VentureBeat

Berggi started as a service wanting to charge you $9.99 a month to give your “dumb” phone e-mail and instant messaging capability. When we first looked at Berggi, a company, we were skeptical.

For a PR perspective it made things worse for itself by fudging some details about membership numbers when it launched.

Berggi says it warrants a second look: It has announced a three-year alliance with SINA, one of China’s biggest online content producers that is trying to move into mobile. The one-year-old Berggi has dropped the price tag on its service to zero, and says it has since grown to nearly two million registered users (again, we’re taking the company’s word on this, assuming it isn’t fudging). The company says it’s adding 15,000 registrations per day, and that 20 percent of the user base is logged-on to the service at all times.

If these figures are accurate, that’s good traction. But the next question is, how on earth does it plan to make money? It has built a strategy around localizing its service in multiple languages, and marketing it by advertising on websites. So it is paying money to advertise, but not bringing in any money for its free service. It plans to make money from advertising on its mobile service.

Co-founder and CEO, Babur Ozden says the deal with SINA, in which Berggi will power SINA’s mobile e-mail capabilities, could be its breakthrough moment. SINA’s online network reaches more 700 million unique visitors a day, but has not aggressively extended its reach into mobile. SINA is also the third largest e-mail provider in a country whose e-mail adoption rates are skyrocketing with no signs of slowing down.

Berggi claims that its technology reduces the cost of data necessary for e-mail from 300 Yuan a month to around 20, a big deal in a generally poor country. Babur says the goal of whole venture is to create a downloadable, feature-rich portal to all types of mobile content.

The company raised $9 million by selling a stake to Avanzit — a large Spanish telecom — and has offices in the U.S., Madrid and Beijing.

Here’s the latest (updated) action:

Geomas says it has location-based search patent — The London based company says its patent is being infringed upon by some 20 large internet players, and this probably includes Google and Yahoo. Here’s a description of the patent. The company says it raising $20 million to help it extract licensing deals. It started by suing Verizon. (Via Techdirt).

KyteTV gets investment from Nokia — See our story here.

IPO market sees strongest month since 2004, but not for buyout firms - Eleven venture-backed companies raised $1.6 billion through initial
public offerings (IPOs) on US exchanges in May, higher than any other month since Oct. 2004, according to data from Thomson Financial and the VC lobby, NVCA. However, IPOs of companies backed by buyout firms have actually declined, raising questions about whether the bubbly investment activity in that sector is sustainable.

A PayPal-only search engine — TheFind, a shopping search engine launched paypal.thefind.com, a new shopping search engine built solely for browsing products from merchants who accept PayPal payments.

Google’s privacy upgraded — Google said it will keep the Web search histories of users for only 18 months instead of 24, responding to pressure from EU authorities. See story here. Meanwhile, search engine expert Danny Sullivan discovers Google is considering creating a dashboard (scroll to near bottom) where people can decide what aspects of their search and surf behavior Google can access.

Google opens the veil for advertisers — Google released its Placement Performance Report, which enables AdWords advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. It also provides “site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites.”

Google powers search on Sina — Google will place its search box on the Website of Sina, China’s third largest site in terms of traffic. Marketwatch reports here. In return, Sina gets a share the search advertising revenues Google collects. This is the latest move by Google to try to catch Baidu, China’s leading search engine.

Technorati’s mysterious traffic surge — Techcrunch has details on why the traffic surge may be somewhat misleading.

[Updated: YouTube's video-music filtering technology not reliant on Audible Magic -- Google's video property YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world's largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co. It will be built by Google's own engineers, and not be solely reliant on Audible Magic, as we'd previously believed after this report. Audible Magic has had filtering problems, as earlier reported. It turns out, Audible Magic is being used for music filtering only; see Elise Ackerman's follow-up today,who also points to an agenda by Google to use the copyright controversy to build up a massive database of videos.]

Former Engadget editor Pete Rojas to form company focused on ad-driven music label — He teams up with Downtown Records to launch a new music label, dubbed RCRD LBL, that will offer the music of artists for free, but paid for with ads. See story here.

Quzhai latest foreign clone — Quzhai is a clone of StumbleUpon, with a little Digg thrown in. Notice how most clones seem to originate in Germany and China, somewhat understandable since they have two of the largest domestic non-English internet markets. Quzhai raised RMB 1 million seed funding from BV Capital.

Biomass it steaming hot — Bull Moose Energy gets $60 million for project in San Diego and other cities. See our story here.