VentureBeat

1. EBay CEO Meg Whitman prepare to retire
2. Open Source revolution continues, with Intel
3. Microsoft purchases virtualization co., Calista
4. Cleverset, software recommendation co., sold
5. Yahoo has some small layoffs coming
6. Facebook-branded Nokia handsets?
7. LifeLock, anti-credit fraud co., gets $25M
8. Online ad co., Spotrunner, draws buzz
9. Jobs snubs both Amazon and Google
10. Coventi Pages gives up the ghost
11. Singapore opens search engine contest

EBay chief exec Meg Whitman is preparing to retire — Whitman, the most visible female chief executive of Silicon Valley (where there aren’t many great female role models), could step down within weeks, according to the WSJ. John Donahoe, 47, president of eBay’s auction business unit, has emerged as the leading succession candidate.

Open Source revolution continues, with Intel — In case you haven’t noted, the open source software industry is on fire. We’ve covered a series of investments into open source companies over the past few days, and last week was punctuated by the acquisition of open source MySQL by Sun for $1 billion. Now Intel is crowing about its open source investments. News today emerges that it has backed REvolution Computing, creator of an open source parallel computing software for computational statistics. The amount of the funding round, the New Haven, Connecticut company’s first, was undisclosed

Microsoft purchases Silicon Valley virtualization start-up Calista Technologies – Microsoft is trying to catch up with VMWare, which has opened up a lead in the hot virtualization industry, which lets companies reduce the number of servers they use by letting them run multiple operating systems on a single machine. So it has acquired Calista (see WSJ story for good summary). The acquisition price wasn’t disclosed, but the San Jose, Calif. Calista was backed with an undisclosed amount by Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and others (we mentioned the secretive company more than a year ago).

Cleverset, software recommendation service, sold to ATG for $10 million — Cleverset, like many other companies we’ve covered, offers software that presents users of e-commerce sites with relevant recommendations and information. Press release here.

Yahoo has some small layoffs coming — The past few days have featured rumors that Yahoo will be laying off thousands of employees, as it tries to become a leaner, more efficient organization. The actual cuts may not be so drastic, counters reporter Kara Swisher, who has followed Yahoo closely: “[E]xpect the changes to be less bold than has been reported, much in the same way [chief executive and founder] Jerry Yang has been handling other changes at Yahoo–slow and decidedly non-dramatic,” The company will move to places where Yahoo has an advantage — “mobile, communications, like email, and its graphical ad network” — she says.

Facebook discussing Facebook-branded Nokia handsets — If Google is going to have a cellphone strategy, well, by golly, so is Facebook. PaidContent has the report about a possible partnership. The arrangement may also include Nokia buying a small stake in Facebook, according to the report.

LifeLock, the anti-credit fraud company, gets $25M more — This is the controversial Tempe, AZ company co-founded by Robert Maynard, who himself has been accused of deceptive practices, and where CEO Todd Davis publicly discloses his social security number (457-55-5462) to prove his company’s fraud protection product works. AlleyInsider first reported, and the company now confirms that the company has raised $25 million more in a round led by Goldman Sachs, and including Bessemer and Kleiner Perkins. The company previously has raised close to $13 million in round led by the latter two firms.

Spotrunner action — There’s lots of buzz around Spotrunner, the online advertising company. First, large advertising company WPP is looking at possibly acquiring SpotRunner along with another online ad company, VideoEgg, according to the NY Post. Meanwhile, Spotrunner has acquired GlobeShooter, a network of more than 1,200 independent filmmakers, videographers, producers and production companies across the U.S. Spotrunner is backed by venture firms Battery and Index (see our earlier coverage ).

Online word processor Coventi gives up the ghost — Despite actively soliciting users and press attention for much of 2007, online word processor Coventi Pages has apparently failed to gain enough users to continue competing with Google Docs, Zoho and scads of other, lesser-known rivals. The startup sent out an email to users, reported by Web Worker Daily, stating that it will close its doors on February 1st.

