VentureBeat

DeviceVM, a company that allows you to use your computer while it’s booting up, has raised another $15 million in funding.

The San Jose, Calif. company’s software is called Splashtop, and it comes preinstalled on PCs and motherboards. When those PCs are turned on, or when users hit a special key, they can use Splashtop within a few seconds to check their email, chat with friends, get on the Internet and more. (See screenshot below.) Although it’s kind of sad that computer boot times are slow enough to make this product useful, it’s cool that you don’t have to just twiddle your thumbs as you wait for your computer to start.

In addition to snagging some positive press and awards, DeviceVM has also landed some high-profile investors. This new round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from existing investors Storm Ventures, DFJ Dragon, Tim Draper and Larry Augustin (the last two are high-profile individual investors). Earlier this year, DeviceVM raised $1 million from Merus Capital, the firm created by former managers and executives from Google and Microsoft. The company has now raised a total of around $36 million.

DeviceVM says Splashtop has already shipped on millions of ASUS computers, while HP will be including the software in some of its notebooks soon.

1. WSJ Digital Network hires Microsoft for ads
2. Paramount Pictures, live in virtual world Habbo
3. Tim Draper raising fund for entertainment startups
4. MPAA downplay claim of movie piracy at colleges
5. Southern Cross first Aussie VC firm to open Silicon Valley office
6. How to find private photos on SmugMug
7. Redpoint Ventures does well with Fraud Sciences
8. Sprint and Clearwire revive WiMAX plan
9. VCs showed best returns of 2007 in Q2

Wall Street Journal Digital Network hires Microsoft for ads — The Wall Street Journal Online, Barrons.com, MarketWatch.com, AllThingsD.com and other sites will have their contextual and paid search advertising ads provided exclusively by Microsoft’s adCenter. Strange that The Wall Street Journal isn’t using the advertising services of its parent company News Corp., which has also been experimenting with contextual advertising that makes use of Myspace user data (our coverage). Ashkan Karbasfrooshan’s explanation is that this is actually being orchestrated by News Corp’s Murdoch. By recruiting Microsoft, he’s playing the software giant off against Google. You’ll recall Google has already cut a $900 million deal to serve ads on News Corp’s other properties, Myspace and other Fox Interactive Media sites. So why not keep the two giants honest, creating a little competition for News Corp.’s business?. Meanwhile, Microsoft also places ads on Myspace rival Facebook.

More than 20 million unique users visit the Journal’s network of sites per month, generating monthly 330 million page views. Microsoft now claims to have one of the largest vertical ad networks focused on financial readers. Other properties it runs ads on include MSN Money, CNBC.com and EDGAR Online.

Paramount Pictures, live in virtual world Habbo — Habbo (sample, left), formerly Habbo Hotel, has won “merchandising rights” to sell virtual goods to its users in North America, that feature items from the movies Mean Girls, the forthcoming The Spiderwick Chronicles and Beowulf. Habbo’s eight million monthly visitors will be able to buy virtual clothes, virtual furniture and other accessories (press release here). Paramount is the latest movie studio to start inserting its content into a virtual world. Sony and Time Warner have been doing the same thing. Both of those studios have had their movies and other content playing in the background of virtual rooms in virtual world Gaia Online (they also both invested in that company).

Tim Draper is reportedly still raising a fund to focus on entertainment startups — Or so recent reports suggest. We heard the same thing back in August.

MPAA admits movie piracy by college students not as bad as previously claimed — The Motion Picture of Association of America has come clean. The MPAA’s 2007 study will show that motion picture industry losses due to college students pirating movies amount to 15 percent. That’s down from the MPAA’s 2005 number of 44 percent, which the MPAA now says was due to an “isolated error.”  For a brutal breakdown of this announcement, read this.

Southern Cross Venture Partners is the first Aussie VC firm to open up an office in Silicon Valley — The Australia-based firm has already made investments in four companies of Australian origin: Xerocoat, Mantara, M&MD and UIactive. It closed a $150 million (AUD$170m) fund in the middle of last year. It plans to deepen relationships with US VCs, to help fund startups that begin life in Australia and New Zealand, and introduce them to the US market. The firm’s new office is in downtown Palo Alto, so I’ll be keeping my ears tuned to overhear Aussie-accented conversations while I write articles at Coupa Cafe.

