VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Intel cuts fourth quarter estimates — The chip maker says sales could fall by as much as 19 percent, and things look similarly bleak for chip companies Applied Materials and National Semiconductor.

IPhone takes on Nintendo and Sony in portable gaming — Among other things, the iPhone tempts developers with lowered distribution costs. There are almost 2,000 games already available in Apple’s App Store.

Google joins smart grid group — The group, called the Demand Response and Smart Grid Coalition, includes companies that make electricity meters and software for sharing information between utilities and their customers.

Game designer Richard Garriott leaves NCSoft after his successful journey into space — Garriott, who made his name with the famed Ultima series of roleplaying games, says going into space has sparked new interests that he wants to pursue.

Larry Shapiro, former creative chief at Brash, becomes president of Oddworld Inhabitants — Prior to leading Brash, Shapiro represented the makers of the “Oddworld” game series as an agent at CAA.

Technorati founder Dave Sifry launches OffBeatGuides — The site lets you build your own guidebook, then buy a physical copy or download it as a PDF.

Cyber thieves are making a killing stealing corporate data — Tech security experts tell USA Today that most corporations aren’t doing enough to control how employees use the web, leaving them vulnerable to these attacks.

Check how Zoho’s applications are doing using Zoho Status — This new transparency should give customers more confidence in Zoho’s online business software.

Harmonix founders get $300 million-plus pay day from Viacom — Almost half that money is a bonus for the Rock Band game’s stellar sales.

Is Twitterank a scam? — The web application, which measures your popularity on micro-messaging service Twitter, drew criticism for asking users for their passwords, but the app’s creator says he’s not trying to steal people’s passwords.

Java startup SpringSource acquires G2One — G2One is the company behind scripting language Groovy. Now SpringSource says it will offer support for Groovy and the related programming framework Grails.

Here’s the latest action (aside from a certain election):

FCC agrees to open up the airwaves — A section of the radio spectrum known as white space has been set aside for public use, a move pushed for by tech companies like Google and Microsoft.

Google slows hiring — CNBC reported that Google has implemented an unofficial hiring freeze, but the search giant denies the rumor, saying that it has merely slowed down.

Dell making more cutbacks — The computer maker has instituted a global hiring freeze, is offering “enhanced” severance packages and is encouraging employees to take unpaid leave. Meanwhile, chief executive Michael Dell is nurturing a budding film career, with a brief appearance in a film called “The Sno Cone Stand, Inc.”

Gaming platform Steam Cloud coming this week — The new offering from famed game maker Valve will allow gamers to store things like keyboard and mouse configurations in the Internet cloud, then access them from other computers.

Mr. Benioff, tear down that wall — Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff says his company is all about love, but Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu disagrees, using Zoho’s attempt to get onto the Salesforce AppExchange as an example.

Voting machines are still causing problems — Virginia and Pennsylvania had the biggest issues yesterday, according to Wired.

What would Facebook look like with huge ads? — That’s what brand advertisers really want, argues blogger Andrew Chen. He put together an impressive mockup, featuring the new James Bond film Quantum of Solace.

Same-sex marriage ban wins in California — Proposition 8 was opposed by a number of Silicon Valley luminaries, including Sergey Brin of Google, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Jerry Yang of Yahoo, but it looks like a majority of California voters supported the initiative. On the other hand, Silicon Valley (by which I mean Santa Clara and San Mateo counties) voted overwhelmingly against it.

There’s a lot to like about Zoho Mail, the next step in Zoho’s rapid roll-out of a broad range of business applications . But for a non-Zoho user, there’s one thing that’s kind of galling: You can access your Zoho Mail through integration with browser extension Google Gears. It’s a smart, useful feature, and that only makes it more annoying that Google hasn’t provided similar offline functionality for Gmail.

Back in July, there were rumors that Google would use Gears to create desktop versions of Gmail and Google Calendar. (Gears’ big selling point is its ability to bring web applications offline, although it has much more potential than that.) Well, those six weeks have come and gone. In the meantime, we had a brief-but-terrifying Gmail outage, making the need for Gears integration even more apparent.

