Avanade, a technology consulting firm which specializes in Microsoft technologies, has named Chris Miller to the position of chief information officer. Miller previously spent 16 years at Accenture where he served as senior director of the company's Collaboration 2.0 program. Founded in 2000, Avanade is a joint venture of Microsoft and Accenture.

Ignition Partners of Bellevue is participating in a new $23 million round of funding for San Francisco-based Cloudmark, a maker of anti-virus and anti-phising products. New investors in the round -- the first for the company since 2004 -- include Summit Partners and Nokia Growth Partners.

Zuckerberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells The Wall Street Journal that he's in no rush to go public even as the company could hit between $1.2 billion and $2 billion in revenue this year. The in-depth story also discusses an attempted $8 billion bid by Microsoft for the social networking powerhouse.

ThePlatform -- the Seattle unit of Comcast -- has released a new online video player which allows users to share video across a number of social networks and blogging tools. The video players are pre-integrated with social media sites such as Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Reddit and others.

Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital has participated in a $15 million investment in Mountain View, Calif.-based Audience, a semiconductor company that id developing noise suppression technology based on the human hearing system. Total funding in the company now stands at $75 million, with New Enterprise Associates, Tallwood Venture Capital and others also participating.

The Travel Channel is using digital storage technology from Isilon Systems to store 30,000 tape media library into one common online storage pool.

Datasphere plans to launch neighborhood and hyperlocal blogs in conjunction with Raycom Media, which operates 46 TV stations in 18 states. The Bellevue startup -- which raised $10.8 million in venture financing earlier this year --has a similar deal with Seattle-based Fisher Communications.

Shares of Dendreon are up nearly five percent Thursday after the Seattle biotech released positive results for its Provenge prostate cancer drug.

Digital marketing agency Ascentium said that it has hired David Blum as chief client officer. He previously worked at Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners and Avenue A | Razorfish's Seattle Web Development Group.

Venture capitalists are going green, with a new study from KPMG indicating that three quarters of the 200 VCs surveyed predict an increase in clean tech investing in 2010.

The bonuses of some executives at Sprint Nextel are now tied directly to WiMax, including the number of customers signing up for Clearwire's broadband wireless service, according to a report in the Kansas City Business Journal.

Redmond's Digipen Institute of Technology has been named to the No. 2 slot in Princeton Review's list of the 50 best undergraduate institutions in the U.S. and Canada to study game design.