These days, €40m ($51m) is a big funding round for any company whose revenues are based entirely on advertising. Blyk provides free mobile calls to 200,000 British 16- to 24-year-olds in exchange for them receiving advertising messages, a membership it reached much faster than expected. Its response rates of 25 per cent have attracted 180 advertisers – but is even that enough to maintain revenues, with advertisers pulling budgets from even the most tried and tested of media?

Blyk’s fundraising – its third, coming from existing investors, who include Goldman Sachs and Sofinnova Partners – was accompanied by a “new media partnership strategy”. Blyk currently operates using a mobile virtual network, airtime bought wholesale from Orange in the UK and Vodafone in the Netherlands. But for further international expansion, Blyk’s co-founder and chief executive (and a former Nokia president), Pekka Ala-Pietila, says: “We don’t need to work purely on our own.”

A strategy of partnering more closely with operators or local media companies was prompted by interest in Europe and Asia “at such a level it has given us a lot of food for thought, to consider how we can be fast in expanding in new countries and also more flexible in pursuing different kinds of opportunities”, he says. “Where there is high demand then it makes sense to move and ride with the wave when the time is right.”

In constrained times, anything that cuts phone bills is likely to be popular, but Mr Ala-Pietila is thin on specifics of how such partnerships will work. Alexandra Rehak, mobile media analyst at Analysys Mason, a research group, expects Blyk to offer consulting services to operators impressed by those response rates and its mobile advertising technology.

Blyk also says it is pruning back from its estimated 60 people, among other undisclosed “streamlining” efforts. But in spite of the change in business model, cost cutting and a statement that Blyk is “feeling the impact of the world’s financial situation”, Mr Ala-Pietila insists that advertising on Blyk remains robust.

But Ms Rehak finds that hard to believe. “Obviously the advertising market in general is taking a huge hit and that is going to carry over into mobile even more than advertising at large, because it is new and untested,” she says. “Blyk’s whole business model is based only on advertising… they really have nothing to fall back on.”

Maybe, as Mr Ala-Pietila says, the advertising environment is not hurting Blyk in the UK yet. Mobile is an unproven medium, but demands only a small fraction of marketing budgets.

Reaching 100,000 subscribers – the point at which it says advertisers started to take it seriously as a “youth media” – by itself in a new country would be a much tougher proposition. In the meantime, the extra funds will help service the network costs of those 200,000 subscribers if advertisers do start to pull out.

Wi-fi can be a hard thing to figure out for a user on-the-go - all those networks, signal strengths, passwords and WEP encryption keys.

While popularising wi-fi with its Centrino chipsets for laptops, Intel did a pretty poor job with the software, in my opinion, making it impossible for me to log on to some networks from my corporate notebook.

So I’m glad they’ve now handed the job to someone else, in the shape of Devicescape, a Silicon Valley company backed by VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, among others.

Its software is now used in most Intel-based laptops, as well as a host of other devices.

For example, I downloaded its popular Easy Wi-Fi application for the iPod touch and entered my login details for AT&T Wi-fi. Now, when I go into a Starbucks coffee store, I just press a button on the app screen to instantly connect. Before, I had to fire up the Safari browser and re-enter all my details on the AT&T website to get online.

David Fraser, Devicescape’s chief executive, tells me it should be even easier than that. As more smartphones, such as the iPhone, incorporate wi-fi chips, manufacturers are embedding Devicescape’s software to switch seamlessly between 3G and wi-fi, without the user noticing.

“We’ve moved from text messaging to watching YouTube videos on the phone and this explosion of data traffic can cause problems for carriers,” he says.

By shifting users onto wi-fi, where available, operators can ease any congestion. Devicescape’s technology is used in Blackberry, Motorola, Nokia and Palm smartphones. As more categories of devices include wi-fi, the company sees its market expanding - it is in the new Nintendo DS handheld console and sees opportunities in personal navigation devices and digital cameras.

The company maintains a database of thousands of networks, enabling easy connections to hotspots, municipal wi-fi and services such as Meraki and Fon.

The San Bruno start-up, employing 30 people, was known as Instant 802, before Mr Fraser joined four years ago and rebranded the company. It is now at cash flow break-even and is hiring staff, at a time when everyone else in the Valley seems to be cutting back.

After all the personal criticism he has taken in his 17 months as CEO, it’s worth remembering the reception Jerry Yang got when he was picked by Yahoo’s board to replace Terry Semel.

