MySpace thought it was all over when it secured the MySpace.co.uk domain in February this year. A decision by Nominet’s dispute resolution service handed over the address, which previously had been owned by a small UK ISP since 1997, two years before MySpace.com launched. But an appeals panel has today handed the domain back to Total Web Solutions (TWS), a company in Stockport, near Manchester.

The fact that Myspace.co.uk was originally used to offer email services and websites to subscribers meant TWS had insulated itself from an action for some time. But MySpace’s main argument to Nominet centred on the most recent use of the domain as a Pay Per Click website which sent MySpace.co.uk visitors to a parked page with advertisements for social networking websites including MySpace. MySpace Inc says the practice started in July 2005 when News Corp took it over, boosting its fame, but TWS claims it was “at least” before June 2005.

Secondly, at issue was whether parking the .co.uk domain had become “abusive” when the PPC ads changed because MySpace.com became well known. In the case of MySpace.co.uk, the ads on the parked domain did change to “reflect the fame of MySpace.com”, admitted TWS, “but that had happened automatically as a result of the algorithms used by parking company Sedo.” In other words, TWS fingered the firm servicing the ads. While MySpace Inc. argued that TWS should have exercised control over the content of the adverts, TWS said this did not constitute a “change of use”.

The three-person appeal panel said they were “reluctant to place any duty on a registrant, who has merely had the good fortune (or maybe ill fortune) to register a name in good faith…” so long as they don’t exploit the situation.

There appears to be no more steps that MySpace can take within the Nominet DRS arbitration process to challenge TWS’s right to hold onto the name. So it’s the end of the line – unless there is further action MySpace can take through the civil courts.

Total Web Solutions also claims that Nominet tried to “unfairly help” MySpace by at first denying the existence of emails sent between solicitors and MySpace which may have aided TWS’s case. The solicitor who represented Total Web Solution in the case, Jim Davies, is now standing for election to the Nominet board, as he believes it’s unwise to “operate the DRS (Domain Resolution Service) from within the company.” Davies has been involved in a number of the more high profile domain name disputes in the UK recently.

Total Web Solutions’ Managing director Paul Fallon issued a statement [PDF] saying “We refused to be bullied by one of the largest media organisations in the world. This has been a very stressful case for a legitimate medium sized ISP to have to take on – but we had to defend our reputation and to stand up for what was right.”

Of course, the MySpace.co.uk domain is now effectively worthless since TWS would be ill-advised to do anything with it at all now. It is currently displaying a blank page. MySpace continues to use uk.myspace.com/. A MySpace spokesperson declined to comment.

Last.FM has got in touch to say that since the new Coldplay single ‘Violet Hill’ was released for free on Coldplay’s website this morning, Last.FM has been tracking the number of times it’s been listened to. And it’s a lot: 10,000 times in the 5 hours since the track was released. That’s 1 play every 2 seconds. Apparently the last time a track was listened to this intensively on Last.fFM was ‘15 Step’ from Radiohead’s free In Rainbows album, which clocked up close to 22,000 listens in 12 hours. Coldplay has had about 51 million listens on the site and their entire back catalogue of music is available for free-on-demand streaming. I’m not sure how that would compare, say, to a radio station playing a track on high rotation during a typical day of release. But then Last.FM’s service can go on forever, right down into the Long Tail, the radio station can’t.

Lycos Europe, the forgotten portal site which left the tent and said “I am just going outside and may be some time” a few hundred years back, is up for sale (via PaidContent). Owned 32.1 percent by Telefonica and 20 percent by Bertelsmann, it’s now appointed Dresdner Kleinwort as its advisor following the inevitable “strategic review to evaluate its options”. First quarter revenues are EUR 16.2 million, respective to Q107 last year of EUR 20.0 million. Net losses were about EUR 5.9 million, down from a profit of EUR 7.5 million over the same period.

So the ideal play would be to roll-it up with Excite Europe, itself living on the smell of an oily wrag following an acquisition last year by GOADV, an Italian media company which specialises in generating qualified traffic and which at least has a few interesting ideas like its Mix start page. Either that or a long painful death, owned by some terrible advertising company.

