Often, startups will issue a stuffy press release when announcing their venture rounds. But in the case of Etsy – an online platform to buy and sell handmade goods – there is actually a detailed blog post from the co-founder Robert Kalin, which even includes a video.

In all, the company raised $27 million in a venture round. The investors include Union Square Ventures, Hubert Burda Media and Accel Partners. In fact, Accel Partners' Jim Breyer is taking a board seat (keep in mind that he invested in Facebook in the early stages).

Kalin goes into lots of detail on the "use of proceeds." Etsy is going to invest about $5 million in hardware and servers, and there will be big improvements in the payment processing system, which is on par with Amazon.com's (NASDAQ: AMZN). Oh, and the company wants to provide Google-like (NASDAQ: GOOG) search functionality.

Even without such things, Etsy is getting lots of traction. The community has more than 650,000 members and there are more than 120,000 sellers.

And as seen with its funding press release – which is one of the most transparent I've ever seen -- Etsy certainly takes the concept of "community" very seriously.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

In light of the mega deals from Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), IBM (NYSE: IBM), and SAP (NYSE: SAP), the buzz is that business software is dead. How can small- and mid-sized players compete?

Well, I think there's still life in the sector. Take a look at the on-demand operators, such as Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) and NetSuite. They are disrupting existing markets – and growing at break-neck speeds.

We are also seeing some new-fangled Web 2.0 players enter the market. Take Huddle.net, which announced a venture capital round of $4 million (the investor is Eden Ventures).

Basically, the company realizes that the MySpace/Facebook generations want a different approach to software. As a result, Huddle.net has a cool system that allows for online workspaces, which even allow for social networking.

True, I know many think that this is a fad. Ironically enough, that's probably good news for Huddle.net. It allows the company to build out its offerings and learn form customer interactions.

In fact, for the past six months, Huddle.net has seen 25% growth in new users per month.

If you want to check out other cool venture capital deals, visit DealProfiles.com.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.