Wikipedia gets $2M from Omidyar Network

Philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network just announced that it’s making a $2 million grant to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that runs online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The investment firm was started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, so the two groups seem like an obvious fit, with their shared do-gooder missions and tech roots. Wikipedia, of course, is extremely popular (the press release cites comScore numbers showing the site receives 300 million unique monthly visitors and … Continue Reading

U.S. puts clean coal projects to the test with $27.6M

The U.S. Department of Energy announced that it will provide $27.6 million in funding to 19 different projects testing the efficiency of underground carbon dioxide sequestration as a potential strategy for reducing greenhouse gases and preventing global warming.

Coal is still the most plentiful source of energy in the U.S., with the plants that use it churning out 80 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. Any effective, affordable technology capable of slashing this output … Continue Reading

Channels.com centralizes and stores Web video

Channels.com compiles video from around the Web — including premium TV shows — into a central hub, where you can create playlists and subscribe to the shows you like. The two-year old Palo Alto-based start-up relaunched today with a new design stressing premium content. (The old site was more of a rough RSS service — a tool for subscribing to content on the Web, in this case video — for early adopters.)

Channels.com reckons itself … Continue Reading

Wired takes on Craigslist founder, who promptly walks into a door

Wired writer Gary Wolf has done the best job ever of capturing the enigmatic, inspiring, yet clumsy personality of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. If you’ve ever met Craig at a party and found it hard to hold a conversation with him, don’t feel bad. Charlie Rose had the same problem on national TV.

Wolf’s assessment of Newmark’s business is that Craigslist has refused to evolve, in part because Newmark is happier replying to customer support … Continue Reading

Nintendo's Wii Sports Resort tops a million sold in a month

Nintendo said today that it has sold more than 1 million Wii Sports Resort games in the U.S. alone since its launch on July 26, a bright spot for a games industry that has had few big hits so far in 2009.

Wii Sports Resort is the sequel to the 2006 game that helped Nintendo’s Wii console steal the No. 1 spot in the game console business. On a worldwide basis, about 50 million copies … Continue Reading

Yahoo acquires Maktoob, jumps into fast-growing Arabic ad market

While Internet ad spending has fallen off in North America and Europe, the Arab online ad market is still growing between 25 and 50 percent per year. That’s the claim Yahoo’s senior vice president of emerging markets, Keith Nilsson (pictured) made at a press conference in Dubai earlier today announcing Yahoo’s purchase of Arabic portal site Maktoob. (This link goes to the English version of the site.)

Yahoo paid $75 to $80 million for Maktoob, … Continue Reading

Aboomba tests a new fundraising strategy: Get married

With venture investing still down, and the VC industry likely to shrink even further, what’s a cash-strapped startup to do? The soon-to-be-married couple behind stealth-mode web company Aboomba decided to take a fresh approach: Ask their wedding guests for funding.

Drue Kataoka, an artist who co-writes the Valley Zen blog, and Svetlozar Kazanjiev are getting married on August 29, and like any couple, they’ve created a registry listing their requests for wedding gifts. But rather … Continue Reading

Do the math: An easy formula to forecast customer growth

Venture capitalists don’t want to hear about value – at least not initially. Before you have a shot at a capital injection, you’ll first have to provide firmly grounded revenue projections. And to do that, you need to know exactly how your customer base in going to grow.

The benefits extend beyond VC interests. Customer forecasting correlates closely with cash forecasting, so the better you are at predicting customer behavior, the better you’ll be with … Continue Reading

What's really happening to venture capital industry?

Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital, has written one of the clearest explanations yet about what is happening to the venture capital industry.

Bottom line: Don’t be surprised if the number of VC firms in the U.S. is cut in half. And don’t be surprised if the average Silicon Valley resident doesn’t notice.

The reason: The VC industry may well return to the size it was during the mid-1990s, and this will be … Continue Reading

Rhomobiles's RhoSync server adds push notification to enterprise apps

With the proliferation of multiple competing smartphone platforms, there’s been more talk about the pain that can cause an application developer — Google’s Vic Gundotra has even said Google is “not rich enough” to develop native apps for every smartphone out there. Since launching in March, a startup called Rhomobile has been trying to ease that pain, and now it’s taking even closer aim at big, enterprise-scale companies.

Cupertino, Calif.-based Rhomobile says that rather than … Continue Reading

Smith & Tinker raises $29 million to launch Nanovor web game and toy

In the biggest venture funding for a game company this year, Smith & Tinker disclosed today that it has raised $29 million to date for its line of interactive games and toys that combine both web and handheld gadget play for a generation of kids who have grown up with the Internet.

