VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Cleantech investments laugh in the face of recession — Everyone knows the economy is in the dumps, right? (Heck, it even says so in The New York Times.) Well, no one told the VCs putting their money in cleantech. The Cleantech Group reports that cleantech investment reached a record high of $1.25 billion during the first quarter of 2008, with $195 million going to biofuels and $119 million going to solar. It doesn’t hurt that cleantech projects can take so long that we’ll probably go through several more boom-and-bust cycles before some investments start paying off.

Google opens marketplace for enterprise apps — Following Monday’s launch of the Google App Engine, the search giant is taking further steps to position itself as a developer’s best friend. It just opened the doors on Google Solutions Marketplace, a listing service for applications that enhance Google’s enterprise offerings.

Last.fm says giving music away pays off – The company’s free, full-track music service launched 12 weeks ago, and it says the songs are promoting real sales. The 119 percent increase in purchases through Last.fm’s click-through partnership with Amazon seems to back this up.

Yahoo exec joining OpenX, aka OpenAds – Kara Swisher reports that former Yahoo Senior Vice President of Search Tim Cadogan has joined OpenX, a startup that provides open source ad serving software. The company recently changed its name from OpenAds and is moving from London to Los Angeles.

Will Google App Engine compete with Facebook? – Speaking of the Google App Engine, Nate Westheimer argues that the tech media (including VentureBeat) got the story wrong — the app engine won’t compete with Amazon’s web services at all, Westheimer says, but rather with Facebook’s F8 Platform. Unfortunately, he fails to understand that two products can still compete, even if they’re somewhat different.

HD DVD owners get $50 back from Amazon — If you’re the less-than-proud owner of an HD DVD player, you’re probably feeling pretty bummed right now. But even though you were on the losing side of the format wars, Amazon is offering a consolation prize — $50 in store credit. Maybe you can help Blu-ray players get close to Sony’s hoped-for-but-unlikely 50 percent market penetration.

Vignette acquires white label video publisher Vidavee — The deal was for $6.6 million, less than the $8 million Vidavee has raised, according to Paidcontent.

Updated

Less than a month after CBS’s $280 million acquisition of Last.fm, Spain’s 25 year-old media mogul, Antonio Asensio, has led a $25 million second-round investment in Corvallis, Oregon-based MyStrands, a music recommendation site that wants to join the big leagues.

MyStrands, like Last.fm, offers a download that plugs into your media player of choice, tracks the songs you play, and recommends others. It builds an online profile that shows you your recently played songs, and links you to users who share your tastes. It even has a nearly identical “recently listened tracks” widget for social networks and blogs.

It would almost be a complete knockoff is in many ways like Last.fm, but it doesn’t have a general online radio station for recommended tracks; instead, it has an “Indie Radio,” station that features a limited set of songs and bands and offers a way for unknown musicians to get their music some attention.

With MyStrands, you get your recommendations in a few ways. First, you create an account and download the software. When you’re listening to a song, it will suggest others based on the listening habits of people who have liked similar songs. It will also create a “my recommendations” page in your profile, and let you browse the profiles of people who have recently played the song you’re playing, as well. From there, you can see other songs they’ve played. But you can’t play these songs, or hear songs like them. You can listen to 30 second previews, instead.

The recommendations offer good songs, but not necessarily similar ones. Listening to 2Pac, we got suggestions for David Bowie and Joan Baez thrown in with Naughty by Nature and Dr. Dre.

MyStrands has a couple of interesting features of its own. The best of these is the Playlist Builder, which mines your collection and automatically builds playlists based on a few seed tracks, artists, or albums. This is good if you have a massive library, as it allows you to rediscover music you already have but might never hear.

It also offers some its functionality for Symbian or Windows Mobile phones, allowing you, for example, to see the profiles of other people listening to the same song you are playing on your phone, add them as friends, and see their recommendations. There is also an interesting but “Partystrands” feature that lets you use SMS to vote on music at participating parties, bars, and clubs.

It’s likely that people won’t want more than one music application on their phones, and MyStrands’ mobile features don’t really stand up against products like Orb, which allows you to stream your entire music collection to your phone or Maestro (see our coverage here), which — assuming it can get around copyright issues — will soon let you stream your friends’ music as well.

With this significant infusion of capital, however, MyStrands now has the means to build something worthy of comparison to the company whose success it hopes to replicate. Execution is all that’s left.

Previous investors Debaque and Sequel also participated in this round, which brought the total invested to $31 million.

See MyStrands’ blog post about the investment here.

Update: SplashCast’s Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed us to some elements of MyStrands that we’d missed, and we’ve since revised to reflect that.

Updated

CBS has bought music recommendation website Last.fm for $280 million, the extremely popular London-based company that lets users search for and listen to music based on their past preferences and recommendations of other users.

Last.fm says it has around 20 million active users each month, four million of which are in the US. The purchase comes at a time when services such as Last.fm are growing extremely quickly. Other private competitors showing growth are Pandora and iLike. The deal is significant because it gives Last.fm greater distribution, by integrating with other CBS channels.

