VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Obama Bay Area event sets fund-raising record — Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama visited the Bay Area and racked up $7.8 million in fund-raising, a record for a single event, according to Draper Fisher Jurvestson’s Steve Jurvetson, who, with his wife Karla Jurvetson, donated in $9,200.

Xbox 360 sells out in Japan — The Microsoft gaming console has never been able to gain a strong foothold in the country which prefers its own Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation 3. Perhaps the tides are turning — or perhaps this shortage was staged, as many commenters are speculating in the comments on Kotaku. Either way, there will be more in the country next month.

Hulu closer to going international? — The popular NBC and Fox-based video streaming site is apparently trying to hire people to expand to other countries, according to GigaOm. That will remove perhaps the biggest knock people have against it — if you’re outside the U.S., you can’t watch it!

Tsavo gets funding — The new southern California start-up that is buying up content and advertising start-ups, akin to Demand Media, raised $20 million from American Capital. The start-up is the latest project of Michael Jones, who has just left AOL, where he worked for two years after AOL bought his previous text-voice-video chat software company, Userplane, for about $40M. TechCrunch has more.

American Airlines takes Wi-Fi to the skies — The airline has started rolling out its in-flight Internet service powered by Gogo, according to CNET. For now it’s only on non-stop flights between New York and San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles and New York and Miami.

iPhone update 2.0.2 is meant to address 3G issues — Suspicions that the new software update was meant to address iPhone 3G connection issues have been confirmed by an Apple representative talking to USA Today’s Ed Baig.

Salesforce.com posts solid numbers — It’s the first software as a service company to exceed a $1 billion annual revenue run rate, according to the release. It saw record revenue of $263 million, up 49% year-over-year.

VC in the middle of online escort scandal — William Ferretti, the co-founder of Medstar Television and a self-described venture capitalist, faces felony charges. Vallywag has more.

Don’t tweet for money when raising funding — Jason Goldberg, the founder of SocialMedian, sent a tweet (Twitter message) out this morning letting people know he was raising more funding and to contact him if you were interested in participating. One problem, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, who is also a lawyer called him out on that being illegal because it was technically an unregistered public offering. The tweet was deleted.

BioImagene gets a new round — The digital pathology company has landed a $26 million fourth round. Burrill & Co. led the round with Ascension Health Ventures, National Healthcare Services, Artiman Ventures and ICCP Ventures also participating.

Personalized talk radio company Stitcher launches an iPhone app — Watch the video below for more.

Hulu, the online streaming video site backed by NBC and Fox, has been nothing short of successful. The usage numbers are very good and the amount of free, ad-supported content is arguably better. If there is a knock that can be made against it though (besides its lack of availability outside the United States), it’s in the department of high definition content.

Though Hulu launched its “HD Gallery” back in December, it basically only contained movie trailers. It was more of a proof-of-concept then a feature. Today, the site rolled out some actual content in HD including popular shows like The Office, 30 Rock, Heroes and 24. Unfortunately, each of these shows only has one episode a piece in HD.

ABC.com by comparison offers entire seasons of some of its shows in HD. However, its player requires a seperate download while Hulu does not (assuming you have the latest version of Flash). ABC is planning to launch a revamped player in time for this fall.

Hulu does off all of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the hit web-only show created by Joss Whedon in HD.

Perhaps even better is that none of the shows in HD currently have advertisements attached to them. This seems a bit odd given that this is how Hulu is able to stream its shows for free, but apparently this will only be the case “for a limited time,” a Hulu PR representative told NewTeeVee.

While some may argue that this isn’t true HD video (it’s 720p video likely at a relatively low bit-rate), I just watched the episode of 24 full-screen on my 20-inch monitor and I have to say, it looked absolutely great. As someone who watched all of season 2 of Heroes on Hulu in standard definition, I can definitely say this is a huge improvement.

It’s so good in fact, that when Hulu adds more content in HD I may just have to go out and buy a Mac Mini to hook up to my HD television to play it on there. Assuming one of the many set top boxes doesn’t gain Hulu support first.

Updated

Online video sites saw more growth in December, according to Comscore, gaining more than 2.5 million unique viewers over November to reach nearly 141 million people in the US. YouTube once again sucked up the majority of the new traffic, seemingly at the expense of its many competitors.

One reason for the traffic surge, according to Comscore, is the maybe-close-to-over writers’ strike. Thousands of movie and television scriptwriters have stopped writing over the past three months to try to negotiate for a larger share of media companies’ online revenues, among other things. Television viewing, seemingly for lack of fresh programming, has been dropping.

We’ve been interested to see if large media companies’ video sites and the current rash of competing online video startups (our coverage) could make headway against YouTube, in this context. Fox, Viacom, have among other things hoped to differentiate their video sites through offering their own, professional-quality videos, like clips of John Stewart’s The Daily Show.

But of course, new professional content requires working writers. Sadly for online video startups, these writers are unionized and haven’t (for the most part), broken ranks to try out making content for online video startups. YouTube’s specialty, meanwhile, is being the central place for freely-created videos from users.

Google video properties, 97 percent of which is comprised by YouTube, actually gained market share, with 32.6 percent of all video views in December (3.3 billion) up from 31.3 percent in November (3.0 billion). Meanwhile, the closest competitors stagnated or dropped.

Users watched an average of 41.6 videos on YouTube, but watched an average of 8.2 videos on Myspace, even though Myspace had 40.5 million viewers versus YouTube’s 77.6 million. The difference in number of videos watched may be because Myspace users are watching videos in the context of browsing the social networks’ web pages while YouTube viewers go to YouTube specifically to watch videos, on the other hand.

