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With an initiative called BizSpark, software giant Microsoft is making a new pitch for startups to run their business on Microsoft’s tools.

It’s an enticing free upfront three-year package, bundling together software, support and promotion for no upfront cost — requiring merely a $100 payment when you leave the program. It’s an aggressive move by Microsoft to ensure that technology startups at least consider using Microsoft’s tools when they are putting together their initial infrastructure — and comes a time when competitors are bidding for the business of those same startups by offering them low cost, often open source alternatives.

Dan’l Lewin, vice president of strategic and emerging business development, says that Microsoft has already put a number of startups through a trial of the program, and the company plans to enroll thousands of startups in 83 countries in the next six months or so. The participants are nominated by BizSpark’s hundreds of “network partners” — including the National Venture Capital Association, The Indus Entrepreneurs and other economic development agencies, university incubators, hosters and investors — and must meet three criteria: They must be a private company, less than three years old and making less than $1 million in annual revenue.

If they meet those criteria, companies will get a free three-year license to Microsoft software and servers including Visual Studio, Windows Server and Microsoft SQL server. They will also get access to business and technical support from the aforementioned network partners, and they will be promoted on the Microsoft Startup Zone site. Microsoft already been targeting startups through the Startup Zone (and related programs such as the Startup Accelerator), but Lewin says that was aimed at venture-backed companies with global ambitions. It sounds like BizSpark will be reaching a much broader range of companies.

With the negligible cost, BizSpark presents a pretty irresistible offer to startups, especially in tough economic times — assuming you’re willing to build on Microsoft’s platform. Less charitably, you could look at this as Microsoft’s effort to stay relevant in a world where startups can choose to build on many competing platforms, and as more and more startups are moving towards a cloud computing model, where Microsoft is playing catchup to companies like Amazon, Google and Rackspace. When asked why Microsoft  is launching BizSpark, Lewin cites a lyric from the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime: “Same as it ever was.”

“Microsoft has always been about the developer community,” he says.

He adds that BizSpark isn’t about forcing companies to use Microsoft products exclusively, so the initiative will support interoperability with other platforms and services.

There are already some notable startup names signed up, including Xobni, which offers a powerful way to organize your email in Microsoft Outlook, and ZocDoc, an online medical appointment-making service backed by big names like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Khosla Ventures and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff.

ZocDoc chief executive Cyrus Massoumi says Microsoft approached him to join the program at this year’s TechCrunch50 conference, where ZocDoc had a booth. The startup has now been part of BizSpark for about six weeks, and although the service was already built on Microsoft’s platform, Massoumi and chief technology officer Nick Ganju say the program has already paid off by connecting them with expert help when needed, and helping them increase the site’s security and scalability.

The free software is nice, Massoumi says, but he’s even more excited about “being able to get access to people at Microsoft who are building these products. This is stuff that we couldn’t buy.”

Update: Here are the details, courtesy of Docstoc:

Microsoft BizSpark Program Guide for Startups - Get more Information Technology

Before the advent of the written word, the story goes, humans had to either store all their memories in their own heads, or by oral tradition passed down through designated members of their tribes. With trade came notation of facts and figures, and later alphabets, books and libraries. With them came the modern brain, which treats recorded knowledge as an extension of itself.

Throughout these developments, previous generations have grumbled that each new advance leaves us worse off — take this month’s issue of the Atlantic, which includes a feature story titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. Yet Google’s search-and-retrieve functions are only the tip of the Internet iceberg, when it comes to memory. A whole new generation of efforts to move our memories online is in the works, and may represent one of the biggest upcoming movements in computing.

Pensieve, an IBM technology, is the latest project to unveil itself. The idea, being able to snap pictures of business cards and people with your cell phone for later retrieval, sounds almost identical to Evernote, a company I reported on a month ago when it came out of private beta. That doesn’t mean IBM is copying; rather, that IBM is taking the most obvious tack first. Business cards (as well as receipts and other short, printed matter) are easy for image recognition software to read.

The problem right now is that the low-hanging fruit is fairly limited. Recording is easy — so easy that a Microsoft researcher has been doing it for nine years, saving photos, videos, web pages, and nearly everything else he interacts with.

Each of those capabilities is now duplicated for regular people. “Life casting” became a minor fad with Justin.tv last year, and more recently Qik’s had its public launch. Other companies like Kyte also offering video and picture feeds from your mobile phone, all of which can potential be saved. Emails have always been possible to save, although companies like Zimbra and Xobni have since added much more functionality, while Xoopit helps search through mail. For web pages, there are bookmarkers like Delicious, and upcoming services like Twine, whose private beta I’ve started using to save my web ramblings, although the service itself still needs plenty of work.

However, there’s still a lot missing. First, you need an integrated storage spot for all this material. Hard drives die, photo sharing services go down, email accounts are hacked. It’s likely that in the future web companies will exist that offer ironclad storage for all your data — meaning the complete, unedited record of your life. Storage services abound right now, but users will want something special for storing their lives.

