VentureBeat

Latest action:

Evite vs. Socializr continued — The bad blood between Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster and now founder of online event service Socializr, and the lawyers at Evite, is worse than we realized. The bitterness started during the Friendster days, and worsened when Evite threatened to sue Socializr, saying the start-up had copied Evite’s templates and styles. Abrams now responds with a diatribe, saying Evite is a hypocrite and a bully. We’ve requested comment from Evite.

Voki makes a better avatar — Voki is the latest animated avatar service offered by Oddcast, and is designed for bloggers. It is free, and has made improvements over its former avatar product, called Sitepal, which was for businesses. You can leave audio clips by talking right into your laptop, and your avatar will speak your words from your blog. Fred Wilson, an investor the company, is pushing the company to let avatars speak the words you might leave it with a Twitter message. If you haven’t seen the President Bush avatar, check it out (you’ll have to wait a few seconds for the intro to stop, but then you can change his nose, skin, mouth, shoulders, color of eyes, skin, etc). Similarly, Voki gives you a dashboard that makes it easy to edit your own avatar. It is similar to Meez (our coverage).

Founders of best companies are in the mid-20s or earlier — That’s the observation made by Valleywag. This topic has been controversial for some time. Sequoia’s Michael Moritz has made a big deal about backing young founders. Can you argue with him? He made big money from YouTube, Google and Yahoo — all started by young founders.

Yahoo has a new CFO — Some say the banker-as-CFO heralds more deal-making, more acquisitions for Yahoo. Yahoo did look at Facebook last year, but it’s probably too late now to try again. There’s an independence and pride over at Facebook these days that suggests it may decide to go for an IPO or nothing.

More details on the backing of Jason Calacanis’ company — Calacanis, who is starting a new company called Kokua (scroll down), has gotten funding from Sequoia, as earlier reported, and also apparently from News Corp’s Jeremy Phillips and CBS, if you believe this report. We’re trying to confirm.

Google’s wants to watch you — At least, that’s what this patent filing suggests (see details). The patent would monitor your behavior in PC video games, and seek to serve you targeted advertising based on that behavior.

Amazon.com plans to launch DRM-free digital music store — The iTunes-like service is scheduled for later this year, and will sell songs from EMI without the anti-piracy technology currently demanded by most music labels. However, it doesn’t appear any different from iTunes, which has already announced it is doing the same. Amazon says it will have “millions of songs” without protection.

Warner Music Group sues Imeem — Imeem, a Palo Alto, Calif. music start-up, came out of nowhere earlier this year, boasting in March it was the fastest-growing company on the Web, with 16 million unique users a month. (Hitwise ranks Imeem fourth among multi-media entertainment sites, behind Google Videos, YouTube and MySpace Videos). Users create and share music playlists. The copyright-infringement suit from Warner Music could be bad news for the young start-up, which had labored for two years in relative obscurity until changing its model last year. The company did not respond to a request for comment. Morgenthaler Ventures, a backer, declined comment, as did another backer, Sequoia Capital (Sequoia, of course, backed YouTube, which is a target of a major suit from Viacom.) During the upload process, Imeem does issue a warning to users not to upload media they don’t own, but that wasn’t good enough for Warner.

Sony is in talks to buy online childrens’ game, Club Penguin for $450 million — Club Penguin is a company we’ve covered before — noting its excellent execution of an enjoyable game for kids centered around happily chatting penguins. PaidContent is reporting it has annual revenues of $60 million, and margins of 50 percent. The impressive part is, the company didn’t take any venture backing to do this.

VCs still trying to distance themselves from those job-cutting private equity guys — “We’re in two different industries,” says Ted Schlein, venture capitalist at the Silicon Valley firm Kleiner Perkins to Fortune. “We recruit. We help companies sell product. We do business development. [Private equity] is not an industry that can talk about creating ten million jobs.” The point, of course, is that any new tax, if there is one, as Washington is discussing, should be levied on the private equity guys.

In other news….
–MySpace announces more video channels featuring content from an array of big-name publishers, in an apparent move to go after YouTube.
–Google, without advertising — Really.
–Coupons, a Mountain View, Calif. provider of printable coupon marketing products, said it has acquired Consumer Networks LLC and its Boodle.com coupon service, from Gannett Co.
–Mozilla is experimenting with “Joey,” a service that lets you select portions of Web sites, including images, text, and videos, and later access them from a cell phone.

Here’s the latest action:

YouTube follows through, almost — YouTube tomorrow (Friday) will start sharing advertising revenue with select video content creators, though not with the masses yet. The move to share revenue with users had been signaled in the past. The initial bunch includes Lonelygirl15, LisaNova, HappySlip, renetto, Smosh, and valsartdiary, Newteevee reports. However, no specifics are mentioned.

