VentureBeat
Silicon Valley news about tech money and innovation
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Playhaven creates lots of fan communities for iPhone game developers
Playhaven is making it easy for gamers to create fan communities around iPhone games. It does so by creating online forums for fans on its web site, with a new fan section for every iPhone game. Developers can then claim those game communities as official fan sites. To date, 40 developers have launc …
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Google search marketing gets all touchy-feely
Google hasnt traditionally engaged in large-scale advertising campaigns. Instead, it has relied mainly on word of mouth to become the $180 billion company it is today. However in the last year, the company (as many mature brands start to do) has rolled out bigger and bigger paid advertising efforts. …
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Microsoft misses the boat on web applications
Editors note: Chuck Dietrich is the chief executive of online presentation company SlideRocket, and previously served as general manager and vice president of mobile at Salesforce.com. He contributed this column to VentureBeat. There is a lot of chatter over the impending arrival of Microsofts Offic …
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Twitter COO Dick Costolo: Revenue is on and advertising is coming soon
Twitter COO Dick Costolo is on-stage at the Real-Time CrunchUp in San Francisco. Im taking some notes as we go. The big takeaways are that Twitter is making more than $4 million a year, but wont specify how much and thats through the recent data-sharing deals with Microsoft and Google. Next, Twitter …
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Infoaxe — a real-time search engine that doesn’t rely on Twitter
Infoaxe, which records your web history and make it searchable, just launched a public facing real-time search engine tapping the behavior of its more than 2 million users. Infoaxe is a fairly unique entrant into the real-time search space. It doesnt rely on Twitters data stream the way that competi …
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Cloud Engines launches next generation Pogoplug
San Francisco startup Cloud Engines, maker of a box-like device called Pogoplug that makes external hard drives accessible from any computer or iPhone, today launched the next generation of the device, supporting more hardware and software capabilities. Listening to customer feedback, the new Pogopl …
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FunMail livens up your iPhone messages
FunMobility, the developer of a bunch of social mobile applications, is releasing a new iPhone app that chief executive Adam Lavine says will finally convince people to use their phones multimedia messaging (MMS) capabilities. It is called FunMail, and it automatically offers up suggestions of image …
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Tech mishaps and the human problem
Behind every tech problem is a human problem – and if you don’t dig into it and figure out how solve it, your company will never progress. Serial entrepreneur Eric Ries, in this entrepreneurial though leader lecture given at Stanford University, notes that a layered analysis of decisions and procedu …
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Adobe’s Acrobat.com comes to smartphones
Adobe just announced a bunch of upgrades to Acrobat.com, its suite of web collaboration applications. The most important: Its releasing an application for the iPhone and BlackBerry. Mobile support has been a big missing piece for Acrobat.com, since a big selling point of applications like Adobes (as …
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Facebook bans offer providers Gambit and Tatto Media due to questionable ads
Facebook has banned offer providers Gambit and Tatto Media from providing offers in games and apps on the social network. The development is one of the results of the recent scandal around the quality of offers in social games and apps. Some of the offers have been tainted as scams because they dont …
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Battery company R2EV and Fuel 2.0: Changing the electric vehicle paradigm?
If youve followed coverage on R2EV, you already know that some are skeptical about the companys battery, designed to be swapped out in a network of Greenbox facilities nation wide. Perceived problems with interoperability, improper installation or short circuiting and decreasing life cycle of a flee …
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GreenBeat: Live-blogging Nobel Prize winner Al Gore
Straight from GreenBeat 2009, we bring you former vice president and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore. Ill be live-blogging this session so it wont be perfect or word-for-word, but it will be fast! Well pull out the gems as soon as we can. Laura Ipsen, Cisco Systems smart grid guru is introducing Al Gore …
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eBay completes sale of Skype at $2.75 billion valuation
eBay said it has completed the sale of a 70-percent stake in Skype communications service for an amount that values the company at $2.75 billion. The buyer is an investor consortium led by Silver Lake Partners, the private equity buyout firm. It includes participation from Joltid, the company founde …
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Seesmic jumps on Twitter’s new location feature with map previews
Seesmic, the Twitter client that was the first to incorporate lists, has now jumped on the social networks new location-tagged tweets. You can roll over tweets that have a special marker to show a map of where they are, without ever leaving the client. Twitter finally rolled out its location applica …
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Fluidigm raises another $7.5M for stem-cell analysis chips
Fluidigm, which makes chips that for genetics lab, has raised $7.5 million in new equity, according to VentureWire. Thats part of a new $18.5 million round that the South San Francisco, Calif. company is raising. The funding comes from existing backers Alloy Ventures, EDB Investments, EuclidSR partn …
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Politics and policy needed for the smart grid. Soon.
At GreenBeat 2009s Politics and Policy session, the prevalent theme was the need for a simple, efficient legislation and regulation package for the U.S. power system. Robert Gee of Gee Strategies went so far as to say, Before anything is passed into law we need to get it past a panel of sixth grader …
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GreenBeat: Cisco has a blank check for Smart Grid, but what will it do with it?
Cisco Systems put no limit on its budget for Smart Grid development, the companys grid guru Laura Ipsen told the audience at GreenBeat 2009 albeit quoting her boss John Chambers. The question now is what Cisco (a GreenBeat 2009 sponsor) will use that money for currently, it looks like the company …
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Business intelligence company Manthan Systems raises second round
Manthan Systems, which provides business intelligence and analytics software to retailers, has a raised a second funding round of up to $15 million. The round was led by Fidelity International, with participation from existing investors IDG Ventures India and DFJ ePlanet Ventures. The company is bas …
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MyFit raises $1M to help parents with college applications
MyFit, a new services that helps parents figure out how to get their children into the college of their choice, has raised $1 million in a first round of funding, led by New Enterprise Associates. The Mountain View, Calif. company says it looks at data about graduates from more than 3,500 higher lea …
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Offerpal Media sets standards to lock out scam offers
[Updated with interview] Burned by a scandal in its offer business over inappropriate promos, Offerpal Media is moving to set standards which forbids offers that are misleading, deceptive or otherwise objectionable. The action is the first move the company has made since it brought in a new chief ex …
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