Almost as important are editing services to narrow all the incoming data to points, which can be disseminated across Facebook feeds, weblogs and other public forums. If you really did record your whole day today, you’d have to spend a lot of time searching out the moments that mattered and tagging or annotating them for immediate use or later retrieval. The more automation exists, the more people will record parts of their lives.

Search and editing, in fact, are choke points that may stunt the growth of a memory industry. But then, there are trends that suggest otherwise. Image recognition, driven by advertising uses, is advancing rapidly under the care of companies like Blinkx and Viewdle. Voice recognition has stalled researchers for years, but companies like SoliCall and VoiceBox may yet offer a working solution.

Once software can recognize pictures, video and audio in addition to text, the work passes on to the growing ranks of semantic startups. Twine itself isn’t just a storage point for web pages; it’s attempting to add structure through automatic, intelligent tagging so that when you’re trying to find something you’ve saved, it’s easy. (A similar effort not yet out of stealth is called Qitera.)

Such startups will represent the first set of technologies that can truly help establish external stores of memory. Simulating short-term memory early startups like ReQall and Jott, both now available on the iPhone, already help with day-to-day reminders.

Our long-term memories are the tougher nut to crack, but there’s a wealth of opportunity in automated journals, work streams and research logs, not to mention data mining services that can help us manage our time better (RescueTime is an early example). And a true integrated service may be closer than it seems; take a look at Numenta, which is working on a “hierarchical temporal memory system (HTM) patterned after the human neocortex.”

And when all these things exist, what will happen to our memories? As the Atlantic article suggests, we may find that the net effect is to “scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration,” — or, as it argues in another part, we could spur a “golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.” The result may well depend on the quality of the efforts.

Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson moves to Juniper Networks — Microsoft’s lead on the failed Yahoo acquisition has called it quits, heading for the top post at software and device firm Juniper Networks. Johnson was the president of Platforms and Services, which meant he oversaw most of Microsoft’s web initiatives.

Xobni’s first employee heads to the Xobtuo — Gabor Cselle, a vice president and the first official employee at email startup Xobni, has resigned, stating that he wants to start his own company. Given his past experience and expertise, the new venture will almost certainly be email-focused as well.

Hackers continue to step up attacks in 2008 – Security firm Sophos has published research on the first half of the year, showing that malware levels continue to rise on the web. Businesses, also, are increasingly being used as both targets and launching points for attacks.

Humanoid robot soon for sale — No, it’s not the next-gen Realdoll. A French company called Aldebaran Robotics is preparing to sell its NAO humanoid robots for about $15,000 each. That’s far cheaper than the competition from Fujitsu and Honda. Of course, quality is the real issue, which is why you should actually use the money to go buy a whole herd of Pleos.

Space: The last (solar power) frontier — Sending up satellites to harvest solar energy and beam it back down to earth might be a bright idea, according to this New York Times Op-Ed. The solar crowd already contains many space cadets, so the scheme should work well.

Amazon doubles net with soaring sales — The web retailer bucked the market trend and posted unexpectedly strong results, reporting doubled second-quarter profit on a 41 percent increase in revenue.

Google’s Schmidt says the iPhone is good for Android — Top exec Eric Schmidt told an interviewer that he believes the iPhone is good for Google’s upcoming Android platform, at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech event. The device, he said, has forced competitors to step up and make their own versatile handsets combining GPS, a camera, a computer and a browser.

Cisco acquires Pure Networks — The communications and IT giant paid $120 million for Pure, which was funded by Bessemer Venture Partners, Ignition Partners, Mayfield and Intel Capital, according to John Cook.

Passwords safe, San Francisco accuses admin of IT terror — The bizarre tale of a San Francisco city employee imprisoned for refusing to hand over the passwords to a city network continues, even now that the man has passed the password to smooth-talking mayor Gavin Newsom. The new accusation is that the felony suspect rigged the network to “implode”.

Classic Nintendo controllers at risk of extinction — The judge in a patent case relating to three of Nintendo’s older controller designs will ban sale of the controllers this morning. Nintendo can temporarily get out of the ruling by posting a bond, which it will do, along with filing an appeal.

Photo credit for Kevin Johnson: Fortune magazine.

Big Facebook profile changes are coming, sure to impact developers — Facebook has been experimenting with a ground-up redesign of its user interface for months, that it hopes will improve communication among users. Now, the company is providing Facebook application developers with more details on the changes — and how those changes are going to affect applications. The new home page will have a tabbed interface for news feed, personal info, photos, and something tentatively called “boxes.” The “box” tab will house Facebook applications (see screenshot, above), although the apps will also appear in various forms within the other tabbed sections. Perhaps most significantly, the news feeds themselves will include a new range of ways for applications to share stories with Facebook users who haven’t already added the application. If you’re interested in the many, many changes happening, see this detailed post by Justin Smith of the blog Inside Facebook and application company Watercooler. The official preview site here.

