VentureBeat

Web and mobile-based messaging service eBuddy, based in Amsterdam, has raised $9.6 million from Dutch venture firm Prime Technology Ventures.

In the past, we’ve compared Meebo and eBuddy as rival companies that are trying to let you IM with anyone else on any IM platform — AOL, Yahoo, etc. This past year, the two companies’ products have diverged, somewhat, as each has focused on different ways of building on its respective user bases.

EBuddy has developed its mobile chat services for its 12 million monthly unique users (the company’s internal numbers) spread around the world — in many countries people use mobile phones in place of computers. The company plans to use the funding to in part continue building out its mobile services.

Meebo, meanwhile, has focused on building widgets for the web, seen by the explosion of the Meebo Rooms chat room widget on other sites — the company now has more than 24 million users, most of whom use Meebo within another site. It has also recently launched a developer platform, although the success of that has yet to be seen.

EBuddy’s latest round was provided by Dutch venture firm Prime Technology Ventures. It previously raised $6.3 million from Dutch firm Lowland Capital Partners in the fall of 2006 (our coverage).

Also, note that eBuddy is one of relatively few startups to receive funding from European VCs — see our previous story on that, here.

Earlier today, we wrote about the IM players, and noted that start-ups such as Meebo and eBuddy will have to work hard to to keep from getting swallowed by the big guys.

Coincidentally, Meebo had been working quietly on a project that launches tomorrow: Meebo Rooms. They are web-based IM chat rooms where people can gather and discuss a video or other media file that plays from a central media player. The company showed us the feature earlier today.

It’s significant because it keeps its features its IM offering one step ahead of the Google/Microsoft/Yahoo crowd, and directly answers the product soon to be offered by Orgoo, also mentioned today.

Here’s how it works: You create a room by clicking at the bottom of your profile (see red arrow on right in image below). Then you post a media file like you’d post a normal IM message: You paste in the link, hit return. Meebo recognizes the media file, and automatically queues it to play in the room’s media player. The player can play audio or music files too. Each room has it’s own URL, so you can invite people to join in by sending them a link. See below for example of a room with NBC Late Night clip.

The feature is useful because users can chat with others with similar interests. For example, there are featured rooms, such as the Flixter room (see left arrow above). If successful, this will move the company beyond its original role as “instant messaging aggregator” and into a new role as instant media aggregator.

As with Meebo Me, the company’s embeddable widget that allows people to chat within blogs and other public sites, Meebo Rooms can be embedded into sites across the internet.

Meebo Rooms taps into the people’s interest in compelling content and their desire to instantly talk about it with like-minded individuals. In fact, a single room, say, about “politics” can both be embedded in multiple sites across the web and displayed within a Meebo user’s homepage: one conversation, occurring synchronously across the web.

Meebo is well-positioned to promote the service. The company has been growing quickly, with 6.5 million screennames this month as opposed to 5.5 million in March — which means around five million humans are on the site a month (factoring out the people with multiple screen names), according to chief executive Seth Sternberg.

Moreover, Meebo has cut deals with major content sites such as Sony, NBC, Vibe and Pop Sugar. These sites will feature Meebo Rooms on their sites, thereby driving Meebo users to them and their users to Meebo.

Perhaps even more significantly, Rooms marks the first time the company is actively trying to make money — through video ads displayed in Rooms during lulls in the Room’s media player.

Sternberg claims Rooms, with its media files, is around four times harder to handle than the base Meebo IM service — it takes significant scaling technology.

It’s one way Meebo differentiates itself: The vision is to build interesting applications on the IM base, and Rooms is the company’s first big test of the vision.

Web-based instant messaging services, such as Meebo and eBuddy have had high growth rates over many months. They’ve raked in a lot of funding from hungry VCs. But we see IM becoming a commodity.

So far, these non-aligned startups have offered an advantage. They’ve let everyone communicate with everyone. They’ve aggregated the various IM clients in a single web site, so that someone with GTalk can IM with someone from Yahoo Messenger.

