VentureBeat

This fall, if our San Francisco Bay Area readers spot a zeppelin overhead, don’t worry — you haven’t been caught in a time warp. It will just mean that a startup called Airship Ventures has succeeded in bringing the zeppelin (an icon of 1930s aviation) back to the United States. The company just raised $8 million in a first round of funding.

Specifically, Airship Ventures plans to offer zeppelin rides out of Moffett Field. If the company follows through on its plans, it will bring the first zeppelin to Moffett Field since 1947. In a few months, Airship will operate a single Zeppelin NT based in Moffett’s Hangar 2, which was built by the Navy to house zeppelins in 1942.

The funding will allow Airship to actually complete the purchase of its first vehicle. Apparently, at 246 feet in length, the Zeppelin NT will be 50 feet longer than the largest blimp, and will hold up to 12 passengers. Similar airships are already operating safely in Japan and Germany, the company says.

Airship will offer its rides for “flightseeing” tours (yes, that’s what they call them), as well as media and science operations. Apparently, flights will be available for between $250 and $500, around the same price as a ride in a hot balloon.

The funding comes from six individuals, including noted tech commentator Esther Dyson. On her blog, Dyson praised the company a year ago as “an absolutely fantastic idea, both in the positive sense and as in ‘pure fantasy’.”

Airship is led by the wife-and-husband team of Alexandra and Brian Hall. Alexandra Hall was previously the head of the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, Calif.

1. Amazon S3, VentureBeat go down
2. Montalvo Systems vs. Intel, with chip for handheld devices
3. Fox Interactive to introduce “music Hulu for MySpace”
4. Yahoo’s board moving against Yang
5. Google searchers are wealthier, buy more online
6. Xobni hires Jeff Bonforte away from Yahoo, to be its new CEO
7. Stormfisher raises $350 million for biofuel project
8. Cable veteran Philip Balboni moving to online news site
9. Nielsen buys Audience Analytics
10. Air commuter conference coming up this spring
11. Report: Online Community Best Practices
12. Wal-Mart chooses Blu-Ray

Amazon S3, VentureBeat go down — Online data storage service S3 went down. Affected startups include SmugMug, 37Signals, Twitter and many others. Lots of coverage on Techmeme. Earlier today, VentureBeat was down because of separate hosting problems.

Montalvo Systems taking on Intel, focusing on a chip for handheld devices — It has designed a chip for smartphones, notebook computers and other portable devices, that should run software that works on Intel or AMD chips. The company’s plans have been outlined in some detail by Michael Kanellos at CNET (our previous coverage ).

Montalvo’s chips, however, will fundamentally differ from the latest Core or Opteron processors from Intel and AMD in that the cores on its chip won’t be symmetrical, i.e. identical to each other. Instead, Montalvo’s chips will sport a mix of high-performance cores and lower-performance cores on the same piece of silicon, similar to the Cell chip devised by IBM, Toshiba, and Sony, according to sources close to the company.

It has received more than $73 million venture and private equity firms including Bay Partners, NEA-IndoUS Ventures, U.S Venture Partners, Leapfrog Ventures, CMEA and Adams Street Partners.

Fox Interactive to introduce “music Hulu for MySpace”– The project, which is still being put together, intends to sign up all the major music labels as content providers — who would get equity. The music would be distributed on widgets and contained in a portal page, similar to video-sharing site Hulu, which Fox is a part of. The music on MySpace would be DRM-free and ad-supported. PaidContent has the scoop.

Yahoo’s board moving against Yang — Founder and chief executive Jerry Yang and a small group sympathetic members are trying to avoid a sale to Microsoft at all costs. But Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock is leading an informal group of board members and billionaire Ron Burkle who think that Yang may be ignoring his fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. The New York Post has more.

Google searchers are wealthier, buy more online — Hitwise numbers here. See chart for more.

Xobni hires Jeff Bonforte away from Yahoo, to be its new chief executive — Bonforte was previously a vice president who helped lead the growth of Yahoo Messenger. Company blog post here.

Stormfisher raises $350 million for biofuel project — It turns agriculture and food-industry byproducts into methane gas, which reduces the levels of waste in landfills. The investor is private equity firm DenHam Capital, which has already sunk many millions into biofuel projects.

Cable veteran Philip Balboni moving to online news site — He’s leaving New England Cable News to join online international news company Global News Enterprises LLC, which is slated to launch in April with more than 70 international correspondents. The new company has taken on around $8 million from angels. (Photo via Columbia University.)

Nielsen buys Audience Analytics – The web measurement company says the Provo, Utah-based startup will improve its ability to handle large quantities of audience measurement data

Air commuter conference coming up this spring — Tech commentator Esther Dyson and publisher Imaginova are teaming up to organize the fourth annual Flight School from July 4-6, an event that brings entrepreneurs together to talk about innovation in aviation and space travel. The focus is still on “air taxis” — basically, smaller planes making local flights on-request — but Flight School’s scope will be broader this year, Dyson told us. Since the conference began, air taxis have become a marketplace reality through companies like DayJet, and commercial space flight is becoming more and more practical too, Dyson said. She added: “When I was a kid, I took it from granted that I would go to the moon. Now it looks like I’m going to have to work pretty hard to get there.”

