Crescendo captures $5M to accelerate delivery of web apps

Crescendo Networks, a company that claims to deliver web applications for enterprises faster and more efficiently, has raised $5 million in a fourth round of venture funding from Trilogy Equity Partners, Evergreen Venture Partners, Apax Partners, StageOne Ventures and Challenge Fund, reports PE Hub. Based in Menlo Park, Calif., it has raised more than $45 million to date and plans to use its recent financing to build out its sales organization.… Continue Reading

iLike, Sony launch new music trivia app to boost song sales

iLike, a platform for sharing music via social networks and other sites, took a step in a new direction today with the launch of its iLike Challenge application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Available starting now in the Apple App Store, iLike Challenge allows users to compete with one another (or just test their own knowledge) based on how any songs they can correctly identify during a timed session. All of the music is … Continue Reading

Probability management: The new arithmetic for risk

Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists know there is no return without risk. But they can enhance their odds of success by tapping into the emerging field of probability management to better visualize how the risks of individual ventures combine to make up total venture portfolio risk. This is vital in managing the risks and returns of their overall investment strategy.

The conventional wisdom in venture capital is that among ten startup investments, one will hit a … Continue Reading

Employee smartphone manager MobileIron raises $11M

MobileIron, a company that helps corporate IT departments manage employee smartphones, originally caught my eye because it had the backing of some impressive venture firms — Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, and Storm Ventures. Now the Sunnyvale, Calif. company has raised an $11 million second round co-led by the same investors.

MobileIron launched officially just a couple of weeks ago. The company’s key technology involves the creation of a virtual version of each employee’s smartphone … Continue Reading

Power2Switch lets small businesses choose their electricity suppliers

Editor’s note: This is part of VentureBeat’s series “Startup Spotlight.” Every week, we’ll sift through the scores of companies applying to be promoted and profile the best one. Companies can sign up here at the Entrepreneur Corner, which is currently sponsored by Microsoft. (Of course, we’re still interested in covering startup news and innovation in our day-to-day coverage.) Today, we continue the series with Power2Switch, below.

Power2Switch, a young startup bringing the energy market to … Continue Reading

Acrossair develops augmented reality restaurant, entertainment listings

The augmented reality browser market is getting nice and crowded. Earlier today, we covered GraffitiGeo, which has an upcoming augmented reality app.

Now British iPhone app developer acrossair, which created the augmented reality subway finding app Nearest Tube, is launching a browser of its own with restaurant and theater listings.

What’s augmented reality? It’s a burgeoning field that lets you see information or 3-D graphics superimposed over real objects in a live camera feed. With … Continue Reading

Roblox raises $2.3M to help kids build casual games

Roblox, a casual games and virtual world site aimed at children, has raised about $2.3 million in a first round of funding, according to a regulatory filing.

It looks like Roblox allows users to create free games using building blocks that look kind of like Legos, though the site emphasizes that the Redwood City, Calif., company is not affiliated with Lego or similar products. The Roblox site also says the product is still in early … Continue Reading

sfCube launches to seed fledgling startups

A new early-stage startup incubator, sfCube, has launched in San Francisco to seed as many as 12 companies with between $10,000 and $25,000. Its founders, startup veteran and former engineer Dylan Rosario and patent lawyer Ben Bedi, say they are especially interested in funding web-based services, cleantech initiatives and search companies.

The incubator is in the process of raising its fund, with a target between $8 and $20 million. It says the bulk of this … Continue Reading

Buzz matches user-generated video with location: Could lead to radical political activism

When the iPhone 3G S launched two months ago boasting a video-recording feature, we all knew there’d be a surge of user-generated video content. The 3G S is the ultimate video-blogging tool: It provides a faster network, and lets you edit your video straight on your phone too.

Combine that with location, and you’ve got quite a powerful tool. That’s what a new video iPhone app, Buzz, has done with a new application that launched … Continue Reading

Like.com team shuts down visual search site Riya

Riya, the visual search engine whose team later built shopping site Like.com, is shutting down later this month.

