DealZone

E Ink’s “electronic paper” is the special sauce that makes e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle possible, but it hasn’t proven to be much of a meal for its venture capital backers.

The privately held company was purchased by Taiwanese display maker Prime View International on Monday for $215 million, 12 years after it emerged from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory.

peHUB notes that the decade-plus span is far from ideal for VCs (the ideal horizon is five to seven years). Even worse, VCs including Intel Capital, Motorola Ventures, Solstice Capital, the McClatchy Company, Lucent Technologies, FA Technology Ventures, and the Hearst Corporation sunk some $148.8 million into E Ink over the years, for an underwhelming 1.4 multiple.

E Ink holds more than 100 patents on its “electrophoretic” ink technology, in which electric charges are sent along a grid embedded in the paper. The charges cause tiny black and white particles to move up and down, creating text and images.

E-Ink and Prime View are already close business partners, with E-Ink providing the front part of flexible displays to Amazon and Sony. Prime View makes the back end and assembles the displays. The companies said said the deal would provide the financing and manpower needed to fuel development of color displays, slated for mass production at the end of 2010.

Dan Primack of Thomson Reuters’ PE Hub takes a look at the implications of the $240 million that Microsoft invested in Facebook last year:

The WSJ recently reported that Microsoft is sniffing around Facebook, less than seven months after investing $240 million in the social network at a $15 billion valuation. It was largely discounted as the hopeful fumblings of Steve Ballmer, in his search for a rebound acquisition after being dumped by Yahoo. But it got me to thinking: Microsoft’s initial investment may be one of the worst venture capital deals of all time.

Click here to read the full article.

On a related note, check out this uncomfortably literal depiction of Facebook from BBC’s “The Wall.”

Christian video site GodTube has been blessed with a $30 million funding round from hedge fund GLG Partners, according to a report by paidContent.org, valuing the company at a whopping $150 million.

GodTube, billed by the L.A. Times as a “who’s who of U.S. Christianity,” has been racking up the page views with a “holy trinity” of user-generated video, social networking and a live webcasting service known as The Godcaster that allows churches to stream sermons and other events. In the same article, former CBS executive and GodTube CEO Chris Wyatt calls his site “Jesus 2.0″.

As paidContent notes, video startups like Metacafe and Veoh consume huge amounts of expensive bandwidth and so must raise large amounts of money. Nevertheless, it called GLG’s investment “ungodly big.”