Adding to its investments in India, Intel Capital (the VC arm of the chip giant) is putting $23 million in three startups in the country.

The startups are One97 Communications, a provider of value-added services like ring tones and games for mobile phones, online B2B marketplace IndiaMart and vocational educational institute Global Talent Track, according to the Associated Press.

The AP said funds for the investment would come out of the $250 million Intel Capital India Technology Fund, set up in December 2005. The fund is said to have already invested about $100 million.

In 2008, Intel Capital invested about $50 million in nine companies in India.

Silicon Valley startup ViVu Inc. (with a development center in Bangalore) has raised around $1 million in its first round of funding.

The round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Amidzad Partners, with participation from Quest Ventures and other angel investors, including serial entrepreneurs Bill Carrico and Amarjit Gil.

Founded by startup veterans from Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and IIT graduates, ViVu is developing a Participative Event Platform that is designed to enable live video participation from a PC, Macintosh or smart phone without any proprietary downloads and integrate with the popular streaming video and conference solutions.

ViVu’s Participative Event Platform is actually a software service that can be accessed over the web. It’s supposed to scale from corporate training sessions to large video events with thousands of participants.

The product is currently said to be in alpha.

VivU claims its alpha widgetry is already with three customers (we don’t believe such tall claims since the company would not provide us the names of the customers).

The funding will help the company to accelerate product development,

Indian movie rental service Seventymm has raised Rs 50 crore in a new round of funding from NEA-Indo US Ventures, according to the Hindu BusinessLine.

A Netflix copycat, Seventymm offers DVD rentals in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi and Chandigarh.

The latest round of funding will go toward expanding the service to more

Venture capitalist and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla has backed a New York City-based healthcare startup ZocDoc.

Vinod’s VC outfit Khosla Ventures led ZocDoc’s Series A round, which raised $3 million.

ZocDoc, which went live in September 2007, lets users make online appointments for primary care, dermatology, ophthalmological and dental care in New York City.

The fledgling hopes to add more specialties and locations soon.

ZocDoc plans to use the funding to expand its network of practitioners and lay the foundation for a nationwide rollout.

Gameplan
ZocDoc’s gameplan is to use the Internet to improve patient access to healthcare. Patients are supposed to be able to see real-time availability of doctors in their area, find those that accept their insurance plan and read feedback from real patients.

Haven’t we heard this nonsense before. Hello, anyone remember the

Meraki, a Silicon Valley wireless Internet startup co-founded by a desi entrepreneur Sanjit Biswas, seems to be on a tear these days but we are skeptical that this Formula car will ever reach its destination.

The two-year-old Mountain View, California start-up offers networking widgetry that promises to make setting up wireless Internet access a snap.

Meraki’s Mini routers and an online dashboard tool to monitor and manage networks are supposed to let even non-technical folks set up a wireless network.

In a company backgrounder, the Meraki folks write:

Plugging a Meraki Mini router into a DSL line instantly creates a gateway. As more Minis are added nearby, the signals stream back and forth to build a web of wireless connections. Known as a mesh, this fabric of signals makes it possible to use just one DSL line to create a cooperative wireless Internet network, bringing access to more people than ever before. 

The fledgling claims it’s taking a bottoms-up approach that lets people affordably and cooperatively build a wireless network in contrast to the top-down approach that has mostly failed so far in the U.S. at least.

It’s true that municipal WiFi experiments – free or otherwise – in the U.S. have mostly turned out to be still-born. Come on, no one with sense would have picked Philadelphia, the headquarter of Comcast, the largest U.S. broadband Internet access provider, for a municipal WiFi project. It’s like trying to peddle oil-alternatives in Saudi Arabia.

In any case, we remain skeptical about Meraki’s prospects for multiple reasons.

The company may have tasted some success with

Struggling with its Internet misadventures in the face of the relentless Google onslaught, a desperate Microsoft is investing $240 million in social networking web site Facebook Inc.

Google, which was also keen on a deal with Facebook, has a social networking web site Orkut that’s popular in India and Brazil but has yet to catch on in the U.S..

Microsoft’s investment – which gives it a tiny 1.6% stake in the social networking web site - is set to happen in Facebook ’s next round of funding and values the profitless start-up at an astronomical $15 billion.

The two companies have an existing relationship under which Microsoft is the exclusive provider of banner ads on Facebook in the U.S. 

Under the expanded alliance, Microsoft will be the exclusive third-party advertising platform partner for Facebook, and sell advertising for Facebook internationally in addition to the U.S.

Facebook will also sell ads on its own through a new ad network that it expects to debut shortly.

Writing on the Microsoft-Facebook deal, the Wall Street Journal said (subscription required):

The deal is rooted in an online-advertising boom that has turned Facebook into the newest Internet darling. In recent years, advertisers large and small that once focused their spending on television, newspapers and other traditional media have started shifting their spending to a host of Web sites. Google has built its fortunes on that shift and others including Microsoft are rushing in.

Founded in February 2004 by Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has received funding of $40.7 million from a bunch of marquee investors including Founders Fund, Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.

Facebook claims it’s got 50 million active users and that 200,000 new users are registering every day.

Microsoft has been one of the biggest failures and laggards on the Internet side of the computer industry.

The software giant’s biggest failure is on the search front where Google has walked away with the glory and all the money.

Despite pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars, Microsoft’s MSN search engine is on a downward death-spiral in the face of a far superior service from Google.

Microsoft head honcho Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer have failed to make headway with their online initiatives. As the WSJ story says:

Winning Facebook’s hand could help lift morale at Microsoft’s struggling online business. Over the past four years the software giant has invested heavily into building its own Internet search and online advertising services but has failed to keep pace with the growing online ad market and its leader Google.

The folks at WSJ report that Facebook will break even this year on a cash flow basis on revenues of $150 million.