Singapore opens search engine contest — Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research has opened a competition, with a $100,000 prize, for a new online search engine. Rather than just fostering yet another competitor for Google, the agency is looking for an engine that can search through text, audio and video. Contestants will have eight months to build their engine following the February 29th registration deadline. [via Physorg].

Jobs snubs both Amazon and Google — Apple’s Steve Jobs wants to own the hot mobile device market, and he takes a shot at both Google and Amazon’s latest efforts in that area. Of the Amazon Kindle reader, he says: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he tells the NYT. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” He’s also critical of Google’s Android project, to develop open cellphones that could compete with the iPhone: “We’ll see how good their software is and we’ll see how consumers like it and how quickly it is adopted.” In seeking not to get locked out of the mobile phone world, “I actually think Google has achieved their goal without Android, and I now think Android hurts them more than it helps them. It’s just going to divide them and people who want to be their partners.”

[Update: The crowd has voted: Cleverset wins best in show. G.ho.st wins most creative idea. Spiceworks mostly likely to exit first.]

Here are the companies presenting at today’s Launchpad event at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco: G.ho.st, Realius, Cleverset, Click Forensics, TripIt and Spiceworks.

The first three are new to VentureBeat, although two of those have been around for a while. We’ll update this post as we learn more about them. For now, here’s a summary:

G.ho.st — The company wants to provides every person with what it calls a free “virtual computer,” letting you log onto an account from any browser and so you can perform standard computing tasks. It offers you access to 3GB of online storage, email, and software applications including office applications from Zoho and Thinkfree. Here’s an intro to the offering. The company isn’t entirely new, having launched in April. It calls itself an operating system for the Web. Note: Google and many other companies may make this company redundant soon. Google offers a range of online applications, as well as online storage options. Moka5 and Mojopac, meanwhile, are two of several virtual VC companies taking this concept to a new level — with PCs in your pocket.
How will it make money? It wants to get revenue as an Amazon affiliate, in other words taking a cut if people say, buy a book from Amazon while looking at an ad on G.ho.st’s page (this is a longshot model, in our view, and needs work) The company is backed with $2 million from an undisclosed venture firm. Crowd reaction: Divided, though some people really liked it.

Realius — This is a fantasy real estate game site — The goal is to price the value of a home. The crowd of users get to decide the final price. The site plays on the U.S. obsession with homes and home prices. It uses real places, properties, people and other considerations that factor into home pricing, such as data about crime and schools. It offers expert advice to help you play the game. The company wants to target the $10 billion market in the real estate advertising market, only a small fraction of which is online. It launches in two weeks. Question: Are people really so obsessed that they’ll play this sort of game? We doubt there’s a significant market for this.

Cleverset — This is a strange one for Lauchpad, because Cleverset is five years old. But the Seattle company recently turned to develop personalized recommendation technology to consumers who are shopping on retail sites. It is a competitor to Aggregate Knowledge of Silicon Valley, and Wunderloop of Germany, among others. Cleverset records information about products in order to draw relations between them. The method goes beyond existing recommendation services that might, for instance, suggest different kinds of umbrellas if you’re looking to buy one. Instead, CleverSet might also suggest a wide-brimmed hat and a box of chamomile tea. All of the products it knows about can be mapped out and cross-referenced for interesting buyers.
Previously, it offered data-mining technology has been used by the U.S. military to track battlefield assets in Iraq. The National Institutes of Health to determine the likelihood that an elderly individual will stumble and fall. John Cook profiled CleverSet two years ago. Google’s VP of research, Peter Norvig and former Amazon.com chief scientist Andreas Weigend have been advisors. New today: It has 80 customers, and they’re seeing an average conversion rate increase of 20 percent and revenue increase of 30 percent. These are whopping numbers, comparable to Aggregate Knowledge’s claims. The company says it is now raising its first institutional venture capital round.

