VentureBeat

Debix, a young company that helps fight identity theft, has gotten financial banking from a group of investors, including Gideon Yu, a prominent Silicon Valley executive who is now Facebook’s chief financial officer.

Yu’s move is also significant because it comes at a time when his company, Facebook, itself is under considerable scrutiny for the amount of information it provides partner companies about its users.

Yu himself was a victim of identity fraud himself — only noticing the theft after two years when an impersonator launched a spending spree in Reno, using his name and credit card number to make fraudulent purchases. Yu’s story is carried in the New York Times today.

Debix, of Austin, Tex., is just the latest in a number of companies that help fight such fraud with more aggressive measures than those provided by existing credit agencies Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Debix places automated calls to its customers every time someone opens credit in their name, for an annul fee of $99 a year. Once getting the call, the customers then enter a four digit PIN code to approve the transaction. Launny Steffens, a former vice chairman of Merrill Lynch is also an investor.

Other companies include LifeLock and TrustedID. We covered LifeLock’s problems earlier this year (scroll down), when it emerged that co-founder Robert Maynard, ironically, had a criminal past himself. In a new development, however, it turns out that LifeLock’s venture capital backer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers knew about Maynard’s past before it backed the company, the NYT reports.
“Not one investor or board member was unaware of the issue,” a partner at Kleiner Perkins, Ted Schlein, said. “LifeLock is executing very well and growing fast.”

TrustedID apparently goes the first of these services. As we reported, it takes the extra measure of actually freezing your credit in certain cases, meaning that no one can take credit it out in your name until you unfreeze your account.

Yu’s investment appears to be motivated more out of personal interest, rather than linked to Facebook’s own challenges on the privacy front — though the NYT article didn’t make the clear. Some consumer groups are asking the federal government to look into Facebook’s ad targeting plans, calling them a violation of privacy. (See Facebook’s Own Van Natta respond to these fears).

Gideon Yu, Facebook’s chief financial officer, has joined the board of directors of Vobile Inc., a startup that automatically identifies copyrighted video content on online video sites, the Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required).

Vobile offers a service called VideoDNA that monitors, tracks and manages online video content, so companies can automatically pull down copyright-violating videos instead of paying people to manually find and remove the offending videos. The company can also identify the contents of a video — information that can be used to serve contextually relevant online ads (a capability not unlike the YouTube-Adsense service Google announced today).

Audible Magic is another company YouTube is using to help it help filter content, but it tracks music within videos only, not video imagery itself, and has been less than perfect.

Yu knows a thing or two about the problems surrounding copyright violations in online video. He left his job as treasurer at Yahoo last year to work briefly at YouTube: He was the guy who brokered the deal to sell YouTube to Google last year.

After leaving YouTube earlier this year, Yu got hired at red-hot Facebook this summer instead of joining venture firm Sequoia Capital as he’d previously planned. [Update: To be clear, Yu is both chief financial officer at Facebook and on the board of Vobile.]

Since the sale, Google has kept promising better copyright detection measures — in the face a billion-dollar lawsuit from Viacom for copyright violations. In July, for example, the company said it would launch a system in September.

Obviously, this is the sort of technology that YouTube needs to implement, and now Yu is getting an inside view of it. Perhaps he’ll be brokering the sale of another company to Google pretty soon here?

Here’s the latest action:

The fast rise of Gideon Yu — Gideon Yu has reportedly become a junior partner at Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capital firms. What a ride he’s had: He was a Yahoo treasurer until September of last year, when he was scooped up by YouTube to be their chief financial officer, a month before the acquisition by Google, where he apparently played a major role. When negotiating the sale to Google, Yu admitted to Time that he told Google different things about YouTube’s budget than he was telling his own team at YouTube. That’s the sort of brass-knuckles Sequoia likes. Thus, he follows the path of Roelof Botha, chief financial officer of Paypal, who did something similar before joining Sequoia. (Via Valleywag). We’ve requested confirmation from Sequoia.

Google releases Web History; you getting scared yet? — We almost skipped over this news when it was released Friday, thinking that Google was simply relaunching its search history feature, which has been around for a while. But Web History lets you track everything you do on the Web, not just search. From now on, you can carry around your entire surfing identity — so that when Google finally creates that chip in the brain, you will be a perfect, intelligent, non-forgetful machine human being.

Microsoft couldn’t get DoubleClick, despite being willing to spend the cash — How did Google make off with DoubleClick, a major banner advertiser that strengthens Google’s positioning considerably? How did they do it while spending less money than Microsoft was willing to pay? Questions are still unanswered, but John Battelle has post on this, and promises a follow-up. He’s got a summary of Microsoft’s argument that the GoogleClick merger goes against antitrust laws, because it can now control ad pricing. (Also, merger document here).

Stumble while on your favorite site — StumbleUpon recently released a new feature that lets you stumble from specific sites, without leaving them– called StumbleThru. More here and here.

How much is Second Life worth? – Half a billion? A venture capitalist told us Friday evening that he’d heard from “three independent sources” that the virtual world company is close to raising a new venture round valued at $450 million or greater. Now, he’d been drinking some wine, and perhaps he was thinking of a virtual funding round — because Second Life is officially adamant that it’s baloney: “Utterly untrue!” says Second Life spokeswoman Catherine Smith, after checking with management. She said such a funding would “go against everything the company has been talking about for the last six months,” which itself is a clue. At which point she shut up. What do you think? Is it about to be sold?

Key online advertising industry group blasts comScore and Nielsen — The Interactive Advertising Bureau, a grouping of major publishers and online advertising networks has criticized the two major Internet audience measurement services, comScore, Inc. and Nielsen/NetRatings, asking them to submit to a third-party audit of their measurement processes. It referred to their “outdated measurement methodologies,” including a panel structure that was “developed in the 1930s and still relied on today.”

Dot-bomb chronicles still playing out today — David Hayden, the entrepreneur behind the dot-com darling Critical Path, the boom-era email provider, went from thinking he was worth $200 million to a nasty lawsuit with bank Robertson Stephens threatening to leave him $38 million in debt. “If we lose, we’re done,” he tells the NYT. We talked with Hayden a year and a half ago, when we wrote about his latest company, Jeteye, the future of which is also in question.

Institutions are increasing their hedge-fund holdings — …while the smart people are getting out. Are they smelling trouble ahead?