Public records now show the buyer was Google.

So yes, indeed, there is a body of social search intellectual property — around things like user-driven ranking of Web pages and a distributed file system — that three companies have the rights to use: Google, Facebook and the virtually unknown start-up Jildy.

Last week Jildy released its very first product: An iPhone app for clustering and sorting Facebook friends and status updates.

It’s kind of similar to Katango, a friend-sorting app that Google recently bought for an undisclosed sum.

The Jildy interface is rudimentary and so far only includes Facebook data, but it already provides some interesting tools to those who want to slice and dice their social streams.

Jildy gives users tools to monitor four types of lists:

1. keyword-based searches of their friends’ status messages that they can set up manually
2. algorithmically created lists of friends who are friends with each other (this is like what Katango did, but Jildy users can both read and write to the lists of people)
3. demographically created lists, like male friends and female friends, or San Francisco friends and New York friends
4. any lists that users have already created on Facebook

Then, Jildy tries to find out the top five to seven people or topics within each of those lists, so a user can quickly dive in and see what’s happened recently.

In the next couple of weeks, Jildy plans to add notifications. So for instance, said Jildy’s Mark Drummond (the co-founder and former CEO of Wowd), a user could be alerted every time a friend mentions a term like “skiing,” “snowboarding” or “Tahoe,” the better to facilitate serendipitous meet-ups on the slopes.

Other upcoming additions should include Twitter and LinkedIn data. Drummond said he also thinks it’s important to help users edit their friend lists to stay updated as social circles change.

On a larger note, the patent wars that plague the mobile device industry haven’t crept into social networking yet, aside from a few defensive buys throughout the years, like the Friendster portfolio (now owned by Facebook) and the Six Degrees patent (bought by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Zynga’s Mark Pincus, when Pincus was at Tribe.net).

But all the interest in the Wowd patent portfolio — which, to be clear, has not yet been used to build a successful social search product — shows that giants like Facebook and Google are attentively shoring up access to intellectual property in case social patent wars do break out.

It’s kind of ironic (and maybe even a good thing, if you don’t like software patents) that the two rivals have rights to use the very same technology from the same defunct start-up.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Jildy has seven employees and $650,000 from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and KPG Ventures. To be specific, it has non-exclusive licenses to three awarded patents and six patent applications from Wowd, and owns three more Wowd patents. Drummond said Wowd is in the process of becoming a liquidating trust.

Photo of Mark Drummond by James Duncan Davidson for the Web 2.0 Summit 2009, where Wowd was first announced.

Wowd, which launched in October 2009, was initially a peer-to-peer search engine, where users contributed their Web page visits in real time, but when that didn’t succeed it pivoted to be a news feed filtering service. The company was based in Palo Alto, with much of its development in Serbia. It raised $5 million in two rounds from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, KPG Ventures and Stanford University.

But the start-up only had “a few million users” and “we weren’t growing fast enough,” said Wowd co-founder and former CEO Mark Drummond, so it started looking around for other options earlier this year. It turned out that multiple companies were interested in Wowd’s technology, particularly two fast-track patents Wowd had received, one for ranking Web pages based on how people use them, and one for a distributed file system (here’s a story I wrote at the time they were awarded).

Facebook was interested in not only the technology but also the people who made it, so it ended up licensing the patents and hiring seven Wowd engineers, who are moving from Serbia to California. (A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the hires.)

Then a “large publicly traded company” got wind of what was going on and arranged to buy the patents outright, agreeing to uphold the Facebook licensing. Drummond would not disclose what company this was, but said that deal closed less than a month ago. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has not yet posted a record of the new owner.

Meanwhile, Drummond was still inspired to continue working on news filtering, having had the insight that it would be a better fit as a mobile app than yet another Web site. “The mobile experience of social data is actually completely different than the desktop experience,” he said.

He’s started an entirely new company called Jildy to do exactly that, and Steve Jurvetson of DFJ and Vince Vanelli of KPG have again agreed to invest. And like Facebook, Jildy has a license to use the Wowd patents, which are now owned by this unnamed public company.

