VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Veoh wins in court, YouTube claps — A federal judge ruled that Veoh was not infringing on copyrights by letting its users upload videos to the site. This is an important ruling because it sets a precedent for the similar, but much larger YouTube/Viacom case. You can probably expect an appeal. The LA Times and TechCrunch have more.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 released — “While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2,” claims a post on the IEBlog. There are three themes Microsoft is laying out for IE8: Everyday browsing, safety and the platform. I just hope it’s more web standards compliant than previous versions of IE.

How the iPhone 2.0.2 update fixed (or will fix) the connection issues — It all has to do with power control for the part of the phone that transmits signals. The key take away? “The sooner everybody is running 2.0.2 software the better things will be,” a source tells RoughlyDrafted. Apparently, the network won’t be fully healed until all phones are updated. Now we know why AT&T sent out that text message about upgrading last week.

Wind power blows? — Know all those big wind farms we’re building? Well, the grid can’t handle them. Large solar power farms could also be affected. More from the New York Times.

Dell to push low cost PCs for emerging markets — Laptops and desktops in the $400-$500 range will be targeted at areas like China and India, which also happen to be the two most populated countries in the world. The San Jose Mercury News has more.

Artists staying away from iTunes? — Kid Rock decided to have his latest album not be on iTunes. Some are upset with Apple’s insistence of selling single songs rather than whole albums. Could this push Apple towards an “iTunes Unlimited“? The Wall Street Journal has more.

TheWB.com becomes more like Hulu — Unfortunately for the network’s revamped site, “It’s actually a much better experience watching WB programming on Hulu than it is watching it on TheWB.com,” NewTeeVee concludes.

Cells change identity in life-sciences breakthrough — Scientists can turn one kind of cell into another without stem cells. This has lots of implications for the biotech industry. Think of growing new heart tissue after a heart attack or new pancreatic tissue for diabetics. The Associated Press has more.

Appetite for destruction? – A man was arrested in Los Angeles for posting unreleased Guns N’ Roses songs on his website. Demand is high since the band hasn’t released a new album in 15 years. The LA Times blog has more.

TiVo keeps losing customers — The popular digital video recorder is losing hundreds of thousands of subscribers each quarter. A deal to find shows to record via Entertainment Weekly recommendations isn’t likely to reverse that trend. More on Wired.

Television advertising isn’t interactive, typically — unless you like dialing up 1-800 infomercial numbers to purchase things like bona fide omelette toasters, commemorative Indian nickel plaques, and large, dull-proof knife sets. TiVo, the company that made a name for itself by letting users record TV for later viewing (and skip commercials), is working on a next-generation form of TV advertising, that promises to be far more interactive. It is partnering with Amazon to offer product ads that appear alongside regular TV ads and programming. These ads will let viewers go and purchase those products directly from Amazon.

In the coming months, the four million-plus TiVo users out there will begin to see options to make these purchases, the New York Times reports. So if a viewer stops watching a show to go buy a product, TiVo will let them seamlessly return to watching after making the purchase. Viewers will also be able to save intended purchases on their Amazon account in case they decide to make the purchase later. The ads will also be contextually featured within TiVo’s interface.

Alviso, Calif.-based TiVo has been trying to expand from its existing user base, which by itself is not large enough to impress major television advertisers. It has started licensing its TV-viewing software to large cable companies like Comcast, although these efforts are not yet getting mass distribution. In the meantime, the so-called DVR technology that it helped pioneer has been widely copied.

TiVo users can already download videos from Amazon’s Video on Demand stores; but that Amazon product has also undergone a recent, major upgrade and it’s not yet clear where it will leave TiVo.

Though TiVo chief executive Thomas S Rogers tells the Times that interactive TV ad sales “is not our focus today,” this move seems to be pointing the company in that direction.

As we’ve discussed recently, there are a growing number of players in the online movie distribution field. Eventually, one way the winners are going to set themselves apart is by promoting content that others don’t have. Apple had that for a while with Disney movies. Not anymore.

Today, the digitial video recorder TiVo announced a deal with Disney to place its films on the device for rental. This service will be provided via a deal with CinemaNow, according to NewTeeVee.

Apple didn’t have an exclusive deal with Disney, but it was one of the only major players with both a download service (iTunes) and set top box (the Apple TV) to have access to the popular films. This was hardly surprising given that Apple chief executive Steve Jobs sits on Disney’s board of directors and is Disney’s largest individual shareholder (thanks to the deal made when Disney bought Jobs’ digital animation film house Pixar for $7.4 billion in 2006).

With Disney films now on TiVo, it makes the device a more compelling competitor to Apple TV (not that it wasn’t already given that it has DVR functionality while the Apple TV does not). It also indirectly gives a boost to iTunes competitor Amazon Unbox because that service is on the TiVo as well for movie downloads (though the Disney deal is separate from Unbox).

