Outright (formerly called GoBootstrap) launched its online bookkeeping app in public beta earlier this year after raising $2 million in seed funding from undisclosed angel investors and the VC firms that have now joined this second financing round alongside Sequoia.

Outright wants to make it easier for small businesses and self-employed individuals to keep track all of their income and expenses in order to get their taxes done accurately (it was designed for the United States tax system).

The service is currently free to all customers and will remain so, although the company aims to introduce a number of paid options and fee-based services at some point in the future.

(Via peHUB)

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The latest name to surface on LinkedIn is that of Wilson Miner, a designer, web developer and entrepreneur from San Francisco.

Miner was formerly interactive designer at Apple, where he worked on the first comprehensive redesign of Apple.com in more than 10 years. He went on to co-found and head design for EveryBlock, the hyperlocal news startup that was acquired by MSNBC for an undisclosed amount in August 2009, a mere two years after its inception.

Miner was also one of four people that helped create the original version of Django, an open source web application framework written in Python.

At Rdio, Miner will be working with Malthe Sigurdsson (former lead designer and creative director for Skype) on the design of the online music service, which will conceivably be available both as a desktop, web and mobile application. ReadWriteWeb recently got its hands on some screenshots, although I’m told the actual product will look distinctly different from these early design mock-ups.

I’m left wondering how much capital has already been invested in Rdio pre-launch, considering that the startup has quite some top talent from all over the world working for them (some for about a year and a half already) while its first public beta has yet to ship.

And of course I’m curious about the fate of the company: will Rdio prove to be another Skype (lots of hype, solid product, disruptive, successful and a moneymaker) or another Joost (lots of hype, full stop)?

(Photo cc Flickr / yaili)

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The plaintiff in this case, New York bankruptcy lawyer David Shaev, filed the action last Thursday in a Delaware Court, claiming the proposed agreement – which involves HP paying stockholders of 3Com $7.90 a share – constitutes a breach of 3Com’s fiduciary duties owed to public shareholders. He argues that 3Com’s directors should have pushed for a higher price.

The complaint, which names the entire company’s board of directors, alleges the defendants are attempting to deceive 3Com shareholders and unfairly deprive them of the true value of their investment in the company.

The acquisition – which was clearly leaked – is currently awaiting approval from regulators as well as 3Com stockholders. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

Should the merger indeed be completed without a hitch, the class action will seek damages caused by the alleged breach of fiduciary duties.

(Image via eHow)

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SpotiChart, for example, is an amazing pet project by London-based developer Benoit Xhenseval that aggregates Spotify tweets from public Twitter accounts and parses the data in order to build dynamic global music charts based on streams of tracks, albums, playlists, artists and more.

SpotiChart regularly tracks the public Twitter timeline for tweets that contain the word spotify (which can be in a URL, even when it is shortened by one of the many tools for that) and upon reception contacts the Spotify service to get the details of items. SpotiChart then weeds out duplicate tweets, compiles the rest and turns the data into custom charts.

Every now and then (see schedule), SpotiChart will create updated charts and alert followers of the @SpotiChart account, which means in between 7 and 12 tweets per day will be sent to these users. Custom charts for tracks, albums and artists also have their own RSS feed, which updates once every day.

Great stuff, Xhenseval. But expect some backlash over that one unsolicited tweet your service sends out to random Spotify users to raise awareness for SpotiChart.

(Via Kieran McGrady)

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The New York Times Company is considering the launch of a brand new online news reader that would let people experience the consumption of NYTimes.com content in an entirely new and fairly innovative way. The publisher has reached out to members of its Insight Lab to get some rudimentary feedback on the new reader prototype and to help settle the naming issue.

Insight Labs members can test out the new prototype on a live website, which means you can, too. All you need to do is head over to this web page and you’ll be able to play around with the ‘newview’ as well.

One of the names the NYT is considering for the new online reader is Article Skimmer, which is the same name that was given to a prototype product the publisher threw out there some time ago. But the new reader linked above boasts more features than the Article Skimmer that’s currently featured on First Look, which is basically a showcase for new NYTimes.com features and services.

This could be a sign that the company considers graduating the Article Skimmer experiment to a full-fledged mass product and giving it a new name for the occasion. Some other names it is suggesting in the survey: Grid View, Times View, Easy View, Broadsheet and Easy Reader.

