VentureBeat

Blog search engine Technorati has just unveiled its new ad network, Technorati Media. It’s a smart and obvious expansion, particularly as the San Francisco startup tries to regain some of its initial buzz.

There’s heavy competition in this area. Among existing companies, Glam Media, which has been showing big numbers with its controversial push for growth, just announced the acquisition of Monetise Limited, a U.K. firm that represents different media companies, while Federated Media recently launched an analytics service for advertisers as it continues its land grab for publishers. There are new players too, like blogging company Six Apart, which announced a new advertising program back in April.

Having already established its name in the blog world, Technorati could become a serious player. It has been building the network in private testing mode and signed up several sites to form the core of its ad program — blogtalkradio, Blogcritics, blogcatalog, BlogTV, GeekAlerts, GPSMagazine, NerdApproved and Technabob. Chief executive Richard Jalinchindra says those sites reach a collective audience of 17 million and adds that Technorati will be adding other blogs from “the mid and long tail within those verticals,” i.e. similar sites with smaller audiences.

The startup will now split into two operating groups, Jalinchindra says, one focused on advertising and one on the main Technorati.com site. The search part of the business has been taking some criticism recently for updating rather slowly, and the company plans to overhaul its crawler and search engine over the course of the summer. Private Equity Hub broke the news of Technorati’s new $10 million funding round last week.

Databases aren’t the most exciting technology. But Truviso has found a way to make them dynamic. Using a cool new technology, Truviso allows web companies such as Technorati to display ever-changing data on the fly.

Technorati, which indexes the blogosphere, is debuting the Truviso technology today with its live channel tag clouds. The clouds are a collection of keywords. The bigger the font, the more the keyword in blog posts. If the color is blue, that means the use of the word is on the rise, while gray means it is in decline.

That’s no big deal since many sites have their own tag clouds. But Foster City, Calif.-based Truviso has a dynamic database. It allows Technorati to update the tag cloud every five minutes rather than every day or every week. Truviso can do this with huge sets of data because it stores that data in a different way.

Roman Bukary, vice president of marketing at Truviso in San Mateo, Calif., said that most data is stuck in static databases. When you query them, the search program sifts through all of the data before it comes up with an answer. Truviso, by contrast, always has queries running. When new data arrives, it adds the data to an existing query and produces an answer right away. When you have a huge database, Truviso doesn’t bog down in a long search. That’s particularly useful to index companies such as San Francisco-based Technorati, which has terabytes of data.

One way to think about it is to consider a jar full of thousands of jelly beans. You can find out how many are in the jar by counting each one, or you can count it all once and then keep track of how many beans are added or subtracted.

Truviso was founded in 2005 by Michael Franklin, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Franklin had researched the topic for a decade and launched Truviso’s first product in 2007. It has about a dozen customers.

Dorion Carroll, vice president of engineering at Technorati, said that the Truviso technology will let people know the pulse of the blogosphere, as ideas wax and wane. More than two million blog posts are created each day and Technorati tries to analyze those posts as soon as they go up. The company says there are more than 100 million blogs, though only 50 million to 60 million are active.

The significance of the tool goes beyond tag clouds. Anyone who needs real-time visibility into changing trends can tap to Truviso tool. You could, for instance, measure traffic every few minutes to watch its ebb and flow. Or measure the growth of crime.

Truviso has raised a $4.8 million first round of funding from Onset Ventures, Diamondhead Ventures and UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund.

Here’s the latest action:

Advanced Micro Devices is in a world of hurt — The Sunnyvale, Calif. chip company lost $358 million on revenues of $1.5 billion in the quarter. It cited a tough outlook for the computer market, but it is clearly hurting from Intel’s newfound competitiveness. AMD’s core business is microprocessors and graphics chips for personal computers. It has other businesses related to getting those chips into other devices, from consumer electronics to mobile phones. CEO Hector Ruiz said the company is looking at its “non-core businesses” to evaluate them as part of a new cost-cutting program. That’s in addition to its previously announced restructuring in which it will cut 10 percent of its staff. Hence, it may sell off some of its non-core businesses.

Sequoia wants to be Blackstone, Carlyle going through shift — Sequoia Capital, Silicon Valley’s top dog venture capital firm, is trying to broaden its franchise, looking to do asset management and advisory work, according to Dan Primack, who says it is looking to become the venture community’s Blackstone Group. Among other things, PE Wire says Sequoia is raising a $750M hedge fund and has hired Eric Upin, former chief investment officer for the Stanford University endowment, and Michael Beckwith, former principal with Maverick Capital. We’ll look into this (let us know if you know more). Meanwhile, Primack also mentions that Bob Grady, who has led venture capital activities for The Carlyle Group, an investment firm with close ties to the Bush Administration, is moving into a lesser role. It’s part of a larger transition happening at the firm. The firm has lost two partners, and it replaced them with Nick Sturiale (formerly of Sevin Rosen Funds) and Greg Rossman (formerly of Pequot Capital). According to Primack, it also has hired Jeb Miller as a principal. Miller was previously ousted from ComVentures when that firm merged with Velocity Interactive Group.

