VentureBeat

YouNoodle, an online community and website for entrepreneurs, just unveiled a feature that’s certain to attract (and anger?) plenty of curious users — a “startup predictor” that scores early-stage companies’ promise and feasibility, and even estimates what their value will be in three years.

The San Francisco startup already drew a fair amount of skepticism when it announced its intentions back in February. But VentureBeat Editor Matt Marshall thought the basic idea isn’t totally crazy, and after talking to chief executive Bob Goodson, I agree.

Here’s how the predictor works: You fill out a lengthy questionaire about a startup, which gathers information about four factors — the founding team, financial information, advisors and the concept. It crunches the data, then gives you a score based on a 1,000-point scale and a valuation. The goal is to provide investors with a quantitative, “scientific” guide to whether a startup will be a good investment.

Is there really a scientific way to measure something like team dynamics and potential? There is, Goodson says — the startup predictor draws heavily on social network theory, and it even has a Stanford Ph.D. student named Rebecca Hwang on its team who does research on that very subject.

Naturally, I had to get a valuation for VentureBeat. After plowing through page after page of questions, what really struck me is the emphasis that seems to be placed on the founding team, while questions about concept and finances are relatively sparse. For example, I didn’t have to enter any information at all about VentureBeat’s revenue or traffic, which is a bit odd. The reasoning is that YouNoodle (for now, at least) just provides a “snapshot” of a startup right when it’s getting out the gate, Goodson says. To use a metaphor from the press release, YouNoodle looks at a startup’s DNA, not its growth and development.

That’s also why the predictor wouldn’t provide a score for VentureBeat as its exists today, only as it was in January 2008 (before I joined). Now we’re too advanced, apparently.

It’s pretty rare that venture capitalists will bet on a company that shows a hint of impropriety. Yet happens occasionally, for companies that don’t push the envelope too far.

In March, for instance, soft-porn site Zivity got $7 million from two prominent firms. The latest is PurePlay, a poker and proto-gambling site that today announces $15 million in funding from Bay Partners and prominent investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel and Owen Van Natta.

PurePlay doesn’t do much to distinguish itself in terms of game play: Like Yahoo Games and many other sites, it uses standard poker variants like Texas Hold’em and Omaha Hi-Lo.

What distinguishes the site is that you can actually play for, and win, money in your poker games. That makes it almost unique in the aftermath of recent legislation. Recent laws like the Unlawful Interent Gambling Act, passed in 2005 to limit online gambling, drove the betting sections of huge poker sites like PartyPoker.com out of the United States.

That initial description makes it sound like PurePlay was started to capitalize off the UIGEA. The law has been murky, and so open to infringement. Congress stopped short of defining it clearly in the 2006 law, directing the federal government instead to enforce state laws restricting such activities.

But the site was planned out and started well in advance of those laws, says CEO Jason Kellerman. The trick to PurePlay is that it works off a subscription model, with users paying set monthly fees to play, but gaining the potential to win large sums if they’re good enough to win tournaments.

That general scheme also applies to other sites, like skill-gaming portal King.com, but PurePlay caters exclusively to poker players. And the market is huge: 50 million players, of whom 40 million don’t gamble for money anyway, according to Kellerman.

For that 80 percent of the group who apparently don’t want to pay, though, there’s a hidden motivation to shell out for a subscription fee. In free games, bad play reigns — when the money is entirely virtual, players have no motivation to do well, and make stupid moves that detract from the game. With a subscription fee, players are simultaneously assured that any losses will be small, while also given a better standard of gameplay.

Of that sizable pool of gamers, PurePlay has captured about a million people. It doesn’t disclose how many are paying, but some extrapolation is possible. The company says it pays out over $125,000 each month in prizes. Subscriptions are $20 a month, so if PurePlay gives back 25 percent of its subscription fees, it has around 25,000 paying subscribers; if it gives back 50 percent, then only 12,500 subscribers, and so forth.

For the (likely) vast majority who still prefer to play for free, PurePlay runs its own ad business, which Kellerman says does quite well, generating “hundreds and hundreds of millions” of ad impressions each month. In addition, he says, user growth has been strong, with adoption rates by new visitors “fantastic.”

So if the online poker business can still be so profitable, why isn’t everyone and their brother jumping in? For starters, Kellerman says, the business of growing a poker portal isn’t easy. “It turns out the infrastructure is pretty expensive,” he told me, noting that the majority of initial investment went toward scaling up to meet demand.

Now the “vast majority” of the company’s money is pushed back into advertising. Kellerman, as well as other members of the executive team, have backgrounds in search engine optimization, meaning they pour most of their effort into low-CPA schemes like Google ads.

