VentureBeat

Roundup of the latest tech action in Silicon Valley:

Young start-ups pouring into the South of Market (SOMA) area in San Francisco. Deja-vu? — The region’s real estate prices are lower, at least where large companies like Looksmart are able to sublet expensive buildings to new copycat video sites like Cuts. With the territory comes late-night sleepovers, punching bags and yoga. See story in WSJ. Deja-vu, the same thing happened during boom #1.

Yahoo’s assumptions on Facebook — Techcrunch has scoop on Yahoo’s acquisition talks with Facebook, and Yahoo’s assumptions about Facebook’s performance. Notably, Facebook will have about $50 million in revenues this year, and would hit $1 billion in profit in 2015 according to projections — and thus justifying a $1 billion acquisition price. More remarkable is that Yahoo predicts Facebook will have a penetration rate of 60 percent among all young Internet users, up from 18 percent his year. Unfortunate for Yahoo, this justifies Facebook CEO’s Zuckerberg’s inclination to hold on to the company.

Do VCs cut good entrepreneurs? Perhaps, but rough going — Here’s a good story about latest on VCs-turned-entrepreneurs. Poor guys. They have to decide what chairs to put in their office.

Google’s smokescreen innovation — There’s an insightful piece in the Chronicle, printing a Q&A with Google’s Sergey Brin in 2000, where Brin says Google wouldn’t do anything besides search. Brin also made a statement several months ago that Google was rolling out too many features, and not honing the ones it already has. And remember CEO Eric Schmidt saying Google Payments wouldn’t compete with PayPal? Right. There’s a pattern emerging here. Google is releasing as many features as possible: There’s Google Maps with Wikipedia and user notations (see icons). There’s Gmail Fetcher, which lets you get email from other non-Gmail accounts in one place, just as you can do with Outlook. Only thing missing now is getting your Gmail offline. And there’s very extensive additions to Google Finance, worth checking out for all the tools it offers. And, of course, there’s radio advertising.

Although perhaps Google isn’t as innovative as you may think — Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny says Google copied its IE7 download feature, and has pretty good evidence. Google has since changed the look, but we’re wondering if someone’s head is rolling as a result. And the radio program looks similar to Voice.com’s. Suppose there’s a chance Google merely didn’t see it, though that’s unlikely because Google’s radio product managers surely would have soured the market.)

Easy in-video tagging and clipping — There’s a new product called Scenemaker that launched today. It lets you clip and tag any portion of a video, and the user interface looks good. Demo here.

61 video sites compared — This is a nice effort at taxonomy, but somehow not too helpful.

iTunes sales collapsing? — The Register is a notoriously unreliable source. But it cites a Forrester analyst here, who may or may not have pinpointing evidence of a collapse in iTunes sales. If true, could it have something to do with all the innovation going on, music rights getting cut with other sites, from YouTube, to Grouper?

Roundup of a busy week:

Instant messaging and email are merging, Yahoo kicks it off — Yahoo will be integrating IM through its email, Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse revealed during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. In retrospect, we’re wondering why this trend hasn’t happened earlier.

Email is limiting, providing no way to see whether the person on the other end is present or not (that person may not want to show you they are present, but email doesn’t even give them the option). It piles up, and it’s clunky — not letting you switch to conversation immediately, if you want to. Instant messaging, meanwhile, can be distracting, isn’t ideal for careful phrasing, isn’t as easy to archive or forward to other people. So what’s needed is a bridge, and now people are building it. We’ve heard ideas bubbling up from entrepreneurs here in the valley, but Yahoo’s move steal the initiative. Techcrunch has a screenshot of what it looks like. There’s also a Chicago company offering something similar, called Parlano, with its product called Mindalign, though its design isn’t that great. (Via Jeff Nolan).

A Web 2.0 University? — One is being created in Alexandria, VA of all places — Details here, and it’s open for registration for its AJAX and Web 2.0 “boot camp” courses.

From Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s talk — Google is working to allow users to export their search histories to other locations, such as Yahoo. Meanwhile, he rejects rumors that Google had set aside money to bail out YouTube from copyright lawsuits — though it is true that Google Video itself has been sued.

Microsoft-Google fight to be greener – Microsoft execs are bragging about building what appears to be the first carbon-neutral data center, taking care of 400 customers for the same energy it “takes to light one 60-watt light bulb.” (Via Mercury News). We reported earlier how Google aims to be carbon neutral, that is save as much fossil fuels as it burns in energy at the Googleplex and from corporate jet trips.

