Silver Spring pumps another $15M into smart grid tech
Silver Spring Networks, a company that wirelessly connects residential smart meters with utilities, has added another $15 million to its now $90 million fourth round of funding, reports VentureWire. Open since October, the round will help the company expand and bring more utilities into its fold.
Silver Spring, which competes with other smart grid meter companies like GridPoint, Ambient and SmartSynch, says it has about 500,000 homes in its network. These homes are outfitted with … Continue Reading
Sunlight Foundation gets another $4M from Omidyar
The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit group that uses the Internet to increase government transparency, has received a $4 million grant from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropic investment firm the Omidyar Network.
Sunlight was founded in 2006 and has helped create a number of government-related databases, including OpenCongress.org, Congresspedia.org, OpenSecrets.org, and EarmarkWatch.org. OpenCongress, for example, has detailed profiles of bills, senators, representatives, and committees — this is all publicly available information, but the Sunlight Foundation tries … Continue Reading
IBM rumored to be in negotiations to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5 billion
IBM is in negotiations to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported today.
If the deal happens, it would be one of the biggest consolidations in the computer industry since Hewlett-Packard merged with Compaq in 2001.
IBM would eliminate a major competitor if it follows through with the all-cash deal, which would be a big premium over Tuesday’s closing price of $4.97 a share. The deal would strengthen IBM’s hand against … Continue Reading
Hollywood animation house Titmouse expands into games
Titmouse said today it is launching its own game studio and is making a console video game dubbed Seven Haunted Seas.
The Hollywood, Calif.-based company is the creator of Metalocalypse, one of the Cartoon Networks’ highest-rated Adult Swim animated film series. It has also done the animations behind cult animation hits like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Afro Samurai and the Amazing Screw on Head.
Now the new studio, Titmouse Games, will expand into an area … Continue Reading
MindArk's Entropia Universe now has legally sanctioned virtual central bank
Sweden-based MindArk is announcing today that Entropia Universe, which is actually a collection of virtual worlds, now has a real bank. The Mind Bank, which serves as a central bank for all of the different virtual worlds within the Entropia Universe, has been granted official status by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (Finansinspektionen).
MindArk chief executive Jan Welter Timkrans said the development is a milestone for virtual worlds, which have realistic economies built around currencies … Continue Reading
Sun looking to claim space in the cloud
Sun Microsystems jumped on the cloud computing bandwagon today with the announcement of its own platform for applications that run in the Internet cloud. The company is launching its effort with two products — Sun Cloud Services and Sun Cloud Compute Service.
With Amazon already an established leader, and with Google and Microsoft — plus many others — developing their own solutions, how does Sun plan to stand out? A big selling point will be … Continue Reading
Eduify tries to make writing less painful for students
A startup called Eduify is launching the public beta test today for a product that should resonate with anyone who remembers struggling to write papers in high school or college. The company has tried to create a web application that eases that process as much as possible, particularly the gathering and formatting of bibliographic sources.
To illustrate the Eduify concept, the company offers this outline of how a normal high-schooler might write a paper: They’d … Continue Reading
MySpace shares more data with the web, could get more traffic in return
MySpace is making it easier for users and developers to access data on its site from around the web, with the release of several new features for its MySpaceID distributed identity service. The service’s new features could make the entertainment-focused social network more relevant to more people, at a time when the company’s traffic is stagnating and management is turning over.
Starting today, MySpace users can log into partner sites using their MySpace identities, see … Continue Reading
Nonoba launches tool for managing casual game web sites
There are thousands of casual game sites on the web. Now Danish startup Nonoba is making it easy to create even more. The company has launched its GameRise content management system to make it easy for anyone to run a professional-looking game web site.
GameRise allows casual game developers to manage a catalog of games and display them in up to 26 different languages. It also provides tools to create and manage chat rooms, forum … Continue Reading
iPhone OS 3.0 roundup: Push notification, cut and paste, and more
Apple made a flood of announcements about version 3.0 of its iPhone operating system this morning. I have to say, I was pretty impressed — despite the rumors, there was no mention of a tablet computer, but a solid majority of the complaints I’ve heard about the iPhone were addressed in today’s news.
