VentureBeat-DEMO hit Seattle, and the sun is actually shining!

We had a great cocktail party last night in Seattle, with more than 150 entrepreneurs, investors and other professionals showing up at the Spitfire bar downtown.

Chris Shipley and I found flew in yesterday, only to hit the usual mass of thick clouds that cover Seattle. But today, the sun broke through again (and resumed one of the longest, sunniest spells in Seattle ever). We’ve been holding meetings and calls all day with local entrepreneurs … Continue Reading

Dig in to the Q12009 MoneyTree Report

It may come as no surprise, but attracting the eye of a venture capital firm is a lot tougher during a recession. VC investments hit a 12-year low during the first quarter of 2009 with only 549 deals struck, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree Report.

That’s roughly half the number of deals done during the same period in 2008.

VC’s invested only $3.08 billion during the first quarter, with double digit declines … Continue Reading

DEMO & VentureBeat visit Los Angeles, prowling for great companies

We continue to search for the most exciting companies and products to launch at the DEMOfall conference in September.

Next, Chris Shipley and I are coming to Los Angeles!

Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 24, we’re meeting up for an evening of cocktails and conversation at The Parlor (pictured) in Santa Monica at 1519 Wilshire Blvd (at 15th).

We’ll start at 6:30pm. The first 40 folks through the door receive a drink ticket good for your favorite … Continue Reading

Adobe vets build rival to Flash for iPhone apps

Adobe CEO Shantana Narayu has promised a Flash player for mobile phones in October, but that’s a long way off in the current market. Meanwhile, enterprising application designers and developers are eager to get something into the iPhone App Store now, not next week.

Ansca, a San Mateo, California-based startup led by two former Adobe employees, is jumping into the gap with a software development kit that simplifies app development by bringing Flash-like qualities to … Continue Reading

With big cuts, what's next for MySpace's international efforts?

MySpace plans to lay off around 300 of its 450 international employees, and close at least four of its 15 international offices as the it tries to figure out how to survive falling traffic and revenue numbers. It laid off about the same number of people last week in its US offices, leaving around 1,000 employees as of today.

The social network spent the last couple of years trying to get more international users through … Continue Reading

Silver Spring signs deal to make Sacramento meters smart

Silver Spring Networks, one of the major players in the smart meter space, announced today that it signed a deal with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District to deploy a wireless network connecting smart meters for 600,000 homes and businesses in Sacramento County by March 2011.

The focus of the roll out is to provide residents and business owners with the data they need to make more prudent choices about their energy consumption. The utility will … Continue Reading

Conduit toolbars to get more content

For those of you who love browser toolbars, expect more options soon. Conduit, a company that lets web sites make their own, customized toolbars is letting its clients add a couple more features now. Sites can both syndicate their content to other sites that have Conduit toolbars, or include content from those sites.

Google, Yahoo and many, many other companies have their own toolbars, but these options might keep more people using Conduit. (Note: this … Continue Reading

Super Rewards' advertising offers come to Twitter games

As inevitable as spammy invites, advertising offers are now coming to games that use Twitter. Super Rewards, a leading provider of offers for games on Facebook and other social networks, is launching its service with 140 Mafia, a mafia-style Twitter role playing game.

Just like in Mob Wars on Facebook and a variety of copycat applications on various social networks, 140 Mafia has you go around its virtual world committing crimes, earning money — and … Continue Reading

Fast-growing Spil Games site adds Disney's Club Penguin

Spil Games said today it is adding Disney’s Club Penguin kids virtual world to the collection of games accessible via its online gaming portals. This move will extend Club Penguin’s reach to popular game portals in France, Brazil and the UK., and it essentially means Disney is giving its blessing to the fast-growing casual web games market.

Based in Hliversum, Netherlands, Spil Games is the parent of more than 50 casual game portals with 4,000 … Continue Reading

Web tools leave the cloud: Zoho available for SharePoint

As online office software tries to move into big corporations, it’s starting to work more closely with entrenched solutions — which often means technology built by Microsoft. In the latest example, Zoho just announced plans to offer its collaboration services as an add-on for SharePoint, Microsoft’s server and software for collaboration and document management.

