Instant messaging service Meebo announced a new product tonight called community Instant Messaging that will effectively provide “instant messaging in a box” to any site with a community. It will be a federated system, which means users can access friends on other meebo powered social networks, too. DanceJam, Flixster, myYearbook, Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group’s AddictingGames, Piczo, SparkArt, Sugar Publishing and Tagged were also announced as launch partners.

The product interface looks surprisingly similar to Facebook Chat, which launched earlier this year. Well, perhaps it isn’t so surprising, since other social networks are scrambling to counter Facebook Chat, but don’t have the resources to build out their own platform quickly. Even MySpace lacks a web chat product, although they are building one for launch later this year.

Like Facebook Chat, users can “pop out” the chat session and keep it live on their desktop even after they leave the site. Community partners can send messages into user chat streams (things like new friend requests and news stream items). That gives a more persistent connection to the user for the partner, another value point to the product.

The business model: Meebo will offer this free and place ads. Revenues are split 50/50 with the partner. For now Meebo is only working with a few partners, but over time they say they will open up the API for everyone and provide the service as a utility on demand.

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Skype is getting a major, much-needed upgrade: Skype 4.0. President Josh Silverman calls it the “biggest new release in Skype’s history.” The new software client, which which will be released here in beta tomorrow (for Windows only), takes up the whole screen. Video is front and center.

“Our old UI was purpose-built for voice ,” Silverman tells me. (I put an excerpt from my interview with him up on TalkCrunch, or you can listen to the audio file directly). Now by going full-screen, the functionality can be spread out and made much simpler. It also makes it a better video-chat client. There is a big green “video call” button now. There is picture-in-picture functionality, and you can move the thumbnail around that shows your video.

The peer-to-peer technology ensures good quality video, and there is more space available for text chatting or sending files while the conversation is going. When you do a video chat, it really has the feeling of being in a video chat room. You can also pull in videos from Metacafe and DailyMotion (but not from YouTube). While Skype can handle up to 25 participants on the same call with voice, it is limited to one-to-one video chats at this point. Although, those can be combined with multi-party voice and text chats where everyone else just hears the audio. In comparison, Paltalk can do thousands of simultaneous video chats in a similar room-like environment.

The other major change in Skype 4.0 is that the entire experience is now centered around conversations and managing those conversations, whether those are with groups or individuals. Skype 4.0 lets you import contacts from Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. (No Gmail, another snub to Google).

There are also other improvements, such as automatic detection when you plug in a new headset or if your laptop lacks a built-in microphone. It also has software tools for testing your audio and video quality. All in all, Skype 4.0 is a step forward.

Skype, which is owned by eBay, boasts 309 million registered users and had $126 million in revenues in the first quarter.

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Update on our post from earlier today - Meebo is now confirming that they have raised a $25 million third round of financing from Jafco Ventures, Time Warner Investments and KTB Ventures. Previous investors Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson also participated.

Meebo was looking for a buyer through their investment bank, Montgomery & Co., but moved to a fundraising round earlier this month when there were no takers at the price they wanted. The rumored valuation on the financing was $200 million.

Meebo was pitching strategic partners hard to join the round, including eBay, Fox/MySpace and AOL. Time Warner/AOL obviously sees something they like. Last month the two companies started working more closely with the release of Open AIM 2.0.

This round also signals that Meebo will be looking to Asian expansion. Jafco is a Japanese based fund; KTB is Korean.

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Web chat startup Meebo has closed the funding round they’ve been working on with investment bank Montgomery & Co., a source tells us. Expect an announcement shortly.

The best information we’ve been able to gather says the company raised $25 million or so on a $200 million valuation. Earlier this month they abandoned efforts to sell the company, focusing instead on raising money.

Meebo was negotiating with strategic partners to join the funding round as well, including eBay, Fox/MySpace and AOL. From what we’ve heard, none of those companies invested.

To date Meebo has raised $12.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

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Putting a value on private companies is hard enough for insiders and venture capitalists who have full access to the company’s financial statements. When outsiders try to do it, even well-informed ones, it is nothing more than a guessing game. But it is nonetheless perhaps one of Silicon Valley’s favorite parlor activities.

