Roundup: Supreme Court's new patent ruling, gas prices at record, multiple services give up the ghost, and more

Supreme Court gives supply chains protection from patents — In a notable ruling today, the Supreme Court has ruled that patent holders can’t demand royalties from supply chain customers who bought products from license-holders further up the chain. The decision should help reduce “patent exhaustion” in the system, not to mention the overall level of silliness.

Gas hits record $4 average, but cleantech may not always benefit — Average gas prices across the country have … Continue Reading

The second coming of the iPhone, and more: Our coverage of the Apple WWDC conference

Silicon Valley isn’t the most spiritual place in the world — usually. But sometimes, Apple manages to make many of the most cynical of geeks into devout followers. Today, for example, the company has announced a second, significantly improved version of the iPhone at its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. It has satisfied months of breathless anticipation about its plans to further compete in the mobile hardware and software market.

At least some VentureBeat … Continue Reading

CrownPeak raises $6M for web content management

CrownPeak, a startup that offers online software to help companies manage their web content, has raised $6 million in a second round of funding.

This round brings CrownPeak’s total funding to $10.25 million. It was led by SunAmerica Ventures, with backing from existing investors Sigma Partners and Altos Ventures.

The Los Angeles startup says its customers include 3M, Hyundai Motors and Home Depot. Through its website ContentManagement.com, CrownPeak also offers a more affordable solution for … Continue Reading

iPhone 3G questions unanswered: AT&T subsidy, 3G data price, no video?

Everyone at the WWDC conference is extremely excited about the new iPhone 3G — and that’s an understatement. However, there are a few questions that Apple’s chief executive left unanswered:

Is the $199 price a result of an AT&T subsidy or is Apple eating the cost?

What about the data price plans from AT&T, will those get more expensive with the faster 3G data?

And finally, will the device offer any video capabilities?

One would … Continue Reading

WWDC live blogging: Steve Jobs takes the stage, unveils the $199 3G iPhone

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Finally, the mobile Monolith is here! It’s the iPhone, in all its 3G glory.

First, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage and talked about the initial iPhone’s success: 6 million sales in the first year. It has 90 percent-plus customer satisfaction. The next challenges are, he says, 3G networks, enterprise support, third-party application support, more countries, and making it more affordable.

So of course, Jobs says, Apple is taking it to the next … Continue Reading

WWDC live blogging: Apple launches MobileMe

Apple’s .Mac syncing service is now called MobileMe, and it stores your information up in the cloud. If you use a Mac, a PC or the iPhone, you can get your information no matter where you are. In addition, new web-based applications will be available at Me.com.

We can all get push email, contacts and calendars right to our device. It works over the air, wirelessly.

It’s like “[Microsoft] Exchange for the rest of us,” … Continue Reading

WWDC live blogging: Jobs outlines more new iPhone features

After a long demo of new applications, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has retaken the stage at today’s WWDC conference to outline further features of the new iPhone 3G. Here they are:

* You can now view iWork documents, look through contacts, and view Microsoft Office documents on an iPhone.

* You can save images directly to different locations.

* There’s a scientific calculator.

* There are parental controls.

* There are two forms each for … Continue Reading

Rap star Ludacris launches online record label Wemix

Christoper Bridges, the rapper and actor better known as “Ludacris,” has put his celebrity power into an online music community called Wemix.

The recently launched startup isn’t your run-of-the-mill music site. It’s a community for unsigned talent in the music industry — singers, songwriters, rappers, musicians and producers — who can register, create profiles and upload their original music. Users can offer tips and pointers, as well as collaborate on new songs. And recognition as … Continue Reading

Recommendation service Plinky, and its brain, plot to take over the blogging world

Here’s a startup to watch, although there’s not much to see yet. It’s called Plinky, and it’s founded by Jason Shellen, a former lead developer at blog platform Blogger, which was acquired by Google in 2003. Shellen, who left Google almost a year ago after doing things like creating Google Reader, is by virtue of his Blogger job well-versed in the blogosphere’s behavior patterns.

So, Plinky is building a “content encouragement” tool, Shellen tells GigaOm … Continue Reading

WWDC live blogging: medical apps from Modality and MIMVista on the iPhone

S. Mark Williams, CEO of Modality is giving a talk right now at the WWDC conference in San Francisco about how his company’s platform, run on the new iPhone, would allow students, educators, and professionals to get ready access to key reference materials on their mobile devices. His example: A medical student can use Modality on an iPhone to look up data on the human body, select it, zoom and then look at a detailed … Continue Reading

Online video-based marketplace The Talk Market raises funding from Amazon

The Talk Market is trying to create a video-based marketplace, where users can customize their self-created informercials. As a seller, you shoot a video of what you’re selling, then use The Talk Market to add graphics, including customized motion graphics, and music to your videos.