Jildy hired another five of the Serbian developers and added a mobile-focused developer in Palo Alto. Wowd co-founder and former CTO Boris Agapiev is now an advisor to Jildy.

(To close the loop, Drummond said another 15 of Wowd’s Serbian developers did not get jobs at either Facebook or Jildy.)

Got that? A company shuts down, its employees go to Facebook and a new start-up doing a mobile version of the same thing, and someone else buys the patents and licenses them to both.

In the broader context, what happened to Wowd is interesting because it’s yet another poor outcome for real-time search, which just a few years ago had seemed like a wide-open space of opportunity. Most every real-time search product, including those from Collecta, Ellerdale, OneRiot and Google, has been shut down.

Photo of Mark Drummond by James Duncan Davidson for the Web 2.0 Summit 2009, where Wowd was first announced.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement. 

Legacy software vendors aren’t keeping up, says Box CEO Aaron Levie. “Many of today’s entrenched software solutions don’t have mobile counterparts — let alone an open platform for third-party mobile developers to leverage,” he wrote in a blog post this morning.

To support the expansion, and to handle Box’s relationships with developers, Box has hired Chris Yeh, former head of the Yahoo Developer Network, as its VP of Platform. Before Yahoo, Yeh (pictured above) was VP of marketing at Tacit Software, which was acquired by Oracle in 2008.

Things are moving fast for Box. The service is seeing 200 million calls to its API every month, which is a pretty good indicator that developers are building applications on top of Box that are getting used. And Box itself has more than six million active customers, including 60,000 companies. In February, it raised a combined $48 million in a Series D funding round from Meritech Capital Partners, with Andreessen Horowitz and Emergence Capital Partners joining prior investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Scale Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. The round included $10 million in debt financing from Hercules TGC. As The Wall Street Journal reported in March, Levie saw huge interest and had to turn down several investors who wanted in on the deal.

The company is also trying to give mobile app developers an additional jolt by offering a $35,000 cash prize to the winner of its Box Mobile Dev Challenge. The winners won’t just get cash — prizes also include credits to advertise on InMobi, the mobile ad network; pitch meetings with Draper Fisher Jurvetson; and TouchPads from Hewlett-Packard.

New investors Singapore’s EDBI, SingTel Innov8, and Motorola Solutions Venture Capital join a handful of existing investors, including Alloy Ventures, Citi Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurveston, DFJ Gotham, First Data, Miven Ventures, Motorola Mobility, Nokia Growth Partners and NCR.

To date, the company has raised $90 million.

ViVOtech’s near field communication technology is being used by Google to enable Android users to tap their phones at registers to make a payment.

Google unveiled its mobile payments and offers initiative last month, and since then a lot of interest has poured into the space, with other companies, such as Square, American Express, Visa and others coming up with several alternatives.

The 10-year-old Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is providing the NFC-enabled point of sale readers to merchants also participating in Google Wallet. So far, the company has shipped more than 600,000 readers in the U.S., which are all capable of accepting Google Wallet payments.

The new funding will be used to expand internationally beyond the 35 countries it serves today.

Shapiro said in a blog post this week that Altly will be a social network that gives users easy and detailed privacy controls, data ownership and portability, and an even footing with advertisers who wish to use their data.

You already know this, but I have to say it:

Of course privacy is an enormous issue for Facebook and one many people are pissed off about, but it will be incredibly hard for an upstart social network to compete with Facebook, and even more so for one that is more private and therefore can’t fully enjoy the benefits of network effects.

Some quotes, in case you’re not up for reading the full manifesto:

There is clearly nothing wrong with Facebook making money, as all business has to do. What IS clearly wrong is when our privacy, our personal information, our digital lives are being subjugated for the sake of profit, without us having any meaningful capability to opt out, or even know the extent of such activity.

Is there another option? What are our alternatives? If we don’t like what Facebook is doing, what can we do about it?