Of the $15 million invested into PurePlay, the company isn’t disclosing how much went into each round. It’s based in San Francisco.

YouNoodle, a new San Francisco company, says it has developed a “startup predictor,” or a set of analysis tools to help investors place bets on the university entrepreneurs that are the most likely to succeed.

The company, founded by two 20-something entrepreneurs who met at Oxford, will offer its basic technology beginning March 3. Its core analysis stems from work YouNoodle has done over the past 11 months, working with universities to help them organize business plan competitions. The “predictor” analysis will consist of historical data about qualities of a start-up team’s founders, the type of network these founders have, their participation in competitions and their progress over time. By comparing founding teams across hundreds of university, college and vocational campuses, YouNoodle says it can make good estimates for success entrepreneurial teams in their earliest stages. A more advanced algorithm will be released some time later for professional investors, for a subscription fee.

I talked with two of the founders this evening, Bob Goodson, 27 (left) who is chief executive, and Krill Makharinsky, 22 (right), both recruited by PayPal founder and Slide chief executive Max Levchin to come to the U.S. Levchin and former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel have both invested in YouNoodle, as has Thiel’s Founder Fund. Goodson wouldn’t disclose the amount; he said other investors will also be announced.

I challenged them on their audacious goal of predicting success of start-ups, telling them it was impossible to say which ones become the next hundred billion dollar Google. I’d read Goodson’s quote the NYT earlier in the day where he said: “Give us some information, and we’ll give you some idea of what the company will be worth in five years.” That’s pretty absurd, and investor Paul Kedrosky’s quote to the Times was spot on: “If their tool did such a good job, they’d raise a fund themselves and beat the tar out of us.”

But when I talked with them directly, the two founders were somewhat chagrined by the New York Times article, saying it was sensationalist, especially the Times’ headline about being able to predict a company’s fate. Whether they were backtracking or not, I don’t know, but what they told me seemed to make a lot more sense than what I read in the Times. “That’s not what we’re doing,” Goodson told me. “What we’re interested in is the very earliest stage. That’s the biggest pain, when it’s just getting off the ground,” he said. He explained that they’re trying to do with more mathematical rigor what an investor tries anyway through time-intensive diligence, that is, check into a team’s heritage, its network, success with early prototypes, etc., and then make conclusions about a team by comparing it with other founding teams. Goodson conceded: “Of course, it would be absurd to say we’d predict all the factors involved that go into a startup being successful.”

In other words, this makes a lot of sense, and I can see it being quite useful if done right. There is so much work investors have to do, and so much inefficiency before the first round of capital, that anything to make it smoother would be good for both the startup and the investor. However, after the first round, market factors, and other dynamics take over, it’s impossible to predict how a company will do.

Today (Monday), the company has opened up sections of its site, including profiles of companies, entrepreneurs, as well as several of the groups that are hosting business plan competitions on the site, such as Stanford’s BASES, and the Stanford Social e-challenge Competition, as well as programs at Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London. You can subscribe to an RSS feed to stay updated on events and news about start-ups of your choice, and you can upload your resume for others to see.

The company is a team of five.

There’s still a gap between the Match.coms of the world and the Facebooks, says Redux CEO Darian Sharazi, and he thinks his company’s new site can fill it.

While social networking sites like Facebook connect you with existing friends, and dating sites are narrowly focused on romance, Redux is the first “people discovery” service, says Sharazi, an early Facebook employee — in other words, a site that can help you find friends based on your tastes and temperament. Like a dating site, Redux tries to find people you’d be interested in, but it uses the search in a broadly social context, not an amorous one.

The need for such a site is clear, says Sharazi, since there are already people trying to use Facebook for similar ends. “Whenever someone’s trying to circumvent the way a site should actually be used, that means there’s a big market there,” he says.

Younger people, especially, want to search for people that they’re likely to make friends with. Sharazi and his cofounders have come up with an alogrithm they think will do that. It’s not the first company to try to match people based on compatibility. However, of the companies we can think of that take a similar approach, none are identical. For example, we’ve reported on eHarmony, Ourlikes and Flirtable, but those focus on romance, not friendship.

Redux’s “relevancy” algorithm seems to take a broader approach. The company says it’s not a simple “Who likes the things you like?” match-up, but rather a complex algorithm based on a number of factors, including, yes, your interests, but also how you rate others’ interests and how you answer innocuous yes-or-no questions like “Do you cry at movies?” that occasionally pop up at the bottom of the screen.

