VentureBeat

Datamonitor points to IT budget freeze — Major sector analyst Datamonitor says that half of IT organizations around the globe will cap spending levels next year.

Chrysler to roll out electric cars — Car maker Chrysler will unveil a line of electric cars to its dealers next week, according to the Wall Street Journal. The large car company has not previously shown off any electric vehicles.

Bee well — Remember when some researchers were blaming mobile phone signals for colony collapse disorder, a mysterious ailment that was killing honeybees? They’ve since decided it’s a virus, and now an Israeli company, Beeologics, is claiming to have the cure. Israel21c has a lengthy profile.

Is Google Knol destined for failure? — Slate’s Farhad Manjoo writes that Google’s Knol, a reference project designed to go head to head with Wikipedia, is a “wasteland” of cribbed articles, factual errors and typos. Manjoo suggests that Knol will always be a victim of its advertising pay-outs and lack of editing. Of course, one might point out that Wikipedia probably sucked two months after its release, too.

Microsoft to buy back $40B of stock — In a bid to regain stock price lost since its failed grab for Yahoo, Microsoft has announced plans to buy back $40 billion of stock and pay a 13 cent quarterly dividend, 18 percent more than before.

SanDisk launching music albums on flash — Silicon Valley Insider has a few reasons that SanDisk’s newest idea, putting music on flash disks and calling it SlotMusic, may not be such a bad idea. This is the firm’s latest attempt to broaden its market since the failure of TakeTV.

Facebook lets users vote for favorite apps — As part of its $250,000 grand prize for five application developers, part of a contest with over 600 entrants, Facebook has announced that users will have a say, by voting on their favorite apps.

Nanosolar cell efficiency pinned down — After a whiffed attempt at guessing thin film solar giant Nanosolar’s cell efficiency, which the company won’t disclose, Gunther Portfolio has pegged it at around 11 percent, still well over the industry average.

Adap.tv raises $13M for ad analytics — Online video ad outfit Adap.tv has raised $13 million from Spark Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Gemini Israel Fund for its new business strategy of picking the best ads to show on a video for publishers.

Anystream acquires video syndication service Voxant — Syndication firm Voxant has merged into Anystream, a video encoding and management company, under undisclosed terms. Voxant was funded with $10.5M from Softbank Capital, Court Square Ventures and Longworth Venture Partners.

CityVoters raises $2.6M for “Best Of” lists — Need the best piano tuner in your area? CityVoters needed a few million dollars to tell you who it is. The company got $2.6 million from investors including Allen & Co. and Dace Ventures.

(UPDATED: See below.)

Cambridge, Mass.-based Sermo, an online social network with a twist, offers physicians the opportunity to ask for and offer advice free of charge. The catch: Well-heeled investors can pay to listen in.

Sermo, which just raised $26.7 million in a third funding round (details below), offers doctors the opportunity to share, discuss and vote on the importance of each others’ medical observations. The intriguing notion here is that doctors are likely to identify emerging trends in disease, treatment methods, drug side effects and so forth simply by sharing their local knowledge with one another. The company aims to maintain a high-quality conversation by restricting full membership to licensed doctors.

But what the company bills as a way to advance public health by harnessing this social knowledge is also an exercise in hard-edged capitalism. For $100,000 to $500,000 a year, Wall Street firms are also welcome to beam into the online discussion in order to discover fresh sources of medical intelligence. These outsiders won’t be able to identify the participating docs, but can pose questions to the community and of course will be free to base investment decisions on whatever they learn, such as whether a given drug seems safe and possibly even whether an experimental drug seems to be working in clinical trials.

Complicating matters is that doctors aren’t asked to disclose conflicts of interest that might call their judgments into question. The doctors themselves are also eligible for bonuses from Sermo for postings or votes that are deemed valuable, although only after the particular topic has been closed. The company does eventually plan to give government officials, academics and other healthcare companies — read, insurers, drug companies and hospitals — access to the network as well.

In May, the American Medical Association joined the party, announcing a partnership with Sermo under which the AMA can post questions to doctors in exchange for including “Discuss on Sermo” links in its print and Web publications. The move attracted a certain amount of criticism at the time — see, for instance, some comments in this AP story and this post from Pharmalot’s Ed Silverman, who in a rare departure from his usual equanimity denounced it as a “new way to exploit docs.”

Investors in the latest financing round include Legg Mason, Longworth Venture Partners and Softbank Capital. A spokeswoman for Sermo said Legg Mason contributed $25 million, while the other investors made up the $1.7 million difference.

There’s a description of how the service works here, and here’s a screenshot, too:

UPDATE: Added screenshot and a link to how Sermo works, slightly revised the description of the service and fixed the link to the AP story.

UPDATE REDUX: Sermo’s spokeswoman confirmed details of the funding round, so I’ve rewritten those sections and further refined a description of the service.