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More on Facebook profile changes: The feed wall — The new profile is slated for launch later this year. The latest new feature the company is previewing: A “feed” portion of the new design, where you can easily add content from within a standardized interface. The goal is to make Facebook easier to use. The company is being transparent about this latest effort — in contrast to some of its earlier product launches, like its introduction of its news feeds and its “Beacon” ad program. Now, it is giving sneak peeks of the new mock-ups of its redesigned profile pages, and getting feedback from users. Take a look for yourself, here, and see the sample screenshot, below.

Report: Jangl sold to Live Universe — Internet-based calling startup Jangl’s remnants have been sold to Live Universe, according to Techcrunch. The company’s founders and some of its employees have already left for competitor Jajah, as we’ve covered.

Analyst: Amazon’s Kindle digital book reader could be a big business — The device could contribute up to three percent of Amazon’s overall revenue by 2010, grossing $750 million for the company if one combines device sales and digital book sales, according to Citi analyst Mark Mahaney. Silicon Alley Insider takes a deeper look.

Windows XP is coming to the OLPC — One Laptop Per Child, the nonprofit organization that wants to put its inexpensive computer into the hands of every child in the world, has gained Microsoft as a partner, and its tried and true XP operating system as an option for its users.

Google CFO joins board of LifeLock — George Reyes, the long-time and now ex-chief financial officer at Google, has joined the board of Tempe, Ariz. online identity security company LifeLock. The company has issues, but it also recently raised $25 million from the likes of early Google investor Kleiner Perkins. Incidentally, former YouTube executive and current Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu is on the board of LifeLock rival Debix. If one more financial officer from a web company joins the board of an online identity company, we’ll have a trend on our hands.

Electric car dust-up continues — Fisker Automative and rival Tesla Motors have been locked in a legal battle about who owns what intellectual property concerning the companies’ competing electric cars. Fisker’s latest move is to file a motion to compel arbitration — it’s the one getting sued, and it is trying to end things quickly. More on the latest news here; our previous coverage here. Fisker’s sports car prototype, pictured.

Magazine article aggregator Brijit out of money, closing shop — Washington, D.C. based Brijit condenses long-form articles into 100-word summaries. It has gained more than 160 summarized stories in its database, and it is seeing strong growth, the company tells VentureWire, but that’s not enough. Although it is backed by Herbert Allen III, president of boutique bank Allen & Co., and by former Time editor-turned-banker-turned-Bloomberg executive Norman Pearlstine, it is out of money and shutting down.

More YouTube metrics features — Online video needs more measurement for users, video creators and advertisers. Online video creators, for example want to see how valuable they are compared to other users; brand advertisers want to know more about which users see the ads that run in online videos. YouTube, the most popular video site in the world, already offers a basic metrics service called Insight that lets you see geographic locations where your video is popular, and how popular it is relative to other videos. Yesterday, YouTube announced addition features for Insight, including aggregate views that all of your YouTube videos have generated, and your relative popularity to other YouTube users.

Our good friend Mike Arrington of TechCrunch has news on the impending launch of Flickr Video. While it’s a little hard to take an announcement seriously when it’s done via video blogger Loren Feldman playing Shel Israel as a puppet (embedded below), the details of the post seem legitimate.

Whereas market leader YouTube exploded in popularity thanks at least in part to its ease in distribution of copyrighted material, Flickr Video will look to cater to a different audience by limiting videos to 90-seconds in length and/or 150 MB in size (this could change in the future according to Yahoo). Perhaps more notable is that only Flickr ‘Pro’ (paying) account holders will be able to upload videos, though anyone will be able to view them.

The decision not to create yet another direct YouTube online video competitor is a smart play, especially given the predicament Yahoo is currently in with Microsoft (our latest coverage). Yahoo simply did not need to enter another war it could not win.

The amateur photographer and hobbyist audience that enjoy Flickr should appreciate that many of the features such as tagging will be available for videos as well.

