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SightSpeed, a desktop-based video conferencing application, tomorrow launches SightSpeed Light (see screenshot below), a widget video conferencing app, on the Myspace application platform.

SightSpeed Light provides a Flash-based free video chat and video mail between MySpace users, but it is also integrated with SightSpeed on the desktop. The company has plans to relase the widget on social networks LinkedIn, Salesforce, Plaxo, Orkut, Hi5 and others, but so far it doesn’t have a date for these releases.

Last year, SightSpeed released Vlip, a video logging and video chat website aimed at the casual user, but it seems to have fallen off the map.

This seems to be SightSpeed’s first foray into directly attracting the casual user, whereas for years it has attracted businesses. In 2007, some 1.5 billion minutes were used on SightSpeed, the company boasts, but it won’t release metrics on the size of its user base, traction and growth, or profitability.

The original SightSpeed product, mostly used by businesses, is a Windows/Mac desktop video conferencing application that comes in three packages: free and ad supported, a premium $9.95/mo subscription model that includes multi-party chatting, extended video mail, and video mail tracking, as well as SightSpeed business with an admin console and report-building for $19.95/mo.

Chief Technology Officer Aron Rosenberg says he considers the widget as just one way video conferencing will reach a mass audience — and he wants to stay ahead of free competitors Oovoo, Tokbox, and Skype Video.

“For all the people who have heard of Skype, there are billions of people who have not, and millions who associate [Skype] with just phone conferencing. Skype may have 200 million users, but so did Yahoo,” he says in a thinly veiled comparison to Google’s eclipse of Yahoo even though Yahoo was once much bigger.

SightSpeed’s advantage over Skype and other competitors is quality, Rosenberg said. However, Oovoo and Tokbox offer multi-party video chat for free, which SightSpeed charges for.

VoIP phones from Vonage can be integrated with Sightspeed. Sighspeed can be co-branded and white labeled, has an open API, and it also works well with PC manufacturers says Rosenberg, taking another swipe at Skype by remarking how closed and un-interoperable Ebay’s stepchild is.

Sightspeed is included in every Creative Labs webcam installed, which Rosenberg credits for a significant chunk of the company’s distribution, as well as a partnership with Logitech, and has received rave reviews from PC Mag.

The future for SightSpeed is on the mobile device, says Rosenberg, who looks to the US to advance its phones in the upcoming years — Taiwan already has $100-$200 video phones he says.

So far, SightSpeed works with an Nokia N95 mobile phone, with plans to be accessible on the next-generation iPhone.

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FCC chair rejects opening existing wireless networks — A petition from Skype failed to convince FCC chairman Kevin Martin to force wireless carriers to open up their existing networks to outside devices and software, leaving the newly-auctioned 700Mhz airwaves as the only network opened by regulation. More at the WSJ.

PG&E wants 800 - 1,200MW more renewable energy by 2015 — Energy utility PG&E, which supplies the Bay Area, just struck a deal for 900 megawatts of energy from solar thermal company BrightSource. Instead of taking a day of rest, though, the company has gone on to ask for up to 1,200MW more in a public “Request for Offers”, or RFO. It will announce bid winners in July. Via the East Bay Business Times.

Jana refuses board seat, continues attack on CNET — Jana Partners, the fund that is using its 10 percent share in CNET in an attempt to force the company to oust its top executives, has turned down another offer of a board seat. According to a new statement from Jana, CNET’s execs “lack the industry-specific experience and expertise to stop this shareholder value destruction.” It’s sticking to its demands for seven board seats, and has sent a proposal to CNET for an some changes it wants made, including more extensive social networking on the news site. More at Reuters.

Algae could become major source of hydrogen — Auto companies and government are both calling for a hydrogen-fueled transportation infrastructure, but nobody’s quite sure yet where all the cheap hydrogen will come from. The latest possibility is algae, which could be tweaked to release hydrogen, according to researchers at Argonne National Laboratory.

Microsoft’s open-source OOXML standard gets approval — Despite stiff opposition from open source devotees and some advocacy groups, Microsoft’s open document standard, called OOXML, passed an ISO vote to become a recognized standard. As a result, Microsoft will have an easier time keeping governments and some large businesses using its document software. More at Ars Technica.

