"Foursquare for TV" app Miso gets seed funding

Bazaar Labs, the creator of a mobile application for sharing what movies and television you’re watching called Miso, just announced that it has raised a seed round of undisclosed size.

Miso is modeled on Foursquare, the mobile application for sharing your location with friends. Foursquare creates a social gaming experience around where you are, and Miso creates a similar experience about what you’re watching. Users “check in” to let their friends know what they’re watching … Continue Reading

EC Roundup: Your hidden sales force and how to spend a marketing budget

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner.

Issuing stock options? Here’s what you need to know – Stock options can be a terrific incentive to recruit and retain key employees, but they’re not without their issues. Attorney Scott Edward Walker runs down a few things you’ll need to keep in mind when putting together an option plan.

Influence or data? How to spend a marketing budget – Startups with small marketing budgets face a dilemma: … Continue Reading

Roundup: VCs battle carried interest tax bill, Kleiner recruits life science guru and more

Here’s the latest action:

Salesforce reports strong earnings — The enterprise application company brought in $376.8 million in revenue, up 24 percent from the previous year and beating analyst expectations of $368 million.

VCs fight tax on carried interest — The venture capital community is pooling its resources to defeat a bill just introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would increase the tax on carried interest — the share of the profits made … Continue Reading

Zynga adds a game bar to FarmVille: Will 75 million people care?

When you have a game enjoyed by 75 million people, you have to make changes very carefully. That’s why Zynga has been slowly rolling out a new feature in its FarmVille game, which is the most popular app on Facebook.

The new feature is a FarmVille Game Bar, pictured above, which resides in your internet browser. This feature looks like it isn’t universally available; I got an invitation to install it today.

The bar is … Continue Reading

Serial entrepreneur Mike Cassidy sells Ruba to Google

Mike Cassidy has scored multiple hits as a serial entrepreneur. His latest coup is selling his online travel site Ruba to Google today, according to a Ruba blog post.

Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed. Cassidy himself tweeted the news, saying “Now I’m a Googler. Very excited!” On Monday, Ruba’s team will move into the Google headquarters.

Ruba is just 15 months old. It has created a visual travel site and community with a … Continue Reading

Location wiki PublicEarth raises $1M more

PublicEarth, a wiki-style site where users can view and edit information about various locations, has raised another $1 million in funding.

The site includes data about more than 5 million locations right now, PublicEarth says, ranging from general interest spots like restaurants and hotels to more specialized locations like haunted spaces and dog parks. The data includes a photo, latitude and longitude coordinates, keywords, and more. It comes from the site’s visitors and from PublicEarth’s … Continue Reading

Killzone 3 to arrive in 3D for PlayStation 3

Sony’s next major exclusive title for the PlayStation 3 is going to be Killzone 3. And word has arrived that this title is going to support 3D viewing on the latest flat-panel TVs. Sony’s counting on consumer adoption of 3D TVs to drive a big resurgence in TV purchases.

Lots of people have been skeptical of 3D TV, since the magic of movies like Avatar in 3D theaters may not translate into a great experience … Continue Reading

Babble lands $3M for online parenting advice

Babble Media, an online magazine and social network for hip, stylish parents, today announced it has secured a second round of funding for $3 million. That brings its total funding to $6.25 million. The funding will be used to build the company’s team, which includes another 10 hires in the next six to nine months.

Looking to be more than just a basic parenting publication, Babble claims to touch upon the whole breadth of parenting, … Continue Reading

The good news and bad news about bubbles

On Thursday, I moderated a panel of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists discussing a provocative question: As startup valuations get frothy, are we blowing another bubble?

It seems like you can wander down Sand Hill Road muttering “social location games” and get a $20 million check dropped in front of you these days. And yet lots of promising startups developing deep technologies are starving for capital. So what’s the deal?

The panelists at the event, sponsored … Continue Reading

MySpace says it welcomes social games to its platform

MySpace announced today it is launching MySpace Games Lab to help third-party app makers bring more social games onto its social network. It is also launching an internal team to make more in-house games on MySpace.

The pilot program will support game developers by providing rapid feedback and quick turnaround on new features to be added to social games. Mike Jones, co-president of MySpace, said in a blog post that MySpace welcomes game developers of … Continue Reading

Today's best comment about Google-AdMob

After the Federal Trade Commission’s announcement this morning that it’s approving Google’s acquisition of mobile ad company AdMob for $750 million, it seemed like everyone in the mobile industry wanted to comment. And yes, there’s room for lots of discussion and debate.

