Cooliris loses its chief revenue officer to AOL

Cooliris, the startup that developed a 3-D wall for users to explore images and other online media, lost one of its most notable hires today, when chief revenue officer Shashi Seth joined AOL.

Seth came to Cooliris in June 2008 from Google, where he was in charge of monetizing YouTube. At the time, Seth told GigaOm that the search engine had gotten “a little big.” Now he’s part of a wave of ex-Googlers jumping aboard … Continue Reading

MySpace appoints Alex Maghen to CTO

MySpace promoted Alex Maghen to become its chief technology officer today. He replaces Aber Whitcomb who is leaving.

Maghen was the chief technology officer for MySpace Music, the social network’s last bastion of dominance against competitors like Facebook. Before that, Maghen was the CTO for MTV Networks. He’ll report to chief operating officer Mike Jones. … Continue Reading

5 O'Clock Roundup: GM kills eBay plan, Microsoft's tablet leaked, Dogster / LOLcat ad network can has planet

GM ends its experiment with selling new cars on eBay — The General committed seven weeks to testing eBay as a sales channel for new cars in California. Neither company has a lot to say on the record, but the Wall Street Journal reports that dealers were put off by buyers who sat at home, or at Starbucks, and lobbed lowball offers for cars posted on eBay. Car salesmen and saleswomen still pride themselves on … Continue Reading

Recurrent, ProLogis team up for 4.8 MW of rooftop solar in Spain

Recurrent Energy, a rooftop solar power developer in the U.S., has branched globally, teaming with major warehouse builder ProLogis to turn thousands of square feet of roof in Madrid and Barcelona into a distributed 4.8 megawatt powerplant — large enough to electrify close to 4,000 homes — by the middle of 2010.

The most interesting part of the story may very well be the choice of Spain for the deal. Recurrent Energy is based in … Continue Reading

What does ACS do, the 100-word version

When Xerox announced its $6.4 billion acquisition of ACS yesterday, Web 2.0 types like us out here in San Francisco had only one question: What’s ACS?

Rebecca Scholl from Affiliated Computer Services, a 74,000-employee firm based in Dallas, Texas, sent us the tidy list below, just right for cutting and pasting into a blog post. It explains why ACS is worth exactly 6.4 Twitters.

The video clip tipped us off: ACS runs New York’s E-ZPass … Continue Reading

Liftopia elevated by $1M for real-time ski lift discounts

Liftopia, a web site that provides a pricing and discount directory for ski lift tickets at various resorts, has taken in $1 million in a second round of funding just in time for winter. The San Francisco, Calif. company tracks prices as they rise and fall depending on the time of year, time of week, popularity of resorts and quality of snowfall — that way users will be able to find the most affordable prices … Continue Reading

Benchmark hires MySQL's Marten Mickos as Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms, has hired former MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

Mickos built MySQL, the popular open-source database company, into a significant international company before selling it to Sun Microsystems last year for $1 billion.

Benchmark was one of the leading investors in MySQL and netted a nice return from the sale (only $40 million was invested in MySQL beginning in 2001). So it’s no … Continue Reading

Zipcar finally puts iPhone app in drive

Zipcar — the car rental service with a Web 2.0 twist — has launched its hotly-anticipated iPhone application. It had stalled for a while in the Apple App Store’s approval process, but today Zipcar users have the power to not only find nearby available vehicles and make reservations from their phones — they can even unlock their rental car’s doors from their handhelds. Pretty impressive.

To understand why a mobile tool is so key, you … Continue Reading

Schwarzenegger adds Meebo to gubernatorial website

Hard to believe it’s been four years since Sandy, Seth and Elaine founded instant-messaging site Meebo. I don’t know them, but I read about them. Since then, the company has grown to a monthly reach of 90 million people, of whom one-third are in America. Today’s news is that California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s website has sprouted the Meebo Bar, which makes it easy to share parts of the site with people on social networks, email … Continue Reading

SlideRocket beefs up slide shows for sales and marketing teams

SlideRocket, maker of a web application that allows groups to collaborate on multimedia presentations and slide shows, launched a new sales and marketing version of its platform today.

