Roundup: Stock market drops, Microsoft retreats, and more
Here’s the latest action:
Tech stocks lead market to new lows — The thing about a downturn is it can always get worse. The Dow and S&P both hit 11-year lows on Monday, with the tech-driven NASDAQ’s 3.7 percent decline outpacing 3.4 percent drops in the blue chip averages.
Microsoft retreats on severance repayment demands — The software giant had initially asked laid off workers to return money that was in excess of planned severance … Continue Reading
It's all about utility: Social media apps grow up (for advertisers, too)
[Editor's note: Social media applications on networks like Facebook and MySpace -- and more recently the iPhone -- are starting to pull in real revenue. And we're seeing some developers add new types of functionality to their offerings in order to stand out from the crowd and attract new advertisers through a better brand offering and increased revenue. Below, Chris Cunningham, founder of appssavvy, a company that connects social network application developers with advertisers, highlights … Continue Reading
Utility Scale Solar aims to bring solar costs level with coal, natural gas
Utility Scale Solar, maker of tracking devices for solar thermal installations, plans to try out its technology with clients over the next several months, and is looking for $6 million in first-round funding to do it, reports VentureWire.
Based in Palo Alto, Calif., the company is in the last stages of developing single and dual-axis gearless tracking systems that it claims will increase efficiency and lower operation costs. It will use its new money to … Continue Reading
My music to my ears: Imeem's Android app accesses your music in the cloud
Love it or hate it, all of your digital information is moving to the cloud. And your music is no different. While music social network Imeem has let you upload your own music to its servers for a while, today it’s offering a powerful new feature: access to that music from a mobile device, thanks to its Android application.
The feature, called MyMusic, will let you stream your music over the Internet to your phone … Continue Reading
Halogen Network announces $5M funding for luxury ad network
Halogen Network has been putting together an online advertising network over the past four years, running ads from high-end hotels, airlines and other companies on more than 50 sites as of today. The company is now announcing it raised $5 million in a second round of funding — back in 2007 — from Kohlberg Ventures and angel investors. I assume the announcement’s an attempt to garner a bit of press, and I’ll bite: It will … Continue Reading
The cost of open: $200 app that does nothing hits Android's Market
Ever since the launch of the G1, the first phone to use Google’s Android mobile operating system, key industry players and fans have been touting the platform’s “openness.” What they don’t tell you though, is that there’s a downside to openness — one that took mere hours to manifest itself in a small way in Android Market upon the launch of paid applications last week: Shady applications.
Let’s be clear: Apple has had its share … Continue Reading
Vehicle sharing service Zipcar brings plug-in hybrids on board
Zipcar, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company that allows users to rent cars online without ever speaking to an agent, has added plug-in hybrid vehicles to its San Francisco fleet. This is part of a national pilot program to increase public awarenss of new electric vehicle technology, says the service, which integrated hybrid vehicles in 2003.
Essentially, this pilot will allow one of the greenest cities in the country to test-drive the cars of the future, Zipcar … Continue Reading
Portero summons $6.6M for second-hand luxury goods auctionhouse online
Portero, a web site that auctions off authenticated pre-owned luxury items, announced that it raised $6.6 million in a second round of venture funding from LFE Capital, Compagnie Financiere Richemont and The Grosvenor Funds. Offering more than 180 brands of watches, handbags, accessories, jewelry and more, the site seems to trump itself up as a web-based equivalent of famed auctionhouses Christie’s and Sotherby’s — complete with resident brand and vintage experts. Portero’s verification process is … Continue Reading
Principle Power lands deal to build floating turbines, raises $20M
Wind energy developer Principle Power just signed a deal with Energias de Portugal (EDP) to build a floating wind energy project off the coast of Portugal, and it’s looking to raise $20 million in first-round capital to help fund it. The Seattle-based company says it’s already in talks with several private and strategic investors along these lines.
EDP has been named an equity partner in the project (a price tag has yet to be estimated), … Continue Reading
Pixel8 sets itself up to be online video game-changer
Pixel8 Networks, a stealthy San Jose, Calif.-based provider of online video distribution technology, announced plans to roll out a line of products in September that could fundamentally change the way online video is delivered. Very little information has been released about what’s in store, but co-founder Randy Chou told VentureWire that the company is working on better ways to transfer video and large amounts of data.
