VentureBeat

A Silicon Valley start-up television show — A Silicon Valley public access channel (KMTV Channel 15) will debut a new series next month dealing with the “trials, tribulations and successes” of various start-ups and their VC-backers. The show is produced by the nonprofit Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs and will be called “Silicon Valley Entrepreneur”. Look for it every Tuesday at 9pm starting April 1. [via VentureWire]

FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects — Despite questions of entrapment, the FBI has gone forward with a technique in which it posts fake hyperlinks on certain pages promising to take users to to videos of minors having sex. When a person clicks on that link, they’ll find a video that contains no illegal images and may seem broken, but that click will alert the FBI. One doctoral student at Temple University found that out the hard way in February when police raided his home after he followed the link according to CNET.

Sony charges $50 to remove pre-installed software — A lot of people hate the pre-installed software that come on new PCs and wish manufacturers simply wouldn’t put it on there. Well now Sony has that option, but it’ll cost you $50! On certain Sony Vaio customization pages you’ll now find a special ‘Fresh Start’ option that allows for the removal of Vaio applications, trial software and games — which Engadget affectionately calls ‘crapware’.

U.S. power plant emissions rose 2.9% in 2007 — Despite all the talk of alternative energies and how quickly they are emerging, U.S. power plants saw their worst increase in carbon dioxide emissions since 1998 last year. Texas, Georgia and Arizona had the largest increases according to Clean Edge.

Apple researching 3D displays that don’t require glasses — A patent filed in 2006 and just uncovered by AppleInsider shows a complicated set-up of a projector, something called a ‘3D imager’ and a light sensor. These devices would be placed all around an observer and would give the illusion that a person was seeing an image in its three-dimensional form. The best part is that such an image could be created without the use of 3D glasses and that multiple people could see the 3D projections based on where they were standing.

Sail-powered cargo vessel proven to get 20% energy savings — A cargo ship rigged to use a huge 160-meter sail was able to use about 20 percent less fuel that it regularly would have during a two-month voyage. The sail, developed by SkySails, could save shippers up to $2,000 a day with regular usage. The sail has been estimated to cut as much as 35 percent of fuel consumption depending on weather and sea conditions according to CNET’s Green Tech Blog.

Revision3 launches branded Miro player — Online TV network, Revision3, has teamed up with Miro, the web TV player, on a co-branded, specialized app. This downloadable piece of software allows users to have quick and easy access to all of their favorite Revision3 shows which include “Diggnation” and “The Totally Rad Show”. The application is available for both Mac and PC. We’ve previously written about the co-branded Miro service here.

Here’s the latest action (updated):

Airborne mash-up: lawn chair travels 193 miles –Oregon resident Kent Couch tried to fly to Idaho last weekend — in an apparatus made out of his lawn chair carried by 105 large helium balloons. He carried instruments to measure altitude and speed, and also a parachute. He didn’t make it, though. (Image courtesy of AP)

More adult supervision at Facebook — Chamath Palihapitiya, a former AOL executive turned venture capital investor at the Mayfield Fund, will be joining the company as VP of product marketing and operations. Known for helping to turn around AOL’s instant-messaging division, his job now will include helping the company to figure out how to make more money.

Rumors have emerged that Facebook wants to public, and so filling out senior ranks is important. Facebook now says it has 30 million active users. It is reportedly making $30 million annually from $150 in revenue. We’ve heard a big portion of this comes from Microsoft payments for banner ads on the site. Palihapitiya caused controversy earlier this year, when he commented in a French video about a “white male circle of insiders” running Silicon Valley (our coverage here). Facebook also recently hired a new chief financial officer, Mike Sheridan, formerly CFO of video game publisher IGN Entertainment Inc.

MSN search engine market share actually grows — After steady decline, it has grown of late, driven by online games like Chicktionary, Compete reports; analyst Steve Willis has the full explanation:

A good portion of the additional Live searches are coming from the Live Search Club, where you can apparently play games for points which you can redeem for fine Microsoft products. All of the games involve using Live’s search engine - to get the points, you have to search with Live.

Google brings Map mashups to its platform — Tomorrow, Google brings Map mashups of data from external sites like Zvents and ChicagoCrime.org to its own platform, Mashable reports.

Index Ventures and 3i launch Seedcamp in Europe — Details are here. Entrepreneurs apply with their “big ideas” before August 12 and the top 20 will be chosen to spend a week in London with industry professionals (VCs, lawyers, marketers, HR people, etc), and from there, the top 5 winners will be announced and they’ll receive 50,000 euros in funding and continued mentorship to get their businesses started.

Nielsen/NetRatings, a leading online-measurement service, scraps rankings based on page views — Instead, it will begin tracking how long visitors spend on Web sites. The move comes as page views lose their value in expressing a site’s importance. Many sites, such as Friendster, have boosted page views with simple networking features. Others, such as those using online video and new technologies such as Ajax, reduce page views.