Since the aforementioned Microsoft proposal, Yahoo has been releasing new products at a blistering pace. Flickr Video follows Yahoo Live (our coverage), Yahoo Buzz (our coverage), Shine (our coverage) and FireEagle (our coverage), among others. One would hope Yahoo isn’t simply shoving these projects out the door to try and showcase its potential strength to investors going forward — after all, Yahoo Live did have a lot of uptime problems following its launch.

As Arrington notes, the embed player looks very clean and should flow nicely on Flickr pages where these videos will reside next to images.

The new functionality does not appear to be live yet, so we’ll update with more when we see it.

update: While I don’t see the feature on my Flickr account yet, based on the embed code, this video does indeed come from Flickr.

Of note: This has to be one of the worst embed processes I’ve ever seen for a video. There is no option to copy until the video plays all the way through and when you copy it from the player, it does so in a way that makes it nearly impossible to embed correctly in something like WordPress without first copying it to a text editor. You might want to work on that Yahoo.

update: Flickr now has its own silly video quasi-announcement of Flickr Video on its blog as well.

Often I find myself watching videos on the web that contain parts which are extremely funny, but the rest is painful to sit through. A new online video mashup service, Omnisio, which launched today, hopes to change that by making it super easy to re-edit videos on the web.

The company was one of the ten we profiled in our post on the Y Combinator demo day. As we said then, the slick, easy-to-use interface is one of the strengths of the site. Getting started is as easy as copying and pasting a URL from an existing video on the web. The site only accepts videos from YouTube, Google Video and Blip.tv — but really, as long as your have online video king YouTube, the lack of other sites is forgivable.

Once you submit a video URL to edit, you are taken to a page with a simple cropping tool which allows you to select only the exact portion of the video you wish to keep. To merge this clip with another web video, simply click the ‘Add Video’ button near the bottom of the editor. Here, you’ll paste in another URL and follow the exact same process.

When you have the clip you want, you hit ‘Publish’, enter elements such as a title and description and you’re done. Your video now exists on Omnisio and can be shared or embedded just as you’d expect from any other video site.

As mentioned, there are other sites that do this, such as Searchles (our coverage), but Omnisio has pushed forward with more features. Viddler is another online video company that allows for user commenting within videos, like Omnisio does.

Unlike many other online video startups, Omnisio has a smart approach in terms of keeping costs down: They don’t host any of the videos. Instead, the video still resides on a site like YouTube while Omnisio simply pulls in what it needs for the new video created off of it.

One of the best feature of the site is that you don’t have to create an account to use it. While Omnisio recommends you create one so you are able to come back and edit your videos later, if you know you just want to make a quick and dirty mash-up to use once, Omnisio is the place to go.

Online video traffic in the UK is up 178 percent over the past year, new Hitwise data shows. With headlines trumpeting the rise of online video stateside, it’s easy to overlook the effect it is having in other parts of the world as well.

Not surprisingly, the most popular video site in the UK is YouTube. With a market share over 55 percent, the site is actually more dominant in the UK than it is in the United States, where it has a market share around 34 percent, according to the latest numbers from comScore.

YouTube’s UK dominance is even more impressive when you consider that the No. 2 video site is the UK portal of YouTube with nearly a 14 percent market share! Combined, YouTube controls nearly 70 percent of the market.

The third most popular video site in the UK is the BBC’s iPlayer. The site streams the BBC’s original content over the Internet to your web browser. The iPlayer has been getting quite a bit of buzz stateside recently for its publicly stated desire to work with Apple to become available on the Apple TV device. The BBC recently launched a beta version of the iPlayer for the iPhone in the UK as well.

The only other non-Google property with much traction is MySpaceTV, which controls just over 5 percent of the market. MySpace is the second most popular social networking site in the UK behind Facebook and just ahead of Bebo.

[The Hitwise chart above shows the surge in UK Internet traffic to top video sites over the past two years.]

Movie studio Warner Brothers has a deal in place with YouTube to promote its upcoming summer film Get Smart, reports Silicon Alley Insider. The $750,000 deal may not seem like much, however for Google’s YouTube unit which is struggling to monetize, any little bit helps.

Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion in 2006, but the site pulled in as little as $20 million in revenue last year according to Fortune. The problem certainly isn’t viewers — YouTube had nearly 79 million of them in January, accounting for one-third of all online viewers according to comScore. The problem is the lack of professional content (only 10 percent to 20 percent of the videos on YouTube are professionally made), which is easier to monetize. What’s more, advertisers don’t have much experience advertising beside the other, less professional content. They’re only now testing the waters.

Google is experimenting with video overlay advertisements that run on the bottom of the screen for the first ten seconds or so of a video. This is just one of the video advertising approaches Google is looking into. For this Warner Brothers deal, a stand-alone Get Smart video advertisement will reportedly run on pages with videos tagged as having comedic content.

Google is facing enormous costs in running YouTube. Fortune has some truly staggering numbers, including that YouTube spends roughly $1 million a day on the bandwidth required to stream videos alone. For some perspective: This entire Get Smart/YouTube deal would not even pay for a single day of typical YouTube bandwidth usage.

Still, the Warner Brothers deal could possibly signal more deals to come. Research firm eMarketer expects U.S. spending on web video ads to come in around $1.35 billion this year, but by 2011 will rise to $4.3 billion.

Also check out our post where we sat down with Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and discussed some of the video opportunities going forward on the web.

[Above: The trailer for Warner Brothers' Get Smart starring Steve Carell]

Online video sharing service Magnify.net is rolling out version 3.0 of its site today. With this iteration, the company is adding some new social media tools as well as professional video services in an attempt to turn the site into a full-scale online video network.

Magnify.net thinks it can take on a much larger site like YouTube by emphasizing its openness to the Internet community as a whole. While YouTube focuses on single videos throughout its network, Magnify.net encourages users to upload videos to its site as well as spread videos from other video-sharing sites around the web.

The most significance addition to Magnify.net’s 3.0 version is the new services for professional video creators. The site now has both ‘Pro’ and ‘Enterprise’ packages, which will allow for more customization than the standard free accounts do. For a fee ($5.95 per link), ‘Pro’ users will also be able to remove many of the standard links on the Magnify.net page — such as those showcasing more channels — for a cleaner-looking page.

More importantly, ‘Pro’ users will have the option to take 100 percent control of the advertising on their pages.

The ‘free’ default is a 50/50 ad share split between Magnify.net and the user. However, ‘Pro’ users willing to pay $24.95 a month can gain control of 100 percent of the advertisements for up to 5,000 pageviews. $84.95 buys control for 25,000 pageviews, and $159.95 takes that number up to 50,000 pageviews. Those taking advantage of these upgrades will be able to run their own ads or opt not to have any.

‘Enterprise’ users will have access to all the ‘free’ and ‘Pro’ services but can also have videos of unlimited length on their pages. More importantly, ‘Enterprise’ users will automatically have total control of all advertisements, including those displayed within their videos. Pricing for this ‘Enterprise’ option is not specified on the site.

The new social networking elements Magnify.net is launching are fairly standard. Users will be able to have profiles, friend one another as well as track and subscribe to each other’s activities on the site. YouTube has had all of these features for some time now. The addition of widgets from sites such as Twitter and Flickr should add to the community feel — but again, these integrations have become ubiquitous with social networks.

Magnify.net raised a $1 million round just last month. Investors included Next Stage Capital, New York Angels and Rose Tech Ventures among others (our coverage).

The New York-based company launched last year (our coverage).

BrightRoll, a company that provides high volume, targeted and branded video advertising has created the first high-definition ad network. Utilizing the widespread availability of broadband connections and HD-compatible LCD monitors on computers, the company expect this to be a quickly growing market. However, with major online video players such as YouTube shying away from HD-quality video, is the Internet ready for HD-quality advertisements?

BrightRoll chief executive Tod Sacerdoti believes so, and made it clear when he spoke with us today. Right now, “60-70% of users we see could accept HD-quality ads based on their signal strength,” Sacerdoti said. For those who don’t have the appropriate connection speeds, the company uses its signal detection to dial-down the ads to a lesser quality.

