VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Layoffs hit Revision3 — A number of shows are leaving the online video network or have been canceled.

Google Earth now available for the iPhone – The Google Earth Blog declares that the new iPhone app is “awesome.”

Microsoft opens Surface to third-party developers — The goal is to find the “killer app” for Microsoft’s tabletop computer.

AOL to use Brightcove video player — The move marks a shift in AOL’s strategy, because it has spent the last several years developing its own proprietary video player.

TubeMogul buys Illumenix — Both companies provide web video analytics. The terms were not disclosed.

Police bust online game ring for money laundering — The group allegedly sold game money that was illegally produced in China using cheap labor and virus programs.

Virtual world Gaia Online adds support for AOL’s Instant Messenger — Gaia says its users are already sending 2 million instant messages per day with the new feature.

Sohu.com, a Chinese operator of online games and media sites, plans $150M stock buyback — Sohu’s board just approved the repurchase program.

Illegal G1s pouring into China — The smartphones reportedly cost $584 in Beijing, plus another $73 to unlock the phone.

Truphone brings VoIP to BlackBerry — The mobile software developer had an earlier hit with its iPhone app.

Vanno uses Digg-like ratings to judge company reputations — ReadWriteWeb has 500 invites to the social news site.

Verizon profits soar on wireless — For the third quarter, Verizon’s profits increased 31 percent to $1.67 billion (59 cents per share).

Windows Live ID supports OpenID — Now you can use your Live ID to set up an OpenID alias to access sites like social network Plaxo. Microsoft says OpenID is “an emerging, de facto standard web protocol for user authentication.”

Following on the heels of Cisco and Google, IVT is launching its own version of “YouTube for the enterprise.” Google launched its “video for business” application just a couple of weeks ago, while Cisco hit the market in June with “Enterprise TV.”

IVT will challenge those players as well as start-ups Veodia and Brightcove with a portal-like media center that can aggregate not just videos but all rich media, such as recorded WebEx meetings, iTunes podcasts, Cisco video conferences, webcasts, and Polycom conference calls.

IVT PrimeTime is a portal that corporations can use to manage content within their organization. Employees can upload video for corporate training into the portal and search for videos and other media within it. Users can set up channels for specialized content and access controls to determine who can view it.

IVT is based in Los Angeles and Palo Alto, Calif. Its clients include Cisco, AT&T, IBM, E&Y, Oracle, NEC, Rohm & Haas and EDS. It provides them with rich media video communication and webcasting software. Now it is adding PrimeTime to cash in on corporate video sharing. The company says it will make it as easy to share videos in a business context as can be done on consumer video sites such as YouTube. Rohm & Haas said it has been using IVT PrimeTime for months now and has archived hundreds of hours of video.

The company says it can easily transcode video from any format into Adobe’s Flash format for universal viewing. Each component of IVT’s product is installed as a web-based platform. For users, it has a PrimeTime Studio tool that makes it easy to stage webcasts and upload video.

The company has 20 employees and was founded in 2005. In 2007, it raised a $3 million first round from Monitor Ventures and Tudor Investments. IVT is thinking about raising a new round. It sounds like a “me-too” company. But the company says that founder Greg Pulier has been involved in developing content creation tools and online video applications for years. He foresaw the need to make a unified platform for all sorts of rich media, not just video.

Heading into a battle with Cisco and others, Google is launching a YouTube-like video service for businesses.

Dubbed Google Video for Business, the service makes it easy for large businesses to tap into everything from camera phones to handheld video cameras and upload video to a corporate network. The videos can be standard YouTube-style quality or higher quality video as well.

“We want to make video mainstream for business, just like YouTube did for consumer video,” said Matt Glotzbach, product management director at Google’s enterprise division.

Glotzbach said the time is ripe because video production has reached the masses, with video technology in the hands of everyone from small outfits to large corporations. Companies can use it for executive messages, trip reports, or training. Google is using a new brand — instead of YouTube, which Google owns — since the YouTube brand isn’t viewed as business ready. Historically, business video has been expensive and complex.

Google Video for Business will be tightly integrated with Google Apps. You will be able to insert secure videos into your Google Apps, whether it’s in the middle of an email or presentations or a spreadsheet. The business will tap Google’s YouTube infrastructure for video conversion, streaming, uploading and security. To share a video, you simply type the email address into a field. You can embed videos in an enterprise web page. You can rate or tag videos easily so people can find it through searches.