Meanwhile, Facebook is seeing an overall drop in the number of new applications that grow quickly, and a probably-related drop in the number of developers working on the platform — even as the site continues to grow around the world. So these profile changes are part of a far-reaching initiative by Facebook to make the site more usable; the company has previously, for example, placed ever-more restrictive measures on app developers, to try to curb abusive practices like spam-emailing users. All in all, these changes will likely benefit Facebook users, the company, and the higher-quality applications, as another top Facebook app developer, Jesse Farmer notes here. The open question about the profile redesign is how Facebook is going to manage explaining the changes to its users.

News Corp. earnings report: MySpace, FIM miss revenue targets — News Corp. executives admitted yesterday that they weren’t monetizing MySpace and other social networking properties like they’d aimed to — bringing in $900 million in revenue versus $1 billion. Surprisingly, quarterly revenue actually declined from $233 million to $210 million. A number of pundits have jumped on this news to surmise that social networks may never monetize very well, as you can read over on Techmeme. But overall, monetization has actually been improving across a number of fronts at MySpace, as Silicon Alley Insider details, even if it’s not as fast as News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch wanted. For example, MySpace is actually earning 49 percent more money per-user compared to last year even as the user base continues to grow, partially through efforts like better-targeted ads. And many forget that monetizing social networks is not just about banner ads. We’ve covered companies that are creating new ways of doing things like distributing music or creating sports communities — companies that are helping to drive ticket sales for live events, apparel sales and other non-banner-ad forms of making money. Basically, social networks are in the process of becoming businesses and there are lots of unexplored opportunities. Here’s another one: Online video, which benefit greatly through being distributed on social networks, also have the opportunity to make money, as blog HipMojo notes.

Fuel cells coming soon to your GPS device? — MTI Micro has introduced a methanol-based fuel cell prototype, essentially a new and longer-lasting form of battery, for GPS devices.

Comcast may introduce a new fee system targeting people who habitually download large files — More here.

Email organizer Zaplets technology bought by email startup Xobni — Zaplets was developed in 2000 to turn long strings of back-and-forth emails into single emails, with the most recent information being displayed most prominently on each message (which sounds not unlike Gmail to me). Zaplets’ parent company, FireDrop had raised more than $100 million, with venture investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It went bust, some of the patents ended up with an “enterprise process management” company called MetricStream — and have now been bought by email analysis startup Xobni. Zaplets’s problem was that it was ahead of its time, Xobni chief executive Jeff Bonforte tells Techcrunch. So, look for Zaplet technology in Xobni.

MeeVee bought, finally — The Burlingame, Calif. company offers a sort-of TV Guide-style site for online videos. But gaining only around 1.1 million monthly active users after raising $27 million since it was founded in 2000, MeeVee decided last month to try to sell. It has reportedly succeeded, selling to Live Universe for an undisclosed price.

updated

Xobni, the San Francisco company we raved about last year that offers a way to better organize your email from Outlook, is launching publicly with its test version.

Its key feature is a sidebar in your inbox that shows you profiles of the people you’re corresponding with. It makes information easily accessible, such as their phone numbers, past correspondence and files you’ve exchanged with them. We mentioned last week its work to join Microsoft and Yahoo’s email offerings.

It’s a download, which is its main obstacle for adoption, because people are lazy. But Xobni thinks it’s useful enough to overcome that.

Founder Matt Brezina said 140,000 people have signed up for a test account, but he’s let only 50,000 use it so far. Now the beta is open for everyone.

The company has spent a lot of time debugging the service and making it lighter. There was a point when I was forced to uninstall the service because it slowed my Outlook too much. It’s now a lot faster.

Xobni is using viral marketing to spread the service. When you download it, and it starts indexing your email, it will notify you of interesting factoids, such as who you most frequently correspond with, who responds to you most quickly, and who within a particular domain name responds to you most quickly. It then gives you a way to email those people, to invite them to download Xobni too.

Notably, Xobni is also working with third party developers to let them build applications with Xobni. By allowing third party integration for its APIs, Xobni becomes a trojan horse for those third parties to access Outlook integration through a plugin. Microsoft Outlook doesn’t offer a friendly set of APIs for people to plug into Outlook, and so Xobni hopes to become the place developers come to for such access. Salesforce is a good example. If you’re emailing someone, Xobni could show you — through an integration with Salesforce — how many sales calls you’ve made to the person, and how many dollars in computer sales you’ve made to them. Xobni will announce such partnerships over the coming weeks.

Update: Folks in comments are asking for more details about how this integration works. Here’s more from Xobni’s Brezina:

We combine multiple Outlook APIs and use each API for what it is best at. Also, our UI doesn’t use any Outlook APIs but instead uses Win32 hacks to insert the Xobni sidebar in the outlook window.

We’ve done things with Outlook that were never intended by the original designers of the program or the API. The sidebar UI is one piece. The other piece is our data store. Outlook’s data stores are too slow, no matter which API you use. So, we keep our own store of the data on the user’s computer that is several orders of magnitude faster than the fastest Outlook API.

75% of our code base exists outside of the Outlook API integration.

