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United Systems Access will purchase bankrupt mobile entertainment company Amp’d Mobile, letting more than 100,000 customers keep their service if they make the jump to the Main-based company.

The Los Angeles Times has the story here.

United Systems’ Prexar Mobile will provide service. Amp’d will also get a 25 percent stake in Prexar, but will be paid according to how many of its customers actually switch.

Sorry folks, we made a big mistake on this one.

This was originally a story about the asset list of bankrupt mobile entertainment network Amp’d Mobile, and how it included several pages of porn titles. A source, reliable in the past, had sent us a list and pointed us to what he said were pages and pages of porn on Amp’d Mobile’s assets list. We glanced at it: The titles included things like “Doggy Style,” “Hot Dish” (starring a young lady with cleavage), “Gold Diggers” (a series about women who like money, including one titled “Porn Stars”) and “Bush: Stinky or Sweet.” Rather than checking them out, we assumed the source was was correct, and posted. But astute readers have verified that none of it is actually X-rated porn.

So we have pulled the misleading story, and apologize to the company and to its investors for the error.

Here is the company’s list of assets for sale (pdf).

Amp’d Mobile will close its service and sell its assets.

We’ve written enough about this company. It is badly run, and so its difficult to draw lessons on what it means for MVNOs, or networks that lease infrastructure from the big carriers. But its difficult to avoid the conclusion they don’t work very well. It follows ESPN’s MVNO failure last year. The carriers have too much power and little interest in letting upstarts succeed.

That hampers smaller players from innovating. It’s one more reason to open up the wireless spectrum, and why AT&T’s negative response to Google’s proposed criteria for doing so is somewhat preposterous. AT&T’s shrill remark that Google should “put up or shut up,” and bid on the spectrum under the conservative terms initially proposed, is unaccompanied by any specifics about why Google’s more radical plans for opening the spectrum are unreasonable.

Amp’d Mobile, the hard-charging mobile content company that raised $360 million only to burn through it all and crash into bankruptcy, continues to surprise.

We’re now hearing from people familiar with Amp’d strategy that its mistake was to change its credit check policy, in a foolhardy effort to boost subscribers. The company’s founder chief executive, Peter Adderton, known for dashing in and out of Los Angeles with a helicopter, searched his business for bottlenecks to the company’s growth. The big one he found: Credit checks. While his company’s carrier partner, Verizon, checked customers’ credit to make sure they had enough cash to pay their bills within 30 days, Amp’d decided to relax the requirement to 90 days for its own network.

So Amp’d marketed like crazy to these riskier people with lower credit ratings, got them all signed up, and then 90 days later — oops — found that something like half of them were having trouble making their payments, many of heading into collections, according to our source. We’ve contacted the company for comment, and will update.

Adderton has since been ousted. But what were Amp’d Mobile’s multiple investors — including Highland Capital Partners, Columbia Capital Equity Partners Vivendi/Universal Music Group and MTV Networks — thinking? How did they let him get away with such a careless strategy, especially when it was well known virtual network operators in the past, including ESPN’s had so much trouble?

Two days ago, a peeved Verizon Wireless, which was letting Amp’d use its cellular network, asked a court to let it kick off Amp’d from its network. It said Amp’d is burning through $370,000 a day since filing for bankruptcy in June, and still hadn’t come up with a loan to pay the millions it owes Verizon for usage of its network. Amp’d Mobile will have just $9,000 in cash by this coming Monday, Verizon said.

(Updated) Here’s the latest action, catching up for the past two days:

Boring shopping Web sites attract interest — There are so many shopping search engines, we’ve given up trying to count. And yet investors remain interested. Santa Monica, Calif.’s ThisNext, a social shopping Web site, has raised a round of venture debt Western Technology. It lets people share and recommend products with friends. This comes after rumors that private equity firm Providence Equity Partners is buying 66 percent of Nextag, the Silicon Valley also-ran shopping search engine, for between $1 and $1.2 billion, which would be huge. GigaOm has the story, but classifies it as a rumor. We requested comment from Nextag chief executive Pernendu Ojha Wednesday afternoon, but no word yet. Nextag is reportedly doing $200 million in revenues, with a lucrative mortgage and other lead generation business going — it buys ads from Google to get business.

