VentureBeat

The holiday break felt especially long this time, so here’s a longer roundup than usual — of everything you may have missed over the last few days:

Ebay’s Kijiji tries to tar Craiglist’s reputation — The NYT has a story about Kijiji, a competitor to online classifieds company Craigslist. The remarkable thing about the story is that it lets Kijiji executives associate Craigslist with offers of “sadomasochistic encounters and prostitutes,” without some sort of response from Craiglist. Kijiji, meanwhile, is positioned as family friendly.

Nokia has agreed to acquire Apertio, a UK mobile data network management provider for about €140 million — Details here.

IBM has acquired Israel’s data storage technology company, XIV for a rumored $350 million — Details here.

Venture firm Sevin Rosen splitting apart — All four of the venture capital firm’s Silicon Valley firm are leaving the Texas-based firm, including Nick Sturiale, the investor in Xensource, the virtualization company recently acquired by Citrix for $500 million. Sturiale will be a managing director at Carlyle Venture Partners, we’ve confirmed. The split was first reported by PEInsider.com. It’s part of a longer process of decline at the firm, and of general hardship in the venture industry right now.

Blekko is the umpteenth start-up to go after Google — Never mind that Google has won the search engine wars, or that Microsoft and Yahoo have poured tens, if not hundreds of millions, into trying to keep up, or that scores of other companies have launched to fulfill every conceivable search engine niche. Start-ups trying to take on Google keep coming. The latest is Blekko, a secretive company to be launched by Rich Skrenta, who co-founded the Open Directory Project and news site Topix. Skrenta says Google doesn’t have any competition, but we’re wondering where he was when a tsunami of search engines that hit in 2006, not to mention new ones like Mahalo last year and now Wikia Search to emerge in a few days. Anyway, it’s always great to see people think big, and we wish him well. He’s raised $2 million in seed funding from Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures and two early Google employees, David DesJardins and Jeremy Wenokur. [Image is from the placeholder on Blekko's site]

Peter Thiel says venture industry need to be shaken up — The WSJ has a notable story about Peter Thiel’s view on the weaknesses of the traditional venture industry. However, the piece also says the value of his seed investment in Facebook has increased more than 50 times, which seems understated based on Facebook’s reported valuation of $15 billion now. You’d think the a seed investment would have been made at far less than $100 million, and that the value of his investment may have increased 1000-fold or so. We’ll do some checking on that…

Google’s corporate blogging outshines most others — Here’s a piece about how well Google’s corporate blogging effort is doing, and how few others are manging to do the same.

Marc Canter gets $400,000 for his PeopleAggregator.com — Canter has been working his platform, which is supposed to encourage more open social networks, for some time now. Here he writes his latest thoughts, and discloses his funding. See our previous coverage.

Dash Express, the Internet-connected GPS navigation device for your car, to sell for a whopping $600 — The Silicon Valley company, Dash, has raised closed to $42 million in backing from big-name venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. But who is going to buy this device at such a price, when you can get mobile phones or devices that offer much the same thing — more phones are GPS enabled and they’re sporting services like Google which provide increasingly accurate local search? And the Internet connection on Dash is unlikely to reliable while driving around. Dash lets you do things like find a Chinese restaurant while driving somewhere, but you can do that easily on a phone. In addition to the $600, Dash charges fees of between $10 and $13 a month, GigaOM reports. (Our previous coverage ).

The Google investing Mafia — The New York Times has the story about all of the former Googlers who left to start investing in companies, including Chris Sacca, Aydin Senkut, Paul Buchheit, Georges Harik, Satya Patel, Salman Ullah, Sean Dempsey, and Andrea Zurek. Only PayPal has rivals Google in spawning so many eager investors and entrepreneurs in the Internet industry. Particularly noteworthy is the example of Meraki Networks, the WiFi router company, which is both co-founded and backed by ex-Googlers.

Edgeio’s asset sold — Looksmart acquired most of the assets of Edgeio, the online classifieds company that shut down a couple of weeks ago.

Google Android smartphones phones could launch in February, according to rumors by APC — Although, while Google’s Android is stumbling on deadlines, phone standards around Linux are being rolled out by a consortium including Orange, France Telecom, MontaVista, and Access. The group has included an APIs for telephony, messaging, calendar, instant messaging, and presence functions, as well as new user interface components.

