VentureBeat

Much of the buzz for online video has gone to Hulu as of late following its public launch (our coverage). However, a new tidbit that was published in April’s Portfolio magazine suggests it may be too soon to completely write-off the online video site that everyone was buzzing about this time last year, Joost.

You see, buried in the magazine’s profile of the company and its chief executive Mike Volpi are the following two sentences (uncovered by CNET):

This year, viewers will be able to watch Joost videos in a browser window. Go to Joost’s website, click on shows like Seth Green’s edgy Robot Chicken or an old Rocky and Bullwinkle episode and you can watch them as easily as you’d watch a video on YouTube.

Joost, it seems, is listening and willing to change its model to adapt. Many (including us) have noted that while Joost is doing quite a few interesting and innovative things in the online video realm, the fact that it requires a seperate application cripples it in a world of YouTube and now Hulu.

Joost is not stopping there. The company also plans a major push into live programming — beginning this week with the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. CBS is already seeing huge March Madness online numbers just a few days into the tournament so it’s probably not unreasonable to think that Joost is as well.

The company plans to also use this live broadcast ability so that fans in different time zones can watch the sports they love them in real-time. Chicago Cubs fans from around the country and European soccer fans in the United States are given as two examples.

Here’s the latest action:
1) Warner CEO praises Apple, DRM-free music
2) VMWare is after your engineer blood
3) Berners-Lee warns of walled gardens
4) Microsoft completes $47M acquisition
5) Another VC speaks in favor of taxing himself
6) Joost rolls out new ads
7) Billeo raises $7M for easy payment

Warner Music CEO now supporting DRM-free music, iTunes – “We used to think our music was perfect just the way it was … of course, we were wrong,” said Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman at a recent conference. The media chief is now singing praises for iTunes and Apple, and the Warner online music store has also begun selling DRM-free tracks. These supportive comments and others from Bronfman, who just a few months ago was spouting rhetoric against online music sharing, may herald the way to a new era of cooperation between record labels and online retailers.

Silicon Valley engineering talent getting ever scarcer – VMWare is prepared to battle it out with Facebook and Google for the Valley’s top engineering talent, according to GigaOm. Combine the boom in the number of local startups with the growing companies’ endless thirst for talent, and you’ve got serious shortages — all the more reason to relax H1-B visa rules for skilled workers from other countries.

Microsoft closes $47M MusicWave acquisition – The Redmond giant paid $47 million for the French mobile music company. Not a bad deal, when compared to the $121 million that Openwave paid for the same company two years ago.

Yet another VC backs VC tax – First it was Fred Wilson. Now it’s another one, though with smaller name. William Stanhill of Trailhead Ventures testified in front of Congress that the carried-interest tax rate should go up, against the objections of his partners. The bill passed Congress, but will reportedly be be blocked in the Senate. Stanhill is unapologetic; of course, at the age of 71, he has every reason to be straightforward, and even calls himself a “depreciating asset.” Score one for the “nothing to lose” crowd. For more on why VentureBeat thinks the tax should pass, see this post.

Joost gets creative with the ads – A new “advertising widget” called Coke Bubbles has debuted on Joost, which has so far only run pre-roll ads on its videos. Advertising advocates are pushing for more creativity online, and that’s what Joost appears to be after. Whether the widget is particularly creative is another matter; it’s essentially a video sharing app with Coca-Cola branding. The reception in the blogosphere was lukewarm at best, with CNET’s Caroline McCarthy comparing it to “those Pop-Up Video shows that VH-1 did back in the ’90s, except not quite as customizable.” Ouch.

Berners-Lee speaks out against walled gardens in the mobile space – Mobile phones are in danger of being locked into walled gardens, says Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of today’s Internet. “An open platform means using standards,” Berners-Lee said. “The mobile internet must use the same standards as the Internet.” More from the New York Times here.

Billeo raises $7 million for online payment – Billeo offers online bill payment software for use by consumers and small businesses. It assists by auto-filling forms for online shopping, offering single-password logins, saving receipts, and helping organize finances. The funding is the Santa Clara, Calif. company’s second, and was led by ATA Ventures. Altos Ventures, Claremont Creek and the Pacifica Fund also participated.

