Terra-Gen bags $1.2B for massive Southern California wind farm

Terra-Gen Power, a major developer of wind, solar and geothermal energy projects in the U.S., is $1.2 billion closer to building the country’s largest wind farm. This new capital, announced today, will help the company aggregate 570 megawatts-worth of power at its Alta Wind Energy Center site in Kern County, Calif.

This new capacity, composed of four separate projects, will be added to existing installations at the Center (150 megawatts-worth of turbines built by General … Continue Reading

Venture firm DCM raises $400M fund, enlists Slingbox creator

DCM, a venture firm that invests in the United States, China, and Japan, announced today that it has finished raising two new funds. The big one is DCM Fund VI, the latest version of its main fund for early-stage investments, for which it raised more than $400 million. It also announced a new fund of 200 million Chinese yuan ($29.5 million) to make investments in China.

DCM also revealed that it has two new general … Continue Reading

Zuckerberg's "quite sure" he didn't give away Facebook in 2003

Mark Zuckerberg said that he was “quite sure” he didn’t sign any documents in 2003 that could have potentially handed over a majority stake in Facebook. He made the statement during an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC World News today.

A lawyer for the company said yesterday that she was “unsure” whether Zuckerberg signed a web development contract with Paul Ceglia seven years ago, according to Bloomberg.

“If we said that we were unsure, … Continue Reading

eBay beats expectations, posts $2.2 billion revenues

eBay just posted second quarter revenues of $2.2 billion on earnings of $0.40 per share.

The consensus revenue expectation for the quarter was $2.16 billion.

According to JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan, revenues above $2.2 biillion are “positive.”

The consensus earnings expecatation was $0.38 per share.

In a note published earlier today, JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan wrote that anything below $.38 per share would be a disappointment.

Here’s Citi analyst Mark Mahaney’s eBay breakdown:… Continue Reading

Bit.ly revamps analytics dashboard for enterprise customers

URL-shortening service Bit.ly is racing to remain competitive since it stopped being the default for Twitter in April and with the proliferation of new, particularly branded link shorteners like amzn.com for Amazon and Cokeurl.com for Coca-Cola. To sharpen its edge, Bit.ly just updated its real-time analytics dashboard for its enterprise customers.

The new tools will allow web publishers to keep better tabs on where their links are popping up all over the web, giving them … Continue Reading

Shockwave catches the virtual goods wave with newest games

Joining in on an industry gold rush, Viacom’s Shockwave.com entertainment web site is launching virtual currency for use in the games on its web site.

Dave Williams, senior vice president of the Nickelodeon Kids and Family Games Group (pictured), said in an interview at the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle that the new virtual currency called Shockwave Cash will allow players to buy in-game items and personalize their game experience in Shockwave’s online titles.… Continue Reading

Heyzap Arcade delivers "games portal in a box"

Heyzap is launching a way to simplify that non-game companies can add games to their web sites with Heyzap Arcade.

The San Francisco company, which indexes Flash games on the web and helps developers make money from them, will provide the equivalent of a games portal in a box. Heyzap Arcade is already integrated with social network platform Ning. Heyzap Arcade is a tool that allows any site to add one line of code to … Continue Reading

Flipboard CEO: New 'social magazine' de-uglifies the Web

One of the hottest subjects in tech news this morning is the launch of Flipboard, a new startup backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (and others) that makes an app for browsing social networks and other content on the iPad. I just got off the phone with chief executive Mike McCue, who offered more details about his vision for the company and how it plans to make money.

But first, some context about what … Continue Reading

Fred Wilson: Apple is evil and Facebook is just a photo-sharing site

Twitter and Foursquare investor Fred Wilson shrugged off Facebook’s open graph, the social network’s strategy for mapping the web via people’s relationships and tastes, and called Apple evil for its increasing control over devices and the mobile ecosystem.

