VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Web data offers new info on presidential election — It remains to be seen whether Barack Obama’s tremendous lead over John McCain in Facebook friends will lead to a similar victory on election day. Meanwhile, another study looks at which social networking sites are big in which swing states.

Google CEO stumping for Obama — Eric Schmidt says he’s speaking for himself, not Google, and that he has previously been an informal adviser to the campaign.

Wall Street workers getting big bonuses — Discretionary bonuses at six banks, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, will total $70 billion, one-tenth the size of the $700 billion bailout package.

The Sarah Palin video game backlash begins — Apparently, the number of Palin-themed Flash games has proliferated, and GamePolitics has had enough.

National Association of Broadcasters challenges FCC white space report — The report backs efforts by tech companies like Google and Motorola to open up white spaces (unused slivers of spectrum) for unlicensed use.

Satellite radio operator WorldSpace files for bankruptcy with $2 billion in debt — The company broadcasts to more than 170,000 paid subscribers in Europe, Africa and Asia.

Financial empires built on debt are crumbling — The trend is hitting Russia especially hard.

Federal takedown of HerbalKing didn’t reduce spam — The Federal Trade Commission predicted that after it shut down the HerbalKing spam network, spam levels would drop. But companies that track junk mail say that hasn’t happened.

Adbrite, Sequoia-backed online ad company, cuts 40 percent of staff — The company’s VPs of marketing and finance were among those laid off.

PressFlip founder resigns – The blog search engine was founded by Ted Dziuba, who also wrote the startup-mocking blog Uncov. Now, Dziuba says he’s quitting because he’s going to be a father next year, and because he’s “tired of the fight.”

Four of five Al-Qaeda web forums taken offline — A distribution network for Al-Qaeda supporters says “technical reasons” are to blame.

Heavy’s heavy layoffs — The video network announced 14 percent cuts last week, but Silicon Alley Insider calculates the company’s staff is actually down 45 percent since June.

Peer-to-peer lending systems undergo scrutiny — The largest network, called Prosper, stopped taking money for individual loans last week.

Financial crisis leads to boom in lawsuits — More than one-third of company lawyers expect to see more litigation next year.

Hong Kong magnate Richard Li mulls buyout of PCCW — Investors say a takeover of Li’s telecom company would face serious hurdles, including shareholders demanding a premium price.

The back and forth between Yahoo and billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who is attempting to take the company over, is now arguably more entertaining than the formal letter wars during the whole Microsoft/Yahoo debacle.

Icahn recently got FTC approval to purchase a huge amount of Yahoo stock, putting him one step closer to a hostile takeover.

This morning, Icahn sent a letter to Yahoo laying out five steps of what he plans to do with the company upon a successful hostile takeover:

• First, I would work to have the board replace your “poison pill” severance plan with an acceptable alternative.
• Second, I intend to ask our new board to hire a talented and experienced CEO (attempting to replicate Google’s success with Eric Schmidt) to replace Jerry Yang and return Jerry to his role as “Chief Yahoo”. Indeed, it was much speculated that Jerry would serve in the CEO role temporarily until a permanent CEO was hired after the board asked Terry Semel to resign.
• Third, I intend to ask our new board to inform Microsoft that unless any alternative transaction can insure a $33 or higher stock price (of which I am skeptical) all talks of alternative transactions are over.
• Fourth, I will ask our new board to offer publicly to sell Yahoo! to Microsoft in a friendly and cooperative transaction.
• Fifth, to the extent Microsoft does not want to make a proposal, I will ask our new board do a deal on search with Google, but only if it contains termination provisions that would in no way impede a subsequent acquisition by Microsoft.

In summary: Icahn would eliminate one of the main deterrences that stopped Microsoft from taking over Yahoo. He would then push Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang aside and replace him with clone of Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. (He would allow Yang to stay with the company as a cheerleader.) With steps three and four, Icahn would then beg Microsoft to come back to the table. And finally, if a Microsoft deal wasn’t immediately possible, he would be okay with the Google/Yahoo search advertising deal back up plan — until Microsoft eventually came around again, at which point he would kick Google to the corner.

This all sounds great except that it relies upon the willing submission of at least a half dozen other parties who would have to do exactly what Icahn wants.