The P4P Working Group wants to improve the way peer-to-peer Web sharing works, thus helping the entire internet to grow. The group is composed of major tech industry players including Verizon, Pando and Yale University, in whose labs the idea originated.

P4P (not to be confused with pay-for-placement, an advertising term) refers to a network management technology that will help Internet service providers route P2P traffic. P2P applications work by sharing files directly between user’s computers. They generally allow traffic to route randomly, meaning you’re as likely to be connected to a peer in Beijing as to one in Birmingham. However, distance matters, even on the internet.

A more intelligent system could reduce costs, speed traffic and make it easier for P2P-based applications to thrive. Joost, one of the most well-known Web 2.0 services to use P2P sharing, has joined the testing, and the group plans to propose its system as an international standard in late November.

A potential solution couldn’t come at a better time. Taken together, the popularity and inefficiency of P2P sharing have seen it rise to account for more than half of all internet traffic, clogging networks and reducing the profit margins of internet service providers, which have to buy more network equipment simply to keep traffic flowing at the same speeds.

The P4P solution centers around those ISPs that have been forced to limit the transfer rates of peer sharers, or close connections entirely — heavy-handed tactics that infuriate their customers. Traffic shaping, which is similar in that it assigns importance levels to different types of traffic, is also used at times.

ISPs that adopt P4P’s standards will be able to install software to route traffic more efficiently, connecting people who are geographically closer and improving how all P2P traffic is routed across the internet. In preliminary tests, download speeds for users have as much as doubled, and link utilization has similarly improved, which could help reduce the traffic load on ISPs.

The tracking servers that P2P sharing applications use would also have to adopt the standards, which will be free of any license and open for anyone to use. Such servers can be owned by a company like Pando, or operated by a sharing site like Demonoid (recently in the news for having briefly been shut down).

Where P4P seems to fall short is in improving the flow of traffic when there aren’t many peers seeking to download the same file. Laird Popkin, chief technology officer at Pando, told us that files without a large audience might not benefit, saying, “It’s something where you have tens of thousands of people.”

This implies P4P will favor commercial services like Joost, while not doing much for homegrown sharing networks with only a few dozen people seeking to download any given file. That would include most illicit file sharing services.

When we asked Popkin whether ISPs would use P4P for filtering out traffic that can’t make use of the standard, he said that they probably wouldn’t interfere, both for legal reasons and because of a widely-accepted principle called net neutrality.

Similarly, the routing software keeps sharers anonymous, only assisting in peer connection.

The P4P group, which is part of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, will present the new standard to an industry audience on November 27th, at the European Peering Forum in Barcelona.

Here’s an (updated) summary of the latest action:

–Adobe launches online-offline media player, and Share. Other applications launch using Adobe’s AIR
–Microsoft launches Office Live WorkSpace
–Joost officially launches its online TV service
–Skype makes earn-out. EBay takes $1.43 billion impairment charge for Skype, and co-founder Zennstrom steps down.
–Facebook to let you group your friends
–Findory shuts down

Adobe launches new online-offline media player, and lots more – Adobe’s new player lets you watch Flash videos whether or not you’re connected to the internet. Videos are offered through deals with other publishers. The media player is an Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR application that combines online access with a user interface normally seen in desktop applications. Last night, we covered the purchase of Virtual Ubiquity, a company with a word processor called Buzzword, also an AIR application. Like other software companies that offer a platform for developers and services for users, Adobe is both helping and competing against startups: Veoh, a competitor, is another AIR media player, for example. The Adobe player is part of several Adobe announcements being made at its Adobe MAX conference today.

Another of these announcments is eBay’s desktop application, running on Adobe. AOL is also using the platform to feature the top 100 videos. Nickelodeon Online also has an interactive game using it. Also featured at the conference: Playyoo, a Flash-based mobile gaming startup that will be launching in December.

Another Adobe announcement is Share, a service still in private testing mode that lets you upload and share documents with friends or with anyone on the web. Adobe hosts up to 1GB of documents and lets you view documents in any format, using its Flash player.

