Google, Microsoft to team up on privacy push launching tomorrow

The world’s biggest tech heavyweights are set to team up with each other to influence the future of Internet privacy law. Google, Microsoft and a number of other civil liberties groups, think tanks and tech companies will unveil a set of principles they want to advocate for updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act tomorrow.

That’s a law created in 1986 that sets out the kinds of privacy rights people can expect to have when they … Continue Reading

Self-published books on Lulu to be available on iPad

Electronic book publisher Lulu told its top authors over the weekend that their electronic books can be made available on Apple’s new iBookstore that is debuting with the launch of the iPad on April 3.

This is one more way that indie books by self-published authors can appear on Apple’s iPad platform, which is a tablet computer that is expected to be one of the hot gadgets of the year. The self-publishing book company said … Continue Reading

Investment banker predicts big investments, mergers in game market

Tim Merel sees lots of action coming in the video game industry as it expands to become one of the biggest entertainment industries in the world. Merel is corporate finance director for games and other sectors at IBIS Capital in London. He just released a 60-slide review of the global opportunities for investing in video games. He looks at everything from funding to merger opportunities throughout the industry, from console games to social games. Here … Continue Reading

Jambool hires marketing veteran from Electronic Arts for social app payments platform

Game veterans are following the gold, leaving traditional game companies for the many upstarts that have sprung up around the social networking economy.

Today, Jambool (which also goes by Social Gold) is announcing it has hired Mike Quigley as its chief marketing officer, VentureBeat has learned. Quigley was former vice president of global marketing for Electronic Arts’ EA Games label and spent 10 years at the company, overseeing marketing of games such as The Sims, … Continue Reading

How green are solar companies, really? SVTC ranks them for you

An environmental group pushing the solar power industry to adopt best practices for “greener” manufacturing has released a scorecard showing which companies rated highest on solar panel recycling and other environmental efforts.

The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), a nonprofit based in San Jose, Calif., released its SolarScorecard — the first of what it plans to make an annual survey. The report lists 24 leading makers of photovoltaic (PV) solar modules and one maker of … Continue Reading

Facebook's plan to auto-share user data gets a grand total of 131 comments

Last Friday afternoon, Facebook unveiled a new proposed privacy policy that included a paragraph about an upcoming program that will automatically share your identity with certain ‘pre-approved’ partners the moment you hit their site.

Reviews of this new project in the blogosphere were almost universally negative because of privacy concerns, even through spokesperson Barry Schnitt told us that the intention behind it was really to provide users with a better, more seamless experience. (Read the … Continue Reading

Brett Sperry's Jet Set Games to launch Highborn game for iPhone, iPad

Jet Set Games, a new startup led by the co-creator of the original Command & Conquer game series, announced today its it will launch Highborn, a social strategy game for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

Las Vegas-based Jet Set Games is headed by Bretty Sperry, who co-founded Westwood Studios along with Louis Castle in 1985. Westwood was a pioneer of strategy games on the PC such as Dune II, where the idea of real-time … Continue Reading

Brightcove readies its video platform for the iPad, announces HTML5 support

It seems like Apple’s refusal to support Adobe’s Flash technology on the iPad may be contributing to widespread changes across the web. Take for example Brightcove, maker of one of the leading online video platforms, who announced today that it will be supporting HTML5 video in its “Brightcove Experience” software.

The news means that sites using Brightcove’s video platform will be able to deliver video content to Apple’s iPad, as well as the iPhone and … Continue Reading

Quora's elegant community design wins it funding from Benchmark

Quora, the question-and-answer site that has become the new obsessive past-time of Silicon Valley insiders, raised funding in a first round led by Benchmark Capital. The company’s co-founders, Adam D’Angelo, who was Facebook’s chief technology officer and Charlie Cheever, who was another early Facebook engineer, also invested. Matt Cohler, another early Facebook executive, joins the board from Benchmark.

D’Angelo confirmed the round through Quora, but didn’t disclose the size. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch says sources … Continue Reading

MailChimp's hard lesson in freemium business model: spammers love it

The freemium business model, where you give away a service or app for free and charge a subscription fee to those who want premium features, has taken off everywhere. But Ben Chestnut, chief executive of the email marketing firm MailChimp, warns that the freemium model leads to a very unwanted side effect: a tripling of reported abuse cases.

