VentureBeat

Mill River Labs has raised a $900,000 seed round for its start-up information wiki TradeVibes, which just launched in public testing mode.

TradeVibes is far from the only website to offer some kind of company database — read our hot-off-the-press coverage of LinkedIn’s new features, for example — but chief executive David Li’s vision goes beyond creating an information repository. TradeVibes, he says, can become the center of not just business facts, but also debate and discussion.

Investors include the “godfather of Silicon Valley” Ron Conway, Dave McClure, the Kinsey Hills Group and Aydin Senkut’s Felicis Ventures. (Senkut is an investor in VentureBeat.)

Despite some respectable backing — and the impressive history of its four co-founders, who were all early PayPal employees — the Mountain View, Calif.-based company seems to face an uphill battle. For one thing, it doesn’t have the built-in publicity that CrunchBase gets from parent site TechCrunch, and it can’t draw on a large pool of existing users like LinkedIn’s new company directory (the former can be edited wiki-style by users, while the latter should be adding wiki features soon).

Li, on the other hand, is quite aware of TradeVibes’ competitors — you can look them up on TradeVibes’ “Mill River Labs” profile. In fact, the “competitors” page is one of TradeVibes’ best features. Not only can you see a list of competing and related companies, you can also draw up a chart comparing those companies’ web traffic. (See screenshot below.) Other features include a “start-up discovery” function that identifies start-ups in the TradeVibes database that might match your interests, as well as a customizable company information widget. It also helps that unlike some competitors, such as Hoovers, TradeVibes is free.

Above and beyond the individual features (which are mostly useful, but not groundbreaking), there’s TradeVibes general emphasis on social tools. After all, the wiki approach — and Li’s stated desire to “democratize company information” — is the heart of the TradeVibes concept, not an add-on as it is at CrunchBase and elsewhere. Not only can users write and edit TradeVibes company profiles, they can also submit relevant news stories, which other users can discuss and vote on. There’s also a “Bulls vs. Bears” option, in which you can vote on and argue about a company’s prospects.

So the site offers a bunch of interesting, possibly useful ways for entrepreneurs, investors and others to interact, and the whole package is quite intuitive. But, like any wiki, TradeVibes’ real value won’t become clear unless and until it attracts users. If it can’t, anyone visiting the site will find him or herself in an empty room — a nice room, but empty nonetheless. If, on the other hand, people start participating, then TradeVibes could build itself into a fun, informative and thriving community.

updated

VentureBeat has just raised a seed round, and I wanted to be the first one to let you know. The news is beginning to leak after we filed a regulatory document.

VentureBeat has grown steadily since launching more than a year ago. We’ve been hiring writers and we have record traffic. I’ve bootstrapped the company thus far, and while it’s been rewarding, there’s just so much more we’d like to do. We’ve been pretty much in the black since I launched, and I’ve hired writers as cash afforded. Now that we’ve got our feet on the ground, its time to get to the next phase.

We’ve raised $320,000 cash from a number of angel investors, including Georges Harik, a very early employee at Google and manager of several of its early products; Aydin Senkut, another early Google employee who is now running a small angel fund called Felicis Ventures; Mike Brown, an investor at Foundation Capital, but who invested on his own accord; Philippe Cases, an investor specialized in open source; MHS Capital; Amidzad; and Elliott Donnelly’s White Sand Group among others.

Obviously, with investors come potential conflicts. Each one of the investors is aware of VentureBeat’s determined focus on independent reporting, and we won’t be changing that. If we write about a topic where we feel we have a conflict, or a perceived conflict, we’ll disclose it clearly in a story.

Update: We’ve just seen a piece published by PEHub, which suggests our traffic is falling. The reporter who called me up just now didn’t even bother to ask me about it. Too bad, because our traffic hit a record high last month, and it’s been growing strongly. That’s confirmed by all our direct-measurement stats, from Google Analytics to FM’s page tracker. We’ve got syndication deals, too, plus growing RSS feeds. Alexa and Compete, the sites PEHub cites, are notoriously unreliable, especially for relatively small sites (read this), because they rely on non-direct methods. Wow, now even I know how it feels to be raked over the coals by an aggressive reporter. Though he’s a competitor, so I guess we should expect that.

