VentureBeat

It was Hammer Time tonight at the Intel Capital dinner.

With some 600 start-up chief executives in the audience, entertainer MC Hammer offered ministerial advice (embrace technology, don’t forget community) for tech entrepreneurs from a “content guy’s” perspective. With references to “tweets” and rubbing shoulders with the tech elite at the D6 conference, the middle-aged rap artist showed he knew his technology.

He started by showcasing musicians from his own music label (including his talented daughter) and moved on to a demo of his latest start-up, DanceJam.com, where he is chief strategy officer. He closed with a rendition of his ’90s hit, “Too Legit to Quit;” joining him onstage were a couple of dozen audience members as backup dancers — including Intel CEO Paul Otellini. (We have the pictures to prove it).

Hammer (Stanley Kirk Burrell) started on the road to fame as a bat boy for the Oakland A’s baseball team. Slugger Reggie Jackson gave him the nickname “Hammer” because he thought the youngster resembled “Hammerin’ Hank Aaron.” Hammer said he was an entrepreneur from the start, selling tickets that the A’s players were allotted but didn’t use. Charley Finley, the legendary coach of the A’s, kept Hammer aboard as a child “executive vice president.” By the time Hammer was 14, Finley was asking Hammer to fire people.  He had the crowd laughing at that.

But he got serious for a moment, noting how Finley as a CEO managed to pull together the fractured community of Oakland — during a time of urban chaos and protests of the Vietnam War — with five championship wins.

“I would be less than I really am, if I stood before four or five hundred CEOs, and didn’t emphasize the point that each and every one of you, in our current, turbulent times, each one of you can change the environment,” he said. “We as CEOs are not irreplaceable. Why don’t we take our time to create not only great businesses, but make an impact on the lives of the people in our companies and bring some light into dark moments?”

He noted how Napster disrupted his own industry and mentioned how he met a despairing Shawn Fanning as Napster was going down the tubes. While riding around in Hammer’s Hummer, Hammer told the bright Napster founder that he probably had four or five companies in him. Fanning just sold another company, ThreeSF, to Electronic Arts for $30 million. (EA confirmed that today, but didn’t disclose the price).

“Don’t let them discourage you,” Hammer told him. “Hang in there. Even when I saw disruption coming, I embraced the man and the technology. Today, the music industry still doesn’t embrace technology. Just to use a song, you still need a seven-month licensing process.”

Hammer was looking a bit older than I remembered him while watching his smash “U Can’t Touch This” video in my youth. But his deep preacher’s voice was unmistakable. He left most of the dancing and singing to his own daughter and other rapping kids being groomed for the big time.

He noted how he considered every “artist as a start-up” at his Full Blast House music incubator, where he sees his job as applying filters to find talent. Those young artists are immediately matched with business development people who could start thinking about the brand at the beginning and move beyond CD sales.

“There are so many ways to monetize content,” he said.

One of those is to showcase the dancers and artists on his new site, DanceJam.com, founded a few months ago and funded by Softbank and Rustic Canyon Ventures. His site demo didn’t work. “Oh well, Hammer, welcome to the tech world,” he said, not skipping a beat.

But its point is to highlight young dancing talents, index their videos, allow viewers to rate them, and show dance competitions “dubbed battles.” Maybe it will catch on. Hammer reminded everyone that music is what made MySpace take off. He promised big partner announcements soon. At the same time, Hammer is starting an effort to get music and technology into the hands of troubled youth in Philadelphia to “keep them from killing each other.”

He closed with an encore performance, encouraged by Intel Capital President Arvind Sodhani, who did his own Hammer dance imitation. Hammer was inspiring and he brought the crowd to its feet. Don’t be surprised if a few of those 600 CEOs start busting some moves in the future.

updated
1) Online advertising up 28 percent
2) Yahoo confirms $160M acquisition of Maven
3) AOL to launch mobile soc-net platform
4) Starbucks to offer somewhat-free WiFi
5) Topanga, next-gen lighting, funded by Khosla
6) Stealth division at EA making social games
7) Bored.com sells for exciting $4.5 million
8) DanceJam gets another $3.5 million
9) Uncomfortable ads from Facebook
10) Initial review of Android: Not ready yet
11) Motorola and Nortel consider unit merger
11) The long wait for cleantech permitting

Online advertising up 28 percent at end of year — The total US ad spend in the fourth quarter grew almost 28 percent over the same period last year, according to the latest numbers from IDC. The firm also found that Google’s market share declined toward the end of the year.

