Federal Antitrust Probe Targets Google, Yahoo and Apple. (Washington Post)

Plaintiff’s Lawyers Allege NebuAd Staged Closing. (Mediapost)

Silicon Alley vs. Silicon Valley. (WSJ)

Jason Calacanis Tries Turning Mahalo Into a Wikipedia That Pays. (MediaMemo)

Alibaba Plans To Spend At Least $200 Million On Acquisitions. (Paidcontent)

Microsoft issues $100 million manifesto’ for Bing. (AdAge)

Apparently, NebuAd is being rebranded in the UK as Insight Ready. According to No DPI, NebuAd’s phone number gets answered by Insight Ready and NebuAd were branding its platform product “Insight.” After hours, NebuAd’s UK number goes to the voicemail of NebuAd’s Commercial Director, Tony Evans. During the day, the call is answered as Insight Ready. The Insight domain is also registered by Nebuad.

NebuAd, a deep packet inspection company, has been battling in court, and it appeared that it was closing down, apparently protecting itself from further litigation.  The Federal Trade Commission last year held hearings on the company which had technology that allowed it to capture consumers’ online behavior by looking at the traffic that passes through their ISP.

Depending on what they did with the assets, it’s unclear if this latest move will protect the company in an ongoing privacy lawsuit or if it plans to get back into the ISP capture game in the UK. Another question is whether investors Menlo Ventures and Sierra Ventures, which poured more than $30 million into NebuAd, knew that the company was being reborn.

UPDATE: According to ClickZ, Evans said he is working with the new company on a consultancy basis, and that NebuAd’s U.K. Managing Director, Paul Goad, is the Managing Director of Insight Ready. An Insight Ready employee said while NebuAd intended to use ISP data, the new company won’t.

UPDATE II: It will launch “in several weeks” and will “collect behavioural data in partnership with website owners. The data will be “anonymised” and sold on to ad networks, with the cash split between websites and Insight Ready.”

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According to court documents, NebuAd, a deep packet inspection company, has been winding down its affairs since last summer. NebuAd laid off nearly all of its officers and employees, it once employed over 60 people, and closed its office in Redwood, California and moved to Foster. Operating with skeleton staff, who will all shortly be fired as well, the company will soon “cease to exist as an ongoing concern,” the documents state.

The Federal Trade Commission, as part of its ever growing review of online behavorial targeting, held hearings on the practices of NebuAd, which had technology that allowed it to capture consumers’ online behavior by looking at the traffic that passes through their ISP.

A lawsuit was filed against it, alleging that the company violated a federal wiretap law, privacy laws and computer fraud law; they are requesting damages in addition to an injunction that would force NebuAd to erase any information it has about them. The suit alleged that NebuAd violated privacy by buying information on the surfing activity of subscribers to various ISPs.

According to the WSJ, funds Menlo Ventures and Sierra Ventures invested more than $30 million into NebuAd.

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The suit, which is seeking class-action status, was filed in federal district court in San Jose, Calif.

While the U.K. government acknowledged concerns over the legality of Phorm’s ISP-based ad-targeting technology, it rubber-stamped Phorm’s plan to be carried on several U.K. ISPs, including BT Group, TalkTalk and Virgin Media.

Phorm’s plan to notify users and get their permission to target them with relevant ads has been credited with their ultimate success.

“After conducting its inquiries with Phorm, the U.K. authorities consider that Phorm’s products are capable of being operated in [a legal manner],” The U.K.’s Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, said in a statement. However, consumers must be “presented with an unavoidable statement about the product and asked to exercise a choice about whether to be involved,” the agency said.

VeriFone Holdings has appointed Dykes to serve as senior vice president and CFO (he’ll assume the latter post following the filing of the company’s third fiscal quarter report). Dykes replaces Clinton Knowles, who served as interim CFO, after its former CFO, Barry Zwarenstein, was let go.

Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers has plucked up previous CBS Mobile chief Cyriac Roeding. He will be an entrepreneur-in-residence and may help Kleiner Perkins move its mobile-investment project along (it has partnered with Apple to launch the $100 million iFund specifically for mobile investments).

Bebo, a social media network, has snagged Nicole Vanderbilt from Google to mastermind its international expansion plans (focusing first on France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands). At Google, Vanderbilt was the head of industry marketing in Europe and India.

Harlan Stone has been named president of Major League Gaming’s sales arm, MLG Properties. Previously, Stone was a principal at Velocity Sports & Entertainment.

As of yet, the company hasn’t systematically tracked users’ online behavior, but it wants to, AT&T said in a letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. However, the company said it would only track users who “opt in” to the program.

The House committee began investigation targeted advertising after a host of reports emerged about ISPs that were preparing the sell their user data to NebuAd. The committee sent 33 letters to ISPs requesting information on their tracking policies. Most (32) have responded and the big guns – including Time Warner, Verizon, Comcast and AOL – have all said they don’t and won’t track surfing behavior on sites they don’t specifically run.

AT&T is rationalizing the potential tracking by pointing the finger at Google’s tracking methods, the Times reports.

