VentureBeat

Latest Silicon Valley round-up:

IPO window opening? — Lots of companies filing to go public lately. In just the past couple of days, there’s WiMax company Clearwire (see our story), game company Glu Mobile (see story), WiFi company Aruba (see story) and now rumors of software company Netsuite preparing one.

Redback Networks comes long way — This San Jose company went big, and then bankrupt in 2003. Now we learn the company, which manages 50 million broadband connections, has been bought by telecommunications equipment maker, Ericsson for $2.1 billion.

Google offers multiple destinations – You’ve probably noticed that Google has improved its directions service on Google Maps. It started storing previous addresses you’ve looked, and now has offered a way to look up multiple destinations in one go. You just hit the “add destination” button (see image below)

U.S. dumps VaxGen — In an unusual dose of tough medicine, the U.S. government canceled its $877.5 million contract with Brisbane’s VaxGen for an improved anthrax vaccine because the company didn’t meet its deadlines. Good overview of the debacle here in the Merc.

Zoho continues its barrage of software offerings, offers Wiki product — We’ve written about this scrappy, low-cost, but impressive software provider before. It has one of the widest arrange of online software products out there, many of them free. It told VentureBeat yesterday that Zoho Wiki is now available. You can create it for public use, or private use among a group. Zoho’s previous weakness was that many of its products weren’t integrated within the same platform, but it has moved to change that lately. The Wiki, for example uses Zoho Writer as the editor, and appears to have most of the other features you’d want (spell check, integration with spreadsheets, immediate syncing when those spreadsheets are changed, YouTube video embedding, RSS for pages). More details here.

Podaddies, yet another advertising start-up — Gigaom reviews San Francisco start-up, Podaddies, which wants to place advertising in user-generated video. We don’t see much new here. It does want to customize the service to each site it serves, but there are others that do that too. It is a self-admitted “tortoise” among many hares.

Milpitas is wired with WiFi — Earthlink announced that its service in Silicon Valley city of Milpitas is now ready for use. However, it is not free. After 30 days free testing, a user must pay $21.95 a month. Occasional users can pay rates ranging from $3.95 for a one-hour pass to $15.95 for a three-day pass.

(Update: Apologies, we’d meant to put a questionmark in the headline, so we’ve fixed. We’re checking on this rumor, but now we’re getting more doubts about this supposed sale)

Here’s the latest in Silicon Valley tech world:

Video site MetaCafe to be sold for $200 million? — That’s what this site says. We reviewed Metacafe, which recently moved to Palo Alto, here.

Common Sense Media, a site where families can review movies, films, TV shows, games, raises $4.25 million — The cash for the San Francisco company comes from the Omidyar Network. Christine Herron, an investor at Omidyar, has spoken highly about this company; the investment comes as little surprise.

Lots of VC deals — If you haven’t kept up with our left column lately, here are links to the venture fundings of PayByTouch, MontaVista (from a couple of days ago), and Pinger (we’ve since confirmed details of this one), respectively. Also Zipcar, largest car-sharing service, raises $25 million. This is the second round of venture backing for the company, and it comes from Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital and Boston Community Ventures.

Has Google invested in Chinese peer-to-peer company Xunlei? — That’s what the rumor is. Xunlei is reported to have seen between 75 million to 100 million downloads of its software, and has raised previous funding from Morningside and IDG Ventures.

Google’s vanishing click-fraud case — Bizarre story about how Google has apparently dropped a click-fraud case. Michael Bradley, 32, reportedly was caught red-handed while trying to extort money from Google — investigators allegedly taped him across from an office at Google where he’d visited and threatened distribute a click-fraud technology he’d developed, unless Google paid up. The article makes your think Google found the technology so scary that it cut some sort of deal with Bradley, to avoid legal proceedings that would have brought the technology to light.

Yahoo’s woes in china continue — Yahoo China President Xie Wen has left “for personal reasons,” only 42 days after he had joined the company.

Jason Calacanis joins Sequoia Capital as entrepreneur in residence — Calacanis recently resigned from leading AOL’s Netscape property, and said Tuesday he’ll be joining Sequoia Capital, the big-name Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Previously, he founded Silicon Alley Reporter magazine and was a co-founder of Weblogs, a network blogs sold to AOL last year.

AskCity looking pretty good — Last week, we reported IAC and its search property, Ask, were launching a local portal site. It has launched, and it looks very useful. As mentioned, it makes sense for IAC to merge its various properties: Now you can select a restaurant, book a reservation through OpenTable, do a search for nearby events, such as a concert, book a ticket through Ticketmaster, find a map to chart your nights traveling, and do all this during one search session — and all at IAC’s properties.

We’ve put green arrows on the screenshot below to highlight the notable parts. At right is a place you can easily annotate it all for friends (place markers, or draw boxes on a map, and so on). On the left, you’ll see the four categories of search: businesses and services, events, movies, and maps & directions.

InterActiveCorp is about to unload a local information and entertainment service, apparently named “Ask City,” and it’s about time.

IAC is an Internet media conglomerate headed by Barry Diller, and it plans to introduce the local site next week, combining Web search, city guides, maps and event listings and tickets, a move that appears to finally combine the company’s assets in a logical way.The new Web-based city guides, scheduled to start Dec. 4, will be followed later in December by a redesign of the Ask.com search service, according to the NYT. This is an obvious thing to do (the company owns Ask.com, CitySearch, Evite and TicketMaster, among others), and we hope it is good. Lots of companies have been biting off little pieces of this strategy (Yelp, Smalltown, JudysBook, BackFence to name a few) but none of them have the same breadth in this area as IAC.