Cleantech investing doesn’t mean being a nice guy — People, planet and profit: Bill Green, managing director of VantagePoint Venture Capital’s cleantech investments, only cares about one of those factors, and you can probably guess which. “You really don’t want the chief sustainability officer, you want the chief financial officer,” he says. “We need to change this conversation around. The chief sustainability officer, man he’s your friend. He drinks the cool-aid, he wakes up in the morning, he reads your blog, he so gets this, he hates George Bush, it’s all good. That’s not going to get us to done.” More Green tips for green investing over at Greenbang (no relation).

Mashery launches WhitePages API — A new API from Mashery will allow developers to easily add people search to their applications. The company is growing quickly, according to a post on ReadWriteWeb.

Samsung’s iPhone killer and Microsoft smartphones — Samsung has released its ‘Instinct’ phone, an iPhone competitor that “does a decent job aping Apple’s phone”, according to the Silicon Alley Insider. The phone got better reviews from other sources, but as SAI points out, a new, even better iPhone is due out next quarter. Meanwhile, Microsoft announced that it is releasing Windows Mobile 6.1 and an upgrade to Internet Explorer Mobile, which the company says will have more security and easier navigation.

Here’s an (updated) summary of the latest action:

–Adobe launches online-offline media player, and Share. Other applications launch using Adobe’s AIR
–Microsoft launches Office Live WorkSpace
–Joost officially launches its online TV service
–Skype makes earn-out. EBay takes $1.43 billion impairment charge for Skype, and co-founder Zennstrom steps down.
–Facebook to let you group your friends
–Findory shuts down

Adobe launches new online-offline media player, and lots more – Adobe’s new player lets you watch Flash videos whether or not you’re connected to the internet. Videos are offered through deals with other publishers. The media player is an Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR application that combines online access with a user interface normally seen in desktop applications. Last night, we covered the purchase of Virtual Ubiquity, a company with a word processor called Buzzword, also an AIR application. Like other software companies that offer a platform for developers and services for users, Adobe is both helping and competing against startups: Veoh, a competitor, is another AIR media player, for example. The Adobe player is part of several Adobe announcements being made at its Adobe MAX conference today.

Another of these announcments is eBay’s desktop application, running on Adobe. AOL is also using the platform to feature the top 100 videos. Nickelodeon Online also has an interactive game using it. Also featured at the conference: Playyoo, a Flash-based mobile gaming startup that will be launching in December.

Another Adobe announcement is Share, a service still in private testing mode that lets you upload and share documents with friends or with anyone on the web. Adobe hosts up to 1GB of documents and lets you view documents in any format, using its Flash player.

Microsoft, not to be outdone (it hopes) — Microsoft is launching Office Live Workspace, another online service where you can store, access and share documents.

Joost officially launches its online TV service – The public release of the much-hyped Joost offers a couple of user interface improvements such as search and better navigation across videos in the site. It is also offering an open application programming interface so third-party developers can build widgets for Joost users, which it first announced a month ago. Check out the video interview with Joost chief executive Michael Volpi on NewTeeVee.

Zennstrom steps down from Skype — In related news, Joost co-founder Niklas Zennstrom — co-founder of internet calling service Skype — is stepping down as chief executive of that company. He will become the non-executive chairman of Skype’s board of directors, and the reason is in the following item

EBay takes $1.43 billion impairment charge for Skype — eBay had promised to pay $1.5 billion to Skype if it met certain performance milestones after eBay acquired it in 2005. But Skype hasn’t done very well, and eBay has just announced that prior Skype shareholders will only get about $530 million of a possible $1.7 million for meeting targets. In addition, eBay is taking a hit to its earnings. It says the charge includes a $900 million reduction in “goodwill,” or value that it had assumed it was getting after acquiring Skype. The Skype co-founders have now finished their earnout period, which is one reason why Zennstrom is stepping down.

Facebook to let you group your friends – “We’ll let you organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what,” the company says about its forthcoming feature, which it hopes will help users better separate personal and work relationships within the site.

