VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Mashup companies take over Web 2.0 — InfoWorld profiles three companies making announcements at this week’s conference: Serena, which is launching an online marketplace for business mashups; JackBe, which has a new version of its enterprise mashup platform; and Kapow, which provides a hosted service to build mashups that provide web intelligence. We’ll also be writing more about Rearden Commerce and Zude in the next few days. And we just covered SnapLogic, which provides data integration for, you guessed it, enterprise mashups, and has launched version 2.0 and professional editions of its software.

Linden Lab names Mark Kingdon as new chief executive — Kingdon previously spent five years running digital ad agency Organic. The appointment of someone with a stronger business background than founder Philip Rosedale makes sense, particularly since Linden Lab board member Bill Gurley told me the company needs a chief executive who can help it grapple with rapid growth. Less charitably, the appointment can be seen as an attempt to help Linden get back on track after struggling to live up to the initial promise of its virtual world Second Life. Rosedale announced last month that he plans to step down.

IBM buys storage company Diligent Technologies for $200M — The terms of the deal were not disclosed officially, but Israeli newspaper Globes says it was for $200 million. Diligent is IBM’s third Israeli acquisition this year.

StumbleUpon approaches 5 billion stumbles – The website-discovery and rating service is about to get its 5 millionth user, and is also getting very close to nearly 5 billion “stumbles” (recommendations). Not only is that a number just plain impressive, but since each stumble should improve StumbleUpon’s “discovery” service, it also means the site is getting better and better. StumbleUpon is owned by eBay.

Solar plant builder Stirling Energy Systems gets $100M — The funding comes from NTR plc. Stirling is building solar energy projects in the Imperial Valley and the Mojave Desert.

Walter Bender resigns One Laptop Per Child — Apparently Bender , who served as the organization’s president, is more interested in incorporating open source methods into education.

Social bookmarking was one of those hot areas for a while back in 2006, as Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon exploded into popularity. Clones began to pop up everywhere, but few have managed to gain much ground.

That makes Diigo, a newer social bookmarker aimed toward information gathering that I reviewed last year, sound like something of a throwback. However, Diigo is releasing a new version today, and says it has a small but growing group of devotees.

Diigo is distinguished by its highlighting capabilities, which allow users to go through a page and mark certain portions. Users can also leave comments on pages, made visible by a Diigo plug-in available for most browsers.

That makes it great for research, but Diigo seems to be aiming at more of a mass audience with a set of new social networking and recommendation tools. Users can now join groups, send messages to each other and follow what friends are doing. Recommendations are provided based on your own bookmarking and existing tags and groups are available to search through, which can help new, friend-less users get started.

Diigo’s CEO, Wade Ren, told me that the service is getting some attention as a group research tool for people like teachers and marketers. It’s now somewhere north of 100,000 users.

Interestingly, Ren points out Delicious as the only competitor to his service that’s still innovating. However, it looks like traffic to Delicious is falling off, while StumbleUpon has spiked upward according to Alexa, Compete and Quantcast (click through for the charts). That may mean that the average user is actually interested in a less full-featured service.

Around the corner is Delicious 2.0 (coverage on that from TechCrunch), so we’ll soon have a chance to see.

updated

Auction giant eBay has acquired StumbleUpon, an San Francisco company that helps people “stumble upon” and share new sites related to their interests, for about $75 million.

In a statement this afternoon, eBay said the acquisition will give it “exposure to a fast-growing community-based service” that has around 2.3 million users, and that StumbleUpon is attractive because it shares similarities with eBay’s concept of community.

The deal size is not large relative to other deals we’ve seen lately, but it is a big coup for the founders, who moved from Canadian to San Francisco more than a year ago, and were self-funded until March of last year. They raised a round of $2 million or less (update: $1.5 million, we’ve confirmed) from Google’s founding investor, Ram Shriram, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, Topic founder Ariel Poler, angel investor Ron Conway. (Update: First Round Capital also invested.)

