VentureBeat

Comcast announced today it has invested an undisclosed sum in seed-round funding to mobile WiMax company Cartiza.

Founded in late 2006, the Boston, Mass. company has previously raised $12.6 million in funding, according to the Boston Business Journal. Cartiza is reportedly in stealth mode, working on infrastructure software for the next generation of mobile broadband. While the company website doesn’t say so, it is working with WiMax: Cartiza is listed in the WiMax Forum membership roster.

In April, Comcast was part of a group of industry giants, including Google, Time Warner, Intel, and Bright House Networks, that invested $3.2 billion in WiMax company Clearwire. Other WiMax start-ups are also getting money in anticipation of spending on WiMax infrastructure. One such start-up is BridgeWave Communications, which last week announced it had raised $10.3 million to create wireless transport infrastructure for WiMax and LTE (long-term evolution) cell phone networks.

Louis Toth, Managing Director at Comcast Interactive Capital, already had ties with Cartiza. According to his CIC profile page, he is “involved as a Director, Board Observer or adviser” for Cartiza and six other companies. However, it’s unclear if he took this role before funding Cartiza.

Here’s the latest action:
1. Data centers floating in the SF Bay?
2. CEO of search engine Ask goes to Redpoint
3. Xobni’s Outlook plugin enhanced
4. Microsoft dealmaker Bruce Jaffe to join startup life
5. Yahoo’s browser-based player now public
6. Readburner lets you see what’s shared on Google Reader
7. Nextreme keeps chips cool
8. Planting hairy plants may help prevent global warming?
9. Intel to launch WiMax PC card by June
10. LiveUniverse buying video sharing site Revver?
11. Terry Semel restarting investment company, Windsor Digital?

Data centers floating in the SF Bay? – Some of the stranger news we’ve heard, but apparently true. A Silicon Valley start-up called IDS (International Data Security) is planning to build up to 50 data centers on de-commissioned cargo ships, the first of them docked at Pier 50 in San Francisco. Image at left is an oil tanker in the Bay carrying some of these data centers, according to Silverback Migration Solutions. Apparently, this keeps the data center secure from “natural disasters” according to a company brochure, and the sea water helps cool the servers. Speaking of disasters, we recall a bad one two months ago when a tanker hit the bridge and spilled all kinds of oil. Are servers really going to be safer floating on the water? We couldn’t find too much information about this company, so still trying to confirm this one.
CEO of search engine Ask goes to Redpoint — IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Jim Safka becomes chief executive of IAC’s search engine, Ask.com, which has remained steady at around 4 percent market share since its controversial advertising campaign, a small bump up from 3 percent, but down from 5 percent several years ago. Safka will remain CEO of Primal Ventures, IAC’s investment arm. He replaces Jim Lanzone (pictured left), who joins Silicon Valley venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence. More here.

Xobni’s Outlook plugin for better email processing gets upgrades, expands test group – The San Francisco company impressed us at launch. However, it had to shut off access, due in part to high demand. It has spent the last few months making a range of improvements, including faster data processing and design changes. Today, Xobni invited the more than 14,000 people on the company’s waiting list. Each person will be able to invite up to five more friends. Xobni is most popular among those needing to track of a lot of work email, as you’d expect: Sales and marketing people, and project managers. Users are clicking on the application an average of more than eleven times per day, and internal surveys show more than 90 percent of its users are happy, the company said. Enhancements include right click actions, adding pictures, drag and drop of files, copy and paste of text etc. See here for more.

Microsoft dealmaker Bruce Jaffe leaves for Valley startup life — Jaffe was part of the team that acquired advertising firm aQuantive and invested $240 million in Facebook. He’s been interviewing at jobs in Silicon Valley, but has instead decided to start his own company, according to Valleywag’s scoop. Marketwatch confirmes the news.

Yahoo Tech Ticker: A tech TV we may just watch — It’s a select group of pundits, as TechCrunch reports: Sarah Lacy is a BusinessWeek reporter with a book on Silicon Valley slated to hit shelves later this year (you can get it on Amazon, here). Henry Blodgett is a fallen analyst turned successful blogger at Silicon Alley Insider. Paul Kedrosky is an investor, entrepreneur, blogger, and talking head. These people know a lot, and their attitudes are just as sharp.

Yahoo’s second iteration of its browser-based player is now public — It lets you link to MP3s on any web page. Details here.
Readburner lets you see what is shared on Google Reader — Readburner is the latest meme-tracker, this time on what are the most popular items shared via Google’s RSS reader. See image at left, which showed that our own Eric Eldon’s piece today was the third most popular item shared as of 10:30pm Wed eve. Mashable has more.

Start-up Nextreme keeps chips cool — The Durham N.C company, a spinoff of research institute RTI International, says it lowers temperatures in the specific areas of chips that get too hot. Excess heat has caused chip giants like Intel and AMD to find alternative methods to speed up their processors, for example creating multi-cores chips. WSJ has more.

Wiki-style website to help speed up U.S. broadband access? – Analyst Drew Clark of Washington DC will launch BroadbandCensus.com later this month, letting people enter where they live, the price of their service and how happy they are with it. A speed test will measure connection quality — and put pressure on the federal government to improve service where it is poor.

Planting hairy plants may help prevent global warming — More here.

Intel to launch WiMax PC card by June – Details at GigaOm.

LiveUniverse buying video sharing site Revver in a stock swap? — That’s the rumor. Los Angeles’ LiveUniverse, run by former News Corp. exec Brad Greenspan, owns LiveVideo, and it apparently wants to add Revver to its network of video sites. Greenspan mentions taking a 30 percent stake in LiveLeak in his blog. LiveUniverse also bought video search site Flurl in Oct. 2006. Revver took $13 million over the last two years from venture firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Benture Partners, Draper Richards and William Randolph Hearst III.

Terry Semel restarting his old investment company, Windsor Digital? — Semel, who exited from Yahoo after that company’s anemic progress over the past couple of years, is reportedly joining up with former Yahoos Drew Buckley and Jeff Karish. PaidContent has the news.

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.