It may seem a stretch from music to personal finance, but the team behind the MyStrands music recommendation service is now advising on the best way to spend or invest your money.

Strands, which has Spanish roots but has rebased itself in Oregon, has plenty of cash on hand to plan its own investments, having raised $29m last year, $24m coming from Spanish bank BBVA, and $65m in funding overall since it was founded in 2003.

It followed its own recommendations and used some of the money - figures were not disclosed - to acquire NetworthIQ this week, a social personal finance site that allows users to track their net worth and share and compare it anonymously with others.

That follows the recent acquisition of Expensr, a personal finance site that allows users to categorise their expenses and compare their spending habits with their peers.

Last month, Strands launched moneyStrands, its own personal finance site, in private beta. This can aggregate a user’s online accounts and provide a snapshot of their finances along with an anonymous comparison with others.

“Its kind of addictive, you could compare yourself with other journalists in the Bay area and see whether you spend more on your mortgage or have a bigger salary than them,” Gabi Almadiz-echevarria, head of communications at Strands, told me, by way of intriguing example.

All well and good, but sharing music tastes is one thing, making your financial data available to everyone, despite the guarantees of anonymity, may be a social step too far for many.

Strands will also adapt its music-recommendation technology, which learns what users like from their listening habits, to provide personal recommendations for financial products that could save its members money or prove to be a good investment for their situation.

The company clearly has the finances to be a consolidator in this field and mount a challenge to better known sites such as Mint.

“Personal finance was an opportunity that we saw a year ago when we started discussions with BBVA, and we want to lead the explosion of sites in this area,” said Almadiz-echevarria .

Quincy Smith has carved out a reputation as one of the leading digital visionaries among old media execs. Since joining CBS 18 months ago as head of digital efforts he has made a show of disdaining tired old Web 1.0 ideas in favour of Web 2.0 thinking (In a comment to the Wall Street Journal, he recently accused the video site Hulu of “arguing to be a premium destination in a time when nobody wants a destination.”)

This has not always made him popular in media circles. A senior figure at a big CBS rival I spoke to recently bristled at Smith’s apparent rejection of the traditional model that has typified the mass media business from the beginning: create your own destination (be it a TV network, newspaper or website) and attract as big an audience to it as you can.

So it seems highly ironic that Smith has just led CBS into a $1.8bn purchase of that icon of Web 1.0 internet media, CNET. Clearly the overriding online need for CBS right now is online reach and scale, Web 2.0 niceties be damned.

This is what my colleague Johsua Chaffin had to say after talking to Smith only a matter of weeks ago (full article here):

As CBS tries to catch up, Wall Street has been bracing itself for a big digital acquisition. When he took the job, Mr Smith said his goal was to find “the next YouTube” - only a year earlier in its development and considerably cheaper than the Dollars 1.6bn paid by Google.

After scouring the Valley, he now reports that there is a dearth of candidates that can add meaningful revenues right away and would not entail big integration headaches because of old technology.

“Every media company is gunning for properties in this space,” Mr Smith says. Then he asks rhetorically: “Has the next YouTube come in the last 18 months?”

While Silicon Valley’s Apple and its iPhone may reign supreme in technology design, the Bay Area is home to several other stylish gadgets.

Oqo, set up by Apple renegades in San Francisco, invented the ultra mobile PC category in 2004 with its O1, which was succeeded by the O2 last year. Tivo, based in Alviso, and Sling Media, the Foster City developer of the Slingbox, have changed the way many people view television.

Oakland’s LiveScribe has just released its Pulse smartpen, whose linking of note-taking with audio recordings can transform the way you work.

Finally, San Francisco’s Aliph today introduced a new version of its Jawbone bluetooth headset.

It is half the size of the original and, besides its great looks, features improved noise-cancellation technology it calls NoiseAssassin.

The Jawbone had already set itself apart in reducing ambient noise, distinguishing the human voice with its contact with the cheek and ability to sense vibrations as users speak.

With California becoming the fourth state to ban cell phone use while driving from July 1, and dozens of other states considering such a move, the Jawbone has an ever-growing hands-free accessory market on its doorstep to tap.

Carl Icahn might well have a better chance of bringing Yahoo and Microsoft together than Steve Ballmer ever had of doing it on his own.

That’s the message the Yahoo stock price has been screaming. With the activist investor  mounting a proxy fight, Yahoo’s shares now actually stand higher than they did on several days when Microsoft was still pursuing its unsolicited bid.

Is this rational? Two things suggest it may be.

One is that it took Microsoft to drop its takeover offer for some of Yahoo’s biggest shareholders to show their hand. Remember that Bill Miller, who controls 6 per cent of the stock, had been publicly calling on Microsoft to pay $40 a share: once Steve Ballmer balked, Miller’s comments suggested he’d have taken $34 after all. Gordon Crawford, also with 6 per cent, said something similar.

This is valuable information to an investor like Icahn. Potential sellers don’t normally put their cards on the table quite so publicly.