It would be foolish to think that Zoho poses any immediate threat to Gmail. Google is probably taking its sweet time to get everything just right on the Gmail/Gears integration, as ReadWriteWeb speculates. And that makes sense, since the point isn’t just to pull emails from your Gmail account onto your desktop — you can do that already with applications like Mozilla’s Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook — but to bring Gmail’s rich features offline. Still, the fact that Zoho used Google’s own technology to bring this functionality to Zoho Mail makes the wait particularly exasperating.

Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna has a quick overview of the application’s features, and they sound pretty cool. For one thing, it gives you the option of seeing each email in the order it arrives, like Outlook (and most other desktop email tools), or to see them grouped into conversation threads, like Gmail. There’s also a mobile version Zoho Mail website that’s customized for the iPhone. Zoho Mail is also integrated with Zoho Chat. Finally, Zoho Mail is free, and, as with other Zoho applications, you can also use it with your Google or Yahoo accounts.

The Pleasanton, Calif.-based company is owned by AdventNet.

Zoho is expanding beyond its broad range of business applications today with the launch of the Zoho Marketplace, where developers can sell the apps they build using Zoho’s Creator tool. The launch, which was announced last week, is a sign that Zoho is serious about enlisting developer support — you have a lot more incentive to build an app if there’s a centralized location where you can sell it.

The obvious rival is Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, which offers apps built around Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) software. The AppExchange has been successful enough that there are companies like Appirio making the exchange the main focus of their business. Google also offers a “solutions marketplace” for products that build on Google Apps.

Zoho, however, has the potential to create a richer, more useful market by selling any app built with Zoho Creator, not just apps that enrich its existing tools. The company says Creator is so easy to use that applications can be built for a specific, one-time purpose in a matter of minutes. Developers and users can negotiate prices, and Zoho doesn’t take a commission on sales. In fact, no extra fees are required to post to the marketplace — the company just charges its normal fees for Zoho Creator. Users can also request a certain type of app, and developers can bid to create it.

The Pleasanton, Calif. company, owned by AdventNet, says 100,000 applications have already been built with Zoho Creator. That should get the market off to a healthy start. Here’s a fun video (well, fun for a corporate demo, at least) introducing the marketplace.

Zoho continues to roll out its ever growing lineup of inexpensive (indeed, mostly free) online office software. Today’s addition is Zoho Docs, an application that allows you to access the text documents, spreadsheets and presentations created in Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show, respectively, through a single application.

To be honest, my first thought on hearing the news was, “Holy crap, you couldn’t do that already?” So this is hardly an amazing breakthrough. It is an important move, though. First because, yes, it’s lame if you can’t access all of these documents in one place. But it also plays to one of Zoho’s biggest strengths — the sheer range of products that it offers. The better a job Zoho does of integrating its various applications, the more compelling the overall suite will be. There’s a little competitor called Google that offers some compelling, free online office apps, but Zoho is still ahead in terms of quantity of offering.

Through Zoho Docs, users manage their documents in a folder system similar to a computer hard drive. The application includes other basic-but-useful features like the ability to upload any file, share your documents with a group and chat (using Zoho Chat, of course).

The Pleasonton, Calif. is owned by AdventNet. Here’s a video demo.

Zoho, a company that offers a growing variety of cheap and free online office applications, just launched Zoho Share, a service for sharing documents on the web or within your company.

Now, all documents, presentations, spreadsheets and PDFs created using Zoho Apps can be viewed as an embeddable file, similar to Scribd or Docstoc. Those documents can be shared publicly, or just internally, as with Microsoft’s Sharepoint. (Which is why Zoho calls the service “Sharepoint meets YouTube.”)

In his announcement, Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna points to two things that make Zoho Share unique: First, it allows you to decide what kind of license/copyright controls the documents you share. Second, it was designed to be simple and functional, rather than flashy; for example, the player is built using HTML/JavaScript, not Flash.

