Netvibes announced today that they have released a mobile version of their website and it works very well for all phones.  The URL for the mobile Netvibes module is http://m.netvibes.com.  Although I am not sure how it looks on the iPhone, I did try out the mobile version on my HTC Mogul 6800.
Below are a couple pictures I took of Netvibes on the HTC Mogul:

I didn’t give Netvibes much credit for creating a Facebook application, but I now know that I’ll be obsessed with the mobile version of Netvibes.  Tariq Krim and other Netvibes’ team members, you are geniuses.

Today Microsoft made an announcement that they would be acquiring Parlano. Parlano is a Chicago, Ill. based company that developed software called MindAlign, an enterprise group chat messaging system. Microsoft is expecting to implement Parlano software as a part of Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Office Communicator. Microsoft Office Communicator is an internal messaging system that works similar to Windows Live Messenger, commonly used among major corporations.

“Parlano has been successful in meeting the rigorous communications needs of companies in financial services and other vertical markets,” stated Gurdeep Singh Pall, the corporate vice president of the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft. “Parlano’s expertise and technology, added to Microsoft’s unified communications offering, will deliver customers the most complete presence, instant messaging and group chat solution on the market.”

Financial terms for the acquisition were not disclosed. Parlano is a spin-off from UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) and has 50 employees. Parlano’s investors include Longworth Venture Partners and Oak Investment Partners.

“Parlano has helped many organizations enhance operations, improve service delivery and increase sales through more effective ongoing group communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing,” stated Nick Fera, the chairman and CEO of Parlano. “The resulting competitive advantage will be further enhanced as we bring Parlano technology together with Microsoft Office Communications Server and Office Communicator.”

Yahoo! Music has just unleashed a redesign.  The search has a pull-down menu so that a user can search All, Artists, Albums, Lyrics, Songs, and Videos seamlessly.  On the homepage, there is a Flash-based news feed that displays featured artists, video spotlights, current contests, featured videos, and video premieres. 

The homepage also has a Top 100 Charts and without having to leave the homepage, users can find out what the Top 10 Videos, Top 10 Albums, and Top 10 Songs.  Exclusive Yahoo! Music videos are on the homepage as well.  One of the interesting features is local concert listings integrated from upcoming.org.

And the last new feature placed on the homepage is Music Blog feeds.  One of the main Yahoo! Music blogs is written by Rob O’Connor’s List of the Day.

Below is a screen shot:

The Cable News Network is America’s #1 cable news source based on the highest number of unique viewers according to Nielsen.  As the news network grew more powerful, the company introduced CNN.com in 1995.  Around the time of September 11, 2001, CNN.com’s unique visitors grew from 1.3 million to 4.6 million according to MediaLifeMagazine.

In 2006, CNN.com received 1.6 billion page views per month and served 600 million free videos over the course of the year.  Between January 2006-November 2006, CNN.com was ranked #1 for mobile news providers.  Based on these statistics and the prestige of having CNN as a client, Google AdSense should throw a victory party for themselves.  It was recently announced that they will be the exclusive pay-per-click advertisement providers for CNN.  Previously, Yahoo! was the advertisement provider since 2004.  In 2004, Yahoo! took the exclusive rights for CNN advertisements and competed against Google for the same deal.

Google’s search engine is also powering CNN.com for archived stories as well.  Google also sealed a deal to be the exclusive pay-per-click advertising company and search engine for most FOX Interactive Media websites, including MySpace last year.  The deal with FOX costed roughly $900 million – $1 billion.

“This is an important deal for Google because CNN.com has a lot of traffic and high quality content. The agreement provides an opportunity for our advertisers to target CNN.com and get high quality traffic for their ads,” stated Brandon McCormick, a Google spokesman.

CNN recently revamped their website.  Pulse 2.0 reviewed CNN Beta last June.

When I subscribed to Time magazine through a solid deal that a Best Buy cashier promised me, I signed away my credit card with the intention that it will provide me information that related to current events, not things that I already know about. 

The cover page of this past Time magazine had a picture of Mother Teresa and the cover title was The Secret Life Of Mother Teresa, so how come when I turn to page 54, I find myself reading redundant news about Facebook’s refusal of Yahoo!’s $1 billion offer, controversial News Feed feature, and how it evolved from a Harvard University directory?  This information was already known in 2006.  The year, 2007, is 3 months away and between the old news coverage of Facebook and reading about Digg’s overhyped homepage redesign, I find myself slightly agreeing with Mark Cuban.

Does anyone agree with me when I say that I fear for America’s web technology future?  Innovation needs to persevere once again.  Where is the next Wales,’ Roses,’ Zuckerbergs,’ Jobs,’ Pages’ and Brins’, Yangs’ and Filos,’ and Gates’ today?  Under a rock?  Someone needs to make a further impact so that Time has something fresher to talk about.