Findory shuts down – Personalized online news service Findory has announced it will cease operations on November 1. The site launched four years ago, offering each user a home page of fresh content — news articles, videos, etc. — based on what the user had previously read or viewed.

Lypp is a free group calling service that works with your existing landline or cellphone number, and launches a private testing version tomorrow.

It’s a nifty service. Free conference calls. So what’s the catch, you ask?

Nothing to start off with, except for a limited number of minutes: 500 a month.

Here’s how it works: You initiate calls with instant messenger (AIM, iChat, GTalk, Jabber, MSN or Yahoo), from the Web or on your phone, and Lypp will connect you to up to ten people at ten different phone numbers.

The remarkable part of this service is that it end-runs the carriers. Lypp lets you use your IM client on your phones. You send a message to Lypp with who you want to call. Lypp’s server then sends calls out, on its own dime. To sign up, you register through your IM client online. To use it on your mobile phone, you do have to ensure that IM is configured on your phone. Increasingly, this isn’t a problem, though, because IM clients are coming pre-installed. Recent BlackBerry phones, for example, already include GTalk and Yahoo. Or if you don’t have IM, you can download EQO, Nimbuzz or Mig33.

Lypp says it will get several hundred thousand users within 12 months. You can request a test account at beta@lypp.com. You don’t need to download any software to your phone. The company says it will soon add a feature that allows you to initiate calls via SMS and email too.

Here’s the trick: You get a package of 500 free minutes to start off with, and you can earn more minutes by referring friends to the service. You’ll be able to make free calls within the U.S. and Canada.

The company hopes to make money by offering premium service, which will include more minutes and other features. It might consider running ads, too.

The company says the conference call business is $3 billion, and the wireless call market is $200 billion plus. It wants to blow up the conference call business, sucking the costs out of it, says Dan Gibbons, a co-founder.

The application was built on Rails.

One competitor is a Facebook application called Iotum. Another service is Foonz. Both are like FreeConferencecall.com, uses a loophole that allows it to provide free conference call bridging by having the calls bridged in Iowa or other federally subsidized states. However, even with those services, users are forced to pay long-distance rates. They do save the conference organizer from paying the fees charged by other conference call services. But Lypp is offering everything for free.

Finally, there are conference call services provided by folks like Jajah and Skype, which use VoIP and P2P. technologies. However, Lypp is different because it uses the existing telephone (PSTN) network – offering that quality network for free, when these VoIP an P2P services still charge for use, and can be patchy quality.

Lypp has also built an API, allowing people to build on top of Lypp, to be unveiled after launch.

The company is self-funded but is considering raising venture capital.

The outage of internet telephone service Skype last week helped several companies, including apparently the Gizmo Project and Grand Central. The latest company to say it benefited is Jajah, which claims users registrations surged by 50 percent more than usual when Skype was down last weekend (though it didn’t release specific numbers)

[Update: Jangl, another VoIP provider for consumers, saw a 30 percent jump to 7,000 users on its Facebook application, Phonebook, up from 5,500 during the same time-frame.]

Jajah also plans to release an application for Facebook, sometime over the next couple of weeks, allowing Facebook’s 31 million users to make free (if the other person is registered, and living in certain countries) or low-cost Jajah calls from within their Facebook profiles.

To use the app, you select the person’s name and click “call,” without knowing your friend’s number and it keep yours private. Jajah calls your phone, you pick up, and it connects you with your friend.
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Here’s the latest action:

Skype trying to buy back customer love — Skype is sending out notes to users saying they’ll get a week’s worth of free service. The San Jose Internet phone company says it has 196 million users and reported earlier this year that it was profitable for the first time. As Jeff Nolan points out, its users now number 3 percent of the world’s population, and only just now profitable?

