GigaOM

With great joy, we report sightings of new funding in the otherwise barren optical landscape. French DWDM vendor Ekinops raised $20 million; Acton, Mass.-based 40 Gbps gear maker Mintera Networks raised $19 million (and snagged a partnership with JDSU) from the likes of Polaris Ventures; and lastly Bangalore-based Tejas Networks raised $24 million from Goldman Sachs.

Written by Alistair Croll, Coradiant co-founder and VP of product management who blogs about online user performance and networking.

Earlier this year, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg decided to let people build applications atop his social networking site. Many of the attendees at this week’s Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco agree that it was a great strategic move, putting Facebook far ahead of competitor MySpace.

But letting people build applications atop a large web site is also an indicator of something bigger. For many of the largest web sites – including Facebook, but also eBay (EBAY), Salesforce (CRM), Google (GOOG), and Amazon (AMZN) — turning into a platform makes them the web’s version of an operating system.

And when web sites become operating systems, interesting things happen.

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There’s big action in search engines these days: see Web Worker Daily’s list of 11 alternative search engines, Read/Write Web’s top 100, and the GigaOM show’s opening question to Google’s (GOOG) Marissa Mayer about the spate of search engine competitors.

But even as would-be Googles aim at the apparent heart of search — the keyword or natural language query itself — the place of greatest user need could lie a level above, at the iterative and exploratory pathways that users often follow in finding and refinding the information they need.

We know who owns the search engine. Who will own the entire search experience? Right now it’s up for grabs.

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This morning we picked up a useful Q&A with VC Josh Kopelman, at Businessweek.com. Kopelman founded Half.com, sold it to eBay and became a VC. More timely, he sits on the board of Facebook’s $10 million fund for Facebook applications developers. But in the talk with Business Week, Kopelman revealed three things “he’s sick of seeing from startups” in company pitches thesedays. (Hint: Facebook-play alone won’t cut it.) Here they are. Continue »

In the 2007 postseason, Alex Rodriguez batted .267, had an on-base percentage of .353 and hit a home run.

In the third quarter of 2007, Google’s revenue jumped 57 percent for its first $3 billion quarter, pushed profit 46 percent higher to $3.38 a share and beat the Street’s estimates by 16 cents a share.

See where I’m going with this? Both are playing at the top of their game, yet both have disappointed a bit with their recent performances. But that disappointment has come because they’ve been average, and not spectacular, the way they’ve been in the
past.

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One of the tricky things about following eBay (EBAY) is fitting all the complex data points into a coherent picture. The company has three distinct units that sort of overlap, and is better than many about offering consistent data about each one. So even analysts and investors who have a good grasp on all the numbers are left to decide which numbers matter more.

We’re seeing some of that confusion at play in eBay’s stock following the release of its third-quarter results late Wednesday. The company posted a massive loss, but the stock rallied as much as 6 percent in after-hours trading because the bulk of that loss — the Skype writedown — was expected, and factoring it out showed eBay with good profit growth, not to mention strong revenues.

Today, eBay’s stock not only gave up those aftermarket gains, it closed down more than 6 percent.

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It is only a matter of time before Facebook gets some insane amount of money from someone like Microsoft (MSFT), but one thing is clear: it isn’t going to sit in the bank for very long. The company is growing way too fast and it needs a lot of servers and data center space. (OK if they want to be like Google (GOOG), they need to spend like Google.)

Data Center Knowledge blog is reporting that the company just signed a lease for new data center space in Virginia, which is on its way to becoming what seems like the data center capital of the world.

The deal for the 10,000 square feet of space in a new facility built by DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT), known as ACC4, was signed on Monday. It’s not clear when Facebook will start moving gear into the new space. I am keeping close tabs on Facebook’s cap-ex spending and if you have any special insights (or tips), send them my way.

Earlier this month, MCV discovered that Google (GOOG) had filed for patents related to interactive entertainment. Today Tiga, the trade association for videogame creators in the UK and Europe, said that a product marketing manager from Google Adsense will speak at the group’s day-long “Working with Games” conference next week. There have been rumors that Google was casting a covetous eye on videogames at least since Google bought Adscape back in February. Now the picture is getting a little less murky, it seems, as Google heads out to make contact with videogame developers, publishers, and trade organizations. They’ve got some catching up to do but hey, they’re Google, and that means any competition they provide will need to be taken very seriously.