VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:
1) Dan Farber takes the helm at CNET
2) Mozilla launches email-focused subsidiary
3) Scribd creates iPaper, an Acrobat competitor
4) Hewlett-Packard has great first quarter
5) Tesla Motors pulls in another $40M
6) Verizon, AT&T unveil new unlimited wireless plans
7) Oligarchs, proletariat run amok in Silicon Valley
8) Scientists suck up CO2 to make alternative fuel

Dan Farber takes the helm at CNET — One familiar figure is stepping aside for another at CNET, where long-time editor-in-chief Jai Singh is ending his long rule over the editorial arm of the media company. Farber, a veteran journalist and former EIC at some of the tech world’s most recognized publications, takes on the role at a time that CNET is struggling with activist investors including Spark Capital and Jana Partners. His own thoughts on the transition are here. (Image by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid.)

Mozilla launches new subsidiary to improve email — The Mozilla Foundation, which makes the Firefox browser, has launched a subsidiary called Mozilla Messaging that will work on improving the Thunderbird email client, another of the company’s products. In a painfully vague blog post, David Ascher, the CEO-to-be of Messaging, says that the new division will give Thunderbird the kind of attention Firefox has always gotten, adding new features and opening it to more contributions from outside developers. Despite the vagueness, as a major competitor to Microsoft Outlook, a next-generation version of Thunderbird may (eventually) be big news.

Scribd creates iPaper, an Acrobat competitor — Does clicking a link only to find it opening up a PDF file in a separate window bug the hell out of you? Scribd is hoping it can tap into that pain point to get a foothold over Adobe’s Acrobat, with a new document viewer called iPaper that will be embedded directly in web pages. The viewer will be able to display a variety of formats including normal text and Powerpoint presentations and, get this, advertisements powered by Google Adsense, without requiring a download. The app is quite similar to Macromedia’s FlashPaper, which Adobe effectively abandoned when it acquired that company. Ironically, iPaper is also made with Adobe Flash.

Hewlett-Packard has an excellent first quarter — Giant computer maker HP had an excellent first quarter, especially as compared to the recent earnings and stock performance of most of its compatriots on the NASDAQ. The company saw a small bump in North American revenue, accompanied by a jump in Asia and Europe. It’s often considered an indicator for the enterprise sector, so strong results coming now from HP suggest that the recession might not be so bad after all, at least for tech.

Tesla Motors pulls in another $40 million — Electric car maker Tesla has taken another $40 million, raising total investment in the company to date to $140 million, as we briefly mentioned yesterday. The lead investors were Valor Equity Partners and Elon Musk, the company’s chairman. Tesla is shooting for $250 million more over the next two years, and the launch of a new model; for more details, see yesterday’s article.

Two major carriers unveil new unlimited wireless plans — Verizon and AT&T now both offer unlimited-use wireless plans, starting at $99. Directed at the high-end market, the new packages are a significant step away from the set-minute “buckets” that the largest carriers have favored to date. They mark a further move toward using value-added services like applications and data as the major differentiator between wireless plans.

Oligarchs, proletariat run amok in Silicon Valley; middle class vanishing — Petit bourgeousie, where art thee? Recent employment figures for Silicon Valley show that overall employment levels are rising, but jobs in the $30,000 - $80,000 earning range are on the decline. Worse, the job growth for low-end earners  making less than $30,000 was at five percent, while growth for the $80,000-plus group was at only one percent. This might have something to do with an increasingly common business model: One well-paid CEO, one small army of interns.

Suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make fuel — A couple of new schemes hope to pull carbon dioxide from the air to create an alternative fuel. The idea reported here by the New York Times involves using a nuclear plant as the power source for the electrochemical reaction that would produce the fuel, though, so don’t plan on seeing it any time soon.

Update

Scribd, the fast-growing site that lets you post documents online, has launched two free programs, one to let high-volume publishers organize and market their content, and another to allow educational institutions to store and share information securely online.

The company, which calls itself the “YouTube for documents,” says it has over 4 billion words contributed and 10 million unique visitors per month. See our earlier coverage here. With competition sprouting up (DocStoc, divShare, TheCollegeFreeway), this move is an attempt to draw in large numbers of new users and embrace publishers by giving them a way to rein in copyright violations.

