Yahoo revenue continues to plunge for third straight quarter

Yahoo announced another steep drop in net revenue today, citing the limping online advertising market for search and display ads as the cause for losses spanning three consecutive quarters. On a (dimly) positive note, the company did see second-quarter earnings per share that beat analysts’ expectations — but mostly due to severe cutbacks (its net income increased by almost 8 percent to $141.4 million for the same reasons).

Not only did revenue decline yet again … Continue Reading

Apple beats the street with $1.23 billion profit

That darned iPhone! Sales of iPhones and Macs turned out to be stronger than expected during the three-month period that ended on June 27th. Apple’s revenue for the quarter jumped up to $8.34 billion, with $1.23 billion of that logged as profit. That whumps last year’s $7.46 billion revenue and $1.07 billion profit.

Apple sold 2.6 million Macs, 10.2 million iPods and 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter.

The next three months are looking up … Continue Reading

Facebook Connect now available in more languages

Around 70 percent of Facebook’s 250 million monthly active users are outside of the US, and most of them aren’t speaking English. The site has been seeing massive growth around the world, partly the result of Facebook letting users translate the site into their own languages over the past couple of years. Now, the company is aiming to capitalize on its international growth by providing translated versions of its web-wide identity service, Facebook Connect.

Here’s … Continue Reading

Get paid to shop! Tibesti hacks the referral system

The Internet economy often works counter to what you’d expect in terms of who pays who. Take Tibesti, for example. Tibesti is a social network for shoppers that hacks the Internet’s referral fee system. The company lists 20 million products and is still adding more. Tibesti members are encouraged to create wishlists from this seemingly infinite supply of products. The site is primed with a set of expert reviewers to get things going, but the … Continue Reading

Khosla Ventures to bank $1B as fund-raising freeze shows signs of thaw

Khosla Ventures, the venture firm spearheaded by Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, is getting ready to close two new funds in the next two weeks: A $250 million pot to support seed-stage startups, and a $750 million pot to finance bigger deals.

Venture firms looking for funding have had a tough time recently as limited partners and institutional investors conserve their cash through the downturn. Very few new funds have made it past the starting … Continue Reading

Big Fish Games strikes deal to make games for People.com

Big Fish Games announced today it has struck an alliance to make games for People.com in an attempt to expand the market for casual games.

Jeremy Lewis, chief executive of Seattle-based Big Fish Games, said in a keynote speech at the Casual Connect game conference that the company will develop big titles for People.com, not just “white label” games (white label seems like his code for lots of generic games that really suck).

People.com has … Continue Reading

Arkadium to make advergaming social

The community gaming features found on social networking sites will soon come to Arkadium’s “advergaming” portals. (Advergaming means using video games specifically to advertise a product).

In acquiring Advergame.com and relaunching another gaming portal, GreatDayGames.com, Arkadium, whose clients include Sony, CBS and Good Housekeeping, said it’s well on the way to stepping up the way marketers can reach gamers. But the biggest change will be in social features coming to Arkadium’s network of sponsored gaming … Continue Reading

Rumored iPod Touch with camera, microphone could be used as home phone

Wired writer Eliot Van Buskirk believes the rumors are true that Apple has a new iPod in the works, one that could be used as a home phone. Van Buskirk claims to have a “well-connected source” who has verified that Apple’s factories in China are already manufacturing the device.

The rumored new model has a microphone and a camera. Loaded with Skype or another VoIP application, the enhanced iPod Touch would make a cool but … Continue Reading

Playdom launches Mobsters: Big Apple as its first iPhone game with links to MySpace version

Playdom has launched its first iPhone game, Mobsters: Big Apple, as an extension to its hit version on the MySpace social network.

The hot social games startup has the No. 1 game on MySpace with its Mobsters title, which has 13.5 million users. The company hopes to repeat that success on the iPhone as it makes a very deliberate, if late, move to take on rivals such as Social Gaming Network and Zynga on the … Continue Reading

Tapjoy partners with Pinch Media analytics on ad optimization for iPhone

Tapjoy announced today it has launched a new version of its monetization platform for iPhone apps and is also partnering with analytics firm Pinch Media. The aim is to increase profitability for iPhone app developers by giving them more options for generating revenues.

