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Putting “geo-context” into information is a hot topic these days on the mobile web.

The phrase means making data more useful by putting geographic context behind it, like listing all of the wireless Internet hot spots nearest you on a map on the phone. Adding geo-context to the mobile web is what LightPole, a start-up that launches today, is banking its business on.  LightPole says it can take just about any web site and turn it into a mobile service with geo-context.

For instance, it can make Yelp’s restaurant listings viewable on the map view of a cell phone. But it goes a step further than mobile map or search services because it lets someone comment on results, share it with a bunch of friends and have it viewable on a wide variety of phones.

On the consumer side, it lets phone users discover what’s around them, said Doug Klein, CEO of LightPole in San Francisco.

“A GPS navigator gets you to a certain point, but we let you discover what’s around you when you reach that point,” he said.

The software is a kind of translation service. LightPole’s customers put a Java-based widget on a web site. Users click on the widget (which looks like a mobile phone) to load a mobile version of that site’s services onto a cell phone. Users type in their phone numbers and enter confirmation codes to download the application.

LightPole is announcing a bunch of partners today, including Yelp, Hotspotr, Mappy Hour, Yahoo Local, Zvents, The Bathroom Diaries, Gables and Fables, and Platial Mobile Map. Yelp identifies nearby restaurants. You can use the application to view restaurant details, make a reservation, share it with friends and then exchange text messages about a meeting time — all by looking at your phone. Hotspotr locates nearby Wi-Fi wireless Internet access points.

LightPole also announced today that it’s raised its $1.7 million first round of capital from Alloy Ventures and Stanford University.

Competitors include basic search services such as Where, ULocate, Google Maps and Yahoo Local, which is also one of the partners. In the future, services such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Google’s Android phones are likely to compete in the same space.

At some point, Klein said, LightPole will create a third-party application for the iPhone, using Apple’s newly released software development kit.

Here’s the latest action:

1) Bizarre claim made by academic: France shipping nuclear waste to U.S.
2) Google up against new rivals, which can see what you surf
3) MingleNow is leaving the party
4) Solar’s scaling challenges may have an answer
5) Incandescent lighting heading for the door
6) Gaming feud could cause aftershocks
7) Freewebs relaunches as Webs.com
8) More money heads to Hollywood

U.S. denies France is shipping nuclear waste to South Carolina — At the ThinkGreen conference in San Francisco, University of Florida professor Yogi Goswami (pictured left), a former President of the International Solar Energy Society, made the bizarre claim that “a large majority of the nuclear waste from France is actually shipped to the U.S,” specifically to Savannah River Lab in South Carolina — and that not even the Department of Energy knows about it (story carried by Cleantech.com). Coming from an accomplished academic, at an investors conference, you’d think there is something to this (we talked with the Cleantech folks, and they say Goswami is respected). But the DOE denied Goswami’s claim, calling it inaccurate and misleading. Anyone know anything about this? We’ll do some digging, meantime.

Watch out, Google, the wolves are circling — The online ad business is hot, and there potential rivals to Google are numerous. Internet service providers like CenturyTel and Embarq Communications are starting to use their innate advantages to do ads, with targeting that really works: Since they serve their customers with internet service, they can track every Web site the customer visits. That’s far more than Google can do. The Wall Street Journal reports on their progress; for more on the actual technology, check out our own article on NebuAd, one of the technology companies behind so-called “deep packet inspection” techniques.

MingleNow decides to leave the party – A social network for the bar and club scene (our coverage) will close on January 7th, according to their blog, a little more than a year after launching. Perhaps nobody expected it to really succeed (see the comments on our original post), but Read/Write Web says an anonymous source tipped them off that the site was actually forced to close by Yahoo, which bought BlueLithium, owner of MingleNow.

Solar power may not find large-scale success — At least in its current form, says the American Scientist Online. The power required to manufacture photovoltaic equipment may make it difficult to scale installations quickly enough to satisfy global power demands. However, an upcoming technology called dye-sensitized cells may be cheap enough to solve an early production crunch. Check out the original article for more.

Incandescents speeding their exit from the market — As the above story implies, efficiency is a big part of the cleantech equation, which is why everyone from the Department of Energy to Wal-Mart is trying to eliminate incandescent lighting. It’s no news that initiatives to replace them with compact fluorescent bulbs and LEDS are going well, but an update on the progress is always nice; for the best one lately, check out this article on Chemical & Engineering News.

Gaming feud could have industry consequences — The peremptory and unexplained canning of an editor by popular gaming review site GameSpot may seem like a minor scuffle at first, but it could have broader implications for gaming as a whole, says GigaOm. The controversy the firing caused may push the industry further along the path to casual games with a broader market appeal and hurting the business of established gaming websites.

Freewebs launches social gaming, changes name to Webs — Freewebs, a social media company that hosts personal websites, is relaunching itself as Webs.com. The new site will include a social publishing site called Pagii, the old Freewebs site, and the Social Gaming Network, which offers games for play on the site or on social networks like Facebook. More coverage from Techcrunch.