Zoho Share is an important step for the Pleasanton, Calif. company (which is owned by AdventNet), because it’s another way that Zoho documents can be accessed by non-Zoho users. Without that assurance, I’d be a lot more hesitant about using the company’s products. Zoho made another move in this direction in May, by allowing anyone to log into Zoho using their Google and Yahoo accounts.

Here’s the latest action:

Apple can deactivate iPhone apps remotely? — The device can apparently phone home (to Apple), check your applications against a list of unauthorized ones and deactivate them remotely. iPhone Atlas found a URL that appears to contain the banned app list. If this is true, it’s troubling to say the least from a personal privacy perspective.

I Am Rich vanishes from the App Store — Speaking of Apple removing iPhone apps, it has removed what has been perhaps its most controversial application so far from the App Store, Cult of Mac points out. Maybe the company read some of the criticism on this site and others, or maybe it just realized that I Am Rich was a $999.99 app that did nothing. It’s still somewhat troubling that Apple can remove apps such as this, NetShare and BoxOffice without any explanation as to why it is doing so.

It also looks like at least one person downloaded I Am Rich by accident and is not happy!

Zoho hits 1 million users — The online office suite reached the milestone in less than three years. Of course, Google Apps also has hit 1 million users — in schools alone!

Sierra Wireless Buys Junxion Assets — The deal will allow Sierra to offer backhauling, which could help ease the strain on wireless networks by mobile Internet usage, according to VentureWire.

Dish Network and DirecTV thinking merger again — The Wall Street Journal has details.

Apple may finally release new monitors…in 2009 — The current crop of Cinema Displays have been around forever, which is odd for a company that does (product) refreshes quicker than your average monitor. MacWorld 2009 could bring us new ones, according to MacRumors.

Twitter gets profiled in Fortune — The micro-messaging service that we love to write about is getting a lot of mainstream press recently.

Digg gets a slick new Firefox 3 extension — Founder Kevin Rose explains more on the Digg Blog and in the video below.

Digg Firefox 3 Extension from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

It just got a little more tempting to use startup Zoho’s suite of online applications — users can now log in using their Google and Yahoo accounts.

This is a smart move, because it lets users try out Zoho’s products (which cover the gamut of office and business applications) without having to create yet another online account. Even better, this means Zoho customers don’t have to worry that the documents they make using Zoho Creator and related apps can only be shared with other Zoho customers, which was obviously a big limitation.

The goal, naturally, is to attract as many users as possible by lowering the barriers to entry. Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna points to a totally scientific (note: not really) Lifehacker poll comparing Google Docs and Zoho’s apps. Google came out ahead, but mainly through name recognition. When it came to customers who tried both, Zoho came out ahead by a whopping 70 percent. (Google and Zoho’s apps offer a similar selling point of being cheaper than most of the competition, but irrespective of the product quality, Google has a huge leg up by just being Google.)

Pleasanton, Calif.-based Zoho is part of AdventNet, which is self-funded. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reports that Zoho plans to add compatibility with the OpenID log in protocol, too.

There are already numerous customer relationship management software offerings out there that target large corporations. So you’d think it was game over as far as new CRM entrants was concerned.

But start-up Zoho has launched an “enterprise edition” of its low-cost CRM products, in yet another move by an upstart to lower the cost of software by offering it over the Web.

Zoho’s move comes just a few days after CRM company Salesforce announced it will be integrating with Google Apps to offer those low-cost office applications to its customers.

The big new feature in Zoho CRM is role-based security administration, which should be an easy way to manage permissions and access within the hierarchy of a big company. The new update also includes improved customization and support for 11 languages. Zoho goes into more detail about the changes here. The enterprise edition of Zoho CRM will cost $25 per user per month, putting it on the low end of the industry price range.

As a company, Zoho tends to deliver solid products, then differentiate itself through pricing and by linking its broad array of applications (including Zoho Meetings, Zoho Invoice and ZohoDB) together into a powerful package.