Weebly, the free AJAX website creator, has just raised a $650K angel round and launched a way for you to create blogs from within your site.

The move pits the young San Francisco company, which has garnered about 25,000 users, against entrenched players like Google’s Blogger, Automatic’s WordPress and SixApart’s TypePad — each of which have millions of users.

The money comes from Ron Conway, Steve Anderson, Paul Buchheit (a creator of Gmail), Aydin Senkut and Mike Maples. Weebly had received its seed funding from YCombinator.

Weebly’s blog creator deploys the same remarkably simple AJAX-based, drag-and-drop interface that makes their website design tool so easy to use. (See our previous coverage here.)

When creating blog pages, you get the extra option of a “Blog Sidebar,” from which you can drag Twitter, Flickr and del.icio.us Linkrolls widgets (partial screenshot below). Weebly intends to add to this selection of widget defaults, but for now you can add any widget you want by dragging in an HTML box and pasting the widget’s code.

The best thing about Weebly is that you see the effects of your edits at the instant you implement them. Unlike its biggest rivals — including Blogger, which has some AJAX controls — there’s no need to pop up another window, adjust some settings and look at the preview to make sure you’ve nailed it. While Weebly is simple and fun to use, however, you’ll need design skills to create a professional looking blog — with appropriate color matching, and so on.

Weebly, its rival SiteKreator and others represent a move towards the commoditization of basic website design. All of them are in the early stages and do not have wide reach or a robust business model. But they represent a growing, potentially critical threat to web designers not versed in the cutting edge of the art. As these companies — and their much larger rivals — continue to improve on this technology and implementation, this threat becomes even greater.

Happy Thanksgiving weekend, folks. Here’s a roundup of the latest.

The crisis at Digg — Digg, the San Francisco company that lets users rank news, is facing a credibility test. A fake story about Sony recalling its PlayStation 3 stayed on the site’s front-page for several hours, even though the content was clearly questionable — people blindly digged the article nonetheless. This led to some sleuthing by Niall Kennedy, who turned up evidence of some major spamming. This and other problems are causing some people to give up on the site.

How — or how not — to buy out your angels — We’ve written about Evan Williams’ move to buy back his struggling podcasting company, Odeo, back from his investors. The New York Times reports today he paid $2 million to do this. But since Charles River told VentureBeat it made money on the $4 million it originally invested in the Odeo, this suggests Williams must have additionally handed over more than $2 million in unused cash to the firm. Evan must indeed be a nice guy; arguably, based on the facts at hand, he could have just closed the company and moved on. Instead, he’s $2 million out-of-pocket. Maybe we’re missing something. VentureBeat was supposed to connect with Evan two week ago, but our schedules didn’t work out. Stay tuned…

Yergin says we’re not running out of oil — Pulitzer Prize-winning oil historian Daniel Yergin argues we won’t begin running of oil until 2030, later than a lot of experts have been saying lately.

Has Silicon Valley’s luck moved south? — The Persian rug merchants in Palo Alto own various properties, including a venture fund called Amidzad, and lots of real estate in Palo Alto including the supposed lucky spot at 165 University (early home of Google, PayPal, etc). They say that luck may be moving south. Earlier this year, led by Saeed Amidi (pictured here), they opened a 150,000 square foot building in Sunnyvale to house start-ups, called Plug & Play Tech Center. Already three of the newcomers have been acquired by other companies. In just the past couple of weeks, Bix was acquired by Yahoo, Nsite by Business Objects (though, if you believe the comments, the exit may not have been that great), and Andale by Vendio. Other companies at the complex are getting funded: Solexant just raised an angel round for its new solar cell technology. Meanwhile, 165 Univ. hasn’t been too lucky lately.

Mobio offers movie service — Mobio is a relatively new mobile phone service that provides movie listings, reviews, maps and the ability to buy tickets easily from your phone. We mentioned the company earlier this year, when it was still secretive. It has raised $9 million from Interwest Partners, Storm Ventures and others. You load it from the company’s site, at www.getmobio.com, but it only works for the RAZR and some Samsung phones.

