VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Google adds search to Reader — In an obvious but very useful move, Google Reader, the company’s web-based RSS feed reader, has added the ability to search through your RSS subscriptions, or the categories and tags you use to organize them. So you can search for words in articles in RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to, without actually having the articles on your screen. Cool!

First venture capitalist to sell his blog: Rob Day — We’ve been a fan of venture capitalist Rob Day’s blog Cleantech Investing from the day it started. It’s about clean technology. Greentech Media Inc, a company that has just launched to focus on the clean-technology sector, has acquired the blog for an undisclosed amount, and now runs it on its site. By the way, Greentech Media is also pulling feeds from VentureBeat’s articles about clean-technology. It provides links to our full stories. Day told us about the purchase last week, but we were waiting for Greentech to launch and get its feeds squared away, which it did yesterday. Day now works for @Ventures.

Quattro Wieless raises cash to help companies adapt their Web sites to mobile versions – The Waltham, Mass. company serves businesses by providing them with mobile versions of their sites. This field has many competitors now. The year-old Quattro has raised $12.3 million in a second round of funding from Globespan Capital Partners and Highland Capital Partners, bringing its total funding to $18 million. It provides online software to let companies see what their mobile site would look like. If the publisher likes it, they can join Quattro’s network, which customizes it for most mobile devices. The company helps publishers serve advertising on their mobile site, and takes a cut while doing so.
reword:

Universal sues Veoh — Universal Music Group, a record label that has been actively suing music and video-focused startups, is at it again. It is suing Veoh, a site where you can upload and share videos, for letting users upload and share videos that Universal claims a copyright to. Veoh received threatening letters from Universal earlier this summer, and actually counter-sued for court protection against Universal in August, saying that it should not be held liable for what users do on the site. Universal was not deterred. Paid Content has more.

Groxis, the company with a visual search engine, now gets third CEO in little more than a year — We profiled Groxis and its search engine Grokker here and here. It was an early challenger to Google’s search format. Instead of giving you pages of results, it provided spheres, breaking out result by categories. Search for Paris, for example, and you’d get spheres titled “History,” “Museums,” “Universities,” “Hotels” and so on. It was always a bit complicated, however, and it has struggled to find direction. It has moved away from the sphere format, and is clearly still experimenting. We’ve heard almost nothing new from this company in years. Here’s the announcement of its latest CEO, Randall Marcinkio. He replaces Brian Chadbourne, who replaced founder and CEO R.J Pittman last year. Groxis raised $16 million for its search engine Grokker from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Jackson Boulevard Capital Management and Draper ePlanet Ventures.

GigaOm has launched a new site, earth2tech, to cover clean technology.

This is an important space, and we’re glad to see the new site off to a great start. This is such important area, in fact, that we here at VentureBeat would like to start our own site on clean and alternative energy technology. If any of you are interested in helping out, let us know. We’re considering candidates now.

This latest blog comes as many other efforts are launching. Here’s a summary:

Dow Jones last week announced it was launching a subscription based newsletter and Web site devoted to clean technology investing, adding it to its other subscription-only, venture-focused publications that include VentureWire. (Dow Jones did not say how much the clean-tech newsletter will cost nor its exact launch date, but VentureWire costs about $900 annually.) The product is the first to emerge from the company’s recently formed new energy and commodities group, which tracks public and private investments in clean tech, and Dow Jones said it has more offerings to come.

Dow Jones rival The New York Times publishes a regular series on alternative energy and green tech, along with a consumer-oriented blog called Eco-Worrier. Cambridge, Mass.-based upstart Greentech Media, which is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, plans to unveil an industry news Web site and newsletter later this summer. Its newsletter will sell for about $850. There are bunch of other sites like Treehugger.com, which have been educating people about green technologies and eco-trends for free for some time. Greener World Media, an Oakland media company, raised more than $250,000 in January, and is led by Joel Makower, a well-known writer and editor on green business topics. That company publishes the sites GreenBiz.com, ClimateBiz.com and GreenerBuildings.com.

Sites are popping up everywhere: RiverWired seeks to connect 18-to-30-somethings who care about healthy and sustainable lifestyles - hoping to tap into growing green-oriented marketing budgets of U.S. companies. Founded by CEO Catherine Billon, a veteran of Time Warner, National Geographic, and Discovery Channel and a couple of tech startups, RiverWired lets green-minded consumers blog about biofuel, share shopping tips, photos and videos, and skim categorized feeds from other green-oriented blogs and websites. If all goes well, it hopes a company like Toyota might be convinced to sponsor the site’s car and transportation area, for example. At its beta launch in early April, RiverWired was scant on content, though that may have since changed.

Another effort, Greenlight Magazine, is distributed in PDF form with all the pagination and graphical style of an old-school publication and lots of Web links, too. Greenlight produces most of its own content - mainly about alternative, “earth-friendly” products - and has built a base of 37,000 paying subscribers, says publisher and co-founder Thea Selby.

Finally, SustainableCircles, founded in 2004 in San Francisco, recently raised $3.5 million from individual investors. It produces an animated cartoon series - The Unsustainables - for Web, mobile, and TV delivery and its SustainLane site posts users’ reviews of green products.

Who did we miss?