VentureBeat

Social web browser Flock has garnered a lot of hype since its release in 2005. It’s also won a lot of fans. Both likely played a role in its new $15 million fourth round of funding announced today. The round was led by Fidelity Ventures, with all previous lead investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures and Shasta Ventures, participating.

Impressively, this round of funding actually surpasses all of Flock’s previous rounds combined.

This money will be used for the usual purposes such as research, development and marketing. An emphasis will be placed on global expansion as well as the company sets its sites on the 230 million members of social networks globally.

Flock is a browser just like Firefox or Internet Explorer except that it has built-in functionality for various social networks on the web. Say for example you sign in to your Flickr account, you can have Flock remember your info and keep it open in a sidebar tab and update you when your contacts post new photos. It also works with more traditional social networking sites as you might expect such as Facebook.

According to the company, since January of this year Flock’s user base has increased by more than 250 percent while its revenue has risen by more than 400 percent. As we’ve reported previously, Flock makes money thanks to a deal it has with Yahoo to use its search technology. This is similar to the deal Mozilla’s Firefox browser has with Google.

Flock is currently testing out its 1.2 Beta version of the software, which includes Digg integration. This is a pretty good idea and certainly hardcore Digg users will go crazy over it. While I don’t think anyone can accuse the browser of not looking nice, I still find it too slow for my tastes in what I use a web browser for: browsing the web.

Another service, Minggl, shares some similar social functionality of Flock but does it via a Firefox or Internet Explorer plug-in rather than an entirely different browser.

FriendFeed has garnered a lot of popularity within the tech community for its ability to aggregate information across a wide range of social networks, and layer a new conversation on top of that. Minggl is a new service attempting to do something similar, only via the browser rather than a web page.

I sat down with Minggl founder Dewey Gaedcke and marketing director Brian Buser to go over the service and have them show me what it was all about.

Minggl exists as a browser plug-in for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Thanks to this, it’s always running (as long as you want it to be) while your browser is open. Say you want to track what your contacts are doing. To do this on FriendFeed you would have to have window with the site open and switch back to check it constantly. With Minggl you simply browse the web as you normally would as notifications appear on your toolbar as your contacts update various services

But Minggl does a lot more than this. It also allows you to merge your friends together from different online networks and tag those friends so you can easily search for and find just who you are looking for. Say you have a group of friends you go hiking with. Simply tag anyone with “hiking” from across any network you have set up on Minggl, and they will show up in your sidebar upon a search.

The service also has a “status blaster” which allows you to update your status across all the sites that use such functionality, like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. You can also do group messaging on networks from within Minggl. That feature is interesting because it points to one of the bigger differences that separates Minggl from other services, including FriendFeed.

Where FriendFeed uses sites’ APIs to pull in information from other networks, Minggl actually logs you in to the services in the background to pull information. Because of this, Gaedcke explains, Minggl has access to MySpace and LinkedIn and also the data on Facebook, such as the News Feed, that they won’t send out via API. You are constantly logged in to these sites, but you can still set the interval with which Minggl checks for updates.

Getting the information from these social networks was crucial for Minggl because it is “more friend-centric than news-centric,” Gaedcke notes.

Right now Minngl works with the Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twtter. The service also just launched integration with the popular social news voting site Digg to pull in the stories users submit and vote on.

The service doesn’t plan on stopping with those. Gaedcke and Buser said that it’s relatively easy to add more services to the toolbar, so we should expect the likes of YouTube, Flickr, Yelp and others soon. Also in the pipeline are some very cool and interesting features that they are hesitant to share at this time, but they gave me a sneak peak, and I can certainly vouch for them being potentially controversial — and popular, if executed right.

Minggl does have limited advertisements in the activity stream sidebar right now, but it is more focused on building up a loyal user base than monetizing right now

Another competitor for Minggl would have to be the social network-infused browser Flock. Flock might do things a little prettier, but it also requires that you download and use an entirely new browser. With Minggl, you can stick with either Firefox or Internet Explorer. Then there are newer services like MySocial 24×7 which takes FriendFeed’s services and ports them into your browser.

