VentureBeat

MobiTV, a heavily funded provider of white-label streaming video services, says it is adding a million subscribers to every six months. The Emeryville, Calif.-based company offers video streaming to any internet-connected device, but focuses on working with carriers and operators to provide professionally-produced television on mobile devices.

Now it’s just raised $5 million from Leader Ventures — on top of $125 million it has already raised from venture firms Gefinor Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, private equity firm Oak Investment Partners and strategic investors Adobe Systems Inc. and Hearst Corp.

The money is intended to pay for equipment costs.

While MobiTV already offers hosted services — chiefly for streaming mobile TV programs from ESPN, NBC, FOX Business Network and other broadcasters — it also recently launched another service that gives partners direct access to its server technology through a licensing program.

Of course, users are able to access streaming video onto many different devices, using a variety of types of video streaming services. On the web, there are consumer-facing sites (like YouTube) that offer infrastructure to other services, and also a whole range of video streaming provider companies (like Move Networks, Brightcove, Maven Networks, Joost and others). On the mobile side, where MobiTV is focusing now, there are even mobile-browser-based video sharing sites, like MyWaves.

The latest in the world of start-ups and venture capital:

Fred Wilson sells home listed at $37.5 million — Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures in New York, who has one of the most widely read VC blogs, AVC, has sold his 15,000-square-foot townhouse in Manhattan. If it closed near the asking price, the 1847 mansion would be the most expensive single-family residence downtown, reports the Observer. In 1996, the home apparently sold for $3.9 million.

In this video, found via Alex Haislip at PE Week, Wilson tells WallStrip: “I went from basically being penniless to having more money than I knew what to do with,” referring to the $3.6 billion sale of Geocities to Yahoo in 1999. Haislip suggests the slimmer pickings lately for Wilson (his Del.icio.us investment was sold to Yahoo for a mere $30 million) may be one reason Wilson put his house on the market. We’re not sure about this, so VentureBeat emailed Wilson for comment. He declined comment.

Don’t have friends commenting on your blog? — Not too late to hire FakeYourSpace, which lets you choose from a selection of ‘models’ to leave you customized comments to look like you have (sexy) friends and are popular online. The basic service is $1.99 month, but they’re offering special of 99 cents a month.

Mojungle for sale on eBay — Mojungle, a site that lets you deliver photos and video to blogs and web sites from your mobile phones, has listed itself on ebay for $60,000. It lets you deliver via SMS, MMS, email, but that’s not enough to lift it above all the competitors out there doing similar things (Shozu, Veeker, Mywaves, etc).

MobiTV, making headway — MobiTV has quietly becoming the wireless television delivery for most major carriers - Sprint Nextel, Cingular, and AT&T, and now apparently Comcast. Now we know why it has raised $100 million — these are huge clients and it had better deliver.

Edgeio expands real estate search — More info here, and how it follows from its acquisition of ARES.

MobiTV, the Emeryville start-up that offers TV and other digital content to your mobile phone and other connected devices, is soaking up the cash.

It has just raised $30 million more in its third round of venture capital, GigaOm reports. This make for a total of $100 million since July — and its valuation reportedly already exceeds $400 million.

Is this company red hot, or is it getting bloated? It started out serving mobile phones. But it has since expanded to support any device with broadband — via any WiFi, or with provider AT&T.

Large investors like Oak need to put their money to work, and so are willing to pay a high price. It has invested the most so far. The latest investors in MobiTV are Hearst Corp. and Adobe Systems. Hearst, of course, has all kinds of media properties, and it would make sense to distribute it over mobile phones and other gadgets. Adobe, meanwhile, is also flush with cash for ventures, having created a new venture arm. And Adobe, too, is interested in digital media distribution. It wants to support Apollo, its new system for running applications written in Flash, HTML, and JavaScript from the desktop.

Google, the giant search engine in Mountain View, is about to surpass Cisco to become the valley’s most valuable company.

It has passed IBM to become the third most valuable technology company, behind Cisco and Microsoft. Google’s stock is above $475 per share, bringing its total market worth ($475 x total number of shares) to $145 billion, surpassing the total value of IBM at 139.5 billion. Now it is breathing down the neck of Cisco, which has a value of $147.5 billion.

And you thought last week’s Googleplex solar power announcement was big? — Google just announced a 1.6 MW solar system it is building for the Googleplex. That makes it the largest corporate installation in the U.S. Now we learn Google really wants to install 10MW, to make the company “carbon neutral.” There’s a good summary of Google’s other goals via a leaked internal memo at the Google-watching blog called Google Blogoscoped.

