Netflix chief and Charter Fund buy education game startup DreamBox Learning

Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings and the non-profit venture capital firm Charter Fund have acquired DreamBox Learning for an undisclosed price.

The new owners have agreed to put an additional $10 million investment into the educational game startup. Hastings, who is speaking today at the Education Innovation Summit at Arizona State University, is a well-known education philanthropist. The investment will expedite the company’s expansion strategy, helping it increase its presence in U.S. schools and develop … Continue Reading

Ad-hating Tumblr founder raises $5 million

Blogging startup Tumblr, a service founded by David Karp that lets users publish short, simple blog posts, has secured a third round of funding for $5 million. The round, first reported by MediaMemo and confirmed to VentureBeat by Karp, was led by existing investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.

Karp hasn’t commented on the valuation, but in a comment on a blog post, investor Fred Wilson of Union Square said it was “a huge … Continue Reading

Offerpal becomes one-stop shop for ads and offers

In a move to broaden its appeal to advertisers, Offerpal Media is expanding into the ad network business.

Today, Offerpal’s main business is running offers, which are special ads in social apps where a user can opt to accept an offer — such as signing up for a Netflix subscription — in lieu of paying for a virtual good in a game with a credit card. Lots of major brands and ad agencies work with … Continue Reading

Lost next-generation iPhone puts a scorching spotlight on luckless Apple employee

The next-generation iPhone prototype that turned up in the press this week is putting the spotlight on one particularly unlucky Apple engineer.

Gizmodo, which acquired the phone through someone who said they found it at a bar, wrote in a post Monday that the lost phone belonged to Gray Powell, a 27-year-old Apple software engineer. The story is pretty comic, unless you’re the hapless Powell or a member of the Apple legal team. Apple is … Continue Reading

Ford Sync will let you control smartphone apps with voice commands

The Ford Sync car computing system got an upgrade as the car maker announced Tuesday that it will allow drivers to control apps with voice commands.

The Ford Sync AppLink, first hinted at in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, is a downloadable software upgrade for BlackBerry and Android-based smartphones. The first Ford car that will use the AppLink is the 2011 Fiesta model, which debuts in the summer.

The first Sync-enabled apps are Pandora, … Continue Reading

Roundup: Apple countersues Kodak, Radio Shack gives up on the Palm Pre and Pixi

Here’s the latest action:

Apple countersues Kodak: Responding to a patent suit by Kodak in February over the camera technology in the iPhone, Apple countersued the company on April 15, reports Patently Apple. The countersuit claims that several Kodak products — including the M and C series cameras, along with the SLICE camera — are infringing on two Apple patents.

Google working hard to bring iPhone developers to Android: An iPhone developer writes … Continue Reading

Will FaceCash, the mobile payment application, kill the credit card?

A Silicon Valley company with a noteworthy founder has created a mobile payment system called FaceCash that it hopes will one day displace credit cards.

You might be tempted to write this off as too audacious. But consider this: The founder is Aaron Greenspan, the Harvard graduate who claimed in 2007 that his former schoolmate, Mark Zuckerberg, ripped off his work when Zuckerberg created Facebook. Greenspan settled a trademark lawsuit with Facebook and Zuckerberg filed … Continue Reading

Malware spreads to emerging countries as cyber threats multiply

Thanks to cookie-cutter tools, cyber attacks are multiplying exponentially across the internet, hitting both developed and emerging countries in all regions of the world, according to an annual assessment by security vendor Symantec.

Symantec found that cyber attacks are growing dramatically in countries such as Brazil, India and Russia. The U.S. is still the No. 1 country where computers are attacked, accounting for 19 percent of all malicious code findings. But that stat is down … Continue Reading

80legs makes it even easier to crawl the Web like Google

80legs launched last fall with the goal of offering Web crawling for the masses — in other words, it offered relatively cheap technology to help companies browse and index data from the Web, as giant companies like Google and Microsoft currently do to create their search engines.