(click for larger size)

Here’s how the NYT describes the new reader prototype:

NYTimes.com is launching a new online feature that offers the experience of reading a newspaper spread out on a table, allowing readers to more easily browse through headlines and discover stories deep within a section. Each section of the Web site is organized in an easy-to-read grid displaying the headlines and short summaries of each story. Full articles are one click away and keyboard short cuts provide easy navigation from section to section. Readers can select from among eight different skins to display content in the way that best meets their interests and needs.

Some of the themes (or skins) are fascinating. One called ‘Flows’ displays headlines, a short summary and the author of the article in a single, continuous stream of text, while another (’Blackout’) reminds me a lot of the TweetDeck design (see screenshot on top).

Evidently, there’s some place reserved for advertising units inside news content.

The keyboard shortcuts – which are mostly meant for navigation – are fairly useful, although not all of them worked flawlessly in my limited testing in both Firefox and Chrome. What’s more interesting is the fact that you can customize the content in your reader much more easily than on the regular NYtimes.com website, giving you the opportunity to filter what you see based on section, blogs, and topic. Surprisingly, there’s no option to display only articles from a specific writer.

Your thoughts on the new reader prototype?

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The latest person to jump ship is Utkarsh Srivastava, who has resigned from his position as Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research to join micro-sharing sensation Twitter. Louis Gray caught wind of the new hire at Twitter early, keeping tabs on the company’s own Twitter list of employees.

Now Srivastava has confirmed the news by means of, evidently, a tweet.

Srivastava, a Ph.D graduate in Computer Science from Stanford University, did brief research stints at Microsoft and IBM before joining the Yahoo! Research team now more than 3 years ago.

During his tenure at the Internet giant, he became one of the original designers and developers of Pig, a high-level language for data processing over Hadoop. He is also one of the lead architects and developers of PNUTS, Yahoo!’s internal large-scale key-value store.

Like Gray said, a ton of data flows in and out of Twitter on a daily basis, and it’s precisely that gigantic data set that gives Twitter a competitive advantage and turns it into a potential moneymaker (it’s what interests investors so much). Hence, it makes all the sense in the world for the company to recruit data management specialists, although it’s not clear if Srivastava was hired to streamline current Twitter projects or rather to develop new ones.

Time will tell, 140 characters at a time.

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The auto-tagging app was only available in private beta so far, but today the company is debuting the public version of Photo Tagger. It’s free of charge, and it’s awesome.

Here’s how it works: after you install the app on Facebook, you can select any public album (either their own or from friends). Photo Tagger then scans the photos, batches subjects into groups using its facial recognition technology and suggests tags for faces it has identified as such. Confirmed tags are then pushed directly onto Facebook, mirroring the social network’s privacy settings, and the result is a custom album made up of tagged photos.

You have to try it out to see how it works for you, but Face.com claims faces can be recognized regardless of facial expressions or the lighting, quality, backgrounds, angle and focus of the pictures.

This turns Photo Tagger into quite an impressive social search engine for faces on Facebook, where millions of images are uploaded to albums every week. It also doubles as a handy notification tool, because it has a system in place dubbed Face Alerts that lets users know when pictures of them appear on Facebook, with or without tags.

Face.com says the private alpha edition of Photo Tagger attracted over 30,000 users and identified 5 million faces on Facebook within three months.

For an alternative, take a look at what Polar Rose is doing.

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It’s been quiet at the Raindrop blog since the announcement, but people who are interested in the whole thing are advised to keep track of the Raindrop Design blog, where Canadian designer and Mozilla employee Andy Chung posts updates on concepts for layout and structure of the Raindrop project.

Last night, Chung posted about some very initial ideas for how Raindrop could function as a mobile application, which GigaOm correctly identified as one of the most fertile grounds for this type of platform to thrive.

Note that these are early concepts, so it’s just a way for Mozilla Labs to throw something out there and then iterate based on feedback from the designer and developer community. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see how Raindrop could potentially look like on mobile screens.

What you see (from Flickr): a homepage with a summary and menu, what the ‘inflow’ of messages would look like on mobile, a rudimentary Twitter client, a mailing list messages inbox and finally a screen featuring notifications from around the web.

(Thanks for the tip, Orli)

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The civil case, which was filed in July 2006, related to hundreds of fake profiles for Barrichello that were created on Orkut, some of which depicted him as a toy turtle – I kid you not.

