VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Veoh to get ABC content, kind of — ABC, the television network that has been the slowest and stingiest in making its content available online, has struck a deal with video site Veoh that seems, well, behind-the-times and stingy. Veoh will index ABC’s online content, but since ABC doesn’t allow sites to embed its video player, it looks like you won’t actually watch ABC shows on Veoh; the site will just offer links to ABC’s media player. ABC, in turn, will pay Veoh for the extra traffic it receives. I’m inclined to agree with NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes, who describes the deal as “a bit silly.”

U.S. venture capital industry is shrinking – Last year, 844 venture firms invested in U.S. companies, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. That’s 40 fewer firms than in 2006, and also represents a 30 percent drop from the bubble days of 2000, when there were 1200 investors.

Congress tells telecom industry that all is forgiven on domestic spying — The U.S. House and Senate have agreed on the wording of the bill that grants immunity to telecom companies that gave away their customers’ private information without receiving a warrant. As Techdirt puts it, the bill essentially gives the companies a “get out of jail free” card, a move that should make the telecom industry happy while infuriating civil liberties advocates.

Dispute between Associated Press and Drudge Retort is “closed” — The AP has released a statement about its dispute with the news blog The Druge Retort saying “both parties consider the matter closed”. The AP faced heavy criticism after asking the Drudge Retort to take down excerpts of AP articles, a move that was particularly hypocritical since the AP doesn’t abide by its own stated standards when quoting other news sources. The AP’s statement doesn’t offer any further details about how the situation has been resolved, or whether the organization’s approach to similar situations will be any different in the future.

Fifty tweets that will live in infamy – InsideCRM has compiled a list of 50 of the most embarrassing comments posted to the social messaging service Twitter. Some of their choices don’t seem terrible enough to qualify for a list dubbed “the Twitter Hall of Shame.” But the range of topics covered — from politics to society to love and family — shows Twitter’s importance and potential for misuse in practically all of modern life. Perhaps the most fascinating item is the series of “tweets” earlier this year from Yahoo’s Ryan Kuder after learning he had been laid off.

Veoh, which brands itself as an Internet Television service rather than one of the many online video start-ups, has received a new large round of funding. As you might expect, this money will be used for expansion efforts and Veoh continues to grow

By the end of Q1 2008, Veoh claims to have had 28 million viewers who spend an average of 100 minutes per month watching content on Veoh. Both of these numbers are up from the numbers it previously told us in February: 23 million viewers worldwide watching an average of 87 minutes per month. A viewer is defined as a person who started playing a video on the Veoh home site or on a Veoh video embedded in another site.

We last heard Veoh was trying to raise another $40 million back at the end of February. This would have put its valuation at $150 million, Silicon Alley Insider reported at the time. With this round finally coming in at $30 million, that still makes for a valuation well over the $100 million mark. [update: The new valuation is around $125 million, according to SAI.]

Aside from user-generated content, Veoh offers several premium videos including popular television shows. These are ad-supported. The video recommendation engine is also a big part of Veoh’s arsenal. A new start-up we covered yesterday, ffwd, is looking to expand and improve upon that model.

This latest round was led by Intel Capital, the global investment arm of Intel Corporation. It was joined by Adobe Systems Inc., and Gordon Crawford, the senior vice president of Capital Research Global Investors. Existing investors Shelter Capital, Spark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Michael Eisner’s Tornante Company, Time Warner Investments and Jonathan Dolgen joined in this round as well.

The San Diego-based Veoh previously raised a $26 million round in the Spring of last year. It now has raised around $70 million total in four rounds.

1. Niche social networks grow, market leaders level off
2. Startup employees headed to big companies?
3. Stage6 had a lot of would-be investors, still has at least one
4. Sprint’s fate unclear
5. Sandvine, a company that helped Comcast block BitTorrent traffic, facing trouble
6. Chatterous: Message all of your friends at once

Niche social networks grow, market leaders level off — Web metrics service Compete reports that leading social networks MySpace and Facebook saw traffic plateau in the US between January and February, with smaller sites growing fast. One must be cautious about interpreting monthly numbers — large networks have seen seasonal dips in the past, and obviously no social network can grow forever (our coverage). Regardless, the largest, fast-growing social network is high school social network MyYearbook, which has grown 284 percent since February of last year, to more than 20 million visits this past month.

