Can the Chevy Volt bring GM back from the dead?

General Motors posted its first quarterly profit in almost three years today — a victorious declaration of its financial rehabilitation. It only took a major bailout, the slashing of several vehicle brands, and massive layoffs to turn things around, but the outlook is good — and made even shinier by a forthcoming line of exciting new products, capped off by the plug-in Chevy Volt.

GM reporting a surprisingly high $865 million profit for the first … Continue Reading

Roku adds more streaming sports content with UFC partnership

Owners of Roku‘s set-top box — which brings streaming web videos to your television — will soon have access to even more sports-related content, thanks to a partnership announced today with the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The company already has deals with MLB.tv and NBA Game Time, in addition to its  Netflix, Amazon, and Pandora partnerships.

Roku announced that the new UFC Channel will be available today, and will give users access to all live pay-per-view … Continue Reading

Starbucks offers $1 discount to Foursquare mayors, gets customer statistics

Becoming a Foursquare mayor is not about just bragging rights anymore. The coffee chain Starbucks announced today that it has started a nationwide “mayor reward” program with the popular location-based service.

On the game-like location-based service, users have long been able to claim the title of mayor at businesses like Starbucks coffee shops by “checking in,” or announcing their presence to friends. Starbucks is now rewarding the mayors by knocking one dollar off the price … Continue Reading

GM, Chrysler might finally get some love from the Energy Department

Last year, when the U.S. Department of Energy was doling out its first batch of massive low-interest loan guarantees to car companies under the banner of the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) Program, it very blatantly left out General Motors and Chrysler — almost entirely due to their miserable financial situations.

But it seems both companies have turned things around enough to qualify for forthcoming rounds of federal stimulus funding, according to DOE senior advisor  … Continue Reading

Bubble, bubble: Is Silicon Valley headed for trouble? (event)

Are we in another tech bubble? I don’t think I’m smart enough to answer that question, so I’ve assembled a panel of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to hash out the question of whether startup valuations are getting too frothy. This Thursday at the Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 at 5:30, join me, our panelists, and our hosts from the law firm of Dorsey & Whitney for the discussion. And then we’ll imbibe some bubbles — … Continue Reading

NY companies: Join us Thursday for pitches and drinks at Village Ventures

If you’re thinking about launching your company’s new product at DEMO, the leading conference for emerging technology, consider applying for a special pitch session this Thursday with one of New York’s respected venture capital groups, Village Ventures.

On May 20, we’ll be meeting with up to five companies at the Carlton Hotel in Manhattan (88 Madison Avenue at 29th Street).  Each company will be given five minutes to present to the DEMO team, several partners … Continue Reading

MySpace says it will make privacy easier

The growing criticism directed at Facebook’s privacy policies may be creating opportunities for competitors, particularly its fading rival, MySpace. The News Corp.-owned social network, still favored by quasi-celebrities like Tila Tequila, just outlined upcoming privacy changes in a blog post that may tempt some users fed up with Facebook.

The change sounds pretty straightforward, at least as it’s described in the post by copresident Mike Jones. Where users once had to adjust the settings for … Continue Reading

Twitter engineer, former API lead Alex Payne departs to co-found BankSimple

Alex Payne, who was one of Twitter’s early engineers and was the lead on its application programming interface, has left the company to co-found a financial startup, BankSimple. He’ll be the company’s chief product and technology officer and work out of Portland, Ore., although the company’s co-founders are in New York.

Payne worked on a critical part of Twitter, its application programming interface or API. The API effectively made the company what it is today; … Continue Reading

Mitsubishi leaps into the Smart Grid game with $76M initiative

The movement toward a cleaner, more efficient Smart Grid is suddenly becoming vital to a range of existing companies. Appliance makers, software empires and automotive giants alike are all rushing to get a piece of what is quickly becoming a billion dollar business unto itself. The newest entrant: Mitsubishi Electric, which today threw down $76 million for a far-reaching Smart Grid strategy (PDF).

