Buchheit's lucky streak as an angel (and a founder)

Gmail creator, FriendFeed co-founder and now Facebook employee Paul Buchheit has not only has had a stellar career as an entrepreneur and engineer. He’s also proving to be a savvy angel investor with four acquisitions of his portfolio companies in six months.

Yesterday’s acquisition of mobile e-mail startup reMail by Google marked yet another home run for Buchheit, who came up with the search giant’s “Don’t be evil” slogan. He was also an early investor … Continue Reading

WordPress.com goes down, taking out TechCrunch, GigaOm, 10.2M others

Update: WordPress.com says it’s “back running at full capacity,” as of around 3:30pm Pacific. There’s a summary here. WordPress says the 110-minute outage took down 10.2 million sites, costing them 5.5 million pageviews. Apparently an unexpected router change at a WordPress data center provider was responsible.

WordPress.com, the blog hosting service associated with WordPress blogging software, has apparently been down for about an hour. That probably affects all 9.2 million of the blogs that WordPress … Continue Reading

Steve Jobs trash-talks Flash at Wall Street Journal iPad briefing

Update: Apple expert John Gruber, cited below, wrote in to say his sources told him the Flash image in an iPad demo, now removed from Apple’s website, was a mockup, and that Apple engineers left Flash support out of the iPad from the start. I’ve removed a paragraph that claimed Flash already works on the iPad.

One of the biggest controversies over Apple’s forthcoming iPad tablet is that the iPad doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash interactive … Continue Reading

Apple doubles iPhone download limit over 3G

With little fanfare, Apple has doubled the 10MB 3G download cap for iPhones to 20MB.  Apple hasn’t offered any official reasoning regarding the change, but it’s likely that it is in preparation for the launch of the iPad.

The 10MB cap has been an annoyance for some time, since it prevents iPhone users from grabbing large files and applications when away from a Wi-Fi connection. Doubling the cap will help somewhat, but it’s still not … Continue Reading

Vacation Rental Partner pulls in $300K to help you rent out homes

Vacation Rental Partner, provider of a web platform that allows homeowners to more easily market their properties to vacationers, make bookings, and communicate with temporary renters, has raised $300,000 of a targeted $500,000 round of equity, according to a filing with the SEC. The company is based in San Francisco and has not disclosed any investor information.… Continue Reading

Super Bowl shocker: Biggest online audience watched a full week later

Update: ScanScout incorrectly stated that 3 times as many clips were watched a week after the game. The actual ratio is about 1.6 to 1, as seen in the chart above.

Video ad network ScanScout has concluded from analysis of Web video traffic that far more football videos were watched on Sunday, February 14th — one week after the Super Bowl — than on the day of the game. As seen in the chart above, … Continue Reading

Despite a couple of bad moves, Activision Blizzard CEO says he runs a kindly mothership for game developers

Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard, runs the biggest independent video game development company in the world. Some people have taken potshots at him because he doesn’t play games and has said some things that make him seems like an abrasive numbers guy who doesn’t respect creative game developers.

In a rare talk in front of game developers at the Dice Summit in Las Vegas, Kotick acknowledged that he has made some mistakes in … Continue Reading

2 startups say they can keep your phone charged wherever you are

In the glamorous world of mobile technology, battery charging is a bit of a Cinderella. This is in spite of the fact that power is a major issue for most users of mobile technology, especially as phones get more sophisticated and power-hungry. Mobile carriers are also effected, since users conserve the battery by using the phone less. At the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona this week, two startups showed off products that address the … Continue Reading

Regen absorbs $1.6M to roll out solar-powered lights, stereos and more

Regen, maker of a compact solar panel called the ReNu used for powering audio equipment and household lights, and even charging phones, has just brought in $1.6 million of an anticipated $2 million round of equity, according to a filing with the SEC.

The sleek, seemingly Apple-inspired ReNu is one of the most consumer-friendly applications of solar technology on the market today — along with solar backpacks used to charge personal electronics and Novothink‘s solar-charging … Continue Reading

OnLive shows live demo of its games on demand service

Steve Perlman has been talking about OnLive, his potentially disruptive games on demand service for about a year. Today, at the Dice Summit in Las Vegas, he showed a live demo of it.

The service, which is in the midst of a closed beta now, worked without a glitch. That’s a big deal, since skeptics have said that what OnLive is trying to do is impossible. But using a cable modem speed connection, Perlman showed … Continue Reading

Charles River Ventures' George Zachary: Our QuickStart portfolio earned $37M

Charles River Ventures, a firm whose portfolio includes big names like Twitter and Scribd, announced an experimental seed program called QuickStart three years ago, and it has been making investments for two years. Today, partner George Zachary got on stage at the Future of Funding event (where VentureBeat is one of the sponsors) and, surprisingly, provided specific numbers on how the program is performing.

