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Here’s the latest action:

Mobile enthusiast gives up on “mobile web” – Russell Beattie, a Silicon Valley developer and mobile enthusiast who spent two years working at Yahoo Mobile before launching a start-up called Mowser, has given up on the mobile sector. He writes: “The general answer is that I don’t actually believe in the ‘Mobile Web’ anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I’m talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence. Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn’t happened, and now I’m sure it isn’t going to.” Mowser focused on adapting content for mobile phones. Beattie said the expected traffic never came. His story is a cold shower for industry players hoping advances by the iPhone and the Android will inject life into the sector.

Credit crunch hits cleantech after all — Despite some crowing from the clean-technology crowd that the credit crunch hadn’t hit it, it did eat into one a that sector clean-technology companies: private equity investment. Earth2Tech has a good wrapup of the numbers and commentary.

Silicon Valley’s giants are fine, but maybe not for long — The big tech companies of Silicon Valley, on the other hand, are humming along as if the current (probable) recession weren’t even taking place, says the San Jose Mercury News in its annual SV150 issue. The reason: Their international business divisions are going strong. However, the New York Times reports that housing markets worldwide are following the US market’s tailspin, so credit and spending abroad could suffer as well, challenging even multinational companies.

Feed your tank, starve a poor person — Biofuels have pushed back the fight against poverty by seven years and may continue to hurt poor people, according to a quote from World Bank president Robert Zoellick in the Guardian. The tapping of biofuels for alternative energy has faced a growing negative reaction, because it is sending food prices soaring around the world. Biofuels are made from food crops like corn and sugar, and so are taking away from the food stock. The effect, at least for the moment, will probably be limited to more cautious government subsidization policies.

Farecast rumored sold for over $75M — Online travel search site Farecast may have been sold for over $75 million, according to John Cook of the Seattle PI. He’s not sure who the buyer is, but speculates that Expedia would be a likely match since two major competitors, SideStep and Kayak, merged last year. Farecast has done well with its feature that lets you predict whether fares are going up or down in the near future, helping you decide when to buy.

Radio One buys Community Connect for $38M — Media giant Radio One has laid down $38 million for Community Connect, which operates niche sites based on ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. The company had taken funding from Dominion Ventures, ConnectCapital, Comcast Interactive Capital and Jump Ventures, according to peHUB.

YouTube dominates video, while Google roars in search — YouTube boasted 73.18 percent of all U.S. visits among a group of 68 online video websites in March, according to Hitwise. MySpaceTV received the second highest percentage of visits, with 9.21 percent followed by Google Video with 4.06 percent. YouTube dominates video more than Google dominates search. But then search makes much more money. Google got 67.3 percent market share for search, and that’s a high, while Yahoo and Microsoft hit new lows.

Gawker media cuts Wonkette and others loose — Gawker owner Nick Denton tells Silicon Alley Insider that as the economy stumbles, he’s ditching three “underperforming” Gawker sites: Wonkette, Gridskipper and Idolator, which will all continue under new ownership. That leaves the company to focus on its 12 “core titles,” like Silicon Valley’s beloved gossip blog Valleywag.

Google App Engine and Amazon web services, together at last — When Google launched its Engine App a week ago, allowing developers to build and deploy web applications on Google infrastructure, the move was widely seen as a move against Amazon’s web services. But just because they’re competing products doesn’t mean they can’t work together, as Portland entrepreneur Chris Anderson has shown by creating AppDrop, which allows you to build apps with Google’s software development kit and deploy in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. There have been complaints that Google Engine App locks in your applications, but AppDrop shows that isn’t quite true.

LiveUniverse reportedly acquires home page service Pageflakes — LiveUniverse, the online entertainment network run by former MySpace executive Brad Greenspan, has acquired the Ajax home page service Pageflakes, according to TechCrunch’s unidentified sources. Just a few hours earlier, GigaOM reported that Pageflakes was “desperately” seeking a buyer. Last February, a number of sites said that LiveUniverse purchased video site Revver, so the network appears to be in an acquisitive mood.

Video site Kyte has raised another $6.1 million in venture funding to push forward with a new broadcasting platform. Although anyone can use it, the platform seems targeted at big media companies, and Kyte says it’s already partnered with four major music labels, as well as hip hop star 50 Cent.