HAVA, better than the SlingBox? — The makers of the HAVA say it lets you stream your TV programming to any PC, wherever you are. And it says it does the popular SlingBox one better. It is compatible with Windows XP Media Center Edition, works with WiFi (SlingBox is Ethernet only), and allows multi-casting (multiple PCs can view the stream at the same time, compared to SlingBox, which allows only a single viewer).

The company let us demo it, and we liked the quality. It is selling for $249. We first saw a review of HAVA at CNET. It is made by a private company we haven’t written about before, Monsoon MultiMedia, with R&D in India, but marketing and sales in San Mateo.

San Francisco news ranking start-up Digg has become a symbol of new-age Internet buzz, ever since its hyped cover story on BusinessWeek several weeks ago.

Now TechCrunch reports Digg has been in recent acquisition discussions with a number of companies, including News Corp. — with a price of $150 million being discussed.

Rumors abound of a possible sale. BusinessWeek cited sources saying Digg was worth $200 million, but that value was so out of whack with Digg’s revenue and usership base that it was hard to find credible. That, combined with the article’s other errors (partly documented in the comments), put the whole story into question. See this Red Herring piece, which suggests that based on a both user numbers and rules of thumb concerning value as related to revenue, the $200 million number is way too high, when compared to the MySpace acquisition.

Or was it? This is where we get into the game of unreliable statistics, and it gets extremely frustrating. If we don’t get more standards on stats, the industry will suffer.

Techcrunch caught word of early Google talks with YouTube, but it has caught word of other rumors that haven’t panned out. More notable, though, is its reference to the unreliability of traffic statistics. Specifically, it suggests Digg’s claim to have 20 million unique monthly visitors has created a bone of contention in the acquisition talks. Comscore shows Digg has only 1.3M uniques. As a result, the article suggests, Digg wasn’t able to get its bottom line demand of $150 million. Instead, the article concludes, Digg may decide to raise $5 million + from its backers, possibly Greylock Partners.

Now, when Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion, it was such a huge bet on the future of video that accuracy of statistics for YouTube usership may not have played a big role. Everyone knows YouTube is the biggest, and even if your measurement is one or two degrees off, you are going to do a deal based on basic hunches and not on whether video traffic today is at 30 or 35 percent market share.

But then there’s the other thing you can do, if you are really interested in buying a company — and it’s presumbably what News Corp and others did with Digg. You take a look at the targeted company’s own server statistics — which the company will surely show you if you are serious about buying them. Yet even these statistics are being thrown into doubt. Take a look at this recent piece by BusinessWeek, written by one of the authors of the original Digg story, about how unreliable statistics are. It tells the story of Seth Sternberg, chief executive of online IM site, Meebo, offering Comscore access to his internal statistics and trying to convince Comscore that its estimates for Meebo’s traffic are too low — to no avail.

Techcrunch says Comscore’s data are notoriously unreliable. Singling them out is a little unfair. Comscore may be off, but everyone else is off too. And the reason Comscore has become more credible for some people is because it is more conservative. It doesn’t count any of the junk page views, such as ad pop-up ads, that a server may count, for example. Indeed, more advertisers are requesting Comscore data for this reason. And thus a game begins to get played. Advertisers like Comscore because they can pay less to sites if the data shows less traffic.

In other words, this statistics problem has become big. We’ve written about it before.

By the way, we checked with Digg about this latest acquisition rumor, and here’s Kevin Rose’s response, as sent through a spokesman:

After the YouTube buyout there have been so many rumors and speculation about the future of Digg that we’ve made the decision as a company to not respond to any of them. As always, we’re focused on execution and cranking out future versions of digg — you can expect many cool new features coming very soon.

Also, here’s more background on the valuation discussion, from Red Herring article:

To look at this another way, the $200-million valuation is roughly 66 times current revenue. Put in context, when News Corp. paid $580 million for Intermix, the parent company of MySpace, the offer was seven times company revenues—and News Corp.’s offer was called stratospheric at that time.