How to find private photos on SmugMug — Is the popular photo-sharing site keeping your private photos private? Google Blogoscoped and others have discovered it’s not, apparently. Read here for more.

Redpoint Ventures cashes out Fraud Sciences six months after investing in it — EBay is buying Fraud Sciences for $169 million, which had received $8 million in funding from Redpoint, BRM Capital and undisclosed investors last year. It tracks online buyers to pin-point suspicious behavior, and is supposed to be particularly good at detecting fraudulent overseas transactions, a particular pain point for Paypal.

Sprint and Clearwire revive plan to build high-speed wireless network using WiMAX — The mobile carrier and the internet service provider are looking at forming a joint venture that could include Intel, Google and even retailer Best Buy, The Wall Street Journal reports.

VCs showed best returns of 2007 in Q2 — That’s according to the latest private equity performance index put together by Thomson Financial and the National Venture Capital Association. Take a look at this table for more details.

Here’s the latest (updated) action:

Six Apart’s headaches — The blogging software market is highly competitive, so small differences in quality can make a difference in user adoption. Six Apart, a Silicon Valley start-up that offers several blogging software platforms, including Movable Type, has released a product after acknowledging internally it could make developers mad. [Six Apart's Anil Dash has since responded in comments, saying the company took time to fix the bugs for the release. The references in an internal memo before the release that caused concern were the following: The need for "PR to stay ahead of the curve" with people who say "we rushed the release" and to developers who "will be very mad" for not having the resources to upgrade their plugins.] Moreover, chief architect Brad Fitzpatrick has left the company. We asked Six Apart for comment, but they did not respond. Frankly, the various bugs are one reason VentureBeat moved to embrace Wordpress, dropping Movable Type. Wordpress, owned by Automattic, also seemed swifter and more flexible. Separately, Wordpress’ hosted version (Wordpress.com) is more secure than Six Apart’s hosted versions. Wordpress has three different data centers, so you wouldn’t see it crash like Six Apart did when an SF data center melted down several days ago. Wordpress is run by a Swiss named Toni Schneider, who is obsessed with scaling the company without hitch or server meltdown. Lead developer Matt Mullenweg goes to bed thinking about scaling problems, Schneider adds. Related: I cited Toni in a piece I just did for Forbes about “when to hire an IT guy.”

Clicktale records what happens when a user hits your Web site — Today, Clicktale launched to show things like the number of mouse hovers over a link (in other words, showing how a link may be attractive, but not enough for people to click), how many mouse hovers eventually convert to mouse clicks and other interesting behavior measures. Techcrunch has a good review here. The Israeli start-up has competitors, including RobotReplay and TapeFailure.

Zhanzuo.com, a Facebook clone in China, has acquired Yoolin.com, a campus social networking site targeted at Chinese students abroad — Yoolin was founded in June 2006 by Chinese students from Stanford, UC Berkeley, Harvard and MIT, but according to Alexa data cited by this blog (which reported the acquisition), their traffic didn’t grow much.

Another news site, Newser.com — Journalist Michael Wolff has started a news Web site called newser.com that aggregates news articles for convenient reading. New York Times has the story. We don’t understand the company’s model. The cater-to-all destination site is a dead horse fairly beaten.

Non-profit music industry agent conflicted? — Wired reports that Sound Exchange, a nonprofit that administers copyright licensing and license-fee collection is funding a group called musicFirst, which is lobbying for the enforcement of extra broadcasting fees on terrestrial radio stations. According to Wired: “Whether or not SoundExchange’s lobbying efforts prove to be illegal, its presence as an advocate in this debate undercuts its role as neutral administrator of royalty fees set and approved by the Copyright Royalty Board.”

GoFish’s acquisition of Bolt, dead in water — Details here.

Microsoft testing ad supported Microsoft Works — Details at Ars Technica.