Kyte chief executive Daniel Graf says that since he unveiled the product last year, a number of media companies have approached Kyte about partnerships. There’s certainly no shortage of livestreaming sites (our overview of the field), but Graf says Kyte stands out because you can upload videos with just one click and because you can embed its channels (which update in real-time, unlike most embedded videos) pretty much anywhere online, be it your own site or social networks like MySpace and Facebook. (In our previous coverage of Kyte, we said it “appears to do everything.”)

The company is also launching some new features today that make its platform even more flexible and attractive. Rather than uploading prerecorded videos, you can now send footage live from your phone to a Kyte channel. Graf downplays the importance of this new feature, saying that most users are more interested in prerecorded video, but this is still an innovation — other sites can livestream from a phone or from webcam, but Kyte is the first to do both. (See screenshot below, in which Graf broadcasts from a webcam while showing off the mobile phone he was broadcasting from earlier.)

Kyte users can now also turn their video channels into a Facebook application in a few minutes.

There are already some complaints that the new site for Kyte’s video platform is too tough to navigate, and Graf acknowledges it could probably be improved. He also argues, however, that the site shouldn’t be a destination for most users — instead, they should be visiting the sites of its media partners. (You can also view a video demo of Kyte here.)

Graf says his long-term vision focuses more on partnerships with other companies than on the user-generated content at Kyte.tv. Kyte isn’t moving completely away from UGC, but more of it will be tied into a specific brand or partner, Graf says, such as fan videos for 50 Cent.

The new funding completes a $21.1 million second round, bringing Kyte’s total funding to $23.3 million. The money comes from Steamboat Ventures and Swedish mobile operator TeliaSonera.

Kapow Technologies, which sells software to companies that lets them assemble their own “mashup” applications by gathering data from around the web, has raised a $11.6 million third round of financing.

Mashup technologies have become increasingly important lately, now that data has proliferated around the Web and new technologies such as RSS allow people to pipe it directly to their computers, versus having to go get it themselves. A research analyst covering the retail sector, for example, no longer has to go visit the Victoria Secret web site to scour it for data and paste it into their spreadsheet. Now she can create a feed from Victoria Secret and all other major retailers, and have it all sync in a single spreadsheet within her Kapow dashboard.

Kapow, based in Palo Alto, Calif., lets her also configure a way to gather data from other places, such as internal enterprise resource planning (ERP) application or database that might be behind a corporate firewall. She can then mash it all up into whatever application format she wants.

Even if a site doesn’t provide an RSS feed, Kapow can create an RSS feed by using a robot to crawl the site. Kapow then relies on an application like Excel to allow you to pull it all together, or other receptor applications provided by companies like IBM and Serena. Kapow can even deliver it to your mobile phone.

Other companies doing something similar are Dapper, but that company has been less focused on serving large companies, more focused on consumers.

There are an array of other mashup companies, for example other mashup interface makers, such as Backface and Jackbe, but they too focus less on actually gathering data from other places, and more on helping you do the mashup application itself. Other companies, such as Connotate, provide a mashup service to automate the process for you, relying on outsourced help, and providing less customizable features.

Kapow says customers include Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Credit Suisse Boston, and that some 3,000 companies have installed the technology worldwide.

New investors include Steamboat Ventures, a venture capital firm affiliated with The Walt Disney Company, and Morgan Stanley’s Strategic Investments Group. Previous investors Kennet Partners and NorthCap Partners also participated in the round.

Vobile, one of several companies hoping to help content producers crack down on copyright infringement in video, has raised $7 million more in financing.

We previously wrote about the Silicon Valley company here, when Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu invested. The latest round was led by Steamboat Ventures (a venture firm affiliated with Disney) and undisclosed individuals, and was first reported today by VentureWire.

The video identification field is getting increasingly sophisticated, and it needs to be. Many videos are ripped and converted into the grainy format of YouTube, and then mixed with music so that they’re hard to track. A new company Eyealike launched at the DEMO conference last month (see our coverage), saying it can pinpoint with 95 percent accuracy whether an image is copyrighted material or not — using frame-by-frame analysis of the movement of objects within the footage. It says this is more effective than relying solely on image or facial recognition, which it says companies like Vobile do. Google is also testing its own product to use with video identification for its YouTube subsidiary. Other players in include the venture-backed Gracenote, and Viewdle (though Viewdle is more focused on facial recognition for indexing purposes, rather than copyright identification purposes).

