VentureBeat
Silicon Valley news about tech money and innovation
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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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GreenBeat: Steve Westly spreads the Smart Grid gospel, says innovation should fly fast and loose
Steve Westly, former California state controller and now founder of the venture firm Westly Group, says he got interested in the Smart Grid and cleantech in order to save the world and make massive amounts of money in the process. During a talk designed to counter Vinod Khoslas Smart Grid skepticism …
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GreenBeat: Khosla warns against Smart Grid hype, pushes storage
Im not skeptical that the Smart Grid should exist, famed Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla said, kicking off his conversation with VentureBeat editor Matt Marshall at VentureBeats GreenBeat 09 event today. I wouldnt be here if I was. Khosla has been unofficially dubbed a Smart Grid skeptic becaus …
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Twitter finally enables geotagged tweets with new location API
Twitter finally rolled out its new application programming interface for tagging tweets with your location. It wont appear on Twitter.com, but it will be enabled for location-based services like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid and Twittelator Pro. Tweetie already switched on som …
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Foursquare makes global push: 50 new cities
Popular location-sharing game Foursquare has just gone global with the announcement of 50 new cities worldwide, doubling the services previous coverage. The company says it chose the cities based on feedback from users requesting the service. The new cities take the service across six continents, bu …
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Textbook rental site Chegg.com raises another $57m
Popular textbook rental site Chegg.com continues to raise tremendous amounts of money today it announced a $57 million fourth round, as well as $55 million in credit and debt. The Santa Clara, Calif. company says it will use the extra $112 million (!) to meet the demands of its rapid growth. Chegg …
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Yahoo juices up its news search with Twitter
It would be pretty hard to build a news search that keeps you up to date these days without Twitter. As news organizations pile into the microblogging service and as shared links and retweets become a decent metric of whats interesting, the webs biggest search destinations are incorporating Twitter. …
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Finding a buyer for your start-up
(Editors note: John Ovram founder and CEO of Exit and Answers, a social community for entrepreneurs looking to sell their company. The story originally appeared on his blog.) Entrepreneurs tend to look for one of two types of buyers when they decide to sell their business. Some search for the perfec …
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Game ad firm NeoEdge merges with game developer, hires new CEO
NeoEdge, a company that offers a way to insert video ads into online games, is going through some big changes in part driven by the recession in the online ad market, but also by the proliferation of other, cheaper games. Today, the company is announcing that is merging with casual game development …
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Flurry launches AppCircle to help apps get discovered
With 100,000 apps in Apples AppStore, it has become ridiculously hard to get an app discovered. At any given time, perhaps 100 apps are easy to find on the featured apps or top apps lists. Thats why analytics startup Flurry is launching a new platform, AppCircle, whose aim is to get iPhone and iPod …
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Runa’s new service looks to turn web surfers into sales
Last year, e-commerce retailers spend $21 billion, or 15 percent of their revenues, in online marketing to drive traffic to their websites. The end result a dismal 2-3 percent conversion rate between visitors and sales. Mountain View startup Runa, a provider of revenue growth and profit maximizatio …
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Olive Media launches new way to serve music to home stereos
High-end audio is moving into the digital age. Olive Media announced today it has created an audiophiles music storage system that can deliver digital music to home stereos. The San Francisco-based company is launching the Olive 4HD, a high-definition Hi-Fi Music Server. The system serves as a contr …
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