Jason Calacanis, the scrappy entrepreneur — Fast Company has an entertaining profile of Calacanis, the entrepreneur who is trying again with Mahalo, a search engine with results made by humans. The piece provides Calacanis’ point of view on the Mahalo, but there are tougher questions asked in a blog post by Rich Skrenta. Skrenta suggests Mahalo really only wants to game search engines with so-called Search Engine Optimization, and argues it won’t work. Calacanis responds in comments that he isn’t focused on SEO, and a good discussion ensues. Fast Company also has more facts on Mahalo’s backing. We ran the account by Calacanis, and he confirmed the speed of the fund-raising, but isn’t commenting on the $20 million figure for total raised:

It took Calacanis all of 10 days to close his first round of financing with Sequoia, Musk, Cuban, Ted Leonsis of AOL, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, and Matt Coffin, who founded LowerMyBills .com. “…By May, Calacanis closed a second round of financing, adding News Corp.; CBS; David Bradley, owner of The Atlantic Monthly ; and Burda Media, a German publisher. The total: $20 million, good for about five years of operations given his current expenses. Calacanis then laid out $11,000 for the domain name Mahalo.com, which, at one point, had been a nude-celebrity site.

Acoona, the third-rate search engine, sees underwriter pull IPO offering — We wrote about the shoddy-looking search engine here. The New York Times says the underwriter has now pulled the IPO. It looks at the strange relationship between the company and investor Marc Armand Rousso.

Zoho, the online Office suite, launches offline capability — You can now read documents in Zoho Writer offline, and in about a month or so, you’ll be able to edit them offline too. Other Zoho applications, for example spreadsheets and presentations, will carry similar technology shortly thereafter. Ironically, Zoho’s latest offering is built on Google’s open source project Google Gears, and beats even Google in offering this online-offline feature that everyone wants. Thinkfree has a similar offering. Joyent is moving in this direction, too. There’s a brief window for first-movers to scoop up users before Google arrives, but we’re not sure it will be enough. (Announcement here.) Zoho is based in Pleasanton, Calif.

BluBet lets you bet on anything — Except you can’t use money. On BluBet, players will be able to place bets on anything from Brittany’s sex life, to Facebook outgrowing MySpace. See Techcrunch review. The San Francisco company is backed with $225,000 from Jawed Karim (Co-Founder of YouTube), Kevin Hartz (Co-Founder of Xoom), Joe Greenstein (Co-Founder and CEO of Flixster) and Keith Rabois (Former PayPal & LinkedIn Executive and Current Slide Executive).

Microsoft’s experimental engine, Tafiti, to show off Starlight technology — The engine helps people share their search sessions.

WikiScanner, a new Web site, traces the source of changes to Wikipedia — Now you can see more easily where changes to the Wikipedia entries originate. Wikiscanner tracks the Internet protocol address of an editor’s network, and it has suddenly revealed some interesting edits by the CIA and self-interested editing by Anheuser-Busch (erasing negative comments), among others. Story in NYT.

U.S. intelligence agencies prepare to launch “A-Space” — The Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the U.S. intelligence community in December. It will feature an internal communications tool modeled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace, according to the FT.

EBay releases its eBay Marketplace on Facebook — Now you can show your goods to your Facebook friends.

Brad Fitzpatrick wants to set your information free: New Google employee and open-source poster boy Brad Fitzpatrick blogged last Friday about his work to create an open “social graph.” He wants to help users more easily extract their own information from one site — say, Facebook — and add that information into another site as they wish. To do this, he and others are working on open-source software and standards to let developers build sites that help users port their data as easily as possible, leaving developers to focus on whatever core value they are trying to create on their own sites.

The uses are many. One example he gives is a “trust/reputation” application programming interface (or API) to help bloggers using Movable Type or Wordpress see which comments are coming from legitimate readers, and which are coming from spammers.

He points out developers’ concerns over Facebook’s tight-fisted control over much of its users’ data, but also says that early discussions with the company about this project are promising. After all, Facebook’s API launched last year to try to provide “social context” on other sites. Few interesting applications were built for it, because it didn’t let developers completely remove most user data. Its more recent platform for developing applications within Facebook has been a hit with developers so far, though.

Myspace, meanwhile, has only started talking about its own developer platform, although it has let third-party widgets in since its inception.

Fitzpatrick’s vision, as he notes, sounds similar to what other companies, such as Plaxo, have also been working on — and he got an overwhelmingly favorable response from other bloggers. The project has a site here for interested persons.

We wish him the best of luck, even if the goal is a touch utopian. We have to wonder how far the people who control much of this user data now — Facebook, Myspace, etc. — will go along (most users are lazy and so won’t pressure networks for this feature). We also wonder how this effort will tie into Google’s other social networking initiatives.