The Santa Clara, Calif. Vobile has now raised at least $10 million. The company was founded three years ago, and includes among its backers angel investor Jarl Mohn, former chief executive of Liberty Digital and others.

updated
Content delivery networks are increasingly important to large media companies that want to provide play no-delay, high quality music and videos over the web.

CDNs are distributed computing systems, built to smoothly and quickly transmit large media files like videos and music online to many users. Every media company needs a CDN.

Los Angeles-based EdgeCast has differentiated itself by charging separately for bandwidth component of its service, instead of lumping it in as part of a fixed cost package of other CDN services. In other words, while other CDNs force customers to lock into a contract to pay for bandwidth as a fixed price, EdgeCast adjusts the bandwidth cost as the market price swings up and down, it says.

There’s speculation that market leaders Akamai, Limelight and CDNetworks are feeling pricing pressure, but that’s being debated. Those companies have business partnerships with many large music and video sites.

Disney, which is also reportedly looking to acquire 20 consumer internet startups, is apparently thinking about its delivery costs. Its investing arm, Steamboat Ventures, has led a $6 million investing round into the company — a strategic relationship between the two companies.

EdgeCast previous raised $4 million.

updated
While YouTube ran away with the video-sharing crown in the United States, the race is still heated in China, the world’s second largest Internet market and fastest-growing.

There, two leaders are fighting it out, Tudou.com and 56.com. Tudou commands 22 percent of searches for video on China’s most popular search engine Baidu, compared to 56.com, which gets 19 percent. In third place is Youku.com, with 13.9 percent.

56.com seeks to catch Tudou, today announcing it has raised $20 million in venture capital, led by Hikari Private Equity and Susquehanna International Group China. Hikari, a publicly traded Japanese company, focused on the mobile sector in Asia, is expected to help develop 56.com’s mobile strategy. Japan’s mobile video market is hot, and 56.com sees mobile becoming an important offering, though more likely later next year and in 2009. Hikari also sees more potential in pushing anime in video.

Tudou got ahead early, always enjoying more capital. After raising an early undisclosed amount last year, it raised $19 million more in July. It also dominated because it was quick to let people easily upload video they’d taken from TV or ripped from other places. 56.com, on the other hand, was moved first to let Chinese upload their photos and turn them into slideshows.

Both sites are seeing significant growth in people uploading their own videos, with 56.com now getting about 60,000 new videos a day, according to Jay Chang, president and chief financial officer of 56.com, in an interview early Friday. He said the levels of video being uploaded match the levels seen by YouTube when it was acquired last year. 56.com now has 30 million registered users, he said.

56.com is also the Chinese equivalent to a combined RockYou and Slide, because it commands about 90 percent of the third-party slideshow widget market in China, according to Chang. Unlike in the U.S., where people are easier with uploading videos of themselves, the Chinese initially tended to be somewhat more reserved, and were swifter to upload photos and turn them into videos via slideshows. That has since changed, as more people turn to video. But slide-shows remain popular. Todou has since moved to embrace slideshows too. Another reason for the relative slowness of video to catch on was China’s under-developed broadband infrastructure, Chang said. This financing will help the company buy more servers to handle traffic, he said.

Also investing in 56.com are Adobe Systems Incorporated and the CID Group, and previous investors Sequoia Capital and Steamboat Ventures, the venture capital firm affiliated with the Walt Disney Company. (Sequoia also backed YouTube). 56.com earlier raised $6 million.

Youku, meanwhile, has raised $28 million (see our coverage) from Farallon Capital, Bain Capital’s Brookside Capital Partners, Chengwei Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures.

Tudou.com is backed by Capital Today, General Catalyst Partners, Granite Global Ventures, IDG China, JAFCO Asia, KTB Ventures and JAIC.

56.com is using compression technology that keeps its bandwidth costs lower, compared to other sites, it says. 56.com is led by Kitty Zhou (left), who earlier was product manager at NetEase, managing its email, photo album and other applications for that early leading Chinese portal. She has brought the company a tech focus and concentration on ease of use. Chang calls her the “Marissa Mayer of China,” referring to the respected product manager at Google.

Chang said he hopes the company can become profitable within 12 to 18 months.

56.com also hopes to draw on the video technology expertise of the new investor Adobe.

Update: Corrected reference to Chang’s position, originally misunderstood in our call.

