VentureBeat

(Updated: Corrected PBWiki seed amount and added reference to Seraph investor)

Here’s the latest news on the Google bull in the Silicon Valley china shop:

Google unveils a Gmail application via your mobile phone — Phone must be Java enabled. It lets you get Gmail directly, bypassing browser.

Socialtext launches second round of Wiki Wars — After Google buys the wiki company Jot, competitors in the wiki industry scrambled to respond. Chief among them is Socialtext, which took issue with our earlier statement that it is struggling. Socialtext’s chief executive Ross Mayfield has since offered users of JotSpot’s wiki sever product, the JotBox, free migration over to Socialtext for a year. Jot, for some reason, had discontinued the JotBox, which serves large companies. Mayfield wouldn’t comment on his revenue traction. He did say, though, that this is “round two of the Wiki Wars.” (For background, we wrote an article two years ago about the Wiki Wars, featuring heavily backed Jot against the more frugal Socialtext — that original story is now long gone behind Merc’s archive wall). Mayfield has launched a number of products and redesigns recently. He says there’s plenty of room for multiple players, citing Gartner prediction that 50 percent of large companies will be using wikis by 2008. He’s aggressively hiring in engineering and sales, he adds.

PBWiki is here too! — We also heard from the guys at PBWiki is in San Bruno. They’re just three guys in a single office and host 130,000 wikis, which they claim is the biggest wiki hosting service. David Weekly, Ramit Sethi and Nathan Schmidt are all Staford guys in their 20s. They’ve taken $350,000 from Seraph (an
angel group), Chris Yeh (Symphoniq) and Ron Conway (prolific angel investor).

The Google binge machine timeline — Here’s an Ajax chart of Google’s acquisitions through time. You’ll have to scroll down to the blue table, and then start dragging the map.

Google Base 2? — Google Blogoscoped has the scoop on the latest Google classifieds project.

Google co-founder buys a place in New York — Don’t know who, or why.

UTube sues Youtube — This news has been widely covered, but as usual, Techdirt has good perspective.

Speculative stuff about bribery on YouTube deal –Lots of people pointing entrepreneur Mark Cuban’s blog on dubious stuff that went down between Google, YouTube and the music labels right before the GooTube acquisition, and some are calling it bribery. We didn’t point to it initially, because even the original anonymous source says some of it was based on speculation (if that’s not a warning signal, don’t know what is). But it has appeared everywhere, so we point to it too.

Google launches sponsored videos — You produce a video, Google gives you a cut of the revenue from ads appearing beside the video. Google kicks it off with the latest Diet Coke and Mentos video.

Google flexes political muscle, funds Republicans & everyone else — Details here.

Before the Google-YouTube merger was announced, it didn’t sound ludicrous for Yahoo’s Terry Semel or Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer to speak boldly of competing against Google.

But Google has become so big, with advertisers willing to pay such a premium to place ads on the search engine, that a virtuous “network effect” has finally pushed Google out of their reach. EBay did it with auctions. YouTube enjoys the same effect — people flock to post videos there because they know it has the most users, and they want their videos to be seen by the most people. The biggest player wins. With the “two kings” (GooTube) together, there’s no stopping it. The concessions from Google’s competitors are eye-opening.

Here’s Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer speaking to BusinessWeek, admitting that that it is almost game-over:

The truth is what Google is doing now is transferring the wealth out of the hands of rights holders into Google. So media companies around the world are all threatened by Google. Why? Because basically Google is telling you how much of your ad revenue you get to keep. They better get some competition. Us. Yahoo!. Somebody better break through or you can short all media stocks right now.

As long as there are two, you can hold onto media stocks. Google understands that. And that’s one reason why they’re willing to lose money up front. Just look at some of these deals. That MySpace deal (where Google provides the ad engine for MySpace). We bid a lot of money on that MySpace deal. And we got outbid. We wanted to win that MySpace deal. At some point, we said we can’t do this. Now Google can afford to spend more than us and Yahoo because they have more people in their ad system, so they’re getting better yield, effectively.

There are fierce competitors on the content side, the folks who compete with YouTube for video hosting — such as News Corp., which owns MySpace. MySpace users can load videos at YouTube and link to them — something that MySpace apparently considered prohibiting. MySpace makes a ton of money from Google ads, and so News Corp. looks like it wants to work out a deal — but it could team up with Viacom and GE’s NBC and demand up to billions of dollars in copyright penalties (see WSJ).

The sabre-rattling Dick Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner (which own AOL), said his group would pursue its copyright complaints against the video sharing site YouTube.com But he too complains about Google’s size: “..Google can do that better than anyone and I didn’t have Google dollars,” he said.

(Keep in mind that Justin Uberti, AOL’s top AIM Developer, was recently poached by Google, which adds to the wounds.)

In other notes about Google’s reach:

–Essayist Nick Carr is known for his sensationalism, but he suggests a case for Justice Department intervention on GooTube on antitrust grounds. (Sen. Stevens from Alaska will agree with Carr about the need for action, now that Google owns the “tube.”) Chad Hurley, Carr notes, argues in a recent interview that YouTube enjoys a “natural network effect” that should allow its share to continue to rise strongly.

–Statistics, and damned lies: The data about Google’s market share is unreliable. Google has a 43 percent share of the video market, after acquiring YouTube, Carr says, citing Hitwise. However, Comscore, which says it considers more sources and has more reliable methodology, has got GooTube with only 10 percent market share. Hitwise is now saying that GooTube has almost 60 percent! Yeesh.

–And what does it mean for Limelight, the content delivery network (CDN) that distributed a lot of YouTube video around the world? It just raised $130 million from Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, in part because it was showing so much growth. Limelight had YouTube as a customer, which clearly was helping drive some of that growth. It was placing large numbers of servers around the world to carry the video traffic. Google has its own network so won’t need Limelight (though we’ll have more next week about why this may not be a real problem for Limelight long-term.)