Technorati and b5media to merge? — Seems like an odd idea to merge a company like Technorati, which searches and ranks blogs all across the web, with b5media’s network of 340 topic-oriented blogs. Wouldn’t the result be b5-biased Technorati rankings? Anyway, the merger is off because of personality differences and accounting issues, apparently.

The future of social networking: Watch this space — Social networking executives, investors and pundits sounded optimistic at a panel held on Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus yesterday afternoon. There are still issues with making networks profitable, but that will come with time, panelists said. The discussion was part of ReMix, a follow-up to Microsoft’s big Mix conference earlier this year. The award for best quote goes to Dalton Caldwell of imeem (pictured), who said about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, “I think Zuckerberg is calling the shots for our industry, and when they launched a platform, our heads exploded.”

Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive continue to trade barbs as EA extends takeover offer — More here. Our previous coverage here.

Quality-video site Hulu coming to mobile? — It’s been talked about before, and chief executive Jason Kilar implied as much again during a recent talk. Of course, there are already mobile competitors. YouTube has its own mobile site, while startup MyWaves has a deal with media conglomerate Viacom to be the sole provider of mobile Viacom videos.

“‘Crazy guy’” thinks CNN’s web site is about to be attacked by Chinese computers — more here.

Here’s the latest action:

1. Bubble Video singer gets $3M
2. Bahu, a social network for European high schoolers
3. Vinod Khosla upset with California regulations
4. Technorati revises its front page yet again
5. Smilebox, a software download for sharing photos, videos and other media, raises $7 million
6. Microsoft announces display advertising on MSN Mobile
7. Competitious relaunches as RivalMap, gives you dashboard to track your competitors
8. Worst case scenario: The next Great Depression
9. Verizon to take over all your Internets

YouTube takes down “Here comes another bubble” video — Remember the fun video that circulated Silicon Valley last week, about us being in another bubble? Well it has just been taken down after someone told YouTube it violated some sort of copyright. Too bad, because the snippets in the video were so brief it’s hard to understand how any of it could be considered a rip-off. Kara Swisher posts about it all here. In fact, this weekend, we bumped into one of the singers in that video, Tom Shields (pictured left) of the Richter Scales, and he was pretty bubbly himself that the video had already got more than a million views (it hit Yahoo’s front-page); the take-down request certainly didn’t come from his side.

Speaking of Tom Shields, he just got $3M for YieldEx — While Shields’ video got hit with the take-down notice, the a capella singer has other things to be thankful for. Shields recently left his role as venture capitalist at Woodside Fund, and has founded a new company called YieldEx, which is still early, but aims to help Web site owners maximize their ad revenue. He’s mum on the details, but VentureBeat hears he has $3 million, mostly from Woodside. (See Shields’ blog here).

Bahu, a social network for European high schoolers — The Paris social network has gotten a first round of financing from Lightspeed-Gemini Internet Lab. The amount of the round was undisclosed. The site appears to have more MySpace than Facebook (it wants users to be able to promote their music, artists and writing). It said it had two million unique visitors in September.

Vinod Khosla upset with California regulations — The aggressive investor in clean-technology companies says that some of his solar and other companies are contemplating moving out of state. Details here

Technorati revises its front page yet again — Technorati, the blog search engine company, apparently doesn’t know what it wants to do. It keeps changing its face, and now looks quite similar to Techmeme, a site that focused on ranking popular blog and mainstream tech news. Technorati has raised a total of $21.6 million in venture capital across three rounds of financing. Techmeme has raised next to nothing.

Smilebox, a software download for sharing photos, videos and other media, raises $7 million — Smilebox is a Redmond, Wash. company that lets family and friends share your media inside digital scrapbooks, slideshows and photogreetings via email and blogs. It features designs from folks like Hallmark, Making Memories and others. The round is its second,and comes from Bessemer Venture Partners. It reports 1.3 million monthly users. Details here.

Microsoft announces display advertising on MSN Mobile — Paramount Pictures and Jaguar Cars North America are among the first companies to launch a campaign on the service, Microsoft said. Technology for it comes from ScreenTonic, a leader in mobile advertising in Europe that Microsoft acquired.

