VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Free mobile calls, via texting — An Ottawa company called bOK is using VOIP to give Canadians free mobile calls, using SMS. Here’s how it works: You send a text message with your contact’s phone number to bOK, and, just like better-known JaJah, bOK calls both parties — voila, free incoming call!

The service is temporarily free for any phone number in the U.S. and Canada. Anyone with a US-based phone plan, though, can expect to use up minutes. The service will work in Canada especially well, where many carriers offer plans with free incoming calls. The company charges for international calls at standard VOIP (low) rates. Maybe those with friends and families across the Northern border will appreciate this service? You do have to provide your phone number and other considerable data (from birthdate, to address), which is a downside.

The self-funded company emerged about a month ago and now says it has handled 10,000 calls and is breaking even; it hopes to raise a venture round shortly. Besides Jajah, other companies trying to redefine telephony include: Mobivox, Talkster, Truphone as well as Skype. bOK has decided to enter a very crowded market pretty late in the game, never mind any future legal issues. We like what it does, but wonder about its chances for success.

After patent score, Jingle makes a deal – Jingle Networks, the operator of a free 411 service, has partnered with Internet calling company Skype. In the US, Skype users will be able to use Jingle for 411 calls, and add “Free411USA” to their Skype friend list so they can call for a 411 operator — if they are on Skype version 3.5 for Windows. Jingle’s patent is for ad-supported calls, for when you don’t want to use a search engine on your web browser.

Local.com gets own patent for voice and mobile for directory-search assistance — Local.com, based in Irvine, Ca., was awarded a patent for a method of searching local directories on a pay-per-referral basis where users receive results via an operator call, SMS or a number of other options. It includes an ad model, and comes on top of another patent it received in local search last week. Previously-mentioned Jingle also offers SMS-based advertising; Microsoft’s TellMe and Google’s Voice Local Search, are also in the market.

Mister Wong, a clone of Delicious, launches private beta in U.S. — Oddly named German company Mister Wong is arriving Stateside. You’d think it would be called Mr. Schmidt or something. Next, here’s the dirt on this quirky sounding company: 1) It successfully copied the bookmarking site, Delicious, and developed a stable base in Europe; 2) It is trying to use this base to gain a foothold on the US; 3) We’ve heard that Delicious hasn’t grown much since it hit the 1 million mark last year. We’ll be watching to see if it goes anywhere. What we won’t be watching is the Alexa graph that Mister Wong provides on its splash page, comparing itself to such companies as gnolia.com, spurl.net and furl.net (see above). (More from Mashable)

South Korean search co. rules South Korea — Naver.com is the South Korean search engine of choice, and benefits from user participation in search results. While it handles more than 77 percent of all Web searches, search giant Google handles just 1.7 percent. The site is entirely in Korean; as far as long-term plans go, we can only assume that the company is aiming north.

Facebook traffic numbers are up 89 percent this May versus a year ago, according to Comscore – This isn’t surprising news to anyone who has been tracking Facebook for the last year, as the company has been disclosing its internal numbers (if those are to be believed, the site now has 28 million active users). We referenced the trend in March:. The most notable recent development: A huge chunk of new traffic is now coming from over 10 million adults ages 35 and up. This data may be suspect though because of a methodology problem: Total users don’t equal sum of the age segments listed (there’s a 1.2 million user difference). If true, it still suggests older people are joining, even though the site started in college campuses. Now, Mom and Dad apparently want to see what their kids have been up to for the past few years. Techmeme has more blogging about these numbers.

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Facebook Apps are getting translated – Facebook-focused blog Inside Facebook, points to an application, Nestoria, that’s entirely in Spanish, possibly the first non-English app. Facebook itself is currently English-only, although as more people have joined from around the world, they’ve brought their languages with them (like this Facebook group called I LOVE LEBANON). As the post notes, the company is trying to hire somebody to build out localized versions.

Here’s the latest action:

Page draws attention with helicopter landing — The Google co-founder’s colorful arrival at the Foo Camp this past weekend was captured on film. Scott Beale, always good with imagery, has the clips on his site Laughing Squid.

Thomas Layton takes top job at Metaweb Technologies — Metaweb is one of several companies trying to create a public database to store the world’s digital information. It has garnered considerable hype. It is backed with $15 million from Benchmark Capital and others. It isn’t much of a surprise, then, that Layton comes from another Benchmark company, OpenTable (Benchmark is known to take an active role in recruitment at its companies).

