VentureBeat

More on Facebook profile changes: The feed wall — The new profile is slated for launch later this year. The latest new feature the company is previewing: A “feed” portion of the new design, where you can easily add content from within a standardized interface. The goal is to make Facebook easier to use. The company is being transparent about this latest effort — in contrast to some of its earlier product launches, like its introduction of its news feeds and its “Beacon” ad program. Now, it is giving sneak peeks of the new mock-ups of its redesigned profile pages, and getting feedback from users. Take a look for yourself, here, and see the sample screenshot, below.

Report: Jangl sold to Live Universe — Internet-based calling startup Jangl’s remnants have been sold to Live Universe, according to Techcrunch. The company’s founders and some of its employees have already left for competitor Jajah, as we’ve covered.

Analyst: Amazon’s Kindle digital book reader could be a big business — The device could contribute up to three percent of Amazon’s overall revenue by 2010, grossing $750 million for the company if one combines device sales and digital book sales, according to Citi analyst Mark Mahaney. Silicon Alley Insider takes a deeper look.

Windows XP is coming to the OLPC — One Laptop Per Child, the nonprofit organization that wants to put its inexpensive computer into the hands of every child in the world, has gained Microsoft as a partner, and its tried and true XP operating system as an option for its users.

Google CFO joins board of LifeLock — George Reyes, the long-time and now ex-chief financial officer at Google, has joined the board of Tempe, Ariz. online identity security company LifeLock. The company has issues, but it also recently raised $25 million from the likes of early Google investor Kleiner Perkins. Incidentally, former YouTube executive and current Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu is on the board of LifeLock rival Debix. If one more financial officer from a web company joins the board of an online identity company, we’ll have a trend on our hands.

Electric car dust-up continues — Fisker Automative and rival Tesla Motors have been locked in a legal battle about who owns what intellectual property concerning the companies’ competing electric cars. Fisker’s latest move is to file a motion to compel arbitration — it’s the one getting sued, and it is trying to end things quickly. More on the latest news here; our previous coverage here. Fisker’s sports car prototype, pictured.

Magazine article aggregator Brijit out of money, closing shop — Washington, D.C. based Brijit condenses long-form articles into 100-word summaries. It has gained more than 160 summarized stories in its database, and it is seeing strong growth, the company tells VentureWire, but that’s not enough. Although it is backed by Herbert Allen III, president of boutique bank Allen & Co., and by former Time editor-turned-banker-turned-Bloomberg executive Norman Pearlstine, it is out of money and shutting down.

More YouTube metrics features — Online video needs more measurement for users, video creators and advertisers. Online video creators, for example want to see how valuable they are compared to other users; brand advertisers want to know more about which users see the ads that run in online videos. YouTube, the most popular video site in the world, already offers a basic metrics service called Insight that lets you see geographic locations where your video is popular, and how popular it is relative to other videos. Yesterday, YouTube announced addition features for Insight, including aggregate views that all of your YouTube videos have generated, and your relative popularity to other YouTube users.

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The back-story on Jangl’s slow death — Yesterday, we reported on Jangl’s asset sale process. A tipster tells us that Seattle-based WhitePages had offered to buy Internet phone company Jangl for $20 million, but then kept the company in diligence for more than a month and walked away at the last minute — giving Jangl no choice to but throw in the towel when it ran out of time and options. Whitepages flew down from Seattle for regular meetings, and Jangl’s execs flew up to Seattle, but then WhitePages caught wind that Jangl was running out of money and that investors had given Jangl’s team a deadline to sell by May 15. WhitePages whittled down its offer first to half, then cut off a severance agreement to those who would be laid off, and then lowered the offer even more: “They had us over the barrel,” said one Jangl employee. [Update: There are always two sides to the story. WhitePages is denying they ever offered $20M. And that's partly what happens in these sorts of negotiations: There's verbal dancing, and there's written, signed legal offers. If there's no deal, there's no deal.]

Virgin Mobile USA considering merger with Helio — While many MVNOs have simply collapsed or been closed by their parent companies, Virgin Mobile USA and smaller rival Helio have scraped by, if not flourished. The two may solve some mutual problems by undergoing a merger, which would create a bulkier combined company and add to their respective plan and phone options. However, mocoNews suggests that they might still look for a private equity buyout afterward.

VC investment continues to move overseas — Limited partners say they’re still wrestling with the implications of more and more venture capital activity moving abroad. The comments came during the LP panel at the recent meeting of the National Venture Capital Association. VentureWire was there to note some of the most interesting facts and figures. There’s definitely a lot of activity — almost 20 percent of domestic funds were deployed outside the United States in 2007, compared with 7 percent in 1998, according to Bob French of Adams Street Partners. And David York of Paul Capital predicted that within the next decade, as much as 50 percent of global venture capital activity will take place outside the United States.