A host of Silicon Valley companies also have reason to be happy. Business network LinkedIn grew 729 percent to more than 11 million visits. White-label social network provider Ning, which we’ve previously questioned the potential of, is doing well for itself, having grown 4,803 percent to nearly four million visits. Likewise, messaging service Twitter, which generally keeps a tight lid on its internal numbers, grew 4,368 percent to more than four million visits.

But the fastest-growing site of them all is Fubar, an online bar and happy hour — and not a dating site, as its founders made clear to us last year (see comments). It grew to 3,272,217 percent to more than 6.5 million visits last month. Cheers!

Startup employees headed to big companies? — The Wall Street Journal puts together some evidence — and more speculation — that there’s “a new flight to safety [at big companies] among tech-industry workers as the economy struggles.”

Stage6 had a lot of would-be investors, still has at least one — The aftershocks of DivX’s decision to close popular online video site Stage6 are continuing. Today, Greg Sandoval reports that MySpace cofounder-turned-investor Brad Greenspan still has an offer on the table, even though Stage6’s core team has quit and the site has all but shut down. We’ve also spoken with a number of investors who said they would have been interested in funding Stage6 if it was spun out — as was DivX’s original plan. As of today, the site’s front page features a final message about the closure in a rather bizarre-looking format. The site has otherwise been wiped clean, except for a message at the bottom of the homepage (pictured) encouraging Stage6 users to go to Veoh, another online video site.

Sprint’s fate unclear — A host of rumors are circling the company. One is that T-Mobile is looking to buy it. Another is that Nextel will be spun off. More here.

Sandvine, a company that helped Comcast block BitTorrent traffic, facing trouble — Last year, Comcast tried to selectively slow down sites and services that use a lot of bandwidth, in order to prevent peer-to-peer file-sharing. It used network management software provided by Sandvine. Comcast’s actions got it in trouble with the FCC (our coverage). Now, not surprisingly, the market for Sandvine’s software is withering, TorrentFreak reports.

Chatterous: Message all of your friends at once — Chatterous lets you send a single message to friends across SMS, IM and email. Mashable has the details on this Y Combinator-backed company.

Updated with more information from the company

Online video startup Veoh is in the process of raising a $40 million round at a proposed $150 million valuation and has hired investment bank Bear Sterns to help with the effort, Silicon Alley Insider reports.

San Diego-based Veoh is a distant competitor to market leader YouTube, but still claims to be growing at a healthy rate. The site features user-created videos, clips from partners such as the Independent Comedy Network, as well as content from large companies like Viacom. From what we hear, the company is well respected in the media world, partially because it’s made a point of forging partnerships with entertainment companies.

However, Veoh’s traffic numbers are contested, as they have been at least since the company raised $26 million round last spring (our coverage).

Last December, third-party analytics firm Comscore showed Veoh bringing in nearly 16 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, with only 3.5 million of those in the US. That’s versus YouTube’s nearly 250 million. Meanwhile, rival analytics firm Nielsen says Veoh received more than 2 million unique US viewers in December (not visitors).

[Update: Veoh tells me it has more than 23 million monthly video viewers worldwide, defined as people who started playing a video on the Veoh home site or on a Veoh video embedded in another site. It says that Nielsen's panel may be missing large chunks of Veoh traffic, because the panel is comprised of the wrong demographic. It says that using a separate Nielsen tracking service, the web analytics firm obtained numbers much closer to Veoh's own.]

Today, Spark Capital investor Bijan Sabet, who sits on Veoh’s board, writes that Nielsen’s numbers are wrong, after SAI cited them in its article.

Sabet says that Veoh’s internal server logs show 21 million unique monthly viewers in December, up from 2.5 million at the beginning of the year. He also says that users are watching more than 30 million hours of Veoh videos per month, now.