Report: Online Community Best Practices — Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang delivers the report (buy here). Its tagline is “Communities Are A Powerful Tool, As Long As You Put Members’ Needs First.”

Wal-Mart chooses Blu-Ray — More here. Meanwhile, Toshiba may be ready to give up on HD DVD.

Updated with full list of names of angel investors

How do you build the perfect local community Web site — with news, events, comments and more?

If you manage to, it will be a grand slam. It becomes the talk of the town, people spend more time going there, and local advertisers spend money there.

A wave of companies have tried, but failed. But Outside.in, a new Brooklyn, NY start-up is looking very good — as good, if not better than any we’ve seen so far. Its visual presentation is nice and simple (see screenshot at bottom). It uses AJAX and other technologies to improve upon efforts preceding it.

Here’s the background: Newspapers have largely dropped the ball. A dozen or so Internet companies have tried to adapt the community concept online, but none have nailed it. There’s Yelp, which specializes in reviews of bars and restaurants. There’s Judysbook, which began with a broader community feel, but has since moved toward shopping. There’s Insiderpages, which is struggling, and focused on business listings. Smalltown focuses on local business, too. Topix gives you community news. Backfence gets closer, as does ePodunk to coverage of wider community events — but their execution and user interfaces have remained unimpressive. Craigslist provides a local marketplace, but stops there.

Outside.in takes both existing content (from local bloggers, city governments, movie listings) and user generated content, and packages them into local sites.

For each town, Outside.in lets you see stories, comments, places and “neighbors,” or registered users. It has one useful, powerful feature we haven’t seen before: You can switch the focus of your region easily — using a map feature at the top left of your region. This lets you zoom in or out to include more or less surrounding regions or cities — and the information, news, events and comments all adjust in real time.

So you can limit a search for crime to Park Slope, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. Then you can search for Italian restaurants across the entire city. Or you can look for poetry readings in Park Slope and surrounding neighborhoods. All by just scrolling within a map.

There’s a lot to look at here. Outside.in provides a URL for each city (it adds a +1 to the URL if you zoom out and see a mile of surrounding area, etc), but also for each place. For example, there’s an entry for the Whole Foods in Brooklyn, which is under development, and creating considerable community debate. People can go to the URL and see the latest stories by local bloggers, and can submit their own comments.

In this way, Outside.in wants to be a Wikipedia for local places. How does it monitor the comments and entries? Well, like Wikipedia, it has the crowd controllers. Of its eight full-time employees, three are chaperoning the site, and 12 more freelancers are helping out.

It is early days, and it is a little buggy. For example, in Palo Alto, Calif., some “top places” are actually based in places like Mountain View (in part, because Outside.in is still figuring out how to deal with regions like the Bay Area where cities merge into each other, and because it wants to show places with buzz within ten miles from you).

Founder Steven Johnson gave us a demo today. He was the co-founder of the online magazine FEED and community site, Plastic.com.

Hollywood producer Andy Karsch, and John Seely Brown seed-funded the company with $200,000. Yesterday, the company announced it raised $900,000 more from Union Square Ventures, Milestone, Village Ventures and individuals Marc Andreessen (Netscape co-founder), Esther Dyson, George Crowley, John Borthwick and Richard Smith.

This will be fun to watch. We’ve been waiting for a decent site to come along. While Outside.in has a long way to go, it is looking very smart.

Boxbe, the San Francisco company that wants you to accept marketing pitches through an email account, has raised $1.5 million in venture capital.

We wrote about this company last month, and said it sounds pretty useless.

Basically, you create an-email account at Boxbe, provide some basic information about yourself, and then you set a price marketers have to pay to contact you. The marketers earn the right, thereby, to have their email get to your other, regular email account. Boxbe takes a 25 percent cut. The company suggests you set the price somewhere between 15 and 25 cents per email. The idea is, if they have to pay, marketers will stop spamming. But this won’t keep marketers from spamming your regular box anyway.

Boxbe gives spammers another way to reach you without paying. The marketers merely need to fill out a short questionaire.

Boxbe says its email is good to have on a public site, such as a MySpace profile or blog, so you don’t have to give out your regular email address. But if the spam is going to get to your regular address anyway, what is the point? There are other ways to get messages from your blog without giving out your email address, such as contact forms.

It is the latest controversial investment by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which has a fascination with these sorts of gimmicks. Recently, it invested in PayPerPost, a site that pays bloggers to write things for marketers — and until recently argued that bloggers didn’t need to disclose they were being paid. DFJ was also behind Hotmail, the free email account that became known as a popular tool among spammers. DFJ’s Steve Jurvetson joints the Boxbe board. Tech pundit Esther Dyson also joins the board, and has invested. These are credible investors, so perhaps they know something we don’t. Maybe the lure of money really will drive people to sign up? Why not just create a dummy account at Hotmail or Yahoo to have the spam sent there, and let marketers pay you and just not read any of it? It may not be worth the effort, because Boxbe makes you acknowledge you’ve received each paid email before it pays you.