Well, herein lies the problem. There are NO serious alternatives at this time. For every Coke there is a Pepsi, for every Ford there is a Chevy, for every PC there is a Mac and for every Facebook there is…. a void! Facebook has such overwhelming power that practically no one believes that trying to build an alternative is possible.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson Managing Partner Josh Stein said in a tweet, “Incredibly excited to be an investor in Altly, my third adventure with @dmitry.”

Shapiro’s previous companies include Veoh (a video streaming site that spent a ton of money falling behind YouTube, was finished off by a legal fight with Universal Music and eventually sold to Qlipso) and Akonix (an instant messaging security company that was bought by Quest). He left Myspace in April.

Disclosures: Myspace is owned by News Corp, as is this Web site, and please see the part about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The company has created mobile-optimized search results pages for hundreds of Web sites, often with their collaboration. A search query on Do@ brings up 15 or so of these search results pages that users can swipe through.

So a user who searches “Bridesmaids” would see results pages for Fandango and Flixster and other sites devoted to researching, watching and reading about movies. A search for “sushi” will produce pages of results from sites like Yelp and Foodspotting that are targeted to the user’s location. Normally, a user would have to navigate to these pages one by one and reiterate the search, which can be tedious and frustrating on a phone.

“The mobile version of a Web site is not about something that’s the right smaller font,” said Do@ co-founder Ami Ben-David. “It should be more like an app than a Web site.”

Do@ also tries to make search quicker by disambiguating searches with categories such as @news, @shopping and @music. So a search for “iPad” in @shopping would bring up different sites than one in @technews.

Tel Aviv-based Do@ has completed two rounds of funding: $1.5 million from angels, and $7 million in a new Series A round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and including DFJ Tamir Fishman and BRM Capital.

Why so much funding before even launching? “We’re going into a market controlled by really large companies: Google, Bing, etc,” Ben-David said. “It’s not about the money, but about being in a market where if it catches on we may have to scale really quickly.”

We’ve been tracking Do@ for a while now while the company has been in stealth. They’re expected to present later today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, and the iPhone app should be available then. We’ll update with more information as we can.

CafeMom, a social-networking and community site aimed at mothers, is expanding its offerings to daily deals, as well as announcing an anticipated launch of a site aimed at Hispanic moms.

The deals effort has just been launched under the killer URL of Mom.com and will first be available in the Northern New Jersey area.

The sales force, which will presumably compete with armies of sales people from social buying phenoms such as Groupon and LivingSocial, will be made up of local moms in these markets.

The “Mamas Latinas” site–which is still unnamed–will be run by former People en Español publisher Lucia Ballas-Traynor, who has just been hired by CafeMom.

In an interview yesterday, its co-founders Michael Sanchez and Andrew Shue said the New York-based CafeMom was aiming at another major growth spurt.

Said Shue of the effort so far: “It’s just two dads trying to create the definitive mom’s site.”

There is a lot of competition in the space, such as iVillage, which is more broadly aimed at the lucrative women’s space.

But CafeMom had attracted attention too and had considered a number of acquisition offers last year, before deciding to expand its service on its own.

Last summer, in fact, Yahoo and several other companies expressed interest in the possibility of acquiring CafeMom.

After considering a variety of offers, said Sanchez, who is CEO of CafeMom, “We think we have a unique opportunity to grow ourselves and not for someone else.”

The company has been knocking around for a long time in Internet terms, morphing from a sister company owned by CMI Marketing called ClubMom back in the Web 1.0 days.

CMI, which was also founded by Shue and Sanchez, finally got two big fundings in 2008 totaling $24 million, from venture firms such as Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Moving from what was essentially a glorified bulletin board for moms, it has added content and other social-networking tools and games.

For example, it recently launched a blog and content platform named “The Stir.”

Shue and Sanchez said the main CafeMom site now has 7.6 million million unique monthly visitors on its main site and almost 21 million on its overall network of affiliated sites.

The pair said that CafeMom is profitable, with 100 employees. It now has revenue of about $36 million annually.

