VentureBeat

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The back-story on Jangl’s slow death — Yesterday, we reported on Jangl’s asset sale process. A tipster tells us that Seattle-based WhitePages had offered to buy Internet phone company Jangl for $20 million, but then kept the company in diligence for more than a month and walked away at the last minute — giving Jangl no choice to but throw in the towel when it ran out of time and options. Whitepages flew down from Seattle for regular meetings, and Jangl’s execs flew up to Seattle, but then WhitePages caught wind that Jangl was running out of money and that investors had given Jangl’s team a deadline to sell by May 15. WhitePages whittled down its offer first to half, then cut off a severance agreement to those who would be laid off, and then lowered the offer even more: “They had us over the barrel,” said one Jangl employee. [Update: There are always two sides to the story. WhitePages is denying they ever offered $20M. And that's partly what happens in these sorts of negotiations: There's verbal dancing, and there's written, signed legal offers. If there's no deal, there's no deal.]

Virgin Mobile USA considering merger with Helio — While many MVNOs have simply collapsed or been closed by their parent companies, Virgin Mobile USA and smaller rival Helio have scraped by, if not flourished. The two may solve some mutual problems by undergoing a merger, which would create a bulkier combined company and add to their respective plan and phone options. However, mocoNews suggests that they might still look for a private equity buyout afterward.

VC investment continues to move overseas — Limited partners say they’re still wrestling with the implications of more and more venture capital activity moving abroad. The comments came during the LP panel at the recent meeting of the National Venture Capital Association. VentureWire was there to note some of the most interesting facts and figures. There’s definitely a lot of activity — almost 20 percent of domestic funds were deployed outside the United States in 2007, compared with 7 percent in 1998, according to Bob French of Adams Street Partners. And David York of Paul Capital predicted that within the next decade, as much as 50 percent of global venture capital activity will take place outside the United States.

Yahoo launches regional search variant – Yahoo’s Indian team has put together a search product called “Glue Pages” that integrates traditional search with results pulled from Yahoo’s portal business, including content like recipes, medical information, images and restaurant listings. The feature is undergoing testing on Yahoo India, with no plans as yet to offer it in the United States. More at CNET News.

Warner Music may invest again in imeem — In an encouraging turnaround for the music industry last year, Warner Music dropped a lawsuit against music sharing social network imeem, then followed up with an investment in the company. It may tag along with Sequoia Capital and make another investment this year, according to the Silicon Alley Insider.

RealNetworks spins off game studio — RealNetworks, maker of the most irritating media player ever created, has spun off its games division, which includes recent acquisition Trymedia. The gaming business is one of RealNetworks’ most profitable; it will retain an 80 percent ownership stake, but will allow the new company to forge its own path.

Real Goods Solar prices IPO real low — Solar installer Real Goods Solar, which recently announced plans for an initial public offering, has priced its 5.5 million shares at the bottom of its $10-12 range. Most cleantech companies have held off from IPOs this year due to the current market troubles.

Google achieves coveted “brain drain” status — The BBC has a report on the steady stream of executives away from Google, many of whose departures we’ve also noted, including Chris Sacca, Gideon Yu and Elliot Schrage. Many are headed to Facebook, which is described in the article as “the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago,” while Google is called a “behemoth” that is “no longer the firm it once was.” Google’s current position, of course, is precisely where Facebook aspires to be.

Forbes.com launches business social network — Following in the footsteps of BusinessWeek, Forbes.com has launched its own social network, the AnswerNetwork. As might be expected from the name, users are expected to ask questions and share answers with each other, in return gaining competence rankings based on their expertise. LinkedIn, which is BusinessWeek’s partner, has a similar feature, although it seems to be only moderately popular with users.

King.com, one of the largest makers of games where people compete against each other for small awards, has announced an exclusive partnership with RealNetworks, a once popular video player company that has struggled of late.

This is just the latest deal happening in the increasingly competitive online gaming industry. However, we mention this one because King (previous coverage) and Real have been particularly active of late.

Last week, King announced MyGame.com, which lets you create, play and share games. It’s trying to let anyone create their own game in just two minutes, which can also be shared via embeddable widgets.

RealNetworks announced a deal on Tuesday with toy-maker Mattel, where it will turn classic Mattel titles like the Uno card game or the Scrabble board game into online and downloadable games.

This latest deal makes London-based King.com the exclusive provider of skill games for Real, including popular titles such as Solitaire, Sudoku and American Idol. Real will be the exclusive provider of online and downloadable casual games for King’s audience.

