VentureBeat

Cisco does a little better than expected — Sales fell 9 percent in October, compared to a year earlier, the computer networking giant reported yesterday; the company expects sales to drop up to 10 percent this quarter versus the $9.8 billion a year ago. Yet “[i]n our opinion, the U.S. will be the first major country to recover,” chief executive John Chambers said. More at the New York Times.

Hitwise: Yahoo wins presidential election web site traffic — Check out the table, below.

New York City funds study on how to preserve NY media industry — It looks to me like one idea has already been implemented: Have New York-based media outlets give preferential coverage to New York-based digital media companies.

Satellite radio company Sirius XM tries to refinance debt — Meanwhile, Sirius star Howard Stern throws some stones through his glass house as he tries to make fun of web companies like Twitter and Facebook.

MySpace’s new self-serve ads may be making up to $50 million a month — That’s what TechCrunch is hearing.

Micro-market for comment plugins getting consolidated — Blog platform WordPress recently bought Intense Debate; now, comment-and-poll blog plugin JS-Kit has bought rival CoComment [Update: Alarm:clock reported this as a purchase. TechCrunch has more recently talked to the companies and they've clarified that its just a partnership].

Chip-maker AMD cuts 500 more jobs — More on CNET.

Range Fuels hires Shell vice president as chief executive — David C. Aldous comes on board as the company builds a big new cellulosic ethanol plant. Oil company executives are slowly leaking over to biofuels.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer can’t believe Google is pouring money into a project without a clear revenue stream — That project is mobile-focused operating system Android. (Ballmer photo via, unsurpisingly, Android Community.)

Google employees sued in Italy for YouTube video — The charges come even though the video in question — of, regrettably, a handicapped child being bullied — was quickly pulled. Incidentally, Italy’s prime minister, media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, is well-known for his media manipulation. This video seems like a great excuse for his government to try to clamp down on a site that is more open to free speech.

JS-Kit, the Silicon Valley company that makes it easy for bloggers to add comments, polls, product reviews or ratings system to their websites, has gotten a boost when it most needs it.

It has raised $3.6 million in a second round of funding led by Altos Ventures, right when the climate for getting such capital is turning harsh. With the market turning downward and venture investors renewing their focus on profitability, many widget companies aren’t likely to get funding. Making money on widgets has proved harder than many people realized, and scrutiny of these companies will only grow now that the advertising industry is likely headed into downturn. JS-Kit already had venture backing, so it is one of the lucky ones. TEF3, which invested $1.2 million last year, also participated in this round.

Notably, JS-Kit’s chief executive Khris Loux said he got the funding by being featured at TheFunded, a web site that lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists, but which has since started to offer a range of other services. JS-Kit used the site’s feature called “TheFunded Connect,” where companies looking for funding can call upon their entrepreneur friends and ask to be introduced to investors. TheFunded Connect makes a company fill out a form, and then entrepreneur friends can look at the pitch and decide whether to recommend the company.

JS-Kit prides itself on the simplicity of its product. To add a comment, poll or rating widget to their site, bloggers simply copy a few lines of HTML and then paste those into their websites. JS-Kit faces stiff competition from multiple places. In comments, for example, there are many players such as Discus and Intense Debate. (See screen shot of JK-Kit comment widget below.)

The company says its widgets are distributed across 550,000 registered sites, including AOL, Evite, JetBlue, and Sun Microsystems.

Loux has just posted a blog about the round.

JS-Kit, best known for its easy-to-add commenting widget, has acquired Haloscan, another comment service, for an undisclosed mix of cash and stock. The acquisition adds 500,000 blogs to JS-Kit’s reach and makes it larger than the rest of the market, which includes Disqus, SezWho, and Intense Debate, combined.

The company made the acquisition in January and will now begin marketing the rest of its widgets, which include a ratings widget similar to the one below this post, to Haloscan’s existing base. It claims that its widgets, which are used by Sun Microsystems and JetBlue, now have over 19 million users and over 100 million page views a month. It’s not clear, however, how many of these users are active commenters. JS-Kit makes money by placing ads into a stream of comments and shares the revenue 50/50 with the content producer.

In conjunction with this news, JS-Kit has added a “portable profile” feature that strongly resembles the one offered by Disqus. This profile contains all of the posts a commenter has made across any of the sites in JS-Kit’s ecosystem. Despite the fact that this feature is clearly inspired by Disqus (which VentureBeat uses), JS-Kit CEO, Khris Loux, does not hesitate to bash his much-buzzed-about competitor, which he alleges “steals traffic from bloggers” and “is not upfront about its plans to monetize at the expense of its users.”

His critiques focus on the fact that Disqus hosts comments on its own servers and site and in so doing, takes away all the benefits that comments could have on a blog’s search engine ranking. Asked to respond to these criticisms, Disqus founder, Daniel Ha (no relation to VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha), points out that his service offers a plug-in that makes it relatively simple to get search engines to index the comments on your blog, itself. Ha also argues that since JS-Kit puts ads in its users’ comments, its monetization plan interferes with the user experience.

See Allen Stern’s post on CenterNetworks for more on the ups and downs of Disqus.