Earlier this week, Brazilian media published the outcome of the Sao Paulo court’s ruling, which ordered Google to compensate Barrichello half a million dollars in damages upfront and a daily fine of $590 until all the profile pages relating to the F1 driver were removed from the social network. Note: different media report different amounts.

Google told local reporters that it will always remove illegal content from Orkut but does not feel responsible for all other content that appears on there, and they don’t expect to have to police negative commentary about celebrities. Google can still appeal the case in higher court.

This isn’t the first time Google finds itself in Brazilian courts over Orkut.

On August 22, 2006, a Brazilian Federal Judge ordered Google to release Orkut user’s information of a list of about two dozen Brazilian nationals, believed to be using the social network to sell drugs and to be involved in child pornography. The judge ordered Google to pay $23,000 per day in fines until the information was turned over to the Brazilian government. Google back then stated that it would not release the information, on the grounds that the requested information is on Google servers in the U.S. and not in Brazil, and is therefore not subject to its national laws.

For what it’s worth, multi-millionaire Barrichello was looking for ‘respect rather than money’, and that he would be donating the money awarded to him in court to his non-profit organization Barrichello Kanaan Foundation. On Monday, the F1 driver tweeted a quote from Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel (which I suspect was freely translated from his famous quote “There is no respect for others without humility in one’s self”).

My guess is he simply doesn’t like turtles.

(Via F1Planet)

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Turns out Ojjeh is actually no longer senior vice president and head of Yahoo!’s strategic data solutions group. The man apparently left the company a few weeks ago but hadn’t yet found the time to change his LinkedIn profile.

Bassel Ojjeh started his career in the software business as developer and later senior manager of Fox Software, which merged with Microsoft in 1992. Ojjeh stayed with the company for another 8 years and went on to co-found digiMine, which later morphed into Revenue Science and changed names again some time after to finally settle for AudienceScience (for now).

Ojjeh was one of the co-founders of data mining and warehousing solutions provider DMX Group, a company that was acquired by Yahoo in August 2004.

He became senior vice president and head of the new business unit (strategic data solutions group or SDS group), whose team members were responsible for combing through the dozens terabytes of data that Yahoo users generate on a daily basis by clicking links, weeding out the relevant bits, compressing and storing it.

Ojjeh told me he’ll be engaging in a couple more angel investments in the USA and the Middle East, and that he’s currently already set to start a new company.

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We like to say that zembly is the development environment for Sun’s bold vision—an application development environment that not only targets the web as its native platform, but uses cutting-edge web innovations such as web services, social networking, and Web 2.0, to change the way applications are built, deployed, scaled, and delivered to where users congregate.

Zembly was an interesting attempt to lower the barrier of entry to writing applications for social platforms such as Facebook, Orkut, Meebo, OpenSocial and the iPhone by sharing services and widgets with the developer community. But apparently, Sun’s bold vision didn’t quite cut it, so it’s cutting zembly loose and shutting the service down at the end of this month.

In a message sent to its users and posted on its website, the zembly team says the service will be suspended on November 30th, and the FAQ teaches us that all applications and services currently on zembly will be made unavailable, along with the user data of all members of the community.

Users have until the end of this month to get hold of their application code and widgets.

Zembly is now part of the illusive TechCrunch deadpool.

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Details are scarce at the moment, but Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Telefónica Europe (O2) are said to be looking to buy the venture capital-backed company for a price ranging from $200M to $400M. We’re digging for more information.

Jajah was founded back in 2005 and in March 2006 introduced the world to a pretty decent consumer service that allowed cellphone users access Jajah’s low-cost calling system through their mobile devices, over the Web. Jajah went on to raise $28 million in VC funding from investors like Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Deutsche Telekom and Intel.

The Skype rival amassed about 10 million users when in April 2008 they announced a deal that would bring its premium voice services to nearly 100 million Yahoo Messenger users more. The deal proved crucial for Jajah, which connected its 1 billionth call last Summer. And that was before it turned to Twitter to spread the voice service even more.

Jajah says it currently serves over 25 million consumers and business callers in more than 122 countries, and provides calling access to more than 200 destinations globally. It’s unclear how much revenue it is generating from these users, but it’s apparently enough – or has enough potential to scale and grow – to make for an interesting strategical acquisition target for companies with deep enough pockets to engage in a bidding war.

It’s odd to see O2 mentioned as one of the companies who’s sitting at the negotiation tables, and I consider Microsoft and Cisco to be more likely buyers. Both of them sit on heaps of cash and are undeniably acquisition-hungry, and Redmond has the added benefit of having entered into a partnership with Jajah on enterprise IP communication solutions.