Citysearch, an online guide service about local US businesses, has partnered with MerchantCircle, in an effort to hold their own in the increasingly competitive area of local reviews.

The move comes as Citysearch is under attack from newer, fresher sites like Yelp, which offers reviews about locales and is appearing as high, if not higher than Citysearch in search engine results.

Citysearch, a division of IAC, has a large collection of local data that includes 14.5 million business listings, more than 600,000 user reviews, and ratings on more than two million business locations in the US. It has been growing through acquisitions, having purchased local review site Insider Pages earlier this year (our coverage).

MerchantCircle, which has already received funding from Citysearch, has been growing fast. It launched in June of 2006 with 5,000 merchants using its services — today it has 300,000. The Los Altos, California company lets businesses create a homepage with basic business information (including photos and videos), create online coupons, send email newsletters to customers and more. The company tells us its most successful feature is its reputation manager, a tool that automatically aggregates reviews and directory listings about a company from around the web.

The partnership will allow MerchantCircle to aggregate Citysearch data, and take advantage of Citysearch’s local ad network. Citysearch will use MerchantCircle’s software.

Of course, these companies are competing against many other also trying to provide local information more efficiently.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are all working on local search offerings. Google, for example, has both local search and local mapping services that many find useful. Then there are startups like local-review site Yelp and local search engine Grayboxx. Then, there are companies like accounting software company Intuit, which are trying to buy their way into local business. Earlier this week, Intuit purchased business web services company Homestead.

The Citysearch-MerchantCircle partnership will run deep. MerchantCircle will offer Citysearch marketing programs to its members, MerchantCircle will use Citysearch’s local and national ad-sales teams to help sell ads on its site to advertisers, and IAC will get a seat on MerchantCircle’s board.

Besides Citysearch, MerchantCircle has also taken on funding from Rustic Canyon Partners, Scale Venture Partners and Disney’s Steamboat Ventures.

Online advertising remains hot. But with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo fighting to serve advertising to large companies and publishers, smaller business clients are left neglected.

MerchantCircle, a controversial Silicon Valley company helping thousands of small businesses market themselves online, has raised $10 million in financing to pursue these small businesses further.

It has also arranged a credit line with Square 1 Bank to acquire other rivals in the sector.

The Los Altos, Calif. company has been accused of aggressive tactics. First, it lures small businesses to sign up as customers by creating profile pages for them MerchantCircle encourages the companies to “claim” these pages, by registering at the site.

Next, if the businesses don’t sign up at MerchantCircle, the company cold-calls them. MerchantCircle does offer a real service: It helps small businesses create a more robust online presence for a fee, ranging from $29 to $99 monthly, for example tracking reviews written about them at major review sites and other business listing portals. MerchantCircle alerts them when someone leaves a review about them. Merchant circle also offers them ways to advertise online with search engines (it helps them band together to get better deals too, for example, rounding up landscaping companies and working with them to create ads more cheaply at sites like Webvisible, using economies of scale). Finally, if a small business creates an online coupon on their MerchantCircle profile page, MerchantCiircle publishes that action on the pages of other local companies (see example of this in screenshot below of a profile page). This creates peer pressure, so that other companies see the actions of their peers, and are encouraged to do the same.

The strategy has worked. It has 250,000 small business customers, after 16 months of work. The latest investment is an endorsement too: Investors include Rustic Canyon, Scale Venture Partners and Disney. IAC was a new investor, which Smith said he welcomed for its expertise at doing acquisition deals. It raised $4.2 million two years ago (see our coverage).

Ben Smith, who founded Merchant, has returned as chief executive. He had previously left to become chairman, but returned to the helm this month after the company declined an offer to be acquired. Smith decided to embark on an acquisition strategy, instead. He declined to say how much the credit line is for.

One major rival is ReachLocal, which is hiring a massive salesforce to do something similar: Sell online marketing services to small business, including ads beside Google and Yahoo search results, and tools to maximize search engine optimization tricks. That company recently raised $52 million in venture backing to continue to add to its 300 person work force, and may even try to hire as many as 10,000 — all in an effort to compete with YellowPages. Reactions to our story about ReachLocal were almost universally negative (see comments; people thought it was crazy to be hiring so aggressively). The bile may reflect a bias among our Silicon Valley readers in favor of technology. MerchantCircle is a technology company — it has almost no salesforce. It has 10 employees (the marketing calls it makes are outsourced).