Today, Henry Blodget & Co. at Silicon Alley Insider try to peg valuations on 25 private Web companies. Facebook is at the top of the list, but it is valued at $9 billion instead of the $15 billion that Microsoft’s investment put on the company. Why? Because everyone knows that the $15 billion is too high, so SAI decided to apply a 25X multiple on Facebook’s 2008 revenue forecast of $350 million. Does that make its valuation correct? Probably not. But in the absence of any true market pricing, anyone can go ahead and make a guess.

The same goes for any of the valuations on the SIA 25 list, which puts Wikipedia’s worth at $7 billion, Craigslist’s at $5 billion, Mozilla’s at $4 billion, LinkedIn’s at $1.3 billion, Ning’s at $560 million, RockYou’s at $325 million, and Spot Runner’s at $250 million. Note that three of the top five (Wikipedia, Craigslist, Mozilla) are essentially not-for-profits sitting on very valuable assets. The valuations for those three are based on what they would be worth if they were run differently with an eye towards maximizing revenues—which, of course, could impact how consumers interact with them, which in turn would impact their valuations.

Another 25 startups make up the contenders list, which includes Federated Media ($245 million), Yelp ($225 million), Meebo ($220 million), Mahalo ($150 million), Digg ($125 million), Etsy ($115 million), Powerset ($80 million), and Twitter ($75 million). A full list that changes dynamically every 20 minutes, based on changes in the Nasdaq, can be found here (although, exactly how the valuations are linked to the Nasdaq is never clearly explained)

Some of these valuations have more merit than others. Some have none whatsoever. For instance, SAI gets at its $125 million valuation for Digg by “splitting the difference” between a $200 million buyout rumor we reported and the $60-to-$80 million that Kara Swisher came up with. Splitting the difference between two rumors is not exactly the height of financial analysis.

But what are you gonna do? At least SAI acknowledges that the list is an imperfect work in progress. Don’t get too caught up in the actual numbers. It is more useful really as a starting point to think about relative valuation between different startups. Is Meebo really worth three times as much as Twitter? Is Ning worth as much as Slide? Let the parlor game begin.

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Web chat startup Meebo has been working with investment bank Montgomery & Co. for the last few months to either find a buyer or raise a big new round of financing. The rumor was they were looking for a $250 million valuation.

A couple of sources have told us that eBay, Fox/MySpace and AOL all took a long look at the company, but ultimately passed based on the price and the fact that the company has done aggregate revenues since launching of only $1 million or so.

So instead of selling, Meebo is closing a financing round valuing the company at $175 - $200 million. The company wants strategic investors as well as the inevitable private equity funds that would be willing to pay this kind of valuation (traditional VCs won’t touch a deal like this). The rumor is that Fox and/or AOL may be investing in the round.

Meebo’s big selling point is the success of Meebo Rooms, which essentially turns chat rooms into a web service. Also, Facebook just jumped into the chat space; other social networks can quickly add the feature via a partnership with Meebo.

The deal has not yet closed, according to our sources, although we hear Meebo has a big announcement scheduled for Thursday morning, Our guess is that it isn’t the financing, but we’ll see.

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Investment banker Michael Montgomery has his chance to prove he’s still relevant in the tech banking world if this VentureBeat story is true. The rumor is that Meebo has hired Montgomery & Co. to represent them in a new fundraising round that may value the company at a cool $250 million.

If they pull it off, they’ll set Meebo’s value at half of the $500 million Slide was recently able to talk the markets into. That Slide deal had Montgomery & Co. competitor Allen & Co. behind the deal.

In fact, Allen & Co. seems to be representing all the hot startups these days. In addition to representing Slide in that massive valuation, they’ve worked with Bebo in their recent sale to AOL and Digg in their ongoing acquisition talks, etc. Montgomery, meanwhile, has been taking on lower profile deals like Technorati’s recent fundraising/sale effort. If Montgomery pulls of this deal, perhaps Silicon Valley startups will stop looking exclusively to Allen & Co. for the big stuff.

Is Meebo worth half a Slide? Well, I’m not sure Slide is worth half a Slide, to be honest. If anything, though, Meebo is a potentially more interesting platform. They have created a syncronous world of chat that works perfectly along side a number of applications. Gaming, for example, is a natural fit with Meebo.

Still, Comscore says Meebo has only 4.6 million unique monthly visitors. That’s valuing each of them at $54. That’s significantly more than AOL paid for each of Bebo’s 22 million Comscore visitors ($39). My guess is the valuation may get taken down a notch or two before the deal’s done. Or perhaps not, if Montgomery does his job and gets a few bidders going after the deal.

