VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Skype trying to buy back customer love — Skype is sending out notes to users saying they’ll get a week’s worth of free service. The San Jose Internet phone company says it has 196 million users and reported earlier this year that it was profitable for the first time. As Jeff Nolan points out, its users now number 3 percent of the world’s population, and only just now profitable?

Jason Calacanis, the scrappy entrepreneur — Fast Company has an entertaining profile of Calacanis, the entrepreneur who is trying again with Mahalo, a search engine with results made by humans. The piece provides Calacanis’ point of view on the Mahalo, but there are tougher questions asked in a blog post by Rich Skrenta. Skrenta suggests Mahalo really only wants to game search engines with so-called Search Engine Optimization, and argues it won’t work. Calacanis responds in comments that he isn’t focused on SEO, and a good discussion ensues. Fast Company also has more facts on Mahalo’s backing. We ran the account by Calacanis, and he confirmed the speed of the fund-raising, but isn’t commenting on the $20 million figure for total raised:

It took Calacanis all of 10 days to close his first round of financing with Sequoia, Musk, Cuban, Ted Leonsis of AOL, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, and Matt Coffin, who founded LowerMyBills .com. “…By May, Calacanis closed a second round of financing, adding News Corp.; CBS; David Bradley, owner of The Atlantic Monthly ; and Burda Media, a German publisher. The total: $20 million, good for about five years of operations given his current expenses. Calacanis then laid out $11,000 for the domain name Mahalo.com, which, at one point, had been a nude-celebrity site.

Acoona, the third-rate search engine, sees underwriter pull IPO offering — We wrote about the shoddy-looking search engine here. The New York Times says the underwriter has now pulled the IPO. It looks at the strange relationship between the company and investor Marc Armand Rousso.

Zoho, the online Office suite, launches offline capability — You can now read documents in Zoho Writer offline, and in about a month or so, you’ll be able to edit them offline too. Other Zoho applications, for example spreadsheets and presentations, will carry similar technology shortly thereafter. Ironically, Zoho’s latest offering is built on Google’s open source project Google Gears, and beats even Google in offering this online-offline feature that everyone wants. Thinkfree has a similar offering. Joyent is moving in this direction, too. There’s a brief window for first-movers to scoop up users before Google arrives, but we’re not sure it will be enough. (Announcement here.) Zoho is based in Pleasanton, Calif.

BluBet lets you bet on anything — Except you can’t use money. On BluBet, players will be able to place bets on anything from Brittany’s sex life, to Facebook outgrowing MySpace. See Techcrunch review. The San Francisco company is backed with $225,000 from Jawed Karim (Co-Founder of YouTube), Kevin Hartz (Co-Founder of Xoom), Joe Greenstein (Co-Founder and CEO of Flixster) and Keith Rabois (Former PayPal & LinkedIn Executive and Current Slide Executive).

Microsoft’s experimental engine, Tafiti, to show off Starlight technology — The engine helps people share their search sessions.

WikiScanner, a new Web site, traces the source of changes to Wikipedia — Now you can see more easily where changes to the Wikipedia entries originate. Wikiscanner tracks the Internet protocol address of an editor’s network, and it has suddenly revealed some interesting edits by the CIA and self-interested editing by Anheuser-Busch (erasing negative comments), among others. Story in NYT.

U.S. intelligence agencies prepare to launch “A-Space” — The Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the U.S. intelligence community in December. It will feature an internal communications tool modeled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace, according to the FT.

EBay releases its eBay Marketplace on Facebook — Now you can show your goods to your Facebook friends.

Brad Fitzpatrick wants to set your information free: New Google employee and open-source poster boy Brad Fitzpatrick blogged last Friday about his work to create an open “social graph.” He wants to help users more easily extract their own information from one site — say, Facebook — and add that information into another site as they wish. To do this, he and others are working on open-source software and standards to let developers build sites that help users port their data as easily as possible, leaving developers to focus on whatever core value they are trying to create on their own sites.

The uses are many. One example he gives is a “trust/reputation” application programming interface (or API) to help bloggers using Movable Type or Wordpress see which comments are coming from legitimate readers, and which are coming from spammers.

He points out developers’ concerns over Facebook’s tight-fisted control over much of its users’ data, but also says that early discussions with the company about this project are promising. After all, Facebook’s API launched last year to try to provide “social context” on other sites. Few interesting applications were built for it, because it didn’t let developers completely remove most user data. Its more recent platform for developing applications within Facebook has been a hit with developers so far, though.

Myspace, meanwhile, has only started talking about its own developer platform, although it has let third-party widgets in since its inception.