More investment going to Hollywood — A new $200 million private equity fund raised by FilmBankers International LLC will invest directly in the production of independent films in the United States. The firm is still fundraising, but plans to use the money for films with a budget range of $10-20 million. FilmBankers bases funding decisions on a “credit score”, which attempts to predict the potential success of a film. The fund is part of a new wave of private capital headed for Hollywood, with hopes of outmaneuvering the time-worn blockbuster model of the big studios. News via TheDeal.com.

Google today released a revised version of its maps for mobile phones, including a new “my location” feature that uses cell tower ID information to provide users with their approximate location.

This is a very significant release, for a few reasons: Location information makes search faster and more convenient, and there are a ton of advertisers willing to advertise locally to grab your attention as you shop, dine or date. The Google feature helps people find what’s around them, and how to get there.

It’s also significant because it doesn’t rely on GPS, the prevalent technology used to deliver location information to date by other providers. GPS is supported on fewer than 15 percent of the mobile phones sold this year, according to Google. Google’s feature, by contrast, is supported by most phones.

The My Location technology also complements GPS-enabled devices, Google said, as it delivers a location estimate faster than GPS, provides coverage inside buildings (where GPS signals can be unreliable), and doesn’t drain phone batteries as quickly as GPS.

More from the release:

The My Location technology takes information broadcast from cell towers and sifts it through Google-developed algorithms to approximate a user’s current location on the map. This approximation is anonymous, as Google does not gather any personally identifiable information or associate any location data with personally identifiable information as part of the My Location feature. The feature can also be easily disabled by anyone who prefers not to use it. The My Location technology is available on most smartphones, including all color BlackBerry devices, all Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition devices, most Windows Mobile devices, newer Sony Ericsson devices, and some Motorola devices.

Google Maps for mobile, first launched in the US in November 2005, enables users to view interactive maps and satellite imagery, find local businesses, get point-to-point driving directions, and view live traffic updates, all while on the go. The application is now available on and optimized for a wide variety of platforms, running on most J2ME-enabled devices; all color BlackBery devices; Windows Mobile devices with Windows Mobile 2003, 5.0, and above; Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition devices; and Palm devices with Palm OS 5 and above. Google Maps for mobile is being actively used by millions of people in more than 20 different countries around the globe.

To download Google Maps for mobile with My Location, point your mobile or desktop web browser to www.google.com/gmm. To see the full range of mobile products and services available from Google, visit mobile.google.com.

updated
MySpace, the large social networking company, has joined the anti-Facebook coalition led by Google, we’ve confirmed.

Meanwhile, SixApart, the blogging software company, has confirmed with VentureBeat that it is joining the ever-growing coalition.

The grouping, called OpenSocial (see our coverage here), is setting open standards for sharing user information across applications that run on social networks. It is supposed to go live today. The MySpace rumor first came from AlleyInsider, which said an announcement could come by the end of the day. We’ve confirmed it with a separate source, but a MySpace spokeswoman still tells us “no comment.”

The moves are significant. The Google-led effort is clearly a way to counter Facebook’s momentum in this area, and MySpace is the still the 800-pound gorilla of social networking. Developers have been flocking to Facebook’s platform to build applications, ever since Facebook told them they were free to build applications on its platform and make money. With MySpace in Google’s camp, this is shaping up to be quite a stand-off.

Here are the obvious reasons for this: It stunts some of Facebook’s incredible buzz of late, it is good for Google because it potentially gives it more access to MySpace data (though its speculation to say how much), and it allows MySpace not to have to deliver on its own open platform, and instead rely on Google’s (MySpace’s weakness is its product delivery).

Here’s the bad, though: It could mean turning over more data to Google, MySpace won’t really own the core platform, and it makes MySpace more dependent on Google. Moreover, it may not impact Facebook at all (some people are skeptical on the concept of the concept, and we’ve our own piece on its challenges).

Meanwhile, the coalition now shows 5x traffic, compared to Facebook. Conclusion: Facebook has Microsoft in its camp; it may also consider warming up with Yahoo. And Yahoo could use some help from Facebook.

Update: Myspace and Google have apparently been working on this for the past year. Developers will be able to start building applications for Myspace tonight, using OpenSocial.

Google has also released an official list of OpenSocial members: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

Flixster has also released an application for Myspace using OpenSocial.

Eric Eldon contributed to this article.

Updated

A host of Silicon Valley companies led by Google are ganging together to take on Facebook — the social networking company that is the toast of the town right now.

A group of Facebook’s cross-town rival, including Google, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning, are apparently responding, in an effort to see if they can stop Facebook from running away with the lead in social networking.

The OpenSocial project is introducing common standards to allow software developers to write programs for their various developer platforms. It centers around Google’s new project, called OpenSocial (URL to go live on Thursday, see press release below). The New York Times reported the news first. The project offers common APIs application developers can use to create applications “host” company sites that participate.

It’s the latest manifestation of a plan that can be traced back publicly to new Google hire and well-known software developer Brad Fitzpatrick’s detailed post in August. Then, he described how he hoped to develop ways of connecting users based on their social relationships between many web sites.

A set of common standards between social networks has long been proposed by some of Silicon Valley’s digerati, foremost among them Marc Canter, although the proposals have focused on letting users port their profile information from site to site. The OpenSocial effort appears to let the various sites maintain control over profiles, however, letting developers build applications that would fit into an area within the host site’s user profile page, but not necessarily port the profile itself — just like at Facebook.

