Sun sets on satellite operator ProtoStar

ProtoStar, a company that leases satellite usage to broadband providers in Asia, has filed for bankruptcy and is moving quickly to sell off its remaining satellites, reports VentureWire. The San Francisco-based company fell upon hard times when it lost two customers to the economic downturn, putting one of its satellites out of commission.

ProtoStar still has a sizable amount of debt, but its creditors have begrudgingly agreed to keep it afloat until it sells off … Continue Reading

Catamount finalizes $80M early-stage fund

San Francisco-based venture firm Catamount Ventures announced that it closed its fourth fund at $80 million, according to VentureWire. It plans to use the smaller fund to back early-stage companies in the IT and cleantech sectors.

The fund had initially raised $74.15 million in February, but was able to tack on an additional $15 million from an undisclosed source. In fact, Catamount has declined to name any of its contributors, though a regulatory filing for … Continue Reading

Spy photo snags Steve Jobs back at Apple. Also: Why Apple won't be at CES 2010

TMZ beat the tech bloggers with this photo of Apple CEO Steve Jobs crossing one of the streets that run through Apple’s campus in Cupertino, Calif., at the bottom end of Silicon Valley. Jobs, whose health has been a hot gossip topic for months, is notably thin following a liver transplant about three months ago. The full picture is below.

The photo was, TMZ says, taken on an iPhone around 3 pm on Wednesday. TMZ … Continue Reading

Heatwave Interactive unveiling hip-hop online role-playing game with T.I.

We all want to live the lifestyle of musicians. Parties, concerts, groupies.

That’s the idea behind Platinum Life, a new kind of online role-playing game from Heatwave Interactive, which has teamed up to make the game with hip hop artist T.I., who has sold millions of records.

“The game is about the aspiration to live the life of T.I.,” said Anthony Castoro, chief executive of Heatwave.

In the online game, you play the role of … Continue Reading

Five marketing time wasters

Deciding how to allocate time and resources is a difficult process for any business -and it’s even harder for start-ups. But of all the allocation decisions to be made, there’s none more difficult than marketing.

Promote your company too little and you’re almost certainly doomed to fail. Promote it too much and you’re squandering dollars that might be better spent on R&D or preparing for a fundraising round.

As you consider your marketing strategies, here … Continue Reading

uShow lets videos skip to the good stuff

Sometimes, the best part of a video is a minute or two past the starting point, and a new service called uShow is making it easier for users to get there.

The service lets users tag online video with notes or names of people they follow on Twitter or Facebook. Once tagged, a link to the video can be shared with anyone, and it automatically jumps to the relevant playback point.

The idea is, if … Continue Reading

Mint.com data: Economy may be bouncing back

Economic forecasts? National numbers on consumer spending? Who needs them when we’ve got user data from personal finance site Mint.com?

Okay, so we’re not talking about data that represents the US public as a whole — not only is it a limited group, it’s also risky comparing data between time periods, since Mint’s user base has grown and changed since the service launched in the fall of 2007. But hey, the Mountain View, Calif., company … Continue Reading

Roundup: Milken launches business advice site, Palm blowhard proves wrong, Microsoft goes on a "permanent diet"

Michael Milken-backed business advice site goes live — Bizmore is a new businessperson-to-businessperson advice site aimed at small business and small enterprise execs. The site, which I’ll disclose that I worked on for all of three days last year, aims to fill a perceived gap in sound business advice on the Internet at sites like BNET. In fact, Bizmore stole BNET editor Jeff Davis to be its editor in chief. The New York Times reports … Continue Reading

Security researchers: Online transactions aren't as safe as we thought

Internet security is busted, said researchers at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas today.

If this sounds familiar it’s because just a year ago, Dan Kaminsky (pictured left) found a flaw in the Internet’s address book, the Domain Name System, where hackers could fool DNS servers into redirecting traffic to bogus sites. The tech industry pulled together quickly to patch the hole and minimize the vulnerability.

The same thing happened here, as Kaminsky rounded … Continue Reading

Cleantech investing surges 73 percent in Q2 after gloomy Q1

Investment in the cleantech sector leaped 73 percent to $572 million in the second quarter. Financing was distributed across 48 rounds — a full 100 percent increase from the previous quarter, according to new analysis from Ernst & Young based on Dow Jones Venture Source data. These stats defy the basement levels of investment in the sector earlier this year.

