VentureBeat

Here’s the latest (updated) action:
1) Kyte.tv raises $15 million
2) Electric Sheep Company lays off 22
3) FCC receives 700MHz auction applications
4) Microsoft signs $500M ad deal
5) GPS devices fly off the shelves
6) Netsuite sets high price for planned IPO
7) Eric Eldon, celebrity at large?

Kyte.tv raises $15M second round — An online startup that offers a video player allowing near-live communications by video, photo and chat, Kyte has picked up some steam online, attracting a decent-sized audience and celebrities like 50 Cent to its service. The $15 million second round was provided by Telefonica, Nokia, DoCoMo, Swisscom, Holtzbrinck and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, according to Robert Scoble. Quite a hefty amount, in comparison to the $2 million investment into live streaming video company, Ustream that we reported in yesterday’s roundup. However, Kyte still has some work to do in competing against newer, sharper-looking rivals like Qik, which says it can stream live video straight from your phone, something Kyte doesn’t quite do (though is working on).

Electric Sheep Company lays off 22 employees — It’s time to cull some lambs from the fold for the Electric Sheep Company, which builds software that third-party companies can add to virtual worlds Second Life. It had planned to build an ad network within these worlds. Instead, it has cut almost a third of its workforce, and is giving up on the ad plans for now. It plans to branch out beyond Second Life to worlds like Metaplace (our coverage). More details are at ClickZ News.

FCC receives applications for 700MHz auctions — More than two hundred applications were filed to bid on the upcoming Federal Communications Commission auction for the 700 Megahertz wireless spectrum, planned to begin January 24th. Although some applicants must correct and finalize their applications, the list contains some notable names — Google, of course, but also Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s venture firm Vulcan Capital, and startups like Frontline Wireless (expected). Check out the lists of finished and unfinished applicants yourself for more.

Microsoft signs $500M ad deal with Viacom – Taking a first step toward becoming a viable competitor to Google in the online ad market, Microsoft signed a deal with Viacom that it says is worth about $500 million, over a contract period of five years. Google, in turn, immediately claimed that the deal is proof that Federal anti-trust watchdogs should allow its merger with DoubleClick to go through. Microsoft may well be kicking itself, because as Bloomberg reports, the Federal Trade Commission will likely approve the Google-DoubleClick merger this month (although it must also find approval with European regulators).

NetSuite sets high price for planned IPO — First the expected range for NetSuite’s initial public offering was $13 to $16, then underwriters boosted it to $19 to $22. Now the final price has been set at $26, almost double the original range. That means that Larry Ellison, the billionaire CEO of Oracle whose family owns over 70 percent of the company, will make out like a bandit. NetSuite, of course, is a competitor to Salesforce, whose own stellar performance on the markets likely helped improve NetSuite’s outlook. Ellison was also at one time an early investor in Salesforce, which is now run by a former employee of his, Marc Benioff.

GPS devices becoming cheaper, more ubiquitous — Many GPS devices have dropped below $100, and even the better units often retail for little more than $200. Sales of the devices at local malls are through the roof, according to Dean Takahashi. Cell phones, likewise, are providing an ever-cheaper way to find your way around. Excellent news for the dozens of startups that have sprung up offering to show you the way to the nearest store, friend or event — now the question is, which will come out on top?

VentureBeat’s own Eric Eldon becomes a celebrity — Admittedly, those are the words of Speedddate.com, a dating startup that ran a session with eight “celebrity bloggers.” We (or he) will take the compliment. Way to end those lonely nights of blogging, Eric.

CoComment launched last year, giving bloggers a way to track comments about topics across Web sites — without actually having to visit each site.

The company reports growth, saying users find it useful to follow conversations from a single place: Their profile page at CoComment (see here for example).

However, it is difficult to gauge how sustainable the growth will be. More on that later.

Today, it’s launching new features. Publishers can offer CoComment on their sites, so that users don’t have to download software to see their comments. They just go the publisher’s site on CoComment to track all their conversations in one place. This saves them time from having to click back and forth on multiple pages. It’s available for Wordpress, Movable Type, Drupal and other platforms — through a blog-platform plugin.

So far, like CoComment , competitors Co.mments and Commentful had offered bookmarklets for users to track their comments. Commentful has a Firefox extension, as does CoComment.

CEO Matt Colebourne told us that 15 percent of the comments tracked are now taking place by conversations taking place directly on CoComment’s site. So it has become a forum of forums. To augment this, users can now become friends, track and add to each other’s comments, and see who else is commenting on their conversations — all from within CoComment itself. Hosted comments are also now visible and searchable there.

While this all may appear of marginally of interest to some, the site’s growth suggests others yearn for ways to track their conversations. It has grown from less than 30,000 users last October to around 325,000 users now, the company says, with growth still accelerating — in part because of friends inviting others to share views. However, it is difficult to know how many are active users (returning), and how many of these users are one-timers lured by the viral invites.

Another side-effect: If a blog gets commented on in the site, a link will allow users to go to the site to read the article, thereby driving more traffic to the publisher.

The site may help avoid censorship. CoComment is a “service provider” and not a content publisher. Governments — especially in Europe and Asia — that try to hold publishers accountable for reader comments will have a more difficult time going after CoComment, the company hopes. It hasn’t tested this yet, though. The company emphasizes privacy. It tracks locations, but it does not otherwise require personal information.

Here are the top 5 countries/regions, as a percent of its total users:

US: 25%
UK: 10%
Germany and France: 8%
Japan: 4%
China: 3%

Colebourne said he’s expecting trouble from the Chinese government, but hasn’t had any so far. The site can track comments in any language, although its user interface only supports six languages.

The company says it is talking with a number of large publishers in the UK who are interested in the protection it gives them (as opposed to having an in-house team that manually approves comments).

Incidentally, CoComment is based in Geneva and funded by Swisscom, a regional large telco there — CoComment wants to be the Switzerland of the comment-sphere, one might say. It is also funded by Netage Capital Partners, also the backer of Mixi, a popular Japanese social network.

Kyte.tv, the San Francisco company that lets users manage their own TV channels online or on a cell-phone, has raised a second round of financing in the “single-digit” millions of dollars.

Swiss carrier Swisscom and German media group Holtzbrinck Ventures has invested in the round, Chief executive Daniel Graf told VentureBeat. He would not disclose the exact amount. The investment follows the launch of Kyte last month. Some 3,000 users have since downloaded the player, Graf said. The funding comes after a $2.25 million investment last year from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards and Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom. (Here’s our most recent coverage, and link to the VentureBeat Kyte channel we showed off at the time).

Other investors in the latest round include “angel” investors Klaus Hommels, Oliver Jung, and Peter Schüpbach.

It’s just the latest new media investment for Holtzbrinck, which has become the German equivalent of News Corp. in terms of making Web 2.0 investments and acquisitions. Its portfolio includes studiVZ, Germany’s Facebook.