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Before the advent of the written word, the story goes, humans had to either store all their memories in their own heads, or by oral tradition passed down through designated members of their tribes. With trade came notation of facts and figures, and later alphabets, books and libraries. With them came the modern brain, which treats recorded knowledge as an extension of itself.

Throughout these developments, previous generations have grumbled that each new advance leaves us worse off — take this month’s issue of the Atlantic, which includes a feature story titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. Yet Google’s search-and-retrieve functions are only the tip of the Internet iceberg, when it comes to memory. A whole new generation of efforts to move our memories online is in the works, and may represent one of the biggest upcoming movements in computing.

Pensieve, an IBM technology, is the latest project to unveil itself. The idea, being able to snap pictures of business cards and people with your cell phone for later retrieval, sounds almost identical to Evernote, a company I reported on a month ago when it came out of private beta. That doesn’t mean IBM is copying; rather, that IBM is taking the most obvious tack first. Business cards (as well as receipts and other short, printed matter) are easy for image recognition software to read.

The problem right now is that the low-hanging fruit is fairly limited. Recording is easy — so easy that a Microsoft researcher has been doing it for nine years, saving photos, videos, web pages, and nearly everything else he interacts with.

Each of those capabilities is now duplicated for regular people. “Life casting” became a minor fad with Justin.tv last year, and more recently Qik’s had its public launch. Other companies like Kyte also offering video and picture feeds from your mobile phone, all of which can potential be saved. Emails have always been possible to save, although companies like Zimbra and Xobni have since added much more functionality, while Xoopit helps search through mail. For web pages, there are bookmarkers like Delicious, and upcoming services like Twine, whose private beta I’ve started using to save my web ramblings, although the service itself still needs plenty of work.

However, there’s still a lot missing. First, you need an integrated storage spot for all this material. Hard drives die, photo sharing services go down, email accounts are hacked. It’s likely that in the future web companies will exist that offer ironclad storage for all your data — meaning the complete, unedited record of your life. Storage services abound right now, but users will want something special for storing their lives.

Almost as important are editing services to narrow all the incoming data to points, which can be disseminated across Facebook feeds, weblogs and other public forums. If you really did record your whole day today, you’d have to spend a lot of time searching out the moments that mattered and tagging or annotating them for immediate use or later retrieval. The more automation exists, the more people will record parts of their lives.

Search and editing, in fact, are choke points that may stunt the growth of a memory industry. But then, there are trends that suggest otherwise. Image recognition, driven by advertising uses, is advancing rapidly under the care of companies like Blinkx and Viewdle. Voice recognition has stalled researchers for years, but companies like SoliCall and VoiceBox may yet offer a working solution.

Once software can recognize pictures, video and audio in addition to text, the work passes on to the growing ranks of semantic startups. Twine itself isn’t just a storage point for web pages; it’s attempting to add structure through automatic, intelligent tagging so that when you’re trying to find something you’ve saved, it’s easy. (A similar effort not yet out of stealth is called Qitera.)

Such startups will represent the first set of technologies that can truly help establish external stores of memory. Simulating short-term memory early startups like ReQall and Jott, both now available on the iPhone, already help with day-to-day reminders.

Our long-term memories are the tougher nut to crack, but there’s a wealth of opportunity in automated journals, work streams and research logs, not to mention data mining services that can help us manage our time better (RescueTime is an early example). And a true integrated service may be closer than it seems; take a look at Numenta, which is working on a “hierarchical temporal memory system (HTM) patterned after the human neocortex.”

And when all these things exist, what will happen to our memories? As the Atlantic article suggests, we may find that the net effect is to “scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration,” — or, as it argues in another part, we could spur a “golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.” The result may well depend on the quality of the efforts.

With all the video content online, the video advertising market is booming. Investors are still placing bets on new companies, and existing companies are getting more aggressive with ad techniques.

The latest company to raise money is YuMe, a Silicon Valley company offering a video-centric ad network. It has just raised $9 million more from prominent firms DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, and BV Capital.

