VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

New partnership brings Helio to Virgin Mobile — Virgin Mobile USA will acquire the U.S. arm of South korea-based SK Telecom, namely, a mobile operator called Helio, according to the Financial Times. Both mobile operators have been struggling to make money by piggybacking on the infrastructure of existing carriers. This announcement doesn’t offer any sense of how they might bounce back; it just seems loaded with more bad news, like the estimate that Virgin Mobile USA will lose up to 160,000 users in the second quarter of this year.

Starbucks will stop selling CDs — Starbucks is abandoning its plan to become an entertainment hub where customers can pick up a CD or iTunes gift card along with their lattes, reports Silicon Alley Insider. All in-store music offerings should be gone by September. Starbucks customers may not notice, since they weren’t buying many of those CDs anyway, but this is more bad news for the struggling music industry, which once saw Starbucks as an opportunity for growth.

Digg competitor Mixx adds community-building features – Mixx, another site that allows users to vote on media content, is launching a new feature called Mixx Communities. Users can now set up their own Mixx sites, allowing them to build a Mixx community around specific topics. Another competitor called Reddit already enabled user-created pages, and even went a step further last week by going open source.

Intel doesn’t want Vista either — Intel has decided that it won’t upgrade the computers of its 80,000 employees to the latest and arguably least popular version of the Microsoft operating system, according to The New York Times’ anonymous source. That looks pretty bad for Microsoft, since the software company and chip maker have had a famously close relationship; some observers dubbed the pair “Wintel.” On the other hand, it’s not that surprising, because it’s pretty darn hard to find anyone who wants Vista on their computer. (Aside from VentureBeat writer MG Siegler, that is.)

Social network Multiply lets you backup your videos and photos — With an application built on the Adobe AIR platform, Multiply users can automatically backup all the media in selected folders on their computers. The site charges $20 per year for unlimited storage. In some ways, the move makes sense, since there’s so much media hosted by social networks like Multiply anyway.

Craigslist to overtake eBay in 2009? — The online marketplace market (what a mouthful) is going to have a new leader within a year, predicts entrepreneur and blogger Andrew Chen. Spurred by a comment at the GigaOM’s just-finished Structure conference, he looked at traffic numbers from Compete and Quantcast. As eBay traffic falls and Craigslist traffic rises, the latter will overtake the former in 2009, Chen says.

Vint Cerf: Video downloads will be more popular than streaming — The current model of video sites like YouTube won’t last, says Google’s Vint Cerf, the computer scientist frequently described as “the father of the Internet.” In a (streaming) video at Beet.TV, Cerf argues that as web video’s popularity increases and its technology improves, most users will start downloading videos to their computer, rather than streaming them off a site.

Here’s the latest action:

Icahn considers his own proxy war for Yahoo — Billionaire investor Carl Icahn began buying massive amounts of Yahoo stock last week — up to 50 million shares — and now is thinking about using that influence. He is considering replacing some of Yahoo’s board members (not quite the full replacement Microsoft was considering) with those of his own choosing, according to CNBC. Such a move could potentially force Yahoo to sell to Microsoft. The problem? The Microsoft offer is no longer on the table, and there is still no indication that it would come back even if Icahn is successful — though something tells me it would.

Craigslist countersues eBay – Just two weeks ago, online auction site eBay filed a lawsuit against online listing site Craigslist for taking unspecific actions to lessen eBay’s economic interest in the company (eBay owns a minority interest of Craigslist). Now Craigslist is returning the favor, charging eBay with unlawful and unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, deceptive passing-off, business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and breaches of fiduciary duty, according to its blog. With minority partners like these, who need enemies?

Google Search to be bigger than Windows next year — Some people still look at Google and wonder what exactly it does to make so much money? Next year, those people will be even more confused as Google’s search business is on track to surpass the size and profitability of Microsoft’s Windows business, according to Silicon Alley Insider. As SAI notes, this is just Google’s search business, this doesn’t even include its advertising wing, AdSense. Now perhaps you see why Microsoft so badly wants to becomes a legitimate online player.