Xobni, the email service whose fans include Bill Gates, is getting ready to expand beyond its current Microsoft Outlook-only product. That’s a smart and obvious move, and the startup’s new service is particularly juicy for Internet rumormongers –Xobni plans to add compatibility with Yahoo Mail, including features that let you use Yahoo Mail and Outlook together, according to TechCrunch.

This news fits in nicely with a couple of acquisition stories that have been floating around. First, of course, there’s the continuing saga of Microsoft’s attempt to purchase Yahoo. But there have also been rumors that Microsoft wants to purchase Xobni for $20 million, although Xobni co-founder Matt Brezina told us it’s too early to comment. If the Yahoo deal (finally) goes through, it’s easy to see why Microsoft would want to own a startup that not only enhances Outlook, but connects Outlook to the very popular Yahoo Mail.

We were pretty impressed when we played with Xobni Insight last September. The San Francisco startup’s product helps you organize and navigate your email, primarily through a sidebar that shows you profiles of people you’re corresponding with. Soon, Xobni will give you the same functionality in Yahoo Mail, and also help you consolidate your past correspondence and contacts from both services. That’s going to be pretty useful, even if the acquisition rumors turn out to be little more than empty talk. It’s a good next step for Xobni — the company’s long-term plans probably include compatibility with as many email programs as possible. With its enormous popularity, Yahoo Mail is an obvious choice, not to mention the fact that Xobni brought on Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo’s former vice president of social search, as its new chief executive in February.

Here’s the latest action:

Six Apart evolves into an ad network — The blogging company behind MovableType, TypePad and Vox is offering a new advertising program which will give publishers more control over ads and revenue from their sites. The company claims its ad network will be better than the many others out there (with more popping up everyday) because it has the best experience with advertisements specific to blogs. The company also launched Six Apart Services after acquiring Apperceptive, a New York-based company that has helped build communities for large sites such as The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and Boing Boing. Six Apart vice president, Anil Dash has more.

Microsoft acquires Xobni, maybe — The email startup, which Bill Gates has called “the next generation of social networking,” has supposedly signed a letter of intent to be purchased by the software giant, sources tell TechCrunch, apparently for $20 million. But not so fast,  we reached co-founder Matt Brezina on his cell, who said it was too early to comment. He said the company remains focused on rolling out product for general release. He did seem remarkably relaxed, suggesting the deal may not yet be in final stages, but it was hard to tell. He was sauntering on the Penn State campus, about to start a lecture to students, providing tips about entrepreneurship. Now we’re seeing other sources say no letter has been signed and that the company plans to remain independent until it gets its product out. Our guess is that Microsoft has offered, but that no deal has been signed yet. Xobni works as a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook and allows users to easily view past related conversations and search quickly through mail — which sounds a lot like Google’s Gmail.

Sequoia adds another partner to start broader investment initiatve — The WSJ’s Rebecca Buckman follows up on rumors that Sequoia is seeking to broaden its activities, confirming the hiring of Eric Upin and Keith Johnson, both of the Stanford Management Company. They’re creating an investment fund that would “invest in multiple asset classes, instead of just venture capital… The new vehicle — if it gets off the ground — likely would mimic the investment style of university endowments and other private funds that put money into stocks and bonds but also ‘alternative investments,’ such as buyout funds, venture capital and natural-resources investments.”

23andMe admits personal genetics have no medical purpose — Google raised eyebrows when it made investments in both genetic screening company, 23andMe (started by Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife) and Navigenics, another company that allows you to see your genome. Now under scrutiny in states like New York, services like these are being forced to admit they are little more than a vanity. “23andMe’s services are not medical … they are educational,” 23andMe spokesman Paul Kranhold told Forbes.

Attack of the Mac clones — Computer maker Psystar continues to grab headlines with its OS X-enabled (Apple’s operating system) computer. Apple does not allow 3rd parties to create Mac computers, whereas dozens of manufacters make Windows-based PCs. But with Apple’s market-share and demand on the rise, there certainly seems to be a market out there for a very low-cost Mac. Apple’s Mac Mini is currently the cheapest they offer at $599, but this Psystar system would be $399 with no software installed. Naturally, the legality of making these systems without Apple’s blessing is an issue.

John Battelle is first “John” in Google, shows Google is broken — Look, we all like John Battelle, the founder and chairman of Federated Media (which runs some of the ads on VentureBeat), but come on, he’s the number one result when you type “John” into Google’s search box? “I mean, I am ahead of Lennon. The Gospel. Er…McCain,” Battelle himself notes. I could go on: John Adams, John Hancock, John F. Kennedy, etc. With all due respect, I think it’s fair to say that most of the world has no idea who John Battelle is, yet that’s who they’ll find when they search for one of the most common names in the English language.

