VentureBeat

1. Google buying contact organizer Plaxo?
2. Bebo raising new round of capital at $1B+ value?
3. Facebook en espanol
4. Chip maker to show off Google phone Monday
5. Surprise! Record industry wants filtering on your PC
6. Apple splashing production orders due to low demand
7. U. of Wisconsin sues Intel for Core 2 Duo infringement
8. BBC to launch download of iPlayer sometime this year
9. OpenID interesting concept, but will anyone use it?
10. Real Goods Solar files for $57M IPO
11. WooMe raises $3M round for video speed-dating

Google buying contact organizer Plaxo? — That’s the latest rumor (courtesy of Wired), but there’s been plenty of rumors about Plaxo lately, that suggests its investors are looking for a way to sell. We reported earlier a rumor that Facebook was in talks to buy Plaxo. Dan Primack says Google may be interested, but that there are other suitors involved too.

Speaking of rumors, Bebo may be raising a new round of capital — Kara Swisher, of AllThingsD, blasts Techcrunch for running a rumor that Google or News Corp.’s MySpace may be interested in buying social networking company Bebo for $1 billion or more, blaming the site for not doing its reporting. Instead, she claims, Bebo may get an investment from those two sources, or from any on a long list of other strategic or institutional investors. Yahoo and Microsoft, she adds, had also floated possibly buying the whole company. The $1 billion-plus number comes from the valuation the company would get for the investment round. Bebo has about 21 million unique visitors a month.

Facebook en espanol — Facebook has been translated into Spanish for its 2.8 million active users in Latin America and Spain. French and German translations are expected in the coming weeks.

British chip maker ARM to show off version of the Google phone on Monday — Details here.

Surprise! Record industry chief wants users to install copyright filtering software on their PCs — Details.

Apple splashing production orders due to low demand — First it was iPods and iPhones, and now notebooks too.

University of Wisconsin sues Intel for patent infringement for its Core 2 duo — Details here.

BBC will launch download version of its iPlayer sometime this year — The iPlayer is a “catch-up” online TV service.

OpenID is interesting in concept, but will anyone really use it? — Microsoft, Google, Verisign, IBM have decided to support something called OpenID, which is a service that lets people use same login information for multiple sites. But as Techcrunch notes, it’s not clear whether any of the latest adherents have agreed to be a “relying party” (allowing users with third party OpenIDs to log in to their sites). So far, they’ve merely pledged to be OpenID “compatible,” which means they really want to be an ID “issuer” so that they “own” the user.

Real Goods Solar files for $57M IPO — The company said it is the largest installer of grid-connected solar panels in California. The Broomfield, Colorado company is a subsidiary of environmental lifestyle company Gaiam.

WooMe raises $3M round for video speed-dating — WooMe, an online video platform for meeting potential dates (or finding roommates, travel companions, and so forth) has raised an additional $3 million extension to its first round of $1.9 million. We’ve covered the company pretty extensively, here and here. Mangrove Capital led, Atomico Investments participated, and individual investors Oliver Jung and Klaus Hommels (of Balderton Capital) also jumped in.

Kyte.tv, the San Francisco company that lets users manage their own TV channels online or on a cell-phone, has raised a second round of financing in the “single-digit” millions of dollars.

Swiss carrier Swisscom and German media group Holtzbrinck Ventures has invested in the round, Chief executive Daniel Graf told VentureBeat. He would not disclose the exact amount. The investment follows the launch of Kyte last month. Some 3,000 users have since downloaded the player, Graf said. The funding comes after a $2.25 million investment last year from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards and Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom. (Here’s our most recent coverage, and link to the VentureBeat Kyte channel we showed off at the time).

Other investors in the latest round include “angel” investors Klaus Hommels, Oliver Jung, and Peter Schüpbach.

It’s just the latest new media investment for Holtzbrinck, which has become the German equivalent of News Corp. in terms of making Web 2.0 investments and acquisitions. Its portfolio includes studiVZ, Germany’s Facebook.

The eye-opening performances claimed by new behavioral advertising start-ups Aggregate Knowledge and Wunderloop are sure to grab the attention from online retailers and publishers.

Take the little announcement by the nine-month-old Menlo Park company Aggregate Knowledge yesterday at DEMO: It drove more than 20 percent of all of the holiday purchases at major discount retail site Overstock.com. Considering that the annual revenue of Overstock is in the range of $700-800 million, our rough estimate is that Aggregate Knowledge pushed at least $100 million in sales. Aggregate Knowledge wouldn’t comment, but if we’re right, this is downright impressive, considering Overstock is just one customer. AK gets paid for boosting sales (we don’t know exactly how much). We do know that it was making millions even before the holiday period (see our earlier coverage).

