VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

ComScore: Facebook users triple in Japan during the last year – But Mixi.jp is still number one, with 12.7 million visitors compared to Facebook’s 538,000.

MySpace and NBC select citizen journalists — They’ve chosen Matt Britten and Sara Pat Badgley to cover the Democratic and Republican Conventions, respectively, as part of the companies’ Decision08 contest. Britten and Badgley’s videos and blog posts will appear on MySpace, and possibly on the MSNBC TV channel and website.

Mobile subscribers to hit 5 billion in 2011 — That forecast comes from Infonetics Research, which also predicts that mobile broadband will grow at a compound rate of 104 percent every year until then.

Google establishes Latin American HQ in Brazil — The country is reportedly Google’s fastest growing region. That’s particularly impressive since Google only opened its Brazilian office three years ago.

Private equity firm Blackstone creates a cleantech arm — This group could help provide the late-stage investments that cleantech companies need.

Did Facebook try to acquire StudiVZ? — That’s what a former executive at the German social networking site claims. The implication is that Facebook is only suing StudiVZ because it wants more of the German market, not because (as alleged) StudiVZ copied Facebook’s look, feel and features.

Department of Energy supports green building — The federal agency will contribute to the $50,000 prize for the winning company in the California Clean Tech Open’s green building contest. That amount, of course, is only a drop in the bucket compared to the funding most green building startups actually need.

Philadelphia Inquirer: So much for that Internet news thing — The newspaper has a new policy decreeing that except for breaking news, articles won’t run on the website until after they have appeared in the Inquirer’s print edition.

Magnify.net makes video network bigger, faster — The startup, which helps customers include video channels on their websites, just added MySpace, Hulu, Vimeo, College Humor, Howcast and MTV Overdrive to its content network. That network supposedly runs twice as quickly now.

You will probably see Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road, center of the nation’s venture capital industry, turn to the right during the next elections.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has just become the last of the main three Democratic presidential candidates to announce her support for ending a tax break that has enabled venture capitalists and other investors to enjoy taxes of 15 percent on their profits, instead of the income tax level of 35 percent.

We’ve covered this story as it has developed. Congress is considering passing legislation to end the break.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she was quoted in today’s NYT as saying in New Hampshire, in response to a question about whether this would harm the support of entrepreneurship. “Private equity and venture capital play important roles in our economy, and we should continue to support the entrepreneurial spirit that makes America great.”

But she went on, “We can close this loophole that unfairly benefits some of the best-paid people in America, while continuing to encourage investment in innovative, young companies.”

VC Kate Mitchell has argued that VCs are putting their money at risk along with the entrepreneur, citing her own example: She has invested her own savings into start-ups, and then waits many years for returns that may or may not come. The shortcoming to this argument, of course, is that alongside her own money, she is also investing money her firm gets from institutional investors. She partakes of profits returned on both her own savings and on this other institutional money that is not hers. [Update: Indeed, the VC tax being discussed would be applied to this latter portion, and so her argument about her own savings may be irrelevant, as the commenter below suggests. We're checking the details on this.]

Mitchell also argues VCs are different from buyout and other investors, in that VCs support entrepreneurship and nurture young companies that tend to add jobs and contribute to economic expansion.

Update: Oh, and look at what buyout firm Blackstone is doing. Effectively, avoiding paying $3.7 billion in taxes. Makes the head hurt.

The Blackstone Group, one of the most successful buyout firms, has filed for a $4 billion IPO (see filing).

VentureBeat is about money and innovation, and focuses on venture capital, and so doesn’t cover the buyout world much. The buyout industry is on fire, because public companies are seeking shelter from the demanding public market — lured by sexy, lucrative offers by these big buyout firms that have few public reporting requirements. Firms such as Blackstone take them private, so that they can restructure, and hopefully make a profit when they are publicly floated again, or acquired.

However, Blackstone’s move is quite brazen. It is generating huge management fees. It has increased its investments rapidly over the past year, and there’s no guarantee that the small group of professionals at Blackstone will be able to continue its past record of a 30 percent internal rate of return (which basically means a net profit of 30 percent a year, every year), especially now that everyone and their brother has entered the sector to compete with them. Records amount of cash has flowed into buyout funds over the past two years. And Blackstone will now be subject to public reporting requirements, presumably ending any advantage it had in arguing the benefits of its own — until now — private status when acquiring companies. Blackstone had made a business of counseling public company CEOs to go private, another irony.

