VentureBeat

Roomba technologist moves to new robotic venture — Rodney Brooks, chief technology officer and co-founder at iRobot, is moving on to a new company called Heartland Robots, which will work to “rehumanize and revitalize manufacturing.”

Zombie networks surge ahead — Botnet networks of infected computers have tripled in size over the past three months, according to a tracker, the Shadowserver Foundation.

Newspapers giving business to ad startups — Faced with falling revenues, some of the biggest dailies, including the Chicago Tribune and LA Times, are going to startups like Creative Circle Advertising Solutions, Gumiyo and IQZone in hopes of winning back advertisers, according to VentureWire (sub. req’d).

There.com adds Mac and messaging support — There.com, a competitor to Second Life, now works with Macs. The company also added an instant messaging tool called ThereIM, which can communicate with others either within or outside of the virtual world, as well as control some aspects of the game.

Moses Joseph, VC at Anila Fund, convicted of fraud — A former general manager at Palo Alto’s Anila Fund, Moses Joseph, was convicted on Thursday of 22 felony counts, including theft and securities fraud. He faces up to 28 years in jail.

Avago Technologies files for $400M IPO — Singaporean chip maker Avago is planning an initial public offering in the U.S., although it has not decided on a share price or date. The company, which primarily makes LEDs and other lighting products, was once part of Agilent.

Codexis withdraws its IPO — Don’t get too excited about the IPO market. As Avago goes in, biocatalyst outfit Codexis is backing out, citing difficult market conditions. The company plans to make pharmaceuticals, biofuels and other products from its process.

NebuAd’s CEO hits the road – Controversial advertising startup NebuAd has lost its CEO, atop its many other problems.

Amphire merges with iTradeNetwork — Two supply chain startups that mainly work in food and hospitality, Amphire and iTradeNetwork, have merged their operations, taking on the latter’s name.

Mobile social network Buzzd teams up with Virgin Mobile — Buzzd will provide an ad-supported entertainment service to Virgin, combining user-generated content with material from Time Out Magazine and Flavorpill.

Spending in IT trends downward — Growth in spending is slipping from 7 percent to 5 percent this year, according to a Goldman Sachs report summarized on CNET. Cost cutting measures are getting the most new investment, with server virtualization topping the list.

Google may start auto or music service — Having successfully predicted that Google would start Google Health and a virtual world, which turned out to be Lively, research firm Hitwise has turned back to its data to predict the search giant’s next moves. The results suggest something related to either autos (perhaps bad news for these two ) or music (which could affect many more companies).

Yahoo may want to buy Demand; Demand may not want to sell — Demand Media, a large domain speculator and advertising business that qualifies as one of the Internet’s most heavily-funded companies, may be on Yahoo’s acquisition radar, reports TechCrunch. One small problem: Demand don’t wanna sell, at least according to All Things D. Were the acquisition anything more than pipe dreams, Yahoo might offer up to $2 billion.

Senator grills ad startup over privacy — “Deep” targeting firm NebuAd may not survive in its current form, if the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee has his way. The Senator took issue with the startup’s tracking of users’ surfing in a hearing on Wednesday morning, and especially with the company’s opt-out policy, which he said should be opt-in, only. We’ve previously covered the company’s technology in some depth. Separately, Facebook’s privacy officer testified on his own company (transcript here), and Google and Microsoft said that they would support new privacy legislation.

Senate approves expansion of Internet surveillance –Also on Wednesday, the Senate passed expanded wiretapping provisions to allow more government surveillance of citizens, just hours after the Commerce Committee was criticizing businesses for making efforts to do the same. Neither opt-ins nor -outs from FBI snooping were discussed.

Gaming investor? Headed to E3? Don’t bother — Long-running and highly successful gaming conference E3 has turned into a lame duck, according to Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter, who told TheStreet.com that the event is “virtually useless for retail and investors.” Of course, some might argue the booth babes are reason enough for a visit.

Could all Internet traffic be encrypted? — If the famed Swedish file-sharing community the Pirate Bay has its way, the answer is yes. The group is proposing a network-level encryption plan called “Transparent end-to-end encryption for the Internets”, or IPETEE, in response to a local law that allows Sweden to snoop on the Internet communications of its citizens. Incidentally, the idea would also put a stick in the spokes of US surveillance programs, as reported above. But the plan may never see the light of day; NewTeeVee has more, including a brief history of TPB’s failed schemes.

