VentureBeat

Fisker pulls out of Michigan just before stimulus payday

Fisker Automotive, maker of the luxury hybrid Karma, says it will probably receive its $529 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy by the middle of March, according to Dow Jones VentureWire. This follows the company’s announcement that it will be shuttering its research and development center in Michigan (PDF) — bad news for a state that needs all of the automotive dollars it can cling to.

Even though the DOE gave the loan... Continue Reading

Hey bloggers, do you wish for Tumblr Pro? Try ZooLoo

When pushbutton-simple free blogging site Tumblr launched in 2007, friends of mine with a lot to say but no interest in tinkering with HTML jumped onto it. Not only did they create their own personal blogs, they spun off temporary joke blogs for topics of the day. A coworker of mine at Valleywag created fakepaulboutin.tumblr.com, where she posted my wisecracks from Valleywag’s private chat room.

But if you want your own personal domain rather than... Continue Reading

Lead411 buffs up with 1.4 million executive profiles, deeper info options

For some types of searches, Google totally sucks. Are you looking for a senior editor at Wired to pitch? Until recently, Google’s built-in directory returned me as a top result, seven years after I’d lost the job. If you’re a salesperson, marketer, recruiter, or competitor researching company executives, Google is full of non-leads, and its website results are often out of date. That’s because one in four Americans changes jobs each year, according to the... Continue Reading

Point, click: a review of gesture control technologies

The first big hit in gesture control technology was the mouse. If you’re too young to have any pre-digital memories, this might seem like an odd claim. My three-year-old is no more mystified by mice and touchpads than she is by building blocks. Once upon a time, though, we needed lessons in how the motion of a peripheral device rolling around on the table related to the motion of something on the screen called... Continue Reading

Google Buzz is no Twitter-killer, but it may solve an intimacy problem

Google tapped its sleeping giant of a social network today with Buzz. The new product lets people follow Gmail contacts for status updates and shared articles, photos and videos.

While Google has fumbled on many of its other social efforts, Buzz holds more promise than earlier products like Orkut or Latitude. According to ComScore, Gmail had about 176 million unique visitors in December so there’s a very low cost of new user acquisition.

But... Continue Reading

Toyota loses green cred, recalls hybrids over faulty brakes

Toyota’s having a bad week. It is already recalling millions of cars to fix floor mats and gas pedals that have led to unintentional acceleration — a snafu costing the company more than $2 billion. Now it has announced that it will recall about 150,000 of its hybrid vehicles due to problems in the software controlling the anti-lock brake systems in its 2010 Prius and 2010 Lexus HS 250h models. The majority of the recalled... Continue Reading

Google takes another stab at location-based services with Buzz

Much of the talk surrounding Google Buzz, the search giant’s new social sharing tool, has focused on new capabilities it will bring to the web through its integration with Gmail. But the new mobile features are also an important part of the announcement, because they add a compelling location-based component to the service.

Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra said Google Buzz is being integrated into three of Google’s mobile websites and applications —... Continue Reading

iTunes music: Higher prices result in slower sales growth

On this morning’s earnings call for Warner Music, CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr said that the company’s $1.29 tracks — a 30 percent price boost over Apple’s standard 99 cents — have been a “net positive” for the company. Yet as media pundit Peter Kafka observed, the entire music industry’s iTunes sales growth is slower than a year ago, when consumer confidence and willingness to spend were much lower:

Industrywide, year-over-year “digital track equivalent album unit... Continue Reading

U2 gets behind carbon trading, raises money for geothermal

Known for its international relief efforts, rock band U2 is now raising funds in Turkey to pay for the country’s Dora-1 geothermal plant. It is also selling carbon offset credits for $1.89 a pop.

The credits will go toward purchasing clean power to neutralize the 127 kilograms of greenhouse gases each of the band’s fans, on average, generates to see the band play. Incidentally, the Dora-1 project could save as many as 30,000 tons of... Continue Reading

How Sergey Brin uses Google Buzz as a business tool

Google Buzz, the social sharing tool that Google just announced at a press event in Mountain View, Calif., isn’t just for fun. The company said it’s going to be launching an enterprise version of Buzz as part of its Google Apps bundle of business applications.

During the presentation, Google was pretty vague about Buzz in a business context, both in terms of how it might be used and when it will launch (“soon” is all... Continue Reading

Google socializes Gmail with Google Buzz

Google announced a new product today called Google Buzz, bringing credence to previous rumors that social networking features would be added to Gmail. Buzz is a service for sharing and talking about content. In the same way that the company calls Gmail “a Google approach to email,” it’s calling Buzz “a Google approach to sharing.”

Todd Jackson, a product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, demonstrated the product on-stage at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View,... Continue Reading

Ubisoft hits reduced expectations, announces new Tom Clancy game

Ubisoft, the big French game company, reported third fiscal quarter results that met reduced expectations for its sales of video games in the busy holiday quarter.

Sales for the quarter were 495 million euros, down 2.7 percent from 508 million euros a year earlier. For the first nine months of the fiscal year, sales were down 22.5 percent. Ubisoft said it is refocusing its high-end game strategy by concentrating on more regular releases for its... Continue Reading

Twilio adds SMS text support to its phone-to-Web API

Twilio is a company that offers an Internet API so companies can create Web applications that make or take phone calls. For website application developers, getting any sort of connection to telephones can be a show-stopper. Wireless carriers, which are enormous bureaucracies, can take forever to approve and support the connection. Twilio was founded in 2007 to solve that problem at an affordable price. Twilio offers Web app makers an API connection to phone... Continue Reading

Yes, there’s a Google Street View Snowmobile now

Iterating off the Street View car and the Street View “tricycle”, Google has built another contraption to record the physical world for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

They’ll be driving a Street View Snowmobile around the Games for maps. Dan Ratner, the mechanical engineer behind the “trike”, also built this one.

It’s been able to capture everything from snow runs on the Whistler Blackcomb Mountains, the... Continue Reading

A giant table of Super Bowl ads ranked by online results

Gomez is a division of Compuware that does website performance measurement for businesses. Like me, they constantly hammer the point that a slow site loses a lot of business. In fact, 78 percent of consumers surveyed told Gomez they have switched to a competitor’s site because the site they wanted was too slow.

With that in mind, this past Sunday Gomez studied the websites of every company with a Super Bowl ad as their commercials... Continue Reading

AMD releases details on its graphics-microprocessor combo chip

Yesterday, Advanced Micro Devices showed off the progress it has made designing a chip that combines graphics and a processor in a single chip.

Dubbed Fusion, the family of chips is getting nearer to commercial release. The chip design, which AMD revealed at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, has been years in the making. AMD says the idea for the chip bubbled up from observations of how consumers began using their... Continue Reading

Yodle launches Organic to optimize web traffic and leads for small businesses

Shortly after announcing a $10 million fourth round of financing and alluding to a new product launch, Yodle, a company that helps businesses advertise online, today launched Yodle Organic, a new product to help local businesses increase web traffic and search engine optimization (SEO).

Yodle specializes in helping local  businesses in several major cities, including Boston, New York and San Francisco to display local advertising on search pages. The company’s new product, Yodle Organic, looks to not... Continue Reading