Silicon Valley notables such as Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, Robert Scoble of Podtech and Michael Arrington of Techcrunch followed up together with Canter on Fitzpatrick’s post with a user’s “social web Bill of Rights”. The blog post described how users had the right to own and control their own data, including data about relationships with friends.

“The Internet is supposed to survive many threats,” Plaxo’s John McCrea tells us about OpenSocial. “What we’re watching is an immune reaction to the rise of walled gardens which threaten to Balkanize the web.

VentureBeat confirmed the news of OpenSocial this evening with Google. The company said other participants include Oracle, Viadeo, ING, Hyves, Tianji and Salesforce.com. Facebook is not a member, but was welcome to join the group, according to Joe Kraus, a Google product manager. Facebook’s spokeswoman Brandee Barker, when asked to respond, said “no comment.”

By sharing standards to develop applications, the sites will inevitably draw developer interest. Most developers we’ve talked with are stretched for time and resources, and they’ve flocked to Facebook because it was the one place that let them develop applications with clear rules and also the freedom to make money. By creating a second social network hub, Google and its allies could be a compelling home for developers. Had Google not done this, developers may have chosen to work with MySpace (expected to launch in a month or so), or not even bothered leaving Facebook.

One thing not yet addressed by OpenSocial is the money and advertising component. It’s fine to have common standards, but will those standards include the right to make money from applications, and to run advertising on the application pages, without interference from the hosting Web site? It appears to leave this for each host site to determine. We requested comment from Google on its own plans, but haven’t heard back on that [Update: A Google spokesperson said "we haven't ironed out any details yet," but was confident that OpenSocial's model "will create revenue opportunities for everyone."]

MySpace, Meebo and Bebo, all significant players with platforms, or planning platforms, are also were not listed as members of the group. Slide, a photo-sharing site not mentioned in Google’s materials, is believed to be participating, however. Flixster and RockYou were mentioned as participants, but are developers, not “hosts.”

Another big name that is absent from the list is Yahoo. While the real significance of the grouping is not yet known, for Yahoo to miss the boat on this wouldn’t be good. It has struggled enough over the past year.

See the press release below for available details, but the available APIs are 1) access to a user’s profile, 2) their friends, and 3) the ability to let their friends know that activities have taken place

Facebook provides developers with a markup language, for security reasons. However, OpenSocial does not have its own markup language, instead relying on normal javascript, html and Flash — all straightforward technologies that keep things simpler for developers than the Facebook platform.

Below is a draft press release from Google on the program:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — November 1, 2007 – Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the release of OpenSocial — a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web — for developers of social applications and websites that want to add social features. OpenSocial will unleash more powerful and pervasive social capabilities for the web, empowering developers to build far-reaching applications that users can enjoy regardless of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use. The release of OpenSocial marks the first time that multiple social networks have been made accessible under a common API to make development and distribution easier and more efficient for developers.

The proliferation of unique APIs across dozens of social websites is forcing developers to choose which ones to write applications for – and then spend their time writing separately for each. OpenSocial gives developers of social applications a single set of APIs to learn for their application to run on any OpenSocial-enabled website. By providing these simple, standards-based technologies, OpenSocial will speed innovation and bring more social features to more places across the web. Users win too: they get more interesting, engaging, or useful features faster.

“The web is fundamentally better when it’s social, and we’re only just starting to see what’s possible when you bring social information into different contexts on the web,” said XXXX. “There’s a lot of innovation that will be spurred simply by creating a standard way for developers to run social applications in more places. With the input and iteration of the community, we hope OpenSocial will become a standard set of technologies for making the web social.”

Learn Once, Reach Across the Web

One of the most important benefits of OpenSocial is the vast distribution network that developers will have for their applications. The sites that have already committed to supporting OpenSocial — Website Partner A, Website Partner B, Website Partner C, etc. –- represent an audience of well over 100 million users globally. Critical for time- and resource-strapped developers is being able to “learn once, write anywhere” — learn the OpenSocial APIs once and then build applications that work with any OpenSocial-enabled websites.

Several developers, including Gadget Partner Z, Gadget Partner Y, Gadget Partner X, etc., have already built applications that use the OpenSocial APIs. Starting today, a developer sandbox is available at http://sandbox.orkut.com so developers can go in and start testing the OpenSocial APIs. The goal is to have developers build applications in the sandbox so they can deploy on Orkut and ultimately other OpenSocial sites.

More Social In More Places

The existence of this single programming model also helps websites who are eager to satisfy their users’ interest in social features. More developers building social applications more easily translates directly into more features more quickly for websites.

“Orkut has tens of millions of passionate users who are constantly clamoring for new ways to have fun with their friends and express themselves through Orkut,” said Amar Gandhi, group product manager for Orkut, Google’s social networking service. “By using OpenSocial to open up Orkut as a platform for any developer, we can tap into the vast creativity of the community and make new features available to our users frequently.”

The common method that OpenSocial provides for hosting social applications means that websites can engage a much larger pool of third party developers than they could otherwise. They can direct resources that might have gone to maintaining a proprietary API and supporting its developer community to other projects.