Former Virgin exec joins Valhalla to invest in mobile — Saj Cherian, a former executive at Virgin Mobile USA and NBC Universal, has joined Virginia-based Valhalla Partners as a principal. Cherian will focus on mobile investments. MocoNews has a brief interview.

Venture capitalists: Now with less arrogance — The latest bubble to deflate for VCs is their egos, according to the Silicon Valley Venture Capital Confidence Index. Early-stage investors are bummed out over a lack of exits, particularly through IPOs. The full .PDF report is here, while ZDNet has a shorter summary.

Zimbra wins a battle in the educational email market — Yahoo-owned Zimbra has won a pretty significant victory with a decision by Stanford University to use the service over its competitors, which TechCrunch names as Gmail and Microsoft Exchange.

A tale of private equity gone horribly wrong — John Devaney lost his investors’ money. Not part of it; not most of it; all of it. Normally investors would pull out when things looked bad, but Devaney froze their funds before managing to lose them. Today’s feel-good private equity story is at the New York Times.

Here’s the latest action:

1) Bizarre claim made by academic: France shipping nuclear waste to U.S.
2) Google up against new rivals, which can see what you surf
3) MingleNow is leaving the party
4) Solar’s scaling challenges may have an answer
5) Incandescent lighting heading for the door
6) Gaming feud could cause aftershocks
7) Freewebs relaunches as Webs.com
8) More money heads to Hollywood

U.S. denies France is shipping nuclear waste to South Carolina — At the ThinkGreen conference in San Francisco, University of Florida professor Yogi Goswami (pictured left), a former President of the International Solar Energy Society, made the bizarre claim that “a large majority of the nuclear waste from France is actually shipped to the U.S,” specifically to Savannah River Lab in South Carolina — and that not even the Department of Energy knows about it (story carried by Cleantech.com). Coming from an accomplished academic, at an investors conference, you’d think there is something to this (we talked with the Cleantech folks, and they say Goswami is respected). But the DOE denied Goswami’s claim, calling it inaccurate and misleading. Anyone know anything about this? We’ll do some digging, meantime.

Watch out, Google, the wolves are circling — The online ad business is hot, and there potential rivals to Google are numerous. Internet service providers like CenturyTel and Embarq Communications are starting to use their innate advantages to do ads, with targeting that really works: Since they serve their customers with internet service, they can track every Web site the customer visits. That’s far more than Google can do. The Wall Street Journal reports on their progress; for more on the actual technology, check out our own article on NebuAd, one of the technology companies behind so-called “deep packet inspection” techniques.

MingleNow decides to leave the party – A social network for the bar and club scene (our coverage) will close on January 7th, according to their blog, a little more than a year after launching. Perhaps nobody expected it to really succeed (see the comments on our original post), but Read/Write Web says an anonymous source tipped them off that the site was actually forced to close by Yahoo, which bought BlueLithium, owner of MingleNow.

Solar power may not find large-scale success — At least in its current form, says the American Scientist Online. The power required to manufacture photovoltaic equipment may make it difficult to scale installations quickly enough to satisfy global power demands. However, an upcoming technology called dye-sensitized cells may be cheap enough to solve an early production crunch. Check out the original article for more.

Incandescents speeding their exit from the market — As the above story implies, efficiency is a big part of the cleantech equation, which is why everyone from the Department of Energy to Wal-Mart is trying to eliminate incandescent lighting. It’s no news that initiatives to replace them with compact fluorescent bulbs and LEDS are going well, but an update on the progress is always nice; for the best one lately, check out this article on Chemical & Engineering News.

Gaming feud could have industry consequences — The peremptory and unexplained canning of an editor by popular gaming review site GameSpot may seem like a minor scuffle at first, but it could have broader implications for gaming as a whole, says GigaOm. The controversy the firing caused may push the industry further along the path to casual games with a broader market appeal and hurting the business of established gaming websites.

Freewebs launches social gaming, changes name to Webs — Freewebs, a social media company that hosts personal websites, is relaunching itself as Webs.com. The new site will include a social publishing site called Pagii, the old Freewebs site, and the Social Gaming Network, which offers games for play on the site or on social networks like Facebook. More coverage from Techcrunch.

