VentureBeat

Datamonitor points to IT budget freeze — Major sector analyst Datamonitor says that half of IT organizations around the globe will cap spending levels next year.

Chrysler to roll out electric cars — Car maker Chrysler will unveil a line of electric cars to its dealers next week, according to the Wall Street Journal. The large car company has not previously shown off any electric vehicles.

Bee well — Remember when some researchers were blaming mobile phone signals for colony collapse disorder, a mysterious ailment that was killing honeybees? They’ve since decided it’s a virus, and now an Israeli company, Beeologics, is claiming to have the cure. Israel21c has a lengthy profile.

Is Google Knol destined for failure? — Slate’s Farhad Manjoo writes that Google’s Knol, a reference project designed to go head to head with Wikipedia, is a “wasteland” of cribbed articles, factual errors and typos. Manjoo suggests that Knol will always be a victim of its advertising pay-outs and lack of editing. Of course, one might point out that Wikipedia probably sucked two months after its release, too.

Microsoft to buy back $40B of stock — In a bid to regain stock price lost since its failed grab for Yahoo, Microsoft has announced plans to buy back $40 billion of stock and pay a 13 cent quarterly dividend, 18 percent more than before.

SanDisk launching music albums on flash — Silicon Valley Insider has a few reasons that SanDisk’s newest idea, putting music on flash disks and calling it SlotMusic, may not be such a bad idea. This is the firm’s latest attempt to broaden its market since the failure of TakeTV.

Facebook lets users vote for favorite apps — As part of its $250,000 grand prize for five application developers, part of a contest with over 600 entrants, Facebook has announced that users will have a say, by voting on their favorite apps.

Nanosolar cell efficiency pinned down — After a whiffed attempt at guessing thin film solar giant Nanosolar’s cell efficiency, which the company won’t disclose, Gunther Portfolio has pegged it at around 11 percent, still well over the industry average.

Adap.tv raises $13M for ad analytics — Online video ad outfit Adap.tv has raised $13 million from Spark Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Gemini Israel Fund for its new business strategy of picking the best ads to show on a video for publishers.

Anystream acquires video syndication service Voxant — Syndication firm Voxant has merged into Anystream, a video encoding and management company, under undisclosed terms. Voxant was funded with $10.5M from Softbank Capital, Court Square Ventures and Longworth Venture Partners.

CityVoters raises $2.6M for “Best Of” lists — Need the best piano tuner in your area? CityVoters needed a few million dollars to tell you who it is. The company got $2.6 million from investors including Allen & Co. and Dace Ventures.

Cambridge, Mass-based PodZinger, previously branded as a search engine for podcasts, has re-named itself EveryZing, and raised $10 million to expand its services.

EveryZing has a video and audio search engine for consumers, which we’ve covered before, but CEO Tom Wilde says that the company is using the money to change focus: EveryZing will use its speech-to-text technology to help publishers get their content into major search engines’ results and get related advertising.

Wilde claims that this technology, developed by military contractor and EveryZing’s original parent company, BBN (EveryZing has since spun off), is 85-90% accurate and has the capability to extract the meaning of a video’s content in ways that competitors like Adap.tv and Scanscout’s cannot. Specifically, he says, EveryZing has better speech recognition and natural language processing capabilities (We looked at Adap.tv and mentioned Scanscout here.)

EveryZing’s technology seeks to extract key terms from the transcripts it creates and auto-tag the content, making it searchable by Google and other search engines. Video search engine blinkx has similar capabilities, but confines usage to its site.

The other aspect of EveryZing’s new strategy is aimed at enabling contextual advertising in audio and video content. Large media producers find it difficult to mine their content for context, which hampers their ability to target ads. On top of this, advertisers don’t want to pitch their products next to objectionable content. EveryZing says its ability to create transcripts and determine their themes can solve these problems.

Getting computers to create accurate transcripts from video and then determine the meaning within them are terrifically hard problems, and EveryZing’s technology produces mixed results. For example: In a breakdown of a complicated TED talk from the author, Robert Wright, in which Wright asks whether or not biological and cultural evolution have direction and purpose, the transcript was impressively accurate — not perfect, but roughly in line with Wilde’s 85-90 percent accuracy claim. EveryZing’s thematic analysis also managed to determine that “biological evolution” was a key term. However, it decided that “histamine,” was a key term, as well. (See screenshot below) If you’re using a contextual advertising technology that relies on these key terms, you might take issue with EveryZing’s judgment.

That being said, it might be a little while before machines can scan transcripts and understand them, so early on, “good enough,” might have to do, even if that means a few ads for Benedryl or Claritin-D show up in a video about the meaning of life.

Fairhaven Capital led the round, with Accel and, strangely, General Catalyst — which invested in EveryZing competitor, Scanscout — participating as well. The company has now raised $15 million in total.

Adap.tv, a San Mateo, Calif. company, launches today with less-intrusive ways of matching advertisements with online video.

Most video advertising dominates your screen: Ads blast you for a few seconds, either before or after a video plays, or even during — so-called pre-roll, post-roll and mid-roll ads, respectively.

Adap.tv’s technology is similar to that of Videoegg, of San Francisco. The ads show up discreetly within a video while it is playing. Adap.tv says it will differ from Videoegg by focusing solely on ads (Videoegg also powers video for social networking sites, and began advertising as a side business).

Adap.tv’s ads run on different portions of the screen, pulling them in based on the content that is on the screen.

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So for example, in a video interview with Al Gore, you might have ads running along the bottom that offering other related products, for example: Al Gore’s interview with Charlie Rose last year, which you can get on Amazon.com (see screen-shot).

While the ads are supposed to be less-intrusive, some producers will use the technology in addition to pre-roll and other ads, so that you are bombarded with ads relentlessly (indeed, see this example of an Adap.tv video about DVDs, where the content is essentially one big advertisement).

Here’s how it works: Adap.tv analyzes the video for things like meta-data (classification tags that producers or others have given it; in this case, a producer would tag it “Al Gore,” for example), and use speech recognition to figure out what Gore is talking about, so that if it is about global warming, Adap.tv can run an ad for an environmentally friendly product. Finally, Adap.tv measures how viewers are responding to ads. If viewers respond favorably to eco-friendly product ads by clicking on them, for instance, it may serve up more of those ads.

The company also announces a partnership with video site Metacafe. Metacafe, one of the larger destination video sites after YouTube, will use Adap.tv’s advertising for in-video ads. Metacafe will use other platforms to run pre- and post-roll ads, however. Metacafe splits the ad revenue multiple ways, giving a sliver to Adap.tv, another sliver to the post and pre-roll providers, yet another to the video publisher, and finally, keeps a portion for itself.

The publisher of a video simply pastes 12 lines of code into their Flash player. This code then automatically requests ads from Adap.tv’s servers and places the ads in the video. The default is two ads a minute, though the publisher can choose whether to run them more or less frequently. While it supports only Flash 8 and 9 players right now, Adap.tv will be able to serve ads to other platforms soon.

Adap.tv was founded by Amir Ashkenazi, co-Founder and former chief technology officer of Shopping.com. It has an undisclosed amount of backing from Gemini Capital.

Update: Scanscout, of Boston, is doing something similar, though we haven’t had time to see how it compares. General Catalyst Partners has just invested a $7 million first round of capital into the company. (See announcement and details)

Update II: When it rains it pours. YouTube is testing some in-line video ads, though if you look at Liz Gannes’ piece, you’ll see the ads are actually videos, and so quite disruptive — different animals altogether.