VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:
1. Data centers floating in the SF Bay?
2. CEO of search engine Ask goes to Redpoint
3. Xobni’s Outlook plugin enhanced
4. Microsoft dealmaker Bruce Jaffe to join startup life
5. Yahoo’s browser-based player now public
6. Readburner lets you see what’s shared on Google Reader
7. Nextreme keeps chips cool
8. Planting hairy plants may help prevent global warming?
9. Intel to launch WiMax PC card by June
10. LiveUniverse buying video sharing site Revver?
11. Terry Semel restarting investment company, Windsor Digital?

Data centers floating in the SF Bay? – Some of the stranger news we’ve heard, but apparently true. A Silicon Valley start-up called IDS (International Data Security) is planning to build up to 50 data centers on de-commissioned cargo ships, the first of them docked at Pier 50 in San Francisco. Image at left is an oil tanker in the Bay carrying some of these data centers, according to Silverback Migration Solutions. Apparently, this keeps the data center secure from “natural disasters” according to a company brochure, and the sea water helps cool the servers. Speaking of disasters, we recall a bad one two months ago when a tanker hit the bridge and spilled all kinds of oil. Are servers really going to be safer floating on the water? We couldn’t find too much information about this company, so still trying to confirm this one.
CEO of search engine Ask goes to Redpoint — IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Jim Safka becomes chief executive of IAC’s search engine, Ask.com, which has remained steady at around 4 percent market share since its controversial advertising campaign, a small bump up from 3 percent, but down from 5 percent several years ago. Safka will remain CEO of Primal Ventures, IAC’s investment arm. He replaces Jim Lanzone (pictured left), who joins Silicon Valley venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence. More here.

Xobni’s Outlook plugin for better email processing gets upgrades, expands test group – The San Francisco company impressed us at launch. However, it had to shut off access, due in part to high demand. It has spent the last few months making a range of improvements, including faster data processing and design changes. Today, Xobni invited the more than 14,000 people on the company’s waiting list. Each person will be able to invite up to five more friends. Xobni is most popular among those needing to track of a lot of work email, as you’d expect: Sales and marketing people, and project managers. Users are clicking on the application an average of more than eleven times per day, and internal surveys show more than 90 percent of its users are happy, the company said. Enhancements include right click actions, adding pictures, drag and drop of files, copy and paste of text etc. See here for more.

Microsoft dealmaker Bruce Jaffe leaves for Valley startup life — Jaffe was part of the team that acquired advertising firm aQuantive and invested $240 million in Facebook. He’s been interviewing at jobs in Silicon Valley, but has instead decided to start his own company, according to Valleywag’s scoop. Marketwatch confirmes the news.

Yahoo Tech Ticker: A tech TV we may just watch — It’s a select group of pundits, as TechCrunch reports: Sarah Lacy is a BusinessWeek reporter with a book on Silicon Valley slated to hit shelves later this year (you can get it on Amazon, here). Henry Blodgett is a fallen analyst turned successful blogger at Silicon Alley Insider. Paul Kedrosky is an investor, entrepreneur, blogger, and talking head. These people know a lot, and their attitudes are just as sharp.

Yahoo’s second iteration of its browser-based player is now public — It lets you link to MP3s on any web page. Details here.
Readburner lets you see what is shared on Google Reader — Readburner is the latest meme-tracker, this time on what are the most popular items shared via Google’s RSS reader. See image at left, which showed that our own Eric Eldon’s piece today was the third most popular item shared as of 10:30pm Wed eve. Mashable has more.

Start-up Nextreme keeps chips cool — The Durham N.C company, a spinoff of research institute RTI International, says it lowers temperatures in the specific areas of chips that get too hot. Excess heat has caused chip giants like Intel and AMD to find alternative methods to speed up their processors, for example creating multi-cores chips. WSJ has more.

Wiki-style website to help speed up U.S. broadband access? – Analyst Drew Clark of Washington DC will launch BroadbandCensus.com later this month, letting people enter where they live, the price of their service and how happy they are with it. A speed test will measure connection quality — and put pressure on the federal government to improve service where it is poor.

Planting hairy plants may help prevent global warming — More here.

Intel to launch WiMax PC card by June – Details at GigaOm.

LiveUniverse buying video sharing site Revver in a stock swap? — That’s the rumor. Los Angeles’ LiveUniverse, run by former News Corp. exec Brad Greenspan, owns LiveVideo, and it apparently wants to add Revver to its network of video sites. Greenspan mentions taking a 30 percent stake in LiveLeak in his blog. LiveUniverse also bought video search site Flurl in Oct. 2006. Revver took $13 million over the last two years from venture firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Benture Partners, Draper Richards and William Randolph Hearst III.