Here’s the latest action:

1) Dash Navigation opens platform
2) Flock releases new browser, with Facebook in sidebar
3) Patriots successfully sue ticket scalper, StubHub
4) Google’s great quarter: Net income up 46 percent
5) Brad Greenspan’s tell-all essay on MySpace
6) Microsoft releases Popfly, allowing non-geeks to build apps
7) Comcast steps away from Net Neutrality

Dash Navigation opens platform — Dash, you’ll recall is the cool GPS device that you can use in your car, and which will be constantly connected to the Internet. The company orginally said it was going to release its product this fall. However, last month, it delayed the release and will come next year. Notably, at the Web 2.0 Summit today, it also declared it will be an open platform. So you can do mashups with maps, and use Zillow, for example, to track the values of homes as you drive by them. That’s a good turn, because earlier year we criticized the company for being closed. That’s when it signed an exclusive contract with Yahoo to offer people search. What’s the point of letting people use the Web from their car if you’re going to shut them out from using other services? We still think this company is somewhat hyped. Accessing a decent, reliable Internet connection from your car is going to be a very difficult thing to do, and there’s loads of competition out there. As mobile internet access gets more robust, however, this device will get more attractive.

Flock offers new version of its broswer to the public here — We’ve written about its sidebar, which lets you operate within some of your social networking accounts without actully going to their site. New is the ability to access your Facebook account, and do upload photos directly to that account from your browser (see image).

Sports: Patriots successfully sue StubHub to gain ticket resellers’ identities – Stubhub, a marketplace that lets people buy and sold tickets they have purchased for sports games, concerts, and other events, was forced to divulge the identity of 13,000 of its users to the team. The Patriots claimed reselling tickets violated a Massachussets state law against reselling tickets for over two dollars the price at which they were purchased. EBay-owned Stubhub has begun notifying its affected users that the Patriots have their names, addresses and phone numbers. The Patriots management says it may revoke the tickets of people who resold on Stubhub. The Boston Globe has more. The team is now spying on its fans, after having been busted for spying on its opponents, as others have noted.

Google widens lead in search – Google’s said net income in the third quarter rose 46 percent compared to a year ago. Sales climbed 57 percent, beating estimates. Its profit margin declined somewhat, but its market share keeps rising, and competitor Yahoo said its revenues had grown just 12 percent.

Funky macro economics — We’re not certain how this will affect start-ups, but the dollar is an all-time low, at $1.42 to the euro, and the price of crude oil also hit a record, briefly breaching $90 a barrel yesterday. This could mean inflation, but housing woes are keeping things in check. (Details here).

Comcast steps away from Net Neutrality — Web companies like Joost and BitTorrent that have business models based on peer-to-peer sharing rely on the concept of “net neutrality,” meaning all traffic on the internet will be treated the same. Net neutrality isn’t a law, though; internet service providers can manipulate traffic in other ways if they wish. Comcast, the nation’s second largest internet service provider, has now been shown to be selectively blocking some peer-to-peer traffic, with no regard to the source of the traffic — in other words, they don’t care whether it comes from illegal file sharing or a legitimate business, they just don’t want it.
It’s not time for P2P-based companies to panic just yet. Comcast was already notorious for heavy-handed tactics to limit their bandwidth, and the bad publicity may force them to drop the practice. On the other hand, if the company manages to set a precedent, Joost et al. could be in trouble. And to make matters worse, many customers can’t vote with their feet by leaving Comcast — in many areas, only one or two service providers are available to choose from.

The tell-all essay of Brad Greenspan, Myspace “founder” – Greenspan played an early role at a company called eUniverse, which gave birth to MySpace. However, while he claims to have been a founder of MySpace, Myspace executives dismiss his role there. Greenspan writes in a long, unedited essay on the anti-Myspace site: I was forced to leave eUniverse at the end of October as [venture capital firm VantagePoint Venture Partners] took control of eUniverse and Myspace. His screed, complete with court documents, tells the story of how he was the driving force behind Myspace, and how a cast of characters took the company out from under him. Greenspan has already tried suing News Corp over his grievances, but his case was dismissed. See our previous coverage of the issue here. Found via YC hacker news.

Software giant Microsoft’s drag-and-drop Web mashup development tool, Popfly, now open for public testing — Its for people who don’t know how to code, and gives anybody the ability to build applications. As it becomes easier to mix and match programs, like building a house from Lego pieces, maybe the rest us will really start building applications. This may have limited popularity, but it won’t be a blockbuster.