Even though it’s not yet the leader in movie downloads that it is in music downloads, it seems like Apple is being come at from all sides. Just a couple weeks ago, Netflix announced a new set top box with Roku that will allow subscribers of that service to access catalog content in their living rooms for free. The device is also significantly cheaper than the Apple TV ($99 vs. $229).

Now even Mickey Mouse has dealt a blow to Steve Jobs. Will he counter with an announcement at Apple’s WWDC event a week from Monday?

[photo: Disney]

MG Siegler shares his thoughts on how awful most big media cable box UIs (user interfaces) are — even when compared to something like a grocery store cash register screen. With companies like TiVo, Apple and others pushing for better user experiences through their nice UIs, the cable companies had best get their act together or risk losing customers for their boxes in the future.

TiVo, the personal video recorder, will soon offer YouTube videos streaming from the Internet on their boxes. This partnership stems from YouTube’s decision to open up its platform to developers, which Google publicly announced yesterday (our coverage).

TiVo is not the first to partner up with YouTube to bring web videos into the living room, Apple launched the functionality last year in its Apple TV box. However, TiVo is used by many more users than the Apple TV, and this is an important next step in bridging the gap between content on your computer and content on your television.

The service will be available on TiVo Series 3 and TiVo HD set-top boxes. There will also be the obvious requirement of having a broadband connection to stream the video. This is significant. TiVo has sold 1.7 million TiVo boxes and only 800,000 have the necessary broadband connection according to The New York Times.

Buried in The New York Times piece is word that the company also plans on bringing an RSS reader (which they refer to as an “R.S.S. reader”) of sorts into the box as well. While it’s not clear if this functionality will eventually expand beyond subscribing to videos via RSS, that would seem a logical extension. Soon you could find yourself doing many of the things you do daily on your computer, from the comfort of your couch.

The TiVo/YouTube functionality is expected to be available at some point later this year.

update: It looks like Apple may be looking to bring DVR functionality to the Apple TV in a patent uncovered by AppleInsider. This sets up the device in more direct competition with TiVo — especially when TiVo gains the YouTube channel that Apple TV has.

Here’s a pre-weekend roundup of the latest action:

1) Is the recession coming, or already here?
2) Jaman signs distribution deal with TiVo
3) Amazon buys indie film distributor Without a Box
4) Google probably intends to lose in 700mhz auctions
5) The “UltraBattery” has promise for electric cars
6) China on the verge of becoming largest internet market
7) But they’re worried their citizens game too much
8) Digg’s editing Illuminati

Is the recession on its way, or already here? — While we’ve been snuggled away in our safe world of private investing, Wall Street has been busy crumbling under the psychological pressure of a possible recession. The major exchanges all lost significant ground over the past four days, with the Dow dropping 306 points today alone, leaving it down 14.2 percent from its October high. That, in turn, brought comparisons to the catastrophic drop in 2001, just prior to the last recession. Housing starts also fell, and pundits are saying it’s too late for an economic stimulus package from Washington. But hey, Silicon Valley, look on the bright side — at least nobody will say it’s your fault, this time.

Jaman signs distribution deal with TiVo — Jaman’s catalog of independent and international films will be offered for direct download to TiVo users, under the term of a recent agreement between the two companies. Previous deals inked by Jaman include partnerships with TakeTV and DivX. See the full release here.

Amazon buys Without a Box, an independent film distributor — The Internet Movie Database division over at Amazon.com has picked up a Los Angeles-based film distributor called Without a Box for an undisclosed sum. The company helps independent directors distribute their films to hundreds of film festivals around the world. No official line yet on why, but it’s very conceivable that Amazon will soon be offering a plethora of independent films for download, a move that could conceivably compete with startups like, you guess it, Jaman. (via John Cook’s Venture Blog )

Google may be playing to lose in the 700mhz auctions — Google spent a lot of time and effort trying to impose its own guidelines on the 700mhz spectrum auctions starting in less than a week, going so far as to promise a minimum $4.5 billion bid. However, the company probably has no intention of bidding to win and will likely throw the auction to AT&T and Verizon, according to an analyst interviewed by PaidContent, who goes on to say that the winner “will likely implement the letter rather than the spirit of the open access requirements.”

Combined battery / capacitor could set new standards for electric cars — The “UltraBattery,” a project being run by the United Kingdom’s Energy Transformed National Research Flagship, is an energy storage unit combining a battery and a capacitor. It gets about 50 percent more power than conventional batteries, lasts four times as long, and a test car with one installed just crossed the 100,000 mile mark on a test track. More from ScienceDaily.

