The top story in today's Wall Street Journal Technology Europe section is the news that DailyMotion, the French equivalent of Google-owned YouTube, has raised another $34 million from Advent Venture Partners LLP of London, and AGF Private Equity of Paris - a division of Allianz AG. This comes on top of a $9.5 million sum raised in October from Atlas Ventures and Partech. Such unusually high amounts for a European Internet startup (YouTube had only raised $11 million before they sold to Google) show that a time-to-market race has started, with YouTube now pushing into international markets as well (they just opened local sites in France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the U.K.).

Whether these investments will pay off for DailyMotion also depends of course on how illegal copyright material can be weeded out from the site. Google so far has not had much fun with its expensive YouTube acquisition, getting drawn into many copyright infringement cases. They are a nice cash-rich target for that. Anyone who might be looking at acquiring DailyMotion will have that in mind, which makes a trade sale exit somewhat unlikely. So the only other exit would be an IPO, which requires that DailyMotion makes a good profit over some time. The goal now is that the new money raised brings them to that stage. Not an easy task though I would think.

The German newspaper FAZ interviewed the head of a 400 year old publishing house. Mr. Christian DuMont Schütte, answered questions about the future of his publishing house and the publishing industry as a whole. The interview itself is not very interesting to read as Mr. Schütte does not give any clear answers to any of the questions raised. He basically only said that no-one has the answers on how the Internet will play out for the newspapers and publishers, and of course was quite negative on Google, which makes tons of money from other people's content while the professional content producers lose ad business. Quite understandable that he does not like that. And of course, he is not the only one in his business. The only interesting statement he made was this one in the last question and answer: "...habe ich die These aufgestellt: In zehn Jahren ist Google tot." (...I stated the thesis that Google will be dead in 10 years).

Quite a bold statement I thought, so I read on to see what argument he could bring. He said that the Ebay enthusiasm is already at the end and he sees the chance that the Internet market - unlike old economies - are so fast moving and have such short life cycles that they can be conquered anew over and over again. Well, I thought, the man is right in that. But that a publishing house would suddenly become the new Google or Ebay is less likely than that these publishing houses will simply vanish because they cannot compensate for lost ad business and are unable to transform fast enough into something new. BTW, some folks might say that Google and eBay are so established now that you would rather count them as old new economy type of businesses from the first generation. New vs. old is becoming so short lived that traditional publishing folks can't even catch up with understanding what's going on. I think this interview actually proves that.

Imagine you saw the following lists of tags:

• advertising | ASP | consumer | user generated content | video
• ASP | community | ecommerce | enterprise | reviews | user generated content
• enterprise | handwriting | hardware | healthcare

This is what First Round Capital, a US venture capital firm, uses to describe their list of current portfolio (40) investments. They also have a short intro text for each of them but the list of tags usually is enough to get a first overview on what each company does. While tagging is nothing new and has been used extensively in blogs for example it is the first time that I see a VC firm use it and I must say it makes a lot of sense and shows that they are also going with the latest things. They also summarize all of the tags in a tag list (see below) which gives a snapshot on where the focus of their investments lies and can also be used to list the investments by tag.

The tag list above is BTW for the following companies.
http://www.videoegg.com

http://www.bazaarvoice.com

http://www.satorilabs.com

Francis Turner, one of my colleagues, pointed me to this website here: The Funded. It is a place where people can rank and comment on their experience with VCs. VCs themselves are typically extremely well connected and send each other business plans and other info on a daily basis. But what should young entrepreneurs do when they need to find out which VCs might be a good fit for them, and which ones they had better be careful with? That is one aspect of The Funded site, where a VC ranking and personal comments give some insights. I have not checked out the site in detail so I am not sure how good the info is, but I would think it is at least a place worth looking at when you are checking out VCs.

That you cannot see someone is a dog on the Internet is not exactly a new saying (although you actually can to a certain extent with smart search software, but OK, that is a different topic). Now consider this. Someone places an empty file with the extension .exe and the name "awardmestars" onto 1013 software download sites and this "program" does absolutely nothing at all. In its description it even says so: "This program does nothing at all. It doesn't even run. It was created as an experiment to see how many shareware awards it could get."

Now what do you think happened then? Here is the net result as CNet and the "program" author reports: listed on 218 Web sites, rejected on 421 Web sites, 7% of the sites that listed the software gave him an award and e-mailed that back to the author. The absolute best and hilarious are of course some of the reviews it got like for example on Topshareware.com:

"Wow! I also tried it in Linux, AIX, Solaris, and even my PDA, and it does exactly the same job and with the same excellence! It's not only OS-independent: it's also CPU-independent! If the five-stars are because the program meets the expectations it creates, then they are the fairest five-stars ever!"

So what do we learn from this? You have to be selective from where you actually get software downloads from. Some of the safe ones are: NET's Download.com, SourceForge.net, Tucows.com, Filecart.com, Freshmeat.net or Download-tipp.de. If you want to have a good laugh then go to Topshareware.com.

We don't want to make jokes about other people's inabilities but sometimes we simply cannot hold back. Look at the text below, which was translated into English from Italian. If even non-native speakers start laughing, then it must be truly bad. But how recently have you checked how your own website and sales/marketing material is likely to be perceived in the US or the UK?