Venture capitalists back cloud technology

SAN FRANCISCO. US: In the more than three years since the term "cloud computing" was coined at the first Cloud Expo, venture capitalists have backed a range of companies that have developed virtualized computing resources to deliver software and information on-demand.

And it appears to be an investment opportunity that is growing.

The Sand Hill Group, a software consulting and angel investment, reported earlier this month that cloud computing represents one of the largest new investment opportunities on the horizon.

In the shadow of the latest Cloud Expo in New York City earlier this week, the latest cloud company to raise financing is 3Crowd Technologies, which raised more than $6.6 million from Canaan Partners and Storm Ventures.

The startup previously raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding from Storm Ventures, Greenwich Technology Associates and individual investors Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson (Adelson recently stepped down as CEO of Digg, replaced by Rose).

3Crowd has developed a product called CrowdDirector, which helps to give enterprises more control over content delivery and cloud services. It lets its users control multiple services at once. The goal, according to Barrett Lyon, CEO of the San Mateo, California-based company, is to ultimately improve the economics of delivering large amounts of data across the Web such as videos and audio.

3Crowd is the latest startup in the space for Lyon, who was previously co-founder at BitGravity, a video platform for delivering videos and live streams.

Of 3Crowd, Lyon said the company is on "a journey which will disrupt and define a new era of Internet data delivery."