VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

YouTube follows through, almost — YouTube tomorrow (Friday) will start sharing advertising revenue with select video content creators, though not with the masses yet. The move to share revenue with users had been signaled in the past. The initial bunch includes Lonelygirl15, LisaNova, HappySlip, renetto, Smosh, and valsartdiary, Newteevee reports. However, no specifics are mentioned.

Yahoo Photos to be phased out — Yahoo will announce the closure of Yahoo Photos tomorrow, which will occur over a few months. Users will be shunted to the hipper Flickr, which has just overtaken Yahoo Photo in traffic. Techcrunch has the Comscore data and news.

Joost launches to public, but broken — Too bad for Joost, the new Internet TV company started by co-founders of Skype, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. They’ve impressively crafted hype around this throughout its development, only to have it crash upon launch. They apparently weren’t ready to handle traffic needs. Bottom line, it says something about lack of preparation, because the ability to scale is crucial. Happened to us at VentureBeat when we launched. Toni Schneider of Automattic/Wordpress says many people neglect scale; Wordpress lead developer Matt Mullenweg, he said, goes to bed every night thinking about how to scale. The problem killed Friendster.

Did Silverlight, Microsoft’s new Web platform, change the world? — People are debating just how significant the software giant’s new tools will become. Robert Scoble has some good interviews with the Microsoft team (click on image left). Finally, the Microsoft guys say, “real applications” can be built within in a browser — no more javascript, HTML. And then there’s the impressive media support.

Big-brother nation — Video surveillance technologies are getting more advanced, some would say creepily so. Companies use them to crack down on employees slouching off at at work and other abuse. 3VR, of San Francisco, offers that. Its software recognizes employees and follows them around as the come and go. There’s Pixim in Mountain View, which can take video in dark, shady places, and NiceVision, in Rutherford, N.J, which searches for “unusual’ activity, as in un-patterned. See Merc story. The Brits are considering introducing a lip-reading technology for its pervasive surveillance cameras.

Guy Kawasaki, the former Apple marketing specialist-come-VC, is restless — He’s looking for bloggers and paparazzi in the flow of interesting rumors, for a Twitter-like service. He explains on his blog: “They would be folks who can provide ’scoops’ that begin with a phrase like, ‘Did you hear that…?’ For example, did you hear that Angelina Jolie just adopted another child?” Apparently, the venture will be called Truemors. That URL has a cached version with a phone number, 650-329-2020, and a Twitter-like message: “I saw Guy Kawasaki at the Stanford Park Hotel.” Apparently a reverse-Twitter: Messages about what others are doing.

Apple’s Steve Jobs vows to go green — Under pressure from shareholders to hold to more stringent recycling guidelines, and eliminate toxic chemicals such as mercury, Steve Jobs has vowed to get better. This is encouraging. Apple has been a laggard, I found out when reporting on the recycling habits of major computer companies. Having Al Gore on his board probably added to the pressure on Jobs to do something.

Boo.com bought by new owner — The dot-com company that epitomized excesses of the boom, Boo.com, a flashy online clothing retailer that was difficult to use, burned through $125 million in capital. It has now been bought, and made part of a travel site, reports the Financial Times.

Breakthrough on solar cells? — That’s what Rice University is saying about its project on quantum dot technology. This is essentially a press release; we haven’t confirmed how significant this is.

Calacanis project not as broadly ambitious as earlier implied – We pointed to rumors entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, backed by high-powered venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, is creating a search engine that crosses Wikipedia with Google — a compelling idea. As mentioned, it was just speculation. Now there are more facts dribbling out: The start-up is reportedly called Kokua, and mix of Wikipedia and podcasting, with a focus on automobiles and video games. This is more focused, and possibly still attractive, given the possibility of targeting ads, but more predictable too.

Techdirt launches Insight Community — At the Plug&Play Expo this week, Techdirt showed off the testing version of its new service, just launched. We mentioned it last year here. It solicits the input of expert bloggers in niche fields to inform a corporate client in areas in which the client is interested. Techdirt wants Insight to outperform traditional analyst work for Fortune 500 companies. After receiving funding from entrepreneur Mark Fletcher and others, it’s looking to raise another round.

IBM saves Moore’s Law — IBM unveiled today a breakthrough in chip design to reduce power loss. Called “airgap,” the technology will use nanotechnology to insulate wiring in the chip. An IBM senior vice president crows: “I think it extends Moore’s Law another decade or so.” It follows other reportedly significant breakthroughs by Intel and IBM earlier this year to reduce power loss.