The Google Video for Business will be sold as part of the premier edition of Google Apps, which costs $50 per user per year. An education version will be available on Sept. 8 for free until March 9, 2009. After that, it will cost $10 per user per year. Google Apps is being used by 500,000 businesses, with 3,000 signing up every day. It has more than 10 million active users, hundreds of thousands of whom pay for the premier edition.

The service will compete with other video services such as Cisco, which recently introduced Enterprise TV. It will also compete with Brightcove, which focuses on video for the media industry. But it won’t really go head to head with Fliqz, which allows small businesses to make their own custom videos. Google Video for Business will mainly focus on sharing video, not actually creating it. Veodia is another rival.

Each Google Apps Premier Edition domain gets 3 gigabytes of of video storage per user account. Existing Premier Edition administrators can enable Google Video for business immediately from the Google Apps control panel.

“This is a bottom up thing,” said Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research. “There’s no employee-driven video market today, but lots of use cases. Training video, sales force pro talks, field service repair videos, meet the team videos and others.”

Sales teams and field service representatives are the likely early adopters, he said. Here is a video of a demo of Google Video for Business.

Web video platforms like Brightcove, Move Networks and Maven have a problem: They have all built business models targeting the handful of content companies willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to push video on their sites. As a result, the platforms are angling for the same big fish in a relatively small pond; each must find ways to outdo the next by investing in new features without adding much to their price.

For Brightcove and its competition, two much smaller companies called Fliqz and Kaltura are here to bring the pain. These start-ups, while lacking the depth of features of their larger counterparts, offer video hosting, content management and streaming capabilities to websites at dramatically lower costs. Fliqz does it with proprietary self-serve software that gets video up and running on a site in around 30 minutes. Kaltura has a few plug-and-play extensions for wikis and blogging platforms, but its integration into regular websites is slightly more elaborate.

Both Fliqz and Kaltura have a few large enterprise customers, but with prices ranging from free to a few thousand dollars a month, they are going after the small and medium-sized websites that Brightcove and its ilk have all but ignored.

Fliqz’s model revolves around its simplicity. You go to its site, select a subscription level that reflects the size of your audience, pay for it and then add a few lines of code. Its substantial ease of use and quick deployment has enabled it to bring in around 17,000 customers, most of whom are using the ad-supported free version that grants them 500 streams a month. Along with relatively large sites including Dogster, Flixster and Autobytel, Fliqz counts religious organizations, dating services, parenting sites and travel agents among its users.

While Kaltura is still relatively simple, its vision is more expansive: For one thing, its technology is open source, so it has the potential to become much more powerful than Fliqz without spending tens of millions of dollars. While this means that anyone could use it for free, Kaltura is counting on revenue from value-added resellers that build features on its platform, and from sites that don’t want to worry about services like hosting and maintenance. For another, Kaltura’s video capabilities come with an impressively simple web-based editing tool, a sort of “video wiki” that lets anyone with permission add content to a video and remix it. With this tool and a recently announced partnership with Wikimedia, Kaltura hopes to add collaborative video to Wikipedia, which could get quite interesting.

More significantly, if Kaltura does manage to attract development, it has the potential to lead the charge to a commoditized market. Though this is already starting to happen, a powerful open source alternative could be serious trouble for the Brightcoves and Mavens of the world. This is an especially large issue for Brightcove, which has raised a hell of a lot of capital but has yet to find an exit, even as it raises yet more money to expand into Japan. Maven, on the other hand, managed to get acquired by Yahoo, so it’s Yahoo’s problem now.

Fliqz, which is based in Emoryville, CA, has raised a total of $7.5 million in two rounds and says it will soon start looking for $10-15 million more. New York’s Kaltura has also raised two rounds. The first was $2.1 million. The size of the second was not disclosed.

I hope we’re not about to get back into the numbered naming scheme for software products/web apps. To me that became uncool as soon as AOL hit version 3.5. That isn’t stopping Internet video platform provider Brightcove however, which today unveiled the beta version of Brightcove 3.

To this I ask, where is Brightcove 2? I can’t seem to find it on the Internet.

Naming silliness aside, Brightcove 3 is a complete overhaul of the current look and feel of the service. It also promises a new model for utilizing video players and video information on web pages.

