VentureBeat

Comcast to dam and damn the Internet with usage caps

You just knew it was too good to last. Starting on October 1 of this year, Internet service provider Comcast will begin placing a cap on the amount of data its customers can access a month, DSLreports has learned.

The 250 gigabyte cap, now confirmed by Comcast, represents around 14,000 of the company’s 14.1 million users, it claims. While that may be true today, and while 250 gigabytes may seem like a very high cap, going… Continue Reading

Picateers raises new round for Web 2.0 school portraits

Picateers has raised $6.6 million in a second round of funding to expand its effort to replace school portrait vendors with volunteer-based programs run by parents.

The San Mateo, Calif., company is disrupting the school portrait business by using a web-based approach. It recruits parents to use their own digital cameras to shoot portraits of kids. The volunteers then upload photos to the Picateers web site. There, the kids’ parents can view photos, select the ones… Continue Reading

Apple’s major multi-touch plans continue to come into focus

A lot of companies file patents for products they are never going to make. Apple is no exception. But given how many it has filed the past few years for advanced multi-touch technology and devices, it’d be very surprising if a multi-touch-enabled tablet device isn’t coming from the company at some point in the near future.

The latest patent filing, uncovered by AppleInsider, is one of the most in-depth yet, showing a maturity in the project… Continue Reading

Video dating site SpeedDate says its growing 50 percent a month, raises $6 million

Remember the awkward video from last December that featured various bloggers and video bloggers in video speed-dating situations? Well, the company that offered the dating service behind it, SpeedDate.com, claims to be on a bit of a tear. It’s growing 50 percent a month and now getting 100,000 online dates happening on its service per day.

The San Mateo, Calif. company offers a three-minute date that uses webcams, audio and instant messaging to create an interactive… Continue Reading

Sync service SugarSync sweetens the deal with an iPhone app

SugarSync, the service from startup Sharpcast that allows users to synchronize files across multiple computers and mobile devices, just became even more useful with the release of an iPhone application.

There are a lot of other sync services out there, including Syncplicity and Dropbox, but I was really impressed by the demo I saw when SugarSync launched in March — once you set up SugarSync, it requires virtually no thought or effort to keep multiple files… Continue Reading

Android Market, Google’s response to Apple’s App Store for third party developers

Mobile software operating system Android is coming soon, at least on one device — and that device will have a way for third-party applications to get access to users. The Google-led software initiative will offer a service called Android Market, a way to find, maybe purchase and download third-party applications (and maybe other content?). This is like what Apple’s App Store is for the iPhone and iPod. But there are some differences, according to the… Continue Reading

Humungous banner ads coming to YouTube?

Google-owned video site YouTube is experimenting with another way to make some extra cash — placing a giant banner ad on its homepage, according to Silicon Alley Insider.

People love to speculate and complain about YouTube’s struggle to make money from its huge audience. Yesterday, Google revealed that when YouTube notifies content owners that their copyrighted material been found on the site, most owners choose to monetize those videos, rather than demanding they be taken down…. Continue Reading

BuzzCity grows in the low-end mobile ad market with new funding

BuzzCity, a Singapore-based mobile advertising company, has picked up an additional $10 million for its combination approach of an ad network and social site, myGamma.com

The company is aiming to expand in the United States, but chances are, you’re not in its target market. Its idea is to reach out to audiences everywhere that are on a similar economic level. In India and Indonesia, the countries with the most BuzzCity users, that means the growing… Continue Reading

Another massive funding for thin film solar, with $104M to AVA Solar, a challenger to First Solar

It may not be as much as the colossal $300 million financing that Nanosolar finally disclosed yesterday — the biggest ever for a solar company — but another thin-film manufacturer, AVA Solar, has broken into the nine-figure funding range today, with a challenge to industry giant First Solar’s dominance.