Microsoft, not to be outdone (it hopes) — Microsoft is launching Office Live Workspace, another online service where you can store, access and share documents.

Joost officially launches its online TV service – The public release of the much-hyped Joost offers a couple of user interface improvements such as search and better navigation across videos in the site. It is also offering an open application programming interface so third-party developers can build widgets for Joost users, which it first announced a month ago. Check out the video interview with Joost chief executive Michael Volpi on NewTeeVee.

Zennstrom steps down from Skype — In related news, Joost co-founder Niklas Zennstrom — co-founder of internet calling service Skype — is stepping down as chief executive of that company. He will become the non-executive chairman of Skype’s board of directors, and the reason is in the following item

EBay takes $1.43 billion impairment charge for Skype — eBay had promised to pay $1.5 billion to Skype if it met certain performance milestones after eBay acquired it in 2005. But Skype hasn’t done very well, and eBay has just announced that prior Skype shareholders will only get about $530 million of a possible $1.7 million for meeting targets. In addition, eBay is taking a hit to its earnings. It says the charge includes a $900 million reduction in “goodwill,” or value that it had assumed it was getting after acquiring Skype. The Skype co-founders have now finished their earnout period, which is one reason why Zennstrom is stepping down.

Facebook to let you group your friends – “We’ll let you organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what,” the company says about its forthcoming feature, which it hopes will help users better separate personal and work relationships within the site.

Findory shuts down – Personalized online news service Findory has announced it will cease operations on November 1. The site launched four years ago, offering each user a home page of fresh content — news articles, videos, etc. — based on what the user had previously read or viewed.

Here’s this morning’s roundup of the latest action:

Joost opens widget API to developers: Joost, the oft-hyped online video site started by the founders of Skype, has soft-launched an application programming interface this week. It is trying to get third-party developers to build widgets on top of its online TV network so Joost users can do more with the site’s data.

The company already has sample widgets available on its test site, including a “What’s Similar” widget that displays recommendations for video clips similar to the ones you’re already watching. The most exciting aspect of Joost’s API is the access it gives developers to build social tagging and video-programming features into the site. As NewTeeVee notes: It’s a way for users to create sets of videos tailored specifically to their own interests, with minimal effort.

Widgets can do wonders for a site’s growth, but we’re still not sure if they will for Joost. For example, Myspace stood out a couple years ago for allowing outside developers to build widgets that integrated with its social network, giving users the chance to redefine how they used Myspace.

However, Myspace’s flexibility — and hardcore marketing in influential Los Angeles circles — came in tandem with market-leader Friendster’s implosion.

Joost doesn’t appear to have the same advantages. It may have raised a lot of money, with big content deals under its belt, and a solid grounding in how peer-to-peer video-sharing works. But, a lot of other big video sites, like Dailymotion, Veoh and Metacafe, have their own ideas about the future of online video, and they are raising big bucks, too.

Fliqz’s new super-easy toolbar to upload video — Fliqz, the Berkeley start-up, has made it extremely easily to copy a video into your blog. Until now, it has offered an nifty video upload tool, but not as easy as the toolbar. That older product lets you upload video into a player on your Web site sites (the player is called Fliqzster) and does it without forcing you to download any software. That was simple, but you still had to tab to your hompage to to get the code, and then toggle back to your editor to paste it in your article or Web page. But now the company has released a toolbar, called “Quikvid,” which lets you upload any video from your desktop or other source straight from your editor (because it reside on the top of your browser). If you’re a blogger writing an entry, you simply raise your eye to your toolbar, browse to select the video from your desktop, then hit “upload” and cut and paste the generated code into the editor. The toolbar is an install on your IE browser. There’s no other product like it on the market, Fliqz’s Kris Drey says.

Viacom hits guy for copyright infringement, but does so for a post he made of content that Viacom itself had taken from him without permission — Read this bizarrely ironic story here.

