ZAP lands $25M, branches into full-size electric vehicles
ZAP, a company known for building electric motorcycles and three-wheel cars, has just raised $25 million in capital and plans to use the money to jump headlong into full-size electric vehicles. To buoy this effort, it is also seeking $200 million in stimulus loans from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Santa Rosa, Calif.-based ZAP is uniquely positioned for several reasons. Due to its well-developed scooter business — which has been around since 1994 — it … Continue Reading
Simply Hired hits profitability with new $4.6M
Simply Hired, a job listing search engine based in the Silicon Valley, announced today that it has crossed into profitability with a new $4.6 million in fourth-round capital from IDG Ventures and Foundation Capital. The company is also marking four consecutive quarters of positive cash flow.
Simply Hired says it plans to use the funds to expand its global presence, making it one of the top job databanks in the business. It will also grow … Continue Reading
Get ready for femtocells: Ubiquisys raises $11 M
If you’ve used an iPhone, you’ll know how frustratingly spotty its wireless coverage can be.
Fact is, wireless carriers such as AT&T (which serves the iPhone) are desperately searching for ways to unload the huge amount of traffic that are hitting their networks from iPhone and other smartphone owners. These users are slurping up large amounts of bandwidth to do things like browse the Internet and watch videos.
Ubiquisys is getting ready to attack cell … Continue Reading
BP gives nod to algae biofuels with $10M to Martek
Martek Biosciences, a company that has been working on growing algae for conversion into microbial oils and biofuels, has inked a $10 million deal with energy leader BP for the joint development of technology using fermentation to derive fuel to power transportation.
The end goal of the agreement is to produce commercially scalable methods — the most dire challenge facing the biofuel space today. With BP’s weight behind the effort, this might just be realistic. … Continue Reading
Search tech guru Doug Cutting leaves Yahoo, joins Cloudera
Doug Cutting, the respected open source engineer who has led the way in speeding up the processing of huge amounts of data, is leaving Yahoo to join a startup called Cloudera.
Cutting announced the move on his blog yesterday. The move is significant for two reasons. One, it’s one more sign that Yahoo is losing the guts of its search intelligence now that it has ceded its search initiatives to Microsoft leadership (even though Cutting … Continue Reading
Google's new search update "Caffeine" changes both look and feel
Google has unveiled a new architecture for the company’s web search, which it says will improve speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness.
The project, called Caffeine, has been worked on secretly by a large number of employees for several months, the company said in a blog post yesterday afternoon. Engineer Matt Cutts provided more information about the changes today, explaining that Caffeine is being worked on primarily “under the hood.” Short term, the company isn’t integrating much … Continue Reading
Microsoft defends Internet Explorer 6, says it's all about "user choice"
There’s been increasing pressure from frustrated web developers to get users off Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 web browser, which they say is an increasing pain to support. Last week, for example, a group of startups launched a campaign called IE6 No More, where site visitors are urged to “switch to a modern browser.”
So we can all look forward to an IE6-free future in a few months, right? Not according to a blog post written … Continue Reading
11 things an angel investor will never say
(Editor’s note: Dharmesh Shah is a serial software entrepreneur and angel investor.)
As a tribute to the very funny VC Non-Admissions and the follow-up Founder Non-Admissions, I offer to you my own take on this – from an angel investor perspective. Sorry that mine aren’t in a cool presentation form with pictures and such. I don’t have that kind of talent.
10 Things An Angel Investor Will Never Say
1. I really want to support … Continue Reading
Twitter CEO's wife tweets about labor, ongoing birth of first child
Sara Morishige Williams, Twitter CEO Ev Williams’ wife, is certainly making use of the company product — for the birth of their first child.
She went old-school, using text messages rather than a fancy application to post the news. Twitter, meanwhile, has gone so mainstream (at least in parts of the country) that Morishige will be far from the first person to tweet a birth. The San Jose Mercury News reported last week that expectant … Continue Reading
"Mobile shopping" ads promise more in-store sales
“Our experience with iPhone shoppers shows they are 17 times more likely to go to a local store than buy online,” NearbyNow CEO Scott Dunlap said in a press release I’d have otherwise deleted. NearbyNow makes what insiders call a “white label” technology for finding and selling to shoppers who now carry their smartphones into the store.