Users can be another benchmark of a company’s value. At the time of the News Corp. acquisition, MySpace parent Intermix had 27 million unique users, valuing the purchase at $21 per user.

By that measure, if Digg were acquired for $200 million with 1.35 million unique visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix’ traffic estimates, it would be valued at $148 per user.

Silicon Valley never sleeps. Here’s the latest tech stuff:

Digg subverted — The news site that ranks stories based on how many users submit them, is being subverted by a group called Spike the Vote. It lets its members conspire to submit certain URLs of stories — thereby lifting the odds those stories will get front-page coverage.

MyBlogLog goes live — This is a site we’ve mentioned before, while it was in testing mode. It hasn’t changed its basic model, so we’ll refer to that earlier story for the full background. MyBlogLog has provided a way for bloggers and other sites to get more information about its visitors. One of its offerings is a “recent readers widget,” which shows the photos/avatars of the recent readers on a site. So for example, every time we show up at blog of venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who has implemented the widget (see lower left hand side), we are surprised to we see our own face. It is opt-in, so if you haven’t signed up to MyBlogLog, your photo won’t be there).

Three of the four major music companies make money off of YouTube deal — This is a bizarre. Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony and Bertelsmann’s jointly owned Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and the Warner Music Group — each quietly negotiated small ownership stakes in YouTube as part of video- and music-licensing deals they struck shortly before the sale to Google, the New York Times is reporting. The music companies collectively stand to receive as much as $50 million from these arrangements, sources told the Times.

Moreover, the music companies rushed to complete the deal ahead of the YouTube deal, in part so that they could benefit in the jump in YouTube’s value, the Times said.

Sounds a bit like extortion, in other words: Wink, nudge, you let us make $50 million, and we’ll let you acquire YouTube and leave you alone legally — for the time being.”

Sneak preview of the Sling Media for Mac — Here.

The $1,200/year online calendar — Trumba has some guts. The Seattle start-up (which we mentioned here), backed by profit-focused firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, August Capital and Oak Investment Partners, is lifting its price to $99 a month from $39.95 — even though a host of free competing calendar offerings exist on the market. We don’t get this one. (Via Jeff Nolan).

Paul Graham always makes you think — The essayist has written “The 18 Mistakes that Kill Start-ups” and it’s great reading.

Friendster says it has a new patent — Liz Gannes at Gigaom says social networking company Friendster called her up to chat about the new patent it has , which Friendster says covers uploading a photo and associating it with someone you are connected to on an online social network. Friendster says it should extend to “videos, audio, comments,” and any other content type, supported in public or private forums, within a social network. But we don’t see any reference to video or audio in the patent text, so we’re not sure what they’re talking about. We’ve contacted Friendster to check.

SF’s WiFi project derailed, or seriously delayed, by crazy nut jobs — Or so says David Freeberg. Sounds like Google’s Chris Sacca was right when he blew up in frustration about this earlier.

Google Optimizer — If you are an advertiser on Google, this new tool lets you experiment with different headlines, copy, and images that people see when they click on an ad link and come to your site. This experimentation, Google says, will let you find out which combination results in the most conversions.

Washington is in sad state of ignorance — On Tuesday, we referred to comments made by the AeA’s Bill Archey, a lobbyist for high-tech, bemoaning the ignorance most members of Congress show on technology issues. Eric Schmidt, chief exec of Google, made a similar point Tuesday: Those in the know about technology must spend more time reaching out to governments and helping them understand the Internet’s role in society, he said: “The average person in government is not of the age of people who are using all this stuff,” ZDNet quoted Schmidt saying. “There is a generational gap, and it’s very, very real.”

Kongregate lets game developers make money directly — This is a San Francisco start-up that lets game developers upload their Flash-based games, and gives them a cut in any revenue made from users. It is in a closed testing phase, but is eager for feedback. Founder Jim Greer told us yesterday the company is raising a seed round of capital.

Updated

Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, the co-founders of the news ranking site Digg, have started yet another company. Called Revision3, it is an Internet video production house that will exploit the trend toward TV viewing via mobile phone and podcasting.

