VentureBeat

The iPhone’s Safari web browser has ignited interest in browsing the “real web” on mobile devices, but it’s not the only mobile browser out there. Skyfire lets you see the web just as you would on your home computer but on a number of Windows Mobile-based devices. Today, it’s launching the beta version of its software for the Symbian platform as well.

Specifically, this version is built for the Symbian Series 60 (S60) platform, which is used on a variety of Nokia phones. Nokia recently purchased Symbian and plans to open the platform to spur development.

Skyfire mainly competes with the mobile version of Opera, Opera Mini, but Mozilla will soon be launching a mobile version of its Firefox browser as well. Skyfire claims it has an advantage in that, of all the mobile browsers on the market today, it’s the only one that supports “all Web 2.0 standards, including full support for Flash.”

It even notes in the press release that this means you can watch YouTube clips on your phone, and even cooler, Hulu videos. Hulu is the NBC and Fox-backed online video site that lets you watch premium television and film content for free.

The first 100 readers who go to this url: http://www.skyfire.com/sign-up/symbian/step2 and use the code Vbeat, will be let into the beta program. Note that this is only for US-based phones at this time.

Skyfire raised a $13 million second round of funding back in May led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. This followed an initial $4.8 million round. The company hired former Mowser cofounder Mike Rowehl to be its scalability architect last month.

Skyfire has raised a $13 million second round of funding as it ramps up its campaign in the mobile browser wars.

The Mountain View, Calif. startup’s goal, says chief executive Nitin Bhandari, is to make a browser that makes the mobile web experience as close to the PC-browsing experience as possible, rather than settling for the simplified web presented on most mobile browsers like Opera Mini. Some of that comes down to the interface: Like the iPhone’s Safari browser, Skyfire lets you see a full web page, then zoom in by touching the screen. Even more significantly, Skyfire supports web formats like Flash and AJAX that don’t work on many mobile browsers. For example, Skyfire is the only one to support the latest version of Flash, Bhandari says. And even with formats that other browsers support, Skyfire is the fastest. Jake Seid of Lightspeed Venture Partners, which led the round, says the browser is normally five to 30 times faster than the competition.

Skyfire is currently in private testing mode for smartphones with the Windows Mobile operating system. Although Bhandari describes the initial response as very positive, he says it’s too early to release any numbers to back that up.

The company plans to add compatibility with other platforms soon, starting with the Symbian operating system, and Bhandari says he wants to leave testing mode in late summer. Apple’s iPhone has been credited with leading the way in popularizing mobile web surfing, but Bhandari says Skyfire doesn’t have any immediate plans for iPhone compatibility. That makes sense, since much of Skyfire’s promise is to bring a smooth browsing experience to mobile devices that aren’t as expensive as the iPhone.

As for making money, Bhandari will only say that there are players in different “layers in the [wireless] ecosystem” that are interested in partnerships.

Seid says one of the big reasons for Lightspeed’s investment is Skyfire’s vision of allowing phone users to access “the real web” rather than a watered-down mobile web. As an example, he points to Flash video site YouTube. Although the iPhone has a special YouTube application, and there’s also a YouTube mobile site, most mobile browsers can’t run videos from the real YouTube site.

Does that mean Lightspeed is essentially betting on the desire of users to access multimedia content on their phones? Not so, Seid says, because more and more web pages in general are moving onto Flash and AJAX: “It’s not a bet on [multimedia], it’s a bet that people want to access the web, period.”

Skyfire previously raised $4.8 million from Trinity Ventures and Matrix Partners, who also participated in this round.

Some venture firms are having difficulty raising new funds, but top firms are still getting money with ease — in part to invest in fast-growing places like China and India.

In the past month we’ve seen Foundation Capital take $750 million, Kleiner Perkins grab $700 million, plus its $500 million “Green Growth” fund, and now Lightspeed Venture Partners is announcing its own fresh $800 million fund, oversubscribed from a $675 million target.

The fresh Lightspeed fund is almost twice the size of its last raise, which topped out at $475 million two years ago. It seems like a lot to invest. But the firm is expanding its game. It will continue to invest in early-stage investment in the United States and Israel, but put more focus on later-stage investments in China and India.

It joins a host of other firms. That trend became most notable last year, when Sequoia Capital kicked its highly-respected LP Yale University to the curb for refusing to put money toward the firm’s risky-looking global investments, like its vegetable farm in China. Along with cleantech — the reason for Kleiner Perkins’ extra $500M — global investment is the top reason that many VCs have started raising funds sized more to private equity.

China and India are prime beneficiaries of the trend, in particular China: Last year, VCs pumped $3.2 billion into Chinese companies - up from $1.8 billion the previous year - and that figure could jump to $4 billion to $5 billion in 2008, according to a piece by the Mercury News on the trend this weekend.

Despite their immensity, China and India have been capital starved historically, Lightspeed managing director Ravi Mhatre told me. However, there’s no indication that Lightspeed is going to start putting money into growing vegetables. He explains his approach using mobile services as an example. In the US and Europe, the market isn’t growing much, so carriers are looking for value-added services for high-paying customers. In poorer countries, revenue per subscriber is much lower, but their numbers are exploding — making investment more of an infrastructure bet.