Because OpenSocial removes the hassle from developing for individual websites, developers can unleash their creativity anywhere that catches their interest. This will translate into a wave of social features in contexts outside of the personal entertainment and games that are traditionally thought of as the social web.

Three APIs available now

The OpenSocial APIs give developers access to the data needed to build social applications: access to a user’s profile, their friends, and the ability to let their friends know that activities have taken place. OpenSocial resources for developers and websites are available now at code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

Developers will have access to:
- Three JavaScript and Gdata APIs to access social functions
- A live developer sandbox on Orkut at sandbox.orkut.com

Websites will have access to:
- A tool to help OpenSocial-enable their websites
- A support forum for communicating with Google and other websites

All of these resources and the live developer sandbox are available now.

Developers already at work

Dozens of developers have helped test early iterations of the OpenSocial APIs and Google is grateful for the extensive feedback they have provided.

[List of all gadget developers]

Links to these gadgets are available at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

Eric Eldon contributed to this article.

Is Google-the-Goliath sneaking into the Facebook building — via the basement?

Google is actively recruiting third-party developers with applications on Facebook to run Adsense ads within applications pages, VentureBeat has learned.

These aren’t just any old Adsense ads, according to our sources — developers have been inserting plain-vanilla Adsense into Facebook applications since the developer platform launched in May. Now, Google is specifically building this network for advertisers who want to be on Facebook, and will let advertisers run their ads across all Facebook apps that sign up for it.

Facebook has been clear about letting third-party developers sell ads on their own “canvas” pages on the site and keep all the revenue — a loophole that the Google seems to fit through just fine. See sample screenshots of what the Google ads will look like, taken here from Fantasy Stock Exchange and South Park Character Creator (and no, I don’t regularly use either app):

Microsoft has already inked an exclusive deal with Facebook to sell ads on Facebook pages within the US. By selling ads on third-party applications, Google is doing an end-run around this deal.

When it comes to Facebook and social networking, Google is apparently firing on all fronts.

Building relationships with Facebook advertisers also allows Google to test how to successfully monetize third party applications before it introduces its own developer platform. Google is apparently set to make an announcement on November 5 that it will give third party developers access to user data in Orkut, its own social network which is popular in Brazil and India but not in most other countries. To this end, it is also actively recruiting third-party developers on Facebook to develop on Orkut, we are told.

Google is also rumored to be in a three-way competition with Microsoft and Yahoo to sell ads on Facebook’s own pages outside of the US. Like its two competitors, it is also rumored to be trying to buy a chunk of Facebook.

So far, only third-party startups that have launched ad networks for applications on Facebook, including those run by RockYou, VideoEgg, Social Media, Lookery and others. Some of these networks sell contextual text and video ads within an application’s pages. Some even sell ads on popular Facebook applications for less popular applications, so the latter group can try to convince Facebook users to add their application as well. Also of note: We’ve also been hearing rumors that Facebook is working on its own ad network for applications within Facebook.

Whether anyone can make big bucks from third-party applications is another question. We’re hearing from developers that all of these ad networks work about the same. We’re hearing some — those with 50,000 active users or more - are even getting enough to pay for their servers, room and board. That’s enough to avoid taking on funding while you work out your long-term business strategy.

Google has responded with the usual “no comment.”

Web 2.0 Summit, co-hosted by O’Reilly Media and CMP, kicks off this Wednesday at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. A who’s who list of Web 2.0 digerati will converge for three days of deal making, partying and more deal making.

If you didn’t have the budget to nab one of the $3,595 tickets for the event, fret not - VentureBeat reporters will be on hand to bring you frontline dispatches.

In preparation for the event, here’s a quick preview of what’s expected during the week, which includes some product launches by MadeIt, Userplane, Radar and Nokia.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Marissa Mayer and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer will all be speaking — and ears will be perked for the latest on reported acquisition talks between Microsoft and Facebook, and Google’s response to this.

EBay’s Meg Whitman will be speaking Thursday, right before her company’s Q3 earnings announcement the same day. Friday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about eBay’s struggle to juice its slowing growth rates. We also hope the moderator asks her questions about the departure of Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom, and about eBay’s associated $900 million write down. Speaking of Mr. Zennstrom, the Skype founder curiously disappeared from Web 2.0 Summit’s list of speakers sometime over the last few days. As recently as last Wednesday according to the Google cache, Zennstrom was listed as a speaker at the conference, where he was to participate in a session entitled, “Show Me.” Oops. Today, all references to Zennstrom are removed from O’Reilly’s conference agenda.

Wednesday evening, MySpace will host a dinner with News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdock and MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe. We hope he speaks about his pending acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, and how he sees his new media properties meshing with his old media properties.

Several companies are expected to show off their latest Web 2.0 wares.