Sacerdoti made the important point that these HD ads are not meant for every publisher right off the bat. Certain areas such as television, movie trailers, and DVD releases could obviously benefit from having their content shown in HD, but for others it would be less meaningful. Sacerdoti also noted that many high-end commercials are already shot in HD and so they would naturally be ready for an online HD-quality video ad network such as the one BrightRoll is offering.

While staying away from HD-quality for now, YouTube did recently enable the ability to see high quality (read: not quite HD) videos. Another company, Dailymotion, recently launched HD content for its online video site, suggesting the market for better-quality video on the web is growing (our coverage).

BrightRoll is based in San Francisco and launched in 2006 with $1 million in funding (our coverage). The company’s investors include True Ventures. Some of its clients include HP, Visa, Warner Brothers and Wal-Mart.

Rumor: Facebook is working on its own instant messaging service — I’ve been hearing for some time that Facebook is working on its own IM protocol, letting users IM each other within its site instead of using third-party services like AOL’s AIM or Google’s Gtalk. Techcrunch has published the rumor here, although many details are still vague. If the rumor is true, IM could radically change how Facebook users interact with each other. For example, would people still use the “poke” feature? Poking somebody is an important form of lightweight communication between friends, as Jeremy Liew has pointed out, because it lets friends know they’re thinking about each other without either person having to write a more elaborate message. That said, IM could be a smart way for Facebook to keep its users on its site for longer.

Also, if Facebook does implement its own IM, it may in some form be in competition with IM aggregators like Social.im (our coverage) and Imo.im (our coverage). Both of those startups are in their own ways letting users IM each other using their Facebook identities.

Trouble in the auction-rate market hits Silicon Valley – The slowdown in auction-rate securities is hurting some Silicon Valley start-ups, because investments they’re suddenly stuck with investments that were supposed to have high liquidity. A few days ago, we broke news about problems at start-ups banking with Comerica, and now the Wall Street Journal follows with a good overview. Ken Lawler of Battery Ventures says 12 of the 65 start-ups that Battery has invested in have money in the auction-rate market, although only a few of them are facing immediate problems.

Some YouTube videos now available in high-definition — More on the company’s official blog.

Mochi Media didn’t raise a new round — On Wednesday, PEHub reported that gaming-ad company MochiMedia had raised a $4 million round from Accel Partners, citing a regulatory filing. A number of other tech publications published this as if it was news. I was surprised, because we’d written a story last July about the San Francisco company raising an undisclosed round from Accel. Figuring the recent filing was for that old round — and not a new round — I double-checked with the company co-founder, Jameson Hsu. Sure enough, there was no new round.Data: Google cashing in on the web — Google.com advertising revenue in 2007 grew by $2 billion, compared to 2006. That’s twice the $1 billion increase of the offline properties of 13 traditional major media companies combined, according to an analysis by Silicon Alley Insider. The report looked at 17 major media companies.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes: RateMyCop.com back online – Los Angeles-based RateMyCop lets you leave feedback about interactions with police officers, and rank the officer’s service based on three criteria: professionalism, fairness and satisfaction. Your feedback is anonymous, to protect you. The company is facing backlash from police departments concerned their safety will be jeopardized by citizens retaliating based on unfair reviews. Cop pressure convinced RateMyCop’s first web host, GoDaddy.com, to take the site offline, then web host RackSpace refused to host the site, as detailed by Wired. Now the site is back online, with an unknown host.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Roman poet Juvenal asked “who guards the guards?” I think this site has as good an answer as any. I agree with libertarian magazine Reason’s opinion on this one:

Police officers are public servants. Not only that, they’re public servants with the power to arrest, detain, and use lethal force. If certain officers are the subject of repeated complaints and aren’t being properly investigated internally, the public ought to be informed of that. This culture of secrecy—and of intimidating anyone who dares question it—isn’t healthy.

Quaero, a French government-backed search engine destined for free-market destruction — Thomson and twenty-two other companies will receive $152 million from the EU to develop a state-sponsored multimedia search engine, named Quaero. The project is the French half of an attempted French-German search engine first dreamed up in 2005. The German part of the project, called Theseus, received $165 million from the German government last July. Some details here. Even more bizarre: The European Commission approved the funding in part because it wants to help the two countries combat the presence of Google — and American culture.