Another competitor is Weblistic, which is somewhere between ReachLocal and MerchantCircle on the automation scale. It has a salesforce, but not as big as ReachLocal’s. Weblistic, a two-year-old Fremont Calif. company led by the former chief technology officer of YellowPages.com, is backed by venture capital firm Foundation Capital. It has a low profile; we haven’t mentioned them before.

Here’s the latest:

1) Another Googler goes to Facebook, to head its developer platform
2) Facebook traffic apparently took a dip last month — [Update: Or didn't. See Om's update, and a big looping conversation about Facebook on Techmeme]
3) Madonna latest in string of musicians to ditch record labels
4) Mozilla preparing mobile web browser, may improve mobile web user experience?
5) Mixx.com launches to let publishers give users relevant content
6) CBS acquires gossip site Dotspotter for $10 million
7) What happens when a wiki gets old?
8) Will Crescendo Ventures be saved?
9) “Virtual TV” network raises $8M
10) Industrious Kid to part ways with Steamboat Ventures
11) SendMe, a San Francisco mobile entertainment services company, acquires Mbuzzy

Another Googler goes to Facebook, to head its developer platform – Benjamin Ling, a high-ranking Google employee who has most recently led its e-commerce effort, including online payment service Checkout, is leaving for Facebook, reports Netly News. Facebook has been successfully recruiting out of Google for months, notably stealing former YouTube chief financial officer Gideon Yu (our most recent coverage) earlier this summer.

Facebook traffic apparently took a dip last month — [Update: Are we the only ones tired of talking about Facebook?] Comscore will soon release a report showing that the number of unique visitors to Facebook decreased 9.3 percent to 30.6 million in September from 33.75 million in August, according to GigaOm’s early look at the data (see table); Pageviews were also down 3.8 percent.

Some wonder if it is Comscore that is having problems collecting accurate data although Facebook itself has been citing Comscore for much of its publicly available traffic statistics.

Madonna latest in string of musicians to ditch record labels – The ever-popular and controversial artist is about to leave Warner Brothers Records for a deal worth around $120 million with concert promoter Live Nation, reports the Wall Street Journal. The money is in live performances and merchandise, not the music itself, as TechDirt has been pointing out for years. Other major artists, such as Radiohead, have also announced distribution deals that cut out the labels.

Mozilla preparing mobile web browser, may improve mobile web user experience? – Mozilla, the nonprofit foundation that leads development on open source web browser Firefox, has announced detailed, long-term plans to develop an open source web browser designed for use on phones and other mobile devices. The move dovetails with many other efforts to develop open source mobile software, such as Google’s rumored Linux-based mobile software, as gadget blog Crave points out.

Mixx.com launches to let publishers give users relevant content — The service is yet another recommendation engine, offering up content, including news stories, video and photos, depending on a user’s interests and locations. Mixx has signed deals with USA Today, Reuters.com, The Weather Channel, Kaboose and uclick Comics. It is owned by Recommended Reading, of McLean, Virginia. It has raised $1.5 million round of funding, in a round led by Intersouth Partners.

CBS acquires gossip site Dotspotter for $10 million — Valleywag got the scoop here.

What happens when a wiki gets old? — The grandaddy of them all may be revealing the answer. A study by a Wikipedia user of the site’s stats, which have been unexamined for a year, shows that edits and new account creation have both fallen from their peaks, by 20 and 30 percent respectively. The unanswered question is whether the drop in traffic is a result of the wiki fad wearing off, or simply because the online encyclopedia has reached a critical mass of information, leaving fewer opportunities to add more.

Will Crescendo Ventures be saved? — The Silicon Valley firm has been on the ropes for some time, and we wrote last year that it may not be able to raise another fund if it didn’t produce any results soon. (Scroll way down to see our original story about the firm; apologies for the buggy page). Yesterday, one of its companies, Compellent, finally went public, and it saw a 77 percent increase in its trading price in the first hours of trading — the second best performance this year. The company is unprofitable, a network storage company among a lot of competitors that have also filed to go public, or already having gone public — all losing money. The company is based in Eden Prairie, Minn., and its technology serves small and mid-sized customers. We’ll see if it’s enough to allow Crescendo to raise another fund from its skeptical investors. Crescendo owns 21 percent of Compellent, now worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But regulations force the firm to wait six months before it can cash in on the investment. Partner David Spreng did not respond to a request for comment.