The venerable FriendsReunited, one of the the oldest social networks in the UK, has relaunched as a free social network containing features which will have a direct impact on several niche social startups, specifically Miomi and Rememble, which are both pushing the “digital lifestyle aggregation” as a feature.

Rememble is a bootstrapped startup but Miomi is a larger venture backed by Brightstation Ventures and created by three German developers and headed up by CEO Jonny Crowe. Both were launched last year.

Both sites feature timelines where you drop in life events, as well as share content like photos – exactly the same feature at Friends Reunited has added (see video, after the jump, which I have manually encoded so it will auto-play, apologies – FR don’t have a properly embedable version the video is annoying!).

Friends Reunited was sold to TV broadcaster ITV in 2005 for £120m.

TechCrunch UK & Ireland has learned that Wubud will be the next venture of UK-based entrepreneur, Paul Walsh, who already runs Segala, a usability and certification agency (though he is possibly better known as a blogger and UK Internet scene networker). Wubud – yet to launch – will be a mobile social network pre-installed as an application on a SIM card belonging to an as yet unnamed MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) as well as distributed for download online.

The Wubud mobile social network will most likely hook into location-based services, and details are sketchy at this point – but anyone watching Walsh’s stream of Twitters can’t have failed to notice the idea has been brewing for a while.

The model is an interesting one, according to what I understand Walsh has been saying to colleagues. The MVNO will have some kind of deal to distribute the SIMs (I’m guessing a large retailer or online player?) and will also take care of billing customers. But as an application on the SIM, Wubud will also have access to the billing system and will be able to charge for services without the customer having to input credit card details. That removes a lot of friction and allows Wubud to introduce paid-for services on top of its social network. The only other players able to do this would be another MVNO or mobile carrier, as a normal mobile social network would need to integrate with a separate payments system like Paypal or SMS billing, which incurs extra charges.

The team for Wubud will include (Update: apparently these are just ‘advisors’): Paul Birch (Co-founder, Bebo), Carl Taylor (Director of Applications & Services, Hutchison Whampoa Europe and a member of the Executive Committee at the GSMA); and Ewan Spence, long-time mobile commentator, writer and blogger.

Along with Walsh’s backing I understand that Birch, who recently hit paydirt when his stake in Bebo was realised with its sale to AOL for $850m, is providing seed investment.

Meanwhile, Walsh’s other business, Segala, which specialises in the arcane world of Internet standards compliance certification for web and mobile services, is developing a browser extension. This will classify the content of web sites in a Semantic Web fashion to enable “trust” based on standards and codes of conduct. Angus Banks (Co-founder of Moreover, bought by Verisign) recently became an advisor to Segala, which is looking to raise a $4 million round.

Kenshoo, an Israel-HQ’d startup which automates search engine marketing techniques performed by SEM agencies, has launched a UK office, following its recent round of funding. The company, which competes with bid-management software from the likes of DoubleClick, aQuantive’s Atlas Solutions, and Omniture, automates the creation and management of labour intensive search marketing campaigns, in theory freeing up an SEM agency to focus on the other aspects of campaigns. Kenshoo is backed by Arts Alliance, and US VC firm Sequoia Capital which invested in Kenshoo in December 2007 (terms were not disclosed). Kenshoo has hired Mike Chowney, the former European CEO of NeoSearch@Ogilvy, as the company’s MD and Brent Hoberman, founder of Lastminute.com is an advisory board member.

Accosted by a man with a video camera who asks you what Web 2.0 is all about during Web 2 Expo, I had a crack a the subject in a few pithy sentences. The video by SocialTNT is below, but if you don’t have 5 minutes (for the whole video) then here’s the short version. I think the Web has gone through three stages, or what I call the “Three Ps” :

1. Pages (”dumb” pages with no intelligence or data)
2. People (social networks producing richer data and eventually platforms for applications)
3. Power (all that data producing powerful intelligence about the things we really want to know, like ‘what’ or ‘who’ am I looking for etc).