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AOL is pushing their two year old OpenAim initiative much further this morning with OpenAIM 2.0.

There are three key changes of note. First they are now embracing services that they previously tried to stop - multiheaded clients and websites that allow users to access all of the major instant messaging platforms in one place. These are desktop services like Pidgin (open source), Adium (Mac) and Trillian (Windows). And web based services like Meebo and eBuddy. Today those services have to hack in to MSN, Yahoo and AOL services (Google Gtalk is open). Now AOL is giving them unfettered access, too.

What that means is that AOL goes from being in a position of half ignoring services like Meebo and half vaguely threatening to sue them, to fully embracing and supporting the services.

Second, AOL is also removing the usage restrictions that were put in place two years ago that restricted big services from using them (again, forcing Meebo, eBuddy and others to hack in).

Third, AOL is saying they’ll soon be giving partners who build software on top of AIM the option to run AOL-served advertisements with a revenue share. AOL says more details on advertising will be coming next month, and will be powered by their Userplane group, which AOL acquired in 2006.

There are a number of additional changes to OpenAIM as well, including more robust tools for third party add-ons (see gallery of existing add-ons here) and for mobile applications. And they are documenting their protocol for accessing AIM, called OSCAR.

David Liu, AOL SVP of Social Media, Messaging and Homepages, said in an interview that they want to remove all the friction and hurdles to third parties who want to leverage the AIM service, and welcome them with open arms. “To that end, we’ve come together with third-party chat services such as meebo and eBuddy to enhance the experiences of our users who access the AIM platform from these web-based services. We’re also giving developers the tools and flexibility they desire to build innovative and meaningful applications around instant messaging for web users around the globe.”

AIM has 27.3 million monthly users (plus another 30 million at ICQ, which is not part of this announcement), according to recent Comscore data. MSN has 235 million and Yahoo has 97.6 million. Gtalk has 4.9 million.

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Orgoo, the long-anticipated, all-in-one, browser-based communications suite that presented at TechCrunch40 last fall, is releasing a new video chat service to the public today. This comes ahead of a general release of its email, IM, and SMS tools, which remain in private beta.

Over the last seven months, Orgoo has been working on building a replacement to the Userplane video chat it has relied on. The new service is entirely browser-based and allows up to four people to chat via video together at a time (with an unlimited number of people who can join via text chat). For now, there will be a cap of 1,000 people who can broadcast simultaneously over Orgoo, although the company will increase that cap daily.

Orgoo is one of the first to provide this capability independently and all within the browser for private chat sessions. Yahoo Live, which we covered recently here, allows for five-person video chats but in a more public-broadcasting type of setting. ooVoo supports up to six people but requires a Windows-only download. Tokbox supports up to six people but only provides text chat when used with Meebo. And MeBeam supports up to 16 people but has a very primitive user interface. Paltalk has been at this the longest, and offers a 10-person video chat via PaltalkScene (a Windows-only download) and PaltalkExpress (a Web-based version in alpha for both Macs and Windows PCs).

When demoing Orgoo’s new service, there were some problems with audio echos and delays. However, I was assured that these issues would be worked out for today’s launch. If Orgoo’s video chat is able to function for several people as smoothly as Skype functions for two, then this will be quite an awesome service. Both businesses and casual users alike will find it very useful for connecting with people over long distances.

Orgoo video chats will soon be embeddable into other sites as well. The company is working with MySpace to provide its users with video chat capabilities while alleviating the obvious concerns about child predators.

Another cool feature is the ability to initiate one-on-one chats from within group chats. You can just select the person you want to chat directly with, and you’ll enter a dialogue only with them. Both group and one-on-one chats can be viewed fullscreen as well.

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Yahoo has killed off their web chat ambitions, we’ve heard. The six person team that was working on the unlaunched myM service are now working on the webmail product. (update: commenters have noted that the Yahoo web messenger product remains live).

Chris Szeto, the director of product management for Yahoo Messenger, oversaw the project but has since moved on to join Sequoia-backed Meebo. From what we hear, myM was going to basically be a Meebo clone. But the team has dispersed, and the software has been shelved indefinitely.

It joins the deadpool. For posterity, we’d love to see a screen shot of what the service looked like. If you were a beta tester and have one, please email it to us (editor at techcrunch).

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