So maybe Veoh is pretty big, but like every other video company, it is trying to figure out how to monetize. Many startup rivals have also raised large amounts of money. Two examples: Last year, DailyMotion raised $30 (our coverage) and MetaCafe raised $34 million (our coverage). Hosting and streaming lots of videos gets expensive, and right now there’s no way to cover costs.

[Update: I asked the company about monetization. Veoh says the average user spends more than 87 minutes on the site per month, with much of the viewing happening during evening prime time hours. It says its audience presents great opportunities for brand advertisers.]

Here’s the latest action:

Google adds search to Reader — In an obvious but very useful move, Google Reader, the company’s web-based RSS feed reader, has added the ability to search through your RSS subscriptions, or the categories and tags you use to organize them. So you can search for words in articles in RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to, without actually having the articles on your screen. Cool!

First venture capitalist to sell his blog: Rob Day — We’ve been a fan of venture capitalist Rob Day’s blog Cleantech Investing from the day it started. It’s about clean technology. Greentech Media Inc, a company that has just launched to focus on the clean-technology sector, has acquired the blog for an undisclosed amount, and now runs it on its site. By the way, Greentech Media is also pulling feeds from VentureBeat’s articles about clean-technology. It provides links to our full stories. Day told us about the purchase last week, but we were waiting for Greentech to launch and get its feeds squared away, which it did yesterday. Day now works for @Ventures.

Quattro Wieless raises cash to help companies adapt their Web sites to mobile versions – The Waltham, Mass. company serves businesses by providing them with mobile versions of their sites. This field has many competitors now. The year-old Quattro has raised $12.3 million in a second round of funding from Globespan Capital Partners and Highland Capital Partners, bringing its total funding to $18 million. It provides online software to let companies see what their mobile site would look like. If the publisher likes it, they can join Quattro’s network, which customizes it for most mobile devices. The company helps publishers serve advertising on their mobile site, and takes a cut while doing so.
reword:

Universal sues Veoh — Universal Music Group, a record label that has been actively suing music and video-focused startups, is at it again. It is suing Veoh, a site where you can upload and share videos, for letting users upload and share videos that Universal claims a copyright to. Veoh received threatening letters from Universal earlier this summer, and actually counter-sued for court protection against Universal in August, saying that it should not be held liable for what users do on the site. Universal was not deterred. Paid Content has more.

Groxis, the company with a visual search engine, now gets third CEO in little more than a year — We profiled Groxis and its search engine Grokker here and here. It was an early challenger to Google’s search format. Instead of giving you pages of results, it provided spheres, breaking out result by categories. Search for Paris, for example, and you’d get spheres titled “History,” “Museums,” “Universities,” “Hotels” and so on. It was always a bit complicated, however, and it has struggled to find direction. It has moved away from the sphere format, and is clearly still experimenting. We’ve heard almost nothing new from this company in years. Here’s the announcement of its latest CEO, Randall Marcinkio. He replaces Brian Chadbourne, who replaced founder and CEO R.J Pittman last year. Groxis raised $16 million for its search engine Grokker from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Jackson Boulevard Capital Management and Draper ePlanet Ventures.

Here’s the latest action:

Veoh Networks files preemptive suit against Universal Music Group — Veoh, the San Diego video start-up we’ve written about, said it filed the suit to assert its rights as a copyright-compliant company after UMG threatened it with litigation.

Geni gets cloned by a German Verwandt, but there’s also Israeli MyHeritage — Verwandt, the German copycat of the family tree social network company Geni, told us last month it had raised financing from Neuhaus Partners, and had broken into the top 500 sites in Germany according to Alexa, with more than 200,000 profiles in three weeks (was it spamming people?). Verwandt’s only real difference from Geni, however, is that it offers comic avatars, so we didn’t bother looking too closely. However, now there’s also Israel’s MyHeritage, which has just raised funding from Accel Europe. The company reportedly has at least $3 million and maybe more (checking). These sites are coming out of the woodwork and remarkably, all getting funding.

MySpace barely making any profit — News Corp.’s Fox Interactive unit, which consists mainly of MySpace, turned a profit of $10 million on revenue of $550 million during the last fiscal year. With MySpace doing 4.3 billion page views a day, it means the company is making a mere fraction of a cent on each page view — just the latest sign that social networks are in the early days of trying to monetize with ads.