Digg chief executive Jay Adelson will be interim chief executive of the new company, he told VentureBeat in a briefing last week.

It is the outgrowth of Internet video activities they’ve been developing on the side. They’ve just raised $1 million in financing, led by a $250,000 commitment from Greylock Partners, which also backed Digg and some other popular sites like Facebook. Other investors include Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, and Michael Tanne, of tag search engine Wink, Don Hutchison, of Goodmail/Excite@Home, Mike Maples, a podcasting expert, and Ron Conway.

We’ll point to the NYT story this morning as a good overview. It is worth reading, and we won’t try to replicate all of its reporting here. The NYT broke the embargo of tomorrow (at least that is what we were told), but since the NYT has run something, we are too:

Here is the full cheat-sheet. The company launches tomorrow.

In brief, Revision3 builds on a number of popular programs their team have already produced, such as geek show “Diggnation” and cooking show “Ctrl-Alt-Chicken” in an attempt to grab market share in a fast-growing area of niche TV online. They say hundreds of millions of people are ready to tap into such content; this is another “long-tail” play, an overused term, but you get the picture. Revision3 wants to profit by being early. It is called Revison3 because it is ushering in the third era in video evolution, Adelson says. The first was cable TV programming, catering to the general interest. The second was PC-based Internet video, but it had no business model, he argues.

The main audience of “Diggnation” is Digg users, which number more than half a million members, according to Adelson. Each edition is downloaded about 250,000 times, and is one of the most popular shows in the Apple iTune directory. Meanwhile, the expansion of Revision3 beyond technology matches Digg’s own effort to appeal to users outside of technology, which has had limited success so far.

Revision3 continues the experience Rose had at cable TV channel TechTV. TechTV was acquired last year by Comcast, and Adelson says the service has been somewhat neglected. He emphasizes Revision3 will produce the shows itself, and will not be an aggregator like YouTube or Podshow. It’ll have its own network, cameras, editors, producers — all designed for the iPod video generation. With syndication technology like RSS gaining ground, people can download these shows easily, whether via iTunes, TiVo or a Palm phone with Verizon, Adelson said.

The revenue model will be advertising, he said — focused on product placement, for example interrupting a show to say that it is sponsored by say, GoDaddy. He said numerous advertisers have called, wanting to advertise at Revison3’s early shows (which now number ten - see list here), but things have been so busy he hasn’t been able to sign them up. The company could be profitable immediately, but will go into the red first, he said. “The capital requirements are so low that we’re already profitable going into this round,” he said. “The intent is to go non-profitable as soon as possible, because we want to scale the business.”

Does Adelson really have the stamina to be CEO of two fast-moving companies? “Its crazy, I admit it,” he told us. But he’ll do it until he breaks, and will be looking for a CEO to take his place when the time is right. “It’s passion of mine,” he said, pointing to his life-long career in the TV industry.

Another Google guy has started investing in start-ups, though this time he is not likely to leave Google anytime soon to do this full-time.

Chris Sacca, a dealmaker at Google and overseer of Google’s WiFi project in San Francisco, says on his blog What is Left that he has invested in popular photo-sharing company, Photobucket — noteworthy, since he’s backing a competitor to Google’s own photo site, Picasa.

But then Sacca isn’t a meek guy. He’s been griping in public about San Francisco officials who have been slowing down Google’s efforts to install its WiFi network there. He complained that the talks on the final contract have stalled, and that officials have requested free computers and a share in revenues — both unreasonable demands. “The WiFi project will happen,” he told us last night. “It has worked in Mountain View and will eventually work in SF. Every now and then we need to remember that we are all building these systems for the people who visit our community training sessions and ask, “What’s a browser?,” he said. “When we think of those disenfranchised folks, everyone moves faster and with the deserving end user in mind.”