Thursday night, at a party promoted here, MadeIt.com, a new Web 2.0 online invitations site, will make its public beta debut. MadeIt.com plans to take on market leader Evite.com by adding social networking features to “keep the party going” after the party’s over, such as online photo sharing, video sharing, slideshows, story sharing, message boards and widgets. The company was founded by CEO Stephen Weir and his advisor, Jonny Hendriksen. Weir tells VentureBeat the company has been self-funded to date with about $80,000 in capital. The company is looking to do a seed round of up to $300,000 in the next three months to get to proof of concept stage, at which point it may seek a Series A. However, it enters a very crowded sector, filled with the likes of Socializr, Renkoo, Skobee, MingleNow and the related events sites such as Going.com.

On Wednesday morning at an invitation-only breakfast, cell phone maker Nokia says it will introduce a new N series handheld computer that promises to marry the mobility of a multimedia device with the Internet (yes, this is frustratingly vague, but we don’t know anything else). Other handheld computers in N Series family combine many of the features of an Apple iPhone - such as Internet browsing, photos, videos, games and maps, without the phone part.

Userplane, which provides hosted communications applications such as chat, messaging and voice recording for online communities, plans to announce Userplane Feeds, a collection of free APIs so that developers can build the applications into their own sites.

On Friday, Radar Networks’ CEO Nova Spivack, who in a previous life founded EarthWeb, will unveil and name the company’s first Semantic Web application, most likely an online personal data organizer, according to a July feature in the recently shuttered Business 2.0 magazine. The San Francisco company, which is backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Leapfrog Ventures and angel investors, has been in stealth for a few years, yet has been been aggressively promoting its business, technology and ideas for the Semantic Web for quite a while (this is one of those “pseudo stealth” companies, promoting itself in public relations pitches to media outlets, even as it feigns secrecy). Friday’s anticipated announcement will also mark the start of the private beta for the not-so-secret service. In addition to naming its first product, the company says it will announce a strategic partnership. Stay tuned for later this week when VentureBeat’s Chris Morrison reports on Radar Networks’ product launch and tells us if the company’s first Semantic Web application is ready for prime time.

We’ve noticed a couple passes listed for sale on Craigslist here and here, or you can always crash the conference and join the unofficial Web 2.0 Summit LobbyCon unconference in the lobby of the Palace hotel.

Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He’s founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker

Yahoo said it is considering the sale of Kelkoo, its online shopping comparison service, only three-and-a-half years after it acquired the company for €475m ($672m).

The move, reported by the FT last night, comes as Yahoo is struggling to redefine its business strategy, and after evidence that Kelkoo hasn’t performed to expectations.

The Kelkoo purchase was another one of those “What were you thinking?” moments, when industry experts were widely perplexed at why Yahoo had paid so much for what many considered the king of spam, a second rate service that bought most of its traffic from other search engines such as Google.

The news comes a day after eBay, another Silicon Valley company, admitted that its Internet phone company Skype, has performed badly. Like Yahoo’s deal with Kelkoo, eBay’s purchase of Skype for $4.1 billion was another one of these deals made by a company desperate to show some sort of long-term growth strategy, but where the company failed to articulate how the acquisition would make it money. Apparently its time for companies to take their lumps, now that others are doing it.

Before the Yahoo purchase in 2004, Kelkoo was paying for ads on Google’s search engine — so that people searching for a refrigerator, for example, would see a Kelkoo ad for refrigerators beside Google’s search results, and click through to Kelkoo’s site. It was great at getting traffic, but its results were poor. People thought Yahoo had way overpaid.

Yahoo hasn’t disclosed revenue numbers for Kelkoo since the acquisition, but it hasn’t made much headway in Europe, where the Paris-based company was supposed to help Yahoo expand. In fact, it appears to have lost momentum against its rivals, such as Google. Google was the most visited internet site across most European countries in June, followed by Microsoft and then Yahoo, according to comScore, the traffic measurement company.

Yahoo tried to integrate Kelkoo’s offering with its other search marketing property, Overture, but the effort never went anywhere. Yahoo’s large base of advertising clients never saw any reason to use Kelkoo. Two big competitors have overshadowed it. Shopping.com has remained a front-runner in the U.S. And in Europe, a Swedish company named Pricerunner, bought by Valueclick, has won customers from Kelkoo. For example, Kelkoo had powered search for MSN in the UK, but Pricerunner stole that account.

The move also comes amid speculation that Yahoo has talked with Google about pulling out of the search engine game altogether and letting Google handle its search business.

Google has revamped its Book Search, now giving you a way to create and search your own book collection, or library.

This is pretty powerful, since Google lets you search for words within your books. It’s more fruit from its laborious but contentious process of scanning books into its index — something it began more than two years ago.

A student can build collection out of sources for an upcoming term paper, and then search with Google to find the book and page containing a needed reference. A frequent traveler might search her Google book library for guide books to figure out which book in her offline collection provides information about an obscure town she’s planning to visit.

See screenshot below, which shows you can select your library by clicking on a button underneath the search bar.

Other features Google is offering with this:

• Sharing: While you’re creating your library, you can also annotate it by adding labels, writing reviews, and rating books. Then share your collection with others by sending them a link to your library in Google Book Search. You can set up RSS feeds with friends so that they’re alerted when you add new books to your collection.

