Roundup: Intelius and A123 forecast IPOs, EMI cuts, Coghead and more

Here’s the latest action:
1. Intelius readies for $140M+ IPO
2. Battery start-up A123 predicts IPO
3. Hollywood writer pied piper raising $30M
4. Liberty Media ups holding in IAC
5. Is Yahoo imploding?
6. Flip.com flops, but embraces Facebook
7. Job cuts at music industry giant, EMI?
8. Genealogy company Verwandt raises more $
9. Coghead releases new version
10. Lots of fundings
Intelius sets up for $140M+ IPO –The controversial founder of InfoSpace, Naveen Jain (pictured left), is maneuvering his latest venture, a people- and background-search engine called Intelius, for an initial public offering that could gross the company near $150 million. Jain is no stranger to IPOs, having seen InfoSpace through a skyrocketing bubble-era IPO. Then again, there are some possible downsides: Jain was ousted from InfoSpace in 2002 and later sued for alleged theft of trade secrets when he founded Intelius. The suit failed, but Federal regulators were reportedly investigating Intelius as recently as last year. John Cook has a story on the Bellevue, Wash. company.

Battery start-up A123 feeling confident, says it will have IPO — A123 Systems, a company offering a new kind of lithium ion battery for electric cars says it hopes to go public, “as early as this year.” The company has raised a whopping $132 million in capital from well-known Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital and General Electric’s finance arm. That GE connection may help it as GM selects it as part of a consortium that will supply parts for its upcoming Volt hybrid. With so many electric and hybrid cars coming to market, and all of them needing cutting-edge batteries, A123 could be nicely situated. The WSJ has the latest. David Vieau, the company’s chief executive, sees a limited window of opportunity. “When the market is in such a big disruption as it is now, that’s the only time a company like ours has a chance to cut into the business,” he tells the WSJ. “There’s really no existing supplier.”

Job cuts at music industry giant, EMI? — Guy Hands, boss of private equity group Terra Firma and owner of EMI, one of the major music labels will apparently outline at a meeting this week how he intends to revive the ailing company — and will cut “up to one in three” of its staff, according to the Guardian. The label has been struggling. RadioHead recently quit.

Hollywood writer pied piper raising $30 million in venture capital to develop films — Fed up with being out of work, a group of professional writers is looking to start their own production and distribution company, reports NewTeeVee. Aaron Mendelsohn, writer of the Disney film Air Bud and an active WGA member is leading the effort, which is called Virtual Artists. The group will help writers develop and produce films, and may even acquire content.Henri Poole of CivicActions and Brian Behlendorf of the Apache Project and CollabNet are serving as technology advisers. As NewTeeVee points out, there are a number of other competitors: 60Frames, Blowtorch Entertainment, and another group called Hollywood Distrupted mentioned by the Los Angeles Times.

John Malone’s Liberty Media purchases a bigger stake in IAC/InterActiveCorp — Liberty has bought 14 million more shares of IAC, the company controlled by Barry Diller, for $339.5 million. Liberty now holds about a 30 percent stake, up from 24.1 percent last year. InterActiveCorp, owner of a range of Internet properties, has seen its stock fall 38 percent over the last year. Details here.

Is Yahoo imploding? — Analysts are starting to wonder. Jeffrey Lindsay, of Sanford Bernstein, says the company’s stock has fallen so far that the value of Yahoo’s cash and stock holdings exceeds its actual business. See the breakdown here from the NYT’ Saul Hansell. Hansell analysis follows a similar take from Valleywag’s Owen Thomas. With its value plunging so far, rumors of an acquisition increase. The latest is that Microsoft is looking.

Flip.com flops, but seeks to live again through Facebook — Media giant Conde Nast has never been noted for its online acumen, and its destination site for teenage girls, Flip.com, fails to break the mold. The company may be learning, though: It has decided to turn Flip into a distributed media property spread across already-popular sites like Facebook. Its applications on social networks previously directed users to the home site, but it will now stand alone on existing social networks. Conde Nast, in turn, will benefit from a much lower maintenance cost for its site, as it will effectively be hosted elsewhere.

Genealogy social network Verwandt raises undisclosed second round from Hasso Plattner Ventures — The latest round of financing for the German company is reportedly in the “multi-million-dollars,” but is undisclosed. It follows a first round in July 2007 from Hamburg-based Neuhaus Partners. Despite launching later than its U.S. based competitor, Geni, the company claims to be growing more quickly, Techcrunch reports, now boasting more than 1.4 million families and 16 million profiles. In part, it’s because Verwandt is available to users in German, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English. Coghead releases second generation of its Web app builder– Coghead, which lets people at small and medium sized businesses build their own Web applications, and then deploy at $10 per user of those applications, has emerged with an updated, speedier version: It is adopting Adobe’s Flex software, which improves Coghead’s look and feel. It is also adopting Adobe’s AIR, an emerging cross-operating system technology that lets developers make Web applications also work on the desktop. Finally, Coghead will also use Amazon’s EC2 and S3 for its hosting — to alleviate concern about security.

Lots of fundings – Many of our readers by RSS still don’t get our regular diet of funding announcements on the left hand side column. Make sure you check out the latest companies to get funding, which include Jellyvision Lab, Invite Media, Aptilo Networks, Spendview, Shocking Technologies, Freepath, Tremor Media and more.