The investors in the second round, which closed in July, include Alsop Louie Partners, DCM, Foundry Group, Leo Capital Holdings and billionaire Paul … Continue Reading

Parallels to make switching to the Mac easier, safe and painless

In the Windows vs. Mac war, we are at a crossroads. Apple is launching its Snow Leopard version of the Mac operating system on Friday at the low price of $29. Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system will launch in October with the primary aim of fixing the problems created by Windows Vista.

There has never been a better time to switch to the Mac. Parallels, which makes software so you can run Windows or Mac … Continue Reading

Tweetmeme experiments with commenting features

Tweetmeme, a content aggregator and sharing service fueled by tweets, is experimenting with commenting features to bolster its position as a leading Twitter-tracking service.

The U.K.-based site tracks retweets, a way of sharing content on the microblogging network, to fuel its main page of popular links and its real-time search results. Tweetmeme’s traffic soared to near 12 million unique visitors last month from 6,000 at the beginning of the year, according to Compete.

With Tweetmeme’s … Continue Reading

Roundup: Jobs hard at work on new tablet, Wikipedia to review revisions on living people, and more

Here’s the latest action:

Steve Jobs is really honestly definitely back at work, driving people crazy and working on that tablet you’ve read about — The Wall Street Journal confirms that His Steveness has been hounding employees just like the old days as Apple pushes to get its Crunchpad-like device out the door. Except that Apple’s tablet will be prettier, and it will have some crazy only-Apple-would-do-that gimmick to it, like the talking iPod. I’m … Continue Reading

Trilliant, IBM join forces to help utilities smart up their grids

Trilliant, provider of radio transmission devices and networks that allow smart meters to wirelessly beam energy consumption data between utilities and their customers, has become the newest of IBM’s partners in its smart grid efforts.

Trilliant will be integrating its software, called UnitySuite, with two of IBM’s software products, WebSphere and Tivoli. The result should help utilities scale their smart meter rollouts much faster and more securely, Trilliant says. The deal gives IBM rights to … Continue Reading

Irex partners with Barnes & Noble to challenge Amazon's Kindle

Irex Technologies announced a partnership with Barnes & Noble today for its ebook reader, joining in the heavy competition to rival the popular Kindle. When the Dutch company releases its eReader in the fall, books provided by the popular bookseller will be available on the device.

Irex is the second electronic book company to pair with Barnes & Nobles eBookstore, following Plastic Logic in July. While both companies are working to provide competition with Amazon’s … Continue Reading

Nokia's Tero Ojanperä: "We will quickly be the world's biggest entertainment media network"

Nokia’s executive vice president of entertainment and communities, Tero Ojanperä was one of the most memorable characters at our MobileBeat 2009 conference last month. He’s on the cover of the September issue of Fast Company, striking the same patiently condescending Bond villain pose he took when rebutting Google’s Vic Gundotra onstage at MobileBeat. The article is a fairly long, cleanly written exploration of Nokia’s strategy for the future.

Many Americans don’t realize how much Nokia … Continue Reading

Yahoo adds apps to Mail, upgrades Messenger

Yahoo’s kitchen sink approach to its mail and messaging services were on display as the company unveiled updates to both.

The updated Mail site rolls out today in the U.S., and over the next few weeks worldwide. Users of Yahoo Messenger can download version 10 today.

The biggest change to Yahoo Mail is the addition of applications, which replace advertisements in the bottom left corner of the screen. The recently-acquired Xoopit has been fully integrated … Continue Reading

Yahoo reveals alternative to "10 Blue Links"

Back in May, Yahoo hinted at how it wants search to be more than a simple string of links, and today the company showed what it has in store.

It turns out that Yahoo has no intent to destroy the “10 Blue Links.” They’re as prevalent as ever in the redesign of its search page. The difference is a sidebar of contextual searches and site-specific search results, as you can see below:

The main changes … Continue Reading

"Skank" blogger speaks: "I thought my right to privacy was being protected"

Rosemary Port (pictured, right), a 29-year-old student at Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology, was identified by Google last week as the author of the “Skanks in NYC” blog, on which she anonymously assailed model Liskula Cohen as a skank, a ho, and an old hag, and posted photos of Cohen (below) striking sexually suggestive poses. Cohen sued Google in January to identify the author of the blog, which ran on Google’s Blogger service. (The site … Continue Reading