Social game firm Crowdstar embraces Facebook Credits in five-year agreement

Crowdstar is giving a big endorsement to Facebook Credits. The social gaming company has made a five-year commitment to using Facebook’s virtual currency.

The introduction of Facebook Credits this summer is a big step for the social network, much like the introduction of the euro currency was for Europe. The hope is that the universal currency will grease the skids of electronic commerce on Facebook, prompting users to spend more money across a bunch of … Continue Reading

Tesla Motors rings Wall Street's bell

On a day when the Dow and the Nasdaq were in the red, Tesla Motors, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based electric-car startup, saw shares of TSLA climb slowly but steadily. Shares in the company’s initial public offering were priced at $17 last night by the offering’s four underwriters, but the first trades today went for $19. The price just this second, at 8:30am Pacific, is hovering in the $17-18 range.

Tesla’s debut marked the first IPO … Continue Reading

Cisco unveils home energy management dashboard

Following up on the roll out of its first smart grid products last month, Cisco Systems announced today perhaps the most important component of any home energy management system: a consumer-facing interface.

The networking giant has been on a mission to establish its dominance in the smart grid market for over a year. But it has only recently been making good on all its talk, launching what it calls its lineup of “Connected Grid Solutions.” … Continue Reading

Game critics nominate the best of E3 2010 (reader poll)

The Game Critics Awards group has presented its list of nominees for the best games of E3 2010. Each year, this list turns out to be one of the best ways to predict success for the top games of the year and the game companies that make them.

Notable facts: id Software’s Rage received the most nominations at five, including Best of Show. Disney’s Epic Mickey, Dance Central, and Portal 2 each received four nominations. … Continue Reading

Google Me, the company's answer to Facebook, may be real — but it's a longshot

Another of Silicon Valley’s most prominent thinkers in social networking has come forward and confirmed that Google is working on a serious challenge to Facebook’s dominance in social networking.

Facebook’s first chief technology officer and Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo said on the question-and answer service last night that Google is building out a “full, first-class social network” in order to keep Facebook at bay. This comes on top of Digg founder Kevin Rose’s tweet over … Continue Reading

Seagate debuts a 3-terabyte hard disk drive

Breaking a barrier for storage capacity, Seagate is announcing today the world’s first 3-terabyte external hard disk drive.

The desktop drive is now available under the 3TB FreeAgent GoFlex Desk name for $249. For the geeks who keep track of such things, this drive can store 120 high-definition movies, or 1,500 video games, thousands of photos or entire libraries of digital music.

Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Seagate said the desktop computer external drives will be available … Continue Reading

Roundup: Google still wants to get social, Froyo hits the Nexus One and more

Here’s the latest action:

No more flesh on Flash — The founder of well-known porn empire Digital Playground says that the site will be moving away from Adobe Flash as soon as HTML is fully supported by desktop browsers. ConceivablyTech identifies the porn industry as a surprising ally for Apple.

Google’s taking another run at social — After Buzz failed to impress, the search giant is trying again to leap into social networking, according to … Continue Reading

With Harry Potter release, OnLive shows it isn't just about old games

OnLive, the games-on-demand company that launched last week, said today that it has released the Lego: Harry Potter Years 1-4 video game on its service at the same time the game is being released at retail.

Tonight, OnLive players got to play the game at midnight eastern, before retail stores opened to sell the newest Harry Potter video game for the consoles and the PC. So this is the first game where OnLive has been … Continue Reading

Google preparing for possibility that its site could go dark in China

Google said today in a blog post that its attempt to strike a balance between providing free information and abiding by Chinese law isn’t working.

Since it decided not to censor results on Google.cn in January, the company has been automatically redirecting Chinese users to Google.com.hk, the company’s Hong Kong search engine. The redirect has worked well from Google’s point of view and from the point of view of its users. But not for the … Continue Reading

Motion-sensor chip maker InvenSense files to go public

Motion-sensing chip maker InvenSense has filed papers to go public in an initial public offering.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based InvenSense makes gyroscope chips that can sense motion. Its chips are used in a variety of motion-sensing applications, including the gyroscope in Nintendo’s Wii MotionPlus handheld game controllers.

