VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:
1) US internet ad market is big, getting bigger
2) San Francisco, home of the carbon tax?
3) Google Maps adds user ratings to local search
4) Wal-Mart launches cleantech accelerator
5) Visits to Facebook appear to drop
6) Proofpoint raises $28 million for email security
7) Piczo suffers from walled garden approach
8) Covad could save Silicon Valley municipal wireless
9) Fundability funded for entrepreneur/investor network
10) Google joins group to build transpacific optic cable

US internet ad market is big, getting bigger — Two separate analyst groups estimate the US online ad market at $21.1 billion and $22.5 billion, respectively. Either number works out to well over 20 percent growth from last year. The global market is estimated at $45 billion. TechCrunch has a slightly longer summary.

San Francisco, home of the carbon tax? — Mayor Gavin Newsom said he’d like to set up a plan to tax the carbon emissions of businesses in San Francisco this morning, during an early morning keynote at the Cleantech Forum. Confusingly, this appears to be a ballot issue for the city, separate from an emissions tax already being considered for the entire Bay Area. Newsom’s plan also involves congestion fees for inner-city driving, a measure typically only considered by much larger cities like London and New York. For a rundown of some possible pitfalls, Earth2Tech has a good brief.

Google to become a Yelp competitor? — If not Yelp, fill in the name of your favorite local listing service. Google Maps now has user ratings and “neighborhood refinements”, a pair of user-generated stats that could help you find the best local businesses by pushing them up in Google’s search results.

Wal-Mart launches cleantech accelerator — Also at the Cleantech Forum, Wal-Mart announced the cleantech accelerator, an open call for applications from green and energy-efficient technologies that could benefit the retail giant’s business. No word on whether proof of residence in China is required to apply.

Visits to Facebook appear to drop — Traffic to Facebook has dropped about 27 percent from its peak, according to the latest Hitwise stats. However, the drop can probably be explained away by a post-holiday seasonal trend. The average time users spend on the site has continued to rise.

Proofpoint raises $28 million for email security — About $58 million had already gone into Proofpoint prior to this round, so this latest investment pushes the Cupertino firm into the funding stratosphere, at least as email companies go. We’ll have more details tomorrow.

Piczo suffers from walled garden approach — Teen-oriented social network Piczo appears to have taken a serious traffic hit in the United Kingdom, perhaps due to its more restrictive joining policies. The network aims to create a safe place for 13 to 16 year olds, but being closed isn’t helping it against its more popular competitors, including Bebo, MySpace and Facebook (which opened up last year). Piczo has laid off about a quarter of its staff, according to Valleywag.

Covad could save Silicon Valley municipal wireless — By focusing in on business use instead of trying to address the much broader consumer base in the region, high-speed wireless firm Covad might manage to revive the plan for municipal WiFi in Silicon Valley, which appeared to die last year. The network would serve group including local fire and police, which would in turn help pull in more grant money. More from InfoWorld. Another promising venture in the municipal wireless space is Meraki, which plans to roll out free WiFi in San Francisco, as we recently reported.

Fundability takes $500,000 second funding — Fundability, a connection platfom for entrepreneurs and investors, appears to have received a fairly unusual second round of funding, at one-sixth the size of its $3 million first round in January. The company also launched its online marketplace for the public, claiming that several startups already received funding on the platform during the private beta. We’ll see how it fares now that the rabble can come in. The investment amount was reported by VentureWire (subscription required).

Google joins consortium to build transpacific fiber-optic cable – The move is the first time an Internet company has invested in an ocean-spanning cable. Story here.

updated

Piczo, the social networking company that tries to distinguish itself as the safer place for teens, has raised $11 million in a third round of funding, it tells VentureBeat.

Piczo is one of handful of sites gunning for “second place” behind MySpace, the overwhelming leader with 65 million unique users a month. Facebook is around 17 million. Piczo boasts 10.5 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, mainly in Europe and the U.S. Bebo and Hi5 are around that. Like other networking sites, Piczo offers video, photo-sharing, and other communication tools. However, it doesn’t allow people to search profiles, creating more of a sense of security for young people. It’s also invite-only.