Seeing as the service is in closed beta for the time being, only open to select customers, it’s hard to know exactly what all these changes are beyond the rather vague press release. There is also a preview site set up with even less information.

Brightcove 3 boasts that it will bring television programing to the Web by enabling the delivery of long-form, broadcast-quality content through any website without the need for proprietary software plug-ins. Which the increasingly popular NBC and Fox-backed video site Hulu already does.

While big customers such as the New York Times, Dow Jones, Barron’s, Newsweek, Showtime, HBO and MTV may have already have access to Brightcove 3 or will shortly, everyone else can expect to see these new features this coming Fall,

The service, which claims to have some 135 million unique Internet users every month, launched a Japanese subsidiary last month. Brightcove KK is a strategic expansion to an area of the word where many citizens have access to broadband Internet, an integral part of Brightcove’s vision.

Brightcove raised a large $59 million round back in the start of 2007.

With a majority of Japanese households hooked up to broadband, Japan is a prime market for online services, like video, that require high-speed Internet access. That’s why Internet video provider Brightcove is launching Brightcove KK, a new Japanese subsidiary.

In the United States companies ranging from Showtime to The New York Times to Dow Jones to Universal Music Group currently use Brightcove to serve up content.

The new subsidiary is being built on a $4.9 million investment from Brightcove, Inc. as well as four Japanese strategic partners, Dentsu, Inc., J-Stream, Inc., Transcosmos, Inc. and Cyber Communications, Inc., Brightcove KK will focus on tailoring Brightcove’s on-demand Internet video platform for the Japanese market.

Brightcove KK will be based in Tokyo, Japan with three of its investment partners, Dentsu, J-Stream and CCI serving as sales agents in the country.

Brightcove previously raised a large $59 million round in early 2007.

As any good sci-fi fan will know, the popular series Battlestar Galactica’s 4th and final season premieres tonight. The show offered an early glimpse to fans on SciFi.com today, streaming the entire first episode live. The problem? It ran at 9 am Pacific time.

While it’s great to utilize the Internet to give fans a sneak-peak, it should probably be done on a day and time that is appropriate. Those on the east coast could conceivably watch it during a lunch break, but everyone else either had to play hooky from work or be super fast with the minimize button.

SciFi isn’t the only television channel using web video to pre-run returning series. Showtime recently released the first two episodes of the new season of its hit show, The Tudors, online through various outlets including Internet TV platform, Brightcove.

Those who didn’t catch the morning viewing of Battlestar Galactica can watch it tonight on the SciFi channel at 10 pm (9 pm Central) - a much more reasonable time for the working sci-fi lover.

Below: A preview of Battlestar Galactica season 4

1) Verizon to let “any apps, any device” onto its network
2) Google GDrive is real, almost here
3) Brightcove to focus on video distribution for its partners
4) JotSpot, where are you?
5) GuildCafe, a social network for gamers, buys Uberguilds Network, an online gaming network
6) Xbox introduces more advanced friend features

Verizon to let “any apps, any device” onto its network – There’s lots of excitement today about an announcement by oligarchic mobile carrier Verizon that it will let any application or device developer access its network — even somebody “in their basement,” a Verizon executive said.

At first glance, this is great news for mobile startups, because it could mean they’ll get less restricted access to Verizon’s 63.7 million customers. Verizon will publish its technical standards in early 2008, that developers will need to follow in order to work with Verizon’s mobile network. If you meet the minimal standard, Verizon will activate you, with designs being tested and approved in a special Verizon testing lab. Verizon customers will be able to choose any application on their devices.

With this timing, Verizon will be getting a jump on a rival effort, the Google-led Android open source mobile software project, as Larry Dignan points out.

There are all sorts of details that need to be clarified in Verizon’s plans or developers may stay in their basements, such as what turnaround time for testing will be, a better understanding of Verizon’s standards and the price of certification fees.

For more, see Om’s pithy take.

Google GDrive is real, almost here – Rumors have abounded around the blogosphere for years about such a service. Google’s GDrive will let you store large files, like video, music, and images Like Box.net, the Wall Street Journal reports. This apparently means it will compete against file-hosting startups like Box.net, Divshare and many others. Google already lets users have a few gigabyts of storage for free in GMail, its online email service. Gmail has been steadily increasing its storage capacity, recently adding a subscription-fee enterprise version with storage up to 25 gigabytes for a single account.

