Glam Media has hired Michael Adair, most recently Google’s head of North American sales finance, as their new VP Corporate Development and Finance. Prior to Google Adair was an investment banker at Lehman Brothers and he has an MBA from Harvard. He’ll be responsible for making investments and acquisitions on behalf of Glam.

Glam, a women-focused advertising network, raised a massive $85 million round of financing earlier this year - bringing their total capital raised to over $115 million. A lot of that money was reportedly taken off the table by Glam’s founders, but the company clearly has the cash and stock currency to make acquisitions.

Presumably Adair’s deep finance and banking experience will help him make those acquisitions and investments as Glam gears up to compete with Sugar Inc. and other competitors.

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The medical industry is one that thrives on innovation and evolution. New procedures, medicines, diseases, and theories are released practically every day. In such an environment, the need for a website to reflect and allow for documentation is apparent.

MedPedia is a new project, currently in development, that will offer an online collaborative medical encyclopedia for use by the general public. In order to keep the content accurate and up-to-date, content editors and creators have to have an MD or a PhD. Several highly-esteemed medical colleges will be contributing content to MedPedia, including Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School. Medpedia is also receiving support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and many other government research groups. The content from these organizations will then be edited by MedPedia’s community of medical professionals.

MedPedia is currently in closed beta with a live preview site, where contributors can apply to be included, and users can submit feedback and suggestions. They plan on opening up their beta in late 2008.

The site will feature content about diseases, anatomy, procedures, medications and medical facilities in two ways. The topic front page will be written in easy-to-understand language for the general public, but there will also be a more technical page where medical professionals can discuss more in-depth with a clinical tone. With more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions, more than 10,000 drugs prescribed each year, thousands of medical procedures being performed and millions of medical facilities around the world, they have their work cut out for them.

There is obvious competition with established medical resource sites like WebMD and MayoClinic. Those sites have done really well, but there’s always room for disruptive technology like this. Look at what Wikipedia did to Britannica, a 250-year old encyclopedia publisher. The advantage MedPedia has is its large range of medical professionals who create content based on their specialties, rather than having several in-house doctors creating content on a range of topics they aren’t formally familiar with.

This system is advantageous both to MedPedia and the medical professionals. MedPedia benefits from their knowledge and experience, and the doctors are able to promote themselves in their specific field of expertise. MedPedia contributors will also be able to form committees and boards in specific areas like “Childhood Obesity” and “Skin Cancer.” Each professional that specializes in that field will be able to join the committee (five of whom will make up the board) and will oversee the content generated and edited in that field.

MedPedia was founded by James Currier, a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Currier founded Tickle, a quiz and personal test site in 1999, which sold to Monster in 2004 for about $94 million (though it recently lost a hefty portion of its staff and was said to be shutting down). After taking some time off to spend with his family, he started an incubator called Ooga Labs. He is also known for singing in the Here Comes Another Bubble video, from the group The Richter Scales. Currier is one of three co-founders for the group, which was surrounded by some controversy (they also performed the song live at The Crunchies). He got the idea for MedPedia when he found himself constantly searching for medical information online, like if his three-year old son needed to go to the emergency room for a fever.

The Advisory Board includes Gilbert S. Omenn, M.D., Ph.D., Professor University of Michigan Medical School; Linda Hawes Clever, M.D., M.A.C.P., Clinical Professor University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical School; Joseph B. Martin, M.D., Ph.D., former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University; and Mitch Kapor, philanthropist and founder of Lotus Development Corporation, designer of Lotus 1-2-3, Chair of Board of Directors for Linden Lab (creator of Second Life), Chair of Mozilla Corporation, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Wikimedia Foundation.

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Social gaming network Zynga just got some serious funding. It raised $29 million in a B round led by Kleiner Perkins. (IVP and prior investors Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group and Avalon Ventures also participated in the round). The company is also announcing the acquisition of YoVille, a virtual-world app for Facebook with 150,000 daily active users. And, along with the cash, new Kleiner partner Bing Gordon is taking a board seat and an operating role at the startup.

Bing recently left Electronic Arts, where he was the chief creative officer and one of its founding executives. But he was already an informal adviser to Zynga, and helped bring the deal to Kleiner. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus says:

He is super-involved in product strategy, brings the gaming DNA to us, and is an amazing CEO coach. He’s already stopped us from doing stupid things.

Like what?

Stupid things like build a PC downloadable MMO game that would cost anywhere from $5 million to $30 million, and would be free to play with virtual goods.

