Clicker launches Internet video guide based on HTML5 at Google I/O

Clicker, a television guide for the Web, announced today at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco the launch of Clicker.tv, a Web-based application that gives users a way to more easily find and watch the videos they are looking for on the Internet.

Much like Hulu, Clicker.tv spotlights popular episodes of television shows on its simple home page. It also provides advanced search functionality, allowing viewers to find search by media type (TV, general … Continue Reading

LibreDigital lands $8.1 million more for e-publishing service

LibreDigital, an Austin-based startup that supplies technology to deliver e-books from publishers to readers’ gadgets, announced an $8.1 million Series C round of funding led by S3 Ventures. Previous investors Adams Capital Management and Triangle Peak Partners also joined the round.

LibreDigital’s clients include HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Wiley, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Their client list includes six of America’s top 10 book publishers. LibreDigital delivers its technology … Continue Reading

Atmel's maxTouch chips to allow 16-finger touch on big displays

This will be good for apps such as party games on tablet computers.

Atmel is announcing new display chips today that will mean that touchscreen devices of the future will be much faster, more accurate, and able to accommodate as many 16 finger touches at once.

The new chips will advance the state-of-the-art in touchscreen displays, which are becoming popular as a natural user interface in everything from smartphones to iPads. I’ve noticed in iPad … Continue Reading

Web TV network Blip.tv raises $10.1M

Blip.tv, a startup that lets independent producers create their own Web TV shows, just announced a $10.1 million third round of funding.

The New York City company was founded in 2005. It said there are now 44,000 producers creating shows, and that those shows attract a total of 90 million views per month. Blip.tv runs targeted advertising on around 85 percent of those views. In addition to hosting shows on its own site, it syndicates … Continue Reading

Call of Duty: Black Ops game trailer shows that the blockbuster franchise lives on

Activision Blizzard and its Treyarch game studio showed off a trailer today for its next installment in the Call of Duty series. The video captures a minute and 43 seconds of footage, but it’s enough to show that the company is quite serious about keeping this blockbuster property going.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops game is being built by Treyarch and will be released on November 9 on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii … Continue Reading

Roundup: A bevy of iPhone news, HP to green data centers with manure, and more

Here’s the latest action:

Jive names new CEO on way to IPO — Jive Software, maker of Web-based collaboration software for enterprises, has just named Tony Zingale, the former CEO of Mercury interactive, as its new chief executive officer. It has also moved its headquarters to Palo Alto, Calif., as it bulks up in preparation for a potential initial public offering.

Visa unveils case that turns your iPhone into a credit card — Out of … Continue Reading

Parallels launches easy way to upgrade to Windows 7

Windows 7 is the fastest-selling operating system in history, giving a boost to sales of new PCs. But only 10 percent of existing Windows Vista and XP users have upgraded to it. That’s why Parallels is launching software today that makes it dead simple to upgrade to Windows 7.

The Parallels Desktop Upgrade to Windows 7 software walks users through easy-to-use instructions on how to upgrade software safely. It shows you how to upgrade without … Continue Reading

Playdom acquires a familiar name with Acclaim Games deal

Acclaim is one of the oldest names in the video game business, not unlike Atari in terms of its importance to video game history. So it’s interesting that one of the Young Turks of video games, social game publisher Playdom, has now acquired Acclaim Games.|

Mountain View, Calif.-based Playdom said today that it acquired Acclaim in for an undisclosed price. It is the latest in a series of acquisitions that Playdom has made as it … Continue Reading

Mobile developers: Compete for the Getties Awards at MobileBeat 2010

We’ll be celebrating the best mobile developers at our MobileBeat 2010 conference on July 12-13.

Our friends at GetJar, the world’s second largest app store, have just announced “The Gettie Awards 2010,” a competition for talented mobile application developers. The winners of the awards will be announced at a ceremony to take place on the evening of July 12, immediately following the first day of MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s two-day executive conference at the Palace Hotel … Continue Reading

Glucose biofuel cell could revolutionize medical technology

It turns out glucose, the naturally-occurring sugar compound that provides energy to living things (including us humans), can be harnessed to power electronic devices, according to new research out of Joseph Fourier University in France. The breakthrough could have far-reaching implications for makers of medical devices ranging from pacemakers to artificial organs.