The price range seems to be on the high end, but that’s what happens when a bidding war goes the way the company that’s on the table (and its financial backers) would want it to go.

We’re cataloging this as a solid, plausible rumor for now and will update with more information / confirmation as soon as it comes in.

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A not so well thought-out feature – or defect – allows any LinkedIn user to indicate the company they work for has acquired, merged with or become a division of another company without any third-party verification whatsoever. Worse, when a user falsely claims company A has e.g. purchased company B, this will actually show up on company B’s public profile as such. Needless to say, this could cause quite some confusion.

For examples, head on over to the LinkedIn profiles of Yahoo! and Google, which are both apparently owned by a Pakistani web hosting firm with about 10 employees. Or take a look at the public LinkedIn profile of Internet commerce giant eBay, which is seemingly a subsidiary to collector community and marketplace operator Colnect, whose founder and sole employee Amir Wald tipped us about the ‘feature’.

Update: fixed now

The only thing you need to make false pretenses about the relationship of a company with another, is indicate you work there as well as obtain full access to the profile settings – I couldn’t make Google the parent company of say, Skype, even if I pretended to work there because I don’t have a valid e-mail address and/or the necessary rights.

But you can definitely make any company you have editing rights to the owner or subsidiary of any other company without as much as a hitch.

All you need to do is go to the part of the LinkedIn website where you can edit a company’s profile and click on the ‘Related Companies’ menu item. There, you can indicate your employer – true or not – is a Division, Subsidiary, Parent, Acquisition or Merger of any company that has a profile on the popular business social network.

Always dreamed of owning Apple or Microsoft? Here’s your chance to pretend you do, and it’ll take you only about 5 seconds.

We can’t be sure how long this has been possible already, but we’ve contacted the company about it, so we expect to see a quick fix to this anomaly.
Update: fixed now

In the meantime, please behave yourselves. Okay? Okay.

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Customer wins are one thing, but Xignite has a pretty interesting model, has attracted millions in venture capital funding, boasts an impressive customer roster and still manages to largely fly under the radar. So this gives us a perfect excuse to take a closer look.

Essentially, Xignite delivers a wide range of financial web services via the cloud, enabling browser and desktop application developers as well as online publishers to tap into a stream of critical market data on-demand in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. The data that can be pulled into applications ranges from market quotes, news, corporate data, industry information and analytics to detailed statistics.

Here’s what we wrote when Xignite and Forbes.com jointly announced how the latter was integrating the company’s data streams:

Google, CNBC, and WSJ pay the NASDAQ a sizable chunk of money for a single cumbersome stream of data. Now, Forbes.com joins the handful of consumer portals offering real-time data–with minimal development costs to integrate the raw NASDAQ or BATS data.

Rapid iteration is a major benefit of cloud-based systems, though forcing further reliance on your partner. Forbes.com simply embeds a widget on any page that needs stock quotes. The Achilles heel is that Forbes must now depend on Xignite for any widget changes. For a large company, this may not always be an easy decision. But for smaller companies, this gives them access to services previously reserved for the big boys.

Xignite is today announcing that it has signed up StockTwits, a community-powered micro-blogging information service that allows users to track information about public company stock performances.

Another new customer is Turing Studios, an iPhone application developer that is about to debut a realtime version of its PortfolioLive app, which tracks stock prices, values, options and futures. Last but not least, the company has won business from Palantir Technologies, a developer of an enterprise analytics platform called Palantir Finance that enables banks and hedge funds to integrate and analyze data sources.

As more and more data moves to the stream, Xignite is positioned well to turn itself in an essential building block for many financial Web and desktop application providers and online publishers. And it’s a great case study for the cloud, too.

Privately-held Xignite has to date raised a mere $5.5 million from Altos Ventures and Startup Capital Ventures, although a host of large companies and financial institutions are on their customer reference list, including Citi, GE Commercial Finance, Wells Fargo, ING, Marsh & McLennan, NetSuite, Starbucks, and Wendy’s.

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Turns out the venture still had a considerable amount of money left in the bank, which they will now be using to run the company in its third life under the name TownHog.

The startup has reinvented itself completely this time, leaving its social betting past behind completely because it simply “wasn’t working out”, TownHog CEO Song Kim tells us. It’s now hedging its bets – wink, wink – on the concept of collective purchasing.