Nirvanix to launch content delivery network — The San Diego, Calif. company aims to compete with Amazon’s popular S3 storage web service. In a statement, it said it plans to offer delivery of rich media and streaming content for web developers, and is designed to be “the backbone for social networking and web 2.0 companies.” It also plans to announce in September that it has raised venture capital, though the news has already leaked (funding is reportedly $12 million).

Google showing bias for sites that use Google Checkout — Google is using its clout to boost the ranking of sites that use its Google Checkout service, penalizing those that rely on eBay’s PayPal, according to this account. [Update: Google has responded: "It's common practice to include descriptive links in blog copy, and we added the link in question for that reason," a Google spokespersons said. "This was an editorial decision, and it was made independently by Google."]

Segway Enthusiasts Club of America disbands — The hyped gyroscope-laden scooter, the Segway, apparently is losing its fan base.

Blog network GigaOm has brought on a business person and a professional managing editor — Details here.

Internet music radios — Companies like Roku, Com One, Revo, Terratec and Tivoli have all produced tabletop or bookshelf radios that are “freaky hybrids” of the old radio and the new Internet. The New York Times’ Pogue has a review. You tune into radio shows just as you have for decades, but the radios’ antennas are internal Wi-Fi receivers that connect to a wireless home networks.

Xconomy, business technology new site focused on Boston area, raises undisclosed amount of funding — Founder Bob Buderi tells us the round was led by CommonAngels. Here’s his post about it. Robert Buderi is former editor-in-chief of MIT’s Technology Review. Steve Woit, publisher, is a partner at IDG Ventures in Boston.

The Universal Music Group acquires a stake in the operator of the urban social networking Web site, Loud.com — Details here.

Color-coding on Wikipedia edits — Wikipedia is about to test a quality-control technique: Coloring a new edit red, in order to flag potentially dubious content, especially if the editor is new or otherwise untrusted. As the editor gains a reputation, the marking color will change and become less red. There’s a test site here, and a visual example here. More details about the experiment here. It will first be tested on a related, smaller site, Wikia.

Ooma offers pre-sale orders of its Hub and Scout telecom products — Ooma says demand for its products, which allow free land-line phone calls, was sufficient to open orders for sales earlier than planned. We reviewed the home telecom product here.

Veoh, the video-sharing site that recently raised $26 million, today launches a test of VeohTV, a downloadable application that the company says will kill another new flashy competitor, Joost.

VeohTV’s hook is that unlike Joost, which limits itself to certain formats and the content it licenses, Veoh has opened its doors and essentially created a browser that accesses anything in Yahoo video’s index — an archive that seeks to search the whole world of internet video.

VeohTV has been designed to make the browsing experience simple enough to navigate with a remote control, and from the looks of it, Veoh has pulled this off. With a few clicks, you can also browse and watch the online offerings from CBS, Fox, NBC, and Comedy Central. Just as easily, you can sort through videos you’ve found from across the web.

VeohTV can display videos in any format, and has also has a built in a DVR that allows you to download videos you might want to watch later — as long as they don’t come from proprietary channels. Joost, on the other hand, does not allow downloads.

VeohTV will also include a recommendation engine that will track which videos you watch and suggest others like them, though this is not active in the early stages of the testing. A much-hyped start-up, Divvio, had been promising this feature for quite some time, but has yet to deliver, so talk is cheap until we see something. Providing accurate recommendations is a hard problem to crack when you’re talking about the entire Web.

With VeohTV, you can also subscribe to video feeds and have them automatically download to your computer. You can create video play-lists with a drag-and-drop interface, and, in a cool touch, watch your videos side by side with a handful of Yourminis‘ widgets on your desktop. YourMinis analyzes the videos’ so-called “metadata,” or relevant information, and displays that on your desktop too. (See screenshot below.)

Veoh’s CEO, Dmitry Shapiro, told VentureBeat that because Joost is a walled garden that only allows you to view its own content, and because it requires a network connection to work, it does not have what it takes to be a “killer” application. But this is not clear so clear. Is having millions of online videos to parse through — even with an amazingly simple interface — a much better experience than easy access to a limited but consistently excellent selection? (By asking that question, however, we don’t mean to imply that Joost has reached that nirvana, because it hasn’t yet.)

