VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Mashup companies take over Web 2.0 — InfoWorld profiles three companies making announcements at this week’s conference: Serena, which is launching an online marketplace for business mashups; JackBe, which has a new version of its enterprise mashup platform; and Kapow, which provides a hosted service to build mashups that provide web intelligence. We’ll also be writing more about Rearden Commerce and Zude in the next few days. And we just covered SnapLogic, which provides data integration for, you guessed it, enterprise mashups, and has launched version 2.0 and professional editions of its software.

Linden Lab names Mark Kingdon as new chief executive — Kingdon previously spent five years running digital ad agency Organic. The appointment of someone with a stronger business background than founder Philip Rosedale makes sense, particularly since Linden Lab board member Bill Gurley told me the company needs a chief executive who can help it grapple with rapid growth. Less charitably, the appointment can be seen as an attempt to help Linden get back on track after struggling to live up to the initial promise of its virtual world Second Life. Rosedale announced last month that he plans to step down.

IBM buys storage company Diligent Technologies for $200M — The terms of the deal were not disclosed officially, but Israeli newspaper Globes says it was for $200 million. Diligent is IBM’s third Israeli acquisition this year.

StumbleUpon approaches 5 billion stumbles – The website-discovery and rating service is about to get its 5 millionth user, and is also getting very close to nearly 5 billion “stumbles” (recommendations). Not only is that a number just plain impressive, but since each stumble should improve StumbleUpon’s “discovery” service, it also means the site is getting better and better. StumbleUpon is owned by eBay.

Solar plant builder Stirling Energy Systems gets $100M — The funding comes from NTR plc. Stirling is building solar energy projects in the Imperial Valley and the Mojave Desert.

Walter Bender resigns One Laptop Per Child — Apparently Bender , who served as the organization’s president, is more interested in incorporating open source methods into education.

Here’s the latest (ahem) action:

Second Life avatar sues another avatar, over virtual sex bed — We should have predicted this. Second Life entrepreneur Kevin Alderman has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Second Life resident Volkov Catteneo. This is apparently the first time an avatar has sued another avatar in the virtual world. Alderman, who has made money before in Second Life by selling a virtual island for $50,000 (real money), says his avatar, Stroker Serpentine was doing quite well selling a SexGen bed, which allows avatars to have sex, for L$12,000 (US $45.11), but that Catteneo has copied it and is selling it for a third of the price.

Geni uses viral messaging to grow quickly – Family-tree company Geni (our
review) claims five million profiles have been created by users in five months. The secret? Instead of making you sign-up, and then start creating a family-tree, it combines the two steps. Its user interface cleverly inserts your initial data into your first family tree — leading a new user to immediately begin inviting their family members to also build out the family tree. We noted in March that the site had over 100,000 users that had added about 2 million profiles; this was when the company closed a funding round valuing it at around $100 million. The surge in growth since then can only be good news for the investors.

Bill Gates’ investment arm backs Gay.com — His Cascade Investment Group invests $26.2 million into the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender online community PlanetOut, which owns Gay.com. More from John Cook in Seattle.

Russia shuts down Allofmp3.com, or tries to at least — Russia shut the music download website, a leader in music and video piracy, to placate the U.S. concerns about Russia’s copyright protection policies. However, an alternative site run by the same Moscow company has emerged: Mp3Sparks.com.

Netvibes, one of the more popular start-page companies, sees departure — With Google and other big players pushing their own start-pages (pages that you can customize and make your home page as you surf the Web), there’s growing tension at the many start-up companies that launched similar features early on. Paris-based Netvibes has lost Pierre Chappaz, who was co-CEO and said he had disagreements on strategies of “distribution and monetization.” See his post here.

Helio reportedly to get more life-support — Earthlink and South Korea’s SK Telecom plan to pump $100 million each in Helio, their money-losing U.S. mobile telecom network. Helio is a so-called MVNO, or networks that pay to use the infrastructure of other carriers to offer their services, and they’ve had a poor track record. Amp’d Mobile recently filed for bankruptcy, and ESPN’s mobile network failed. Helio is getting costly. It has already soaked up $440 million, and expects a net loss of $330 million to $360 million this year, compared with a $192 million shortfall in 2006.

Netsuite 74 percent owned by Larry Ellison, and it competes with Oracle — Netsuite, software company that just filed to go public, undercuts Oracle by selling dirt-cheap online software for ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) for CRM (Customer Relationship Management). And yet it is 61 percent owned by Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle. Ellison owned another 13 percent, which he has given to trusts related to his family. Netsuite’s products sell at a loss. (See WSJ story for more; subscription required).

KKR is latest buyout firm to file for IPO — KKR has filed for an IPO that will let it raise $1.25 billion. This follows the much hyped IPO of another buyout firm, Blackstone. Lately, the sector has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers, who are now considering levying a new tax on buyout professionals. Blackstone’s stock has dropped 4.1 percent since its IPO. Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and Peter Peterson have pocketed $2.56 billion between them. Now, will individual investors fall for another buyout IPO? Probably.

Yahoo’s personalized SmartAds — Yahoo has released new ad tools that allow for better “behavioral targeting.” Called SmartAds, they let advertisers create custom ads, using information Yahoo has about where the user is located and which sites they are visiting. The NYT has a good description of how it works:

This is how Yahoo’s new system works: the advertiser (or its agency) would provide Yahoo with the components of its display ads — including the logos, tag lines and images. The retailer would share information from its inventory databases that track the items on the shelves in each of its stores. Next, Yahoo would combine that data with the information it has about its users’ demographics and actions online to create a product-specific advertisement. For airlines, SmartAds uses Yahoo’s information about its Web surfers to create display advertisements for each person that feature ticket offers with actual prices listed. In time, Yahoo plans to offer rich media advertisements where users can buy the ticket at that price right within the ad unit, rather than having to click through to another Web site.