Change at the helm of Topix.com — Co-founder Chris Tolles has become chief executive of the five-year-old local news site. He takes the place of Rich Skrenta. No real reason is given. However, investors have high expectations, having pumped in $15 million recently. Topix was an early news aggregator online, an area which is now filled with competitors.

LinkedIn opens its service to third-party developers — The social network for business professionals says it will open its API over the next several months. This is late, given that most other networks have already taken similar moves, but better late than never (ZDNet’s Dan Farber talks with LinkedIn’s chairman Reid Hoffman).

Local.com wins local search patent — The publicly traded search engine Local.com, which no one has heard of says its patent covers the process of indexing and retrieving web-related information by geographical location. We don’t know where this will go.

The class difference between Facebook and MySpace — A study suggests users of Facebook are wealthier and more educated than those of MySpace — not completely a surprise, given Facebook was started as a social network for colleges. And it was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard student, with some classmates, and it spread among the elite schools before moving on to other groups. The culture of that group has been reflected in the site’s design and overall tone.

Fairtilizer not a great name for Web site — Anyway, its the name of the latest online music community site reviewed by ReadWriteWeb.

Michael Bloomberg toast of Silicon Valley — The mayor of New York, who is mulling an independent presidential bid, was hosted by Silicon Valley investor Sandy Robertson at a dinner here last Sunday, featuring guests such as Google’s Sergey Bring, his wife, Anne Wojcicki and Saleforce’s Marc Benioff. Robertson had previously backed Bill Clinton.

Sequoia Capital’s $100 rule — If partners at the big-name venture capital firm arrive late to a meeting with an entrepreneur, even by a minute, they have to donate $100 to charity. Entrepreneur Noah Kagan confirms this with partner Michael Moritz.

SlapVid a P2P video player from your browser — You’ve seen peer-to-peer technology used by Joost, Babelgum and Veoh to lower the costs of delivering Internet TV to your desktop. Now SlapVid, a Pittsburgh, Pa. company is using peer-to-peer technology to deliver video straight to your browser. There’s no download, just an applet that manages delivery as SlapVid draws the video content from other peers. You can sign up for it at the site. Users can also make their own widgets, called “Slapstrips,” that can share the video on other Web sites.

Mitch Kapor’s Foxmarks to launch search technology — We first covered veteran entrepreneur Kapor’s company, Foxmarks, six months ago. Back then, Kapor said Foxmarks would be a cross between Google and Wikipedia — that was before Wikipedia’s founder decided to try out the idea himself. Foxmarks has since taken a circuitous route. It offers a way to automatically synchronize your bookmarks between two or more computers running Firefox. Doing this, it has collected data about bookmarks, knowing for example what words people have used to tag specific URLs. In a couple of months, it will offer a new search engine, according to Techcrunch, so that when you search for a word in its database, it can return URLs that match those words. The results should be relevant, considering Firefox bookmarks are usually highly organized by users. More at Kapor’s blog.

Activity in online health is…healthy — OurHealthCircle, a community of online support groups launched publicly this week, joining DailyStrength in offering outlets for sick people looking for camaraderie and advice. The company intentionally launched the same week that “Sicko”, Michael Moore’s new movie about the health care industry, comes out. Also, today, vertical search engine, Kosmix, has announced that it will power search on AOL co-founder Steve Case’s all-purpose health site, Revolution Health.

Ebay makes up with Google, sort of – The large auction site resumed advertising on Google, albeit in a more limited volume, saying proudly: “We found that we were not as dependent on Google AdWords as some may have thought.”

Google still not happy with Microsoft’s operating system — Google has asked a federal judge to extend the Justice Department’s oversight of the software giant, saying Microsoft’s Vista unfairly disadvantages rivals, pointing specifically to Vista’s integration with desktop search.

IPhone protected under lock and key — AppleInsider reports iphones are being delivered to various airports with armed guards, treatment normally reserved for diamonds and other precious cargo.

Yahoo loses chief sales officer — Wenda Harris Millard departed Sunday after reorganization of Yahoo’s sales team, to become president of media for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Yahoo went to lengths to say she was no longer needed, i.e., this wasn’t a defection.

Business.com valued at $300 million? — You’ve probably seen the rumors about bids for Business.com, the company with a very popular domain name. It is considered valuable because stray Web users will blindly type in “business.com” and land on the site. The site can then serve them with advertising without doing much more. Om Malik unearths reports that the company does have a business and is reportedly making $50 million in revenue. So the value is not as absurd as it sounds. Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley is an investor in this company.