KaChing's stock picking is fantasy no more

KaChing, the Palo Alto-based startup that’s like Fantasy Football for investing junkies, is finally letting users put skin in the game today.

It’s allowing people to invest real money, matching its best investors blow-by-blow, while slicing off a share that it says is small enough to challenge the $10 trillion mutual fund industry’s traditional fee structure. The site launched as a stock-picking site last year where people could publicly compete to beat the market and … Continue Reading

Music battle begins as Rock Band debuts on the iPhone

So much for Tapulous‘ monopoly on the “rhythm music” game genre on the iPhone. Now the competition is heating up as Rock Band — the hugely popular music game on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 — is now available on Apple’s AppStore.

Electronic Arts, MTV Games and Harmonix said the launch of Rock Band for the iPhone was on its way on Oct. 8. The aim is to take back some ground that an … Continue Reading

Livescribe expands its line-up of Pulse smartpens for digital writing

It may seem like an uphill battle, but Livescribe is still trying to replace the 99-cent ballpoint pen with a $199 computerized smartpen known as the Pulse. And it’s not doing such a bad job at it.

Today, the company is launching a couple of new models that will expand its line-up of Pulse pens, and it is also expanding its sales reach by signing up Best Buy, Apple Stores, and Staples as new retailers. … Continue Reading

Plastic Logic unveils Que eBook reader for business people

Taking on the Amazon Kindle eBook reader, Plastic Logic is announcing today a cool-looking electronic book reader for business professionals that will be able to download books from Barnes & Noble’s eBook store.

The Que proReader is billed as an essential tool for busy professionals. That’s a contrast to the Kindle, which is more like a recreational reading device. Mountain View, Calif.-based Plastic Logic will unveil the Que more completely at the Consumer Electronics Show … Continue Reading

'Gone Google' ad campaign goes global

It looks like Google is happy with the initial response to its “Gone Google” campaign, where it uses simple white billboards to try to recruit more companies to its Google Apps online software.

The campaign started in August, with the posting of billboards in Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, whose messages changed every weekday. The billboards were aimed at workers and IT managers frustrated with traditional work software like Microsoft Office, and bore … Continue Reading

Transfer To: Lets you transfer mobile phone credit to relatives

Transfer To, a company that lets people transfer mobile phone credit to friends or relatives, has raised $3 million in a first round investment to expand the service internationally.

Transfer To operates a service that facilitates the transfer of mobile phone credits (otherwise known as “airtime”) across borders, letting users give their friends or relatives more calling minutes in their mobile phone account.

By sending text messages to Transfer To, foreign workers can use the … Continue Reading

Week in review: Threadsy tests a way to 'abhor' Facebook posts, YouTube serves 1 billion daily pageviews

Here’s our rundown of the week’s tech and business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Should you be able to “abhor” Facebook posts? Threadsy says yes — “Oh, ‘I bought new socks’ status update. How I hate thee. And now you literally can hate them.”

Virtual goods sales to hit $1 billion as social games pay off big — “Thanks to the astonishing growth of games on social … Continue Reading

Entrepreneur Corner Roundup: Must haves vs. nice to haves and a particularly harsh lesson learned

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner:

How to make friends and influence people (and convert them) – Social media can be a good marketing tool for your company, but if you’re able to become a trusted resource for people via Facebook or Twitter, then you’re really on to something special, notes YoungEntrepreneur.com co-founder Adam Toren.

Is your product a “must have” or “nice to have”? – Many entrepreneurs are too close to their topic … Continue Reading

So much for that venture capital recovery

Optimists hoping that venture capital investing might be bouncing back will be disappointed by the latest numbers from Dow Jones VentureSource. After venture investments saw an encouraging uptick during the second quarter of 2009, they dipped again in the last three months.

Specifically, VCs invested $5.1 billion in 616 deals during Q3. That’s down 38 percent from the $8.2 billion invested during the same period last year, a drop you’d expect. But it’s also down … Continue Reading

5 O'Clock Roundup: Tech sector rebound, hedge fund fraud, mobile awards winners

Tech sector may actually be rebounding – The New York Times pulls together data points and anecdotes from all over to back up Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s statement after yesterday’s impressive earnings report, “The worst of the recession is clearly behind us and because of what we have seen, we now have the confidence to be optimistic about our future.”

