VentureBeat

Here’s this morning’s roundup of the latest action:

Joost opens widget API to developers: Joost, the oft-hyped online video site started by the founders of Skype, has soft-launched an application programming interface this week. It is trying to get third-party developers to build widgets on top of its online TV network so Joost users can do more with the site’s data.

The company already has sample widgets available on its test site, including a “What’s Similar” widget that displays recommendations for video clips similar to the ones you’re already watching. The most exciting aspect of Joost’s API is the access it gives developers to build social tagging and video-programming features into the site. As NewTeeVee notes: It’s a way for users to create sets of videos tailored specifically to their own interests, with minimal effort.

Widgets can do wonders for a site’s growth, but we’re still not sure if they will for Joost. For example, Myspace stood out a couple years ago for allowing outside developers to build widgets that integrated with its social network, giving users the chance to redefine how they used Myspace.

However, Myspace’s flexibility — and hardcore marketing in influential Los Angeles circles — came in tandem with market-leader Friendster’s implosion.

Joost doesn’t appear to have the same advantages. It may have raised a lot of money, with big content deals under its belt, and a solid grounding in how peer-to-peer video-sharing works. But, a lot of other big video sites, like Dailymotion, Veoh and Metacafe, have their own ideas about the future of online video, and they are raising big bucks, too.

Fliqz’s new super-easy toolbar to upload video — Fliqz, the Berkeley start-up, has made it extremely easily to copy a video into your blog. Until now, it has offered an nifty video upload tool, but not as easy as the toolbar. That older product lets you upload video into a player on your Web site sites (the player is called Fliqzster) and does it without forcing you to download any software. That was simple, but you still had to tab to your hompage to to get the code, and then toggle back to your editor to paste it in your article or Web page. But now the company has released a toolbar, called “Quikvid,” which lets you upload any video from your desktop or other source straight from your editor (because it reside on the top of your browser). If you’re a blogger writing an entry, you simply raise your eye to your toolbar, browse to select the video from your desktop, then hit “upload” and cut and paste the generated code into the editor. The toolbar is an install on your IE browser. There’s no other product like it on the market, Fliqz’s Kris Drey says.

Viacom hits guy for copyright infringement, but does so for a post he made of content that Viacom itself had taken from him without permission — Read this bizarrely ironic story here.

NBC Universal won’t renew contract with Apple’s iTunes service — NBC Universal says it was unable to come to an agreement with Apple on pricing, and so will no longer sell digital downloads of television shows on iTunes after the current contract runs out in December, according to the New York Times. NBC was the largest supplier of digital video to Apple, accounting for 40 percent of video downloads, including hits such as “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Office” and “Heroes.” This is a big deal, because its the latest evidence studios are bugged by Apple’s power and are trying to break free. It comes after NBC has made progress recently in creating its own joint venture, now called Hulu, to compete with iTunes and YouTube. In July, the Universal Music Group of Vivendi, the world’s biggest music corporation, said it would not renew its long-term contract with iTunes.

Here’s the latest action:

Netvibes offers Netvibes2go — Netvibes, the company that has gotten buzz with its cool personalized home page service, is offering a mobile version called Netvibes2Go. It lets you access all your info — contained in useful modules, including email, calendar, to-do list and any RSS feed — while you’re on the go. To get it, you have to configure your Netvibes account on a PC first (creating a new tab, called “mobile” and then putting in compatible modules). Founder Tariq Krim tells us an announcement will be coming shortly. Was discovered by bloggers.

Check out VentureBeat Newswire for latest stories — They include John Doerr’s latest company (physician software), video-sharing company Fliqz’s latest VC round (surprising, for us), Sequoia’s latest investment (in PopularMedia), secretive home telecom company Ooma’s latest round (from Sean Parker and others) and more.

Google adds real-time traffic to maps in several cities — Cities include San Francisco, New York and others. Image at left is a partial screenshot of what SF traffic looked like at 9:30am this morning. In other words, be glad if you don’t live or work in the East Bay.

