VentureBeat

With the popularity of virtual worlds like Second Life, enterprises and other organizations are taking an interest in creating virtual environments to communicate better.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Forterra Systems helps create virtual worlds for corporations, government agencies, and healthcare industries. The company is in the midst of raising $10 million in venture funding, according to an interview with CEO David Ralston on Venture Wire. Read the rest of this entry »

(Update: Corrected name of company acquired by News Corp. It was Newroo)

Roundup of latest Silicon Valley action:

One of Digg’s top diggers, p9, has quit, and Netscape is grinning — When Kevin Rose, founder of the news-ranking site, Digg, said he wanted to make the voting process for stories more democratic, he apparently alienated some of the site’s top users. One top digger has left, and slammed the door loudly in protest. Here’s a good description of how Digg works, by the way, and a discussion about the changes underway. Of course, all this is giving Jason Calacanis (pictured above, with dog) fodder for saying he was right all along to offer to pay the top users at Digg and other news sites to leave join him at Netscape. Calacanis’ site competes with Digg. This has also sparked a debate about how long users can volunteer their time and energy digging sories for Digg without getting some reward or other form of recognition.

Now Calacanis is suggesting his parent company, AOL, consider stealing away top users from competitiors to AOL’s other sites, for example at Uncut Video, AOL’s clone of YouTube. He’s suggesting Uncut steal from YouTube’s best 1 percent of video posters: (Wow, this copying behavior is becoming quite a trend over at AOL):

So, I’m wondering if the folks on AIM pages or Uncut are seeing something similar and if similar strategies might work. Maybe Uncut should hire the top 20 video producers on YouTube to work for us? Maybe AIM Pages should hire the top 20 folks on MySpace to be part of our “leadership program” (or something like that). Have them train the user base and give feedback to the developers.

Video ads really that popular? — Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, has produced rosy set of calculations for the revenue video-sharing site YouTube can bring in from advertising. He estimates 80 percent of YouTube’s 100 million vidoes being watched daily can be monetized, with advertisers paying an average of $12 per 1,000 times these video are shown. He assumes YouTube will give users a cut for sharing their content, and arrives at a total $153 million net revenue per year. He says this is just back-of-the-envelope, and not meant to be exact, but even then we find it hard to agree with the analysis. Let’s face it, ads become a turn off at a certain point. The joy of YouTube is sitting there gawking at vidoes run over and over again. Forcing forcing people to sit through ten-second ad will radically change the experience. Here’s a Business Week article about the topic which shows much more skepticism.

InterActive Corp (IAC) the latest to media giant to move into deal-making mode –The big media companies are upgrading their buyout strategies. Sumner Redstone, chairman of media giant Viacom Sumner M. Redstone last week fired Viacom’s chief executive, Tom E. Freston, and replaced him a Philippe P. Dauman,a deal-maker. As the NYT reported, investment bankers scrambled to make lists of possible acquisition targets to pitch, including folks like YouTube, FaceBook and Bebe. In fact, even Viacom itself showed up on the list — as a candidate to be taken private by all the hungry private equity companies out there. This is the era of the acquisition, baby, and it Silicon Valley is getting its fair share. The latest comes from IAC, which has hired Kara Norman, the young associate with Battery Ventures, as its “vice president, mergers and acquisitions.” We teased Kara for chasing entrepreneurs through the NY’s Central Park, and now she will be based in New York where she can chase full-time, though she promises to visit the valley often — where there are plenty of acquisition possibilities.

Kara’s hire comes on the heels of IAC’s hiring of Jason Rapp, who will be her boss at IAC. Rapp was VP of online development and associate GM at New York Times Digital. He has joined Barry Diller’s IAC as senior VP, mergers and acquisitions. IAC, which owns properties like Evite, Ask, Ticketmaster, is giving the new hires a pretty broad mandate Kara said. IAC, of course, is smaller than NewsCorp, where Ross Levinson head of NewsCorp’s Fox Interactive division is making all the waves buying up Web 2.0 companies, such as MySpace and Webaroo Newroo.

Mendel Biotechnology has new ethanol technology — The NYT has a good summary of the various approaches to cellulosic ethanol production, which is where the great expectations are right now. Instead of corn stalks, perennial plants like grasses that require far less energy-consuming irrigation and fertilization than corn are looking promising. On this blog, we’ve mentioned most Silicon Valley companies active in the clean-tech already, but not Mendel, a Hayward company. According to the NYT, it is:

…looking more at miscanthus, a perennial grass native to China, where Mendel has set up an operation.

The company said miscanthus could produce well over 20 tons an acre each year. “No planting, no fertilizing, no irrigation,” said its chief executive, Chris Somerville, who is also the director of plant biology at the Carnegie Institution and a Stanford University professor. “You can just cut it every year for 10 years.”

Silicon Valley green-tech Young Innovator, Christina Galitsky. Technology Review pays tribute to Christina Galitsky — The publication has made Galitsky, 33, “2006 Young Innovator.” She left a chemical engineering program UC Berkeley with her master’s in 1999, and found work testing California’s water quality. She recognized contamination was coming from the power industry and, eager to fight pollution, joined Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. There, she began diagnosing energy waste in nearly a dozen industries, from concrete to beer, and is helping companies like wineries to spot their energy waste more easily.

New life for the Segway? — The high-tech scooter company’s chief executive James Norrod is taking “a much more expansive view of what Segway is about.” Instead of limiting the Segway to the two-wheeled personal transporter we’ve all gotten comfortable with — and, frankly, tired of — Segway can put its technology “into anything that moves.” According to a BW story:

That means unmanned vehicles with potential military or industrial uses, or multiperson vehicles that use Segway’s computers and electric engines to glide smoothly over obstacles. And Norrod thinks Segway’s efficient electric motors could be central to a new generation of hybrid cars (yes, cars). Segway has already built a four-wheeled, multiperson prototype. “If people want four wheels,” says Norrod, “I should give ‘em four wheels.”

Second Life database gets hacked – There have been several major Internet privacy snafus lately, and this one at Second Life is just the latest. A hacker apparently accessed account names, real life names and contact info. Sadly, it seems there’s nowhere really safe to play online anymore, even in the ultimate escapist world of Second Life.