VentureBeat

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The back-story on Jangl’s slow death — Yesterday, we reported on Jangl’s asset sale process. A tipster tells us that Seattle-based WhitePages had offered to buy Internet phone company Jangl for $20 million, but then kept the company in diligence for more than a month and walked away at the last minute — giving Jangl no choice to but throw in the towel when it ran out of time and options. Whitepages flew down from Seattle for regular meetings, and Jangl’s execs flew up to Seattle, but then WhitePages caught wind that Jangl was running out of money and that investors had given Jangl’s team a deadline to sell by May 15. WhitePages whittled down its offer first to half, then cut off a severance agreement to those who would be laid off, and then lowered the offer even more: “They had us over the barrel,” said one Jangl employee. [Update: There are always two sides to the story. WhitePages is denying they ever offered $20M. And that's partly what happens in these sorts of negotiations: There's verbal dancing, and there's written, signed legal offers. If there's no deal, there's no deal.]

Virgin Mobile USA considering merger with Helio — While many MVNOs have simply collapsed or been closed by their parent companies, Virgin Mobile USA and smaller rival Helio have scraped by, if not flourished. The two may solve some mutual problems by undergoing a merger, which would create a bulkier combined company and add to their respective plan and phone options. However, mocoNews suggests that they might still look for a private equity buyout afterward.

VC investment continues to move overseas — Limited partners say they’re still wrestling with the implications of more and more venture capital activity moving abroad. The comments came during the LP panel at the recent meeting of the National Venture Capital Association. VentureWire was there to note some of the most interesting facts and figures. There’s definitely a lot of activity — almost 20 percent of domestic funds were deployed outside the United States in 2007, compared with 7 percent in 1998, according to Bob French of Adams Street Partners. And David York of Paul Capital predicted that within the next decade, as much as 50 percent of global venture capital activity will take place outside the United States.

Yahoo launches regional search variant – Yahoo’s Indian team has put together a search product called “Glue Pages” that integrates traditional search with results pulled from Yahoo’s portal business, including content like recipes, medical information, images and restaurant listings. The feature is undergoing testing on Yahoo India, with no plans as yet to offer it in the United States. More at CNET News.

Warner Music may invest again in imeem — In an encouraging turnaround for the music industry last year, Warner Music dropped a lawsuit against music sharing social network imeem, then followed up with an investment in the company. It may tag along with Sequoia Capital and make another investment this year, according to the Silicon Alley Insider.

RealNetworks spins off game studio — RealNetworks, maker of the most irritating media player ever created, has spun off its games division, which includes recent acquisition Trymedia. The gaming business is one of RealNetworks’ most profitable; it will retain an 80 percent ownership stake, but will allow the new company to forge its own path.

Real Goods Solar prices IPO real low — Solar installer Real Goods Solar, which recently announced plans for an initial public offering, has priced its 5.5 million shares at the bottom of its $10-12 range. Most cleantech companies have held off from IPOs this year due to the current market troubles.

Google achieves coveted “brain drain” status — The BBC has a report on the steady stream of executives away from Google, many of whose departures we’ve also noted, including Chris Sacca, Gideon Yu and Elliot Schrage. Many are headed to Facebook, which is described in the article as “the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago,” while Google is called a “behemoth” that is “no longer the firm it once was.” Google’s current position, of course, is precisely where Facebook aspires to be.

Forbes.com launches business social network — Following in the footsteps of BusinessWeek, Forbes.com has launched its own social network, the AnswerNetwork. As might be expected from the name, users are expected to ask questions and share answers with each other, in return gaining competence rankings based on their expertise. LinkedIn, which is BusinessWeek’s partner, has a similar feature, although it seems to be only moderately popular with users.

Unisfair is trying to get businesses to take virtual trade shows as more than a curiosity. On Monday, the company will announce version 2.0 of its Virtual Events for Business tool, VentureBeat has learned.

The Menlo Park, Calif., company helps businesses stage trade shows online so they can cut the costs of phsyical trade shows, yet reap the same benefits of gathering for talks and exhibitions. The new version delivers capabilities such as e-commerce, multiple-language support, and professional networking.

“The improvements are aimed at improving the stickiness of the virtual events,” said Guy Piekarz, CEO of Unisfair, in an interview.

A survey from the Factpoint Group says that virtual events attract an average of 1,587 attendees (42% of which are international). Thanks to increased attendance and the availability of detailed marketing data, such events deliver 348 qualified leads per each event sponsor.

Unisfair’s environment lets attendees create avatars, or 3-D characters, that they can use to browse through the virtual trade show. They can interact with text or voice chat. And the environment integrates with online business tools such as Salesforce.com or the Webex online meeting tool.

Clients such as Cisco and Forbes have used Unisfair to hold 415 events since the company debuted the virtual events . More than 500,000 people from 2,000 companies have attended the events. Over time, Piekarz said the virtual events will move to more of a self-serve model where companies can stage their own events without too much hand-holding.