Will frustration with SF force Sacca to exit Google to launch an angel career, similar to ex-Google Aydin Senkut, who has been investing all over the place, and rivaling angel Ron Conway as chief sponsor of Web 2.0 companies? No. Sacca said in an email: “I wish I had the ammo that Aydin has. However, I joined Google in 2003 and therefore my investment in Photobucket makes no rational sense with respect to my net worth. :)”

SlimDevices to release latest Squeezebox — The come-out-of-nowhere Mountain View start-up sells a device that lets you play your music anywhere in the house, and hooks up with all kinds of services, from Pandora to Rhapsody. Its latest one will sell for $2,000 device; the NYT has the scoop. This scrappy company is run by 20-somthing Sean Adams, and to our knowledge he has made do with a mere $330,000 from angels (though he may have raised more without us knowing).

ChaCha a new search engine, with guides — That’s right. This company is just like Google, only it pays its employees or contractors to help you refine your search. On the good side, this a really useful service, and we hope ChaCha will stay in business. But that is the mind-boggling part for us. Read the story in the Mercury News. Maybe we’re missing something, but if this service is really for free, how is the company going to make money? Yes, there may be search result advertising (including vidoes while you wait), but we don’t see how that will cover the costs. We tried it out, but got tired waiting for a response (ChaCha is supposed to average about a minute, but we gave up after five minutes waiting for answer we posed about how much venture money start-up Rojo had raised; it was listed on both VentureBeat and Gigaom, but ChaCha didn’t find it). And we were annoyed by the site, which made regular “swooshing” sounds, though don’t understand why (was it the ads?). Don’t want to be quick to criticize; we’re just raising these questions given the prominent coverage in media articles where the cost question isn’t really dealt with.

Band of Angels for India — The Band of Angels in Silicon Valley, a network of individuals who band together to invest in start-ups, has been fixture for years. They told us a few years ago they had no plans to go international. So now there is a Band of Angels in India, led by the same guy Alok Mittal, who also happens to run the new office in India for Silicon Valley venture firm Canaan Partners. See more at Gigaom.

Digg to respond to criticism about clique influence — Responding to criticism that a small group of influential “Diggers” are controlling what news gets to the site’s home page, Digg chief exec Kevin Rose says he’s found a way to counterbalance their influence. He said a new algorithm will “look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be [needed] to deem the story homepage-worthy.”

Has eBay become the investment bank for Web 2.0? — With Web calendar company Kiko being bought on eBay for $250,000 by another company Tucows, this is a question being posed lately about eBay being posed lately. Om first joked about eBay setting a new floor on investment banking fees about a few days ago. Now Techcrunch is talking about it as a serious way for Web 2.0 companies to be bought. There are more showing up. Indeed, why don’t companies place a permanent listing at eBay, disclosing the lowest price they’d agree to be sold for — even if they aren’t desperate for a sale yet? They can keep changing the offer price, depending on their own assessment of their promise. In Kiko’s case, of course, the company had run out of steam, and wanted to make whatever it could from a sale of its assets. And Tucows, which wanted a basic calendar company for its own use, made the move. Tucows probably wouldn’t have found out about Kiko without eBay. Conclusion: The risks associated with starting a Web company, already reduced because of the very low costs involved, have just gotten even lower. Maybe that’s why you see even more Web calendars still launching (the company hassome differentiating features such as voice-enabled entries, and new ways of synching.)

Woz’s book, and Steve Jobs’ change of heart — Valleyway runs with some news that it concedes might be a tad old; but we hadn’t seen it. It is about Woz’s book, and why the Apple co-founder couldn’t get his former colleague, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, to write a foreward. Perhaps no one saw news about the book until now because the latest, from the DailyNews, has a much more colorful quote from Wozniak:

“We wanted him to do a foreword, but he declined,” Wozniak tells Jacob Bernstein this week in WWDScoop, the new magazine from Women’s Wear Daily. “He felt the book sort of portrayed me as a good guy and him as an a-hole.”

Among other anti-Jobs anecdotes, Wozniak recalls in the book that when he invented a universal remote control and sent it to Jobs, he threw it against a wall, stuck it in a box, and mailed it back. “Steve had a fit about it,” Wozniak tells Bernstein. “He was under the impression that I’d left Apple in a very negative mode.”