Catchup Tuesday in Silicon Valley: LaLa land, WhaBam, BitTorrent, Cisco & more

Updated

LaLa, nothing new — A new CD-trading website, unveiled today, is yet another attempt to give consumers music for less than the cost of buying it new — but stay legit at the same time.

It is called LaLa, and is written up by the Mercury News here (free registration). It is in a closed testing mode until June (you have to be invited to test it) . It’s like an eBay for used CDs. Based in Palo Alto, it has apparently raised $9M in venture capital. But before it even launches, it is slammed by Techdirt, for looking too similar to old business models that haven’t worked — basically, only mediocre CDs are likely to get passed around.

Meanwhile, there are other copycats jumping out all over, including Santa Clara’s WhaBam.com, duplicating eBay, which launched in October.

The bug in Google’s desktop search — We thought it was only us. We noticed that some email we found via our Google Desktop software couldn’t be retrieved. The search would locate the email, and show its text, but we couldn’t actually pull it up to edit, or forward, etc. We were scratching our heads about why. So here’s the explanation: When you move a file from a location on your computer to a different location, Google Desktop doesn’t track it. The only solution is to reinstall Google Desktop from scratch. This is kind of pain to do each time you move a document.

Interesting way to come out of stealth — Palo Alto’s Mobio Networks has been building its secretive mobile application service for the past several months, and has just raised $8 million in a first round of funding from Storm Ventures and InterWest Partners, according to VentureWire (sub required). Chief Executive Ramneek Bhasin explains, somewhat comically, that he is coming out of stealth only to help the company’s recruitment efforts, but then declines to offer much detail on what the company actually does.

Mobio’s four full-time employees are still quartered at Storm Ventures’ Palo Alto office, where the company was incubated.

Cisco takes yet another step into your living room — We’ve mentioned how giant San Jose networking company made a big move by buying Scientific-Atlanta, giving it access to TV set-top boxes in your living room. Now it has joined Intel in funding Tel Aviv gaming company Extent Technologies which, surprise, is trying to integrate itself into Intel’s “Viiv” home entertainment platform.

Google’s sarcasm rankles — Our colleague Mike Langberg takes Google’s Eric Schmidt to task (free registration) for flippant comments about Google building an infrastructure for a $100 billion company, but leaving it for his audience to guess whether he means valuation or revenue. Wait, Mike. Google has been clear from the beginning, for example in its IPO prospectus, that it doesn’t want to guide analysts about its likely performance and revenue growth. So why is there always all this hoopla when Google falls short on this front? If you don’t want risk of tumultuous ups and downs as a result, don’t buy the stock.

Just us, or is anyone else getting hammered by comment spam? Our comment box has been inundated with spam, and we’ve all but given up trying to combat it. We tried shutting down our site. We also just tried Matt Mullenweg’s anti-spam software Akismet, hoping his contention that it is 99.9 percent accurate in combating spam would be correct. But it hasn’t helped much. Then again, he says there are reasons for why certain blogs get nailed. In short, our blog might be the first to be hit by this particular torrent. We request your patience with this. (Update: Just realized we might have installed Akismet incorrectly. We’re working on it).

Meanwhile, Om reports a bit of a torrent between the Cohen brothers at BitTorrent — Here’s his reporting.

AOL opens its Instant Messaging service for developers to plug in other applications — Here’s some analysis about AOL’s opening up of its so-called APIs. It comes at a time when there is a lot of pressure on the big three — AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo — to open up. By the way, here’s our story over the weekend about some of the action going on in the IM space lately, in which we chatted with the guys at IMVU and Meebo. And here again, Cisco is a player, teaming up with Microsoft to provide a new service (free registration) that allows workers to see “presence,” i.e, if their colleagues are available for communication by phone or IM, etc.

Cisco/Andiamo veterans try something ‘Nuova’ — While we’re mentioning Cisco, we’ll note that the guys who did that fancy spin-off from Cisco a few years ago to form Andiamo Systems are back at their tricks. Mario Mazzola and the rest of his team are back working at another San Jose startup just months after their departure from Cisco, according to Light Reading. Reportedly called Nuova Impresa, Italian for “new enterprise,” the company has hired about a dozen people and is self-funded.

London stealing our IPOs? — VentureWire has a piece today (subscription required) about a Foster City bio company, Entelos, saying that it wants to go public on the London stock exchange AIM, and how there seems to be trend away from Nasdaq because of costs, regulation, etc. Interesting development that we’ll have to look into.