VentureBeat

Latest action:

VC firm Sequoia Capital backs Will Ferrell and Adam McKay comedy video site — Called FunnyOrDie.com, the site features a two-minute clip that won a reported 1.5 million page views in less than a week.

StumbleUpon to be acquired? — Several folks (Techcrunch/GigaOm) are reporting that San Francisco social Web site StumbleUpon is in talks to being acquired by AOL, Google or eBay, for a rumored $40 million to $75 million. That’s not very high for a supposed “top 25″ Web 2.0 company, but a good return considering it raised only $1.5 million to $2 million in seed financing from Google board member Ram Shriram, and angels Ariel Poler, Mitch Kapor and Ron Conway.

StumbleUpon has been growing quickly, with 6 million U.S. page views per month, according to ComScore, double the previous month. StumbleUpon is a toolbar that tracks the pages you vote on as interesting, and then offers up sites (called a stumble) that match those interests (sites found by other people that have voted similar to the way you have).

It makes money by showing an ad every hundred or so stumbles. It recently started doing the same for videos. Unique visitors are 900,000, or about three times last year. Techcrunch says the suitor is eBay, which may make sense for that site, given that stumbles could be made on eBay items, and because eBay may be feeling a little lighter lately (profit is up 52 percent, and Skype is making more revenue). Past VentureBeat coverage here.

Yahoo going carbon neutral — Co-founder David Filo blogs on the company’s commitment to go carbon neutral this year. This is impressive, and the company should be commended. (Too bad, however, that it’s timed with Yahoo’s bad earnings results).

Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

Google to release its Powerpoint competitor, and video filter — It is due this spring, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said it will be part of Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Somehow he manages to argue with a straight face that it doesn’t compete with Microsoft. (Good overview of Schmidt’s comments here). It has just bought Tonic Systems, a company based in SF and Melbourne (we mentioned Tonic last year) to help with a component of this. Moreover, Schmidt said Google will release software to keep copyrighted videos from being uploaded to YouTube, which will address Viacom’s suit because of copyright infringements. Schmidt said the release would be within a few weeks.

Google Feed API — Google’s AJAX API team release Feed API that gives an Ajax developer the ability to access feeds, cached in the fast Google edge cache where appropriate, from across the web using a simple JavaScript API.

Venture capitalist Will Hearst invests in Fora.tv — Hearst, the former partner at Kleiner Perkins and former publisher of the SF Examiner, invests in Fora.tv, an online video aggregator for programming from serious sources like Hoover Institute and the Brookings Foundation. More at The:Alarmclock and WSJ. The site’s contacts details say it based in Culver City, Calif., while the WSJ says it is based in SF.

Oracle has acquired mobile application developer AppForge, of Atlanta — Details here.

Why do all the “top-ten” tips that VCs give always sound the same? — Because they are.

Eric Hahn new venture, Bing Technology, has folded — The former Netscape CTO’s peer-to-peer backup service has returned its remaining funds to investors, according to one of the former employees. (Via Valleywag)

Finally, see our latest NewsWire pieces — They include the following: Adify gets $19 million for vertical ad networks; Cordys raises $80M and sees controversial entrepreneur Jan Baan back in the mix; Yardbarker gets seed funding for sports news site from Kleiner Perkins partner.

Zoho is a notable company because it keeps offering new, cheap office software at a breakneck pace. Owned by AdventNet, of Pleasanton, the company keeps firing off software updates, at a stubbornness that suggests this company is going somewhere.

Like Techcrunch, VentureBeat finds it challenging to cover this company’s machine gun-like bursts (coming every two weeks or so) of releases. See Zoho blog.

This is not a Web 2.0 era company. The company started in 1996, before the first bubble, and bootstrapped itself, as we’ve mentioned.

