VentureBeat

Sling Media, known primarily for the SlingBox, a device that can stream your home television signal to you anywhere in the world, is branching onto the web today with a limited beta release of Sling.com, a video portal that will let users not only watch premium and live video content, but also share clips of their favorite shows with friends.

Sling.com will give users access to a library of video content — movies, television and popular clips from 60 content partners — making it competitive with services like Hulu, Joost and Jadsters. What is unique, however, is the inclusion of PC-based SlingPlayer software that will let users watch their live or DVR’ed TV through the site (if they already own a SlingBox, that is), as well as an eventual Clip+Sling option that will let them record and share bits and pieces of video content with their friends through a social network.

Combined, these features might not be enough to make a serious run at popular YouTube, with its user-generated content, but Hulu and its ilk should sit up and take notice. The site isn’t fully baked yet. A select group of users received an invitation to a private beta yesterday, nearly two years after the company announced its intention to launch a portal. There will probably be several rounds of feedback before the site sees the full light of day.

This is just one of several ideas the company has thrown at the public in the last couple weeks, the biggest of which is the SlingCatcher, a $300 device that will let viewers watch any video existing on the web on their living room televisions. They aren’t alone in this pursuit. Startup ZeeVee is marketing a set-top box that will deliver whatever is on your computer’s screen to any television, and the Digital Entertainer EVA8000 by Netgear will do largely the same. As of yet, the pricey Sling device doesn’t seem to differ. As a footnote to their other developments, Sling last week shipped its new SlingBox PRO-HD hardware, capable of catching and streaming HD programming.

Data Robotics has raised $15 million in a fourth round of funding for its consumer-focused Drobo backup storage business.

The Santa Clara, Calif., company makes “data robots,” or external backup storage units that make it easy to back up data on a computer or a network of computers. The lead investor is Greylock Partners. Other participants include new investor New Enterprise Associates, as well as existing investors RRE Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. To date, the company has raised $43 million in four rounds.

The company’s storage products are aimed at consumers and small businesses that don’t want to deal with technical hassles when backing up large amounts of data.

There are a host of rivals for storage inside the home or small businesses. Big companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Seagate and Netgear are diving into the networked storage market for the home. Most use a technology known as “RAID” to redundantly store data, so no data is lost even if one drive fails. But Data Robotics’ “BeyondRAID,” which uses virtualization technology to create storage that adapts to available disks. While RAID software is often complex to use and is geared toward enterprise technicians, the BeyondRAID software is simple.

Drobo holds up to four 3.5-inch hard drives. It hooks up to a Mac, Linux or Windows computer via USB port, Firewire, or gigabit ethernet wires. It shows up as a single external hard drive and doesn’t require a software installation. Unlike with RAID arrays, you can use different-size hard drives. It has green, yellow and red lights indicating how much storage is on a drive, while a blinking light is a warning not to remove a drive. You can add a drive at any time just by inserting one into a bay. Doing the same thing with a RAID array takes a lot more time. If a drive fails, you take it out and put a new one in.

To share it on a network, you simply plug it into the network via an Ethernet wire. You can then share data on the Drobo drive with other devices on the network. DroboShare can support two connected Drobos at a time, meaning the networked storage can grow to as much as 32 terabytes.

The company has sold more than 30,000 Drobo data robots in the past year, said Geoff Barrall, chief executive of the company. Many of the customers come from high-storage businesses such as video production, education, medical, photography, legal, government as well as consumers. The drives start at $499. The company was founded 3.5 years ago.

Barrall said the company will use the money to expand its sales, overseas operations and product development.

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.