One of the things Tapjoy does is give developers the ability to optimize ads, or choose which ad network will serve ads to users in real time. This generates higher ad revenue … Continue Reading

Bill.com takes enterprise bill payment paperless

Bill.com, a startup specializing in software for online bill payment and management, has launched ePayments, a new feature that allows small and mid-sized businesses to pay anyone through direct-deposit money transfers. Now its clients can pay any individual, vendor or employee with any bank with several clicks, the Palo Alto, Calif., company says.

Bill.com claims that companies using digital means to pay bills — especially those that set up automatic payment schedules — are more … Continue Reading

Can this save the Flash game market? Mochi Media launches virtual currency

Flash games on the web started out as a hobby. Now there are tens of thousands of them that, through advertising, are generating steady incomes for their creators. And today, Mochi Media is launching a virtual currency that could extract even more revenue from those Flash games.

The announcement should be greeted with relief at the Casual Connect Summit, which is getting underway in Seattle today. Makers of casual games — those that provide short … Continue Reading

iPhone prototype goes missing; Chinese worker investigated, commits suicide

Updated

Last Thursday, 25 year-old Sun Danyong committed suicide after a fourth-generation iPhone prototype he was responsible for went missing. It’s a story, from what tech-industry friends in China tell me, of how Apple’s secretive ways send extreme pressure all the way down the company’s international supply chain.

Sun was a recent engineering graduate, and had landed a job handling product communications for electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn in Shenzhen, a leading city in the industry-heavy … Continue Reading

SlideRocket surges ahead with $5M for presentation collaboration

SlideRocket, maker of an application that allows multiple individuals to collaborate on media-rich presentations, has brought in $5 million in a second round of funding to continue developing the platform and to expand its headcount.

Based in San Francisco, the company says its product breaks through the limitations of traditional PowerPoint presentations to give users the next level of tools in the cloud. The most different feature, perhaps, is the ability to use SlideRocket to … Continue Reading

VC investing rebounds in Q2, still at mid-1990s levels

Venture capital investment activity rebounded to $3.7 billion in the second quarter, but the gains are only enough to put the sector on track to match annual levels from more than 12 years ago.

While the change in direction is reassuring, it may be a dead-cat bounce after the first-quarter’s precipitous 40 percent drop in venture capital activity. We argued then that the goldrush era of technology prospecting may be over, as Silicon Valley has … Continue Reading

Real Networks hopes syndication will make up for falling game prices

Casual games may sound like a lot of fun. But it’s a pretty difficult business these days. Real Networks is a case in point. Its game traffic is increasing slightly, but the money it can make from each game is going down, so it’s constantly having to tune its business to keep on a growth path.

Today, the Seattle-based company is announcing a significant expansion of its game syndication business, where it distributes games to … Continue Reading

Roundup: $99 BlackBerry, Skittish cyberczars, 3D YouTube, Twittermania mania

President Obama is having trouble bringing a national cybersecurity adviser on board — Forbes reports that the job is a pay cut and, worse, a power cut in the minds of many candidates. The administration wants the cyberczar to report to both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council headed by economist and former Harvard president Lawrence Summers (pictured). That latter stipulation has turned off many candidates, Forbes says. Former Virginia Senator Tom … Continue Reading

Yahoo will launch new homepage months early on Tuesday

The Wall Street Journal has obtained reliably-sourced insider information that Yahoo’s overhaul of its flagship site, a project code-named “Metro,” will go live tomorrow. The new site will encourage users to customize Yahoo with links to other sites, says the Journal:

The biggest change in the new design is a left-hand menu users can customize with links to dozens of potential third-party software, such as micro-blogging service Twitter and Google Inc.’s Gmail, said the people … Continue Reading

Demand for solar equipment on the upswing as prices fall

One of the key takeaways from last week’s Intersolar North America conference in San Francisco was that solar panel makers are seeing a much needed uptick in demand as prices for their equipment continue to decline.

Unfortunately, that demand hasn’t made it across the Atlantic to the U.S. quite yet. Europe is leading, with advantageous government incentives securely in place in Germany, Italy and Spain. China too is ramping up its efforts, which should have … Continue Reading