Advertisers in UK yank ads from Facebook when they realize the ads are posted next to the group page of a far-right-wing political party — Details here. Slowly but surely, advertisers are beginning to realize how dangerous it is to run campaigns in social networking sites. Tod M. Sacerdoti, founder of BrightRoll, which inserts advertising into videos for clients, told us recently he has all but abandoned serving social network sites, after seeing multiple examples of advertising networks exposing major advertising brands to lewd, quasi-porn video content.

Answers.com loses 28 percent of its viewers due to a change by Google’s algorithm — GigaOm points to the story.

IAC bags Google, chooses Microsoft - It will use Microsoft’s aQuantive’s ad network over Google’s Doubleclick.

Thomson Financial finally releases VC data — Like the data released last week by VentureOne, it shows venture capitalists are investing at the highest levels since 2001. VCs poured $7.1 billion in 977 deals in the second quarter of 2007 - the largest number deals since the third since Q3 2001. A Thomson spokeswoman said the week’s delay in the survey was caused by a server crash, and then a week’s worth of verification with its partners in the quarterly MoneyTree Survey: PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. We asked whether a reported 61 layoffs at Thomson in recent months had anything to do with the snafu, since some of the VC reporting department has been replaced by outsourced labor in places like the Philippines. Or perhaps caused by distraction caused by Thomson’s pending merger with Reuters? A spokeswoman did not address the layoffs, but said the Reuters deal hasn’t closed yet, and so that played no role.

Vibrator maker Jimmy Jane might get real VC? — Individuals such as Tim Draper have backed Jimmy Jane, the sex-toy company, with about $1 million, but now the New York Times’ Matt Richtel says the company is about to get a real VC round. We contacted Jimmy Jane for comment, but no response thus far. Draper, for his part, suggested something is coming: “I don’t think I am allowed to answer that,” he said, when asked about a pending round. “We don’t make comments on financings until they are done.”

Yahoo advised to… go after social networking — An analyst report by Bear Stearns recommends that Yahoo more aggressively pursue social networking, saying it is a high growth opportunity, and noting that Facebook could be worth $6 billion or so. Yahoo had reportedly sought to buy Facebook last year for $1 billion.

Yahoo advised to… pursue open source — Tim O’Reilly says Yahoo is grasping open source as a competitive advantage and commends it, writing off the news Yahoo is now supporting something called Hadoop.

WiMax notebook computers coming by late next year — So says Intel, a leading provider of the technology, which will operate many times faster than WiFi technology used by most laptops. (Mercury News story)

Silicon Valley’s WiFi network project shifts from free, to paid — A Mercury News story shows the Silicon Valley Joint Venture Wireless Project looks shakier than ever.

The latest in Silicon Valley:

Doppelganger raise $5M more for virtual world focused on teens — Doppelganger is the San Francisco start-up taking aim at the teen, or MTV audience (see our earlier coverage). It launched last year with a virtual club featuring the band the Pussycat Dolls, and is signing deals with other bands. Teens can design their avatars, chat with other sexy avatars, including of the band members themselves, and dance. Chief executive Andrew Littlefield says (listen to podcast) there’s a void between SecondLife, which he says appeals to a slightly older sci-fi crowd, and Habbo Hotel, which appeals to the Nickelodeon crowd. Doppelganger’s lounges integrate with AOL’s Instant Messenger, allowing teens to use existing Buddy Lists. It has raised $5 million in a third round led by Greycroft Partners, a New York-based firm whose West Coast office is run by former VSP partner Dana Settle. This follows $11 million in earlier rounds from Trident Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Of course, there’s the ongoing legal battles around VSP that are ongoing (Primack has latest).

Draper backs sex toy company — Speaking of DFJ investments, turns out DFJ’s party-hardy extrovert partner Tim Draper is behind the new San Francisco sex-toy company, JimmyJane, we wrote about recently. Alex Haislip has the scoop. Draper is joined by Phil Schlein, a venture partner at U.S. Venture Partners. Things are apparently livening up on traditionally conservative Sand Hill Road.