Some, such as EQO, combine communication services, offering mobile IM together with Skype mobile. Meebo and eBuddy both provide widgets in order to integrate services with these other sites. The result: Friends can chat with each other across platforms from a single location, over increasingly multiple formats — IM, voice, email or text.

However, new competitors are launching every week. Today, we’ve reviewed Orgoo, a new company that will soon be launching and integrating IM, voice, email and text into one Web-based platform from the outset. And giants Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are beginning to offer competing services. They’re integrating their IM services with other applications, and they are working (to some degree) on making their platforms more interoperable.

Here’s a brief summary on how the field looks:

The big fish

Microsoft
Microsoft’s Chief Software Officer, Ray Ozzie, says that software applications of the future are going to have components that are on the desktop, on the web, and on mobile devices. Windows Live Mail now includes the option to initiate a chat using Windows Live Messenger; the company’s IM platform is already interoperable with Yahoo’s.

Google
Gmail has already successfully integrated the company’s IM platform, GTalk, so that its users can chat while emailing. We’ve also heard rumors that GTalk will be integrated with applications such as Google Docs. AOL and Google also agreed to make their IMs interoperable, albeit in a roundabout way — and it looks like this will happen soon. Like Ozzie, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been stressing the importance of mobile — like Microsoft, Google is integrating apps across platforms. What’s more, 3rd party sites such as Joost are integrating GTalk into their offerings.

Yahoo
The company’s Web Messenger (beta) launched last week — its own web IM service. It integrates with Windows Live Messenger, although without Yahoo Voice (for now, but this is clearly an early beta release). Looks like more integration with other Yahoo! apps will be here soon, such as with with Yahoo Mail.

AOL
Let’s not forget that the IM granddaddy has web and mobile IM services, too; plus the GTalk interoperability.

With the big fish circling, what are the startup minnows to do?

Answer: differentiate themselves through targeting specific, untapped markets. This means continuing to redefine IM.

We covered one startup, called Livemarkets, that integrates IM with online advertising so that customers can interact quickly and directly with salespeople. The company uses the Jabber open standard, and built its own IM technology on top. But as one of its founders told us, “we’re scared to death of Google and Yahoo.”

Last week, we wrote about Mig33, which is also finding its own way with mobile IM, by integrating with other services, such as voice and text:

“[M]ost of its users are using the company’s own IM service, instead of opting to use more popular IM services, such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, or MSN, which Mig33 does let its users choose. More than 75 percent of subscribers are choosing Mig33’s IM services.”

The company is only 18 months old, but has over four million subscribers, mostly in South East Asia — for many, it is their only form of web access, and compliments existing mobile usage patterns in some countries, like SMS in the Phillipines.

The leading IM startups are busy adding functions, too.

EBuddy has launched a mobile IM service. If Mig33’s success is any indication, eBuddy mobile might also do well abroad. It claims to have momentum: 10.3 million unique web visitors and 1 million unique mobile visitors last month. CEO Jan Joost Rueb says the company gets between 60,000 and 80,000 new users on a “good day.”

Meebo has more than 5.5m people using its web service each month but it isn’t going mobile anytime soon, as this terse response to its users’ requests shows.

Beyond voice and mobile IM integration, eBuddy, Meebo and EQO all offer widgets for integrating into other web services (as do a number of other IM startups). Meebo has also worked out special deals with Netvibes and large partners.

But, really, can the small fry survive?

Web-based IM aggregators such as Meebo have also become popular because their web-based offerings bypass school or corporate firewalls that prevent users from downloading IM platform’s desktop clients. How much will this matter, if Google and others offer similar Web-based products, but with more integration with other apps?

Perhaps a good comparison of the risk is what Google did with Google Maps: A number of startups, such as Platial, created new functionality based on data from Maps, then watched as Google decided to do the same.

