Roundup: Frontline, Breitbart, Maxthon, Clipsearch, Yahoo-Viacom, Salesforce-Koral

Here’s the latest action:

Big names support Frontline Wireless, which wants to end-run carriers — James Barksdale, former chief executive of Netscape (left, top), and John Doerr, a big-name venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins (left, bottom), are the latest to back Frontline Wireless, the company we wrote about last month, which wants to bid for radio spectrum dedicated for public safety but which can also be used for profitable wireless offerings.

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The long-wave spectrum will support wireless Internet devices, and spectrum ownership is a great way to bypass dealing with the monolithic carriers. Ram Shriram, an early investor in Google is already a backer. Vanu Bose, an entrepreneur and technologist, is also investing, according to the story in the NYT. Fact check: NYT calls Barksdale a Silicon Valley investor, but he isn’t based here. No word yet, though, on whether Google will invest. (Update: Doerr’s investment is on behalf of Kleiner Perkins, we’ve confirmed.)

Breitbart latest news site with traffic — We’re hearing that Breitbart, a news aggregator, got 22 million page views last month, simply by amassing news stories from wire services like Reuters, AP, and by getting an early look at stories posted to press release services (by paying them). Readers come to the Breitbart, click on stories, and Breitbart shares ad revenue with the original sources of news (AP, etc). We’ve contacted Breitbart to contact the traffic numbers. Note: While Google is getting sued from folks like AFP, and being pushed into licensing deals with CBS, Breitbart’s model is to say upfront it will sign the licensing deal.

Maxthon browser gets investment from Google — Maxthon, the browser company headquartered in Israel, has reportedly sold a minority stake to Google for $1 million (Techcrunch). Maxthon, has been catching on in China, in part because of its ability to circumvent Chinese censors. The investment is apparently part of a “strategic deal” that would make Google the browser’s default search engine. Maxthon has just crossed 80 million downloads of its browser, and reports that more than half its 14 million unique monthly users are in China. That’s excellent growth for such a young company, but it has slowed form the rapid pace last year, when Maxthon got five million new downloads a month for a period. And why only 14M uniques, when you’ve had 80M downloads? The company got $5 million from CRV, and seed money from Morten Lund and WI Harper in 2005. Reached by VB, chief executive Netanel Jacobsson declined comment.

Clipmarks releases tool to search what people are clipped — We’ve mentioned Clipmarks before (VentureBeat coverage), a service that lets you clip material from Web pages. It has now released Clipsearch, a way to search what others are clipping, and ranks the clips by popularity.

Krugle and SourceForge partner — Now you can search code on SourceForge, with the code search engine Krugle.

Yahoo signs deal with Viacom — This is the season of major ad deals. Google’s size and momentum brings it most of the publicity. But it has alienated some, including Viacom, which has sued Google for not aggressively filtering for pirated content on its video site, YouTube. Now, Viacom has signed a deal with Yahoo, which makes Yahoo the exclusive provider of search ads at MTV.com, Nickelodeon.com and other sites run Viacom.

Salesforce.com acquires Koral, a document management start-up — Salesforce.com, of San Francisco, will use nine-person San Mateo’s Koral’s technology in a new service to let customers’ employees find and manage documents and other content. The service, Apex Content, lets people collaborate on applications using documents such as video, email, HTML and other office documents. More detailed coverage here. Remember, Koral is the site run by Mark Suster (pictured left), who got pissed off last year when venture capitalists used their Blackberry during a meeting. He ended up getting seed funding. Maybe that’s good. Had he taken VC, he may have been forced to hold out for a bigger deal. We don’t know. See Suster’s blog. Anyway, the Salesforce M&A guys probably weren’t using Blackberrys during the talks.