Forget instant messaging, get ready for instant thinking — Brown University researchers have developed a way to let a man play simple games by moving a cursor with only his brain, no hands. We’ve read about similar research before; it starting with monkeys. So here comes the future: All work, emails, spreadsheets, and Google searches, will one day be performed by mind control. No way around it. You won’t need that Google chip in the brain, because you’ll be able to control everything, not just Google search. And then there’s the next step — “network-enabled telepathy” — or instant thought transfer. Your thoughts will flow from your brain over the network right into someone else’s brain, according to a DARPA researcher.

EBay moves into radio auctions — EBay will begin allowing radio stations to auction advertising air time on its platform, in cooperation with Bid4Spots Inc. of Encino, Calif. More than 2,300 radio stations are expected to participate. However, we’re not certain why this will work, when its effort in TV didn’t seem to work.

Yahoo prices ads on value of traffic — Yahoo’s Panama charges advertisers more to place ads on sites likely to draw the most valuable traffic, based on the number of people who click on ads and their likelihood of carrying through with an order. See statement here.

Google purchase of PeakStream — See our story here.

The Amp’d whitewashing begins — Amp’d Mobile, the bankrupt mobile network that offers entertainment to youth, no longer has the ridiculously high number of board members cited earlier (20). Jon Auerbach of Highland Capital Partners and Allen Beasley of Redpoint Ventures have resigned, Dan Primack points out. Each has removed mention of the company from their online bios. Highland has gone so far as to remove Amp’d from its online list of portfolio companies. Too bad. We like style of venture firm Bessemer: The firm boldly lists its mistakes.

Microsoft’s search engine skunk works not as reported — Earlier, we cited a report by Techcrunch that Microsoft has launched a stealth search project here in Silicon Valley. However, search expert John Battelle has heard the report is not correct, and says stay tuned.

This Google Street View gets worse — We’ve ragged on the service’s privacy problems already. Now we find out that Google’s cameras took a shot of a guy peeing on the side of the road, and this is still in its maps. Harder to believe is that Google has left it up for a full day after it was discovered by bloggers. See details via Digg. We’ve requested comment from Google. [Update: Kate Hurowitz, of Google, responded: "...we respect the fact that people may not want imagery they feel is objectionable featured on the service. We provide easily accessible tools for flagging inappropriate or sensitive imagery for review and removal." We at VentureBeat didn't see those tools immediately, but we do notice the offending image has now been taken down.]

Michael Volpi has joined Joost – We reported this; it is now official.

Ready for your iPhone? — See the company’s latest ads.

LaLa Media pays for music, and gives it to you for free — Lala is one of the quirkier companies in Silicon Valley. A year ago, we were puzzled when the Palo Alto, Calif. start-up launched as a CD-swapping service. CDs in 2007? We were puzzled again when it pocketed $14.7 million from Bain Capital (a private equity firm with little experience with start-ups) and Ignition, another venture firm. And then we really scratched our head when it bought a radio station, WOXY. What next? Well, as widely reported yesterday, Lala has blitzed the world by offering to serve music for free, directly from its Web site, and it has the agreement from Warner Music Group to do that with Warner’s music assets. Lala and Warner believe this will stimulate sales. If you like the music you listen to, you can buy the album. True to the odd style of this company, chief executive Bill Nguyen has decided he won’t let you buy individual songs — and for no apparent reason. Also, Lala will change pricing, depending on the popularity of the album, what is in your music library already, and other factors — which could create confusion. Lala also said it is working to license music from the other three labels.

Crazier, Lala will pay about $140 million to the labels in order to do this streaming. But unlike other music-subscription services, which charge users a monthly fee, Lala gives you this all for free.