The company might be on to something. I know plenty of twentysomething, post-college friends eager to expand beyond their old social circles from school and their new circles at work, but uncertain as to how. So if Redux does what it says, it could fill a real need. The test, of course, is in the execution. I also know plenty of people dying for dates, but that doesn’t mean they’ve all joined Match.com.

The company’s launched a private beta, which I played around with this morning. As with similar sites, the first thing you have to do is fill out a profile with biographical details, interests and your geographic location. (See screenshot below.) It’s familiar and easy, although I was a little surprised they didn’t have room for professional or educational data. Yes, that sounds deathly boring, but it’s also relevant. Some of the beta users try to sneak it in by listing “entrepreneurship” as something they do for fun.

You can also enter your Myers Briggs Type Indicator, which describes your personality. Redux says it’s the only company that MBTI publisher CPP has allowed to use the indicator so far. The site lets you choose your personality or determine it through a test. I’m guessing most people will enter their personality type manually, rather than fork over $35 for the test.

To be honest, the site didn’t recommend anyone who struck me as a perfect match. It’s not surprising that the site’s beta users are a bit limited, but that does make it hard to tell if the algorithm is effective. At least Redux doesn’t claim to introduce me to a new bosom buddy — the user “most relevant” to me only has a “relevance index” of 61 percent. (Not surprising, since I don’t think entrepreneurship is fun. No offense, entrepreneurs!)

Redux also features “entourages”, which are similar to Facebook groups, but with a more limited membership. Using a list of related events, entourages can plan activities together. (see screenshot of the “DEMO 08″ entourage below.)

“These are the people you roll with, to put it in layman’s terms,” Sharazi says.

In March 2007, the Berkeley-based company raised $1.65 million for its first round of funding. There were some big-name investors, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. VentureBeat first reported on the company’s funding when it went under a different name, Next3.

Redux should launch in San Francisco and Los Angeles later this quarter, with more locations added throughout 2008, Sharazi says.

If the service is a hit, the long-term goal is to start introduce widgets across the Web that will allow similar people to have conversations about items of interest found online.

The holiday break felt especially long this time, so here’s a longer roundup than usual — of everything you may have missed over the last few days:

Ebay’s Kijiji tries to tar Craiglist’s reputation — The NYT has a story about Kijiji, a competitor to online classifieds company Craigslist. The remarkable thing about the story is that it lets Kijiji executives associate Craigslist with offers of “sadomasochistic encounters and prostitutes,” without some sort of response from Craiglist. Kijiji, meanwhile, is positioned as family friendly.

Nokia has agreed to acquire Apertio, a UK mobile data network management provider for about €140 million — Details here.

IBM has acquired Israel’s data storage technology company, XIV for a rumored $350 million — Details here.

Venture firm Sevin Rosen splitting apart — All four of the venture capital firm’s Silicon Valley firm are leaving the Texas-based firm, including Nick Sturiale, the investor in Xensource, the virtualization company recently acquired by Citrix for $500 million. Sturiale will be a managing director at Carlyle Venture Partners, we’ve confirmed. The split was first reported by PEInsider.com. It’s part of a longer process of decline at the firm, and of general hardship in the venture industry right now.

Blekko is the umpteenth start-up to go after Google — Never mind that Google has won the search engine wars, or that Microsoft and Yahoo have poured tens, if not hundreds of millions, into trying to keep up, or that scores of other companies have launched to fulfill every conceivable search engine niche. Start-ups trying to take on Google keep coming. The latest is Blekko, a secretive company to be launched by Rich Skrenta, who co-founded the Open Directory Project and news site Topix. Skrenta says Google doesn’t have any competition, but we’re wondering where he was when a tsunami of search engines that hit in 2006, not to mention new ones like Mahalo last year and now Wikia Search to emerge in a few days. Anyway, it’s always great to see people think big, and we wish him well. He’s raised $2 million in seed funding from Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures and two early Google employees, David DesJardins and Jeremy Wenokur. [Image is from the placeholder on Blekko's site]

Peter Thiel says venture industry need to be shaken up — The WSJ has a notable story about Peter Thiel’s view on the weaknesses of the traditional venture industry. However, the piece also says the value of his seed investment in Facebook has increased more than 50 times, which seems understated based on Facebook’s reported valuation of $15 billion now. You’d think the a seed investment would have been made at far less than $100 million, and that the value of his investment may have increased 1000-fold or so. We’ll do some checking on that…

Google’s corporate blogging outshines most others — Here’s a piece about how well Google’s corporate blogging effort is doing, and how few others are manging to do the same.

