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Mippin (formerly Refresh Mobile), whose browser-based site presents content specially designed for mobile consumption, says it has named a new CEO and reached a milestone of 500,000 users. But I question its ability to survive.

The London-based startup’s service also learns what users like and recommends stories based on their previous interests. I call it a mobile portal analogous to Yahoo, MSN, Netvibes or PageFlakes, but Judy Gibbons, the new CEO, has a different definition. She says it’s a mobile media services company, in that it optimizes PC content for consumption on a mobile device. “We believe there is only one Internet - there is not a separate mobile one,” Gibbons told me via email. “But mobile presents different challenges and opportunities and there is real user value to having all this content in one place in the same consistent format with a great fast user experience.”

Whatever you call it, Mippin needs to gain wide adoption in a crowded area to support its advertising-based revenue model. The market includes efforts by Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, and according to ad network AdMob — which does business with Mippin — the number of mobile portals is steadily rising (see graph). Obviously the mobile world cannot support 500 varying portals. Even in the PC web world, portals have problems.

Despite impressive growth from its October 2007 launch, averaging 110 page views per user and advertising click-through rates of 3 percent and 15 percent for contextual ads, (way better than the .5 percent rates on other mobile sites), I’m not sure Mippin will deliver the audience advertisers need given the amount of competition fighting for consumers’ eyes. It’s a nice service, but unfortunately that doesn’t always win out.

Vlingo’s new software for BlackBerrys (the link goes live at 5 a.m. PT), which gives me the ability to navigate my phone entirely by voice, has me feeling like a kid on Christmas morning. I press a button on my Pearl, wait for a chime, simply say, “Web search, weather San Francisco,” and the browser opens and delivers me the weather in San Francisco. I can also use it to text and send emails to my contacts, though admittedly without the benefit of typing, punctuation is a problem.

As Om has pointed out, voice makes navigating phones easier, but the Vlingo application does eat up bandwidth. Regardless, the Vlingo software for BlackBerry devices is powered by the same speech recognition engine behind Yahoo’s oneSearch, the voice-enabled web search software that had me so excited I downloaded it in the middle of the keynote speech introducing it.

With the ability to text and email by voice, the Vlingo software has more features than oneSearch, but in return I’ve given Vlingo voice control of my entire phone. And that poses a problem for Nuance Communication, the leader of speech recognition software for dictation and for mobile phones. Nuance powers my BlackBerry’s voice dial feature — or at least it did until I downloaded the Vlingo client. (Device-wise, for now the software is only available for BlackBerrys.)

Both Nuance and Vlingo are going after deals with carriers because that’s where the money and reach are. Vlingo hopes to sign deals with partners to make them the default option for voice-powered commands such as web search or directory services. It’s popularity so far may be one of the reasons Nuance earlier this month filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Vlingo.

Vlngo’s CEO Dave Grannan says the suit is without merit; he also recently raised a $20 million round of funding, which he says he’s willing to use to fight the infringement case. However, infringement suits are a messy business and have long been used as a blunt instrument to fend off competition. Vlingo’s technology is good, but as a startup going up against Nuance, which has sued everyone from Yahoo to TellMe, it’s going up against a practiced plaintiff.

Last October, Found|READ lunched with serial entrepreneur and Lookery cofounder Scott Rafer, who gloomily predicted the technology industry was “no more than five months away from the next bust.”

Pessimistic, even for the opinionated Rafer, but then he knows a thing or two about successes (MyBlogLog), struggles (Feedster), and recessions. Rafer then generously loaded our plate with great tips for less experienced founders who might need help preparing for the market’s “hard knocks.”

Seven months on, times are tougher, but plenty of companies are still getting funded. So this week we checked in with Rafer again. First words out of his mouth: “There has only been a flight to quality. Frankly I’m struggling to understand it.”

While still expecting “the collapse,” Rafer does admit more optimism for founders’ prospects in the near term. Why? “Investors are spending into this recession,” he says. “People are neither writing stupid checks, nor are they running for the hills. Crude oil at $200 a barrel would change that. But if crude drops to $80, this will last forever.”

The $64,000 question, then, is when will the day of reckoning come? The summer of 2000, Rafer recalls, was similarly angst-filled for Valley types – the Nasdaq had cratered in April, and everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Only it didn’t, until more than a year later, on that fateful day in September 2001.

“People — including me, apparently — forget that things weren’t that bad, or not as bad as we remember them now, before the attack. I closed a $23 million round for Fresher in May 2000, and then launched WiFinder on Sept. 5, 2001.” Then everything changed. “Most tech downturns are a lot shorter than that last one, which at 36 months was very unusual; 9/11 stretched it out.” By Rafer’s timeline, we’re a good two months past the top of the tech cycle on the downward slope – and it still isn’t that bad.

Rafer’s lesson: Make hay while even a little bit of sun shines. Then hunker down, and you stand a good chance of surviving the “bottoming out” ahead. Here is Scott Rafer’s Recession Prep:

Rule #1: Raise a reasonable amount of money now, and use talent to do it.
“If you have a good team, it barely even matters right now what you do.” Rafer says he knows of several startups that have recently closed angel rounds, some without a single customer reference. VCs have committed capital that they need to spend, and in recessions it’s easier to rationalize investing it in good people than it is in ideas. But whatever you do, he warns, don’t raise as much as you can. Taking on more money than you need will come back to haunt you. (See Rule #5.)