The radical nature it all, and Lala’s ability to hack Apple’s iPod platform, is masterful: Separately, Lala lets you pay to download songs to your iPod for $0.99 cents, and you can do so only with the iPod — no other device. Once you do this, you can’t move the music elsewhere. So it it is a digital rights management (DRM) equivalent. It’s a direct attack on Apple’s iTunes, and ignores other devices too. It counts on people discovering the service through its web site. What’s more, Lala is getting its investors to pay for it. It said it is raising some $40 million to pay for expected short-term losses (there’s so much capital floating around, Lala may actually find a VC to fund this).

Finally, its program will scan your desktop for digital tracks — everything from iTunes downloads, ripped CDs, etc — and then keeps it all for you in an account online so you can access it from anywhere. It then lets you download that to your iPod too. And you won’t be able to use iTunes again unless you reconfigure your iPod! To our knowledge, Apple hasn’t responded to this yet. This is such an endearingly outrageous move by Lala that that we find ourselves warming to this company. It’s a very long, desperate shot, but if it works, it could be big.

More details at Gizmodo and at Techdirt.

Ask.com’s new search – The second-tier search engine calls its new search “Ask3D,” but it’s a terrible name, because its not three dimensional. The 3D refers to three columns, a new way of organizing a search engine format. See below for an example of a search on Oakland. On the left is the search bar, and underneath are pointers to ways you can refine your search if you don’t find what you want — something that Google doesn’t have. In the middle column are the results. This is where the 3D search falls short. It is somewhat bewildering: An ad in the middle is barely demarcated (if you squint, you may be able to detect a ever so slight difference in shade). Finally, on the far right, Ask gives you different types of files related to your search: video, images, links to MP3 files, event listings and encyclopedia results from Wikipedia. Videos are provided by Blinkx, but not Google Video, another shortcoming. Finally, no ads on the right. More details here and here.

Amp’d Mobile, a Los Angeles based mobile provider, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after falling into debt and not being able to raise more cash to cover it.

This is a spectacular crash because the young company — which offers mobile entertainment targeted to young people — swallowed more than $360 million in venture backing. To raise so much cash was risky — as we’d pointed out back in March, when Amp’d had raised its last $107 million — because other such networks have struggled. ESPN’s network, for example, shut down. These so-called “mobile virtual network operators” are tough to pull off because they don’t own their own spectrum, but resell services using the network of other mobile phone operators. Branding is hard to create, given the dominance of established carriers.

Amp’d had boasted strong growth, with around 200,000 subscribers, and revenue, but not enough to cover the costs to run the service. Still, the company says on its web site that it is negotiating with one of its lead investors to restructure, and that is confident that it will emerge “stronger than ever” because of high demand.

One mind-boggling fact about this company is that it has 20 board members.

Among the investors are Columbia Capital, Heights Capital Management, Highland Capital Partners, Qualcomm, Quilvest Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Rho Ventures, TELUS Ventures, Tudor Investments, and Universal Music Group. Hedge fund Old Lane Cayman Master Fund LP led the most recent round.

According to the WSJ:

According to legal documents filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, Amp’d Mobile has total assets of less than $100 million but is more than $100 million in debt. It owes Verizon Wireless, its largest creditor, about $33 million; its handset provider, Motorola Inc., about $16 million; one of its investors, Vivendi SA of France, about $10 million; and one of its retailers, BestBuy Co., about $8 million.

Amp’d Mobile leases access to networks of Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC of the United Kingdom, and markets voice and other services under its own brand

.

Here’s the latest action:

Ooyala, secretive ex-Google company, about to launch — The Mountain View, Calif. company, founded by ex-Google engineers and product managers, is secretive but says it delivers a high-quality, interactive, video experience, and is a couple of months away from launch. Sean Knapp, a co-founder, formerly led Google’s user interface team for web and image search. Bismarck Lepe, also from Google, and another of the three co-founders, told VentureBeat the company wants to stay quiet on details, but that it is a “new interaction and monetization platform for online and offline video,” and that it raised a large round of funding from the “typical folks in the valley and the not-so-typical guys in Hollywood” earlier this month. It has launched a closed testing version. It will open office in New York and Los Angeles.