The new Qualified Education Program (QEP) is intended to give schools, students and researchers access to research and administrative documents stored in a self-contained area of the Scribd web site and will allow these institutions to share information with each other if they want.

The Qualified Publisher Program (QPP) is for high-volume publishers only and aims to block copyrighted content from being uploaded and allow publishers to build communities around their cohesive bodies of work.

Members of QPP can manage their own distribution groups and integrate threads alongside documents for feedback, the company says. Additionally, part of the QPP offering is a set of analytical tools that let QPP members track traffic and monitor sales conversions through the site.

Scribd says it’s launching this program as a proactive measure against copyright infringement. The company uses a text-matching system to make sure that any new content a user tries to upload doesn’t violate the copyright of a QPP member. [Update: Publishers who don’t sign up for the QPP will won't have to resort to sending takedown notices to copyright violators on Scribd, however. These publishers can use the text-matching system to find copyright infringements, whether or not they are part of the QPP. See comment.]

The company says it plans to draw revenue from the site by introducing an advertising program sometime next year, but it hasn’t announced any details yet.

Scribd was launched in March of this year and has received $4 million in funding (more on that here). It is based out of San Francisco.

DivShare, one of the best in the ever expanding mass of mostly undifferentiated file hosting and sharing services, has just added a flash-based document viewer to its offerings, which include photo slideshow, video, and music players.

Like that of Scribd and SlideShare, DivShare’s document viewer lets you upload Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF files, embed them anywhere, and read them without having to download anything.

Standing alone, this is nothing new, but combined with its other flash players and its free, unlimited online storage, DivShare offers an attractive package.

DivShare has also created an iPhone application that allows you to search, e-mail, and download your stored files. Next week it will release a Facebook app, “Projects by DivShare,” that creates a space for students to share and read documents within their profiles. Let the plagiarism begin!

The four person company recently moved from a beachfront home in Delaware to Silicon Valley and intends to raise a Series A in the near future.

Docstoc, the company that describes itself as the “YouTube for professional documents” has closed a small first round of financing.

Docstoc, along with competitor Scribd, makes it easy for people to upload and post entire documents on the Web — where they can be easily read without clicking on links.

The companies have stirred controversy because of the potential for copyright infringement. Scribd, which launched earlier this year (see coverage), and which is open to the public, continually has to remove copyrighted books, such as Harry Potter novels. Docstoc, of Beverly Hills, has not launched publicly yet, but has been testing privately with users. It will launch soon, no later than the next couple of months, says chief executive Jason Nazar.

The company focuses on legal, business and educational documents. Nazar said many people search for legal and financial advice. Someone may want a will for free so that “they don’t get screwed by a lawyer,” he said. Others may want special help, and find a good lawyer or adviser by finding their document at Docstoc, seeing their contact details and getting in touch with them. So lawyers and other professionals have an incentive to post, he said.

One difference from Scribd is the attention to different professional categories. You’ll be able to search for categories of professionals and then sub-categories, i.e., tax lawyer, divorce lawyer and so on.

Scribd, which dubbed itself the “YouTube for documents,” earlier raised $4 million in venture capital.

Among the Docstoc investors are Scott Walchek, of Integrity Partners; Brett Brewer, a co-founder of Intermix, which was the parent company of MySpace before it was sold to News Corp.; Robin Richards, founding president of MP3.com; and Rick smith, former managing director at Palomar ventures)

Docstoc’s chief technology officer, Alon Shwartz, formerly led product development at MySpace.

Here’s the latest action:

Google phone details — Google’s Eric Schmidt had said Google wasn’t releasing a Google Phone, but the WSJ has the latest details about its significant action in the phone area nonetheless. Namely, it is working with other manufacturers.

Yahoo executive Daniel Rosensweig joins Quadrangle Group, a private equity firm — The former Yahoo operating chief will join the New York firm and help it on media, tech and communications investments. More here. Quadrangle’s investments include Cablevision Systems and movie-theater operator Cinemark.

Amazon is launching its own competitor to PayPal and Google Checkout — Techcrunch has details.

Discovery Communications buys green blog TreeHugger.com for a reported $10 million — TreeHugger makes announcement here. TreeHugger says it attracts 1.4 million unique users monthly. More at New York Post.