Judging from the Salesforce-Google announcement, Salesforce also realizes that integrating multiple applications into a single package is crucial. Zoho chief executive Sridhar Vembu was dismissive of the new partnership in a blog post. (The title alone — “Very Expensive + Affordable = Still Very Expensive” — makes Vembu’s argument pretty clear.) In that post, Vembu also says that Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff had offered to buy Zoho, but Vembu turned him down.

You can read our coverage of Zoho’s latest application, Zoho Invoice, here.

Zoho has added another product to its constantly growing suite of online office and business applications — Zoho Invoice, which allows you to create and track invoices online.

Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna outlines the product’s new features here. It’s pretty straightforward: You add customers, products or services and a recurring payment schedule if necessary. Then you can print it, email it or export it as a PDF (see screenshot below). Zoho Invoice also supports billing in more than 150 currencies.

Overall, it’s a solid package, if nothing remarkable. That’s the norm with Zoho’s releases: The company rarely blows us away, but it provides all the basic functions you would need, and usually at a cheaper price than the competition. (You can read our coverage of Zoho People and Zoho Writer here and here, respectively.) Zoho Invoice expands Zoho’s already formidable offering of 16 other applications, moving well beyond the company’s initial focus on productivity apps. Vegesna says Zoho Invoice is particularly well-integrated with Zoho CRM.

I was surprised by the new pricing plan: The free option is close to useless, as you can only create five invoices a month. (Invoice Journal and Invotrak allow you to create an unlimited number for free.) Luckily, the other payment plans are quite affordable, ranging from $5 to $35 per month — the high end seems like a great deal, since you can create up to 1,500 invoices per month.

Pleasanton, Calif.-based Zoho is part of AdventNet, which is self-funded.

Zoho, a company that claims to offer a wider range of productivity and business applications than anyone, has launched a human resources app called Zoho People. Unlike most HR apps, Zoho People is aimed at relatively small companies, says Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna — in other words, companies that have more than 50 employees but aren’t too much larger than Zoho, which has a staff of around 200.

That small-company focus is most evident in Zoho People’s pricing. The app, now in testing mode, will probably cost around $50 per month for HR staff to use, and around $4 per month for other users, so a smaller company can pay well under $1,000 per month. In contrast, Vegesna says competitors like WorkDay and PeopleSoft often charge in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Zoho People’s offerings include organizational charts, automated hiring processes, automated expense reporting and automated task assignment. None of this is particularly innovative, but Vegesna says Zoho People’s other big selling point is its customization.

Because the company’s application maker Zoho Creator has been embedded into Zoho People, users can alter any of the existing forms or build new ones through a drag-and-drop/picklist interface. For example, in less than a minute I was able to edit the holiday request form to add a requirement for supervisor approval, as well as space for the employee to say when and how they can be reached during their vacation. (see screenshot below).

You can watch a video demo here.

The Pleasanton, Calif.-based company’s other offerings include Zoho Writer (our coverage), Zoho CRM and Zoho Meetings. Zoho’s parent company AdventNet is self-funded, Vegesna says.

Here’s the latest action:
1) Opera’s mobile web browser picks Google for search
2) Web-born show ‘Quarterlife’ bombs on NBC
3) Zoho updates its online writer
4) Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope is revealed
5) Panther Express, a NY start-up, gets funding
6) AngryJournalist.com lets writers vent
7) Drama amid the DivX shutdown of Stage 6

Opera’s mobile web browser picks Google for search - Starting next month, Opera’s mobile browser will begin using Google as its default search engine. Opera’s mobile variety is very popular (it works on both Symbian and Windows Mobile) and this is not good news for Yahoo, which is still trying to convince everyone — including its shareholders that it can soldier ahead without being taken over by Microsoft. ReadWriteWeb wonders how much money Google is sending Opera’s way to make this deal happen.

Web-born show ‘Quarterlife’ bombs on NBC - The popular web-based show that was purchased by NBC made its debut last night and flopped. It drew just 3.1 million viewers, which was less than half of its competition on both CBS and ABC. Silicon Alley Insider has more on the bad news for the show.

