VentureBeat

Flickr founders join exodus from Yahoo — Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, the founders of photo-sharing app Flickr, a $35 million Yahoo acquisition, have added their names to the lengthening list of Yahoo defections. Kara Swisher speculates that a boardroom brawl is underway at the embattled search company. No word on where Fake and Butterfield will head next, although with any luck it’ll be another startup.

Another $3 $1 billion for cleantech — Todd Thompson, the ex-CFO of Citi, is raising a targeted $3 billion (correction: It turns out Thompson is sticking to $1 billion after all, although the move to cleantech is confirmed) for a new cleantech-focused private equity fund, according to a tipster. Thompson was reported to be raising $1 to $2 billion for a new private equity fund last year. Originally slated for other purposes, the fund was flipped over to cleantech and carbon credits. The money will be a welcome capital influx for cleantech, which has rapidly grown to become the third-largest venture investment category.

Microsoft buys TV ad network Navic — As part of its ongoing plan to capture a share of the modern advertising market, Microsoft has snapped up Navic Networks, which makes interactive ads for TV, as well as running its own sales network.

Study predicts 100X growth in solar by 2025 — Solar of all sorts accounts for under 0.1 percent of electricity generation in the United States today, but a study co-authored by Clean Edge and Co-op America predicts that it will rise to around 10 percent by 2025. The price tag: Around $500 billion. Meanwhile, pleasingly-named Texan T. Boone Pickens is still betting on wind, and is lobbying Washington to help out.

Ad startup Zango lays off 68 employees – Zango, historically one of the foremost perpetrators of pesky pop-up ads served up by Trojan ad software, has been forced to lay off about a third of its workforce, according to John Cook at the Seattle PI. The company has actually distanced itself from pop-ups in recent years, which leads one to wonder if they should have stuck with the illicit activities.

The Westly Group’s new $130M cleantech fund — Connie Loizos of peHUB has an interview with the two principals of the Westly Group on their new cleantech fund.

Varolii gives up on IPO plans — How many companies have backed out of IPOs this year due to bad market conditions? More than you can count on your fingers, but less than if you included your toes. Varolii, a customer communications software maker in Seattle, has helped come closer to breaking the finger-toe barrier by backing out of its own IPO.

Cadence makes hostile offer for Mentor: Cadence Design Systems made a $1.6 billion offer to buy chip design software and verification firm Mentor Graphics. But Oregon-based Mentor rejected the $16 a share offer as too low. The price was a 30 percent premium over Mentor’s Monday closing price.

Associated Press starts selling “quotation licenses” — As part of its ongoing face-off with bloggers and small media outlets, the Associated Press has started selling licenses to quote its material. The lowest price: $12.50 for 5-25 words. That’s a pretty clear f— you to the new media establishment, most of which is lucky to make a cent per word of their own. The AP may just be grandstanding, but as Boing Boing points out, if it gets its way it could rewrite the existing landscape of fair usage.

Photo credits — Top: Flickr / yoz; Bottom: Flickr / weegeebored

Here’s the latest action:
1. Yahoo’s personal communications hub
2. Media deals: Comcast, Microsoft to offer lots of films
3. Apple close to deals with movie studios
4. HD DVD looks dead
5. Yahoo to lead effort to modernize music?
6. CES highlights
7. Big Think, a video site for big ideas, plans on little traffic
8. Be careful how you structure your company’s board
9. Google understands text in images and video?
10. Facebook application using Zango malware gets banned

Yahoo’s personal communications hub — Yahoo’s chief executive Jerry Yang provided a sneak peak at the company’s plan to unite search, contacts, and messaging (email and IM) to make it all easier. It’s still an early concept, but sounds pretty cool if Yahoo can pull it off. ZDNet has the best overview, with screen shots of the demo (images here courtesy of ZDNet’s Dan Farber). NYTimes’ Miguel Helft has a nice anecdote describing it:

He [Yang] dragged an e-mail from co-founder David Filo suggesting dinner at a Las Vegas burger joint onto a Yahoo Maps icon, and up popped a map, highlighting the restaurant. Better yet, the software could recommend a list of suitable restaurants, ranked from 1 to 5, for a dinner between a handful of Yahoo execs based on their culinary preferences. Then, a selected restaurant could be dropped into an Evite icon, and an invitation to dinner would be automatically drafted and sent to others in the group.

Comcast to offer huge menus of films — The cable giant plans to offer subscribers a huge supply of movies and TV shows — some 6,000 titles, up from its current 300 –to be viewed demand and through the Internet through its new “wideband” technology which speeds up downloads. Details here.

Apple close to deals with movie studios — Details here.

Microsoft signs deals, for big video offering — Microsoft announced partnerships on Monday with Walt Disney, NBC Universal and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to bolster online video sales and step up competition with the iTunes operation of Apple. The NYTimes has details. Microsoft said that owners of its Xbox 360 games console would be able to buy shows like “Desperate Housewives” from the ABC network of Disney, and they could watch movies including “Rocky” from MGM.

