Pageflakes, an Ajax home page service that originally launched in Germany in late 2005, has been acquired by Los Angeles based Live Universe, sources tell us. The deal has not yet been announced, and both Live Universe and Pageflakes refuse to comment.

Pageflakes raised a high profile round of funding in May 2006 from Benchmark Europe (renamed Balderton Capital). Balderton has continued to bridge the company with additional funds, and about $4 million has been invested to date.

Live Universe, which was founded by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, has made a number of acquisitions to spur growth. Most recently, they acquired video site Revver, in February 2008. The also run the video site LiveVideo.com.

The deal was competitive, according to one source, who says that Colorado-based NewsGator was also bidding. But it’s likely that the acquisition price was not huge - Pageflakes is in a highly competitive market dominated by Yahoo and Google. Even so, reports that the company may be going to the deadpool seem to be inaccurate.

Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen, who ran the My Yahoo product prior to joining Pageflakes, will report to Greenspan, and the company will remain at their current offices in Germany and San Francisco.

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The global hip-hop community: twenty four million people between the ages of 19-34, from a range of nationalities, ethnic groups and religions. Their collective spending power is $500 billion annually in the U.S. alone. Naturally, there are lots of online properties dedicated to Hip Hop culture. And now they have a customizable Ajax home page, too.

New York based global Grind launches this morning with some serious backing, a venture round (size undisclosed) from Accel Partners and Russell Simmons.

The service is essentially the same as Pageflakes, Netvibes and other customizable Ajax home pages.

Users set initial interests (video, comedy, news, etc.) and get a set of pre-made modules. You can also add feed URLs directly, create multiple tabs, etc. All standard stuff, even if Global Grind has slightly edgier design than the others.

A lot of the pre-made content is directly related to Hip Hop, though, such as one that shows the most recent beefs between rap artists (just like blogger wars apparently, plus money, sex and guns - see image to right). Users can also make tabs public and share content.

The company was founded by Navarrow Wright, formerly the CTO of Black Entertainment Television. The company has twelve employees.

So…will it work or will it drown in the competition? Frankly, I’m in favor of any experiments which bring technology to people beyond the early adopter tech geek crowd. The Global Grind user base is already tech savvy, though, and aware of a lot of the new web products out there. That means they have to be cool and edgy enough to attract and keep users who wouldn’t think of using, say, Netvibes. Having Russel Simmons involved will certainly help in that area. We’ll check back in on them in six months or so and see how things are going.

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Customized home page startup Pageflakes launched a slew of new features this morning under what it is calling its “Blizzard” release.

Among all of the new features, the two that are important to highlight are social networking and customizable themes on pages.

Until today Pageflakes users could create pages for their own use, and/or make public pages called Pagecasts. The content was and continues to be completely up to the user. Now, however, each user also gets a profile page and can add other Pageflakes users as friends. Effectively, Pageflakes is now a social network, and users can connect based on common interests. See a screen shot of my profile page above (click for larger view). Users with common interests are shown on the bottom right.

Pageflakes is also releasing “themeable” public pages and has partnered with a number of high profile media companies to create their own Pagecasts - USA Today, Rolling Stone, CNN, WashingtonPost, Newsweek Interactive, Entertainment Tonight, The Insider, Slate, AOL, Die Welt, Bild and others. This is comparable to Netvibes’ Universe product, although Pageflakes is live and anyone can create a themed public page (Netvibes still requires a partnership, you can’t just create one yet). Over 120,000 public pages have been created by users to date - now those pages can have custom themes. The TechCrunch public Pageflakes page is here.

Pageflakes also continues to roll out more widgets - they have 240,000 so far. And new users will like the auto-customization that lets them create a customized page quickly based on a few questions.

See a full profile of the company here, and note previous product releases as well. This continue to be a heavily competitive space, but that competition is driving innovation - from Pageflakes as well as the others. Consumers win.

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Personalized home page startup Pageflakes is under new management. The Benchmark-funded startup opened an office in Silicon Valley and brought on Dan Cohen, who previously led the teams working on Google IG and then My Yahoo, as CEO.

He’s made some noticeable changes already. Last month they quietly launched a video widget that pulls videos from major video sharing sites based on a keyword. I actually passed on covering it, but have since become hooked on the module and it’s become a sort of personal tv channel on my start page. This morning they will launch a new set of features designed to make creating a new home page as easy as possible.

There are two features think are worth noting in the release - personalization and a number of very cool RSS/widget features.

Personalization

Like the recent My Yahoo release, Pageflakes will focus on customization as soon as you come to the site. Unlike Yahoo, they don’t have a lot of data on your prior web usage, so they will ask you a few questions to start. You pick the things you are interested in - news, sports, tech, gossip, food, games, etc. and tell it your city or zip/postal code. Pageflakes will then build you a personalized start page with pre-populated modules (they call them “flakes”). Weather, local news and local events are set to the user’s location, and can be edited or removed for different content via an Ajax interface.

RSS And Widget Features

Any module on a pageflakes page can be turned into a widget and placed on another site. Above I’ve embedded a widget for the TechCrunch RSS module, but this works for any widget.

By far the most interesting new feature, however, is the “power user” RSS reader. Pageflakes and other Ajax home page sites provide a very good view of RSS information, but only for a few sites. Too many feeds on a page and it gets too cluttered. I use Pageflakes to read a few key feeds multiple times per day, and Google Reader for reading a much longer list of feeds less frequently. With Pageflakes, you now have the best of both. Click “Reader” in the top right corner of any of your pages and you’ll be taken to a RSS reader that looks very much like Bloglines or Google Reader (sometimes called an “Outlook” view because it has two or three panes like Outlook). All feeds from all of your Pageflakes pages are included. It isn’t as feature rich as Google Reader, but it’s close. And it’s fast. Posts can be viewed with or without the original site’s CSS included.

This means Pageflakes is making a play to become THE place users keep all of their RSS feeds, not just the few that are checked constantly.

Other New Features

There are additional features as well, although they will be overshadowed by the RSS reader. Most of these are new modules that can be added to the site, including a nice mashup module of Google Maps and local event data that shows you what’s going on in your location. There are also new modules for stock prices, MySpace profiles, a Hot Or Not viewer, and horoscopes.

Pageflakes is in a very crowded space dominated by Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. They have a larger startup competitor in Netvibes as well. But statistics show that once someone starts using a personalized home page they tend to stay there. Since the vast majority of Internet users don’t use any of these products yet, there is still a race to grab users. Whatever happens, it’s good for us consumers - competition is driving innovation. I’d like to see Google combine their IG and Reader products in a similar way, for example. Perhaps we’ll see that soon.

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