In This Update:
• Kosmix’s New Approach to Search Raises $20 Million
• Former Vodafone Head Arun Sarin’s Name Floated As Prospective Yahoo CEO
• NBA Will Allow Regional Sports Networks To Manage Its Digital Ops
• MySpace Announces Open Platform
• VCs Must Woo Unhappy Investors, Too
• Madison Avenue Sees Online As Safe Haven Amid ‘09 Economic Storm
• Will Microsoft’s CES keynote yield a ZunePhone?
• Chinese Learning’s Idapted Raises First Round
• Vodafone Acquires Sweden’s WayFinder For €24 Million
• Appcelerator Raises $4.1 Million for Open Source RIA Platform

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Kosmix’s New Approach to Search Raises $20 Million
VENTUREBEAT
Kosmix, a search startup that automatically builds pages about any topic, has raised a $20 million in new funding led by Time Warner. That brings the Mountain View, Calif. startup’s total backing to $55 million – pretty impressive, especially for an ad-driven company. It’s also launching a redesigned version of the Kosmix site in beta testing. Initially, the idea of yet another search engine struck me as silly, but the concept has grown on me. Kosmix basically hits a sweet spot somewhere between Google and Mahalo. Like Mahalo, Kosmix doesn’t try provide definitive search rankings, but rather gathers the most useful online information and resources about a specific topic.
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Former Vodafone Head Arun Sarin’s Name Floated As Prospective Yahoo CEO
PAIDCONTENT
Arun Sarin, the former CEO of telecom Vodafone, has emerged as the latest name being considered to replace Jerry Yang as Yahoo’s chief, WSJ reports, citing unidentified sources. Sarin’s name as a contender feels like a trial balloon. The big test will be how investors greet the news on Tuesday morning when the market opens. On the surface at least, Sarin fits the basic criteria Yahoo’s board is looking for in a chief exec, including experience heading a public company. He is viewed as someone who cut costs and helped turn Vodafone around.
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NBA Will Allow Regional Sports Networks To Manage Its Digital Ops
PAIDCONTENT
In a major alley-oop, the NBA is about to give regional sports networks (RSNs) like MSG, YES and Fox Sports affiliates the rights to control their local digital content, the Sports Business Journal reports. Once the specifics are worked out, the NBA will be the only professional sports league to allow the RSNs (which typically partner with or are owned by their respective teams) to develop, manage and roll out digital content as they see fit. The new deal will cover VOD, some broadband services and the local in-market streaming rights to live games. Of course, these rights don’t come cheap. In exchange for the VOD rights, the NBA wants up to 200 advertising spots per month on each network. Networks will pay the league $3,000 for each game they stream live locally, or about $250,000 for the whole season. The networks’ per subscriber fees (or fees they pay to the NBA for the rights to carry games in an area outside of a team’s 75-mile market) will be bumped up by about 9 percent
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MySpace Announces Open Platform
WEB PRO NEWS
MySpace has launched its answer to Facebook Connect with the MySpace Open Platform. This is the broader suite of products that includes the MySpace Application Platform, ‘MySpaceID’ (formerly Data Availability) and Post-To MySpace. MySpaceID is the real meat of the package. Right now it supports AOL (pictured above), Flock, Eventful, Flixster, Yoono, and others, but it also takes advantage of of both Open Standards (OpenSocial, OAuth, and OpenID) and Google Friend Connect. It allows users to connect MySpace profile data to partner sites, find MySpace friends on a partner site, register on partner sites using their MySpace URL, and publish activities from partner sites to MySpace. MySpace has also formed partnerships with Vodafone and Netvibes for MySpaceID support. The Vodafone agreement in particular should be big for the mobile use of this product.
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VCs Must Woo Unhappy Investors, Too
GIGAOM
The latest tale of woe out of the VC industry appears today in the Wall Street Journal, on how the limited partners who invest in venture capital firms are backing out of their commitments to fund individual VC funds. The end result of LPs failing to follow through are shuttered companies such as Ambric, which had to close despite having signed several customer deals and keeping its investors’ confidence. But when the investor’s investors back out, the money dries up.
Unlike the last technology bubble, when LPs questioned how much money they put into venture capital as an asset class, this time around there are questions about both the viability of the asset class and pressure on all alternative investments. Right now the venture industry is stuck between an inability to get money out of their investments through public offerings and M&A and the inability to get money into their investments through new investments into funds.
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Madison Avenue Sees Online As Safe Haven Amid ‘09 Economic Storm
MEDIA POST NEWS
It was clear from outlooks delivered by Madison Avenue’s leading forecasters – including its most bearish – in New York Monday morning that online advertising growth is slowing down, but it still is poised to grow at rates that would be considered healthy by any other established medium, even in good times. And during the kind of advertising recession that the analysts now say we are heading into, online actually looks like a pretty safe haven. Even so, the consensus is that online advertising will expand at its lowest rate since it climbed out of the dot.com inspired bust of 2001.
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Will Microsoft’s CES keynote yield a ZunePhone?
VENTUREBEAT
Yes, the rumor is back again. And it will keep coming back until Microsoft eventually releases its own phone. The rumor today is that Microsoft could use chief executive Steve Ballmer’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) keynote to unveil a device based on both its Zune portable music device and the Danger-made Sidekick device, Tech Trader Daily reports. This rumor comes compliments of Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry. While analysts typically have horrible reputations when it comes to predicting products, seeing as the CES keynote is less than a month away, it’s possible Chowdhry actually has some real information – and it’s not like he’s the only one out there saying it. Chowdhry also notes that on top of being based on the Zune and the Sidekick, the device will have “some motion enhancement features.”
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Chinese Learning’s Idapted Raises First Round
ALARM CLOCK
Beijing’s Idapted has raised an undisclosed amount of series A funding led by Gobi Partners and Ambient Sound Investments with angels Russ Siegelman and Xu Xiao Ping. The startup sells live Mandarin and English language training. The startup was founded by Adrian Li and Jonathan Palley who were Stanford kids. From what we understand, the Sino-American education opportunity was ripe 2 years ago and given the current market, easy money may be hard to find but long term of course if they can stick with there is nothing wrong with the business.
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Vodafone Acquires Sweden’s WayFinder For €24 Million
TECHCRUNCH
The increasingly acquisitive Vodafone accounted the acquisition of Sweden’s WayFinder this morning in Europe for €24 Million. Last Spring they also acquired Danish mobile social network ZYB for €31.5 million. WayFinder develops mobile GPS-enabled location applications, including a GPS routing app called Wayfinder Navigator, a POI database called Wayfinder Earth, and an application called Wayfinder Active that helps athletes monitor their progress in outdoor activities. The applications are available for a wide variety of phones (including those running Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems) but requires a GPS-capable phone to work (users without integrated GPS can also use an external Bluetooth GPS unit if their phone supports it).
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Appcelerator Raises $4.1 Million for Open Source RIA Platform
TECHCRUNCH
Mountain View-based startup Appcelerator has raised $4.1 million in a Series A round led by Storm Ventures . The money will go primarily towards the development of an open source competitor to Adobe AIR , which enables web developers to create applications that look and function more like desktop programs. The first version of Appcelerator’s RIA platform, dubbed Titanium , is being released today for developers on Windows and Mac OS. Appcelerator is also releasing a few demo applications , such as a Twitter client named Tweetanium and a YouTube media player called Playtanium (both shown in the video below). I’ve tested the Tweetanium client and it does indeed operate like AIR clients such as Twhirl and Alert Thingy, albeit with far fewer features.
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