Put a Google map on any image — And when we say any image, we mean it. Scoble has the scoop on Maplib.

Google offering GPS on the Helio Drift phone — Here are the details. Note that is doesn’t appear to be integrated with Dodgeball, and is a step closer to matching the advantage of Loopt.

Google executive Marissa Mayer says Google is like a VC firm — Fortune has a noteworthy conversation between Huffington and Mayer:

HUFFINGTON: Whatever products Google (Charts) is developing, they are incorporating a 60 Percent to 70 percent failure rate. I find that utterly fascinating. Talk about that culture and how that translates into our lives.

MAYER: As we’ve grown, one of our challenges has been, How can we continue to innovate? We have a theory around failing fast. If you assume that one in five things you do will turn out to be really successful, and maybe two of five will be moderately successful, and the other two will languish, you want to do a lot of things. It’s all about being agile. Most of the teams at Google are three to ten people. Five people launched Google News. About five people launched Google Toolbar. They operate like small companies inside the large company. Google is a lot like managing a VC firm, because you’re placing bets on different teams.

Video companies Brightcove and Reality Digital are looking to raise VC rounds — Start-up Brightcove, which hosts video for companies and lets them insert advertising into the video, is looking to raise a round of more than $55 million, GigaOM first reported, with a post-money valuation well north of $225 million range. It has already raised $21 million in two rounds from General Catalyst Partners and Accel, and several others.

San Francisco’s Reality Digital, which does something similar, but in some ways is more ambitious (it hosts video for its clients, but also blogging and forums) is also looking to raise another round. It raised $2 million in a first round in November last year. It has ten employees, and has several customers. One is SPARQ training, which lets high school athletes promote themselves to recruiters — via Reality Digital’s video/blog platform. The athletes can have their coaches chime with their own blogs, too, for example.

The start-up garage is a thing of legend in Silicon Valley.

Now, Google has bought the Silicon Valley home where co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage eight years ago to start their company, the AP reports.

The Mountain View-based company bought the 1,900-square-foot home in nearby Menlo Park from one of its own employees, Susan Wojcicki, who’d let the Google guys work there.

During Google’s five-month history there, the garage became like a second home for Page and Brin.

The entrepreneurs, then just 25, seemed to be always working on their search engine or soaking in the hot tub that still sits on the property. They also had a penchant for raiding Wojcicki’s refrigerator - a habit that may have inspired Google to provide a smorgasbord of free food to the 8,000 employees on its payroll.

(Via Battelle)

Here is a shotgun of the latest stuff in raging Silicon Valley, leading of course with video:

VideoEgg gets easier — VideoEgg, a site that lets you download software so you can post video on any site, has partnered to make the process easier at key sites. Users at Bebo, Dogster, Hi5, AOL, Current.TV and Tagged can post video content from mobile or other devices to those sites, and VideoEgg’s small browser plug-in that makes it easy to get code for a video and upload it as easily as you can post photos, it says

Zillow.com sets homeowners free, allows them to enhance their home value — You could see this coming. Start-up Zillow infuriated some homeowners and agents by estimating the property values of homes across the nation, and listing them online. Some people felt they were being unfairly treated. Now the site is letting homeowners contribute information about their own homes, listing upgrades, remodeling and other notes (waterfront view, parking, roof composition) — showing ways the homes may be more valuable than simply historic or comparable home prices would indicate. Homeowners can then recalculate their home values, but Zillow insists it will keep showing its existing estimates too.

Fon, the WiFi company backed by Google and Sequoia, releases subsidized router — For $5 you can get a router from Fon that lets you participate in a WiFi scheme where you can let other people hop on to your router for Internet access in return for the right to hop on to theirs when you need it. See the demo here by Fon chief executive Martin Varsavskky, or click on the image, and then push play.

Gore partners with Yahoo on Current TV – A couple of days after we mention Google has hired an “astroturf” lobby firm in Washington that poked fun of politician Al Gore, we find that Gore is suddenly partnering with Google’s competitor, Yahoo, on the Current TV project. This, even though Gore started the project in partnership with Google. The partnership will combine professional and user-generated video clips, and will be the first time Yahoo has included commercials with user-generated content.

The eBay dead-company listings phenom is picking up — We first mentioned the eBay trend here. Several others have since listed, including Madhens, a way for publishers to auction of ad space. Now, here’s San Francisco’s Crispads, which has been listed several days with a starting price of $90,000 but no bidders.

