VentureBeat

Here’s the morning roundup of the latest action:

Summary:
*AirGoogle at Moffet
*Twitter API has ten times traffic as Twitter.com
*House passes bill to overhaul nation’s patent system
*Hotswap, used car site, to launch, with $1M in funding
*Hulu sued by Lulu
*Google’s desktop software gets respect; GapGemini recommends it to corporate customers

Air Google using NASA grounds at Moffett Field — First reported by Valleywag, the SF Chron follows up, confirming that the Boeing 767 owned by Google’s co-founders has used the NASA airport near Mountain View. The field is normally closed to private aircraft, suggesting NASA has awarded Larry Page and Sergey Brin partial landing rights. The Google co-founders are reportedly negotiating to lease a hangar from the space agency. Both co-founders have expressed interest in space, and at one point even discussed building a space elevator — a giant tether that could take people there.

Twitter API has ten times traffic as Twitter.com — This shows the power of letting other people, in this case developers, do the work for you.

U.S. House of Representatives passes bill to overhaul nation’s patent system – The bill limits the scope for patent infringement suits, allowing courts to change they way they assess damages in patent infringement cases. Currently, courts consider the value of the entire product when a small piece of the product infringes a patent; the bill would allow, but not require, courts to base damages only on the value of the infringing piece (see story in IT World ). The bill overcomes objections by Republicans and pharma companies who don’t want to see the patent infringement suits reduced. It’s supported by software companies, however, including Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp., which are the ones being challenged in many of these cases.

Hotswap to launch, with $1M in funding — Berkeley, Calif.’s Hotswap, an online site for used cars and which lets sellers upload videos of their cars, has raised $1 million from Kinsey Hills Group. It launches formally this week, according to Techcrunch. Listings by individuals a free, while dealers pay a fee fee per listing. There’s standard search capabilities, allowing users to search cars by year, make, price and mileage for example. Viewers get to ask questions. It has plenty of competition, however, including from eBay, Autotrader.com, cars.com and many others. It’s a huge market, and many competitors can play. Videos, when taken well, can help sell a car, but it’s hard to think that other sites won’t adapt and allow video too.

Hulu, the joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp, gets sued by Lulu — Details here.

Google desktop software wins respect — CapGemini, a consultant to large companies, will recommend Google’s desktop applications to its customers, which own a million computers globally. The rap on Google’s software is that it isn’t secure enough for corporate usage. This is the first sign it is making headway overcoming that bias. (Details here)

San-Francisco-based Scribd, the so-called “YouTube for documents,” has attracted a lot of attention — including plenty of suitors from Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms.

So it comes as no surprise that, shortly after launch, it has raised $3.7 million from Redpoint and original seed investor Kinsey Hills Group. Co-founder Trip Alder wouldn’t disclose precise valuation the investors placed on Scribd, but did say the rumored $17.5 million post-money valuation is just about right.

The round closed a few weeks ago, but Trip had waited for the legal work to be done before saying anything. Several top firms were interested, and the high valuation resulted from competitive bids for the deal. Venerated VC firm Sequoia Capital was among those turned down. Redpoint, Trip says, offered the right combination of track-record (Redpoint partner Geoff Yang backed Tivo, MySpace and Excite, among others) and attractive terms.

Pre-launch, the Y-Combinator graduate had tried to raise significant funds, and though Trip had expected that Y-Combinator would connect him to scores of potential investors, he says, this did not happen. Ed Kinsey and Michael Hills came to the rescue with $40,000, allowing Scribd to scale enough to go live.

Shortly after the launch, Scribd was racking up 100,000 unique visitors on a daily basis and suddenly, the previously tepid investors were banging down the door. An associate at Redpoint approached them and the rest flowed from there.

We previously covered Scribd and expected it to run afoul of hawkish publishers out to protect their copyrights, but Trip says this has not really been an issue. On average, Scirbd gets about one “takedown” notice a day, and Scribd takes down the material within 24 hours. Whether this situation will sustain itself as Scribd grows is yet to be seen. Copyrighted Harry Potter books, for some reason, are continually uploaded, and Scribd does a search each day for them preemptively.

Right now, they have limited competition. A potential competitor called Scriptovia has emerged to focus on getting high-school and college students to share their papers and lab reports, but it has not seen much action. And now that Scribd has a Facebook application, that niche might already be served.

The company intends to use the money to build out an API, expand its programming and marketing teams, and move into real offices. Until now, it has been three guys in a small apartment.