King.com claims to be the largest online “skill gaming” site on the web, referring to games where users compete against each other for prizes. It says it had more than 80 million games played this past January.

RealNetworks has been developing casual-gaming sites of its own, including RealArcade.com, GameHouse.com and Zylom.com. The company says brings it in more than 40 million unique players per month. It is also still perhaps best known to consumers for its formerly popular RealPlayer streaming video and audio player; web sites such as YouTube use Adobe’s Flash Player, instead.

King’s 60-plus skill games are available in eight languages and in seven currencies. The company has raised over $45 million from Europe-based Apax and Index Ventures, as well as individual investors. (You’ll see different figures on this in our previous coverage, because the dollar amount is translated from euros, and the dollar keeps falling!)

Here’s the latest action:

Google Korea has cluttered page — This is a striking departure from the spartan interface Google is known for. Details here. We checked with Google, and a spokeswoman confirmed the Korean site was developed in response to market research and feedback from Korean users. She called it a “new intuitive and easy-to-use design” that helps discover Google products and services.

AOL serving ads in IM and chat — AOL subsidiary Userplane lets Website publishers install IM, chat and other widgets and serve advertising within them, sharing revenue with Userplane. It is called Userplane Money.

Volpi joins Joost? — Mike Volpi, who gave up his CEO-in-waiting job at Cisco in February, is reportedly joining Internet TV company Joost as CEO (source: PaidContent). Volpi served on the board of Skype, the previous company of Joost’s co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, so this isn’t out of the blue.

RealNetworks releases new player that lets you capture Flash video — With one click on a video you see online, you can save the file — whether Flash, QuickTime or Windows Media — to your desktop, and burn it to a CD or DVD. The player will be out next month. This capability has been offered by other companies, but not by a major player like Real. Video with DRM, however, won’t work. If you’re interested in this, Scoble has details in the video below:

Google Street View continued — They should have called Google’s latest map service, Street View the Google Living Room View instead. Turns out Google has been driving its own cars around the Bay Area and collecting street level views, including of tabby cats in people’s homes. Bizarre. Google also partnered with Immersive Media for the street service.

Panoramio, bought by Google — For every company squashed out of existence by Google for doing mashups that Google can easily replicate, there’s one that ends up getting snapped up with welcome Google dollars. Panoramio, which lets users upload their photos to share them on Google Earth, is the latest.

Senator Hillary Clinton’s clean-tech agenda — Passing through Silicon Valley today, she lobbies for the establishment of a Strategic Energy Fund to coordinate research on energy and global-warming solutions, provide tax incentives for home and businesses to become more energy efficient, and help install E85 pumps for ethanol-enhanced gasoline and more. See the WSJ, which reports she’d even support the creation of bacteria to remove radioactive materials from the atmosphere.

Despite past failures, another effort to take on the NFL — Bill Hambrecht, the well-known San Francisco banker who tried to take on the IPO establishment with his “Open IPO,” is doing it again. He’s starting a professional football league called the United Football League. So far, he and his partner, Tim Armstrong, a senior executive at Google, have pledged $2 million each. Mark Cuban, the billionaire who owns the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks, will be a team owner. Hambrecht, you may forget, has a history. He was part owner of a team of the earlier failure, the United States Football League. (See NYT)

Facebook’s Platform slammed this afternoon — After seeing Facebook’s Platform site down periodically over the course of this afternoon, we checked with Facebook to ask what was up. Spokeswoman Brandee Barker: “We’re experiencing an unexpected surge in the number of applications being built on Facebook Platform – more than 300 as of this morning.”

Is EMI’s music really DRM-free? — Well, that’s the announcement we covered earlier, but what we didn’t know at the time is that the EMI songs sold via iTunes without DRM still have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you (Arstechnica).

News corp confirms Flektor and Photobucket purchases — See statement here. Photobucket deal rumored to be $250 million.

Attributor to track copyright material for AP — Attributor, a company in Redwood City, Calif., said its filtering technology will be used to fingerprint AP copy and to identify and document its display wherever it appears across the Internet. Attributor is just one of many digital fingerprinting technologies that have popped up over the past year.

Yahoo’s technology chief resigns from Yahoo — Farzad Nazem leaves just six months after Yahoo named him head of the company’s newly created technology group, saying he simply wants to retire.

Want to try Spock? — Here are a few invitations for Spock’s people search engine, still in closed testing.

Google Mapplets — Just when you thought you’d seen enough Google Maps, there’s another barrage coming: Google has introduced Mapplets, giving developers a way to perform specialized searches directly within Google Maps. The example below is of movie search. You type in a zip code and a movie, and voila.