Competitious relaunches as RivalMap, gives you dashboard to track your competitors — We’ve covered Competitious in the past. Yesterday the company announced a new release, called RivalMap. It gives a web-based tool to manage information and knowledge about their competitors. More details at http://www.rivalmap.com and a video tour here http://www.rivalmap.com/tour/video. The company told VentureBeat several months ago it had raised angel funding. It is now looking to raise venture funding/

Worst case scenario: The next Great Depression — A diseased housing market and a weak dollar have economists and Federal officials chewing their fingernails, as evidenced by the latest quarter-point rate drop in interest rates, designed to stimulate the economy by making borrowing cheaper (thus encouraging spending). Predictions of recession are also on the rise, but just how bad could it get? If you’re prone to worrying, don’t ask Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, who thinks we might be on our way back to the Great Depression. Better drop the Web 2.0 stocks and start investing in those canned food startups, if he’s right. More on his ideas from GigaOm.

Verizon to take over all your Internets — Verizon, which is one of the country’s major internet service providers, has deepened its re-direct scheme, where it seeks to exploit mistakes by users when they are typing in words by redirecting them to pages filled with ads where it can make money. The ISP is now hijacking valid attempts from users to reach web pages through simply typing in a domain name, e.g. simply typing ‘google’ in the site bar. They’ve also made the opt-out process nearly impossible, according to ClickZ. The re-directs lead to pages with Verizon’s own advertising. This comes after Verizon was forced to stop its earlier “Site Finder” initiative.

The chief executives of PodTech, a tech-news company, and Technorati, a blog search engine, separately announced their departures today — neither move is unexpected from these formerly high-flying companies

Both launched a couple of years ago, when the promise of podcasting and blogging were exciting but not well understood. They both made big bets about the evolution of the web that have — from what we can tell — turned out to be off.

Podtech’s John Furrier says he is stepping down, to be replaced by chief operating officer James McCormick. Over the past two years, the Palo Alto company has gone from its namesake audio podcasts to focus mostly on video news and infomercials. Rumors of the company’s troubles have been swirling for months — ranging from internal disputes among staff members to questionable videos to a curiously small bit of additional funding last month. Still, it has the bubbly demi-celebrity Robert Scoble and a range of other attention-grabbing employees; Furrier says he will keep a position on the company’s board, and will also continue as an employee.

Technorati’s David Sifry blogged about his own departure here, noting that the San Francisco company is continuing a months-long search for his replacement, and that he will remain as the chair of the company’s board. Technorati has struggled to define itself as competitors including Google and Sphere have begun offering their own services for finding blog articles. Sifry says other executives at the company will take over his responsibilities as the search for a replacement continues — then casually notes that the company has also laid off eight other employees. Not a graceful end to not a graceful tenure.

Here’s the latest (ahem) action:

Second Life avatar sues another avatar, over virtual sex bed — We should have predicted this. Second Life entrepreneur Kevin Alderman has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Second Life resident Volkov Catteneo. This is apparently the first time an avatar has sued another avatar in the virtual world. Alderman, who has made money before in Second Life by selling a virtual island for $50,000 (real money), says his avatar, Stroker Serpentine was doing quite well selling a SexGen bed, which allows avatars to have sex, for L$12,000 (US $45.11), but that Catteneo has copied it and is selling it for a third of the price.

Geni uses viral messaging to grow quickly – Family-tree company Geni (our
review) claims five million profiles have been created by users in five months. The secret? Instead of making you sign-up, and then start creating a family-tree, it combines the two steps. Its user interface cleverly inserts your initial data into your first family tree — leading a new user to immediately begin inviting their family members to also build out the family tree. We noted in March that the site had over 100,000 users that had added about 2 million profiles; this was when the company closed a funding round valuing it at around $100 million. The surge in growth since then can only be good news for the investors.

Bill Gates’ investment arm backs Gay.com — His Cascade Investment Group invests $26.2 million into the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender online community PlanetOut, which owns Gay.com. More from John Cook in Seattle.

Russia shuts down Allofmp3.com, or tries to at least — Russia shut the music download website, a leader in music and video piracy, to placate the U.S. concerns about Russia’s copyright protection policies. However, an alternative site run by the same Moscow company has emerged: Mp3Sparks.com.

Netvibes, one of the more popular start-page companies, sees departure — With Google and other big players pushing their own start-pages (pages that you can customize and make your home page as you surf the Web), there’s growing tension at the many start-up companies that launched similar features early on. Paris-based Netvibes has lost Pierre Chappaz, who was co-CEO and said he had disagreements on strategies of “distribution and monetization.” See his post here.