Ten more companies presented during today’s afternoon portion of the Techcrunch40 conference. If we were able to have stock in these companies, here’s the order we’d rank them: MusicShake, Cake Financial, Tripit, Ponoko, Everywhere, CrowdSpirit, DocStoc, Flock, StoryBlender and TeachThePeople. Summaries of each company follow.

MusicShake, a music-creation app — This is site is winning kudos because it looks addictive. According to the logo on the webpage, it’s a “Music making game which is no need of intelligence.” Whether that’s really a translation mistake — the company is South Korean — is a matter of opinion, but it does reflect the whimsical attitude of the founders. MusicShake’s presentation started out with annoyingly-upbeat techno pumping out of the speakers, music that they claimed had been created by a 9 year old girl. And when they started to show off the app, it looked easy enough for even a child to make music at least as good as what’s played on commercial radio. The method is simple: Like existing music creation software, MusicShake provides instrumental sounds to users, who add them together to create songs. The difference is that MusicShake is both free to use and entirely intuitive. One possible drawback: Our immediate thought was that MusicShake provides a brilliant way to keep users anchored on a website, but the founders have chosen not to place any ads on the app. Instead, they claim that users will be able to sell the music they make, and split the revenue with the company. Its hard to sell to online, so the risk is that the company won’t make much.

Cake Financial, a great way to access investing information — We wrote a separate post about this company today. It gives you a way to see the historical performance of your portfolio, as well as and monthly and yearly performance data, on risk adjusted basis. You can see the portfolio holdings of other people, and how you compare with them. Angel investor Ron Conway invested in the company, but conceded he doesn’t that use the service, but lets Goldman Sachs make his investments. Yossi Yardi, an entrepreneur and investor, also on the panel of the presentation, gave him a hard time, Conway he wasn’t eating the “dog food.” One significant risk factor for this company: People may not want to expose less than stellar investment habits and decide not to participate? That might hamper adoption.

TripIt, a travel plans organizer — This service launched out of beta today. Rather than attempting to compete in the crowded booking space, dominated by giants like Expedia, TripIt aims to organize the avalanche of information that serial travelers face. Users can link in information from their travel plans — airline tickets, hotel bookings, tours, and so forth — and an app, cleverly called “the Itinerator”, gathers the most relevant information into an organized file, a process that CEO Gregg Brockaway calls “a baby step toward the semantic web.” Rather than stopping at organizing a traveler’s itinerary, TripIt then goes on to pull together information on the destinations being visited from outside sites like Wikipedia and Flickr. Finally, users can collaborate to put together group trips. TripIt benefited from a better thought-out presentation than most of the other companies, but also struck us as a solid business plan in a space that has so far been left more or less open.

Ponoko, a personal manufacturing platform — This is a fun company, letting you design any product by using a wizard that takes you through the process (say for a piece of jewelry, a piece of clothing or a lamp). It provides drop down menus of materials you can use, what they look like after they’ve been processed. Finally it will soon provide you tools to help sell the product and promote it. You can get design tips from others, or buy designs from others who have built things on the site. It has been in beta testing so far.

Everywhere, a community-generated magazine — 8020 Publishing, the company launching Everywhere today, has already met success with JPG Magazine, using nearly the same model. That’s perhaps the most important detail about the new magazine: While it won’t knock your socks off, the fact that 8020 is working from a tried-and-true model sets it apart from almost all the other companies by raising its chances of success. However, as a magazine play, its upside is limited too. Everywhere will work by starting a community for travelers to share pictures and stories, of which the best will be periodically pulled together into a glossy-paged publication. Overall, the magazine’s website looks similar to Flickr, with space to write stories.

CrowdSpirit, a company that uses “crowds” for designing consumer electronics — This lets end users submit designs for products. The submission gets rated by others, as well as feedback for improvement. It also then leverages fan of a particular product, and possible partners who might buy the product to distribute in retail. CrowdSpirit tells the product or application manufacturer when there appears to be enough demand from fans, and partner orders, for them to ship for manufacturing. The company will make money from rev from sold products.

Docstoc, the “YouTube for professional documents” — This company lets you post documents easily online, giving you a way to post them straight from your desktop. Others can come and read them or use them. We just wrote about this company’s funding round. The company has more extensive features than we’d previously realized. You can classify documents in detail, so that people can search for documents for say, a divorce lawyer, and Docstoc will show you the documents that have been most used by others in that category. People submitting doc can tag by category, or others can do it for them. People can vote documents according to usefulness. You’ll also be able to store your documents with Docstoc. The question about this company is how it will make money. The company says people may be willing to pay for extra storage and that it can make money that way, or by getting shared revenue by selling things like say, research reports from Gartner.