Indeed, they reap a massive profit, something that most start-ups taking venture capital can not afford to do. Companies like Digg, for example, are rumored to be valued by venture investors at more than $75 million. Because VCs have bought shares at such a high price, they won’t let a company sell at such low levels.

The StumbleUpon deal was expected, rumored by several sources, and the price was reported accurately by the WSJ earlier this month.

Once people download is toolbar, StumbleUpon shows you Web sites that you can rate as good or bad. It starts showing you more of the types of sites you appear like, based on those sites have been rated highly by other people that have voted similar to the way you have. It does the same for videos, people and product information.

It makes money by showing an ad every hundred or so stumbles.

With no marketing, the StumbleUpon community has grown 150 percent from last year and
delivers some five million new recommendations a day to its user base, the company said.

As mentioned earlier, StumbleUpon could potentially let people stumble upon eBay products they’ve bought in the past, though the eBay did not mention this in its statement.

StumbleUpon launched in 2001, but only recently caught on in a major way.

Here’s the latest action:

Google’s fireworks — This has been an impressive week for Google, and it shows in the 4 percent-plus jump in Google’s stock price earlier this morning (though it has tapered in the past hour). The main driver was its stellar earnings report. But here are the side-shows:

Video: It announced a video-conferencing product acquisition this morning (see our story).

StumbleUpon lookalike: Google also released a tool that looks a lot of like StumbleUpon, the site that delivers Web sites for you based on what you’ve told it you find interesting. Google’s tool centers on a recommendation button on its Toolbar that looks like a pair of dice:

Google explains: “Click on the dice, and we’ll take you to a site that may be interesting to you based on your past searches. If you want another, just click the dice again and we’ll show you a new one. We’ll give you up to 50 new sites per day that might be of interest. If you prefer to get your information at a glance, we’ve added a recommendations tab that you can add to your personalized homepage….We’ll give you a page of recommendations that are updated daily.”

Froogle tossed — Google has relaunched its shopping engine, changing its name to the bland Google Product Search. (We think Froogle is a cool name, and should be kept for a discount version of Product Search.) Google didn’t do much marketing of Froogle. With the relaunch, they’ve changed that: In your main search results, Google will sometimes feature an item from its Product Search if it matches your search query exactly (contained atop the regular results in a so-called “onebox” area). Notably, however, there’s no change from the prior policy of using only products submitted to Googlebase. So Google is forcing merchants to play in its system — unfortunately, not trawling the Web for items objectively, the way that made Google so popular in the first place. (See our story here on this). Google is also prioritizing merchants using Google Checkout, thereby penalizing those relying on PayPal. This is another Big Company move that undercuts its image of impartiality. Too bad. (See more thorough analysis at CNET and SearchEngineLand), which obviously got previews before it was released.

Google phones will be out by the end of this year — Apparently, they’re launching with Orange and HTC, featuring Google search and email built in. They’ll sport the Texas Instruments 3G platform and EDGE, but not GPS. (Details here)

There is, however, some non-Google news:

Twitter spun out — Evan Williams, who runs Obvious, the parent of Twitter, they messaging company that is all the rage lately, says Twitter is being spun out into its own company, Twitter Inc, with a CEO in Jack Dorsey.

Mitt Romney gets private equity support — The former Bain Capital chief, Mitt Romney has raised about $257,525 from buyout professionals in the first quarter, way more than anyone else, according to PEHub.

Web 2.0 Pyramid Watch — Cambrian House, a Canadian company creating a place for people to sell their business online, is moving to Mountain View, Calif., and its latest scheme is to give a share of stock in the company to anyone who signs up for his service, according to the SF Chron. He plans to ultimately sell the company or have a public stock offering. “We really are built to flip,” he said. “I’m the only guy who says that out loud. I don’t know why everyone lies.”

Digg releases API, an answer to MySpace News — News-ranking site Digg has released its API, which gives developers tools to build other products around Digg’s data, and also to integrate it into existing sites. You can use the API to request very specific information about news stories and videos submitted to Digg, digging activity, comments, and users. This comes just as MySpace has unveiled its own Digg-like news service (see our previous coverage), built after acquiring Newroo.