Luckily, there were several, far more intelligent answers from others such as Dan Farber (CNET News.com), Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb), Dean Takahashi (VentureBeat), Scott Beale (Laughing Squid) and Josh Lowensohn (Webware).

I’ve decided to go the whole hog and pull out the whole of 2007’s list of VC investments in tech companies, as compiled by CalibreOne recently. Over the next few days and weeks I’m going to delve into what happened to a few of these firms, a large number of which are the kinds of companies TechCrunch would take an interest in. But for now, feast your eyes on a year’s worth (all in dollars) of venture capital in the UK (after the jump, and I’ll do the same for Ireland shortly).

Read More

In case you haven’t noticed, we are still running a special launch offer of £20 a job on CrunchBoard. Here are some of the latest jobs:

Senior Systems Administrator – Linux – VC Backed Internet Startup

Technology Associate – University of the Arts

User Interface Engineer – Jiglu.com

Developer – School of Everything

James Brocket of Headhunters CallibreOne has been busy compiling a great list of VC investments in tech companies (PDF). Why? Because they do a lot of work for VC backed companies. The number are encouraging – surprising, even, given the doom and gloom in the wider economy.

Nic Brisbourne DFJ Espirit pulled out some good points: More venture capital appeared in Europe in Q1 than ever before – the $1.3bn total was a lot higher than the previous peak in the first quarter of 2007. The UK lead the pack with $592m of deals, more than the previous three quarters combined. The average deal size for Europe broke $10m for the first time, boosted by big deals in the UK including $100m in Spinvox. The average deal size in the UK was $11.9m which is higher than the US figure of $11.6m.

In Ireland the numbers also look encouraging. Total capital invested for the last quarter was $12.6m across two investments which contrasts with $8.4m invested in the first quarter last year across three.

However, the numbers probably mask the seed/early stage market. I counted only four deals in the $1-$2m range, and anything below that was rarely announced or just too small to be picked up by CallibreOne. An anecdotally, we know that investment in early stage startups is probably going down right now.

I have pulled out the relevant parts from the PDF (apologies for the messy list I will tidy it up shortly) and bolded the Web companies relevant to TechCrunch readers.

United Kingdom

Q1 2007

Month – Company – Total – ($US) – Investors

7-Feb Vizimo 1,422,000 Northstar Equity Investors, Private Investors

10-Feb Quick TV 1,738,000 NorthStar Equity Investors

10-Feb Seatwave 25,000,000 Fidelity Ventures, Atlas Venture, Mangrove Capital Partners, Adinvest

11-Feb Axis Network Technology 5,985,300 Bessemer Venture Partners

11-Feb Coull Undisclosed Finance Sout West, Creative Ventures

11-Feb Elonics 4,266,000 Braveheart, Scottish Venture Fund, Tom Farmer, Brian Souter

11-Feb FREEDOM4 Undisclosed Intel Capital, Pipex Communications

12-Feb Quartix 25,438,000 Bank of Scotland Corporate

12-Feb Velocix 27,334,000 Amadeus Capital Partners, 3i Group, Pentech Venutres

13-Feb Bragster 3,500,000 Intel Capital

14-Feb Camrivox 2,394,120 NESTA Investment, Phil O’Donovan, Create Partners, Bank of Scotland Growth Equity, Oxford Investment Opportunity Network

14-Feb Lexara Undisclosed South East Growth Fund

15-Feb Player X Undisclosed Kreos

15-Feb Quantum Filament Technologies Undisclosed Kreos

20-Feb SalesTrak Undisclosed Aspiration Capital

20-Feb Whizz Kid 4,266,000 Ingenious Media Active Capital

21-Feb Opta Sportsdata 1,896,000 Close Ventures

22-Feb Arieso 10,586,000 Oxford Capital Partners, Qualcomm Ventures, Add Partners, Top Technology