AOL releases new test version of myAOL — It offers new personalized tools such as myPage, a personal dashboard offering access to content and applications from AOL and other sites; Mgnet, which lets users find new sites and information based on personal preferences; and Favorites, a feed reader that combines user feeds and bookmarks in one place.

Users of TiVo can order movies from Amazon.com directly from their TVs — Details here.

Intel Corp. invests $218.5 million in virtualization software maker VMware – The investment will give Intel ownership of about 2.5 percent of VMware’s outstanding shares after VMware completes its initial public offering. Details here.

Will the video start-ups ever stop coming? — United Talent Agency and advertising start-up Spot Runner have jointly created a company called 60Frames Entertainment to finance and distribute original professional videos online. 60Frames, of Los Angeles, has raised $3.5 million in funding from investors including Tudor Investment Corp. and the Pilot Group, and says it wants to provide higher quality videos than YouTube. Its videos will run a few minutes and cost “in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands” of dollars to produce, the NYT reports.

Talking of video sites, Revision3, another one, finally gets CEO — Recently departed PC World editor Jim Louderback will become CEO at video site Revision3, replacing interim chief exec, Jay Adelson NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes reports.

Sequoia Capital, which recently invested in video site, Funny Or Die, now says there’s too much content — Roelof Botha, the Sequoia Capital partner who also invested in YouTube and Joost — video companies that only help to propagate more content — now says there’s so much information out there that it is overwhelming, and so you need humans to help (thus Sequoia has invested in Jason Calacanis’ human-assisted search engine, Mahalo). See video below, conducted by WSJ’s Kara Swisher (RSS readers will have to go to site):

Ning’s ridiculously large venture capital round — Ning, the company that provides tools for people to create their own social networks, co-founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, has raised a whopping $44 million, on a reported $170 million pre-money valuation. That values the company at a mighty $214 million. Andreessen says on his blog the round was “orchestrated” by the wealthy family firm Allen & Co, of New York, and was led by Legg Mason of Baltimore, with a number of others participating. Andreessen is smart. Large East Coast firms are flush with cash, and are also somewhat removed from the valley, and so won’t realize just how competitive this market is. If you’re curious to know more about Allen & Co., here’s an impossibly long story in Fortune about the firm.

Digg released an application for the iPhone — The news ranking site’s founder Kevin Rosen announces it here.

A link-exchange network for Facebook apps — Developers of applications on Facebook’s platform can exchange links in order to get more attention and traffic, by using FbExchange. More details at GigaOm.

Hey!Spread, a video uploading service that delivers your videos to multiple sites — Upload your video to YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Yahoo Videos, Dailymotion and Blip.tv all at the same time. (Techcrunch).

TwitterGram lets you deliver voice message on Twitter — It comes from Dave Winer, the Web guru who also created the RSS protocol. You can leave the message with a phone.

Revision3, a San Francisco company creating high-quality video shows on niche topics, has raised $8 million more from investors.

Like several other companies, including Podtech (see our coverage) and Next New Networks (our coverage), its seeks to exploit the trend toward niche video viewing. Revision3’s own slant has been toward serial content, with regular hosts of shows lasting between 20 minutes and an hour. They include the geek show “Diggnation,” and cooking show “Ctrl-Alt-Chicken.” The idea is that loyal viewers subscribe to the shows and download them for regular viewing via TiVo or on mobile devices such as their iPod.

The question remains whether Revision3 can launch other shows that are as popular as Diggnation– especially at a time when so many other companies are producing video content now.

The company, started by the co-founders of news ranking site Digg, raised $1 million last year (see VentureBeat’s coverage). The latest funding matches the $8 million funding that Next New Network got several months ago.

The dough comes from previous backer Greylock, and several of the angel investors, chief executive Jay Adelson told VentureBeat. He said the company’s value jumped significantly. David Sze and James Slavet, of Greylock have joined the board. Greylock is also a backer of Digg.

Adelson said two of the company’s ten shows in production are now profitable. The experience has provided the company with enough evidence that the overall business model will work, he says. The shows make money through sponsorships, with their hosts taking break periodic breaks from programming to discuss sponsors in a conversational way. Sponsors include GoDaddy, Sony, Microsoft and Verizon. The company as a whole is not yet profitable, but he said the funding is enough to help the company get there. Viewers are downloading two million shows a month. The majority are RSS subscribers, downloading shows and watching them via iTunes, for example. The company hopes to distinguish itself by producing high-definition, professional quality shows.

Next New Networks is the latest company to launch a niche content strategy — this time, online TV sites tailored to specific themes.

The New York company has received $8 million in a first round of funding from Spark Capital, an East Coast venture capital firm focused on media companies.

The logic is clear. Advertisers like niche sites. Nothing really new here, so this investment is not very surprising. The only question is, why does it need $8 million?

Next New Network is so early, that it has nothing really to show yet. Co-founders Fred Seibert and Emil Rensing started Frederator and VOD Cars, respectively, but those are nascent sites that will change significantly soon, the company tells us. Other co-founders include Herb Scannell, who is chief executive, Jed Simmons and Tim Shey. Scannell is former vice chairman of MTV Networks and president of Nickelodeon. The others are all experienced media execs too.

