Silver Lake backs a new Silicon Valley data-center startup
A new data center company called Vantage Data Centers is launching today. It purchased a data center campus from Intel, with backing from a storied Silicon Valley private-equity fund, and said it has plans to expand the facility dramatically.
The company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Silver Lake, a firm that seems to have been quiet recently, but whose investments include well-known companies like Gartner, Seagate, and Skype.
The former Intel facility … Continue Reading
Telegent hires former Agere CEO Ford Tamer
Mobile entertainment technology maker Telegent, which canceled its IPO last month, has brought on board an accomplished CEO who plans to make the firm a billion-dollar company. Don’t laugh; he’s pulled off feats like this several times already.
Ford Tamer (at right in photo), who packs multiple engineering degrees from MIT, co-founded Agere Systems in the dot-com era after growing two smaller companies and bringing them to profitable exits. He then grew Broadcom’s Infrastructure Networking … Continue Reading
Solar maker Stion follows TSMC deal with $70M and plan to create 500 jobs
Stealthy thin-film solar panel developer Stion announced yesterday that it has landed a partnership with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Today, it’s keeping the good news rolling with announcements of $70 million in fourth-round capital and new plans to expand its San Jose, Calif. manufacturing facility in size and headcount.
As part of the deal with TSMC, the semiconductor giant has bought a 21 percent stake in Stion for $50 million — included in … Continue Reading
One Kings Lane crowns a dotcom survivor as home-furnishing startup's CEO
Here’s a sign of how hot the once-moribund e-commerce sector is looking: Venture capitalists are chasing down experienced CEOs to run the startups they’ve invested in. Take, for example, One Kings Lane, which announced Thursday that it had hired Doug Mack, the former CEO of GoodHome.com, to run the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers-backed discount home-furnishings site.
San Francisco-based One Kings Lane, founded by Ali Pincus and Susan Feldman in 2009, is part of the … Continue Reading
Former Forbes CEO invests in WebMynd's publisher tools
San Francisco startup WebMynd is releasing a new product to help publishers on the Web make money from content.
Monetizing on content is what WebMynd chief executive Amir Nathoo calls a “hair on fire” problem.
The company first launched in 2008, offering a browser add-on to deliver personalized search results. Those results appear alongside a user’s regular searches, linking to pages from their favorite websites. This add-on has been installed 1 million times and used … Continue Reading
Quark takes on Adobe with e-publishing partnership
Ten years ago, Quark was the tool of choice for producing Wired magazine and many other high-production-value publications. Since then, Adobe’s less expensive, aggressively competitive InDesign has stolen a lot of Quark’s customers.
Now, Quark is making a move to win back glossy-publication developers trying to move onto digital platforms without hiring lots more staff. This morning, the company announced a three-way partnership with Ray Kurzweil’s K-NFB Reading Technology and digital distributors Baker & Taylor. … Continue Reading
Verizon’s Humphrey Chen to kick off MobileBeat's 4G discussion
Fourth generation (4G) mobile networks are just 3G networks with more bandwidth, right?
Wrong. They’re the complete renewal of the whole mobile ecosystem.
The nation’s major carriers — led by Sprint and Verizon — are furiously building out their new networks, called 4G because they represent the fourth generation of mobile network technology. These networks will allow mobile phones to operate with blazingly fast data speeds.
But the upgrades will mean a lot more than … Continue Reading
Facebook's social plug-ins are outpacing Tweetmeme's retweet buttons
United Kingdom-based Tweetmeme announced a few impressive milestones this week. The company is serving nearly 500 million impressions each day of its light-green retweet button (pictured right), which you can click on to share content through Twitter.
Founder Nick Halstead said that in a matter of weeks, the retweet button will be on more than 200,000 websites.
The only problem? Facebook’s social plug-ins have already reached 200,000 sites and it took them only six weeks … Continue Reading
AT&T cripples the HTC Aria, removes ability to install apps outside Android Market
AT&T can’t catch a break. After announcing that it would be releasing its first worthwhile Android phone next week, the HTC Aria, it now appears that the carrier is having trouble coming to terms with the open nature of the Android operating system. It’s planning to lock down the device from installing apps outside of the Android app Market, according to ComputerWorld.
