Turn raises more cash & other news

We bumped into Jim Barnett, the guy who is running a secretive company called Turn, at the VentureOne conference today. Barely anything is known about this company, other than the former chief executive of AltaVista and executive at Overture is planning to launch a next-generation advertising network. He told us he has just closed a second round of funding, bringing the total up to just shy of $20 million. So that is news.

Turn’s technology will target advertisements to users with a precision we’ve not yet seen. And he gave us another clue today. Turn is working on ways of using advanced search to look for “tags”, or subject words, that publishers or bloggers put on their sites (like ours on the bottom of this post), as indicators about what the articles or posts are about, and thus relevant for advertisers. Yes, we know this tagging idea isn’t new, but it seems he’s got much more up his sleeves…he was coy and wouldn’t say much.

Talks between Lucent & Alcatel turn serious — Wonder what this means for Cisco, and the valley? Om ponders.

Catching up:

PayPal has moved onto mobile phones — Money can be sent, received and goods purchased all via PayPal from your mobile phone.

Sling Media releases SlingPlayer Mobile — It gives you a way to watch and control your home TV from any network-enabled mobile phone or handheld powered by Windows.

AjaxWrite — So Michael Robertson, the guy behind the SIPphone, has built yet an AJAX word processor, called AjaxWrite (if it sounds familiar, its because we were just talking about Writely, another AJAX word processor which was sold to Google). AJAX is behind many of the cool interactive offerings you’re seeing these days, such as Google Maps. But who cares? We’ve got several of these things floating around.