The free market hasn’t been kind to Google competitors. Search expert Danny Sullivan notes Thomson has previously struggled in this area: “The EU needs to back that, because it’s not like private companies like Thomson could do it themselves. Oops. Actually, Thomson did it already, bought the Singingfish multimedia search engine from its US owner then sold it back to a US owner — AOL — in 2004.”

Updated

YouTube today announced a new platform for third parties to more easily publish videos directly from their own sites, without having to first go to YouTube to do the work.

It’s the latest move by YouTube to offer the infrastructure for more kinds of online video, presumably so it can eventually run its own ads on any video, anywhere.

The changes today allow an external site to upload videos and video responses to YouTube from within the third-party’s own user interface, including tools for setting up options like pause, play and stop. Previously you had to do all that from YouTube’s site, even if you were going to distribute the video elsewhere later on. The new service also lets you add or edit user and video metadata, such as titles, comments, ratings and descriptions.

Click on the image at left to run a video providing more details.

YouTube is also addressing international audiences wanting to see non-English videos via YouTube. Standard RSS feeds for things like most-viewed videos and top-rated videos, as well as custom YouTube video search queries, will now be available for 18 international locations.

The Google-owned company uses the usual Google line about everything being free and available to anyone. As the company said in its announcement today: “We do all of the hard work of transcoding and hosting and streaming and thumbnailing your videos …”

Every video that third parties create using YouTube’s new APIs will also appear on YouTube. On the one hand, this can bring more traffic to the third party’s video, and so the move makes sense for the many partners that YouTube has lined up for this launch. Electronic Arts, for example, will let users create videos out of its new game, Spore, using the YouTube service.

On the other hand, however, it means video viewers can just go to YouTube and avoid the third party’s site. This is something star video creators like gossip blogger Perez Hilton have already rejected (our coverage), because while YouTube can still make money by selling ads on it site alongside videos, third-party sites themselves may get less traffic — so less money.

What’s not addressed today: Will YouTube let third parties run their own video advertising in their videos? [Update: John Paczkowski's blog quotes the API terms of use as saying YouTube won't allow third-party ads on these videos.] YouTube is experimenting with its own overlays and other forms of video advertising — and certainly, it and every other online video provider is still figuring out how to monetize. The reason sites like Hulu exist is because the best video creators and publishers don’t want YouTube getting the traffic and the advertising dollars from their hard work.

Which leaves me wondering: Is today’s announcement an act of munificence? Or is it a shrewd business move to wipe out an entire range of competing video distribution and advertising service providers — Brightcove, Maven Networks (which just got bought by Yahoo), Broadband Enterprises (our coverage), and many, many more. In my view, as long as these companies continue to offer better ways for creators and publishers to make money, YouTube’s move is unlikely to be a threat.

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen says that live streaming video is something that YouTube has always wanted to do, and that this year, with the resources of Google, it is finally going to happen.

Take a look at this clip (above, at the last tag) with video blogger Sarah Meyer, which was featured in Meyer’s new online tech TV show, Pop 17.

NewTeeVee points to the clip, and thinks this spells trouble for live-streaming online video startups. The other question is: How will YouTube or anyone else make money from live streaming video?

Note: Meyer has a rather intense way of confronting people on camera (as I learned last year). An aggressive style can lead to scoops — I’m looking forward to more from Pop 17.

User behavior is surprisingly diverse when it comes to watching online videos, a recent study by Comscore and Media Contacts has found. The data provides a more granular perspective on the surge of people going to online video sites, instead of watching television.

The 20 percent of viewers who watched video the most averaged 841 minutes of viewing per month. The next 30 percent averaged 77 minutes. The other half of the population watched just six minutes.

These top 20-percenters also generally spent more time on foreign-language sites, such as Chinese-language video sites Youku.com and Todou.com.