Google increasing market share -– Hitwise , a traffic measuring service, said Google accounts for 64.35 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending July 28, up from 60 percent last year. Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 22.131, 8.79 and 3.21 percent respectively.

Google responds to criticism on video shut-down — It is now allowing users to watch videos for another six months, and get credit for purchases via a credit card.

The latest action:

Skype for iPhone — SHAPE Services, a Stuttgart, Germany-based company, known for making mobile IM clients, has announced Skype for iPhone, an iPhone-optimized Web site that allows you to access Skype via the iPhone’s browser. Om has details.

Gbox, offering digital music without copy-protection — Gbox, a Cupertino, Calif. startup is apparently being used by Universal Music Group in its efforts to sell music without DRM. GBox has been secretive so far. AP has the details. Gbox will get referrals through ads to be listed beside Google results when people search for certain types of music. Songs at Gbox cost 99 cents each. It will launch Aug. 21, and is negotiating with other labels.

Gbox’s parent is Navio, a company we wrote about a year ago. See that story for the other notable features it offers. Navio has raised nearly $40 million, including $25.4 million in a second round of funding from WK Technology Fund and VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Yahoo thinking of giving up its paid search business to Google — Kara Swisher has details about supposed memos circulating at Yahoo, over at AllThingsD.

Google is closing Google Video Store — Users who have already bought videos through the store will be compensated for no longer being able to access those videos, but only with Google Checkout credit. Of course, this isn’t that great if you don’t happen to use Google Checkout.

The first hotel in space — Slated for a 2012 opening, ‘Galactic Suite’ will cost about $4 million for a three-day stay, according to Reuters. “But they may have solved the issue of how to take a shower in weightlessness — the guests will enter a spa room in which bubbles of water will float around. When guests are not admiring the view from their portholes they will take part in scientific experiments on space travel.” Company director Xavier Claramunt wouldn’t reveal his backer, but said a “space enthusiast” provided most of the $3 billion needed to build the hotel. The article is pretty vague on other details: “An American company intent on colonizing Mars, which sees Galaxy Suite as a first step, has since come on board, and private investors from Japan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates are in talks.”

BarCamp Block – The event for geeks is taking place Aug. 18-19. No superstar keynote speakers, no pre-programmed agendas. Back at SocialText offices in Palo Alto…”only this time, we are expanding it to the entire block to include the offices and boardrooms of many other tech startups who have benefited from BarCamp.” BarCamp leaders include Chris Messina, Ross Mayfield, Liz Henry, Tantek Çelik and Tara Hunt. Details here.

Here’s the latest action:

Free mobile calls, via texting — An Ottawa company called bOK is using VOIP to give Canadians free mobile calls, using SMS. Here’s how it works: You send a text message with your contact’s phone number to bOK, and, just like better-known JaJah, bOK calls both parties — voila, free incoming call!

The service is temporarily free for any phone number in the U.S. and Canada. Anyone with a US-based phone plan, though, can expect to use up minutes. The service will work in Canada especially well, where many carriers offer plans with free incoming calls. The company charges for international calls at standard VOIP (low) rates. Maybe those with friends and families across the Northern border will appreciate this service? You do have to provide your phone number and other considerable data (from birthdate, to address), which is a downside.

The self-funded company emerged about a month ago and now says it has handled 10,000 calls and is breaking even; it hopes to raise a venture round shortly. Besides Jajah, other companies trying to redefine telephony include: Mobivox, Talkster, Truphone as well as Skype. bOK has decided to enter a very crowded market pretty late in the game, never mind any future legal issues. We like what it does, but wonder about its chances for success.

After patent score, Jingle makes a deal – Jingle Networks, the operator of a free 411 service, has partnered with Internet calling company Skype. In the US, Skype users will be able to use Jingle for 411 calls, and add “Free411USA” to their Skype friend list so they can call for a 411 operator — if they are on Skype version 3.5 for Windows. Jingle’s patent is for ad-supported calls, for when you don’t want to use a search engine on your web browser.