In the program’s first two years, Charles River made 22 QuickStart … Continue Reading

Facebook, PayPal partner on advertising, virtual goods payments

Facebook is tapping eBay-owned PayPal to power payment options for advertising and virtual goods on parts of the site.

Users and marketers can choose PayPal as an option for purchasing ads and Facebook Credits, a system being tested in a small number of games and applications for buying virtual goods on the site.

It looks like, at this time, Facebook is content to outsource payments services to its partners to help accelerate growth in virtual … Continue Reading

Sony Ericsson turned down Google's offer to build the Nexus One

Oh snap! According to Sony Ericsson CEO Bert Nordberg, Google offered his company first dibs on building the Nexus One. In its infinite wisdom, Sony Ericsson refused, and the Nexus One build duties went to HTC.

Nordberg apparently wanted to protect the Sony Ericsson brand. He said that the company would only produce phones under its own brand, and that it wouldn’t be a subcontractor to anyone.

The news leaves me sort of speechless, … Continue Reading

Clicker, a TV guide for the web, raises a pre-emptive $11 million round

Clicker, a TV Guide-styled search engine for online video, raised $11 million in a second round of funding led by JAFCO Ventures. Earlier investors Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures also joined this round.

“This was not a need-based round of fundraising,” said Clicker chief executive Jim Lanzone. ”This was an opportunity raise where we had a lot of inbound interest.” Lanzone said a number of funds competed to invest, although he wouldn’t say how many. … Continue Reading

Beyond Facebook: How social games terrify traditional game makers but will lead us to gaming everywhere

Facebook is truly shaking up the traditional video game market and the responses from the industry range from panic to visions of a new kind of gaming paradise for the world.

Jesse Schell, a game design professor at Carnegie Mellon University, generated a lot of chuckles this morning with his observations about that in his talk “Beyond Facebook” at the Dice Summit in Las Vegas.

At the conference aimed at the hardcore game developers, Schell … Continue Reading

Yahoo-Microsoft search deal cleared by both U.S. and Euro bureaucrats

“We’ve received clearance from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission for our search agreement with Microsoft,” Yahoo senior VP for search products Shashi Seth blogged this morning.

Microsoft’s Bing engine will deliver Yahoo search results once the two companies complete their planned integration. Microsoft’s self-serve ads will appear on Yahoo search results. Yahoo’s sales team will sell and book premium sponsorships for both Yahoo and Bing.

Bloomberg reported earlier in the … Continue Reading

Google Docs gets a web clipboard

Google has made life a bit better for hardcore Google Docs users. Today, the company unveiled a new web clipboard feature for the Docs suite. It allows users to copy items to a cloud-based clipboard from any Docs application, and then paste them into another Docs app with proper formatting.

Users can copy items to the web clipboard using the new clipboard menu shown below:

They can then use the same menu in another Docs … Continue Reading

Tesla plane crash victims identified. Glad no one tweeted this yesterday

On Wednesday morning, Tesla Motors employees Doug Bourn, Brian Finn and Andrew Ingram were killed when Bourn’s small private plane — apparently flying by instruments in fog too thick to see through — ran into ten-story high PG&E power lines in East Palo Alto.

Reporters from VentureBeat and elsewhere obtained the names of the victims fairly quickly that morning by ringing the cellphones of Tesla employees and others.

But there’s a longstanding rule among news … Continue Reading

Microsoft renaming Windows Mobile 6.5 to Windows Mobile Classic

Something had to be done about Microsoft’s aging Windows Mobile 6.5 platform now that we’ve learned about its upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series. MS can’t kill the platform outright, because many phones still rely on it and they will likely be sold for some time. Instead, according to Long Zhen, Microsoft will be renaming Windows Mobile 6.5 phones as Windows Phone Classic.

The name change won’t take effect until 7 Series phones hit retail sometime … Continue Reading

FarmVille, Mafia Wars maker Zynga is worth $3 billion, says trading site SharesPost

Games company Zynga, developer of the runaway hits Farmville and Mafia Wars, hasn’t filed for an IPO yet. So we don’t know for sure what Zynga’s market value will be if that happens.

But a study done by research form Next Up for pre-IPO trading service SharesPost says Zynga is worth three billion dollars, putting it in the same league as Facebook’s estimated $5B valuation.

SharesPost lets customers buy and sell shares in companies that … Continue Reading