I liveblogged the event on FriendFeed, and we’ve been digging deeper into some of the announcements throughout the day. It’s a lot … Continue Reading
Roundup: AOL launching news site, Facebook co-founder turns VC, and more
Here’s the latest action:
AOL to launch political news site — Just as newspapers cut back on staff, AOL plans to launch a political news site with seasoned journalists. Meanwhile, former AOL chief Steve Case made an appearance at an AOL event.
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes goes to dark side – Hughes has joined venture capital firm General Catalyst as a full-time entrepreneur in residence. PEHub has more.
Computer science enrollment rises – For the … Continue Reading
Optical transceiver company OneChip Photonics secures $16.5M
OneChip Photonics , a company that that develops and manufactures optical transceivers for broadband applications, just raised $16.5 million in a second round of funding from DCM, BDC Venture Capital , GrowthWorks Canadian Fund and Morgenthaler Ventures. The company says that the money will enable it to expand operations globally and deliver fully integrated fiber-to-the-home transceiver technology to clients in the second half of 2009.
The product allows for small business and consumer broadband applications … Continue Reading
Layoff game meant as salve for corporate doublespeak
Lots of corporations are eliminating redundancies these days. Now you can do the same in a free web game dubbed Layoff.
Inspired by games that require you to match three objects, such as Bejeweled, you start with a grid of workers. You swap positions of any two workers to align three or more workers of the same type. Then the workers disappear and you are told exactly how much money you’ve saved by eliminating redundancies. … Continue Reading
Digital storage provider Omneon calls off IPO
Omneon, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based provider of digital content storage and data processing services for media companies, announced that it has canceled its $115 million filing to go public due to poor market conditions. Its application had been in the hopper since December 2006.
The company has raised $105 million in capital to date from Norwest Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Advanced Technology Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners, Invesco Private Capital and Lucent Ventures.… Continue Reading
Virtual goods on the iPhone could generate big revenues for game firms
Apple’s announcement today of a virtual goods platform for the iPhone will likely produce a bonanza of revenues for game developers and publishers.
The new virtual goods platform should go live this summer when the iPhone 3.0 software announced today is available to consumers. Since there are more than 6,000 games on the iPhone (more than 2,000 of which are free), it’s pretty hard for game companies to pull in profits. Those who charge for … Continue Reading
AT&T partners with SmartSynch to bring the smart grid to your neighborhood
AT&T announced today that it will open its wireless network to smart meter maker SmartSynch, allowing electric utilities to install its IP-based smart grid technology in even more residential areas. Every SmartSynch SmartMeter will now send energy use information to utilities and homeowners over the expansive AT&T network, saving millions of dollars in network infrastructure, expansion and maintenance costs.
Now any consumer with AT&T service will be able to understand their energy consumption in economic … Continue Reading
Rebel Monkey launches CampFu casual online game world with co-op play
Rebel Monkey is launching its CampFu online game world for teens today. The New York company hopes to distinguish itself from a bunch of rivals with its cooperative style of game play.
As many as four players can join together to play the four different mini games included in the CampFu world, said Margaret Wallace (pictured below), chief executive of Rebel Monkey. The company spent more than 18 months creating the Monkey Wrench game platform … Continue Reading
After layoffs, Spot Runner down but not out
Spot Runner, a digital agency for television and online video advertisers, announced that it laid off another 60 employees last week, adding to its earlier deep cuts of 115 in November and 50 in August. Things are looking pretty grim for the Los Angeles-based company and its competitors, but Spot Runner insists that it’s not down for the count and that the recent changes were only made to buoy operations until the recession lifts at … Continue Reading
100 more things: The new iPhone 3.0 features
At its iPhone 3.0 preview event today, Apple started off with some impressive numbers for the iPhone/iPod touch and App Store, then went into some of the new software development kit (SDK) features (like Push Notification) and then did some app demos. But that wasn’t enough. The real crowd-pleaser came after when Apple announced over 100 new features for the iPhone 3.0 software. Most importantly, these new features included three of the big ones that … Continue Reading
Skytap soars with new $7M to extend cloud services
Skytap, a company that provides virtual computing environments for application testing, announced that it brought in $7 million in a second round of funding from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation. The new money will be used for product development and to bolster sales efforts, the Seattle-based company says.
Skytap specializes in delivering cloud services to companies that are actively developing and testing applications. Its technology can help lower hardware and software … Continue Reading