CBS Mobile is promiscuous with mobile ad companies — It has partnered with not one, but four mobile advertising companies: AdMob, Millennial Media, Rhythm NewMedia and Third Screen Media.

Google experiments with new behavioral targeted ads — If you perform a search for “Italian Hotels,” and then another search for “weather,” Google will show you ads next to your results related to the weather in Italy. Details at NewTeeVee.

Homepage company Netvibes criticizes Facebook for being closed — You can’t pull in the news feeds from your Facebook friends on to your homepage at Netvibes. Netvibes has introduced a widget to provide you information about your friends, but it is protesting the lack of the news feed.

New York Times suggests the Bancroft family was essentially bought off, when it agreed to sell Dow Jones/WSJ to Rupert Murdoch — Of course, it’s in the Times’ interest to make the parent of its competitor, WSJ, look dysfunctional, even if the structure will change under Murdoch. Reading a story like this, you begin to see why Dow Jones wasn’t performing very well.

Docstoc, a site where people can post any sort of document, reportedly about to raise cash — Docstoc is a competitor to Scribd, and is clearly trying to keep up. Scribd dubbed itself the “YouTube for documents” and raised $4 million in venture capital. Docstoc is rumored by Techcrunch to be about to raise money from co-founders of MySpace and angel investors in Baidu. We’ve asked the company for comment, but it hasn’t responded.

Yelp releases opens its platform to third-party developers — Yelp, the review site, has released an API that lets other sites or companies with mobile applications retrieve Yelp business and review data for integration into their own offerings.

The FCC set the wireless auction rules — The Mercury News has a good summary. Notably, Reed Hundt, a former FCC Chairman and executive with potential auction bidder Frontline Wireless, was originally a critic of the proposed rules. Now, he has responded by saying he supports the rules. We asked his representative why he has changed his tune. She said Hundt is now stressing the “glass half full” instead of “half empty.”

BitTorrent is rolling out free video service — Beginning next month, the San Francisco video and media distribution company will offer some of its library of television and feature films - which include titles such as “Letters from Iwo Jima” and “24″ — for free, supported by advertising. See Mercury News story here.

San-Francisco-based Scribd, the so-called “YouTube for documents,” has attracted a lot of attention — including plenty of suitors from Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms.

So it comes as no surprise that, shortly after launch, it has raised $3.7 million from Redpoint and original seed investor Kinsey Hills Group. Co-founder Trip Alder wouldn’t disclose precise valuation the investors placed on Scribd, but did say the rumored $17.5 million post-money valuation is just about right.

The round closed a few weeks ago, but Trip had waited for the legal work to be done before saying anything. Several top firms were interested, and the high valuation resulted from competitive bids for the deal. Venerated VC firm Sequoia Capital was among those turned down. Redpoint, Trip says, offered the right combination of track-record (Redpoint partner Geoff Yang backed Tivo, MySpace and Excite, among others) and attractive terms.

Pre-launch, the Y-Combinator graduate had tried to raise significant funds, and though Trip had expected that Y-Combinator would connect him to scores of potential investors, he says, this did not happen. Ed Kinsey and Michael Hills came to the rescue with $40,000, allowing Scribd to scale enough to go live.

Shortly after the launch, Scribd was racking up 100,000 unique visitors on a daily basis and suddenly, the previously tepid investors were banging down the door. An associate at Redpoint approached them and the rest flowed from there.

We previously covered Scribd and expected it to run afoul of hawkish publishers out to protect their copyrights, but Trip says this has not really been an issue. On average, Scirbd gets about one “takedown” notice a day, and Scribd takes down the material within 24 hours. Whether this situation will sustain itself as Scribd grows is yet to be seen. Copyrighted Harry Potter books, for some reason, are continually uploaded, and Scribd does a search each day for them preemptively.

Right now, they have limited competition. A potential competitor called Scriptovia has emerged to focus on getting high-school and college students to share their papers and lab reports, but it has not seen much action. And now that Scribd has a Facebook application, that niche might already be served.

The company intends to use the money to build out an API, expand its programming and marketing teams, and move into real offices. Until now, it has been three guys in a small apartment.

