Wind companies ask "Is this heaven?" — No, it's Iowa

With eco-friendly legislation looming on the horizon in the U.S., states are racing to roll out their green economic development plans. Crown champ California, solar-happy Arizona and the efficiency-conscious Northeast are all coming down the home stretch, and few would have predicted Iowa would break into their ranks. But it has — becoming the No. 2 wind power producer in the country behind Texas (an unbeatable foe, generating as much as its three top rivals … Continue Reading

Web 2.0: GE's Jeff Immelt shows off "stethoscope of the 21st century"

Jeff Immelt, the chief executive officer of General Electric, showed off what he called the “stethoscope of the 21st century” at the Web 2.0 Summit today.

He held up a white gadget with a flip-out screen and a control mechanism that looks lot like the old iPod navigation wheel. Immelt said the device could do ultrasound scans on the fly and wirelessly communicate the data as necessary. Doctors can use the devices to immediately see, … Continue Reading

Web 2.0: Twitter co-founder Williams wants to kill suggested users list; praises Facebook's agility

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams is onstage right now at the Web 2.0 Summit talking with moderator John Battelle. Here’s a transcript of the conversation:

[Update: Now that I've finished live-blogging, here are some takeaways: because the company's rolling out lists, there's really no need for the Suggested Users List, so Williams wants to kill it. He's pretty doggedly focused on staying independent, rather than selling like he did with Blogger to Google. He also says … Continue Reading

Updated: Benchmark Capital gets a "new" entrepreneur-in-residence: Symantec's Michael Wolfe

Benchmark Capital is bringing Symantec’s Michael Wolfe on-board as an entrepreneur in residence — and for a second time. [Updated: Wolfe talks about what he's learned as a serial entrepreneur and what he wants to work on at Benchmark below.]

Wolfe co-founded Vontu, a company that makes software to prevent data loss, while an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark the first time and sold it to security company Symantec for $350 million in 2007. He … Continue Reading

Jive's Social Business Software gets another $12M from Sequoia

Jive Software, which uses social networking to help businesses collaborate internally and externally, has raised another $12 million from Sequoia Capital.

Portland, Ore.-based Jive’s products include sites where employees can collaborate, customer discussion forums, and company social networks. Despite being part of the flood of companies offering business social networking tools, Jive seems to have done well. The company says its revenue doubled in the third quarter of 2009 compared to the same period last … Continue Reading

5 O'Clock Roundup: VC dry spell, Sun layoffs, another doomed e-reader

VC spending increases, but mostly on existing companies – Here’s a different way to look at the survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association that VentureBeat writer Anthony Ha reported on earlier: Brand-new startups will find it harder than ever trying to raise capital. VC spending increased to $4.8 billion in the quarter that just ended, according to the survey. But the money is going to keeping existing companies afloat. New startups only … Continue Reading

Web 2.0: Zynga's Mark Pincus predicts an economy built around social apps

Social gaming company Zynga has been one of the primary beneficiaries of Facebook’s rapid growth to a social network of more than 300 million people.

The San Francisco-based company has been able to surpass 50 million daily active users for its Facebook games, where you can share with your friends the fact that you’ve planted a crop of corn with hundreds of your virtual friends in games such as FarmVille and the even faster-growing Cafe … Continue Reading

Web 2.0: PayPal wants payment apps in your phone and fridge with its new platform

PayPal is opening up a platform to developers on November 3, to spur innovation in outside payment apps that can connect with anything as far out as physical advertisements or home appliances.

“PayPal will be the first truly global online payment service to open its platform to everyone,” said president Scott Thompson, speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit today in San Francisco. “We’ll be releasing APIs that will allow anyone in the industry to create … Continue Reading

What makes a Bing homepage?

I asked Bing homepage editorial director Stephanie Horstmanshof to explain it to me: What is the recognizable quality of a Bing homepage photo that makes it Bing-worthy?

“There are three things we look for,” she told me over the phone. “A sense of exploration, a sense of discovery, and a sense of delight. It should make you want to know more about it.”

Portions of each page are interactive, so that you can roll over … Continue Reading

Web 2.0: Morgan Stanley predicts tech recovery and a huge mobile Internet wave

Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker said today that the tech economy is in a state of recovery, based on the leading indicators that usually signal an end to recession. She was also bullish that a huge shift will come about as the mobile Internet, enabled by smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone, sweeps through the world in the coming years.