• Popular passages: Learn how authors are quoting one another. This feature displays quotations or other excerpts of a book that appear in lots of other books. This also lets you discover connections between books too. Google provides an example of a quote that appears in more than 140 books from 1759-2007:

“An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made; Imitations are often a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art and labour, out of pre-existent materials…”
-Edward Young

• Select, Clip and Post Text: Google lets you clip and post selections of text from out-of-copyright books so you can share your favorite passages or quotes with others. Click on the ’share this clip’ icon in the blue navigation bar, highlight the text, and then choose whether to post it to Blogger, Google Notebook, or get the URL to embed the clip wherever you’d like to display the passage.

• Refine your search: In addition to the new features that let you interact with books, Google has also added search refinement links on the results pages. These links point you toward categories of books that match your search and give you a new way to peruse the index.

Mahalo, the search engine that relies on humans to organize results around popular search returns, has released a toolbar that gives you supplemental results to the ones you get from Google.

The new release by Mahalo, launched by scrappy entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, is called Mahalo Follow, and is a download to your desktop that lets you see Mahalo’s human-edited results alongside those of Google and other sites.

It does that by creating a sidebar on the left of search results. See example below. You’ll note that a search for an iPhone on Google provides predictable results, but that Mahalo offers many more practical links in the same amount of space on the left. The screenshot is truncated for space reasons, but Mahalo provides a whole column of spam free, human edited results.

We’ve been skeptical of Mahalo’s chances in the past, because people are habitually prone to use Google, Yahoo, Ask or any number of other popular big-brand sites. Becoming a destination site was a tough road. Now, through this download, it creeps onto your screen as a helpful companion while you search at any site. It works whether you’re on Google, or searching for news items on CNN. If you’re on CNN or some other content site, Mahalo scans the content in real time, and determines the subject matter – and provides tips on related sites and information in its bar.

The arrows in our screenshot below point to other elements of Mahalo Follow. It includes a search bar, a directory menu to let you easily find the subjects Mahalo has indexed and more

In an update, Calacanis said results pages have been created so far for 8,800 search topics, and that the site will easily exceed the 10,000 pages it had targeted for this year.

He said more than 800 people signed up for participation in Mahalo’s program to create and curate result pages. The company is drawing on these users to create about 100 search result pages a day. Users create the pages, submit them to “mentors,” who in turn submit them to Mahalo.

Updated

Google, seeking to extend Internet access to more people, which helps it make more money from its own services, made two big wireless announcements today.

It said it will bid at least $4.6 billion in an upcoming up-coming auction to operate a part of the wireless spectrum.

It also said it is leading a $25 million investment into a U.K company, Ubiquisys, which is developing hardware that lets cell phones run on home WiFi networks. In other words, it helps carriers move some of their data traffic away from their own cellular network, onto a home’s local area network, or the so-called “edge.” More on that in a second.

In explaining Google’s commitment for the wireless auction, Chris Sacca, head of Google’s wireless initiatives, complained that wireless spectrum for mobile phones and data is “controlled by a small group of companies, leaving consumers with very few service providers from which to choose.” The $4.6 billion, while it sounds a lot, may actually be low when compared to bids by others, he noted.

Last week, as the debate heated up around the FCC’s proposals about how to open up the 700 Mhz band of wireless, Google lobbied for the following points, all of which it said are necessary to shake up the staid wireless industry, bring choice to consumers, including lower prices:

* Open applications: consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire;
* Open devices: consumers should be able to utilize their handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer;
* Open services: third parties (resellers) should be able to acquire wireless services from a 700 MHz licensee on a wholesale basis, based on reasonably nondiscriminatory commercial terms; and
* Open networks: third parties (like Internet service providers) should be able to interconnect at any technically feasible point in a 700 MHz licensee’s wireless network.

As we understand it, at least, the third and fourth points above have not been guaranteed in the earliest drafts of proposals by the FCC on how to handle the spectrum being auctioned (See former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt’s column for VentureBeat earlier this week on this).

According to Sacca:

Why $4.6 billion? While we think that a robust and competitive auction based on these four principles will likely produce much higher bids, and we are eager to see a diverse set of bidders competing, $4.6 billion is the reserve price that FCC has proposed for the auction. With any concerns about revenue to the U.S. Treasury being satisfied, we hope the FCC can return its attention to adopting openness principles for the benefit of consumers.

Google’s backing of Ubiquisys, meanwhile, continues its efforts to support the extension of residential wireless access. Ubiquisys, based in Swindon, UK, makes so called femtocell access points for the residential market. Femtocell is a technology that will improve transmission of IPTV and high-bandwidth services. Wireless services would operate on local home networks, and be hooked up with the home’s land-lines or through VoIP using a home’s existing broadband connections. Carriers would sell the technology to consumers, pitching it as a way they can lower mobile subscription costs. According to a report from Dow Jones, Graham O’Keefe, a partner with Atlas, said the device sell for about $100-$150, and be brought to market in 2008. That’s a lot of money to ask consumers to fork out, though; its too early to know whether this will be compelling.

The investment is part of Ubiquisys’ second round of funding, the first being led by Accel Partners, Atlas Venture and Advent Venture Partners. The investors joined Google in this latest round.