Who Is Jonathan Ive? He’s Apple’s design guru, and has notable advice — With all the go-go tech-happy Web 2.0ers rushing out features, Apple’s Ive has a tip you might be able to use. Here’s Business Weeks’ summary:

The man who, after Jobs, is most responsible for Apple’s amazing ability to dazzle and delight with its famous products, chose instead to talk about process — what he called “the craft of design.” He spoke passionately about his small team and how they work together. He talked about focusing on only what is important and limiting the number of projects. He spoke about having a deep understanding of how a product is made: its materials, its tooling, its purpose. Mostly, he focused on the need to care deeply about the work.

India getting more bubbly by the day – Back in July, we wrote about angel investor Ram Shriram’s view on India’s boom, and how valuations are rising. We remarked on the escalating value being assigned to a high-tech park in India. Well, the value has just doubled again, this time to $20 billion. The Indian state of Haryana is developing a research and education “Nano City,” modeled after Silicon Valley, and it was first billed to cost something like $2 billion. Then we saw some reports inflate this to an unqualified “$10 billion.” Now, apparently there is going to be $20 billion invested. Of course, when you read the reports carefully, there are different definitions being used for these numbers (costs, investments, and so on), but they all seem to refer to how much money is being invested in this area — and it keeps growing. And when you consider it is supposed to generate a fourfold return, that means we’re looking an $80 billion jackpot. It all started with Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of the Hotmail e-mail service, who had planned to raise $550 million to start the project, modeled on Silicon Valley — without specifying a time frame.

Mr. Cheney picks the “right side” of Menlo Park — We were wondering why Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting with venture firm Sequoia. Turns out, he was raising money for the Republican Party at a reception at the big-name firm. The politics on Sand Hill road are delineated. The other big-name firm, Kleiner Perkins, which is just across the street, is led by John Doerr, and Democrat supporter and loud advocate for clean-tech. Even Vinod Khosla (still has offices at Kleiner, though has officially left the firm), an espouser of Republicanism in the past, is pushing an oil tax.

News site Topix sees growth improve by 24 percent over the past month — If you haven’t seen its time-line news feature, check it out. You can do a search of a term and see a line graph that shows how popular the term was in articles carried over the past year. So for “Hurricane Katrina,” for example, you can see where news spiked, click on that period and review events as they unfolded. It appears to have bolstered Topix’s growth.

Craigslist is rocking — About half of the growth in visits to online classified ads is going to San Francisco online classified site Craiglist, according to comScore Media Metrix. Craiglist is considered by many in Silicon Valley’s tech crowd to be clunky, a homely Web 1.0 site lacking the jazz of newer players, such as Oodle. But it is getting the job done. Web sites featuring classified ads drew 47 percent more unique visitors this July than the same month a year ago, while Craiglist’s visits about doubled, to 13.8 million unique visitors.

Intel’s new laser for chips could speed up communications 1000-fold — Intel’s new research has found a way to create a laser out of hybrid chip materials, and Dean Takahashi of the Merc has the details (registration required).

HP investigations deepen — Now we’re hearing that HP planted software on journalists’ computers, and the NYT is reporting that HP even considered planting moles within journalists’ offices.

Silicon Valley can be a smug, protected place, and along the leafy streets of studied Palo Alto, quite conducive for dreaming up lines like “do no evil.”

What happens when your platform outgrows this place? We learn that Google has retained the services of DCI Group, which specializes in “corporate-financed grass-roots organizing,” such as setting up front groups to “agitate for a client’s position, placing letters to the editor with key newspapers, and using phone banks to generate calls to politicians.” At least that’s the nice description. Others call it “the phony seed bed for the most noxious astroturf organizing and general baboozlement in contemporary politics.”

The group, generally known for its ties with Republicans, made a YouTube video spoofing Al Gore’s documentary about global warming, and its clients happen to include the multinational oil company ExxonMobil. Notable, of course, given Google’s efforts to stop global warming, which includes supporting a new 100+ mpg hybrid car — and given Google’s other ties with Gore, including the partnership in Current TV. So what happened to Google’s “do no evil” morals? Maybe they’re reading Machiavelli, who once said, “politics have no relation to morals.”

Most start-ups don’t think about the politics of Washington, DC until they are quite big, and Google is the latest to go through this. There’s always the Craigslist model, which we’ll leave for another time.

Updated

3Jam has launched a new way to texting friends in groups, and we think it’s going to do well. Multi-person texting simply isn’t possible yet, and with 80 million people with texting in the U.S. and growing, 3Jam may be hitting a sweet spot.

