VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

In Buffet we trust — Billionaire Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathway group is investing $3 billion in General Electric. Why the investment? GE is the “symbol of American business to the world,” Buffet told VCCircle. That’s the spirit in a troubled economy — or is it bottom-feeding?

New data on M&As and IPOs — Mergers and acquisitions activity and initial public offerings of venture-backed companies are on pace for the lowest levels this decade, according to data from Dow Jones VentureSource. This seems in line with what we said earlier about the IPO market being the worst it’s been in 30+ years.

Mac laptops continue to gain share — Portable computers made by Apple accounted for some 20 percent of retail notebook sales during July and August in the U.S., according to data from NPD. With new ones likely due soon (more on that at the bottom of this post), expect this growth to continue. Register Hardware has more.

Nintendo’s rumored Wii follow-up — The video game maker is said to be working on the follow up to its massively successful Wii console. It’s set to hit the market by 2011, according to the blog What They Play. Nintendo just outlined the new DS portable gaming system as well.

Acquia launches enterprise-class support for Drupal — The company that is behind the open-source Web content management system (CMS) appears to be making it slightly less open source for this particular version, according to CNET’s The Open Road.

Microsoft still trying to pay users to search — SearchPerks gives users points for each search performed on Live search. You can redeem these points for stuff. I guess it’s better than straight up paying people, but it’s still awfully pathetic. Make that best product Microsoft, that’s how you win, not by paying users. The Inquisitr has more.

GameStop buys Micromania for $700M — The video game retailing giant is buying the French gaming chain to bolster its brand in the region. Gamespot has more.

Glam teams up with GumGum — The two can now offer free legal images across Glam Media’s publishing network, according to TechCrunch. Glam + GumGum? Golly gee that’s great.

Blizzard beats the bots with a lawyer combo — The World of Warcraft creator if successful will get $6 million from the makers of a software bot, which automates many parts of the online fantasy game. The BBC has more.

EA kills Tiberium — The squad shooter based in the Command & Conquer universe was originally delayed until 2010. Now, it’s a goner. Kotaku has more.

Jaxtr gets premium memberships — Best international call rates, priority customer service, personalized contact pages, global online voicemail and the ability to forward voicemails to email are all part of the package for the company that links your phone to the web.

More fake MacBook Pro photos? – The event for the launch of the new laptops is rumored to be coming up in less than two weeks. Could the picture below really be what they look like? Probably not, but it’s much better than the first attempt. Cult of Mac also has a rumored promo shot.

Photrade hopes to make the web safe for photographers. That is, it has a technology for tracking photos so that photographers can control the spread of their photos and get paid by those who use them.

It connects photographers, advertisers, and web publishers in a marketplace where publishers can access photos legally and photographers can get paid each time their photos are viewed.

We wrote about GumGum’s business for licensing photos so that photographers can get paid for their work. Photrade is doing the same thing. But its solution isn’t as restrictive as GumGum’s, which wraps the photos in a layer of Flash in order to track them.

“We’re democratizing photography with a visual marketplace,” said Andrew Paradies, chief executive.

With Photrade, photographers can choose their licensing business model, including making photos free with ad support. The company has built a protection platform, with technologies such as custom watermarking photos, that makes it harder to steal images. It tracks the photos and reports back on usage.

When a photographer logs in, he or she can set prices for each photo. You add tags to it to make it easy to find. A blogger looking for a stock photo can use a photo for free by getting the photo and its accompanying advertising code which goes with the photo. The publisher gets the photo for free and the photographer gets revenues from the ad.

You can use Photrade as a personal photo selling site. The Cincinnati, Ohio-based company was founded in 2006. It received angel funds in January from Flashline Partners and Empower Media Marketing.

Besides GumGum, Photrade competes with Kickapps, Mochila as well as stock photo companies such as iStockPhoto. The latter stock photo companies typically license a photo for a flat fee but don’t pay per usage. The site is now live.

Click here for all of our DEMO/TechCrunch 50 Conference coverage, including special posts that aren’t on the main VentureBeat page.

Tracking photos on the web isn’t easy. And getting paid a royalty each time a photo is viewed? Fuggedaboutit.

Well, GumGum says it can do just that. The Santa Monica, Calif.-based start-up has an analytics technology that tracks photos across the web and counts how many times they are viewed. It allows the copyright owner to get paid per view or to be paid a share of ads that go with the photos.

The company announced today that it has completed a first round of $1.2 million in funding that we previously reported was in the works. First Round Capital and Crosscut Ventures led the round. Ophir Tanz, chief executive of GumGum, said that the company has tested the technology in the past 60 days and has had some astounding results. More than 300 million views of licensed photos have been tracked each month.