To begin with, there is Zoho Show, which became the first AJAX-based office suite online, according to Zoho’s Arvind. It lets you create Powerpoint-like presentations online, and you can open up your Microsoft Powerpoint and Open Office documents with it. It has the latest Web 2.0 features, for example letting you pull in pictures from Flickr. There’s also Zoho Writer, a word processor (a competitor to Google’s Writely) and Zoho Sheet, an online spreadsheet, and many more (Zoho Planner, Zoho CRM, Zoho Chat, Zoho Projects, etc). Where relevant, they have tagging, export-to-blog and sharing features you’d expect with Web 2.0. Finally, they’ve just introduced a single sign-on for these products.

Speaking of online presentation products, we should mention a Mountain View start-up called Uzanto, which has released a similar product called Slideshare — that lets you upload PowerPoint or Open Office files, and play your slides in a YouTube-like interface. Techcrunch has a discussion of this, including of the challenges online services have with AJAX and Flash.

It mentions other services in this area, including Tonicpoint, by San Francisco’s Tonic Systems.

YouTube, the two-year-old San Mateo start-up that raced ahead to become the leader of online video sharing, is facing the fight of its life.

Microsoft’s launch of its YouTube clone, called the Soapbox, made official today — see announcement with an offering of a way to sign up for a beta account, is only the latest challenge. (The dancing man with MSN colors strikes us as somewhat unhip, but then what can we expect a corporate giant to do? In fact, when looked at again, we see it is a cute metaphor for an old fogey getting with the program.)

Its fate may really lie in excruciating talks taking place with the Universal Music Group, which must decide whether to take YouTube to court or instead embrace and even invest in it.

The YouTube story is significant because there’s more confusion about YouTube’s prospects, its inherent uniqueness and its legality than ever before. Moreover, there’s more at stake in the world of online video than most of us realized just a few months ago. It is where movies, music and advertising meet — and billions are at stake, and anxious incumbent music giants are angry. The proliferation of broadband, new technologies making loading videos dead easy, and the high price of buying music compared to simply sharing it free on YouTube, is giving that upstart the edge. –>

Here in Silicon Valley, the buzz is all about video, music and then more video — and throw in some talk about how to take it mobile. There’s a new announcement every day. (Just yesterday: Silicon Valley chip giant Intel announced a deal with AOL to place AOL Video onto Intel’s Viiv home computers. SanDisk, the Milpitas maker of music players competing with Apple’s iPod, signed a deal with Seattle’s RealNetworks, owner of music service Rhapsody, to imbed that service direclty into its Sansa e200 MP3 player. And Google is reporteldy talking with Apple about having Google vidoes downloadable to the iPod).

On the plus side for YouTube, the company announced a deal with Warner, whereby Warner will open its music library to YouTube users to integrate into their videos. But public details of the deal are few, and Warner still has the right for veto, and the royalty and revenue split agreement is unknown.

That deal came a few hours after entrepreneur Mark Cuban wrote an aggressive but notable piece titled “The coming dramatic decline of YouTube,” and outlined why YouTube is going to get sued and will implode just like Napster did in Web 1.0, even though Napster eventually cut deal with Bertelsman. In a bizarre coincidence, the Napster remnant company is losing money and just yesterday put itself on the block, as mentioned). The problem, Cuban said, is that you can search for songs on YouTube, and have them play, while minimizing the video screen — even those songs are copyrighted and no one is getting paid. If you read the comments on Cuban’s blog, you will see that outright confusion prevails about YouTube’s prospects.

YouTube’s fate may really lie in talks it’s having with Universal Music Group and Sony BMG. Fresh reports say these are talks about distribution deals. YouTube has long said it is engaged in talks, so it is difficult to say how real these reports are. Just last week Universal threatened to sue. Now apparently YouTube has offered to sell an equity stake to the labels, though that’s an easy offer to make when you are against the wall.

Finally, as Rafat at PaidContent points out, the filtering technology YouTube has to implement by the end of this year, to meet the accord with Warner Music, is significant. It is similar to technology already offered by both Audible Magic and Snocap, which works on audio — the main area of concern right now. If YouTube implements this rigorously and agrees to take down any infringing content that somehow slips past those filters, it has a pretty good defense, no?

This will be a drama to watch.