Yahoo launches regional search variant – Yahoo’s Indian team has put together a search product called “Glue Pages” that integrates traditional search with results pulled from Yahoo’s portal business, including content like recipes, medical information, images and restaurant listings. The feature is undergoing testing on Yahoo India, with no plans as yet to offer it in the United States. More at CNET News.

Warner Music may invest again in imeem — In an encouraging turnaround for the music industry last year, Warner Music dropped a lawsuit against music sharing social network imeem, then followed up with an investment in the company. It may tag along with Sequoia Capital and make another investment this year, according to the Silicon Alley Insider.

RealNetworks spins off game studio — RealNetworks, maker of the most irritating media player ever created, has spun off its games division, which includes recent acquisition Trymedia. The gaming business is one of RealNetworks’ most profitable; it will retain an 80 percent ownership stake, but will allow the new company to forge its own path.

Real Goods Solar prices IPO real low — Solar installer Real Goods Solar, which recently announced plans for an initial public offering, has priced its 5.5 million shares at the bottom of its $10-12 range. Most cleantech companies have held off from IPOs this year due to the current market troubles.

Google achieves coveted “brain drain” status — The BBC has a report on the steady stream of executives away from Google, many of whose departures we’ve also noted, including Chris Sacca, Gideon Yu and Elliot Schrage. Many are headed to Facebook, which is described in the article as “the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago,” while Google is called a “behemoth” that is “no longer the firm it once was.” Google’s current position, of course, is precisely where Facebook aspires to be.

Forbes.com launches business social network — Following in the footsteps of BusinessWeek, Forbes.com has launched its own social network, the AnswerNetwork. As might be expected from the name, users are expected to ask questions and share answers with each other, in return gaining competence rankings based on their expertise. LinkedIn, which is BusinessWeek’s partner, has a similar feature, although it seems to be only moderately popular with users.

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Jangl, the Internet phone company we reported about earlier this week as being in talks to sell, is essentially being closed down and its assets sold off. It is still looking for a buyer; a deal close to being signed last week has fallen through.

I just got off the phone with Michael Cerda, who was Jangl’s chief executive until he resigned on Monday. Cerda said he and his co-founder Ben Dean have joined competitor Jajah, where they will round out that company’s management team.

“We wanted to build a company here, and that’s not what is happening,” Cerda said, explaining his decision to leave to Jangl. The two founders are taking five other developers with them to Jajah. Cerda will be running business development and sales at Jajah, and Dean will help build a Silicon Valley engineering team (Jajah’s technology team so far has been based in Israel).

He said his goal is to keep the team intact, and to use its expertise to add value to what Jajah is doing and to see his team’s vision through to the next level.

He said Jangl has a skeletal crew remaining that will stay on to try to sell the company. He said there may be a strategic investor interested. Aside from its intellectual property and signed partners, Jangl still has revenue coming in, he said. It gets money from its premium calling service on dating sites and also from advertising, especially on its SMS offering.

He said the majority of Jangl’s investors wanted Jangl to proceed to a sale, even though he thought it was premature to do so. Jangl really needed 18 to 24 more months to reach its full potential, he said.

Cerda will be writing up a summary of his Jangl saga shortly, and I’ll update with a link.

Update: Here’s Cerda’ blog.

Update 2: Another VoIP company, TalkPlus, may soon be exiting the business, according to GigaOM. The company’s chief executive, Michael Toepel, recently left the company after it failed to secure a new investment. We previously covered TalkPlus last year and back in 2006 after it raised a $5.5 million first round from Menlo Ventures.

Jangl, a Silicon Valley Internet phone company that also offers VoIP services via widgets on the web, is looking to be sold, and it will announce more news “this week.”

VentureBeat first learned something was up last week, when we heard reports about employees from Jangl applying for other jobs. One includes the VP of marketing.

When we contacted the company again today, spokesman Tim Johnson confirmed that the company is looking to be sold, and that the company has received a number of offers. “We’ll have more news later this week,” he said.

He said Jangl executives last fall directed by the company’s board “to pursue acquisition opportunities in lieu of venture funding.”

This suggests the Jangl’s backers, which have pumped $9 million into the company beginning three years ago, saw the VoIP field as too competitive and too risky to make further investments. On the other hand, the company had enough money to honor its commitments to partners for quite some time. It will continue to do that, Johnson said.

The company has tried all kinds of tactics to find traction in the cut-throat world of free calls. It started by issuing you a disposable number, so that you could give out numbers to dates, for example, and avoid giving them your real number. It then moved to more fully embrace placing widgets on web sites, making it easy for you to make free calls over the Web. The company has continued to work on new initiatives, including a pre-roll ad platform for VoIP calls most recently.

