VentureBeat

Big Facebook profile changes are coming, sure to impact developers — Facebook has been experimenting with a ground-up redesign of its user interface for months, that it hopes will improve communication among users. Now, the company is providing Facebook application developers with more details on the changes — and how those changes are going to affect applications. The new home page will have a tabbed interface for news feed, personal info, photos, and something tentatively called “boxes.” The “box” tab will house Facebook applications (see screenshot, above), although the apps will also appear in various forms within the other tabbed sections. Perhaps most significantly, the news feeds themselves will include a new range of ways for applications to share stories with Facebook users who haven’t already added the application. If you’re interested in the many, many changes happening, see this detailed post by Justin Smith of the blog Inside Facebook and application company Watercooler. The official preview site here.

Meanwhile, Facebook is seeing an overall drop in the number of new applications that grow quickly, and a probably-related drop in the number of developers working on the platform — even as the site continues to grow around the world. So these profile changes are part of a far-reaching initiative by Facebook to make the site more usable; the company has previously, for example, placed ever-more restrictive measures on app developers, to try to curb abusive practices like spam-emailing users. All in all, these changes will likely benefit Facebook users, the company, and the higher-quality applications, as another top Facebook app developer, Jesse Farmer notes here. The open question about the profile redesign is how Facebook is going to manage explaining the changes to its users.

News Corp. earnings report: MySpace, FIM miss revenue targets — News Corp. executives admitted yesterday that they weren’t monetizing MySpace and other social networking properties like they’d aimed to — bringing in $900 million in revenue versus $1 billion. Surprisingly, quarterly revenue actually declined from $233 million to $210 million. A number of pundits have jumped on this news to surmise that social networks may never monetize very well, as you can read over on Techmeme. But overall, monetization has actually been improving across a number of fronts at MySpace, as Silicon Alley Insider details, even if it’s not as fast as News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch wanted. For example, MySpace is actually earning 49 percent more money per-user compared to last year even as the user base continues to grow, partially through efforts like better-targeted ads. And many forget that monetizing social networks is not just about banner ads. We’ve covered companies that are creating new ways of doing things like distributing music or creating sports communities — companies that are helping to drive ticket sales for live events, apparel sales and other non-banner-ad forms of making money. Basically, social networks are in the process of becoming businesses and there are lots of unexplored opportunities. Here’s another one: Online video, which benefit greatly through being distributed on social networks, also have the opportunity to make money, as blog HipMojo notes.

Fuel cells coming soon to your GPS device? — MTI Micro has introduced a methanol-based fuel cell prototype, essentially a new and longer-lasting form of battery, for GPS devices.

Comcast may introduce a new fee system targeting people who habitually download large files — More here.

Email organizer Zaplets technology bought by email startup Xobni — Zaplets was developed in 2000 to turn long strings of back-and-forth emails into single emails, with the most recent information being displayed most prominently on each message (which sounds not unlike Gmail to me). Zaplets’ parent company, FireDrop had raised more than $100 million, with venture investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It went bust, some of the patents ended up with an “enterprise process management” company called MetricStream — and have now been bought by email analysis startup Xobni. Zaplets’s problem was that it was ahead of its time, Xobni chief executive Jeff Bonforte tells Techcrunch. So, look for Zaplet technology in Xobni.

MeeVee bought, finally — The Burlingame, Calif. company offers a sort-of TV Guide-style site for online videos. But gaining only around 1.1 million monthly active users after raising $27 million since it was founded in 2000, MeeVee decided last month to try to sell. It has reportedly succeeded, selling to Live Universe for an undisclosed price.

Here’s the latest action:

Rulings could make website owners more vulnerable to lawsuits — Decisions made by judges in two separate cases, against Friendfinder.com and Roommates.com, could expose websites to potentially harmful lawsuits, according to an article on CNET. Websites were previously immune to most lawsuits based on content added to their sites by others.

Video search firm Meevee wants to throw in the towel — “Combining with an established player will maximize the potential for the community, technology and content relationships the company has built,” in-video search company Meevee said in a press release yesterday. Translation: Despite some growth, 1.1 million unique users per month just isn’t cutting it for a company that took $27 million in funding. Investors included Bay Area Equity Fund, Defta Partners, FCPR Israel Discovery Fund, Labrador Ventures, Rothschild Ventures and WaldenVC, according to peHUB. We wrote more about the company’s business model here.

Scientists learn to map CO2 emissions — Researchers have found a way to do daily tracking of carbon dioxide emissions based on locality. Preliminary results show the Southeast is an even heavier emitter than previously realized (but California produces a lot, too). It seems likely that such maps could someday be used to help address problem areas, when attempting to scale back emissions.

EMC lays down $213M for storage firm Iomega — Iomega, the maker of the popular branded storage drives Zip and Rev, sold itself to information infrastructure company EMC for $213 million. EMC has three main divisions, in content management, information security and storage; the acquisition should help it expand further into the consumer market.

