Personal finance site Mint hits 1M users
Updated
Mint, a site that allows users to track their bank, credit card, and investment accounts through a single free service, just announced that it signed up its 1 millionth user on Sunday.
The news is just the latest sign of the Mountain View, Calif. company’s rapid growth since launching in a crowded field of finance sites at the TechCrunch40 conference in September 2007. It looks like Mint has become a hit through its intense … Continue Reading
EA Sports chief Peter Moore on upcoming games
Electronic Arts sports game chief Peter Moore held court in downtown San Francisco last Thursday as his division offered the press its first look at 2009 releases like Fight Night Round 4, Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf 10, Grand Slam Tennis, Tiger Woods on the iPhone and EA Sports Active. VentureBeat sat down with Moore during the event in a one-on-one interview and here is what he had to say.
VB: Last year, the big … Continue Reading
Enterprise consultancy TCS expands in downturn, teams with startups
As the global downturn deepens and many companies lay low, business-services giant Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai, India, plans to keep growing worldwide and strengthening its global network of startups, venture investors and technology partners.
In a recent interview with VentureBeat by conference call, TCS chief technology officer Ananth Krishnan said that many of the outsourcing firm’s clients “are using this period of economic uncertainly to streamline their IT systems and business processes.” Rather than … Continue Reading
Aussie startups take on Manhattan
Australia has a small but vibrant community of digital media innovators. Starved of funds by a dying venture capital sector, most have gotten by through boot-strapping. And with a home market of only 21 million, they’re looking to export sales early in their life cycles.
Even deep in the global economic crisis, the plummeting Australian dollar makes the New York market look like a good bet.
So last week a group of seven Australian mobile … Continue Reading
Sony's PlayStation 3 blockbuster: Killzone 2 lives up to the hype
Just when we thought the Nintendo Wii had won the video game console war, along comes Sony’s Killzone 2.
In 2005, Sony whet our appetite for the PlayStation 3 (which debuted in 2006, without Killzone 2) by showing off a demo of a then-distant game. It was a beautiful cinematic shot of the opening scene of the sci-fi game, with outstanding graphics and grueling first-person combat. It was so good that the game press launched … Continue Reading
Is the social stream the new email?
During the “Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet” panel today at SXSW (moderated by VentureBeat’s own Eric Eldon) all the participants agreed that social streams of data are going to be an integral part of the web going forward. David Sacks, the chief executive of Yammer, went farther, calling these streams “email 2.0.” No one seemed to disagree.
With Facebook’s new redesign now fully in place and focusing on real-time updates in … Continue Reading
Facebook: Your iPhone apps can now have friends
I’m here at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, live-blogging what Facebook has billed as a big announcement.
And it is: “For the first time, your iPhone apps can now have friends,” says Dave Morin, Facebook’s senior platform manager.
The company has been working with a number of third-party Facebook and iPhone game developers to more tightly integrate Facebook user data into iPhone and iPod Touch games and other applications.
While companies have previously … Continue Reading
HP Labs reports on its restructuring and open initiatives
A year ago, Hewlett-Packard revamped its approach to fundamental research with a restructuring at HP Labs. The population of the labs’ research team had been declining for years, so new director Prith Banerjee decided to refocus the team from hundreds of projects to just 20 or 30.
A year later, Banerjee said the team is much more focused on just 23 major projects now and 40 smaller ones, has eight areas of focus for its … Continue Reading
VIA Pharmaceuticals nabs loan for cardiovascular treatment
Public biotech company VIA Pharmaceuticals secured a loan of up to $10 million from Bay City Capital to fuel further development of its lead drug candidate for cardiovascular disease, reports VentureWire. Bay City was the company’s only backer before it went public in 2007.
Based in San Francisco, the company makes a pill that reduces the inflammation of blood vessels that leads to heart attacks or strokes. It is currently in phase-two clinical trials. VIA … Continue Reading
Roundup: PG&E installs smart meters, Stewart cows Cramer, the market seesaws and more
MySpace Events get an upgrade — The network’s new event invite system takes more advantage of users’ social circles. TechCrunch has more.
PG&E smart meters get the green light — The utility will spend $467 million in taxpayer money to install the meters in California homes. The San Jose Mercury News has the story.