The company has raised an undisclosed round of equity funding from Amazon. Also, it uses Amazon Web Services Flexible Payment service, providing its merchants with free (but mandatory) Amazon Payments … Continue Reading

WWDC live blogging: Next up, games on the iPhone with Sega's Super Monkey Ball and more

Apple’s first guest on stage today at the WWDC conference is Ethan Einhorn from Sega to talk about an iPhone game: Super Monkey Ball. He says Sega created four stages from scratch in a few weeks. Now it’s cleared through 110 stages.

The game uses the iPhone as a kind of slate with tilt control. You move the iPhone horizontally, up and down, to control a rolling ball. You knock things down and roll the … Continue Reading

Steve Jobs kicks off the keynote speech at WWDC: iPhone news

Apple’s annual WWDC developer conference has just kicked off and CEO Steve Jobs has taken the stage. The room filled up fast, and I’m here among crowds of thousands. Conference organizers have told us all to turn off our cell phones, iPhones, PDAs and paging devices. At least they didn’t tell us to turn off cell phone modems.

Jobs says there are three parts to Apple: the Mac, music, and the iPhone. He just mentioned … Continue Reading

A preview of Live blogging from the WWDC

MG Siegler and I are sitting in the audience at the WWDC keynote now. They’re playing Chuck Berry music now and the big Apple logo is on the big screen. Here’s a couple shots of the crowd. We had to avoid getting trampled as the press rushed in. We were fast but we’re still 20 rows back. “Roll Over Beethoven!” The crowd is cheering.  Steve Jobs has taken the stage.… Continue Reading

Phanfare announces new iPhone application for sharing photos

Phanfare, an online photo- and video-sharing service, has announced a new iPhone application that allows users to upload and share their photos directly to the web.

Mobile integration is one way the Metuchen, NJ-based company is trying to make its product stand out from the many other photo sharing services available. That’s really important for a company trying to compete in the incredibly crowded photo-sharing market, and even more so for Phanfare, since its founders … Continue Reading

Ifbyphone brings its telephone platform natively to the iPhone

It used to be that you had a telephone that sat on a table somewhere in your house and it had a number. Both were anything but portable. You could call another person’s phone with their own number, but if that number was busy, you were out of luck.

The times have changed.

We now live in a world of mobile phones and disposable numbers. Ifbyphone, a company with a platform for telephone applications, is … Continue Reading

Innotas, a project portfolio market company, gets $6M boost

Innotas, a company offering something called project portfolio management (PPM), has raised $6 million more in funding.

PPM is software designed to help groups tackle projects, with an eye toward managing resources and meeting goals. Where Salesforce has become a titan from selling customer relationship management (CRM) software to sales divisions at big firms, Innotas and others hope to fatten from peddling PPM to the rest of the company. Both CRM and PPM are broadly … Continue Reading

Meebo introduces interactive ads, another step towards social web sites making money

We were hard on instant message startup Meebo in March when it was raising a $25 million round at a $200 million valuation. While it has gained tens of millions of users in a couple of years, it has yet to generate significant revenue.

Today, in one of the Mountain View, Calif. company’s most explicit efforts yet to make money, it is introducing interactive ads.

Meebo’s ads will appear at the bottom of its chat … Continue Reading

Sinexus gets $20M, Entellus takes $15M for sinus products

Feeling stuffy? Two sinus-focused companies, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Sinexus and Maple Grove, Minn.-based Entellus, want to help out, with fresh rounds of funding for product development.

Venture funding for ear, nose & throat (ENT) companies hasn’t been terribly common in the past, but seems to be on the rise, with companies like these two and Acclarent, which took $35 million last year, promising safer, easier treatments for common sinus conditions. Acclarent just filed for an … Continue Reading

Sense Networks experiments with indexing the city

In what may be a first step toward bringing some real-time intelligence to local recommendation sites like Yelp and CitySearch, a startup called Sense Networks is today unveiling a new platform, called Citysense, that it says can create a Google-style “index” of places in a city based on where people are going.

Think of people as being a bit like members of nomadic tribes, and you’ll be on the track to understanding what Sense wants … Continue Reading