HD DVD looks dead — Paramount is reportedly about to drop its support of the HD DVD format after Warner Brothers decided to back Sony’s competing Blu-ray technology, a move that will “sound the death knell of HD DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end,” according to the Financial Times. Universal Studios remains the only major studio to exclusively support the HD DVD format.

Yahoo to lead effort to modernize music? — Ian Rogers, Yahoo Music’s VP of product development, has been talking recently about the future of music on the internet. He says music should be easy to access and build communities around. Michael Arrington, in turn, thinks Roger’s ruminations mean that Yahoo Music has big changes up its sleeve, speculating that “it looks like Yahoo wants to spearhead an effort to create open standards around music buying, playing, managing and sharing.” Notably, this comes as Europe is pushing for unified DRM standards, which may or may not dovetail with Yahoo’s efforts.

CES highlights — Lot’s going on, including too much noise, but Dean Takahashi has a good roundup of the essentials, which include Zink’s printer service that uses now ink, and Sony’s move into navigation devices that calculate your location even when it loses connection with the GPS satellites that provide the basic service. It draws estimates based on your previous momentum, motion sensing, and other variables.

Big Think, a video site for big ideas, plans on little traffic — When intellectuals log onto the Internet, where do they go for their YouTube experience? Big Think. The new site launches with videos from leaders in academia, politics and science, and is admiringly reviewed in the NYTimes. It hopes it can bring in the brains with videos of interviews with big name thinkers, alongside social features encouraging discussion by visitors. Its founders are former PBS producers, and it’s backed by big names including Peter Thiel and Larry Summers, ex-president at Harvard. Others in the seed investment — in the low millions of dollars — include South Africa’s David Frankel, Nantucket Nectars’ Tom Scott and TV producer Gary David Goldberg. Unfortunately, we can’t help but think the Ivory Tower crowd who might be interested in spending much time on Big Think is probably painfully small — take the evidence of Fora.tv, a similarly “intellectual” video site that has operated for most of 2007 with very little attention, or traffic.

Be careful how you structure your company’s board – At first, it looked smart for the One Laptop Per Child computer company to appoint an Intel representative to its board. But the partnership between Intel and OLPC hit the rocks when an Intel saleswoman tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs. NYTimes has details.

Google’s patent application on technology that understands text in images and video — This would be huge for Google, if the patent were to be approved. It would make advertising beside all of its videos so much easier — and Google has a lot of them, through its YouTube subsidiary. Information Week has details.

Facebook application using Zango malware gets banned — Details here. We’ve mentioned Zango before here.

1) Yahoo launches brick-and-mortar internet cafes in Vietnam
2) Mozilla Corp., maker of the popular Firefox web browser, made $66 million in revenue in 2006
3) The internet still probably won’t be taxed in the US, through 2014
4) Adware company Zango buys comparison shopping service Smartshopper, a $9 million backflip
5) Tioti, social TV site, raises first round
6) Anti-aging product review site RealSelf.com launches, announces nearly $1 million in funding

Yahoo launches brick-and-mortar internet cafes in Vietnam – It’s an effort to bring the internet — and Yahoo, in particular — to people who otherwise might not have good access. More here.

Mozilla Corp., maker of the popular Firefox web browser, made $66 million in revenue in 2006 – Its main source of money is fees paid to it by Google in exchange for running Google as its first option in its search box. This revenue shows the browser’s increasing popularity: revenue was up 26 percent from 2005, with the browser now used by 120 million people around the world, or 13 percent of the market.

The internet still probably won’t be taxed in the US, through 2014 – The bill would prohibit state and local governments from taxing services that connect users to the internet. The Senate revised and then approved an earlier bill from the House; now the House needs to approve the changes before it goes to the White House to get signed and made law.

Adware company Zango buys comparison shopping service Smartshopper, a $9 million backflip – Bellevue-based Zango had bought HotBar, Smartshopper’s parent company, in 2006.

At that time, Oren Dobronsky, one of the owners of HotBar, bought SmartShopper back from Zango for $250,000 then tried and failed to raise funding for it. Almost one and a half years later, Dobronsky has sold it back to them for $9 million, reports Alarm Clock.

Zango is best known for its dastardly tactic of secretly installing software that pops up advertising windows on users’ computers, software that is extremely difficult to remove.

Tioti, social TV site, raises first round — The Seattle company allows users to find TV content, comment on it and recommend and share it with friends with things like an online widget. It has raised a first round of funding from Pond Venture Partners, amount unknown. The company launched this month after acquiring some 18,000 users during a testing period.

Anti-aging product review site RealSelf.com launches, announces nearly $1 million in funding – The Seattle company has raised money from a number of angel investors; release here.