See what goes into your food with GoodGuide

I’ve been a big fan of GoodGuide — the online database for information about whether a product is healthy, environmentally friendly and ethical — since it launched at the TechCrunch50 conference in September. But as much as I admired GoodGuide, I didn’t actually use it all that much, simply because the site used to focus on products that I don’t spend much money on — namely personal care and household cleaning products, with the recent … Continue Reading

Jajah holds strong, dials up $2.8M to expand VoIP services

Jajah, a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) communication service, has taken in $2.75 million of an anticipated $5 million fourth round of funding, peHUB reports. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company provides service to millions of users, much like competitors mig33 and Jaxtr. Last April it scored a deal with Yahoo to provide phone-to-PC calling capabilities to the 90 million people who use the search giant’s messenger product.

Jajah has seen impressive growth over the three … Continue Reading

Adknowledge acquires Miva's media division for $11.6M

Pay-per-click ad network Adknowledge announced last week that it bought the media division of peer ad network Miva (formerly Espotting) for $11.6 million. The move is part of a growth strategy Adknowledge launched two years ago. Since then, it has gobbled up Cubics.com, Media Run Divisions, Adonomics and Lookery. This recent purchase includes Miva’s domain Findwhat.com. A public company based in Fort Meyes, Fla., Miva will retain the rights to its Miva Direct properties, which … Continue Reading

Could Apple drop the tablet bomb tomorrow?

With Apple holding its iPhone OS 3.0 preview event tomorrow, the rumor mill is in full force. And given that Apple only sent out the invite to the event last week, the amount of uncertainty about what it will show off is higher than usual — yielding even more rumors.

What we know for sure is that Apple will be previewing the 3.0 release of its new iPhone OS software. This is likely to be … Continue Reading

Transera raises $17M for on-demand call center technology

Transera, provider of software that lets its clients set up cost-effective call centers with agents (in-house or outsourced) all over the world, announced that it brought in $17 million in a fourth round of funding from Accel Partners, Apax Partners, Lighthouse Capital Partners and Storm Ventures. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company says it will use the money to go after new customers, improve its service infrastructure and continue developing its products.

In particular, Transera’s software, called … Continue Reading

Stealthy decision engine Hunch.com raises $2M

Hunch.com, the secretive self-dubbed “online decision engine,” announced that it brought in $2 million in a first round of funding — even though very little information is available about it anywhere on the web. For now, its web site is simply a form people can use to request notification when the product finally launches.

The company’s only defining feature is that it hired Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake to be its chief product officer following her … Continue Reading

PubMatic scores more funds to optimize ad revenues

PubMatic, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company that works with online publishers to squeeze more revenue out of their advertising strategies, announced that it has brought in an undisclosed amount in a second round of funding from existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Nexus India Capital and Helion Ventures. The company, which partners with 5,500 publishers right now, says the money will be used to fuel worldwide expansion.

PubMatic offers a suite of tools to streamline publishers’ … Continue Reading

33Across nabs $750K to identify influential online users

Stealthy 33Across, a startup that uses an algorithm to identify which online users are the most influential of others’ behavior, announced that it has raised $750,000 of an expected $1.5 million in second-round funding, according to peHUB. The New York-based company, which also lets its clients target messages to these users, says its platform “enables performance and brand marketers to activate the social web.”

First Round Capital has led the round so far.… Continue Reading

Roundup: Checking out of Google Checkout, Surface 2.0 and more

Here’s the latest action:

Google Checkout raises transaction fees — It seems like a weird time to do so, as merchants are already poorer from the recession. They seem to be leaving in droves. Hello, PayPal!

There’s a second-generation of Microsoft’s Surface table computing systems coming — The BBC has more.

Blogger Robert Scoble joins Rackspace — His thoughts, here.

IBM sinks into water management business — The Wall Street Journal has more.

Sequoia loses … Continue Reading

Real Time Genomics launches with $3M for data analysis software

Real Time Genomics launches today with $3 million of an anticipated $4 million first round of funding from Catamount Ventures. Based in San Francisco, the company is an American subsidiary of New Zealand-headquartered software maker NetValue, which produces a data aggregation and query program called SLIM SearchTM. The package is particularly applicable to the complex datasets associated with genomes, the company says. Real Time’s use of the software will help NetValue establish a toehold in … Continue Reading

Google channels Apple with an event . . . for iGoogle gaming themes?

