VentureBeat

Chirp offers a screensaver that you download, then sync with Facebook, Flickr and soon, other sites. It displays status messages, photos and more from your friends. If you see a photo or update on Chirp that you want to look at, you click on it to go to the source site. (Demo here.)

It reminds me of the SETI screensaver – you know, the one that uses your computer to analyze radio telescope data collected by researchers, trying to find signs of intelligent, extraterrestrial communication. The difference is, Chirp is a screensaver that helps you see intelligent communication from your friends.

I fully accept that the screensaver is “a medium of distribution” for many people, as Eve Phillips, the company’s chief executive, describes it to me. Personally, I’m not in the demographic that would find a product like this useful. I’m a laptop user (on a Mac; Chirp only works on Windows, for now). I close the lid when I’m not using it. I don’t really need a screensaver to keep my power on, even at low power.

However, two-thirds of social network users also use the screensaver, according to the company’s studies.

Chirp is based in San Francisco and has raised seed funding from Greylock Partners, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and angel investors Reid Hoffman, Jay Adelson, and Dave Samuel. It’s screensaver is currently in beta.

It’s been a little more than a month since the last rumors surfaced about social news site Digg trying to sell itself for at least $300 million.

A reliable source just confirmed the company’s plans, noting the company has hired Allen & Company, a tiny but influential private investment firm, to help broker a deal. The asking price is still $300 million, the source said.

This will come as no surprise. Rumors of a sale have been rampant for months, although until now we hear co-founder Jay Adelson has been trying to muster up interest in a sale. This is the first time Digg has hired a bank to shop the deal, we’re told.

Valleywag reported the $300 million rumor last month. Separately, it reported Digg chief executive Jay Adelson’s attendance at Allen & Company’s annual Sun Valley, Idaho get-together of the rich and famous, noting the company might be looking to find a buyer among one of the many media company executives in attendance.

Allen & Company traditionally uses the event to do what it terms “direct research” on potential buyers and sellers, then inserts itself as banker.

For more on the history of Digg rumors (including a suggestiong to “Hire A Banker. Sell This Thing, Already”), see Techcrunch’s post from last month.

We asked Digg founder Kevin Rose about a potential sale, and Allen & Company’s involvement. He told us, unsurprisingly, that “we never comment on things related to acquisitions.”

Revision3, a San Francisco company creating high-quality video shows on niche topics, has raised $8 million more from investors.

Like several other companies, including Podtech (see our coverage) and Next New Networks (our coverage), its seeks to exploit the trend toward niche video viewing. Revision3’s own slant has been toward serial content, with regular hosts of shows lasting between 20 minutes and an hour. They include the geek show “Diggnation,” and cooking show “Ctrl-Alt-Chicken.” The idea is that loyal viewers subscribe to the shows and download them for regular viewing via TiVo or on mobile devices such as their iPod.

The question remains whether Revision3 can launch other shows that are as popular as Diggnation– especially at a time when so many other companies are producing video content now.

The company, started by the co-founders of news ranking site Digg, raised $1 million last year (see VentureBeat’s coverage). The latest funding matches the $8 million funding that Next New Network got several months ago.

The dough comes from previous backer Greylock, and several of the angel investors, chief executive Jay Adelson told VentureBeat. He said the company’s value jumped significantly. David Sze and James Slavet, of Greylock have joined the board. Greylock is also a backer of Digg.

Adelson said two of the company’s ten shows in production are now profitable. The experience has provided the company with enough evidence that the overall business model will work, he says. The shows make money through sponsorships, with their hosts taking break periodic breaks from programming to discuss sponsors in a conversational way. Sponsors include GoDaddy, Sony, Microsoft and Verizon. The company as a whole is not yet profitable, but he said the funding is enough to help the company get there. Viewers are downloading two million shows a month. The majority are RSS subscribers, downloading shows and watching them via iTunes, for example. The company hopes to distinguish itself by producing high-definition, professional quality shows.

Updated

Digg, the news site that lets users rank stories by voting, has raised $8.5 million in fresh financing from existing backers, putting to rest for now speculation that it might sell to a bigger media player.

The latest financing was reported by VentureWire (sub required) this morning. According to the report, the funding comes from previous investors, Greylock Partners and the Omidyar Network, which is run by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Statistics have become a major sticking point for Digg, with the company saying in October that it has 20 million users, while conservative measurement sites like Comscore say Digg has a mere 1.3 million. VentureBeat reported on the statistics mess here. The confusion is significant because it points to uncertainty about just how popular the site is. Supporters say Digg is the way of the future, riding the “Web 2.0″ wave, whereby users get to interact with and contribute to news filtering.

When measuring Digg’s performance, mainstream news publications continue to rely on statistics from Alexa, which are notoriously unreliable because the site draws data from a very small base of people — Web administrators who have downloaded an Alexa toolbar on their computer, people who are more likely to be “geeks” playing with sites like Digg. BusinessWeek started off the trend, with a much hyped story, citing Alexa to suggest Digg was nipping on the heels of the NYT. The Mercury News today points to Alexa as evidence Digg is a top 20 U.S. site. VentureWire points to Alexa to say it is a top 100 global site. There’s little question that Digg has grown robustly, however. Compete, another free measurement site, puts Digg’s ranking at 144. VentureBeat wrote about Compete’s methodology here (scroll down).

Digg’s limiting of investors to insiders may be more evidence that Digg’s progress is too controversial for outside investors to agree on investment terms — insider investors presumably argue that Digg is worth a lot more than outsiders do. However, we’re not certain about this. It is normal for venture capitalists to let an outside investor come in and set an independent value for a company. But there are exceptions. Insiders may simply feel that Digg is worth so much they don’t want to let outsiders participate. (Update: We’ve just talked with Greylock investor David Sze, who says Greylock and Omidyar weren’t interested in having an outside investor dilute their holdings, and that Digg’s management didn’t want to waste time trying to raise money at a higher value from other parties. Sze said Digg’s usage continues to grow, and is confident that Comscore is undercounting it. Comscore ignores Digg’s RSS users, which could account for between 30 and 40 percent of all users, he said. Comscore also ignores international usage. In all, Comscore undercounts Digg’s traffic by up to three or four times, he says.)

Digg recently integrated new media to its site, including video.

However, the site continues to get gamed. A top “digger” recently admitted a marketer had convinced him to digg a story about the marketer’s company, JetNumbers, in return for free services — just the latest evidence the site is being gamed by spammers. It is remarkable, therefore, that chief executive Jay Adelson dismisses suggestions his company has been gamed. “First of all, I don’t believe it happened,” he tells VentureWire, though VentureWire may not be providing the full context of his remarks. VentureWire apparently did not raise the JetNumbers or other cases. Digg is not profitable, Adelson added.

Update: Adelson comments below that he was taken out of context.

Update: In other remarks, Greylock’s Sze said Digg is unlikely to be sold anytime soon, and is more likely to focus on partnering with other sites that have expressed interest in integrating Digg’s format into their own sites. Music sites, for example, are interested, he said. The non-tech news parts of Digg’s site are bigger than the tech news, he added. Finally, regarding the gaming of Digg, Sze said the company is busy putting in safety measures to stop this sort of thing happening — and that Digg can continue to grow despite being targeted by spammers, just as Google and eBay did.