“The leading indicators have turned the corner, but the lagging indicators are still weak,” Meeker said … Continue Reading

Web 2.0 Summit: The king for cable giant Comcast, surprisingly, is content

Brian Roberts, chief executive of cable giant Comcast, said that his company continues to invest on faith in faster Internet access and bigger digital cables into consumers’ homes.

Roberts is making those multibillion dollar investments because he believes that applications will emerge that will consume all of the Internet bandwidth that he can provide to consumers.

He also said that Comcast isn’t shy about investing in content, such as TV shows or Internet content properties. … Continue Reading

Apple revamps MacBook, iMac, 'magic' mouse

Apple announced several additions to its computer lineup today, with a new MacBook laptop and iMac desktop computer, as well as a mouse with multi-touch capabilities. The news represents a refinement of Apple’s product strategy — rather than a breakthrough on the level of the much-discussed, still-not-announced tablet computer — but that strategy continues to pay off in impressive earnings and by chipping away at the marketshare of Microsoft Windows.

Here are the products, in … Continue Reading

Electric cars: Brand new, but the paint is already coming off

The fully electric car — the kind you never have to fill up with gas — was supposed to be (and is still believed by many to be) a major coup for automotive carbon reduction. No fossil fuels burnt, no emissions, right? Wrong. According to a new report released yesterday, electric vehicles will still be shackled to fossil fuels, only slightly less than their gas-powered competitors. Sure, you might be plugging your car into a … Continue Reading

Yahoo blows past Eeyores with $186M quarter

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz can swear as much as she wants with results like these. The company’s sales for the quarter that just ended on September 30th fell 13% from last year, but cost controls boosted the company’s profits to $186 million, more than double last year’s figure.

“With revenue coming in above our guidance and flat sequentially, we had a solid third quarter that signals our major businesses have stabilized,” Bartz said in a … Continue Reading

GreenBeat spotlight: Picarro's "sci-fi" box may prevent cap-and-trade fraud after Copenhagen

As the United States and world consider new policies and legislation to help stop climate change, verifying whether they actually work is going to be a big deal.

And it’s really encouraging to see a bunch of companies already trying to help. Picarro is one of them. It helps monitor the atmosphere’s gases to determine whether one of the main ideas for fighting global warming, a “cap-and-trade” system, is working.

By the way, startups that … Continue Reading

Artemis raises $9M for prenatal diagnostics

Artemis Health, maker of technology for prenatal diagnostics, has brought in $9 million of an expected $10 million round of equity, according to a filing with the SEC. The San Carlos, Calif. company is backed by Alloy Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. It last raised financing in September 2008, bringing in $20 million in a third round of venture funding.… Continue Reading

Scout Labs scores $4M in funding for brand-management tools

Sentiment analysis sounds like another bogus term being thrown around by social media consultants. But Scout Labs’ dashboard, which shows brand managers how everyone on the Internet is feeling about their product or service at the moment, has convinced venture capitalists that there’s a market for social media analysis tools that really work. Scout Labs has announced a $4M round of funding. The round was announced a few weeks ago, but only now has the … Continue Reading

Nvidia's new Cloud 3D platform to vastly improve web-based 3-D imagery

Graphics chip maker Nvidia today introduced Cloud 3D, a platform that will make it much easier to for developers to create powerful 3-D graphics technology and show it to users by the millions via cloud computing.

The platform lets developers access cloud-based graphics computing power — where the 3-D hardware is housed in a big data center instead of on the user’s computer — to render realistic 3-D animations that can then be streamed over … Continue Reading

Unity Technologies raises $5.5M from Sequoia Capital for 3-D game technology

Unity Technologies has raised $5.5 million to finance its business of making 3-D game platforms for browser-based games, VentureBeat has learned.

The money came from Sequoia Capital. The San Francisco-based company has gained a lot of traction for its Unity 3D engine, which lets game developers create fast-action 3-D games that run inside a web browser.

Once gamers download a small Unity plug-in for a game, they can play any Unity-based game through a web … Continue Reading

Jelli: A pretty novel social music experience on the radio

If you think about the world of music discovery today, there are startups for following others’ tastes like Last.fm, Hype Machine or Spotify, with its playlists. Then there’s Pandora, which uses algorithms to suggest similar songs based on structure.

But they’re asynchronous — short of watching live concert streams, you’d be hard-pressed to find a place on the web for simultaneously experiencing and reacting to new music with strangers.

Jelli, a San Mateo-based startup, is … Continue Reading