VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action (updated):

Airborne mash-up: lawn chair travels 193 miles –Oregon resident Kent Couch tried to fly to Idaho last weekend — in an apparatus made out of his lawn chair carried by 105 large helium balloons. He carried instruments to measure altitude and speed, and also a parachute. He didn’t make it, though. (Image courtesy of AP)

More adult supervision at Facebook — Chamath Palihapitiya, a former AOL executive turned venture capital investor at the Mayfield Fund, will be joining the company as VP of product marketing and operations. Known for helping to turn around AOL’s instant-messaging division, his job now will include helping the company to figure out how to make more money.

Rumors have emerged that Facebook wants to public, and so filling out senior ranks is important. Facebook now says it has 30 million active users. It is reportedly making $30 million annually from $150 in revenue. We’ve heard a big portion of this comes from Microsoft payments for banner ads on the site. Palihapitiya caused controversy earlier this year, when he commented in a French video about a “white male circle of insiders” running Silicon Valley (our coverage here). Facebook also recently hired a new chief financial officer, Mike Sheridan, formerly CFO of video game publisher IGN Entertainment Inc.

MSN search engine market share actually grows — After steady decline, it has grown of late, driven by online games like Chicktionary, Compete reports; analyst Steve Willis has the full explanation:

A good portion of the additional Live searches are coming from the Live Search Club, where you can apparently play games for points which you can redeem for fine Microsoft products. All of the games involve using Live’s search engine - to get the points, you have to search with Live.

Google brings Map mashups to its platform — Tomorrow, Google brings Map mashups of data from external sites like Zvents and ChicagoCrime.org to its own platform, Mashable reports.

Index Ventures and 3i launch Seedcamp in Europe — Details are here. Entrepreneurs apply with their “big ideas” before August 12 and the top 20 will be chosen to spend a week in London with industry professionals (VCs, lawyers, marketers, HR people, etc), and from there, the top 5 winners will be announced and they’ll receive 50,000 euros in funding and continued mentorship to get their businesses started.

Nielsen/NetRatings, a leading online-measurement service, scraps rankings based on page views — Instead, it will begin tracking how long visitors spend on Web sites. The move comes as page views lose their value in expressing a site’s importance. Many sites, such as Friendster, have boosted page views with simple networking features. Others, such as those using online video and new technologies such as Ajax, reduce page views.

AOL releases new test version of myAOL — It offers new personalized tools such as myPage, a personal dashboard offering access to content and applications from AOL and other sites; Mgnet, which lets users find new sites and information based on personal preferences; and Favorites, a feed reader that combines user feeds and bookmarks in one place.

Users of TiVo can order movies from Amazon.com directly from their TVs — Details here.

Intel Corp. invests $218.5 million in virtualization software maker VMware – The investment will give Intel ownership of about 2.5 percent of VMware’s outstanding shares after VMware completes its initial public offering. Details here.

Will the video start-ups ever stop coming? — United Talent Agency and advertising start-up Spot Runner have jointly created a company called 60Frames Entertainment to finance and distribute original professional videos online. 60Frames, of Los Angeles, has raised $3.5 million in funding from investors including Tudor Investment Corp. and the Pilot Group, and says it wants to provide higher quality videos than YouTube. Its videos will run a few minutes and cost “in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands” of dollars to produce, the NYT reports.

Talking of video sites, Revision3, another one, finally gets CEO — Recently departed PC World editor Jim Louderback will become CEO at video site Revision3, replacing interim chief exec, Jay Adelson NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes reports.

Sequoia Capital, which recently invested in video site, Funny Or Die, now says there’s too much content — Roelof Botha, the Sequoia Capital partner who also invested in YouTube and Joost — video companies that only help to propagate more content — now says there’s so much information out there that it is overwhelming, and so you need humans to help (thus Sequoia has invested in Jason Calacanis’ human-assisted search engine, Mahalo). See video below, conducted by WSJ’s Kara Swisher (RSS readers will have to go to site):

Ning’s ridiculously large venture capital round — Ning, the company that provides tools for people to create their own social networks, co-founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, has raised a whopping $44 million, on a reported $170 million pre-money valuation. That values the company at a mighty $214 million. Andreessen says on his blog the round was “orchestrated” by the wealthy family firm Allen & Co, of New York, and was led by Legg Mason of Baltimore, with a number of others participating. Andreessen is smart. Large East Coast firms are flush with cash, and are also somewhat removed from the valley, and so won’t realize just how competitive this market is. If you’re curious to know more about Allen & Co., here’s an impossibly long story in Fortune about the firm.