The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and Mangrove Capital Partners. Piczo’s existing investors, Sierra Ventures and Catamount Ventures, also participated in the third round of funding.

The company has now raised $18 million since 2005

Chief executive Jeremy Verba tells VentureBeat the company has hit saturation point in the UK, and Canada, but is growing rapidly in Germany, with a million uniques now, up from nothing last summer. Overall, Piczo is adding 30,000 registered users a day, he says.

Piczo is also seeing a lot of overlap with MySpace. MySpace, which is open to search, is like a wide-open “disco,” says Verba. Piczo is like a private party, in comparison — where many of the same people using MySpace go to link privately with their friends, typically ten or 15 people. Another difference is freedom of expression. MySpace keeps users to similarly structured profile templates. Piczo lets users play with their pages more creatively. Its target age group is 13 to 16. Girls make up 70 percent of users.

Verba says there’s no deadline to hit profitability, but there are multiple ways to make money — through advertising and other means. Piczo’s users don’t seem to mind pop-up notes, for example telling them about a Justin Timberlake Piczo page, where they can go and get wallpaper, links to Timberlake’s music videos and pictures and chat with fans. Piczo makes money because Timberlake’s label, Sony BMG sponsors it.

PixSense, latest start-up to offer video compression, is hiring! — This Santa Clara start-up claims no one has been able to compress a video by 85 percent to share it via mobile phone.

It is offering such a feature to consumers and carriers. Some 90 percent of cell-phone users don’t have a set data plan, meaning they pay for bandwidth they use while sending pictures. PixSense will lower costs. It will also sell its technology to carriers, a spokesman told us. It has angel funding of $1 million and is a raising a venture round. The start-up has 30 people, and here’s the kicker: It plans to employ 150 by next year.

Veeker buys Thumbdrive, to pursue mobile video messaging — Veeker, a San Francisco company building a mobile video-message sharing service targeting young users, told GigaOM that it has acquired San Francisco-based mobile software development company ThumbJive, which also has employees in China.

Mercora, that Santa Clara radio song-sharing service, launches service for smart-phones — Mercora says its wireless music service “beat Steve Jobs to the iPhone…And we’ve beat Microsoft to the Zune.” Dubbed “M,” the service allows smart-phone users to listen to music that sits on their PCs. Further, M subscribers can share music with each other — by accessing each other’s PCs.
We wrote about Mercora here.

Piczo, another sleeper social site? — The San Francisco social networking site, which focuses on teens and photo-sharing, is boasting 17 million registered users. It has raised a total of $7 million, according to GigaOM’s Liz Gannes, who brings us an update on the relatively closed, privacy-conscious site. (We’d reported earlier only $4 million raised). Sierra Ventures and Catamount Venture are the backers.

PayPal prepares a way for users to store files — Techcrunch has the skinny on the yet-to-be released service, called DropBox, which creates a secure storage area within a user’s account. We called PayPay, and there is no intent to create a digital distribution platform of any kind. It is merely offering what most mainstream payment providers do, including a way to batch-process payments instead of settling one payment at a time, said spokeswoman Sara Bettencourt. She declined to provide more details.

Cynical blog Dead20, which has covered the valley’s Web 2.0 companies with scorn, is down — It has an error message saying “Bandwidth limit exceeded,” after the author, who has been writing in anonymity, is all but outed.

Facebook founder puts Microsoft on hold — The WSJ, in its recent story about Facebook, reported how Facebook executives told their Microsoft peers “they couldn’t do an 8 a.m. conference call because the company’s 22-year-old founder and chief executive, Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, wouldn’t be awake, says a person familiar with the talks. Microsoft executives were incredulous.”

No surprise here. We, too, remember showing up for an interview at Facebook last year at 10am, and having Zuckerberg show up late. Only Facebook co-worker Matt Cohler was in the office, who told us some engineers had only just left after working through the night.

Remember Imeem, the company that lets you share your desktop contents directly with others? — It is raising money. It has also changed its business strategy. We’ll report more soon.

AdMob, a company that sells advertising on mobile devices, said it raised $3.6 million in its first round of venture funding — We reported earlier on the funding, but the SF Business Journal has the exact amount.