This isn’t a game, but Icahn is almost making it seem like one. It’s like fantasy CEO. Yang isn’t working out so lets replace him with a five-tool chief executive like Schmidt. Come on, we can totally get him, we have a high draft pick.

We saw Yahoo respond this afternoon with a much shorter letter:

Leaving aside Mr. Icahn’s inaccurate interpretation of our retention plan, we again note that he has no credible plan to operate Yahoo!. We believe that Mr. Icahn’s suggestion that we cancel our retention plan would have a destabilizing impact on Yahoo! and would clearly not be in the best interests of our shareholders. Furthermore, his suggestion that we put out a price publicly to see if Microsoft will alter its stated position is ill-advised. As we have stated numerous times publicly and privately, we are shareholders.

In summary: Icahn is crazy.

Forget Beacon, the controversial new Facebook advertising feature that tracks what you buy on other sites, then sends that information to your friends on Facebook. Politicians are getting serious about bigger privacy issues on the web. Ranking Republican Rep. Joe Barton (Texas) is going after Google and its prospective $3.1 billion purchase of advertising network DoubleClick.

Yesterday, Barton sent a 24-question letter to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, asking in detail about both DoubleClick’s and Google’s privacy practices. The congressman has also complained that Schmidt ignored his requests to discuss the issues following an initial meeting between the two last month.

Google, meanwhile, says there was a mix-up in communication with Barton and is busy arranging a meeting to clear things up.

At the same time, privacy groups are asking the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission to recuse herself from reviewing the proposed DoubleClick acquisition, as her husband is apparently advising DoubleClick on antitrust issues — DoubleClick could give Google an even more dominant position in the online advertising market. The five-person FTC committee is scheduled to make a ruling this month.

The basic issue here, as we said during the height of the Beacon controversy, is whether or not companies like Google and Facebook should be allowed to collect data about your behavior across web sites without asking you first.

DoubleClick, like many other large advertising networks and now Facebook, tracks what you do on the web using web “cookies.” These cookies are parcels of text that reside in your web browser and send information to companies about sites you visit. DoubleClick uses this data to serve you banner ads, for example, that are contextually relevant to the data it collects about you.

Although you can opt out of cookies in your web browser, they are required to access password-protected sites like Facebook or Gmail.

The FTC says it gets the big picture about privacy, even though it has also stressed that its review of the DoubleClick purchase will focus on antitrust issues. As one commissioner was quoted recently, privacy issues “really do transcend any particular acquisition” — or Facebook feature.

VentureBeat is hearing that Google is negotiating an advertising deal with DirecTV, the nation’s largest satellite broadcast service with 16 million subscribers.

Dish, the nation’s second largest satellite TV company, announced a deal with Google last week. (VentureBeat was first to report the Dish deal a month ago).

This is just the latest move by Google to sew up the entire advertising world. Google is pushing into newspapers, magazines, radio, cable and now satellite.

The DirecTV deal is taking more time than Dish’s to close because DirectTV is managing the ownership change announced last last year (when News Corp said it would sell its ownership stake to Liberty). More details on DirecTV here. The deal with Google will go through eventually, says a source who wants to remain anonymous. [Update: Google says "no comment," and DirecTV says: "We are always looking for ways to increase our ad sales revenue but we have nothing to comment regarding any new partnerships."]

In case there’s any doubt about Google’s ambition, there’s a notable interview in Wired with Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, who says Google is first of all an “advertising system.”

Here’s the relevant snippet from Schmidt’s interview:

Wired: Wired How should we think about Google today?

Schmidt: Think of it first as an advertising system. Then as an end-user system…

Roundup of a busy week:

Instant messaging and email are merging, Yahoo kicks it off — Yahoo will be integrating IM through its email, Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse revealed during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. In retrospect, we’re wondering why this trend hasn’t happened earlier.

Email is limiting, providing no way to see whether the person on the other end is present or not (that person may not want to show you they are present, but email doesn’t even give them the option). It piles up, and it’s clunky — not letting you switch to conversation immediately, if you want to. Instant messaging, meanwhile, can be distracting, isn’t ideal for careful phrasing, isn’t as easy to archive or forward to other people. So what’s needed is a bridge, and now people are building it. We’ve heard ideas bubbling up from entrepreneurs here in the valley, but Yahoo’s move steal the initiative. Techcrunch has a screenshot of what it looks like. There’s also a Chicago company offering something similar, called Parlano, with its product called Mindalign, though its design isn’t that great. (Via Jeff Nolan).