Here’s the official press release about the Hispanic moms site:

CafeMom, the #1 site for moms with more than 7MM monthly visitors, to launch new website for Hispanic Moms

Outgoing publisher of PEOPLE en Español announced as co-founder.

New York, New York May 4, 2011–CafeMom announced its plans to launch a web destination catering to Hispanic moms in the coming months, to be co-founded by Lucia Ballas-Traynor, a Hispanic marketing veteran and the just-departed publisher of PEOPLE en Español. As part of its market research, CafeMom conducted a major national study of Hispanic moms, across the acculturation spectrum, and found that 92% of Hispanic moms believe there is not currently a website that clearly serves their needs.

“There is currently a huge gap online in serving Hispanic moms,” said CafeMom CEO, Michael Sanchez. “By 2014 one in four moms online will be Hispanic, and advertisers are increasingly looking for ways to reach this key segment. The site represents a tremendous opportunity, both to add value to millions of moms’ lives and to deliver unique integration possibilities to the brands that are most committed to the Hispanic market.”

CafeMom conducted a nationally-representative study of Hispanic moms fielded in both English and Spanish with a well-respected third party research vendor. The study showed Hispanic moms are underserved online, and are also eager to connect with each other. 79% of Hispanic moms said they wanted to connect with other Moms who share their culture, heritage, and life experiences.

Co-founder Lucia Ballas-Traynor brings her 25 years experience in Hispanic media, and has been at the helm of leading Hispanic media brands such as Univision’s Galavision, MTV Tr3s and most recently People en Español, the largest selling Hispanic magazine in the U.S.

“Our plan is to leverage CafeMom’s expertise in community, content, and strategic programs for leading brands and combine it with a world class leadership team that has a deep understanding of Hispanic moms and media,” said Sanchez. “As part of this effort, we are excited to bring Lucia on to the team. She has a proven track record in delivering for consumers and advertisers alike.”

“I’m thrilled to be working with CafeMom on this,” says Ballas-Traynor. “CafeMom is uniquely positioned to deliver this opportunity as an authority on moms. I’m confident that we can create something that will add real value to the lives of millions of Hispanic moms.”

It’s a big shot in the arm for Box, which has 5 million users and saw its revenue grow more than threefold last year, largely on business with 60,000 corporate customers including DreamWorks, Cisco Systems and Dell. Not bad for a company started in a dorm room as college business project.

I asked CEO Aaron Levie–the company started in his dorm room at the University of Southern California–what he’s going to do with all that money. “There’s a pretty significant transition underway from legacy on-premise systems to the cloud,” he says. “Two years ago it was a tool for medium sized businesses, and now we’re seeing much larger companies. Just the technology we have to build to serve those customers takes a lot of investment. We’re also going to invest in our sales team significantly.”

Use of Box.net is so easy–you can start for free sharing pretty much any kind of file–that by the time a company is talking formally to Box.net, it’s already an unofficial customer. “Our plan is to have Box.net surface [from free users] in these organizations, and then we have to sell it,” Levie said.

So why the mix of VC funding and debt? Infrastructure. Box operates two data centers in California and needs more. It can be cheaper to pay for that kind of infrastructure with debt, he said.

George Bischof, managing director at Meritech Capital, said that during the due diligence period before the investment, all the lawyers and investors involved had to use Box.net to give it a thorough going-over. “That was sort of the ultimate litmus test for simplicity if the lawyers and investors can use it well,” Bischof said.

Box.net sees itself as a rival to Microsoft’s Sharepoint, and threw down the gauntlet pretty hard in 2009 when it launched a bake-off challenge and handed out T-shirts declaring Sharepoint to be “Sharepoo.” Nothing grabs attention like starting a fight.

So does Levie want to take Box public? Sure, he says, but he’s in no hurry. “Now that we’re selling to larger companies, there’s actually a strategic reason to go public. Large public companies tend to more easily trust other public companies with their IT, so it turns out to be a competitive advantage. But it’s a few years out for us.”

What Google is doing today is making some careful tweaks to weave social signals into search: Most notably, bringing social search results up from the bottom of the page and parsing links shared by friends.