Fitzpatrick’s vision, as he notes, sounds similar to what other companies, such as Plaxo, have also been working on — and he got an overwhelmingly favorable response from other bloggers. The project has a site here for interested persons.

We wish him the best of luck, even if the goal is a touch utopian. We have to wonder how far the people who control much of this user data now — Facebook, Myspace, etc. — will go along (most users are lazy and so won’t pressure networks for this feature). We also wonder how this effort will tie into Google’s other social networking initiatives.

Google increasing market share -– Hitwise , a traffic measuring service, said Google accounts for 64.35 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending July 28, up from 60 percent last year. Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 22.131, 8.79 and 3.21 percent respectively.

Google responds to criticism on video shut-down — It is now allowing users to watch videos for another six months, and get credit for purchases via a credit card.

updated

Mahalo.com, the latest company from entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, launched, with a stripped-down search engine designed to handle only the most popular requests in widely appealing categories.

Focused on areas such as travel, music, television, movies, cars, food, health, news and sports — and filtered with the help of a team of 40 employees in Santa Monica, Calif. — the limited results are meant to avoid the spam and other junk results that clog up the other search engines. They aim to fulfill the Web’s most repeated requests.

By cherry-picking only the most popular 10,000 search terms, it can organize results in the form of a more organized, thoughtful list about your search term’s attributes.

The challenge here, though, is that dozens of other search engines have launched to tackle specialized search already, including shopping search engines, job search engines, travel engines and engines like Hakia that organize results in similar ways to Mahalo. Moreover, there are other sites that provide real people to help assist in searches, such as ChaCha.com. Finally, Mahalo forces people to change their searching behavior, requiring them to calculate when to use Mahalo versus say Google or other engines — all things that make this a long-shot for quick, big success.

However, Calacanis, who co-founded Weblogs, a blogging network, sold to AOL for $25 million in 2005, says he has enough cash to tide him over for four or five years without turning a profit. Mahalo is backed by Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz, News Corp., CBS Corp., Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, co-founder of online payment service PayPal.

It has completed 4,000 of the 10,000 planned pages. If you search for something Maholo doesn’t have the answer to, it defaults to Google’s results.

More details here.

Example for search term “Porsche 911″ below:

The latest roundup of Silicon Valley tech stuff:

YouTube myth debunked; idea really came from HOTorNOT — Remember the Pez dispenser story eBay fabricated to drum up a catchy media story about its founding? Turns out, the same thing happened at YouTube. The founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen told us and many others that their idea for YouTube came during a party, and their frustration at not being able to upload videos of it. Now Time reveals the truth, based on its own conversations with the founders, was much more complicated:

Chad and Steve both say that the party did occur but that [third co-founder Jawed] Karim wasn’t there. “Chad and I are pretty modest, and Jawed has tried to seize every opportunity to take credit,” Steve told me. But he also acknowledged that the notion that YouTube was founded after a dinner “was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible.”

No company, of course, is ever founded in a single moment, and YouTube evolved over several months. Chad and Steve agree that Karim deserves credit for the early idea that became, in Steve’s words, “the original goal that we were working toward in the very beginning”: a video version of HOTorNOT.com.

DFJ backs Indian electric carmaker — The Silicon Valley venture firm helps pump $20 million into India’s only electric carmaker, the Reva Electric Car Company.

Jason Calacanis looks into advertising — Like media entrepreneur John Batelle, who moved from Industry Standard to FM Publishing, entrepreneuer Jason Calacanis has also realized the advertising industry is what really drives money in the media industry. So Calacanis, who previously formed media companies Venture Reporter and Weblogs, moderate successes, apparently wants to hit it big finally. Now at Sequoia, looking for his next big idea, Calacanis posts from his blog:

I’m looking for two full-time researchers in Los Angeles (i.e. folks who could work with me on a daily basis) and I’m trying to dig deeper into statistics and testing. Specifically, I want to deepen my knowledge around advertising using A/B and multivariate testing…

The Google mobile phone? — The Observer of London writes that European phone giant Orange is in talks with Google to create a mobile phone, and held preliminary discussions. There’s a lot of hype on this story; note it is poorly sourced, and note also the reference to “preliminary.” Google has good reasons to talk with everybody, but no reasons to get into the hardware business. Sure, it will deliver its search capability to anyone who wants it. Yes, it bought Reqwireless, a mobile browser company earlier this year, but the stated reason was to acquire talent, and don’t forget Google has been fixing its search for mobile phones for some time. Google bought Android, which supposedly tinkered with a mobile operating sysem. But Google is likely want to develop just that, to provide its search and other software in more sophisticated ways over a phone. Finally, phone theorists will point to Google’s purchase of Switzerland’s Endoxon, announced yesterday, which makes software to display maps on computers and mobile phones. But a hardware phone? Don’t think so.