The assumption on Wall Street was that he would be a stop-gap boss, there to keep the seat warm until Sue Decker had done enough to prove she was up to running the show. According to people who know him, he was always happiest in the Chief Yahoo! role, where he could exercise significant behind-the-scenes influence (the relationship with Jack Ma of Alibaba owes much to Yang) while still getting the time to hone his impressive golf game.

What came next would be enough to make the toughest CEO blanch: an unsolicited bid from Microsoft, a proxy fight with Carl Icahn, regulatory opposition to a major strategic move (the Google partnership) and a collapsing advertising market. For good measure, Yang also had to endure Congress’s version of a public flogging at a hearing over Yahoo’s role in the jailing of a Chinese dissident.

The question that remains is not so much why Yang failed, as why Yahoo’s board left the company so exposed. Semel, who served as chairman after first handing over the reins, must take much of the blame. Roy Bostock, who succeeded Semel, may have had little choice but to support Yang through much of this year’s turmoil, but he personally bears much of the blame for the debacle of the Microsoft talks.

Yang may be stepping out of the firing line, but Bostock - and the rest of Yang’s board - are still very much in it.

Spansion, the memory chip maker, embarked on a new litigious business model on Monday, but its moves against Samsung will not mean iPods being absent from retail shelves this Christmas.

The company said it was filing two separate patent infringement complaints in the US against the biggest memory chip maker, one in a Delaware court and the other with the International Trade Commission.

It wants the ITC to ban the import of more than 100m MP3 players, cell phones, digital cameras and other consumer electronics devices containing Samsung’s allegedly infringing flash-memory chips.

The ITC will commit itself to a schedule where it could impose a final injunction banning such imports in 12 to 16 months, Bertrand Cambou, Spansion chief executive (pictured), and Boaz Eitan, executive vice president, told me.

Mr Eitan is also chief executive of Saifun Semiconductors, the Israeli company acquired by Spansion in March. 

At the time, Mr Cambou intimated Spansion would be leveraging Saifun’s expertise in licensing and intellectual property rights in exploiting its own portfolio of more than 3,000 patents.

“Nobody believed us then, but we announced that Spansion was going to enter a large scale licensing business and we expected hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees,” the chief executive told me.

“This is a different company that you are going to see going forward and licensing is going to become big for us because of the strength of our IP,” he told me.

Spansion, a spin-off of a joint venture involving Fujitsu and AMD, is in dire need of new revenue streams. Flash memory prices for the industry have been collapsing, the company is servicing around $1.4bn in debt and analysts do not expect profitability before 2010.

Mr Cambou says Samsung firmly closed the door on licensing negotiations a year ago and Spansion has been building its case, with Saifun’s help, over the past nine months.

“This company is open for business negotiations at any time and we expect that Samsung is going to turn around and talk to us,” he said.

A Samsung spokeswoman issued a simple “No comment” later on Monday.

Livescribe’s digital pen, the Pulse, is just the sort of gadget that should appeal to a Mac user.

It is innovative, comes with cool software that can search your handwriting and is aimed at an audience - college students - which is buying Macbooks hand over fist.

So it is surprising that the Bay Area company has taken more than six months to come up with a Mac version, released today, of the software only available on Windows when the pen first launched.

At a preview event last week, Jim Marggraff, founder and chief executive, told me:”I think we would have had 60 to 100 per cent more sales if we had had the Mac software at launch. Roughly 50 per cent of college freshmen buy Macs and there are professional Mac users such as graphic designers interested as well.”

Nevertheless, he added: “We’re doing well, we’ll make our numbers this year, I can’t announce sales now but, in a dismal retail climate, we’re a bright spot.”

The Pulse features an infra-red camera that records handwriting as the user writes on special dot-printed notebooks, with microphones in the pen picking up associated audio. Tapping on the writing, replays the audio at that particular point in the note-taking.

The software allows images of handwritten pages with audio to be uploaded, stored and searched on a PC or Mac.

Livescribe appears to have suffered the usual start-up problems of delays and difficulties getting everything ready at once for a brand new product, but is catching up now. The Mac version of the software now allows pages to be saved as PDFs and audio exported to the AAC format.

I bought a pen at launch and use it daily as a journalist, finding it an indispensable tool for capturing audio with my hard-to-read shorthand. I would like to see a sleeker version 2 at some stage with a better backup system, but a software update due next week may help address the problem of slow transfer speeds from the pen to the desktop.