Fisker Auto seeking a large round of funding — Fisker Automotive is seeking more funding to produce a $40K sedan in a few years, according to CNET. It is currently working on an $80K sports car. The back story here is that Fisker is competing with Tesla, which has the $100K Roadster (which was at the VentureBeat SF Green event) and is planning a $60K sedan. Tesla has sued Fisker, which Ray Lane (who was at SF Green) has called “ridiculous”. The Fisker founder helped design the Tesla. Fisker plans a counter-suit, according to Earth2Tech.

Electronic Arts continues to lose money — The world’s largest video game company, also know as EA, lost $94 million in the fourth quarter of last year as it spent a lot of money developing new titles. The loss was worse than Wall Street had been expecting, and significantly worse than the same time period last year, according to Bloomberg. EA is trying to take over game developer Take Two, and it could sure use the $500 million Take Two’s Grand Theft Auto IV made in its first week of sales.

Mayor wants electric cars for San Francisco — San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, may want to help Project Better Place move to his city, according to Earth2Tech. Better Place is an electric car startup that wants to build recharging stations all over Israel and Denmark, and has $200 million towards that plan. We’ve covered the startup extensively (see the links), and would love to see it in SF. However, considering Newsom’s failure to even get extra solar subsidies passed — we’ve heard further rumors today that the measure will die — it seems highly unlikely that electric car charging stations will fly, unless the money is all private.

It’s not TV, it’s iTunes — and HBO is on it — Following up on yesterday’s rumors of HBO coming to Apple’s iTunes store, several shows were in fact launched today. These include The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex in the City and others.

After a crazy 13 weeks, Yahoo hopes life will start to calm down — That’s the gist of this message to company employees from Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang, after he and its board of directors rejected Microsoft’s purchase offer. Yahoo may get punished in the stock market today, but still, “I’m so proud of how this company has come together, put the noise aside, and showed the world that we have the resolve and determination to thrive in challenging times,” Yang says. Read our most recent coverage of the move, plus some more analysis. One clear winner this past weekend: Friendfeed, the so-called “life aggregation” service that lets you track blog posts, Twitter messages and other activities from your friends around the web. Frederic of The Last Podcast, Robert Scoble and many other bloggers used it to have freewheeling discussions with readers about the possible results of Yahoo’s rejection. [Photo via The Huffington Post.]

Grand Theft Auto IV on the hunt to break records — The release of violent, crime-oriented video game GTA IV last Tuesday is proving to be “the cultural, business and technological milestone” that VentureBeat’s resident video game expert Dean Takahashi and others predicted. While creator Rockstar Games hasn’t released official sales numbers yet for the United States, here’s some anecdotal evidence of its impact. The game is apparently driving a strong increase in sales of the two game consoles that it’s currently available for: Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation 3. GTA IV also set a first-day video game sales record in the UK. It appears to have kept quite a few people home this weekend, hurting box office sales for newly released action movie Iron Man [Update: Actually, it appears that many people took a break from GTA IV to go watch Iron Man, which grossed $100 million this past weekend.]. And, inevitably, the extreme violence of the game is causing a backlash among people who find it offensive.

Related: Top game publishers drop out of their own trade association — Activision, Vivendi and other top publishers have been quitting the Entertainment Software Association, in part — it seems — out of displeasure with the ESA’s new president failing to respond appropriately to critics of games like GTA IV. Kotaku has the story.

Verbal war continues between Craigslist and eBay — Online marketplace eBay is suing online classifieds site Craigslist, which it partially owns, for allegedly attempting to water down eBay’s control of the company. In a post titled “Kettles and Pots,” Craigslist chief executive Jim Buckmaster responds that “eBay is suing us for implementing protections for Craigslist that it clearly believes are perfectly appropriate for protecting itself” — then dives into some messy eBay history.

Forbes release list of top-paid tech CEOs — And Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison is number one. More here.

