Listening to Zynga CTO of Infrastructure Allan Leinwand talk about his company’s hybrid cloud, data center managers learned what they had suspected all along: Used at scale, the public cloud is no bargain.

Your Facebook or LinkedIn account doesn’t have a phone number, but one day it might if Tyntec has anything to say about it. The German company wants to build a virtual mobile phone into any Web 2.0 service whose primary mission is interpersonal networking. By doing so Tyntec can bridge the gap between two flourishing yet largely disconnected worlds: over-the-top IP communications and mobile.

I came to Seattle for a two-week reporting assignment with little idea of what exactly I should cover. Sure, there are the obvious players: Microsoft, Amazon, Cheezburger, and Valve. But rather than focus solely on the history of Microsoft and Amazon, there’s also a pressing need to define the startup experience in Seattle. What makes Seattle’s tech scene tick? What about this city doesn’t receive enough press coverage? What is Seattle’s id?

SEOmoz, a company that tackles search engine optimization for businesses, has raised $18 million in funding.

SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin has been down this path before, as detailed in his extensive account of the company’s unsuccessful attempt to raise a large round of venture capital funding last year. But this time, with a different investor, the deal has actually closed.

Having been burned by venture capitalists before, Rand Fishkin wasn’t sure he wanted to raise money from them again.

One of several start-ups in recent years to see backup storage as fertile ground to grow a business, Symform Inc. said it has secured $8 million in a quick Series B round.

Alternative cloud storage startup Symform has raised $11 million to store your files in tiny fragments on hard drives all over the world.

Cloud storage and backup service Symform has raised $11 million led by WestRiver Capital, with participation from existing investors OVP and Longworth Capital.

There’s been a steady stream of venture capital activity in Seattle enterprise software companies in recent weeks, from the $50 million round for Apptio to the $19.5 million round for Opscode. Now, here comes another big deal.