CaptureToCloud Starts ?Social Workspace? As It Gets New Capital

CaptureToCloud, a year-old web developer, announced a new social workspace for all kinds of digital content in the Cloud that's tightly integrated with services from Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), the No. 1 search engine.

The San Jose, Calif.-based site also said it had raised $4.7 million in new venture capital from Acero Capital, of Menlo Park, Calif., which has invested about $150 million so far in information and clean technologies.

We want people to be able to work with content, said Ramon Nunez, 47, CEO of CaptureToCloud. We want document-level collaboration to be content collaboration.

Aside from working with Google Apps and Google Chrome, users of the initially free service can link to files they may have already stored in Dropbox, add digital content, then share or collaborate on it with partners.

The CaptureToCloud innovation is in not requiring file transfer, so sharing is speeded, Nunez said. The target market is small business as well as individuals, he said.

Nunez, former CEO of Ikos Systems before its acquisition by design software giant Mentor Graphics (Nasdaq: MENT) and CEO of private MetaLINCS before it was acquired by storage giant Seagate Technology (Nasdaq: STX), said the company had been previously bootstrapped by some of its principals.

CaptureToCloud is also compatible with Cloud offerings from Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), the world's biggest software company, he said. Yammer, the social network company acquired by Microsoft last month, had used the workspace tools.

The company also announced an advisory board whose members include Jay Renley, Google's director of America enterprise sales; Ken Rudin, head of analytics at Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), the No. 1 social networking site, and Steve Apfelberg, chief marketing officer for private Skire, which handles Cloud-based content for capital construction projects.

For $5 a month, the company will offer a premium service to allow more content to be shared, Nunez said. While none of its technology has been patented, he's identified targets for possible protection later this year.