Brightcove to focus on video distribution for its partners – The company has until now offered a public site, Brightcove.tv, where users could share videos, but it was really late to the game. There are a horde of online video startups experimenting with variations on that theme. Brightcove, which raised a huge $59 million round last January, will stop allowing users to upload videos on December 17. It will focus on being a specialized media platform for media companies — including some of its funders, such as the The New York Times, Hearst, CBS, and others.

JotSpot, where are you? – Since JotSpot, the wiki company, was purchased by Google in 2006, it has closed off registration for new users and has otherwise gone quiet. The sharp eyes in the forums section of Google Blogoscoped spotted another clue over the weekend that JotSpot is returning soon — a new mention of Jotspot in some Google software code. We’ve also been hearing rumblings that it will be introduced soon and integrated with other Google Apps like Gmail and Google Docs.

GuildCafe, a social network for gamers, buys Uberguilds Network, an online gaming network — Guildcafe connects gamers across so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing games (or MMOGs), including World of Warcraft, the Lord of the Rings Online, and Guild Wars. Players can form groups, or “guilds,” that can move across these games. The purchase negotiation was no doubt bloodily simulated between the two companies in a virtual battle fought across the MMOGscape. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed.

Cambridge, Mass.-based Guildcafe raised an undisclosed amount from IDG Ventures Boston back in July, apparently to acquire companies.

Xbox introduces more advanced friend features – If you’re one of the eight million Xbox Live users around the world, you’ll be able to see who your friends on Xbox are friends with. Question is, when will Xbox owner Microsoft sync this the data in its social network ally, Facebook.

Move Networks, a company offering video delivery technology for customers such as ABC, Fox, CW, Televisa, Discovery and ESPN.com, has raised a whopping $34 million round of capital.

This makes Move one the best funded video delivery companies out there. Late last year, it raised $11.3 million. The company is helping the large broadcasters get online, and competes against a number of other well-funded companies, such as Brightcove. These companies could put a dent in plans by newer sites such as Veoh or Joost to aggregate video content for such Internet delivery. At stake is potentially billions of dollars of ad revenue, though it isn’t clear how much Move or Brightcove can tap into this, and how much they’re simply licensing their technology to the broadcasters.

Also today, San Francisco’s BitTorrent, which offers a popular peer-to-peer technology used by many people to illegally download copyrighted video, continues its efforts to become legit. It said it has cut a deal with Brightcove to deliver video for that company’s clients, including CBS Corp., Viacom Inc.’s MTV Networks and New York Times. Its product is called BitTorrent DNA, and says its delivery is secure enough to meet these broadcasters’ needs. Brightcove has raised $80 million in backing, including $60 million of that early this year.

Move’s technology encodes high-quality video, and cuts down on buffering delays. It allows the broadcasters to stream long-form programs like Grey’s Anatomy or Bones over the Internet, delivering it across multiple platforms (to PC, mobile, etc) and adjusting speed depending on your broadband connection speed.

Silicon Valley venture firm Benchmark Capital led the round, which also included previous investors Hummer Winblad and Disney’s venture arm Steamboat Ventures.

Also investing in this round are large broadcasting industry players (including the “largest cable company” and “largest content provider,” according to our source, though the names haven’t been disclosed yet; the official announcement has been held up, we’re told, because another investor wants in).

Move’s technology also accommodates advertisers who want to target users.

The seven-year-old company is based in American Fork, Utah.

Two months ago, the company several new hires in sales and marketing, including industry veterans — for example, Doug Parrish arrived from Walt Disney Co., where he served as executive vice president and chief technology officer for the Walt Disney Internet Group. He’s senior VP of operations at Move.

Here’s a timeline of Move’s deals:
2006
- August: Fox (myspace) goes live with Move Networks
- Sept: Televisa switches to Move

2007
- January: CWTV went live with Move
- April: ABC dumps Flash for Move
- July: Many Fox Owned and operated stations
- August: ABC launches HD stream with Move
- August: Discovery launches with Move
- Sept: ESPN360.com launches with Move
- Sept: ABC/AOL launches with Move

Sample list of shows streamed by Move Networks:
- ABC High Definition (abc.com): Lost, Desperate Housewives
- Fox (fox.com/fod): 24, PrisonBreak, The Simpsons<- CWTV (cwtv.com): Girls Go Cruisin, Beauty and the Geek
- ESPN360.com (espn360.com - certain ISP/broadband connection required): college football games, NASCAR races, etc
- Discovery Networks: Discovery Channel’s “DIRTY JOBS”; TLC’s “LA INK”

Brightcove, a company that gives media outlets and other businesses a platform to deliver online video, has raised a whopping $59 million in a third round of funding.