China is on the verge of becoming world’s largest internet market — According to a recent announcement by the Chinese government, its population of internet users reached 210 million at the end of 2007, a 53 percent gain on 2006’s year-end number of 137 million.  At that rate, it’ll surpass the United States by the end of this month. As it is, only 16 percent of the country’s entire population has internet access of any type.

Next up: The Chinese government hates your gaming startup — Or, at the very least, there’s the potential that they do. The latest target is online gaming, with the government raiding Internet cafes, barring children from entering them and setting time limits on players. This is possible because a good portion of China’s internet users only have access through cafes.

Digg may have secret editors — Social news site Digg, where users supposedly have all the control over which news items make it to the top, actually has editors, says Valleywag. Aside from any sense of betrayal the users might have, though, this probably isn’t a big deal. The point of automation and crowd-sourcing is, at least in part, to keep costs down for startups, something that’s less of a worry for Digg these days. And, judging from the junk content that regularly reaches the top of Digg despite any secret editors, we could almost wish they exercised their powers more.

Here’s the latest action (updated):

Airborne mash-up: lawn chair travels 193 miles –Oregon resident Kent Couch tried to fly to Idaho last weekend — in an apparatus made out of his lawn chair carried by 105 large helium balloons. He carried instruments to measure altitude and speed, and also a parachute. He didn’t make it, though. (Image courtesy of AP)

More adult supervision at Facebook — Chamath Palihapitiya, a former AOL executive turned venture capital investor at the Mayfield Fund, will be joining the company as VP of product marketing and operations. Known for helping to turn around AOL’s instant-messaging division, his job now will include helping the company to figure out how to make more money.

Rumors have emerged that Facebook wants to public, and so filling out senior ranks is important. Facebook now says it has 30 million active users. It is reportedly making $30 million annually from $150 in revenue. We’ve heard a big portion of this comes from Microsoft payments for banner ads on the site. Palihapitiya caused controversy earlier this year, when he commented in a French video about a “white male circle of insiders” running Silicon Valley (our coverage here). Facebook also recently hired a new chief financial officer, Mike Sheridan, formerly CFO of video game publisher IGN Entertainment Inc.

MSN search engine market share actually grows — After steady decline, it has grown of late, driven by online games like Chicktionary, Compete reports; analyst Steve Willis has the full explanation:

A good portion of the additional Live searches are coming from the Live Search Club, where you can apparently play games for points which you can redeem for fine Microsoft products. All of the games involve using Live’s search engine - to get the points, you have to search with Live.

Google brings Map mashups to its platform — Tomorrow, Google brings Map mashups of data from external sites like Zvents and ChicagoCrime.org to its own platform, Mashable reports.

Index Ventures and 3i launch Seedcamp in Europe — Details are here. Entrepreneurs apply with their “big ideas” before August 12 and the top 20 will be chosen to spend a week in London with industry professionals (VCs, lawyers, marketers, HR people, etc), and from there, the top 5 winners will be announced and they’ll receive 50,000 euros in funding and continued mentorship to get their businesses started.

Nielsen/NetRatings, a leading online-measurement service, scraps rankings based on page views — Instead, it will begin tracking how long visitors spend on Web sites. The move comes as page views lose their value in expressing a site’s importance. Many sites, such as Friendster, have boosted page views with simple networking features. Others, such as those using online video and new technologies such as Ajax, reduce page views.

AOL releases new test version of myAOL — It offers new personalized tools such as myPage, a personal dashboard offering access to content and applications from AOL and other sites; Mgnet, which lets users find new sites and information based on personal preferences; and Favorites, a feed reader that combines user feeds and bookmarks in one place.

Users of TiVo can order movies from Amazon.com directly from their TVs — Details here.

Intel Corp. invests $218.5 million in virtualization software maker VMware – The investment will give Intel ownership of about 2.5 percent of VMware’s outstanding shares after VMware completes its initial public offering. Details here.

Will the video start-ups ever stop coming? — United Talent Agency and advertising start-up Spot Runner have jointly created a company called 60Frames Entertainment to finance and distribute original professional videos online. 60Frames, of Los Angeles, has raised $3.5 million in funding from investors including Tudor Investment Corp. and the Pilot Group, and says it wants to provide higher quality videos than YouTube. Its videos will run a few minutes and cost “in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands” of dollars to produce, the NYT reports.

Talking of video sites, Revision3, another one, finally gets CEO — Recently departed PC World editor Jim Louderback will become CEO at video site Revision3, replacing interim chief exec, Jay Adelson NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes reports.

