5 O'Clock Roundup: Nook sold out, Sony launches online store, Bing gets slammed

We’ve been a little behind with roundup lately. Our apologies. Here’s the latest action:

Barnes & Noble Nook sold out — The bookseller’s entry into the eBook reader market is under way. The B&N Nook is out of stockk on the company’s web site and it is now taking orders for devices that will ship next year. Analysts say that the Nook wasn’t ready for shipment in huge quantities and B&N probably launched it anyway … Continue Reading

Week in review: Microsoft's Ray Ozzie on apps, Al Gore at GreenBeat

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

Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie: Apps don’t make your phone special — “It’s not the applications available on the various platforms that will be the differentiators, Ozzie said, even though that’s what many companies and writers seem to focus on.”

Microsoft’s Xbox Live chief on banning modders and browsing Facebook photos on TV — “It’s … Continue Reading

Entrepreneur Corner Roundup: The state of the VC world and tech’s human problem

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

5 ways VC firms can stop shooting themselves in the foot – Venture Capital firms drill the need to create basic credibility into the companies they invest in – but often fail to take their own advice. Laura Grimmer, CEO of Articulate Communications (which works with VC firms), lists five things they could do to build a better pipeline of prospective portfolio companies.

After VC cash? Show ‘em … Continue Reading

Now anyone can try Brizzly's app for Facebook and Twitter

Brizzly, an application for managing messages in Twitter and Facebook, expanded its beta test today — now you don’t need an invite code, so anyone can use it.

The application was created by San Francisco-based Thing Labs, and includes features like expanding links and photos, the ability to “mute” people who you want to stop seeing updates from temporarily, and recently-added support for Twitter Lists.

In addition to opening the beta, Brizzly also added a … Continue Reading

Tweetmeme launches buttons for re-tweetable advertising

Twitter said it’s planning a large-scale advertising network soon, but U.K.-based Tweetmeme beat them to the punch with a monetization effort of its own today.

The startup, which creates those green ‘Retweet’ buttons you see everywhere (including on this site), is rolling out the same feature for ads. They’re partnering with Federated Media to insert retweet buttons into their advertising two weeks from now, enabling people to share compelling ads with others.

Advertising in social … Continue Reading

GreenBeat: Big thank you and media roundup

Thanks to everyone who made it out to GreenBeat 2009 yesterday and Wednesday!

We were thrilled with the turnout, and couldn’t be more grateful for all the support we received from attendees, speakers, sponsors and the press. It’s clear that the Smart Grid has gained the momentum it needs for serious work to be done, and we are excited to play a big role in this conversation going forward.

With Al Gore, and several of … Continue Reading

GreenBeat: Al Gore says Smart Grid part of 'the single largest solution' to climate change

Nobel Prize winner and former vice president Al Gore gave a wide-ranging, passionate talk at VentureBeat’s GreenBeat 2009 conference yesterday in San Mateo about combating global warming. We already liveblogged Gore’s talk, but for folks who don’t want to read the blow-by-blow description, here’s a summary.

Perhaps the most significant point: That energy efficiency is “the single largest solution to the climate crisis,” and the Smart Grid will “play a crucial role” in achieving that … Continue Reading

New speakers, sponsors for DiscoveryBeat; today is last day for early-bird discount

We’ve got some great momentum for VentureBeat’s upcoming DiscoveryBeat event, which will attack the problem of how to get attention for an app in the midst of a lot of noise.

One of our newest speakers is Randy Breen, chief operating officer at Social Gaming Network, where he oversees game development, business development, strategy and executive management. He has worked in the game industry since 1986 at companies such as Electronic Arts, LucasArts and Emotiv … Continue Reading

LaDiDa brings reverse karaoke to your iPhone

There are tons of karaoke applications for the iPhone, but a startup called Khu.sh is introducing a twist on the concept, “reverse karaoke,” to the App Store.

There have been other reverse karaoke products, most notably Microsoft Songsmith, a Windows application that lets you record your singing, then automatically generates musical accompaniment. Songsmith even prompted a series of YouTube videos highlighting the hilarious badness of many of the resulting songs.

Khu.sh’s iPhone app, LaDiDa, lets … Continue Reading

French game maker Gameloft ditches the Android platform

[Updated] French mobile phone games publisher Gameloft said it is giving up on the Google Android platform.

