VentureBeat

Here’s a summary of the latest action:

1) Google integrates Postini
2) Record M&A in media industry
3) Japanese virtual world Meet-Me
4) Ballmer says Facebook a fad
5) Boing Boing TV
6) Utility computing and video delivery start-ups continue to get funding

Google integrates Postini – Nearly three months after buying Postini for $625 million, Google has integrated the company’s security features into Gmail and is offering them to businesses. Its intention is to challenge Microsoft and other software companies that sell primarily desktop-based software to businesses, that include similar security features.

Postini features include a way where administrators can manage who gets what emails based the content of the message, whether it has attachments or not, and the identity of the sender or receiver. These rules can be used to do things like prevent people from sending messages with certain keywords to outside parties. Administrators can also search emails across a domain and recover deleted emails.

Google has also increased storage for individual mailbox’s using the service to 25 gigabytes, up from 10 gigabytes.

Media industry sees record M&A activity – The media and information industries saw record levels of M&A activity during the first three quarters of the year, with 637 deals worth $95 billion, according to The Jordan, Edmiston Group, an media-focused investment bank. The level was 64 percent more than last year’s $60.6 billion. Now you know why VentureBeat has been so focused on advertising and media companies lately. An explosion in online advertising budgets has made online ad networks and technology providers attractive and has led to deals like the $5.7 billion purchase of aQuantive by Microsoft.

Japanese virtual world “Meet-Me,” a safer alternative to Second Life — Here’s the story by Associated Press. In Japanese version, you can’t fly. Here’s the question. Do we want our virtual worlds to be exact replicas of our offline worlds? Sometimes it seems we’re headed in that direction. Each virtual world we see appears to be heading more toward reflecting the cultures that use them, so that we’re really no longer exploring taboos but simply extending our life virtually, nothing more.

Ballmer says Facebook may be a fad — In London, the Microsoft chief executive says: “I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.” This comes amid reports that Microsoft is negotiating to acquire a stake in Facebook.

Top Up TV, a London provider of pay TV service, raised a significant round of funding — It comes from Balderton Capital. Dow Jones (subscription required) quotes Balterton partner Tim Bunting saying it is in the double digit millions.

The firehose of VC funding to video delivery technology continues – There are way too many of these video delivery companies already, but when Silicon Valley investors like Ron Conway (early investor in Google) go around touting that they continue to want to invest in video, everybody else thinks its a great opportunity too. Here’s the latest: Move Networks and Acinion, according to PE Hub. Move, of American Fork, Utah, got $34 million, while Acinion, of Acton, Mass., raised $16 million. This brings Move’s total venture financing to more than $45 million from firms like Steamboat Ventures and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Acinion has now has raised around $21 million from firms like Globespan Capital Partners, IDG Ventures Boston and Sigma Partners.

DECA announces first show, Boing Boing TV – The next blog to receive its own professionally produced show will be Boing Boing, the “directory of wonderful things.” Despite the length of about three minutes, the move is revealing of how internet media is moving ever closer to mainstream realm. In celebrity news, where there’s more money to go around, blogger Perez Hilton recently scored an hour-long show on VH1. DECA, the Web 2.0 production company behind Boing Boing TV (we reported on it last week here), has hinted that there’s more to come.

European startup to compete with Amazon utility computing – Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services, which offer scalable processing power and storage respectively, recently came up against competition in the United States from new startup Nirvanix. Now a new venture in the United Kingdom has joined the fray: Flexiscale made by XCalibre. Demand for elastic computing capabilities has been increasing as other companies find new uses for it, so there’s no telling yet how deeply the new company will cut into Amazon’s profits, if at all.

With the profusion of video sharing services on the internet, a number of startups are helping produce professional online content. Every Silicon Valley venture capital firm, it seems, wants to back one.

DECA, a Santa Monica, Calif., studio that calls itself “the best of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and Silicon Valley,” is the latest to bring professional production values to computer screens and mobile phones.

The company’s initial funding round of $5 million would cover only a fraction of the production costs for a modern Hollywood blockbuster, but its a start. Backers are Mayfield Fund, General Catalyst Partners and Atomico Partners, the fund led by the Skype/Joost co-founder Niklas Zennström. The company is still bare on details, but it says it wants to scout for video ideas, and then develop them, finance them, and distribute them across the Web.

It also wants to use social networking, user generated content and other community features to drive the process. But the company itself will probably not appear in its productions, CEO Michael Wayne told us. “DECA is not consumer facing — consumers may never know what it is. When we fund a project, we bring in producers or production companies.”

In comparison to DECA’s operating model, most internet video companies (YouTube, MetaCafe, etc) have relied on users to submit their own home-made videos, which the companies hope will then go “viral” and spread around the internet. But lately, start-ups like National Banana, Funny or Die, Rockin Cat (see coverage), Crackle (see coverage) and others seeking to produce professional content, designed for viral Internet distribution from the beginning. The model has yet to prove itself.

The best example of someone making a successful viral video is lonelygirl15, a fictional character played by Jessica Rose. The videos became successful enough that the creators were able to parlay their fame into an ongoing series and a company called LG15.

Although DECA is vague on its current plans, Wayne says the company will be making further announcements about its projects in the coming weeks.