The other reason to believe a deal has a better chance with Icahn on the scene is his track record in oiling the wheels of difficult negotiations. Exhibit One is the resolution of Oracle’s bid for BEA Systems earlier this year. With BEA publicly holding out for $21 a share, Oracle actually walked away from its offer of $17 a share: the deal (with Icahn acting as broker) eventually got done behind the scenes at $19.375. This was a bigger gap to overcome than the difference between Microsoft and Yahoo, as one investor in takeover stocks points out.

The big risk for the hedge funds that have been piling into Yahoo’s shares this week is that Microsoft can’t be brought back to the negotiating table. Having wasted three months and considerable credibility already, though, it seems almost unimaginable that Ballmer wouldn’t come back - at the right price.

Fire Eagle, Yahoo’s effort to broker location data for users and sites wanting to add where-in-the-world features, appears to be gaining traction, judging by a presentation at the Where 2.0 conference.

Tom Coates, leader of the project that launched the Fire Eagle beta two months ago at Yahoo’s experimental Brickhouse offices in San Francisco, gave a long list of sites now using or about to use the software

Coates described Fire Eagle as helping users to control their data and privacy by sitting in the middle of services providing location data and those services trying to use that data. He used the analogy of it being a lens that allowed the user to look through and see location-specific applications on social networks, search engines and other sites.

The list of Fire Eagle-enabled services includes Dopplr, social networking for travellers, Navizon, which uses Wi-Fi and cellular tower triangulation for its positioning service, the MyLoki location service, ZoneTag which location-tags photos from cell phones, Firebot’s Twitter direct-messaging updates of your location, Plazes and Brightkite, which offer location-based social networking,  Fireball, for finding people at conferences and Proximizer, which shows how close a person is.

Others that he hoped would include Fire Eagle in the future included Wikinearest, an idea to tap the 1m geotagged articles in Wikipedia and show the five nearest locations to you, and a pair of Compass sneakers from Isaac Daniel, which have built-in GPS.

Microsoft has just announced a couple of Xbox milestones - 10m of its Xbox 360 game consoles sold in the US now and 12m members globally of its Xbox Live online service.

The company says the 360 is the first next-generation system to pass the 10m mark in the US.

The latest figures from the NPD research firm, up to the end of March, showed the 360 leading with 9.9m units, the Nintendo Wii second with 8.8m and Sony’s PlayStation 3 in third with 4.06m units sold.

“History has shown us that the first company to reach 10m in console sales wins the generation battle. We are uniquely positioned to set a new benchmark for the industry,” said Don Mattrick, head of  Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business, in a statement.

But given the 360 had a year’s head start over the Wii and only sold 262,000 units in March to the Wii’s 721,000, it seems only a matter of time before the 360 is overtaken.

Even so, Microsoft can boast that it does a better job of selling software with its consoles. It has a US “attach rate” of 7.5 game titles per console, compared to 5.3 for the Wii and 4.6 for the PS3.

That figure could increase with the new line-up of Microsoft Games Studios titles, which were previewed for the gaming press in San Francisco yesterday. Gears of War 2, Viva Pinata 2, Fable 2 and Too Human were among those demonstrated.

Microsoft is also well ahead of its rivals in online services, with the 12m figure for Xbox Live representing a doubling of membership in the past year. The company said the prospect of playing Grand Theft Auto IV online, which will include episodic content exclusive to Xbox Live, had given a recent boost to membership.

The best news for Sony is in Europe, where Kaz Hirai, head of its console division, told us earlier this month that the PS3 had overtaken the 360 with more than 5m units now sold.

Anyone looking for juicy new details today about the in-fighting between craigslist and eBay would have been sorely disappointed.

As expected, craigslist countersued eBay after itself being sued for allegedly trying to reduce the influence that the internet giant has as a large shareholder of the classified advertising concern (we wrote about it earlier this week, here.)

Lawsuits are often the place where you get a behind-the-scenes look at how messy corporate break-ups like this really work. In this case, though, there have been few vicarious thrills.

eBay, which bought its 28 per cent stake from a former craigslist employee, courted the company hard to try to enhance its rights as a shareholder, according to the lawsuit. Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO, apparently first buttered up craigslist’s controlling shareholders (founder Craig Newmark, pictured above, and CEO Jim Buckmaster) with the tale of how her own son found an apartment on their website. She played on the fact that both companies thrived by building strong communities. Then eBay won them over by putting its own founder, Pierre Omidyar, on their board. What sealed the relationship, according to the craigslist lawsuit:

“[Newmark and Buckmaster] believed that Mr Omidyar had a moral compass very similar to their own.”

How touching. Now the craigslist duo have decided that eBay is not so cuddly after all, accusing it of “unlawful and unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, deceptive passing-off, business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and breaches of fiduciary duty.”

That’s quite a laundry list. Newmark and Buckmaster frequently seem to play on their public image as well-meaning innocents in an online world increasingly dominated by unfeeling corporate powers, but it seems they can at least play legal hardball with the best of them.

I’m blogging live from latitude 37.6 degrees North, longitude 122.4 degrees West, or roughly a mile south of San Francisco airport, location of the fourth annual Where 2.0 conference on the geospatial web.