Amount Invested: Undisclosed
Series: Angel
TheBig is a video channel website that is based in India. The company has raised angel funding from Suhel Seth and Swapan Seth. Suhel is a Managing Partner with Counselage and Swapan is the CEO of Equus Red Cell. Gaggan Duggal and Chetan Sharma were also investors. Chetan is a consultant for ZeeTV and Duggal is the founder of Matrix, a brand name in international calling cards.

TheBig does not focus on strictly user generated content, but also has original programming. Some of TheBig’s original programming includes Sudarshan: The Lonely Boy, Professor Aye Tein, News With Leela Loose, and Agony Tau.

“With the progressive emancipation of bandwidth and the acutely swift growth of the Internet, we see a long term play in this space. Www.thebig.tv is also very different from a concept like YouTube. YouTube only uploads third party provided content. With www.thebig.tv, there is a lot of content creation from the site itself. Furthermore, over time we will also be offering films that can be downloaded,” stated Swapan Seth.
[Source: alarm:clock]

Amount Invested: $250-$500K
Series: Seed Financing
iFamily gained popularity as a Facebook geneaology application. Below is a screen shot of the application when it is active in a profile:

iFamily’s investor is a boutique investment banking company called CountryRoad Capital. iFamily has about 83,000-plus total profiles and the company was recently given a valuation of about $1 million.

“This investment from CountryRoad Capital will allow iFamily to accelerate its product and business development and sustain its leadership position as the first and foremost genealogy application on Facebook,” stated Ilya Nikolayev, the CEO of iFamily. “CountryRoad has a distinguished track record of identifying and catalyzing unique emerging technology opportunities and we are pleased to partner with CountryRoad’s Managing Partner Andrew Merkatz and his team. Rather than take an existing genealogy application and try to bend it to work within Facebook, and rather than develop a competing family oriented social network, we have chosen to build this application from the bottom up to fully leverage and integrate the power of Facebook. I believe this market positioning is unique and will allow us to drive significant value for our shareholders.”

CountryRoad Capital also invested in SocialMedia.com, the parent company of other Facebook Applications: Happy Hour, Trakzor, Foodfight.
[Source: alarm:clock]

Amount Invested: $28 Million Total
Series: Second Round ($14 Million)
Veveo is the company that created Vtap, a mobile video/Internet search service. The company’s official launch date is September 10th according to VentureBeat.

Vtaps’s search technology focuses on predictive technology rather than the number of incoming links that Google’s PageRank uses. An example that VentureBeat provides is that if you type “Gwy,” then Vtap will suggest Gwenyth Paltrow as the top result. And then users can seamlessly watch clips that feature Paltrow in them.

The investors in Veveo include Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, and North Bridge Venture Partners. Murali Aravamudan is currently the CEO of Veveo and is a former researcher at Bell Labs.
[Source: alarm:clock]

Amount Invested: $1.7 Million
Series: Series A
Vadver is a start-up site that is aiming to become a video-discovery service. Draper Fisher Jurvetson invested $1.7 million in the company. Vadver is run by Patrick Koppula.

Koppula is also part of iLike.com, Gcast.com, GarageBand.com. Vadver is based in San Francisco.
[Source: alarm:clock]

Amount Invested: $6.75 Million Total
Series: 2nd Round ($4.5 Million)
Federated Media Publishing is company that acts as a brokerage for advertisements to be placed on some of the top web publication and news companies including Digg, TechCrunch, BoingBoing, Mashable, Alarm:Clock, Ars Technica, GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Wikia etc. Inevitably, Pulse 2.0 (P2) is aiming to become a client too, but P2 is still in the growth phase.

Federated Media was founded by John Battelle, author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture and co-founding editor of Wired. Investors that participated in this round of funding includes JPMorgan and Omidyar Network (started by eBay’s founder).
[Source: PEHub]

Yahoo! has just barged into an international mobile market by purchasing Actionality, a German mobile advertising company that plugs ads into mobile devices through mobile games. The acquisition complements Yahoo!’s launching of Go For Mobile 2.0.

The acquisition also complements Yahoo’s acquisition of Right Media, a digital advertising agency. The acquisition of Right Media was seen in the blogosphere as a move that was triggered by Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick (pending) and Microsoft’s acquisition of aQuantive (complete).

“Yahoo! is being very ambitious and will face strong competition in the mobile advertising market, which is still very much up for grabs,” stated Eden Zoller, a research analyst at Ovum which is a market research company. “Google tends to be viewed as the lead contender in terms of online brands moving into mobile advertising, mainly because of the huge clout carried by its brand among both consumers and the advertising community. However, we think it unwise to underestimate Yahoo. The mobile publisher advertising network should be viewed alongside Yahoo’s other activities in this space, which are ramping up quickly.”