Zoho updates its online writer - The web-based word processor Zoho now supports Docx (the new Word file format), has a thesaurus, allows for emailing to groups and has enhanced support for endnotes/footnotes, headers/footers. Zoho has over 600,000 users but trails Google Docs, and of course Microsoft Word in usage. TechCrunch has more.

Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope is revealed - Well, now we know why blogger Robert Scoble was crying after he left a presentation at Microsoft’s labs a few weeks ago (our coverage). Microsoft Research officially announced their WorldWide Telescope software today. It is software that brings together images from some of the biggest telescopes on the Earth and in space to create an expansive visual map of the Universe. According to Scoble the software is currently in the private alpha stage and is set to launch in Spring 2008.

Panther Express, a NY start-up gets funding - From the PE wire: “Panther Express Inc., the content delivery network founded by the former chief executive and chief technical officer of DoubleClick Inc., has landed a $15.75 million Series B round of funding. Index Ventures led the round with participation from Gold Hill Capital and previous investor Greylock Partners. Index Partner Ben Holmes will join the board of directors. Panther Express previously raised $6 million.”

AngryJournalist.com lets writers vent - From the site: “Tell us what’s making you upset at your journalism job. Anonymity guaranteed. One rule: no real names.”

Drama amid the DivX shutdown of Stage6 - Everything seemed set for DivX to spin-off Stage6 last year and get it a $27 million round of funding in the process. However, when it came time to vote in November, the DivX board nixed the deal. A massive battle of egos killed the deal according to Mike Arrington. Relationships within the company badly strained, DivX simply decided to shut down Stage6, throwing out millions of dollars in revenue in the process. Naturally, investors are not happy.

Here’s the latest action:

1) Classmates.com IPO called off
2) Microsoft buys Multimap for $50M
3) StyleHive picks up StyleDiary
4) Toshiba’s new lithium-ion released
5) Venture Hacks on legal fees and VCs
6) Zoho Show adds on functions
7) Six Apart sets Movable Type free
8) Guardian Analytics launches product

United Online cancels Classmates.com IPO — One less for the story books of internet success: United Online has nixed the nearly $180 million Classmates.com public offering, planned to take place on the Nasdaq. PaidContent points to an analyst forecast that sums up the lack of investor excitement over Classmates: “We expect the Classmates.com subscriber base to peak in the first half of 2008, followed by a steady decline to zero by 2012,” opines Cowen & Co.’s Jim Friedland. If he’s a betting man, we’d guess his money is on Facebook.

Microsoft buys Multimap for $50 million — Multimap is a U.K. company that offers interactive online maps, much like Google Maps or Microsoft’s own, less successful Live Search Maps. Multimap also has two mobile apps with rather self-explanatory names: Storefinder4Mobile and Multimap2Mobile. Microsoft likely has plans to use the company to flesh out its mobile advertising efforts. The company’s founder, Sean Phelan, cashed out to the tune of $25 million, according to the Times Online.

StyleHive pulls StyleDiary off the rack — StyleHive, of San Francisco, is one of a handful of social bookmarking sites for fashionistas. It acquired StyleDiary, of Los Angeles, for an undisclosed amount, to provide professionally produced editorial content as a complement for its user’s contributions. Our past coverage on StyleHive’s $2.62 million funding is here.

Toshiba releases fast-charging lithium-ion battery — Toshiba’s Super Charge ion Battery (SCiB) contains an advanced lithium-ion technology that extends the life of the battery up to 10 years and allows charging in as little as five minutes. The battery should be especially useful for motorcycles, automobiles and construction equipment, and may help foster the market for fast-charge electrical stations, as well as the vehicles that visit them.

Sneaky VCs trying to pass off their legal fees — Venture Hacks has a good post on a tricky practice that new entrepreneurs should look out for. “When you pay your investor’s legal bill, you’re paying their lawyers to negotiate against you. You’re paying their lawyers to make your deal worse,” goes one piece of cautionary advice. For other nuggets of wisdom, go read the original post.

