Accel's Rich Wong: Flash isn't relevant in mobile

Updated

There’s been a lot of debate over whether Adobe’s Flash and AIR technologies, which power many videos and games on the web, are going to be significant on smartphones and upcoming devices like Apple’s iPad. Accel Partners’ Rich Wong, who specializes in mobile startups, weighed in on the debate today at a developer event hosted by mobile advertising startup AdMob.

“I don’t think Flash plays a relevant role,” Wong said. “Flash missed its window.”… Continue Reading

AdMob CEO: The App Store wins because we're in mobile's 'Yahoo phase'

Omar Hamoui, founder and chief executive of mobile advertising startup AdMob, offered a catchy way today to think about the evolution of mobile applications and the mobile web — we’re in “the Yahoo phase,” he said, because it’s still possible to find applications using directory-style app stores.

Hamoui spoke at AdMob’s developer event in San Mateo, Calif. One of the attending developers asked whether HTML5, the new version of the basic formatting languages of the … Continue Reading

VentureBeat's Best of DEMO list; pick your own favorites

Disclosure: The companies listed are among those chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.

The organizers and audience at this week’s DEMOSpring10 conferencehave already chosen their winners, but the team of VentureBeat writers covering the event also took time to vote on our favorite companies. We were impressed with the quality of … Continue Reading

Cisco buys into WiMax for Smart Grid, acquires stake in Grid Net

Cisco Systems has been scouting for major plays in the Smart Grid infrastructure arena for about a year — some analysts even speculated that it would buy wireless networking provider Silver Spring Networks. But today, it announced its decision to go with Grid Net, one of the first and only companies to trumpet WiMAX as the ultimate solution for transmitting data between utilities and smart meters.

Most utilities and meter makers rely on cellular networks … Continue Reading

Netflix now shipping instant streaming discs for Wii

After announcing that it would support Nintendo’s Wii this past January, Netflix has finally started shipping out instant streaming discs to lucky Wii owners.

E-mail alerts regarding the discs went out today, and Netflix subscribers will start receiving them as early as tomorrow. Just like with Netflix’s Playstation 3 instant streaming offering, subscribers need to request the disc at netflix.com/wii before it gets mailed out.

The Wii is the last gaming system to receive support … Continue Reading

Bing to start roll-out of new search features

Microsoft unveiled some interesting new features to it’s Bing search engine today at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City. While the new features are available to some, the company said the majority of users will see the roll-out happen over the next couple weeks.

The company continues its push to develop a true decision engine, one that tries to determine the searchers request and give responding results, rather than the traditional Google … Continue Reading

EnerNOC brings demand-response to small businesses with SmallFoot buy

EnerNOC, one of the best-known demand-response companies in the field, has been gobbling up competing and complementary companies to expand its reach, hoping to bring down the costs of its programs enough to cater to smaller businesses. Now it has acquired Boulder, Colo.-based SmallFoot to do just that.

EnerNOC is one of several companies, including CPower and Comverge, that redistributes energy loads on electrical grids when peak demand is climbing dangerously high. Brownouts and outages … Continue Reading

Location may get a central place in Google's web search redesign

Google is giving location a prominent place in its upcoming search redesign: Your whereabouts may be displayed right underneath the search bar.

Not only that, the left-hand sidebar (which has been in the beta test for a long time, but hasn’t been fully released) gets a touch-up. The heavy bars are gone and the icons are cleaner and brighter in color, compared to redesign screenshots that were floating around last month (see below).

Google spokesperson … Continue Reading

Official Digg iPhone app launches

The social news site Digg has finally released a homegrown iPhone application, which gives iPhone users a faster and more elegant alternative to the Digg mobile website.

The app is free (but ad-supported), and offers up many of the features you’d expect: You can view all of the stories throughout the site’s many categories, and vote them up or down from within the app. You can also view and vote on comments, search the site, … Continue Reading

Genomatica bags $15M as green chemicals trounce biofuels

Despite a rosy outlook early on, biofuels have hit a wall. Too expensive and unwieldy to scale, most projects have stalled in the demonstration stage, unable to make the leap to market. Several of the companies that make them, however, have discovered a lucrative loophole: green chemical manufacturing.