Here’s the latest action:

Scribd hype — Maybe because it calls itself the “YouTube for documents,” the young Scribd is getting a lot of interest from Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists. We’ve talked to some eager to invest. Rumors are leaking out, including at Gigaom and Techcrunch that the round is almost done, with GigaOm saying it is done and citing a large $10 million valuation. We talked with Scribd’s Trip Adler today, and he didn’t want to say much. He said those other reports are “inaccurate.” He hasn’t closed the round yet, he added. (Our coverage of Scribd here.)

Adobe open sources Flex platform tools — The company announced that outside developers can use its Flex platform to participate in building rich Internet applications for the Web, including Apollo applications for the desktop. This is significant because Adobe’s Flex/Flash platform — around which many cutting-edge Web sites are being built these days — has remained relatively closed. Announcement here, and more details here. Robert Scoble had an early look.

TheStreet.com buys Stockpickr.com — This is another success for Web 2.0. Stockpickr offers place for people to compare and exchange investment tips. (Story here).

Grand Central offers its one-telephone number feature via mobile devices — You’ll recall (VentureBeat’s coverage) that Grand Central is the company that lets you create one telephone number for all your needs. Through a Web dashboard, you can direct calls to whatever phone you want to use, and centralize voicemail. Now, you can control all this from your cell-phone too. (Grand Central Mobile)

Oak Pacific Incorporated falling apart? — The Chinese Web company that some have called the Chinese Myspace, backed by U.S. venture capitalists, has laid off serious numbers of employees. From recent blog posts (here and here, you’d think the company is disintegrating, and chief executive Joe Chen out of control. However, we talked with David Chao, partner at DCM and an investor in OPI, and he said bloggers have focused on the visible lay offs from units that have struggled, in part because of new regulations imposed by China Mobile. Those regulations increase the revenue share on wireless services such as SMS, MMS and voicemail management, and also restrict their use in some ways — so the revenues of all wireless companies got hit, not just OPI. That said, OPI is sort of like IAC — a holding company with lots of properties. Some units are going to do poorly, and they’ll be cut. Others are growing quickly, including Mop.com and Xiaonei, which Chao likens to the Facebook of China, and is on fire — one of the fastest growing companies in China, in terms of page views and visits. We covered Xiaonei here. All told, Chao says the business is a “net positive.” And chief executive Joe Chen is talented at making multiple bets, he said.

Red Herring not as dire it seems — While we had Chao on the phone, we asked him about the struggling business magazine Red Herring, where Chao is a board member. ValleyWag says the mag is in default, and that it has the proof to show it — in the form of lawsuit papers filed by Comerica. Sighing at the question, he said he didn’t want to get in a pissing match with another publishing company (i.e., Valleywag’s parent, Gawker) but that the financials aren’t as bad as they appear.

Tim Draper in Vietnam — Tim Draper, who has been expanding his Silicon Valley venture firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson more aggressively internationally than just about any other firm, announced a $50 million Vietnam fund last year (see our coverage). He was in Ho Chi Min City a few days ago to celebrate its launch, and looks quite at home.

Razz, the voice-mix service, raises another round — The San Francisco company, earlier known as Phonebites, lets you insert noises while you are talking on the phone. As Thealarmclock puts it, “farts” for example. Mayfield Fund, one of the alleged new investors, did not respond to our request for confirmation of the investment, reported by PE Wire. Besides Mayfield, Cardinal Venture Capital, Garage Technology Ventures and Greenpark Capital also reportedly invested. (Our past coverage)

Cozmo.TV, latest personalized TV site — The San Francisco start-up joins a crowded space of players wanting to let you personalize and share the TV programming you watch. With Cozmo, you select shows from places like YouTube, Google, MySpace and combine them into channels that you then roll into an embeddable widget, which you share. Problem is, there are other sites that do something similar. There’s Blinkx, Channels.com, Joost and MeeVee. (See Techcrunch)

Speaking of Blinkx, it is being taken public — The video search company will go public on the London AIM exchange, which has somewhat of a flimsy reputation. Om says Blinkx has been adrift, and suggests public investors may be duped.

Speaking of Joost, it is signing up lots of advertisers — This is advantage you get if you have the name recognition Skype co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The duo haven’t even formally launched their company Joost, yet have lined up several major advertisers. The company wants to send free videos and other programming to your TV. The NYT says United Airlines, Microsoft, Sony Electronics and Unilever are among 30 on board as “launch partners.” The launch is planned for Tuesday, the Times says.

