In This Update:
• MySpace Launches Mobile Video Effort

• Wikipedia Raises $890,000 for the Luddites
• Angie’s List Grows A Lot Longer: Add Another $7 Million in Financing
• Health Social Net DailyStrength Bought By HSW International
• Web Marketing That Hopes to Learn What Attracts a Click
• Picasa Chief Departs Google for Fetch
• Pandora Solidifies its Place as the Top iPhone App with its 2 Millionth User
• Report: Ex-AOL Boss Seeks Funds for His Firm, Not Yahoo
• Dimdim Exits Beta With New SynchroLive Platform, Releases Source Code
• UTest Raises $5 Million for Crowdsourced Software Testing

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The law firm of new media. Major offices in New York, Boston, Newark, Stamford, and other cities. Advising new media companies from start-up to exit. Venture capital, IP protections and disputes, employment matters, outsourcing, joint ventures, acquisitions, to name just a few.

MySpace Launches Mobile Video Effort
SOCALTECH
Los Angeles-based social networking website MySpace said late Tuesday night that it has launched a new mobile video service, MySpace Mobile, which will allow users to view MySpace video content from mobile devices. According to MySpace, the beta service allows users to view videos users have uploaded or marked as favorites on the site. MySpace is tapping technology from video transcoding provider RipCode for the streaming capability. RipCode’s transcoding hardware translates videos from any format into mobile video, adjusting for handset type, bandwidth, and other conditions. MySpace said the move now makes 100 percent of its videos accessible via mobile phone.
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Wikipedia Raises $890,000 for the Luddites
CNET
Anyone who’s ever edited or created a Wikipedia entry can attest to the fact that it’s not that self-explanatory. They’re in luck–the non-profit anyone-can-edit encyclopedia has received $890,000 from the Stanton Foundation in order to make it easier to use. More specifically, the grant was given to the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that encompasses Wikipedia. It’ll fund the hire of three new software developers in the foundation’s San Francisco office. Then, per a press release, the team will “commission research to identify the most common barriers to entry for first-time writers, and then work to systematically reduce or eliminate them…hiding complex elements of the user interface from people who don’t need them.”
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Angie’s List Grows A Lot Longer: Adds Another $7 Million in Financing
PAIDCONTENT
Ms Angie’s list of investors keeps on growing: Angie’s List, one of the original online review sites focused on local home-service companies and contractors, has added another $7 million in debt financing, after it announced $18 million in venture debt just last month. The latest money has come from Chicago-based Prism Mezzanine Fund, which invested $6 million in subordinated debt funding, as well as $1 million in equity investment. And this on top of $35 million in funding it announced in April, from Battery Ventures. This means, just this year, the Indianapolis-based company has raised $60 million, for a total of around $73 million since it was founded. The list/service was founded in 1995, and says it has 750,000 subscribers in all major cities in U.S.
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Health Social Net DailyStrength Bought By HSW International
PAIDCONTENT
Health information social networking site DailyStrength has been acquired by HSW International, the digital content company that is a spinoff from HowStuffWorks.com (which later got acquired by Discovery Communications). Terms of the deal were not disclosed. DailyStrength raised a seed money and a first round, both from Redpoint Ventures, and the total funding range was around $7 million. The site was launched in March last year, by CEO Doug Hirsch, a former senior exec of Facebook and one of the first employees of Yahoo. It hosts about 500 communities focused on issues such as weight loss, divorce, parenting and illnesses. Hirsch will join HSW International as SVP with responsibilities including DailyStrength and the company’s social media strategy.
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Web Marketing That Hopes to Learn What Attracts a Click
NEW YORK TIMES
Online advertisers are not lacking in choices: They can display their ads in any color, on any site, with any message, to any audience, with any image. Now, a new breed of companies is trying to tackle all of those options and determine what ad works for a specific audience. They are creating hundreds of versions of clients’ online ads, changing elements like color, type font, message, and image to see what combination draws clicks on a particular site or from a specific audience. It is technology that could cause a shift in the advertising world. The creators and designers of ads have long believed that a clever idea or emotional resonance drives an ad’s success. But that argument may be difficult to make when analysis suggests that it is not an ad’s brilliant tagline but its pale-yellow background and sans serif font that attracts customers.
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Picasa Chief Departs Google for Fetch
CNET
Mike Horowitz, product manager for Google’s Picasa software for managing photos and the Web site for sharing them, has left the company for Fetch Technologies. “Mike was a valued member of the Picasa team and Google, and we wish him well in his new endeavors. We have a talented team working on Picasa, and we’re excited about the future,” Google said in a statement. The company didn’t say who would replace Horowitz. According to Horowitz’s LinkedIn profile, he began his new role in December as chief product officer at Fetch, an El Segundo, Calif.-based company founded in 1999. The company sells an artificial intelligence product called Fetch Agent Platform “for extracting and integrating information from multiple Web sources, and transforming the data into a form that is useful for business applications,” according to the company.
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Pandora Solidifies its Place as the Top iPhone App with its 2 Millionth User
VENTURE BEAT
Late last night, Apple unveiled its new iTunes 2008 section of the iTunes store showcasing the best of what the store offered this year. The area dedicated to the App Store shows the apps which have been most downloaded. So what was the top app of the year? Pandora Radio, the app built by Pandora, the Internet streaming radio service. So just how many times has it been downloaded? Many app developers try to keep exact numbers private, but as fate may have it, Pandora just happened to hit a milestone on the day it was crowned top app of 2008. This morning, the app gained its 2 millionth user, a post on Pandora’s blog confirms.
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Report: Ex-AOL Boss Seeks Funds for His Firm, Not Yahoo
REUTERS
Former AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller is trying to raise capital for Velocity Interactive Group, an investment firm focused on digital media where he is a partner, and not for buying Yahoo Inc, the New York Post reported. Miller, who led AOL, Time Warner Inc’s online advertising division, from 2002 to 2006, is seeking as much as $30 billion from investors to buy all or part of Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, boosting shares of the Web search engine firm 7 percent. But the chances of Miller, an Internet industry veteran, doing a deal with Yahoo are extremely low, the paper said, citing a source familiar with Miller’s fundraising efforts.
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Dimdim Exits Beta With New SynchroLive Platform, Releases Source Code
TECHCRUNCH
Dimdim , provider of a browser-based web conferencing platform that doesn’t require the installation of any desktop software, is dropping the beta tag with the release of a new edition of its application and is simultaneously releasing its complete source code to the open source community. If you would like a Pro version (starts at $99 per year for an unlimited number of meetings) free of charge, click this special TechCrunch link to sign up. Dimdim will upgrade a percentage for every 100 registrations, up to 1000 free Pro accounts in total.
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UTest Raises $5 Million for Crowdsourced Software Testing
VENTUREBEAT
UTest, a marketplace where companies can “crowdsource” the testing of their software, has raised $5 million in a second round of funding. Chief executive Doron Reuveni describes the outsourced testing industry as “an old space that has been there for a while, and it needs innovation.” By creating a software-as-a-service platform for testing that allows companies to assemble a team of testers (rather than just hiring a single person or company) and pay through a pay-per-performance model (usually a set fee for each bug found or for useful feedback), uTest offers a better deal than traditional outsourcing companies, or even newer outsourcing/remote work web sites like Elance and Rentacoder. One of the most impressive things about uTest is the size of its testing community – almost 12,000 software professionals in 144 countries. Reuveni says his customers include both startups who couldn’t afford a traditional quality-assurance team and larger companies looking for a better way to do QA. (The only big customer he will identify is email marketing company Constant Contact.)
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