According to the statement:

The Ubiquisys ZoneGate femtocell offers mobile users high-quality mobile coverage in the home using their usual 3G cell phones. The device plugs into an existing home broadband gateway or is built into a gateway product that includes WiFi, DSL, Ethernet, phone ports and USB.

‘Our mission is to empower mobile carriers to bring compelling service packages into homes using our ZoneGate solution,’ said Chris Gilbert, CEO Ubiquisys…In June 2007 ABI Research rated Ubiquisys number one femtocell vendor in a survey of the top ten players in the sector, based on product innovation and implementation.

The three-year-old company has now raised a total of $37 million.

EBay, in a surprisingly defensive move, has yanked all of its advertising from Google’s network (a story that has been widely covered).

The action came after Google planned a fun party — with free drinks, food and massages — to pitch its online payment service, Google Checkout in Boston during eBay’s user conference there.

This was a direct attack on eBay’s PayPal service, and surprisingly aggressive given Google chief executive Eric Schmidt’s insistence that Google Checkout wasn’t a competitor to PayPal. It also comes after years of tension between the two companies: Four years ago, Google emerged as a threat — luring merchants away from eBay to have them advertise their wares via Google’s Adwords.

Google abruptly canceled the party yesterday, but only after eBay had made the advertising decision. EBay will be using the money to spend for advertising on Microsoft and Yahoo. This is the sharpest break between eBay and Google yet, and it’s not likely to get better: Google is too much of a threat. Its rare to have such visible cold wars in the valley, the latest being Peoplesoft vs. Oracle.

Sedo, the world’s largest domain name auctioneer, sold a popular URL, Boobtube.com, for $41,688 last week, but then turned around and canceled the sale because the seller didn’t really own it.

This auction had lasted more than two weeks, and was frenetic.

The cancellation raises prickly questions about the nascent domain name exchanges, which are handling several hundred million dollars of trades. Are they trustworthy? Are they open to market manipulation?

This might be pardonable if it were an isolated, very rare case. However, it doesn’t appear to be so — from what we’re hearing. I know about Boobtube.com, because I was one of the bidders, and Sedo’s customer service department notified me of the nullified auction. I was the first bidder at $5,000 (my wife and I are authors of BOOB TUBE, a novel about the daytime television soap opera industry, to be published later this year). Click on thumbnail images to see the start and ending bid prices.

Clearly, the exchanges must take more decisive measures to protect the interests of buyers and sellers. While I appreciate that I and my fellow bidders weren’t defrauded of our money, it was still a big time sink. Sedo apparently noticed the problem only at the last minute. Without the essential service of trusted and transparent exchanges, domain buyers and sellers are forced to negotiate blindfolded in the virtual equivalent of a dark alley.

If Sedo serves as any example, the domain exchanges have a long way to go. At Sedo, for example, domain buyers and sellers are presented with incomplete information about how the auction process works. In my case, my quest at Sedo for Boobtube.com actually began about one week earlier than the public auction. Sedo lets you negotiate one-on-one with seller, who was initially asking $7,500. My bid started at $500, I raised, he lowered, and when I raised it to $5,000 I was surprised to learn my private one-on-one negotiation was moving to a public auction. Nowhere in their online documentation does Sedo warn buyers of this possibility. (Sedo’s customer service department tells me sellers like this option). Imagine you’re at an art dealer, negotiating a price for a painting and at the last minute, the dealer ends the negotiation by saying, “sorry, I think I’ll auction this at Sotheby’s instead.”

Will Sedo press criminal charges against the naughty seller for trying to sell a domain he didn’t own? We doubt it. Despite my personal requests for additional details, Sedo has been mum.

If these shenanigans were taking place on the Nasdaq or NYSE, you can bet the exchanges and the Securities Exchange Commission would want to hang the perpetrator from the nearest lamp post.

Up until last year, Boobtube.com was owned by Rogers Cadenhead, an author, blogger and industry gadfly who himself came to notoriety when he registered benedictXVI.com in anticipation of the new pope.

What does Cadenhead have to say about last week’s Boobtube.com fiasco? I contacted him last week to inform him of the scam, and to learn if he still owned the domain and was willing to sell it. His reply:

“I just heard about this auction today from the winner, who had the high bid at $45,000. [Editor’s note: not the correct price]

I sold the domain last year. The current owner put his WHOIS information private and hasn’t done anything with it yet.

It’s very weird that Sedo allowed an auction for a domain that the seller didn’t own. I would’ve thought they had safeguards to prevent that.”

Why did it take Sedo so many weeks to determine that the seller of Boobtube.com didn’t own the domain?

It’s difficult to say, although for the rest of us amateur domainers it’s becoming more difficult than ever to identify the true owners of a domain. To liken the domain trading business to wild west horse trading would be an understatement.

Up until a few years ago, it was simple to identify the owner of a domain. You just searched the WHOIS database at Network Solutions or Internic. Search for “pepsi.com”, for example, and you see it’s owned by Pepsico. But search for BoobTube.com on WHOIS and you learn only that the domain is parked at Godaddy.com, but the identity of the owner is cloaked.

Big money is at stake for the domain name exchanges, all of whom are still small compared to the potential for this business.