Spiceworks — The company relies on ads to offer IT management software. We covered it in August. It has plenty of competition, including Packettrap, announced yesterday, though none that we know want to rely entirely on ads. Here’s what was disclosed today: It now has more than 160,000 people using it, and claims it’s growing at 10 percent a month, making it the fastest growing company in IT management ever. Remarkable: The company has a 4 percent market share. It says it has London Symphony Orchestra as a customer. A bit of a surprise mention, because orchestras are notoriously cheap. Question: How are advertisers going to target the orchestra IT guys? Anyway, the crowd reaction to this company is very positive. The company got $8 million from Shasta and Austin, which is a bit of a coincidence considering that Click Forensics (see next entry) got funding from the same two venture firms. Other competitors are GroundWork OpenSource (see our coverage), Ipswitch, Kace Networks and SolarWinds.net.

Click Forensics — The San Antonio, Texas company reports on online click-fraud, has raised $5 million in a first round of financing earlier this year. See our coverage. It is backed by Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures, and competes against companies like FraudWall, and ClickFacts (see coverage). Click-fraud is when someone clicks on an online page or advertisement purposefully to inflate revenue for the publisher of the site hosting the advertisement, or to make the advertiser pay more than they otherwise would have. Click Forensics is a spin out of Optimal iQ. From the presentation, nothing really new presented today.

TripIt– This is a travel plan organizer that we covered at the Techcrunch conference. Here’s what’s new today: It lets you email the service to request information, such as flight trip times. Convenient for mobile usage.

[Mark Coker and Chris Morrison contributed to this report.]

(Updated) Round-up in Silicon Valley:

Google working on a Google Earth version of Second Life? — So says venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg, a partner at Benchmark capital, the firm that invested in Second Life, citing a rumor from the “PhD grapevine.” [Update: Google spokesman Daniel Pastor says: "We're continually exploring opportunities to expand our offerings, but we don't have anything to announce at this time."] Google co-founders have always been about having “impact.” This would give them a chance to act as virtual central bankers, a function Second Life has been having problems with. See the latest allegations, for example, that Second Life is akin to a pyramid scheme, and that it’s much harder to pull your money out than you’re led to believe.

Marketclusters, latest effort to filter blogs for corporate clients — It is the old lemming play. Monitor110, of New York, and TechDirt, of Belmont, Calif. (Silicon Valley) are doing versions of this, and have just raised capital to sign up clients. And so Marketclusters, of London, has raised $3 million from New Media Spark. It serves corporate and financial clients. Notably, it lists among its clients Silicon Valley venture firm Benchmark Capital, which happens to be an investor in Seeking Alpha, a company that aggregrates information from financial blogs, and so is somewhat related. Benchmark has been known to hedge (for example, investing in both online loan marketplace competitors, Zopa and Prosper).

The world’s densest memory circuit — Researchers at Caltech and UCLA said they have created a circuit 100 times denser than today’s standard memory circuits — while remaining as small as a human white blood cell.

Adobe’s curious acquisition of a peer-to-peer networking company — Om speculates on why Adobe, the giant software and Flash multimedia maker, has bought a Santa Cruz, Calif. P2P networking start-up, Amicima though we’re still left scratching our heads about exactly why.

Bix, the little $41M web site? — Bix, you’ll recall, was the light-weight Web site that let people compete in online karaoke, hot or not and other contests. It raised $6.7 million, and then was snatched up by Yahoo, apparently for a 6-fold return (according to one rough account), within six months of launching. Not bad. [Update: A credible source close to Bix tells VentureBeat the actual price was higher than $41M]

CleverSet latest online behavior monitoring company — This company joins a number of other players, including Aggregate Knowledge, that try to predict what people will want to buy based on their behavior. CleverSet watches what you click on, what information its clients have about you, your purchase history, all to help their online retail clients make better merchandise recommendations to you. The Seattle company just raised $2 million. On its advisory board are Dr. Peter Norvig, director of research for Google, and Dr. Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist of Amazon.com.