“Facebook is a photo-sharing site, really. Maybe with some chat attached to it,” Wilson said at the Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco today. “I don’t think the open graph is important. Everybody’s got a social graph. Every … Continue Reading

Gazelle lands $12M to buy and resell your used electronics

Gazelle, a company that buys and resells used consumer electronics, announced Wednesday that it has raised a third round of funding for $12 million. The new funding, bringing its total to about $22 million, will be used to grow the business to meet consumer demand, build pricing models and strengthen retail partnerships, according to the company’s announcement.

The company buys used consumer electronics, such as phones, GPS units, laptops, game consoles, and camcorders from consumers … Continue Reading

Six years on, Facebook crosses half a billion users

Facebook crossed a half-billion active users today, a little over six years after it launched out of Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard.

The company is celebrating by crowdsourcing stories from users about how the social network has affected their lives.

This milestone was expected for about a month, and it’s maybe even a little behind considering the company was growing at about 50 million users every two months and said it crossed 400 million … Continue Reading

About 75 percent of online game fans have bought virtual goods, survey finds

Three of out of every four online game fans have bought a virtual good using real money, according to a survey released today by virtual goods company PlaySpan and market researcher VGMarket.

About 64 percent of users have made at least one purchase every month, while 9 percent say they have bought at least one virtual good every day, according to the 2010 Digital Goods Report. The report is based on a survey of 2,221 … Continue Reading

Downloaded PC game sales catching up with retail sales

PC games downloaded via the Web are almost equal to the number of games sold at retail stores in the U.S., according to market researcher NPD Group.

In 2009, 21.3 million PC games were downloaded to computers in the U.S. via online game services such as Valve’s Steam, compared with 23.5 million purchased at stores. With the launch of new PC online game services such as OnLive, you can expect that 2010 online game downloads … Continue Reading

ThisNext raises more cash to focus on women's shopping

Social shopping startup ThisNext is in the middle of a shift from its previous identity as a general shopping site to one that’s targeted at women. As part of that effort, it’s announcing new funding.

The Los Angeles company’s chief executive Matt Edelman (who joined ThisNext earlier this year) told me that with the recent acquisition of StyleHive, as well as feedback from ThisNext and StyleHive users, it seemed like a good time to focus … Continue Reading

DoNanza brings its freelance job listings to publishers

There are a number of sites trying to connect employers and freelancers, including Elance and oDesk. A newer company, DoNanza, aims to become the most comprehensive site for these listings, and today announced that it wants to distribute those listings to Web publishers too.

Founder and chief executive Liran Kotzer compared DoNanza to travel site Kayak. Like Kayak, Donanza wants to aggregate the “work-from-home” job listings found on other sites, so that it becomes the … Continue Reading

LoKast shares media between iPhones and Android phones

Wireless IP networking company NearVerse has just rolled out an Android version of its LoKast mobile content-sharing app. LoKast is designed to help people within 300 feet of each other share content – music, contact information, text documents – easily between iPhones, and now Android phones, too. So now users can share content wirelessly across operating systems, ie. from iPhones to Android devices.

The new feature is a “really big deal” to NearVerse, according to … Continue Reading

Google Ventures backs Trada’s crowdsourced approach to search marketing

Trada, a Boulder, Colo. startup allowing businesses to tap into a pool of experts to manage their search advertising campaigns, just announced that it has raised a $5.75 million funding round led by Google Ventures.

The idea behind Trada is that instead of trying to run a search advertising campaign themselves, or relying on a single consultant, businesses are able to take a crowdsourced approach, where a group of search advertising experts can contribute their … Continue Reading

Hi5 exec Alex St. John wrestles sumo stand-in for Facebook (video)

Facebook is expected to announce Wednesday that it has crossed the 500-million user mark. Rival social network Hi5, with just 40 million users of its social network, is puny by comparison. But Alex St. John, president and chief technology officer of Hi5, tried his hardest tonight to upstage his gigantic rival just before its big occasion.

Tuesday night, in a dojo in a bar at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, St. John stripped down … Continue Reading