Marc Canter gets $400,000 for his PeopleAggregator.com — Canter has been working his platform, which is supposed to encourage more open social networks, for some time now. Here he writes his latest thoughts, and discloses his funding. See our previous coverage.

Dash Express, the Internet-connected GPS navigation device for your car, to sell for a whopping $600 — The Silicon Valley company, Dash, has raised closed to $42 million in backing from big-name venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. But who is going to buy this device at such a price, when you can get mobile phones or devices that offer much the same thing — more phones are GPS enabled and they’re sporting services like Google which provide increasingly accurate local search? And the Internet connection on Dash is unlikely to reliable while driving around. Dash lets you do things like find a Chinese restaurant while driving somewhere, but you can do that easily on a phone. In addition to the $600, Dash charges fees of between $10 and $13 a month, GigaOM reports. (Our previous coverage ).

The Google investing Mafia — The New York Times has the story about all of the former Googlers who left to start investing in companies, including Chris Sacca, Aydin Senkut, Paul Buchheit, Georges Harik, Satya Patel, Salman Ullah, Sean Dempsey, and Andrea Zurek. Only PayPal has rivals Google in spawning so many eager investors and entrepreneurs in the Internet industry. Particularly noteworthy is the example of Meraki Networks, the WiFi router company, which is both co-founded and backed by ex-Googlers.

Edgeio’s asset sold — Looksmart acquired most of the assets of Edgeio, the online classifieds company that shut down a couple of weeks ago.

Google Android smartphones phones could launch in February, according to rumors by APC — Although, while Google’s Android is stumbling on deadlines, phone standards around Linux are being rolled out by a consortium including Orange, France Telecom, MontaVista, and Access. The group has included an APIs for telephony, messaging, calendar, instant messaging, and presence functions, as well as new user interface components.

Netcape dies, while co-founder Jim Clark stumbles in real estate pursuit — Netscape, once a leading Web browser, has finally shut down. This comes, coincidentally, as one of its co-founders, Jim Clark, who left Silicon Valley a few years ago saying the tech industry boom was over, stumbles on his subsequent endeavor: real estate. The founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and WebMD went to build condos in Florida, starting a company called Hyperion. The New York Times reports about problems the company is having repaying a $110 million loan and with customer complaints.

Google about to sign deal with Japan phone giant NTT DoCoMo — This will give Google a potential 48 million in a market where Yahoo has traditionally dominated. Details here.

updated
The Founders Fund, a maverick venture firm run by veteran entrepreneurs, has just raised a new fund of $220 million.

The firm will invest money from the fund, officially called Founders Fund II, in 15 to 20 early-stage startups.

The San Francisco firm has made a point of giving power to entrepreneurs in ways that many competing firms don’t. In its view, this focus is fixing the venture business model.

Specifically, it will continue its practice of offering start-up founders Series FF stock, that can be converted to preferred stock during following rounds of funding (more on FF stock, here). Preferred stock can let founders sell a portion of their stock while still running their companies. The firm also says it gives entrepreneurs additional voting power, to help them maintain direct control of their companies as additional investors are brought on board.

The first Founders Fund was $50 million from personal investments, and from select individuals. This time around, the money comes from institutional investors. In an interview Monday at their office at the Presidio, the firm’s partners said the investors had all requested confidentiality. The Wall Street Journal reports one institutional investor was Stanford University’s endowment arm — a backer of other Silicon Valley venture firms.

The Founders Fund managing partners are some of the younger investors in the Valley. They include two of many PayPal co-founders, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery (ages 32), former PayPal chief executive and hedge fund investor Peter Thiel (age 40) and iconoclast entrepreneur Sean Parker (age 28, pictured - our coverage of him joining the fund, here). The partners see themselves as bringing venture capital back to its roots.

The Journal article says some institutional investors were skeptical of the partners and passed on the opportunity to put in money. Parker confirmed that the fund-raising process turned out to be more time consuming than the firm had expected. But he also said limited partners had invested because their model — namely, a venture firm run by founders with experience — was needed in the industry. The firm originally sought to raise $150 million, but ended up raising $220 million.

Early Silicon Valley venture capitalists were entrepreneurs who made their money and wanted to invest in the next generation, Parker said. These days, as The Founders Fund partners put it, many VCs are investment bankers and MBAs who don’t have experience actually founding successful companies. [Update: An astute reader points out below that some of the earliest venture capitalists, including some of the best of them, were not entrepreneurs. This is true. However, there's also no denying that the "institutionalization" of venture capital in the late 1990s, which saw many funds grow to $1 billion in size, and having 8 or more partners, ushered in an era of the low-risk "career path" to VC, which hadn't existed in the early days.]