Digg released an application for the iPhone — The news ranking site’s founder Kevin Rosen announces it here.

A link-exchange network for Facebook apps — Developers of applications on Facebook’s platform can exchange links in order to get more attention and traffic, by using FbExchange. More details at GigaOm.

Hey!Spread, a video uploading service that delivers your videos to multiple sites — Upload your video to YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Yahoo Videos, Dailymotion and Blip.tv all at the same time. (Techcrunch).

TwitterGram lets you deliver voice message on Twitter — It comes from Dave Winer, the Web guru who also created the RSS protocol. You can leave the message with a phone.

The latest action:

My Maps kills start-ups? — There is plenty of commentary about how Google’s new feature My Maps is killing off start-ups doing the same thing. The new feature lets you build maps. Platial and Frappr are already doing this. This doesn’t make Google an ogre, as some suggest. An ugly company is one that does due diligence on your company, under guise of possibly partnering or acquiring you, only to pull out at the last minute and replicate what you do. My Maps makes a lot of sense for Google, and it should have been obvious for start-ups (see VentureBeat coverage) that it was coming. Plenty of sites have incorporated Google maps, and are not in danger, because they do something very different from what Google will do. In fact, you won’t see Platial complaining too much because its own backers, Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shriram are actually represented on Google’s board. Platial, of Portland, Oregon, you’re recall, raised $2.4 million in a first of funding just last month. And Kleiner partner Randy Komisar has been saying openly that Web 2.0 companies with no model other than supported by Google ads are pretty much goners (Platial relies on Google ads, no less).

Will your jacket power your iPod? – Researchers in New Zealand have developed synthetic dyes that can be used as solar cells to promise to generate electricity at one tenth of the cost of current silicon-based solar panels. The photosynthesis-like compounds work in low-light, and may even eventually be incorporated into clothing, so that your jacket may one day recharge your cellphone. The research is still in the earliest stage, so will be years before this gets to market. (More here).

Latest climate report from Brussels: 2°C rise from today’s temperatures will cause the extinction of 30 percent of species — Another scary report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in Brussels, Belgium today.

Delicious releases latest extension for Firefox browser — For those who love bookmarking, worth a look.

Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate for VCs? — The Republican presidential hopeful has already has $23 million in the first quarter, putting him well ahead of GOP rivals like McCain and Giuliani, and just behind Democratic frontrunners Clinton and Obama, reports PEHub. During his Mass. governor campaign in 2002, his support came from the who’s who of the East Coast private equity establishment. (See
Romney_Donors1.xls)

Ask undercuts itself with Google campaign — The anti-Google advertising campaign by competing search engine company Ask.com has only demonstrated how inferior the search site really is. Shortly after the ads appeared, people noticed that searching for the word “Google” on Ask.com returned this comment: “Don’t be a droid — use different sources of information” next to a drawing of a man on puppet strings and a link to Ask.com’s anti-Google Web site. Ask’s Jim Lanzone says the link was put up by overzealous staff, and was quickly removed to avoid any doubt about the impartiality of the site’s searches. Too late. That sort of internal gaming has never happened at Google, to our knowledge — and it raises questions about what else Ask is tinkering with behind the scenes we’re not aware of. We’re the first to support the underdog. But Google’s discipline — fanatical, some would say — is one reason you can trust its results.

How basic is Twitter? — We don’t want to add to the hype, but Dave Winer, always a big thinker, and creator of break-through protocols like RSS, is taking a serious look at Twitter, the new company getting buzz for letting you message to the world what you are doing at any given time. Winer suggests it could be the basis for a new open communications protocol. Meanwhile, take a look at this 3D Twitter viewer (screenshot below), which takes Twitter’s messages and places them on a global background to give you a smattering of what people are saying around the world. It uses Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. It is just one of several viewers created since Twitter became all the rage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Tex. a couple of weeks ago.