Flock, a browser dedicated to social networking — If you’re totally addicted to Facebook, Flock may be useful. The browser is all about streamlining social networking, adding value by easing interactions for hardcore social networkers. The question is whether enough people think of the internet as a platform for Facebook and Flickr to support an entire browser. As the drawn-out fight between Microsoft’s Explorer and Firefox has shown, people tend to stick with what they know unless the alternative is repeatedly shown to be inferior. Flock has been around for a while, having notched up almost 2 million downloads, in contract to Firefox, which is approaching 400 million. The big announcement today was that a pre-release of version 0.9 is now available to everyone for download, and version 1.0 is in private beta. For our previous analysis for Flock, see this post.

StoryBlender, collaborative video creation — Allows you to “blend” videos, putting together parts of different videos and adding in simple animation effects. Anyone familiar with professional video editing would laugh this app out of the room, but the point is to simplify enough that the average person can put together a simple mashup. Storyblender allows collaboration, and can show a visual timeline detailing the chain of people working on any particular video. The concept is mildly interesting, but is less polished (from the demo at least) than MusicShake. An encouraging detail is that its CEO is the founder of Cyworld, a social network that holds a near-monopoly in the South Korean market.

TeachThePeople, a “peer-to-peer” collaborative education service — This company lets experts try to make money from their knowledge. So someone like Marc Andreessen, a well-known entrepreneur, might try to sell advice to first-time entrepreneurs. Andreessen would do this by creating a “community,” outlining the details of his offering, the category it belongs in, goals, and how he wants share his knowledge. He can appoint community managers for his site to help him manage subscribers, and he set different layers of access for subscribers to the community. It gives him space to load lectures. The company makes money by sharing in advertising, if Andreessen offers his service for free, or in revenue if he charges. There’s chat, too. The downside is that it’s hard to get people to buy things over the Internet, and experts already have a number of voice as and Web-based alternatives for selling their services. The company is seeking a round of funding.

(This was co-written with Matt Marshall)

Flock announced its intention, over two years ago, of making the web browser more social — like a flock of penguins, it never got off the ground. Two years later, the Palo Alto, Calif. company has a bigger set of wings, a 9-month late version “0.9.”

Big questions remain, though, as to whether this will be enough.

The browser already gives people a way to save text and images of Web pages to a clipboard, save these for direct posts to blogs, and collect photos and share them with friends on Flickr. The newer version takes these features a step further.

For example, Flock has added video to its “media stream,” which until now had let users run pictures from their Flickr and Photobucket accounts atop their Flock browser window. You can run videos from your YouTube or AOL’s TruVeo account.

It also wants to offer a personalized home-page feature like NetVibes and PageFlakes. Its new “MyWorld” start page allows users to see a list of their favorite bookmarked sites, rss feeds and photo and video files on a single page. It lacks the depth and breadth of the market leaders’ offerings, such as the ability to embed widgets.

The new version has more new features than we have space for (the company lists the new features here; a review here).

The features above are a couple of the ways that Flock helps one manage things like photos, videos, rss feeds, favorite and web pages. Firefox, by contrast, simply offers add-ons that do the same things. The advantage is that people can customize their Firefox browser with only the add-ons that they want to use.

Firefox counts 85 million users across all of its versions, and over 370 million downloads since its 1.0 — compared to Flock’s 1.5 total downloads to date (caution: while the number of active Firefox users is clearly orders of magnitude larger than Flock’s, we don’t have reliable numbers on either).

The big question for Flock: How many people can actually be bothered to download a new browser, outside of the early adopter crowd? Even Firefox is getting bloated. There are many reports of it performing poorly on Macs, especially when burdened with add-ons. This has led some (including this author) to switch to the fast and elegant Camino browser designed specifically for Mac. Oh, and did we mention that most people on the web are still using Internet Explorer, and to a lesser extent Safari?

There appears to be a sad tale of internal struggle here. One blogger from the Flock developer community posted last month that the company has been in “a pressure cooker environment in need of an outstanding product release.” Two of the founders have left within the last year, and the venture-backed company’s board brought in a new CEO, Shawn Hardin from LA.

