VentureBeat

VentureBeat threw a party last night to celebrate the launch our new digital media blog. (In truth, the blog is still a glorified tab on our main site, but we’re headed soon to a more separate offering.)

Held at the Ambassador club in San Francisco, hundreds of movers and shakers in digital media arena showed up — entrepreneurs, PR folks, even Warriors basketball star Baron Davis (below), an investor in IBeatYou (which also had an announcement at the event).

Kara Swisher, who runs the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD, showed up and took some footage, and writes a post here. See video below.

People in the video talk about this being the “surest sign there’s a bubble.” But thankfully, Kara comes back to interview me, and I tried to explain other reasons why that may not be the case. Had I been more articulate, I would have gone into more depth about why exactly some of these new media companies are creating so much value. Companies like Adify are creating sensible, targeted networks that advertisers want. Music, TV and gaming, and social communication are all being transformed too — there’s plenty of opportunity. Although its true I’m a skeptic about some of the frothy financings that are happening, and have to eat my hat from time to time.

Finally, I’d like to thank VentureBeat’s business manager, Jacob Mullins, who brought in the sponsors who made it all possible to have the fun last night. Many thanks to Sun Microsystems, venture capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures and law firm O’Melveny & Myers.

Below are a few of Brian Solis‘ great shots. Check out the rest of his set here.

[Above: Baron Davis speaks to the crowd as Matt Marshall (right) looks on.]

[Above: Dan Farber of CNET.]

[Above: Three partygoers having fun.]

[Above: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and guest.]

[Above: The VentureBeat team.]

[(CC) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com, bub.blicio.us.]

updated after reaching CEO Russ Fradin and Cox Chief Financial Officer John Dyer

Adify, whose software helps companies build their own advertising networks, has been acquired by media company Cox Enterprises for $300 million, according to various sources.

We’ve since confirmed the acquisition with CEO Russ Fradin (see his own blog post here).

The San Bruno, Calif. startup had raised around $27 million in total funding, with backers including U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock Associates, GE Commercial Finance, NBC Universal, and Time Warner Investments.

Adify has built many vertical ad networks and its client list that includes the Guardian, Forbes.com and NBC WeatherPlus. Some speculate that Adify was a strategic acquisition target for Cox, which is a private but giant media company that owns Cox Newspapers (with related websites) and Cox Networks, the third-largest cable company in the United States.

However, Fradin downplayed the strategic nature of the deal, instead saying it was just the latest move by Cox to enter a high-growth media business, something it has done consistently over the years. Cox started as a newspaper company, but then diversified with each new innovation, moving to radio, TV and eventually online, building Autotrader, for example, cannibalizing its own existing classifieds business. Cox Chief FInancial Officer John Dyer also told us Cox’s media properties could use some help to build their own ad networks, but he said the main reason for the deal was Cox executives’ belief that Adify’s business will continue to grow.

The price tag must have made Adify executives and investors pretty happy. PaidContent reports (and we’ve since confirmed) that the company brought in $7 million in revenue in 2007 and was set to bring in around $35 million this year. Adify launched in 2006 and was founded by Larry Braitman and Richard Thompson, the team that also created Flycast Communications a decade earlier.

The company has built 108 ad networks, Fradin said.

[Update: See below. This is not owned by Adify, as we'd originally implied]

Adify, an online company that is building ad networks for specific niches, has just announced its latest: the Gay Ad Network.

Adify, a Belmont, Calif. start-up which launched last year, and which got $19 million in financing a few months ago (see our coverage) is a small player relative to the other big ad networks.

This is a smart move, though. We’re in the age of niche advertising, and this lets gay and lesbian publishers, advertisers can more easily reach online gay audiences, for which there’s bound to be a solid market (albeit seedy one, if the comment below is any measure).

[Update: While Adify's platform is hosting this, the network was actually launched Mark Elderkin, former president of PlanetOut and CEO and founder of Gay.com, which he built into a large gay online community. The property is in fact not owned or operated by Adify; rather merely uses its technology. Gay Ad Network has its own sales, operations and marketing teams and Adify's technology handles things like ad serving, billing, reporting and campaign management.]

Adify said the network already offers access to two dozen independent publishers representing more than 200 Web sites.

More details here.

Latest action:

VC firm Sequoia Capital backs Will Ferrell and Adam McKay comedy video site — Called FunnyOrDie.com, the site features a two-minute clip that won a reported 1.5 million page views in less than a week.

StumbleUpon to be acquired? — Several folks (Techcrunch/GigaOm) are reporting that San Francisco social Web site StumbleUpon is in talks to being acquired by AOL, Google or eBay, for a rumored $40 million to $75 million. That’s not very high for a supposed “top 25″ Web 2.0 company, but a good return considering it raised only $1.5 million to $2 million in seed financing from Google board member Ram Shriram, and angels Ariel Poler, Mitch Kapor and Ron Conway.

StumbleUpon has been growing quickly, with 6 million U.S. page views per month, according to ComScore, double the previous month. StumbleUpon is a toolbar that tracks the pages you vote on as interesting, and then offers up sites (called a stumble) that match those interests (sites found by other people that have voted similar to the way you have).

It makes money by showing an ad every hundred or so stumbles. It recently started doing the same for videos. Unique visitors are 900,000, or about three times last year. Techcrunch says the suitor is eBay, which may make sense for that site, given that stumbles could be made on eBay items, and because eBay may be feeling a little lighter lately (profit is up 52 percent, and Skype is making more revenue). Past VentureBeat coverage here.

Yahoo going carbon neutral — Co-founder David Filo blogs on the company’s commitment to go carbon neutral this year. This is impressive, and the company should be commended. (Too bad, however, that it’s timed with Yahoo’s bad earnings results).

Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

Google to release its Powerpoint competitor, and video filter — It is due this spring, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said it will be part of Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Somehow he manages to argue with a straight face that it doesn’t compete with Microsoft. (Good overview of Schmidt’s comments here). It has just bought Tonic Systems, a company based in SF and Melbourne (we mentioned Tonic last year) to help with a component of this. Moreover, Schmidt said Google will release software to keep copyrighted videos from being uploaded to YouTube, which will address Viacom’s suit because of copyright infringements. Schmidt said the release would be within a few weeks.

Google Feed API — Google’s AJAX API team release Feed API that gives an Ajax developer the ability to access feeds, cached in the fast Google edge cache where appropriate, from across the web using a simple JavaScript API.

Venture capitalist Will Hearst invests in Fora.tv — Hearst, the former partner at Kleiner Perkins and former publisher of the SF Examiner, invests in Fora.tv, an online video aggregator for programming from serious sources like Hoover Institute and the Brookings Foundation. More at The:Alarmclock and WSJ. The site’s contacts details say it based in Culver City, Calif., while the WSJ says it is based in SF.

Oracle has acquired mobile application developer AppForge, of Atlanta — Details here.

Why do all the “top-ten” tips that VCs give always sound the same? — Because they are.

Eric Hahn new venture, Bing Technology, has folded — The former Netscape CTO’s peer-to-peer backup service has returned its remaining funds to investors, according to one of the former employees. (Via Valleywag)

Finally, see our latest NewsWire pieces — They include the following: Adify gets $19 million for vertical ad networks; Cordys raises $80M and sees controversial entrepreneur Jan Baan back in the mix; Yardbarker gets seed funding for sports news site from Kleiner Perkins partner.