That’s a dig at other gaming startups. Zynga specializes in casual games you can play with your friends on social networks. Some of its hits include Texas Hold’Em (with four million hands of poker played daily), Attack, and Scramble. Al told, they attract 2.9 daily active users across Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks. On Facebook alone, Zynga’s games have 1.6 million daily active users (right behind Slide, RockYou, and SA Ventures).

The company raised $10 million just last January, and Pincus claims he still has all of that money in the bank and is cash-flow positive with 80 employees. But he feels the stakes are about to get higher as the worlds of casual social gaming and online video games collide. That means he will have to spend more money on both production values and marketing. Pincus tells me:

I think in 18 months these games are going to be highly graphical and immersive. You will be able to jump in and have a casual experience of today, and if you want to go deeper you will be able to.

As it becomes harder to get viral growth, you will need marketing.

Zynga uses its most popular games as a distribution mechansim for new games by cross-promoting them. But Zynga is not alone in trying to build a social gaming network. Competitor SGN raised $$15 million last May, and counts Jeff Bezos as an investor. Both are trying to disrupt the current gaming giants (like EA) with lower development costs, lower marketing and distribution costs, and more social gameplay.

Pincus wants to keep his player acquisition costs low, but add in some of the deeper engagement that online multiplayer games enjoy. He is building some of these games now. But he no doubt will do more buying of small fry gaming app startups. (Playfish looks like bait in this area).

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Chris Saad, a co-founder of the Data Portability project has posted that tomorrow at OSCON a new Open Data Web Foundation will be announced by David Recordon and others.

The goal of the new foundation is to set out the actual data specifications, legal structures around data portability and in helping to evangelize set formats. Saad says that the initiative is different to the Data Portability project in that it is details oriented around specific technology and legal implementations rather than the broader evangelizing effort that has come out of Data Portability:

Continue reading on TechcrunchIT >>

Update: David Recordon has responded by saying that he isn’t at OSCON tomorrow.

Update 2: David Recordon has confirmed that an Open Web Foundation will be announced on Thursday morning.

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One of the most frustrating things about the iPhone is that it can’t handle Flash, which has become the standard for streaming video on the web. YouTube managed to work around this by transcoding all of its videos into the H.264 format, but other video serving sites have failed to follow suit. Today Episodic, a video web publishing company, has launched a new web app that looks to solve this problem by converting Flash-based videos into a format that the iPhone can play in its native Safari browser. The service works with content uploaded to a number of different video sites, including Blip, YouTube, and Metacafe.

The site takes standard RSS feeds and scans posts for any video content, which it then converts to an iPhone-friendly format. Each blog’s converted feed can be accessed from a static URL (for example, you can check out a feed of WebbAlert at http://iphone.episodic.com/WebbAlert from your iPhone). Hypothetically, a video blogger could redirect to this static Episodic URL whenever an iPhone user visited their site.

While the video conversion seems to work well, Episodic’s app is still very limited. There’s currently no way to take a standard URL and convert that page’s content to video - you need to generate a playlist using an RSS feed. Some bloggers may also take issue with the fact that videos are now being hosted outside of their site (anyone can submit your site’s RSS feed for conversion). CEO Noam Lovinsky says that this shouldn’t be an issue, as the site is merely serving as a syndication platform, and will do everything it can to respect bloggers’ wishes.

Episodic is also hoping to help bloggers monetize their video content by offering an advertising and analytics service for streamed videos. Unfortunately there’s currently no way to authenticate who owns the videos - you could easily input an RSS feed and then start monetizing someone else’s content. Lovinsky says that the site is working on this issue, and that the company’s ultimate goal is “to help people get paid for the content they create”. In the future, the site intends to roll out a full-fledged video platform designed to help serial video creators generate professional content quickly.

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Blogging network GigaOm will announce the acquisition of the small but excellent mobile-focused blog jkOnTheRun this evening. Founders James Kendrick and Kevin Tofel will remain in Houston and continue doing their thing.

The deal size isn’t being announced, and it’s likely small. But it shows what might be the beginning of something that I wrote about in March - the rollup of the better blogs as the space gets hyper-competitive (you gotta love zero barriers to entry).

I predict that this is just the beginning of the process that will accelerate over the next 12-18 months. larger blogs lacking the stomach for competition will sell to large media corporations. The more competitive large blogs who want to see this thing through will start to acquire the smaller ones and group by topic areas. Whoever builds the network of the most interesting and prodigious voices will eventually win. Or perhaps everyone will win, but to different degrees.

