Webaroo Technology has raised a $10 million round of funding for their product SMSGupShup, an SMS-based community site in India, according to Pluggd.in. The round, the third for the company, was co-led by Helion Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures.

SMSGupShup is a community site that enables users to join groups according to their interests and receive updates through their mobile phones via SMS. Very similar to Twitter, in that you can send and receive mobile updates to your friends, family and other group members (without the downtime). SMSGupShup has over 7 million subscribers and 300,000 publishers. They see a much lower proportion of web visitors as mobile phones in India outnumber computers almost 7 to 1.

While Twitter is mostly used for casual communications and notifications, SMSGupShup is used for services that are critical to a lot people. For example, fishermen can receive tide and weather information, and people can pass along emergency information to locals who don’t have televisions or computers. The site has seen a huge rise in growth, with the SMSGupShup community having grown from 1 million subscribers in January to the current 7 million.

Webaroo, originally launched as a service that allowed users to see cached web content when they are offline. Founders Rakesh Mathur (founder of Armedia, Junglee, Stratify) and Beerud Sheth (founder of Elance) presented their startup in July 2006 at the TechCrunch-sponsored Connected Innovators program at the Supernova conference. Two years later, they have changed their approach, focusing on their core offering, SMSGupShup. Webaroo also offers their original product Webaroo for Notebooks, a mobile client, a search utility called Search Radar, and a Wikipedia browsing tool called WikiSlice.

Helion Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures join previous investors Hummer Winblad Venture Partners ($1.5 million Series A), and Cambrian Ventures, Lloyd George Asian Plus Fund, and HTSG ($10 million Series B), bringing their total funding to $21.5 million.

Update: We’ve tracked down a source that says this is a premature announcement, and that the funding hasn’t closed yet.

Over 100 startups applied to present their companies at the TechCrunch-sponsored Connected Innovators program at the Supernova conference last week. Twelve were selected and had a chance to launch their new products to an audience of hundreds.

I drafted some real-time notes of the products demo’d and launched at event at CrunchNotes, and my more complete notes are below.

Attensa	Ether	lifeio
Netvibes	PostApp	PROTOMOBL
Sharpcast	SoonR	StumbleUpon
Vpod.tv	Webaroo	ZiXXo

Sharpcast

Palo Alto-based Sharpcast (TechCrunch posts here) has developed a platform to sync application data across your computers and mobile devices. Their first showcase application is Sharpcast Photos, which not only pushes photos from one device/computer to others, it also keeps them synced. Make a change on one and it pushes the changes to the other copies as well. There are lots of new applicaitions coming as well (documents, calendar, contacts). The company, which has raised $16.5 million in capital, will be application-agnostic so you don’t have to switch to using new software. Windows only today, Mac coming soon.

Webaroo

Webaroo, headquartered in Santa Clara is a new service that launched in April that allows PC users (no Mac support yet) users to access cached web content when they are offline. Webaroo offers pre-selected content, called “web packs”, and users can also cache whatever websites they would like to have access to. For more, see the TechCrunch Webaroo review here.

PostApp

PostApp is a new company that allows users to pull web services directly into their blog or other website without having the technical skills to use the API supplied by the service provider. With the explosion of widgets, PostApp may be the right application at the right time. They also secured $1.5 million in funding from Hummer Winblad. See the full profile here.

Vpod.tv

Vpod.tv was one of my favorite companies presenting at a conference in Spain last month. It is a video sharing site, similar to YouTube, but that focuses on transcoding to most video devices (ipod, PSP, etc.) and allowing users to download video to those devices. They also have an innovative approach to monetization. See the full TechCrunch post here, which also discusses their $5.1 million funding.

Ether

Ether officially launched at Supernova. They’ve created an “ebay for services” that allows people who wish to sell their time on the phone to do so. Place an Ether logo on your site – when someone clicks on it they can set up a time to speak with you according to the terms you’ve set (price, time of call, etc.). When your phone rings, there is a person on the other end who has already given their credit card information and is looking for your advice. Ether went into beta in March, and we covered the official launch here.

Lifeio

Bruce Spector from attap gave the Supernova audience a very early look at Lifeio, “the new life organizer”. Lifeio will combine instant messaging, email, calendaring, contacts, to-do lists, etc in a multipage Ajax site (from what I saw it looks like Lifeio is competing with Goowy, Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc.). Lifeio is also opensourcing the platform framework, called jitsu. Look for more details as the September launch date approaches, and sign up for the beta on the Lifeio homepage.

Other attap companies include Riffs, Buzzvote and personal DNA.

GearON

GearON, a mobile service launching this month from ProtoMobl, centers on your phone’s contact list and creates a social network around it to share photos, music, events and venue information. See the flash demo of GearON here to get a better idea of what it’s all about. Their launch will be covered on MobileCrunch as well as here at TechCrunch.

Soonr

Soonr is a new mobile platform that we’ve previously covered at TechCrunch. One of the most useful applications they’ve launched so far is the ability to use Skype on a normal cell phone (all you pay for are the Skype-out charges from Skype to your own cell, and you can then use Skype to call anyone on your Skype list). The Mac version of Soonr was announced at Supernova.

Zixxo

There are a few ways to look at Zixxo. For users they will deliver highly targeted local and national coupons to you based on whatever personal and demographic information you choose to share with them. For businesses, they are a very cost-effective way of reaching consumers who actually want to receive these coupons. For third parties there is a revenue share opportunity for bringing users and/or businesses to the network. Zixxo is still very young, but the core idea is strong. Look for a potential quick acquisition of this company if they start to get traction.

Attensa

Craig Barnes, the CEO of Attensa, talked about how his suite of RSS reader applications (mobile, outlook, online) analyze user behaviors to recommend specific content and help people deal with information overload. They’ve also just released a new version of Attensa for outlook. TechCrunch posts on Attensa are here.

Netvibes

Founder and Co-CEO Tariq Krim gave the audience an overview of London and Paris-based Netvibes, the Ajax home page that has seen tremendous growth and now has millions of passionate users. Netvibes now has an active community of independent developers creating modules for the site. Netvibes is on a roll. TechCrunch posts are here.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a social browsing application. Users download a browser toolbar and can find popular sites in different categories, vote on sites, etc. Stumbleupon has nearly 1 million registered users in 139 countries, who “stumble” 2.2 million sites er day. Advertisers can get their ads in front of a targeted audience for 5 cents an impression. I use this service.

For those of us who are still offline sometimes and want access to at least some web content (me) and running a Windows machine (not me), Santa Clara based Webaroo will be a useful service. It launched today.

Webaroo indexes the “highest quality” websites for content and creates topic based web packs for download. The content in those webpacks is stored offline on your computer and updated periodically. To test it, I fired up my old PC, installed the 5 MB application, and downloaded the World News and San Francisco web packs. You can also ask Webaroo to index specific websites for offline viewing. I added TechCrunch.

Then I unplugged from the net and tried it out. The webpacks were great, allowing me to search or browse content. I would love this on a plane. The specific website index didn’t work out so well – all formatting and CSS was stripped from the page and the site looked horrible. Still, the content was there.

Webaroo also allowed me to choose to index the content linked to from the site, so links from TechCrunch were also viewable. Great feature.

Webaroo is also available for mobile devices running the Windows Pocket PC operating system. And they announced their first deal with a PC manufacturer, Acer, to pre install Webaroo on new Acer laptops. More on Memeorandum.