80legs’ cheap technology puts Web crawling, and the interesting data analysis it allows, within reach for small companies that couldn’t afford it otherwise. To advance that goal, 80legs … Continue Reading

Palm's loss is Twitter's gain

Twitter’s hiring continues apace. The hot, well-funded microblogging startup was up to 175 employees at its inaugural developer conference Chirp. And now it has snatched one more key hire for its vice president of engineering slot: former Palm senior vice president Michael Abbott.

SEC filings Friday revealed the executive, who was critical to the development of its Web OS platform, had recently left the mobile device company.

As he moves in, current vice president of … Continue Reading

Funding roundup: Latest deals around the Valley

A lot of money changed hands around Silicon Valley last week. Here’s a list of the bigger deals that went down.

PubMatic, provider of tools to optimize Internet ads for publishers of all types and sizes, raised $7.5 million in a third round of venture funding. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., the company is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Helion Venture Partners and Nexus India Capital. It has now raised $18 million to date.

ServiceMax, … Continue Reading

Profounder offers a crowdsourced approach to funding startups

When you’ve got a cool startup idea, raising the initial funding can be the hardest part. In fact, the broken state of startup investing seems to be a topic at every conference I go to these days. Now Jessica Jackley, who brought a new approach to nonprofit fundraising with Kiva.org, is working to do something similar for startups and small businesses with a site called Profounder.

Since they haven’t launched yet, Jackley and her co-founder … Continue Reading

Apple's iPhone 4 will usher in a wave of mobile video conferencing

Now that Gizmodo has outed Apple’s next generation iPhone, we finally have some idea of what Apple is planning with its next release — and it’s more than just a simple speed bump like the iPhone 3G. In addition to a slew of design changes and other upgrades, the next iPhone apparently features a front-facing camera, which is integral for mobile video conferencing.

It may seem like a small addition, but its a sign of … Continue Reading

Facebook overhauls profile interests, converts them to Pages

Back in the good old days of Facebook (think 2004), you used to be able to click on people’s profile interests and easily pull up a list of all friends who were into the same things like bands or TV shows. That changed as the site’s search evolved and as the company launched more marketer-friendly Fan Pages.

Today it looks like some of that functionality may be coming back with new Community Pages that are … Continue Reading

Wordnik wants to be dictionary for cool apps, launches developer contest

A startup called Wordnik has been amassing a huge collection of words (8 million so far) and information about those words — definitions, histories, examples of usage, statistics, and more. Now founder and chief executive Erin McKean is asking developers to build applications with that data. She’s launching a contest with prizes for the coolest apps.

Wordnik released its first application programming interfaces (APIs) allowing developers to use its data around six months ago, McKean … Continue Reading

Big Fish Games swims into Facebook with Treasure Quest casual games portal

Casual game companies, which grew up as operators of portal web sites, are adapting to the new world order of social networking. Big Fish Games is doing that today as it launches Treasure Quest, a casual games portal with eight games on Facebook.

The Treasure Quest portal is a big effort by Big Fish Games to shift into the space dominated by social game companies such as Zynga, Playfish and Playdom. The Treasure Quest portal … Continue Reading

Playdom hires ex-Yahoo executive as CTO

Hot social gaming company Playdom has hired former Yahoo executive David Sobeski as chief technology officer.

The hire shows that the company is still able to pick off executives from old guard tech companies as it continues to grow its social game business. Playdom dominates social games on the MySpace social network and has been investing heavily in Facebook games as well.

Sobeski most recently served as senior vice president in charge of open strategy … Continue Reading

Going full circle, Nolan Bushnell rejoins Atari's board

The arc on this event spans the entire history of the video game industry. Nolan Bushnell, the father of video games, is rejoining the board of directors of Atari today.

Bushnell founded the original Atari Inc. with Ted Dabney in 1972, launching a revolution in home and arcade video games. He sold the company in 1977 to Warner Communications and was forced out in a management dispute in 1978. He went on to found Chuck … Continue Reading

Palm loses one exec, but offers cash and stock to keep the rest

With rumors of an impending sale on the horizon, Palm is getting in gear to retain its top executives, according to SEC filings released on Friday.

The filing revealed that Michael Abbott, Palm’s senior VP of software and services who was critical to the development of its Web OS platform, would be leaving the company as of April 23. To prevent other key execs from following suit, the company is offering them $250,000 in cash … Continue Reading