Johnson did say he’s not aware that any final acquisition terms have been agreed upon.

As of right now, two engineering staff members have been let go, he said.

Jangl, the online calling service, has launched a new way to monetize its operations with a platform they are calling the Mobile Media Initiative.

While Jangl had some success relatively early on in its lifespan teaming up with paid dating sites such as Match.com, the explosion of social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo has allowed the company to spread its services to an entirely new crowd. Their more recent partnership with the top-ranked dating site Plentyoffish.com is well on its way to being their most successful one yet, Jangl chief executive Michael Cerda told us.

Of course, its also been harder to monetize on these sites that are free — which the social networks and Plentyoffish.com both are. The Mobile Media Initiative hopes to change that by fostering partnerships with advertising companies to offer a unique blend of quick pre-roll advertisements on VoIP calls and inserting short text advertisements at the bottom of text messages sent over Jangl.

The company promises that these pre-roll audio ads on calls will be very short, and should simply take up the time while the number you are dialing is ringing. Likewise, the text-based ads inserted into text messages will be limited to 30 characters at the very bottom of a message (see image below).

The company has announced a new site wholly separate from Jangl.com at Janglmedia.com which will give advertisers, developers, and partners more information about their platform.

Jangl’s first two partners in this Mobile Media Initiative endeavor are Pudding Media, a company that has built a platform for ad-supported calls, and Ogilvy’s Digital Innovation Group, which is an advertising and communications agency.

The company told us that they see this Mobile Media Initiative as the next step in its evolution process. “This is really becoming more of a media company”, Cerda said.

The image above is an example of a short text ad placed at the end of an SMS message.

While they also acknowledge the steps Google recently took towards their field with the limited relaunch of GrandCentral (our coverage), they do not see it as too much of a threat because the two companies are going about things differently. Whereas Jangl’s numbers are quickly used and recycled, GrandCentral gives users a more static number to use. “It can become just as sticky as a real number”, Cerda said while emphasizing that this may lead to the same hesitation people have in giving out their own personal numbers on the web now.

As for Google’s integration of GrandCentral with their blogging application Blogger, Cerda noted that they’ve already learned that “bloggers didn’t want to talk on the phone with their audience”.

Jangl hopes this new mobile media initiative will also further differentiate themselves from rivals Jaxtr (our coverage) and Jajah — which recently joined forces with Jangl in November (our coverage).

With more information about Apple’s software development kit (SDK) due out in a few hours, I couldn’t help but ask about the possibility of seeing a VoIP Jangl application on the iPhone in the future. In a very coy way I got back, “I think we’ll have some news in the future”, followed by a whisper of “iJangl”.

The Pleasanton, CA-based Jangl has raised $9 million in funding over two rounds since 2005 from firms including Cardinal Venture Partners, Storm Ventures and Labrador Ventures.

See more of our previous coverage on Jangl here.

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Jaxtr, a Silicon Valley company that offers Internet calling, is crowing about its growth rate. Five million people have used the service since it launched, up from half a million users in July, it says.

To be clear, this is not the same as its monthly active users, which the company didn’t disclose. So many users who experimented with the service once may be counted in its number, but may no longer be using the service.

Indeed, Jaxtr’s fiercest competitors, Jajah and Jangl, report growth too, but are vague with specifics.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Jaxtr says its growth is evidence that it has a superior interface that helps drive adoption.

With Jaxtr, you sign up and get a URL link, then you send that link to a friend. They click on the link and enter their phone number. Then, their phone rings, your number rings, and the call connects. Jaxtr provides a local telephone number, so you can make calls overseas while paying domestic rates. You can also link all of your accounts to one number.

However, its competitors’ interfaces are — at least to us — also relatively easy to use.

To be frank, VoIP calling services still aren’t as intuitive as normal landline or mobile phone services, at least for most people. Mass distribution has not been easy for any of these startups.

The place where VoIP really stands out is when it is built into a more comprehensive suite of office communication services so you can easily record messages and store them with your email. Or, it can be used as a cheaper way to make international calls if you have friends and family overseas.

Jaxtr, Jajah and Jangl all offer widgets on social networks and other sites, in an effort to get the average Myspace or Hi5 user calling their friends on it. Jangl has cut business deals to make money: It provides anonymous calling services to dating sites like Match.com and the FriendFinder.com empire.

UPDATE: The company also says 45 percent of its users logged in to its site in the past 30 days — mostly to check voicemail. It also says most people make calls without going to the site, either through a widget or through their phone.

Jajah and Jangl may have sensed a shakeout among VoIP startups. They recently announced a strategic partnership, where Jajah will continue work in its calling infrastructure and Jangl will focus on building social web applications.

Still, Jaxtr claims to be growing so fast that it is facing scaling issues, necessitating more engineers. It recently poached Taneli Otala from MySQL, to be company’s new vice president of engineering.