GumGum tried out the usage-based content-licensing technology on MTV Europe as well as a number of sites that belong to Gawker Media, which owns blogs such as Gawker, Jesebel, Defamer, i09 and Valleywag. Typically, photographers can get paid if they sell their photos to stock-photo companies such as Getty Images, which charges a standard flat rate.

But Tanz says that with such a royalty scheme there is no way to distinguish between the high-use photos and the ones that don’t get used.

“Online content lives forever, but usage is almost entirely unknown,” he said.

Other companies wrap software layers around photos using Adobe’s Flash technology to collect analytic data for photo usage. Competitors using Flash include Kickapps and Mochila. But Tanz said his company’s second version technology can track any photo, whether it is in the Flash format or any other format.

Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media, said in a statement that GumGum reduces his photo-licensing costs and still allows Gawker to publish high-quality photos from a number of photo agencies. Tanz and Ari Mir founded GumGum in 2006 and launched the company’s site in November 2007.

GumGum is raising $1.2 million in a first round so that it can expand its business of licensing and distributing online content. The Santa Monica, Calif. company has developed a platform to monetize media, starting with photos, that are often pirated online.

Users upload their photos to GumGum. Then users who want to purchase the content can do so at the GumGum site, and the company handles the payment, tracks every time the content is viewed, and protects the content with its proprietary authentication technology, distribution wrapper, and watermarks. Publishers who use the content can pay on a per-use basis, or when it’s viewed, or they can subsidize the usage via ads.

The company uses Flash objects to track impressions and bill them. GumGum, founded by Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir, says that works much better than licensing a photo on a flat fee, which is the industry norm.

You can see GumGum’s wrapper on Internet photos with the tagline, “Photo licensing by GumGum.” GumGum keeps a small percentage of the amount that publishers pay the content owners. Providers of stock photography, such as Fotosearch, Moodboard, and Getty Images, compete with GumGum. So does Redwood City, Calif.-based startup Attributor, which also tracks intellectual property.

Investors in the current round include First Round Capital of West Conshohocken, Penn.

1. KnockaTV a big lesson for start-ups
2. Nokia unveils handset made entirely of recycled pieces
3. Magnify.net, the DIY video platform, growing
4. Novell buys Sitescape, open source collaboration tool
5. MySpace rips-off another Facebook idea: Slingshot Labs
6. GumGum helps photographers make money on the web
7. Hollywood’s writers have voted to end strike
8. Microsoft exec calls Vista-capable machines “junk”
9. Internet phone company Vonage in financial trouble
10. Intel puts $3.5 million into bizarre idea: Bragster

KnockaTV a big lesson for start-ups — KnockaTV, a video site we’d reviewed positively (see here and here ), is blowing up after founders began fighting each other over the company’s burn-rate. Reports about the Israeli company’s saga (the Globes has the fullest account; the English translation is here, though truncated) suggest the founders are driving the company into receivership on purpose. The team is made of the creators of ICQ, the successful early instant messenger service, which sold for $407 million a decade ago. The company was backed last year with $3.5 million, led by Evergreen Venture Partners. Lesson: No matter how successful or high-profile your founding members are, teamwork is more important.

Nokia unveils handset made entirely of recycled pieces — Details here. The phone, called the “Remade,” is part of Nokia’s effort to go green.

Magnify.net, the do-it-yourself community video platform, growing — Details here.

Novell buys SiteScape, an open source collaboration tool – Details here.

MySpace rips off another idea from Facebook: A program to fund third-party applications — Slingshot Labs is MySpace’s way to match the fund created by Facebook and its backers to invest in third-party application companies that use Facebook’s platform. Details here in Business Week. It’s an incubator for developing Internet ventures, and it plans to back four or five ideas per year.

GumGum, trying to help photographers make money on the web — Let’s say you’re a member of the paparazzi, and you have a thousand photos of Britney Spears. You upload those photos into GumGum, then a web publisher — let’s say gossip blogger Perez Hilton — goes to GumGum and finds a Britney photo he wants to use. Hilton would make money for you one of two ways. One, Hilton pays you for the Britney photo on a cost-per-impression basis. If lots of people see the image on the publishers’ site, Hilton pays you, based on the CPM amount you set. Two, you run VideoEgg ads on on your photo that appears in Hilton’s site. Los Angeles-based GumGum has raised $125,000 in angel funding. See video, below Techcrunch has more.

Hollywood’s writers have voted to end strike — They ended after 100 days, probably because there was nothing decent anymore to watch on TV (it all went to the Internet).

Microsoft exec calls Vista-capable machines “junk” — Ouch.

Internet phone company Vonage in financial trouble — Details here.

Intel puts $3.5 million into bizarre idea — The chip giant’s investment arm is backing “Bragster,” a site where people can show off. Details here.