Orsus raises funds for risk management software, buys rival Cinario
Orsus, a Mountain View, Calif. company that makes both software and hardware for risk assessment and security purposes, announced it has raised a round of capital and has acquired smaller rival Cinario. The financial terms of the deal have yet to be disclosed. All that is known about the financing round is that it was provided by existing investors.
The purchase may give Orsus more reach in the United Kingdom, where Ireland-based Cinario’s clients include … Continue Reading
Conformiq raises $4.2M to automate software tests
Conformiq, a Saratoga, Calif.-based company that automates the generation of tests for software products, announced that it’s brought in $4.2 million in a round of venture capital led by Nexit Ventures and Finnish Industry Investment, reports VentureWire. It claims that its lead product, Conformiq Qtronic, not only creates tests without any work on the part of the user but also provides documentation and related executable scripts.
Conformiq also recently named a new chief executive, handpicking … Continue Reading
Venture firm Kleiner Perkins is raising $1.25B — much of it green
Kleiner Perkins, the well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm is raising an additional $1.25 billion to invest in companies, according to regulatory filings.
It comes at a time when Kleiner Perkins has reportedly been asking both existing and new investors to participate in its funds. Kleiner is raising the money to add to four of its existing funds, presumably to give it enough gunpowder to support investments it has already made as the economy enters … Continue Reading
Casual games are growing but have a mixed outlook
Paul Thelen, chairman and chief strategy officer of casual game distributor Big Fish Games, said his company grew faster in the fourth quarter than it did at any time in the past two years. That raises the question: Just how is the recession affecting casual games?
“We do see a little delinquency in credit cards,” he said during a panel at Casual Connect in Hamburg. But he also said those players who do pay are … Continue Reading
Amazon sparks controversy over casual games pricing
Amazon.com purchased casual game portal Reflexive back in October. So it came as no surprise when Amazon launched a casual games download service last Tuesday.
Now any of the 88 million yearly Amazon customers can purchase and download casual games for just $9.99 each.
But at the Casual Connect conference in Hamburg, long-brewing pricing tensions are coming to a head. Developers are not happy, because they see Amazon’s price-point as an attack on the industry.… Continue Reading
Roundup: Twestival is tomorrow, Palm talks Pre and patents, Google pays up and more
Here’s the latest action:
Twestival: Bad name, good cause — Tomorrow, over 175 cities around the world will host Twitter festivals (really, meetups), or Twestivals, to raise money and awareness for charity:water, a project aimed at giving some 1.1 billion people on the planet access to clean drinking water. To find an event near you, visit the Twestival site. If you can’t go to one, Magnify.net is powering a live video stream found here, and … Continue Reading
Diddit launches surprisingly addictive activity guide
The development team behind search company Inktomi is launching a new service tonight called Diddit, which functions as both an activity guide and a way to share stories and accomplishments.
Diddit is a bit like business-rating services such as Yelp and Citysearch, but with a broader range of listings, and a dash of “story-sharing” sites like Tokoni. It includes individual attraction descriptions as well as lists of everything from Harry Potter books to free activities … Continue Reading
Collaboration startup Smartsheet adds outsourcing through Amazon
Smartsheet‘s business collaboration tool just got a little smarter with a new feature called Smartsourcing, which lets companies outsource tasks in Smartsheet through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
This is a cool idea. Most collaborative business software, such as Jive Software‘s Clearspace, focuses either on collaboration within the organization, or with customers. [Update: And with partners, as someone from Jive reminds me in the comments.] But outsourcing is increasingly important, especially given the current economic environment. … Continue Reading
Google's new social toolbar lets web sites add simple social features
Google‘s latest foray into social networking is a toolbar it is introducing today, that shows users’ social information on other web sites. It’s designed to help web site publishers and users make better use of Google Friend Connect, a service that already lets developers add social features to web pages.
The toolbar includes buttons that, when clicked on, reveal drop-down windows showing you your own user identity, the activity taking place on the site (such … Continue Reading
Activision Blizzard isn't immune from the recession, but it beats Q4 estimates
Video game publisher Activision Blizzard lowered the forecasts today for its 2009 earnings targets, sending its stock down in after-hours trading.
Activision shares dipped five percent and are now down about 1.4 percent to $9.48 a share. But the company reported better-than-expected earnings for the holiday quarter, which was driven by strong sales of its Guitar Hero World Tour and Call of Duty World at War games.
