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Obama Bay Area event sets fund-raising record — Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama visited the Bay Area and racked up $7.8 million in fund-raising, a record for a single event, according to Draper Fisher Jurvestson’s Steve Jurvetson, who, with his wife Karla Jurvetson, donated in $9,200.

Xbox 360 sells out in Japan — The Microsoft gaming console has never been able to gain a strong foothold in the country which prefers its own Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation 3. Perhaps the tides are turning — or perhaps this shortage was staged, as many commenters are speculating in the comments on Kotaku. Either way, there will be more in the country next month.

Hulu closer to going international? — The popular NBC and Fox-based video streaming site is apparently trying to hire people to expand to other countries, according to GigaOm. That will remove perhaps the biggest knock people have against it — if you’re outside the U.S., you can’t watch it!

Tsavo gets funding — The new southern California start-up that is buying up content and advertising start-ups, akin to Demand Media, raised $20 million from American Capital. The start-up is the latest project of Michael Jones, who has just left AOL, where he worked for two years after AOL bought his previous text-voice-video chat software company, Userplane, for about $40M. TechCrunch has more.

American Airlines takes Wi-Fi to the skies — The airline has started rolling out its in-flight Internet service powered by Gogo, according to CNET. For now it’s only on non-stop flights between New York and San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles and New York and Miami.

iPhone update 2.0.2 is meant to address 3G issues — Suspicions that the new software update was meant to address iPhone 3G connection issues have been confirmed by an Apple representative talking to USA Today’s Ed Baig.

Salesforce.com posts solid numbers — It’s the first software as a service company to exceed a $1 billion annual revenue run rate, according to the release. It saw record revenue of $263 million, up 49% year-over-year.

VC in the middle of online escort scandal — William Ferretti, the co-founder of Medstar Television and a self-described venture capitalist, faces felony charges. Vallywag has more.

Don’t tweet for money when raising funding — Jason Goldberg, the founder of SocialMedian, sent a tweet (Twitter message) out this morning letting people know he was raising more funding and to contact him if you were interested in participating. One problem, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, who is also a lawyer called him out on that being illegal because it was technically an unregistered public offering. The tweet was deleted.

BioImagene gets a new round — The digital pathology company has landed a $26 million fourth round. Burrill & Co. led the round with Ascension Health Ventures, National Healthcare Services, Artiman Ventures and ICCP Ventures also participating.

Personalized talk radio company Stitcher launches an iPhone app — Watch the video below for more.

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ComScore: Facebook users triple in Japan during the last year – But Mixi.jp is still number one, with 12.7 million visitors compared to Facebook’s 538,000.

MySpace and NBC select citizen journalists — They’ve chosen Matt Britten and Sara Pat Badgley to cover the Democratic and Republican Conventions, respectively, as part of the companies’ Decision08 contest. Britten and Badgley’s videos and blog posts will appear on MySpace, and possibly on the MSNBC TV channel and website.

Mobile subscribers to hit 5 billion in 2011 — That forecast comes from Infonetics Research, which also predicts that mobile broadband will grow at a compound rate of 104 percent every year until then.

Google establishes Latin American HQ in Brazil — The country is reportedly Google’s fastest growing region. That’s particularly impressive since Google only opened its Brazilian office three years ago.

Private equity firm Blackstone creates a cleantech arm — This group could help provide the late-stage investments that cleantech companies need.

Did Facebook try to acquire StudiVZ? — That’s what a former executive at the German social networking site claims. The implication is that Facebook is only suing StudiVZ because it wants more of the German market, not because (as alleged) StudiVZ copied Facebook’s look, feel and features.

Department of Energy supports green building — The federal agency will contribute to the $50,000 prize for the winning company in the California Clean Tech Open’s green building contest. That amount, of course, is only a drop in the bucket compared to the funding most green building startups actually need.

Philadelphia Inquirer: So much for that Internet news thing — The newspaper has a new policy decreeing that except for breaking news, articles won’t run on the website until after they have appeared in the Inquirer’s print edition.

Magnify.net makes video network bigger, faster — The startup, which helps customers include video channels on their websites, just added MySpace, Hulu, Vimeo, College Humor, Howcast and MTV Overdrive to its content network. That network supposedly runs twice as quickly now.