Meanwhile, the other companies keep coming out with more features. Jangl now has an SMS service, for example.

Here’s a short video on how Jaxtr works.

Online telephone services Jajah and Jangl have joined forces to overcome the large odds against them in the cut-throat, low-cost world of telephone calls.

Under their accord, the two sides will exploit Jajah’s wider infrastructure and Jangl’s growing user base on Web sites. The deal heralds a consolidation in the busy Internet telephone industry — which is filled with wannabe start-ups.

Jangl and Jajah have been scrappier than most. Jangl offers a white-label calling service on dating sites and provides calling widgets people can embed on their social network profile pages. You enter your phone number on a Jangl site or widget, then you get a disposable phone number that you can pass out to friends — or dates — without revealing your real number. You can make calls across landline and mobile devices; you can make international calls at local rates.

Jajah offers similar services, although it has not cut as many deals with other sites.

The idea behind this strategic partnership is to build on Jajah’s technical expertise in Internet telephony, extending that infrastructure worldwide. Jangl will use this infrastructure, in some cases, to provide calling services to its larger distribution across Web sites.

The two companies will run advertising across many of their web properties and split the revenue, using the advertising system Jajah recently launched. They will keep the names of their existing products.

We talked with Michael Cerda, chief executive of Jangl and Roman Scharf, cofounder of Jajah, who explained the rationale behind the deal.

The market is “seemingly crowded,” Cerda told us, “and people — the press, venture folks and end users — are confused” about how the services are different from each other.

Jajah, Jangl and a third competitor, Jaxter, have been lumped together as companies that have received funding from VCs but don’t have clear ways to become big businesses or pull ahead — “bubble” companies, as USA Today wrote in this article.

This strategic partnership is “going to surprise people, it cuts off some companies at the knees — you know who I’m talking about,” Cerda told us, obviously referring to Jaxtr.

“Some [VoIP] companies don’t have anything specific. There are a lot of weak concepts and strategies,” Scharf said. Jajah has telephony infrastructure in 55 countries, which it claims makes it the most widespread telephony system. There are VoIP competitors. Skype is one, and it has many more users. Jangl and Jajah say their services are easier to use than Skype because they don’t require users to download software or buy a special headset in order to make calls.

Both companies are mulling new opportunities on web and mobile. Jajah will launch an application programming interface (API) so other developers can build Jajah’s calling services into their applications. Jajah and Jangl will also develop calling applications to run on social networks that use Open Social, the Google-led initiative to allow applications to work on multiple social networks.

The companies are looking at ways of doing revenue-sharing deals with third-party developers.

Jangl has raised $9 million from Storm Ventures, Labrador Ventures and Cardinal Venture Capital.

Jajah, is backed by Sequoia Capital, and recently raised $20 million in a third round led by Intel Capital.

Jangl, a Pleasanton, Calif. start-up released a noteworthy little messaging feature this week.

It lets both parties leave messages or talk with each other without using their real numbers. It’s free, even internationally, because it is over VoIP.

How does it plan to make money? It doesn’t — for now.

Here’s how it works: First, let’s say you have only someone’s email address. You can enter their email address on the Jangl homepage, and Jangl will issue a new phone number to call. You call it, and leave a message. Jangl ties that message to the email you gave it, and forwards your voice message in an email (they click on a link to hear an audio message). It also issues a local number for you, so the recipient calls you back, again without having your real number. This saves money on International calls, because it’s done through VoIP. You can do the same with an IM address: Just plug that into Jangl, and it will let you leave a voice message for them via IM.

Once you’ve registered, Jangl will give you a dashboard so you can choose which messages you want to respond to, and it lets you change settings, such as how you want to be reached (phone number, email, etc) or how want to respond when reached (phone, email). Because it lets you call a local number, even when someone is abroad, it is free. You pay for any local minutes your carrier charges you, obviously.

Jangl has also issued a widget. See image above. Here’s how it works: I come a long to your widget, and I type in my real number at top. Note that your number, below, is blurred out, so I don’t see it. Jangl then issues a different phone number for me to call you on, and leave a message. You don’t ever see my real number. You call me back on the same issued phone number. It sounds weird that we share a number. But think of it as a virtual number: Jangl knows our real phone numbers, so can put the calls through to our real phones.

Here’s the tough part. There’s no clear way for the company to make money short-term. The company says it plans for mass adoption first. It will seek to make money by offering premium features or advertising, such as within the widgets, or within calls, but hasn’t made any decisions about this.

We talked about this with chief executive Michael Cerda about these new features a couple of months ago, when the service was still under wraps. We missed the announcement when it went live a couple of days ago. To bring this up to date, Jangl has just integrated the widget service within Facebook.