We are very excited that OnMedia has just announced Aster as one of the winners of the AlwaysOn OnMedia 100, a listing of the top 100 private, emerging technology companies in the advertising, publishing, marketing, branding and PR spaces. As a technology enabler for many media clients like MySpace, Invite Media, aCerno, Aggregate Knowledge (and others soon to be announced), we understand the pressures that media faces today. Our customers are a great testament to the fact that Aster has the best solution to meet the rapidly changing needs of media, to keep up with the huge amounts of data they are managing for themselves and their end clients. More info on Aster’s win here.

We announced today that we have raised $12M in our Series B funding.

We’re thrilled that our vision and message have resonated so well in these times when investors have become extremely selective. And frankly that is because our message is resonating so well with our customers: within 4 months of publicly launching the company in May 2008, our customer base had grown to double digits with several of our customers deploying/considering a second production system.

The inside story is that we had scheduled our first meetings to raise Series B for the week of October 5. It turned out to be the week of a perfect financial storm. The week began with Iceland’s currency dropping 30% against the Euro. On October 6, several European governments stepped up to guarantee bank deposits. On October 7, as Iceland and Russia exchanged Yes and No statements on a Euro 4B loan, Sequoia Capital gathered its portfolio CEOs in an auditorium and warned them (and by the power and reach of the Web, every venture capitalist, entrepreneur, executive and journalist) that the time had come to “Get Real or Go Home”. By October 10, the cost of short-term credit had spiraled up and as a result DJI dove to 8,451 from 9,955 at the start of the week, its lowest point in the previous 5 years.

Tasso and I still went to our scheduled meetings to present Aster’s opportunity and our customer adoption, and got invited back. In the next 5 weeks, as the financial markets continued their drop off a cliff, we continued to receive strong interest for investing that matured with multiple term-sheets for us to consider.

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When I can afford a multi-week break, I head home to India. It is really impressive how home refreshes and recharges a person as nothing else does.

India has a burdgeoning media and communications industry. The movie industry is well-known and huge, but in truth the story of media in India in the last decade has been that of television coming of age. Internet as a media channel is still in its infancy here. Even in communications, Internet’s growth is dwarfed substantially by the growth of mobile networks.

The power of media in shaping conversations and spreading awareness really hit home in two separate anecdotes.

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