Google buys online application security company, GreenBorder Technologies — The Mountain View, Calif. company, founded in 2001, boasts it’s the industry’s first desktop “DMZ” software for Windows, saying that it keeps internet invaders out and enterprise data in, allowing users to “safely connect anywhere, go to any website, open any Internet email or attachment, and use any downloaded files without worry.” (Via Googlified)

AMP’d CEO is still in charge, but company is indeed in turmoil — The mobile network provider is rumored to be desperate for more cash. But see latest from PE Week, which has talked with CEO, who contends he is still at the helm despite rumors that he is out. However, if it is true that the board has 20 people, no wonder the company is having trouble with direction. Here is our latest coverage of its whopper financing round.

Yahoo opening up — Until now, the portals have all tried to promote their own traffic on their home page. However, they’re experimenting with testing links to outside sites.

Ambient Sound Investments invests in Chinese virtual world, Frenzoo — Ambient, you’ll recall, is the firm run by former Skype co-founders. It has made an undisclosed investment in the Hong Kong 3D social networking company which has been likened to Second Life. There are other virtual world competitors in China, such as HiPihi, and Shanda’s coming version.

Odd story — VeriSign’s board announced the surprise resignation of Chief Executive Stratton Sclavos, saying the company “has reached a point in its evolution where it can benefit from new leadership.” (WSJ) No explanation?

Google losing the employee hiring game — There are increasing reports that start-ups are being able to hire employees that Google also sought to hire. This is because they offer the upside reward of a potential IPO. Google’s advantage is that it did most of its initial spurt of hiring during the downturn. The hires these days are specifically mentioning potential riches as one reason why they’re joining start-ups which, while understandable, may also point to motivation challenges for these start-ups down the line. See the NYT story, including a quote from Powerset employee, Nitay Joffe (pictured here), who was wooed by Google, but joined Powerset because it had the one thing Google didn’t offer: “When you get a stock option at 5 cents and it goes to $50 …,” Mr. Joffe said, before his voice trailed off.

Updated

Apple TV is a hit — According to early accounts, at least.

YouTube killer? — [Update: This has been confirmed.] Rumors have existed for some time about collusion among the big-media players to challenge YouTube, the king of video sharing. Now the LA Times reports that News Corp. and NBC Universal plan to announce as soon as today that they’re building an online video site “stocked with TV shows and movies, plus clips that users can modify and share with friends.” Not clear how MySpace fits into this.

More on Google’s Pay-Per-Action — We mentioned Google’s PPA announcement Tuesday. However, we didn’t point specifically to the “text link format” ad unit, which some say crosses an ethical line, because it can be considered a pay-per-post. Mike at Techcrunch has a good review. More about the general PPA program at the Mercury News.

Wink sees management buyback — Wink, a start-up that began as a search engine for tags, has revised its business plan, and wants to be a search engine for people. However, some investors balked at this turn, and so Wink’s management has bought back shares from some of the investors — though the exact amount wasn’t specified. Lead investor Greylock has reduced its stake, though remains the largest shareholder, the company confirmed with VentureBeat today. Wink had raised $7 million.

Oil behind the Doerr — PEHub writes more on the ties between well-known venture capitalist John Doerr and oil, noting that Doerr and his wife Ann wrote a $1,000 check this year to Ted Stevens, the Republican senator from Alaska who has repeatedly tried to approve oil drilling in Alaska’s Artic National Wildlife Refuge. Again, this seems to fly in the face of Doerr’s leadership in supporting green policy in Washington and boosting investments in alternative energy. Doerr did not respond to a request for comment yesterday. [Update: To be fair, its entirely possible Doerr wrote the check to help get Stevens' ear, in a shrewd effort to push green policy, but we just don't know...]

Yahoo releases latest widgets for your desktop — They’re designed to use less memory. Here’s a tour.

Other:
–In our Newswire: Amp’d Mobile has raised a whopping round, and reportedly has 200,000 subscribers.
–For those of you relying on our RSS feed, we’ve been making changes, and you may have missed the piece by Stu Phillips, about ruthless scrapers of content, and how publishers need to join ‘em, since they can’t beat ‘em. Michael Cerda, meanwhile, writes a piece about the new wave called “Phone 2.0.”