Intuit gets into the customer management business

Intuit, the company best-known for financial software like Quicken and QuickBooks, is expanding its lineup today with Customer Manager, an application that brings Intuit into competition with established sales software companies like Salesforce.com.

Many of the small businesses that buy Intuit software use relatively primitive tools like a spreadsheet or a whiteboard to track their customers, said Intuit product manager John Flora, because more sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) software doesn’t really address their needs,. … Continue Reading

Evernote, the startup that boosts your memory, raises $10 million

Evernote, which lets you record almost any type of data and recall it when you need it, just raised $10 million in a second round of venture-backed financing. It was led by Morgenthaler Ventures, with more funding from earlier investors including Troika Dialog. (The startup said it raised $2 million from NTT DoCoMo in October on top of $4.5 million in a venture-backed round in January. They also raised $6 million in angel funding back … Continue Reading

Smashwords expands eBook business worldwide with Shortcovers deal

Two eBook companies are creating an alliance that will help democratize eBook publishing for authors and small independent presses around the world. Smashwords and Shortcovers are teaming up to distribute eBook content in international markets.

Toronto, Canada-based Shortcovers, an eReading application owned by Indigo Books & Music, will distribute eBooks published by Smashwords on a worldwide basis. Shortcovers will distribute the eBooks in 189 countries. Smashwords has more than 5,000 original eBooks from 2,300 self-published … Continue Reading

Softkinetic teams up with Optrima to offer 3-D gesture control cameras

Softkinetic, a maker of software that lets cameras recognize gestures, plans to team up with startup Optrima in a joint venture.

Under the deal, Brussels-based Softkinetic will make software that is used in a 3-D gesture recognition system. In such systems, consumers could play games or other apps by using their own bodies to control what’s happening on the screen. To simulate sword fighting, for instance, users could wave their arms around. With this kind … Continue Reading

Smarter Agent expands mobile presence for real estate listings

Smarter Agent has given real estate agents a lot of help in the difficult housing market in the past year. The company provides real estate listings via mobile phones with navigation data so that potential home buyers can easily find homes for sale while driving.

Now the Camden, N.J.-based company is expanding to cover Verizon Wireless phones as well as phones based on the Google Android platform. With those distribution deals in place, Smarter Agent … Continue Reading

LayeredBrain promises to triple your video ad revenues

With high speed Internet connections becoming widely available, the online video market is booming: 25 billion videos were viewed in September alone in the US, according to comScore statistics, twice as many as a year ago. This might get video-sharing site YouTube feeling all warm and cozy, dreaming about hitting break-even, but what about those people actually creating video content? When do they get to start seeing a profit? Romanian startup Brainient hopes to answer … Continue Reading

List of the biggest launches in video game history

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is by all accounts likely to be the best-selling video game of all time. It could top 7 million units worldwide on its first day alone, an incredible achievement despite the fact that the economy is still in a pretty weak state.

Here are the biggest sales records in the game industry for opening day sales. At the bottom, we’ve also included a list of the biggest first-week sales … Continue Reading

Week in review: Droid vs Eris, Google acquires Admob

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

Which phone should you buy: Droid or Eris? Go with the Droid! — “Like many phone buying Americans, my budget is tighter than the average consumer’s pants after Thanksgiving dinner. With two Droids to choose from, I had a bit of a mental tug-of-war as to which one to buy.”

YouTube to support … Continue Reading

Entrepreneur Corner Roundup: More ways to ensure angel investor rejection and lessons from the high court

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

Excel where your competitors suck – The most minute annoyance can drive a customer into the arms of a competitor. Serial entrepreneur Scott Olson discusses how to turn this to your advantage – and how to make sure you don’t unintentionally drive your own customers away.

Running a start-up outside of the Valley – With the focus of the media (and VCs) on Silicon Valley as the home … Continue Reading

Slowpokes to get penalized in Google search rankings?

WebProNews dug up a pretty interesting nugget in an interview with Google’s Matt Cutts over the weekend at PubCon — there’s a faction of Googlers who are lobbying for site speed to be a factor in search rankings.