Several domain exchanges have emerged as early leaders. Sedo is ranked number one by domain name appraisal consultancy, Zetetic of Davis, Calif, who recently released revenue data they compiled on the top five exchanges. Zetetic says approximately $111 million in after market domain name trades took place in 2006, with just over 50 percent of those taking place in private deals outside the exchanges.

Zetetic’s numbers, however, most likely underestimate the overall dollar volume of domain name buying and selling. In 2004 alone, for example, publicly traded domain aggregator Marchex of Seattle paid $155.2 million in cash and $9 million in stock for a single portfolio of 100,000 domains, many of which were misspellings of common brand names.

According to David Kesmodel, a Wall Street Journal reporter writing a book about the domain business, Marchex currently owns about 220,000 domain names.

Driving the rich price of domain names are the following: The combination of direct navigation (users type keywords or search phrases rather than URLs directly into their browser’s navigation bar), domain parking and keyword-triggered sponsor advertising such as Google Adsense, which is how web site publishers monetize the typically wayward traffic.

Click on any one of the millions of parked domains – we’ve all stumbled upon these nearly useless pages – and you’re presented with a bunch of sponsored ads. No original content. It’s big business for the domain parking players like Sedo and GoDaddy, as well as for Google and Yahoo who supply the ads. And for thousands of domain owners, parking means they can monetize their domain assets without ever having to type a line of HTML code. Owners of parked pages love direct navigation users, because they drive high click-through rates on sponsored links.

Much of this business would dry up, however, if direct navigation users would simply learn how to use search engines. We can only hope. Or, Web browser makers could kill the business overnight if they stopped trying to guess the user’s destination, and instead used the keywords to open a search engine query so the user could choose a real destination.

In the meantime, it appears I may never own the domain I’ve coveted for the last five years. At least I own boobtubebook.com. And yes, this and several other domains I own are parked at Sedo.

Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He’s founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker

Updated

Google said today it will offer a range of new features in its search results, including things like a new navigation bar at the top left side of the home page to things like Google’s Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets and Picasa Web Albums.

The effort is part of what it calls a move to “universal search,” much of which will be subtle at first, but will change over time.

Many of the changes will begin today (Wednesday). Many of the features, including the navigation bar, still weren’t live as of this writing. We checked with Google, and a spokesman said the changes are still rolling out, and that everyone will see the changes by Thursday morning. The changes were announced during Google’s Searchology event today, which VentureBeat attended.

More significantly, the move is also an answer to a threat posed by a string of other search engine companies, including Ask and Hakia, which are starting to give users clusters of information about a search term neatly on the first page of results — rather than spitting out the pages and pages of results like Google.

Google said that search results will include links to more sources, such as videos, books and blogs and maps. Take the example of a search for Star Wars character Darth Vader. Google said users want info about the character and the actor – not just web pages that mention the movie. Google will deliver search results that include different elements — such as a humorous parody of the movie, images of the Darth Vader character, news reports on the latest Lucas film, as well as websites focused on the actor James Earl Jones – ranked according to how relevant Google thinks they are to the query.

See image below for what we are seeing as of 1pm on Wednesday:

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Google said it is introducing a new “technical infrastructure” to enable the intensive computations to produce universal search results — and that it’s upgrading its ranking algorithm to compare the different clusters of information.

Here are the other parts of Google’s announcements today:

New links have been added above the search results — For example, a search for “python” will now generate links to Google’s Blogs, Books, Groups, and Code pages. See below.

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Google Experimental — Available on Google Labs, you can use this to search results on a map or timeline. For instance, when you search for “Albert Einstein” you can choose to see search results on a map that shows locations mentioned within web pages about Einstein or on a timeline illustrating the history of Einstein’s life. We don’t see this feature yet, either.

Updated

Cross-language search engine — This is coming. Until now, you’ve been able to download Google’s toolbar and you can get translations of words and phrases by scrolling over text. However, this new cross-language feature will be different: Queries will be translated into other languages, and results from other languages will be translated on the fly back into your language of choice.

More videos in Video search — Videos will be pulled from video sites beyond Google Video and YouTube, including for example MetaCafe.

Tellme, the voice recognition company, has released more mobile search features, giving it a leg up on Google’s recently announced 411 service.

In addition to offering voice mobile search, which Tellme announced last month, it gives you a way of search for business listings using SMS texting or mobile Web. Tellme gives business listings, maps, phone numbers and driving directions. See images below.

If you use the voice service, which you do by calling 1-800-555-TELL and just saying “business search,” you can get the results visually. If you text, you send your request to TELLM (83556). Finally, you can download the mobile application at http://www.tellme.com (or http://m.tellme.com from your mobile phone.)

Of course, with Microsoft just announcing its acquisition of Tellme, this gives Microsoft a response to Google’s mobile 411 service, launched just last week. It also puts renewed pressure on independent players, such as 4Info.

Tim O’Reilly, the co-owner of the Web 2.0 conference who has also studied the world of data closely, says these efforts are more than they appear at the surface. It’s also about the data:

In short, I’m speculating that the 1-800-GOOG-411 service is designed to harvest voice data to build Google’s own speech database, rather than licensing from Nuance or another player.

If I’m right about this, we see here another demonstration of my Web 2.0