Hulu, the online streaming video site backed by NBC and Fox, has been nothing short of successful. The usage numbers are very good and the amount of free, ad-supported content is arguably better. If there is a knock that can be made against it though (besides its lack of availability outside the United States), it’s in the department of high definition content.

Though Hulu launched its “HD Gallery” back in December, it basically only contained movie trailers. It was more of a proof-of-concept then a feature. Today, the site rolled out some actual content in HD including popular shows like The Office, 30 Rock, Heroes and 24. Unfortunately, each of these shows only has one episode a piece in HD.

ABC.com by comparison offers entire seasons of some of its shows in HD. However, its player requires a seperate download while Hulu does not (assuming you have the latest version of Flash). ABC is planning to launch a revamped player in time for this fall.

Hulu does off all of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the hit web-only show created by Joss Whedon in HD.

Perhaps even better is that none of the shows in HD currently have advertisements attached to them. This seems a bit odd given that this is how Hulu is able to stream its shows for free, but apparently this will only be the case “for a limited time,” a Hulu PR representative told NewTeeVee.

While some may argue that this isn’t true HD video (it’s 720p video likely at a relatively low bit-rate), I just watched the episode of 24 full-screen on my 20-inch monitor and I have to say, it looked absolutely great. As someone who watched all of season 2 of Heroes on Hulu in standard definition, I can definitely say this is a huge improvement.

It’s so good in fact, that when Hulu adds more content in HD I may just have to go out and buy a Mac Mini to hook up to my HD television to play it on there. Assuming one of the many set top boxes doesn’t gain Hulu support first.

We’re one week away from the opening of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. Most of us stateside likely won’t be making the long trip, but there are a few interesting ways to keep up to date on the action around the web.

First and foremost, NBC will be streaming over 2,000 hours of live content and 3,000 hours of on-demand video to the Internet via its site NBCOlympics.com, reports CNET. This will not only be a big test for Microsoft’s Flash competitor Silverlight, which will power the site’s web video player, but also for the viability of large-scale live web video itself.

Earlier this year, CBS earned rave reviews for its streaming of the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament on the web. It was so popular that some employers even had to block access to the site. However, on the opposite end, MLB.tv revamped its site for live baseball game coverage this year and has been marred with problems.

Also looking to capitalize on the excitement is Google. Today, Google’s Maps team updated its data to include new imagery footage above Beijing that is less than two weeks old, according to the Google Lat Long Blog. The new images look great. (See below)

View Larger Map

This Google Maps and Google Earth (the imagery is updated for both) China coverage update is somewhat surprising for two reasons:

First, as Google itself notes, “it’s very hard to get good satellite photos of Beijing due to clouds and other atmospheric conditions.” By that it means pollution, which is a major problem in the city. So much so that the use of cars has been restricted to try and curb emissions leading up to the games. Google credits its partners GeoEye and DigitalGlobe with cutting through the fog (or smog).

Second, it’s no secret that China is notoriously restrictive when it comes to the web and access to its people. High resolution satellite imagery of the country would seem like something China would definitely be against, but perhaps it made some compromises for the Olympic coverage. Apparently the areas with the new coverage are Beijing, Tianjin, Shenyang and Quindao.

There has also been a FriendFeed room set up to cover the Olympics live and on-location. Blogger Chad Catacchio (also the marketing director at ZoomProspector), is over in China for the games and will be piping in live updates, news and pictures among other things into his Beijing Olympics FriendFeed room.

Covering events using FriendFeed has worked well for us in the past, it should be interesting to see how the Olympics unfold on the other side of the world.

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Yahoo has a bad day, but it could have been much worse — The Internet giant announced its earnings today and fell short of expectations, but only by about a penny-a-share. Net income was down 19 percent from the same quarter last year. Still, considering it no longer has a Carl Icahn-led hostile takeover to worry about, the company can — and more importantly, will live with these numbers.

Icahn’s wild weekend — While Yahoo was busy breathing a sigh of relief now that the Icahn takeover “distraction” (as Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang called it on the earnings call today) is behind them, Icahn got back to writing about Yahoo on his blog. His new post is entitled “How I Spent My Weekend” — no, really. He’ll be here all week folks, try the veal.