I’m sticking to my argument that blogs should get cash positive and then start to acquire others - raising a slug of money just gives people an incentive to spend it, and you lose control to a group of investors who may know little or nothing about how to build a blog.

And what’s most clear in all of this is that the small, independent, passionate blogger who writes day and night about whatever it is that captures her imagination plays an important role in the ecosystem. They keep the larger blogs honest, and the best of them will grow into large properties in their own right. It’s a beautiful, nasty, hyper-competitive world we bloggers live in, and most of the time I wouldn’t change it for the world.

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Google’s on and off negotiations with Digg have been back on in a big way for the last six weeks, we’ve heard from multiple sources inside of Google, and the two companies are close to a deal that will bring Digg under the Google News property. The acquisition price is in the $200 million range, says one source.

We first wrote about the Google-Digg negotiations in March. Despite a vigorous denial by Digg CEO Jay Adelson the negotiations continued, although Google’s Marissa Mayer reportedly cooled on the company for a period of time.

The companies are now in final negotiations according to our sources, although it could be a couple of weeks before it closes. And while the major deal points have been agreed on, the acquisition could still fall apart. Microsoft, which was previously interested in the company, may be willing to step back in at a much lower price.

Most of Digg’s revenue comes from a three year ad deal with Microsoft, which will be terminated on a sale to Google. Digg has raised $11.3 million in venture capital.

Meanwhile, Google’s fascination with the Digg voting concept continues.

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Apple’s App Store has seen an unprecedented amount of success and exposure since its launch, with millions of total downloads and 909 applications already available. Unfortunately, Apple has been unable to keep up with the influx of submissions from developers (each app must be approved before it appears on the store), leaving many companies frustrated and confused as their apps sit in limbo.

Adding to the frustration has been the difficulty associated with testing an application. As Craig Hockenberry, one of the people behind the popular app Twitterific explains:

The big problem here is that the only way to install software on an iPhone or iPod touch is with the App Store. There are also no provisions for beta testing… The only way to “test” a fix is to release the changes to tens of thousands of users. It’s the developer equivalent of playing Russian roulette.”

Now we’re hearing from an app developer that Apple is finally going to start rolling out a new beta program in the next few days. Details are slim, but it seems like Apple is capping the total number of beta participants at 100 per app. In order to download a beta app, users will need to submit their iPhone’s serial number to the developer, who will then need to flag its eligibility in the store itself. All betas will still be distributed through the App Store - you won’t be able to download one on an external site.

It sounds like developers that haven’t had their apps approved yet will still be able to participate in the beta program. This should alleviate some of the developers’ anxiety (at least they’ll know their app will work once it goes live), but it still doesn’t address the the delays and lack of communication that many developers are complaining about.

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Fast growing women-focused blog network Sugar Inc announced that they’ve terminated their year-old ad sales relationship with NBC. All ad sales will now be via an in-house sales team, says the company.

There was speculation that NBC’s recent investment in Blogher, arguably a competitor to Sugar, was to blame. But Sugar CEO Brian Sugar (guess where the company name came from) says this was purely an economic decision. NBC’s cut of ad sales simply got too expensive.

Comscore says the Sugar sites have 4.6 million unique visitors and 24 million page views per month. We’ve heard the company will do around $15 million in revenue this year, with 2/3 of that from advertising. Assuming NBC takes 50% of sales, that’s $5 million Sugar is paying them every year. Bringing sales in-house certainly makes sense.

Sugar is also clearly gearing up to compete with Glam Media, a company that represents other women-focused sites for ad sales. To get there, though, Sugar needs to build up their own sales force. It looks like they’re doing exactly that.

Disclosure: We partnered with Sugar for our LA party earlier this year.

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TicketLeap, a service that helps promoters sell tickets to their events though a self-serve platform, has raised $2 million in a Series A funding round led by MentorTech Ventures and Ben Franklin Technology Partners.

TicketLeap differentiates itself from large ticket vendors by catering to small companies and events. Rather than charge event coordinators for selling their tickets, TicketLeap passes on the cost to the ticket buyer by charging a small fee along with each ticket. The Philadelphia-based company was founded in 2003 by Christopher Stanchak, who initially created the site as part of Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program.

There are a number of strong competitors in the ticket management space, most notably Eventbrite, which charges event planners a set fee of 2.5% for every ticket sold (users can also choose to pass on the fee to their customers, as they can with TicketLeap).

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