The CBS deal is a win for London’s Index Ventures, which has been on a roll with investments in companies such as Skype and Tellme. Index invested a mere $5 million into Last.fm exactly a year ago. The deal nudges Index’s Danny Rimer, who is on Last.fm’s board, closer to the top of the VC pack, in terms of track-record — and most certainly seals his place at the top of those under 40.

CBS has been on a rampage lately, striking deals and partnerships with more than a dozen Web 2.0 companies to seek distribution through new Web channels in order to access younger viewers, including buying video site Wallstrip last week.

Viacom was earlier rumored to be in talks with Last.fm. (update: Investor Neil Rimer tells us this rumor was a load of crock.)

Last.fm focuses on user preferences, sorting music based on user feedback, whereas Pandora recommends music based on song characteristics that are similar to ones you have previously chosen. iLike is more similar to Last.fm, and is showing tremendous growth on Facebook’s platform, heading toward 1 million new users within the first week of integrating with that service — though works only with iTunes recommendations. Last.fm also submits recommendations from music from other players, including on your desktop. There are more than 500 monthly track submissions on Last.fm.

Under the accord, Last.fm co-founders Martin Stiksel, Felix Miller and Richard Jones will remain in east London.

Last.fm, just four years old, has struck deals with with EMI and Warner Music.

Pandora, meanwhile, has raised more than $20 million from Crosslink Capital, Labrador Venture Partners, Selby Venture Partners and WaldenVC. iLike has raised $13.5 million from IAC’s Ticketmaster five months ago, giving Ticketmaster 25 percent of the company — a deal that may make Ticketmaster look pretty smart based on Last.fm’s $280 million valuation.

The deal will only add to the frenzy we’re seeing in M&A right now. In addition to iLike and Pandora, Santa Clara, Calif.’s Mercora, another music discovery site, is also in play.

Update: We just talked with Index’s Neil Rimer (Danny’s brother), who said Last.fm will be in an even better position to serve music, because of CBS’ range of partnerships.

Here’s the latest action:

Feed Crier gets bought — Feed Crier, the service that lets you subscribe to blogs or other content within your instant messenger (IM), has just been bought by IMified. That company, meanwhile, says it plans to do more on mobile front. It’s just the latest in a crazy-full day of IM stuff.

VCs have produced less profit than they invested, since 1997 — In other words, the industry is negative for the past decade. The vast majority of profits come from a few dozen firms. Other firms are bleeding red ink. See NYT story: For instance, in the first nine months of 2006, venture firms invested $20 billion but paid out $10 billion; in 2005, they invested $23 billion but distributed $20 billion… Diana H. Frazier, a managing partner of Flag Capital Management, a limited partnership, who mediated the limited partner presentation at the venture capital association meeting, estimated that from 1986 to 2002, only 32 firms accounted for 56 percent of money distributed. Ms. Frazier and other limited partners said the success for investors depended on being among the top-tier firms. “This is an access class, not an asset class,” she said.

Facebook has launched classifieds — It’s called Marketplace, and it launched this weekend. We’ll be writing about it more. For now, here’s the NYT story. It will allow users to create classified listings in four categories: housing, jobs, things for sale, and other. Facebook told us over the weekend that Oodle and Jobster do not have exclusive classifieds relationships with Facebook, despite previously announced partnerships. Jobster does offer job related products that go beyond Marketplace’s listings. Facebook users who create classifieds can show them to only chosen friends or to anyone in one of their “networks” — their high school, college, company or geographic region. They can choose to make the listings appear on their profile pages, and send them out on “news feeds,” the automatic updates that appear when users log in to the site. Buyers will be able to see how they’re connected to sellers. Get ready for some serious Facebook road-kill: The handful of stand-alone college classifieds start-ups (we hinted this might happen, here).

MySpace announces “Take Down Stay Down” — MySpace said it is using the technology of Audible Magic, a Los Gatos, Calif. company to prevent users from re-posting video content at MySpace after that content has been removed at the request of the copyright owner. MySpace is the first company to launch this feature. Google reportedly also has a deal with Audible Magic, and says it offer similar filtering technology at its YouTube property, but hasn’t commented on specifics. It’s hard to believe YouTube’s traffic won’t get hit when it implements the technology.

Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, gets married — …quietly, to his girlfriend, Anne Wojcicki, in the Bahamas last weekend. Story here. As mentioned before, Wojcicki is a biotech analyst who just started her own company. She’s a Yale graduate in her early 30s. Her sister Susan rented her Menlo Park, Calif., garage to Brin and Larry Page — which became Google’s first office.

Last.fm announced video service — Here is the company’s announcement. Last.fm has gotten buzz for its music recommendation technology, and social networking that lets you connect with users with similar tastes. It will let users create personal videos channels, just as they can create music channels. Recommendations will come from its partnership with indie labels such as Ninja Tune, Nettwerk Music Group, and Domino. Now people are calling Last.fm the “MTV of Web 2.0.”

Tagged fastest growing social network? — Michael Arrington has an update about the Silicon Valley social network, Tagged, which is now profitable, and perhaps the fastest growing. However, it’ll be worth checking back to see if it is sustainable, because the traffic spurt happens mainly over a single month.