The resulting problem, as Parker says, is that entrepreneurs often know how to run their companies better than investors do, but are prevented from doing what they think is best. One example he gives is Friendster, which faced crucial “scaling” problems as it grew, several years ago. The load on Friendster’s servers, caused by the expanding number of calculations it was performing, was tremendous (see our discussion of the company’s graph server problem). That company’s venture backers couldn’t imagine a Silicon Valley tech company having scaling as its biggest problem, and they ignored its founder’s pleas for a greater focus on solving the problem immediately. Partly as a result of continuing site performance problems, users gradually left to other social networking sites.

Parker has learned such lessons first-hand. He helped found formative music-sharing service Napster and contact aggregator Plaxo, and was the president of Facebook during its early years. As many in the Valley know, Parker has had a long and turbulent history with established investors, especially Michael Moritz of Sequoia and other VCs who served on the board of Plaxo. He was also a friend of Friendster chief executive Jonathan Abrams, and witnessed through that relationship how even a company like Friendster, with a large lead in the social networking sector, and backed by the two big-name VC firms, Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark, could lose its way.

After surviving Plaxo and watching Friendster disintegrate, Parker took an uncommon approach to bootstrapping Facebook. When the company needed capital to build out its infrastructure in order to match its exploding growth, Parker obtained $250,000 in debt, which prevented him and the other early Facebook employees from having their stock diluted.

Then, Thiel stepped in with $500,000 — Facebook’s first angel investor.

Current Founders Fund investments include leading social network Facebook (via Thiel’s investment, from what we understand), along with widget-maker Slide, online genealogy mapper Geni, search engine Powerset, web analytics company Quantcast, and land-line calling service Ooma.

The Founders Fund may spend similarly small amounts of money on early stage companies, the partners say — whatever the startup needs. It will focus on what it knows best: Consumer internet companies, including social networking applications, especially in the US. However, the partners stress that they are “contrarian” to investment trends and will put money into any team they believe in, anywhere in the world, across industries.

Update: The Journal reports that the firm’s first fund, raised in 2005, had a “return of 23 percent net of fees,” which we’ll assume means a 23 percent “internal rate of return,” since that is the venture capital industry norm for measuring fund returns. This means it has earned 23 percent each year since investment began, which is much more than industry average. Investments typically take years to yield profits, and so most funds yield a negative IRR until their third year. We’re confirming that the WSJ meant IRR.

Xoom, a company that lets you go online to transfer money internationally, has raised $20.29 million in a fifth round of funding.

It’s just the latest in a wave of companies using the Web to shake up the payment-lending industry.

This six-year-old San Francisco company has now raised more than $50 million. To use it, you log on to Xoom’s Web site and pay between $3.50 and $12 per transaction, not exactly cheap — but considering the hassle and cost of other transfer methods, it’s competitive. Recipients don’t need to have bank accounts or Internet connections to receive fund.

It follows a $50 million round of capital raised by another PayPal competitor, Revolution Money (see our coverage), which is just about to launch.  That company, however, is promising free transfers within social networking settings. So transfers are tending toward zero, like Internet phone rates. (Bytes are almost free.)

This Xoom latest round was led by DAG Ventures, and included Fidelity Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia Capital. Peter Thiel, former executive of online payment company PayPal is also an early investor. The financing was first reported by PE Hub.

A whole bunch of other new companies are trying to make inroads into the micro-payment or lending markets.

Facebook is reportedly being courted by Microsoft to sell a small portion of itself to the software giant, valuing the network at a whopping $10 billion and upping the stakes for Google and others that will want to stop Facebook from falling into the wrong hands.

Separately, Facebook is also moving toward becoming a full-blown virtual world. Or at least it looks that way when a virtual currency for Facebook, Acebucks (here), gets introduced.

Buddy Media, the company that manages the Acebucks currency, said it got $1.5 million in funding from a group of angels that includes Facebook investor and board member Peter Thiel.

The service lets you buy and sell digital or real items through your Facebook account without having to use real dollars.

Thiel, who has also taken up an active role investing in third-party applications in consultation with Facebook, is no doubt trying to push the nascent ecosystem of third-party Facebook developers into hyper growth.

On the one hand, Google has been rumbling with plans concerning its own social networking platform and virtual world. On the other hand, Microsoft is looking to pay up to $500 million for five percent of the company at Thiel’s asking price — a $10 billion valuation that frankly needs a dynamic ecosystem to help justify. It would continue a close relationship with Microsoft since that company signed a large deal with Facebook to supply the fast-growing company with ads.

Back to Acebucks: You can accumulate Acebucks through signing up, inviting friends, and selling items through the site.