Sequoia Capital, which recently invested in video site, Funny Or Die, now says there’s too much content — Roelof Botha, the Sequoia Capital partner who also invested in YouTube and Joost — video companies that only help to propagate more content — now says there’s so much information out there that it is overwhelming, and so you need humans to help (thus Sequoia has invested in Jason Calacanis’ human-assisted search engine, Mahalo). See video below, conducted by WSJ’s Kara Swisher (RSS readers will have to go to site):

Ning’s ridiculously large venture capital round — Ning, the company that provides tools for people to create their own social networks, co-founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, has raised a whopping $44 million, on a reported $170 million pre-money valuation. That values the company at a mighty $214 million. Andreessen says on his blog the round was “orchestrated” by the wealthy family firm Allen & Co, of New York, and was led by Legg Mason of Baltimore, with a number of others participating. Andreessen is smart. Large East Coast firms are flush with cash, and are also somewhat removed from the valley, and so won’t realize just how competitive this market is. If you’re curious to know more about Allen & Co., here’s an impossibly long story in Fortune about the firm.

Digg released an application for the iPhone — The news ranking site’s founder Kevin Rosen announces it here.

A link-exchange network for Facebook apps — Developers of applications on Facebook’s platform can exchange links in order to get more attention and traffic, by using FbExchange. More details at GigaOm.

Hey!Spread, a video uploading service that delivers your videos to multiple sites — Upload your video to YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Yahoo Videos, Dailymotion and Blip.tv all at the same time. (Techcrunch).

TwitterGram lets you deliver voice message on Twitter — It comes from Dave Winer, the Web guru who also created the RSS protocol. You can leave the message with a phone.

(Updated) roundup of latest tech stuff:

Amazon.com answers Wal-Mart on video downloads — There are so many video download services, it’s easy to get jaded. Wal-Mart just announced its own download service, but the test site looks awful (it still badly garbled as of this writing). A more promising video service is the offering by Amazon Unbox to download movies directly to your TiVo. This is significant: It’s the first service letting people watch regular TV programming and Internet video from the same box. This will be rolled out beginning in a few weeks. Other services, such as CinemaNow, Akimbo and others require buying a new box, setting up a network or other steps that confuse or turn off most people. [Update: Just noticed that Amazon-TiVo consumers will have to order their videos from their PCs, instead of from their TiVO, so this is not as simple as we originally thought.]

News Corp. rethinking ad deal with Google — Google is dragging its feet on filtering copyrighted videos on its new property YouTube, so you’d expect the music and video companies owning the copyrights would play hard ball. No surprise, then, that MySpace parent News Corp. is apparently rethinking the advertising deal it signed with Google last year (see WSJ story). News Corp. is already upset with Google over the copyright issue.

Another RFID company trying to go public — RFID stands for Radio Frequency ID, and refers to the little radio tags retailers and others are placing on goods to track them better. It was supposed to be all the rage two years ago, but the early-bird companies wanting to go public look risky. First there was Alien Technology, which was rejected by the public markets. Now Applied Digital, which a Florida company that owns an implantable RFID unit, is trying for the second time, and still looks risky.

Talking of risky IPOs, Globalstar was always one — We always thought satellite communications company Globalstar rushed its IPO a bit, going public as soon as it got some decent revenues. But it did so after raising a bunch of cash, and not long out of bankruptcy. Were there unknown problems lurking at this company? We couldn’t tell. Now, it turns out all their satellites might just stop working because of technology problems, it discloses. Needless to say, the stock has plunged.

AT&T shuts down the famous Iowa phone-loophole scam — Or at least, it appears to be making progress in one case, FuturePhone.

Once high-flying video site Metacafe, imploding? — Traffic is apparently falling for the company, which recently located to Palo Alto from Israel. Company gets a new CEO.

MFG.com, online marketplace for custom manufacturers, raises $4M — The Atlanta company, seeded earlier by Amazon.com’s chief exec, Jeff Bezos, has raised its first round of venture capital, led by the European Founders Fund. Designers with sketchings and other designs to implement can get hooked up with specialty suppliers.

Google tracks not only your search history, but apparently your spam history too — In other words, if you tried to spam its search engine in the past, you may be permanently blacklisted.

Teliris raises $40 million for telepresence offering - It’s to difficult to understand why companies like Teliris, which is already established, is raising $40 million from Fidelity Ventures and Columbia Capital to build out its “telepresence” offering, when such large competitors Hewlett Packard, Cisco Systems and others have entered the market with similar high-end offerings. With communications costs going down, and more video-conferencing offerings launching for free (albeit perhaps with not such high quality yet), its difficult to know how companies, even large ones, can continue to justify spending several hundred thousand dollars on each room installation. But Fidelity has been a smart investor in the past, so maybe it knows something about the budgets of Fortune 500 companies that we don’t.

Lots of other financings — See VentureBeat’s Newswire for latest deals, including Beceem’s latest funding, to help build out mobile WiMax, Fonality’s funding for VoIP services, Bright Source’s funding for solar power plants, and Baynote’s funding to stave off upstarts like online behavior companies, Aggregate Knowledge.