VentureBeat

PixSense, latest start-up to offer video compression, is hiring! — This Santa Clara start-up claims no one has been able to compress a video by 85 percent to share it via mobile phone.

It is offering such a feature to consumers and carriers. Some 90 percent of cell-phone users don’t have a set data plan, meaning they pay for bandwidth they use while sending pictures. PixSense will lower costs. It will also sell its technology to carriers, a spokesman told us. It has angel funding of $1 million and is a raising a venture round. The start-up has 30 people, and here’s the kicker: It plans to employ 150 by next year.

Veeker buys Thumbdrive, to pursue mobile video messaging — Veeker, a San Francisco company building a mobile video-message sharing service targeting young users, told GigaOM that it has acquired San Francisco-based mobile software development company ThumbJive, which also has employees in China.

Mercora, that Santa Clara radio song-sharing service, launches service for smart-phones — Mercora says its wireless music service “beat Steve Jobs to the iPhone…And we’ve beat Microsoft to the Zune.” Dubbed “M,” the service allows smart-phone users to listen to music that sits on their PCs. Further, M subscribers can share music with each other — by accessing each other’s PCs.
We wrote about Mercora here.

Piczo, another sleeper social site? — The San Francisco social networking site, which focuses on teens and photo-sharing, is boasting 17 million registered users. It has raised a total of $7 million, according to GigaOM’s Liz Gannes, who brings us an update on the relatively closed, privacy-conscious site. (We’d reported earlier only $4 million raised). Sierra Ventures and Catamount Venture are the backers.

PayPal prepares a way for users to store files — Techcrunch has the skinny on the yet-to-be released service, called DropBox, which creates a secure storage area within a user’s account. We called PayPay, and there is no intent to create a digital distribution platform of any kind. It is merely offering what most mainstream payment providers do, including a way to batch-process payments instead of settling one payment at a time, said spokeswoman Sara Bettencourt. She declined to provide more details.

Cynical blog Dead20, which has covered the valley’s Web 2.0 companies with scorn, is down — It has an error message saying “Bandwidth limit exceeded,” after the author, who has been writing in anonymity, is all but outed.

Facebook founder puts Microsoft on hold — The WSJ, in its recent story about Facebook, reported how Facebook executives told their Microsoft peers “they couldn’t do an 8 a.m. conference call because the company’s 22-year-old founder and chief executive, Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, wouldn’t be awake, says a person familiar with the talks. Microsoft executives were incredulous.”

No surprise here. We, too, remember showing up for an interview at Facebook last year at 10am, and having Zuckerberg show up late. Only Facebook co-worker Matt Cohler was in the office, who told us some engineers had only just left after working through the night.

Remember Imeem, the company that lets you share your desktop contents directly with others? — It is raising money. It has also changed its business strategy. We’ll report more soon.

AdMob, a company that sells advertising on mobile devices, said it raised $3.6 million in its first round of venture funding — We reported earlier on the funding, but the SF Business Journal has the exact amount.

Nisan Gabbay, a venture capitalist with Sierra Ventures in Menlo Park, has launched a noteworthy site called Startup Review to assess why certain start-ups are successful.

Nisan, who makes Internet investments, and was a strategy consultant at Accenture before joining Sierra for two years ago, says he is devoting about ten hours of weekly research for each success case-study. His latest case-study, about MySpace, is worth reading.

Here’s Nisan’s own description of his site:

Startup Review features weekly, in-depth case studies on successful Internet start-ups. The companies profiled will have achieved either: a) significant exits, b) large revenue, and/or c) strong Internet brands. Each case study is based on interviews conducted with early employees of the company. The case study analyzes what strategy and product decisions made the company successful, including a section on launch strategy, exit analysis, and additional resources.

We saw the site referenced by Jeff Nolan, a former venture capitalist at SAP Ventures.

Jeff notes that Nisan (pictured here) is using the social aspects of blogging to elicit input from others. It is not a wiki. Nisan appears to be asking for contributions mainly in the form of tips about who he can interview for each case-study. Most of the feedback is coming through comments. The MySpace study comments are helpful, delving into why Friendster failed, for example, and also how Facebook is a relative success despite opting for a more “closed” environment than MySpace (which is relevant, because Nisan says MySpace’s success was partly due to its open environment). Good stuff, Nisan.