Ask.com founder jumps into citizen journalism at Allvoices

In the mid-1990s, technologist David Warthen (right) founded the quirky search engine Ask Jeeves, which used natural language search technology to guide users to one shining answer for whatever they wanted. Ask Jeeves was one of the dot-com era’s successful IPOs in 1999.

Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp bought the company in 2005 for $1.85 billion and renamed it Ask.com. Today, it is one of the top search sites traffic-wise, not far behind Google, Yahoo and … Continue Reading

Tremor Media scores $40M to steal video ad budgets from TV

Video ad network Tremor Media has pulled in $40 million in new funding as advertisers prove they’re willing to increase spending on online video ads as an alternative to broadcast television.

“Brand advertisers are beginning to move seven-figure budgets into online video,” CEO Jason Glickman told me during a phone call late Tuesday. “We’re starting to see large pieces of the $70 billion per year spent in television move online. Some advertisers are making videos … Continue Reading

Apple evidently tracked down man who found iPhone prototype

Representatives of Apple allegedly visited and sought persmission to search the Silicon Valley address of a college-age man who found the next-generation iPhone prototype at a bar, Wired.com reported tonight.

The Apple employees knocked on the door of the finder’s home last week. A roommate answered the door, but wouldn’t let them in. That was confirmation that the lost iPhone was pretty important to Apple.

A 27-year-old Apple engineer left the phone by mistake at … Continue Reading

Round-up: Bezos, Dell, Carey back health care startup; Time Warner's massive mistake

Here’s the latest action:

Bezos, Dell and Drew Carey (?!) back health care startup: The Amazon.com and Dell founders, along with the comedian, are investing in a Seattle-based Qliance Medical Management, which tries to deliver affordable quality primary care by eliminating insurance companies. The company said it raised $6 million today.

Angel investing heats up: As the traditional venture capital industry still suffers from bloated funds raised a decade ago amid the tech bubble, early-stage … Continue Reading

Modern Warfare veterans heave a legal grenade at Activision Blizzard

Another day, another Infinity Ward lawsuit. Today, 38 developers at game studio Infinity Ward filed a lawsuit against parent company Activision Blizzard. The legal morass just keeps on getting deeper in this case, which is really about how to destroy a blockbuster game studio in 90 days.

The move is the latest in a saga that has engulfed the makers of Modern Warfare 2, the most successful game in video game history with more than … Continue Reading

Western Digital acquires Hoya's magnetic media operations for $235M

Hard disk drive maker Western Digital has agreed to buy Hoya’s magnetic media operations business for $235 million in cash.

The deal will ensure that Western Digital has access to a key component for its 2.5-inch hard disk drive business. Irvine, Calif.-based WD said the acquisition will help the company finish components faster and provide it with cost advantages, geographic diversification, a new pool of employee talent, and a more secure supply line.

WD is … Continue Reading

Third-party search engines start indexing Facebook "likes," shared content

Third-party search engines are starting to index some of the new real-time Facebook data unveiled last week.

OneRiot, a real-time search engine that raised $27 million in venture capital, has started indexing “likes” that are publicly shared on Facebook. It uses the data as a “social signal” about what links and pieces of content are interesting to people on top of real-time data it collects from sites like Twitter and Digg. So if a lot … Continue Reading

Crowdstar sues WonderHill for copying fish mating dance routine in social game

The copied fish mating dance was the last straw. The similarities between Crowdstar International’s Happy Aquarium and WonderHill’s Aquarium Life were so plentiful that the cloning of the social game is now a legal matter.

Burlingame, Calif.-based Crowdstar has filed a federal lawsuit accusing WonderHill of unfair competition and copyright violations for copying Happy Aquarium on Facebook. Among the signature features that WonderHill allegedly copied was a “distinctive mating dance to a backdrop of hearts … Continue Reading

Quirky's 23-year-old CEO finds love with the supply chain

Ben Kaufman is known as the guy behind Mophie, the Burlington, Vermont-based iPhone accessory maker that claimed $1 million in revenue in 2006.