Shuffle at the top of Etsy — The online marketplace for handmade things has announced that Maria Thomas, its former chief operating officer, will now be its chief executive. Founder Rob Kalin will now be the chief creative officer. It also announced Chad Dickerson as its new chief technology officer. Dickerson leaves his job as the head of the Yahoo Brickhouse special projects group. Yes, that’s another Yahoo exec who is leaving.

Sugar ends its relationship with NBC — The female-oriented blog network has decided to take charge of its own advertising. Too bad that Lauren Zalaznick, president of Women and Lifestyle Entertainment networks for NBC Universal, just played up its partnership with Sugar in announcing the BlogHer deal last week.

GigaOM scoops up a mobile blog — jkOnTheRun joins the Giga Omni Media network of blogs. Read about it from Om Malik himself.

MySpace announces support of OpenID — If you have an account with MySpace you can now use it to login to any other site supporting OpenID.

Ryan Block leaves Engadget — The editor of the popular gadget blog (left) is leaving to start an undisclosed new project with another former Engadget editor, Peter Rojas.

Google walking directions — In the spirit of summer, Google now allows you to get directions tailored for those who may not want to drive or take public transportation to a destination.

Joost goes to China — Maybe it’ll fare better there than it has in the U.S. NewTeeVee has the details.

Twitter acknowledges spam issue — The micro-messaging service is fully aware that marketers and others are signing up for accounts and mass-friending people. It does not like that, as it writes in its blog.

Comedian Jimmy Fallon is taking over NBC’s “Late Night” show next year when current host Conan O’Brien moves up to replace Jay Leno on the “Tonight Show.” Producer Lorne Michaels, apparently unsure if Fallon is ready to make the jump to nightly television, has a novel idea: Work out his kinks on the web first.

Fallon will debut this fall on a site to be determined, with 5- to 10-minute episodes every night, according to the New York Times. Plenty of other television shows have “webisodes,” short clips of original footage from a television series that play on the web, but this is the first time the web will be used as a minor leagues of sort for the big leagues of traditional television.

From the New York Times piece:

Mr. Michaels, the long-time boss of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” who also serves as executive producer of “Late Night,” told television reporters here Sunday that he wants Mr. Fallon to work out as many of the rough spots in his presentation as possible in performances on a website.

So if a show is performing poorly, perhaps studios should now have the option to send it down to the minors (the web) to get in some work before coming back up to play with the big boys?

It’s not a horrible idea, it’s just humorous.

These Jimmy Fallon web shows could last months, as Jay Leno may not step down until June 2009. That’s a lot of practice.

[photo: 20th Century Fox's Fever Pitch]

NBC.com will soon begin offering show-specific streaming data for its site. That’s great, it will help advertisers know exactly who is watching what so they can better target individual shows. One problem is that I don’t watch any shows on NBC.com, I can’t figure out who would stream shows there when you can on the other NBC-backed online video site, Hulu.

NBC.com isn’t bad for streaming full episodes of shows, in fact it’s much better than ABC.com. But both are behind Hulu in terms of functionality, ease-of-use and content. (Hulu not only has shows from NBC, but from Fox and its affiliated channels as well — and it has movies.) I only see NBC.com as being useful if you want to use its direct download functionality to download shows rather than stream them.

Hulu seems poised to be the future of online streaming for full episodes of television shows. If I were an advertiser I would want that data.

When asked about the possibility of this data being released for NBC shows on Hulu as well, NBC’s media contact, Joe Libonati, told me, “that would be a question for Hulu.”

Apparently the two don’t talk much.

[photo: NBC's show "Chuck"]

With over a billion residents, India is a market that Western companies can’t ignore. The latest big media conglomerate to make a significant play in the region is NBC Universal, which has struck a partnership with New Delhi Television Limited (NDTV), India’s largest news and infotainment network. The deal, worth $150 million, gives NBCU an indirect stake of 26 percent of NDTV.

This means NDTV has a valuation significantly larger than when Velocity Interactive Group put a seed investment in of $20 million just nine months ago. The company is growing very fast.