25-Feb GroupSpaces Undisclosed Avonmore Developments, Oxford Early Investments

26-Feb Helveta 3,002,000 Close Ventures, Oxford Capital Partners

26-Feb ORECon 24,964,000 Advent Venture Partners, Venrock, Wellington Partners, Northzone Ventures

29-Feb Opscape Undisclosed Mercia Technology Seed Fund

3-Mar Ubiquisys Undisclosed T-Mobile Venture Fund, Google, Accel Partners, Atlas Venture, Advent Venture Partners

3-Mar VoiceSage 4,740,000 Private investors

4-Mar Rapid Mobile Media Ltd 3,990,200 New Enterprise Associates, Alliance Trust Equity Partners, Pen Tech Ventures, Scottish Venture Fund

4-Mar Sayu 498,775 UK Steel Enterprise

5-Mar Livebookings 12,968,150 Balderton Capital

6-Mar Zinwave 10,270,000 SEB Ventures, Scottish Equity Partners, Atlas Ventures

7-Mar Pikum 5,372,000 Virgin USA

11-Mar Playfish 3,000,000 Angel investors

14-Mar isango 8,058,000 SPARK Ventures, Beringea

14-Mar i-Snapshot Undisclosed NorthStar Equity Investors

17-Mar CloudMade 3,792,000 Sunstone Capital

17-Mar Mfuse 5,087,505 Bestport Ventures LLP

18-Mar REM Probe 2,054,000 Partnership Investment Finance, Yorkshire and Humber Equity Fund

19-Mar Reevoo Undisclosed Banexi, Eden Ventures

20-Mar SpinVox 100,000,000 Goldman Sachs, GLG Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management, Toscafund Asset Management

22-Mar Zemanta 1,496,325 T.A.G., Eden Ventures

23-Mar Moneyexpert 49,877,500 TVC

25-Mar Mobango 5,700,000 Innogest Capital

25-Mar Songkick Undisclosed The Accelerator Group, Softech VC, Betaworks

28-Mar Handy Group Undisclosed Advantage Early Growth Fund

28-Mar Realtime 50,000,000 Maverick Capital, Creative Industries Management, New Enterprise Associates

31-Mar Mantic Point Solutions Undisclosed YFM Group

31-Mar Onzo 3,990,200 Sigma Capital

Total capital invested: 592,383,175

Total number of investments for the quarter: 73
(including undisclosed investments)

Average investment: 11,847,664

Total number of undisclosed investments: 23

Q1 2007:

Total capital invested: 445,528,020

Total number of investments for the quarter: 55
(including undisclosed investments)

Average investment: 9,900,623

Total number of undisclosed investments: 10

IRELAND

Month – Company – Total – ($US) – Investors

Q1 2008

17-Feb Celtrak 2,370,000 Egis, Enterprise Equity, Bank of Scotland

4-Mar NewBay Software 10,270,000 Fidelity Ventures, Balderton Capital

Total capital invested: 12,640,000

Total number of investments for the quarter: 2
(including undisclosed investments)

Average investment: 6,320,000

Total number of undisclosed investments: 0

Q1 2007

Total capital invested: 8,450,000

Total number of investments for the quarter: 3
(including undisclosed investments)

Average investment: 2,816,667

Total number of undisclosed investments: 0

Rummble, the mobile and location-based ’social discovery’ tool, has added a basic integration of Yahoo’s Fire Eagle location data to its service. If you have a Fire Eagle account (it’s in invite-only beta right now) you can allow Rummble to set your Fire Eagle location when you set your location on the Rummble web service. You can also update your location manually from within Fire Eagle. Rummble, which was recently on the WebMission, has an algorithm designed to works out which reviews of places are relevant to you based on your social network and location.

Coming out of Europe, Wolpy is a new social network for travellers to share their travel experiences. The basic idea is to create a map of the places you have visited and preview the places mentioned. You can share these places with your friends view their trips. You can view the map in full screen mode. It’s a nice clean design and has simple features, but other than a Google Mashup map there doesn’t seem to be much more to it. However, in a few weeks they plan to “add a whole bunch of new features”. It’s created by Miguel Abad (Developer) of Málaga, Spain and designer Ana Belén Ramón of Zurich, Switzerland. Possibly one to watch.