More investment going to Hollywood — A new $200 million private equity fund raised by FilmBankers International LLC will invest directly in the production of independent films in the United States. The firm is still fundraising, but plans to use the money for films with a budget range of $10-20 million. FilmBankers bases funding decisions on a “credit score”, which attempts to predict the potential success of a film. The fund is part of a new wave of private capital headed for Hollywood, with hopes of outmaneuvering the time-worn blockbuster model of the big studios. News via TheDeal.com.

(Updated, to include precise amount of funding, and reporting about privacy controls NebuAd has implemented not included in the first version of this story)

NebuAd, a controversial advertising firm, emerged from secrecy today to announce it has received $20.5 million in a second round of financing.

Its “targeted” advertising technology is likely to add fuel to the debate about privacy. The service can be used by your Internet service provider to get an unprecedented look at the types of Web sites you visit. While it will bring smiles to the faces of marketers, it may enrage people worried their privacy is already non-existent on the Web.

Targeted advertising usually relies on “cookies” that a Web site places on your browser when you visit it. The cookies can afterwards track which individual pages the visitor accessed. Cookies have a number of limitations, not least their inability to see what a user has done away from that particular website. Technology developed by Redwood City, Calif.’s NebuAd  a different technique called “deep packet inspection,” which can be likened to poking through all the mail that arrives at or leaves your house to get an idea of who you correspond with, and what you tell them. NebuAd offers its packet inspection software to internet service providers, the services you use to access the internet. NebuAd then turns around and provides the traffic information to advertising networks.

Surfers visiting pages with ads from NebuAd-affiliated networks will find the ads more likely to be meaningful to them; a user researching electric cars, for instance, might be less likely to see an ad for an SUV, and more likely to see one for a Prius.

NebuAd’s CEO, Bob Dykes, claims that such targeted advertising is superior to even the best offered today by companies like Tacoda, which collect cookies from all the webpages that connect to a particular ad network. Tacoda was acquired in July by AOL for a reported $300 million. NebuAd’s technology will collect more information than Tacoda’s cookies do. The more targeted the advertising, the more money can be generated — up to dozens of times what an untargeted method might be worth. Under NebuAd’s system, all stand to take a cut of the enlarged pie.

The funding was led by Sierra Ventures. Menlo Ventures, which provided the company’s first $11 million round of funding in May, also participated. Founded in early 2006, NebuAd has about 90 employees.

In an interview with VentureBeat, NebuAd’s Dykes said the company has taken measures to avoid collecting information users are uncomfortable with. For instance, any traffic going to or from websites with pornography or information on illegal acts would be filtered out. NebuAd’s data is also collected in a way that it can’t be used by anyone to identify individual users, even if it fell into the wrong hands, he said. As data about an individual’s Internet behavior flows NebuAd’s appliance, the individual is represented merely as a hash number, he said. It doesn’t know the individual’s name, because it hasn’t asked for it from the ISP.

Privacy advocates, who have long decried even the tracking performed by cookies, aren’t happy with closer scrutiny of surfer’s habits — but are apparently consoled by NebuAd’s promises to keep the information anonymous. Scott Bradner, a technology security officer at Harvard backtracked on an original critique in Network World, in which he called the approach “disgusting.” He now says NebuAd is acting responsibly.

ISPs are also required to mail or email documents to their users asking for permission to track their surfing habits, Dykes said. There is more than one way of going about getting agreements, however, and our concern is if ISPs prefer to simply bury a clause in the inevitable legal agreements that accompany every modern service.

Finally, users will be able to permanently opt-out through a separate NebuAd service called Fair Eagle, assuming they know of its existence. NebuAd, in response, says its opt-out option is obvious enough; it is stated on its Web site.

NebuAd isn’t alone in attempting to pull packet information from ISPs, although it has taken the most funding so far. Vancouver-based Adzilla uses the same techniques, and has so far signed up eight ISPs, according to its homepage. NebuAd, which is scheduled to have its official launch in November, has been testing on several ISPs, but wouldn’t tell us how many.

Now that the deep packet inspection cat is out of the bag, it isn’t likely to climb back in, despite the objections of onlookers. Owners of websites and ISPs will find the technology well-nigh irresistible, if it delivers on its promises of valuable, always-targeted advertising. Advanced tracking also holds promise for ad-supported internet access, which has not yet successfully implemented.

For more information about targeted advertising and ad networks, visit this VentureBeat post, written by contributor Jeremy Liew.