VentureBeat

Apple’s Steve Jobs dealt setback — Former Apple finance chief Fred Anderson now says Apple chief executive Steve Jobs misled him about stock option accounting. Story here, and statement by Anderson here. Question: Will this bring down Jobs?

Ram Shriram weighs in on FCC vote on wireless rule changes — See the Google investor’s VentureBeat column, where he advocates the FCC should take the first step toward opening wireless standards and access when it meets later today (Wed). He says the innovation gap will grow, if it doesn’t. Separate but related: India added 67 million mobile phone users (WSJ sub required) last year alone, more than the 41 million land lines in the entire country.

Google Maps have limited reach — Indian streets, along with the village masses of the Indian countryside, defy Google’s search for order, and so Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins, and its investing scout in India, Ram Shriram, have invested in Mapmyindia, according to Content Sutra. Although even Mapmyindia has trouble in India’s own capital.

Blackberry users get VoIP — Iotum’s Talk-Now feature lets Blackberry users see who in their contact list are available to chat with. Now, Iotum has incorporated Jajah’s VoIP service, letting users make low-cost global phone calls with an Internet call.

…while other phone users can get Blackberry features — Users of Windows Mobile 6 phones, including Palm Treos, will this fall be able to use software from BlackBerry that makes these phones work like a BlackBerry. It will load applications like its push email, phone, address book, calendar, browser and so on. We remember Silicon Valley’s investors dismissing Blackberry a few years ago, saying it didn’t understand software. Despite its recent outage, this company isn’t going away.

FunnyOrDie.com continued — Turns out, the comedy site, run by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, got its capital from Sequoia Capital partner Mark Kvamme. Kvamme became interested, he tells Forbes, when his 17-year-old son, an aspiring stand-up comedian came to him and said there weren’t any good comic sites online. Kvamme’s explains why this is a venture-backed company: On one hand, you have the talent of Ferrell and McKay driving things but they can only do so much, so you also draw on user generated content and voting to do the rest. (Photo via Valleywag).

Chinese video clones keep coming — Ku6.com has received $5 million from DFJ ePlanet Ventures and some others, according to Bill Bishop. Meanwhile, Tudou.com has raised a very large (for China, and for video) $18 million from JAFCO in its third round of financing, and is reportedly valued at about $70 million. This comes after it got more than $9 million from IDG, Granite Global and others.

Check out Zude — It launches May 1. Mashable says it is a better version of the homepage Netvibes, but it is really just a convenient way to drag and drop any content from the Web onto your page.

Peace between MySpace and Photobucket — The announcement is here, but we don’t know how they resolved it.

The proliferation of Twitter continues — When a company spreads virally, it’s a good sign. Twitter, the service that lets people update their friends with their latest goings-on, is finding itself being pulled into various plug-ins for your browser — from 30boxes’ feature, which lets you share Flickr photos, Youtube video and URLs via Twitter, to TwittyTunes, which lets you send a message to Twitter telling friends what music you’re listening to, with a link back to the song and artist.

Controversial company, PayPerPost, now seeking readers — PayPerPost, the company which pays bloggers to post articles about advertisers, just acquired Zookoda, which gives those bloggers another way to distribute their paid posts to readers. Announcement here. Zookoda, of Australia, lets a bloggers update their readers via email whenever they blog a new post. (Presumably, paid articles won’t draw hordes of readers — so now the strategy is to push the posts on people). Zookoda is the second company that listed on our VentureBoard to be sold.

Catching up:

YouTube is making $7.5 million a month –Everyone has been guessing whether YouTube is profitable, given the high costs it faces hosting all its videos. This guy says YouTube is doing $7.5 million a month in ads, and is profitable.

FON, the company that wants to encourage people to share their WiFi routers, having problems? — The general manager of US division has left. We’re beginning to think this Fon idea my be too clunky to fly. You buy a router to let other people use it, and it lets you tap into other peoples’ FON routers when you travel. It is a chicken and egg problem; Why buy it, unless you know lots of others have bought it too? Problem is, there are so many ways to get online these days. For starters, FON’s own backer, Google, is building out free networks. Google is using a WiFi router built by Mountain View’s Meraki.