Terry Semel restarting his old investment company, Windsor Digital? — Semel, who exited from Yahoo after that company’s anemic progress over the past couple of years, is reportedly joining up with former Yahoos Drew Buckley and Jeff Karish. PaidContent has the news.

Here’s the latest action:

1) Dash Navigation opens platform
2) Flock releases new browser, with Facebook in sidebar
3) Patriots successfully sue ticket scalper, StubHub
4) Google’s great quarter: Net income up 46 percent
5) Brad Greenspan’s tell-all essay on MySpace
6) Microsoft releases Popfly, allowing non-geeks to build apps
7) Comcast steps away from Net Neutrality

Dash Navigation opens platform — Dash, you’ll recall is the cool GPS device that you can use in your car, and which will be constantly connected to the Internet. The company orginally said it was going to release its product this fall. However, last month, it delayed the release and will come next year. Notably, at the Web 2.0 Summit today, it also declared it will be an open platform. So you can do mashups with maps, and use Zillow, for example, to track the values of homes as you drive by them. That’s a good turn, because earlier year we criticized the company for being closed. That’s when it signed an exclusive contract with Yahoo to offer people search. What’s the point of letting people use the Web from their car if you’re going to shut them out from using other services? We still think this company is somewhat hyped. Accessing a decent, reliable Internet connection from your car is going to be a very difficult thing to do, and there’s loads of competition out there. As mobile internet access gets more robust, however, this device will get more attractive.

Flock offers new version of its broswer to the public here — We’ve written about its sidebar, which lets you operate within some of your social networking accounts without actully going to their site. New is the ability to access your Facebook account, and do upload photos directly to that account from your browser (see image).

Sports: Patriots successfully sue StubHub to gain ticket resellers’ identities – Stubhub, a marketplace that lets people buy and sold tickets they have purchased for sports games, concerts, and other events, was forced to divulge the identity of 13,000 of its users to the team. The Patriots claimed reselling tickets violated a Massachussets state law against reselling tickets for over two dollars the price at which they were purchased. EBay-owned Stubhub has begun notifying its affected users that the Patriots have their names, addresses and phone numbers. The Patriots management says it may revoke the tickets of people who resold on Stubhub. The Boston Globe has more. The team is now spying on its fans, after having been busted for spying on its opponents, as others have noted.

Google widens lead in search – Google’s said net income in the third quarter rose 46 percent compared to a year ago. Sales climbed 57 percent, beating estimates. Its profit margin declined somewhat, but its market share keeps rising, and competitor Yahoo said its revenues had grown just 12 percent.

Funky macro economics — We’re not certain how this will affect start-ups, but the dollar is an all-time low, at $1.42 to the euro, and the price of crude oil also hit a record, briefly breaching $90 a barrel yesterday. This could mean inflation, but housing woes are keeping things in check. (Details here).

Comcast steps away from Net Neutrality — Web companies like Joost and BitTorrent that have business models based on peer-to-peer sharing rely on the concept of “net neutrality,” meaning all traffic on the internet will be treated the same. Net neutrality isn’t a law, though; internet service providers can manipulate traffic in other ways if they wish. Comcast, the nation’s second largest internet service provider, has now been shown to be selectively blocking some peer-to-peer traffic, with no regard to the source of the traffic — in other words, they don’t care whether it comes from illegal file sharing or a legitimate business, they just don’t want it.
It’s not time for P2P-based companies to panic just yet. Comcast was already notorious for heavy-handed tactics to limit their bandwidth, and the bad publicity may force them to drop the practice. On the other hand, if the company manages to set a precedent, Joost et al. could be in trouble. And to make matters worse, many customers can’t vote with their feet by leaving Comcast — in many areas, only one or two service providers are available to choose from.

The tell-all essay of Brad Greenspan, Myspace “founder” – Greenspan played an early role at a company called eUniverse, which gave birth to MySpace. However, while he claims to have been a founder of MySpace, Myspace executives dismiss his role there. Greenspan writes in a long, unedited essay on the anti-Myspace site: I was forced to leave eUniverse at the end of October as [venture capital firm VantagePoint Venture Partners] took control of eUniverse and Myspace. His screed, complete with court documents, tells the story of how he was the driving force behind Myspace, and how a cast of characters took the company out from under him. Greenspan has already tried suing News Corp over his grievances, but his case was dismissed. See our previous coverage of the issue here. Found via YC hacker news.

Software giant Microsoft’s drag-and-drop Web mashup development tool, Popfly, now open for public testing — Its for people who don’t know how to code, and gives anybody the ability to build applications. As it becomes easier to mix and match programs, like building a house from Lego pieces, maybe the rest us will really start building applications. This may have limited popularity, but it won’t be a blockbuster.