NBC Universal won’t renew contract with Apple’s iTunes service — NBC Universal says it was unable to come to an agreement with Apple on pricing, and so will no longer sell digital downloads of television shows on iTunes after the current contract runs out in December, according to the New York Times. NBC was the largest supplier of digital video to Apple, accounting for 40 percent of video downloads, including hits such as “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Office” and “Heroes.” This is a big deal, because its the latest evidence studios are bugged by Apple’s power and are trying to break free. It comes after NBC has made progress recently in creating its own joint venture, now called Hulu, to compete with iTunes and YouTube. In July, the Universal Music Group of Vivendi, the world’s biggest music corporation, said it would not renew its long-term contract with iTunes.

Veoh, the video-sharing site that recently raised $26 million, today launches a test of VeohTV, a downloadable application that the company says will kill another new flashy competitor, Joost.

VeohTV’s hook is that unlike Joost, which limits itself to certain formats and the content it licenses, Veoh has opened its doors and essentially created a browser that accesses anything in Yahoo video’s index — an archive that seeks to search the whole world of internet video.

VeohTV has been designed to make the browsing experience simple enough to navigate with a remote control, and from the looks of it, Veoh has pulled this off. With a few clicks, you can also browse and watch the online offerings from CBS, Fox, NBC, and Comedy Central. Just as easily, you can sort through videos you’ve found from across the web.

VeohTV can display videos in any format, and has also has a built in a DVR that allows you to download videos you might want to watch later — as long as they don’t come from proprietary channels. Joost, on the other hand, does not allow downloads.

VeohTV will also include a recommendation engine that will track which videos you watch and suggest others like them, though this is not active in the early stages of the testing. A much-hyped start-up, Divvio, had been promising this feature for quite some time, but has yet to deliver, so talk is cheap until we see something. Providing accurate recommendations is a hard problem to crack when you’re talking about the entire Web.

With VeohTV, you can also subscribe to video feeds and have them automatically download to your computer. You can create video play-lists with a drag-and-drop interface, and, in a cool touch, watch your videos side by side with a handful of Yourminis‘ widgets on your desktop. YourMinis analyzes the videos’ so-called “metadata,” or relevant information, and displays that on your desktop too. (See screenshot below.)

Veoh’s CEO, Dmitry Shapiro, told VentureBeat that because Joost is a walled garden that only allows you to view its own content, and because it requires a network connection to work, it does not have what it takes to be a “killer” application. But this is not clear so clear. Is having millions of online videos to parse through — even with an amazingly simple interface — a much better experience than easy access to a limited but consistently excellent selection? (By asking that question, however, we don’t mean to imply that Joost has reached that nirvana, because it hasn’t yet.)

Some will no doubt prefer the plethora of options. Veoh has created something powerful and different, and Joost and others will have to watch their backs.

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(Updated) Here’s the latest action, catching up for the past two days:

Boring shopping Web sites attract interest — There are so many shopping search engines, we’ve given up trying to count. And yet investors remain interested. Santa Monica, Calif.’s ThisNext, a social shopping Web site, has raised a round of venture debt Western Technology. It lets people share and recommend products with friends. This comes after rumors that private equity firm Providence Equity Partners is buying 66 percent of Nextag, the Silicon Valley also-ran shopping search engine, for between $1 and $1.2 billion, which would be huge. GigaOm has the story, but classifies it as a rumor. We requested comment from Nextag chief executive Pernendu Ojha Wednesday afternoon, but no word yet. Nextag is reportedly doing $200 million in revenues, with a lucrative mortgage and other lead generation business going — it buys ads from Google to get business.

Forget instant messaging, get ready for instant thinking — Brown University researchers have developed a way to let a man play simple games by moving a cursor with only his brain, no hands. We’ve read about similar research before; it starting with monkeys. So here comes the future: All work, emails, spreadsheets, and Google searches, will one day be performed by mind control. No way around it. You won’t need that Google chip in the brain, because you’ll be able to control everything, not just Google search. And then there’s the next step — “network-enabled telepathy” — or instant thought transfer. Your thoughts will flow from your brain over the network right into someone else’s brain, according to a DARPA researcher.

