VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Blackberry 8820 announced – It is the first BlackBerry that is dual-mode, letting you use both cellular networks (EDGE/GPRS/GSM) and WiFi. More at ZDNet. This is probably enough for BlackBerry to stave off the iPhone, at least among the BrackBerry-fixated VC crowd.

Ashopfor.com, latest Web 2.0 pyramid scheme — Like Zlio (see our coverage), Ashopfor.com is a company that lets you create an online store, and wants to give you money for sales you drive: “Your shop earns a cash back contribution from the retailers when you or your friends make a purchase through the retailer links on your shop or when you refer a new shop.” However this is like some of the other Web 2.0 schemes we’ve been seeing. When your shop refers new shops, Ashopfor gives you 20 percent of the total amount of the contributions these referees make. This includes contributions from any shops they refer, and the ones they refer, and so on. A classic pyramid.

WipBox helps people sell things on eBay and Craigslist — The new service allows users to text “WipBox” and an item’s name — iPhone, for example — to 44636 to get average and high prices for items listed in their local area, based on eBay and Craigslist data. WipBox is founded by Jason Weiner, founder of early Web 2.0 company Dipsie. Weiner demoed an early version of the site for us several weeks ago, and WipBox does make the cumbersome listing process easier.

Venture capitalists are going later stage — PE Hub reports on the trend. And while venture firms are investing later in a company’s life, valuations have crept higher, reports the Mercury News.

Loomia, a recommendation engine used by online retailers and publishers to suggest related content to users, signs a deal with the WSJ — Its technology is similar to Aggregate Knowledge, which we’ve written about several times.

Aaron Swartz (left), early employee of news-ranking site, Reddit, starts book-to-web free library — Details here.

HBase, a Google Bigtable clone — Google’s Bigtable is a distributed storage system for structured data. HBase appears to be a very early stage open source project to clone Google Bigtable. It will provide Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop. It’s not surprising to see that folks behind this are from Powerset, a search engine trying to compete with Google (Via Greg Linden).

Economic boom times in BRIC — Brazil, Russia, India, China. See story Fortune.

Google offers search engine to small Web sites for $100 per year — But sites with more than 5,000 Web pages will have to pay more: $500 a year for up to 50,000 Web pages.

Google to offer new mobile service — The company wants to go beyond letting you basic Web search on your cell phone. According to the WSJ, it wants to let you search for things like a ringtones and games, giving you a list of places you can buy them. Eventually, Google would charge companies for high placement in the search results. This, of course, brings it closer to competing with the carriers, which also like to charge for such information. More analysis here.

GetLeaflets, a site launched by design firm Blue Flavor, provides a series of applications designed for the iPhone via its browser — Techcrunch reports: Direct your iPhone browser to Getleaflets.com and you’ll see a menu of application ready for use: Search, Flickr, New York Times, Upcoming, Del.icio.us, for example. There is also a feed reader.

You’re familiar with Amazon.com’s recommendation feature: “People who bought this book, also bought these books.”

Aggregate Knowledge is a Menlo Park start-up offering such a recommendation service on a mass scale — to any Web site. But it does Amazon one-better by watching consumer reading patterns online, and giving recommendation feedback immediately. (Amazon updates its recommendations once a month)

By all accounts, AK is doing very well. It started in April, and is already making $2 million in annualized revenue, according to chief exec Paul Martino. Tomorrow, it will announce it has won $5 million from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. First Round Capital and others invested $500,000 in an earlier seed round. It employs 21 people, up from three in April. Recommendations are hotter than many people realize. Amazon says 35 percent of product sales result from recommendations. Martino, formerly at Tribe, said he noticed the power of recommendations while working at his previous company, Tribe — and thus his decision to launch AK.

We last wrote about AK here

Overstock.com is one of several sites that have implemented it. Shoppers of a gift basket (see image below), will see items that previous readers have gone on to view after viewing that item — saving users time, and helping them get to their likely destination quicker — since AK knows what previous readers ended up viewing.

In his earnings call last month, Overstock’s chief executive Patrick Byrne says integration with AK was easy, and that it’s providing a “nice, measurable lift” despite being up only a few weeks.

AK offers the service for news sites, too: It links to articles that previous readers of the same article went on to read. It also helps find more relevant ads, tracking which ads are popular based on the behavior of past viewers. This is where AK hopes to beat Google. Take, for example, a reader of Fox Sports, who learns their team going to the Super Bowl. Google might offer an ad for ticket merchant RazorGator. However, AK would skip RazorGator altogether and offer a way to buy Super Bowl tickets directly. In other words, it will offer an ad, a product, or a service - depending on what the reader is most likely to want, based on previous behavior. AK tracks click streams during sessions on a Web site; it does so anonymously, aggregating data so it knows what readers are most likely to do.

AK gets paid based on performance. If the customer is a news site, AK gets paid for increasing page views. If the customer is a product site, AK gets paid if it sells more products.

AK takes several days to customize its product for sites. By first quarter next year, Martino tells us, he wants to make it plug and play. VentureBeat, for example, could get a widget that allows its readers to see what other readers have also read. Sphere does something similar now. See the “Sphere it” button at the top of this article. If you click it, you’ll see mostly other blog related material. However, Sphere’s recommendations are based on related sites and content, not necessary on where people have actually gone.

AK’s competitors include Boston’s ChoiceStream. Its software reportedly takes longer to deploy. Loomia, of San Francisco, is another player.