Basically, that means you can use Zoho Office as the interface for collaborative editing of documents, while the documents themselves sit … Continue Reading

Collaboration software Socialtext goes free for up to 50 users

Socialtext, which offers collaboration tools like wikis and microblogging for businesses, is trying to reach a more mainstream audience with a new price: Free.

The new version of Socialtext is called the Socialtext Free 50, and as the name implies, it doesn’t cost anything for up to 50 users. It sounds like a classic “freemium” model (i.e., lure in users with a free product and make money by convincing some of them to pay for … Continue Reading

Reductive Labs scores $2M for Puppet IT automation tool

Portland, Oregon-based Reductive Labs makes Puppet, a tool for automating IT resources. Can we just say it? Puppet lets companies cut the sizes of their IT staffs. In a shrinking economy, that’s a hot ticket. Valley early-stage investor True Ventures led Reductive’s A round, which was rounded out with angel money. Reductive claims that Puppet’s users include Google, Digg, Twitter, The New York Stock Exchange, Barclays Capital, Oracle, Sun, Red Hat, Harvard Law School, and … Continue Reading

Social gaming mob war breaks out: Zynga sues Playdom

Sooner or later, if you make gangster games, things are bound to get nasty.

Zynga has filed a lawsuit against its social gaming rival Playdom, which allegedly is misleading consumers in an ad in which it entices Zynga’s Mafia Wars customers to play Playdom’s own mob-related game, Mobsters.

Both are extremely popular games. Zynga’s has 2.5 million players on Facebook. In the lawsuit, Zynga alleges that Playdom has an online ad that entices Zynga players, … Continue Reading

Brazil: Social advertising's next frontier

Trendwatchers take note: Brazil offers a fascinating glimpse at how rapidly social media has changed internet usage patterns. Brazilian consumers spend an average of 19.3 hours online for personal use versus 9.8 hours watching TV, according to a study released by Deloitte. Sixty-seven million Brazilians now have internet access, which is approximately 34 percent of the population, reports Internet World Stats.

While Google’s Orkut social network is virtually unknown to Americans, its dominance in the … Continue Reading

Has Intel finally broken into the cell phone market?

[updated] Intel and Nokia announced today they have created a strategic alliance to cooperate on future mobile devices as computing and communications converge.

They did not specifically say that Nokia will use Intel’s Atom processors in cell phones in a conference call this morning. But  Anand Chandrasekher, head of the Atom business unit at Intel, said that Intel will work on x86-based designs with Nokia.

On top of that, Nokia will work with Intel on … Continue Reading

Roundup: Flash player for mobiles; Stephen King promo texts may draw $90M fine

Three years ago, publisher Simon & Schuster text-messaged thousands of SMS users with the message, “next call you take may be your last.” It a promotional stunt for horror novelist Stephen King’s The Cell. The company has been found to be in violation of the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits companies from using automated systems to make calls to cell phones unless the owners have consented. The suit was brought on behalf … Continue Reading

Tesla's Musk fires back at founder, lawsuit

Earlier this month, Tesla Motors founder Martin Eberhard filed suit against the company and its current chief executive Elon Musk for slander, mismanagement and delivering him a damaged roadster after he’d been promised the second model off the assembly line. Now Musk has responded to the charges in a lengthy blog post today claiming that Eberhard did not have as much of a hand in the Tesla roadster’s success as he would like the public … Continue Reading

Hackers claim they harvested personal data of Facebook users

A couple of self-proclaimed “fans” of Facebook say they were able to gain access to the private information of Facebook users, including Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

The site FBHive said today that it found a security loophole in Facebook that allows anyone to view the social network’s private data about users. The data in private profiles is accessible even if that information has been hidden via privacy settings. Facebook said it has verified the … Continue Reading

LiquidPlanner raises $1M to help projects adapt when things go wrong

LiquidPlanner, which offers an online project management tool that focuses on accommodating changes in plans, has raised $1 million in funding.

The LiquidPlanner service launched about a year ago, and I found the concept pretty compelling: It has standard project management features like a calendar and tasks, but it also includes a lot of automation so that schedules and plans get adjusted as the situation changes. For example, each task is assigned a range of … Continue Reading