VentureBeat

Online display ads not so much better than print ads — In one of the hardest-hitting pieces yet this year on the online advertising industry, AdAge’s Abbey Klaassen dissects the perils of the display (banner) advertising business. In a nutshell, online banner ads that appear next to online content aren’t much more effective than, well, print ads that appear next to print content. In order for that to change, Group M Interaction chief executive Rob Norman tells her, these ads will need to be better targeted to match a user’s intent, ad metrics need to better inform ad buyers about what they’re getting, and ad messages need to resonate with users.

Is Google getting into the content business via Knol? — That’s the question that Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis takes on in this searing post. Mahalo, like Associated Content, Squidoo and others, create pages of content on particular topics, and aims to get those pages displayed high up in Google search results. Google’s Knol, meanwhile, has been appearing high up in Google search results since the new project launched last week. For an example, I first went to look for stories being featured on the Knol homepage, picked one, and searched for it — and voila, buttermilk pancakes (see the fifth result for more).

Dixero raises funding for audio transcription service — The Swiss-based company lets you convert RSS files into audio tracks — audio tracks read by a selection of male and female computer voices. This could be useful for the hard-of-sight, or those who want to listen to news while they commute or work out. Provided that the robot voices don’t grate on your ears. Dixero has raised €1.5 million from un-named investors.

Goldman: MySpace may be worth up to $3.1 billion — Premier investment banking firm Goldman Sachs recently took its shot at valuing social network MySpace. The bank’s number-crunched conclusion is that the News Corp property is worth $3.1 billion. Silicon Alley Insider has more.

BlueCollarOrDie, dead on the web — Do people who like jokes about rednecks enjoy short-form online comedy clips? Maybe not. BlueCollarOrDie, a site under comedy site FunnyOrDie’s umbrella, has been closed due to lack of demand among its target demographic — males aged 35 years and up.

Big media gets in on future-guessing action — Predictify, a service that lets users make predictions, has partnered with the Washington Post, following deals with blogs ranging from the New York Times’ Freakonomics to ReadWriteWeb.

Kampyle launches online feedback service — The Israeli company lets sites create and customize comment feedback forms and place them alongside other features, like site registration or purchase forms, to collect responses. Today, Kampyle is integrating its service into Google Analytics, so users can see both numerical measurements such as number of visitors to a page, as well as comments about that page.

Oodle to power MySpace classified ads — Oodle runs classified ads on sites across the web, and now it’s also starting to run ads on MySpace, one of the larger sites on the web.

Latest action:

VC firm Sequoia Capital backs Will Ferrell and Adam McKay comedy video site — Called FunnyOrDie.com, the site features a two-minute clip that won a reported 1.5 million page views in less than a week.

StumbleUpon to be acquired? — Several folks (Techcrunch/GigaOm) are reporting that San Francisco social Web site StumbleUpon is in talks to being acquired by AOL, Google or eBay, for a rumored $40 million to $75 million. That’s not very high for a supposed “top 25″ Web 2.0 company, but a good return considering it raised only $1.5 million to $2 million in seed financing from Google board member Ram Shriram, and angels Ariel Poler, Mitch Kapor and Ron Conway.

StumbleUpon has been growing quickly, with 6 million U.S. page views per month, according to ComScore, double the previous month. StumbleUpon is a toolbar that tracks the pages you vote on as interesting, and then offers up sites (called a stumble) that match those interests (sites found by other people that have voted similar to the way you have).

It makes money by showing an ad every hundred or so stumbles. It recently started doing the same for videos. Unique visitors are 900,000, or about three times last year. Techcrunch says the suitor is eBay, which may make sense for that site, given that stumbles could be made on eBay items, and because eBay may be feeling a little lighter lately (profit is up 52 percent, and Skype is making more revenue). Past VentureBeat coverage here.

Yahoo going carbon neutral — Co-founder David Filo blogs on the company’s commitment to go carbon neutral this year. This is impressive, and the company should be commended. (Too bad, however, that it’s timed with Yahoo’s bad earnings results).

Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

Google to release its Powerpoint competitor, and video filter — It is due this spring, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said it will be part of Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Somehow he manages to argue with a straight face that it doesn’t compete with Microsoft. (Good overview of Schmidt’s comments here). It has just bought Tonic Systems, a company based in SF and Melbourne (we mentioned Tonic last year) to help with a component of this. Moreover, Schmidt said Google will release software to keep copyrighted videos from being uploaded to YouTube, which will address Viacom’s suit because of copyright infringements. Schmidt said the release would be within a few weeks.

Google Feed API — Google’s AJAX API team release Feed API that gives an Ajax developer the ability to access feeds, cached in the fast Google edge cache where appropriate, from across the web using a simple JavaScript API.

Venture capitalist Will Hearst invests in Fora.tv — Hearst, the former partner at Kleiner Perkins and former publisher of the SF Examiner, invests in Fora.tv, an online video aggregator for programming from serious sources like Hoover Institute and the Brookings Foundation. More at The:Alarmclock and WSJ. The site’s contacts details say it based in Culver City, Calif., while the WSJ says it is based in SF.

Oracle has acquired mobile application developer AppForge, of Atlanta — Details here.

Why do all the “top-ten” tips that VCs give always sound the same? — Because they are.

Eric Hahn new venture, Bing Technology, has folded — The former Netscape CTO’s peer-to-peer backup service has returned its remaining funds to investors, according to one of the former employees. (Via Valleywag)

Finally, see our latest NewsWire pieces — They include the following: Adify gets $19 million for vertical ad networks; Cordys raises $80M and sees controversial entrepreneur Jan Baan back in the mix; Yardbarker gets seed funding for sports news site from Kleiner Perkins partner.