VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Veoh Networks files preemptive suit against Universal Music Group — Veoh, the San Diego video start-up we’ve written about, said it filed the suit to assert its rights as a copyright-compliant company after UMG threatened it with litigation.

Geni gets cloned by a German Verwandt, but there’s also Israeli MyHeritage — Verwandt, the German copycat of the family tree social network company Geni, told us last month it had raised financing from Neuhaus Partners, and had broken into the top 500 sites in Germany according to Alexa, with more than 200,000 profiles in three weeks (was it spamming people?). Verwandt’s only real difference from Geni, however, is that it offers comic avatars, so we didn’t bother looking too closely. However, now there’s also Israel’s MyHeritage, which has just raised funding from Accel Europe. The company reportedly has at least $3 million and maybe more (checking). These sites are coming out of the woodwork and remarkably, all getting funding.

MySpace barely making any profit — News Corp.’s Fox Interactive unit, which consists mainly of MySpace, turned a profit of $10 million on revenue of $550 million during the last fiscal year. With MySpace doing 4.3 billion page views a day, it means the company is making a mere fraction of a cent on each page view — just the latest sign that social networks are in the early days of trying to monetize with ads.

Nirvanix to launch content delivery network — The San Diego, Calif. company aims to compete with Amazon’s popular S3 storage web service. In a statement, it said it plans to offer delivery of rich media and streaming content for web developers, and is designed to be “the backbone for social networking and web 2.0 companies.” It also plans to announce in September that it has raised venture capital, though the news has already leaked (funding is reportedly $12 million).

Google showing bias for sites that use Google Checkout — Google is using its clout to boost the ranking of sites that use its Google Checkout service, penalizing those that rely on eBay’s PayPal, according to this account. [Update: Google has responded: "It's common practice to include descriptive links in blog copy, and we added the link in question for that reason," a Google spokespersons said. "This was an editorial decision, and it was made independently by Google."]

Segway Enthusiasts Club of America disbands — The hyped gyroscope-laden scooter, the Segway, apparently is losing its fan base.

Blog network GigaOm has brought on a business person and a professional managing editor — Details here.

Internet music radios — Companies like Roku, Com One, Revo, Terratec and Tivoli have all produced tabletop or bookshelf radios that are “freaky hybrids” of the old radio and the new Internet. The New York Times’ Pogue has a review. You tune into radio shows just as you have for decades, but the radios’ antennas are internal Wi-Fi receivers that connect to a wireless home networks.

Xconomy, business technology new site focused on Boston area, raises undisclosed amount of funding — Founder Bob Buderi tells us the round was led by CommonAngels. Here’s his post about it. Robert Buderi is former editor-in-chief of MIT’s Technology Review. Steve Woit, publisher, is a partner at IDG Ventures in Boston.

The Universal Music Group acquires a stake in the operator of the urban social networking Web site, Loud.com — Details here.

Color-coding on Wikipedia edits — Wikipedia is about to test a quality-control technique: Coloring a new edit red, in order to flag potentially dubious content, especially if the editor is new or otherwise untrusted. As the editor gains a reputation, the marking color will change and become less red. There’s a test site here, and a visual example here. More details about the experiment here. It will first be tested on a related, smaller site, Wikia.

Ooma offers pre-sale orders of its Hub and Scout telecom products — Ooma says demand for its products, which allow free land-line phone calls, was sufficient to open orders for sales earlier than planned. We reviewed the home telecom product here.

Updated

Ooma, a Palo Alto company, is letting you make free land-line phone calls to anyone in the United States.

It hopes to let people share their phone lines with each other to bypass having to use a major telecom companies.

Here’s how it works: You install an Ooma “hub” device, costing a $399 one-time fee, in your home. This routes phone calls through your computer or your land-line. Ooma’s device also sends and receives calls for other people in your geographic area — those using local land lines that Ooma exploits with proprietary technology. You do need a broadband internet connection.

(The first ten VentureBeat readers can get a free Ooma device, see below, courtesy of the company.)

The devices in each home help balance the load of calls coming across the Ooma network (Ooma uses an algorithm to do this balancing, so that everyone can share their excess phone lines with each other). The most similar comparison is to peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing systems like BitTorrent.

That’s because Ooma takes advantage of empty space in current land-based phone systems, according to chief executive Andrew Frame, a former Cisco employee who started his first company at 15.