The rush toward copyright violation prevention technologies — Yesterday, we wrote about a new start-up Attributor that is fingerprinting audio and video files to help content owners stop pirating. MediaHedge is another entrant in this area.

Text messaging people in other cars — Using the license plate of cars to text people occurred to us a few days ago while driving. After a few seconds deliberation, though, we dropped the idea, thinking it was silly: The only times it would be used, we realized, would be to send hate messages (an unprintable version of “your driving stinks”) or obnoxious come-on messages from guys leering at cute babes. Yet, coincidentally, just a couple of days later, we see that a company is indeed trying this long-shot idea.

News-ranking site Digg has upgraded video and podcasting features — See details here.

Linksys’ Internet iPhone — Linksys, the Cisco-owned unit that makes routers for homes, is selling new phones that enable calls through eBay’s Skype service and Yahoo’s Messenger. The phones carry the iPhones trademark is owned by Cisco, and thus raises doubts that the supposed Apple phone — rumored to be coming, perhaps next year — will carry the same name. What’s wrong with “iPod Phone”?

Google to deliver 3D images of moon, Mars and other planets — Details of the agreement with NASA here.

MySpace made available on Cingular — Details here.

Tom Perkins to publish memoir, beginning with HP scandal — The big-name venture capitalist, founder of Kleiner Perkins, who blew the lid off the Hewlett-Packard spying scandal, is writing another book. Gotham Books will publish his memoir, “Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins,” in fall 2007. It will begin with his resignation from the HP board. The Merc has details.

(Update: Apologies, we’d meant to put a questionmark in the headline, so we’ve fixed. We’re checking on this rumor, but now we’re getting more doubts about this supposed sale)

Here’s the latest in Silicon Valley tech world:

Video site MetaCafe to be sold for $200 million? — That’s what this site says. We reviewed Metacafe, which recently moved to Palo Alto, here.

Common Sense Media, a site where families can review movies, films, TV shows, games, raises $4.25 million — The cash for the San Francisco company comes from the Omidyar Network. Christine Herron, an investor at Omidyar, has spoken highly about this company; the investment comes as little surprise.

Lots of VC deals — If you haven’t kept up with our left column lately, here are links to the venture fundings of PayByTouch, MontaVista (from a couple of days ago), and Pinger (we’ve since confirmed details of this one), respectively. Also Zipcar, largest car-sharing service, raises $25 million. This is the second round of venture backing for the company, and it comes from Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital and Boston Community Ventures.

Has Google invested in Chinese peer-to-peer company Xunlei? — That’s what the rumor is. Xunlei is reported to have seen between 75 million to 100 million downloads of its software, and has raised previous funding from Morningside and IDG Ventures.

Google’s vanishing click-fraud case — Bizarre story about how Google has apparently dropped a click-fraud case. Michael Bradley, 32, reportedly was caught red-handed while trying to extort money from Google — investigators allegedly taped him across from an office at Google where he’d visited and threatened distribute a click-fraud technology he’d developed, unless Google paid up. The article makes your think Google found the technology so scary that it cut some sort of deal with Bradley, to avoid legal proceedings that would have brought the technology to light.

Yahoo’s woes in china continue — Yahoo China President Xie Wen has left “for personal reasons,” only 42 days after he had joined the company.

Jason Calacanis joins Sequoia Capital as entrepreneur in residence — Calacanis recently resigned from leading AOL’s Netscape property, and said Tuesday he’ll be joining Sequoia Capital, the big-name Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Previously, he founded Silicon Alley Reporter magazine and was a co-founder of Weblogs, a network blogs sold to AOL last year.

AskCity looking pretty good — Last week, we reported IAC and its search property, Ask, were launching a local portal site. It has launched, and it looks very useful. As mentioned, it makes sense for IAC to merge its various properties: Now you can select a restaurant, book a reservation through OpenTable, do a search for nearby events, such as a concert, book a ticket through Ticketmaster, find a map to chart your nights traveling, and do all this during one search session — and all at IAC’s properties.

We’ve put green arrows on the screenshot below to highlight the notable parts. At right is a place you can easily annotate it all for friends (place markers, or draw boxes on a map, and so on). On the left, you’ll see the four categories of search: businesses and services, events, movies, and maps & directions.