It offers a virtual “mall” where you can buy and send images to your friends. It also lets you auction items off, such as (USD) $50 iTunes gift certificates.

Acebucks plans to include an application programming interface (API) to help other developers incorporate the currency into their applications. It competes with at least one other Facebook currency app, the even-smaller Zuckerbucks.

Many virtual worlds and online games already use virtual currencies and virtual goods to reward users for participating. One of the better-known examples is Second Life, a virtual world that features users as 3-D avatars and has its own virtual currency.

Earlier this month, Utherverse — the owner of adult-themed virtual world Red Light Center — added its own currency (question for the company: is it illegal to buy virtual drugs?). It is growing fast, with nearly half a million users, it claims.

The purchase of kid virtual world Club Penguin by Disney for $700 million in July has reminded many that virtual worlds can make a lot of money through online payments. Club Penguin only took seed funding, and made millions on subscription services and the buying and selling of virtual goods.

We talked to gaming veterans Nabeel Hyatt and Susan Wu about this last month — they’re the co-founder and investor, respectively, of Conduit Labs, a stealthy startup that aims to combine the real world connections of social networks like Facebook with the 3-D interactivity of virtual worlds. Both told us that after the Club Penguin sale, they were each inundated with pitches from others looking to start their own virtual world sites.

Buddy Media’s other angel investors include Mark Pincus, a serial entrepreneur who also runs a profitable Facebook app where you can play poker, as well as Howard Linzon, James Altucher, Roger Ehrenberg and others.

Mogad is the latest startup building a peer-recommendation web service, similar to Facebook’s “news feed” feature.

Unlike Facebook’s closed system, however, Mogad wants to be a “news feed” for the whole web, that can give you recommendations from anything they do. For example, if you’re purchasing a book, Mogad will show you what books your friends are most interested in.

This field is a daunting one, because it’s filled with players. Plaxo’s social network, Pulse, Forbes’ newly-purchased Clipmarks and a number of other sites are working on variations of this same idea. However, Mogad says none of the existing players have provided an adequate way to securely select and invite your friends and control what they’re seeing from you.

Mogad is still in early days, and it’s almost premature to point people to its site — the company is planning a wider launch in the next couple weeks.

It hits the radar mainly because it has just received a first round of investment of half a million dollars from former Google employee Aydin Senkut, who manages Felicis Ventures, and angel investors Peter Thiel and Georges Harik.

The San Francisco-based company uses a browser plugin to collect information about what you and your friends are viewing, then it makes recommendations about things you might find interesting: articles, videos, and so on. It uses both explicit recommendations from your friends and its own software to figure out what you’ll most want to see.

See screenshots below. The plugin has two buttons: One that shows you what friends who have joined Mogad have recommended and one that allows you to send a recommendation to your friends.

For example, if you want to share a part of an article, you can select text from an article and send the text and a link to your Mogad friends.

Mogad offers a range of privacy settings so you can choose to allow only friends or yourself to see what it collects. You can also share your Mogad’ed items with the public on Mogad’s site — or turn the thing off completely if you have very private browsing to do. If need be, you can delete whatever Mogad collects from you.

The plugin is only available for Firefox now, but the company is also working on an Internet Explorer browser plugin.

The company’s founders have computer science backgrounds. One founder, Blake Commagere, a recent Plaxo employee, also developed the popular Facebook third-party applications Zombies and Vampires. Yanda Erlich used to work in product management in both Google’s advertising and consumer web products divisions.

Senkut, who has invested in a number of companies, says this is the first time he will join a company’s board.

The Mercury News has just run a story listing the top five venture capitalists under the age of 40. Reporter Constance Loizos has done a good job with the selection. Here’s her intro.

Below are the names of the VCs and links to short profiles.

1. Danny Rimer. Hits: Skype, Tellme.

2. Roelof Botha. Hits: YouTube.

3. Peter Thiel. Hits: Facebook

4. Peter Fenton. Hits: Reactivity, JBoss, Wily.

5. Kevin Efrusy. Hits: Facebook

Of these, who do you think is tops? Admittedly, the bios are short, and don’t list all their investments. But if you have an opinion, vote below. And if you think another VC not on the list deserves mention, add them below in comments. (If you’re reading this in RSS, you’ll have to go to the site to see the poll.)

Bambi Francisco, the former MarketWatch columnist who left last month amid a stir to form her own video company, has finished raising a round of capital.