Another DEMO mention: Jaman — This site, just launched, lets you download a video player so you can watch “world cinema” online, or foreign movies you can’t get easily. We downloaded the player, and it is nice enough. It costs $1.99 to rent the movies, and $4.99 to buy, but we’re not sure how this rises above the noise, or how it got to DEMO. There are lots of other movie companies, and players. More at GigaOM (which links to a full history of this Palo Alto company)

Meebo is an instant message service loved by students, because they can use it from any computer, even at school. Its usage keeps growing — it doubled registered users to more than a million over the past three months.

The meta-instant messaging service (it works across Google, AOL, Yahoo Messenger, etc) announced tonight it has raised $9 million in venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson — a round we’d hinted was coming. In its statement, the company also said Sequoia also participated, but did not say how much the total funding was.

Some people swear by the Mountain View company, and the cute little widget it offers, the Meebome, which lets bloggers chat with visitors directly from their site. Others suggest it embodies the hype of Web 2.0 — it is just an instant messaging service, now essentially a commodity, and there’s still no sign of how it will make money. It had already raised $3.5 million from Sequoia.

There’s always advertising, of course, but you generally need more page views (than 1.2 million logins it gets a day) to run a decent business. However, Meebo exchanges 75 million messages per day, with average sessions of 70 minutes — a length of time that becomes significant if you can advertise creatively during the session.

This may be its “show-me” year, and we’ll see how Meebo does. Tim Draper, of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, joins Meebo’s board.

Updated

Phonezoo is a new Silicon Valley start-up that makes downloading ringtones a fun activity, even for us at VentureBeat who have so far snubbed the trend.

Phonezoo, of Sunnyvale, has been in testing mode until now, but today launched publicly. We’ve tried it. You go through an easy registration process, where you list your phone, so Phonezoo knows how to best transcode ringtones for your particular phone.

Once enter the Phonezoo site, you can explore ringtones that other members have created and submitted to the site. You can see the most recent ringtones or top-rated ones, and rate them yourself. Each ringtone is titled with the name of songs if playz (see partial screenshot below). You find “Clocks” from ColdPlay, for example, and download it.

The great part, it’s free. Other services charge an average of $2.50 per ringtone and limit options to audio prepackaged segments, sold typically by wireless carriers.

But there’s one more step before you can download “Clocks.” Phonezoo puts a green button beside the ringtones ready for download immediately. It puts an orange button next to copyrighted songs, such as “Clocks.” Selecting the Clocks ringtone prompts you to upload the music file from your desktop or other drive — thus ensuring you have rights to it. Once you upload it, Phonezoo automatically scans it and pulls the relevant snippet to match the ringtone you’ve chosen.

It doesn’t stop there. Phonezoo gives you a way to edit the ringtone. It gives you a cool graphic to show which part of the full song you’ve got as your ringtone (see image below). If the “Clocks” ringtone you’ve chosen is defaulted to begins at eight seconds into the song, you move sliders on the graphic to change it so that it starts at the beginning. Moreover, you can change how long the snippet plays, say from ten seconds to 20 seconds.

Phonezoo plans to make money down the line, it says, by inserting advertising that is relevant to the songs you’re looking at — or profiling sponsored content. Phonezoo has a person’s phone data, and so knows where members are located, and thus serve locally relevant concern information, for example. It will let users buy full songs related to the ringtones they’ve selected, and Phonezoo will take a cut in the process — say five cents from an overall price of 45 cents. Phonezoo wants to move into video, chief executive Ram Ramkumar told VentureBeat. It’s also building a way for users to place a widget on MySpace, listing their ringtones, he said.

The company says 69 percent of ringtones are downloaded by women. So the company’s target customer is a 20-year-old college female student, who has more than 100 friends in MySpace and/or Facebook listed in their phones and IM buddy lists.

The U.S. ringtone market is expected to exceed $600 million in sales this year, up from $500 million last year,” according to BMI, a performing rights organization. There’s a plethora of players in the ringtones market, but none that offer a community service for free, Phonezoo’s Ramkumar says.

The company has raised an angel round of $560,000, led by venture capitalist Tim Draper, who invested $300,000 of that. It is now looking to raise $5 million.