Local.com gets own patent for voice and mobile for directory-search assistance — Local.com, based in Irvine, Ca., was awarded a patent for a method of searching local directories on a pay-per-referral basis where users receive results via an operator call, SMS or a number of other options. It includes an ad model, and comes on top of another patent it received in local search last week. Previously-mentioned Jingle also offers SMS-based advertising; Microsoft’s TellMe and Google’s Voice Local Search, are also in the market.

Mister Wong, a clone of Delicious, launches private beta in U.S. — Oddly named German company Mister Wong is arriving Stateside. You’d think it would be called Mr. Schmidt or something. Next, here’s the dirt on this quirky sounding company: 1) It successfully copied the bookmarking site, Delicious, and developed a stable base in Europe; 2) It is trying to use this base to gain a foothold on the US; 3) We’ve heard that Delicious hasn’t grown much since it hit the 1 million mark last year. We’ll be watching to see if it goes anywhere. What we won’t be watching is the Alexa graph that Mister Wong provides on its splash page, comparing itself to such companies as gnolia.com, spurl.net and furl.net (see above). (More from Mashable)

South Korean search co. rules South Korea — Naver.com is the South Korean search engine of choice, and benefits from user participation in search results. While it handles more than 77 percent of all Web searches, search giant Google handles just 1.7 percent. The site is entirely in Korean; as far as long-term plans go, we can only assume that the company is aiming north.

Facebook traffic numbers are up 89 percent this May versus a year ago, according to Comscore – This isn’t surprising news to anyone who has been tracking Facebook for the last year, as the company has been disclosing its internal numbers (if those are to be believed, the site now has 28 million active users). We referenced the trend in March:. The most notable recent development: A huge chunk of new traffic is now coming from over 10 million adults ages 35 and up. This data may be suspect though because of a methodology problem: Total users don’t equal sum of the age segments listed (there’s a 1.2 million user difference). If true, it still suggests older people are joining, even though the site started in college campuses. Now, Mom and Dad apparently want to see what their kids have been up to for the past few years. Techmeme has more blogging about these numbers.

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Facebook Apps are getting translated – Facebook-focused blog Inside Facebook, points to an application, Nestoria, that’s entirely in Spanish, possibly the first non-English app. Facebook itself is currently English-only, although as more people have joined from around the world, they’ve brought their languages with them (like this Facebook group called I LOVE LEBANON). As the post notes, the company is trying to hire somebody to build out localized versions.

Jajah, the Internet telephone company living up to its “scrappy” reputation, has just pulled in $20 million from the venture capital arm of giant chip maker Intel and others.

This is a big endorsement for the young company, which goes up against a multitude of competitors. It now plans to target Skype, armed with a valuable patent it will borrow courtesy of Intel.

Jajah also signaled it is about to obtain funding from a major telecommunications company in three weeks or less. “The new investor will really rock the industry when it’s announced,” said chief executive Trevor Healy in a phone call with VentureBeat. He said the valuation of this latest investment is “significantly higher” than during the last round.

The move is significant beyond the stamp of credibility afforded by Intel’s brand and deep pockets. A large part of Intel’s business revolves around integrating chips into PCs. And Jajah gets access to Intel’s patent (No. 7120140) that covers interaction between digital phones and computers — and lets a telephone service be downloaded onto PCs as software. This technology would integrate Jajah’s service more seamlessly with devices, making it a so-called “softphone.” This lets it match Skype’s software. It also helps give Jajah the legal protection it needs to avoid the sort of lawsuits that plague Vonage. Jajah’s advantage over Skype is that its service calls you back on your land line or mobile phone, so you are not tethered to your PC.

Jajah’s vision now is to integrate itself into any device, and to allow you to call anywhere, anytime, from anyplace.

While Skype is moving in a similar direction, integrating its service within mobile phones, Jajah argues its back-end infrastructure is more modern than Skype’s. See our earlier coverage on this here. Jajah has been expanding coverage with confidence.

To refresh, the young company, now based in Mountain View, Calif. and Austria, lets you make cheap Internet calls from your PC or mobile phone by using the Web. You enter your recipient’s number, and Jajah’s service simultaneously hooks you up with an Internet line. I use it to call my relatives in London on a weekly basis, replacing Skype, and I’m happy with it.