1. Amazon S3, VentureBeat go down
2. Montalvo Systems vs. Intel, with chip for handheld devices
3. Fox Interactive to introduce “music Hulu for MySpace”
4. Yahoo’s board moving against Yang
5. Google searchers are wealthier, buy more online
6. Xobni hires Jeff Bonforte away from Yahoo, to be its new CEO
7. Stormfisher raises $350 million for biofuel project
8. Cable veteran Philip Balboni moving to online news site
9. Nielsen buys Audience Analytics
10. Air commuter conference coming up this spring
11. Report: Online Community Best Practices
12. Wal-Mart chooses Blu-Ray

Amazon S3, VentureBeat go down — Online data storage service S3 went down. Affected startups include SmugMug, 37Signals, Twitter and many others. Lots of coverage on Techmeme. Earlier today, VentureBeat was down because of separate hosting problems.

Montalvo Systems taking on Intel, focusing on a chip for handheld devices — It has designed a chip for smartphones, notebook computers and other portable devices, that should run software that works on Intel or AMD chips. The company’s plans have been outlined in some detail by Michael Kanellos at CNET (our previous coverage ).

Montalvo’s chips, however, will fundamentally differ from the latest Core or Opteron processors from Intel and AMD in that the cores on its chip won’t be symmetrical, i.e. identical to each other. Instead, Montalvo’s chips will sport a mix of high-performance cores and lower-performance cores on the same piece of silicon, similar to the Cell chip devised by IBM, Toshiba, and Sony, according to sources close to the company.

It has received more than $73 million venture and private equity firms including Bay Partners, NEA-IndoUS Ventures, U.S Venture Partners, Leapfrog Ventures, CMEA and Adams Street Partners.

Fox Interactive to introduce “music Hulu for MySpace”– The project, which is still being put together, intends to sign up all the major music labels as content providers — who would get equity. The music would be distributed on widgets and contained in a portal page, similar to video-sharing site Hulu, which Fox is a part of. The music on MySpace would be DRM-free and ad-supported. PaidContent has the scoop.

Yahoo’s board moving against Yang — Founder and chief executive Jerry Yang and a small group sympathetic members are trying to avoid a sale to Microsoft at all costs. But Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock is leading an informal group of board members and billionaire Ron Burkle who think that Yang may be ignoring his fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. The New York Post has more.

Google searchers are wealthier, buy more online — Hitwise numbers here. See chart for more.

Xobni hires Jeff Bonforte away from Yahoo, to be its new chief executive — Bonforte was previously a vice president who helped lead the growth of Yahoo Messenger. Company blog post here.

Stormfisher raises $350 million for biofuel project — It turns agriculture and food-industry byproducts into methane gas, which reduces the levels of waste in landfills. The investor is private equity firm DenHam Capital, which has already sunk many millions into biofuel projects.

Cable veteran Philip Balboni moving to online news site — He’s leaving New England Cable News to join online international news company Global News Enterprises LLC, which is slated to launch in April with more than 70 international correspondents. The new company has taken on around $8 million from angels. (Photo via Columbia University.)

Nielsen buys Audience Analytics – The web measurement company says the Provo, Utah-based startup will improve its ability to handle large quantities of audience measurement data

Air commuter conference coming up this spring — Tech commentator Esther Dyson and publisher Imaginova are teaming up to organize the fourth annual Flight School from July 4-6, an event that brings entrepreneurs together to talk about innovation in aviation and space travel. The focus is still on “air taxis” — basically, smaller planes making local flights on-request — but Flight School’s scope will be broader this year, Dyson told us. Since the conference began, air taxis have become a marketplace reality through companies like DayJet, and commercial space flight is becoming more and more practical too, Dyson said. She added: “When I was a kid, I took it from granted that I would go to the moon. Now it looks like I’m going to have to work pretty hard to get there.”

Report: Online Community Best Practices — Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang delivers the report (buy here). Its tagline is “Communities Are A Powerful Tool, As Long As You Put Members’ Needs First.”

Wal-Mart chooses Blu-Ray — More here. Meanwhile, Toshiba may be ready to give up on HD DVD.

Here’s the latest action:
1. Data centers floating in the SF Bay?
2. CEO of search engine Ask goes to Redpoint
3. Xobni’s Outlook plugin enhanced
4. Microsoft dealmaker Bruce Jaffe to join startup life
5. Yahoo’s browser-based player now public
6. Readburner lets you see what’s shared on Google Reader
7. Nextreme keeps chips cool
8. Planting hairy plants may help prevent global warming?
9. Intel to launch WiMax PC card by June
10. LiveUniverse buying video sharing site Revver?
11. Terry Semel restarting investment company, Windsor Digital?

Data centers floating in the SF Bay? – Some of the stranger news we’ve heard, but apparently true. A Silicon Valley start-up called IDS (International Data Security) is planning to build up to 50 data centers on de-commissioned cargo ships, the first of them docked at Pier 50 in San Francisco. Image at left is an oil tanker in the Bay carrying some of these data centers, according to Silverback Migration Solutions. Apparently, this keeps the data center secure from “natural disasters” according to a company brochure, and the sea water helps cool the servers. Speaking of disasters, we recall a bad one two months ago when a tanker hit the bridge and spilled all kinds of oil. Are servers really going to be safer floating on the water? We couldn’t find too much information about this company, so still trying to confirm this one.
CEO of search engine Ask goes to Redpoint — IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Jim Safka becomes chief executive of IAC’s search engine, Ask.com, which has remained steady at around 4 percent market share since its controversial advertising campaign, a small bump up from 3 percent, but down from 5 percent several years ago. Safka will remain CEO of Primal Ventures, IAC’s investment arm. He replaces Jim Lanzone (pictured left), who joins Silicon Valley venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence. More here.