AVA stands out a bit from its peers, for several reasons. For one, it’s based in Fort Collins, Colorado, well away from the sunny or technology-laden areas… Continue Reading

Roundup: Veoh wins copyright case, Microsoft launches IE8 beta 2, how the iPhone 2.0.2 update fixes connection issues and more

Here’s the latest action:

Veoh wins in court, YouTube claps — A federal judge ruled that Veoh was not infringing on copyrights by letting its users upload videos to the site. This is an important ruling because it sets a precedent for the similar, but much larger YouTube/Viacom case. You can probably expect an appeal. The LA Times and TechCrunch have more.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 released — “While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that… Continue Reading

Jaiku comes back with a new TOS and unlimited invites

The life-streaming site Jaiku has come back online after being down the entire weekend and the first part of this week while it moved to Google datacenters. While the look and feel of the service are exactly the same as before it went down, users were greeted with a shiny new terms of service (TOS) agreement to accept. The big news though is that now users have unlimited invites to send out.

Almost immediately after purchasing… Continue Reading

Top Hollywood writer to create Facebook movie, admits “I honestly don’t know how this works” [Updated]

Aaron Sorkin has created gripping movies like A Few Good Men, and television shows like The West Wing. Now, he’s going to write a story about the creation of Facebook. Sony’s bankrolling the feature film, with Scott Rudin producing it.

Here’s the thing. I’m worried that Sorkin is going to write a movie based largely on all the fawning stories that have already been written about the company’s founding, with his own crude spin. He thinks… Continue Reading

YouTube’s video revolution will be monetized (if the numbers hold)

The online video sharing site YouTube is a great product with a rich community. To say it has a stranglehold on the online video space would be putting it lightly. Yet, as with most things in the tech world, all anyone seems to ever want to talk about YouTube is its monetization. Today, Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion back in 2006, is doing some talking of its own.

In what has to be considered… Continue Reading

FriendFeed adds new widget features; get ready for FriendFeed-powered live blogging on VentureBeat

I’ve already been enjoying the new version of “lifestreaming” site FriendFeed, launched on Monday, as it lets me easily follow select people and conversation rooms. But that wasn’t the only release this week. Today, the Mountain View, Calif. company is making its service more useful, by offering a new set of features for its existing widgets.

The most interesting one lets you embed a widget of a FriendFeed room into your own web site. VentureBeat… Continue Reading

The iPhone 2.0.2 security flaw — and its temporary fix

A security flaw in the new iPhone 2.0.2 software was uncovered last night by a MacRumors forum user. To expose the flaw you must have your iPhone password protected. When you turn on the phone and get to the “Enter Passcode” screen, hit the “Emergency Call” button. From here, double click the main iPhone button and you’ll be taken to your phone’s “Favorites” menu. This should not happen.

The problem is that from this menu I… Continue Reading

Mozilla Labs’ Aza Raskin talks about the big picture for Ubiquity

Mozilla, the company behind the popular Firefox browser, just announced a very cool project that’s in the early stages of development — Ubiquity, a tool that allows users to access services like mapping, translation and search on any website. Earlier today, I had a chance to interview Mozilla Labs‘ head of user experience Aza Raskin about plans for Ubiquity, including a mobile version, improved usability and how Ubiquity could become a Star Trek-style supercomputer.

The interview… Continue Reading

Sports site The Active Network raises $80 million, for more acquisitions

The Active Network, a company that offers sports community sites like Active.com, has raised an $80 million fifth round of funding, led by existing investor and strategic partner ESPN, with additional funding from venture firms.

The San Diego-based company offers a range of events, marketing and online community services based around participatory sports. It was founded in 1998 and tried to IPO in 2004 before pulling back. It currently makes most of its $102 million in… Continue Reading

FriendFeed working on a new RSS supplement to speed up data retrieval

It looks like the rapid fire site updates are about to start again for the social content conversation site FriendFeed. Just a few days after the launch of its new “beta” area, FriendFeed is finalizing a new technology that could help pull content into the site at a much faster rate.

The technology, called Simple Update Protocol (SUP) will process updates from the various services that FriendFeed imports faster than it currently does using traditional Really… Continue Reading

Europe’s largest onshore wind farm is coming to Romania

Taking a page from T. Boone Pickens, who made waves when he announced that he was building the world’s largest wind farm in Texas, Continental Wind Partners and CEZ Group have concluded a deal to create Europe’s largest onshore farm, with a total capacity of 600 megawatts (onshore farms tend to be in hilly areas 3 km or more inland from the shoreline while offshore farms are 10 km or more from land).

As part of… Continue Reading