Yahoo Photos to be phased out — Yahoo will announce the closure of Yahoo Photos tomorrow, which will occur over a few months. Users will be shunted to the hipper Flickr, which has just overtaken Yahoo Photo in traffic. Techcrunch has the Comscore data and news.

Joost launches to public, but broken — Too bad for Joost, the new Internet TV company started by co-founders of Skype, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. They’ve impressively crafted hype around this throughout its development, only to have it crash upon launch. They apparently weren’t ready to handle traffic needs. Bottom line, it says something about lack of preparation, because the ability to scale is crucial. Happened to us at VentureBeat when we launched. Toni Schneider of Automattic/Wordpress says many people neglect scale; Wordpress lead developer Matt Mullenweg, he said, goes to bed every night thinking about how to scale. The problem killed Friendster.

Did Silverlight, Microsoft’s new Web platform, change the world? — People are debating just how significant the software giant’s new tools will become. Robert Scoble has some good interviews with the Microsoft team (click on image left). Finally, the Microsoft guys say, “real applications” can be built within in a browser — no more javascript, HTML. And then there’s the impressive media support.

Big-brother nation — Video surveillance technologies are getting more advanced, some would say creepily so. Companies use them to crack down on employees slouching off at at work and other abuse. 3VR, of San Francisco, offers that. Its software recognizes employees and follows them around as the come and go. There’s Pixim in Mountain View, which can take video in dark, shady places, and NiceVision, in Rutherford, N.J, which searches for “unusual’ activity, as in un-patterned. See Merc story. The Brits are considering introducing a lip-reading technology for its pervasive surveillance cameras.

Guy Kawasaki, the former Apple marketing specialist-come-VC, is restless — He’s looking for bloggers and paparazzi in the flow of interesting rumors, for a Twitter-like service. He explains on his blog: “They would be folks who can provide ’scoops’ that begin with a phrase like, ‘Did you hear that…?’ For example, did you hear that Angelina Jolie just adopted another child?” Apparently, the venture will be called Truemors. That URL has a cached version with a phone number, 650-329-2020, and a Twitter-like message: “I saw Guy Kawasaki at the Stanford Park Hotel.” Apparently a reverse-Twitter: Messages about what others are doing.

Apple’s Steve Jobs vows to go green — Under pressure from shareholders to hold to more stringent recycling guidelines, and eliminate toxic chemicals such as mercury, Steve Jobs has vowed to get better. This is encouraging. Apple has been a laggard, I found out when reporting on the recycling habits of major computer companies. Having Al Gore on his board probably added to the pressure on Jobs to do something.

Boo.com bought by new owner — The dot-com company that epitomized excesses of the boom, Boo.com, a flashy online clothing retailer that was difficult to use, burned through $125 million in capital. It has now been bought, and made part of a travel site, reports the Financial Times.

Breakthrough on solar cells? — That’s what Rice University is saying about its project on quantum dot technology. This is essentially a press release; we haven’t confirmed how significant this is.

Calacanis project not as broadly ambitious as earlier implied – We pointed to rumors entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, backed by high-powered venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, is creating a search engine that crosses Wikipedia with Google — a compelling idea. As mentioned, it was just speculation. Now there are more facts dribbling out: The start-up is reportedly called Kokua, and mix of Wikipedia and podcasting, with a focus on automobiles and video games. This is more focused, and possibly still attractive, given the possibility of targeting ads, but more predictable too.

Techdirt launches Insight Community — At the Plug&Play Expo this week, Techdirt showed off the testing version of its new service, just launched. We mentioned it last year here. It solicits the input of expert bloggers in niche fields to inform a corporate client in areas in which the client is interested. Techdirt wants Insight to outperform traditional analyst work for Fortune 500 companies. After receiving funding from entrepreneur Mark Fletcher and others, it’s looking to raise another round.

IBM saves Moore’s Law — IBM unveiled today a breakthrough in chip design to reduce power loss. Called “airgap,” the technology will use nanotechnology to insulate wiring in the chip. An IBM senior vice president crows: “I think it extends Moore’s Law another decade or so.” It follows other reportedly significant breakthroughs by Intel and IBM earlier this year to reduce power loss.

Spock launches private testing version — We’ve written a lot about Spock, the people search engine. It has just launched its private beta version, and it’s the first time I’ve had free access to the service without one of the founders controlling the demo. I checked out my profile, and it has pretty relevant tags on me, noting that I’m a blogger, related to VentureBeat, and have some affiliation with the Mercury News (the newspaper, my former employer, syndicates VentureBeat content), and so on. No insulting tags, yet.

It takes you through an initial sign up stage, where you can type in your logins to services like Gmail, LinkedIn and other services so that you can automatically reach contacts if say, you land on their profile page and want to reach them. Past coverage.