NBCU saw this growth and felt such a large investment was justified for an expansion into entertainment and convergence, Velocity partner Ross Levinsohn told us. NBCU gives huge amount of brand and library access of English content and movies to NDTV, Levinsohn went on to note.

The convergence of both companies’ strengths into the online world will be part of the plan as well. Perhaps this will hasten NBC’s roll out its online video site Hulu to other parts of the world?

With the deal, NBCU will have an option to increase its holding in NDTV up to 50 percent in two years. This could be a smart play given NDTV’s quick growth and planned expansion to the Middle East, Malaysia and even the United States.

As I mentioned the other day, I use Hulu quite often to watch some of my favorite shows online. Judging from the usage data, so do a lot of other people.

Television network ABC however does not have content on Hulu. You can search for it on the site, but to watch you must go to ABC.com and use the ABC player. The experience, when compared to Hulu, is awful.

ABC is trying to change that perception by unveiling a new online video player. It will allow for full-screen playback, closed captioning and perhaps most importantly, the ability to embed video on other sites — or so it claims. NewTeeVee is reporting that ABC.com won’t actually allow for true embedding of content and will instead provide code that embeds a link to open its player in another window. I have one word for this: Lame.

Hulu has allowed for actual embedding since its launch and it is a nice feature. You’d be hard-pressed to find an online video service out there today that doesn’t allow for embeds of some kind. I foresee ABC relenting on this and eventually allowing it.

The new player will be tested over the summer before launching for the new fall season of shows.

Using the current ABC.com player results in the following experience:

First of all you have to agree to an End User License Agreement (EULA) to access the player. Then you have to install a Java applet. Then there is a significant loading time for the content after which you have to hit another button assuring your computer is up to par (for HD content at least). The advertisements are a lot longer than they are on Hulu, and more intrusive. It’s just a bad experience all around.

ABC was the first of the major networks to launch an online video player in 2006. It is the dominant singular network streaming site, according to Reuters. However, with the speed at which Hulu is growing, ABC.com could soon be an afterthought. Hulu simply offers much more content (it has content from a few different networks and cable channels, as well as some feature films) in a more accessible way.

While the new player should be an improvement, I have a much easier suggestion for ABC: Partner up with NBC and Fox and get on Hulu, now.

Having just moved into a new apartment, I was without cable television for a few weeks. So what did I do to watch some of the network shows such as The Office that I’m addicted to? I turned to Hulu, the streaming video service that was started last year by NBC Universal and News Corp. (owners of Fox). Given some new usage numbers just released, it appears others are tuning into Hulu with me.

Nielsen Net Ratings numbers (by way of TechCrunch) show that Hulu streamed over 63 million videos in April. The average user watched over two hours of video in the month. These are both very good numbers. In fact, they make Hulu the leader among all network sites in videos streamed and engagement time for the month.

While many were skeptical about Hulu when it was announced, it has since won over many of its critics. Remember, Hulu came about shortly after NBC announced its intention to pull its content from iTunes, the most popular online video store. NBC also pulled its content from YouTube. To many, Hulu seemed like an ill-advised experiment to stick it to Apple and Google. Instead, NBC has been able to create a worthwhile service with a killer feature: free premium content.

Having just moved into a new place, I have no television yet. Normally I’d turn to iTunes to catch my favorites, but the problem is that many of those shows are on NBC — the same NBC that famously cut ties with iTunes six months ago. Instead, I visit the NBC and Fox’s free video streaming site Hulu, which is exactly what NBC wants. So why does the company keep teasing us with the possibility of a return to Apple?

For example, NBC is now offering iPhone users the ability to stream select shows for free to their devices, Silicon Alley Insider has uncovered. When it actually works, the quality is awful, but still, why the olive branch to Apple supporters?

Another example: Yesterday, it was revealed that NBC was offering several of its shows on the UK version of iTunes. If you’re attempting to take a stance against iTunes, does it really make sense to partner up with the service again, even if it is in another country?

Back in January, when the writer’s strike was still going on, NBC chief executive Jeff Zucker told the Financial Times that NBC wants to be back in business with Apple. Everyone assumed that comment meant it was a forgone conclusion that the two would get back together, yet all we get are teases.

