$200M in Funding for Coupons.com; Guilty Plea in Insider Trading Case

Every week, Mountain View makes news with technology developments, discoveries and sometimes controversies.

Today, Mountain View Patch brings you a weekly “Bits and Bytes” column, where we’ll relay the past week’s news highlights from our backyard giants, start-ups and small businesses alike.

Mountain View-based Coupons.com has raised an additional $200 million in financing, half of which will be used to grow the company and hire new staff. The company currently has 300 employees in Silicon Valley and hopes to hire 100 people over the next six months. New sales offices are planned in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Google announced yesterday that they have developed the largest corporate electronic vehicle charging infrastructure in the country. The company currently has over 200 chargers for electronic vehicles and will add another 250 in the near future. The infrastructure supports the Gfleet, a car sharing program for Google employees, and is also available to those Google employees who have an electric vehicle of their own.

The social entertainment portal IMVU, Inc. will move its headquarters from Palo Alto to Mountain View to accommodate the growth of their business. The company has doubled in size since the beginning of 2010, and currently has over 120 employees. IMVU members use 3D avatars to play games and socialize online.

Polyvore, a Mountain View-based company that allows users to create fashion collages online, is seeing record traffic to its website and has achieved profitability. The website boasts 10 million unique visitors per month and hopes to become the big name in social commerce platforms for fashion.

Don Ching Trang Chu, formerly a consultant for Mountain View-based Primary Global Research LLC, has pleaded guilty for conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. As in December, the charges against Chu related to insider information that was shared in violation of SEC regulations.