Rule #2: Just get through another “Summer of Angst.”
“If you can last through Labor Day, you ought to be able to come charging out of the summer with at least another few months of runway.” August is a notoriously low-ebbing month in the financial markets, and VCs coming off vacation are often slow to make tough calls. They’re more likely to give it another quarter.

Rule #3: Do one thing only. Think “un-sexy.”
“Be smaller. Be focused. It’s time to do what you do really well, and hire eight people to do just that one thing.” After a year in business at Lookery (which has eight employees), Rafer says the company is on its way to doing “one-and-a-quarter things. It’s enough.” Also, “un-sexy” is still good business, so make your “one thing” a service that plenty of people need, but few entrepreneurs want to do. You’ll have a reliable customer base, and less competition. Consider Lookery, the Internet ad network Rafer launched last July, which he says now serves over 3 billion ads a month into Facebook applications.

Rule #4: Don’t spend to gain 5 percent of your market.
In fact, don’t spend, period. “The days of writing a business plan where you’ll fund your way to being the biggest, baddest thing in an entirely new market segment –- this is no longer the time for that.”

Rule #5: Set business goals you know you can achieve.
If you’re meeting your goals, however small, then when the VCs’ “flight to quality” becomes tangible, as Rafer warns it will, your metrics will be in the right column. One more reason why Rafer urges you to raise money now, just not too much. Every extra digit equals higher expectations. Your job is to keep expectations manageable.

Rule #6 Resemble your customer.
Pare down your own operations. Be ready to run lean and long, because this is what your customers are doing. “If they aren’t, question whether you are selling to the right people.“

Photo credit: Arjen Schat.

Cox Enterprises is spending $300 million to buy online ad network Adify, as both a hedge against the death of classified ads and a way to delve deeper into Internet advertising. As far as bargains go, this one could be a good one for Adify’s investors, who have plowed $27 million into the do-it-yourself ad network. It’s also an acquisition that gets Cox into targeted Internet advertising beyond its previous partnership with Yahoo, which is limited to offering local news to Yahoo in exchange for placing newspaper help wanted ads on Yahoo’s HotJobs property.

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t focused on the company’s $15 billion valuation. He just “doesn’t think about it,” the Facebook CEO said in an interview with Sarah Lacy today at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Instead, he’s focused on building a platform on which people can communicate efficiently and maintain and develop connections. (Watch video)

Efficiency and connectedness were certainly the words of the hour from Zuckerberg. Maybe it was his audience of users and Facebook developers in the packed ballroom of the Austin Convention Center, but his message was tailored more to the Facebook vision rather than any substantive talk about where the platform may go next in terms of features and monetization.

It’s the kind of starry-eyed idealism that is either patently untrue or shows how much Zuckerberg still needs to learn about running a company. I’m all for staying focused on your business rather than chasing every dollar, but at the end of the day a company whose CEO is focused on communicating a message rather than figuring out how to turn a profit is delusional. Sure, sometimes the Field-of-Dreams approach works, but sometimes it just ends up like Kozmo or Webvan.

When it comes to monetization, some type of endorsement-style advertising is in the works, but Zuckerberg didn’t get into details about what it would look like. However, given the more granular privacy controls he’s promising, it’s hard to see how people won’t be able to opt out of obvious advertising. And while marketers might relish positive word-of-mouth advertising; if they’re paying for it they’re going to want to control it, making endorsements a hard sell.

On the financial side, Zuckerberg said, “We’re running the business around breakeven; we’re not throwing off a ton of money.” He also dodged questions about Microsoft being unhappy with the state of banner advertising on Facebook.

As for features, the crowd asked for a better messaging system that if implemented, will look a lot like e-mail. Zuckerberg agreed that a feature like that would be on the way. But when asked about plans for a Facebook music service, his answer was simply, “We have nothing to talk about right now.”

The interview changed none of my thoughts on Facebook or Zuckerberg, but I’m still willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt. As Zuckerberg points out, “Revenue and valuation of a company are a trailing indicators of the value you are building.”

But if no one will pay for it, then how valuable can the Facebook platform be? I think we’ve heard this tune before.

In the game of Internet Q&A, only Yahoo (and not Google) seems to have all the answers. But that doesn’t stop others from trying. AOL, a division of Time Warner is buying Israeli-start-up Yedda, betting that it can get traction in the “answers” game. Q&A is about asking internet for help and getting it and given AOL’s mostly mainstream user base, this seems like a calculated bet by AOL. More on Yedda here.

Small- and medium-sized businesses are the hot target markets right now, whether it’s voice and broadband or web services. The biggest opportunity, however, seems to be in hosted email, as Yahoo’s (YHOO) $350 million bet on Zimbra and Google’s (GOOG) Apps initiative demonstrate.

Rackspace, a San Antonio, Tex.-based managed hosting company, today made its own move to tap the opportunity by acquiring eight-year-old Webmail.us of Blacksberg, Va. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed, but I suspect it was a substantial amount of money.

With some 70,000 companies as clients and 600,000 paying business email accounts, Webmail.us expects to have revenues of around $6 million in 2007. It is popular because of its spam protection features, quality service, and a web interface that is both rich and just generally impressive.

Rackspace, meanwhile, is rumored to be in the running for an IPO. Its acquisition of Webmail.us is another way to distinguish itself from being just a hosting company. Lew Moorman, senior vice president of corporate strategy and product development at Rackspace, believes the opportunity for offering email services to small- and medium-sized businesses is wide open, even with competition from Yahoo and Google.