A Web 2.0 University? — One is being created in Alexandria, VA of all places — Details here, and it’s open for registration for its AJAX and Web 2.0 “boot camp” courses.

From Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s talk — Google is working to allow users to export their search histories to other locations, such as Yahoo. Meanwhile, he rejects rumors that Google had set aside money to bail out YouTube from copyright lawsuits — though it is true that Google Video itself has been sued.

Microsoft-Google fight to be greener – Microsoft execs are bragging about building what appears to be the first carbon-neutral data center, taking care of 400 customers for the same energy it “takes to light one 60-watt light bulb.” (Via Mercury News). We reported earlier how Google aims to be carbon neutral, that is save as much fossil fuels as it burns in energy at the Googleplex and from corporate jet trips.

Put a Google map on any image — And when we say any image, we mean it. Scoble has the scoop on Maplib.

Google offering GPS on the Helio Drift phone — Here are the details. Note that is doesn’t appear to be integrated with Dodgeball, and is a step closer to matching the advantage of Loopt.

Google executive Marissa Mayer says Google is like a VC firm — Fortune has a noteworthy conversation between Huffington and Mayer:

HUFFINGTON: Whatever products Google (Charts) is developing, they are incorporating a 60 Percent to 70 percent failure rate. I find that utterly fascinating. Talk about that culture and how that translates into our lives.

MAYER: As we’ve grown, one of our challenges has been, How can we continue to innovate? We have a theory around failing fast. If you assume that one in five things you do will turn out to be really successful, and maybe two of five will be moderately successful, and the other two will languish, you want to do a lot of things. It’s all about being agile. Most of the teams at Google are three to ten people. Five people launched Google News. About five people launched Google Toolbar. They operate like small companies inside the large company. Google is a lot like managing a VC firm, because you’re placing bets on different teams.

Video companies Brightcove and Reality Digital are looking to raise VC rounds — Start-up Brightcove, which hosts video for companies and lets them insert advertising into the video, is looking to raise a round of more than $55 million, GigaOM first reported, with a post-money valuation well north of $225 million range. It has already raised $21 million in two rounds from General Catalyst Partners and Accel, and several others.

San Francisco’s Reality Digital, which does something similar, but in some ways is more ambitious (it hosts video for its clients, but also blogging and forums) is also looking to raise another round. It raised $2 million in a first round in November last year. It has ten employees, and has several customers. One is SPARQ training, which lets high school athletes promote themselves to recruiters — via Reality Digital’s video/blog platform. The athletes can have their coaches chime with their own blogs, too, for example.

Apple has appointed Google chief executive Eric Schmidt to its board of directors, which is a no-brainer even if you consider only Schmidt’s experience and stature. On the face of it, it may look like just another one of those relationships that Silicon Valley is all about. This is a two-degrees-of-separation kind of place. Most big companies have these ties (Google already has Intel, Genentech, Stanford execs on its board, for example).

But this relationship looks to be more than that. Both companies share a similar culture. A fierce pride in having talented engineers who know how to do things best, and a coinciding tendency to be excessively secretive — because they think they have all these cool tech projects to hide (which may be true), and this engineering culture then permeates through the whole company. Remember Schmidt’s treatment of CNET, when a reporter simply revealed data about Schmidt from Google results that could be found by anyone? And Apple’s unsuccessful suit against groups like Think Secret which have revealed secretive Apple products before they were ready for release.

And of course, both want to take on the Microsoft giant up north. It sort of feels like the days when Netscape, Sun and others ganged up against it. Microsoft’s coming music player, Zune, is another rallying point for Apple, as it defends its iPod turf.

In a press release announcing the move, Apple CEO Steve Jobs cited Google’s focus on innovation and Schmidt’s extensive experience as reasons his appointment will be helpful in guiding Apple’s future course.

Schmidt joined Google in 2001 after spending six years as CEO of Novell, and as MacWorld rightly puts it, “the last of them rocky as the company failed to shift gears from its NetWare OS to the Internet” — but that has all been forgiven with Googles’ subsequent success.