VentureBeat

VentureBeat’s previously mentioned syndication deal with the New York Times went live today. Take a look at the screenshot. The Gray Lady is featuring our stories in a mini-section in the homepage of its Technology section. Click on one of our story links and you’ll be taken to the full version, hosted on the Times’ site.

We’ll only be syndicating some stories, though. This self-congratulatory post, for example, won’t be showing up. In order for us to blast you with the full firehose of our content, you’ll still have to visit us here, or subscribe to our RSS feed, or happen upon one of the many spam blogs that plagiarize us wholesale.

Startups are mostly about working long and stressful hours, and VentureBeat has been no exception. I began here when it was just Matt Marshall, back in the spring of 2007, while I was busy failing at my first startup. Milestones like this tell me that I — we — aren’t crazy for trying to create a business out of blogging. Instead, we seem to be doing something right. Thanks for reading, everyone, and stay tuned.

The New York Times announced today that it will syndicate VentureBeat’s content, as part of a redesign of the Times’ online technology section.

This is great for VentureBeat. The Times has long represented excellence in the news profession. The partnership is an endorsement of something we’ve been working hard to achieve, which is to publish content that is credible, edited, engaging and informative. Second, by placing VentureBeat articles on the front of the Times’ tech page, the deal supplies us with potentially millions of more readers, and brings the companies we write about tons more exposure. The Times, in turn, gains access to our daily scoops on the latest in the Silicon Valley-tech scene. It has rights to pull in a good portion of our articles to its site, and in return, those articles on its site will carry links back to VentureBeat. As part of the same redesign, the Times will also syndicate content from blog sites GigaOm and ReadWriteWeb. Beet.TV has an interview with the Times’ Vindu Goel, who explains why he made the move.

While the Times is making the redesign and syndication announcements today, it will take a couple of more weeks before it actually begins pulling content in from Venturebeat.

This adds to VentureBeat’s range of syndication deals, which already includes a deal with IDG’s tech portal Industry Standard and several other sites.

NYTimes.com had 19.9 million uniques in August, and 638 million total page views, according to Nielsen, making it one of the largest news sites in the world. The site reaches one in nine internet users in the U.S.

The Time is making a range of changes. It extended the TimesPeople social networking features across the site (see image below), adding Digg-like recommendation and rating to its news stories.

It said it is also adding an Economy section and Green Inc., a blog on energy and the environment, and enhancements to The Times’s mobile site. In the coming months, it says, NYTimes.com will expand the Small Business, Personal Technology and Your Money sections, introduce more journalists, deepen coverage within its DealBook franchise, and continue to add new tools and multimedia features.

The New York Times adds social networking: The nation’s biggest daily newspaper is embracing Web 2.0 with the launch of its new online feature: TimesPeople. This beta program allows users to build up a friends list and view a news feed for stories that their friends are recommending. It shows that newspapers aren’t just sitting back and letting the Internet wipe them out. On a personal page, a user can save all of the content the user has shared and review the recommendations of everyone else in the network. The beta release uses a Firefox browser add-on. The TimesPeople site will not monitor routine site activity or broadcast private activities. Who says you can’t learn something new from Facebook?

MySpace redesign goes live: The new design for MySpace is cleaner with fewer things to click upon on a user’s homepage. It makes more use of drop-down menus and the navigation has been redone to reduce the number of clicks to get any single task done. When you do a search for something, results that include your closest friends show up first.

Another virtual world launches: Dozens of virtual worlds are getting hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter. So it’s no surprise to see the launch of Meez Nation, a new virtual world which emphasizes cartoon-like 3-D avatars for playing games, socializing, and hanging out at cool locations. You can hang out in Roomz, which are nicer than those in the popular but flat 2-D world of Habbo Hotel.

Verizon turns up the broadband tap: Starting next week, Verizon will make available the fastest broadband connections in the country to 10 million homes and businesses thanks to its FiOS Internet infrastructure build out. Speeds of 50 megabits per second for download and 20 megabits per second will be available in 16 different states. By 2010, it will reach more than 18 million.

Thinking of pitching technology to doctors? Maybe that’s a bad idea. A study shows that doctors aren’t embracing technology for electronic health records. Just four percent of doctors have adopted fully functional computerized health record systems.

Web analytics company ClickTale releases its free Form Analytics tool: The tool reveals how consumers interact with online forms and provides recommendations that can improve the rate at which consumers complete the online forms and make purchases. More detail is available here.

Gigaom declares console games dead: Wagner James Au says the failure of Grand Theft Auto IV to boost consoles of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (with just a month’s worth of data) shows that the “next-gen” heat-seeking consoles have peaked and the Nintendo Wii is the wave of the future. Online games made with smaller budgets for wider audiences are the wave of the future, Au says. We can’t argue all that much with that, but console games including the Wii are in the midst of their best year ever at a time in the cycle when they should logically be peaking. GTA IV had a better launch than any other previous game (including the predecessor) with 11 million units sold within just five weeks. Like that old Monty Python line suggests, “I’m not dead yet.”

