Hidden behind some billion-dollar database-company acquisitions - on what must be a record-breaking day for number of deals in the sector - came a little funding news that could eventually have equal significance for the way we organise our information online.

While Sun was paying $1bn for MySQL, Oracle was buying BEA Systems for $8.5bn and SAP was wrapping up its $7.15bn Business Objects acquisition, San Francisco-based Metaweb received $42.5m in second-round funding led by Goldman Sachs.

Metaweb says its aim is to build a better infrastructure for the web. Its first product is Freebase – “an open, shared database of the world’s information.”

Web sites have been able to provide more relevant and meaningful results for users’ searches in recent years, thanks to XML, which allows more detailed tagging and categorising of information.

Wikipedia is an example of information being organised by users themselves in an even more structured way and Freebase is extending this by drawing on Wikipedia and many other sources for its open database.

It differs from Wikipedia in listing facts and statistics rather than articles on subjects. This rawer format allows others to sort and repurpose the information into new forms on their own web sites. Freebase is also different from Google Base in eliminating any duplication of data and providing a community editing tool.

It is still early days, but Metaweb hopes to make money by serving ads next to the information that Freebase throws up - a model where Google has been rather successful and where Metaweb could become a threat – as well as by charging for some commercial uses of its APIs.

Apple’s video rentals and the ultra-thin MacBook Air are likely to dominate the headlines out of this year’s MacWorld conference and expo. But new products were not the only juicy tidbits to come out of Steve Jobs’s keynote address. Before he launched into his product marketing pitch, the Apple boss rattled off some interesting new statistics about the iPhone that are worth a second look.

• According to Jobs, Apple has sold 4m iPhones in the 200 days since the handset launched in June - an average of 20,000 iPhones a day. Not bad.
• Jobs said that the 4m figure meant that Apple accounted for about 19 per cent of the smartphone market in the 3rd quarter - the most recent quarter for which there are statistics available. That’s about half the market share of RIM, the Blackberry maker, but nearly as big as the next three competitors combined (Palm, Motorola and Nokia).

With its consumer appeal and lack of support from business ‘push’ email systems like Outlook and Lotus Notes, it is not qute fair to compare the iPhone to business devices like the Blackberry. But it is an impressive performance nonetheless.

Given these statistics, Apple seems better positioned than ever - barring any strong economic headwinds - to meet its goal of selling 10m iPhones by the end of the year.

The second part of Google’s Android plan is about to unfold (OK, the Google version doesn’t look exactly like the character on the left, but you get the point.)

The FCC has confirmed that the boys from Mountain View are on the list of eligible bidders for its much-anticipated wireless auction, which starts next week. If Android (Google’s mobile phone software) is to have life he will need airwaves to ride on, and Verizon’s grand promise last year to open its network to all-comers still feels far too vague. Google must now show whether it is ready to put its money where its mouth is.

Not many surprises jump out of the FCC’s list of 214 qualified bidders, not least because many are shell companies whose real backers are not immediately obvious. Qualcomm is there, as is Chevron (perhaps looking to create a network for remote oilfield monitoring.) Otherwise AT&T and Verizon lead the cast of wireless and cable companies that have jumped the FCC’s pre-auction hurdles.

One name that failed to make the list: Frontline Wireless, a company backed by former FCC chairman Reed Hundt and venture capitalist John Doerr. This is a big loss of face for both men. Frontline used its considerable lobbying power to persuade the FCC to set aside part of the spectrum aside for a joint commercial/ emergency service network. Frontier itself planned to bid for this, but last week conceded that it had failed to raise the money to bid and was shutting up shop. Let’s hope the rest of this widely-anticipated auction fares better.

Classrooms were never going to be the first place you’d expect to find the latest versions of Windows and Office. Nevertheless, the short shrift given to Vista and Office 2007 by the British Educational Communications and Technology Association this week sounds particularly harsh:

From the agency’s summary of its 1-year study:

The new features of Microsoft’s Vista product added value but did not justify early deployment in the education sector. The deployment costs were seen as high and the benefits were far from clear.

Office 2007 contained no "must-have" features and Microsoft should develop an underpinning business case to justify deployment in the education sector.

There were interoperability concerns regarding Office 2007; and Microsoft should urgently provide "native" support for the Open Document Format (ODF.)

