In This Update:

• Slide to Distribute Video on Facebook
• GameStop to Buy French Videogame Retailer
• Bloomberg Brings Its Online Video to AOL
• MTV Sees More Ads with Social Nets, Video Metrics
• Royalty Board to Rule. iTunes Threatens Shut Down
• StumbleUpon Offers Web Toolbar
• Gnip 2.0 Launches, With a Business Mode
• Venture Totals Drop In Southern California for Quarter
• Gigya Raises $11 Million for Widget Distribution
• Tungle Raises $5 Million for Calendar Syncing Tool

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Slide to Distribute Video on Facebook
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Slide Inc., a startup best known for software tools that help people personalize their profiles and amuse themselves on social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, is trying to prove it has staying power.The San Francisco company, begun in 2005 by Silicon Valley wunderkind Max Levchin, on Thursday will kick off distribution partnerships with Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros., CBS Corp., and Comcast Corp.’s E! Entertainment channel, among others. Using a new Slide video service, social-networking users will be able to view clips from shows for free.
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GameStop to Buy French Videogame Retailer
WALL STREET JOURNAL
GameStop Corp. will acquire French videogame retailer Micromania for $700 million, including debt, as it looks to expand its presence in the European market.The Texas-based videogame seller already operates in several markets overseas, but doesn’t yet have any stores in France.
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Bloomberg Brings Its Online Video to AOL
PAIDCONTENT
Just in time for the financial market’s wild ups and downs this week, Bloomberg Television is making a tentative step toward syndicating its videos outside of its own website in a deal with AOL. The business news network will run about 20 videos a day on the AOL Money and Finance channel. The Bloomberg videos will have its own distinct, branded broadband site on AOL’s portal as well. Bloomberg television hasn’t been too active on the online side, but that could be changing. The unit just struck a deal with Google TV Ads, involving audience measurement and targeted ads through satellite company EchoStar’s set-top boxes.
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MTV Sees More Ads with Social Nets, Video Metrics
REUTERS
MTV Networks will track second-by-second viewing of Web commercials and videos, and link viewer online communities built around its TV programs, the network’s digital chief said in an interview focused on the company’s new advertising strategy.MTV will provide advertiser partners second-by-second data on how the videos and ads on its site are watched by users online. On Monday, MTV said it had signed an agreement with Visible Measures, an independent third-party measurement firm to provide the data.
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Royalty Board to Rule. iTunes Threatens Shut Down
HYPERBOT
Apple has filed a brief with the Copyright Royalty Board to fight a proposed increase in mechanical royalty rates from 9 to 15 cents. In the brief first reported by Fortune Magazine’s Devin Leonard, Apple threatens a shut down if rates rise. This increase, proposed by publishers would force iTunes to raise prices, according to Apple. And when the alternative for many consumers is free, raising prices above $.99 cents would only drive them towards P2P.
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StumbleUpon Offers Web Toolbar
MASHABLE
StumbleUpon is a pretty unique site as far as social browsing sites go; no site with a similar concept (i.e. one click ‘random’ surfing through sites recommended by the community) has reached anywhere near its level of popularity. However, unlike – for example – Digg or Delicious, it requires users to do one extra step: install a browser plugin, which is something many users look down upon. Not any longer. StumbleUpon now offers a Web toolbar, which is basically a (relatively) unobtrusive frame at the top of the webpage, with the full functionality of the browser plugin.
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Gnip 2.0 Launches, With a Business Model
TECHCRUNCH
Gnip , the guys that are helping move data around from one social network to the next, launched v 2.0 of the service tonight. The new version of the service allows data consumers (services like Plaxo that take data from other services, like Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, etc.) to have data from requested users pushed to them. It’s no longer “Hey, TechCrunch just tweeted. Go query the API to get the data.” Now it’s “TechCrunch just tweeted – here’s the data.” Data consumers are no longer required to build pollers for any of the publishers pushing data into Gnip, they just give Gnip an endpoint and they push the data to them in real time.
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Venture Totals Drop In Southern California for Quarter
SOCALTECH
A study of the venture capital deal flow in Southern California conducted by socalTECH shows that venture capital deals dropped for Q3, to around $720M in deals, in a market dominated by clean technology firms. The numbers, which were drawn from venture deals tracked and reported in socalTECH’s proprietary venture capital database, found that there was $719.7M in venture capital deals in the third quarter, down dramatically from $1.2B invested in Q3 of 2007, and down slightly from venture numbers in Q2, when there was approximately $966M in venture deals.
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Gigya Raises $11 Million for Widget Distribution
PAIDCONTENT
Widget distribution firm Gigya has received $11 million in its third round of funding. The round was led by DAG Ventures and included previous investors Benchmark Capital, First Round Capital, and Mayfield Fund. The round brings the Palo Alto CA and Israel-based startup’s total funding to about $23.5 million since it was founded two years ago. Gigya’s technology allows widgets makers such as RockYou and online publishers to helps monitor ads across their widgets…it also helps in distribution and development of these widgets. It competes against the likes of Clearsping, or Slide. It recently added a new service to allow sites to integrate various social networking services within their sites.
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Tungle Raises $5 Million for Calendar Syncing Tool
VENTUREBEAT
It’s a big day for digital scheduling startup Tungle. It not only announced a successful $5M first round of funding, but also the beta launch of its free scheduling software. The Montreal-based company offers a downloadable plugin for coordinating meetings with groups of people across companies, platforms and calendaring software.Commonwealth Capital Ventures, a new investor, led the round of funding, followed by JLA Ventures and Desjardins Venture Capital, which had kicked in a combined $1.5 million in seed money 18 months ago. Tungle plans to pour its new funds into marketing and further developments.
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