In other news:
– Metamatrix, a company backed by venture firm Kleiner Perkins, has been bought by Redhat, and some suggest it was at a loss. Kleiner did not respond to a request for comment.
– MySQL, the open source database company that lots of Web sites run on, got $50M in revenue last year and plans to go public, its chief executive says.
–ChinaCache raises $32 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Ignition Partners, IntelVC, Internet Investor Growth, JAFCO ASIA, SIG, Starr International, and Susquehanna International Group. It is a ten-year old company, and helps speed up content delivery over the Web.
–Lifelock, an online identity management and identity theft prevention company based in Phoenix has raised $6 million in Series B funding from Kleiner Perkins, according to Gigaom. Word is, it’s valued at more than $40 million. Kleiner declined comment.
–Here’s a beginner’s guide for Twitter. It has everything (via Nolan).

Updated

Scribd, the new Silicon Valley company pitching itself as the “Youtube for documents” is getting some good traction, in part because it hosts copyrighted material.

Scribd launched three weeks ago, and is attracting 100,000 unique visitors a day. Those are the viewers. Far fewer have signed up to upload documents — about 10,000 users have uploaded 13,000 documents.

Why, we asked initially, are people coming to a site to post documents, when all they have to do is post them on their own blog? One reason is because Scribd makes it dead simple — just like YouTube makes it easy to post videos. Whatever document you want to upload (Pdf, Powerpoint, .lit, .ps, .txt, Word, etc), Scribd throws it into a convenient Flash player format, so that it can be easily read by anyone. It converts simpler documents to HTML.

This saves hassle: If you want to load say, 30 documents online, most blogging software converts them to links that you paste into your blog, and which require visitors to download them for viewing. Scribd lets you upload readable files to its site within ten seconds. Scribd makes documents both searchable and taggable. It lets you zoom in on text. Scribe wants to foster a community around the documents (like YouTube’s community around video), with comments and ratings. Each person who posts gets their own profile (here’s the person who uploaded the Da Vinci Code, apparently copyrighted material; the person’s profile links to a 17-year-old Myspace user).

Scribd offers more features than competitor sites such as Slideshare.net, which is only for Powerpoint documents.

Adobe has not released Flash tools in a way that consumers can easily create a display player on their own blogs (perhaps because Adobe wanted to avoid cannibalizing its other product, the Pdf).

The second reason for Scribd’s popularity is apparently because you can read copyrighted material there without being tracked (posters of material do have to disclose an email address to Scribd, though that can be spoofed).

Scribd has received 30 copyright take-down notices already, according to co-founder Trip Adler. He has removed hundreds of documents, he told VentureBeat today. The problem is acute because Scribd lets you easily download the documents (there’s a prominent download button, and you can download in multiple formats: .pdf, .doc, .txt, and .mp3 files), something YouTube doesn’t let you do easily.

VentureBeat found a couple of copyrighted Harry Potter books online, and Adler said he was aware of them, but at the time hadn’t been able to take them down — he was in his car during our interview, and besides, Scribd is just three guys: “We can’t control it,” he said. He added: “We’d like them to let us know to take it down.” Adler did email us later today to say he’d taken the Potter books down, and pointed to his copyright policy, to indicate Scribd is DMCA compliant. However, another book hosted at Scribd that he was aware of, The Da Vinci Code, is still up several hours later, as of this writing. See screenshot below.

How will Scribd make money? Advertising can be targeted to the text of documents. Scribd may offer premium accounts for various services, from licensing document conversion tools to other sites (perhaps at five cents per conversion), to printing, to allowing authors to sell documents through Scribd.

Scribd is raising venture capital, and should close a round soon. It received $12,000 from Y Combinator, and $300,000 from angel investors (as reported by Techcrunch) in convertible notes, but has spent a total of only $30,000 to date, Adler said. Joining Adler is Jared Friedman, 21, and Tikhon Bernstram, 27. Adler and Friedman studied at Harvard, and they met Dernstan, from Dartmouth, at the Y Combinator school in Cambridge, Mass. last summer. Adler studied biophysics, while Friedman and Dernstan studied computer science.