Yahoo has confirmed its acquisition of Maven Networks – We reported on the deal several days ago, but Yahoo announced this morning the specific price, which we’d only guessed at earlier: $160 million. That’s a big win for General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners and Prism VentureWorks, which together had invested around $24 million, and apparently had invested most recently in 2006 at at a pre-money valuation of just $30 million (which means they’ve made very nice money). As Dan Primack notes, this is great for GC, which originally invested in 2003 at a $7.5 million pre-money, though interestingly, GC has also pumped a ton of money into Maven competitor Brightcove – including a recent round at around a $210 million post-value.

AOL to launch mobile social networking platform — AOL plans on releasing a mobile software platform for social networking, which will initially work across most of the major device operating systems. The platform will have its own XML-based markup language and server, and be open to developers.

Starbucks begins offering (somewhat) free WiFi — Starbucks will drop T-Mobile and take on AT&T as the partner for its 7,000 United States locations. The upshot: If you’re an AT&T broadband subscriber, WiFi at Starbucks is now free; if not, access is still cheaper. Prices for WiFi in all locations have been steadily dropping, which probably sounds like another nail tapping into the coffin to startups like Fon, which plan on creating large networks of WiFi hotspots.

Topanga high-intensity lighting funded by Khosla — Topanga Technologies is based in Topanga, California. If only everything in life were so simple. We don’t know much more than that it makes high-intensity, discharge lighting, as it’s currently in stealth mode. Khosla Ventures disclosed the investment this morning, alongside its announcement that it hired Ford Tamer.

Stealth division at Electronic Arts making social games — A division called EA Blueprint will make games for distribution on online platforms including social networks, according to a story on Gametap. Blueprint will work together with small developers to create games, some of which will be “brand extensions” of existing EA games. The company, however, declined further comment.

Bored.com sells for exciting $4.5 million — The domain name game is as flush as ever, with the sale of Bored.com having just brought in $4.5 million through auctioneer Moniker. No broken records here, though — Sex.com brought in $12.5 million two years ago. Fittingly enough, the sale price for Business.com fell somewhere in between sex and boredom. (Update: See comments below for more color on the various sale prices.)

DanceJam gets another $3.5 million for dance, jam — DanceJam, which hasn’t even launched yet, has gotten tons of publicity because its founder is MC Hammer, not to mention that Michael Arrington is an investor. That means the site, a community for dancers to upload clips of themselves dancing and rate others, had better be good when it finally does launch. The $3.5 million was provided by Softbank Capital, Rustic Canyon Partners and some new angel investors, according to TechCrunch.

Headhunting ad for Yahoo employees shows up on Yahoo profile – First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman placed an ad in Facebook, asking Yahoo employees if they might like to leave their increasingly troubled parent to found startups, and he showed evidence that suggested more employees are clicking through than several months ago — a sign of a potential mass exodus at hand. However, turns out the more recent ads — the ones drawing more clicks — were made more enticing because they showed photos of Yahoo employees. This distorted the entire experiment. The ads managed to find its way onto one satisfied Yahoo employee’s profile, occasioning an interesting exchange. “I don’t want my colleagues to think I’m leaving Yahoo, so … I’ve pulled my “Facebook fandom” for First Round Capital,” writes the disconcerted Yahooligan. The ad raises yet more questions about how Facebook can gracefully pipe ads through social network connections. More at Valleywag.

Hands-on review of Google Android in use in Barcelona — Gizmodo has a quick review of a mobile unit with Google Android installed from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. From the post: “While the Android platform is solid enough for development and testing, it seems we are far away from seeing actual products getting into the market.”

Motorola and Nortel consider merging wireless units — A combined wireless-infrastructure division between Motorola and Nortel would generate $10 billion in annual sales, part of a proposed restructuring of Motorola under consideration by new CEO Greg Brown. The two company’s units make networking equipment for wireless carriers. The broader plan involves breaking Motorola up into parts, and spinning off the struggling handset-making unit.

Setting up wind turbines? Be prepared for a wait — These lines make the Soviet Union look like child’s play: Developers applying for wind projects in Minnesota face a 612 year waiting list, according to EcoGeek. That’s an extreme example of the bureaucracy that come with issuing permits for new cleantech projects.