SEC charges billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam with insider trading – A complaint filed … Continue Reading

Game co. Gazillion lays off staff at John Romero's Slipgate Ironworks studio

Gazillion, a high-flying online game publisher that has raised a ton of money, has laid off an unspecified number of game developers at its Slipgate Ironworks online games studio, VentureBeat has learned. The layoffs did not affect Gazillion’s other studios: the Amazing Society, NetDevil, and Gargantuan Games.

Gazillion, based in SanMateo, Calif., confirmed the layoffs but declined to say how many jobs were affected.

San Francisco-based Slipgate is working on a massively multiplayer online game, … Continue Reading

Interviews with Star Trek Online's creators (with game play footage)

Fear not, Trekkies. Star Trek Online is on schedule for a launch in 2010.

We shot video interviews with Craig Zinkievich, executive producer of Star Trek Online, and Jack Emmert, chief creative officer at Cryptic Studios, at the company’s Los Gatos, Calif.-based headquarters. There, a team of 50 developers is hard at work on making the game, which Cryptic inherited from Perpetual Entertainment (See our companion story that explains it all). The pressure is on … Continue Reading

Star Trek Online game gives Cryptic Studios a chance at a mass audience

[Editor's note: check out our awesome video of Star Trek Online. Photos courtesy of Cryptic, Alexa Lee].

Cryptic Studios is one of the few companies that has made a living at making massively multiplayer online games and lived to tell about it. Since 2000, the company has created three successful MMOs: City of Heroes, City of Villains, and Champions Online.

But now it has a chance for the big time with Star Trek Online, a … Continue Reading

Congrats to Web After Dark winners: Khush, iSyndica, Affective Interfaces and Happier.com

Congratulations to Khush, the startup that wins a spot to attend and showcase its technology at the Web 2.0 Summit Web After Dark party in San Francisco next week.

VentureBeat teamed up with venture capital firm Canaan Partners to select most promising Web 2.0-related company nominees submitted by VB readers.

Runners up are iSyndica, Affective Interfaces and Happier.com.

As the winner, Kusch also receives a pass to the exclusive press pre-party and gets to pitch … Continue Reading

Twitter finally adds user groups feature, calls them lists

Twitter’s new feature, which the company calls lists, allows users to group together curated collections from among the people they follow.

For example, the list @paulboutin/entourage merges status updates from my hand-chosen group of best friends ever: Facebook chantreusse Randi Zuckerberg, VentureBeat mobile maniac Matthäus Krzykowski, local publicist David Speiser, and Bono.

The syntax for a describing a list in conversation is like this: @paulboutin/entourage. The URL for a list looks like this: twitter.com/paulboutin/entourage. Open … Continue Reading

It must be fall: TV and education websites saw big gains, comScore says

TV and education websites saw the biggest gain in visitors last month, according to the latest MediaMetrix report from comScore.

That makes sense, since September is when school starts back up and when television shows return from the summer hiatus. As a category, websites about TV grew 17 percent from August, and top site Yahoo TV grew 63 percent, to almost 20 million visitors. On the education side, Pearson Education’s website was almost as popular, … Continue Reading

At least a few consumers think location-based ads are useful (survey)

There’s a big, untapped audience for location-based advertising, where businesses can send offers to the cell phone’s of nearby shoppers, according to a new survey conducted by Harris Interactive. The study was commissioned by 1020 Placecast — which is, naturally, a location-based advertising company.

Before diving into the results, it’s probably best to get this caveat out of the way: The data was collected via an online survey without probability sampling, meaning you should take … Continue Reading

Twitter operations engineer hit by car, survives, tweets then DJs party

Twitter operations engineer John Adams, who was brought in to help stabilize the microblogging network last summer, was the apparent victim of a hit-and-run on Monday while riding his bicycle.

He tweeted on Monday evening:

“Was hit by a car on my bike this evening on the way home. Driver hit and run. Jwz got the plate and sfpd know. EMT checked me out, I am ok”

Both BoingBoing and SFist picked up the story. … Continue Reading

The future of online video: Q & A with Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire

Jeremy Allaire, who was behind the success of Flash as CTO of Macromedia, started Brightcove five years ago to offer media companies an online video publishing platform. While YouTube was a consumer play, Brightcove focused on a business-to-business model by targeting publishers. After some layoffs in December of last year, the company turned profitable this year, launched a Brightcove Alliance to share technology and know-how with its clients and partnered with Boxee to play online … Continue Reading