The middle 30 percent, meanwhile, favored online video content on sites run by major broadcasters, including CBS TV Local, ABC Daytime, and others — not YouTube. Notably, a separate study by Nielsen shows that the majority of people view online videos on broadcaster’s sites are female. While Comscore-Media Contacts study didn’t address gender, one can guess through putting these pieces together that the middle 30 percent in its study tend to be female.

Lastly, the 50 percent of people who only watch a few minutes of online video per month are serious TV watchers. Out of this group, 46 percent indicated they watch more than 13 hours of TV per week. Unsurprisingly, a lower percentage of the other two categories watched as much TV. Of the middle group, only 39 percent watched as much TV and among the top 20 percent, only 30 percent watched as much TV.

YouTube was the top video site for all three groups in the study, reaching 54 percent of all video viewers.

It is in this context that YouTube is introducing a range of new features, designed in part to position itself even more as the online alternative to television.

The company is going to launch a series of branded videos featuring “living legends,” starting with concert videos from The Rolling Stones. Advertisers trying to reach YouTube users will also be getting more data on users and videos, such as the geographical locations of viewers. For users, the company will launch video recommendations based on your viewing preferences, better video-editing tools, and YouTube videos that can be displayed on places like really big TVs — more here.

Every time we hear from one of the numerous Chinese video sites, they compare themselves to YouTube in its early days. But a closer look at the data suggests the video phenom in China just isn’t comparable.

For example, Youku reports today that the number videos viewed daily on its site has reached the levels YouTube enjoyed in Oct. 2006 when it was acquired by Google. This follows a similar statement by another Chinese competitor 56.com.

Youku says it has 100 million daily views, citing Nielsen/Netrating, which is indeed the level of views that YouTube had back in the day. That’s a whopping 30 million more views per day in November, when we first wrote about the company. However, Youku has far fewer unique visitors than YouTube did back in 2006, according to Comscore’s global data. And while no slouch, Youku doesn’t appear to be growing in the same upward right manner YouTube did, almost without exception — and continues to grow today. Unless Comscore’s data is dreadfully wrong, which is a possibility. However, Youku also has several competitors who say they are growing just as quickly. For example, Tudou and 56.com are just as large, if not larger, in terms of traffic.

Youku has raised US $40 million in three rounds of of funding from Brookside Capital, an affiliate of Bain Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, Farallon Capital and Chengwei Ventures.

Aside from the question about Comscore’s reliability, there’s a story brewing about the statistics game that is going on in China right now, at least according to what we’re hearing. We’ll try to follow up shortly.

Google has announced a new way for web publishers to display YouTube videos in widgets on their sites, together with Adsense ads that are contextually targeted to the video and to the content on the site.

YouTube is the world’s largest video site, while Adsense is the world’s largest online contextual advertising network. Google will split revenue with both web site providers and video creators.

The hope is that pairing these two properties will create a significant, new way for Google and its partners to make money from embedded videos.

Questions remain, however, about how well Google can match ads with videos and web sites, as Adsense already often delivers ads that are poor matches with sites’ content.

Videos will only be available from YouTube video creators who have agreed to have their works distributed through Adsense.

The ad formats include banners outside the video frame as well as in-frame overlays.

A breakthrough for video creators and web publishers, or a “lame scramble” to justify Google’s purchase of YouTube last year? Mathew Ingram has a good wrap-up of that question here.

After several months of testing ads on its videos, YouTube is finally unleashing an ad format it hopes will make it some money.

The format will be semi-transparent ads that appear as strips across the bottom 20 percent of a video. Here’s an example.

The ads show up after a video plays for 15 seconds. If a user clicks on the ad, the video pauses and launches the commercial. If they ignore the ad, it will disappear in 10 seconds.

YouTube, the video leader, has been closely watched by the industry, because it has struggled to find a format that won’t turn off users. If it’s too aggressive with ads, users can flock to any number of other sites. But it can’t sit back either, because Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube and wants to make money from it. YouTube said the chosen format, announced last night, yielded good click-through results. YouTube will share the revenue with its media partners delivering the video, and the ads will seek to relevant to the video containing them. The Mercury News has more info here.