EBay moves into radio auctions — EBay will begin allowing radio stations to auction advertising air time on its platform, in cooperation with Bid4Spots Inc. of Encino, Calif. More than 2,300 radio stations are expected to participate. However, we’re not certain why this will work, when its effort in TV didn’t seem to work.

Yahoo prices ads on value of traffic — Yahoo’s Panama charges advertisers more to place ads on sites likely to draw the most valuable traffic, based on the number of people who click on ads and their likelihood of carrying through with an order. See statement here.

Google purchase of PeakStream — See our story here.

The Amp’d whitewashing begins — Amp’d Mobile, the bankrupt mobile network that offers entertainment to youth, no longer has the ridiculously high number of board members cited earlier (20). Jon Auerbach of Highland Capital Partners and Allen Beasley of Redpoint Ventures have resigned, Dan Primack points out. Each has removed mention of the company from their online bios. Highland has gone so far as to remove Amp’d from its online list of portfolio companies. Too bad. We like style of venture firm Bessemer: The firm boldly lists its mistakes.

Microsoft’s search engine skunk works not as reported — Earlier, we cited a report by Techcrunch that Microsoft has launched a stealth search project here in Silicon Valley. However, search expert John Battelle has heard the report is not correct, and says stay tuned.

This Google Street View gets worse — We’ve ragged on the service’s privacy problems already. Now we find out that Google’s cameras took a shot of a guy peeing on the side of the road, and this is still in its maps. Harder to believe is that Google has left it up for a full day after it was discovered by bloggers. See details via Digg. We’ve requested comment from Google. [Update: Kate Hurowitz, of Google, responded: "...we respect the fact that people may not want imagery they feel is objectionable featured on the service. We provide easily accessible tools for flagging inappropriate or sensitive imagery for review and removal." We at VentureBeat didn't see those tools immediately, but we do notice the offending image has now been taken down.]

Michael Volpi has joined Joost – We reported this; it is now official.

Ready for your iPhone? — See the company’s latest ads.

LaLa Media pays for music, and gives it to you for free — Lala is one of the quirkier companies in Silicon Valley. A year ago, we were puzzled when the Palo Alto, Calif. start-up launched as a CD-swapping service. CDs in 2007? We were puzzled again when it pocketed $14.7 million from Bain Capital (a private equity firm with little experience with start-ups) and Ignition, another venture firm. And then we really scratched our head when it bought a radio station, WOXY. What next? Well, as widely reported yesterday, Lala has blitzed the world by offering to serve music for free, directly from its Web site, and it has the agreement from Warner Music Group to do that with Warner’s music assets. Lala and Warner believe this will stimulate sales. If you like the music you listen to, you can buy the album. True to the odd style of this company, chief executive Bill Nguyen has decided he won’t let you buy individual songs — and for no apparent reason. Also, Lala will change pricing, depending on the popularity of the album, what is in your music library already, and other factors — which could create confusion. Lala also said it is working to license music from the other three labels.

Crazier, Lala will pay about $140 million to the labels in order to do this streaming. But unlike other music-subscription services, which charge users a monthly fee, Lala gives you this all for free.

The radical nature it all, and Lala’s ability to hack Apple’s iPod platform, is masterful: Separately, Lala lets you pay to download songs to your iPod for $0.99 cents, and you can do so only with the iPod — no other device. Once you do this, you can’t move the music elsewhere. So it it is a digital rights management (DRM) equivalent. It’s a direct attack on Apple’s iTunes, and ignores other devices too. It counts on people discovering the service through its web site. What’s more, Lala is getting its investors to pay for it. It said it is raising some $40 million to pay for expected short-term losses (there’s so much capital floating around, Lala may actually find a VC to fund this).

Finally, its program will scan your desktop for digital tracks — everything from iTunes downloads, ripped CDs, etc — and then keeps it all for you in an account online so you can access it from anywhere. It then lets you download that to your iPod too. And you won’t be able to use iTunes again unless you reconfigure your iPod! To our knowledge, Apple hasn’t responded to this yet. This is such an endearingly outrageous move by Lala that that we find ourselves warming to this company. It’s a very long, desperate shot, but if it works, it could be big.