That being said, the figures are still down from where they were a year ago. … Continue Reading

Blog millionaire Jason Calacanis offers best analysis of Yahoo / Microsoft deal

The baby-faced, fast-talking entrepreneur, who edited Silicon Alley Reporter during Web 1.0 and sold Engadget and some other blogs to AOL for more than $25 million in his Web 2.0 comeback, lacks only one thing to make him a star business pundit: An editor.

VentureBeat can help here. Jason, here’s my rewrite of your blog post today about why Yahoo’s search deal with Microsoft is a suicide move:

“Yahoo was once the No. 1 search … Continue Reading

Michael Arrington's plan to save The New York Times: The best writers should quit

It seems like everyone has a plan to save The New York Times, but TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington proposed something a little different today: The best writers should just quit and start their own blog.

“If the top 50 journalists out of The New York Times walked out the door, raised $100 million from a hedge fund and started a site, it would be profitable.” Arrington said, speaking at the AlwaysOn Summit at … Continue Reading

Intel Capital grows commitment to cleantech with five new investments

Intel Capital is no stranger to the clean technology space, but today, it took its participation to the next level with five investments in green companies, amounting to $10 million in all. In the mix, it brought one new portfolio company, demand response firm CPower, into its fold.

While Intel declined to say how much it was giving each startup, it said it was providing follow-on investments to Irish company Powervation, and U.S.-based Convey Computer, … Continue Reading

Palm's Pre fails to help Sprint, and RIM snickers

[Disclosure: This post is one of a series of articles sponsored by Verizon. The company has given us editorial freedom to write what we'd like. In return for us covering the company's developer conference, Verizon will be running ads on our site in ensuing weeks.]

Sprint Nextel’s much-vaunted launch of the Palm Pre smartphone hasn’t turned around losses in the company’s subscriber base yet, according to second-quarter earnings results. The company said today … Continue Reading

Paying for partly-watched video ads? BrightRoll has a fix for that

Video ad network BrightRoll has introduced a new payment model for video ads, one under which advertisers only pay if the viewer watches the entire clip to completion. Ad networks have long stalled on revealing completion data, because the number of ads that get fully watched are so few. Inevitably, though, BrightRoll’s clients, who include Wal-Mart, Visa, Sony and Warner Brothers, pushed for the new pricing system. BrightRoll has dubbed it Cost Per Completed Video, … Continue Reading

Poor Yahoo, here's a defense

Looking around the Internet, it’s hard to find arguments in favor of Yahoo handing its search technology to Microsoft. Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis calls the move “seppuku,” and the Guardian’s Charles Arthur said the gains for Yahoo are “invisible.” The stock market wasn’t too friendly to Yahoo, either.

So call me a fool, but I’d like to take a shot at defending Yahoo.

What sticks in my head is Yahoo’s dominance in the content market. … Continue Reading

Report charts out "iPhone Middle Class" of app developers

Flurry, a small San Francisco company that provides application use data to mobile app developers, has done a study of the app developers you don’t normally read in the press. They’re neither the top nor the bottom of the field, they’re the bourgeoisie in the middle, the iPhone Middle Class making money but not garnering headlines for their moderate sales revenue.

Flurry’s analysis will be ongoing, but the first post already brings useful analysis of … Continue Reading

If these security guys get hacked, what hope do the rest of us have?

Dan Kaminsky and Kevin Mitnick, two of the biggest names in computer security circles, had their web sites hacked and their personal data posted online just as the Black Hat security conference gets under way in Las Vegas.

Kaminsky (pictured) is due to give a talk today on his latest research. Last year, he set off a firestorm when he revealed that he had discovered a fundamental flaw in the security of the Internet. His … Continue Reading

How much is Twitter worth? $589 million, says SharesPost report

Twitter shares might be worth between $19 and $26, giving the company a valuation of up to $589 million, according to NeXt Up! research. The report is part of SharesPost, a private equity market allowing buyers and sellers to exchange shares of pre-IPO companies. NeXt Up! is a research firm co-founded by Michael Moe, a former senior managing director and director of global growth research at Merrill Lynch. The report is available here.

The research … Continue Reading

AT&T's $375 subsidy boosts Apples' iPhone profit margin to 60 percent

Turley Muller, who writes the Financial Alchemist blog, has laid out the math on Apple’s iPhone costs and pricing. Muller calls attention once again to something VentureBeat has reported before: AT&T is nearly buying its customers their iPhones. Customers now pay $99 to $299 for their phone. AT&T kicks in another $375 to bring iPhone prices down so low that the feature-packed device becomes a better buy than a cheaper but less-subsidized phone from another … Continue Reading