Spock launches private testing version — We’ve written a lot about Spock, the people search engine. It has just launched its private beta version, and it’s the first time I’ve had free access to the service without one of the founders controlling the demo. I checked out my profile, and it has pretty relevant tags on me, noting that I’m a blogger, related to VentureBeat, and have some affiliation with the Mercury News (the newspaper, my former employer, syndicates VentureBeat content), and so on. No insulting tags, yet.

It takes you through an initial sign up stage, where you can type in your logins to services like Gmail, LinkedIn and other services so that you can automatically reach contacts if say, you land on their profile page and want to reach them. Past coverage.

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

Cisco sues Apple over iPhone name — Who cares? If Apple loses, it will come up with a different name. Like, ApplePhone, or iPodPhone. Details of suit.

Yahoo signs deal with Akimbo to deliver video to televisions — Just the latest move in a huge number of deals pushing video to your TV. More details here.

Avvenu shares music via link in email — Avvenu, a Palo Alto start-up has been around for a while, but has introduced a new service for sharing music. By downloading a free music player, users can select tracks they wish to share (250 for free) and send links to friends via email. Recipients click on the link to listen for up to five days. Users sharing their music must have iTunes software downloaded, though recipients don’t. Works on Windows mobile software, too.

The latest on Jeff Bezos’ space project – Here’s the scoop from Amazon.com’s Bezos on Blue Origin, which reveals a cone-shaped vehicle to be used “to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system.” Tests have already been made, though the program has some ways to go.

MyBlogLog sold for reported $10M, after no venture capital, and then spammed — The service, which lets bloggers and others see who is reading their blogs, and where those readers tend to go afterward, has sold to Yahoo for a reported $10 million. MyBlogLog became popular last year, after its little widget started showing up on blogs with the pictures of their readers. Some 45,000 bloggers had signed up for it. Om talked with chief exec Scott Rafer. Lately, though, some have showed it is relatively easy to spam.

Update on Techdirt’s analyst service — As reported (see here), Techdirt raised $600,000 to build out its Insight Community product, which hooks up expert bloggers with companies that seek their advice. Mike Masnick (left), of Techdirt, who has built the company without outside investments over the past decade, tells VentureBeat he finally bit the bullet, realizing it made sense to raise money to help build out the project — given all of the interest he’d received in it. It is still in testing mode, but he’s now building more interactive features, letting people in the network communicate with each other, rather than limit it to one-to-one relationship originally envisioned. Entrepreneur Mark Fletcher, one of the investors, joins the board. Also, investors were all outsiders. Insiders didn’t participate, as suggested earlier by the PEhub report, Masnick said.

Slideshow company Slide raised $20 million — We’d reported Slide’s venture round last year. Reports suggest Slide raised $20 million, giving it a valuation afterward of $60 to $80 million. This gives it some runway, even as competitor Filmloop lays off most of its workers. Here is our earlier story.

Weatherbill, an online site to sell weather insurance policies to individuals and businesses — Sounds boring, but it has all the Map mashups and other Web 2.0 candy to make it worth a look (via Techcrunch)
It has raised a first round of round of financing from NEA, Index Ventures and a number of angel investors.

Second Life has opened its application to developers — Many people find the virtual world Second Life difficult to get the hang of, which has no doubt limited its growth. Now it has opened its software for developers to provide alternatives. It isn’t clear whether this will spark a vibrant developer community or not.

Podzinger searches words in YouTube videos — Podzinger gives you a way search for words that are mentioned in YouTube videos. Podzinger has a tab letting you do this on its front page, and it tells you how many minutes and seconds into the video the reference is (although we couldn’t figure out how to zip automatically to the reference, like Pluggd does). More details here, at Splashcast blog. Blinkx is another company that searches audio and video files.

PayPerPost drops its purchase of Perfomancing assets — Details here.

Aaron Swartz, of Reddit, not done dreaming — Good piece in the Chronicle mentioning the impressive rise of Swartz, who built his first web site at 13, got bored, and then, circuitously, ended up building Reddit, which was bought by Wired Digital. Now 20, he says he’s headed back to academia soon. Re hanging out: “I’m so shy I don’t even hang out with the people I know now.”