Flickr has integrated Imagekind — This gives Flickr users a way to create prints of their photos, or sell them to others online. Techcrunch has story.
(Our coverage of Imagekind.)

Latest action:

VC firm Sequoia Capital backs Will Ferrell and Adam McKay comedy video site — Called FunnyOrDie.com, the site features a two-minute clip that won a reported 1.5 million page views in less than a week.

StumbleUpon to be acquired? — Several folks (Techcrunch/GigaOm) are reporting that San Francisco social Web site StumbleUpon is in talks to being acquired by AOL, Google or eBay, for a rumored $40 million to $75 million. That’s not very high for a supposed “top 25″ Web 2.0 company, but a good return considering it raised only $1.5 million to $2 million in seed financing from Google board member Ram Shriram, and angels Ariel Poler, Mitch Kapor and Ron Conway.

StumbleUpon has been growing quickly, with 6 million U.S. page views per month, according to ComScore, double the previous month. StumbleUpon is a toolbar that tracks the pages you vote on as interesting, and then offers up sites (called a stumble) that match those interests (sites found by other people that have voted similar to the way you have).

It makes money by showing an ad every hundred or so stumbles. It recently started doing the same for videos. Unique visitors are 900,000, or about three times last year. Techcrunch says the suitor is eBay, which may make sense for that site, given that stumbles could be made on eBay items, and because eBay may be feeling a little lighter lately (profit is up 52 percent, and Skype is making more revenue). Past VentureBeat coverage here.

Yahoo going carbon neutral — Co-founder David Filo blogs on the company’s commitment to go carbon neutral this year. This is impressive, and the company should be commended. (Too bad, however, that it’s timed with Yahoo’s bad earnings results).

Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

Google to release its Powerpoint competitor, and video filter — It is due this spring, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said it will be part of Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Somehow he manages to argue with a straight face that it doesn’t compete with Microsoft. (Good overview of Schmidt’s comments here). It has just bought Tonic Systems, a company based in SF and Melbourne (we mentioned Tonic last year) to help with a component of this. Moreover, Schmidt said Google will release software to keep copyrighted videos from being uploaded to YouTube, which will address Viacom’s suit because of copyright infringements. Schmidt said the release would be within a few weeks.

Google Feed API — Google’s AJAX API team release Feed API that gives an Ajax developer the ability to access feeds, cached in the fast Google edge cache where appropriate, from across the web using a simple JavaScript API.

Venture capitalist Will Hearst invests in Fora.tv — Hearst, the former partner at Kleiner Perkins and former publisher of the SF Examiner, invests in Fora.tv, an online video aggregator for programming from serious sources like Hoover Institute and the Brookings Foundation. More at The:Alarmclock and WSJ. The site’s contacts details say it based in Culver City, Calif., while the WSJ says it is based in SF.

Oracle has acquired mobile application developer AppForge, of Atlanta — Details here.

Why do all the “top-ten” tips that VCs give always sound the same? — Because they are.

Eric Hahn new venture, Bing Technology, has folded — The former Netscape CTO’s peer-to-peer backup service has returned its remaining funds to investors, according to one of the former employees. (Via Valleywag)

Finally, see our latest NewsWire pieces — They include the following: Adify gets $19 million for vertical ad networks; Cordys raises $80M and sees controversial entrepreneur Jan Baan back in the mix; Yardbarker gets seed funding for sports news site from Kleiner Perkins partner.

Here’s the latest round-up of Silicon Valley tech news:

Video launch of the day: Stumble Video — StumbleUpon, the site that lets you “stumble upon” other sites by offering up recommendations based on your perceived interests, has reportedly seen a spike in popularity. So it has launched a video version, Stumble Video. You stay on its home page, and it plays videos for you. You give thumbs up and thumbs down, letting it figure out your tastes. In doing so, you create your own video channel. It lets you click on a button to find people with similar tastes, and see their channels. Right now, it serves videos from YouTube, Google Video, and Myspace, but will expand.