But right now, I’m partial to AdMob chief executive Omar Hamoui’s succinct reaction on Twitter: “Whew!”… Continue Reading

VH1, Starbucks, and other big brands explore location plays

Tech-savvy early adopters — okay, Internet hipsters — are no longer the only people interested in using their smartphones to check in at the hottest places in town or contend for the mayorship of the local café. Major brands, too, are looking how capitalize on location-based services, which they see as the next step for social media. And competition will get tough: Before you know it, Starbucks will be poaching customers the second they check … Continue Reading

Viacom CEO: "I wanna run" YouTube

With a fresh batch of internal documents now open to the public, both Viacom and Google are still wrestling over their longstanding copyright infringement lawsuit.

Viacom sued Google in 2007 seeking more than $1 billion in damages, arguing that the search giant Google knowingly allowed Viacom’s content to flourish on the site as it tried to grow usage aggressively. Google says the media conglomerate only engaged in a legal strategy once talks to acquire YouTube … Continue Reading

Do video ads work? Study finds they boost in-store sales

A study commissioned by video ad network BrightRoll and British consumer product group Reckitt Benckiser finally puts a number on the effectiveness of video ads. The five-month campaign for Air Wick Freshmatic and Scented Oils resulted in a 6 percent lift in in-store sales for RB’s definitely non-techie products.

BrightRoll’s video campaigns are one of many ways that advertisers now deliver ads and track the response. But what about offline buying? Reckitt Benckiser did the … Continue Reading

Is Microsoft's one-time star J Allard leaving the company?

J Allard was the design brains behind almost everything cool that came out of Redmond in recent years, from the Xbox to the Zune. Now there’s a report that he may be resigning from the company because one of his favorite new projects, a tablet computer called Courier, got axed.

Allard is the chief experience officer and chief technology officer at the Entertainment & Devices group inside Microsoft. He has responsibility for the design of … Continue Reading

AT&T raising early termination fee to $325 for smartphones and netbooks

AT&T is about to make it more difficult for new iPhone users to break their contracts. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the carrier will be raising its early termination fee (ETF) for smartphones and 3G netbooks from $175 to $325 as of June 1. An AT&T spokesperson confirmed the news with VentureBeat, and the company has since issued a press release.

The change won’t affect existing customers, only those signing up for new … Continue Reading

With $8.25M fund, Y Combinator backing even more startups

Y Combinator, the incubator whose graduates include Justin.tv, Reddit, Scribd, Xobni, and many other high-profile startups, just announced that it has raised a new $8.25 million fund.

Created in 2005, Y Combinator was initially funded by cofounders Paul Graham (pictured), Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell. In March 2009, it raised a $2 million fund from Sequoia Capital and angel investors Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, and Aydin Senkut. (Disclosure: Senkut is an investor in … Continue Reading

Atari's brand awareness is weak among young gamers

Older gamers have fond childhood memories of playing Atari video games. But the landscape has changed dramatically in the past few decades, and now the brand appears to be weak among young gamers.

Nolan Bushnell, the legendary Atari founder who rejoined the Atari board recently, believes it is strong. But a survey conducted by E-Poll shows that Atari’s overall brand awareness isn’t very good. Atari will have to deal with a big brand revival campaign … Continue Reading

Yesterday, Google shrank the feature phone market with Android 2.2

Google announced the release yesterday of the software development kit of Android version 2.2, nicknamed FroYo. This release represents a big shake-up for the industry.

In a recent test on the Google Nexus One by developers Android Police, FroYo delivered a whopping 450 percent speed boost on the Android handset. In the industry standard performance test called “linpack”, FroYo scored a whopping 37.5 MFLOPS processing power as compared to 6.5-7 MFLOPS on Android latest 2.1 … Continue Reading

Ex-MySpace exec Shawn Gold raises $2M for his Evite competitor, Cocodot

Los Angeles-based Cocodot, an invitation and greetings service, has raised $2 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. Anthem Venture Partners and Rincon Venture Partners participated in the round. Founder Shawn Gold was previously MySpace’s chief marketing officer.

Isn’t it late in the game for another Evite competitor? Apparently not. The company debuted at the 2009 TechCrunch50 event, where it was dubbed “stylish, prettier, more social” than Evite. What the company probably needs is … Continue Reading