The company filed its S-1 registration statement today with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The number of shares to be offered and the price range have not yet been determined. … Continue Reading

Review: Apple's iPhone 4 excels with polish in the face of Android competition

Months before it was officially announced, the iPhone 4 was already the talk of the technology world — although not in the way Apple would have liked. Thanks to the gadget blog Gizmodo — who purchased a lost iPhone 4 prototype and leaked photos, video, and other key details of the device to an eager public — Apple’s traditional veil of secrecy was lifted. Unlike previous iPhone hardware announcements, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs officially … Continue Reading

Tesla makes magic happen, prices shares at $17

Tesla Motors is already off to a good start before its debut on the Nasdaq as TSLA tomorrow. The electric car company’s shares have been priced at $17 a pop, exceeding the expected range of $14 to $16.

With 13.3 million shares, or about 14 percent of the company, selling on the public market, the total take will be around $226 million. This is higher than the $178 million the company anticipated last week, and … Continue Reading

Leaked Windows 8 slides: It'll be like Apple, but ugly

A leaked set of Microsoft slides meant for PC-making partners details Microsoft’s plans, goals, and dreams for Windows 8, the next version of the company’s ubiquitous operating system that, at this point, has no set release date.

The Microsoft Kitchen blog has uploaded most of the slides, which were stamped with the watermark “Microsoft Confidential — released to Derek.Goode@hp.com.”

Business Insider has created a slide show, but to be honest there’s not much surprising in … Continue Reading

3D maps: you'll be able to walk around in them like in a virtual world

Online maps are extremely useful, but not very innovative in their present form, as most maps we use today merely mirror paper maps. The road map serves most of our everyday needs, but as more and more data with a location component to it is accumulated – geo-tagged photos, videos, or information from social networks like Facebook and Twitter – we’ll need to represent that data in a way that adds value without overwhelming users.… Continue Reading

Green building supplier Serious Materials brings in $19.8M

Serious Materials, manufacturer of sustainable building materials, has raised $19.8 million of an expected $56.2 million in a fourth round of venture funding, according to a filing with the SEC. The company develops energy-saving materials like drywall and windows to help buildings reduce energy use and cut costs.

The Sunnyvale, Calif. company has plans to replace the 6,514 windows in the Empire State Building by December 2010.  The work, which will be done at night, … Continue Reading

10 questions for Tesla before Tuesday's IPO

There’s one story in cleantech today: Tesla Motors‘ public sale.

The electric car maker just raised the bar on its IPO, slated for tomorrow, increasing the number of shares for sale from 11.1 million to 13.3 million. Shares are expected to price between $14 and $16, with the company’s valuation hovering around $1.5 billion.

The word on the street is that the stock is hot. Bankers and analysts alike are seeing a spike in retail … Continue Reading

Facebook investor backs Chattertrap, a personal assistant for content

Chattertrap, a startup that promises to help users find personally relevant articles and links, has raised $1.5 million in a seed funding from Chinese billioniare Li Ka-shing‘s firm Horizon Ventures.

The startup comes out of SRI International, a now-independent research institute founded at Stanford University. According to a profile in The New York Times (where the funding was announced), the research institute’s history goes back to 1947 and includes early prototypes of the computer mouse, … Continue Reading

Location service Geodelic raises $7 million, readies for big announcements

Geodelic, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based mobile application company specializing in location-based services, has raised $7 million in a Series B funding. The round was led by MK Capital, with previous investors Clearstone Ventures Partners and Shasta Ventures also taking part.

The company is known for what it calls “searchless search,” which means that the Geodelic app (available for the iPhone and Android devices) automatically searches points of interest such as restaurants, retailers, cafés and bars … Continue Reading

Obama's broadband plan leans on TV broadcasters

A big chunk of the new wireless broadband spectrum that President Obama wants to make available in the next five years would come from television broadcasters, who will be asked to give up radio spectrum slots for which they have fought and paid so that wireless data carriers can use them mostly for mobile Internet access instead.

The proposal would nearly double the available amount of bandwidth for wireless broadband, from today’s 547 megahertz to … Continue Reading