“Advertising network operators such as Google have evolved beyond merely tracking consumer Web surfing activity on sites for which they have a direct ad-serving relationship. They now have the ability to observe a user’s entire Web browsing experience at a granular level,” Dorothy Attwood, the company’s senior vice president for public policy, wrote in AT&T’s letter to the committee.

Senior members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote to broadband Internet providers and other online companies on Friday, asking whether they have “tailored, or facilitated the tailoring of, Internet advertising based on consumers Internet search, surfing, or other use.”

The request comes amid rising scrutiny of the practice, known as deep-packet inspection, or DPI, by lawmakers and consumer advocates.

The letters were sent to more than 30 online companies, including large broadband providers such as Comcast Corp., AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., as well as search giant Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

“We are interested in the nature and extent to which you engage in such practices, and the impact it could have on consumer privacy,” said the letter from Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell and ranking committee Republican Joe Barton.

Representatives of Comcast, Google and Microsoft had no immediate comment on the letter. A Verizon spokesman said, “Of course we will review the letter and respond.” An AT&T spokesman said, “We look forward to responding promptly to the committee’s request.”

The letter asks where any ad-targeting practices have been used, how many consumers have been subjected to it and whether those people were ever notified about it, among other things.

Concerns about DPI were sharpened earlier this year when cable company Charter Communications disclosed plans for a pilot program, in partnership with an advertising company called NebuAd, to track customers.

Charter has said the service would be anonymous and would not collect or use any information that identifies individuals. It pledged to protect customers’ privacy and said they would be allowed to opt out of the program. But Charter later put the program on hold because of the privacy concerns.

NebuAd’s chief executive, Bob Dykes, has told lawmakers during congressional testimony that the company’s advertising network benefits consumers by serving them with more relevant online ads. He has said NebuAd does not collect personally identifiable information about Web users or store “raw data” linked to individuals.

One of the committee members who signed Friday’s letter, Democratic Rep. Edward Markey, of Massachusetts, has said broadband providers should be required to get their customers’ permission before the companies are allowed to track their online visits.

Courtesy of Reuters Group.

Peter Kaplan is a reporter for Reuters.com.

NebuAd’s system was created to provide targeted ads to subscribers – it has deals with a handful of smaller cable companies.

“Given the serious privacy concerns raised by the sophisticated ad-serving technology Charter Communications planned to test market, I am pleased to hear that the company has decided to delay implementation of this program, which electronically profiled individual consumer Web usage,” Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, said in a written statement. “I urge other broadband companies considering similar user profiling programs to similarly hold off on implementation while these important privacy concerns can be addressed.”

Prediction 1 – 2008 will be the year of new and revised standards for online media.

Many outside our industry (and more than a few within it) have criticized the online media world for lacking business and measurement standards. It’s both a fair and unfair criticism. Fair because the lack of standards has in many instances limited our growth. Look at the online video space for a recent example. It’s also a bit unfair, as standards take time to emerge as learning are accumulated, and consensus is built. And, of course, we have been creating standards but they are not yet fully understood.

But I believe that 2008 will be a watershed year in the development of industry standards, including standards related to public policy. Look for significant improvements in best practice standards around behavioral targeting, lead generation and privacy in 08. Moreover, look for the IAB (their audit and public policy committees) and the Network Advertising Initiative (together with its Digital Policy Forum) will likely take the lead in building consensus, establishing standards, and ensuring they are well publicized. This is especially the case for behavioral targeting in light of the FTC staff’s release on December 20th of a set of proposed principles for self regulation of behavioral targeting.

All of these efforts will improve our businesses and grow consumer trust. In a few years, we’ll look back at some of the work currently underway and be grateful to those who participated.

Prediction 2 – Someone will figure out how to ‘save’ brand advertisers from inappropriate content.

Advertisers who want to enter the interactive space, or are seeking to increase spend are reluctant because they have few options where they can know that their brand will not wind up next to inappropriate content. This certainly isn’t a new problem, but the growth of User Generated Content over the past 18 months has really brought this issue to a head. Moreover, with the widespread use of ad exchanges to buy media, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for brands looking to guard against ‘bad’ content.

Much of the work in this space has focused on the User level – particularly around protecting children. Some attempt to filter out and block bad content  Net Nanny, KidRocket, while others attempt to create a walled-off, safe web for kids via a white list. (Pikluk, Children’s Internet).

The software model may help protect Users, but there just isn’t much out there to help the brands – but that’s changing. There are already a number of companies, particularly in the online video space, that claim to offer a means of protecting brands from inappropriate UGC. These companies generally approach this issue by scanning the video and text content around their advertisements. Others outside of the video space are simply working on categorizing much of the content that’s already out there. Here at NebuAd, we are able to perform real-time scanning before brand Ads are shown, if Advertisers wish to be sure the content is OK.

So I predict that we’ll see a handful of companies enter the content rating and certification business in 2008. And this will be extremely helpful, if, as some have predicted, there is a slump in the advertising business. I remember back in 2001 when many online media firms sought to bolster their slumping ad sales by luring the large brand advertisers. As a significant cadre of companies figure out how to make the Internet brand safe, we’ll all benefit. And in fact, a content certification platform (another standard to work on!) would be attractive to affiliate marketers, online ad exchanges and of course, media networks.