After its rejection last September, Microsoft will make another bid next month for international backing for its own new "open" document standard. This is a reminder of how much is at stake.

The $100 laptop may still not be a reality, but a One Laptop Per Child spin-off is already talking about a $50 version appearing in the next three years.

Mary Lou Jepsen, chief technology officer for OLPC, left the not-for-profit project that has been putting cheap laptops into the hands of schoolchildren in developing countries on December 31.

She has now founded her own company, Pixel Qi, which aims to produce a lower-cost laptop and develop for other devices her innovation of a sunlight-readable low-power screen.

In an interview with Groklaw, she says:

“The big laptop makers have woken up, and there will be a dozen $200-$300 laptops in the market in late 2008. I think that price is way too much…I’m starting a company to go lower – I think we need a $50-$75 laptop in the next 2-3 years.”

While Pixel Qi aims to commercialise the advances achieved in OLPC’s XO laptop, it also says it will help the project by providing products at cost.

However, it could also find itself in direct competition with OLPC.

When we spoke to Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC’s founder, last week he told us he had just attended a meeting to kick off OLPC America, based out of New York and Washington.

“It’s to look at America on a statewide basis, maybe not through schools, but [by selling] directly to kids,” he said.

OLPC has had significant success selling its XO laptop - current cost around $185 – in the US in a “Give One Get One” campaign, which for $400 also donates one free to a developing-world child.

More general availability in the US could put it up against the cheaper laptop that Pixel Qi describes as “ a new machine, beyond the XO.”

Bill Gates’ Last Day At The Office video at the Consumer Electronics Show was quite a hit, but it appears to have been eclipsed among geek attendees by the media marketing power of a simple picture book - Mommy, why is there a server in the house?

This faux children’s book explains why home media servers are the coming thing.  Gizmodo has captured each lovingly illustrated page and lines like: "When a mommy and daddy love each other very much, the daddy wants to give the mommy a special gift."

Microsoft Watch points out this is part of the company’s Stay-At-Home Server marketing campaign. There are billboard ads at CES featuring a “mom” saying: “I admire a server secure enough to stay home with the kids.”

Whoever thought servers could be humanised? Hats off to Microsoft for this one, although these machines hardly need the publicity – HP says it sold three months of inventory in the new category in the first three weeks.

Barry Diller must be feeling pretty frustrated about the search business. When he bought the small but feisty Ask Jeeves three years ago he said his aim was to boost its traffic, partly by plugging it into all of IAC’s other websites. He even took a financial hit, slashing the number of sponsored listings carried on search results pages to make the service less off-putting.

The result? Ask.com (as it is now called) remains decidedly small and feisty. According to comScore, its share of the US search market was just over 5 per cent when IAC bought it: it’s now just below 5 per cent. That is despite a number of user interface innovations that have generally won it good reviews, including the latest "Ask3D" search results page.

Diller seems to have decided it’s high time for a different approach. Jim Lanzone is out as CEO (though his former boss is gracious enough to credit him with a turnaround at the search engine.) Ask.com will now be run by two executives from elsewhere in IAC - Jim Safka, a former CEO of Match.com, and Scott Garell, who had been running IAC’s consumer applications and portals business.

Diller made his reputation by proving, despite widespread doubts, that Fox could become a real contender as the fourth TV network in the US. So far, he has failed to do the same for Ask.com in the search business.

Paul Otellini has been setting out his stall for yet another push by Intel into consumer electronics. His keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show this year made much of the "personal internet". In this vision, every CE device connects to the internet, and anything that connects to the internet should be powered by an Intel chip.

At times like this it’s worth remembering previous Intel false dawns from CES. There was the 2001 announcement of a line of Intel-branded CE devices, like the $300 Intel Pocket Concert Audio Player (by October, Intel had decided to scrap the whole idea, along with the Dot.Station internet appliance for the kitchen, pictured above.) Then there was the 2004 unveiling of the LCOS technology that was meant to revolutionise the large-screen TV business (it was dropped seven months later.) Two years ago came the official launch of the Viiv consumer brand, which is quietly being put out to pasture.

