PatientView brings digital health records to the developing world via mobile phones

PatientView, software that allows health clinics to create and keep track of patient and physician records anywhere there’s a mobile signal, launched its beta today. Relying on text messages and a simple interface, it could change the way health care is administered in rural, and especially developing, regions of the world.

PatientView is a plugin for FrontlineSMS, open-source software that lets users send text messages and receive them from large groups of people. It stores … Continue Reading

Social game "whales" are big spenders on Facebook, survey says

A small but engaged group of Facebook users known as “social game whales” are proving to be big spenders on the social network, according to a new survey.

The new report shows that about 10 percent of social game players actually spend money in Facebook games, according to a study of 2,000 people who were surveyed by Inside Network. The report was co-authored by Inside Network founder Justin Smith and Virtual Goods Summit organizer Charles … Continue Reading

Zuckerberg: What's the point of a "huge amount of profit"?

Mark Zuckerberg said estimates pegging the social network’s annual revenue at between $1 and 1.1 billion were “not so far off,” in an interview well-worth reading from InsideFacebook today.

The 26-year-old founder stressed that he’s focused on growing the business over earning profit and that Facebook is still in the early days of making the web social:

“At this point in the company’s evolution, I don’t see a huge need for the company to be … Continue Reading

OnLive is the easy path to instant gratification gaming

The age of instant digital game distribution got under way last week as OnLive launched its games on demand service, which allows you to instantly play high-end games over an Internet connection even if you have relatively lame computer hardware.

More than eight years in the making, the online gaming service has gone live with a limited number of inaugural customers. For the skeptics who thought it would never get off the ground — I … Continue Reading

The rise of the company analyst

(Editor’s note: Suaad Sait is a co-founder of Workstreamer, Inc. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

A decade ago, company analysts were hardly in vogue. But as barriers to entry for startups tumble and competitors emerge from every corner, the company analyst has become one of the most critical functions in any organization.

They are the fuel for corporate strategy, the catalyst for change and often one of the few members of an organization … Continue Reading

Sonic Solutions cuts online movie deal with Sears, Kmart stores

Sonic Solutions said today that its movie services will be available on consumer electronics gear sold at Sears and Kmart stores.

Novato, Calif.-based Sonic provides the RoxioNow platform, which can deliver digital movies over Internet connections to home devices such as PCs, TVs, Blu-ray players and mobile phones. In a multi-year deal with Sears Holdings, owner of 3,000 Sears and Kmart stores, Sonic will offer movies and TV shows for rent or purchase.

The new … Continue Reading

Salesforce says social network Chatter is ready to talk

Will this be the day that business social networking grows up? Salesforce.com founder and chief executive Marc Benioff probably hopes so. Today, the company is announcing the availability of Chatter, its Facebook-style social network for companies.

Since it first announced Chatter in November, Salesforce has been rolling the service out to early test customers. Team members each get their own profile, then they can follow each others’ activity. Salesforce recently added the ability to form … Continue Reading

New Brightcove development kit supports Android's embrace of Flash

Brightcove released a new software development kit today for Android applications that includes mobile templates supporting Adobe’s Flash technology

Developers will be able to design native apps that allow video playback, search and discovery or use out-of-the-box templates that play video using Flash.

“I’m really happy that we’re standing tall with Adobe as they release Flash Player 10.1,” wrote Jeff Whatcott, Brightcove’s vice president of marketing, who was involved in the development of Flash at … Continue Reading

Libox lets you access media files from anywhere, easily share files with no limits

Libox is aiming to do the impossible: The Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup wants to help people manage their digital media collections by making any media file — be it a picture, song, or high-definition video — available across multiple devices, as well simplifying the age-old problem of sharing media files with friends. And, to make things even more complex, the company wants to do this for free, with no file sharing limits.

After working on … Continue Reading

Tilera's chips have lots of brains, one huge customer

Tilera made news last year when it put 64 cores, or computing brains, on a single chip. Now it figured out how to put 10,000 cores into a single server rack in a data center. And it has a huge new customer in Quanta, the Taiwanese company that makes computers that other vendors sell.

