VentureBeat

Roundup of the latest tech action in Silicon Valley:

Young start-ups pouring into the South of Market (SOMA) area in San Francisco. Deja-vu? — The region’s real estate prices are lower, at least where large companies like Looksmart are able to sublet expensive buildings to new copycat video sites like Cuts. With the territory comes late-night sleepovers, punching bags and yoga. See story in WSJ. Deja-vu, the same thing happened during boom #1.

Yahoo’s assumptions on Facebook — Techcrunch has scoop on Yahoo’s acquisition talks with Facebook, and Yahoo’s assumptions about Facebook’s performance. Notably, Facebook will have about $50 million in revenues this year, and would hit $1 billion in profit in 2015 according to projections — and thus justifying a $1 billion acquisition price. More remarkable is that Yahoo predicts Facebook will have a penetration rate of 60 percent among all young Internet users, up from 18 percent his year. Unfortunate for Yahoo, this justifies Facebook CEO’s Zuckerberg’s inclination to hold on to the company.

Do VCs cut good entrepreneurs? Perhaps, but rough going — Here’s a good story about latest on VCs-turned-entrepreneurs. Poor guys. They have to decide what chairs to put in their office.

Google’s smokescreen innovation — There’s an insightful piece in the Chronicle, printing a Q&A with Google’s Sergey Brin in 2000, where Brin says Google wouldn’t do anything besides search. Brin also made a statement several months ago that Google was rolling out too many features, and not honing the ones it already has. And remember CEO Eric Schmidt saying Google Payments wouldn’t compete with PayPal? Right. There’s a pattern emerging here. Google is releasing as many features as possible: There’s Google Maps with Wikipedia and user notations (see icons). There’s Gmail Fetcher, which lets you get email from other non-Gmail accounts in one place, just as you can do with Outlook. Only thing missing now is getting your Gmail offline. And there’s very extensive additions to Google Finance, worth checking out for all the tools it offers. And, of course, there’s radio advertising.

Although perhaps Google isn’t as innovative as you may think — Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny says Google copied its IE7 download feature, and has pretty good evidence. Google has since changed the look, but we’re wondering if someone’s head is rolling as a result. And the radio program looks similar to Voice.com’s. Suppose there’s a chance Google merely didn’t see it, though that’s unlikely because Google’s radio product managers surely would have soured the market.)

Easy in-video tagging and clipping — There’s a new product called Scenemaker that launched today. It lets you clip and tag any portion of a video, and the user interface looks good. Demo here.

61 video sites compared — This is a nice effort at taxonomy, but somehow not too helpful.

iTunes sales collapsing? — The Register is a notoriously unreliable source. But it cites a Forrester analyst here, who may or may not have pinpointing evidence of a collapse in iTunes sales. If true, could it have something to do with all the innovation going on, music rights getting cut with other sites, from YouTube, to Grouper?

[Update: The Fotodunk purchase price was $120,000. Our previous guess of between $1 and $5 million stemmed from a confidential discussion that turns out to have been misinformed. Apologies]

You’ve been hearing a lot about iLike lately, and they have more coming.

It’s a fresh a way of seeing a list of the music your friends are listening to, and to get recommendations on independent artists based on your tastes (we wrote about it here).

VentureBeat has been tinkering with it, and we find ourselves headed down to the Apple store to buy an iPod for the first time. We’ve been reluctant to buy an iPod so far, in a futile effort to avoid getting locked in — but iLike has pushed us over the edge. Here’s why: Simplicity.

There’s a lot going on, but iLike keeps things straightforward. A partial screenshot of iLike chief executive Ali Partovi’s profile on iLike is shown below. (We’ve cropped away other parts, such as his friends and comments sidebars). But you’ll see the music he has recently played. If you click on the “California Girls” link, a short MP3 will play. But here’s the cool part. iLike has just added a “play video” option, which searches for a video on YouTube that matches the song, and plays one if it finds it.

Moreover, if you look at his most-played artists (lower down on his profile, not shown in image here), you can click on one, say Jack Johnson, and it will take you to Johnson’s profile, which lets you try out snippets of all his songs on iTunes. There’s a whole bunch going on, including the emergence of a social networking phenom — people commenting on a “comment bar” of friends, for example. There are compatibility scores, so that if your friends are highly compatible with you in music tastes, you can get more recommendations.

In a way, this reminds us of Facebook. It is a clean, structured site that is useful for a group of people with a common interest (in Facebook, it was college life; in iLike, it is music discovery), but is not open to the garish creativity you find at MySpace.

Finally, this company, which has no ties to Apple other than a trademark agreement to allow it use the similar iLike/Garageband name, is going to be doing a lot more.

For example, iLike is upgrading its mobile offerings, VentureBeat has learned. It has quietly purchased Fotodunk, a site that lets mobile phone users send photos via email to a its server, and which uploads the photos directly into a Flash widget on a MySpace profile. The company is now working for iLike on a secret project, to be disclosed later. Our guess is the purchase was for between $1M and $5M [this was wrong; see update above] — not bad for three guys who started FotoDunk in April while still at Cal: David McIntosh, 19, Daniel Kluesing, 21, Alan Rutledge, 21. A fourth co-founder, Darian Shirazi, 19, left Facebook after two years of work in September, and joined the team before the purchase. (These guys met with the iLike folks at in a Fulsom St. bar in SF to sign the documents, but were forced to go into an alleyway to finish the deal because there were underage).

The service itself wasn’t that profound, but was very easy to use (see Mobilecrunch review). Helio, for example has offered the service before; but Fotodunk expanded it for use on all cell-phones. It launched in May, and had thousands of users within two weeks. We’re wondering whether they may just upgrade the photo service to video, and integrate it all.

Hacker Jon Lech Johansen, who became known for cracking the copy-protection technology in DVDs, now claims to have unlocked the playback restrictions of Apple iPod and iTunes music products and plans to license his code to others. There’s a summary of his plans by the Associated Press.

He says he is on solid legal ground.

Today, songs purchased from Apple’s online iTunes Music Store can’t be played on portable devices made by other companies. Songs purchased from many other online music stores also won’t work on iPods because they similarly use a form of copy-protection that Apple doesn’t support.

Johansen said he has developed a way to get around those restrictions by creating code that mimics Apple’s copy-protection system. But unlike his previous work, which he usually posts for free, the Norway native plans to capitalize on his efforts through his Redwood Shores-based DoubleTwist Ventures, said the company’s only other employee, managing director Monique Farantzos.