Helio reportedly to get more life-support — Earthlink and South Korea’s SK Telecom plan to pump $100 million each in Helio, their money-losing U.S. mobile telecom network. Helio is a so-called MVNO, or networks that pay to use the infrastructure of other carriers to offer their services, and they’ve had a poor track record. Amp’d Mobile recently filed for bankruptcy, and ESPN’s mobile network failed. Helio is getting costly. It has already soaked up $440 million, and expects a net loss of $330 million to $360 million this year, compared with a $192 million shortfall in 2006.

Netsuite 74 percent owned by Larry Ellison, and it competes with Oracle — Netsuite, software company that just filed to go public, undercuts Oracle by selling dirt-cheap online software for ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) for CRM (Customer Relationship Management). And yet it is 61 percent owned by Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle. Ellison owned another 13 percent, which he has given to trusts related to his family. Netsuite’s products sell at a loss. (See WSJ story for more; subscription required).

KKR is latest buyout firm to file for IPO — KKR has filed for an IPO that will let it raise $1.25 billion. This follows the much hyped IPO of another buyout firm, Blackstone. Lately, the sector has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers, who are now considering levying a new tax on buyout professionals. Blackstone’s stock has dropped 4.1 percent since its IPO. Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and Peter Peterson have pocketed $2.56 billion between them. Now, will individual investors fall for another buyout IPO? Probably.

Yahoo’s personalized SmartAds — Yahoo has released new ad tools that allow for better “behavioral targeting.” Called SmartAds, they let advertisers create custom ads, using information Yahoo has about where the user is located and which sites they are visiting. The NYT has a good description of how it works:

This is how Yahoo’s new system works: the advertiser (or its agency) would provide Yahoo with the components of its display ads — including the logos, tag lines and images. The retailer would share information from its inventory databases that track the items on the shelves in each of its stores. Next, Yahoo would combine that data with the information it has about its users’ demographics and actions online to create a product-specific advertisement. For airlines, SmartAds uses Yahoo’s information about its Web surfers to create display advertisements for each person that feature ticket offers with actual prices listed. In time, Yahoo plans to offer rich media advertisements where users can buy the ticket at that price right within the ad unit, rather than having to click through to another Web site.

Departures at Technorati — The blog search engine, which has lost some of is focus lately, has suffered three more departures. The company’s chief executive Dave Sifry said its top engineers Adam Hertz and Tantek Celik have gone. They had been there for three years, and were responsible for Technorati’s effective evangelizing of its tags and of microformats. Two months ago, the company drew another $1 million from its investors. The departures are a setback; we reached out to Technorati and Tantek for comment, but neither responded. Also, product manager Liz Dunn, who had helped build the company’s latest site, has left, to join Will Farrell’s comedy video site FunnyOrDie, backed by Sequoia.

EBay opens US version of its classifieds site Kijiji — Auction site EBay has quietly opened the cute-sounding classifieds Web site, a clone of Craigslist, in all 50 states (see WSJ story, subscription required). The service had been operating in Canada, Europe and Asia. Its name, though, is harder to spell, and there’s not much difference from Craigslist. Posting is free, but the company will explore ways of charging for display ads and premium services for sellers. This is notable, too, because eBay owns 25 percent of Craigslist. EBay owns a number of other classifieds site in other countries.

Feedburner makes two premium services free — After getting bought by Google, Feedburner is offering for free its Stats PRO service, which provides statistics such as click-through tracking and podcast downloads; and its MyBrand service, which allows users to control the URL of their feed. See Search Engine Land for more details. Danny Sullivan wrote about the importance of owning your feed name here.

Craig Venter’s company transplants entire genome from one bacterium cell to another — This technique could possibly lead to the creation of ‘designer’ microbes producing fuel or help cleaning toxic waste. The company has a way to go yet. The ultimate plan is to stitch together artificial chromosomes, proteins and other building blocks with the aim of jumpstarting their designer microbe to life. (More here.)

T-Mobile’s phone, lost in the iPhone hype — T-Mobile picked a tough week to release its own new phone service. Offered on Samsung and Noka phones, the service lets you place and receive calls over both the regular T-Mobile GSM network and virtually any WiFi wireless network. Called HotSpot@Home, it uses a technology called UMA (unlicensed mobile access). It lets you switch seamlessly between the two networks. It’s quite expensive (minimum $50 a month), so you’d have to be a power user for this to make sense. Calls originating from WiFi zones are free (don’t go against minutes). It works in Starbucks hotspots, without forcing you to log in. It doesn’t work in other areas with registration pages, such as airports, however. Good for use abroad, too, since WiFi calls are free. More details from Larry Magid and the NYT’s Pogue.