The San Francisco-based company says this new offering is tailored for companies with extensive sales and marketing organizations that have many people working on the same projects. For too long, top-tier corporations with innovative projects have been depending on antiquated presentation software, SlideRocket says. In order to … Continue Reading

Federated Media finds its new leader — CondeNet founder Deanna Brown

Updated

Four months after Federated Media founder and chief executive John Battelle said the company was looking for a new leader, the Sausalito, Calif, startup (which sells advertising for more than 100 online publications, including VentureBeat) is announcing online media veteran Deanna Brown as its president and chief operating officer.

Brown was most recently the president of media company Scripps Networks. She also founded CondeNet, the online division of publisher CondeNast, as well as Powerful … Continue Reading

Ribbit injects voice into Google Wave release

Ribbit, one of the earliest web-based telephone services (acquired last year by British telecom giant BT), plans to ride Google Wave‘s coattails — announcing the integration of several gadgets allowing voice calls, phone conferencing, text messaging and voicemail transcription into the search engine’s new, much-hyped communication platform.

These services, available in the limited beta release going live tomorrow, are meant to introduce voice as a major pillar of net communications, along with email, social networks … Continue Reading

Yahoo's new "You" ad: If you don't cry a little, you have no soul

Ogilvy & Mather’s first TV ad out of the gate for Yahoo’s $100 million marketing campaign to turn the friggin’ company around, as Carol Bartz says, pushes all the right buttons for people who feel the Internet hasn’t lived up to its promise to makeover our lives yet.

Peter Kafka at AllThingsD says he wishes the ad would demonstrate some of Yahoo’s products. I think Kafka is afraid to embrace the joy of life. If … Continue Reading

Google Wave opens up tomorrow, but maybe not for you

Google is letting a few more people play with its new communication and collaboration tool, Wave, starting tomorrow. Specifically, 100,000 developers, Google Apps users, and other sign-ups at the Wave website will be getting access to a preview version.

That’s a lot of people, but many more are being left out — Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen tells CNET Google received more than 1 million requests to participate. That’s confirmation that, despite the occasional fuzziness of … Continue Reading

Echofon releases Mac version; never lets you lose a tweet

Echofon, the Twitter client formerly known as Twitterfon, just released a simple and compact desktop version for the Mac.

The big plus to Echofon is that you’ll never lose a tweet while monitoring your Twitter stream. Unread tweets stay in sync between your phone and computer. (The sync only works with the Echofon’s $4.99 Pro version for the iPhone. However, the company behind the app, Naan Studio, said it’ll make the sync available to the … Continue Reading

Intalio raises $1.5M for business management software

Intalio, developer of open-source software for businesses to manage workflow, has brought in $1.5 million in equity and debt, according to a filing with the SEC. The Palo Alto, Calif. company has now raised more than $42 million to date from investors Partech International, Cargill Ventures, 3i Group, Sippl MacDonald Ventures, Woodside Fund and XML Fund.

A prime competitor for Salesforce.com, Intalio launched a cloud computing product in May, branching into customer relationship management software … Continue Reading

Arkadium acquires Gamelab.com game web site

Arkadium, a maker of “advergame” portals for well-known brands, said today it is expanding its reach with the acquisition of New York-based Gamelab.com.

The acquisition should help Arkadium get more traffic for its various casual game web sites. Arkadium currently creates platforms for casual online games where the game and portal are ads for a certain brand. It has a network of 5 million casual game fans who play web games that advertise brands such … Continue Reading

Miley Cyrus alone in heavy Facebook streaming

It’s been a couple of months since Facebook launched its streaming video pages powered by Ustream. Is it catching on? TechCrunch used the feature to simulcast the TechCrunch50 event week before last. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used it to stream a speaking appearance in Brazil. Reggae singer Matisyahu did a show from Twitter’s office.

Ustream’s aggressive (in a good way) marketing department called yesterday to let me know that Facebook streamers have racked up 4 … Continue Reading

Want a career in video games? They've got lots of schools for that

People used to joke about how they majored in video games in college. But it’s not a joke anymore. As jobs dwindle in categories such as chip design, video game jobs have been multiplying. And now there are 254 colleges and other institutions of higher learning that teach video game courses across the nation.

There are now 37 states (plus D.C.) with colleges and universities offering courses and degrees in computer and video game design, … Continue Reading