VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

1) Super Tuesday looks good for McCain, Obama in California
Update: But California went to Clinton / McCain
2) AOL acquires affiliate network buy.at
3) Blue Frog Media files for bankruptcy
4) Google Apps adds security from Postini
5) Solar panels that work even when the sun’s down
6) Baidu sued for linking to pirated music
7) Middle East cable break speculations
8) Flickr users still hate Microsoft

Super Tuesday looks good for McCain, Obama in California — According to the third and last Reuters / Zogby poll, Romney leads the Republicans with 40 percent support in California, while Obama leads the Democrats with 49 percent. However, a more recent WSJ article suggests that while Obama has seen a surge in popularity, Romney’s chances of winning the state have dropped to only 37 percent. Sarah Lacy comments on a poll purportedly showing Hillary in the lead in the Valley: “Based on my personal polling, that’s horsesh**.” We’d tend to agree, but any Hillary supporters out there can feel free to let us know if we’re wrong. For a quick recap of the various candidate’s stances on tech issues (because that’s all we care about here, right?), go to this CNET article and scroll down to the table. Finally, if you can’t get enough of the election happenings, check out the Google/Twitter Super Tuesday Map, mentioned in a VentureBeat article earlier today.

Update note on the above: At midnight, it looks almost certain that Hillary Clinton has won California, along with three other big states. Perhaps it was those quiet Silicon Valley supporters chipping in. McCain performed as expected here, taking the state. The overall race for both parties is still an open field, with McCain front-running for the Republicans and Clinton looking just slightly ahead for the Democratic nomination.

AOL acquires affiliate network buy.at — AOL has picked up an affiliate marketing network called buy.at for an undisclosed price (although TechCrunch UK reports that it was probably around $150 million). Buy.at offers pay-per-action advertising, rather than paying based on other standard measurements like page impressions or click-throughs. The company was founded in 2002 and funded by DFJ Esprit. See the press release for more.

Blue Frog Media files for bankruptcy — Blue Frog Media, an “interactive TV music channel” funded to the tune of $16 million by Canaan Partners and MK Capital, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, according to John Cook at the Seattle PI. The company has a slew of creditors and liabilities up to a million dollars, but the back story is even more complicated, with investors fighting for control and some uncertainty over whether the bankruptcy filing is official. None of that is likely to change the end scenario for Blue Frog, though, with one of the company’s creditor’s telling Cook “We have pretty much written it off.”

Google Apps adds security products from Postini – For $3, $12 and $25 respectively, Google has begun offering message filtering, security and discovery powered by a company it acquired, Postini, to its Apps package (Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar and Docs). The additions show that Google is serious about trying to make its online products more palatable for enterprise use.

Solar panels that generate electricity even when the sun’s down — Researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory have developed a prototype solar panel that could absorb infrared radiation, which is present even at night. Their innovation is using highly efficient “nanoantennaes” embedded in an inexpensive material. More at the INL website.

Baidu sued for linking to pirated music — Baidu may have captured the majority share of the Chinese search market, but part of its appeal may be a certain lax attention to copyrights, according to a lawsuit filed by the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry. The suit points to Baidu’s practice of linking directly to pirated material, a practice the IFPI already won a judgement against Yahoo China for. More at Ars Technica.

Middle East cable breaks a frightening possibility for the future? — The four undersea fiber-optic cables cut near the Middle East have presented a mysterious case: Most serious media outlets have declined to speculate on the how or why of the breaks, but it seems unlikely that four breaks in as many days could be accidental. Thus, we’re forced to turn to Global Guerillas for some nuggets of Ludlum-esque theorizing. Our two favorites: “Disconnection from the global communications grid is very likely to become a form of economic/social coercion in the future,” and, from the comments, “Somebody wanted to (gently) make sure the Iranian oil bourse didn’t open for business until after Super Tuesday.”

Flickr users still hate Microsoft — Appalled at the idea of Microsoft inheriting their precious service from Yahoo, some 1,855 members (at last count) have joined an anti-Microsoft group on Flickr. If unending election coverage isn’t wasting enough of your time today, the resulting Flickr gallery should help. Via TechCrunch.

Here’s a summary of the latest action:

1) Google integrates Postini
2) Record M&A in media industry
3) Japanese virtual world Meet-Me
4) Ballmer says Facebook a fad
5) Boing Boing TV
6) Utility computing and video delivery start-ups continue to get funding

Google integrates Postini – Nearly three months after buying Postini for $625 million, Google has integrated the company’s security features into Gmail and is offering them to businesses. Its intention is to challenge Microsoft and other software companies that sell primarily desktop-based software to businesses, that include similar security features.