By comparison, some households use Voice over Internet Protocal (VoIP) technology, such as Skype, to make calls over the internet using their computer and a voice-enabled headset. While VoIP is normally less expensive, many households maintain an existing land-line in case they need to make a 9-11 emergency call.

These lines are the ones Ooma uses to distribute incoming and outgoing calls between its users.

For what Ooma offers, the one-time cost of the device is a good deal. Competing VoIP technologies typically charge monthly fees; Vonage charges $25 per month, for example. The downside, of course, is that Ooma makes less money. It’s hard to see to how it will make recurring revenue. It also requires people to dole out a significant amount of dough for yet another telecommunications service, when they already have a broadband connection and a fixed line. On first blush, we see success for this company as a long shot. It requires people to install a system they’re not used to.

One way for it to make recurring revenue is if it manages to sell you multiple devices. Here, Ooma does let you add “scouts,” or secondary Ooma devices, costing $39, allowing you to connect phones in different parts of a house. International calls via Ooma will incur a fee comparable to Skype, Frame told us. You can’t do this with Vonage.

The company says it is developing additional features to help it connect different phones with a single number. This way, we’d be able to use the service to take cell phone calls while at home. This would make it similar to a service like Grand Central, which distributes calls across lines based on a single, central phone number.

From the demo version we saw it’s easy to use, and the device itself looks like it comes from the 1980s sci-fi movie, Tron.

Email venturebeat@ooma.com — if you’re one of the first ten people, you’ll receive a free one. Otherwise, Ooma is in a private beta, invite only.

Ooma also boasts an illustrious group of investors and advisers, including Ashton Kutcher from Hollywood and Sean Parker from Napster, Plaxo, Facebook and The Founders’ Fund. We reported about the company earlier, here. It has raised a total of $27 million.

Here’s the latest action:

Netvibes offers Netvibes2go — Netvibes, the company that has gotten buzz with its cool personalized home page service, is offering a mobile version called Netvibes2Go. It lets you access all your info — contained in useful modules, including email, calendar, to-do list and any RSS feed — while you’re on the go. To get it, you have to configure your Netvibes account on a PC first (creating a new tab, called “mobile” and then putting in compatible modules). Founder Tariq Krim tells us an announcement will be coming shortly. Was discovered by bloggers.

Check out VentureBeat Newswire for latest stories — They include John Doerr’s latest company (physician software), video-sharing company Fliqz’s latest VC round (surprising, for us), Sequoia’s latest investment (in PopularMedia), secretive home telecom company Ooma’s latest round (from Sean Parker and others) and more.

Google adds real-time traffic to maps in several cities — Cities include San Francisco, New York and others. Image at left is a partial screenshot of what SF traffic looked like at 9:30am this morning. In other words, be glad if you don’t live or work in the East Bay.

Wesabe, personal finance site, raises $700,000 — The Berkeley company that lets you manage your financials, with things like tagging, and then lets you communicate with others about it (apparently, some people want this), raised the cash from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, which itself just raised a new fund for hacker-driven companies (see our NewsWire story here, from yesterday). Here’s our earlier story about Wesabe from last year.

Second Life adds voice — You’ve been able to chat via IM before. But now the virtual world company is offering ways to talk with others, taking into account three dimensions to adjust volume, that is, how far away you are from other people (in the room or region where you’re conversing), and what direction you’re facing.

Hyped product of the day: Buzzword – Virtual Ubiquity, a Boston start-up, has created some buzz with its online word processor, BuzzWord. It isn’t out yet, but see here for details. Lots of effusive coverage elsewhere.

Another news ranking site, Spotplex — Techcrunch has a story about the Silicon Valley start-up Spotplex. At Spotplex, news stories aren’t submitted by users. Rather, blog and other news sites wanting to be featured at the site submit some javascript code, and it culls the most popular read articles on those sites, and then features them. We’re not sure how this is going to work, because by default, stories from the most popular sites are going to get read (and thus featured at Spotplex), even if they’re crappy stories. Also, there are other sites that do similar things, such as Topix. The company has accepted VentureBeat as a source. We’ll send in our code and see.

Adobe Systems to release Web version of its Photoshop image-editing application — It will do so within six months.

Invalid clicks on Gooole’s Adwords under 10 percent — Or at least, that is what Google tells us. Google adds that, in general, undetected fraud is less than 0.02 percent. However, there’s just no way for Google to know that for sure.