Revamped Zoho Show released – Zoho, an online office suite that we’ve covered several times before (here, here and here), has continued to be just as active in releasing new iterations of its products. The latest is Zoho Show 2.0, an upgraded version of their online presentation application, which is similar to PowerPoint. The new features include a new interface, support for shapes, symbols and clip art, and integration with their chat and meeting applications. For a video of it in action, look here.

Six Apart sets Movable Type free — The popular blogging platform will henceforth have an open-source license, much like larger competitor Wordpress. Some have speculated that Movable Type’s smaller market share had much to do with remaining proprietary, while Wordpress remained completely open, although Movable Type always allowed user modifications to its code. Six Apart will continue to offer paid licenses for bloggers who need professional support.

Guardian Analytics launches anti-fraud product — Guardian Analytics (previous coverage) released FraudMAP, one of a number of new applications aimed at preventing identity theft. It’s one of a new generation of startups using web analytics to identify online activity not consistent with a user’s normal behavior patterns, with FraudSciences Corp. (previous coverage) being another. Given the rising incidence of identify theft (read a Dean Takahashi rant on the topic here), we’d expect this field to grow fairly quickly.

Zoho releases tomorrow (Monday) an online word processor that lets multiple users work on the document online and offline at the same time.

When offline users go back online, the changes they made offline sync with the online document.

It’s the latest iteration to the company’s Zoho Writer.

This is a useful feature for people who need to create and edit documents on planes and trains, or print from offices without wireless access. And while an increasing number of applications allowing this online-offline syncing, Zoho is one of a select few to offer a processor with this feature.

The new version of Writer uses Google Gears, Google’s open-source project to let any web application work offline. You’ll need to install it to try out offline Writer. Log in to Zoho and click on the button at the top of the page to go offline (screenshot below). Gears — and Writer’s offline feature — works on the popular web browsers Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Surprisingly, Google itself still hasn’t allowed offline editing of its Docs.

Zoho has previously released an offline version of Zoho Writer in late August (our coverage) that let you read documents offline but not edit them. The company promised in August that Writer would have offline editing in a month; despite that delay, other development has happened quickly. A few days ago, the company came out with another upgrade to Writer that includes pagination, headers and footers and spellcheck in 43 languages.

Adobe-owned Buzzword is another offline word-processor, which uses Adobe’s AIR developer platform to enable similar editing features, and only recently opened for general use. Thinkfree, another online office software company, released a way to edit Microsoft Office documents offline and sync those changes with Thinkfree docs, in June.

Another example of Gears in action is Google Reader, Google RSS feed reader.

Zoho, a part of Pleasanton, California-based business software company AdventNet, is known for the sheer number and frequency of products it releases, ranging from project management to spreadsheets to presentation software.

Zoho, which offers a suite of online office software, has released yet another application, continuing its machine gun-like delivery of such products. Called Zoho DB, it’s an online database tool designed for people who need to do serious data analysis.

Zoho DB goes beyond the company’s existing spreadsheet application, a simpler tool that competes against Microsoft Excel and Google Spreadsheets.With ZohoDB, you can import data to, and export data from, spreadsheet formats into Zoho DB (you do this via comma separated values or tab separated values). You can also create pivot tables, charts and reports using a drag-and-drop interface. It allows you to run queries on the data using a structured query language (SQL), and works with SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Informix and ANSI SQL.

See video below about how it works (RSS readers will have to the site).

Desktop software like Excel already offers pivot tables — which summarize data sets in part of a spreadsheet to more easily compare to other data sets. Another startup, DabbleDB, has been gaining traction this past year by providing this feature online.

Salesforce’s newly-launched Force.com can also be customized to provide similar database features for businesses.

Zoho, part of a Pleasanton-based company AdventNet, released a private beta “business” version of its office suite a month ago.

Zoho just won’t stop.

The company offers a suite of free, web-based office software, and faces daunting competition from Google Apps, not to mention Microsoft Office (previous coverage). Today it is announces a “business” version today, intended to make it secure enough for businesses to use.

