VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

1) VCs love on Obama
2) Frappr-Platial merge to take on Google
3) Is China is blocking US search engines? Or is it just U.S. jingoism?
4) Wordpress buys avatar company
5) Internet giants agree on copyright protection online — um, except Google
6) Data reveals iLike’s strong music momentum

VCs spend on Obama — Barack Obama is getting the most this year from the private equity crowd. He has raised $128,208 from 75 different VCs, according to PEHub. Running second is Mitt Romney with $94,500 from 51 contributors, while Hillary Clinton ($45,950), Chris Dodd ($22,700) and Rudy Giuliani ($21,100) round out the top five. Democrats got 60 percent more than Republicans.

Consolidation in social mapping companies — Google keeps improving their their social map features, letting you create your own maps and putting them in places like Google Earth, and then sharing with friends. Now Platial, a Portland company that does much the same thing, has acquired competitor Frappr. (Notably, Platial is backed by Ram Shriram, who sits on the Google board. Yes, that’s a major conflict. Update: We asked Shriram whether he is feeling conflicted, and he responded: “Not true at all…I believe Google is a partner but I am not conversant with details”.)  Platial says the combined companies will reach 15 million unique users monthly, which isn’t shabby at all. There’s power in fusion. Frappr never took outside funding. Platial raised $3.4 million from a host of players, including Kleiner Perkins, Keynote Ventures, Shriram, Georges Harik, Jack Dangermon, and Ron Conway.

Is China is blocking US search engines? — That seems to be the claim from a bunch a sources today, including reports that Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are all being redirected. However, some people are stepping back and wondering if there’s confusion on the matter, and some veiled anti-Chinese jingoism thrown in. We’ll track this in coming days. [Recommended update: Danny Sullivan's report, which suggests the Chinese blockade is an effort to avoid references to the Dalai Lama.]

Wordpress buys avatar company — Automattic, the company that operates the popular Wordpress blog software, has acquired Gravatar, a company that gives users a 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from blog to blog. It appears beside your name when you comment on Gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts. What do you guys think? Should VentureBeat enable Gravatar?

Internet giants agree on copyright protection online (surprise: Google not included) — A group of Internet and media companies, including CBS, Dailymotion, Microsoft, NBC Universal, News Corp, Viacom and Walt Disney have agreed to guidelines to protect copyrights online, according to the Wall Street Journal. The principles include using technology to eliminate copyright-infringing content, and blocking infringing material before it is publicly accessible, according to the report. Google didn’t participate, however: Copyright questions, particularly surrounding the posting of video, have bedeviled Google since it bought YouTube. Google’s existing technology wouldn’t meet the agreed standard, because it doesn’t block content from being posted. Google’s technology merely takes it down “in a matter of a few minutes.” Google has been sued by Viacom for $1 billion.

Data reveals iLike’s strong music momentum — iLike has a 90 percent share of the music application installations on Facebook, according to iLike chief executive Avi Partovi at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today. (Not bad, considering there are 200 different music applications on Facebook). Of the top 10,000 bands featured on iLike, 43 percent of them have more registered fans on iLike than they do on MySpace.

[Matt Marshall and Mark Coker contributed to this report]

The latest action:

My Maps kills start-ups? — There is plenty of commentary about how Google’s new feature My Maps is killing off start-ups doing the same thing. The new feature lets you build maps. Platial and Frappr are already doing this. This doesn’t make Google an ogre, as some suggest. An ugly company is one that does due diligence on your company, under guise of possibly partnering or acquiring you, only to pull out at the last minute and replicate what you do. My Maps makes a lot of sense for Google, and it should have been obvious for start-ups (see VentureBeat coverage) that it was coming. Plenty of sites have incorporated Google maps, and are not in danger, because they do something very different from what Google will do. In fact, you won’t see Platial complaining too much because its own backers, Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shriram are actually represented on Google’s board. Platial, of Portland, Oregon, you’re recall, raised $2.4 million in a first of funding just last month. And Kleiner partner Randy Komisar has been saying openly that Web 2.0 companies with no model other than supported by Google ads are pretty much goners (Platial relies on Google ads, no less).

Will your jacket power your iPod? – Researchers in New Zealand have developed synthetic dyes that can be used as solar cells to promise to generate electricity at one tenth of the cost of current silicon-based solar panels. The photosynthesis-like compounds work in low-light, and may even eventually be incorporated into clothing, so that your jacket may one day recharge your cellphone. The research is still in the earliest stage, so will be years before this gets to market. (More here).

Latest climate report from Brussels: 2°C rise from today’s temperatures will cause the extinction of 30 percent of species — Another scary report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in Brussels, Belgium today.

Delicious releases latest extension for Firefox browser — For those who love bookmarking, worth a look.

Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate for VCs? — The Republican presidential hopeful has already has $23 million in the first quarter, putting him well ahead of GOP rivals like McCain and Giuliani, and just behind Democratic frontrunners Clinton and Obama, reports PEHub. During his Mass. governor campaign in 2002, his support came from the who’s who of the East Coast private equity establishment. (See
Romney_Donors1.xls)

Ask undercuts itself with Google campaign — The anti-Google advertising campaign by competing search engine company Ask.com has only demonstrated how inferior the search site really is. Shortly after the ads appeared, people noticed that searching for the word “Google” on Ask.com returned this comment: “Don’t be a droid — use different sources of information” next to a drawing of a man on puppet strings and a link to Ask.com’s anti-Google Web site. Ask’s Jim Lanzone says the link was put up by overzealous staff, and was quickly removed to avoid any doubt about the impartiality of the site’s searches. Too late. That sort of internal gaming has never happened at Google, to our knowledge — and it raises questions about what else Ask is tinkering with behind the scenes we’re not aware of. We’re the first to support the underdog. But Google’s discipline — fanatical, some would say — is one reason you can trust its results.

How basic is Twitter? — We don’t want to add to the hype, but Dave Winer, always a big thinker, and creator of break-through protocols like RSS, is taking a serious look at Twitter, the new company getting buzz for letting you message to the world what you are doing at any given time. Winer suggests it could be the basis for a new open communications protocol. Meanwhile, take a look at this 3D Twitter viewer (screenshot below), which takes Twitter’s messages and places them on a global background to give you a smattering of what people are saying around the world. It uses Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. It is just one of several viewers created since Twitter became all the rage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Tex. a couple of weeks ago.