To bail at its peak, and let the public stockholder take over, is a shrewd, gutsy move. Check out our coverage of the buyout world, where we cite Roger McNamee and others about why there are clouds on the horizon for this industry, and what it possibly means for start-ups.

(Updated) roundup of the high-stakes game going on in Silicon Valley:

Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter memo — The Yahoo executive complained about the company’s “proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside.” This is noteworthy, because he himself was hired from the outside. Before Yahoo, he’d served as chief executive at DialPad, and drove that company into the ground. We reached out to Brad Monday night, and hope to get comment soon.

Larry Sonsini can’t be at fault — Fortune does a long piece about one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful lawyers, Larry Sonsini, and provides good insight into his character. Much of the substance, though, has been covered elsewhere already. Still, a notable quote from entrepreneur TJ Rodgers about why Sonsini is innocent in the options back-dating scandal (reason: he’s too expensive):

“How to give options is well known,” says Rodgers, the Cypress CEO. “You hire outside counsel, they have their word processor kick up a bunch of documents, and they charge you 50,000 bucks. Then you and your HR person give out options according to the plan. You administer it; they’re not involved. You don’t want them [outside counsel] involved, because you don’t want to be sent a bill for $2,000 every time you give out stock options.”

Chris Tate takes back Zooomr sale price — Valleyway says Zooomr, the photo site that likes to think of itself as a competitor to Flickr, turned down a $2 million dollar offer from Google, citing Zooomr’s founder Kristopher Tate as the source: “We’re going to take over the world!” he allegedly told Valleyway, adding that his selling price today would be $15 million. VentureBeat checked with Tate, and he had a different tune. He said he didn’t comment, either way, on the price, but did say he’s going to take over the world.

Reid Hoffman kept out of YouTube by his own VC firm — Reid Hoffman, chief executive of LinkedIn tells the New York Times that he wanted to make an investment in YouTube, but that his own venture backer, Sequoia Capital, edged him out by offering better terms. Sequoia could make nearly $500 million from the Google-YouTube deal. The NYT reporter quotes Hoffman saying he is envious of YouTube. However, Hoffman now says he was quoted out of context, i.e, that he was referring to how other people could be envious, and the Times reporter changed his words. He’s sent a letter of protest to the NYT reporter, a copy of which was slipped to VentureBeat.

Blackstone places $36 billion bet on real estate — This is the biggest buyout ever. VentureBeat don’t usually write about later stage deals, but this is just the latest example of the huge amount of private money circulating the economy, and it is trickling down to the venture world too. As we’ve said before, great time to raise money.

Cisco’s acquisition strategy defies science — Here’s an amusing 16 minute podcast of an interview of Dan Scheinman, Cisco SVP of corporate development by Wharton management professor Saikat Chaudhuri. Once you get in a bit, Chaudhuri keeps pressing Scheinman on the “science” of Cisco’s acquisition strategy, because he’s teaching a class on it, but Scheinman keeps letting him down — diplomatically, at least — insisting its largely intuition. He says an acquisition’s success is all in the timing, and these days Cisco is almost always better off waiting. Cisco checks blogs and discussion boards for news about the start-ups its looking at, again an apparent surprise of Chaudhuri.

A degree from Stanford without actually attending — Notable story in the Merc today about increasing number of people getting a degree remotely, in places like China.

Two years later, California’s stem-cell institute is still on life-support — It gets loans while it fights of lawsuits. This is getting ugly.

Yahoo buying MyBlogLog? Nah –MyBlogLog is a site that helps bloggers see who their readers are. Yet no one took time to confirm rumors with either company. We looked up Scott Rafer, chief executive of MyBlogLog several days ago, and he said was just out talking to a bunch of people about options; he seemed miffed with the inaccurate reporting. But Yahoo did acquire Swedish mobile company Kenet Works.

Iconix and RockYou have apparently settled — Here’s update story about the suit we wrote about here.

Fenwick’s lawyer says founders may be going too far in this rosy VC environment — Ted Wang, an attorney for several Web 2.0 companies, suggests they may be overreaching in the terms they negotiate with VCs.

Infinera’s 100 Gigabit Ethernet demo — Just recently 10 Gigabit Ethernet had become the cutting-edge technology for optical data transport. Now, Sunnyvale’s Infinera has demonstrated the first ever 100 Gigabit Ethernet network across 4,000 kilometers.

Getting paid enough? — Salaryscout just launched a simple way for you to compare salaries. Downside is, there’s not much there yet to compare. Techcrunch has a review.