More details at Gizmodo and at Techdirt.

Ask.com’s new search – The second-tier search engine calls its new search “Ask3D,” but it’s a terrible name, because its not three dimensional. The 3D refers to three columns, a new way of organizing a search engine format. See below for an example of a search on Oakland. On the left is the search bar, and underneath are pointers to ways you can refine your search if you don’t find what you want — something that Google doesn’t have. In the middle column are the results. This is where the 3D search falls short. It is somewhat bewildering: An ad in the middle is barely demarcated (if you squint, you may be able to detect a ever so slight difference in shade). Finally, on the far right, Ask gives you different types of files related to your search: video, images, links to MP3 files, event listings and encyclopedia results from Wikipedia. Videos are provided by Blinkx, but not Google Video, another shortcoming. Finally, no ads on the right. More details here and here.

Here’s the latest action:

Google Korea has cluttered page — This is a striking departure from the spartan interface Google is known for. Details here. We checked with Google, and a spokeswoman confirmed the Korean site was developed in response to market research and feedback from Korean users. She called it a “new intuitive and easy-to-use design” that helps discover Google products and services.

AOL serving ads in IM and chat — AOL subsidiary Userplane lets Website publishers install IM, chat and other widgets and serve advertising within them, sharing revenue with Userplane. It is called Userplane Money.

Volpi joins Joost? — Mike Volpi, who gave up his CEO-in-waiting job at Cisco in February, is reportedly joining Internet TV company Joost as CEO (source: PaidContent). Volpi served on the board of Skype, the previous company of Joost’s co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, so this isn’t out of the blue.

RealNetworks releases new player that lets you capture Flash video — With one click on a video you see online, you can save the file — whether Flash, QuickTime or Windows Media — to your desktop, and burn it to a CD or DVD. The player will be out next month. This capability has been offered by other companies, but not by a major player like Real. Video with DRM, however, won’t work. If you’re interested in this, Scoble has details in the video below:

Google Street View continued — They should have called Google’s latest map service, Street View the Google Living Room View instead. Turns out Google has been driving its own cars around the Bay Area and collecting street level views, including of tabby cats in people’s homes. Bizarre. Google also partnered with Immersive Media for the street service.

Panoramio, bought by Google — For every company squashed out of existence by Google for doing mashups that Google can easily replicate, there’s one that ends up getting snapped up with welcome Google dollars. Panoramio, which lets users upload their photos to share them on Google Earth, is the latest.

Senator Hillary Clinton’s clean-tech agenda — Passing through Silicon Valley today, she lobbies for the establishment of a Strategic Energy Fund to coordinate research on energy and global-warming solutions, provide tax incentives for home and businesses to become more energy efficient, and help install E85 pumps for ethanol-enhanced gasoline and more. See the WSJ, which reports she’d even support the creation of bacteria to remove radioactive materials from the atmosphere.

Despite past failures, another effort to take on the NFL — Bill Hambrecht, the well-known San Francisco banker who tried to take on the IPO establishment with his “Open IPO,” is doing it again. He’s starting a professional football league called the United Football League. So far, he and his partner, Tim Armstrong, a senior executive at Google, have pledged $2 million each. Mark Cuban, the billionaire who owns the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks, will be a team owner. Hambrecht, you may forget, has a history. He was part owner of a team of the earlier failure, the United States Football League. (See NYT)

Facebook’s Platform slammed this afternoon — After seeing Facebook’s Platform site down periodically over the course of this afternoon, we checked with Facebook to ask what was up. Spokeswoman Brandee Barker: “We’re experiencing an unexpected surge in the number of applications being built on Facebook Platform – more than 300 as of this morning.”

Is EMI’s music really DRM-free? — Well, that’s the announcement we covered earlier, but what we didn’t know at the time is that the EMI songs sold via iTunes without DRM still have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you (Arstechnica).

News corp confirms Flektor and Photobucket purchases — See statement here. Photobucket deal rumored to be $250 million.

Attributor to track copyright material for AP — Attributor, a company in Redwood City, Calif., said its filtering technology will be used to fingerprint AP copy and to identify and document its display wherever it appears across the Internet. Attributor is just one of many digital fingerprinting technologies that have popped up over the past year.