Apple is a fan of sending out last-minute press invites to special events when it has a product to launch. Google, on the other hand, tends to roll things out more quietly, opting for a blog post or press release. But it’s apparently starting to favor the event strategy more and more.

Today, we received an invite to a special sneak peak of an upcoming feature for its iGoogle homepage. But oddly, it doesn’t appear … Continue Reading

Cloudera closes $5M to deliver data mining software

Cloudera, the Burlingame, Calif.-based distributor of open-source data processing engine Hadoop, brought in $5 million in first-round funding led by Accel Partners. Founded just last year by executives and data managers at Facebook, Google, Oracle and Yahoo, the company works to adapt the Hadoop system to gather and organize massive sets of data for use by companies of all different sizes.

In the past, Cloudera has taken funds from individual investors including Palm senior vice … Continue Reading

Numerate racks up $5.5M for drug engineering technology

Numerate, a San Bruno, Calif.-based biotech company that streamlines pharmaceutical production pipelines and intellectual property protections, brought in $5.5. million in a second round of funding, according to peHUB. Called the Drug Engineering Process, its system helps research teams set and methodically achieve milestones across different areas, the company says. In its two case studies, it refined therapies for diabetes and HIV.

The funds came from Foundation Capital and Lanza TechVentures. Numerate has bagged $4 … Continue Reading

Y Combinator gets a $2M shot in the arm from Sequoia, angels

Seed-stage venture firm Y Combinator is branching out in its funding strategy today, raising about $2 million from Sequoia Capital and a handful of angel investors. Previously, the firm was funded solely by founders Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston and Trevor Blackwell.

The money from Sequoia will be funneled into a new investment arm of Y Combinator, which will increase the number of companies it can fund each year from 40 to about 60. … Continue Reading

Microsoft Xbox 360 defects: Waiting for Godot in Nome, Alaska

Some stories are just too ridiculous to be believed. Kim and Blaine Galleher of Nome, Alaska, have been through an unbelievable Xbox 360 “red ring of death” runaround. Blaine, who contacted me after a newspaper wrote about it, insists that it’s true.

As reported by the Seattle Times, the Gallehers bought an Xbox 360 for their 13-year-old son. It died in mid-February of the defect problem which we’d reported as a pervasive problem last September. … Continue Reading

Make decisions with TheFunded's new Topicki tool

TheFunded, the sometimes controversial site where entrepreneurs can rate and share information about venture capitalists, is beta testing a new tool. It’s called Topicki, and it’s a site for simple decision-making and management.

There are, of course, a lot of other project management tools out there, but I don’t think anyone’s really dominating the field yet. At VentureBeat, we still use email for a lot of our decisions, which kind of sucks — there’s a … Continue Reading

Facebook to users: How open can you go?

Facebook users can now make a wide variety of information on their profiles completely open to the public. This may not be what all users want, but some do. And until now being completely open with your life on Facebook hasn’t been an option.

It’s another way Facebook is trying to compete against other social networks like MySpace and micro-blogging service Twitter, both of which share information openly.

From Facebook:

Just go to your privacy … Continue Reading

Big Stage Entertainment brings 3-D facial animations to the iPhone

Big Stage Entertainment is bringing 3-D facial modeling to the iPhone . . . sort of.

The Los Angeles company’s newest app (dubbed iStage) lets users snap photos of themselves with their iPhone cameras and convert those photos into three dimensional photo-realistic avatars. To avoid taxing the iPhone’s hardware during the process, the application uploads the pictures to Big Stage’s servers, where it performs the 3-D conversion. Once the conversion is complete, the server shoots … Continue Reading

Desktop status updates: Facebook's latest move against Twitter

Facebook has been redesigning its entire product around getting people to tell their friends what they’re up to — just as microblogging service Twitter does. Facebook’s latest step in that direction came today with the addition of status updates that appear on third-party desktop applications.

A couple of popular Twitter desktop app makers, TweetDeck and Seesmic, are already showing off the new feature. TweetDeck now lets you read a live stream of your friends’ status … Continue Reading

Intel alleges AMD breached its cross-licensing pact

The chip giants look like they’re heading toward a hot war. Intel said that Advanced Micro Devices has breached a licensing pact that has been in place since 2001.

AMD said in a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Intel sent a letter regarding the legitimacy of the pact in light of AMD’s split into two companies. Intel said that AMD’s division into a design business and a manufacturing business, the latter … Continue Reading