Korea’s LG agrees to develop a YouTube-focused mobile phone — LG said the model will allow users to upload, view and share video clips without the need to use a computer. The 3G phone will be offered first in Europe in the second half of this year (Forbes). LG began selling “Google phones” in Europe last month with software installed for directly using the Google service. It offers one-click access to Google’s search engine, Gmail and Google maps.

Videocountner lets you track how may time your video has been watched across various sites — The sites tracked by the service include YouTube, Revver, Daily Motion, MySpace and iFilm (via Techcrunch).

HP’s Presto photo service for elderly isn’t working — It was supposed to be really easy to use, allowing people to set it up for the elderly relatives to receive photos. But the Mercury News’ Dean Takahashi says it doesn’t work. After two tries, his mother gave up. We covered the company here. The Mountain View, Calif. company has $10 million in backing from Kleiner Perkins and Clearstone.

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.

Here’s the latest tech action:

Pledging Facebook fast — Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks to outside developers yesterday that they can build applications for Facebook and keep “all the revenue,” with no revenue share, drew the biggest response from the crowd, and was clearly the most significant announcement about the company’s plans for partnerships. And now, given our prodigious Facebook coverage lately, we’re declaring a Facebook fast for at least 24 hours.

Big media linking to each other — Several large newspapers have signed a deal to link to each other’s stories, to boost their collective ranking in Google’s search results.

Attendio’s local events — Attendio, a San Francisco company, launched an local events service yesterday. You can search, discover, bookmark, and share events in your city. You type in a set of interests and set your location, and Attendio starts feeding you listings. If one strikes your fancy, you can bookmark it and add it to your favorites or send it to your phone, Google Calendar, Outlook, or any services that support iCal. Attendio also gives you a blog widget that lets you share the events you’ve bookmarked, add events on the fly. VentureBeat’s Dan Kaplan says he used Yelp for this sort of thing, but that Attendio has converted him. The company has raised $965,000 in bridge financing from individual angel investors, Felicis Ventures and Sunbridge Partners. Kristen Nicole at Mashable has more on the company.

Pricelock lets you lock into gas prices — Pricelock, a Dallas, Texas company, hasn’t launched yet, but it wants to let people buy gas in two months at today’s rate regardless of whether it has gone up or down. With prices rising strongly, this is a good service, because the assumption is that prices will continue to rise. However, the company hasn’t launched yet, and prices are likely (arguably) to slow down soon, raising the question of whether people are really going to want to bother about this. TheAlarmClock has more details about the service.

Intel and AMD race for technology edge — The Mercury News has a good summary of the battle between the chip titans.

MyPunchbowl’s new technology to pick a date for events — When you’re organizing an event, it can be frustrating to find a date everyone can agree on. What’s surprising is that no site has come up with a good way to facilitate the diplomacy of event date setting. Punchbowl has just done that, with an algorithm that takes into consideration preferences of your invitees, needs of the host and of “VIP” guests, the ones who are really important. It gauges momentum around specific dates, as people start responding to a host’s invite and specified choices, and then figures out what to do in tie-breaking scenarios. Here’s video about how it works (RSS readers will have to click to site):

The three-person team is still looking for $1-3 million in VC funding, but is just about to finish an angel round to tide them over. Founder Matt Douglas says he’s lasted this long on reserves from his days at Adobe.

Bebo says Yahoo rumor not true — This came in response to rumors carried by the Telegraph that the social network was in acquisition talks with Yahoo.

Technorati’s big change — The blog search engine, Technorati, has redesigned itself, to reduce its multiple features (keyword search, tag search and blog directory search) into a single search bar. Chief executive David Sifry explains, blogs are now mainstream, and tags and other features can be incorporated into a single search. However, the result of the radical change is somewhat bewildering.

Google’s “hot” search results — Google now shows you trends along city, state and country lines. Here’s the service. More details here.

The Google Way — Google vice president Marissa Mayer explains how Google’s co-founders trained new employees: “The way Larry and Sergey trained us is they just gave us way too much responsibility and yelled at us until we became the people they needed us to become. And so I’m going to try to execute that program - with less yelling.”

Google tests Adsense in video ads — Google is running is ads in videos produced by any content provider (details here). Not much is known about how well these ads take advantage of contextual clues to target the ads, something that start-ups Adap.TV and ScanScout are doing. Publishers can choose the videos they want to monetize and where the ads will appear within the video; and they can track ad performance. Ads will be no longer than 30 seconds.

Google will figure out your life for you — Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, on Google’s efforts to get better at personalization (Financial Times):

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.

Google translation — The search engine now instantly translates search queries and results into 12 languages, and additionally lets you translate any of the pages you land on when clicking those results.

Environment in trouble — In a story earlier this week, we buried the link to the latest worrying report about the environment, so repeating it here: The National Academy of Sciences reports says things may be much worse than we realized.