Chestnut was speaking at last Friday’s Freemium Summit. MailChimp lets anyone send email newsletters to customers, manage … Continue Reading

Review: Battlefield Bad Company 2 almost stands up to Modern Warfare 2

I took a break from Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer combat to give Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for the Xbox 360 a spin. And I was pleasantly surprised at how fun the new shooting game from Electronic Arts was to play.

I’m happy to see that one of the most competitive genres in all of video games — first-person shooter combat games — is heating up. On the one side, Activision Blizzard’s Modern … Continue Reading

Hardcore gamers are accepting virtual goods in video games, report says

Free-to-play games, where you can play a game for free but are then encouraged to buy virtual goods such as weapons, have taken off. Even though this business model is like a return to the expensive old days when gamers paid a quarter for minutes of play, hardcore gamers are embracing virtual goods.

About 88 percent of 4,816 gamers surveyed said they had purchased some form of digital content, including music, movies and games. About … Continue Reading

Expanding in Asia, Sony launches the PS 3 in the Philippines

It took almost four years, but Sony is finally launching its PlayStation 3 video game console in the Philippines. That’s a sign that the company is serious about expanding the market for games to parts of the world where nobody ever dreamed video games would be popular.

Game consoles have become part of mass culture in Japan, Korea, North America, and Europe. But other regions of the world are only beginning to embrace entertainment technology. … Continue Reading

AMD launches 12-core server chips in latest salvo against Intel

The chip core war continues to heat up. Today Advanced Micro Devices is announcing the release of new server microprocessors with 8 or 12 processors on a single chip.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Intel introduced its first 6-core chips and a day before another major Intel server chip announcement. These announcements are timed so close together it’s like watching a pro tennis match.

But AMD argues that its new chips, based … Continue Reading

Self-published e-books to make it to Apple's iPad for almost no cost

Big publishers are flocking to the iPad, readying to publish electronic versions of their bestselling books on Apple’s much-anticipated tablet device due to launch April 3. But smaller publishing houses are making the move, too, including self-publishing service Smashwords.

Smashwords, a site where writers can publish their own e-books, said today it has signed a distribution deal with Apple to put its books into the iPad iBookstore. Mark Coker, chief executive of Smashwords, said in … Continue Reading

Apple already sells out first week's shipment of iPads

Apple’s web site says it has already sold out its first shipment of iPads, the tablet computers that will be available April 3. That’s the day that the iPad officials goes on sale in stores, but Apple had been taking pre-orders which customers could go pick up in stores on the day of the launch.

Now that has changed. The company says that anyone who orders an iPad now can expect them to ship via … Continue Reading

Week in review: Y Combinator Demo Day, Trip Hawkins' new Facebook game

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

Y Combinator presents 26 new startups — Y Combinator hosted its latest Demo Day this week for startups graduating from its incubator. This post offers a roundup of every presenting company, except for those in stealth mode.

Photoshop’s new “Content-Aware Fill” feature gives you the power of the gods — You can practically … Continue Reading

Roundup: First week of iPads sells out, cities compete to join Google's broadband network

Here’s the latest action:

Apple sells out first week’s worth of iPads — If you order an iPad now, you’ll have to wait until April 12, more than a week after the April 3 launch. Meanwhile, MacRumors has pulled together a list of some launch applications created specifically for iPads.

Cities vie for test of Google’s experimental broadband network — More than 1,100 communities applied to be part of Google’s pilot program, some using promotional … Continue Reading

Facebook says new program to automatically share data 'has nothing to do' with ads

Tucked into Facebook’s new proposed privacy policy released yesterday was a paragraph saying the social network will automatically share your data with special “pre-approved” partners when you visit their sites. But no partners were listed, nor was there any detail given on how these partners would be chosen.

I talked to Barry Schnitt, Facebook’s director of communications and public policy, today to get a few more details. More broadly speaking, Facebook has always had an … Continue Reading