Zattoo, the live TV to PC platform, has extended its channel line-up to include BBC 1 & 2, ITV 1, Channel 4 and Channel 5 via its online streaming media player. Zattoo will also carry financial news from Bloomberg, children’s programming from the BBC’s Cbeebies and special interest channels such as AutoMoto TV and The Poker Channel. Zattoo completely replicates the traditional TV viewing experience online. The UK channel launch will be followed by other planned European, US and Asian market entries throughout 2008. Content available also includes ABC News, CNBC, Al Jazeera, and a number of European channels.

The service operates strictly legitimately on the basis of agreements with broadcasters and copyright law. All the content is free and Zattoo generates revenues through advertising and subscription fees. Zattoo’s ads are five second video slots available in the buffering zone when users switch channels and it can track them if they click on a dedicated landing page for an advertiser.

In January Zattoo opened up its beta software to UK users, previously available for a closed user group since July 2007. It has about 2 million users in total, two thirds of whom use it regularly to watch TV on their PC. It aims to have 450,000 registered UK users by the end of the year. Alexandra Illes is UK country manager for Zattoo. The Zattoo player is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Zattoo has offices in Ann Arbor, Michigan (USA), Zurich, Switzerland and London, UK.

However, although Zattoo concentrates on live streaming, it will face some competition when Project Kangaroo launches in the UK – the project from the major UK broadcasters to aggregate all their catch-up programming, though that won’t offer live streaming.

Zattoo, based in Switzerland, has caused consternation among some in the broadcasting industry who reckon channels are being ‘ripped off’ because there is no way for them to monitor the views or have the audience added to their BARB ratings, key to attracting advertisers.

However, Zattoo solves a few problems for channels. Assuming it can address audience measurement at some point, Zattoo will help broadcasters keep viewers when they travel around and leave the satellite dish behind. Plus, territorial breakdown of copyright is pretty anachronistic these days. Then again, Zatoo’s live streaming model doesn’t exactly play into Long Tail theory either, unless it can win hundreds of channel partners.

The Microsoft/Skinkers P2P live television streaming startup LiveStation will effectively compete with Zattoo when it comes out of closed beta trials. Recently it inadvertently leaked some of the TV partners: BBC News 24, Sky, Al Jazeera, France 24 and Bloomberg. Zattoo’s other competitors include Joost, Babelgum, Next.TV, and Chinese based companies Sopcast, PPLive, PPMate. In October last year Skinkers took $16 million in Series B led by Acacia Capital Partners.

LiveStation’s Silverlight-powered client is designed to stream TV channels over multiple content streams in a manner which is highly scalable and has a slightly better presentation that Zattoo’s player, although we reviewed Zattoo last year and liked it.

Over 500,000 tracks from Sony BMG goes live on We7’s site today, following their first deal with the major label in March. Sony BMG manages act including Take That, Mark Ronson, The Hoosiers and Leona Lewis. We7 gives fans access to music for free by grafting a short audio advert onto the front of each track, with revenue going to artists and labels. Due to a registration system, We7 builds a profile of each individual user, so one user does not hear the same advert as another. The technology allows for the ad to be removed after a set number of listens, or an amount of elapsed time. Versions of the tracks without music can also be purchased out-right. Because the business model is ad-supported, file sharing of We7 tracks is actually encouraged. Steve Purdham, We7 co-founder and CEO, believes that in an iTunes world, only a small percentage of tracks are actually bought, whereas ads can monetise tracks no-one would normally pay for. I believe We7 is just one of the new wave of business models that will change the music industry beyond the old model.

We7 took $6 million in a Series A round led by musician Peter Gabriel and Spark Ventures, with Eden Ventures also participating. Gabriel is also founder of TheFilter.