The easiest way to understand Aggregate Knowledge is that it takes Amazon.com’s feature, “People who bought this book, also bought these books,” and applies it across the Web. For example, if you are browsing at a retail site, and looking at a particular gift basket for Valentine’s, AK proposes other gift baskets that others like you have ended up buying. It does this for news articles, and even advertisements.

No wonder Aggregate Knowledge is getting competition. Germany’s Wunderloop has been working steadily on a similar technology since 1999, but had stayed small and conservative through the downturn between 2001 and 2003. But now, with online retail flourishing, it is going for the big-time too. It has just raised cash from Klaus Hommels, of Benchmark Europe, Howard Hartenbaum, an early investor at Skype with Draper Richards, Skype founder Ziklas Zennstrom’s investment group, Atomico, and the European Founders Fund.

Hommels told VentureBeat last week the investment was in the “single digit” millions. That’s comparable to the $5.5 million invested in AK by Kleiner Perkins and others.

Hommels says Wunderloop has the most advanced behavioral technology in Europe. Like AK, Wunderloop assesses the clicks you make in real-time, making judgments about your tastes, without ever knowing who you are. Then it lets a travel insurance advertiser, for example, target the user profile that Wunderloop has determined to be at least 25 percent interested in finance, and 25 percent interested in travel. It can deliver ads, videos or content, dependent on the user’s tastes. The price of the average shopping basket bought by customers at Web sites using Wunderloop is 48 percent higher than without Wunderloop, Hommels said. Wunderloop serves several large European customers, including AOL, T-Online, Tiscali, Lycos and Freenet. Wunderloop has closed 100 percent of the customers it has started negotiating with, Hommels said. The new chief executive has revamped the Wunderloop management team, he said. It has about 30 employees.

Honestly, we never got FON, the company that sells a WiFi router so that you can share your WiFi with others.

FON claims 50,000 nodes, and that it is the “largest WiFi network in the world,” so it appears to be having some traction.

Whisher is a new Spanish start-up flogging a similar model — but its offering may be more palatable than FON’s. Whisher has just raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Benchmark Europe and SwissCom. This news was supposed to be “embargoed” until Tuesday morning’s Demo conference opened, which is the rule for companies like Whisher presenting there. However, the news has already been broken by the habitual embargo-breaker, Erick Schonfeld (got to love his chutzpah) and elsewhere (a good summary of all the latest WiFi offerings, btw), so we’re weighing in too.

Stepping back, the FON idea is that you share your WiFi with others, and they’ll share with you • a great help when you’re on the road and need a connection for free.

But practically speaking, this is a tough sell. You’ve got to buy the router first, and in today’s rushed world, buying another router in hopes that you might find someone else to share with down the line — well, it doesn’t seem to be high on our priority list. Increasingly, there are muni WiFi sites, and if you’re desperate, there are free WiFi cafes; we know at least one in each major town we visit here in Silicon alley. And there are EVDO cards, too.

So along comes Whisher, which basically does the same thing as FON, but without requiring you to buy the $29.95 hardware box. There’s some emnity here, too, because Whisher is run by Ferran Moreno, who left FON, apparently over a split with FON CEO Martin Varsavsky. You do download a free software. This lets you tap into any free WiFi hotspot, or into the private WiFi network of participating members. Once there, Whisher provides other social networking features • for example IM, file-sharing and information about the locale you’re visiting and the users there.

So how does it plan to make money? Whisher, unlike Fon, wants to rely on advertising. By getting users to chat and interact at a local WiFi connection, Whisher hopes to let advertisers target the users. If you’re near a MacDonalds, for example, the fast-food chain can offer you a discount to lure you over.

The investment from Benchmark Capital is led by Klaus Hommels, who was an early investor in Skype, and who says he sees the same viral possibilities in Whisher.

(Competitor FON, notably, is funded by Skype, along with Google and Sequoia Capital)

Ferran Moreno, founder and CEO, tells VentureBeat he’s most proud of the company’s embedded browser • which lets Whisher control the experience, updating it as needed.

The IM service is integrated with Jabber, which allows you IM with anyone else on the network, regardless of their particular IM service.

The file-sharing is noteworthy too. You leave the files on the WiFi network, so that anyone passing by can have access to them.

Right now, the Whisher’s Windows version is working better than its Mac and Linux versions, Moreno said. VentureBeat was unable to login to test the product.