But….Google is dropping its hiring standards — In the U.S., everyone graduates from college with a so-called GPA. A 4.0 is perfect. A 3.0 is pretty good. The rap on Google is that has required a 3.0 GPA for its applicants, as part of a notorious and excruciating set of high hiring standards. Until now. Google has dropped the requirement for sales people, according to John Battelle — apparently because it can’t find enough smart ones. Hmm, is Google saying something about sales people, or about the job market right now? Or that it’s just getting too big? We’ve pinged the Google press team to see what they say about this.

The latest tech news in Silicon Valley:

The mobile TV revolution continues, and MobiTV is hot — MobiTV, of Emeryville is one of the start-ups on the forefront. It offers TV programming from networks and cable providers. It started out serving mobile phones. Now it has expanded, first to WiFi, and now with AT&T to anyplace with broadband.

Venture investors like Oak are paying a good price to play. MobiTV raised $70 million in a July third round, at a valuation in excess of a pretty $400 million, according to PE Week Wire. That’s compared to a value of just $50 million following a $15 million round in 2004. Oak invested $65 million of the total new investment.

Loopt, the mobile presence company, is finally launching — Loopt uses GPS and other data to give you the location of your friends, along with their presence status, such as available or away. Techcrunch has a review. The company has changed its name several times.

You’ll be able to get alerts when your friends are within a certain distance, and send messages to them (see image below). The service is initially available only to customers of pay-as-you-go service, Boost Mobile.

The Costco of travel sites — cFares, a travel start-up based in Redwood Shores, is charging you $50 to get access to wholesaler discounts, and the resulting prices are about $30 to $50 below those of other major sites, finds GigaOm. The company has raised $1.5 million from Garage Technology Ventures and is working on a second round. Also interesting: cFares.com has built a way for an airline to under-bid another airline at the point of sale, thereby providing a below-market price to the consumer. Finally, it has a “Name-Your-Price” feature, where it does an ongoing search online for fares priced at your wish, or lower.

Social networking siteXuQa raises more than previously thought — The youth oriented site, previously slammed by critics, has relaunched; it is focused on model contests, and revolves around a system of “gathering peanuts.” Goal is to become the most popular, and you get up to $1,000 in cash for rewards. We’ve mentioned the company before here. Some doubted it would raise VC money. But who isn’t able to raise money these days? Turns out, it has gotten $1.3 million from BV Capital and Morten Lund, an early Skype investor. It is based in San Francisco, with most of its developers in Karachi, Pakistan.

Yahoo Local revamps — It now lets you write reviews and submit ratings for local businesses, save your favorite locations, view local businesses on one map to see what’s around you and so on. (See more here, which includes a look at Microsoft Live Local Search’s improvements too.)

Yahoo seeks to retain talent — It is setting up an in-house incubator, called Brickhouse, and will be led by Flickr founder Caterina Fake.

Networking company Netgear ships a Skype phone that works with WiFi — The phone started shipping this week for $249.99.

Google’s market share in China is plummeting (see Red Herring article) — We got in touch with Kaiser Kuo, who wrote the piece, and he says the guy who led the study, Mr. Lu, is credible. As a start-up, Google neglected China. Chief executive Eric Schmidt first traveled there last year. More recenlty, Google was criticized for allowing censorship there, but China’s government has played hardball anyway, and now Baidu is eating Google’s lunch.

Google Earth shows you around the Bay Area with TurnHere videos — Google has released a host of new ways to find information while you’re zooming around its virtual globe. You click on the checkbox for “Featured Content” in the Google Earth sidebar, and a whole bunch of multimedia overlays pop up. In the Bay Area, we see the usual National Geographic feature boxes already announced. But now you see a whole bunch of new videos from start-up TurnHere; it’s a good way to check out restaurants or other places before you visit. In fact, TurnHere plans to shoot 25,000 short videos this year, most of them neighborhoods and local attractions. This could get interesting. Here’s a good Merc story on TurnHere. Here’s a story about Google’s Featured Content.

Silicon Valley leaders picked a consortium led by Cisco Systems and IBM to build and operate a free wireless network for up to 2.4 million across the region. But if you look at the details of the deal, it’s unclear how quickly this will come about.

Here is the Mercury News story about the annoucement.

The consortium, called the “Silicon Valley Metro Connect team,” plans to begin building the 1,500 square-mile network this fall, but it will first need to get separate permission from each of the 40 cities that participated in the discussions — not trivial, given that several of those communities have already opted for other providers. The deal struck yesterday was more of a preliminary agreement that the Metro Connect team is an adequate provider, not really a final commitment.

The winning team beat out two other companies, VeriLan and MetroFi, that had reached the final stage. But MetroFi, a start-up that has tried to prove the free WiFi model by focusing on some select markets, already serves San Jose, and most of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale and Cupertino. Indeed, Mountain View and Cupertino said they are unlikely to sign up with the Metro Connect consortium — even though they participated in the negotiations.