Hype at Asiatech? — Days ago, we reported on the purchase of software developer Mediabolic by Macrovision. Sources told us the return was marginal, giving later investors slightly more than the money they invested. But it was no where near a two-fold return claimed by AsiaTech investor Katherine Jen in an interview with VentureWire recently, they said. Jen did not respond to a request by VentureBeat for comment about her “2x return” claim.

See Jobs’ demo of iPhone — It is striking, and worth it. See here, and click on “touch navigation” for starters.

Roundup of the latest Silicon Valley action:

Browster, dies — The web 2.0 carnage is beginning to pile up. This week’s casualty is San Francisco’s Browster, the company that wanted to save you time by popping up a little image of a page when you scrolled over a link — letting you avoid clicking. It focused on search results at Google, but never found a way to make money. It munched through $5.8 million in funding from Advanced Technology Ventures, Vanguard Ventures, First Round Capital, and individual investors. (Via GigaOm.)

Amazon.com invests $10 million into Wikia — We reported last month that Amazon.com had invested in Wikia, the for-profit wiki company that is about to launch a user-directed search engine on the same principles as Wikipedia. At the time, the amount was confidential, but the deal has been been filed with the SEC, and reported by PE Week. This brings Wikia’s total investment to $14 million.

Dash, why not give us a choice? — Lot’s of publicity about the move by Dash, the car navigation system that hooks you up to the Internet, to sign a deal with Yahoo. Using Yahoo’s local search, users can find restaurants and other places easier. The idea isn’t new, because Dash told us in August it planned to go with either Yahoo or Google. (Here’s our first mention of Dash). But if your strategy is to give people an Internet connection — and thus be more open than the closed incumbent navigator players — why not give people a choice? We realize that it helps to configure search especially for the driver, and this may be a way to make money, but some of us have gotten used to Google and Ask City, both of which offer competitive, and in some ways arguably better (scroll to bottom), services.

Techdirt has raised funding — Techdirt, one of our favorite blogs, has launched an analyst business, and has raised $600,000 in new funding from six investors and from its own five-person founding team, reports PEHub, citing SEC documents. We wrote about the ten-year-old company here, when it launched its latest analyst offering — which lets its corporate clients pay for expert advice from analyst bloggers in Techdirt’s network.

India’s private equity boom — Private equity firms invested a record $7.5 billion in about 300 in India during 2006, according to a study by Venture Intelligence. That’s more than three times more than 2005, which itself was a record. (See info here.) Venture capitalists poured $1.7 billion into 125 Indian companies during 2006, up from $1.1 billion invested into 70 companies during 2005, according to Thomson Financial. More here on trends, though we differ with Haislip’s analysis, which suggests the jump is due to regulations. Regulations or not, India’s growing middle class makes it a very attractive place to invest.

Marty, the repo man, not doing so well — You may recall Marty Pichinson, the fast-talking clean up man who moved from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley to shutter dot-bombs and negotiate away their assets with impressive rapid-fire skill. We followed him around in 2001, and so know him more than most. We almost got in an accident while driving in a passenger seat with Marty — he veered into a neighboring lane on Hwy 101, while talking on two phones and tapping on his PDA — all in the name of selling more of said assets. Our story about him even won an award from the Peninsula Press Club, and was picked up nationwide by other media. Marty has since become famous, but sadly for him, that bites him when the economy is relatively rosy.

Europe, forever divided — The Europeans will always find something to quibble about. When it comes to the world’s sexiest business — search — French are going to back their Quaero, while Germans prefer their Theseus. Good summary of the differences here.

Foreign jurisdiction perplexes U.S. companies — Brazilian judge orders YouTube to shut down for showing a local model having sex with her boyfriend on beach (YouTube is apparently removing it, but people keep putting it back up), while Netherlands bans the high-tech scooter, the Segway, simply for making riders lean back to brake.

Here is a shotgun of the latest stuff in raging Silicon Valley, leading of course with video:

VideoEgg gets easier — VideoEgg, a site that lets you download software so you can post video on any site, has partnered to make the process easier at key sites. Users at Bebo, Dogster, Hi5, AOL, Current.TV and Tagged can post video content from mobile or other devices to those sites, and VideoEgg’s small browser plug-in that makes it easy to get code for a video and upload it as easily as you can post photos, it says

Zillow.com sets homeowners free, allows them to enhance their home value — You could see this coming. Start-up Zillow infuriated some homeowners and agents by estimating the property values of homes across the nation, and listing them online. Some people felt they were being unfairly treated. Now the site is letting homeowners contribute information about their own homes, listing upgrades, remodeling and other notes (waterfront view, parking, roof composition) — showing ways the homes may be more valuable than simply historic or comparable home prices would indicate. Homeowners can then recalculate their home values, but Zillow insists it will keep showing its existing estimates too.

