VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

New partnership brings Helio to Virgin Mobile — Virgin Mobile USA will acquire the U.S. arm of South korea-based SK Telecom, namely, a mobile operator called Helio, according to the Financial Times. Both mobile operators have been struggling to make money by piggybacking on the infrastructure of existing carriers. This announcement doesn’t offer any sense of how they might bounce back; it just seems loaded with more bad news, like the estimate that Virgin Mobile USA will lose up to 160,000 users in the second quarter of this year.

Starbucks will stop selling CDs — Starbucks is abandoning its plan to become an entertainment hub where customers can pick up a CD or iTunes gift card along with their lattes, reports Silicon Alley Insider. All in-store music offerings should be gone by September. Starbucks customers may not notice, since they weren’t buying many of those CDs anyway, but this is more bad news for the struggling music industry, which once saw Starbucks as an opportunity for growth.

Digg competitor Mixx adds community-building features – Mixx, another site that allows users to vote on media content, is launching a new feature called Mixx Communities. Users can now set up their own Mixx sites, allowing them to build a Mixx community around specific topics. Another competitor called Reddit already enabled user-created pages, and even went a step further last week by going open source.

Intel doesn’t want Vista either — Intel has decided that it won’t upgrade the computers of its 80,000 employees to the latest and arguably least popular version of the Microsoft operating system, according to The New York Times’ anonymous source. That looks pretty bad for Microsoft, since the software company and chip maker have had a famously close relationship; some observers dubbed the pair “Wintel.” On the other hand, it’s not that surprising, because it’s pretty darn hard to find anyone who wants Vista on their computer. (Aside from VentureBeat writer MG Siegler, that is.)

Social network Multiply lets you backup your videos and photos — With an application built on the Adobe AIR platform, Multiply users can automatically backup all the media in selected folders on their computers. The site charges $20 per year for unlimited storage. In some ways, the move makes sense, since there’s so much media hosted by social networks like Multiply anyway.

Craigslist to overtake eBay in 2009? — The online marketplace market (what a mouthful) is going to have a new leader within a year, predicts entrepreneur and blogger Andrew Chen. Spurred by a comment at the GigaOM’s just-finished Structure conference, he looked at traffic numbers from Compete and Quantcast. As eBay traffic falls and Craigslist traffic rises, the latter will overtake the former in 2009, Chen says.

Vint Cerf: Video downloads will be more popular than streaming — The current model of video sites like YouTube won’t last, says Google’s Vint Cerf, the computer scientist frequently described as “the father of the Internet.” In a (streaming) video at Beet.TV, Cerf argues that as web video’s popularity increases and its technology improves, most users will start downloading videos to their computer, rather than streaming them off a site.

Multiply, a social network aimed at 30-somethings, has just announced additional venture funding of $16.6 million

The Boca Raton, Florida-based Multiply struggled after launching in late 2003. It was part of the early pack of social networking companies that sprung up in the wake of path-breaker Friendster. It got some initial buzz, but then MySpace, also part of the pack, blew everyone else away. Multiply has trudged forward, almost in the background.

However, it started growing quickly this year. It had more than ten million unique visitors in August, with two million in the US. The number is expanding ten percent a month, the company says. Unique visitors have doubled since it introduced a more streamlined user interface last year, chief executive Peter Pezaris tells us (see Hitwise graph at bottom of article).

Multiply has seen its number of registered users grow to more than six million, Pezaris says, with around 96 percent of existing users returning at least once a month. Note that the number of unique visitors is higher than the number of registered visitors because Multiply allows users to email, say, photo albums on Multiply to friends who are not members, and let those friends view these pages without registering.

So Multiply becomes part of an ever expanding group of social networking also-rans that venture capitalists want to take a bet on — because it might still prove a break-out success.

When the site first launched it was designed to be an all-in-one site for sharing pictures, videos and other media. Key features were created but buried by a slew of bells and whistles — most importantly, its message boards showing users their friends’ activities was placed in a menu together with other options.

The message boards, as the company has more recently discovered, have proven vital for gaining and keeping user attention. Present since the site launched, this feature lets you distribute photos, videos, comments and other information to all of your friends and friends-of-friends. Then Multiply displays this information based on its algorithms for weighing the relationship between you and the people in your Multiply network. The result is a stream of information that users care about most from the people closest to them, flowing through their personal message boards.

The company, however, didn’t give this feature prominence until last November, two months after Facebook launched its own version, called “news feeds.”

At that time, Multiply made its messaging system its users’ homepage, like Facebook (see the company’s sample below). On both sites, this feature has forced users to see what their friends are up to whenever they log in, serving as bait to get users to click through to friends profile pages, photo albums and other items of interest.

Unlike Facebook or Myspace, the median age of a Multiply user is 35, according to Pezaris, which shows the site’s focus on private, close connections is what this demographic wants. Besides the message boards, Multiply has developed all of its features specifically for networks of friends and family, without the voyeurism of MySpace or the college dorm feel of Facebook. It lets you define your contacts as family, friends, acquaintances, etc. so you can decide who gets access to things like your photo collection; when you share information on Multiply, you have the option to choose exactly which type of person gets to see it in their message board. The average Multiply user has around 1000 people in their network, ranging from close relationships like a spouse, to more distant ones, like a friend of a friend at work, according to Pezaris.

Besides larger social networks, like Myspace, Facebook, Hi5, etc., competitors include Friendster (which is also growing fast), which claims to have already nailed the 30-something market, TeeBeeDee for people over 40 and Eons for people over 50.

The big question for Multiply is whether it can distinguish itself as more 30-somethings join Facebook and other sites. Multiply didn’t rank in Comscore’s recent study of the top social networks worldwide, released in July, because it didn’t yet have the 10 million unique visitors required to be included in the study.

The funding round was led by VantagePoint Venture Partners, with Point Judith Capital and previous investor Transcosmos Investments participating.

VantagePoint’s David Scott Carlick will join Multiply’s board. Carlick was formerly Chairman of Intermix Media, the parent company of Myspace before it sold to News Corp. in 2005.

There’s a NYT story about social networks, including Multiply, that target “seniors” here (via IHT).