Filmloop to launch online version — Filmloop, which let people create slideshows on their desktops and then have friends see updated versions automatically on their own computers, has created an online (browser) version too. It’s facing plenty of competition, but says more than 1 million users have uploaded 42 million photos.

Time for these podcasting services to make money — Evan Williams, of podcasting start-up Odeo, is making some public confessions about having trouble, and he is shutting Audioblogger, which allowed you to post on your blog via a telephone call. (Details here.) So eyes have turned to how these companies can make money. PodZinger, an audio and video search engine of Cambridge, Mass., has just launched a way for podcasters to insert advertising in both audio and video files. It says it has “content classification” technology which allows it to match ads to the podcaster’s content. It also says it has algorithms for analyzing a user’s “intent” and provides ad matches that way. The content creators, or podcasters, can decide whether or not they want the service, which can bring them extra revenue — which they share with PodZinger.

Ning’s video & photo move — The Silicon Valley start-up Ning, backed in part by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, gives you multiple tools you build your own web site, as we’ve mentioned. Now it has released more stuff, including letting you customize your own niche, YouTube-like video site, or Flickr-like photo site. The company took us through a demo last week, and it’s easy to use. The video site gives your own embedded player that you can brand as your own, which you can place in your blog or at MySpace — but which runs on Ning’s servers, and so you aren’t paying hosting costs. Ning bets it can cover the costs by taking a share of the advertising revenue. It says its advertising is lucrative compared to some other sites, because its users are creating content-focused sites, and so can be targeted by advertisers appropriately. The ads are generating $2 or more per 1,000 page views, the company said.

Rebtel raises $20 million for (complicated) online calls — Like Jajah, this Stokholm company (co-founder Greg Spector is here in Redwood City office, though) Rebtel lets you make calls cheaply by accessing its own system of low-cost Internet lines. But it gets complicated. It works when you dial a local number it has assigned for the person you are calling (yep, a different number than the one you already have for him or her). Once you call the other person, they have to hang up, and call you back. There’s logic to it: The system is trying to find the cheapest combination of Internet and local lines. It has raised $20 million in venture capital, including from Benchmark and Index. They charge $1 a week, and calls are otherwise free. We’re seeing a lot of these cheaply built phone services emerging; they’ll appeal to the frugal phone user, but not to those of us who want simplicity. (More here).

Asides:

Speaking of ads, there’s not enough place online to host them all — Here’s news that 100 million people watched online videos in July, and evidence that advertisers can’t find enough online inventory to put their ads.

New VC podcast — Levensohn Venture Partners, a venture firm in SF has started a podcast series called VC — Inside Out.

Bono’s direct connection with Apple, gone — Apple said Fred Anderson, who served as the company’s chief financial officer from 1996 until 2004, resigned from the board, because of the option scandal. Anderson remains a partner at the Silicon Valley buyout firm Elevation Partners, which as you’ll remember is where U2’s Bono hangs out, and who promoted the U2 iPod.

Google executive, Marissa Mayer, shows how to hold meetings efficiently — Meetings can be a waste of time. What if your company had the same discipline as Marrisa? You’d get a lot more done. This shows the Google trait of schizophrenia — creativity and discipline in one.

Google has a bunch of new products — No wonder Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently burst out, criticizing his developers for releasing too many products, and not focusing on making them work well. Here’s a recap of last week’s bombardment alone. One lets you restrict the sites you are searching (details here). Next, here’s the latest on the Google gadgets you can put on your Web site (choose from 1,200 of them). Google has also launched an experimental site, called Searchmash, tracking behavior of users off its main site. There’s a new initiative to allow you to build Web apps on top of Google search, whereby Google has opened its APIs to allow an AJAX search box for videos (click on one of the videos to see), for example. Finally, Google launched Code Search, a way to search for source code from around the Web.

Yahoo’s flip-flop– Yahoo has donated $1 million to Stanford University’s John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists, seven months after handing over information about a professional journalist to Chinese authorities. You may view it cynically, but this is a good move, nevertheless — it is earmarked to support journalists from countries where there are restrictions on freedom of the press.