Symantec buys authentication assets of VeriSign for $1.28B
Continuing an acquisition spree, Symantec said today it has agreed to buy the authentication business of VeriSign for $1.28 billion in cash.
The deal includes the secure socket layer, certificate services, public key infrastructure, VeriSign Trust Services, and VeriSign Identity Protection Service. All of those technologies are aimed at making sure people are who they say they are online. Since malware and identity theft have largely robbed the internet of trust, the goal of this … Continue Reading
New energy meters smart about data, but stupid about design, survey says
Hundreds of utilities across the U.S. have big plans to roll out millions of smart meters to their coverage areas to keep tabs on how much energy their customers are using and how healthy the electrical grid is in real time.
Smart meters may be the first step toward a cleaner, more efficient energy system, but they have set off a media and customer relations firestorm that threatens to stall the so-called Smart Grid movement. … Continue Reading
Investor Dave McClure: 'Open is for losers'
Updated
A group of investors argued heatedly about the value of open versus closed technology on a panel today at Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco. Dave McClure (pictured), who oversees the seed investing program at Founders Fund, kicked things off with a provocative statement: “Open is for losers.”
McClure was answering a question from moderator Dick Costolo of Twitter, who noted that one of the big values celebrated in the tech community is openness, … Continue Reading
Location startup Booyah is the first to tap Google's new Places service
Booyah, which has been on a tear of late after announcing it raised $20 million earlier this week, has landed a spot as one of Google’s first partners for Google Places, a service that lets local businesses manage their presence on Google.
Booyah’s location-based game app, MyTown, which has more than 2 million registered users, will take a freshly-launched application programming interface from Google Maps and show users the 20 most popular places around any … Continue Reading
Google Buzz API connects your social data to other apps
Google Buzz, the company’s social networking tool for sharing updates and content with your friends, is opening its data to outside developers today with a new application programming interface (API).
A couple of launch partners are demonstrating their Buzz integration on-stage today at Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco. Users of Seesmic, an application for managing multiple social networking services, will now be able to manage their Buzz accounts on the Seesmic apps for the … Continue Reading
Google's "smart TV" platform to debut tomorrow
We recently reported that Google and Intel will debut their web-enabled “smart TV” platform sometime this week during Google’s I/O developer conference, with Sony as a customer. Now we have a firmer date; It appears that Google is set to debut the platform tomorrow, thanks to some intrepid sleuthing by TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid.
Some fiddling with Google’s I/O press site URL revealed a page that was clearly not ready for public consumption, except for a … Continue Reading
EV maker Coda Automotive speeds ahead with $58M, but can it catch its competitors?
The green car industry seems to be splitting into three tiers, the top being dominated by big traditional automakers like General Motors and Nissan; the second being owned by ambitious and much-hyped contenders Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive; and the third belonging to the many smaller ventures hoping to level up, like Th!nk, Zenn Motors, Zap! Electric Vehicles, and — perhaps holding the most promise — Coda Automotive.
A spinout from electric fleet vehicle maker … Continue Reading
Facebook CEO's latest woe: accusations of securities fraud
Updated.
May has been a bad month for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who just turned 26 last Friday but spent his birthday wrestling with an uproar over Facebook’s privacy practices. The latest unwelcome gift: accusations of securities fraud from former Harvard schoolmates who say he and other Facebook executives tricked them into a supposed $65 million settlement that was actually worth far less.
Divya Narendra and brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (pictured above) contend that … Continue Reading
Location apps that control your heaters are coming with Google's Latitude API
Google has paved the way for all sorts of interesting personal apps based on location, and today it launched a new application programming interface for Latitude, its service for letting people share their location.
The API is constructed so that people can explicitly decide to share where they currently are or a history of their whereabouts, so that third-party developers can build applications based on that data.
The search giant says this opens the door … Continue Reading
Google's enterprise strategy: humility?
Google executives answered a number of reporters’ questions today about the company’s strategy for reaching enterprise customers. In contrast to its domination of Web search, Google is seen as an up-and-comer when it comes to enterprise tools, and Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra (pictured) offered the following answer about how Google might succeed: “It’s a matter of being humble.”