Here’s the latest (updated) action:

The solar-powered motorbike from SunRed in Spain — Read the little story about how the company hopes to make a prototype soon, and needs venture capital to do so.

Marchex launches huge Web site — The public company said it has launched more than 100,000 local and vertical Web sites, publishing more than one billion pages of content for hoping to bait people surfing online. These are third-rate sites, originally filled with advertising, but now hosting more than 15 million business listings in sundry categories. Marchex also scrapes the Web for reviews and other content to place in these sites. The sites include www.cuisine.com, www.locksmiths.com, www.remodeling.com, and www.bayareahotels.com. Marchex paid Yun Ye of Name Development $164 million for 100,000 sites. Marchex says 30 million unique visitors monthly land on its sites by typing in domain names, willingly or unwittingly. This is very similar to the strategy of Demand Media, another opportunist land-grab company we’ve covered. (More at the NYT).

Venture Capitalist blasts buyout industry — Dixon Doll (left), the co-founder of venture capital firm DCM, next chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, said his group is working hard to fend of a new tax that could affect the VC industry. He blamed the buyout industry for the recent proposal in Congress for such a tax, saying it is “plain and simply because of the unbelievable egos of the guys running the PE firms like Blackstone and KKR,” he said. “They put big targets on their back … calling attention to themselves in a nonflattering way.” (We’ve reported on the lavish parties and $300 stone crab eaten by the Blackstone crowd.) They also don’t create jobs, he said: “It’s ‘Barbarians at the Gate’ all over again,” he said. (Via VentureWire.)

The slow video joint venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal — We’ve reported on this joint effort to answer YouTube. Today (Thursday), they appointed a high-level Amazon.com executive, Jason Kilar, to be chief executive of the venture. He led Amazon’s efforts in video and DVD. It is supposed to launch later this year. However, we were on the conference call today, and the date of launch seems uncertain. This is a very slow project. And each week that goes by, YouTube gets bigger. And strangely, News Corp.’s own MySpace launched MySpace TV today, which will serve to confuse. The venture has 30 employees, Kilar said. The venture — which still has no name — is reportedly trying to raise $100 million on a valuation of $1 billion (Paid Content).

Hollywood veterans launch Film Department — Mark Gill, formerly president of Warner Independent Pictures, and Neil Sacker, a former executive vice president at Miramax, said they’ve formed an independent film company with $200 million in financing from a group of unnamed private investors. (Update: We’ve been told Gill got money from Deutsche Bank). It will be called Film Department (no site yet). It will produce six films a year with budgets between $10 million and $35 million. Sounds almost retro, at a time when there’s so much Web novelty. (Details here.)

Google Gadget Ventures — Google announced a pilot project to support third-party developers of gadgets, the cornucopia of items you can choose for your Google home page. It is offering (1) grants of $5,000 to developers who’ve built gadgets in for Google’s directory that already receive at least 250,000 weekly page views, and (2) seed investments of $100,000 to previous Google Gadget Ventures grant recipients who’d like to build a business around the Google Gadgets platform. More details here. This is a smart way for Google to build an active community around its platform

The exodus continues from Google — Indeed, Google may need to nurture those smart developers sooner than they think. Here’s a good summary in the WSJ about the growing stream of people leaving Google. The Silicon Valley mentality: There’s no point working for a public company, especially if it looks like the stock has hit highs for a while, and when you can go roll the dice at another start-up. By being up in Redmond, Microsoft doesn’t suffer the same walk-across-the-street problem. This will be interesting to watch.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets supports folders — Folders, that’s right. Gmail doesn’t give you folders, but Google Docs does. This, and other updates (details here).

Feedster launches disorienting “Version 2.0″ — We’re having difficulty understanding what this well-funded company does that is different. Odd. We’ll look into it.

Pageflakes turns your home page into a social network — Pageflakes is one of dozens of companies offering you a home page where you can put widgets of information such as email, news, weather and sports. Next month, it launches Blizzard, which lets people subscribe to their friends’ widgets of information, or “pagecasts” as Pageflakes calls them. (Erick Schonfeld has the details).