The closure only finalizes a shift that started happening years ago — although the San Mateo, Calif. company is still called Riya, it has been focusing on Like.com for a while now. It doesn’t look like too many users will miss the site either, according to data from Compete. In an email sent to users (and published … Continue Reading

GraffitiGeo: A mobile mix of Yelp and Mob Wars

GraffitiGeo is the latest company to offer an iPhone application that gives you a quick way to see and rate restaurants — but it provides the added simplicity of letting you merely point your phone at the physical location.

The application is pending approval by Apple’s app store (and to be clear, this will be the company’s second application; its existing app is meant to be a sort of Twitter-based Digg for restaurant ratings.)

Here’s … Continue Reading

Moving product at unprecedented scale

In April of 2009, Facebook hit 200 million users – an amazing level of growth for a company that is still relatively new. Speaking at an entrepreneurial thought leader lecture at Stanford University, COO Sheryl Sandberg reflects on how the web has dramatically altered scale for entrepreneurs. It’s no longer just about making a product that people want, she says, it’s also being able to know how to distribute it in a smart way that … Continue Reading

Roundup: Apple tablet likely next year, gaming hits rough patch, Msft exec leaves…

Here’s the latest action:

More rumors about the Apple tablet — It will have a 10-inch screen, look like a giant iPhone, and will come in two editions, one with a webcam and one without, and it’ll cost $700-$900, according to Gizmodo. But that could be wrong, according to others. Meantime, others are hearing that Apple plans to hold a keynote event the week of Sept. 7, but that the tablet won’t be unveiled there … Continue Reading

Thing Labs releases peek at Twitter client Brizzly

Thing Labs, a San Francisco start-up made up of several former members of the Google Reader team, released a video preview of its upcoming Twitter application, Brizzly.

About 80 percent of Twitter’s users don’t access the service through the main site. Instead, they go through third-party applications or clients like TweetDeck, Tweetie and now, Brizzly.

Brizzly expands shared photos and videos from Twitter so you don’t have to leave the application for a separate Web … Continue Reading

Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, augmented reality Gary Coleman?

Want Gary Coleman to predict the next 25 years of your life? Right….

The 80s sitcom star is in an augmented reality Facebook application where you download and print a graphic, hold it up to your Web cam, and a 3-D bobblehead of him will appear in the feed telling your fortune along with the futures of 25 of your friends.

Augmented reality is a young field where developers can overlay information or 3-D graphics … Continue Reading

Australia nixes carbon trading — What does that mean for the U.S.?

The Australian Parliament has voted down ambitious legislation that would have reduced greenhouse gases 5 to 25 percent in the next decade by forcing the nation’s top 1,000 polluters to buy and trade emissions permits.

The plan was defeated by a pretty wide margin — 42 to 30 — with the Greens Party lining up in favor and the conservative members, many backed by big business, on the opposing side. In the end, arguments that … Continue Reading

Hacker Dojo, finally a hangout where coders can go 24/7

A group of entrepreneurs have created a new community center for hackers in the heart of Silicon Valley called Hacker Dojo, where coders can come together and work on projects any time of the day or week.

The group has just signed a lease on a 4,400 square foot building in Mountain View. People using the center will pay a $100 membership fee every month.

One of the group’s founding members, David Weekly, tells me … Continue Reading

Andreessen gets back into browsers with RockMelt?

Netscape founder turned investor Marc Andreessen seems to be returning to his browser roots with his newly christened venture fund. According to ReadWriteWeb, he’s backing a stealth Facebook browser called RockMelt.

Andreessen’s not new to the social networking scene either. He previously helped found build-your-own-social-network company Ning.

RockMelt’s engineering team is reportedly from Opsware (a software company Andreessen sold to HP for $1.6 billion in 2007) and also has Robert John Churchill, the principal engineer … Continue Reading

Solar maker Q-Cells lays off 500, moves to restructure

Germany-based Q-Cells, the second largest maker of solar cells in the world, announced today that it is cutting its staff by a fifth — trimming 500 jobs from its 2,600 workforce. The company has been very frank about reducing costs in order to remain competitive in an increasingly heated market.

Prices for solar cells have dropped off in the last several months due to oversupply, causing companies like Q-Cells and its Chinese competitor JA Solar … Continue Reading