Xobni’s Outlook plugin for better email processing gets upgrades, expands test group – The San Francisco company impressed us at launch. However, it had to shut off access, due in part to high demand. It has spent the last few months making a range of improvements, including faster data processing and design changes. Today, Xobni invited the more than 14,000 people on the company’s waiting list. Each person will be able to invite up to five more friends. Xobni is most popular among those needing to track of a lot of work email, as you’d expect: Sales and marketing people, and project managers. Users are clicking on the application an average of more than eleven times per day, and internal surveys show more than 90 percent of its users are happy, the company said. Enhancements include right click actions, adding pictures, drag and drop of files, copy and paste of text etc. See here for more.

Microsoft dealmaker Bruce Jaffe leaves for Valley startup life — Jaffe was part of the team that acquired advertising firm aQuantive and invested $240 million in Facebook. He’s been interviewing at jobs in Silicon Valley, but has instead decided to start his own company, according to Valleywag’s scoop. Marketwatch confirmes the news.

Yahoo Tech Ticker: A tech TV we may just watch — It’s a select group of pundits, as TechCrunch reports: Sarah Lacy is a BusinessWeek reporter with a book on Silicon Valley slated to hit shelves later this year (you can get it on Amazon, here). Henry Blodgett is a fallen analyst turned successful blogger at Silicon Alley Insider. Paul Kedrosky is an investor, entrepreneur, blogger, and talking head. These people know a lot, and their attitudes are just as sharp.

Yahoo’s second iteration of its browser-based player is now public — It lets you link to MP3s on any web page. Details here.
Readburner lets you see what is shared on Google Reader — Readburner is the latest meme-tracker, this time on what are the most popular items shared via Google’s RSS reader. See image at left, which showed that our own Eric Eldon’s piece today was the third most popular item shared as of 10:30pm Wed eve. Mashable has more.

Start-up Nextreme keeps chips cool — The Durham N.C company, a spinoff of research institute RTI International, says it lowers temperatures in the specific areas of chips that get too hot. Excess heat has caused chip giants like Intel and AMD to find alternative methods to speed up their processors, for example creating multi-cores chips. WSJ has more.

Wiki-style website to help speed up U.S. broadband access? – Analyst Drew Clark of Washington DC will launch BroadbandCensus.com later this month, letting people enter where they live, the price of their service and how happy they are with it. A speed test will measure connection quality — and put pressure on the federal government to improve service where it is poor.

Planting hairy plants may help prevent global warming — More here.

Intel to launch WiMax PC card by June – Details at GigaOm.

LiveUniverse buying video sharing site Revver in a stock swap? — That’s the rumor. Los Angeles’ LiveUniverse, run by former News Corp. exec Brad Greenspan, owns LiveVideo, and it apparently wants to add Revver to its network of video sites. Greenspan mentions taking a 30 percent stake in LiveLeak in his blog. LiveUniverse also bought video search site Flurl in Oct. 2006. Revver took $13 million over the last two years from venture firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Benture Partners, Draper Richards and William Randolph Hearst III.

Terry Semel restarting his old investment company, Windsor Digital? — Semel, who exited from Yahoo after that company’s anemic progress over the past couple of years, is reportedly joining up with former Yahoos Drew Buckley and Jeff Karish. PaidContent has the news.

In ten years, an internet eternity, web-based email has only made token improvements, moving from Hotmail to Gmail. Meanwhile, instant messaging and social networks have rapidly developed.

Four new startups, all of which came out of secrecy this year, point toward a bright new future for email. These oddly-named saviors — Fuser, Orgoo, Xobni and Xoopit — have a simple goal. They want to centralize communication, and they want to give it structure and meaning.

Power users feel the pain of having to repeatedly switch between email and the address book, having to close one email before writing another, or losing track of instant messages as the write a new email. For lighter email users, only once email begins to stack up and conversations become lost or forgotten do their cries for help begin. The least committed email users may have dropped it entirely in favor of messaging on a platform like Facebook, which seems to offer many of the same basic features.

The individual aims of these companies differ. Fuser and Orgoo (previous coverage) both centralize communication, whether from email, instant messaging, a social network or even mobile SMS and video, in one simple interface. Xobni (previous coverage) is an overlay for Outlook that helps organize high-volume communications with a multi-functional sidebar. Xoopit organizes all those thousands of pages of archived email, pulling out meaningful content long since lost by the user.