That’s not taken into account at the moment, although Google tries to boost the speed of its own services with a religious ferocity. (Consider that even a 100 to 400 millisecond delay can reduce daily searches per … Continue Reading

5 O'Clock Roundup: Murdoch threatens Google again, Craig joins Wikipedia

Here’s the latest action:

Rupert Murdoch plans to remove News Corp’s content from Google within a few months -- News Corp’s chief digital officer, Jonathan Miller, says the media mogul’s plan to charge for content and remove The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, and other publications from Google’s index is real and will happen in “months and quarters — not weeks.” Miller repeated one of Murdoch’s talking points: “The traffic which comes … Continue Reading

Renewable energy policy to result in 1.9M jobs, study says

The Obama administration’s progressive support for renewable energy will result in about 1.9 million green collar jobs, according to a new report published by three U.S. universities. It will also elevate the average household income by more than $1,000 and America’s GDP by $111 billion by 2020.

This sets Obama on track to create 5 million green (not just renewable energy) jobs over the next decade. Granted, he made this promise early in his campaign, … Continue Reading

Google's Dave Girouard: Google Docs could be an Office killer next year

Google Docs seems to get a lot of flack — not surprising, since it’s pretty bare bones, as word processors go. But that will change next year, Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard told ZDNet Asia.

Specifically, Girouard said Google plans to make 30 to 50 improvements to Docs’ features, performance, and more — it might not match Microsoft Word (which Girouard described as “an overkill tool”) feature-for-feature, but it will make be capable of serving … Continue Reading

Solar panel demand finally catching up with supply

One of the biggest, most depressing stories in the solar industry has been the oversupply of panels, which drove down prices and discouraged investors for most of 2009. Now, new research out of trade research firm iSuppli, suggests that demand will catch up with supply by the end of next year — good news for the growing number of solar panel and component makers.

One of the forces deflating demand was a rollback of solar … Continue Reading

Speak truth to power: Facebook's Joe Hewitt on abandoning iPhone development

Joe Hewitt, the one-man powerhouse behind Facebook’s iPhone app, explained more of the reasoning behind his decision to leave the project earlier this week. He stopped developing Facebook’s popular app out of frustration with Apple’s review process.

The issue (as it has been for a long time) is Apple’s draconian selection process and the resulting bottleneck for new apps on the platform. He argued that the last decade on the web has been about weakening … Continue Reading

Where did she get that coat? Utvee turns tagging TV shows into revenue

As TV viewers have become more adept at ducking away from advertisements, product placement has become more of a standard in a traditional ad buy. But just because a coat or logo appears onscreen, it doesn’t always mean the viewer knows what it is or where to follow through if they see something they’re interested in.

A San Francisco-based startup called Utvee is trying solve that problem by marrying product placement with user tagging in … Continue Reading

Crederity tells you who to trust on the web

Background checks are old hat, but Crederity wants to bring an easier, web-oriented approach to verifying that someone is trustworthy. In addition to its business tools, the New York company is also rolling out a way for individuals to create a single verified identity across the web — a “seal of approval” that can be part of your identity on social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Crederity, based in New York and Bangalore … Continue Reading

Verizon boosts smartphone cancellation fee to $350

Ditching a BlackBerry, Android or other smartphone from Verizon will cost twice as much as it used to starting next week. Canceling a two-year service contract early on top-of-the-line phones will cost $350 at first, sliding down to $110 at the end of two years.

New York Times gadget guy David Pogue asks the fairly obvious math question about Verizon’s charges: “If the premise of the early-termination fee is to help Verizon recoup its original … Continue Reading

DOE, USDA hand out $24M to biomass projects

Biomass is often overlooked in favor of sexier renewable energy sources like solar and wind — it’s dirty, capital intensive and not emissions free — but it is one of the only drop-in technologies in the alternative fuel space (meaning that it will work with legacy technology, traditional gas tanks and the like). Finally, it has captured the attention of the Department of Energy, which partnered with the Department of Agriculture to give out $24.4 … Continue Reading