Yahoo’s technology chief resigns from Yahoo — Farzad Nazem leaves just six months after Yahoo named him head of the company’s newly created technology group, saying he simply wants to retire.

Want to try Spock? — Here are a few invitations for Spock’s people search engine, still in closed testing.

Google Mapplets — Just when you thought you’d seen enough Google Maps, there’s another barrage coming: Google has introduced Mapplets, giving developers a way to perform specialized searches directly within Google Maps. The example below is of movie search. You type in a zip code and a movie, and voila.

Internet TV company Joost has raised $45 million in a whopper round of venture financing, giving it a significant war-chest to spend just as its product hits the market.

Lead investors were Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. CBS Corporation, Viacom and the foundation of Chinese billionaire Li Ka-shing also participated, according to the company, in a statement to VentureBeat Wednesday evening.

Despite being relatively untested, Joost has gained publicity because it was started by Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström. It has signed deals with several companies, including Viacom, CBS and Time Warner, to carry their content. Some reviewers have been less that excited about the product, however. VentureBeat has received an invitation to review the product, which is still in testing mode, but we have not yet tried it.

It is the first reported round of outside funding for the company.

Index also backed Skype, which used a peer-to-peer technology for phones that Joost is now using for TV. The question now is whether Joost can use its publicity momentum — and now, impressive funding — to take on folks like BitTorrent, which has been playing with peer-to-peer video for sometime, and numerous other Internet TV start-ups. Some competitors, such as Akimbo, are struggling, pitching things like set-top products that are more expensive than the near-free peer-to-peer technology offered by Joost.

Roelof Botha, general partner at Sequoia Capital, led the firm’s investment in Joost. He was also the lead investor in YouTube, a short-length video site — different from Joost, which wants to show full-length video.

Here’s the latest action:

Scribd hype — Maybe because it calls itself the “YouTube for documents,” the young Scribd is getting a lot of interest from Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists. We’ve talked to some eager to invest. Rumors are leaking out, including at Gigaom and Techcrunch that the round is almost done, with GigaOm saying it is done and citing a large $10 million valuation. We talked with Scribd’s Trip Adler today, and he didn’t want to say much. He said those other reports are “inaccurate.” He hasn’t closed the round yet, he added. (Our coverage of Scribd here.)

Adobe open sources Flex platform tools — The company announced that outside developers can use its Flex platform to participate in building rich Internet applications for the Web, including Apollo applications for the desktop. This is significant because Adobe’s Flex/Flash platform — around which many cutting-edge Web sites are being built these days — has remained relatively closed. Announcement here, and more details here. Robert Scoble had an early look.

TheStreet.com buys Stockpickr.com — This is another success for Web 2.0. Stockpickr offers place for people to compare and exchange investment tips. (Story here).

Grand Central offers its one-telephone number feature via mobile devices — You’ll recall (VentureBeat’s coverage) that Grand Central is the company that lets you create one telephone number for all your needs. Through a Web dashboard, you can direct calls to whatever phone you want to use, and centralize voicemail. Now, you can control all this from your cell-phone too. (Grand Central Mobile)

Oak Pacific Incorporated falling apart? — The Chinese Web company that some have called the Chinese Myspace, backed by U.S. venture capitalists, has laid off serious numbers of employees. From recent blog posts (here and here, you’d think the company is disintegrating, and chief executive Joe Chen out of control. However, we talked with David Chao, partner at DCM and an investor in OPI, and he said bloggers have focused on the visible lay offs from units that have struggled, in part because of new regulations imposed by China Mobile. Those regulations increase the revenue share on wireless services such as SMS, MMS and voicemail management, and also restrict their use in some ways — so the revenues of all wireless companies got hit, not just OPI. That said, OPI is sort of like IAC — a holding company with lots of properties. Some units are going to do poorly, and they’ll be cut. Others are growing quickly, including Mop.com and Xiaonei, which Chao likens to the Facebook of China, and is on fire — one of the fastest growing companies in China, in terms of page views and visits. We covered Xiaonei here. All told, Chao says the business is a “net positive.” And chief executive Joe Chen is talented at making multiple bets, he said.