Some will no doubt prefer the plethora of options. Veoh has created something powerful and different, and Joost and others will have to watch their backs.

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(Updated with Comscore and Hitwise stats, which show Veoh’s numbers lower than the company states; also updated with a fuller list of investors)

Veoh, the San Diego video-sharing site backed by former Disney exec Michael Eisner, has raised another $26 million in funding, giving it a massive war-chest exceeding $41 million.

PE Hub has the news.

The video sharing site came out of testing mode in February, and is different from most sites because it uses peer-to-peer technology (a technology that taps the computers of regular users) to distribute DVD-quality video, or better than the standard YouTube video.

However, it is not alone in using such technology. Joost, an IPTV company using P2P, recently raised $45 million in venture backing. And there’s a new player, Babelgum, launched by Fastweb founder Silvio Scaglia with $13.2 million of his own money.

With Veoh, people can upload videos and then can syndicate them to other popular sites including MySpace and YouTube. Joost is also trying to encourage such community activity, offering sharing, chat, IM and even blogging from within a show. Veoh lets producers make money through a revenue share or by charging a fee. Babelgum lags on the social front, and also is behind in pulling in content, and has evident advantage anywhere else, so it is a long-shot at this point.

Veoh says its “user base” is now 12.5 million, up from 4.4 million in February — we’re assuming that’s monthly uniques, but are trying to confirm. (Update: Comscore shows them much lower; see below.)

According to PEHub, Goldman Sachs led the round for Veoh at a rumored $60 to $70 million pre-investment valuation, with Goldman vice president, Pete Perrone, joining the Veoh board. Existing shareholders Spark Capital and Shelter Capital Partners also returned. Time Warner Investments, another previous investor, may also have invested. (Update II: Turns out, other new backers also include former Viacom and MTV Networks Chief Executive Tom Freston’s Firefly3, and Jonathan Dolgen, former Chairman and CEO of Viacom Entertainment Group.  Meanwhile, Michael Eisner’s Tornante Company invested in an earlier round.)

Veoh and Joost have now each raised far more cash than their predecessors did — more than YouTube, MetaCafe and DailyMotion put together, for example.

Update: Here are Comscore stats for worldwide unique visitors (age 15+) for April 2007:

Youtube: 163.2 million
Dailymotion: 25.3 million
Metacafe: 23.2 million
Veoh: 5.5 million
Revver: 945,000

Update II: Here is Hitwise:

The latest roundup of tech stuff:

TrenchMice, a nice F***ed Company? — TrenchMice is a new site trying to mobilize people to submit and edit comments about businesses and employers. Let us know what you think. We tried using it to look for info on Google, and not much there yet. It is based in Seattle.

Pheedo’s new ad platform — The Emeryville start-up, which specializes in inserting ads within RSS feeds, has unveiled a new product. Called “Feedpowered” advertising, it lets advertisers write small articles for their ads, and then feed that text to any site via a little widget (see image). Alternatively, these ads can be fed directly to people subscribing to them. Expedia, for example, has locally relevant feeds, and some people may want to subscribe to keep an eye on good deals, Pheedo says. Moreover, Pheedo has added little social buttons, for Delicious, Digg and other sites at the bottom of the ad — so that you can use Delicious to save the ad to your bookmarks, for example.

Tough week for Google — First, a court rules in favor of Belgian newspapers that sued Google, demanding the search engine remove links to their stories. Second, Google complies with a court order to disclose to Fox the identities of two individuals who illegally uploaded episodes of 24 to Google-owned YouTube. This follows orders from Viacom to take down 100,000 clips. YouTube is slowly becoming a very different sort of place than it used to be. Wonder how its users will take this. Finally, a bunch of media companies are accusing Google of aggressively placing advertising on sites that Google reportedly knew were showing pirated movies. Not good.

MySpace lets media companies block unauthorized video clips — The biggest social networking site said yesterday it is offering a filtering/blocking technology provided by Silicon Valley company Audible Magic, for free. It helps identify the digital audio signature in a video file.

