LocBox is a Bay-area startup announcing funding on Wednesday with the goal of bringing modern marketing practices to small businesses in service industries, making it easy for store owners and entrepreneurs to send updates via social media and manage brand pages across the web. Because when it comes to digital marketing, the divide exists as well. A software startup might have no  problem navigating a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account, but a local hair salon owner might need more help.

LocBox, which launched about a year ago, raised a $5.1 Series A funding round a few months ago from InterWest Partners, Accel Partners, Google Ventures and 500 Startups, following a seed round they raised last year.  Keval Desai, a partner with InterWest and former product director at Google and VP of product at Digg, will join LocBox’s Board of Directors. They also recieved funding from notable angel investors, like Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, founders of Kosmix (see disclosure below.)

CEO Saumil Mehta began working on LocBox after leaving his position as the director of product at Kosmix, right before it was acquired by WalMart. Mehta began talking to local businesses during the AngelPad winter 2011 class, and he said he soon realized the demand for a simple, inexpensive hub for a company’s entire marketing campaign.

“It was very clear to me that there was a big gaping hole,” he said.

LocBox, which has graduated pricing depending on the size and scope of the company, gives users a dashboard from which they can publish updates to feeds like Twitter or Facebook, send out mass emails and texts, and publish Groupon-esque daily deals with a simple payment platform. Mehta said the product already has good traction, and their customers number in the “low to mid-hundreds in terms of actual customers,” and they’ve run about 2,000 campaigns for those clients. Mehta said the new funding will be used to grow the business, which relies mainly on a sales staff to reach out to potential clients.

Disclosure: Venky Harianrayan and Anand Rajaraman are both investors in Giga Omni Media, the parent company of this blog.

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Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, co-founders of the social media startup Kosmix, have announced that they’re leaving WalmartLabs, where they led the San Bruno innovation and data arm of the massive public company.

As reported by Forbes, the two had been with the retail giant for about a year. They founded Kosmix in 2005, and it was acquired by Wal-Mart in 2011. The site provides a dashboard for users to aggregate social media and information about a particular topic, making it well-suited for Wal-Mart’s innovation lab focused on e-commerce. Their previous startup, Junglee, was purchased by Amazon in 1998 for $250 million.

Wal-Mart has used WalmartLabs as a way to analyze large sets of data and understand the buying habits of its customers, which Matthew Ingram wrote about for GigaOM in September.

At GigaOM’s RoadMap event in November, Harinarayan explained the goal behind WalmartLabs:

At Walmart Labs, we’re building a big and fast data group to combine store data with social media data in some meaningful way. For example, a Wal-Mart buyer in Arkansas doesn’t know the optimal time to stock football merchandise in Wisconsin. That buyer can look to the social streams to see when people in that region are tweeting about football or their favorite teams. Monitoring social media can even help Wal-Mart find breakout products.

Harinarayan and Rajaraman said in a statement that they will take time off from the industry after leaving WalmartLabs.

Disclosure: Venky Harianrayan and Anand Rajaraman are both investors in Giga Omni Media, the parent company of this blog.

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