That remark might seem funny coming from a company that has a reputation for being … Continue Reading
Chrome reaches 70 million users, from 30 million last June
Google’s Chrome browser has more than doubled its user base since last June. The browser now has 70 million users up from 30 million last year, the company said at its developer conference today in San Francisco.
Chrome is gradually gaining on rivals Firefox and Internet Explorer, garnering a 6.73 percent of the market. Firefox has about four times as large a share as Chrome with a quarter of the market behind it, according to … Continue Reading
Former Atari/Sony exec joins venture firm targeting disruptive games
Phil Harrison, one of the fathers of the Sony PlayStation empire is helping found London Venture Partners, a new investment group with a mission to fund “disruptive” game development. He has joined the company as a general partner, reuniting with his former colleague, ex-Atari CEO David Gardner.
Together, the two will make up half of London Venture Partners’ founding members, with former EA vice president David Lau-Kee and investment banker Paul Heydon rounding out the … Continue Reading
Loggly raises $4.2M for a 'fun' approach to server logs
Loggly, a startup that wants to help manage web applications, has raised $4.2 million in a second round of funding.
The San Francisco company says it’s developing a fun, intuitive tool that will allow IT administrators, app developers, and data analysts search the logs that track server activity. That should make it easier to see how an application is performing and what’s going wrong. And I’m not making up the fun part — Loggly’s website … Continue Reading
Barcode tagger Stickybits scores $1.6 M in funding
Stickybits, a startup aiming to slap barcodes on real-world objects to link them to virtual information, has raised $1.6 million in additional seed funding on top of earlier $300,000 in initial funding. The company scored some new investors, bringing in First Round Capital and Lowercase Capital, who join previous investors Mitch Kapor and Polaris Venture Partners.
The aim of Stickybits is to capitalize on the growing prevalence of smartphones that can read barcodes with built-in … Continue Reading
Payvment raises $1.5 million to build shopping experiences on Facebook
Payvment, a San Francisco-based startup aiming to provide a single shopping network across Facebook, raised $1.5 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures and angel investor Dave McClure.
The company builds storefronts for retailers on Facebook so users can buy products directly on the social network, instead of having to click through to a new web site. It has built more than 20,000 storefronts since launching last November. The company wouldn’t disclose the volume of sales … Continue Reading
Google, Mozilla, and Opera launch WebM open video project
Google has spent a lot of time evangelizing for open formats for Web applications and media. Today it took another step in that direction by announcing a new free, open source video technology called WebM.
WebM will combine three technologies — VP8 for video encoding (a technology that Google acquired when it bought On2), Vorbis for audio encoding, and the Matroska media container format. Videos created in WebM can be made available in both HTML5 … Continue Reading
Google building a store for Web applications
Sundar Pichai, a vice president of product management at Google, demonstrated a new company service today at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco that he says represents his company’s attempt to solve two of the big problems facing Web developers — discoverability and monetization.
To make that happen, Google seems to have taken a cue from the mobile-app world. It’s developing a store for Web applications, called the Chrome Web Store. Pichai said … Continue Reading
Want to make money off a mobile app? Build a free Java version
Smartphones get all the buzz, but mobile app warehouse GetJar claims that 90 percent of phones in use worldwide, and 72 percent of American phones, are still the non-smartphones that the mobile industry confusingly calls “feature phones.”
To make money from them, according to Patrick Mork, an executive at a leading app store for feature phones, app makers need to create Java-based apps that are free to download, and that make money from ads rather … Continue Reading
Google launches business-app platform with VMware
Google is expanding the reach today of App Engine, its platform for Web applications. It’s announcing a new version called App Engine for Business, where big companies can build applications for use by their employees.
Eric Tholome, director of product management for Google’s developer tools, said App Engine for Business provides the infrastructure for “traditional internal horizontal apps” used by enterprise workforces. By using the cloud, applications will only take up the resources that they … Continue Reading
Google Wave, a novel collaboration tool, takes on Microsoft Office, Outlook, Hotmail all at once
Google launched a public version today of Google Wave, a clever but complex tool that lets small teams of people collaborate in real-time without sitting in the same room.
Compared to Microsoft’s Office 2010 and Hotmail, which were debuted to the press in the past week, Google Wave cranks up the concept of real-time communications to the point where you can watch your coworkers type onscreen.
Google won’t actively hawk Wave against Microsoft’s workplace establishment … Continue Reading