Nimsoft acquires Indicative Software — Nimsoft works in the information technology management field, competing with the “Big Four” made up of Hewlett-Packard, CA, IBM and BMC, while Indicative Software makes domain monitoring and end-user experience testing tools for IT departments. The acquisition price was not disclosed. Indicative had taken $19 million from Sequel Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures and Vista Ventures. [Red Herring]

Search engines pressured to delete user info more quickly in Europe – Google and other search engines should delete info showing what users searched for within six months, says the European Commission, which is considering making the suggestion a commandment. Google global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer claims the data should be kept for up to 18 months in order to help protect user’s identities, but the argument may not sway the EU. Thanks to the global nature of the internet, any decision made overseas may well be reflected at home.

Mytopia raises part of first round for cross-platform gaming — We recently wrote about Mytopia, which is working on connecting games across platforms like Facebook and MySpace. It’s raised about half of a sub-$5 million first round of funding, according to VentureWire. Update: According to Mytopia itself, they’re simply “in the midst” of raising a first round, and have not disclosed the total amount they’re aiming for.

Floating solar balloons proposed to power remote regions — Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology has created a design for floating, thin-film solar cell-coated balloons capable of generating about a kilowatt of power each, aimed at powering remote regions. It plans to start selling them in spring 2009. One question: Don’t remote regions, almost by definition, have plenty of free space on the ground? [Reuters via Ecogeek]

MeeVee’s online guide to TV and cable programming has just gotten better. It lets you track videos from around the Web — and then put them into your personalized Web-based account for easy viewing.

It’s one more step toward MeeVee’s goal of giving users a single funnel for all video content anywhere.

So far, MeeVee has let you create a calendar showing you whenever say, performer Jay-Z appears on a TV show. Today, MeeVee has unveiled a way to track Jay-Z related videos, too. You simply hit the “add interest” button, scroll down to the bottom, and add a keyword “Jay-Z.” MeeVee then surfs the Web and returns the most recent and relevant videos tagged with Jay-Z. You can then click on the videos and watch. See screen shots below for the Jay-Z example. A tab at MeeVee lets you toggle between TV programming and video.

The challenge for MeeVee is to make money. If it simply directs users to other content, it doesn’t have much chance to sign up significant advertising. For now, MeeVee is grabbing feeds from some publishers, such as MBA, Fox Sports, Comedy Central, and MTV Overdrive, so that it can play the programming directly, and it wants to sign up more, in order to advertise directly beside the content. It also wants to charge for referrals to publishers. MeeVee has also added links to entertainment blogging content, under its “news and reviews” section.

We reported on MeeVee here. It raised $8 million in venture capital last year.

SpotDJ, an angel-backed start-up in San Francisco, yesterday launched a service that lets people insert “spots” within iTunes music, which can be listened to by other SpotDJ users. The short spots can be descriptions of the song’s artist, a back-story to the song, or a recommendation about a different version.

Here’s how it works: Once you’ve downloaded SpotDJ, you can listen to a song on iTunes, and then hit the “spot this song” button. That lets you record a spot, and then other SpotDJ users can listen to it. If you don’t want to get bugged by random spots, you can set preferences to select only your favorite DJs. You can rate spots between 1 and 5, so that the community benefits places only the highest rated spots for a given song.

Strip out the junk from your Google search results — Oliver Humpage found that searching for products on Google can be annoying: Nothing but spam from Kelkoo, Pricerunner and other places clogged up his search results. So he wrote GiveMeBackMyGoogle.

Baidu starts (censored) Chinese version of Wikipedia — Chinese search engine Baidu has proven that it works well with Chinese authorities on censorship issues. Some of Wikipedia’s entries are blocked in China. We’ll see if Baidu can do any better.

Turns out, the plush looking MeeVee sign was for free — We mentioned new lavish looking sign of MeeVee, the personal TV and entertainment guide start-up, because some suggested it was a sign of a bubble era. We heard back from the MeeVee folks, who told us it was part of their lease extension negotiation. Also, the sign is visible from the 101, particularly at night, so it was a no-brainer, they said. No bubble perhaps, but it is true that the Silicon Valley corporate real estate market has tightened considerably lately (registration required).

The PayPal mafia and diagram, yet again — You may have seen the PayPal “Diaspora” stories before, about how the former employers of that online payment company have moved on to form other companies. The New York Times jumps in with another story about where all the PayPal folks ended up. It has a helpful diagram (if you’re registered with the Times, click on image here to go to the original version, which you can enlarge), and more background about where they came from, and how they still help each other out:

Mr. Thiel tapped his network of friends from Stanford, many of whom had worked at the Stanford Review, a libertarian magazine that Mr. Thiel co-founded in 1987. They populated PayPal’s business ranks. Mr. Levchin, for his part, hired engineers in large part from his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign…

Reuters reporter lives in Second Life — The news service has assigned a reporter to live within Linden Labs’ virtual world game, Second Life, and report what is going on there.

MySpace spruces up its site to highlight its own video — Now that YouTube is more of a threat, MySpace has made a few minor changes to highlight its own video offerings. MySpace now features videos on its homepage (see top left hand corner). User profile pages now include a section called Video Space, which displays videos the user has uploaded.