The fund will keep its traditional focus on IT, including the internet, enterprise software, mobile services and the semiconductor industry. And like many of its top-tier peers, Lightspeed will probably be up the percentage of its money that it puts towards cleantech from the smaller amount it has invested to date.

In the often silly world of third-party Facebook applications, Friends For Sale is especially silly — and smart.

It’s a game where you and your Facebook friends compete to buy and sell each other as “pets,” with each person receiving a market-based virtual valuation.

The San Francisco-based company says it is not for sale, even though other social game developers have recently been acquired by market leaders Zynga and SGN.

The company has just raised $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Here’s how it works. You join Friends For Sale and receive a starter war chest of several thousand dollars of the company’s virtual currency, as well as a valuation of how much you’re worth. Then you see a list of all your Facebook friends who have added the application, along with their selling price, and you can start buying them up. Price is determined like in any market, by bidders — so if you’re competing against others to buy a particular friend, you’ll have to keep raising your bid in order to maintain ownership.

When you sell a friend, you get to keep half the profit. The other half goes to the person getting bought. You can also make money by doing things like inviting more friends to the application. You earn $2,000 for every four hours that you’re logged in, and $1,000 for every friend you invite. And when somebody buys you, your value increases.

What’s the point of owning a friend, besides making virtual money on their eventual sale? Well, you can buy them gifts, or you can use them to “poke” other friends.

So really, this game is a mask for deeper social intentions. Let’s say you’re a high school student and you want to show a classmate that you have a romantic interest them — buy them and give them a gift on Friends For Sale. Or lets say you want to attract the interest of a prominent entrepreneur and angel investor like early Googler Georges Harik. Buy him, if you can afford it: He’s my most expensive Facebook friend, worth more than half a million dollars in the app’s virtual currency (pictured, above; thankfully, he’s already an investor in VentureBeat).

Since I’m new to the game, I’m virtually poor, and I’ve had to settle for buying undervalued friends on the cheap — specifically fellow blogger Nick Gonzalez. Who knows, maybe this application will turn out to be a good recruiting tool for VentureBeat?

At a high level, this game isn’t just like Scrabulous or one of the many other “social games” on Facebook, that rely on porting in an existing idea onto the site. The game itself is valuing the sorts of social interactions that you might want to be taking anyway.

And it’s one of the more popular apps on Facebook. It started last November and has grown to more than 600,000 regular users, among the seven million Facebook users who have installed it.

There are still some conceptual kinks that the game is working out. If one of your “pets” uninstalls the application, you lose your money on them. There have also been a rash of fake profiles, presumably by users buying their own fake profiles then reselling them at higher prices — virtual market collusion? And, since there are a range of privacy settings, like making your pets private, the market is also not fully transparent for anyone with the virtual cash to participate in.

Friends For Sale is the second try of a team of developers that does business under the name, and I’m not making this name up, “Serious Business.” The team previously tried to port another social game onto Facebook, but it didn’t grow virally because it didn’t integrate into people’s existing “social graphs” in the same way that Friends For Sale does.

The company is using the money to scale up its operations on Facebook and it is also planning to expand to other social networks that offer developer platforms.

Long-term, it says its not aiming to make money through advertising, but through other forms of monetization it won’t tell me about. I’m guessing virtual goods will somehow be involved.

Question is, when can I start buying minority equity stakes in my Facebook friends.

Outbrain is a new start-up that gives blog readers a way to rate and recommend news items, by using a recommendation engine that is similar to Amazon’s feature that offers up other items that people like you have already enjoyed.

While there are several such “collaborative filtering” recommendation engines such as Amazon’s on the market (there’s Last.fm for music, for example), there are few services that focus solely on news. There’s a competing service Spotback, but it lets people rate any content, and isn’t as focused. Outbrain offers site-owners a widget (see screenshot below) that lets readers rate each news article according a five-star system. That way, Outbrain can track what stories you like, and recommend similar stories going forward. Other people making similar choices as you have in the past will also see which ones you’ve ranked higher or lower.

The New York company was launched by Yaron Galai, the co-founder of Quigo, which recently was acquired by AOL for a reported $350 million (not bad, given that Quigo took only $40 million in capital). Quigo offers something similar to Google’s Adsense (ads that are placed besides relevant content), but Quigo served very large publishers who wanted more transparency than Google’s service provided. There, Galia worked with large companies like Fox, ABC, NBC, ESPN, Time Warner and some 250 newspapers. So maybe its no surprise that he’s focusing his next venture on serving the publishing industry.

Galia told me he was tired of wasting his time, reading over articles that he didn’t like, just because they were posted at a favorite Web site.

The company has just raised $5 million in a first round of capital from Gemini Israel Funds and Lightspeed Venture Partners. GlenRock Israel, which seeded the company early on, also participated.

Galia said thousands of websites have already installed the Outbrain widget, which can be gotten here. More information about how it works is here.

Outbrain also offers an API, so that news aggregation sites can also use it.