AT&T did the same to its first Android phone, the Motorola Backflip. It … Continue Reading
Full text of San Francisco's cellphone radiation labeling law
San Francisco, home base of the Internet’s startup economy, is close to passing a law that will cast the city as either a leader on public health, a town full of crazies, or probably both.
The city’s Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance that mayor Gavin Newsom will probably sign. It will require all cellphone retailers, beginning next year, to label the emitted radiation levels of all phones they sell.
The city supervisors make clear … Continue Reading
Google upgrades its search tool for retailers, cuts the price
Google announced today that it’s giving Commerce Search, the search tool that retailers can install on their websites, an upgrade. With Google Commerce Search 2.0, retailers will have more control over the results, the company says, and more of them will be able to join the program thanks to a lower entry price.
Google launched Commerce Search at the end of last year, saying it wanted to replace the crusty old search programs that retailers … Continue Reading
Content creation can open new marketing doors
(Editor’s note: Bill Flitter is CEO of dlvr.it, a content syndication service. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.)
The explosive growth in social media is forcing today’s marketers to ditch their hard sales pitches and flashy page takeover ads. While we’ve all heard the gurus say brands need to create relationships with their customers, the reality is brands need to look at themselves as publishers.
Creating content is the key component in starting a relationship … Continue Reading
PayPal announces its second $150K developer challenge
PayPal continues its efforts to woo developers to build innovative payment applications on top of its technology. It just announced its second PayPal X Developer Challenge, which will again give out up to $150,000 in prizes.
The company (owned by eBay) has been evangelizing to developers for the past year, hoping that the creation of cool payment tools will help make PayPal the “electricity” for all e-commerce (as company PayPal executives have put it). Following … Continue Reading
After the sale, what's next for AOL and Bebo?
AOL has officially closed the deal to sell social networking site Bebo to Los Angeles-based investment firm Criterion Capital Partners for $10 million. Criterion is buying the Bebo brand, its technology and 50-53 million registered users, according to sources close to the deal.
What the deal doesn’t come with, however, is a staff. Bebo’s employees received severance packages by AOL several months prior to the sale.
Richard Hecker, the member of the new ownership group … Continue Reading
A video tour of the new, black, slimmer version of the Xbox 360
After more than 2.5 years under design, Microsoft’s new version of the Xbox 360 is hitting stores this week for $299.
This isn’t a completely new design — it still plays the same DVD movies and Xbox 360 console games. But this is the biggest change that the company has made to the Xbox 360′s physical appearance and electronic innards since the console launched in 2005. Microsoft made a lot of changes based on market … Continue Reading
Microsoft hints at another Xbox 360 model to come
Tipping its hand about future Xbox 360 models, Microsoft said it is considering a new model to replace its low-end Xbox 360 Arcade, which has been discontinued.
When I asked Albert Pinello, director of platform marketing for the Xbox business, about plans for a replacement of the Arcade, he said, “We wanted to launch our new model first … I wouldn’t rule that out at all.”
On Monday, Microsoft announced its 250-gigabyte hard drive Xbox … Continue Reading
Roundup: Google TV's set-top box is the Logitech Revue, Netvibes brings RSS to the iPad, and more
Here’s the latest action:
Sugar’s fundraise smoke and mirrors? — The women’s content network recently reported that it had raised $30 million in fresh capital, but new reports say this isn’t accurate. Instead, the company has brought in $31 million total and isn’t looking for more venture funding.
Logitech Revue unveiled — When Google TV was announced, the search company also revealed its partnership with Logitech, the company building the set top box that complements … Continue Reading
Finally, YouTube launches an online video editor
If you’re a YouTube user who never got around to learning how to edit video, the company has you covered. Today, YouTube unveiled its web-based video editor, which offers several simple ways to make your videos better.
The editor lets you trim the beginning and ending of videos, combine several small videos together, and add audio from YouTube’s AudioSwap library. The interface (as demonstrated in the video below) appears to be fairly straight forward — … Continue Reading
Plancast announces API and widgets to better share your plans
Plancast — a service that lets you share future plans with friends, and view those from others — just got a whole lot more useful today. The company announced its API (application programming interface), which gives developers the ability to use Plancast’s data in their apps, reports the technology blog TechCrunch.
The service is best described as “Foursquare for the future.” Instead of telling people where you are, you can broadcast what you’re going to … Continue Reading
