment firms Earlybird Venture Capital and Capital-E led a $26 million Series A round of funding for Light Blue this month, to help it finish development and market its technology to the consumer-electronics, advertising and automotive industries. Light Blue signed a deal earlier this year with Thales SA, the French aerospace engineering group, to develop displays for aircraft cockpits.

A Game Plan

Fifth-graders typically have vast imaginations, but rarely do their dreams involve starting a technology company. That’s what 11-year-old Arjun Mehta did with his father, Karl, when the boy couldn’t find a satisfactory platform to trade virtual goods obtained in multiplayer online games.

Karl Mehta, a software engineer, set out last year to build such a platform, and this year the Mehtas started PlaySpan Inc., Santa Clara, Calif., to sell their idea to game developers. PlaySpan says its technology lets users trade virtual items within a game, instead of conducting that business on sites outside the game.

Last month, PlaySpan raised $6.5 million in Series A funding led by Easton Capital Investment Group to continue developing the technology, which PlaySpan says will soon serve as a trading platform for seven undisclosed game titles.

Inspector Gadget

Internet advertising networks have proved to be big-money propositions, especially in the wake of Yahoo Inc.’s recent deal to acquire online-advertising company BlueLithium Inc. and Google Inc.’s agreement to buy DoubleClick Inc. One start-up, NebuAd Inc., claims it has an innovative approach to online-ad targeting.

The company, based in Redwood City, Calif., is developing an ad network that draws data from a device placed with an Internet-service provider. The device uses a technology called deep packet inspection that allows NebuAd to analyze people’s online activity — such as which categories of Web sites users visit through search engines or on their own, what they type into search engines and how long they spend on certain sites. NebuAd says it uses this data to build profiles for Web surfers’ IP addresses — the series of numbers that identify a computer, but not the user, connected to the Internet. It plans to sell the profiles to ad agencies and Web-site publishers, which, it says, won’t be able to link the data back to an individual. Internet-service providers must disclose to users that their activities are being tracked.

Last month, Sierra Ventures led a $20.5 million Series B financing round for NebuAd to continue building the product and expand its sales team. NebuAd plans a full launch of the product in November.

The Electric Company

The web of power lines crisscrossing the U.S. may supply more than electricity if some utilities and technology companies have their way. For years they’ve talked about bringing broadband Internet services into every home through ordinary electrical outlets, but regulatory and financial hurdles have slowed their progress.

Asoka USA Corp. makes the adapters needed to transform electrical outlets into broadband-network connections. The six-year-old start-up recently announced a $7 million Series A round of funding co-led by Storm Ventures and Venrock.

Last year, the Foster City, Calif., company generated $6 million in revenue by selling its adapters to consumers through telecom carriers including AT&T Inc., BCE Inc. and Comcast Corp. Asoka’s adapters, powered by chips made by Intellon Corp., plug into a standard electrical outlet and can transmit data at speeds of up to 85 megabits per second. Newer equipment will transmit at 200 megabits per second, enough to handle the bandwidth demands of high-definition television and digital video.

–Compiled by Scott Austin, editor of VentureWire, a newsletter published by Dow Jones & Co. (online at VentureWire.com), based on contributions from VentureWire reporters Scott Denne and Ty McMahan. Mr. Austin can be reached at scott.austin@dowjones.com.

–online.wsj