“Virtual TV” network raises $8M — The secretive Israeli company RayV has raised $8 million in a second round of financing from Accel Partners, according to Globes. One founder, Oleg Levy, was previously an executive at Kagoor, which was acquired by Juniper Networks. It says it wants to offer a new way for “consumers to find, review, and talk about local businesses. A cross between a web-based social community and an online business directory, RAYV is where people go to express their opinions on any type of local business and get recommendations from a trusted source – their peers.” Accel Partners declined comment.

Industrious Kid to part ways with Steamboat Ventures — Industrious Kid, the Oakland, Calif. company that raised $6.5 million last year to build its site, imbee.com, as a social network for kids, is going to try to buy out one of its investors, Disney-affiliated Steamboat Ventures. Apparently, the two sides have differences in strategic direction, and so Steamboat wants to get its $2.5 million back. The companies didn’t comment on the specific reasons.

SendMe, a San Francisco mobile entertainment services company, acquires Mbuzzy — The terms were undisclosed. Mbuzzy is a four-year-old mobile start-up based in San Mateo, Calif., that lets friends share content with each other over the phone, and claims 500,000 users. SendMe previously acquired Vector Mobile, publisher of solow.com.

Move Networks, a company offering video delivery technology for customers such as ABC, Fox, CW, Televisa, Discovery and ESPN.com, has raised a whopping $34 million round of capital.

This makes Move one the best funded video delivery companies out there. Late last year, it raised $11.3 million. The company is helping the large broadcasters get online, and competes against a number of other well-funded companies, such as Brightcove. These companies could put a dent in plans by newer sites such as Veoh or Joost to aggregate video content for such Internet delivery. At stake is potentially billions of dollars of ad revenue, though it isn’t clear how much Move or Brightcove can tap into this, and how much they’re simply licensing their technology to the broadcasters.

Also today, San Francisco’s BitTorrent, which offers a popular peer-to-peer technology used by many people to illegally download copyrighted video, continues its efforts to become legit. It said it has cut a deal with Brightcove to deliver video for that company’s clients, including CBS Corp., Viacom Inc.’s MTV Networks and New York Times. Its product is called BitTorrent DNA, and says its delivery is secure enough to meet these broadcasters’ needs. Brightcove has raised $80 million in backing, including $60 million of that early this year.

Move’s technology encodes high-quality video, and cuts down on buffering delays. It allows the broadcasters to stream long-form programs like Grey’s Anatomy or Bones over the Internet, delivering it across multiple platforms (to PC, mobile, etc) and adjusting speed depending on your broadband connection speed.

Silicon Valley venture firm Benchmark Capital led the round, which also included previous investors Hummer Winblad and Disney’s venture arm Steamboat Ventures.

Also investing in this round are large broadcasting industry players (including the “largest cable company” and “largest content provider,” according to our source, though the names haven’t been disclosed yet; the official announcement has been held up, we’re told, because another investor wants in).

Move’s technology also accommodates advertisers who want to target users.

The seven-year-old company is based in American Fork, Utah.

Two months ago, the company several new hires in sales and marketing, including industry veterans — for example, Doug Parrish arrived from Walt Disney Co., where he served as executive vice president and chief technology officer for the Walt Disney Internet Group. He’s senior VP of operations at Move.

Here’s a timeline of Move’s deals:
2006
- August: Fox (myspace) goes live with Move Networks
- Sept: Televisa switches to Move

2007
- January: CWTV went live with Move
- April: ABC dumps Flash for Move
- July: Many Fox Owned and operated stations
- August: ABC launches HD stream with Move
- August: Discovery launches with Move
- Sept: ESPN360.com launches with Move
- Sept: ABC/AOL launches with Move

Sample list of shows streamed by Move Networks:
- ABC High Definition (abc.com): Lost, Desperate Housewives
- Fox (fox.com/fod): 24, PrisonBreak, The Simpsons<- CWTV (cwtv.com): Girls Go Cruisin, Beauty and the Geek
- ESPN360.com (espn360.com - certain ISP/broadband connection required): college football games, NASCAR races, etc
- Discovery Networks: Discovery Channel’s “DIRTY JOBS”; TLC’s “LA INK”

Pure Digital, the San Francisco maker of low-cost camcorders, releases tomorrow (Tuesday) a new line of devices that let you upload video directly to YouTube.