While each is different, they recognize the same disease, and offer the same cures. To use the wording of Sean Rad, co-founder of Orgoo, the aim is to first aggregate all communication; next, integrate the separate streams into a single work flow; and finally, organize, to increase the efficiency and usefulness of email.

We’ll give a summary of each startup, followed by some thoughts from their top executives as to what’s in the future.

Fuser
Fuser pulls together its user’s communications, both from all of their email accounts as well as the social networks Facebook and MySpace. It then places the message-centers of each service in a single web based interface, providing a central place to catch up on what’s been happening everywhere.

According to the company’s president, Jeff Herman, “The problem is that most people today have multiple email, social networking accounts and so forth. You have to log in to five or six places to find out what’s going on. What we’re really going for is a virtual command center to pull together everything a person has.”

Orgoo
Orgoo, like Fuser, aggregates communication, but with an interface that more closely resembles traditional email. And while both Fuser and Orgoo can access any type of email account, Orgoo adds in instant messaging accounts rather than social networks, and also has a video chat option.

“As things stand, you have different accounts on all these services. If I email you, we continue our conversation by IM or phone. But I don’t have one single view of that conversation. We’ve taken the first step of integrating and allowing you to organize in one central location,” says Rad.

Both Fuser and Orgoo plan to add, as quickly as possible, features that the other has — Fuser will add instant messaging, while Orgoo will add social networking. Where the two companies differ is in their interface (see screenshots) and their target markets; Herman says that Fuser is aiming for the “middle American” market, while Orgoo seems to appeal to a more tech-savvy crowd.

Xobni
Xobni attempts to help information-overloaded business people keep track of their contacts within Microsoft Outlook. A sidebar view shows the relationship of a message’s sender to the user, as well as a correspondence history, their contact information, and files exchanged — all without ever opening a single email, much less tracking through endless folders and conversational threads.

Despite some initial problems with the software’s implementation, with users complaining of excessive memory usage, co-founder Matt Brezina says demand has been strong from heckled Outlook users. “We decided to stick to Outlook because there’s a lot of pain there, and a lot of value that can be created for those users,”Brezina says.

Xoopit
To Xoopit, the email inbox is a library in lack of the Dewey Decimal System. While co-founder Bijan Marashi is guarded in his statements about the company, which will come out of stealth mode later this year, he told us that the purpose of Xoopit is simply to organize email.

For example, Xoopit can search through every email ever sent to a user and pull out and compile a photo gallery from the attachments. Other content in emails can also be separated out. The idea is to make even old emails and content available without requiring hours of digging, much like separating a single towering stack of documents into organized filing cabinets.

The future

The question is, just how painful is existing consumer email? The majority of us are lazy, and we’ll put up with a lot before learning a new system. Sure, our Yahoo Mail may be clunky at times, but it’s “good enough,” right? If they only appeal to a tiny sub-set of users, all four startups are doomed to failure.

However, there are examples of innovation in email paying off. When Zimbra, an enterprise email client, launched in 2005, we admit to doubting that it could challenge Outlook. It took two years, but the Ajax-based software took off, gaining enough momentum among users excited about its extensible features and add-ons to convince Yahoo to acquire it for $350 million, earlier this year. However, Zimbra isn’t (yet) for general consumer use, nor is it a standard web mail client like Yahoo or Google offers.

The lesson is that to have a chance, new email startups must be easy to use, and address multiple needs effectively. To become the command center for any internet user, email should go further, pulling together communication and making them more intuitive, and more useful.

Rad says that Orgoo’s goal is to make a user’s past communications reveal deeper patterns about them. If all your messages are aggregated in one place, the inbox can be the target of an automatic analysis to “allow people to explose the hidden social networks and the hidden information,” Rad says. “We want to create new ways for you to visualize email, easier ways to navigate through and see things in messages and relationships in a larger context. For example, if you look at Gmail, it groups your emails by subject line. That’s good, but there are a lot of other ways to group, whether by sender, topic or something else. You want to create a user interface that allows you to re-thread conversations and put them in context.”

Likewise, Fuser wants to dig into the wealth of information flowing through user’s accounts. While the site already features a “leaderboard” showing who users communicate with most on their social networks, it could gather more information, for instance keeping track of a friend even when she has different accounts as well. More such features are planned, but Herman also points to another important area for his company. “We’re aimed at middle America, where people are not technologists,” he says. “If you don’t make it very easy for people to set up accounts, you’ll lose them. To really win we have to focus on an interface that can be useful to mass America.”

Xobni’s co-founder Brezina says his company doesn’t plan on resting on its Outlook laurels, and may branch out to a high-powered web mail or a client that can, like Zimbra, act as a platform for developers, for example being able to automatically look up real estate prices and connect them information in an agent’s email. And like the other companies, Brezina thinks that email is a rich information resource about a person’s life. While Xobni already pulls out some information like phone numbers from email, there’s much more information waiting for someone to find an innovative way to highlight. “There’s a structure that just hasn’t been broken apart and exposed,” he says.