He’s a media veteran, with experience at Yahoo, AOL Broadband and NBC.

He says the market has changed in the last two years, with millions more people using Flickr, YouTube and social networks for hours every day. He thinks Flock is still well-positioned because it is “the first and only social web browser.” The company doesn’t want a billion users — it’s aiming for “75 to 100 million users,” Hardin says, the ones that use the most “social media.” He’s gearing the company up for a big marketing campaign in the fall, releasing version 1.0 for when the kids come back to school, one of the things he told us he was brought in to do.

Meanwhile, the company makes money from a deal with Yahoo by displaying Yahoo’s search engine as the default option within the Flock browser. It gets paid an average of more than $3 per user per year by Yahoo, Hardin says. He estimates that Google pays Firefox at least $2 per user per year for running its search engine as the default. This makes some serious money for the taxable (for-profit) subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation: over $55 million in the 2005 fiscal year.

The Coop is a new social networking feature by Mozilla, which will let users of its Firefox browser keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share content with them.

It will integrate with web services, using data feeds so that you can keep up your friends’ activities on various sites. This may hurt Flock, the browser company that was about to release a version with similar features (we saw a demo several months ago).

And if it reminds you of Friendster, it should. Though it works with Friendster, not against it.

According to the Mozilla blog:

[One build] uses Facebook’s “Share” feature as the data transport layer for now, and allows you to share web content by dragging it onto your friend’s picture. As the project page indicates, we’re thinking of several different data transport mechanisms, as well as how we want to expose various interactions. This prototype really helps to get a feeling of what The Coop might become over time.

Roundup of Silicon Valley news:

Google’s Larry and Sergey were more interested in technology than Yahoo founders — There’s a revealing 2000 interview with venture capitalist Michael Moritz posted by PodVentureZone, comparing Google’s co-founders and Yahoo’s. He was an investor and on the board of both, and says Larry and Sergey were closer “to the sheet metal, closer to the hardware.” He calls Sergey a “tough, little guy”:

I think Larry and Sergey have a much more pronounced interest in the core technology than Jerry and David. I think Jerry and David had and have an extraordinary and fervent interest in having a fabulous service for their customers, but they’re less interested in developing the raw underlying technology that I think Larry and Sergey are. I think there’s a reason that Larry and Sergey stayed longer grinding through their PhD stuff at Stanford than Jerry and David. And Larry and Sergey are much closer to the sheet metal, closer to the hardware. Don’t forget, Yahoo has never had its own search technology….

Google leases San Francisco office, finally — The search engine has been looking for an SF property for some time, in order to retain young workers who prefer to live and work in the City — instead of trekking down to boring Mountain View. It has now leased 210,000 square feet, for about $35 a square foot, at the waterfront property south of Market St., Hills Plaza. It could host 800 of Google’s employees.

Berkeley regulates nanotechnology — The city of Berkeley, Calif. is regulating nanotechnology, fearful of the new properties generated by the clusters of atoms or molecules sized at a billionth of a meter. At that small size, compounds can take on different, sometimes unpredictable characteristics, leading scientist and Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Bill Joy, among others, to fret about the potential for nanotechnology — when combined with biology — to self-replicate uncontrollably. This threatens to make humans an endangered species. Here are more details (via NYT) on Berkeley’s efforts to regulate the “molecular foundry.”

NetSuite appoints Billy Beane to board — Netsuite, the maker of online software for small businesses, is considering going public, and has added Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager, to its board. Beane was made a legend in Michael Lewis’ book MoneyBall: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which explained Beane’s strategy of picking players using unorthodox metrics and minimal amounts of cash. Beane says he is drawn to Netsuite because it is backed by Larry Ellison, and has an unorthodox means of selling software — doing it online, instead of via disks that must be installed on PC. We hope Beane doesn’t really think selling software online is that revolutionary. It’s been around for a while.

Newspaper industry forms two opposing camps — The newspaper industry remains in decline, but the newspaper companies can’t seem to stop squabbling. It appears two rival camps have emerged. The three largest newspaper publishers, Gannett Co., McClatchy Co. and Tribune Co., are reportedly forging plans (WSJ sub required) to sell advertising jointly on their newspapers’ Web sites — to attract big advertisers that don’t want to hassle with dealing with each company separately. Currently, national advertisers buy the bulk of their online display ads from folks like Yahoo, Time Warner’s AOL or Microsoft’s MSN, the story correctly reports.

