VentureBeat

(Updated, rumor that Backfence is shutting down is wrong, see fresh post here)

Roelof Botha is one of the hotter venture capitalists these days. The Sequoia Capital venture capitalist led that firm’s investment into video-sharing site YouTube — and saw that company sold within a year to Google for $1.65 billion.

Now he’s apparently reviewing the progress of his companies. Palo Alto’s Meebo, the site that lets people use integrate their instant messaging service online, has been out raising money for a while. One investor told us he was shut out from investing, suggesting Meebo is doing fine. Not hearing anything, we looked up chief executive Seth Sternberg. He says Meebo will raise the second round this quarter. So apparently Meebo is being given more time to figure out how to make cash — a nice counter-story to the current pain.

Botha also invested in Redwood City, Calif.’s Insider Pages, a site where users can go and share local reviews on everything from restaurants to doctors. Rumors are that it has laid off two-third of its staff, and we’ve messaged the company to see if it is true. Insider Pages competes with a growing number of community review oriented sites, including Yelp, Judy’s Book, Smalltown and BackFence.

The company has raised $10 million from Sequoia, Softbank and Idealab, and only last year moved to Redwood City from Pasadena.

Here’s a a graphic (scroll to bottom) showing a market matrix of local sites, including Insider Pages (with Smalltown putting itself at the sweet-spot, since it is Smalltown’s graphic). In reality, they all overlap significantly.

[Update II: We hear from a source that Backfence CEO is resigning and 12 of 18 people have been laid off, and the company is closing. We've put in calls to the company. No one answered when we called their Virginia office, 11am their time. Until confirmation, we'll keep this in rumor category. Update III: Something is definitely up. Even someone we know well there is declining comment. Update IV: Layoffs confirmed, but it is staying open. Fresh post coming shortly ]

In other Web 2.0 news, Tagworld doesn’t appear to be doing too well. The Los Angeles social networking company has taken down its management page. We’ve messaged the company, to find out more. Draper Fisher Jurvetson invested $7.5 million into the company. [Update II: On the contrary, someone very close to the company tells VentureBeat the company got a "huge investment" last month from a well-known company]

Meanwhile, more executives are leaving video site Guba, as it looks for a buyer. And another exec has left Wallop, another social networking site.

[In other Sequoia news, the firm has taken down the picture of Elon Musk, a co-founder of Pay Pal from its homepage, where the firm showcases some of its successes. This is apparently a response to Valleywag, which pointed out how Musk was the only one of the PayPal founders pictured -- and noting how other early players such as Max Levchin and Peter Thiel weren't represented. There are big differences among the founders about who should take credit for PayPal's early years, and so Sequoia -- prudently perhaps -- decided to dodge the issue, rather than further endanger its already frosty relationship with Thiel.]

See our earlier Q&A with Botha here.

Round-up of the latest action in Silicon Valley:

It’s all about Google — Notable post by Rich Skrenta about how Google is becoming ever more important. Having become the “start page” for the Web, Google makes $90 to $120 for every thousand times its pages get viewed (or CPM), compared to a mere $4-5 for an average page view elsewhere, he calculates. We asked him for his assumptions, and it turns out he mixes a lot of sources, but the high-end of his figure comes from an analysis from Caris & Co.’s Tim Boyd, who uses Comscore data to estimate that Google makes between 19¢ and 21¢ per search (or roughly $200 per thousand searches).

Google boosts its own products in search results — Google continues to find ways to upgrade its own features in search results. Blake Ross has a good piece about the latest, “Google Tips,” which lists Google’s photo-sharing site, Picasa, a tip for users at the top of its results, even though Picasa doesn’ even show up on the front page of its own search results (see image below). That’s just one example among many such self-interested tips. We messaged Google last week to see when they introduced the feature; they didn’t respond.

Too many others chasing Google — Minekey is just the latest search service to appear, with $3 million in funding (see our story here). The NYT follows today with a piece about all the other search engines vying for a slice of the all-pervasive search engine market. We’ve covered most already at VentureBeat. Problem is, their logic doesn’t quite hold. Yes, if you pick up a single percentage of the search market, you’ll get profits, but it no one seems to be pulling this off (explained by Skrenta’s “winner-take-all” analysis above). Among others, the NYT piece mentions ChaCha, the search engine that has live guides help you with search (we’ve used it, and it’s true) has raised $6 million, including from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Our previous coverage of ChaCha is here (scroll down). It’s hard to comprehend, though, how the company will cover labor costs. The NYT also mentions the yet-to-launch Hakia, a company reported on elsewhere, but not yet mentioned by VentureBeat — which wants to do something similar to Powerset also promises: a natural language search. Hakia raised $16 million from Noble Grossart Investments, Alexandra Investment Management and a motley group of others, including Polish and Turkish oil, real estate and telecom groups.

WiFi in cars; watch out for accidents later this year — Autonet Mobile, a San Francisco wireless start-up, is expected to announce this week it has partnered with Avis Rent A Car System to “provide a rolling WiFi hotspot to Avis customers by March,” according to the NYT. For $10.95 a day, Avis will give customers a portable device that plugs into a car’s power supply and delivers a high-speed Internet connection. It will use the 3G cellular network and work in all metropolitan areas and “about 95 percent of the country,” says Sterling Pratz, the company’s chief exec. We’ll believe this when we see it, because many parts of the Bay Area have spotty cell network coverage as it is, let alone 3G coverage. There’s an amusing concession in the story. The company has some technology limitations, the Times says, like “bandwidth restrictions.” Meanwhile, Ford is introducing bluetooth systems next year in its cars, allowing people to chat, and check email.

Gmail vulnerable to contact list hijacking – If you visit the wrong Web site, you may be vulnerable to having your Gmail contacts lifted. That’s because Gmail stores its contacts in javascript files. Details here.

Walloped takes a wallop — Sean Uberoi Kelly, CTO, founder and principal inventor of Wallop has left the San Francisco social networking start-up Wallop, according to Gigaom. Chief exec Karl Jacobs says the departure is normal, noting Kelly is going to back to New York, where he has family — and has finished building the product. Fair enough, but it’s a blow nonetheless. We have yet to understand Wallop’s strategy and business model (explained here in detail). It raised a total of $13.6 million from Norwest, Bay Partners and angels.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s investment plan for California tech — A hodge-podge of projects comprise the governor’s $95 million proposal for research spending. Summary in Merc: Some $30 million would go toward building a new research building for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Helios Project, which is developing the next generation of efficient solar-energy technology. An additional $40 million would help build an Energy Biosciences Institute facility for research into alternative fuels, at either the University of California-Berkeley or UC-San Diego. Some $5 million would help the University of California’s bid to build a $200 million super-fast “petascale’” computer at the Lawrence Laboratory.