San Jose, Calif. trying to become the center of clean technology investing — WSJ has details.

Yahoo closes Webjay — Not a surprise, given that Webjay was a one-man show when it was bought by Yahoo for integration.

Technorati Inc., the San Francisco company that offers a blog search engine and other services, has raised another $1 million, but still has not articulated a clear strategy.

The latest capital adds to the existing $10.52 million already raised as part of its third round of financing, started last June.

DG Incubation, operator of Technorati Japan, is listed as a new shareholder, alongside existing backers Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital, according to PE Wire, which referenced the filing. VentureBeat hasn’t confirmed this.

Technorati continues its search for a chief executive, and has also appeared unfocused lately (see our recent coverage; scroll down). While its traffic appears to be growing, its search tools have remained somewhat weak, even as upstarts like Sphere improve their blog searches.

Spehere recently started offering better visuals of blog stories, and related content, for example. Take a look a the screenshot below. In this example, VentureBeat is part of the “technology” coverage. As you scroll through Sphere’s headlines, a fuller summary of the story pops up along side. To the far right is related content to the story you’re looking at.

Technorati has now raised more than $15 million.

Here’s the latest:

Thanks for patience — First, VB just changed servers. We understand there are a few formatting problems on our front page, feed hiccups and issues with our search engine. We’ll working to fix them.

Sabio Labs raises second round — Sabio is a secretive Palo Alto, Calif. start-up building a new design process for analog chips. It’s likely up to something significant, because Andy Bechtolsheim, the brilliant engineer and co-founder of Sun Microsystems has led a round of investment into the company. Investors in the earlier, first round include individuals like Art Reidel (CEO Scintera – on the board ), Bill Unger (of Mayfield), Barr Dolan (of Charter Ventures), Rajeev Madhawan (CEO Magma), Carl Showalter (of Lightspeed Ventures), Marc Friend (USVP and Summit Partners), Bobby Yazdani (CEO SABA), Amidzad (Palo Alto investors) and Harry Cheung. We plan to follow up with the company’s chief executive, Mar Hershenson.

The blog search engine Technorati has bought PersonalBee — PersonalBee (see our coverage) lets experts and others create their own news page for others to follow along. See Technorati’s statement here. Meanwhile, Technorati continues its search for a chief executive, something we’ve heard started several months ago. Technorati could have moved into providing blog and stat features, but the nimble MyBlogLog moved more quickly (our coverage). After more than $14 million in venture capital, Technorati appears still to be searching for a business model.

Is Photobucket in negotiations with Fox Interactive Media, owner of MySpace? — That’s what we’ve heard from a source, who says the two are working through Lehman Brothers in talks. Even if true, it’s another thing to speculate whether the recent scuffle between MySpace and Photobucket is related to deal jockeying. Apparently, Diller’s IAC is also interested in Photobucket. (See our update here)

Competitious has raised an angel round — Competitious is a start-up company that gives users tools to compare themselves against competing companies, using a number of variables, such as Web traffic, feature lists and news articles. Paul Colton, the founder and CEO of Aptana, which recently took over the RadRails project, is one investor. The company is still early, and has yet to release its main product. (See our earlier coverage).

Traits of successful entrepreneurs — Venture capitalist Ryan Floyd reports on the qualities of the best entrepreneurs he has funded.

Aggregate Knowledge raises cash, but ChoiceStream raises more — Following our report yesterday about Aggregate Knowledge, a behavioral search company raising $20 million, we learned competitor ChoiceStream, of Cambridge, Mass. has raised more, $25.79 million. The company hasn’t responded to requests for comment. Dan Primack has more details and speculates the company’s valuation exceeds $250 million. Rumor we’ve heard is ChoiceStream rejected a $150 million or so buyout offer, so Dan’s reasoning is sound, though SEC filings can also be misleading. Investors are General Catalyst, Sutter Hill Ventures and a family trust affiliated with ChoiceStream CEO Stephen Johnson. The company has more than 100 employees, and so is burning $1 million a month.

Here’s the latest action:

Sam Zell, soon one of the largest U.S. newspaper publishers, says Google “steals” — The magnate, who recently agreed to acquire the Tribune Co., told a gathering at Stanford University Thursday: “If all the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do, and how profitable would Google be?” This is remarkable, and could foreshadow a legal showdown, especially when Zell begins to realize how difficult it is to make money in the newspaper industry. Unfortunately for Zell, U.S courts may not be as friendly as the Belgium courts, which upheld that Google News violates copyright. In another case that unfolded in U.S. and French courts, the French wire service AFP fought Google to sign a licensing deal, the terms of which are still unknown. But “fair use” is well established in the U.S., and Zell is fighting a losing battle on this one.