Much like Woot.com, TownHog will look for and feature one online deal every day, but the main difference with Woot is that it’ll focus on promotions for local businesses rather than good deals on products that are widely available. It’s kicking things off in San Francisco, but intends to expand into more territories quickly, says Kim.

The first deal that went live this morning is with Cento, which I understand is a hot coffee bar (pun intented) located in the SOMA neighborhood in San Francisco. Basically, if enough users sign up for a deal they get to redeem a voucher that expires at a certain point in time.

In the case of Cento, users get $20 worth of Cento coffee for the price of $10. But the 50% discount will only be valid when 100 people sign up for the offer before the deadline (44 hours away at the time of this writing), and the voucher must be redeemed before the end of this year. People are charged only when the minimum of buyers chip in.

TownHog does a good job at keeping things simple and enables people to easily recruit other buyers on Facebook, Twitter and by e-mail. But it will be competing with a host of other companies offering local deals and coupons in some way, and it’s not like the concept of collective buying is new (many startups have stumbled trying to scale it into a big business).

DotBlu / TownHog received capital in an early angel round from Jawed Karim (Co-Founder of YouTube), Kevin Hartz (Co-Founder of Xoom and Eventbrite), Joe Greenstein (Co-Founder and CEO of Flixster) and Keith Rabois (Former PayPal & LinkedIn Executive and Current Slide Executive). A later $2 million round was funded by Maples Investments and DE Shaw.

We’ve now learned more investors are involved, including Bebo co-founder Michael Birch (who also sits on the board), Jeff Clavier (SofttechVC), Ron Conway and Howard Hartenbaum (via DraperRichards). The company has about $1.5 million in capital left, which Kim says should last them another 17 months at least.

Welcome back into the game, DotBlu!

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Now it seems the TweetDeck iPhone app is MIA from Apple’s App Store completely, barring new users from installing the app on their phones and existing ones to upgrade to a new version.

Apparently, last Friday when the upgraded iPhone app was pushed, too many crash reports resulted in Apple TweetDeck pulling the tool from the store and start working on a bug-free version. An updated version was quickly resubmitted that same day, prompting TweetDeck community manager Richard Barley to tweet that he was going to try and push for a fast return of the (free) app on the store.

Update: more information here.

No such luck, however. A couple of hours ago at the time of this writing, Barley sent out another message saying that he was ’sorry’ and felt ‘frustrated’ because the updated app still hadn’t found its way back onto the App Store.

Of course, Curpertino isn’t exactly at fault here, since it’s the responsibility of TweetDeck’s (admittedly small) team to assure that submitted apps aren’t bug-ridden, which was apparently the case with the first update they had pushed last Friday.

But it goes to show exactly how much control Apple has over the whole process, forcing developers to sit and wait until they find time to review updated versions, with no ETA ever given.

According to Louis Gray, these are the features the new TweetDeck iPhone app will boast:

The new version reportedly added Facebook support, which had previously been limited to the desktop application, as well as video uploading, integrated with 12seconds.tv, a new Landscape compose mode, trending topics support, a “Nearby” option that showed when Twitter friends were close, thanks to the iPhone’s built-in GPS, and the option to open new links in Safari.

Also, here’s a video of the upgraded app, which will hopefully be reinstated by Apple soon:

(Hat tip to Austin Nunn)

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I’ve been keeping busy this weekend doing some very basic research – I love you, Internet – about Rdio and discovered a couple of interesting details that have emerged on the Web since the stealth startup got its first dose of media attention.

First of all, a search on LinkedIn used to surface only Malthe Sigurdsson, a London-based designer who used to be Creative Director at Skype, as one of the people hired by Rdio – as VP of Design. He can stop hiding that now.

Today, that same search on the business social network yields more results:

– Carter Adamson (COO, Rdio) – former General Manager of Desktop Products at Skype and prior to that Director, Product Strategy/Business Developement at AOL and before that Senior Program Manager at ICQ. His recruitment seems to suggest that the Rdio service will not be exclusively browser-based.

– Todd Berman (VP of Engineering, Rdio) – first hired as Software Engineer at imeem in 2005, Berman served as VP of Technology at the venture-backed social music startup until switching to Rdio back in August 2008. During his tenure at imeem, Berman undoubtedly learned a lot about what it takes to distribute music on the web and scale the service for a large user base.