Departures at Technorati — The blog search engine, which has lost some of is focus lately, has suffered three more departures. The company’s chief executive Dave Sifry said its top engineers Adam Hertz and Tantek Celik have gone. They had been there for three years, and were responsible for Technorati’s effective evangelizing of its tags and of microformats. Two months ago, the company drew another $1 million from its investors. The departures are a setback; we reached out to Technorati and Tantek for comment, but neither responded. Also, product manager Liz Dunn, who had helped build the company’s latest site, has left, to join Will Farrell’s comedy video site FunnyOrDie, backed by Sequoia.

EBay opens US version of its classifieds site Kijiji — Auction site EBay has quietly opened the cute-sounding classifieds Web site, a clone of Craigslist, in all 50 states (see WSJ story, subscription required). The service had been operating in Canada, Europe and Asia. Its name, though, is harder to spell, and there’s not much difference from Craigslist. Posting is free, but the company will explore ways of charging for display ads and premium services for sellers. This is notable, too, because eBay owns 25 percent of Craigslist. EBay owns a number of other classifieds site in other countries.

Feedburner makes two premium services free — After getting bought by Google, Feedburner is offering for free its Stats PRO service, which provides statistics such as click-through tracking and podcast downloads; and its MyBrand service, which allows users to control the URL of their feed. See Search Engine Land for more details. Danny Sullivan wrote about the importance of owning your feed name here.

Craig Venter’s company transplants entire genome from one bacterium cell to another — This technique could possibly lead to the creation of ‘designer’ microbes producing fuel or help cleaning toxic waste. The company has a way to go yet. The ultimate plan is to stitch together artificial chromosomes, proteins and other building blocks with the aim of jumpstarting their designer microbe to life. (More here.)

T-Mobile’s phone, lost in the iPhone hype — T-Mobile picked a tough week to release its own new phone service. Offered on Samsung and Noka phones, the service lets you place and receive calls over both the regular T-Mobile GSM network and virtually any WiFi wireless network. Called HotSpot@Home, it uses a technology called UMA (unlicensed mobile access). It lets you switch seamlessly between the two networks. It’s quite expensive (minimum $50 a month), so you’d have to be a power user for this to make sense. Calls originating from WiFi zones are free (don’t go against minutes). It works in Starbucks hotspots, without forcing you to log in. It doesn’t work in other areas with registration pages, such as airports, however. Good for use abroad, too, since WiFi calls are free. More details from Larry Magid and the NYT’s Pogue.

Korea’s LG agrees to develop a YouTube-focused mobile phone — LG said the model will allow users to upload, view and share video clips without the need to use a computer. The 3G phone will be offered first in Europe in the second half of this year (Forbes). LG began selling “Google phones” in Europe last month with software installed for directly using the Google service. It offers one-click access to Google’s search engine, Gmail and Google maps.

Videocountner lets you track how may time your video has been watched across various sites — The sites tracked by the service include YouTube, Revver, Daily Motion, MySpace and iFilm (via Techcrunch).

HP’s Presto photo service for elderly isn’t working — It was supposed to be really easy to use, allowing people to set it up for the elderly relatives to receive photos. But the Mercury News’ Dean Takahashi says it doesn’t work. After two tries, his mother gave up. We covered the company here. The Mountain View, Calif. company has $10 million in backing from Kleiner Perkins and Clearstone.

The latest roundup of the action happening in Silicon Valley:

First evidence of YouTube wealth — What do you do with your money, when you get it? One way is to spend $20 million to buy Andre Agassi’s Tiburon estate. That’s what Stuart Peterson, of Artis Capital Management, an investor in YouTube, did, as PE Week’s Alex Haislip reports. Or you can invest it into night clubs, as some Web entrepreneurs have done.

Google Answers shuts down, while Yahoo Answers booms — This is one more confirmation that Google does best with automation. It started its answering service before Yahoo did, yet was blown away by Yahoo. Google is not adept at the messy business of getting humans involved. Yahoo claims 60 million unique users of Yahoo Answers. It just signed a deal with Answers.com, too. This is a rare victory for Yahoo, and should encourage it to stay focused on its relative advantage at implementing “community”-oriented projects.

Allow comments anywhere on your site — There are some places on blogs or web sites where comments aren’t enabled by the site’s software. So Lev Walkin, a Cisco Security Engineer out of Santa Clara, has come up with a way to let you place them pretty much anywhere, called JS-Kit (via Techcrunch).

Will U.S. Supreme Court brake global warming action? — The future of many clean-tech start-ups here in Silicon Valley depends in part on Washington. The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether California can move ahead with strict pollution controls. In European, meanwhile, the opposite is happening. Brussels is forcing stricter controls on member states, rather than braking.

Danger raises $10.3 million from Sharp –This deal makes sense, because Sharp is building a Danger “hiptop” device, similar to the one distributed by T-Mobile, to run Danger’s software. Also, in case you missed it, see the update on our recent snarky post about Danger and its IPO. Hank Nothhaft took exception, and we clarified some facts. He says the company’s valuation has increased, which is a good sign.

Fuddy U.S. companies on London’s AIM — Now the Brits are suddenly asking why the U.S. companies going public on the London alternative stock market AIM are doing so poorly. Two thirds of them are losing money for investors. Could the reason be that the only reason U.S. companies listing on AIM is because 1) they couldn’t do it in the U.S., or 2) they couldn’t raise money from private equity investors (or venture capitalists) at a time when it is very easy to raise money?

Presto launches the photo service for elderly or tech-phobic — We wrote about Silicon Valley company Presto’s product a while back. Presto has $10M from venture firm Kleiner Perkins and others.