On its web site, Pixel8 (not to be confused … Continue Reading
GamesBeat 09: More great speakers lined up
As the March 24 GamesBeat 2009 games conference draws near, we’re unveiling a new list of speakers. We’re proud to say that some of the biggest names in the gaming world are joining us for the program. Tickets are still available.
Chris Taylor (right), founder of Gas Powered Games, will share the stage with me as co-emcee of the event. We picked Taylor because he has been an advocate for creativity in games and because … Continue Reading
AOL takes one part Bebo, one part AIM, wants to create central lifestreaming service
What does AOL get when it pairs aging instant message service AIM with Bebo, the also-ran social network that it bought for $850 million last spring? A web service that could one day be a main way for people to interact on any web site, the company hopes. Set aside your knee-jerk cynicism about the big tech-media conglomerate trying to innovate, for a moment, because the service is looking better — especially better than what … Continue Reading
Widgetbox wants to make widgets more productive
I think of widgets as marketing tools, but build-your-own-widget company Widgetbox says they can make you more productive, too. To that end, the San Francisco startup is making its widgets compatible with Confluence, a business wiki product from a company called Atlassian.
Now, I haven’t really heard of or seen Confluence in action, but it sounds like a basic project-management/collaboration environment. The concept of bringing widgets into that area sounds intriguing. (Widget-maker Sprout has done … Continue Reading
Apple to Verizon: Can you hear me now? Maybe.
Before it settled on AT&T as the carrier for the iPhone in the United States, Apple shopped the phone to Verizon Wireless and was shot down. It’s thought that Verizon didn’t want to make the concessions (including ceding a lot of control) to Apple which AT&T ended up doing. Of course, the mobile landscape was very different at the time, and now it’s hard to argue that the iPhone hasn’t changed things significantly. So it … Continue Reading
A solution for the iPhone app management chaos
When you have nine pages of apps on your iPhone, it’s basically impossible to try to reorganize them. Sure, you can do it manually on the phone, using the “wiggle” method (when touched for a few seconds, apps wiggle, indicating you can move their icons), but when you move an app to a new page, if that page is already full, it pushes the last app to the page before it. So if you really … Continue Reading
Obama's deficit plan hikes tax on carried interest for VCs, hedge funds
As part of his strategy for reigning in the federal deficit, president Barack Obama plans to raise taxes on carried interest for a wide range of hedge funds and private equity managers, according to officials within the administration. The rate would jump from 15 percent (the usual for capital gains) to the income tax rate of 35 percent, more than doubling the tax investors pay on most of their income. Carried interest can briefly be … Continue Reading
Telonu's layoff widget brings bad news to your website
Telonu, a site where users can review jobs and layoffs, is launching a handy (and depressing) way to stay on top of our crumbling economy: a new Layoff Tracker widget that can be added to any blog or website.
I last looked at Telonu in December when I found the Layoff Talk section to be the most compelling part of the site. Sure, there was plenty of venom and bias, but the often anonymous comments … Continue Reading
OSLO alliance wants to share location across networks
During the days of dial-up, instant messaging came into its own but there was one major issue: If you weren’t on the same network as a friend, you couldn’t talk to them. For example, if you were on AOL and your friend was on MSN, you would have to email one another to talk. This problem spread into instant messaging clients as we moved to broadband, and though some of the big players now talk … Continue Reading
ARM's Cortex-M0 core: the lowest-power ARM chip yet for wireless devices
ARM is announcing today a new microprocessor core that can bring fast performance to even the smallest of electronic devices.
The Cortex-M0 processor core is a 32-bit chip — meaning it can process data in 32-bit chunks and is just about as fast as some low-end computers. Yet it carries the price tag of lesser 8-bit chips and can operate on a very low amount of power.
The Cambridge, U.K.-based company makes microprocessor cores, the … Continue Reading
Roundup: "Hurricane Carol" close to landfall at Yahoo, VC stimulus package is silly, Microsoft cooks up a PR nightmare and more
Here’s the latest action:
Bartz to rock Yahoo like a hurricane — The new Yahoo chief executive is planning a major shakeup which could happen as soon as this week, according to BoomTown. Many top execs could be out, and a lot of the recent changes made by former chief executive Jerry Yang and president Sue Decker could be undone. Apparently, they don’t call Bartz “Hurricane Carol” for nothing.
VC stimulus plan is silly – … Continue Reading