However, Yahoo has announced plans to work with nine other newspaper publishers to build a similar one-stop-shopping spot for advertisers, as we reported. And ClickZ reports there’s bad blood between these smaller publishers and the big three, stemming from the fact that the Yahoo group was excluded by the big three from their CareerBuilder and Cars.com/Apartments.com properties.

OpenView Venture Partners spams web sites — A bizarre thing for a venture firm to do, but maybe not. Gossip site Valleywag reports that Boston’s venture firm, OpenView, spammed it. It seems OpenView sent a computer generated email to Vallewag, saying the firm wanted to invest without really knowing what Valleywag does. This is the modern version of the cold-calling that many later-stage firms have done over the years. We’ve sent emails and made calls to OpenView to confirm, and will report if we hear back.

Venice Project, based on Mozilla framework, but where will it get content? — More details from Om and the WSJ on the Venice Project, the TV-video company being created by the Skype/Kazaa co-founders. We can’t shake the feeling, however, that this project is deluged with competition in ways that Skype and Kazaa were not when those services became popular.

Flock co-founder Geoffrey Arone leaves — Arone, who was holding the fort at the new browser company, Flock, after former CEO Bart Decrem left last year, and other key developers departed, has also gone. We haven’t talked with Flock, but this may suggest the new version of the Browser, due out soon, may not be everything its investors had hoped. We’ve tried reaching Arone, but he did not respond. He is becoming Entrepreneur in Residence at Bessemer Venture Partners (via Techcrunch).

Music recommendation service, Pandora, ruins it, with advertising — Ads on a Web page are fine, but not when they are spliced into music you’d like to listen to. Geek Limit has the latest on Pandora, which tailors music to your tastes, which is inserting short audio commercials inserted into your audio streams. This is part of Pandora’s effort to experiment for ways to make revenue, at a time when music sites are consolidating (see news on AOL Music and Napster)

Second Life hype spurs odd behavior — Banks Wells Fargo and ABN AMO bought islands recently within the virtual world. Feeling the pressure, BNP Paribas decided it needed to buy an island too, VentureBeat has learned. More bizarre is the answer given by Sun Microsystem chief executive Jonathan Schwartz, when asked by the NYT about why Sun bought land in Second Life. He essentially didn’t have an answer, making vague references to how Sun was a new media company and needed to have presence online (read whole response here). His conclusion:

…I’m not going to advertise during the Super Bowl. What a waste of money. Where am I going to advertise? I’m going to buy land in Second Life.

iPhone reality setting in — Some good coverage lately of the Apple iPhone’s similarity to the Macintosh Computer which, like the iPhone, was designed in secrecy, introduced with wild hype and at a high price. But the shortcomings of the Mac eventually cost chief executive Steve Jobs his job. The Mac’s predicted sales never materialized in part because of expansion limitations, and now people are pointing to the iPhone’s limitations. It won’t allow third party applications to be installed. According to Jobs in the NYT, “These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them.” He said some outside software may be introduced, though it will be controlled by Apple. Others say this may not be a big deal. Install an Adobe Flash player that allows a bunch of Web services, for example, and Apple may get around some of the shortcomings.

Skype a disappointment? — Here’s a good summary in BusinessWeek of how Skype may not qualify for the $1.5 billion in earn-outs that were part of its deal with eBay, given lackluster performance. This is off-topic, but we also noticed an intriguing ad placement in the BusinessWeek story. Check out screenshot below, which shows an ad for Branson’s Virgin right next to a paragraph staying Branson is a visionary. Has contextual advertising really gotten this good? Or did this involve a human being?

The round-up of crucial stuff in Silicon Valley:

Did MySpace’s Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson get shortchanged? — VentureBeat has heard that MySpace, the biggest success of the Web 2.0 wave so far, in terms of users, wasn’t such a great a hit for the co-founders. Word is, Chris DeWolfe ended up with a mere $5 million, even though the company was sold as part of Intermix for $580 million. We haven’t been able to confirm this (MySpace declined comment), but that’s a pittance, if true. The founders were watered down considerably by investors.

The Mercury News has an interview with Ross Levinsohn (pictured above), who runs News Corp’s Fox Interactive division — and who was behind the purchase of MySpace — and asks him whether the co-founders are unhappy. He responds: “There’s no indication to me that they’re unhappy.”