Google has tried to bring in new blood to help it “get social,” most prominently hiring the PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin by acquiring Slide. Today’s social search launch was put together by another serial entrepreneur who came into the company through an acquisition: Mike Cassidy. His last company, an online travel guide called Ruba, was sold to Google last May.

Cassidy was a significant get for Google, though he’s stayed under the radar till now. Prior to Ruba, Cassidy had founded and sold three previous companies: Xfire, Direct Hit and Stylus Innovation.

While his title at Google–product management director for search–doesn’t have the word “social” in it, Cassidy noted in a phone interview on Wednesday that Ruba was a social company; it was specifically focused on recommendations by friends. In fact, he said, an early name for Ruba, which was backed by Benchmark Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was “Friendstips.”

Back to Thursday’s launch: Google already has a “social search” product that turns up for a minority of queries in the No. 9 and 10 spots at the bottom of its results page for logged-in users who have connected their Google accounts to social services like Twitter.

Now those results will show up scattered throughout regular results. But that’s only for users who are logged in, and only when a social result is deemed relevant.

The other big change is Google will also now give higher ranking to URLs that are shared as links by friends on public sites like Twitter and Quora. Google will try to determine on a per-user and per-tweet basis if a link is relevant to a certain searcher based on which users shared it.

So, for instance, if an article was shared by a person you are friends with on multiple services, Google will think it’s probably more important to you. Or if a video has been shared by a lot of people, including your friends, there’s a good chance it will turn up high in your results on that topic.

Lastly, Google is tidying up some stuff so users can link social services to their Google accounts without displaying them for all to see on their public Google profiles.

Google’s search folks are not necessarily in alignment about the importance of social. Cassidy said Wednesday, “Recommendations from friends are some of the most powerful recommendations in the world. We’re trying to turbopower that. Google’s mission is organizing the world’s information, and this is an extension of that.”

But one of Google’s search scientists was recently quoted pooh-poohing the potential for social to change search. “Social is just one signal. It’s a tiny signal,” Amit Singhal told Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison from Search Engine Land about what social signals Bing and Google used as of December. Since then, Bing has upped its special integration with Facebook to include pages “liked” by searchers’ friends.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Meebo, which says it reaches a third of U.S. Internet users through its publishers, is preparing for a large-scale launch of its Web check-in feature next year to promote discovery of Web sites and reward loyalty to them.

Disclosure: AllThingsDigital uses the Meebo toolbar.

CastTV was founded in 2006 by a husband and wife team, and had raised $3.1 million from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen.

Though she wouldn’t comment on the terms of the deal, CastTV co-founder and President Alex Vikati said, “CastTV was profitable so we weren’t forced to make any decisions.” She, CastTV’s co-founder and CEO Edwin Ong, and their three employees will make up TMS’s Silicon Valley office, rather than moving to join TMS at its Chicago headquarters.

CastTV had stayed relatively under the radar compared to newcomers like Clicker.com, but it still has four million monthly uniques. Unlike Clicker, which has focused on curation and personalization, CastTV takes more of a pure search and aggregation approach. It historically did not exclude unauthorized content streams (though when I checked this morning, this no longer seemed to be the case). CastTV has also focused on detail-oriented features such as device awareness, so it will filter video results to only the formats playable on a certain device.

TMS will combine CastTV’s databases with its metadata service, and operate CastTV.com in conjunction with its own entertainment guide Zap2it.com, which has about double the audience.

TMS counts just about every content provider and guide service as a customer, including Microsoft, Google, TiVo, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, IMDb and the New York Times.

Vinod Khosla said in a phone interview that he was particularly interested in Meebo’s plans to make Web sites social through its Meebo Bar, which will soon include ways for users to virtually “check-in” to Web sites. And secondly, he was impressed by the company’s success with brand advertisers.

“I think very few things are so broad that they reach most of the users on the Internet and this is one of those,” Khosla said. (Meebo currently reaches 180 million uniques, double what it had a year ago, so it’s not quite at “most” of the Internet, but it’s growing fast.)

Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg said 87 percent of the company’s advertisers in 2009 returned in 2010, on average doubling their budgets. He said the Meebo Bar has a 1 percent click-through rate.

That relatively high effectiveness is in part because the Meebo Bar is always visible on the pages of its 8,000-plus publisher partners. Sternberg said that by the time users click on the ad, they’ve often spent a good amount of time on the page, so it’s not just an errant click–they’re actually interested in the brand.

The average Meebo user spends 60 seconds with an ad, longer than the canonical television commercial.

Sternberg said Meebo preferred a smaller venture round to the jumbo later-stage deals companies like Yelp, Facebook and Groupon have taken, because he doesn’t want to significantly change the culture of his company. $25 million is the same amount Meebo raised the last time it took funding, in spring 2008.

According to numerous sources, Yahoo is eager to close a deal to acquire CafeMom, a social-networking and community site aimed at mothers, in a move aimed at turbocharging its often-meandering strategy in the important women’s space.

The price being offered, said sources, is hovering at $100 million, about the same amount Yahoo (YHOO) recently forked over for Associated Content.

The deal might not happen, of course, but several sources said the pair have been deep in negotiations in recent weeks.

CafeMom, sources said, has wanted to hold out for a higher price of closer to $200 million or more. Other interested buyers include Disney (DIS), sources added.

The New York-based CafeMom has been knocking around for a long time in Internet terms, morphing from a sister company owned by CMI Marketing called ClubMom back in the Web 1.0 days.

CMI, which was founded by Andrew Shue and Michael Sanchez, finally got two big fundings in 2008 totaling $17 million, both from Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Sanchez is CEO, but Shue–known for his BoomTown-approved role as the endearingly whiny Billy (But, Alllllliiiisoooonnnn…) on the original “Melrose Place”–is also deeply involved.

On its Web site, the company claims it has 6.7 million unique visitors on its main site and 18.7 million more on its network of affiliated sites, with 100 million page views.

CafeMom said on its Web site that it was profitable, and sources said its revenues were about $25 million to $30 million annually.

Moving from what was essentially a glorified bulletin board for moms, it has added content and other social-networking tools and games.

For example, it recently launched a blog and content platform named “The Stir”–no, really, it is called that.

A recent article on the sassy blog was titled “Parents Who Smuggle Babies Into R-Rated Movies: Ballsy or Crazy?”

(Ballsy, IMHO! You could go crazy enduring only “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” as I can testify. You need some “Salt” in your diet.)

This kind of content offering is all in Yahoo’s wheelhouse, of course, as it seeks to reinvigorate itself by bringing in new talent and brands.

In the women’s space, Yahoo has its Shine site, which is very pretty but in desperate need of a social boost that CafeMom can presumably provide.

Yahoo’s head of M&A Andrew Siegel–Andrew, don’t be scared of me! Call, I don’t bite! Only rarely, that is!–also reportedly took a strong look at Sugar, an innovative San Francisco women’s site. But the start-up declined to sell.

The women’s market is a big one for advertisers, with many competitors–from iVillage to AOL (AOL) to a recent effort by Demand Media to reach women using a site created with supermodel Tyra Banks.

Yahoo declined to comment, but a PR spokeswoman said in an email that “women are an important audience and our Shine site is very successful.”

Calling from Minneapolis, where he and Sanchez were visiting General Mills (GIS) and Target (TGT) about advertising deals, Shue declined to comment, though very charmingly (and very unlike the mumble-mouthed Billy).

Last night, I was the master of ceremonies, as I have been for several years, at the laudable annual Astia Awards Dinner, which celebrated venture capital firms that support women-led companies.

And VC Tim Draper really went above and beyond in showing–quite literally–his support for his female entrepreneurs.

The San Francisco-based nonprofit does work to accelerate funding and growth of early-stage women-led businesses in life sciences, high technology and clean technology, with chapters in Silicon Valley, London and New York.

