Latest Silicon Valley links — catching up before New Year’s

Updated

Here’s our effort to catch up from the slow posting over past few days. This place never stops.

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—Google geek envy: Amazon’s A9 search engine is giving discounts at Amazon for people who search on A9. They’re saying you save 1.57%, or pi divided by two, as in “sharing the pi(e).” Get it? Remember, pi is the number of shares Google once used as a cute reference in its prospectus. (Via Mike)

—Lightspeed redux: The Silicon Valley venture firm, Lightspeed, which was going through some turmoil recently, has apparently hired two new partners, John Luongo and Maria Walker, who show up on its Web site (at least as of this writing). Probably to replace those who left Lightspeed a few months ago to start Opus Capital. But wait, we’re confused. Luongo is now also listed on the Web site of Opus Capital, the breakaway…

fund. We’ve emailed Luongo for clarification. Lightspeed did say, originally, that the two sides would cooperate on both funds — but if Luongo is on both teams, it is taking friendship to a new level. (UPDATE: Luongo has responded, and says he is indeed working with both funds.)

—MySpace boots YouTube: Some users of the hot social networking site, MySpace, discovered that they can no longer integrate their pages with YouTube, a San Francisco video hosting start-up. Could this be a sign of heavy-handedness by MySpace’s new corporate ownership?

—Juniper sues commenters: The Silicon Valley networking company, Juniper Network has sued some commenters at LightReading for, among other things, stating that “the man at the helm seems to be paying (off) attorneys all over the bay area to cover up the scandal which resulted in the terminations of many at the top including the VP of HR. 1) Board of director 2) CFO 3) GM 4) VP of engineering 5) VP of HR and more.” This, even after LightReading apparently removed the comments.

—ScanR: This new Palo Alto Silicon Valley start-up lets you send it a photo from your cameraphone, which it then ships back to you in the form of a PDF for use in a number of different ways. Alarm:clock raves about it, but TechDirt asks: So what? “What’s wrong with the original photo? Can’t you do the same with the original photo the cameraphone takes?”

—Photo-sharing redux: We wrote recently about a possible photo-sharing bubble. We just heard from the folks at New Jersey’s Phojo.com, who tell us they have recently been looking for capital along Sand hill Road too. So far, they’ve bootstrapped. And they don’t lack confidence. “We like to say that if Google and Apple were to get together and design a photo-sharing site, Phojo.com would be it,” notes founder Doug Barr. Among its innovations for photo management, he says, “are folders, quick tags, instances, copied, is copied…” Good luck, Doug.

—ZohoWriter: Om points us to this new online word processing site, ZohoWriter, which is similar to Writely. Sridhar is chief executive of AdventNet, of Pleasanton, which is the company behind ZohoWriter and other services. This is not a Web 2.0 era company. They started in 1996, before the first bubble, and bootstrapped themselves (in part because they had to).

— VoiceVault Continued.: A few days ago, we mentioned the new investment by venture firm Kleiner Perkins into VoiceVault, a new Silicon Valley voice start-up. Greg Woock and Joe Sipher are two of the founding execs there. Alarm:Clock points to this site, which shows how Virgin Electronics’ Web site makes a big deal last year about how Woock (former exec at Handspring and Creative) and Sipher (Palm, Handspring) were going to do great things for Virgin, taking the consumer electronics arm to the “next level.” That was before Virgin let them move out to San Jose, here in the heart of Silicon Valley, where, you know, things happen to attractive employees. They get picked off.

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—Correction: We’ve updated an earlier post which incorrectly referred to Epinions founder Naval Ravikant getting “booted” from Dot Edu Ventures when he decided to launch a suit against Epinions’ venture investors. Not true. He wasn’t booted. He left of his own accord.