Going a step further, Genomatica, a company that scuttled biofuel ambitions in favor of full-time chemical production, has just raised $15 million in a third round of … Continue Reading

Intel creates Linux version of its app store for netbooks

Encouraged by early results on Windows, Intel said today it will add a beta test version of popular Intel AppUp Center for Linux.

The Intel AppUp Center has a wide range of apps for netbooks, which often don’t have the horsepower to run most PC applications. These apps are tuned to run without a lot of bells and whistles. That’s why they can run on any netbook, adding very little cost.

To help the market … Continue Reading

Google launches remarketing, lets ads follow consumers across the web

Google has unveiled a “remarketing” program, which will allow advertisers to reach consumers long after they’ve initially made contact with an online site or brand.

Remarketing is pretty simple in concept. It lets brands continue marketing to potential customers even if they’ve left your site. That means if they search for an item or click through on an ad but don’t buy anything, a company can keep targeting them with ads on other sites enhanced … Continue Reading

Crowdcast's crowdsourced dashboard lets managers know when they might fall short

A problem large companies face is how to have honest lines of communication between employees and the highest rungs of management. With several hundred or maybe thousands of employees for every key senior leader, it can extremely difficult to find out what’s happening on the ground with a product launch.

“People are often over-optimistic about how a project will progress,” said Mat Fogarty, chief executive of Crowdcast.

Fogarty’s company Crowdcast is a pretty novel solution … Continue Reading

Electric car batteries: The new cleantech bubble?

The electric vehicle battery industry will cave in by 2017, according to a new report that predicts massive oversupply — basically too many batteries for too few cars on the road.

Published by German consulting firm Roland Berger, the report estimates that only six or seven of about 60 worldwide EV lithium-ion battery makers will survive the decade. That includes recent American upstarts like A123Systems and Valence Technologies. The field will literally be decimated.

Johnson … Continue Reading

Sick of coal, China boosts its nuclear goals by 50 percent

China is scaling up its nuclear power plans in a big way. Its goal is to build 70 gigawatts worth of nuclear capacity by 2020 — 50 percent higher than its 2020 target was five years ago. It looks like uranium, still unpopular in the U.S. is finding big fans in Asia.

Achieving this goal will cost the country as much as $59 billion for 28 more reactors — 20 of which are already in … Continue Reading

South Africa still hooked on coal, and plans to stay that way

South Africa’s economy has grown by two-thirds since 1994 and its demand for electricity has kept pace. But, despite near-perfect wind conditions, its minister of finance, Pravhin Gordhan, has decided to keep coal at the heart of the country’s energy policy.

Here’s his logic:

1. Local coal resources are abundant and cheap.
2. Coal plants can be built faster and require less maintenance than nuclear reactors.
3. Brownouts are not an option in South Africa. … Continue Reading

French hacker who leaked Twitter documents to TechCrunch is busted

Tech industry blog TechCrunch caused a big stir last year when it posted internal business documents from Twitter. At the time, no one knew the identity of the hacker who broke into Twitter’s defenses and stole the documents.

But now the hacker has allegedly been arrested in France for the cyber crime. The AFP reported that French police arrested a hacker who sabotaged the Twitter account of Barack Obama. But ReadWriteWeb says the technique described … Continue Reading

Sixteen years in the making, Trip Hawkins' latest game for Facebook is "best idea I've ever had"

Trip Hawkins, chief executive of Digital Chocolate, isn’t shy about describing his company’s latest Facebook game, NanoStar Castles. He first conceived the game, which you could summarize as Pokemon for grown-ups, more than 16 years ago. He boldly says it is “the best idea I’ve ever had” and personally oversaw its design and production.

Those are pretty big words, considering Hawkins founded Electronic Arts, started 3DO, and is now on his mobile-social game company, Digital … Continue Reading

Control4 leads consortium to teach consumers why the Smart Grid is important

“Smart Grid” may be a common enough term to folks in cleantech, but most people don’t know anything about it beyond notice that their utility is replacing their old dusty meters with digital smart meters. The lack of market education has led to backlashes and dead ends. But now a group of companies and organizations with a stake in the Smart Grid have banded together to change the tide.

Spearheaded by the leadership team at … Continue Reading