Four months after Facebook announced the formation of the $10 million fbFund to provide seed capital for startups building Facebook apps, MySpace is responding with its own incubator to be called Slingshot Labs. According to the NYT, the incubator will be financed by News Corp. but will be separate from Fox Interactive Media’s incubator. As we get more details on Slingshot Labs, we will keep you informed.

An incubator is more of a hands-on approach than a seed-capital fund, but will still allow MySpace to focus on its main business while fostering interesting new ideas. As it gets ready to launch its MySpace Developer Platform, the company will want a way to help create viable businesses around its social network. Although one source tells us that the startups will be focussed on more than just MySpace.

It is also our understanding that Josh Berman, currently MySpace COO, and Colin Digiaro, senior vice president of International Corporate Development, are going to go head up this incubator. Both were part of the founding team. But Tom DeWolfe and Chris Anderson got the big $7 million-a-year contracts. This could be a way to give them their own fiefdom with some nice upside if they make the right bets. Amit Kapur, the current VP of business development and a pretty young guy, is slated to step in as COO of MySpace. We have not confirmed these personnel moves with MySpace yet.

Corporate incubators have had a mixed history of success in the past. Sometimes giving startups too much shelter prevents them from adapting quickly enough to the harsh realities of the market. Of course, corporate venture capital funds have their own problems, especially when investments are based on corporate priorities rather than on pure economic ones. Which do you think is the better route?

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MySpace continues to roll out local versions of its social network. As I wrote last week, they tend to put a team on the ground locally (they are now hiring in Turkey) and then build the site not only in the local language, but promote local artists and other popular culture as well. MySpace now has offices in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Milan, Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo, Copenhagen, Sydney, Mexico City, Sao Palo, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Tokyo, and Beijing. Offices will be opening up soon in Mumbai, Moscow, and Istanbul.

Facebook is taking a radically different approach - tapping users to do all the hard work for them. They are picking and choosing markets (Spanish was opened first, two weeks ago; today German and French were launched) and asking just a few users to test out their collaborative translation tool. Once the tool is perfected and enough content has been translated, Facebook will offer users the ability to quickly switch the language on the site, per their preference.

Like Google has done with image search and Wikipedia has done all along, sometimes it just makes sense to ask you users to do as much work as possible. As long as users go along with it, everyone is happy.

The translation application can be found here, but for now only invited users can add and use it.

Once users add the application and enable “translation mode,” they’ll be given phrases from pages they browse that need to be translated. Each phrase is an easy, bite-sized chunk. Once submitted, other users vote on the submissions and/or submit their own version. More details are here.

More than half of Facebook users are now outside of the U.S. Given that all of them need to browse the site in English today, that is an amazing statistic. Today there are just 600,000 active Facebook users in Germany, Facebook VP Matt Cohler told me this morning (actually, he told that to a Business Week reporter, but I eavesdropped and generally made a nuisance of myself). When a German version of the site launches, look for that number to increase dramatically.

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Advertising conglomerate WPP is looking to increase its Web advertising revenues through more acquisitions. Last year it purchased 24/7 Real Media for $649 million, and is currently making a run at Nurun, a Montreal-based interactive ad firm. But it may try to boost its Advertising 2.0 cred even further with more small acquisitions.

The NY Post, not always the most reliable source but pretty good when it comes to Madison Avenue, reports that possible acquisition targets include Spot Runner (cheap TV ads for local businesses), VideoEgg (video ads and a Facebook play), or JumpTap (mobile ads). Quick, sell those ad startups before the recession hits.

Spot Runner

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VideoEgg

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Barely a month after taking most of its videos off of iTunes and going home, NBC is ready to play again. In a story about NBC CEO Jeff Zucker, the Financial Times reports:

Mr Zucker appears to have patched up relations with Apple after a pricing dispute last year led NBC to pull its shows from the iTunes digital media store. “We’ve said all along that we admire Apple, that we want to be in business with Apple,” he said. “We’re great fans of Steve Jobs.”

Still no sign of the missing NBC shows on iTunes. But it looks more and more like NBC’s walkout may have just been a negotiating tactic.

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International social networking site Badoo, just got a $300 million valuation from new Russian investors. TechCrunch UK has the details:

Russian investor Finam has put $30m into UK-based social network Badoo for a 10% stake. The money is to build the service in Russia, where social networking market has reached around 10 million users in January.Badoo’s social networking site with photo and video sharing has 12.7 million registered accounts, mostly in Latin America and Continental Europe. Badoo was launched from London in November 2006 and was the number two fastest rising search term on the Google Zeitgeist list for 2007. It will go up against several other russian sites including Odnoklassniki.ru, Vkontakte.ru and Moikrug.ru which have all attracted several million users each. And now the Russian version of MySpace, which launched only last week.