The NVCA member firms honored at the show, which is sponsored by Deloitte and Fenwick & West, by Astia for making the most investments in companies with a woman CEO were Draper Fisher Jurvetson, InterWest Partners, Prolog Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

In addition, Allan Will, founding managing director of Split Rock Partners, received the Deloitte Leadership in Mentoring Award for encouraging female CEOs in technology-based fields.

Other award winners this year included: Anu Acharya, founder and CEO of Ocimum Biosolutions, who got the Life Science Innovator Award; Diane Greene, founder of VMware, who was awarded the Technology Innovator Award; and Pam Marrone, founder and CEO of Marrone Organic Innovations, who received the Clean Tech Innovator Award.

But it was Draper who stole the show, held at the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

He could not attend, but made his presence known by doing a video in which Draper sings very badly, but with incredible enthusiasm.

But before he starts crooning, Draper takes off an article of clothing for every woman-led company he funded.

Let’s just say, while he should be proud of his investments in women CEOs, it would have gotten very dicey if DFJ had done just one more.

But see for yourself–or, more correctly, see a lot of Tim Draper, in this video:

Last week, I visited Meebo, the Web-based instant messaging company, at their headquarters on Castro Street in Mountain View, Calif.

Why? Well, like a lot of Web 2.0 companies, because it’s a hot and hyped little start-up with a fast-growing audience for its–wait for it!–widgets!

But Meebo makes actually useful widgets, such as its flagship unified instant-messaging offering. Thus, in an endless sea of useless and juvenile apps, that immediately makes BoomTown happy and interested.

And, backed by Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, it also has a solid team, although it is one still in search of a much more solid business plan.

Which is: Advertising, of course! (Which is: Web 2.0′s possibly dubious mantra of mantras! Presumably, if you say it enough times, it will come true!)

How hot and hyped Meebo is was in evidence, when this article in VentureBeat posted yesterday claimed that the company was raising $25 million to $30 million at a valuation of $250 million.

Meebo’s last $12.5 million round valued the company at an already kooky $60 million to $70 million. The company was started in 2005.

Ouch, my head hurts from the bubble atmosphere that persists in Silicon Valley, even as our economy is tanking and the Fed can barely prop it up. But I was already in pain at the $850 million that AOL forked over for the very-nice-but-very-not-worth-$850-million Bebo, so please pardon my deep and unfulfilled need for sanity.

Still, it is hard not to like what Meebo is doing, which is a million times more useful than some widget makers. Basically, it solves the interoperability problem in instant messaging, by allowing a user to chat across the most popular sites–AIM, Google (GOOG) Talk, Yahoo (YHOO) Messenger and Microsoft’s (MSFT) chat service.

It also offers chat rooms to sites across the Web, branded as Meebo Rooms, like the one below on Meebo’s valuation, with lots of cool features, such as the ability to play videos that are embedded in them.

These products have attracted tens of millions of unique monthly users, trading over 100 million messages a day, although–as I said–it is not clear how money will be made providing this useful service.

Meebo, like a lot of similar companies, has struck some interesting ad partnerships, including with record companies, but–no matter what anyone says–it is obviously too soon to tell how effectively it will perform.

Luckily, in this video, two of Meebo’s founders–Seth Sternberg and Sandy Jen (the other is Elaine Wherry, who is not in this video)–as well as recently hired CNET vet Martin Green, who is handling business development, explain it all for you!

Here’s the video:

But that’s just the feeling I got when I read the always sharp Joseph Menn of the Los Angeles Times, who penned an interesting piece earlier this week about writers in Hollywood turning to venture capitalists as the strike drags on.

Wrote Menn: “At least seven groups, composed of members of the striking Writers Guild of America, are planning to form Internet-based businesses that, if successful, could create an alternative economic model to the one at the heart of the walkout, now in its seventh week.”

That includes meetings with Silicon Valley VCs like Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, whose investment in Facebook gives it insight into the creation of new audiences.

The hope for the–let’s just say it, shall we–unnatural pairing of tech VCs and Hollywood folks?