Meanwhile, something we can all appreciate: You’ve heard of Obama Girl. Well, the Wii Fit Underwear Girl is famous thanks to this video where she shakes her tush while playing the Hula Hoop game on Nintendo’s new Wii Fit game. She tells MTV Multiplayer that she didn’t know that her boyfriend was taping her from behind while she was working out. The video has been viewed more than 3 million times.

[Editor's note: Eric, to keep the site PG (or PC?) snuck in and cut out the embedded video so you'll have to follow the link to watch.]

Texas Instruments says cell phone sales weakening: TI said that sales of chips for wireless handsets were “unseasonably weak,” causing the bellwether company for the cell phone economy to lower its second-quarter earnings outlook. The Dallas-based chip maker said that it expects revenue to be $3.17 billion to $3.28 billion, compared with the previous estimate of $3.08 billion to $3.32 billion. It’s interesting that TI is seeing the slowdown in advance of one of the biggest pieces of news to hit the market: the impending launch of the iPhone 3G on July 11.

Women are driving smartphone sales: In the past year, the number of women using smartphones has more than doubled to 10.4 million, according to Nielsen Mobile. Part of the reason is the popularity of the iPhone among women, who accounted for one in three iPhones sold in March. The trend is expected to continue as prices for smartphones fall and more consumers.

Internet service providers to block child porn: Three major Internet service providers — Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable — have agreed to block access to Internet bulletin boards and web sites that display child pornography. The deal is the first a number under negotiation with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Previously, the providers argued the task was too big to handle, given the size and decentralized nature of the Internet. The agreements apply nationwide and will cover service providers with more than 16 million Internet customers.

SanDisk agrees to buy MusicGremlin: The flash memory chip maker is buying MusicGremlin for an undisclosed price. MusicGremlin makes advanced digital content distribution technologies and is a pioneer in the MP3 player market, known for devices that can download music from an accompanying subscription service without the need for a computer. SanDisk said it will use the technology from MusicGremlin in its future Sansa audio-video products.

Paltalk brings together video chatters on the web: New York-based Paltalk has released a multi-person video chat service on the web. The Paltalk Express software is a Flash-based web service that lets as many as 5,000 people share the same video chat room, Techcrunch reports. In coming weeks, the company will release embeddable widgets that compete with other chat services such as Meebo. Paltalk’s download client already has 4 million active users a month.

NetSpend founders launch $100 million investment fund: NetSpend’s Roy and Bertrand Sosa are putting together the fund to invest in companies in the market for financial services for people without bank accounts or credit cards. The MPower Ventures LP fund also includes investor Jorge Vergara Madrigal, the founder of nutritional supplements company Grupo Omnilife SA. MPower has made investments in Sapphire Mobile Systems (now MPower Mobile Inc.) and Rev Worldwide.

NYTimes.com goes after small businesses: The New York Times and AdReady have launched Self-Service Advertising on the NYTimes.com web site. The online display advertising site enables small businesses to easily create and manage online ad campaigns on the New York Times web site. It allows advertisers with budgets of less than $10,000 per campaign to reach the large NYTimes.com audience.

NextG Networks shoots for IPO: The wireless infrastructure company hopes to raise $150 million with its IPO. Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, RBC Capital Markets and UBS are the underwriters. Oak Investment Partners led a $35 million round for NextG in 2004 and another $50 million in January, 2008.

Merced Systems buys Practique Associates: Redwood City, Calif.,-based Merced Systems bought Practique in the United Kingdom for an undisclosed price. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Practique creates tools for incentive compensation management, including the INCA web-based application that automates sales commission and bonus calculations.

Zoran buys Let It Wave SA: Zoran Corp. agreed to buy fabless chip maker Let It Wave SA for $27.6 million in cash. The deal is expected to close today. In June, Let It Wave raised 6 million euros from Iris Capital and T-Source. Paris-based Let It Wave makes components that reduce motion blur for LCD TVs, among other products for consumer electronics gear.

Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive of InterActive Corp., the large Internet conglomerate (owner of Expedia, CitySearch, Evite, Ask) responds to the accusation by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof that his $469 million salary is too high, and that he is lazy.

Diller (pictured here, at right) calls the New York Times’ editorial policy on executive compensation “loony.” The original Kristof column is here (ignore the photo in the link’s article; the Sun-Sentinel has the wrong Kristof).

There’s bad blood here, because Arthur Sulzberger (pictured at left), chairman of The New York Times Co., confronted Diller on stage during the Web 2.0 conference, the same day the Kristof piece was published. Sulzberger presented Diller with a plaque of the piece, who dropped it on the floor after a forced chuckle.

Separately, Diller also says Internet valuations are too high right now.

(Via Kedrosky, who’s link doesn’t appear to be working.)

(Photo credit JD Lasica.)