Amid the trend of consolidation hitting the sector, this funding will help tide the company over. There are oodles of other companies doing something similar, from Twistage, to Reality Digital, vSocial and GridNetworks.

Besides, no one can afford to let Brightcove go under. All kinds of media groups are using Brightcove technology to get online, and they’re investing in it too. They include customers The New York Times Company, and Transcosmos Investments & Business Development, which participated in the latest investment. With so much capital, though, you have to wonder whether Brightcove will ever be able to return a profit on the investment.

AllianceBernstein, Brookside Capital, and Maverick Capital led the latest investment. Other investors include Accel Partners, Allen & Company, AOL, General Catalyst Partners, The Hearst Corporation, and IAC/InterActiveCorp.

We first wrote about Brightcove here.

[Update: Bambi Francisco says the value of the company, after the investment, is $220 million]

Roundup of a busy week:

Instant messaging and email are merging, Yahoo kicks it off — Yahoo will be integrating IM through its email, Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse revealed during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. In retrospect, we’re wondering why this trend hasn’t happened earlier.

Email is limiting, providing no way to see whether the person on the other end is present or not (that person may not want to show you they are present, but email doesn’t even give them the option). It piles up, and it’s clunky — not letting you switch to conversation immediately, if you want to. Instant messaging, meanwhile, can be distracting, isn’t ideal for careful phrasing, isn’t as easy to archive or forward to other people. So what’s needed is a bridge, and now people are building it. We’ve heard ideas bubbling up from entrepreneurs here in the valley, but Yahoo’s move steal the initiative. Techcrunch has a screenshot of what it looks like. There’s also a Chicago company offering something similar, called Parlano, with its product called Mindalign, though its design isn’t that great. (Via Jeff Nolan).

A Web 2.0 University? — One is being created in Alexandria, VA of all places — Details here, and it’s open for registration for its AJAX and Web 2.0 “boot camp” courses.

From Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s talk — Google is working to allow users to export their search histories to other locations, such as Yahoo. Meanwhile, he rejects rumors that Google had set aside money to bail out YouTube from copyright lawsuits — though it is true that Google Video itself has been sued.

Microsoft-Google fight to be greener – Microsoft execs are bragging about building what appears to be the first carbon-neutral data center, taking care of 400 customers for the same energy it “takes to light one 60-watt light bulb.” (Via Mercury News). We reported earlier how Google aims to be carbon neutral, that is save as much fossil fuels as it burns in energy at the Googleplex and from corporate jet trips.

Put a Google map on any image — And when we say any image, we mean it. Scoble has the scoop on Maplib.

Google offering GPS on the Helio Drift phone — Here are the details. Note that is doesn’t appear to be integrated with Dodgeball, and is a step closer to matching the advantage of Loopt.

Google executive Marissa Mayer says Google is like a VC firm — Fortune has a noteworthy conversation between Huffington and Mayer:

HUFFINGTON: Whatever products Google (Charts) is developing, they are incorporating a 60 Percent to 70 percent failure rate. I find that utterly fascinating. Talk about that culture and how that translates into our lives.

MAYER: As we’ve grown, one of our challenges has been, How can we continue to innovate? We have a theory around failing fast. If you assume that one in five things you do will turn out to be really successful, and maybe two of five will be moderately successful, and the other two will languish, you want to do a lot of things. It’s all about being agile. Most of the teams at Google are three to ten people. Five people launched Google News. About five people launched Google Toolbar. They operate like small companies inside the large company. Google is a lot like managing a VC firm, because you’re placing bets on different teams.

Video companies Brightcove and Reality Digital are looking to raise VC rounds — Start-up Brightcove, which hosts video for companies and lets them insert advertising into the video, is looking to raise a round of more than $55 million, GigaOM first reported, with a post-money valuation well north of $225 million range. It has already raised $21 million in two rounds from General Catalyst Partners and Accel, and several others.