To add insult to injury, NBC also announced yesterday that it was teaming up with Microsoft to bring its content to the Zune portable media player. The per-episode price? $1.99, the same as iTunes. (Though, unlike Apple, Microsoft is reportedly open to shifting the price based on varying content.)

I fully expect to see NBC content back on iTunes at some point this year, but I have to wonder why the two are dancing around it. You can have NBC content on iTunes, but not in the United States. You can have NBC content on your iPhone, but not on iTunes. NBC doesn’t like Apple’s pricing structure, but then sets the same exact price with Microsoft for the Zune store.

Perhaps NBC is waiting to see how successful the Apple TV device will be with Apple’s new movie studio deals in place. Or perhaps Zucker just wants to make Apple chief executive Steve Jobs squirm a little more as the Hulu’s positive reviews keep coming in.

[photo: NBC]

Pretty much every James Bond film with Pierce Brosnan seemed to be a cross between a movie and a BMW/Omega/fill-in-the-blank brand advertisement. Even though the last film, Casino Royale, was more tastefully done, there were still those scenes where a product like Sony’s Blu-ray was prominently displayed in a shot.

Product placement has long been a part of film and television productions — and now it’s coming to the web. NBC Universal is creating web-only video programming that will prominently feature sponsor’s products, according to CNET.

While video on the web is popular, companies have been struggling with ways to monetize it. For example, Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.6 billion, but last year made as little as $20 million in revenue from it. YouTube recently launched a campaign with the new film Get Smart to place ads for the movie on YouTube pages where humorous clips reside (our coverage).

That plan along with this product placement idea shows companies are at least thinking beyond the traditional 30-second ads found on television, but will consumers be turned away from advertisements in these shows?

Working with the Omnicom Group, one of the largest advertising and marketing companies, NBC will begin to roll out these new shows on its digital properties such as Hulu (our coverage) in the coming months. The first such show will be a sci-fi show called Gemini Division.

Acura, Intel, Microsoft, and UPS are already on board as sponsors. Expect to see actress Rosario Dawson (the star of the show) driving her Acura to a UPS store to ship her new Intel Core 2 Duo Windows-based PC.

[photo: MGM]

(Update: The amount is $2.5 million, according to regulatory filings.)

4INFO, a Silicon Valley company that lets you search for information using text messaging, has become the official service partner for media giant NBC Universal. It has also received an undisclosed financial investment from the media giant’s arm, Peacock Equity.

While questions remain about how popular text messaging, also known as Short Message Service or SMS, will remain as more mobile broadband services are introduced, 4INFO is on a roll.

This deal means all of NBC’s SMS alerts for information published from its websites, including iVillage, NBC Sports, its mobile sites, and of all of its movie and interactive TV sites will go through 4INFO. SMS ads — text ads that appear with SMS messages — will be sold by both companies. Advertisers will be able to place ads across NBC’s TV, web and SMS ad inventory.

San Mateo-based 4INFO already has similar deals with Gannett and six other media properties, but this deal is wider-ranging, and NBC already has SMS inventory that can feature SMS ads.

More than 500 other companies and developers also use 4INFO.

4INFO is also taking a strategic investment from NBC’s Peacock Equity as part of the deal. The amount wasn’t specified, but Peacock said it was in the range of its typical investment of between $3 million to $25 million. The investment was made at on same terms as 4INFO’s previous round of capital, which included Gannett. Previous backers include DFJ and US Venture Partners. Sand Hill Capital also invested in the latest round.

We asked chief executive Zaw Thet about the long-term prospects for SMS. With more advanced mobile data services exploding around the world, its possibly people may upgrade from SMS to use richer or more complex communications systems like mobile IM, or email — to date, hampered by the state of cellular networks. He says that even in European and Asian countries that have more advanced mobile services, the number of SMS messages sent continues to rise. The reason: text messages are still the fastest, easiest way to contact a mobile user and SMS software is installed on every handset.

Down the road, the company hopes to use its connection with users to gather more demographic and behavioral data about its users so it can offer them more targeted advertising.