Netcape dies, while co-founder Jim Clark stumbles in real estate pursuit — Netscape, once a leading Web browser, has finally shut down. This comes, coincidentally, as one of its co-founders, Jim Clark, who left Silicon Valley a few years ago saying the tech industry boom was over, stumbles on his subsequent endeavor: real estate. The founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and WebMD went to build condos in Florida, starting a company called Hyperion. The New York Times reports about problems the company is having repaying a $110 million loan and with customer complaints.

Google about to sign deal with Japan phone giant NTT DoCoMo — This will give Google a potential 48 million in a market where Yahoo has traditionally dominated. Details here.

Edgeio, a company that provides online classified services, is introducing an e-commerce widget for web publishers, to help them create marketplaces on their own sites.

The Palo Alto-based company now lets a web site owner put up their own digital information for sale and allows other sites to resell the information for a cut.

Amazon and other companies already offer affiliate programs, whereby web publishers can earn a percentage fee from directing users to Amazon’s site in order to make online purchases. Edgeio’s offering is interesting, however, because it lets sites make sales without trying to drive users back to its own site (info here).

For now, the company is focusing on digital information, such as video, audio, downloadable files, etc. but it hopes to go after other e-commerce in the future. We first heard about this vision last fall from chief executive Keith Teare, when the company had completed a $5 million round.

A research company, for example, could use this new service to provide an excerpt from a report it has behind a paywall — you can then click and purchase the full report, using your payment information stored with Edgeio. Further, if you’re a web site publisher you can also resell this report on your own site as an affiliate partner of the research company — you just link to the report and include Edgeio’s one-click purchasing method, then earn an affiliate fee based on how many of your users complete the purchase.

Partner Earningscast is using Edgeio to sell an audio recording it has of the Vonage quarterly earning call yesterday.

Edgeio already tries to facilitate online ads (previous coverage): You can post an ad on your blog, tag the ad with the word “listing” — then Edgeio will search the web to find it, and add it to its database. If you add more tags, such as “Mountain View” and “chair,” Edgeio will use those tags to better categorize the listing.

This new effort is launching today at Gnomedex, in conjunction with the other current Edgeio partner, Lockergnome.

The latest in the world of start-ups and venture capital:

Fred Wilson sells home listed at $37.5 million — Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures in New York, who has one of the most widely read VC blogs, AVC, has sold his 15,000-square-foot townhouse in Manhattan. If it closed near the asking price, the 1847 mansion would be the most expensive single-family residence downtown, reports the Observer. In 1996, the home apparently sold for $3.9 million.

In this video, found via Alex Haislip at PE Week, Wilson tells WallStrip: “I went from basically being penniless to having more money than I knew what to do with,” referring to the $3.6 billion sale of Geocities to Yahoo in 1999. Haislip suggests the slimmer pickings lately for Wilson (his Del.icio.us investment was sold to Yahoo for a mere $30 million) may be one reason Wilson put his house on the market. We’re not sure about this, so VentureBeat emailed Wilson for comment. He declined comment.

Don’t have friends commenting on your blog? — Not too late to hire FakeYourSpace, which lets you choose from a selection of ‘models’ to leave you customized comments to look like you have (sexy) friends and are popular online. The basic service is $1.99 month, but they’re offering special of 99 cents a month.

Mojungle for sale on eBay — Mojungle, a site that lets you deliver photos and video to blogs and web sites from your mobile phones, has listed itself on ebay for $60,000. It lets you deliver via SMS, MMS, email, but that’s not enough to lift it above all the competitors out there doing similar things (Shozu, Veeker, Mywaves, etc).

MobiTV, making headway — MobiTV has quietly becoming the wireless television delivery for most major carriers - Sprint Nextel, Cingular, and AT&T, and now apparently Comcast. Now we know why it has raised $100 million — these are huge clients and it had better deliver.

Edgeio expands real estate search — More info here, and how it follows from its acquisition of ARES.

Silicon Valley classifieds start-up, Edgeio, has acquired a company that will allow Edgeio’s users to search significant amounts of real estate data.