– Craig Kimerer (Senior Software Engineer, Rdio) – also an ex-employee of music startup imeem, where he worked as Software Engineer. At imeem, he seemingly kept busy with ’scaling, new feature data-model designs and micro-payments’ according to his LinkedIn profile. It’s fun looking at his Twitter account, where he recently proclaimed open source media software sucks.

– Manish Singh (Senior Software Engineer, Rdio) – once a senior member of Oracle’s technical staff, Singh was hired by social browser startup Flock in September 2005, where he held a number of technical roles before becoming the company’s Director of Technology. His recruitment (Feb 2009) suggests Rdio won’t exclusively run on desktops but also inside browsers.

– Matt Crocker (Senior Software Engineer, Rdio) – spent a couple of years developing software for Pioneers of the Inevitable, the startup behind customizable open-source music player Songbird. The University of Victoria graduate joined Rdio in March 2009.

– Joshua Miller (Senior Systems Engineer, Rdio) – held senior Linux/Unix system administration roles at IBM and Pay By Touch before moving to a similar role at social network Tagged (which boasts very high traffic numbers). Miller joined Rdio earlier this year.

Pretty skilled team, right?

Now pay a visit to the Rdio website. Not much to see, right? If gives you an option to sign in to your account if you happen to be lucky enough to have one (if you do, we have a special space reserved in our inbox for screenshots of the service) and an option to sign up for updates to your e-mail address. Other than that, there’s nothing but a link to an e-mail address, which actually bounces messages when you send e-mails to it, rendering it gigantically useless.

But then there’s a copyright notice at the bottom right that reads ‘©2009 Pulser Music Services Inc’. A search on the Web reveals that this appears to be a subsidiary of private equity investment firm Europlay Capital Advisors, which cites a preference to invest in “cross-border media transactions and in interactive entertainment businesses”. If you want to know more about Europlay from when it was founded in 2007, here’s the SEC filing.

And guess who’s Chairman and Managing Director of Europlay Capital Advisors? None other than Mark Dyne, the former CEO of Sega and Virgin Interactive Entertainment who was one of the first people to invest in Skype – he was also a member of the company’s board from 2003 to 2006 – and until recently sat on the board of another venture started by Friis and Zennström: the ill-fated Joost.

Rdio CEO Drew Larner is also connected to Europlay, where he apparently recently served as Managing Director. Prior to Europlay, Mr. Larner spent over twelve years as an executive in the motion picture industry, most recently as Executive Vice-President at Spyglass Entertainment Group. In that role, he was involved in all operations of Spyglass with specific oversight of business development, international distribution and business and legal affairs.

So we have some serious veteran media executives investing time and resources in Rdio, which based on my findings already boasts a highly diverse and feathered team of engineers, developers and managers with a track record in digital music companies and carrying experience in working for venture-backed startups. Its earliest hire – that of Todd Berman – was made in August 2008 according to his LinkedIn profile, so apparently they’ve been building this company for nearly a year and a half now.

All that, combined with what Janus Friis recently told Bloomberg regarding Rdio, makes this a company to watch closely:

“We have watched many ad-supported music businesses come and go. We felt the time was right to revisit this space, this time with a compelling offering and a sustainable subscription model.”

It’ll be very interesting to see what they come up with – the service is said to be on track for beta launch in early 2010 – and if they’ll be able to steal some of Spotify’s momentum when that company finally makes its way to the United States.

One thing is guaranteed: Rdio won’t be one of those online music startups who manage to fly under the radar and whose leaders lack the experience and negotiation skills to effectively deal with the music industry juggernauts who control the majority of rights to the music this world has to offer.

Which isn’t necessarily a recipe for success of course – the tale of Joost proves as much.

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Index Ventures, a historical investor in Skype, is not going to be part of that buying party after all, and its partner Mike Volpi is definitely out of the picture (no surprises there). Marc Andreessen, partner of Andreessen Horowitz, tells us: “Everything is settled—all lawsuits, all IP. The Joltid IP is now owned by Skype. The company is free and clear to execute to its full potential.”

The original Skype founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, are now back in the game. The Scandinavian businessmen are getting 14 percent of Skype back for rights to the Global Index P2P technology their company Joltid controls (which is key to the Skype software) – and not 10% like previously reported by other media. In addition, Friis and Zennström gain representation on the board of the new entity. The two men are also putting in a ’significant amount of capital’ of their own in exchange for the stake in the new company, presumably through their Atomico Ventures fund.