Postini features include a way where administrators can manage who gets what emails based the content of the message, whether it has attachments or not, and the identity of the sender or receiver. These rules can be used to do things like prevent people from sending messages with certain keywords to outside parties. Administrators can also search emails across a domain and recover deleted emails.

Google has also increased storage for individual mailbox’s using the service to 25 gigabytes, up from 10 gigabytes.

Media industry sees record M&A activity – The media and information industries saw record levels of M&A activity during the first three quarters of the year, with 637 deals worth $95 billion, according to The Jordan, Edmiston Group, an media-focused investment bank. The level was 64 percent more than last year’s $60.6 billion. Now you know why VentureBeat has been so focused on advertising and media companies lately. An explosion in online advertising budgets has made online ad networks and technology providers attractive and has led to deals like the $5.7 billion purchase of aQuantive by Microsoft.

Japanese virtual world “Meet-Me,” a safer alternative to Second Life — Here’s the story by Associated Press. In Japanese version, you can’t fly. Here’s the question. Do we want our virtual worlds to be exact replicas of our offline worlds? Sometimes it seems we’re headed in that direction. Each virtual world we see appears to be heading more toward reflecting the cultures that use them, so that we’re really no longer exploring taboos but simply extending our life virtually, nothing more.

Ballmer says Facebook may be a fad — In London, the Microsoft chief executive says: “I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.” This comes amid reports that Microsoft is negotiating to acquire a stake in Facebook.

Top Up TV, a London provider of pay TV service, raised a significant round of funding — It comes from Balderton Capital. Dow Jones (subscription required) quotes Balterton partner Tim Bunting saying it is in the double digit millions.

The firehose of VC funding to video delivery technology continues – There are way too many of these video delivery companies already, but when Silicon Valley investors like Ron Conway (early investor in Google) go around touting that they continue to want to invest in video, everybody else thinks its a great opportunity too. Here’s the latest: Move Networks and Acinion, according to PE Hub. Move, of American Fork, Utah, got $34 million, while Acinion, of Acton, Mass., raised $16 million. This brings Move’s total venture financing to more than $45 million from firms like Steamboat Ventures and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Acinion has now has raised around $21 million from firms like Globespan Capital Partners, IDG Ventures Boston and Sigma Partners.

DECA announces first show, Boing Boing TV – The next blog to receive its own professionally produced show will be Boing Boing, the “directory of wonderful things.” Despite the length of about three minutes, the move is revealing of how internet media is moving ever closer to mainstream realm. In celebrity news, where there’s more money to go around, blogger Perez Hilton recently scored an hour-long show on VH1. DECA, the Web 2.0 production company behind Boing Boing TV (we reported on it last week here), has hinted that there’s more to come.

European startup to compete with Amazon utility computing – Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services, which offer scalable processing power and storage respectively, recently came up against competition in the United States from new startup Nirvanix. Now a new venture in the United Kingdom has joined the fray: Flexiscale made by XCalibre. Demand for elastic computing capabilities has been increasing as other companies find new uses for it, so there’s no telling yet how deeply the new company will cut into Amazon’s profits, if at all.

Google said Monday it’ll pay $625 million in cash to acquire Postini, an online provider of email, web and other communications security products. Postini also helps companies comply with securities regulations by helping archiving their correspondence.

The move is significant because it lets Google bolster its hosted online applications for businesses, adding a security component to applications that have so far seen as somewhat flimsy — useful mainly for individuals, but not robust enough for actually running businesses. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said in statement: “With the addition of Postini, our apps are not just simple and appealing to users — they can also streamline the complex information security mandates within these organizations.” More details on Google’s blog.

Postini, of San Carlos, Calif., serves more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users worldwide, including investment bank Merrill Lynch. Its products include archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement — and can also be used for instant messaging, so covers most of Google’s communications offerings. Google also nabs the company before it filed for an initial public offering, which may have raised its value by millions more.

However, it isn’t clear why Postini had been waiting. Two years ago, the company said it was profitable, and that it was an IPO candidate. The company was founded in 1999, and originally sought to help companies fight spam. It has since focused on email security, and so is expected to help Google’s Gmail specifically.

Postini had raised $26 million in venture capital from Bessemer Venture Partners and Mobius Venture Capital. Postini’s acquisition looks to finally delivers a profit to Mobius, a venture firm that has struggled over the years without returning capital to its investors and eventually was forced to wind down. Notably, the Postini deal was led not by a Mobius partner, but by principal Ryan McIntyre.

The purchase is supposed to close by the end of the third quarter.