The round includes Richard Rosenblatt, the former chief executive of Intermix, owner of MySpace, Georges Harick, a former Google engineer who helped develop Adsense, and Matthew Hill, early investor of Shopping.com and, as expected Peter Thiel, former chief executive of PayPal. She is keeping the amount confidential, but we expect it is at least several hundred thousand dollars.

Click on the image above for a link to a video showing Bambi talking about her company Vator.TV with Rosenblatt, after he steals the mic from someone else (Andy Plesser, of Beet.TV).

Entrepreneurs will be able to pitch their ideas in video, Powerpoint or other document. They can then upload it to Vator.TV, either password protected (where chosen investors can view the pitch) or publicly. In other words, a video form of RaiseCapital.com (see VB coverage). The site will soft launch next week, with a more formal launch later on. Early videos will feature Francisco and Thiel.

Rosenblatt is chief executive of Demand Media (see our coverage), which is buying up generic Web sites and searching for content to fill them up with. He’s also been marketing the .TV domain category, and Francisco said Vator.TV will likely be participating in that, though specifics haven’t been agreed. She said Rosenblatt is a significant investor.

Francisco said she was able to access Amazon’s EC2 offering, which will lower the costs of streaming the video.

The WSJ and Zdnet have published oddly incomplete stories about Bambi Francisco, a reporter at Marketwatch, who they say “invested” in a side company called Vator.tv.

They suggest scandal, because she reported at Marketwatch about people who also invested in Vator.

Bambi’s employers requested that she not to talk with reporters about this, but we’ve talked with Bambi over the past few months, so know what she’s been up to. Fact is, Vator is Bambi. This was not a side investment, so much as her own company. Her investment was mainly sweat equity. Read the stories above carefully with that in mind, and it becomes largely a non-scandal. If Vator became a success, the understanding was that she would leave and do it full time.

There are clearly issues she could have handled much better though. The one for us, was that she reported on the activities of venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who also is an investor of Vator. In those stories, published on Vator itself, she should have disclosed his investment more clearly in the story/video itself (he is listed as an investor elsewhere on Vator). We’ve talked with Bambi this morning, and she agrees now that she should have been clearer, but that the site was so small and had so little traffic she just didn’t think of it. Personally, we think she should take the dive into independence (easier said than done), and break altogether from DowJones/Marketwatch, because of the significant complications caused by staying there.

As for her coverage of LinkedIn, Powerset, and Facebook while at Marketwatch, those are all legitimate stories for anyone to be covering, and we understand that she had an agreement with her employer that she could write stories — even those involving Vator’s investors — once they became legitimate stories in their own right. And it was difficult for her to disclose her Vator activities while reporting at Marketwatch, because the point was to avoid using the Marketwatch platform to publicize Vator. Where the ethical line is crossed is hard to tell under these conditions — another reason Bambi should cut and run.

Update: Later Friday, Bambi resigned. See Mercury News.

The latest Silicon Valley round-up:

Correlation between bomb building and entrepreneurship? — Former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel reportedly says four of six founders of the online payment service built bombs while in high school. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson designs rockets.

MyYearbook.com, a social networking site for teens, raises $4.1M – The site looks like a Facebook knock-off. It raised the first round of finance from U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and First Round Capital. The site, hq’d in New Hope, Penn., is nothing to sneeze at: It boasts 1.7 million members globally, and over 5 million unique visitors per month. It prides itself in shunning banner ads of the kind that run on Facebook, saying teens like more interactive, social ads.

Don’t incorporate in Delaware — We know that’s what they all tell you to do, because of Delaware’s business-friendly laws. But a U.C. Berkeley study shows that an entrepreneur who incorporates in California may make $1.75M more in the event a sale triggers a preference clause, or otherwise leads to a showdown with an investing VC. The threat of a suit in your home state is enough to make the VC back off. Via Paul Kedrosky. Valleywag mentions it too.

SIPphone latest company to launch a new browser based calling service — as it tries to answer rivals such as Jajah, Jaxtr, Wengo. The company’s chief exec Michael Robertson told VentureBeat yesterday that “the call is made via the browser, like Skype, but unlike Skype there’s no big software download/install and registration period. You can walk up to any computer and call any phone number in the world. No mobile or landline is required to play.” More details here.

Latest on Google’s social application — Google’s Niniane Wang (left) is currently leading a team of Googlers to develop a new product in the social application space. Via Blogoscoped.