San Francisco’s Reality Digital, which does something similar, but in some ways is more ambitious (it hosts video for its clients, but also blogging and forums) is also looking to raise another round. It raised $2 million in a first round in November last year. It has ten employees, and has several customers. One is SPARQ training, which lets high school athletes promote themselves to recruiters — via Reality Digital’s video/blog platform. The athletes can have their coaches chime with their own blogs, too, for example.

Roundup in Silicon Valley:

FON exploits opportunity to stir up WiFi interest in San Francisco — Search engine company Google is having a heck of a time getting “crazy nut job” local SF residents to agree to its plans for a city-wide WiFi project. So while big Google is stymied, another company, FON, is hoping to slip under the regulatory radar with a grassroots campaign: Offering hundreds of its La Fonera wireless routers at an event it calls “Freedom Friday,” to be held at SF’s Union Square from Noon to 2 p.m. tomorrow. FON’s been having its own challenges drumming up interest in its product, so perhaps this will create some viral buzz? As mentioned, Google is an investor in FON.

Williams buys back podcasting company Odeo — As mentioned elsewhere, Evan Williams, who started San Francisco podcasting site Odeo after selling his blog software, Blogger, to Google, has parted ways with his his venture capitalists.

You knew things were choppy at Odeo when Williams suddenly started giving candid assessments last month about having tried too much too quickly with Odeo. He then shut down Odeo’s Audioblogger, which had let users post audio to a blogger.com blog via a telephone call.

Now we find out he’s bought Odeo from his venture capitalist backers, and renamed it Obvious. Though, from his comments on the site (”We’re not sure how it’s all going to work”), it isn’t entirely obvious. Included in the assets is Twitter, another service we’ve mentioned before — which lets friends know what you’re doing. He says it is “going to be huge.”

George Zachary, the venture capitalist at Charles River Ventures who had invested in Odeo, tells us he actually made money on the deal.

Which reminds us, Zachary has launched a blog — Perhaps the Odeo story is what made investor Zachary decide to launch his own blog, called Sense and Cents. He tells VentureBeat his goal for the blog is to navigate the core of “who we are as humans and what we need.” He notes how technology advances in communications are letting us do things we’ve never done before. He says he wants to “talk about and connect interesting sociological issues and how they integrate and show themselves with technology and experiences of consumer internet.”

Wonder if he’ll try his hand at podcasting? ;)

Are there enough shopping search engines? — Ok folks, we’ve got at least a dozen shopping search engines now, of every stripe and flavor. We just wrote about TheFind.com last night, and now we see yet another one launching: Ugenie. GigaOm has a write up. It has an office in Silicon Valley, among other places, and was founded last May by two Amazon.com alums. It has raised $5 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures and Sierra Ventures and now has 15 employees, but it is not clear what new it is bringing to the table.

Revenge of the server farms — After disappearing after the first Internet bubble burst, the server farms are back. The NYT has the story: Equinix of Foster City, Calif., is building its first new center in Chicago for $165 million and expects to open it late next year. When it opens, the server farm will be 95 percent occupied and demand 30 megawatts of power, enough electricity to power 30,000 houses.

Check out Palm’s colorful new Treo 680 — They’re getting thinner too. See image here at left.

Six Apart launches Vox, another blogging tool — Sigh, do we need another blogging software? The answer is no. But if you’re someone who has been on the sidelines, a non-techie fearful of taking the blogging plunge, this one is worth a good look. The first generation of blog software was clunky, but this latest, called Vox, has a easy and good looking finish to it. It is latest software from company Six Apart, and is free. We created this blog in three minutes, no more.

Oracle kills RedHat — Oracle introduced its open-source Linux operating system (see our wire story from this morning), and the market killed RedHat today. It lost a quarter of its value in trading. Despite the likely dire consequences for RedHat, some people are skeptical that it will help Oracle, though:

I really don’t see why anyone would pay $50,000 per CPU for a license to use a tarted-up version of Oracle Fusion Middleware when so many clever subversives on the edges of organizations are already doing all these cool Web 2.0 things now for pennies a month and there are so many really sensational, and far less expensive, enterprise-level integration solutions available or in the works.

eBuddy raises 5 million euros — See the story here on VentureBeat’s wire, from earlier today. (Another reminder to subscribe separately to our news wire, which is the RSS button on the left of homepage, if you haven’t done so already).