The company said it is cutting back investment in making games and other apps for Android-based cell phones, even though Android has won a lot of attention lately with new models from Motorola and Sony Ericsson, according to Reuters.

“We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others,” Gameloft finance director Alexandre de … Continue Reading

Hot Potato launches event streaming, storytelling in real-time

Expect big things from this location-based service.

Brooklyn-based Hot Potato launched a site and iPhone app today that lets groups of people share and create streams of content around events.

You can create an event like a concert or a football watching session and let other people check in to it. Everyone “checked in” at an event can post their thoughts, photos and videos about what’s going on, creating a stream of activity for others … Continue Reading

Playhaven creates lots of fan communities for iPhone game developers

Playhaven is making it easy for gamers to create fan communities around iPhone games. It does so by creating online forums for fans on its web site, with a new fan section for every iPhone game. Developers can then claim those game communities as official fan sites.

To date, 40 developers have launched official communities at Playhaven in its first month. Fans can join the online communities for free, and developers can claim the communities … Continue Reading

Google search marketing gets all touchy-feely

Google hasn’t traditionally engaged in large-scale advertising campaigns. Instead, it has relied mainly on word of mouth to become the $180 billion company it is today. However in the last year, the company has rolled out bigger and bigger paid advertising efforts (as many mature brands start to do). That includes the Go Google campaign back in August, promoting Google apps as a reliable alternative to Microsoft Office for businesses.

Yesterday, Google rolled out a … Continue Reading

Twitter COO Dick Costolo: Revenue is on and advertising is coming soon

Twitter COO Dick Costolo is on-stage at the Real-Time CrunchUp in San Francisco. I’m taking some notes as we go.

The big takeaways are that Twitter is making more than $4 million a year, but won’t specify how much and that’s through the recent data-sharing deals with Microsoft and Google.

Next, Twitter is going to roll out advertising soon. Costolo says, “You’ll see an advertising strategy from us in the near future. It will be … Continue Reading

Infoaxe — a real-time search engine that doesn’t rely on Twitter

Infoaxe, which records your web history and make it searchable, just launched a public facing real-time search engine tapping the behavior of its more than 2 million users.

Infoaxe is a fairly unique entrant into the real-time search space. It doesn’t rely on Twitter’s data stream the way that competitors TweetMeme, OneRiot and Scoopler do. Instead, its results are based off the data it has collected through a browser toolbar it launched last year that … Continue Reading

Cloud Engines launches next generation Pogoplug

San Francisco startup Cloud Engines, maker of a box-like device called Pogoplug that makes external hard drives accessible from any computer or iPhone, today launched the next generation of the device, supporting more hardware and software capabilities.

Listening to customer feedback, the new Pogoplug now hosts four external drives for expanded data capacity as well as additional software features. With an emphasis on automatic synchronization of new content and advanced sharing benefits, the device allows … Continue Reading

FunMail livens up your iPhone messages

FunMobility, the developer of a bunch of social mobile applications, is releasing a new iPhone app that chief executive Adam Lavine says will finally convince people to use their phones’ multimedia messaging (MMS) capabilities.

It is called FunMail, and it automatically offers up suggestions of images you should send along with your text messages.

Lavine points to a study FunMobility commissioned from Frost & Sullivan showing that only one out of every 70 mobile messages … Continue Reading

Tech mishaps and the human problem

Behind every tech problem is a human problem – and if you don’t dig into it and figure out how solve it, your company will never progress. Serial entrepreneur Eric Ries, in this entrepreneurial though leader lecture given at Stanford University, notes that a layered analysis of decisions and procedures can help you narrow the possibilities and find the root cause of the issue.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/swf/player-ec.swf… Continue Reading

Adobe's Acrobat.com comes to smartphones

Updated

Adobe just announced a bunch of upgrades to Acrobat.com, its suite of web collaboration applications. The most important: It’s releasing an application for the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Mobile support has been a big missing piece for Acrobat.com, since a big selling point of applications like Adobe’s (as well as Google Docs and the upcoming web versions of Microsoft Office) is the ability to access your documents anywhere. Now Acrobat.com users can not only read … Continue Reading