VentureBeat

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.

GridNetworks, a start-up from Seattle that is offering a new video streaming technology, has launched — and wants to steal some of the Venice Project’s thunder.

We downloaded the Grid player software, and are impressed. Check out this example of Little Miss Sunshine (you’ll have to download their software).

It aims to compete with the upcoming Venice Project, which is the company started by the Skype co-founders. Venice is supposed to launch in New York at the Television conference Thurs. or Friday. Venice Project is a peer-to-peer technology (hosted on a network of individual computers) for television viewing as simply as they did peer-to-peer for phones.

GridNetwork, for its part, says its video delivery platform delivers full-screen, DVD-quality video in a format that is better than the other guys out there. It may depend on what side of the table you’re sitting on, though. Grid says it will give media publishers full control, which we’ll explain below, to create their own version of YouTube. The Venice Project, while not out yet, but based on the reports dribbling out, puts more power in the hands of consumers, giving them their own version of YouTube, but for better quality videos.

Grid is a hybrid of peer-to-peer and content delivery network (CDN) technology — taking the best of both. Peer-to-peer is cheap but open to copyright abuse. GridNetworks uses computer nodes (peers) in the network, but places each of them in a distribution grid that delivers encrypted video via a centralized platform that allows it to keep the system legal. By using P2P, it avoids the cost of traditional CDN hardware.

The company has raised an angel round, and is run by an accomplished team led by Jeff Payne, who founded Real Broadcast Network in the mid-1990s. The team has the advantage of watching the likes of other delivery companies such as Kontiki, BitTorrent and Redswoosh (which has a similar hybrid CDN/P2P model), and have built in new technology to make delivery even smoother, Payne said. Grid has created a “Media Vault” feature that allows media companies to control their content delivery. It has built in redundant nodes, and compression technology, and supports both Flash and Windows Media players

It delivers a 1.2GB movie at a cost of 25 to 50 cents, which is pretty cheap.

Here is its statement on technology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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