Tilera boasts that it will be able to put 100 cores on a single chip next year and 200 cores on … Continue Reading

NeuroSky raises $11.8M for brainwave-controlled games (exclusive)

NeuroSky has raised $11.8 million in funding for its brainwave sensors used in a variety of mind-bending games.

NeuroSky makes magical-but-real chips that can monitor your brainwaves, detecting whether you are excited or calm. Then it turns those signals into controls for games. NeuroSky’s sensors are used in toys such as Mattel’s MindFlex, (pictured, right) where you use your thoughts to move little balls, and the Star Wars Force Trainer toy by Uncle Milton.

The … Continue Reading

Roundup: Teaching New York to think like Silicon Valley, Google Street View still in the hot seat, and more

Here’s the latest action:

Teaching New York to think like Silicon Valley — Famed blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow authored a post for Publisher’s Weekly examining the difference between New York’s traditional publishing industry, what it has to learn from the tech-savvy Internet publishing world, and vice versa.

Booz Allen files for IPO — The management and technology consultancy has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a $300 million public sale … Continue Reading

QuantaLife brings in $7.5M to detect and monitor diseases

Biotech startup QuantaLife has raised $7.5 million of an expected $15 million in equity, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in Pleasanton, Calif., the company is developing a nucleic acid testing platform that can be used for early detection of diseases. Paladin Capital Group is an investor in QuantaLife, which was founded in 2008 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The company last raised $8 million in 2009.… Continue Reading

Adobe Flash gets its full launch on Android

After months of back-and-forth debate about whether Adobe’s Flash technology is a good fit for smartphones, Adobe is launching a full version of Flash for mobile devices, starting with Google’s Android operating system.

Adobe released a test version of Flash to the public about a month ago, but this is the real launch of the finished product. Flash 10.1 should now be available for download on phones using the latest version of Android, 2.2, which … Continue Reading

Tesla shops around new line of cars to pump up investors before IPO

While it’s remained mum on anything pertaining to its IPO — scheduled for June 29 — Tesla Motors tipped its hand today about its forthcoming line of electric vehicles, as well as how it plans to put together its highly anticipated mid-market sedan, the Model S.

Drumming up excitement about the impending $178 million IPO, CEO Elon Musk is shopping the business around to potential investors, including a line of several different vehicles that most … Continue Reading

Apple already knows where you are all the time — and is telling others

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that the social network’s geolocation tool is nearing release, meaning Facebook will soon be able to track where its users are. But Apple already knows exactly where all of its iPhone users are in real-time, and it’s sharing this data with its “partners and licensees” for all users who agree to its just revised privacy policy.

This sounds reasonable, except that all iPhone users who want to download applications … Continue Reading

E3 2010 roundup: The best innovations in the video game industry

After five days of non-stop action at the E3 video game show last week, I’ve come up with my list of the top innovations in the video game industry. Naturally, the much-ballyhooed Nintendo 3DS is at the top.

These new technologies span everything from the tools used to make games to the hardware that runs them. Based on these cool new ideas, I expect the video game industry will be instrumental in getting gamers to … Continue Reading

WaveMarket relaunches as Location Labs, considers an IPO

Goodbye WaveMarket, hello Location Labs! WaveMarket, a company that has built a platform for location-based services, is changing its name today to Location Labs and releasing new features for developers, even as its existing business is propelling revenues to heights where an initial public offering is plausible, according to the startup’s CEO, Tasso Roumeliotis.

Roumeliotis told VentureBeat that as Location Labs, his company is rolling out a service for locating mobile devices and a geofencing … Continue Reading

Quora, the exclusive Q-and-A site from early Facebookers, opens to the public

Quora, the hot Q-and-A site from Facebook’s first chief technology officer and a coterie of its early employees, is letting down its velvet ropes.

After a gradual and selective roll out since last winter, the company has decided that it has populated the service with enough quality answers and example behavior that it’s ready to let others in. But indexing by search engines is still off-limits.

Co-founder Adam D’Angelo wrote in an answer on the … Continue Reading