A much better way to connect: two feet of cable — Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has a good line, saying Microsoft’s Zune music player is unlikely a threat to Apple’s iPod. He tells Newsweek:

I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

Starting an Internet business — I’ll moderating a panel about “Monetizing your Site” at the From Garage to IPO conference tomorrow at TiE in Santa Clara. Event details here.

YouTube will contribute to valley’s allure — Two years ago, Google’s buzz, even before its IPO, gave entrepreneurs like Tribe’s founder Mark Pincus inspiration to dream up the social networking revolution. YouTube’s grand sale will also inspire a new wave of entrepreneurs, no doubt. The WSJ has a timely piece — written before YouTube’s sale was announced — about the entrepreneurs still coming to Silicon Valley.

There’s Matt Sanchez, co-founder of video company VideoEgg, who found he was spending more time in Silicon Valley than his home in New Haven, so packed a 12-foot U-Haul van with his servers and other junk, and moved out here. It has paid off. His team of four have since landed venture money, hired 22 more people, and signed lots of deals with Web sites, most of them within an hour’s drive. “There’s a unique set of resources in Silicon Valley that don’t exist in other places,” Sanchez, 25, told the Journal. And then there’s Metacafe, the Israeli video site, which just opened a Palo Alto office, and plans to hire 12 people by the end of the year.

How things change. We still remember the NYT trying to compare Silicon Valley with Detroit, back when it was fashionable to bash this place — and th was as recent as early 2005!

MySpace cleared — The suit filed by Brad Greenspan, the former chief executive of MySpace, against the popular social networking site, has been dismissed.

MeeVee’s logo sign — Meevee, the personal TV and entertainment guide company, is going to some lengths to build branding, putting up a large logo on its building and filming it, reminding some of the bubble era. It has raised $20 million in venture capital.

Microsoft offers mobile ads too –Google and Yahoo offer sponsored ads besides search results on your mobile phone. Now Microsoft has joined them, but offering click-to-call technology too — which is where you see an ad, click on it, and your phone dials the advertiser.

Google and Zoho gunning for online office software leadership — We’ll be moderating a panel tomorrow at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. We recently wrote about Zoho’s impressive product release schedule, apparently an effort to steal the thunder from Google. Zoho has now incorporated its array of software, including a new calendar and a new email feature, under one roof called Zoho Virtual Office. Meanwhile, Google does its own integration, linking up Writely and Spreadsheets with Docs & Spreadsheets.

Tellme Networks making headway in voice recognition — Speaking of the competition in mobile search, Tellme has been around a long time as a private company, based in Mountain View, and is getting a second wind. Back during the Internet bubble days, it was laying off workers. Now that voice recognition has become hot, it has just signed a deal with Cingular Wireless to offer a 411 information service that will allow Internet searches too. It is now handling more than two billion directory calls a year, 74 percent of which are done without human intervention, according to the NYT.

Netflix’s recommendation technology beat within a week — Netflix, the popular DVD site, offered a prize to anyone who beat its recommendation algorithm. Within a week, a team from WXYZConsulting.com in Los Gatos beat Netflix. The team is led by data mining engineering professor named Yi Zhang, of UC Santa Cruz (pictured here).

Sequoia Capital is almost out of Google — We’ve mentioned venture firm Sequoia’s various conflicts and interests related to its backing of Google. But lately, the venture capital firm’s holdings in Google have dwindled to about 0.1%, according to a filing in April by the SEC. That leaves it with 412,823 shares, worth less than $200 million.

With the proliferation of Internet television and other places for video, MeeVee, a Burlingame start-up, says it wants to use its “neutral” player status to sort through the clutter, and today releases new features to help.

MeeVee has competitors, including TV Guide, and Zap2it.com, which like MeeVee let you search and organize favorites. These are owned by big media players, and MeeVee is betting these others are too slow and their services too static. MeeVee, for example, focuses on ways to “push” your favorite content to you when it shows up.

Here are some of MeeVee’s new features, released today:

1) A “my interests” module (see left hand side of image below). You can search for shows, actors, or other keywords in a search box, and Meevee will tell you when those TV or Internet shows or actors are playing. You can place these favorites as “hearts” into your profile. If you like “Monk” for example, Meevee highlights it in your schedule for Fridays at 9pm, telling you the TV channel. If Monk subsequently shows up as an iTunes download, MeeVee will let you know. Same thing for favorite actors, or subjects (”biking,” for example) who appear in shows. MeeVee will let you know.

2) A new personal MeeVee widget for your Myspace, Facebook, Friendster profile or personal blog. You can broadcast to your friends what you’re watching. If someone clicks on the widget, they get a prompt to sign up to MeeVee too. Here’s an example.

MeeVee is cutting deals with studios and other publishers, such as Fox, to allow for show previews, including full downloads in some cases. MeeVee, fresh with $8M in venture capital, wants to make money by placing relevant ads by show listings (an ad for the PGA, for example, by golf show listings; or a Netflix ad by a listing for The Cosby Show)