But if IM is a commodity, maybe other media and tech conglomerates would find a purchase attractive — a popular and fast-growing IM property could help propel overall growth if integrated well with a conglomerate’s other applications.

We haven’t heard any talk of selling, though. eBuddy’s Rueb, for example, said that the company has “too many plans for 6 months out” and it is considering raising a Series B round even though it is already profitable.

The best news now is that all sizes of fish are getting bigger, and so is the ocean of potential users, especially mobile users. The Economist recently wrote about fishermen in India using mobile devices to learn which local markets would bring them the best prices, thereby reducing transaction costs for all involved. Mig33 is already successful in meeting this type of demand, even though it offers competing IM platforms as part of their services.

And let’s not forget the US. When Forrester Research surveyed students ages of 12 to 21 about their most-wanted mobile phone feature, IM was the top choice, nearly twice as popular as mobile e-mail.

(Disclaimer: We’ve mentioned the IM companies, above, as interesting examples. There is a lot more happening with instant messaging than what we’ve discussed here, such as what the MVNO’s are up to — it’s worth noting that Virgin Mobile is going public — or what’s happening specifically in enterprise IM. And we for sure haven’t mentioned Twitter, which more a new form of blogging rather than a direct competitor to IM.)

Here’s the latest action:

News Corp makes $5 billion takeover bid for Dow Jones — If the bid is accepted, the owner of Fox News would own the old, gray business media icon, the Wall Street Journal. What next?

PropertyShark takes property snooping a step further — If you thought Zillow, the housing site that slapped a value on your house, was controversial, take a look at PropertyShark. The four-year old New York company outdoes Zillow on the snoopy factor, displaying owners’ names as well as things like title history, building permits and code violations pertaining to any property (See Mercury News story). It has launched in California, New York and 14 other states.

Google chooses to fight Viacom — Here’s the story about Google’s response to Viacom’s lawsuit for copyright infringement. The Google lawyer says the companies are not engaged in settlement talks, so looks like this is going all the way.

Google’s chief culture officer — See interview with Google’s culture czar and how she looks for “Google-y” people, or those who don’t worry about their titles but focus on getting stuff done.

Companies to use plankton to help global warming — At least two ventures are seeking to grow floating fields of plankton to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and carry it to the depths of the ocean. The New York Times has the story. Foster City, Calif.’s Planktos is already working on a project in the Galápagos and the South Pacific. Planktos says corporations seeking to offset their carbon emissions under new treaties and regulations make need its services. It thinks it can make a profit if it gets $5 a ton for capturing carbon dioxide. There’s also San Francisco’s Climos, which we contacted several weeks ago, but which has remained secretive. Dan Whaley, founder of GetThere, is involved, as is a group of respected scientists on its advisory board.

Supreme Court issues ruling that reforms patents — Most experts say this was much needed. It rules that lower-court rulings have given patent holders more power than the patent law intended. Some patent awards are for innovations that are too obvious, and may stifle innovation.

Google making comeback in China? — After ceding ground to Chinese search engine Baidu over the past couple of years, Google is gaining market share, says Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.

Meanwhile, Myspace China encourages tattlers: Members of MySpace’s new Chinese version are being told to report any “misconduct” by other users, including actions such as “endangering national security, leaking state secrets, subverting the government, undermining national unity, spreading rumors or disturbing the social order.”

EBuddy launches mobile application – Ebuddy, like Meebo, is a company that aggregates IM accounts, so that you can use any of them — AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, etc — from any Web site. Now it has taken its service mobile. Meanwhile, Meebo has decided not to do it, the company’s chief executive Seth Sternberg told us last week. GigaOm has a piece on Ebuddy’s latest momentum. We’re wondering where these stand-alone IM companies will head, now that IM aggregation is becoming easier to do and that we’re hearing of several other companies about to unveil products in this area. We’ll get back to this story shortly.