Called Flip Video camcorders, they are the first that easily let you upload directly to YouTube. We reviewed Pure Digital in October, when it released a device that let you upload video to Grouper and Google in an easy way. YouTube, at the time, was too distracted with its explosive growth to consider partnering with Pure Digital.

Pure Digital boasts momentum, with its pocket-sized camcorders now rated among the best-selling camcorders in the U.S. They have double-digit percentage market share, the company says. The private company won’t release any more specifics. But the growth is enough, says chief executive Jonathan Kaplan, to justify raising $40 million more in venture backing, which the company also announces tomorrow. He said demand for the company’s initial Grouper/Google-sharing camcorders exceeded expectations, with more than half of buyers reporting using the camcorders to upload and share video. Kaplan said an IPO isn’t in the works yet. The goal is first to boost the company’s branding, he said.

The new camcorders will be available tomorrow (Tuesday) at major retailers nationwide. They retail at $119.99 for the 30-minute model and $149.99 for the 60-minute model.

The funding was co-led by AllianceBernstein L.P. and Morgan Stanley Principal Investments (MSPI). Heights Capital Management and existing Pure Digital investors Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, Focus Ventures, Crescendo Ventures, Steamboat Ventures, VantagePoint Venture Partners, and Samsung participated in the round.

Here’s the latest action:

Facebook to be biggest news publisher — Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of social networking site Facebook, suggests Facebook may soon become one of the largest news publishers around — thanks to Facebook’s newsfeed feature, which essentially creates mini articles about members based on their latest activities. He tells the WSJ:

Twenty to 30 snippets of information or stories a day, that’s like 300 million stories a day. It gets to a point where we are publishing more in a day than most other publications have in the history of their whole existence.

China bubble finally here? — For years, folks have been seeing an economic bubble in China, but its economy keeps surging forward. China’s stock markets have coming to life too (large Chinese companies have often preferred foreign exchanges until recently, including in Hong Kong or the U.S). After an eight percent sell-off a few weeks ago sparked a plunge in global stock markets, China’s benchmark Shanghai composite market rebounded to a record high last week. It was the best performing stock market last year, rising 130 percent; it is already up 14 percent this year. (See NYT.)

Google is testing new home page look — Apparently, it will put links at the top of the page, in a pull-down menu, thereby giving you easier access to applications like its spreadsheet and word processor (which are unrelated to search, and so would look odd as links atop its search bar)

For the record, Google is not building a mobile phone — At least, not the hardware, according to a clear statement by a Google executive.

Disney invests in Imbee — Disney’s venture arm, Steamboat Ventures, has invested $2.5 million in Industrious Kid, which owns Imbee, the social networking site built for kids aged between 8 and 14. Industrious Kid has signed a partnership with Disney unit Hollywood Records, so kids can download songs. We reported on Industrious Kid after it raised $6 million in private funding from co-founder Jeannette Symons and others. (See CNET story).

Kaboodle’s CTO loses arm paragliding, but persists — A remarkable story in the SF Chron about Kaboodle’s chief technology officer, Keiron McCammon, who hit a powerline a year ago while paragliding, had his arm amputated, but insisted on sitting in on key meetings to help raise $3.5 million in venture capital.

Photo TLC, a Petaluma, Calif. company that helps restore and personalize photos and other gifts, has apparently shut down, VentureBeat has learned.

Little more than a year ago, the company raised $10 million in a venture capital round led by Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, which was a late time for a photo company to be raising money.

Hundreds of photo companies had already launched, although PhotoTLC was part of a group of new wave moving toward customization as a way to diversify. But many others were jumping in the same area, such as Zazzle. Scores of photo sites have shuttered over the past few years.

Here’s part of an email that an employee sent to a contact at partner company, forwarded to VentureBeat by a credible source:

“I am writing to let you know that PhotoTLC has decided to close their business today without notifying any customers in advance. I WISH I HAD MORE OF A HEADS UP BUT I WAS NOTIFIED THE SAME TIME YOU WERE. It has been a tough day and a huge shock to me as well as I had no idea this was going to happen. I wish I had more to say but words can’t express exactly how I feel at this time.”

We’ve put in a call to the company to confirm, but it is late. Strangely, PhotoTLC’s site is still up, and appears functional, as is the site of Club Photo, a Texas company it acquired in late 2005.