Seven raises $42 million for wireless email product — The wireless email industry is very crowded, and we’re not sure how Seven, a private Redwood City company is doing. Seven says it is the second largest in the sector, behind RIM’s Blackberry, and serves 108 mobile operators. Meanwhile, competitor Motorola has acquired Good, and Visto is losing money but still raising bucketloads ($51M recently). Here is Seven’s statement, which also discloses a CEO chnage.

Yahoo finally opens up Panama to US businesses — It revamps Yahoo’s ad program to be more like Google’s. The platform lets businesses manage their campaigns, test their ads’ potential performance, estimated return on investment and more.

Skype 3.0 has two new features — Trying to keep up with the times, Internet phone company Skype has released the following: 1) Extras, which allows you to play games with your global contacts, share your musical tastes by showing what you’re listening to on LastFM via your “mood message,” and 2) Public Chats, which connects you to others on Skype with perceived similar interests.

MySpace may not have overtaken Yahoo — Lots of media reports about MySpace overtaking Yahoo in overall page views to become biggest on the Web. Comscore figures are cited. However, as we’ve stated, the devil is in the stat details. Sure, Yahoo showed a 9 percent dip in traffic, but that’s partly because Yahoo became more efficient, using AJAX more and so people don’t have to click (VentureBeat has something similar on left side of our homepage), and that deflates page views. By contrast, MySpace’s awful design requires extra page impressions to actually get anything done. Great story on this sort of thing in the NYT, about the tricks played by sites like Concierge.com, ForbesAuto, and Heavy.com (Harvard’s Ben Edelman, pictured here, continues to be a great watchdog).

The Venice Project opens for testing • This is the new Internet TV start-up run by Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, which seeks to replicate the phone peer-to-peer technology of Skype and apply it to Internet TV. They’re being mean, and forcing you to get an invite. GigaOm has more. An early critique, but this is still early testing, folks.

Bloggers may have to disclose if they are compensated to promote products — The Federal Trade Commission said companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which bloggers are compensated to promote products, must disclose those relationships.

The poor man’s Silicon Valley holiday party — Venture capital firm Gabriel Ventures is sponsoring a holiday event with Stirr in SF this evening, for 150 start-ups that can’t afford their own bash. Gabriel has rented out the Exploratorium, and is throwing in $22,000 in shwag, including iPods, and their footing the wine bill. We’re told it is sold out. We all love to snark on VCs, but what would life be like in the valley without these sugar daddies?

Sequoia invests $48M into India’s fifth largest carrier — IDEA Cellular plans to raise $560 million in an IPO next year, and Sequoia Capital has scored a 1.5 percent stake.

New alloy may boost memory chips 500-fold, compared to flash chip — That’s the early word from IBM scientists. Details here.

Yoono is a tool that finds pages relevant to the one you are surfing on, and locates people who are also interested in that site.

This company is notable because similar players like StumbleUpon have become popular lately.

France-based Yoono relies on the goodwill of other users, however, requiring them 1) to download Yoono’s toolbar (and some users are now overwhelmed by toolbars) and then 2) give Yoono permission to search their bookmarks, which it then stores in its database. Yoono is a long-shot, we believe, because of these hurdles. However, after these two steps, there’s no more work required. In fact, your elderly aunt might figure this out — and she may not want to “tag,” which is the alternative used by other social search engines (StumbleUpon and Delicious).

Let’s take a straightforward example of how Yoono works. If you are surfing VentureBeat, you’ll see (partial screenshot below) that Yoono has searched its database for users who have bookmarked articles where VentureBeat is named. It then lists them in the sidebar at left, by relevance. VentureBeat broke the “Powerset” story, and so it is no surprise this story is high up in the article listings. At the far bottom of the sidebar, you’ll see links that Yoono has found in the bookmarks of people who have also saved VentureBeat as a bookmark (Gigaom and Techmeme are at the top; we’ve cut the screen, but dozens of other links follow).

Right now, there are no “Yoosers,” or people who have tastes that are similar to VentureBeat’s (likely because I haven’t opened up my bookmarks for Yoono to tap).

