VentureBeat

Mobio has come out with a useful, cost-saving feature for your mobile phone called Cheap Gas.

This weekend, I choked when I pumped gas for $4.01 a gallon here in the SF Bay Area.

Mobio’s Cheap Gas application lets me locate the cheapest gas stations near any address and lets me filter search results by station brand. Cheap Gas provides a map to the destination station.

There are a number of other cheap-gas Web site offerings, such as Mapquest’s GasPrices, MSN’s Gas Prices, Gasbuddy.com and Fuelfinder, but they’re more basic, giving you gas prices by zip code, not exact address, and not letting you filter by brand. Mobgas sends you information by SMS.

Mobio’s rich media client requires a Java phone. The product announcement will be Tuesday, but we’re told the service should be available tomorrow (Monday).

See our previous coverage of Cupertino, Calif.’s Mobio here. It is backed with $9 million from Storm Ventures. More images below.

ULocate, a Framington, Mass. start-up focused on giving you mobile information based on your location, has raised $11 million more in a second round of financing.

ULocate offers more than a dozen widgets that you can drag and drop onto your mobile phone — giving you things such as directions, ski reports, brewery finders, and even neighboring Twitter posts — and joins a host of competitors racing to give you similar services.

Ask yesteday unveiled something very similar yesterday, with its Ask Mobile GPS. Ask’s advantage is that easily integrate its mobile services with the host of properties owned by its parent, IAC. After a free trial period, Ask’s service will be offered at $9.99 per month. A stripped-down version — GPS services but no navigation — will cost $2.99 per month. IAC plans to integrate more services into Ask Mobile, including as Ticketmaster and Match. See images at far bottom illustrating the Ask offering.

Ulocate offers its services for a $3/month subscription.

These services both rely on Sprint, which is one of the first carriers to offer GPS services, and only for certain phones. For many of us, therefore, this will be unhelpful. In Silicon Valley, Sprint is notoriously weak. Here’s a list of phones ULocate supports (top of FAQ). GPS technology detects your location so that you get information about you area, but so far has gained more traction among Asian carriers.

A host of other companies offer location-capable applications, though most of them ask you to input your location manually. There are Google’s applications, Mobio’s, and others that offer location applications within a broader palette of offerings, such as Zenzui, Plusmo and Widsets.

More info about the ULocate Where widgets is here.

Venrock led the round of funding, with additional participation from returning investors GrandBanks Capital and Kodiak Venture Partners. In 2004, the company raised $4.5 million, and in 2003 a seed round of $600,000.

The company says U.S. mobile users will spend $13 billion on mobile data services this year, and that U.S. consumer spending on location-based services will grow 160 percent this year, citing Phil Taylor, director of Wireless Media Strategies Service for Strategy Analytics.

Mobio, a Cupertino start-up, is distinguishing itself by creating simple, useful services for the mobile phone.

We wrote about the company when it released its movie service — which lists movie reviews, times and maps.

Today, Mobio kicks off a 100 more services, many of them handy for kicking round town. There’s everything from OpenTable, flower-buying, dating services to flight-time checks.

Mobio is just the latest mobile company to ditch your stupid, slow cellphone Web browser. Forget it. As long as you’ve got a Java-enabled phone, you can download Mobio’s software and surf Web info from within the phone application (Mobio launches compatible with 20 phones, which accounts for about 60 percent of the market). It effectively lets you crawl the web, only in a more efficient mobile style, free of keyboard.

Take for example the OpenTable application (see screenshots at left). You select OpenTable from main the menu. Then you can use a search bar to find a restaurant in your locale. The Mobio app tells you if a table is free • the same information you’d find on the OpenTable Web site.

Mobio does all this by using a so-called “mediating” server. In the background, while you are using your phone, the server connects with the various Mobio services (OpenTable, etc), drawing information from them, to deliver to you if you select it. Mobio’s proprietary protocol communicates between the device and the server.

The first application is written in Java. Mobio is rolling out Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry and BREW versions over the course of this year, Ramneek Bhasin, CEO of Mobio, tells Venturebeat.

Mobio focuses on local content. The services are designed to be accessible with three clicks or less.

There are lots of other features we haven’t mentioned. Let’s say you like wine. You can go online before shopping, and configure your Mobio account so that it draws wine tasting notes from a wine connoisseur’s public Kaboodle account. Then, as you shop, Mobio draws info from that account, and serves it to your phone, and you can peruse the notes as you shop — or impress your girlfriend while picking out wine during dinner.

It’s all free. You enter some basic personal information to register before downloading the service.

Mobio has raised $9 million from Interwest and Storm Ventures, among others.

Happy Thanksgiving weekend, folks. Here’s a roundup of the latest.

The crisis at Digg — Digg, the San Francisco company that lets users rank news, is facing a credibility test. A fake story about Sony recalling its PlayStation 3 stayed on the site’s front-page for several hours, even though the content was clearly questionable — people blindly digged the article nonetheless. This led to some sleuthing by Niall Kennedy, who turned up evidence of some major spamming. This and other problems are causing some people to give up on the site.