But as he learned more and more from firsthand visits to outsourced manufacturers in China, Kaufman realized that he didn’t have to design the products himself. Instead, he told Inc. magazine in 2007, he planned to “turn Mophie into a community-based product-development company” that let anyone submit a design. Winning designs would … Continue Reading

Apple expands in-house chip resources by acquiring Intrinsity

Following rumors earlier this month that it was acquiring mobile chip company Intrinsity, Apple confirmed the deal to The New York Times today.

Apple declined to discuss the reasons for the acquisition, but it seems like part of a larger effort to move more of the design and manufacture of its products inside the company. The A4 chip in the iPad was the first big example of that, and there’s speculation that Intrinsity’s chip was … Continue Reading

5 things to know about Chinese startups — from former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee (video)

We were lucky enough this morning to sit down with Kai-Fu Lee, one of the most prominent figures in the Chinese internet universe. Known best and most recently for serving as the founding president of Google China, he also led R&D at Apple and founded the Microsoft Research division in China — the full trifecta of computing kingpins.

After departing Google last September (an event he remained understandably mum about during this meeting), he spied … Continue Reading

Zynga grabs a member of MySpace's old guard for public relations

Social gaming giant Zynga has grabbed MySpace’s vice president of global communications, Dani Dudeck, to shore up its public relations department.

The company, which has attracted bad press before for serving users misleading offers in games and for comments made by its rather candid chief executive Mark Pincus, will need to tightly manage its public image as it quickly grows toward 1,000 employees.

Dudeck expressed enthusiasm on her personal Twitter account about moving back from … Continue Reading

Salesforce.com and VMware team up on new platform for business apps

Two big players in enterprise technology, virtualization company VMware and sales application maker Salesforce.com, announced today that they’re working together on a new service called VMforce. With VMforce, developers can build business applications using the popular Java language, then run them on Salesforce’s Force.com platform.

The move should help Salesforce reach a broader and more traditional group of business app developers. Salesforce says there are already 72,500 businesses running more than 135,000 apps in Force.com, … Continue Reading

Marketo brings in another $10M for marketing automation

Marketo, a company selling web tools for salespeople and marketers, has raised $10 million in a fourth round of funding. The funds came from existing investors, led by Mayfield Fund and with participation from InterWest Partners and Storm Ventures.

The company has been bringing in funding at a steady rate — it raised $8 million in August 2008, followed by another round in September 2009. Its funding now totals $32 million. The money is supposed … Continue Reading

Nokia's new N8 camera aimed at Facebook hipsters

Nokia sells more handsets worldwide — nearly half a billion in 2009 — than top competitors Samsung, LG and Motorola put together. You could throw in fifth-ranked Sony Ericsson and Nokia would still be close to beating the bunch with nearly 40 percent market share.

But in America, Finnish Nokia has lost its footing through several missteps, including an attempt to end-run America’s superpowerful wireless carriers and sell unlocked phones directly to consumers, without the … Continue Reading

Sen. Chuck Schumer's letter to Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook privacy

Facebook is feeling some political heat for its moves last week, after launching a program that “instantly personalizes” websites for visitors by automatically sharing user data with the site owner.

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wrote a letter to chief executive Mark Zuckerberg asking him and the company to revisit their decision on the program and move to an “opt in” default rather than an “opt out” one.

Facebook first mentioned the “instant personalization” program in … Continue Reading

Google acquires Web gadget and game developer LabPixies for up to $25M

Google announced today that it has acquired LabPixies, an Israeli company that develops web-based gadgets and games for its iGoogle personalized homepage, Facebook, and other social sites. The company also develops mobile apps and games for Android and iPhone like Flood-It.

It’s an unusual move for Google, which has classically avoided owning content businesses, preferring to create tools like YouTube and Google search which index and organize content produced by others.

The price of the … Continue Reading

Yahoo Japan and DeNA create social gaming alliance

The Japanese social game market is taking off. Today, Yahoo Japan and mobile social game company DeNA have created an alliance in social games.

The companies say that the Japanese market has potential for rapid growth, not only in mobile games but also games on PCs. Together, they plan to launch a PC-based social game platform, Yahoo Mobage, late this summer.

DeNA’s Moba-ge-town mobile gaming portal has more than 18 million registered members. It expects … Continue Reading