Update: Views have grown more than 34 percent since Comscore began tracking videos in January, 2007, with a seven percent increase in December alone.

Professional-quality online videos will see a resurgence when striking writers return and start writing compelling scripts, big media and video sites alike must hope.

1) Rumor: Google to buy Sprint?
2) The U.S. House of Representatives passes VC tax
3) Berkeley Bionics brings exoskeletons to market
4) Fox Interactive Media may start its own ad network
5) Railpower Technologies to steam on, for now
6) Zuckerberg, speaking grandly
7) Are Facebook’s ads illegal in New York?
8) Murdoch calls Facebook a phonebook
9) Sprint and WiMax startup Clearwire have ended plans to form a joint venture

Rumor: Google to buy Sprint? – The rumor surfaced yesterday, here, suggesting that despite a number of major issues, owning a carrier would give Google crucial control over developing and distributing its own mobile services. The issues, however, are numerous. Google would have to beef up its governmental lobby arm to compete against AT&T and other carriers for favorable regulations. It would also have to manage retail stores for mobile customers (expensive, although they’ve worked for Apple!). The move might also send the message to AT&T and the others considering the Open Handset Alliance that Google is actually going to compete directly against them, regardless of the Open Handset Alliance that Google is spearheading. Om has more about how this move could make sense for Google, Intel, Cisco and other leading Silicon Valley companies.

The U.S. House of Representatives passes VC tax — It will change the carried interest from a capital gains to ordinary income, thereby lifting tax to about 35 percent on VCs and other private equity professionals. It is not expected to pass the Senate, however, and President Bush has suggested he would veto it.

Fred Wilson’s series on the struggling VC industry – Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has a good series of posts about the rise and fall of the VC industry, and explains how the official data VCs report may look better than reality (because poorly performing firms have decided not to report their data, or are shutting down and so can’t report their data), and that even top performing firms in the industry aren’t doing that well. It suggests the VC industry is in for some serious pain.

Berkeley Bionics brings exoskeletons to market – It provides technology to give you extra muscles, and plans to augment human strength in places like the war zone (for military) or other emergency situations (firefighting, and so on). This system provides its pilot with the ability to carry loads up to 150 pounds on his back “with minimal effort” over any type of terrain for extended periods of time without reducing his agility. The company is a spinout from the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory and is raising funds. Via Alarm:clock.

Zuckerberg, speaking grandly – “There is no opting out of advertising,” Zuckerberg said of Facebook’s new platform last week, “Once every hundred years media changes. The last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise [then] was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years, information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have.” Via TechCrunch.

Fox Interactive Media may start its own ad network – FIM may be planning to begin providing advertisements, as well as living off of them. Company representatives have been making the rounds to gauge the interest of outside media sites in showing ads provided by Fox, according to the Silicon Alley Insider. Of course, FIM may be large enough to create its own ecosystem: The company runs AskMen, Fox.com, Dow Jones, Myspace and several other giant media properties. We’re not sure if it’s connected, but we also recently reported on FIM hiring a consulting company to streamline its ad operations. Maybe the advice was, “Go forth, and build your own.”

Railpower Technologies to steam on, for now – The fires were flickering for Railpower, a maker of hybrid locomotives, but the Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan decided to step in and keep the engines running. The fund put $35 million into the cleantech train company, noting that it expects that “increasingly stringent environmental regulations in North America and globally will open up new markets” for clean rail startups like Railpower.

Are Facebook’s ads illegal in New York? — That’s what the New York Times is saying, citing a 100-year-old New York State statute which says that “any person whose name, portrait, picture, or voice is used within this state for advertising purposes or for the purposes of trade without the written consent first obtained” can sue for damages.

Murdoch calls Facebook a phonebook –”The two platforms are very different in the user experience,” said Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp. and owner of MySpace, the competitor to Facebook. “MySpace is a place for self-expression, where users’ MySpace pages become their home on the Internet. It is where they discover people, content, and culture — where they share information, communicate, and consume. Facebook, on the other hand, tends to be a web utility, similar to a phonebook.” Via ZDNet.

Sprint and WiMax startup Clearwire have ended plans to form a joint venture — WSJ has details.

Fox Interactive Media, the parent company of MySpace, Fox.com, AskMen, IGN and a host of other websites, has hired a firm called Operative to help it streamline its ad operations.

MySpace ad only turned a profit of $10 million in a year, we reported in August, despite receiving 4.3 billion page views per day. More recently, Silicon Alley Insider speculates FIM may have missed its $1 billion revenue target, putting it under pressure to increase ad sales.

Bringing on Operative may help FIM grapple with the problem of monetizing its stable of properties.

Operative will assist FIM with building a business system that can sell ads across all its brands at once, rather than selling through dozens of fragmented networks. It will also build a centralized interface that pulls together the various software used by its ad salespeople.

When we asked Michael Leo, the CEO of Operative, whether the aim was to pare down FIM’s advertising workforce, he told us: “Cost savings is probably not on the top of anyone’s mind right now.”

The idea is not to lay salespeople off after becoming more efficient, rather to let those salespeople spend more time doing sales. Right now, many publishers and their sales team are overwhelmed with the technical challenges of advertising, managing things like behavioral targeting — and need to get back to selling, Leo said.

Operative has several irons in the fire, often serving competitors at the same time. It works for big companies, but it also provides consulting services to start-ups with advertising as their business model. It has served older companies, such as the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, WPP, MediaCom, Omnicom and MSN.