How — or how not — to buy out your angels — We’ve written about Evan Williams’ move to buy back his struggling podcasting company, Odeo, back from his investors. The New York Times reports today he paid $2 million to do this. But since Charles River told VentureBeat it made money on the $4 million it originally invested in the Odeo, this suggests Williams must have additionally handed over more than $2 million in unused cash to the firm. Evan must indeed be a nice guy; arguably, based on the facts at hand, he could have just closed the company and moved on. Instead, he’s $2 million out-of-pocket. Maybe we’re missing something. VentureBeat was supposed to connect with Evan two week ago, but our schedules didn’t work out. Stay tuned…

Yergin says we’re not running out of oil — Pulitzer Prize-winning oil historian Daniel Yergin argues we won’t begin running of oil until 2030, later than a lot of experts have been saying lately.

Has Silicon Valley’s luck moved south? — The Persian rug merchants in Palo Alto own various properties, including a venture fund called Amidzad, and lots of real estate in Palo Alto including the supposed lucky spot at 165 University (early home of Google, PayPal, etc). They say that luck may be moving south. Earlier this year, led by Saeed Amidi (pictured here), they opened a 150,000 square foot building in Sunnyvale to house start-ups, called Plug & Play Tech Center. Already three of the newcomers have been acquired by other companies. In just the past couple of weeks, Bix was acquired by Yahoo, Nsite by Business Objects (though, if you believe the comments, the exit may not have been that great), and Andale by Vendio. Other companies at the complex are getting funded: Solexant just raised an angel round for its new solar cell technology. Meanwhile, 165 Univ. hasn’t been too lucky lately.

Mobio offers movie service — Mobio is a relatively new mobile phone service that provides movie listings, reviews, maps and the ability to buy tickets easily from your phone. We mentioned the company earlier this year, when it was still secretive. It has raised $9 million from Interwest Partners, Storm Ventures and others. You load it from the company’s site, at www.getmobio.com, but it only works for the RAZR and some Samsung phones.

HAVA, better than the SlingBox? — The makers of the HAVA say it lets you stream your TV programming to any PC, wherever you are. And it says it does the popular SlingBox one better. It is compatible with Windows XP Media Center Edition, works with WiFi (SlingBox is Ethernet only), and allows multi-casting (multiple PCs can view the stream at the same time, compared to SlingBox, which allows only a single viewer).

The company let us demo it, and we liked the quality. It is selling for $249. We first saw a review of HAVA at CNET. It is made by a private company we haven’t written about before, Monsoon MultiMedia, with R&D in India, but marketing and sales in San Mateo.

After two years of laboring away in secret, advertising network Turn launches tomorrow saying it can target online ads with unprecedented precision.

Run by Jim Barnett, former chief executive of search engine AltaVista and, later, a top executive at Overture, San Mateo-based Turn has raised $18 million from Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital and Shasta Ventures. We were briefed on the company last week.

It calls itself the first “automatic” targeting advertising network.

Google, of course, is the gorilla in this market — it looks at the content of pages, and matches them with relevant ads in its Adsense network. Turn is betting, though, that it can do better by providing more hand-holding to advertisers.

Until now, many ad networks have forced advertisers to sort though hundreds or thousands Web sites to determine which ones are appropriate for their advertising. But Turn is the latest to help them do more precise matching. Competitor Adbrite, for example, is a network that hasn’t let advertisers do much automatic filtering of sites. (However, Adbrite today announced upgrades including an assessment of a publishing site’s user demograpics — by assigning a site’s users a probable age and gender based on their recent Web activity within Adbrite’s network of sites. Adbrite supplements this with race and income estimates it can make by assessing where IP addresses are located geographically, and matching those addresses with U.S census information.)

Turn is offering similar matching abilities, assessing the types of users trafficking a site, if that information is available, but Turn says it also tracks 60 other variables relevant to the ad being run. An advertiser specifies the goals they want to meet, and Turn takes care of the rest.

Let’s say a Motorola makes the following choices: It will pay 75 cents to an online publisher every time a reader clicks on a Motorola advertisement, and $2.50 for every time a reader subscribers to its newsletter, and $30 every time someone buys a Motorola phone. Turn lets advertisers specify this via a Turn dashboard, and Turn takes care of the rest by matching these choices against Web sites in its network.

So if VentureBeat went to Turn seeking advertising, Turn would analyze VentureBeat’s homepage, its secondary pages, its user profiles (if VentureBeat has collected such info) and then look through its database of ads and select the most relevant. It might look for ads related to venture capital, finance and start-up services, for example. It would look for banner and skyscraper ads (which VentureBeat runs). It also assesses the past performance of ads on the VentureBeat pages.

Turn already has 1,000 advertisers signed up, and more than five million ads in its system.

Turn will take 25 percent of the advertising revenue and give publishers 75 percent, though it might take less of a cut on bigger sites.