It’s too early to tell if Intel’s latest attempt to break into a new generation of small, portable internet-connected consumer devices will fare any better, but it certainly faces some headwinds.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of reminders in Las Vegas of what really matters to Intel for the foreseeable future: laptops, laptops and more laptops. According to executive vice president Sean Maloney, the $200, Wimax-connected laptop is in sight, with high speed networks due for launch this year in the US and Japan. At that price, he predicts, laptop sales will hit an inflection point and the machines will become as ubiquitous as mobile phones.

Wishful thinking? Perhaps - but at least this is one consumer market that is already clearly within Intel’s grasp.

Bloggers are buzzing about Facebook’s decision today to dispatch a representative to join the DataPortability Workgroup, a group of coders working to develop standards that would allow web users to transport their friend lists, photos and other media between social networking sites. Google, the search engine, and Plaxo, a web site that lets users share their personal contacts, also announced they would join the group.

But most of the attention has fallen on Facebook, which in the past had favoured a closed approach in which it would not allow its data to be easily ’scraped’ for transfer between sites. Just last week, it blocked the account of Robert Scoble, the popular tech-blogger, after he used a tool made by Plaxo, the web contacts company, to mine his Facebook profile for his user information.

Facebook has not yet said whether today’s move represents a wholesale embrace of data portability, or whether it represents something less than that. But if the response around the blogosphere is any guide, many industry-watchers are excited about the prospect of the fast-growing social network jumping on the portability bandwagon.

"Today changes everything you’ve ever thought about social-networking data and lock-in before," said TechCrunch, a popular Silicon Valley Blog, "by joining the DataPortability Working Group Facebook is embracing open standards and open access, and that is a huge fundamental change from its previous stance on being locked in to closed standards."

That seems a bit premature. Just because Facebook has agreed to join the working group does not mean it is prepared to accept or implement whatever standards emerge from its work. Nevertheless, Facebook’s move is, at the very least, a step forward.

Update: Facebook emails to say:

"We are committed to giving users control of their data on Facebook and, at the same timne, safeguarding the privacy of users. Facebook joined the DataPortability Workgroup in order to actively participate in industry dialogue and to represent feedback from the Facebook community."

That would indicate that Facebook wants to observe and participate, but not necessarily embrace, the group’s work.

If HD DVD is about to lose the next-generation DVD format war to Blu-ray, comparisons with the Betamax-VHS battle and even (for UK readers) the squarial versus Rupert Murdoch’s Sky television, seem particularly apt.

Both Betamax and British Satellite Broadcasting offered better technology than their victorious rivals and the same can be argued for HD DVD.

When Microsoft and Intel came out in support of HD DVD in September 2005, they listed its technological advantages.

These included “managed copy”, a feature that allows consumers to copy movies to their portable devices, “hybrid discs” – copies in both HD DVD and standard DVD formats on the same disc, as well as greater capacity, interactivity and picture-in-picture capabilities.

In contrast, many Blu-ray releases have been a disappointment with their conversions of standard definition films to the HD format, their lack of extra features and capacity constraints.

For an example showing the dramatic difference between what the two formats have been offering, look at the abundant extra features available on the HD DVD version of the movie 300 here (scroll down) compared to the lack of features and poor conversion to Blu-ray for the same movie here.

The one Blu-ray disk I have bought (rather than renting) is the BBC’s Planet Earth, which was actually filmed in high-definition, making the pictures look truly spectacular through a high-definition Blu-ray player and TV.

I still felt cheated though as I paid far more than for the standard DVD set, which included extra features such as mini-documentaries on how the series was made that were missing from the Blu-ray version.

However, times have changed, and while VHS was never going to beat Betamax for quality, Blu-ray can catch up with HD DVD.

Today’s consumer electronic devices are becoming memory-card upgradable and even internet-connected. The forthcoming specification for Blu-ray, Profile 2.0 or "BD Live", was demonstrated at CES this week and has many of the HD DVD features praised by Microsoft and Intel.

They can be added as simply as an operating system upgrade over the internet connection of a PlayStation 3.

The CES demo and Blu-ray booth showed ringtones from a movie soundtrack being transferred from a Blu-ray disc over the internet to a mobile phone and copies of movies being made to a PS3 and then transferred for watching on a PlayStation Portable. A role-playing game is included in the upcoming Alien vs Predator release and Mologs – interactive movie blogs with viewers sharing thoughts on films – will be introduced with SAW 4.

It looks like a brave new Blu-ray world that probably won’t have HD DVD in it.