That the sour lemons being thrown between studios and writers–ironically over future Internet revenues–will actually yield delicious lemonade, spurring the creation of quality online programming using the Internet’s massive distribution system that could also make lots and lots of money.

“Could” is obviously the operative word here, because–as we have noted many times in this column–very little original content created on the Web has had any true payoff yet.

Um, well, none, actually. (Save porn, which is an almost perfect content format for the Web.)

To be fair, there have been promising signs.

Ex-Yahoo exec and Hollywood player Lloyd Braun struck a deal with PepsiCo to pay for and create online content.

MySpace has been backing a range of online-only shows made by Hollywood types (although none has shown strongly increasing popularity and even seem to display worrisome declines in viewership, despite the justified potential touted by creators).

Of course, there’s the high-profile Sequoia Capital-backed and Will Ferrell-fronted FunnyorDie.com, as well as MyDamnChannel.com, from former MTV executive Rob Barnett.

And Viacom agreed this summer to create a new online entertainment studio in a 50-50 split with the creators of the popular “South Park” TV program.

Finally, Creative Artists Agency, which is the biggest talent agency in Hollywood, is apparently working with Silicon Valley VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson to raise up to $200 million to invest in the digital entertainment sector, even as other such firms as UTA and William Morris are making similar moves.

While that is a very little amount of money considering the billions of dollars that slosh around Silicon Valley to fund things like dopey widgets and yet another movie-comparison site, it is still a start.

The presumable goal is that by creating and distributing content for the Web in a lower-cost way, many kinds of revenues could be garnered via everything from advertising to getting back investments by selling the online material to television and the movies.

That sounds like a plan, except for the fact that the current state of advertising innovation related to Web videos is quite nascent, even pre-fetal.

While a lot of companies are focusing on this and advertisers seem willing to move in the direction of more online ad spending, it will simply be a long time before these investments pay off.

Which is just not part of the no-risk-and-all-reward mentality of most players in Hollywood, who wouldn’t know a start-up unless it took their prime table at the Ivy.

In all seriousness, it seems unlikely that the high cost of production now in place in the entertainment industry would in any way lend itself to the critical need for that kind of massive shift in economics required to make online content pay off now.

Currently, studios still only grudgingly want to consider sharing ownership of content, and the talent seems even less willing to take the burden of risk required onto its shoulders.

Still, I admire all the efforts on the part of writers to not just strike, but strike out from their current comfort zone and move into the future, where online entertainment production and distribution seems obviously inevitable.

The problem is that it might take a longer while than those creators have patience for and they will prematurely abandon their efforts and return to propping up a system that is destined for, while not oblivion, then certain diminution.

So what’s needed–as in all marriages–is a crazy leap of faith, like this one from “Heroes” Peter Petrelli on NBC.

I am definitely no expert on this topic, except to say that the problem is that the delta between falling flat and succeeding is frighteningly close.

In other words, I Has No Idea what to do.

On the last leg of my trip to Europe to check out Web 2.0 companies, BoomTown spent the day at the Royal Society in the tony environs of St. James’s Park and Pall Mall, for some more lively discussions with more students, academics and entrepreneurs in England.

The Royal Society, by the way, is an “independent scientific academy of the UK and the Commonwealth dedicated to promoting excellence in science.”

In other words: Geek Central of London for more centuries of nerdiness than you can shake a powdered wig at (and, let me just say, there were a lot of powdered wig-wearing techies back when).

As I have written, it’s been a really interesting visit here overall, first at Cambridge University and now here, where a group of entrepreneurs, academics, execs and venture capitalists from Silicon Valley have been mingling with British students, academics and tech entrepreneurs.

It’s all been organized by Ellen Levy of Silicon Valley Connect and U.K.-based tech entrepreneur Sherry Coutu, in partnership with the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

So here’s my final video of the events, including interviews with European VC Saul Klein of Index Ventures, as well as Silicon Valley visitors Hans Peter Brondmo of the start-up Plum and Emily Melton, a VC with Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

The conclusion: It’s a small world, after all, as you will see. Also a message from the Queen: