VentureBeat

Here’s an (updated) summary of the latest action:

–Adobe launches online-offline media player, and Share. Other applications launch using Adobe’s AIR
–Microsoft launches Office Live WorkSpace
–Joost officially launches its online TV service
–Skype makes earn-out. EBay takes $1.43 billion impairment charge for Skype, and co-founder Zennstrom steps down.
–Facebook to let you group your friends
–Findory shuts down

Adobe launches new online-offline media player, and lots more – Adobe’s new player lets you watch Flash videos whether or not you’re connected to the internet. Videos are offered through deals with other publishers. The media player is an Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR application that combines online access with a user interface normally seen in desktop applications. Last night, we covered the purchase of Virtual Ubiquity, a company with a word processor called Buzzword, also an AIR application. Like other software companies that offer a platform for developers and services for users, Adobe is both helping and competing against startups: Veoh, a competitor, is another AIR media player, for example. The Adobe player is part of several Adobe announcements being made at its Adobe MAX conference today.

Another of these announcments is eBay’s desktop application, running on Adobe. AOL is also using the platform to feature the top 100 videos. Nickelodeon Online also has an interactive game using it. Also featured at the conference: Playyoo, a Flash-based mobile gaming startup that will be launching in December.

Another Adobe announcement is Share, a service still in private testing mode that lets you upload and share documents with friends or with anyone on the web. Adobe hosts up to 1GB of documents and lets you view documents in any format, using its Flash player.

Microsoft, not to be outdone (it hopes) — Microsoft is launching Office Live Workspace, another online service where you can store, access and share documents.

Joost officially launches its online TV service – The public release of the much-hyped Joost offers a couple of user interface improvements such as search and better navigation across videos in the site. It is also offering an open application programming interface so third-party developers can build widgets for Joost users, which it first announced a month ago. Check out the video interview with Joost chief executive Michael Volpi on NewTeeVee.

Zennstrom steps down from Skype — In related news, Joost co-founder Niklas Zennstrom — co-founder of internet calling service Skype — is stepping down as chief executive of that company. He will become the non-executive chairman of Skype’s board of directors, and the reason is in the following item

EBay takes $1.43 billion impairment charge for Skype — eBay had promised to pay $1.5 billion to Skype if it met certain performance milestones after eBay acquired it in 2005. But Skype hasn’t done very well, and eBay has just announced that prior Skype shareholders will only get about $530 million of a possible $1.7 million for meeting targets. In addition, eBay is taking a hit to its earnings. It says the charge includes a $900 million reduction in “goodwill,” or value that it had assumed it was getting after acquiring Skype. The Skype co-founders have now finished their earnout period, which is one reason why Zennstrom is stepping down.

Facebook to let you group your friends – “We’ll let you organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what,” the company says about its forthcoming feature, which it hopes will help users better separate personal and work relationships within the site.

Findory shuts down – Personalized online news service Findory has announced it will cease operations on November 1. The site launched four years ago, offering each user a home page of fresh content — news articles, videos, etc. — based on what the user had previously read or viewed.

There are a ton of “video player” companies out there, and they’re starting to blur.

It takes a lot to impress these days. A video player in 2007 should be able to upload any video file — from your desktop or from the Web — and then have it run from any Website from a widget.

Just when we thought innovation was running out, we hear about Kyte, a video player that allows live video and chat communication over the Web and mobile phones, and is quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.

It is the latest investment by Howard Hartenbaum (pictured left), the early investor in Skype (see our blog about him here, and Mercury News story here). Hartenbaum has been on a tear recently. We mentioned his investment in the new behavior advertising engine, Wunderloop, yesterday. He’s also an investor in DimDim, the new open source competitor to WebEx, which we’ll get to in a sec.

We first heard of Kyte a couple of weeks ago. We followed up with Daniel Graf, founder and chief executive of Decentral.TV, which owns Kyte.

Graf, who is jealously guarding Kyte’s distribution, until public launch sometime this quarter, has delayed release. The product is in closed testing, so we haven’t gotten our hands on it. You get an idea, though, by perusing examples on the Web (click on image below, for example. There are others here, here and here.)

These Web examples are just half of it. The other half is mobile.

