PortalPlayer gives you portal into your laptop; & other news

March 14, 2006 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

Updated

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San Jose start-up PortalPlayer is best known for making the chips that process sound for iPods.

But now the company is making chips that power tiny screen displays on laptops. The mini-displays — small screens on the outside of the laptop shell — will provide consumers with instantly available information and even e-mail without the need to power up a laptop.

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by Thu Hoang Ly

Dean Takahashi, of the Merc, has the story here (free registration). It will debut with Microsoft’s Windows Vista software later this year.

In other news:

–MetaWeb, of San Francisco, has raised $15 million in first-round funding, according to reports today. The company is still stealth, but Benchmark Capital apparently led the deal, and was joined by Millennium Technology Ventures, Omidyar Network and unnamed individuals. It is a spinout from Glendale, Calif.-based Applied Minds Inc., which was co-founded by Danny Hillis, also the founder and chairman of Metaweb, according to VentureWire.

–AllBusiness.com, also of San Francisco, raised $12.4 million, led by Sutter Hill Ventures and including VantagePoint Venture Partners and Reed Elsevier Ventures. Here is the release. The company is trying to serve small businesses by giving them expert blogs and other information on everything from negotiating contracts to real estate advice. We took a quick look, and were annoyed by a pop-up ad. AllBusiness may provide some good help to business owners, so we wish them well. But there is a lot of competition on the Internet, where users can go look for similar information for free. The trick is how they will make money for an Internet content play after taking $12.4M in cash.

Update:

–Also, Om has word that VMix, yet another online video content player, has raised $4 million from Enterprise Ventures and Mission Ventures, and rightly asks why do we need another one.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Like Wine.com, AllBusiness is one of these companies with many lives. Founded in 1999, raised a ton of money, acquired by NBCi (remember them) for a huge but ephemeral sum, spun out, nearly died, raised a lot of money, raised a lot more money, and changed their business plan after just about each event listed.

    Aggregating small businesses online is a tough but valuable objective that no one has been able to crack yet. On paper, they have a pretty impressive looking team now, but you still have to wonder what exactly the plan is.