If you think that is trivial, think again. Online real estate listings face a regulatory mess — related to the legally complicated Multiple Listing Service (MLS) system. The end result is that a Web site must have a direct relationship with an agent or with a regional MLS in order to show detailed data on homes. This has stymied many real estate sites, such as Zillow and Trulia, from getting the data they want. In fact, the Department of Justice is suing the National Association of Realtors, saying it colluded to prevent listings from appearing online, giving established brokers an advantage. The DoJ claims online brokers can deliver services more efficiently at lower prices. But it says the NAR policy of allowing traditional brokers to block listings to online sites inhibits that new technology.

Edgeio seems to be doing an end run around this system, but legally. Chief executive Keith Teare told VentureBeat Wednesday it has acquired the assets of Adaptive Real Estate Services, a company built over the past several years by father and son team Robert and Peter Meyer — and which has patiently built up relationships with brokers and agents in 70 of the top MLS organizations — and equivalent to about 70 percent of the MLS network nationwide. It has about 1.5 million homes listed for sale in the areas it covers. This means Edgeio can show these 1.5 million homes in its search results, and let users drill down to see the data details hosted on Web sites it has relationships with. And going forward, other brokers and dealers can opt into Edgeio’s network.

Says Teare:

The key advance ARES made is that it automates the inclusion of listings via the IDX protocol used by MLS organizations. This is painstaking work as few MLS organizations share common data structures with others.

We last wrote about Edgeio here.

Edgeio, a Menlo Park start-up trying to redefine the way people list classifieds, has raised $5 million in a first round of venture capital, and may raise more. Here is the release.

The round was led by Intel Capital and included an investment from Transcosmos.

The idea behind Edgeio is audacious because it seeks to do an end-run around the incumbents like Craigslist and others, by letting people bypass them entirely.

But in a notable development, some of big players — eBay, Cafepress, and Amazon — are agreeing to play along and are sending their listings to Edgeio to make sure they are included there. Edgeo says it is compatible with these services because it only lists a small excerpt of their classifieds, and users clicking on them will be sent back to the originating site.

Now the question becomes whether Edgeio has folded its end-run strategy too early — agreeing to play with the big boys, and thereby allowing them to co-opt Edgeio by keeping their users to themselves. But Edgeio is betting that becoming a “meta” classifieds site will make it a superior search engine in the long term.

Here’s how Edgeio works: It lets people, from the home owner listing their home, to a car owner selling their car, to post their listings on whatever Web site they want — their own blog, for example — and Edgeio then goes out to find it and lists it at its own site automatically.

It can do this only if people tag their classified listings with the word “listing.” Edgeio will then add it to its database. If you’ve added other tags for the item (e.g., “San Francisco” and “Porsche”) these give Edgeio a way of classifying the ad in the appropriate category on Edgeio’s site. Directions are on the Edgeio site.

We first wrote about Edgeio here.

We just talked with Keith Teare, chief executive, after testing the site. We found the interface experience somewhat clunky, in part because the home-page is still focused on attracting people to list their classifieds there. The site will soon cater more closely to people searching for goods, Teare said, something he agrees has been neglected.

One notable development is that Edgeio has moved up in the organic search results at Google. So if you type in “2007 autos,” Edgeio has the third entry in the results. If you click on the link, Edgeio will take you to the page with its 2007 autos listings.

If you specify a city or zip code, Edgeio will show you the 2007 autos for that region. If there are none, it will show you those closest to your region.

This has opened opportunities for advertising revenue for Edgeio, since some local advertisers will advertise on these pages. So far, it has Google ads. (Below is a partial screenshot of Edgeio’s page for autos in Fremont, Ca).

Now that Edgeio is working with eBay, Amazon and CafePress, it will get paid a referral fee if the traffic it redirects back to those sites’ classifieds ends up in a sale, Teare said.

Teare is also developing a way to help blogs or other focused sites to create their own marketplaces, he said. A blog focused on BMWs, for example, could draw on Edgieo to list BMWs and other BMW components, and earn a cut in revenue on any sale.

Edgeio has launched a Chinese site, and filed a patent for its technology, Teare said.

More than 3000 publishers have uploaded their listings to Edgeio, he said. Since launching six months ago, he says Edgeio has more than 100 million listings from more than 14,000 cities in 130 countries.

The Chinese version of the site is named site named mulu100.com (which in Chinese means catalog of catalogs).