Actionality’s AdFlex Platform enables users to customize mobile content without the use of APIs or programming experience. This content can be placed across mobile operators throughout Asia and Europe. Actionality is based in Munich Germany and has sales offices in Hong Kong and Berlin. Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures provided Actionality seed funding in February 2006.

When I was in between jobs for the last few months, I found myself uploading my resume on Monster.com. Little did I know that it could potentially fall into the wrong hands: hackers, or in the context of computer networking, “crackers” and “phishers.” Researchers at Symantec Corporation plundered the user names and passwords from recruiters searching for job candidates.

“What phishers are trying to do these days is make them as realistic as possible, by adding specific information,” stated Patrick Martin, a product manager at Symantec Corp. “If they know you’ve submitted a resume to Monster, that makes it (seem) a little more legitimate.”

While this is a tremendous flaw in security, I could only imagine how much of a field day computer networking companies are having with this story. From Monster.com’s shoes, I could imagine them thinking that this is not the first time user data has been exposed^[1].

However, Monster.com has just released a security notice on their website, so all users beware of fraudulent e-mails from recruiters.  Below is a screen shot of Monster.com’s security notice:

[1] Totse.com: Bill Wall’s List of Computer Hacker Incidents

“Yodle has put together a phenomenal management team, and, by filling a local void overlooked by Google and Yahoo – one estimated at $100 billion – has become one of the fastest growing players in local online advertising,” stated Iggy Fanlo, the CEO of AdBrite and the newly appointed member of the Yodle Advisory Board.  Fanlo joins Dr. Michael Kearns, a Professor of Computer and Information Science and the University of Pennsylvania.  Fanlo is also the former President of Shopping.com.

Yodle is a 2 year old company that enables small businesses to become part of local online ad market companies.  The technology behind Yodle is ClickRank, which uses a bidding algorithm for online ads to get the name out for these small businesses.  The unique model that Yodle pushes is to direct visitors of the small business websites to actually call the businesses from the web.  This provides a more of a rapport between the potential customer and business-owner.

This model worked so well that the revenue increase for Yodle was 224%.  To date, 87,609 calls were made.  And in November 2006, Bessemer Venture Partners funded Yodle to help keep the model running.  In the About Us page, I also noticed some more interesting information.  David Rosenblatt also joined the Board of Directors earlier this month.  Rosenblatt is the CEO of DoubleClick, a company that Google agreed to acquire for $3.1 billion.

Metacafe has over 25 million unique views per month. And yesterday the company officially announced that they have officially raised $30 million in Series C from Highland Capital, DAG Ventures, Accel Partners, and Benchmark Capital. While YouTube dominates traffic for online video, it seems that Metacafe has a more established business model since users are actually rewarded financially for their creativity.

“Metacafe is defining the next generation of online video, moving away from simple video sharing and hosting to delivering an exceptional entertainment experience for short-form content, said Richard de Silva, Partner, Highland Capital Partners. “Its sophisticated approach to audience-driven programming is unique in the industry.”

With this round of funding, Metacafe plans on supporting continuous operations and developing the Producer Rewards program further. The Producer Rewards program gives users a financial incentive to develop intriguing video content. For every thousand views a video gets on a site, the user will receive $5. The video has to reach a minimum of 20,000 views.

Highland Capital Partners’ Richard de Silva and DAG Ventures’ Tom Goodrich will join Metacafe’s Board of Directors. Metacafe is privately headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. and has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel and NYC, NY.

References:
[1] alarm:clock: Video Site MetaCafe Hammers $30M Round

As a follow-up to my blog post about Google India’s upcoming gift, it turns out that Google India Labs has developed an Indic On-Screen Keyboard Gadget for iGoogle and a Google Indic Transliteration. So it turns out that my guess was a bit off. My guess was that Google India would announce their official partnership with the University of Mysore to scan historic documents.

“We’re now offering an easier way to search in 14 Indian and South Asian languages. You don’t need a special keyboard or software; all you need is a web browser, a mouse, and a Unicode font for your language. So whether you speak অসমীয়া (Assamese), বাংলা (Bengali), ગુજરાતી (Gujarati), हिंदी (Hindi), ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada), മലയാളം (Malayalam), मराठी (Marathi), नेपाली (Nepali), ଓଡ଼ିଆ (Oriya), ਪੰਜਾਬੀ (Punjabi), संस्कृतम् (Sanskrit), සිංහල (Sinhala), தமிழ் (Tamil), or తెలుగు (Telugu), we can help you find content on the web in your language,” stated M T Raghunath and Gokul Nath Babu Manoharan, Software Engineers on the Google Blog.

People in India speak over 20 languages and this is really the first time that I’ve seen a search engine begin recognize the needs of addressing the vast number. This is a big step for search engine progression.