Wesabe, personal finance site, raises $700,000 — The Berkeley company that lets you manage your financials, with things like tagging, and then lets you communicate with others about it (apparently, some people want this), raised the cash from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, which itself just raised a new fund for hacker-driven companies (see our NewsWire story here, from yesterday). Here’s our earlier story about Wesabe from last year.

Second Life adds voice — You’ve been able to chat via IM before. But now the virtual world company is offering ways to talk with others, taking into account three dimensions to adjust volume, that is, how far away you are from other people (in the room or region where you’re conversing), and what direction you’re facing.

Hyped product of the day: Buzzword – Virtual Ubiquity, a Boston start-up, has created some buzz with its online word processor, BuzzWord. It isn’t out yet, but see here for details. Lots of effusive coverage elsewhere.

Another news ranking site, Spotplex — Techcrunch has a story about the Silicon Valley start-up Spotplex. At Spotplex, news stories aren’t submitted by users. Rather, blog and other news sites wanting to be featured at the site submit some javascript code, and it culls the most popular read articles on those sites, and then features them. We’re not sure how this is going to work, because by default, stories from the most popular sites are going to get read (and thus featured at Spotplex), even if they’re crappy stories. Also, there are other sites that do similar things, such as Topix. The company has accepted VentureBeat as a source. We’ll send in our code and see.

Adobe Systems to release Web version of its Photoshop image-editing application — It will do so within six months.

Invalid clicks on Gooole’s Adwords under 10 percent — Or at least, that is what Google tells us. Google adds that, in general, undetected fraud is less than 0.02 percent. However, there’s just no way for Google to know that for sure.

Updated

Folks, it’s time to stop launching video sites. We have lost count. No human mind can keep track of all the video sites out there, or the tiny nuances of sharing and hosting technology that differentiate them.

We’re wondering if Fliqz, a Silicon Valley (Emeryville/Berkeley) start-up will go down in history with the distinction of being the last video site ever to raise a round of capital. The start-up says it has raised $1 million from angels to advance its video hosting and sharing site. It doesn’t want to be a YouTube. Rather, it wants to help people manage their personal vidoes into collections, with high-quality resolution. Today, it launched a new tool called Fliqzster — which it says gives any website owner the ability to host video easily and for free.

Ok, but we’ve heard that line before, from sites like Videoegg. So we asked Benjamin Wayne, president and CEO of Fliqz, how Fliqz was different from say, Videoegg. (Btw, Kevin Sladek, co-founder of Videoegg, tells us there are 300 video sites now.)

With Fliqzster, he said, users don’t have to navigate away from the website they are currently browsing. To embed a video link, users simply select a video on their desktop, then click a button at Flizqz to receive both the permalink and a snippet of code for embedding the video into any blog, classified, webpage, or social networking site. But that’s what Videoegg lets you do. (Correction: Wayne got back to us and clarified the difference, which is important: Fliqzster is the only tool that allows any site to offer video uploading capabilities to its visitors without requiring a client download or any technical integration with the site. Vidoegg requires an initial client download, and an API code integration.)

Does Fliqz offer any new or different technology, we asked? No. Wayne is betting that execution — focusing on the customer experience — is the key to success. We are still left wondering how the site differentiates itself (Wayne says the clarification above is important).

Let us know, folks, if we’re missing anything. Wayne did say that Travelblog, a travel site, and a few other sites are using the Fliqzster tool — but they are using it for free. Fliqz hopes to make money through other means, such as revenue sharing once partner sites run ads at the end of videos. But here again Fliqz is late to the game, with Videoegg and several others already serving such ads.

Angel financing came from The Caufield Angel Fund (as in Frank Caufield, of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), Dave Witherow, former president of VentureOne, Don Hutchison, a former Excite@home exec and Marty Korman, of Wilson Sonsini. The investment was made in a couple of tranches, starting in November of last year, Wayne said.

Update: We’ve since talked with investor Dave Witherow, who rightly points out that the video market is huge, providing plenty of opportunity for smart players. He agreed that Fliqz may not want to push itself as a big-brand consumer play, but work with sites to come up with new, cool ways to implement technology on the back-end.