Google puts Wikipedia definitions at top of search results — Details via Rubel. This is the latest sign of continued momentum for Wikipedia, and comes as founder Jimmy Wales rolls out a Google competitor. Oh, and then there’s Amazon.com’s Wikipedia-clone for products, Amapedia. Confused yet? If not, read on…

Proliferation of Web site review and rating sites — Here’s a summary by Gigaom of the growing number of competitors to Amazon.com’s existing review service. There’s PowerReviews, a Millbrae, Calif. company that raised $6.25 million last year from Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards, and which is a Web-based portal for consumer reviews of products. There’s new player Ratepoint. Not mentioned is MerchantCircle, which lets businesses being reviewed keep up with these proliferating ratings.

Ironkey, a Los Altos, Calif. file encryption company, raises around $2.6M – The funding, apparently part of a larger second round of capital, is led by Leapfrog Ventures, reports Alarmclock.

Amie Street, the company that sells DRM-free MP3s at prices dependent on their popularity — It is looking to raise a first round of capital, reports Techcrunch.

We’re not raising VC! Well, maybe we are.. — CastTV, a video search engine company, which told us in Oct. it was not looking for cash, is reportedly about to close a first round of capital,.

TechStars is a new startup fund/incubator like YCombinator — It gives 10 start-ups a summer camp in Boulder, Colo. and $15,000 in seed funding. TechStars will take 5 percent of the equity in each startup. More at Techcrunch.

News Corp. to invest in ROO — The media giant will invest $12 million for a ten percent stake in the New York online video technology provider, according to the WSJ.

Global warming alert — Six years ago, scientists predicted global temperatures would rise at least 1.4 degrees by 2100. Now, they expect at least 2 degrees. Sea levels will rise between 28 and 43 centimeters. Time to wake up. And it’s not going to be easy.

Mozeen, the stealth mobile web portal — The company, mentioned by AlarmClock, is funded by big-name venture firm Sequoia Capital and the company reportedly claims “top talent from YouTube, Yahoo, Nokia, and Facebook.”

Mobile payment service Obopay has acquired social payment service, Billmonk — Details here.

Pickspal creates popular culture betting site — We covered Pickspal, which raised $6 million for a site where sports fans can bet on event outcomes. Now it has launched Pickspop, which lets you predict, say who will be on this week’s cover of people.

MySQL, the open source database company, is in talks with bankers about going public — Details here, but question is, will Oracle kill it first?

Geni, a new start-up in Los Angeles, wants to do for families what LinkedIn does for business contacts: Create one giant tree that shows you who is connected to who.

The world may be getting smaller; Geni, if successful, will make it tinier still.

Geni has just launched, and we found it easy to use. The company is led by co-founder David Sacks, a former chief operating officer at PayPal, who more recently started Room 9 Entertainment, a production company that financed the movie Thank You For Smoking. Geni has raised a first round of capital of “more than $1 million” from the Founders Fund, which is led by Peter Thiel, former chief executive of PayPal.

Geni has been in private testing for several weeks.

Geni is focused more on networking of living family members, giving them a friendly user interface they can play with, letting you drag the family tree around on your screen, like you can with a Google Map. Once you make an entry for a relative (see screen shots below), Geni lets you email the relative to prompt them to join, so they can make entries. Thus, it is viral.

For now, Geni lets users see only the trees they build for themsleves, or those to which they’ve been invited. This is for privacy reasons, Sacks said. However, Geni will eventually allow users to merge their trees, creating larger numbers of people in a network, and where the nature of privacy changes. Geni wants to build additional features as these trees grows, and is contemplating creating an overall global tree that has some locked features, and edited only with users with certain permission.

Geni is the latest in a long list of genealogy sites. One of the biggest is The Generations Network, which last week changed its name from MyFamily.com. That company owns Rootsweb.com and Ancestry.com. There are also TribalPages.com, OneGreatFamily.com, Genealogy.com and Allfamilytree.com. Some of these, like Ancestry.com, have built impressive record databases. If you type in an ancestor, they’ll search census, birth, death and immigration records.

Sacks said he was driven to build the site because his parents were immigrants from South Africa, and wanted to track family origins in Lithuania and elsewhere — he’s used Geni to connect with relatives from Canada, Australia, France and Israel. Humans have a fundamental need to know where they come from, and who they’re related to, he said.

He plans to make money from advertising. Geni may know more about its users than any other site, and should be able to target advertising better than most, Sacks said: “We’re going to know how old they are, whether they are male or female, where they live, family structure, whether they are single or recently married, whether they have kids, newborn or in college, whether they are divorced…” He may also charge for premium services, even if the basic site remains free. He says the model has worked at LinkedIn.

Sacks wants to make it a family social network, just as MySpace is a network for friends, and LinkedIn is a network for business contacts. People want a different network for each aspect of their lives, he says.

The company was formed last year. Co-founder Alan Braverman most recently co-founded Xoom.