VentureBeat

Here’s the latest (updated) action:

Geomas says it has location-based search patent — The London based company says its patent is being infringed upon by some 20 large internet players, and this probably includes Google and Yahoo. Here’s a description of the patent. The company says it raising $20 million to help it extract licensing deals. It started by suing Verizon. (Via Techdirt).

KyteTV gets investment from Nokia — See our story here.

IPO market sees strongest month since 2004, but not for buyout firms - Eleven venture-backed companies raised $1.6 billion through initial
public offerings (IPOs) on US exchanges in May, higher than any other month since Oct. 2004, according to data from Thomson Financial and the VC lobby, NVCA. However, IPOs of companies backed by buyout firms have actually declined, raising questions about whether the bubbly investment activity in that sector is sustainable.

A PayPal-only search engine — TheFind, a shopping search engine launched paypal.thefind.com, a new shopping search engine built solely for browsing products from merchants who accept PayPal payments.

Google’s privacy upgraded — Google said it will keep the Web search histories of users for only 18 months instead of 24, responding to pressure from EU authorities. See story here. Meanwhile, search engine expert Danny Sullivan discovers Google is considering creating a dashboard (scroll to near bottom) where people can decide what aspects of their search and surf behavior Google can access.

Google opens the veil for advertisers — Google released its Placement Performance Report, which enables AdWords advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. It also provides “site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites.”

Google powers search on Sina — Google will place its search box on the Website of Sina, China’s third largest site in terms of traffic. Marketwatch reports here. In return, Sina gets a share the search advertising revenues Google collects. This is the latest move by Google to try to catch Baidu, China’s leading search engine.

Technorati’s mysterious traffic surge — Techcrunch has details on why the traffic surge may be somewhat misleading.

[Updated: YouTube's video-music filtering technology not reliant on Audible Magic -- Google's video property YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world's largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co. It will be built by Google's own engineers, and not be solely reliant on Audible Magic, as we'd previously believed after this report. Audible Magic has had filtering problems, as earlier reported. It turns out, Audible Magic is being used for music filtering only; see Elise Ackerman's follow-up today,who also points to an agenda by Google to use the copyright controversy to build up a massive database of videos.]

Former Engadget editor Pete Rojas to form company focused on ad-driven music label — He teams up with Downtown Records to launch a new music label, dubbed RCRD LBL, that will offer the music of artists for free, but paid for with ads. See story here.

Quzhai latest foreign clone — Quzhai is a clone of StumbleUpon, with a little Digg thrown in. Notice how most clones seem to originate in Germany and China, somewhat understandable since they have two of the largest domestic non-English internet markets. Quzhai raised RMB 1 million seed funding from BV Capital.

Biomass it steaming hot — Bull Moose Energy gets $60 million for project in San Diego and other cities. See our story here.

Audible Magic, the Los Gatos company that protects music and other content publishers from piracy by scanning files posted around the Web, is having problems.

NewTeeVee tested the so-called finger-printing technology across multiple sites, including Microsoft’s video site, and even enlisted that company’s help when it didn’t work. But time and again, despite posting a copyrighted file to Microsoft’s site, it wasn’t flagged, and the file was posted for free viewing.

This is notable because Audible Magic’s technology has been adopted by a wide range of players, including YouTube (at least, YouTube has announced it will use the technology; it isn’t clear whether it has started), Daily Motion, EyeSpot and Grouper. Having such technology in place is also used by video sites as a defense against copyright violation suits, which is relevant because Google was sued recently by Viacom for such violation.

Audible has several competitors, including Advestigo, Attributor, Auditude, Gracenote and Vobile.

Audible Magic, of Los Gatos raised $3 million in funding six years ago from Florida Silicon Partners and individuals, including Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford professor. At the time, that was its third round of funding. Another investor is Tierra Del Oro, also of Florida, run by Addison Fischer, chairman of SmartDisk (Audible is listed as a portfolio company). The company declined comment when we tried to confirm details of the company’s financing two months ago.

Here’s the latest action:

Feed Crier gets bought — Feed Crier, the service that lets you subscribe to blogs or other content within your instant messenger (IM), has just been bought by IMified. That company, meanwhile, says it plans to do more on mobile front. It’s just the latest in a crazy-full day of IM stuff.

VCs have produced less profit than they invested, since 1997 — In other words, the industry is negative for the past decade. The vast majority of profits come from a few dozen firms. Other firms are bleeding red ink. See NYT story: For instance, in the first nine months of 2006, venture firms invested $20 billion but paid out $10 billion; in 2005, they invested $23 billion but distributed $20 billion… Diana H. Frazier, a managing partner of Flag Capital Management, a limited partnership, who mediated the limited partner presentation at the venture capital association meeting, estimated that from 1986 to 2002, only 32 firms accounted for 56 percent of money distributed. Ms. Frazier and other limited partners said the success for investors depended on being among the top-tier firms. “This is an access class, not an asset class,” she said.

Facebook has launched classifieds — It’s called Marketplace, and it launched this weekend. We’ll be writing about it more. For now, here’s the NYT story. It will allow users to create classified listings in four categories: housing, jobs, things for sale, and other. Facebook told us over the weekend that Oodle and Jobster do not have exclusive classifieds relationships with Facebook, despite previously announced partnerships. Jobster does offer job related products that go beyond Marketplace’s listings. Facebook users who create classifieds can show them to only chosen friends or to anyone in one of their “networks” — their high school, college, company or geographic region. They can choose to make the listings appear on their profile pages, and send them out on “news feeds,” the automatic updates that appear when users log in to the site. Buyers will be able to see how they’re connected to sellers. Get ready for some serious Facebook road-kill: The handful of stand-alone college classifieds start-ups (we hinted this might happen, here).

MySpace announces “Take Down Stay Down” — MySpace said it is using the technology of Audible Magic, a Los Gatos, Calif. company to prevent users from re-posting video content at MySpace after that content has been removed at the request of the copyright owner. MySpace is the first company to launch this feature. Google reportedly also has a deal with Audible Magic, and says it offer similar filtering technology at its YouTube property, but hasn’t commented on specifics. It’s hard to believe YouTube’s traffic won’t get hit when it implements the technology.

Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, gets married — …quietly, to his girlfriend, Anne Wojcicki, in the Bahamas last weekend. Story here. As mentioned before, Wojcicki is a biotech analyst who just started her own company. She’s a Yale graduate in her early 30s. Her sister Susan rented her Menlo Park, Calif., garage to Brin and Larry Page — which became Google’s first office.

Last.fm announced video service — Here is the company’s announcement. Last.fm has gotten buzz for its music recommendation technology, and social networking that lets you connect with users with similar tastes. It will let users create personal videos channels, just as they can create music channels. Recommendations will come from its partnership with indie labels such as Ninja Tune, Nettwerk Music Group, and Domino. Now people are calling Last.fm the “MTV of Web 2.0.”

Tagged fastest growing social network? — Michael Arrington has an update about the Silicon Valley social network, Tagged, which is now profitable, and perhaps the fastest growing. However, it’ll be worth checking back to see if it is sustainable, because the traffic spurt happens mainly over a single month.

Shopping widget mania — Seattle’s Mpire is rolling out about 80 new e-commerce “widgets,” which allow bloggers and publishers to post shopping related content on their sites and make money by passing leads onto Amazon.com and eBay. More details here, by John Cook. The company is similar to Tumri (see our coverage).

Child porn ring on Second Life — Bizarre, but serious.

Wallstrip, a financial video site, sold for $5M? — So say the rumors, but venture capitalist Fred Wilson is emphatic he did not invest $500,000 into the company.

Amazon’s stealth company, Lab126 — The company appears to be focused on digital media for consumer electronic devices. And its president is Gregg Zehr who was VP of Hardware Engineering at PalmOne, VP Engineering at VA Linux and VP PowerBook Engineering at Apple.

Car engine redesign may reduce pollution — See story here, about Purdue researchers who say they’ve created the first computational model to track engine performance from one combustion cycle to the next for a new type of engine that could dramatically reduce oil consumption.

Clean-tech sector summarized — Here is a good summary of details from the Lux Report.

China is out of control — Pundits have been shouting “China bubble” for years, only to see China keep growing with no major setback. This time, though, the mania has hit and China appears headed into the equivalent of Silicon Valley’s euphoric bubble and burst. The stock market has tripled in value since early 2006, and is up 51 percent this year. There’s talk of shares in China’s Bank of Communications jumping 50 percent on first-day IPO trading Tuesday.

Blackstone’s bridge too far? — Orbitz, Blackstone’s latest IPO candidate, does look shaky. See Gigaom story here.

Google’s strategy in three words: “Our next strategy evolution is to really think about three components,” Mr. Schmidt said, in comments picked up widely. “Search, ads and apps.”

Who’s afraid of Google? — That’s the headline screaming from the San Francisco Chronicle, featuring a graphic of a scary Google creature. The real answer, of course, is that Chron itself just as scared of Google as the start-ups it writes about — reeling from a decline in advertising and more layoffs.

iPhones coming earlier — They’re already being sold on eBay for more than $1,000, and apparently coming June 14 or earlier

Blackberry fans, check out the Curve — Slimmer than the 8800, but fatter than the Pearl. Details here. No launch date or pricing yet, but it will launch with AT&T.

YouTube will start filtering videos and other content in order to stop pirated material from being posted to it site, reports the Mercury News’ Elise Ackerman.

The news is significant because the entire music and video industry has been up in arms about YouTube’s slowness to implement filtering.

YouTube’s parent, Google, will use technology from Los Gatos, Calif.’s Audible Magic, the same technology that MySpace is offering media companies to check whether for their copyrighted material that is being posted at MySpace without their permission.

VentureBeat hasn’t been able to confirm any of this.

This is strange because Google earlier had delayed implementation of filtering at YouTube with the suggestion that it was building its own technology — delays that have made media groups like Viacom and News Corp angrier. Our question is: Why now?

The latest roundup of tech stuff:

TrenchMice, a nice F***ed Company? — TrenchMice is a new site trying to mobilize people to submit and edit comments about businesses and employers. Let us know what you think. We tried using it to look for info on Google, and not much there yet. It is based in Seattle.

Pheedo’s new ad platform — The Emeryville start-up, which specializes in inserting ads within RSS feeds, has unveiled a new product. Called “Feedpowered” advertising, it lets advertisers write small articles for their ads, and then feed that text to any site via a little widget (see image). Alternatively, these ads can be fed directly to people subscribing to them. Expedia, for example, has locally relevant feeds, and some people may want to subscribe to keep an eye on good deals, Pheedo says. Moreover, Pheedo has added little social buttons, for Delicious, Digg and other sites at the bottom of the ad — so that you can use Delicious to save the ad to your bookmarks, for example.

Tough week for Google — First, a court rules in favor of Belgian newspapers that sued Google, demanding the search engine remove links to their stories. Second, Google complies with a court order to disclose to Fox the identities of two individuals who illegally uploaded episodes of 24 to Google-owned YouTube. This follows orders from Viacom to take down 100,000 clips. YouTube is slowly becoming a very different sort of place than it used to be. Wonder how its users will take this. Finally, a bunch of media companies are accusing Google of aggressively placing advertising on sites that Google reportedly knew were showing pirated movies. Not good.

MySpace lets media companies block unauthorized video clips — The biggest social networking site said yesterday it is offering a filtering/blocking technology provided by Silicon Valley company Audible Magic, for free. It helps identify the digital audio signature in a video file.

Veoh’s new look — The video sharing site, out of testing mode, has launched a site using peer-to-peer technology (a technology that users the computers of regular users) to distribute DVD-quality video, or better than the standard YouTube video. People upload videos and then can syndicate them to other popular sites including MySpace and YouTube. The company is backed by Michael Eisner, former chief exec at Disney, among others.

Intel’s new chip, with 80 processing engines — This is apparently a model of chips to be used within five years. Details here.