Here’s how it works: The Kyte player is your own interactive TV channel. You can distribute it on the web, or through the mobile phone. On it, you can host videos and photo slide-shows — uploaded from your computer, or elsewhere on the Web, such as YouTube. The most recent content shows in the player, but you can use a back arrow to see earlier content. The example above is player of MySpacer Justin, 26, of San Francisco, and his videos are interesting.

Ok, so what? Well, Kyte appears to do everything. It lets you brand the player as your own. It gives you drag and drop tools to make uploading files easy. You can overlay questionnaires on the player’s screen. Friends can follow your channel on their phone. There’s an IM mashup, too, so friends can respond with messages instantly, and other people watching the video see those messages in real time and can respond. Photos are transferred real-time, says Graf. In other words, if I have Jason’s player on my phone, and he has it on his phone, we can not only live chat about it — more significantly, if Jason turns on camera and takes photos, I can see his surroundings live. “If you see a hot girl on the beach, boom, you can ask him take more shots,” says Graf. [Clarification: He wants to make videos live, too, but that will take some time]

Graf stresses the significance of Kyte as a “full-blown interactive application on the phone.” While Skype, and IM work real-time on the web, this is a real-time, or live video and chat over the phone and the Web. The players get their own URL. You can also open your player channel, so that others can load information too.

Kyte has just signed a deal with a major European carrier, which makes this easier; but it can work without a carrier. The big question remaining for Graf is whether he can actually get this product out of the door!

For now, Kyte supports Java-enabled phones. The product is developed on Flex2 and the latest versions of Flash.

We’ve talked about other mobile video players, including Radar, which transfer mobile videos and photos on mobile phones, but none do this live.

Graf raised $2.3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Hartenbaum’s firm Draper Richards, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström and several others.

DimDim, meanwhile, is an open-source version of Web conferencing software WebEx.

It is Hartenbaum’s other investment. DimDim is free, and so plans to disrupt WebEx — just as Skype undercut telecom providers. WebEx charges a significant $39 a month, which is out of reach for many cost-conscious companies. DimDim is still mulling its business model, but plans to place ads in the video, and/or offer premium services. (If you’re an employee being forced to watch a boring training video by your company, perhaps ads might break the monotony?) There are other competitors in this area, but DimDim is the first to go open-source.

It is the second startup of CEO Deb Dutta Ganguly. He founded Advanced Internet, which he sold to Computer Associates in 2001, and built a team of 1,000 people. DimDim is ready for use now, though your firewall may get in the way (DimDim is fine-tuning some of these compatibility issues). This month, downloads are reportedly hitting 2,000 downloads a day.

DimDim has raised $2.4 million in a first round from Hartenbaum’s Draper Richards, along with Index Ventures and Nexus India Capital. The DimDim financing was first reported by PE Week. WebEx controls more than a third of the Web conferencing market, according to research by Goldman Sachs cited by PE Week. Microsoft follows, with 13 percent.

The company is based in Burlington Mass. Our big question for this company is, how do you make money?

The Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom signed an accord with eBay when their company was acquired.

Under that accord, they can not use Skype peer-to-peer technology to launch another business in the telephony area. So that leaves video.

And once you’ve got entrepreneurship in your blood, you go out and do it again, right? That’s why they’ve launched the Venice Project, their latest company, focused on making Internet TV a reality for the masses.

Om Malik has a brief interview, and here are the important snippets:

Janus Friis:…What we have done is created a streaming P2P platform for television. This is a platform, which is good for content owners, for advertisers and of course the viewers. Since there are no borders on the Internet, this is a global platform. Sometimes we think content owners have legal reasons to restrict content locally and the technology allows them to do that.

OM: When will you launch the service? What are the bandwidth requirements for The Venice Project? And how good of a quality will the streams have.

JF: Like Skype, The Venice Project is simple - you download and you get free television. There is nothing complicated and simple. Our software is already in beta, and we are doing some bug squashing right now. You can sign-up and we are inviting more people to our beta program. It is near television quality, and it needs about one megabit per second.

There is more on Janus’ blog. Our observation of the historical record is that it is rare for an entrepreneur to go out and have two really big hits. We’ve seen them do two decent, or two really good hits, but not two extraordinary hits. So we shall see if they can pull this off.

We hear from a good source there are no venture backers behind this company (at least yet).