For 2009, the company forecasts it will earn … Continue Reading
SodaHead grows from polls to conversations
You may know SodaHead for the embeddable polling widgets it has offered for years, but the company has been steadily turning itself into a destination site where people can ask questions and discuss issues of the day. The result has been a sharp increase in traffic over the last year, from some 166,000 users in December of 2007 to nearly 2.3 million users in December of last year, according to comScore.
Following a recent redesign, … Continue Reading
Webalo brings real-time box office data to smartphones
A Los Angeles startup called Webalo is bringing its mobile service to a new market: Hollywood movie studios. Webalo, which makes it easier to navigate spreadsheets and other business data on mobile devices, just announced a partnership with Lionsgate that gives the studio’s executives access to the most up-to-date box office numbers on their smartphones.
Apparently, Lionsgate stores these numbers as internal SAP system reports, so there was no way to see the data on … Continue Reading
iTunes, we have a storage problem (and a potential fix)
Late last year I bought an Apple TV. It’s a great device for playing digital content in the living room, but it has some limitations. Some of those I laid out recently in explaining why Apple TV is at a crossroads, but the single biggest problem going forward for such a device, and Apple’s expansion into video content overall, is storage. Now, a solution for that problem may be near.
The problem: It’s a matter … Continue Reading
Ginx, an easier way to see what people are sharing on Twitter
Ginx describes itself as a tool for sharing news through Twitter. But it’s not just that, it’s also a better interface for using core Twitter features than Twitter itself. I’ve been playing around with the service, which is still in private testing mode — already, it’s helping me to better see what’s worth reading on Twitter, and who might be interesting to follow.
Let’s say somebody tweets a link to a news article. Ginx shows … Continue Reading
Marvel Comics exec still confused about the Internet
Updated
It’s probably not fair to take one man’s off-the-cuff remarks as representative of his company, but boy, talk about clueless old media.
Publishers Weekly’s comics blog just posted this telling excerpt from the comics on the web panel at last week’s ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference in New York. The speakers are Ira Rubenstein, executive VP of Global Digital Media at Marvel Comics and Dave Roman, a cartoonist and associate editor at Nickelodeon Magazine.
Rubenstein:… Continue Reading
Friendster wires a money transfer feature to the Philippines
Friendster has just introduced a way to send and receive payments with friends on the social network through your mobile phone — if you’re using Filipino currency, that is. This is a smart way for the site to take advantage of the trusted relationships that its users have already made in one of its core demographics (apparently, about a third of the company’s traffic comes from the Philippines). By taking a cut of every transaction, … Continue Reading
Yahoo gets ready to charge for Search BOSS
Yahoo announced today that it will soon be making money from Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service), which lets developers access Yahoo search results in their web applications. That money won’t come through Yahoo’s traditional method of advertising or charging a flat fee for a premium service, but rather through a metered “pay for what you use” model.
A Yahoo spokesperson compared the business model to Amazon Web Services, which is also pay-as-you-go. But … Continue Reading
Tech scores in stimulus bill, Sirius XM prepares bankruptcy filing, Modu stages modular phone launch
Here’s the latest action:
Tech industry scores funding in stimulus package – Infrastructure spending includes $7 billion for expanding high-speed internet access, some $20 billion for building a so-called smart grid power network and $20 billion for digitizing health records. The New York Times has more.
Sirius XM prepares bankruptcy filing – Regulators approved the merger of the two satellite radio companies to avoid this from happening. But the combined company is planning a bankruptcy … Continue Reading
Outbrain, the news story recommendation service, gets $12M
Outbrain, a company that gives blog readers a way to rate and recommend news stories (see its widget at the bottom of this story), has raised another $12 million in a second round of funding.
VentureBeat first covered Outbrain in detail last year. It uses a recommendation technology similar to Amazon’s feature that offers up other items people like you have already enjoyed. While there are several such “collaborative filtering” recommendation engines on the market, … Continue Reading
AdMob and MADS partner to create global mobile ad behemoth
AdMob, which boasts it’s the world’s leading mobile advertising company, has teamed up with MADS, a European mobile ad company, in a strategic alliance to create a global behemoth.
The move is significant because it extends AdMob’s reach in an area where it was relatively weak: Serving ads for high-end publishers across a multitude of mobile channels such as SMS, MMS and the mobile web.
In some ways, you can compare AdMob’s mobile offering to … Continue Reading