Veoh’s new look — The video sharing site, out of testing mode, has launched a site using peer-to-peer technology (a technology that users the computers of regular users) to distribute DVD-quality video, or better than the standard YouTube video. People upload videos and then can syndicate them to other popular sites including MySpace and YouTube. The company is backed by Michael Eisner, former chief exec at Disney, among others.

Intel’s new chip, with 80 processing engines — This is apparently a model of chips to be used within five years. Details here.

Roundup of the latest action in Silicon Valley & tech:

PayPal’s origin explored, one more time — Online payments company Paypal has spawned more Internet entrepreneurs from its founding team than any other company we know. Yet PayPal had a rushed and tumultuous birth; if you’re curious about yet another version of PayPal history, this is worth a read: Co-founder Elon Musk (pictured here) rejects the version that suggests he was a lesser player.

Wikio, which looks remarkably like Digg, raises $5.3M — Aside from ranking stories in various theme areas, like Digg does, Wikio gives you ways to publish articles and personalize your news page. The Luxembourg-based company has closed a first round by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Gemini Israel Funds. Its team has big-name European new media types: Founder is CEO Laurent Binard, who was founder of Mediapps (European Software Publisher), and chairman is Pierre Chappaz, who was Yahoo Europe President and co-CEO of Netvibes. Wikio’s seed investors include Loic Le Meur (VP Sixapart Europe), Martin Varsavsky (CEO FON), Freddy Mini (COO Netvibes), Ouriel Ohayon (Editor Techcrunch France), and Jeff Clavier.

Infinera, the fiber optic company, to pull IPO trigger — This is the company with the power board, with folks like TJ Rogers and Vinod Khosla, that has raised a huge $315 million in venture backing so far. It is reportedly planning to file for an IPO, at a $1 billion-plus valuation, says LightReading, noting Infinera has sent lock-up agreements to shareholders.

Start-ups are killing big software companies — That’s the only conclusion you can draw if software sales are going up and sales of the big guys, SAP and Oracle, are falling. More here.

Stealth companies of the week — Thealarmclock mentions Ron Conway’s latest company, Portfolia, and Redwood City’s Twofish, but has few other details. Let us know if you know more.

Acquisition environment humming — Dow Jones (sorry, subscription only, so no link) cites analysts and others saying M&A activity remains robust for now. We wrote about secondary activity. There’s a notable quote of Foundation Capital venture capitalist Warren Weiss saying the firm sold five of its portfolio companies in 2006 - and “turned down an extraordinary five offers for every one it accepted.”

Good to have power players on your board — Video company Veoh has not escaped the shakeout happening among video start-ups now that YouTube has emerged as leader, but Veoh backer and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner has a way of making news. When Veoh announced a partnership with Wenner Media’s Usmagazine.com, to create a celebrity entertainment channel on Veoh, the NYT wrote about it (even though there are lots of celebrity entertainment sites already).

Google adds sponsored links to your search history — Details here.

Google in talks to buy Adscape Media, for ads in videogames — The search giant is in talks to acquire the San Francisco company, which delivers online advertising and also places ads within videogames, according to the WSJ. A deal could be reached next week. The company has a member of H.I.G. Ventures on its board. (The WSJ notes that Microsoft last year acquired Massive, a company that delivers in-game ads, for close to $200 million).

Kiptronic raises cash for ad-insertion in podcasts — Our story yesterday, in case you missed it, is here. Kiptronic inserts ads in audio and video files as they’re downloaded for off-line use; this is different from the broadcasting ad-insertion technologies. See Techdirt’s critique of broadcasting hype here. More analysis here.

IBM Joins social networking field — Details here.

ThinkFree wins Web-based office software comparison — Computer World compares various Web-based software packages, and rates ThinkFree (first) and Zoho (second) the winners. ThinkFree edged out Zoho because it is more compatible with Microsoft Office. In a significant partnership with Omnidrive, though, Zoho lets users open and edit documents directly within Web-based storage service, Omnidrive, and then save them too — a first, to our knowledge.