Red Herring not as dire it seems — While we had Chao on the phone, we asked him about the struggling business magazine Red Herring, where Chao is a board member. ValleyWag says the mag is in default, and that it has the proof to show it — in the form of lawsuit papers filed by Comerica. Sighing at the question, he said he didn’t want to get in a pissing match with another publishing company (i.e., Valleywag’s parent, Gawker) but that the financials aren’t as bad as they appear.

Tim Draper in Vietnam — Tim Draper, who has been expanding his Silicon Valley venture firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson more aggressively internationally than just about any other firm, announced a $50 million Vietnam fund last year (see our coverage). He was in Ho Chi Min City a few days ago to celebrate its launch, and looks quite at home.

Razz, the voice-mix service, raises another round — The San Francisco company, earlier known as Phonebites, lets you insert noises while you are talking on the phone. As Thealarmclock puts it, “farts” for example. Mayfield Fund, one of the alleged new investors, did not respond to our request for confirmation of the investment, reported by PE Wire. Besides Mayfield, Cardinal Venture Capital, Garage Technology Ventures and Greenpark Capital also reportedly invested. (Our past coverage)

Cozmo.TV, latest personalized TV site — The San Francisco start-up joins a crowded space of players wanting to let you personalize and share the TV programming you watch. With Cozmo, you select shows from places like YouTube, Google, MySpace and combine them into channels that you then roll into an embeddable widget, which you share. Problem is, there are other sites that do something similar. There’s Blinkx, Channels.com, Joost and MeeVee. (See Techcrunch)

Speaking of Blinkx, it is being taken public — The video search company will go public on the London AIM exchange, which has somewhat of a flimsy reputation. Om says Blinkx has been adrift, and suggests public investors may be duped.

Speaking of Joost, it is signing up lots of advertisers — This is advantage you get if you have the name recognition Skype co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The duo haven’t even formally launched their company Joost, yet have lined up several major advertisers. The company wants to send free videos and other programming to your TV. The NYT says United Airlines, Microsoft, Sony Electronics and Unilever are among 30 on board as “launch partners.” The launch is planned for Tuesday, the Times says.

In other news:
– Metamatrix, a company backed by venture firm Kleiner Perkins, has been bought by Redhat, and some suggest it was at a loss. Kleiner did not respond to a request for comment.
– MySQL, the open source database company that lots of Web sites run on, got $50M in revenue last year and plans to go public, its chief executive says.
–ChinaCache raises $32 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Ignition Partners, IntelVC, Internet Investor Growth, JAFCO ASIA, SIG, Starr International, and Susquehanna International Group. It is a ten-year old company, and helps speed up content delivery over the Web.
–Lifelock, an online identity management and identity theft prevention company based in Phoenix has raised $6 million in Series B funding from Kleiner Perkins, according to Gigaom. Word is, it’s valued at more than $40 million. Kleiner declined comment.
–Here’s a beginner’s guide for Twitter. It has everything (via Nolan).

Joost and BitTorrent, two start-ups focused on bringing video to your home using cheap peer-to-peer communication networks, are making progress.

Joost, the company launched by the co-founders of popular Internet phone company Skype, announced a deal with Viacom to bring a range of Viacom content (from properties like MTV Networks, BET Networks and Paramount Pictures) for free to its TV platform. Joost is still in testing mode. But the agreement is significant, because it brings content to the Web that hasn’t been available before, from shows like Laguna Beach to Beavis & Butthead and Real World. Viacom also passed up Google/YouTube in negotiations, apparently because Google couldn’t assure Viacom copyright protection. Moreover, Joost is responding to the key criticism of its efforts so far, i.e., that it doesn’t have any content agreements signed. Joost is offering high-quality video to bring to your TV set.

San Francisco’s BitTorrent, meanwhile, said it has cut deals with 40 studios, production houses and game publishers, and that it will make a major announcement this week (see story by the Merc’s Elise Ackerman here).