Badoo’s main pitch is that it carries no advertising, avoiding the kinds of issues Facebook had with Beacon. Instead, Badoo derives its main revenue from offering users the chance to pay to be popular. Instead, Badoo derives its main revenue from offering users the chance to pay to be popular.

comScore shows erratic swings in worldwide traffic, peaking last June at 11.2 million unique visitors, and now at 5.7 million as of December:

(Quintura CEO Yakov Sadchikov has more here).

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Last October, at the Web 2.0 Launch Pad, the startup voted “Most Likely to Exit First” was CleverSet. Now three months later, CleverSet has sold itself to e-commerce software company Art Technology Group (ATG) for $10 million. It turns out to be a nice exit for CEO Todd Humphrey and founder Bruce D’Ambrosio, who built the company with about $3 million in capital and a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

But it doesn’t quite live up to a lot of the hype surrounding “discovery” right now. CleverSet offers discovery and recommendation engines to e-commerce sites, using a statistical approach to making product matches. The Seattle-based startup competes with the likes of Aggregate Knowledge, Criteo, and ChoiceStream. The investors in those companies are expecting much larger exits. Criteo just raised $10 million in a venture round. And Aggregate Knowledge has raised $25 million.

By those measures, $10 million is either a steal, or discovery just isn’t the next search.

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It’s been four and a half months since Yahoo first previewed Delicious 2.0. We’ve heard not a peep from them since as to when it might launch publicly and replace the existing, somewhat dated interface.

Well, ok, there was a peep last week. In a blog post titled “using delicious on your iphone” on the Delicious blog, they say “We know we haven’t updated the blog in a looong time but the team has been heads down working on the next version of Delicious. We’ll have an update to share with you guys next week.”

The update may be Delicious 2.0 itself, or simply for information on when we can expect it. The team has obviously been working on a number of other projects as well, like integrating Delicious results directly into Yahoo Search.

My understanding is that the team has finalized most of the functionality and features and is working now to ensure it can handle the load of the full userbase and stay responsive.

delicious

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A new web service from Slovenia called Noovo was launched this morning at the DLD conference in Munich. CEO Andrej Nabergoj gave a very high level overview of the service. I’ve been trying to track him down for more details.

“Noovo is a social discovery platform that helps users contribute, find and share highly relevant content in the simplest possible way,” is how they describe themselves. The service is clearly a social network and drives content to users based on what their friends are consuming and recommending. What isn’t clear is if this is a place for people to upload rich media content (see, for example Wixi), or more of a Mixx-type site where users recommend content to each other based partially on a digg-style voting system and partially on an analysis of what your friends are doing.

In describing the service on stage, Nabergoj said that the dominant social network is still email, and that Noovo is a “comprehensive” service to access content, store and share it with friends, etc. Whenever anyone consumes content online, he said, they are thinking of it in relation to other people - who shared it with you, who you can share it with, etc. Noovo, presumably, is going to facilitate that.

Whatever the service is, it has a solid management team and advisory board, and they’re hiring like crazy.

The service is currently in private beta - sign up for it on the home page.

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Lachlan Murdoch, the son of media giant Rupert Murdoch, is said to be offering $2 billion+ AUD ($1.76 billion) today to acquire Consolidated Media Holdings, one of Australia’s largest media companies and part owners of key online properties.

According to The Australian, an announcement on the deal will be made to the Australian Securities Exchange later today.

Lachlan Murdoch walked away from his fathers corporation in 2005 and is believed to be making this bid independently of his father. Reports suggest that he’s partnered with James Packer, the son of the late Kerry Packer, the one time richest man in Australia (James in now second) and previous private owner of the assets, until they were floated, and broken up in the last 2 years.

The purchase will include a 25% stake in Foxtel (Australia’s leading pay/ cable TV company) and PBL Media (owners of the Channel 9 network), 50% of Fox Sports, 27% of Australia’s leading online jobs site Seek.com.au, a 50% stake in NineMSN (the Australian version of MSN) and a stake in Carsales.com.au.

The deal will be put to CMH shareholders later this year as part of a scheme of arrangement.

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A week ago Google disabled IncrediMail’s adsense account and the stock price of the public company, which relies heavily on Google revenue, promptly tanked.

Today they were given a stay of execution: “Google and IncrediMail are now co-operating with the goal of resolving any remaining compliance issues, if any.”

What happened? Neither side is going to say. But it’s a safe bet that some significant level of click fraud was occurring on IncrediMail; it’s the only robvious eason Google would have to ban them.

Will IncrediMail’s stock price fully rebound? I’m betting it won’t - investors are all too aware, now, of IncrediMail’s reliance on a single revenue partner. Keep an eye on the stock and we’ll see if I’m wrong.

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