Levinsohn spoke at the Web 2.0 conference today, and addressed a different thorn — Brad Greenspan, the former chief executive of Myspace, who keeps suing the company on allegations it lied to its investors about its value. Levinsohn said:

He’s lost every single motion he’s charged against us. It’s like when Mike Tyson kept trying to win this fight, and the guy kept getting up …It’s kinda sad…two years before we bought the company, they kicked him out. For a guy who got $40 or 50 million from the sale, I mean…life’s too short.

(via Valleywag)

Yahoo’s acquisition binge at screeching halt? — Yahoo’s stock is in the toilet, and maybe that’s why its lost is appetite to buy companies. Check out this chart of acquisitions by the big three over the past years. Google and Microsoft are munching companies as eagerly as ever (18 between them), whereas Yahoo has acquired just one (Jumpcut), according to this chart at least.

Timebridge raises $6 million for… yet another calendar-scheduling company? — The San Francisco start-up, founded in March of last year that, lets you schedule meetings easily within your calendar. It has launched a private testing version. Chief executive Yori Nelken showed VentureBeat a demo Monday, and it has some cool features to save time organizing meetings among two or more people — like letting users block out possible meeting times, and letting their friends or contacts see the times through a central “meeting space.” When the friend selects a time, the slot is automatically booked for both people. So why all the dough? The company has invested resources into integrating various clients — it has a plugin for Outlook, for a Web version, for Blackberry/Treo, Apple, Thunderbird, Notes, etc — that it can work on whatever calendar you have. Timebridge wants to serve the busy professional, and is letting Google conquer the consumer market.

Mayfield and Norwest are the backers. More details at the site’s tour; see top-right). The basic service will be free, but revenue will could from a subscription for added security, archiving and admin features. Nelken thinks the market would accept a range of $30 to a $100 per user per year. It might also get referral fees from companies like Open Table.

Mashery lets you outsource your development — It handles the open API process for companies.

FON now the largest WiFi access network — VentureBeat caught up with Neil Rimer Wednesday, investor in FON, a company that lets people share each other’s WiFi routers. He says the service is doing well in Europe, particularly in Spain, and now has more access points globally than than any other WiFi access point network, including Boingo and T-Mobile. It was also a good move to hire Joanna Rees Gallanter for U.S. operatons, because she can apparently “talk a dog off a meat wagon,” a different skill than running a venture firm. The Madrid company also bought the popular Firefox extension, GSpace, for an undisclosed amount, GigaOm first reported. The FireFox extension allows users to treat their GMail accounts as an online file storage locker — to be launched in Feb 2007, it is essentially a FON router that will have a USB 2.0 port.

Workday’s missed opportunity — Dave Duffield, the founder of PeopleSoft may be back with new start-up Workday, but critique Jeff Nolan says it missed the opportunity to say something new. In other words, it got great media coverage because of Duffield, but it was ho-hum in the details.

Will Flock’s new chief executive turn things around? — From the beginning, Flock, which was supposed to be a social browser, failed to meet hyped expectations. It had potential, but never executed. A new chief exec, Shawn Hardin, has taken over the Mountain View company. He’s a media veteran, having worked at Yahoo, AOL Broadband and NBC. We’ve just had a sneak peak at Flock’s 1.0 browser, and it’s got some promising features — question is, can Flock convince people to make their browser their central work place or not.

Charles River Ventures STIRRs — Fresh from announcing its new attractive seed investment strategy (where it gives out $250,000 checks to promising ideas, Silicon Valley venture firm Charles River is getting submerged by entrepreneurs eager to pitch. It’s also been invited to mix with the masses — at the Nov. 15 STIRR event, a gig usually reserved for start-ups to give one-minute pitches. The Charles River gang — George Zachary, Bill Tai, and Susan Wu — will get 60 seconds to pitch the crowd. We bumped into Susan Wu today at the Web 2.0 conference; she said she was overwhelmed with dealflow.

Lightspeed Venture Partners keeps adding — Silicon Valley venture firm Lightspeed just named three new associates, Patrick Chiang, Andrew Chung and John Vrionis (as you’ll see on this page of blue shirts). This is the firm that recently saw a split, with several partners leaving to form Opus. We won’t call the Opus guys renegades, because they also like blue shirts ;)