And when will a Google or Yahoo decide to change their own platforms? Xoopit founder Bijan Marashi compares the challenge of changing email to upgrading an operation system: “That’s a major overhaul of stuff consumers use every day, and the [OS] companies pull it off. If someone can really make this stuff simple, the majors might be able to take a lot of it away.”

Adoption or acquisition by a big company may be the best way for any of the four to succeed, providing them with the money and backing to spread their word.

We’ll follow these startups as they evolve. More this week, on related projects coming out of the Web 2.0 conference.

(Update: CEO Matt Brezina tell us the response has been so strong that he’s closing open access and will make it invite-only this evening.)

Xobni Insight, a new email service that sits on top of your Outlook, launches today at Techcrunch40.

It’s extremely useful and we’ll make a bet now it will win the show here, after the two-day competition between 40 companies finishes (we’ve yet to see half the companies, but it blows away the competition so far. Update: Indeed, Mint, which presented later, has since edged out Xobni to win the prize). We’ve downloaded it, and are playing with it, and find it truly impressive.

We’ve covered the company before as it readied for launch (this link takes you there). It allows you to better organize, search, and navigate your email. It’s key feature is a sidebar in your inbox that shows you profiles of the people you’re corresponding with. It gives you an entire history of your correspondence with them, and much more. There’s a tour here: www.xobni.com/learnmore, and screenshots below. The sidebar profile gives you an overview a person’s email habits (for example, when they are most likely up and doing their most correspondence, according to past usage), their phone numbers, how they rank in terms of frequency of correspondence, past conversations (in threaded form), and files exchanged.

So what? Well, it gets better. Outlook drives me nuts, when I’m trying to find past correspondence on the fly, such as attachments I’ve sent people, or the name of someone’s assistant that I’ve forgotten. Xobni lets you search for someone, and their profile pops up in the sidebar, along with all that information. Xobni has it all sifts through incoming email automatically, lifting phone numbers from people from the signatures at the bottom of their email. You don’t have to do anything. You can replay to email right there, within the sidebar — instead of having to toggle back to the Outlook inbox. The constant toggling between Outlook calendar, inbox and the to-do list is a serious hassle, and Xobni removes all that. Xobni lets you look for stuff within the sidebar, and correspond with people from it — all without leaving the email you were originally working on.

There’s more. There’s an organize feature that lets you manage appointments within the sidebar profiles, manage to-do lists and “stay-in-touch” with close friends or contacts you haven’t emailed in a while. There’s an analytics portion too, showing your own email habits, by things like volume and time. The site says the product is only available by invite, however we downloaded it fine from the site just now. Try it out.

Here’s the latest action:

Singularity Institute, the quirky group that thinks machines will take over – Peter Thiel, the former CEO of PayPal, and leader of the Founders Fund, graces the pages of the Mercury News and the SF Chron today with his views about how machines are likely to be directing human affairs sometime in the future, possibly within 30 years. The Merc asks why he’s a lead backer of the institute. Thiel responds: Science and technology are the domains in Western civilization where the most is happening, and this is pushing at the very frontiers of it. It is at the very core of what our civilization is fundamentally about. It is where innovation is happening. The group has occasional weekend conferences, the next being this weekend.

Xobni, the secretive email company, reveals big-name backers — Xobni, the unlaunched company that promises to revolutionize email by giving you more control over it, has announced more top investors: VCs First Round Capital and Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures, Atomico Investments (co-founded by Nik Zennstrom of Skype fame) and individual angels Ariel Poler (the chairman of Stumbleupon), Paul Buchheit (the creator of Gmail), Saar Gur (a partner at Charles River Ventures), Tom Pinckney (founder of SiteAdvisor) and Paul Graham. The San Francisco company announced in March a first round of $4.2 million in capital, naming only Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator.

Rapleaf, a reputation company, now apparently selling your data — Entrepreneur Auren Hoffman founded Rapleaf to track consumer reputations online, across Websites — an improvement over eBay, which tracks your reputation for activity on that site alone. However, CNET’s Stefanie Olsen writes about the other related activities Hoffman has launched of late, including Upscoop and Trustfuse, the latter selling your data to marketers. We’ve requested comment from Hoffman, but have yet to hear back.

VC tax debate resumes – Let’s face it, the VCs and their private equity counterparts should be paying full income tax on the carry portion of the profits they make from their firm’s investments, because its not their own money they are risking. We explain the reasons here. However, the tax debate rages on in Washington. Dan Primack covers the latest. He notes that Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR) had the day’s most explosive line, when he claimed this entire issue was sparked by the “extravagant lifestyle of one man.” He’s referring, of course to Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and his wife, who have a penchant for stone crabs that cost $400, or $40 per claw.

Another VC firm says VC model is broken — One of the oldest venture capital firms in Washington state will not raise a new fund, a decision that Northwest Venture Associates founder Tom Simpson said is driven in part by the tough economics now facing venture capitalists (see John Cook’s piece in the Seattle PI ). “I think the fund model is very broken for a variety of reasons,” said Simpson. “One, there is just too much money out there… As a result, valuations are getting bid up. Number two, you are seeing a huge