This is the company’s third round of funding. It was originally backed by Sequoia Capital.

Jajah says it has more than two million users, and that number should be five million users by the end of the year. A high percentage of registered users remain active users, Healy said, but would not be more specific.

Here’s the latest action:

VCs may be vulnerable to new tax idea — Federal lawmakers are mulling a rule that would make venture capitalists pay much more in taxes. So far, venture capitalists’ profits have been classified as capital gains– and thus subject to the capital gains tax of 15 percent. However, under the proposal being mulled by Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, those profits would be classified as ordinary income, and therefore subject to the income tax of 35 percent, assuming they’ll be in the highest tax bracket. Two law firms, Paul Weiss and Debevoise Plimpton, sent out warnings to clients about the tax proposal idea. The move by high-profile venture firm Sequoia Capital and other firms to eject public investors from participating in their funds a few years ago didn’t help the VC cause much.

Skype rolls out call-payment service — If you want to sell your expertise by phone, you can use Skype voice or video and charge people using PayPal. You can charge these people either a one-off fee or by the minute. Skype keeps a 30 percent fee, which seems excessive, compared to lower 15 percent commission charged by Ether and others. See Skype Prime

FM Publishing seeking sale – An executive at FM Publishing, the company that runs an ad network serving tech blogs and other sites (VentureBeat is a customer), says it has gotten $4.5M in revenue, the first year of operation, and its a good time for someone to buy it before the price goes up, according to a report leaked to Techcrunch. FM’s chief executive John Battelle, however, says the comments were made off-the-record, and that he doesn’t plan to sell anytime soon.

Microsoft’s search pains continue — Despite vowing three years ago to catch up to Google in search, Microsoft continues to get drubbed. Now Chris Payne, 38, who was corporate vice president of Microsoft’s search efforts, Windows Live search, is leaving the company to launch his own.

Friendster switches to Google — Friendster, the social networking company, has switched to Google as its search engine advertising supplier, ditching Yahoo in the process.

Agloco now several weeks late on its Viewbar — Agloco, a start-up that promises to help make people money by letting them use an Agloco Viewbar while they surf the Web, has failed to release its Viewbar on schedule. Back on Dec 20, the company said it would come in seven to ten weeks. Now, in a statement sent out to members, Agloco says it’ll still be a few more weeks. However, more and more people are signing up for the service. The company saw a record number of new sign-ups last week, it said.

Emotiv’s brain-reading headset — San Francisco-based start-up Emotiv Systems hopes to release a headset next year which will detect thoughts through sensors in a helmet, using a brain-computer interface. It then translates them into actions on the screen. It can also detect facial expressions, like a smile or a grimace, and translate those as well. See the Mercury News story by Dean Takahashi. It has raised $6.3 million from Technology Venture Partners, Epicure Capital Partners and the Australian Federal Government.

The Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom signed an accord with eBay when their company was acquired.

Under that accord, they can not use Skype peer-to-peer technology to launch another business in the telephony area. So that leaves video.

And once you’ve got entrepreneurship in your blood, you go out and do it again, right? That’s why they’ve launched the Venice Project, their latest company, focused on making Internet TV a reality for the masses.

Om Malik has a brief interview, and here are the important snippets:

Janus Friis:…What we have done is created a streaming P2P platform for television. This is a platform, which is good for content owners, for advertisers and of course the viewers. Since there are no borders on the Internet, this is a global platform. Sometimes we think content owners have legal reasons to restrict content locally and the technology allows them to do that.

OM: When will you launch the service? What are the bandwidth requirements for The Venice Project? And how good of a quality will the streams have.

JF: Like Skype, The Venice Project is simple - you download and you get free television. There is nothing complicated and simple. Our software is already in beta, and we are doing some bug squashing right now. You can sign-up and we are inviting more people to our beta program. It is near television quality, and it needs about one megabit per second.

There is more on Janus’ blog. Our observation of the historical record is that it is rare for an entrepreneur to go out and have two really big hits. We’ve seen them do two decent, or two really good hits, but not two extraordinary hits. So we shall see if they can pull this off.

We hear from a good source there are no venture backers behind this company (at least yet).