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Google is to sell display ads in video through a partnership with YuMe, an online video advertising network. Apparently YuMe will serve InVideo overlay adverts as part of Google’s AdSense for video beta advertising program. YuMe publishers who are current AdSense customers will also now have the opportunity to accept AdSense for video ad placements.

Current YuMe publishers utilizing AdSense for video to monetize their content include VidShadow, Mondo Media and JoeCartoon, to name a few.

YuMe investors include Accel Partners, BV Capital, and Khosla Ventures.

Great blog post by Loic Le Meur, Founder of Seesmic, explaining how he formed the company and raised his intial investment. what’s that old adage? - Oh yes - ‘ its not what you know, it is who you know’.

I closed the initial funding of Seesmic in September 2007. The main investment came from Atomico’s Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (they invested $5.5 million on the $6 million). Talking to bloggers all the time, I have not been very good at keeping the secret as Om Malik was the first to talk about it on October 8, 2007. On November 28, Liz Gannes got almost the entire list of investors right. We have never really hidden the funding as a partial investor list was even on our company backgrounder at the last Demo conference (by the way see our DEMO video if you want to learn about Seesmic in 6 minutes). So the only real news today is the full list of investors.

We should have made it “officially” public for a while but I did not want to do it until all the paperwork was done and signed. That happened last week. Getting 14 investors on board – most of whom are individuals and not through funds - takes time.

Niklas Zennstrom and I have been friends for years and we have been wanting to launch a project together for a while. We both know that the media that has not really changed since the growth of the Internet is TV. Most of our friends do not watch TV anymore or watch it only with a laptop on their knees. TV will totally change in the future, we all know that. While Niklas and Janus are focusing on the high end video content with Joost, I have always been fascinated by the conversations.

I explained to Niklas that for me, the quality of conversations that I have enjoyed on blogs and social software since 2003 had to happen in video and that simply isn’t happening yet. I said I wanted to make this happen and make it my next company and Niklas immediately [Read more]

Tags: AOL, Goldman Sachs, Google, IPRO, Joost, LinkedIn, Pulver, Seesmic, Skype, SofTech VC, SupportSoft, TechCrunch, Topica

Danish start-up ZYB has launched a free service, which it claimed not only backs up your phone over the air, but also makes it dynamic by tying it in with on-line social networking services such as LinkedIn, Plaxo and FaceBook.

In a very simple manner, seamlessly supported by more than 400 phones, ZYB uploads your mobile phone’s address book and calendar to your online account within minutes after you sign up to the service. As a result, you get online access to your phone’s content from anywhere, and transferring the phone’s content to a new phone in the future is easily done over-the-air from zyb.com. In a pioneering way, the new ZYB also links your phone’s address book to an online community that is constantly connected to your mobile phone, so any updates made by your friends, are automatically updated in your mobile phone. As such, ZYB is the “missing link” between the mobile phone and online social networking, opening up a whole new dimension of social networking, where your online personal network is created from your existing contacts in your phone. According to the leading social networking news site, Mashable, this is “the most appealing part” of the new version of ZYB.

“We believe that your personal network is not something you create; it’s something you already have. Next generation social networks need to evolve around people’s real-life contacts and be “life-capturing” to reflect people’s real-life behavior and relations. The mobile phone has been used for a decade now as a life-capturing device, keeping a record of who you meet and talk to in the real world. Connecting the online social network with the phone’s address book, is the most effective way of moving social networks closer to real life,” said Tommy Ahlers, CEO and co-founder of ZYB.

“There are still a lot of people out there who don’t see the point in building their social network online when they already have a social network in real life. With ZYB they can now leverage the power of social networking without building an online presence from scratch,” adds Tommy Ahlers.

With the new version of ZYB, users can now:

• Connect to people in their mobile phone’s address book
• Let friends keep their own contact information updated on the user’s phone
• Micro-blog online or from the phone and broadcast the blog to friends
• Upload pictures from the mobile phone and tag them using the phone’s address book
• Expand their social network by searching for people with mutual friends ZYB can currently sync a Social Phonebook account with entries on a range of business and consumer networking services. It said that it will soon add the ability to sync with Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar as well.

ZYB investors include Morten Lund and Nordic Venture Partners Management.

Microsoft paid $4.8million to lobbying firms last year whilst Google spent $580,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

So as Google takes a strong stance against Microsoft’s unsolicited offer for Yahoo, what are we mere mortals to make of the battle of the titans of tech? It’s complicated - it’s messy - it’s turning hot - it’s no place for the weak. Take my two-minute test to see if you have what it takes to shape the future of the Internet….. [Read more]