The business model is advertising tailored to the niche of the particular video site’s audience. Each show will run between three and 12 minutes long. It is similar to Revision3, the San Francisco company started by Digg co-founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose (which we wrote about here). That company raised only $1 million.

Podshow, a company that promotes podcasts and finds sponsors for them, has raised $15 million more in a second round of venture capital from its big-name investors, following up on $8.85 million in a first round last summer.

Dan Primack has the scoop.

This is, frankly, surprising, because the business model still hasn’t been proven for this medium. This is a lot of money. There are other players out there, too, like Odeo (funding from Charles River & others) and Podtech (raised $5.5M from USVP & Venrock).

But then a number of investors see a land-grab going on here, an effort to be the primary destination where thousands of individual musicians and other content producers will come to provide their wares, and where millions of listeners will want to download them. We just saw Digg founders launch Revision3 to go for this market in the video area. And like Podtech, Podshow is working with bigger companies — in PodShow’s case, mainstream media companies — to help them produce and distribute podcasts. PodShow is also buying up other podcasting companies, so the cash could be meant for buying up more sites to become the biggest player. Its programming is extensive.

Still, we agree with Dan’s skepticism, as the whole premise of the Revision guys (they raised only $1M, see link above) is that it really cheap to launch these sorts of services. According to Dan:

I just struggle to see venture-type [return on investment] for most of these deals, unless they can be flipped before Yahoo, Google, etc. put down their tall glasses of content Kool-Aid. This isn’t to say that the podcasting market is inherently unprofitable, because it isn’t. VC-backed companies, however, are supposed to produce something a bit more exciting than respectable margins.

Some VCs agree with me, but it is clear that many others do not. Case in point is PodShow inc., which recently raised $15 million in Series B funding. This follows up on an $8.85 million Series A deal from last summer, from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Ram Shiram and Jerry Newman. All four are back this time around, but an undisclosed lead came aboard at a major pre-money valuation step-up.

Updated

Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, the co-founders of the news ranking site Digg, have started yet another company. Called Revision3, it is an Internet video production house that will exploit the trend toward TV viewing via mobile phone and podcasting.

Digg chief executive Jay Adelson will be interim chief executive of the new company, he told VentureBeat in a briefing last week.

It is the outgrowth of Internet video activities they’ve been developing on the side. They’ve just raised $1 million in financing, led by a $250,000 commitment from Greylock Partners, which also backed Digg and some other popular sites like Facebook. Other investors include Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, and Michael Tanne, of tag search engine Wink, Don Hutchison, of Goodmail/Excite@Home, Mike Maples, a podcasting expert, and Ron Conway.

We’ll point to the NYT story this morning as a good overview. It is worth reading, and we won’t try to replicate all of its reporting here. The NYT broke the embargo of tomorrow (at least that is what we were told), but since the NYT has run something, we are too:

Here is the full cheat-sheet. The company launches tomorrow.

In brief, Revision3 builds on a number of popular programs their team have already produced, such as geek show “Diggnation” and cooking show “Ctrl-Alt-Chicken” in an attempt to grab market share in a fast-growing area of niche TV online. They say hundreds of millions of people are ready to tap into such content; this is another “long-tail” play, an overused term, but you get the picture. Revision3 wants to profit by being early. It is called Revison3 because it is ushering in the third era in video evolution, Adelson says. The first was cable TV programming, catering to the general interest. The second was PC-based Internet video, but it had no business model, he argues.

The main audience of “Diggnation” is Digg users, which number more than half a million members, according to Adelson. Each edition is downloaded about 250,000 times, and is one of the most popular shows in the Apple iTune directory. Meanwhile, the expansion of Revision3 beyond technology matches Digg’s own effort to appeal to users outside of technology, which has had limited success so far.

Revision3 continues the experience Rose had at cable TV channel TechTV. TechTV was acquired last year by Comcast, and Adelson says the service has been somewhat neglected. He emphasizes Revision3 will produce the shows itself, and will not be an aggregator like YouTube or Podshow. It’ll have its own network, cameras, editors, producers — all designed for the iPod video generation. With syndication technology like RSS gaining ground, people can download these shows easily, whether via iTunes, TiVo or a Palm phone with Verizon, Adelson said.

The revenue model will be advertising, he said — focused on product placement, for example interrupting a show to say that it is sponsored by say, GoDaddy. He said numerous advertisers have called, wanting to advertise at Revison3’s early shows (which now number ten - see list here), but things have been so busy he hasn’t been able to sign them up. The company could be profitable immediately, but will go into the red first, he said. “The capital requirements are so low that we’re already profitable going into this round,” he said. “The intent is to go non-profitable as soon as possible, because we want to scale the business.”

Does Adelson really have the stamina to be CEO of two fast-moving companies? “Its crazy, I admit it,” he told us. But he’ll do it until he breaks, and will be looking for a CEO to take his place when the time is right. “It’s passion of mine,” he said, pointing to his life-long career in the TV industry.