Google ripping off Chinese company Sohu? — “Google stealing” has become a popular refrain. Apparently Google has copied some technology to allow typing of Chinese characters. Details still vague, but Google has acknowledged wrong-doing.

Google launches Goog-411 — The service lets you make free directory assistance calls, supported by advertising. It is much like 1-800-Free411, a competing service offered by Jingle. The difference is that Google doesn’t offer customer support if the speech recognition service breaks down and doesn’t recognize what you’re asking for. We prefer Jingle for now. More details here.

Technorati is apparently looking for new CEO — The Silicon Valley-based blog search engine hasn’t confirmed the latest reports, though.

Microsoft mobilizes against Open Document Format — It is asking people to send in letters to legislators to oppose California A.B. 1668, which requires state agencies to create all documents in an open extensible markup language-based, XML-based file format, and to prefer Open Document Format (ODF) for all state software procurement.

Microsoft has released instant messaging for the XBox – Details here.

Eghosa Omoigui to direct Intel Capital’s consumer internet investments — Omoigui, who has been Intel Capital’s chief of staff for the past two years, will now help Intel’s venture capital firm make direct investments into consumer Internet start-ups. Intel has traditionally been the largest investor in venture capital and, like Cisco, the chip giant has targeted consumer Internet more closely. (See Omoigui’s recent VentureBeat column).

The Sansa Connect arrives — Using software from Mountain View start-up Zing, SanDisk is releasing its new MP3 device, the Sansa Connect. The Zing software lets the device connect with Yahoo’s Internet music service, which allows unlimited music downloads beginning at $11.99 a month. It will hit stores this week. Zing also has a relationship with Sirius Radio. (See our earlier coverage). Zing raised $13 million in January from IDG, Redpoint and Camp Ventures. The $250 device lets you download music via WiFi, though it can take half a minute to do this. You can store your songs in the device, but you can’t own the music permanently by copying it or transferring it to other devices. It competes against the iPod, and Zune among others — and the WiFi and Yahoo music services may give it the leg up. (Speaking of taking your music with you, separately, Mediamaster, a San Mateo, Calif. start-up is the latest to let you upload music from hard drive to listen online. Review via Techcrunch).

Plastics to be used for fuels? — That’s what DARPA is investigating with a $2.3 million investment. Details here at the NYT.

Here’s the latest action:

Amazon’s odd and scary patent — First, Amazon rolled out a product called Mechancial Turk (image left), where people do tasks for you that a machine couldn’t perform. Strange name, we thought, but nicely couched in history, and the people still ruled. But the latest Amazon patent puts the machine in charge, breaking down tasks, and commanding the human to do them. According to the patent, just awarded, “the humans perform the subtasks and provide the results back to the server.” Note that the inventors are the guys who have since left Amazon and launched Kosmix, a search engine.

Steve Jobs: Great artists steal — We can’t confirm this yet, but h Here’s a statement reportedly made by Apple’s Steve Jobs. The transcript is on PBS, and the edited version of the video is still at YouTube (see below), and emphasis is ours: “…I mean Picasso had a saying, he said good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.” This airing of this again is notable, of course, because Apple is also in the midst of sparking a revolution in music copyright, prodding the removal of digital rights from its iTunes offerings — and music labels are sensitive about their music getting ripped off. The original video, meanwhile, has been ordered down. (Udpate: This is apparently a well-known quote by Jobs, as pointed out in comments below, so perhaps only relevant in the context of the take-down order).

Viacom vidoes represent just two percent of views on YouTube — Viacom, the large music and video publisher, sued Google for $1 billion for hosting pirated video on its video property, YouTube. But only two percent of views had Viacom-owned music or video, according to a report. That’s more than the other labels and studios, though. See summary by Henry Blodget.

Topix, the news site, opens up to citizen journalists — Topix has been working on local news for a long time, and yesterday opened itself up for citizens to post and edit stories. Question is, why did it take so long? Chief executive Rich Skrenta explains some of this on his blog. Also, note Topix is partly funded by USA Today parent Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune, and so was trying to serve those masters, and lost focus on its own survival. Meantime, though, several other such sites (Newsvine, Backfence, NowPublic, Outside.in etc) have emerged and make Topix a little late to the game. Helps to have your partial owner, USA Today, the nation’s largest newspaper, announce the news, though.