Fon, the WiFi company backed by Google and Sequoia, releases subsidized router — For $5 you can get a router from Fon that lets you participate in a WiFi scheme where you can let other people hop on to your router for Internet access in return for the right to hop on to theirs when you need it. See the demo here by Fon chief executive Martin Varsavskky, or click on the image, and then push play.

Gore partners with Yahoo on Current TV – A couple of days after we mention Google has hired an “astroturf” lobby firm in Washington that poked fun of politician Al Gore, we find that Gore is suddenly partnering with Google’s competitor, Yahoo, on the Current TV project. This, even though Gore started the project in partnership with Google. The partnership will combine professional and user-generated video clips, and will be the first time Yahoo has included commercials with user-generated content.

The eBay dead-company listings phenom is picking up — We first mentioned the eBay trend here. Several others have since listed, including Madhens, a way for publishers to auction of ad space. Now, here’s San Francisco’s Crispads, which has been listed several days with a starting price of $90,000 but no bidders.

Who Is Jonathan Ive? He’s Apple’s design guru, and has notable advice — With all the go-go tech-happy Web 2.0ers rushing out features, Apple’s Ive has a tip you might be able to use. Here’s Business Weeks’ summary:

The man who, after Jobs, is most responsible for Apple’s amazing ability to dazzle and delight with its famous products, chose instead to talk about process — what he called “the craft of design.” He spoke passionately about his small team and how they work together. He talked about focusing on only what is important and limiting the number of projects. He spoke about having a deep understanding of how a product is made: its materials, its tooling, its purpose. Mostly, he focused on the need to care deeply about the work.

India getting more bubbly by the day – Back in July, we wrote about angel investor Ram Shriram’s view on India’s boom, and how valuations are rising. We remarked on the escalating value being assigned to a high-tech park in India. Well, the value has just doubled again, this time to $20 billion. The Indian state of Haryana is developing a research and education “Nano City,” modeled after Silicon Valley, and it was first billed to cost something like $2 billion. Then we saw some reports inflate this to an unqualified “$10 billion.” Now, apparently there is going to be $20 billion invested. Of course, when you read the reports carefully, there are different definitions being used for these numbers (costs, investments, and so on), but they all seem to refer to how much money is being invested in this area — and it keeps growing. And when you consider it is supposed to generate a fourfold return, that means we’re looking an $80 billion jackpot. It all started with Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of the Hotmail e-mail service, who had planned to raise $550 million to start the project, modeled on Silicon Valley — without specifying a time frame.

Mr. Cheney picks the “right side” of Menlo Park — We were wondering why Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting with venture firm Sequoia. Turns out, he was raising money for the Republican Party at a reception at the big-name firm. The politics on Sand Hill road are delineated. The other big-name firm, Kleiner Perkins, which is just across the street, is led by John Doerr, and Democrat supporter and loud advocate for clean-tech. Even Vinod Khosla (still has offices at Kleiner, though has officially left the firm), an espouser of Republicanism in the past, is pushing an oil tax.

News site Topix sees growth improve by 24 percent over the past month — If you haven’t seen its time-line news feature, check it out. You can do a search of a term and see a line graph that shows how popular the term was in articles carried over the past year. So for “Hurricane Katrina,” for example, you can see where news spiked, click on that period and review events as they unfolded. It appears to have bolstered Topix’s growth.

Craigslist is rocking — About half of the growth in visits to online classified ads is going to San Francisco online classified site Craiglist, according to comScore Media Metrix. Craiglist is considered by many in Silicon Valley’s tech crowd to be clunky, a homely Web 1.0 site lacking the jazz of newer players, such as Oodle. But it is getting the job done. Web sites featuring classified ads drew 47 percent more unique visitors this July than the same month a year ago, while Craiglist’s visits about doubled, to 13.8 million unique visitors.

Intel’s new laser for chips could speed up communications 1000-fold — Intel’s new research has found a way to create a laser out of hybrid chip materials, and Dean Takahashi of the Merc has the details (registration required).

HP investigations deepen — Now we’re hearing that HP planted software on journalists’ computers, and the NYT is reporting that HP even considered planting moles within journalists’ offices.