The company closed its second round in December with $10 million (our coverage) from Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners. Sequoia invested $15 million in the first round. Unisfair has 65 employees. The company will compete against the larger all-purpose world, Linden Lab’s Second Life, as well as Forterra Systems‘ custom corporate virtual worlds. IBM has also given its own endorsement to virtual worlds as useful beyond entertainment.

1) Yahoo’s Yang lambasted by Congress for China actions
2) Social networks eclipse email in the UK
3) Yet another “semantic” search engine launches
4) Coming to a gas station pump near you: Google maps
5) Coming to online games this year: Google ads
6) Mobile web browser Opera Mini 4 out now
7) Forbes aquires majority stake in political blog site RealClearPolitics.com
8) Google-led Android mobile phone software has a long way to go, says rival

Yahoo’s Yang lambasted by Congress for China actions — When a Yahoo lawyer testified to Congress last year that the company hadn’t played an active role in the jailing of Chinese dissidents, the issue was allowed to blow over. Then an organization called Dui Hua dug up the actual documents served to Yahoo China by Chinese police. It’s pretty clear now that Yahoo did know what was going on, and Congressional leaders aren’t happy about it. CEO Jerry Yang and general counsel Michael Callahan were yesterday called “moral pygmies” during hearings in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. That committee is also urging a bill that would criminalize cooperation by US companies with anti-democratic governments, a significant threat to internet companies looking to expand in Asia. More from the WSJ here (image courtesy of Getty Images).

Social networks eclipse email in the UK — A Hitwise study shows that social networks are now receiving more traffic than web-based email services like Hotmail and Gmail in the United Kingdom. That’s mostly due to strong growth in the traffic of social networks, but there has also been a modest decline in traffic to email sites. Predictably enough, the surge toward Facebook and similar sites is led by users aged 18-34, with the fogeys opting for the more familiar web mail.

Yet another “semantic” search engine launches — TrueKnowledge may or may not be worth its weight in 0’s and 1’s, but it at least has the gamut of buzzwords: Natural language processing, semantic search, internal knowledge bases, etc. Unfortunately, the UK-based company isn’t allowing anyone to touch the goods, including ReadWriteWeb, which has a review and video of the site here.

Coming to a gas station pump near you: Google maps – The Internet-connected gas pumps, made by Greensboro, N.C.-based Gilbarco Veeder-Root, will display the maps to help drivers find local destinations. Notably, the destinations will be hand-picked by pump owners and won’t include a way, for the time being, for people to type in addresses and get directions. Google Maps is also available for mobile phones, specifically so you can get directions. At this time, the maps won’t include ads. AP story here.

Coming to online games this year: Google ads – Google will start beta-testing with casual gaming startup BunchBall Games later this month, embedding 15-second video-style ads that appear before and within some of Bunchball’s games. It will offer PC-based ads in December, starting with cult-classic game Psychonauts. Om has the scoop, here. Bunchball is also a member of OpenSocial.

Mobile web browser Opera Mini 4 out now — details here.

Forbes aquires majority stake in political blog site RealClearPolitics.com — press release here.
Google-led Android mobile phone software has a long way to go, says rival – John Forsyth, vice president of strategy at mobile operating system company Symbian has harsh words for Android. He told the BBC is yet another attempt to introduce a Linux-based operating system.

About every three months this year there has been a mobile Linux initiative of some sort launched. It’s a bit like the common cold. It keeps coming round and then we go back to business. We don’t participate in these full stop. We make our own platform and we are focused on driving that into the mobile phone market at large ever more aggressively.

Symbian sold software licenses for 20.4 million smartphones in the last quarter of 2007.

Clipmarks, one of the many startups that helps users collect and organize information from around the web, is being bought by Forbes Magazine, an inside source tells us.

The New York-based startup lets you select text, photos or videos on web pages, then use Clipmark’s bookmarking feature to save the URL and your selected information to your Clipmarks folder. From there, you can share your “clips” with friends and colleagues and even search to find the most popular clips on the Clipmarks site.

Founded by a lawyer disgruntled with pasting citations from articles into an ever-growing Microsoft Word document, Clipmarks’ features go a step further than established bookmarking services such as Delicious.

It lets you choose only a phrase or paragraph of text, or a specific photo on the page to bookmark. This means your bookmarks more obviously point to the information you think matters most.

Forbes finds the service useful for helping their reporters collect and share information about articles they are reading — and you may soon be seeing Clipmarks used in their stories and blogposts. They’ll clip something, and then blog something quickly around it.

We can see the value of this service for reporters selecting Web items on the fly, pasting it into an editor, and providing a brief comment — and so this may be a good home for Clipmarks. However, for pure research purposes, we find other services more useful. For example, RSS readers, such as Google Reader, help us manage the deluge of fresh information being published across online news sites every day.

Other startups that provide similar social-bookmarking features include Grouptivity (our coverage) and Plum.

Back in 2006, we noted a “locust swarm” of social bookmarking startups that were receiving funding even though it wasn’t clear how any of them would make money. Clipmarks seems to have found the same answer as Delicious: get bought — most likely for a small sum — by someone who needs what you made.