Couched as a two-year experiment starting this year, the plan’s goal is … Continue Reading

Zend lands $9M more to expand PHP offerings

Zend Technologies, provider of open-source tools companies need to develop, deploy, and manage enterprise PHP applications, has raised $9 million in a new round of venture funding from its flock of existing investors. This brings its total to $55 million, a generous amount for an IT company.

PHP, which initially stood for “personal home page,” is a relatively simple scripting language that you can embed directly into HTML documents, used primarily to develop web pages.… Continue Reading

ReclaimPrivacy monitors your Facebook settings for unanticipated changes

A donation-based project called ReclaimPrivacy has launched a browser bookmarklet that checks your Facebook settings for unanticipated changes.

The project is a response to the social network’s continually changing privacy protections. In December, Facebook went through a privacy transition that defaulted content shared by users who had never adjusted their settings to public. It also recently made “likes” and “connections” more public and launched an instant personalization program that shared user data with special partners … Continue Reading

Semantic Web startup Inform Technologies grabs former Joost CEO as CTO

New York-based semantic web startup Inform Technologies hired Joost’s former chief executive Matt Zelesko as its new chief technology officer, where he’ll guide the company’s long-term technology strategy.

Joost was a much-hyped online video startup from Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström that ultimately ended up selling most of its assets to Adconion Media Group last fall. Zelesko led that deal.

“Media publishing is undergoing a dramatic transformation as content moves online, presenting a … Continue Reading

Smartphones on the rise: RIM, Apple overtake Motorola in global cell phone market

Smartphones by Blackberry-maker Research in Motion and Apple continue to gain global market share against all other cell phone types, according to a recent report by market research firm iSuppli. RIM and Apple claimed the fifth and sixth spots in first-quarter market share, while Motorola fell two spots to eighth. The news is particularly significant since both Apple and RIM sell smartphones exclusively.

RIM saw the most growth of all Top Ten cell phone companies … Continue Reading

iPhone invasion: 24 million 4G units planned for this year

Apple’s iPhone sales have been impressive, but suppliers in China say Steve Jobs is planning to send sales through the roof later this year.

Taiwanese consumer electronics supplier trade publication Digitimes claims that Foxconn, the manufacturer of Apple’s next-generation iPhones, plans to build and ship 24 million of the touchscreen gadgets before the end of this year. Most of those 19.5 million — are planned for the second half of the year.

By contrast, Apple … Continue Reading

Google and Intel expected to announce "smart TV" with Sony

Google and Intel are planning to announce a “smart TV” platform with customer Sony this week as they make a push to create web-connected consumer electonics, according to published reports.

The announcement is expected to be made this week at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco. Web-connected TVs have been shipping for some time. But these latest TVs — including a Sony Bravia model — would use Google’s Android operating system and a consumer … Continue Reading

Glyde hopes to take used game market with easy web interface

If you’re opening up an online market and facing huge competitors like GameStop, eBay and Amazon, your only hope is to have a better user interface for buying and selling. That’s the thinking behind Glyde, an online market for used video games, CDs, DVDs, and books.

Fortunately, the big guys have kept the bar relatively low. On eBay, for instance, it can take as much as 77 clicks over 10 minutes to put one item … Continue Reading

Scenios unveils an affordable way for video teams to collaborate

A number of companies have used cloud computing to substantially reduce the cost of some application or service. Joining their ranks is a startup called Scenios, which helps teams share and collaborate on videos.

New York City-based Scenios doesn’t offer video editing tools, but rather “digital asset management,” which is basically the storage and management of media like videos, audio recordings, and digital photographs. There’s a range of such asset-management services out there already, such … Continue Reading

Shutterfly lets you print your Facebook pictures in a book

Facebook has become the world’s largest repository of photos with more than 20 billion pictures uploaded by users. Today, photo site Shutterfly is announcing that it will let you print those photos in picture books within minutes.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company specializes in online photo services such as sharing pictures with friends or printing snapshots from online photo collections. Now Shutterfly is getting more hip with its Simple Path photo book creation service on … Continue Reading