Marc Andreessen, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz, tells us: “Everything is settled—all lawsuits, all IP. The Joltid IP is now owned by Skype. The company is free and clear to execute to its full potential.”

Update: Andreessen shares more of his thoughts on the deal, saying Skype is one of the most important companies on the Internet.

GigaOM first reported that a settlement might have been in the works earlier this month, a report that was later echoed by the NY Times.

Thus ends the legal kerfuffle surrounding eBay’s sale of Skype to the investor consortium (news we broke last August), which it acquired back in September 2005 for $2.6 billion (written down to $1.2 billion in 2007). Friis and Zennström had accused eBay of breaking a licensing deal and sued the investor group last September, claiming damages were growing by $75 million a day.

The newly structured buyout group is now on track to buy approximately 56% of Skype, with eBay continuing to own 30% and the original founders 14%, in a deal valuing Skype at $2.75 billion. EBay is expected to receive approximately $1.9 billion in cash upon the completion of the sale and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. The deal is still expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Withdrawing party Index Ventures released the following statement:

“We are pleased that Skype will now be able to put litigation behind it, and we wish Josh Silverman, his team and the Skype investors well in continuing to grow a great business. Although Skype has the potential to be a great investment, the deal terms changed for Index such that it no longer matches our investment criteria and thus we have decided not to participate in the transaction.”

Meanwhile, the two ruthless European entrepreneurs who founded Skype walk away with a renewed stake, seats on the company’s board and the smile of victory on their faces.

(Top image via E24)

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But Twitter has never been an ideal two-way conversation tool. It’s hard to keep track of back-and-forth communication between users, particularly when you’re not actually part of the discussion but still interested to know what’s being said tweeted. A new tool called Bettween aims to make it easier to visualize conversations between two specific users as well as share them with others.

Like most Twitter-related web apps, the tool is simple and crisp. You enter the usernames of two Twitter users and you get an overview of what they’ve conversed about on a single page, with an indication of when the tweets were published and who replied to whom. And because it comes with a dedicated URL à la bettween.com/arrington/craignewmark, you can easily share conversations between two users with others as well.

I’m left wondering if it would be possible (and/or desirable) to tweak the tool so it could track conversations between more than two users.

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The network, which will be controlled by Scripps, was put up for auction last Summer and attracted interest from other juggernauts such as News Corp and NBC Universal. Cox said in June 2009 that it had received unsolicited offers for the Travel Channel, which it acquired from Discovery Communications back in 2007.

Scripps was planning to announce quarterly results this morning but has now pushed back its earnings call until tomorrow morning.

Under the terms of the agreement, Cox will contribute the Travel Channel while Scripps Networks Interactive will contribute $181 million in cash to the fresh partnership. The joint venture will take on $878 million in third-party debt that will be guaranteed by Scripps and indemnified by Cox, with the proceeds to be distributed to the latter party.

The companies expect to close the deal by January.

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Everlater is a place where you can basically record your travel experiences, share them with others, and discover new travel ideas from your social graph and other travelers that match your profile. The goal of the service is to centralize all travel conversations and information sharing into a single place.

The startups provides tools to geographically organize photos, stories, and trip details, and has partnerships with the travel industry in place to provide a new marketing channel directly through existing social networks.

There’s a plethora of online travel startups and established companies trying to crack this nut, so I predict the fledgling company will have a hard time gaining awareness for its service, however nice it may be.

Everlater was selected to participate in the 2009 TechStars program in Boulder, Colorado.

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A source just tipped us on some interesting changes Google-owned YouTube has made that give its partners more control over the blocking of video content they upload to the service.

Basically, there are two new buttons in the interface for partners. One says ‘Block by Country’ and provides content partners with the ability to geo-block a single video rather than an entire account, an oft-requested feature that allows partners to restrict the geographical rights for specific videos. This can be helpful for blocking a clip in a region where it might be culturally offensive or where rights issues prevent an account for having distribution rights in a handful of countries.

The second button reads ‘Enable Auto Block outside Ownership’ (yes, that’s a confusing name). The purpose of the button is similar to the first button, but is for content owners who only have rights to a video in a single region. Using this feature they can quickly claim rights to that one region, while automatically blocking access everywhere else.

We reached out to YouTube, who says that the new features “are another way that the site is looking to give partners more control over where their videos are viewed”.

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