First up has been Adrian Holovaty, chief executive of EveryBlock. and the former online head of editorial innovation at the Washington Post. He created one of the first mash-ups with Google Maps at Chicagocrime.org, allowing people to see crime incidents in Chicago overlaid on Google Maps.

EveryBlock goes much further. As well as crime data, publicly available information from around 50 sources has been mashed down to be relevant to a single block in the cities of either Chicago, New York or San Francisco.

EveryBlock can pick up on street names in news stories and link them to blocks or whole areas if they are relevant. Flickr photos, Yelp reviews and lots of public information such as crime statistics, property records and restaurant health inspections are included.

The service reminds me of the UK site Upmystreet.com, but much has changed in the 10 years since its launch. Now the data sources are as likely to be user-generated content as official ones and the primary interface is the map rather than a text and postcode-based listing of local services and information.

John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps, told the conference there had been a 300 per cent increase in geotagged annotations on Google’s mapping services in the past year. More and more of it was rich media, he said, with links to photos and YouTube videos. He announced Google was opening up its API for any developer to grab and reuse any of the annotations.

He was joined on stage by Jack Dangermond, president and co-founder of ESRI, the leader in Geographic Information Systems. GIS is a set of intelligent maps that can overlay features such as sewage networks and weather conditions on standard maps.

Mr Hanke said the big challenge was to bring much of this data confined to the “dark web” into the public domain. The ESRI president, a surprise guest who is better known for shunning the limelight, sounded positively evangelical in his support for opening up these geo-databases. He said this would all become possible with ESRI’s ARCGIS 9.3 server software available in about four weeks.
The new product would allow agencies and governments to open up access to their data so it could be scraped and mashed-up by other sites.

One example showed how a map of last year’s fires in southern California could be further enriched with live data tracking the expected trajectory of the fire over a period of hours and road closures as they were implemented.

“With this kind of additional velocity, the best days of mapping and innovation on the Geoweb are ahead of us,” said Mr Hanke.

The venture capital industry may be stuffed with cash right now but that hasn’t stopped Lightspeed Venture Partners raising the biggest new fund of the year so far, at $800m.

When you ask where all this new money keeps coming from, Silicon Valley veterans have taken up a common refrain: the typical answer is “from overseas,” or “from Europe.” This is usually accompanied by a small involuntary smile that is meant to make you think: “Dumb Money” (at least, that is how it seemed at the National Venture Capital Association’s annual meeting in the Valley last week.)

Lightspeed claims that the performance of each of its seven previous funds has been in the top quartile of the industry, so it’s easy to see why it was besieged by investors this time around (the size of the fund was raised from the initial target of $675m.)

This points to a pattern in the VC industry that has been taking shape since the dotcom bust. As described by Gerry Langeler of Seattle VC firm OVP (and pointed out to me by Larry Aragon of Venture Capital Journal), the average VC fund has doubled in size, to $200m, since 2000. That reflects a concentration of money in the hands of fewer managers with better track records.

The trouble is, the VC world still has too much cash driving down returns, whoever is investing it. This was Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, also talking at the NVCA meeting last week:

In other industries most of the profits are concentrated in the hands of a very small number of firms, and venture capital is no different.

Like the inhabitants of Lake Wobegone, Silicon Valley’s elite financiers may all think they can be above average, but logic suggests otherwise.

Apeer, a media collaboration tool, is not a WebEx killer as claimed or even much use as an instant-messaging client, but it is pretty nifty when it comes to sharing digital media.

Launched today by the San Francisco start-up of the same name, Apeer is more akin to Microsoft’s NetMeeting/Windows Meeting Space on performance-enhancing drugs.

The desktop application allows users to drag presentations, photos, video and music into a window they share with other online participants. Anyone can play around with the media - resizing, zooming, pausing, rewinding, annotating - while discussing it in a chat window.

What distinguishes Apeer is that there are few other effective options for collaborating with video and music and manipulation can take place without any noticeable lag. Apeer gets rid of such latency issues by distributing the files to each participant’s computer and then just sending small packets of instructions to move them around and change them.

Bob Goldstein, chief executive, told me this resolved a chief WebEx complaint:

“What people tell us all the time is ‘I tried to do a WebEx session the other day and I was on slide 4 and the other guy was on slide 7 and somebody else was on slide 10,’ with us, you’ll never have that.”

Of course, Apeer does not run Powerpoint, so presentations have to be contained in PDFs. It also takes place in a secure window, so other participants cannot see your desktop as can happen in WebEx.

Apeer lacks the live integrated voice-over-IP of WebEx and the webcam capabilities of instant-messaging clients. That could come in later versions, although Mr Goldstein says such features could slow performance and Apeer could run alongside instant-messaging web-conferencing anyway.

Apeer is aimed at businesses, with a monthly subscription model that can be adjusted on a per-seat basis. Mr Goldstein says it is being offered at a low price point that is “extremely disruptive” in terms of undercutting the competition. A consumer version could follow in the future.