A second company, Blinkx, is already public, but its latest video ad product is controversial: It lets anyone with embedded video on their blogs place contextually relevant text ads inside them even if the videos aren’t ours. To test it, we pulled a YouTube video about Halloween made by One True Media, for example, and inserted ads on to it. We could make money on it by showing it VentureBeat, if we wanted. See image below. Note it gives you the option of showing the ads inside or outside of the video. Details here.

A company named Revlayer had done something similar a few months ago, but disappeared a day after launching. However, it was more obtrusive, placing an entire banner over a video before it started, and wasn’t necessarily contextually related. It’s site is still down, as of this writing.
While the market is expected to become quite large, rising from around $775 million this year to $3.11 billion by 2010, there is no shortage of competition for new companies like YuMe.

Last month, ad network Videoegg raised $15 million. There’s also Adap.tv and, of course, Google. Meanwhile, the big ad serving companies like ValueClick and Ad.com are making forays into video, as well.

Redwood City, Calif.’s YuMe is interesting because its technology works across multiple platforms: It can serve ads into downloaded video and video streamed on websites and mobile phones. This is in contrast to companies like Kiptronic, which focuses on downloaded video, or AdMob, which does only mobile.

YuMe’s chief executive and founder, Jayant Kadambi, says his company aims to place ads in videos from the “mid-tail” of online video, which he defines as “anyone that is not an NBC or CBS.” These include customers like Somagirls.tv, JoeCartoon.com, RedOrbit, Vuze and Pando — medium-size, professional producers and distributors whose content is safe for brand-conscious advertisers. In this mid-tail, the company currently serves between 150-250 million ads a month.

Jayant says that he raised the round mostly to scale YuMe’s infrastructure, recruit top notch executives, and build a sales force. The company previously raised $7 million.

Updated

Blinkx the San Francisco video search engine, has taken us into new bubble territory, going public on the London Alternative Investment Market (AIM) and being valued at $355 million.

It raised about $50 million.

Its IPO is perfectly timed, because it hits all the hype buttons: Blinkx is search, it is video, and best of all, it is online advertising — an industry where the merger activity is at its most frantic levels since Cisco, Nortel and Lucent binged on billion-dollar infrastructure companies at the height of the last bubble.

Should we bother reminding people?: Blinkx does not expect to earn a profit this year. Oh, and there are plenty of competitors, namely Pixsy (which says it has more distribution deals with independent sites than Blinkx), Truveo, Google/YouTube, Yahoo, Microsoft, and the long-tail of other video sites. More more are coming.

(Corrected:) Blinkx’s technology takes a video’s content — the spoken words within them - and translates it into searchable text, which is something different from what most sites do. Pluggd and others translation services are making headway in this area. It is powering video search for a Lycos, Looksmart and a division AOL.

Blinkx, meanwhile, tell us they’re in this for the long haul, and they think they can make money by serving targeted advertisements.

Here’s the latest action:

Scribd hype — Maybe because it calls itself the “YouTube for documents,” the young Scribd is getting a lot of interest from Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists. We’ve talked to some eager to invest. Rumors are leaking out, including at Gigaom and Techcrunch that the round is almost done, with GigaOm saying it is done and citing a large $10 million valuation. We talked with Scribd’s Trip Adler today, and he didn’t want to say much. He said those other reports are “inaccurate.” He hasn’t closed the round yet, he added. (Our coverage of Scribd here.)

Adobe open sources Flex platform tools — The company announced that outside developers can use its Flex platform to participate in building rich Internet applications for the Web, including Apollo applications for the desktop. This is significant because Adobe’s Flex/Flash platform — around which many cutting-edge Web sites are being built these days — has remained relatively closed. Announcement here, and more details here. Robert Scoble had an early look.

TheStreet.com buys Stockpickr.com — This is another success for Web 2.0. Stockpickr offers place for people to compare and exchange investment tips. (Story here).

Grand Central offers its one-telephone number feature via mobile devices — You’ll recall (VentureBeat’s coverage) that Grand Central is the company that lets you create one telephone number for all your needs. Through a Web dashboard, you can direct calls to whatever phone you want to use, and centralize voicemail. Now, you can control all this from your cell-phone too. (Grand Central Mobile)

Oak Pacific Incorporated falling apart? — The Chinese Web company that some have called the Chinese Myspace, backed by U.S. venture capitalists, has laid off serious numbers of employees. From recent blog posts (here and here, you’d think the company is disintegrating, and chief executive Joe Chen out of control. However, we talked with David Chao, partner at DCM and an investor in OPI, and he said bloggers have focused on the visible lay offs from units that have struggled, in part because of new regulations imposed by China Mobile. Those regulations increase the revenue share on wireless services such as SMS, MMS and voicemail management, and also restrict their use in some ways — so the revenues of all wireless companies got hit, not just OPI. That said, OPI is sort of like IAC — a holding company with lots of properties. Some units are going to do poorly, and they’ll be cut. Others are growing quickly, including Mop.com and Xiaonei, which Chao likens to the Facebook of China, and is on fire — one of the fastest growing companies in China, in terms of page views and visits. We covered Xiaonei here. All told, Chao says the business is a “net positive.” And chief executive Joe Chen is talented at making multiple bets, he said.

Red Herring not as dire it seems — While we had Chao on the phone, we asked him about the struggling business magazine Red Herring, where Chao is a board member. ValleyWag says the mag is in default, and that it has the proof to show it — in the form of lawsuit papers filed by Comerica. Sighing at the question, he said he didn’t want to get in a pissing match with another publishing company (i.e., Valleywag’s parent, Gawker) but that the financials aren’t as bad as they appear.

Tim Draper in Vietnam — Tim Draper, who has been expanding his Silicon Valley venture firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson more aggressively internationally than just about any other firm, announced a $50 million Vietnam fund last year (see our coverage). He was in Ho Chi Min City a few days ago to celebrate its launch, and looks quite at home.

Razz, the voice-mix service, raises another round — The San Francisco company, earlier known as Phonebites, lets you insert noises while you are talking on the phone. As Thealarmclock puts it, “farts” for example. Mayfield Fund, one of the alleged new investors, did not respond to our request for confirmation of the investment, reported by PE Wire. Besides Mayfield, Cardinal Venture Capital, Garage Technology Ventures and Greenpark Capital also reportedly invested. (Our past coverage)

Cozmo.TV, latest personalized TV site — The San Francisco start-up joins a crowded space of players wanting to let you personalize and share the TV programming you watch. With Cozmo, you select shows from places like YouTube, Google, MySpace and combine them into channels that you then roll into an embeddable widget, which you share. Problem is, there are other sites that do something similar. There’s Blinkx, Channels.com, Joost and MeeVee. (See Techcrunch)

Speaking of Blinkx, it is being taken public — The video search company will go public on the London AIM exchange, which has somewhat of a flimsy reputation. Om says Blinkx has been adrift, and suggests public investors may be duped.

Speaking of Joost, it is signing up lots of advertisers — This is advantage you get if you have the name recognition Skype co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The duo haven’t even formally launched their company Joost, yet have lined up several major advertisers. The company wants to send free videos and other programming to your TV. The NYT says United Airlines, Microsoft, Sony Electronics and Unilever are among 30 on board as “launch partners.” The launch is planned for Tuesday, the Times says.

In other news:
– Metamatrix, a company backed by venture firm Kleiner Perkins, has been bought by Redhat, and some suggest it was at a loss. Kleiner did not respond to a request for comment.
– MySQL, the open source database company that lots of Web sites run on, got $50M in revenue last year and plans to go public, its chief executive says.
–ChinaCache raises $32 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Ignition Partners, IntelVC, Internet Investor Growth, JAFCO ASIA, SIG, Starr International, and Susquehanna International Group. It is a ten-year old company, and helps speed up content delivery over the Web.
–Lifelock, an online identity management and identity theft prevention company based in Phoenix has raised $6 million in Series B funding from Kleiner Perkins, according to Gigaom. Word is, it’s valued at more than $40 million. Kleiner declined comment.
–Here’s a beginner’s guide for Twitter. It has everything (via Nolan).