Investment startup Betterment says it can make savings accounts extinct

The web may already have a wide array of personal investment sites, but startup Betterment believes it has something new to offer.

The company launched today at TechCrunch Disrupt. “When you go to a broker you have to pick among a menu of funds and stocks that are available,” said CEO and founder Jonathan Stein. “It’s an overwhelming experience for many people, even Columbia MBAs.”

The result is that many people simply leave their money … Continue Reading

Mobile payments firm Obopay promotes president as it prepares for worldwide growth

Obopay has named its Mumbai, India-based sales chief Deepak Chandnani as president as the company expands its mobile payments business worldwide.

Chandnani was formerly head of sales and marketing of the Redwood City, Calif.-based company. He will report to chief executive Carol Realini.

Realini said in an interview that the time is ripening for mobile payments to expand dramatically. Chandnani’s promotion — and the fact that the company is tapping an executive based overseas for … Continue Reading

Microsoft rumored to be planning broad reorg for entertainment/games division

Microsoft is planning a broad shakeup in the management of its division that makes video games, mobile phones, and music devices, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Microsoft hasn’t yet commented. But the Journal says the reorganization goes beyond the rumored departure of J Allard, the one-time star who serves as the chief technology officer of the Entertainment & Devices group which is headed by longtime Microsoft executive Robbie Bach.

The group … Continue Reading

Roundup: Solar tax credits could create 200,000 new jobs, Walmart marks down iPhone to $97, and more

Here’s the latest action:

Tax credits could make a big difference for solar — A new report out of the Solar Energy Industries Association says that tax credits, combined with a two-year extension of the current grant program for U.S. solar projects, would create 200,000 new jobs and 10,000 new megawatts of power.

Apple calling it quits on iPhone 3G 8GB? — Boy Genius Report says it’s heard that Apple has already discontinued production of … Continue Reading

Wafer giant MEMC expands further into solar with $76M Solaicx buy

Solaicx isn’t your garden-variety silicon wafer maker. The Santa Clara, Calif. company says it has devised a manufacturing process that allows it to churn out extremely efficient monocrystalline wafers tailored for the solar market at a viciously competitive low price — the holy grail of photovoltaics.

This opportunity to steeply reduce its manufacturing costs looked too good to pass up for MEMC, one of the biggest makers of silicon wafers in the world, which has … Continue Reading

Publish2 wants to take content distribution away from the AP

Publish2, a content distribution service for print and web publishing, announced today the launch of the Publish2 News Exchange, a proposed replacement for mega content distributor the Associated Press.

The company claims that its new product, which launched today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference, will help publishers avoid the high costs associated with the AP for equally high-quality and free content from around the web. Rather than purchasing content from the AP, the Publish2 News Exchange … Continue Reading

Evertune raises $800K to keep guitars in tune

Evertune, a startup that promises its customers will never have to tune their guitars again, just raised $800,000 in seed funding.

It’s been a good month for the Los Angeles company, which also just won an Invention Award from Popular Science. Evertune says it’s finalizing testing on a guitar bridge that keeps the instrument in tune regardless of the temperature, humidity, or how a string is pulled. Normally, a guitar goes out of tune when … Continue Reading

TweetUp, Sponsored Tweets say they dodge Twitter's new restrictions

Twitter developers say they’re pivoting around the social network’s broad new restrictions on advertising and that their business models won’t be too detrimentally affected.

The San Francisco-based microblogging network said today that it won’t allow third-party companies to serve ads in user feeds and said that businesses that earn revenue from Twitter content may have to compensate the company. (The company wasn’t clear on how it would determine when to require compensation. Size will be … Continue Reading

Yahoo-Nokia deal bores bloggers, but what about buyers?

Earlier today, the world’s largest phone maker announced a deal with the second-largest search engine, a company which also operates America’s most popular email service.

The blogosphere yawned, then clicked Bury.

Yet the deal between Finland’s Nokia and Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo is huge. Yahoo will, over the next year, become the default search and email on Nokia’s phones, which outnumber Apple’s more than ten to one worldwide. In return, Nokia’s Ovi brand of maps will … Continue Reading

User-generated video firm Yoostar hires video game veteran as it shifts into games

Yoostar Entertainment Group has a small but loyal following for its user-generated video business where you insert your own image into classic movie scenes. But now it is shifting into games and has hired game industry veteran Greg Fischbach as its chief executive.

Fischbach is a well-known figure in the video game industry as the former chief executive of Acclaim Entertainment, the company that brought the controversial and bloody fighting game Mortal Kombat to the … Continue Reading

Constant Contact moves into social networking with NutshellMail acquisition

Email marketing company Constant Contact announced that it has acquired startup NutshellMail for an undisclosed amount.

The move is supposed to expand Constant Contact’s services into social networking. A growing number of companies bring social networking data into email, including Xobni, Gist, and Etacts. NutshellMail may offer the service that’s best designed for casual users — it delivers an email with select updates from users’ social networks, and also lets them update their accounts through … Continue Reading

IBM buys business software maker Sterling Commerce for $1.4B

There are deals happening in tech — they just aren’t always with venture-backed startups. IBM agreed to buy the Sterling Commerce business software division of AT&T today for $1.4 billion.

The pending deal is another example of how big tech companies are now starting to do everything themselves on behalf of their customers (being more vertical, rather than horizontal), rather than just supplying components to the customers that have to be cobbled together into a … Continue Reading

GridPoint suddenly relevant again with USPS energy management deal

As we’ve noted a number of times, the energy-management business is getting awful crowded. There’s a bevy of services tackling the residential market (Tendril, EnergyHub, Control4, etc.) and a handful of startups targeting commercial customers (Hara, Enviance, Carbonetworks, and more). Amid this tussle, it’s not hard for individual companies to get lost.

This seemed to be the case with GridPoint, a well-funded but undistinguished Smart Grid company that found success helping utilities revamp their operations. … Continue Reading

Yahoo's Carol Bartz tells TechCrunch editor to "f*ck off"

During an interview on stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in New York City, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz just told TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington to “fuck off.”

First Carol complained that the media is expecting too much from Yahoo so soon after she joined. She said that it took Apple 7 years to grow its market cap after Steve Jobs returned.

She told Mike “you are involved in a very tiny company.”

“It probably takes a … Continue Reading

Tony Blair is Khosla's answer to Kleiner's Gore

Venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers counts former Vice President Al Gore among its partners — now its Bay Area neighbor, Khosla Ventures, has recruited a super star statesman of its own to add heft to its cleantech practice: former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

A long-time proponent of climate change policy, Blair is credited with being the first head of state to add the issue to the G8′s docket. He has been outspoken … Continue Reading

AudioDraft gives musicians new tools for online, worldwide collaboration

Finland, the country that’s brought not only Nokia but open source endeavors like the Linux operating system and MySQL databases to the world, is now applying the open source philosophy to music production. A fresh Finnish start-up called AudioDraft is building a platform to help musicians write music together even if they’re separated by a physical distance.

AudioDraft is a browser-based application. People who need music—movie producers, ad agencies, businesses looking for a jingle, or … Continue Reading

Why did Google disclose AdSense numbers everyone already knew?

For years, online publishers have known that if you dig through Google’s financial statements, you can calculate that the company’s AdSense system, which serves ads to other sites and splits the revenue from advertisers with them, pays about 70 percent of the money it collects from advertisers to publishers who run the ads.

Today, Google exec Neal Mohan made a big deal of announcing that Google gives 68 percent of AdSense revenue to publishers. That’s … Continue Reading