Student VC firms feel the burn — The downturn has dried up cash for small university-based venture firms run by students, … Continue Reading
Juror tweets $12.6M verdict
Twitter ruins everything. Judging from recent headlines, it seems like elected officials are having the hardest time getting a handle on the micro-blogging service — one representative tweeted about a secret trip to Iraq, while another tweet may have ruined party defection plans in the Virginia State Senate. Now another set of tweets may be threatening a $12.6 million verdict in Arkansas.
The messages in question came from Johnathan Powell, who sat as a juror … Continue Reading
SXSW: Check out Eric's panel on the future of feeds
In the last couple of years, “feeds” — reverse-chronological lists of messages, links to web pages, and other information — have become central to the most cutting-edge web services, like Facebook and Twitter. But how will feeds evolve in the future? I’ll be moderating a panel tomorrow (Saturday afternoon) at South By Southwest in Austin, trying to answer that question. It’s titled: “Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet,” and it will start … Continue Reading
Why are there canals on (Google) Mars?
Not satisfied with exploring the 3D version of our planet in Google Earth? Well, you can check out the red planet, too, with Mars in Google Earth. Not satisfied with that, either? Now you can explore maps of Mars from the past, as well as view “live” footage and get a guided audio tour from Bill Nye the Science Guy, as Google announced today.
My favorite new feature is the ability to view historical maps. … Continue Reading
Struggling in-game ad firm IGA Worldwide seeks investments or possible sale
IGA Worldwide, a company that inserts ads into video games, is struggling with the recession. The New York company is trying to close a new round of funding, but it has also put itself up for sale.
Justin Townsend, chairman (pictured below), said in a phone call today that the company’s preference is to finish closing a third round of funding within a matter of weeks. But he said the company also had a fiduciary … Continue Reading
Your mom is leaving MySpace for Facebook (but you aren't)
MySpace has been maligned for what appears to be stagnant if not declining traffic in its core U.S. userbase. But the story is more nuanced, and not so dire. Sure, MySpace’s overall traffic has taken a big hit over the last year — a 28 percent drop from 72.92 percent of the U.S. social networking market a year ago to 52.21 percent this past February, according to new numbers from web measurement firm Hitwise. And … Continue Reading
FriendFeed gives your desktop an information morsel
Lifestreaming service FriendFeed is taking another small step today toward making information feeds easier to consume — it’s launching a simple desktop application that shows you real-time updates from the site. You can already get real-time updates from FriendFeed on your desktop through third-party applications like Twhirl. That app lets you read, sort and respond to shared items and comments on FriendFeed; it also includes integration with Twitter. But FriendFeed’s own app feels cleaner, and … Continue Reading
OneSwarm delivers new way to share files anonymously
Today, virtually everyone is a content provider. But content distributed through BitTorrent trackers can be monitored by third parties, a fact some users don’t like. Third parties can, for example, monitor sharing and then use the data for marketing purposes.
Enter OneSwarm, a file sharing application made by some of the same developers who created the BitTorrent client BitTyrant. Instead of transmitting data directly from sender to receiver and identifying them both, the OneSwarm application … Continue Reading
ABC News to interview John McCain — on Twitter
One of the biggest complaints about Twitter is that its 140-character limit is simply not enough to say what you need to say sometimes. Of course, this limit works both ways — it can also stop people from going on for too long about something. And that’s something that politicians are known for. So in a way, an interview with a politician conducted entirely over Twitter almost makes sense. Almost.
And that’s exactly what ABC … Continue Reading
20 years ago: The web's Big Bang
Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee wrote his original proposal for a better kind of linked information system. He was doing consulting for CERN in Switzerland, and found that its communication infrastructure was leading to information loss. So he proposed a solution using something called Hypertext. This led to the Hypertext Markup Language, or, as it’s more commonly known now, HTML. That in turn, led to the World Wide Web.
Berners-Lee openly admits he had … Continue Reading
Fire Eagle perches on Facebook
Despite the hype they get, location-based services have yet to catch on in the mainstream. The problem so far is that most of the social networks that use location are relatively small — at least, compared to something like Facebook, which is nearing 200 million users. But a new Facebook app from Yahoo will remedy this situation, at least somewhat: Friends on Fire.
The app was built by Yahoo’s Fire Eagle team. Fire Eagle is … Continue Reading
