VentureBeat

mShopper, a price comparison and shopping service for mobile phones, has just launched.

There are a few companies, ranging from giants like Amazon and Yahoo to start-ups like Frucall and mPoria, making moves in the mobile e-commerce market, but it’s early and a clear winner has yet to emerge.

mShopper has a destination site, but the key will be distribution, and according to Boulder, Colorado’s mShopper, it has already signed a handful of deals with mobile carriers, including a major one. mShopper’s chief executive, David Gould, wouldn’t say more. However, if the company’s strategy is to power mobile e-commerce sites for carriers and partner stores, it’s on the right track: that’s where the real money will be.

As far as mobile sites go, mShopper’s is quite solid. Frucall lets you search for products by name, but it’s primary means of finding products requires you to enter a UPC code (see coverage here). While quite useful for precision and arcane products, searching for UPC codes might not be how most people shop. mShopper’s site requires very little text input and as a result, navigating the site is a smoother process.

There are two main features: PriceIt and BrowseIt. As the names suggests, PriceIt is a price comparison engine that finds the best price available in mShopper’s database of stores. The latter lets you browse through this database on your own. PriceIt is intended for use while shopping in retail stores, so you can test out a product hands-on, then find a better price, robbing the retail outlet of a sale. While the company has data from a wide range of stores, from big box to tiny niche, PriceIt only searches that range, not the web itself. Frucall offers quite a few other options. See the helpful demo on its site. It says reviews are coming soon.

We tested mShopper on both EDGE and 3G connections, and found it to be intolerably slow on EDGE, so much so that the process doesn’t seem worth the money we’d save. 3G was excellent.

The company has raised a small angel round, but is primarily self-funded. It should consider spending a few bucks to replace its hideous logo.

Here’s the latest action (updated):

Google buys stake in China’s Tianya, launches two Chinese social sites: Google has invested in Tianya, a Chinese online community of twenty million registered users. A Google spokesperson confirmed the investment with VentureBeat, but didn’t say how much of the company it now owns. Reuters has more. The two companies also announced the joint launch of two services that compete directly against offerings from dominant Chinese search rival, Baidu.

One service, called Wenda, is similar to Google Answers Russia, which launched earlier this year. Remember, an earlier version of Google’s service couldn’t handle stiff competition from Yahoo Answers in the U.S., and shut its doors last year (that version of Google Answers charged questioners, and Yahoo’s doesn’t). Google Answers Russia has developed a more complex point system in which only the top answerers receive a fee. According to China Web2.0 Review, Google Answers China compares well against the answers service provided by Baidu, the dominant Chinese search company.

The other service, Laiba, is an online community that combines a message board and social networking features to help Chinese users connect with friends and share content.

Google tells us that both Tianya sites will be “powered by Google technology” but “are Tianya services, not Google services” — which could be a way for Google to have Tianya do the dirty work of censoring its Chinese users.

Google to invest further in China? — The above news follows reports last week that Google Inc. was planning to acquire one or two Chinese companies and invest in up to five more over the next year as part of efforts to gain ground on rival Baidu.com Inc. in China. “Over the next year, Google will acquire one or two companies in China, and invest in four to five companies,” said Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google China, quoted by PC World, citing a Chinese report. The report didn’t disclose specific company names. Google has already invested in Xunlei Networking Technology, a Chinese peer-to-peer file sharing Web site, and has a mobile search deal with China Mobile Communications, as well as a search deal with Sina Corp., China’s most popular portal.

Google’s gDrive may be alive? A YouTube video allegedly made by a Google employee suggests that Google has developed but not released a service that would allow users to store large files and other data using Google servers. More on this rumor at the blog Google Blogoscoped.

Frucall, the mobile phone that lets you compare prices while shopping, provides automated updates — We noted the company’s comparison shopping service previously. It has added a few new features, including wish lists, and an automatic alert when an item you’ve previously searched for is listed somewhere at a better price.

PubMatic latest online advertising company for blogs and other sites — PubMatic may be a useful service for small and medium-sized publishers who want to maximize the revenue they get from ads. PubMatic tracks four networks, including Google, Yahoo, Komli and ValueClick, and conducts an auction among them, bringing in the highest-paying ads to run on the publisher’s site. This is difficult to do, because most networks don’t provide that data real-time, but PubMatic tries to check as often as it can. The company also looks at the layout of the ad space, environment and other factors (such as color of background, time of day and geographical location your reader is coming from) on your site, and tries to pull in the best ad to match that setting, said co-founder Rajeev Goel. The four networks offered aren’t very high-paying networks, but Goel said he wants to add more networks.

Co-founders Rajeev and his brother Amar, have raised a seed round Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Helion Ventures. Rajeev is based in Menlo Park, Amar in Bombay with the company’s development team of 15. The company also has a small office in New York.

Notably, the brothers were behind Chipshot.com, a Web-based maker of customized golf equipment that soaked up $50 million in venture capital during the Internet bubble, and crashed in 2000. Rajeev said that company was profitable briefly before it got caught up in spending most of its millions on advertising. Since, the two have gotten experience working at places like Microsoft and SAP. They’ve invited 100 publishers to test the product, and only twenty or so places remain, Rajeev said. I’ve put a few more thoughts about so-called “remnant” advertising networks in the voice post below.

Frucall, a Cupertino, Calif. company is offering a convenient way to check prices for all kinds of products from your cell phone while you’re shopping.

Today, in addition to letting you search prices with voice — by calling 1-888-Dofrucall — it also launches price search via your mobile WAP browser and texting (SMS).

We tried it out at Starbucks the other day, and it worked great. We found an Italian espresso machine on the shelf, typed in the product’s barcode at www.Frucall.com/m on our Treo browser, and hit search. While Starbucks priced it at $19, Frucall took us to a page showing it priced at $17 — saving us $2. Frucall gave us a way to purchase the product, and also lists local merchants carrying it.

For people who like hunting for bargains, this is a useful service. There’s a bunch of other features. It lets you record a voice message about a product when you’re shopping, in case you want to retrieve it later. It also converts your voice messages into text.

It also lets advertisers bid to place ads on result pages for specific product barcodes, product categories, zip code, phone area codes. It gives advertisers an easy way to convert voice ads into text.

Google, by contrast, lets you text a barcode, and provides information only on products contained in Google Base (merchants are forced to submit their products there). Frucall’s coverage is broader, including products found at Google, Yahoo and eBay. Pricegrabber, meanwhile, does something similar via the Web, but doesn’t offer a voice service, or such a robust mobile offering.

You can search without registering. But more benefits come with registering, such as finding previous searches.

Frucall raised a first round of funding “in the millions” of dollars earlier this year, from PacGen Ventures, according to chief executive Behzad Nadji. He plans to keep that Series A round open, and to raise more by the middle of this year, he said. Nadji was previously at AT&T, as senior vice president of research and architecture. The company has 20 people.