Shopping widget mania — Seattle’s Mpire is rolling out about 80 new e-commerce “widgets,” which allow bloggers and publishers to post shopping related content on their sites and make money by passing leads onto Amazon.com and eBay. More details here, by John Cook. The company is similar to Tumri (see our coverage).

Child porn ring on Second Life — Bizarre, but serious.

Wallstrip, a financial video site, sold for $5M? — So say the rumors, but venture capitalist Fred Wilson is emphatic he did not invest $500,000 into the company.

Amazon’s stealth company, Lab126 — The company appears to be focused on digital media for consumer electronic devices. And its president is Gregg Zehr who was VP of Hardware Engineering at PalmOne, VP Engineering at VA Linux and VP PowerBook Engineering at Apple.

Car engine redesign may reduce pollution — See story here, about Purdue researchers who say they’ve created the first computational model to track engine performance from one combustion cycle to the next for a new type of engine that could dramatically reduce oil consumption.

Clean-tech sector summarized — Here is a good summary of details from the Lux Report.

China is out of control — Pundits have been shouting “China bubble” for years, only to see China keep growing with no major setback. This time, though, the mania has hit and China appears headed into the equivalent of Silicon Valley’s euphoric bubble and burst. The stock market has tripled in value since early 2006, and is up 51 percent this year. There’s talk of shares in China’s Bank of Communications jumping 50 percent on first-day IPO trading Tuesday.

Blackstone’s bridge too far? — Orbitz, Blackstone’s latest IPO candidate, does look shaky. See Gigaom story here.

Google’s strategy in three words: “Our next strategy evolution is to really think about three components,” Mr. Schmidt said, in comments picked up widely. “Search, ads and apps.”

Who’s afraid of Google? — That’s the headline screaming from the San Francisco Chronicle, featuring a graphic of a scary Google creature. The real answer, of course, is that Chron itself just as scared of Google as the start-ups it writes about — reeling from a decline in advertising and more layoffs.

iPhones coming earlier — They’re already being sold on eBay for more than $1,000, and apparently coming June 14 or earlier

Blackberry fans, check out the Curve — Slimmer than the 8800, but fatter than the Pearl. Details here. No launch date or pricing yet, but it will launch with AT&T.

Slacker is an ambitious new music service created by some industry veterans that takes aim at the iPod.

Slacker is a music player device, but it is also a music delivery service. It is path-breaking because it wants to let you take it anywhere: It will be the first service to use satellite to deliver music constantly to your device.

Slacker’s service is essentially a personalized Internet radio station, similar to popular services Last.fm and Pandora.

On Slacker, your “station” refreshes automatically with new music. It plays music that matches your tastes, which you determine by clicking “love it” on a song you like, and “ban it” for one you don’t like. Slacker then constantly updates the music it plays for you, finds new songs that match the bands you like, and songs from bands that are similar in style to those bands (those that have say, a similar energy level, popularity, or era; Slacker does not, however, assess “acoustic characteristics,” like Pandora does, to decide what music to send you). It reshuffles songs just like a radio station, but it feeds you newly released songs, and also other songs that match your updated tastes.

Slacker has licensed two million songs, so it has depth.

Slacker is so named because it is designed for the estimated 70 percent of people who like music, but who can’t be bothered to constantly update their playlists.

It is different from Last.fm and Pandora in other ways. You can go mobile with those services, but can play them on your device only if you’re within WiFi coverage.

The Slacker device, by contrast, is designed to be used anywhere. The device is about the size of a blackberry. So you can carry it around like you do an iPod. However, Slacker’s servers will communicate with your Slacker device constantly. It uses commercial satellites, and WiFi, refreshing your device’s drive with new songs when they are available. The communication happens every 15 seconds. If a new song found by Slacker matches your preferences, your device caches it. Then, if you do enter a place where satellites and WiFi can not reach the device, you can still listen to music from the cache. Slacker has a car dock.

This is an impressive team. Dennis Mudd, chief executive, was CEO at Musicmatch, a company he took to $70 million in revenue, and which he sold to Yahoo for $165 million. He has brought in Jim Cady as President (ex-CEO at Rio), and Jonathan Sasse as VP Marketing (ex-CEO iriver America).

The basic Slacker account will be free. A premium service of $7.50 a month lets you save tracks, and avoid ads. The hardware devices, depending on the model, will cost $149, $299 and $399. They’ll ship during the second half of the year. Slacker wants to integrate its music service within other devices, too, such as cellphones. You’ll be able to download up to 2,000 songs on the low-end device. Downloads will be $1 a track.

You can track your account on a Web player too (see image, at bottom).

The Web site will open tomorrow (Wednesday).

Based in San Diego, Slacker has raised $13.5 million in venture capital from Sevin Rosen, Austin Ventures and Mission Ventures.

Seperately, Marshall Kirpatrick points to news emerging from the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Tex.: Last.fm is developing a music video recommendation service based on the company’s Audio Scrobbler technology. More details here.