I’m going to have to apologise for the lack of updates on the Web Mission trip of 20 startups to San Francisco and Silicon Valley this week. What with being located in a different hotel to the group, having to run and jump on a bus somewhere every morning, getting WiFi in dribs and drabs, and then racing back to hotels only to go out again, the blogging has somewhat suffered! However, here is a quick update on events so far:

Following the Sunday Brunch at Jim Buckmaster’s house (he is co-founder of Craigslist) the Monday saw a half-day series of chats and a panel at Oracle. I chaired a panel consisting of representatives from Facebook, Amazon and Google. It was a pretty general discussion with several highlights which were useful to the startups. At the end I asked the panel if they though it would be a good idea for UK companies to have some kind of presence (everything form visiting now and again all the way up to an office) in Silicon Valley. They all said yes. Then again, I guess they would, but they were pretty emphatic. That evening the group went to a special Glasshouse event – a conversation between Bebo’s Michael Birch and Jim Buckmaster – which was extremely funny. Think Pete and Dud.

The next day saw the group head out to sponsor Heller Erman’s officies where each startup pitched their company before an audience of press and about 13 VCs. It was at this point I fully realised the high quality of the startups who’d been selected for WebMission, and these pitches formed the basis of my write-up in TechCrunch.

After lunch the group went back to the SF hotel and dinner with Oracle, while I headed out to the unassuming TechCrunch HQ (Mike Arrington’s house). I did some work there and later Mike gave me a lift back into town.

It was at this point that WebMission entered networking mode, and we all hit a lot of parties associated with the Web 2 Expo conference, such as the party thrown by Digg and others. I don’t think anyone would be grudge us the opportunity to network and get into the vibe of the startup scene here.

Wednesday saw the group hit the Web 2 Expo in SF and plenty of walking was done between the vast, echoing halls of the conference. The sheer scale of the event was hard to take in, with hundreds of companies represented. On Wednesday evening we were kindly hosted by Bebo and a few speeches of thanks were made, especially to organisers Oli Barret, Jim lawn and Bronwyn Kunhardt of Polecat.

On Thursday the startups were treated to some sessions on US procedures for setting up some kind of presence in the US, if that was their interest, and more looking around the Expo. In the evening we were hosted by the British Consulate in SF, and met up with some fellow Brits out here for the Expo. (And later on we happily ran into some of the Irish contingent). Of course, while all these events were going on the startups took private meetings with companies and potential partners over here.

Today it’s Friday morning and it is all over too soon in some sense, but perhaps it’s time to head home and reflect on what happened here.

I want to write about this more fully some other time, but as the bus is waiting for the last time I will say just this.

I think the startups involved in this event got three main things out of it . Firstly they got to network with eachother, away from the distractions of their businesses and the UK, and create a support network for eachother. Designers and developers have had support networks like this for many years. Startups CEOs, especially in Britain rarely experience it. Secondly, they were able to network with companies here in a co-ordinated way that would never have happened if they’d come on their own. Lastly, the experience and insight they had into a centre of astounding innovation and technology culture here in California must have been worthwhile. Certainly everyone I have spoken to says WebMission was a resounding success for all involved. Now it remains for us to communicate to those of you back in the UK the many useful things that have been gleaned from this trip. See you soon.

UPDATE: Just to be clear about the tangible outcomes of this exercise: Apart from raising awareness of UK startups generally, and those on the trip specifically, each startup had private meetings about potential investment, partnership, distribution/marketing deals and other meetings. I know for a fact that several real commercial deals will be announced as a result of this trip in the coming weeks and months (Skimbit was the only one to be in a position to confirm three new partnerships during the week).

UPDATE 2: I have now obtained the list of the VCs the startups pitched to:

Clearstone
NEA
Crosslink
Norwest
Lightspeed
Thomas Weisel
KPG
Bessemer Venture Partners
Hercules Technology Growth Capital
Founders Fund
Founders Fund
Felicis Ventures
Benchmark Capital

So, we have launched video comments on TechCrunch UK & Ireland, integrated with Seesmic. I’m going to test this out now. Feel free to have a go yourself…

The Angel-backed, social decision-making tool, Skimbit has won agreement with widget distribution network Gigya to include Skimbit in their Wildfire tool. UK-based Skimbit says it is also in talks with AddThis, the bookmarking and sharing tool. The Addthis button currently appears 20 billion times per month, but Skimbit would potentially be the first social decision-making tool in its network. Skimbit founder Alicia Navarro says Skimbit plans to close a seed round in the next month and hopes to land more publishers for its white-label service, as it did with Wedding TV in December.

