Zivity is a San Francisco start-up company founded by Scott (husband) and Cyan (wife) Banister.  Zivity’s business model was to sell a subscription fee of $10 per month to people that wanted to look at provocative pictures of women.  I always had my doubts about this company because they were essentially competing against all image search services and image websites.  Why would someone pay to use Zivity when you can find such content free?

Around October 2008, Zivity fired about one third of their staff and now they are splitting the company.  Zivity launched a new website called TopFans.com and it looks… for lack of a better word.. mediocre.  Celebrity websites are found all over the Internet, but TopFans just looks bland compared to all the rest.

When Zivity first launched, the company received plenty of media coverage which may be the reason how they raised $8 million in two rounds.  The company today has $4 million of cash left.  Zivity will retain $2 million and $2 million will be given to TopFans.com.  Thats unfortunate considering that the design of TopFans looks very cheap.  If you gave me $2 million, I could probably build the next Google.

Cyan will remain with Zivity, but CEO Jon Elvekrog will become the head of TopFans.  Remaining employees will be dispersed between the two.

BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund will have ownership in TopFans.com now. Will they see a return on their investment?  Unlikely.

JustDial is a local search engine company based in India.  Sequoia Capital India has invested 40 crore (around $8 million) into the search engine company recently.  This round of funding gives Sequoia about 10% equity in the company.

As a result of the investment, Sequoia Capital India Managing Director Sandeep Singhal will be joining Just Dial’s board of directors.  The last time I wrote about Singhal was when there was potential conflict of interest in Minglebox’s round of funding by Sequoia.

Sequoia has about $1.8 billion in capital for investments in India.  The investment in Just Dial is from a $300 million venture capital fund.

5min is a website that features do-it-yourself videos that revolve around categories ranging from arts to pet care to health to video games.  5min has raised a $7.5 million second round of funding from Globespan Capital Partners and Spark Capital.  Globespan led the round.

5min receives about 200 million views per month and has a library of over 100,000 short videos.  5min also syndicates content to wikiHow, Wikia, and hundreds of other websites driving pageviews to their website.

This round of funding will be used to further developer 5min’s VideoSeed syndication platform.  This allows websites to scrape video content from their website, but with advertising built in.

5min raised $5 million in their first round of funding from Spark around November 2007.  Seven months before that, 5min raised $300,000 from angel investors.

[via VentureBeat]

“PayPal is a business that will be bigger than eBay,” stated eBay CEO John Donahoe at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech Conference earlier this week.  I give Donahoe credit for being honest because I believe eBay has passed its peak and now there are tons of competitors out there.  And PayPal is a rapidly growing business making billions in revenue for eBay.

PayPal made about $1.8 billion in revenue in 2007 while eBay’s total revenues were $7.7 billion.  This means PayPal made about 23.3% of eBay’s 2007 revenues.  Over the last year eBay made about $8.5 billion in revenues and I believe that PayPal made over 25% of that revenue.

PayPal also recently opened up APIs to developers.  Donahoe said that the company is not far off from the day that a restaurant will beam a bill to your mobile phone and gives the consumer the ability to pay using PayPal.

A correspondent at The Daily Show decided to cover the iFart and Pull My Finger legal battle recently in a parody form. Joel Comm of iFart and Eric Stratton of Pull My Finger was interviewed by The Daily Show.

The parent company of iFart is InfoMedia and the parent company of Pull My Finger is Air-O-Matic.

Stratton said that iFart ripped his application idea off and used the expression Pull My Finger in the description to misdirect consumers into finding iFart instead. iFart made over $40,000 in the first 2 days when hitting the top of iTunes.

The best part of the interview was the Daily Show correspondent’s reply to the MC Hammer application that Joel Comm talked about. Watch the video clip above to find out what he says.

The Apple-Palm battle continues.  Palm has sent a complaint to the USB Implementers Forum about an improper use of the Vendor ID number.  When manufacturing devices that depend on USB, a form is signed that has the following line attached: “Unauthorized use of assigned or unassigned USB Vendor ID Numbers and associated Product ID Numbers are strictly prohibited.”

Palm’s complaint is that Apple is disallowing Palm’s Vendor ID from using iTunes.  When connecting the Palm Pre to a USB connection, the Pre shows up as an iPod / mass storage device (ID 0x05ac) instead of the Palm (ID 0×083). Palm believes that this misrepresents their brand and I agree with them.

If I owned a Palm Pre and connected it to a computer, but it showed up as an Apple product name instead, I’d be fuming and confused.

[via Engadget]

Actor Kevin Spacey (@KevinSpacey) was on the Late Show with David Letterman last night and he gave a tutorial on Twitter.

Spacey boasted how many followers he had and said that Letterman does not even get that many people watching his show. Spacey wrote a tweet from the show (screenshot below) saying hi to his followers from the show. Letterman said that if he wanted a few thousand people to say hi to him back he could just go on 53rd and Broadway and wave.

By the conclusion of the Spacey interview, Letterman said that Twitter reminded him of “a waste of time!” Check out the video above, it is worth watching.

The University of Michigan (U of M) and Amazon.com is partnering on making books no longer in copyright available for purchase as reprints.  The agreement was made between U of M and Amazon.com subsidiary BookSurge.

The original books are contained within the U of M Library.  ”This agreement means that titles that have been generally unavailable for a century or more will be able to go back into print, one copy at a time,” stated U of M librarian and dean of libraries Paul N. Courant.

The reprint program includes books that have been digitized by the U of M book scanning partnership with Google.  Over 400,000 books across 200 languages have been scanned so far.  U of M will be setting the prices of the reprints and the university will be sharing revenue with BookSurge.