The rap on this company is that its user interface isn’t the prettiest. But it is relentless in its execution, releasing about a feature a week, and on the whole has remained on a par with competitors and exceeding them in many areas. It recently began integrating its applications on a single page, a feature that keeps it competitive with Google Docs.

This version will include centralized user and group management, stronger SSL-based security measures, remote backup, phone support, a special “console” view for administrators and other organization-focused features. Users will get the usual access to the long list of Zoho products: Writer, Sheet, Notebook, Show, Email, Wiki, etc. See demo below.

Zoho will keep a free version of its products available, but is tentatively planning to charge around $40 per user per year for this version.

Zoho is part of a Pleasanton-based private company, AdventNet.

Zoho Business is currently available in private beta, but the company hopes to move to public beta next month and be fully available by early next year.

Here’s this morning’s roundup:

SeatSmart, yet another event ticket sales company, launches — There are way too many of these companies, but hopefully the competition will decimate the dominant Ticketmaster, which is outrageously expensive. SeatSmart, of New York City, says it has raised an angel round of funding. It searches tickets across sites Stubhub, Razorgator, eBay, Craiglist, but competes with Tickex and Viagogo. VentureBeat’s previous coverage.

News Corp. and NBC Universal finally name their YouTube-clone –The two companies have been trying to build a video site that compete with YouTube, but they’ve taken months to even agree on a name. They’ve now named it Hulu. Good. At least it has two syllables, and two u’s, just like YouTube. Bizarre, given their complaining about YouTube’s copyright violation.

Stock-option backdating casualties continue — Silicon Valley’s most powerful lawyer, Larry Sonsini, may not get off free in the rolling backdating scandal. A federal judge is “unlikely to dismiss” a shareholder-filed suit against the board of directors of Brocade Communications, including Larry Sonsini, over its alleged tolerance of backdating stock options.

Wal-Mart’s space on Facebook defaced by comments — Details here.

New method to shrink images — Two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, have demonstrated a new method to shrink images. The method figures out which parts of an image are less significant, and then makes it possible to change the aspect ratio of an image without make it look skewed. (More details at their site.) See YouTube video below:

Zoho Apps are now integrated on a single page — Zoho, the company building out online applications to compete with Google’s applications, is now offering a single start page for its office applications, a move toward integration that makes it more like Google’s product. Zoho’s Writer, Sheet & Show applications can all be accessed from (http://start.zoho.com), with more applications to be integrated later.

Corporate venture capitalists pick up pace — The venture capital arms of large companies invested $1.3 billion into 390 deals in the first half of 2007, and made up the largest percentage of overall venture deals and dollars invested since 2001. Corporate VC groups participated in 21.4 percent of the total deals and invested 9.2 percent of the total dollars during the first two quarters of the year. The data was released by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Thomson Financial data.

Microsoft acquires Parlano, maker of group chat product, MindAlign — Microsoft will add the group chat feature of the Chicago company to it Microsoft Office product offering, which will also have presence, instant messaging, conferencing and VoIP. The company raised $7 million over two rounds, from investors including Longworth Venture Partners, Oak Investment Partners and Golden Gate. Longworth later bought out Golden Gate’s stake, according to PE Wire.

SF Bay Area has nation’s richest city, county: San Jose is the richest city in the country, and Marin is the richest county in the US, according to the latest data released by the government’s census bureau. San Jose doesn’t get much respect, despite marking the south end of Silicon Valley. The Web 2.0 developer elite have forsaken the town, preferring San Francisco instead. But chip and other networking companies in San Jose are still producing great wealth (Cisco et al.), as are older Internet companies (eBay).

San Jose’s median household income was $73,804 in 2006. The median income in Santa Clara County, home to San Jose, was $80,838, showing the relative wealth of nearby suburbs such as Palo Alto and Los Altos. The second wealthiest city was San Francisco (also a county) at $65,497. Marin County, just north of San Francisco, was the richest county, with a median household income of $81,761. This wealth shows both the increasing success of area companies and the resulting cost of living. Deborah Reed from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California told