Betting that tracking consumers' behavior online will translate into big bucks, Commonwealth Capital Ventures led a hefty $15 million Series B round in Me.dium Inc., a company that monitors Web behavior and hooks up people with similar online habits. This latest round raises the one-year-old startup's total funding to $20 million. Paypal Inc. founder Elon Musk was the original investor. Existing investors Spark Capital, Appian Ventures and Mobius Venture Capital Inc. managing director Brad Feld also participated in this funding round.

The Me.dium downloadable plug-in for the FireFox browser may not seem like much today. Once you install the program, it tracks where you go online and lets you communicate with other people who have also downloaded the plug-in and are on the same Web sites you're visiting. Me.dium has only15,000 users, and the odds of running into them are small, says VentureBeat's Matt Marshall, who spent two hours browsing with Me.dium and reports encountering only two other users.

But advertisers are likely to pay well for the data Me.dium collects; its no wonder Google Inc. and others are gathering the same kind of data. Me.dium just makes it potentially more fun for those being tracked. —Mary Kathleen Flynn

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