Webwag, which is similar to Pageflakes, lets you synchronize your widgets with your phone — Details here. We first wrote about this company here.

Here’s the latest (updated) action:

Geomas says it has location-based search patent — The London based company says its patent is being infringed upon by some 20 large internet players, and this probably includes Google and Yahoo. Here’s a description of the patent. The company says it raising $20 million to help it extract licensing deals. It started by suing Verizon. (Via Techdirt).

KyteTV gets investment from Nokia — See our story here.

IPO market sees strongest month since 2004, but not for buyout firms - Eleven venture-backed companies raised $1.6 billion through initial
public offerings (IPOs) on US exchanges in May, higher than any other month since Oct. 2004, according to data from Thomson Financial and the VC lobby, NVCA. However, IPOs of companies backed by buyout firms have actually declined, raising questions about whether the bubbly investment activity in that sector is sustainable.

A PayPal-only search engine — TheFind, a shopping search engine launched paypal.thefind.com, a new shopping search engine built solely for browsing products from merchants who accept PayPal payments.

Google’s privacy upgraded — Google said it will keep the Web search histories of users for only 18 months instead of 24, responding to pressure from EU authorities. See story here. Meanwhile, search engine expert Danny Sullivan discovers Google is considering creating a dashboard (scroll to near bottom) where people can decide what aspects of their search and surf behavior Google can access.

Google opens the veil for advertisers — Google released its Placement Performance Report, which enables AdWords advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. It also provides “site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites.”

Google powers search on Sina — Google will place its search box on the Website of Sina, China’s third largest site in terms of traffic. Marketwatch reports here. In return, Sina gets a share the search advertising revenues Google collects. This is the latest move by Google to try to catch Baidu, China’s leading search engine.

Technorati’s mysterious traffic surge — Techcrunch has details on why the traffic surge may be somewhat misleading.

[Updated: YouTube's video-music filtering technology not reliant on Audible Magic -- Google's video property YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world's largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co. It will be built by Google's own engineers, and not be solely reliant on Audible Magic, as we'd previously believed after this report. Audible Magic has had filtering problems, as earlier reported. It turns out, Audible Magic is being used for music filtering only; see Elise Ackerman's follow-up today,who also points to an agenda by Google to use the copyright controversy to build up a massive database of videos.]

Former Engadget editor Pete Rojas to form company focused on ad-driven music label — He teams up with Downtown Records to launch a new music label, dubbed RCRD LBL, that will offer the music of artists for free, but paid for with ads. See story here.

Quzhai latest foreign clone — Quzhai is a clone of StumbleUpon, with a little Digg thrown in. Notice how most clones seem to originate in Germany and China, somewhat understandable since they have two of the largest domestic non-English internet markets. Quzhai raised RMB 1 million seed funding from BV Capital.

Biomass it steaming hot — Bull Moose Energy gets $60 million for project in San Diego and other cities. See our story here.

EMI Music, the world’s third largest music label company, said it has reached a deal with Google and its YouTube property to allow YouTube users to exploit EMI music while creating videos.

The move follows Apple’s move yesterday to start selling EMI songs without copy protection (digital rights management, or DRM) through its iTunes store. It means EMI songs bought on iTunes will work on other portable music players.

Adding to the flurry of deals, Apple also said yesterday it will begin featuring YouTube videos on Apple TV within weeks. Apple is also including Google’s search and mapping applications on Apple’s iPhone, to be released next week.

EMI Music includes artists including David Bowie, Coldplay and Norah Jones.

EMI said it has “agreed to work” on models to allow access for user generated content featuring EMI-owned and copyrighted audio and video works, but didn’t provide many details. EMI did say it will use YouTube’s content identification technology to help it track and monetize its content, and to allow it to request the removal of copyrighted content (suggesting this is far from a straight-forward carte blanche for users to do anything they please).

Separately, Apple said it would start selling Apple’s TV with 160-gigabyte hard drives. Its move to allow other content, such as YouTube videos comes after some criticism that the set-top box was not delivering a big enough variety of content.