NearbyNow today announced what they’re calling the NearbyNow iPhone Platform, based on the company’s previous work building an … Continue Reading
Video startup Ooyala appoints Agile Software's Jay Fulcher as CEO
Video platform company Ooyala just announced that Jay Fulcher, who was president and chief executive of Agile Software when it sold to Oracle for $495 million, is its new chief executive and president.
The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., and founded by a group of former Googlers, revealed last month that it had been looking for a new chief executive. Co-founder and then-chief executive Bismarck Lepe said the search was his decision, not investor … Continue Reading
Roundup: Facebook-meets-FriendFeed photos, Verizon's bad deals, Scoble is leaving Facebook … now?
Facebook meets FriendFeed — Much of today’s massive coverage of Facebook’s planned acquisition of social network aggregation service FriendFeed seems to presume that readers know what FriendFeed is. My Slate article from last August is still a good intro. FriendFeed now crawls more than 50 sites and delivers what’s now being called “real-time search.” That means you can leave your search results window open and watch new results pop in at the top of the … Continue Reading
Benchmark's Peter Fenton nails both FriendFeed, SpringSource deals in one day
Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton scored two exits in one day — a rarity in the world of venture capital.
Fenton was the lead partner behind SpringSource’s $420 million sale to VMWare, the company’s biggest acquisition yet, and FriendFeed’s sale to Facebook. A competitive triathlete, Fenton has his hands in several of Silicon Valley’s most talked-about companies: He joined Twitter’s board of directors in its most recent fundraising round and holds a seat on Yelp’s board, … Continue Reading
Facebook gets more FriendFeed-like with improved search
In discussing today’s news that Facebook is acquiring social sharing service FriendFeed, both companies have emphasized that the deal is more about talent than technology — which makes sense, because Facebook has been incorporating FriendFeed’s features for a while now. Here’s another FriendFeed-like addition: Facebook is rolling out a new search feature today.
With this feature, users can see every time a certain search term showed up in their news feed during the last 30 … Continue Reading
Introducing "Conversations on Innovation"
We’re pleased to announce that Microsoft will be sponsoring a series of posts called “Conversations on Innovation,” which will be about the most cutting-edge technology developments of our day.
We’ll be publishing the pieces over the next few weeks. Beginning Wednesday, we’ll tackle our first theme: natural human interface technology. Here, touch technology and motion recognition are combining to allow impressively intelligent applications — many of which will soon be in your car, your home … Continue Reading
Pelican scoops up $7M for computational cameras
Pelican Imaging, a company specializing in computational cameras, has brought in $7 million in a first round of funding, according to PE Hub. Recent backers of the Soquel, Calif., company include Granite Ventures and InterWest Partners.… Continue Reading
Power Assure charges up with $2.5M for data center energy management
Power Assure, maker of software that reduces the amount of energy used by data centers, has raised $2.5 million in a first round of funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and a handful of angel investors. Based in Santa Clara, Calif., the company distinguished itself by managing power capacity proportionally to application load.… Continue Reading
Silicon Valley software developers to get WiMAX network soon
WiMAX, the next-generation technology that will replace aging Wi-Fi networks with smarter, faster Internet access, is slated to launch in the Bay Area in 2010. But a small cadre of software developers will be able to access the network much sooner.
A twenty square mile network, dubbed the WiMAX Innovation Network, “will be announced in the coming weeks”, we learned from Clearwire today. Setting up a network in the Bay Area has proven harder than … Continue Reading
FriendFeed's price tag? $50 million, WSJ says
Facebook paid $50 million in cash and stock to buy social sharing site FriendFeed today, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper reported: “The company paid roughly $15 million in cash, with the rest in Facebook stock that vests over several years and would be worth roughly $32.5 million based on the $6.5 billion common valuation an investor recently placed on the company.”
FriendFeed last raised money in 2008 with $5 million from Benchmark … Continue Reading
FriendFeed future cloudy; co-founder Buchheit says he'll "do the right thing" for users
FriendFeed’s sale today to Facebook inevitably raises questions about whether the site will slowly fade out of existence as other acquired companies have.
“The long-term plans are something we need to work out here,” said FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit. “This very much intersects with Facebook’s long-term plans. We are committed to doing the right thing for our users.”
Sounds fairly ominous for FriendFeed users, who have praised the site’s real-time updates and sharing features. FriendFeed … Continue Reading