Phenomenal growth of Zwinky and Gaia, virtual worlds for kids — Zwinky, part of the Fun Webs group at conglomerate IAC, is the latest virtual world to explode in popularity. It has 4.7 million worldwide unique visitors in March. Techcrunch has the latest on Zwinktopia - where users can use their avatars to roam around the world, chat and earn Zbucks, a virtual currency.

Targetspot to let advertisers create commercials for Internet radio — Advertisers can create ads for their tailored audience. It is financed by CBS radio. (Times has the story).

4Info creates SMS ad marketplace — Speaking of new advertising models, Palo Alto company, 4Info, has launched a test program for an SMS marketplace. Chief exec Zaw Thet tells us his is the only company offering a market place. Because of 4Info’s bulk SMS activities, it doesn’t have to pay carriers for the service, meaning it is free for a company like Evite to send out SMS alerts to users, containing ads. 4Info splits the revenue 50-50 with the publisher. Question is, are SMS ads going to be pretty enough?

The Army’s plasma shield — The Army hopes soon to deploy a machine that generates a protective screen of dazzling mid-air explosions – to stun and disorient an enemy. It uses a laser pulse that creates a ball of plasma, and a second pulse that generates a shockwave. It is being build by a company called Stellar Photonics, about which we know very little. Its apparently also working on a portable laser rifle weighing fifteen kilograms with a range of more than an mile. Anyone know more about this company? Send email or leave comment, please.

Jobs disses subscription/rental music model — “Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it,” Jobs told Reuters in an interview, with new authority in the wake of Apple’s stellar earnings report. “The subscription model has failed so far.” People want to own their music, he said.

Jason Calacanis’ real project, a search engine — Calacanis, a media entrepreneur who sold a group of weblogs to AOL for $25m, has a new search engine project, backed by Sequoia Capital. It’s a cross between Wikipedia and Google, says Valleywag, which carries the speculative piece. Sounds a lot like Wikia’s search project, which has gotten a lot of attention. So it would make sense, though VentureBeat hasn’t confirmed any of this.

Microsoft releases more info on Silverlight — Nik Cubrilovic has a good review of the announcement, explaining how Silverlight includes a mini-CLR (Common Language Runtime) for the .NET platform that can be accessed from within the browser. As with the usual .NET runtime, it can support a number of programming languages, including Python and Ruby. Says Cubrilovic: The most remarkable part of the CLR are its speed and its size. First of all, the full Silverlight download with CLR and everything else will weigh in at around 4MB - which with current broadband penetration is effortless….

Jeff Nolan leaves Teqlo, a mashup company –The Silicon Valley start-up Teqlo just wasn’t ready to go to market, and chief executive Jeff Nolan explains his departure today. In remarks to us, the former SAP executive noted that companies delivering APIs as part of their offering find it difficult to make money. How will they share revenue? Moreover, for any of these businesses to achieve scale, as a platform, a significant amount of capital, “upwards of $60 million,” will have to be invested. Moreover, what happens when Microsoft, Google and Yahoo enter the area (indeed, Yahoo already has Pipes, and Google has entered with My Maps)? Not to mention SAP, Oracle and IBM, all of which are heading there too.

Mohr Davidow Ventures hires software entrepreneur Bryan Stolle as partner — This is the latest in several hires recently by the Silicon Valley venture firm. Stolle is co-founder of Agile Software, a company backed by MDV.

See our latest news stories in VentureBeat’s News Wire — including the latest on mobile wireless network company Sonopia, and all the clean-tech deals lately, such as Vinod Khosla’s latest investment.

Venture capital performance turns positive — At least, according to the latest day released by Thomson Financial, for the period ending December last year. Overall, venture capitalists investing over the past five year years saw a 1 percent annual return each year — not very good, but positive for the first time since 2003. The only people losing money, according to the survey, are early/seed-stage investors who have been investing for the last five years. Everyone else is making dough. However, these numbers should be taken with skepticism. The data has long been criticized for being too rosy, i.e, not factoring in the results of firms doing so terribly that they’ve shut their doors. See table below for the performance of VCs over different time horizons.

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).