Thanksgiving’s nine news nuggets

Here are nine news nuggets to catch up on Silicon Valley news from the Thanksgiving slowdown:

Craig invests in trusted news: Craig Newmark, founder of San Francisco classifieds site Craigslist, has apparently invested in a start-up that helps people find the most trusted versions of important sites. The company is still stealth, but Jeff Jarvis, a blogger on all things related to media, also is involved, and adds: “Our goal is to create a platform to organize the world’s news using the best of technology, community, and editors. We see an explosion of interest in and coverage of news from incredibly varied sources around the world and see a need around that. We plan to have a beta in the spring…”

Bono rocks

No mention of Elevation: Here’s a whole story in the New York Times (registration required) about how U2 is run like a business, and it doesn’t even mention the most potent example: Bono is a…

…happy partner in a Menlo Park private equity firm, Elevation Partners, and the firm managed to raise $1.9 billion from investors because of the way Bono runs a tight ship at U2. Times’ reporter apparently went to the Tuesday night performance in New York. We went the day before, and our photo here shows how much the fans love Bono. We mentioned other Bono buzz here.

TiVo serving you ads in search results: “From skip ads, to pop-up ads to now keyword specific ads: TiVo is slowly becoming the new advertising platform, which is to say, new bottle old wine.”
Om Malik comments on the Wall Street Journal piece about the DVR maker working to deliver ads to consumers, who are looking for a specific product. “In other words, its Adwords for Television. Type in BMW and commercials will appear in a special folder right next to saved television programs.”

Lightspeed renegades form Opus Capital: You may remember our item a few months ago about the venture capitalists who fled Lightspeed Venture Partners to form an early-stage venture firm, now called Opus. VenturWire follows (sub required) with an item about how Opus has named Dan Avida as a general partner.

BART outfitted with wireless: “The San Fransico Chronicle reports that the BART subway system has been completely outfitted with cells to allow cellphone usage everywhere on the line. The network has been paid for entirely by Nextel, who leased out the lines to the other carriers.” Slashdot excerpts from the article: “Rae said BART and the wireless companies know some riders will try to make calls over the din as BART roars and screeches through tunnels. But most of the business, he said, will be from people using wireless devices to read and send e-mail or browse the Internet.

Digg about to bury Slashdot?: Here’s a Wired story about how hot Digg is, and how it might be the new Slashdot. A line from the piece: The effect is felt far and wide. Digg gets up to 1,000 links submitted every day and 500,000 visitors, radiating traffic around the web. Its growth has been so pronounced that the site’s own server melted down earlier this month.

Two biologists bolt California for Singapore: An eye-opening story in Merc about how two of the nation’s top government biologists are moving to Singapore instead of Stanford University, worried about the delays in the allocation of $3 billion in taxpayer funds targeted for stem-cell research by Prop. 71.

The “momentary enterprise”: Slashdot, again, points us to an essay about the new phenomenon among startups, the “momentary enterprise.” The article defines the term as a business that ‘takes advantage of an opportunity that may only exist for months’. The piece claims that we’re entering a golden age of technologies that can be glued together to create new types of information that fill an identifiable need.

Cisco heads into your living room: The networking giant’s $6.9 billion deal to buy Scientific-Atlanta Inc., confirmed by the companies Friday, gives Cisco a line of widely used TV set-top boxes as well as server systems used by cable operators to distribute programming. Here’s the WSJ story (sub required).