This is what you call a serial entrepreneur — Gurbaksch Chahal, founder of Blue Lithium, the online ad company that sold to Yahoo for around $300 million last year, is back. He’s starting another company, according to a report in VentureWire, called gWallet. While it’s still in stealth (and closing a $10 million round), it apparently wants to be an online platform that helps shoppers find the best deals on the web.

Is this news? Many, many Facebook apps in the “just for fun” category — See graph put together by FlowingData, below. A number of pundits saw this graph and made the logical error of assuming that since most applications are pointless, they must be worthless. In fact, companies like Watercooler are making money from applications that tap into passionate fan bases of sports teams and TV shows. Also, the metric that should matter here, as one commenter on AllFacebook points out, is how many active users there are in each category. Still, as one Facebook application developer notes, it’s very hard for more complex, less “fun” applications to grow significantly large these days: “It’s not that users or application developers don’t want to use or build useful apps. It’s that Facebook’s current structure is heavily biased against them.” More on that here.

Updated with a blog post from Craigslist chief executive Jim Buckmaster, below the article

Craigslist, the lucrative online listings marketplace, is being sued by its part-owner, eBay, according to a number of reports.

EBay, the dominant marketplace property on the web, bought a 28.4 stake in privately-owned Craigslist in 2004 from an outgoing Craiglist executive. Since then, eBay has launched a competing listing service called Kijiji.

The lawsuit alleges that Craiglist founder Craig Newmark and chief executive Jim Buckmaster “unfairly diluted eBay’s economic interest in Craigslist by more than ten percent,” breaching their fiduciary duty according to Delaware corporate law. (Note: Craigslist, like most corporations, is incorporated in Delaware.)

Why? Some are speculating that alleged dilution could have been caused by Craigslist raising another funding round — which would be weird, because the company makes millions in profit each year.

We have a line out to get comment from Craigslist. We’ll update the post once we hear back.

UPDATED: Buckmaster responds on the company blog:

Ebay has filed suit against craigslist and its board of directors:

http://news.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=305980

We are surprised and disappointed by Ebay’s unfounded allegations, which came to us out of the blue, without any attempt to engage in a dialogue with us.

Coming from a shareholder that views craigslist as a prime competitor, filing suit without so much as mentioning these assertions beforehand feels unethical somehow, and hints at ulterior motives.

Ensuring the future well-being of craigslist and the craigslist community is admittedly very important to us. But Ebay has absolutely no reason to feel threatened here — unless of course they’re contemplating a hostile takeover of craigslist, or the sale of Ebay’s stake in craigslist to an unfriendly party. (In which case, they’re out of luck!)

For our part, we have always treated Ebay very fairly as a minority shareholder, and plan to continue doing so, despite this unfortunate development.

Jobster, the Seattle job search engine, armed with $50 million in financing and aiming to be profitable this year, announces two big moves tomorrow (Thursday).

First, it jettisons its comfy neutrality with other sites. Until now, it has remained a search engine, listing excerpts from job postings at Monster and CareerBuilder, and sending users to those sites to view the full postings. Going forward, Jobster will still do that. But it will also let employers post jobs at its site • and for free. It now becomes a direct competitor to Monster and CareerBuilder, but cheaper.

Second, it has signed a deal with Facebook to exclusively host the popular networking site’s career center. That’s huge, given Facebooks’ popularity among college students. If students start their careers with Jobster, the site can presumably win customer relationships for life.

Jobster’s move to free postings makes Jobster resemble Craigslist. Jobster has far less traffic than Craisglist. But it is more modern. Jobster offers users a way to tag themselves according to the jobs they’re seeking, upload resumes, photos and videos features, and create their own profile pages. Similarly, Jobster gives employers better ways to portray the candidates they’re looking for. If an employer posts a job with certain tag descriptions, the system pulls up the employees who have chosen same tags (see screenshot below). These profiles are separate Web pages, so they can be searched with an engine.

As reported, the three-year old company recently gutted its sales and marketing team, and instead has focused more on its online features.

It makes money by serving large companies with job-filling services, and plans to boost that business with traffic forwarded from the more robust Web site.

Chief executive Jason Goldberg told VentureBeat the site had a million unique users in January.