And texting is the technology of the future. Among college students, there’s a 75 percent usage rate. (For the uninitiated, when we say texting, we’re refering to the short messages people send on their mobile phone, known as SMS, or Short Message Service).

Texting is a little awkward. You type on a small screen, and you’re only able to message one person at a time — until now. 3Jam is solves that problem. It lets you message more than one person — in fact, as many people as you want. Now, if you are running late to that concert, you don’t have to send a message three times to your friends to notify them individually. You just send it once.

We tinkered with 3Jam over the past couple of weeks, and it works well. On our Treo, it took a while to get used to, because the Treo messaging interface is different from most phones. But 3Jam has since released a special application for Treos, which makes things a lot easier. So for Treo or regular phone, it works smoothly.

Here’s how it works. On most phones, you type in: “text (friend #1’s name) (friend #2’s name)” This creates the group. Then you type in a message, and send it to “43526,” which is 3Jam’s short-code number. It is that easy. The message goes to those friends, as well as to your own phone.

Once your friends get the message, they can hit “reply” and send a message to the group too. 3Jam assigns a random number, say 54880, to the group, so that anyone in the group can message the group at that number through the day without having to retype the names.

The Treo app makes it even easier. It requires a download. But then it saves time. Under a “To” tab, you can pull down a menu to select the contacts you want to send to, and send the message to them.

(You can also go to 3Jam.com for directions on how it all works, though the Treo App will soon be available exclusively through Andrew Carton’s blog Treonauts until DEMO. Update: Specific link to Andrew’s post is here, and download itself is here.)

We talked with Andy Jagoe, chief exec of the small start-up. The idea for 3Jam arose when he tried emailing some people for after-work drinks. He found email only worked when people were sitting at their desk. He wanted to reach them all on their phones, where they were likely to be as they rushed for the door at the end of the day. Enlai Chu is the other co-founder.

3jam began testing a private version of this last year. He has since added a few key people to his team, including Thad White, from Yahoo’s mobile product team, and Tom Purcell, who was the first business exec at Danger, and who helped that company launch with T-Mobile.

The 3Jam service will go live officially on Sept 25, when the company launches at DEMO

White brought some “aha” insights from Yahoo, Jagoe explains. About half of all Yahoo’s traffic comes from messaging, either email or instant messaging. And a full one-third of the email traffic is to more than one person or to “reply all,” Jagoe says. If you enable multi-party texting, the thinking goes, you’ve got an immediate, huge market. There are 200 million people in the U.S. with mobile phones, and 40 percent of them are texting, but none of them are able to do multi-party texting.

From 3Jam’s trials, Jagoe says users are reporting they are using their phone more. Jagoe says multi-party messaging could mean a 30 percent increase in overall text messaging.

One user sent more 656 messages in a 4-week period, and some said they’d pay for the capability, Jagoe said.

(Update: We should have mentioned how 3Jam plans to make money. 3Jam wants revenue share from telecom carriers. Regarding pricing, no matter how many people are in the group, a reply counts as only one text message on their phone bill. Meaning, that if you send a group text message to four people, you don’t pay for four text messages, you pay for only one.)

We first mentioned 3jam back in May. At the time, the Menlo Park start-up had pulled in $500,000 of what was a $1 million venture capital commitment from New Enterprise Associates.

Turns out, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, and other business folks helped tipped the balance on the landmark global warming bill passed last week.

The bill, AB 32, mandates that California reduce global warming emissions by 25 percent — to 1990 levels — by the year 2020. Major carbon-emitting industries will be forced to report emissions to the state Air Resources Board.

California Assembly Member Pavley, co-author of AB 32, apparently told the group, which also included Amy Christensen, of Google and Felix Kramer of CalCars (see his VentureBeat “contributor” column today), that their press conference a few weeks ago had helped tipped the scales. By arguing the legislation will help California’s economy, the group (pictured above) produced media coverage depicting California’s business community as divided on the legislation’s economic benefits — and thus, making it more than simply a battle between business and environmentalists. The Environmental Entrepreneurs group, based here in San Francisco, held a total of 124 individual meetings with members of the legislature, plus multiple other meetings — not to mention organizing letter and phone campaigns.

Why do we care? We’ve mentioned before California’s significant role in influencing global policy on the environment. Don’t want to overstate the point, nor do we want to overstate the role of this one group, but this latest example suggests how a few business leaders here in Silicon Valley can potentially have a very large impact on world policy by driving up to Sacramento and trying to move the needle a little bit.