re, available on Google Maps, has become popular as it allows users to virtually explore and navigate a neighborhood through panoramic street-level images. In a bid to protect privacy, the vehicles will capture images of public places alone and blur out faces of people as well as vehicle licence plates to make them unidentifiable, said Vinay Goel, Google India product head. The company will accommodate requests from users to additionally blur any images that feature them and it will take several months before images go live on the search engine, he added. Google came under intense scrutiny from several western governments last year after its StreetView vehicles inadvertently collected email addresses, passwords and other personal information from Wi-Fi networks. The search giant, which launched the StreetView services in 2007, had been collecting and keeping such data since then. Google had apologised for what it said was a mistake and shut down its StreetView Wi-Fi collection soon after an internal investigation discovered it in mid-2010. The company was investigated by authorities in Australia, Germany, Spain, Italy and New Zealand on this issue. Goel said thand efficient tools are urgently needed to treat patients in endemic countries. MAIN FACTS: - The partners will facilitate publication of the results to ensure access to the wider community of researchers focusing on neglected tropical diseases. - The public sector will benefit from the drugs developed through this agreement under the best possible conditions to ease access for patients in all endemic countries, irrespective of their level of economic development. - DNDi is a not-for-profit product development partnership working to research and develop new treatments for negle in the second half of 2012. The Internet-based social shopping and deal site recently raised $138 million from investors to fuel expansion into new markets and businesses. Valuation Linked to Reality? Skeptics point to the lofty valuation for LinkedIn’s stock, which remains well above its $45 a share offering price. It trades at about 20 times revenue for a company that will lose money this year, and boasts a market value of nearly $9 billion. That valuation has raised more than a few eyebrows on Wall Street and beyond. “There’s no convincing argument as to why things are different (than in the dot-com bubble),” says David Menlow of IPO Financial. “There’s nothing out there in terms of growth expectations or financial modeling. It’s like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.” Serial entrepreneur Dennis Fong disagrees. The 34-year old, who’s behind the nascent Raptr social video game platform as well as the Lithium social business customer service, has built and sold online businesses before, during and after the dot-com bust. He notes the differences between Web 2.0 and the Internet Bubble: “There’s real revenue and profits suggesting these companies -- Facebook, Groupon, Zynga -- are the fastest-growing companies we’ve ever seen. Zynga didn’t exist a couple of years ago, now it’s an $8 billion company.” Fong also says the margins are much better on these platforms than for dot-com models. He notes it only takes a short time for an artist to draw additional sheep for Zynga’s social networking game “Farmville”, and the virtual animals can be shipped to users around the globe over and over without paying postage and clearing customs. The Trouble with Bubbles Zach Clayton, founder and CEO of digital marketing agency Three Ships Media, also says bubble talk is premature. “Pattern recognition of bubbles is very, very poor. The nature of a bubble is that things are indiscriminately overvalued and beyond reason. As long as the conversation is focused exclusively around the few industry leaders then there is, almost definitionally, no bubble. "They may be overpriced, but there's no bubble yet - at least at the public company level. The VC level may be a different story.” A wave of cash has indeed washed over start-ups in the past few years as investors sought alternative investments during the market turmoil of the 2008 crash. Grotech’s Rainey says, “We are now seeing private market transactions that rival public market transactions, think $1 billion invested in Groupon or $400 million in LivingSocial.” Grotech itself is an original investor in the social deal site LivingSocial. Daniel Terry is one of the beneficiaries of this VC resurgence. Shortly after graduating from Stanford with his MBA last year, Terry secured $5 million in funding from Sequoia Capital (which backed LinkedIn and was an early investor in video game giant Electronic Arts.). Terry, the 29 year-old founder and CEO of mobile gaming company Pocket Gems, says his company was profitable in seven days. Pocket Gems publishes Tap Pet Hotel and Tap Zoo -- two of the top five grossing games in the Apple iPhone App Store. Not surprisingly, Terry says the LinkedIn IPO is "a sign of good things to come in the market for start-ups." But at the same time, he says Pocket Gems is not close to filing for an IPO or seeking additional start-up cash anytime soon. "We don't need the capital right now," Terry said. “An IPO is one interesting option for shareholders. And stock would be useful as a currency (for takeovers).” Keeping Score: A Red Fer