Scientists proved the technology by implanting what they are calling a “glucose biofuel cell” into the abdominal cavity of a rat and monitoring … Continue Reading

Microsoft sues Salesforce.com over alleged patent infringement

Microsoft filed a lawsuit in federal court today alleging that Salesforce.com has violated several of its software patents.

The lawsuit, which I have embedded at the end of this post, says that the sales application company has violated nine of Microsoft’s patents, including a “method and system for mapping between logical data and physical data”, a “system and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu,” and “automated web site creation … Continue Reading

GQ says it sold 57,000 Apple apps, not 365

[Update: After quoting GQ's publisher below in a story by Min magazine in New York, I got this email from a Condé Nast spokesperson:

"GQ told MIN  that 365 copies of the December issue were sold in the months of March and April (after the magazine was off newsstands). That was left out of MIN's report.

"Additionally, there have been 57,000 purchases of the app since December - it is a combined iphone, … Continue Reading

Modern Warfare 2 map pack shatters PlayStation Network download records

Activision Blizzard announced today that it has sold more than 1 million copies of the downloadable map pack for the latest Modern Warfare game on the PlayStation Network.

The Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 game has been the bestselling game of all time since its launch in November. A follow-on map pack, the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package, has sold more than 17 million units at $15 a piece. Now the … Continue Reading

Chinese online game firm Perfect World buys $8.4M stake in game startup Runic

China’s big game companies continue to be interested in U.S. game startups.

As part of its first quarter 2010 earnings report, Chinese online game publisher and developer Perfect World Entertainment announced today that it has acquired a majority stake in development startup Runic Games. The company invested $8.4 million in Runic, cementing a relationship that began when Perfect World published Runic’s first title, the Diablo-style dungeon crawler Torchlight. That game has gone on to sell … Continue Reading

Facebook launches '0', a free, low-bandwidth mobile site for breaking into emerging markets

Facebook is making a big play for millions of new users around the world with the launch of 0 (pronounced Zero), a low-bandwidth mobile site that carries no data charges as long as users don’t look at photos. It will allow the social network to make headway in dozens of emerging markets where mobile phones may be the primary point of Internet access for consumers. Facebook first spoke of the site in February at the … Continue Reading

Facebook hints that simpler privacy settings are on their way

Facebook’s top public policy official in Washington D.C. hinted that the social network may offer simpler privacy settings in the next few weeks.

“Now we’ve heard from our users that we have gotten a little bit complex,” said Tim Sparapani in a radio interview Tuesday. “I think we are going to work on that. We are going to be providing options for users who want simplistic bands of privacy that they can choose from, and … Continue Reading

Yahoo snaps up Associated Content: Big money for cheap Web articles

Yahoo bought content site Associated Content today for a reported $90 million. Neither company formally disclosed the price, but AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher pegs it at $90 million in cash and AdAge has it at $100 million.

Like AOL’s newly launched Seed and Demand Media, Associated Content farms out assignments to hundreds of thousands of writers and pays around $5 per post. The acquisition brings Yahoo content from 380,000 contributors that can help the web portal … Continue Reading

New German VC firm Hanse Ventures unites stars of old, new media

Four investors, a mix of old and new media veterans with Xing, Bertelsmann, Gruner + Jahr and a search engine optimization firm on their resumes have united to launch a new early-stage fund in Hamburg, Germany.

Hanse Ventures, announced this morning in a press release sent to VentureBeat, claims to already have stakes in eight companies. It’s looking for another six to eight companies to invest in over the next three years.

What do they … Continue Reading

Khosla company EcoMotors snags $18M to develop "breakthrough" car engine

Even as many electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles near their launch dates — foreshadowing the demise of the internal combustion engine — a small Michigan company called EcoMotors is betting that fossil fuel engines are here to stay for a while, and that they could be much more fuel efficient (the same logic that is often used with clean coal initiatives). It just landed $18 million to make its case.

The company is currently developing … Continue Reading