As far back as I can remember, all of these Web 2.0 companies wanted to be gangsters. When they first started, none of them had much of a rep. It wasn’t until these companies grew in the Web 2.0 mob hierarchy that they actually became worth the billions that they are today. And their stories of growth aren’t too different from the stories of mafia gangsters that we see in the movies.

In this case, I’ll use the movie, Goodfellas as an example.

When Web 2.0 companies were just little boys and idolized the crime families (established technology companies such as Yahoo! and Microsoft), they focused on growing within the mob.  These companies tried to work with the mob, but ended up working towards bringing them down (Facebook after Friendster, YouTube after Google Video, Wikipedia after online encyclopedias, Google after MSN/Yahoo!, etc).  This is similar to Henry Hill dropping out of school to work for the mob, but then turns against them.

Google created products that make using Windows such as the Desktop Search and the Google Toolbar.  Facebook was started with the intention of just being a Harvard directory.  But as Facebook invaded mob rival territory by poaching Friendster users.  And Jonathan Abrams of Friendster admitted defeat.  ”I’m never going to make a ton of money off of Friendster like Mark [Zuckerberg] will probably make from Facebook,” stated Abrams in Fast Company.

However, the greed may sometimes ultimately cause the downfall of each rebellious mob character.  Scarface was greedy, Henry Hill was greedy, Pablo Escobar was greedy and so forth.  All of these mobsters made millions just like today’s web companies but made many enemies along the way.

How long will today’s Web 2.0 leaders run the territory?  Its tough to say, but if I were to make a guess, that little rebellious gangster Web 3.0 company will pull the rug out from under the Facebooks, Googles, YouTubes, MySpaces, etc. by 2010.

The SearchEngineWatch^[1] produced an interesting study that was trigged by the author’s experience at the movies. Debby Richman watched the movie Knocked Up in theaters and one of the lines used in the movie was “I googled murder.” Richman then curiously investigated whether kids used kid-friendly search engines or use the big search engines based on parent behavior.

Richman also investigated how different the kid-friendly search engines results were from the more well known search engines (Ask, Google, MSN, Yahoo!, etc.) Below is a screen shot of the overall rankings:

Based on the study, it turns out that Quintura Kids returned the most relevant results out of the other competitors, was easier to navigate, and is more visually appealing. While this seems to be reflecting the opinion of Debby Richman, I remember that I produced an article^[2] earlier about why I would have set Quintura for Kids as my child’s homepage, if I had one.

Quintura for Kids takes into account the innocence of children and filters out inappropriate content in a more advanced manner than the other search engines out there.  And it has been proved that kid-friendly content is embraced in the world of Web 2.0 as evidenced by the acquisition of Club Penguin by Disney for $350 million^[3].

[1] SearchEngineWatch: Savvy Little Searchers
[2] Pulse 2.0: Quintura for Kids Now Live
[3] Pulse 2.0: Club Penguin Waddles To Disney’s World For $350 Million

Next month, Bonus.com is relaunching into a new interactive family website that will enable kids and parents to create and connect through games and other media forms. The changes include a webcomic for kids called The Paranormals. There will also be Comic Book Creator online software available where kids can develop their own comics.

Other changes include a Multiplex, a Fridge, and two-player games. The Multiplex will allow kids to watch streaming video clips, trailers, movies, TV shows, games, and music. The Fridge is a messaging software that kids and adults can use to share comics that have been created and communicate with other users.

Bonus.com’s current features include interactive quiz games that promote academia. For example, there is a 50 States and Capitals game along with American History Crossword PUzzles. The aforementioned changes will start to appear in September 2007.

“With the wide adoption of broadband and social networking, people aren’t just looking for content on the consoles anymore,” stated Bryson Smith, Bonus.com’s VP of Advertising Sales. “Family and friends are looking for new ways to connect online in safe, trusting environments that provide entertaining and interactive experiences.”

The new Bonus.com beta is available at: http://beta.bonus.com.

Given the swarming of open source software applications among many Web 2.0 companies such as Facebook, YouTube, Amazon APIs, etc., it comes to no surprise that Jive Software, a company that is a leader in Open Source collaboration has just raised a substantial amount of funding. The amount is $15 million in first round and the investor is Sequoia Capital.

According to alarm:clock, there are speculations that Jive generated roughly $15 million this year in revenues, an amount that is more than double of the previous year’s. The price of Jive Forums for external communities per server per year ranges from $1,950 – $14,950 depending on how many users are to be supported. The price of Jive’s Clearspace X product per server per year ranges from $4,950 – $29,950 for external communities depending on how many users are to be supported.

Some of Jive’s clients include Sun Microsystems, IBM, Frito Lay, and Price Waterhouse Coopers. Jive also announced that they will be hosting a Developer Community Plugin Content with a $5,000 prize.

References:
[1] alarm:clock: Sequoia Hands Jive $15M After Its Revs Pass $15M