The company also has a “surprise” button, which is similar to StumbleUpon — it finds a site you might like based on the site you’re surfing.

Its business model is advertising. Ads will put in the sidebar. The company raised $2 million two months ago from AGF Private Equity. It has ten employees.

On Dec. 11, at the Paris Le Web 3 event, Yoono will add a blog search feature (which draws on the RSS feeds from sites contained in the 25 millions bookmarks in its database), and a new way to visualize the Yooser network (a control panel to search Yoosers by topic). The company says it has more than 200,000 users.

Roundup of a busy week:

Instant messaging and email are merging, Yahoo kicks it off — Yahoo will be integrating IM through its email, Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse revealed during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. In retrospect, we’re wondering why this trend hasn’t happened earlier.

Email is limiting, providing no way to see whether the person on the other end is present or not (that person may not want to show you they are present, but email doesn’t even give them the option). It piles up, and it’s clunky — not letting you switch to conversation immediately, if you want to. Instant messaging, meanwhile, can be distracting, isn’t ideal for careful phrasing, isn’t as easy to archive or forward to other people. So what’s needed is a bridge, and now people are building it. We’ve heard ideas bubbling up from entrepreneurs here in the valley, but Yahoo’s move steal the initiative. Techcrunch has a screenshot of what it looks like. There’s also a Chicago company offering something similar, called Parlano, with its product called Mindalign, though its design isn’t that great. (Via Jeff Nolan).

A Web 2.0 University? — One is being created in Alexandria, VA of all places — Details here, and it’s open for registration for its AJAX and Web 2.0 “boot camp” courses.

From Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s talk — Google is working to allow users to export their search histories to other locations, such as Yahoo. Meanwhile, he rejects rumors that Google had set aside money to bail out YouTube from copyright lawsuits — though it is true that Google Video itself has been sued.

Microsoft-Google fight to be greener – Microsoft execs are bragging about building what appears to be the first carbon-neutral data center, taking care of 400 customers for the same energy it “takes to light one 60-watt light bulb.” (Via Mercury News). We reported earlier how Google aims to be carbon neutral, that is save as much fossil fuels as it burns in energy at the Googleplex and from corporate jet trips.

Put a Google map on any image — And when we say any image, we mean it. Scoble has the scoop on Maplib.

Google offering GPS on the Helio Drift phone — Here are the details. Note that is doesn’t appear to be integrated with Dodgeball, and is a step closer to matching the advantage of Loopt.

Google executive Marissa Mayer says Google is like a VC firm — Fortune has a noteworthy conversation between Huffington and Mayer:

HUFFINGTON: Whatever products Google (Charts) is developing, they are incorporating a 60 Percent to 70 percent failure rate. I find that utterly fascinating. Talk about that culture and how that translates into our lives.

MAYER: As we’ve grown, one of our challenges has been, How can we continue to innovate? We have a theory around failing fast. If you assume that one in five things you do will turn out to be really successful, and maybe two of five will be moderately successful, and the other two will languish, you want to do a lot of things. It’s all about being agile. Most of the teams at Google are three to ten people. Five people launched Google News. About five people launched Google Toolbar. They operate like small companies inside the large company. Google is a lot like managing a VC firm, because you’re placing bets on different teams.

Video companies Brightcove and Reality Digital are looking to raise VC rounds — Start-up Brightcove, which hosts video for companies and lets them insert advertising into the video, is looking to raise a round of more than $55 million, GigaOM first reported, with a post-money valuation well north of $225 million range. It has already raised $21 million in two rounds from General Catalyst Partners and Accel, and several others.

San Francisco’s Reality Digital, which does something similar, but in some ways is more ambitious (it hosts video for its clients, but also blogging and forums) is also looking to raise another round. It raised $2 million in a first round in November last year. It has ten employees, and has several customers. One is SPARQ training, which lets high school athletes promote themselves to recruiters — via Reality Digital’s video/blog platform. The athletes can have their coaches chime with their own blogs, too, for example.