Brad Greenspan, the jilted MySpace executive, makes play at WSJ — Greenspan, who filed a suit against MySpace’s parent company for ripping off shareholders in its sale to News Corp. (the suit was rejected), is now seeking to buy the WSJ’s parent company Dow Jones. Of course, this continues the rivalry between Greenspan and News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch, another bidder for Dow Jones.

Heads rolls at VC lobby in London, now attention moves to Washington: The CEO of the British Venture Capital Association, Peter Linthwaite was forced to resign after a dismal performance in front of Parliament defending a loophole that allows carried interest to be taxed as capital gains at 10 percent rather than income at 40 percent (more details here in NYT). This comes as the issue heats up on this side of the Atlantic, with Congress taking a deeper look at whether private equity professionals — including possibly Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists — should be paying more tax.

WeFi offers a useful way to find free WiFi hotspots — Several sites let you find WiFi spots, including Jwire.com. However, for the most part, they’ve lacked a social component, and WeFi fills that void. Started 18 months ago by Arnon Kohavi (chief exec), Yossi Vardi and Shimon Scherzer, the company offers a download that lets you discover and connect to nearby free WiFi spots. A map displays the location of other WeFi users (users add the location themselves) and this info is updated every 15 minutes for all users. The Mountain View company has an R&D center in Tel Aviv, and is funded with $7.35 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pitango and Gemini. Kohavi tells VentureBeat the service has gotten a lot of initial downloads since launching a press blitz earlier this week. This is useful for those people spontaneously on the go.

However, we see a long slog ahead for this company. There are so many free WiFi spots already, and even paid ones that offer value (we have a Starbucks account, for example) that it will be difficult to convince existing providers to opt into its platform. Only then can it start serve advertising to make money — and this, arguably for some, degrades the free WiFi experience. Kohavi says he may be able to convince WiFi providers to switch, if he can show them how to make more money. It’s also a tough slog because other services, such as Whisher, hope to let people connect for free, and to serve advertising as well. Kohavi says he’s now considering using the service for hooking up people seeking dates, or gaming partners.

Google approaches 3rd anniversary — And that means more exodus of talent is likely. Employees still holding pre-IPO shares will be completely vested on August 19, meaning they no longer have to stay in order to be able to cash in their stock.

Truphone, a UK-based start-up offering a VoIP download for mobile phones, gets kicked around by T-Mobile UK — Truphone makes it easy to make cheap calls over dual-mode (VoIP/cellular) phones. T-Mobile is refusing to connect calls from the company.

Imeem launches first ad-supported online music service — We wrote about Imeem’s plans several months ago. It has now launched, and compensates artists when their music is streamed on Imeem. It launches with 5,000 record labels with 3 million tracks. This is the company sued recently by Warner.

Odd turns in the story of Tom Perkins, the founder of Kleiner Perkins — Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is, along with Sequoia, one of the two most storied and successful venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Founder Tom Perkins’s monster yacht, it turns out, cost $130 million to build (see Newsweek story by David Kaplan), the most expensive sailing craft ever. That’s up from the $100M we reported last year. More bizarre, however, are the events from 11 years ago, only now showing up in his published memoir. He was racing his yacht off the French coast when he capsized a smaller craft, killing a doctor on board. “I was arrested and tried in a foreign court in a language you don’t understand, by judges indifferent - or worse - to justice, represented by an inappropriate lawyer with the negative outcome preordained,” Perkins, 74, wrote, according to PageSix. Author Danielle Steel sat in court with him.

Another great post from Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen — This one is about what it’s really like to start a company He has good line about the euphoric up days and the catastrophic downer days that seem to plague a founder’s early days.

YouTube released in nine languages — This is about time. Home grown competitors in France and Germany, such as DailyMotion, are gaining footholds.

YouTube Mobile released — The carrier-agnostic version is finally here. But YouTube is still selecting the types of videos it shows, and so will frustrate some. FAQ here. Moreover, YouTube will begin encoding videos in a higher-quality format for the iPhone. Some 10,000 videos will be prepared in the H.264 format for the iPhone.

YouTube launches online video editing tools — They are basic, but basic is what most creators of YouTube’s grainy two-minute videos really need.

LongJump offers ways for non-programmers way to create applications — There are plenty of competitors, however, so this isn’t particularly new. (More details here).

Simple Spark offers a catalog of Web 2.0 products — It makes them easy to find for mainstream users who aren’t versed in the new ways. Searches for Flicker will turn up flickr, delicious will turn up del.icio.us, etc. It offers a concise description of each application. Despite an orderly interface, however, the options remain overwhelming. See this catalog of photo companies, for instance