Also enabled will be the ability to print your own dot paper on certain laser printers and software that converts handwriting to text - as long as you don’t have my illegible scrawl.

It seems churlish to question the success using commercial criteria of One Laptop Per Child, when as a non-profit organisation it has done much to raise awareness of the possibilities and need for cheap computing power.

Getting the XO laptop into production and use around the world was an achievement in itself,  but government orders so far have been underwhelming. Only South America has responded in significant numbers, with 100,000+ orders coming from each of Colombia, Uruguay and Peru.

Ironically, it is sales to consumers in the developed world - never part of the original plan - that is pushing the use of the OLPC in Africa and troublespots such as Haiti and Afghanistan.

The Give One Get One campaign announced last year has led to around 100,000 laptops being sent to such countries by US consumers. They were able to pay $399 for an XO for themselves and the right to donate one to a deserving child.

Now the scheme is being extended to consumers worldwide , with the announcement today that orders will be taken by Amazon’s UK site for sales and delivery worldwide, although it does not expect to have inventory until January.

OLPC came out with plans for version two of the laptop in May, which will be more like a digital book, with two touch-sensitive screens.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of OLPC, tells me this should cost $75, while, at the same time, he admits that the original “$100″ XO laptop still costs $187. The key is integration, he says, reducing 900 parts to 50-60 components.

But in a tacit admission of the uphill battle OLPC is facing, he says the launch date of two years hence is intended to encourage others to beat the non-profit to market.

“As a non-profit we want people to copy this, the more the better, we would love to see the competition beat us,” he says.

He is looking at the success of the small, cheap netbook category of course, but he says such commercial efforts at supplying cheap computing versus OLPC are like comparing McDonalds to the World Food Programme.

In other words, there is no competition - different markets, different targets, which begs the question of how much any commercial solution can contribute to OLPC’s laudable aims.

The latest box to make internet content viewable on a TV is also the smallest.

 Verismo Networks’ VuNow fits in the palm of your hand and at 3.5″ x 4″ looks about half the size of Netflix’s Roku box, the SlingCatcher or Apple TV.

VuNow was unveiled at this week’s New TeeVee Live conference in San Francisco and, in the demonstration I was given, seemed to have a wide range of content available through an attractive on-screen interface.

The box itself has a remote control and just an ethernet connection,  a couple of audio/video connectors and two USB ports - to connect a wi-fi dongle or play back content from external storage -on the back.

It connects up to Verismo’s servers and allows users to choose from around 1400 “channels” , from YouTube to live TV streams such as BBC World. Video can also be found through intuitive on-screen searches.

Verismo says it is adding partners all the time and the service seemed able to play full episodes from ABC.com but not from NBC and Fox’s Hulu.com. There is also integration with CinemaNow, the premium movie service.

Ten different video formats are supported. Quality is dependent on the source’s encoding and the capacity of the broadband connection.

Verismo, based near Google in Mountain View,  is a five-year-old privately funded company employing around 70 people. VuNow is its second-generation version of a bigger set-top box.

It aims to sell the box to telecom operators and content providers who want to deliver their own programming and branded interface, but consumers will be able to buy it online from the end of December for $99 to $149, depending on whether HD connectivity and other features are required. Verismo also aims to make money through advertising and sharing revenues with content providers.

Verismo is focusing on offering hardware and managed services rather than trying to get into the content business itself - a wise move given the failure of other start-ups pursuing that strategy, such as MovieBeam and Akimbo.

It’s understandable that companies should want to sugar the pill when they have bad news, but some pills simply can’t be sweetened.

Take Sun’s sweeping job cuts today (nearly a fifth of the workforce.) Asked what these cuts will actually mean - surely there will have to be severe retrenchment, or even closure, of some parts of the business? - Sun had this to say: it is “amplifying focus in geographic markets where there are growth opportunities.”

Well, at least it can still see the positive side.

For anyone keeping score, this looks like the company’s ninth restructuring plan in recent years. As we pointed out recently, the total restructuring charges had already climbed over $2bn, with hits every year for seven years. That must be some sort of record.

Will this do the trick? The last quarterly numbers for the hardware side of the business were truly horrible: revenues down 11 per cent, with the gross profit margin falling by 13 percentage points as Sun cut prices and suffered from a weaker sales mix. In this sort of environment, with demand collapsing and customers able to drive a harder bargain, it isn’t clear that even cuts this deep will put Sun back into the black.