Something fishy with Technorati traffic? — Odd that Technorati, the search engine for blog material, suddenly announces a spike in traffic as rumors circulate it is searching for a new chief executive. Chief exec David Sifry provides the latest details on traffic: Nine million unique visitors over the last thirty days, up from 3.5 million two months ago. At first, we wondered whether the company had hit the wall, and was looking for publicity as it searches for a sale, or a new round of funding. This comes after we stopped using Technorati for blog searches last year — with the emergence of blog material in other engines such as Google. To be fair, though, others are asking the same question, and hearing that Technorati has simply gotten better. Any thoughts?

MySpace ad revenue disappointing? — The giant social networking site will only make $271 million in ad revenue, says one Wall St. analyst, even though Google was supposed to pay a minimum of $300 million to sell ads on the site!

Capital gains tax on VCs — Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has an good analysis on the debate about the VC tax proposal being weighed in Washington. He criticizes a NYT editorial, which argues the capital gains benefit is excessive. Wilson’s point is that the earlier the stage of investment, the greater the risk, and thus the more justified the tax benefit. Should private equity firms, which invest very late, and take on less risk, enjoy the low taxes they get? Maybe not. But if you tinker too much with VC taxes, the better VCs will leave the industry and become angel investors. The Europeans would love it. They’ve been trying to figure out how to get a vibrant VC industry, and a weaker U.S. industry might push more money over there.

As usual, see latest deals — See our VentureBeat Newswire here.

SustainLane gets $3.5 million for sustainable living site — The funding for the San Francisco company is its second round, according to a regulatory filing cited by PE Week. It ranks US cities by how environmentally friendly they are, and provides animated media about people trying to live green and reviews of eco-products.

FatDoor, secretive social network, to launch soon — The Palo Alto-based start-up, backed by Bill Harris, former CEO of Paypal and Intuit, and Bertram Capital, launches April 15, and describes itself as “a wikipedia of people,” with over 130 million people and business profiles at launch. It wants to let you get to know your neighbors, with “…..search and groups based on pre-seeded politics, religion, ethnicity, age, interests, etc.” The site features “three-dimensional geo-spatial visualization of data” and user-generated community publications and “geo-spatial coupons.” Stay tuned

Here’s the latest action:

Dexter, the first robot that “walks like we do” — Entrepreneur Trevor Blackwell started a robot company in Mountain View, Calif. called Anybots a few years ago (we wrote about it). He built a robot called Dexter, and had real trouble getting him to walk. It’s tougher than you may think. Well, now Dexter has finally taken its first steps. Click on image and play video. Paul Graham’s account of the challenge is worth reading. Maybe Silicon Valley will compete with the Japanese after all (Honda’s robot, Asimo, has long lorded it over Dexter).

Technorati buys PersonalBee? — We’re hearing these rumors too. Valleywag has more. Technorati, a blog search engine, appears to be drifting, and its strategy here is unclear. But Personal Bee is a way to let people create personal news pages (see our original story on the site here). Reported purchase price: Six figures.

MySpace News, here it comes — Wired has the scoop about MySpace’s pending news site, which takes aim at Digg and other sites. However, it ditches the Digg concept of having a (cliquish) group of people submitting stories. Instead, it automatically collects news items from various news sites and blogs. MySpace users then discuss and rate the stories; the stories then change position on the page accordingly. This will be out in the second quarter.

Why you need lawyers, even early at a start-up — A tale of caution by Dave Winer, who sold his company to Verisign, only to get sued by someone because he hadn’t had the proper legal help, costing Winer $40,000 to defend himself.

Applied Materials builds biggest solar power installation — Google previously held the crown for biggest solar power installation on an existing corporate facility. Now Sunnyvale’s Applied Materials, just down the road, is building a 1.9 megawatt power system.

Green tech buzz continued — Notable story in the NYT about the Silicon Valley ecosytem evolving around green technologies. The “dot-watt” boom. Note also the story in the Mercury News, about how Foster City, Calif. start-up SolarCity is using the Web to round up neighbors interested in installing solar panels. If enough people sign up in a given area, the people get good discounts.

Microsoft confirms it will acquire Tellme — This is a big win for Benchmark Capital, which had the biggest stake in Tellme. Reports say Tellme was valued at about $800 million. Keliner Perkins had the second largest ownership, we’re told. Purchase announcement here.

Was Topix.net smart to pay $1M for Topix.com domain name? — Decide for yourself.

More advertising networks, anyone? — We don’t have enough.

Does all that gym peddling create usable energy? — No. It’s been bandied about by crackpots over the years: Generate electricity by tapping into all that energy people expend in the gym — on bikes, treadmills, weight-lifting. San Ramon, Calif. company 24 Hour Fitness invested $15,000 to test this. Turns out, if all 13 machines in one Hong Kong gym were in use ten hours a day every day, it would take 82 years to generate enough electricity worth the $15,000 investment. (Story here).