The Skimbit idea is that, as you might add a site to Digg, you would click a ‘Skim this!’ button to collect options for a decision such as choosing a holiday villa or buying a gadget. Skimbit interrogates the page you ’skim’ to collect the relevant data for the decision making.

An ‘enterprise 2.0′ price war is looming as the UK’s Huddle starts to creep up on the incumbent in the space, Basecamp. The former says it is “growing like crazy”, adding 50% more users in the last month, while the latter recently dropped its prices to remain competitive. However, at $24-$149 a month, Basecamp remains pricier than Huddle’s $20 to $100 a month price range and is still reminiscent of the original Web design project workflow is was designed for. Wrike is different to both in that it charge per user, rather than per project for $3.99 per person per month. Huddle is also providing file-sharing on its service for free, something Basecamp doesn’t yet do. Huddle came out of the gate to compete pretty much head on with Basecamp. In November last year Huddle announced $4m in series A funding from Eden Ventures in London. Companies using Huddle include Reuters and PR group Edelman and UNICEF.

The BBC has quietly joined the OpenID Foundation, announcing the move on its BBC Internet blog. The BBC is the first large media company to join the foundation. Microsoft, Verisign, Google and IBM joined in February. Google,Yahoo, Digg, Technorati, AOL, Plaxo and WikiPedia have previously announced their intention to support the standard, seen as an easy way for users to use a single digital identity across the Internet. So it looks like OpenID is here to stay.

The move is in no way a response to my recent rant on the BBC opening up their data more to outside developers and startups. But it’s a step in the right direction.

However, the BBC’s Jem Stone says they won’t “immediately be offering OpeniDs on bbc.co.uk or even promising to do so.” First they have to “make absolutely sure that this is right for users, is secure and can be implemented properly across all the BBC’s many services.” So it’s really the announcement of an intention, not a service yet.

First they need to replace their platform, with a substantial upgrade based on a data-driven, RESTful service oriented, platform independent architecture. Plus they need to replace their SSO (Single Sign On) identity platform to something OpenID compliant.

It will be interesting to see what users make of this. I like the OpenID ide, but the term OpenID is way too suggestive of a lack of control for the user, and to promote it as ‘OpenID’ would make most mainstream BBC users thing they were ‘opening up’ their ID somehow. This is why services like ClickPass make so much sense.

HubDub, a fantasy league for designed to monetise news content better for publishers (review), has introduced the ability for users to challenge their friends in making predictions. Here’s how it works: A user sends a challenge to a friend to make a prediction on a particular question. Their friend then gets an email and whenever they complete the challenge they compete on their own friend’s leaderboard. Here is a couple of interesting markets.

Since the new feature was introduced last week HubDub’s Nigel Eccles says their sign-up rate has tripled, while registered users are growing at 4% per week. It’s pitch to publishers is to do a rev-share and monetise their content inside this fantasy league-style environment.

HubDub is clearly on to something. It’s most active users average about 400 page impressions per month and monthly uniques average about 66 per month. By contrast the news industry’s average is 8 pages per month per unique user. The Wall Street Journal’s figure is 12, The Guardian is on 9, and most blogs average two or three, according to HubDub. According to HubDub the average person reads a newspaper for about 11 hours per week but consume’s the same newspaper content online for about 5 mins per week. By contrast, HubDub, which launched three months ago says it has top users who average 2-3 hours a day on the site, which sounds bizarre, but could well be true. People do enjoy these fantasy games and are known to be not that bothered about being offered prizes, as the Daily Telegraph’s long-running newspaper fantasy league has found.