Roundup: Quattrone, Carlyle, Omidyar’s social lending, and more

Frank Quattrone, the powerful Silicon Valley ibanker during the bubble, has avoided conviction — The Merc stories are here and here. Merc columnist Mike Langbeg argues Quattrone may be off the hook, but that it doesn’t make him innocent. He says the “spinning” practice perfected by Quattrone essentially robbed companies of some of valuable cash from their IPOs, funneling it artificially — though apparently legally, at the time — to friends who helped him get the deals.

Omidyar spreads its bets, invests in CircleLending — Last year, Omidyar Network, the venture firm led by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, invested in San Francisco online social lending Web site, Prosper. Now it is investing CircleLending, a company that offers loans and mortgages between family and friends. It is less of a Web-based play than Prosper (you come to terms on the loan off-line, in contrast to Prosper’s auction-like dashboard), and instead formalizes loans between family and friends. The $10 million round was led by Venrock, and included Omidyar Network, Intel Capital and individuals.

Carlyle, the big private equity firm, is raising a $700 fund — Not a surprise. Back in March, we reported Carlyle was raising a targeted $650 million fund. And like all funds these days, it will tend larger because investors have so much money to park. And with the contacts that Carlyle has with the Bush Administration, what better place can you think of? VentureWire reported this morning that Carlyle has already raised $282.6 million of the total.

Google’s wallet feature has more growing pains — The service, which competes with PayPal — and is called Google Checkout — is wrongly assigning “Checkout” status to some advertisers who aren’t using the service.

The Mercury News checked with each of the major search engines, to see what their privacy policies are — Elise Ackerman, our Merc colleague, did the reporting here. It comes just as a top AOL executive gets fired after the release of search information typed in by thousands of AOL customers.

Facebook and Microsoft sign exclusive ad deal — The two companies said that Microsoft will be the exclusive provider of banner advertising and sponsored links on Facebook. No monetary amount mentioned.

Other news:

—Jasper Systems., a Mountain View provider of wireless data services, has raised $20.6 million in a second round funding, according to a regulatory filing cited by PE Week. The company is run by Kineto Wireless co-founder Jahangir Mohammed, and is backed by Benchmark Capital and Sequoia Capital. We will have more to say about Kineto shortly.

—Iamba, a Cupertino provider of fiber-to-the-premises solutions, has reportedly raised $8 million in new VC funding, led by Cedar Fund and joined by backers Giza Venture Capital and Pitango Venture Capital, again mentioned in PE Wire today.

–De Novo Ventures, a Silicon Valley (Menlo Park) life-science venture capital firm, has raised its third fund — this time $300 million — to invest in new companies.