Roundup: Tesla vanity plates, Apple and AT&T’s impending divorce, and more

Here’s the latest action:

Tesla vanity plates abound — The other day, photos were snapped of a Tesla Roadster with a most excellent, and ironic license plate (considering the BP oil spill). Earth2Tech highlights some other great plate picks here.

Borders kickstarts marketplace for new, used textbooks — The bookstore chain launhced the Borders Textbook Marketplace today, listing 1.4 million titles of used and new textbooks. TechCrunch has the details.

Top 10 green incumbents — … Continue Reading

Venture titans Kleiner and Sequoia team up behind Jive

Business social networking company Jive Software already has one high-profile venture backer — Sequoia Capital, arguably the best-known firm in Silicon Valley. Now Sequoia is joined by its main rival for that title, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which led Jive’s $30 million third round of funding.

The last time Kleiner and Sequoia teamed up on a deal of this size (larger than $30 million) was more than a decade ago, when they invested in … Continue Reading

Energy Dept. launches blog, social media strategy

Today marked the inaugural post from U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu on the Department of Energy’s new Energy Blog, which it has launched in an obvious effort to better engage with the American public. It’s timely in the wake of the BP oil spill and upcoming mid-term elections in November that could change the course of the department’s funding programs.

The blog’s goal is to provide a central location for people to hear from leaders … Continue Reading

Control4 lets Flash developers take a stab at energy apps

Control4, maker of dashboards that allow consumers to automate their homes — everything from their media collections to their security systems to their thermostats — has just launched a platform allowing third-party Flash developers to create and contribute their own apps to Control4’s repertoire. At the same time, it’s opened up a contest for developers to win as much as $10,000.

Called the 4Store application marketplace, the Flash-based platform is the first app catalog of … Continue Reading

Grid Net, Oracle join forces to extend smart grid software

Grid Net, the smart grid communications provider known for championing WiMAX as the best option for transmitting energy data between meters, utilities and consumers, announced that it is partnering with Oracle’s utilities division to sell network and meter management software.

Oracle delved deep into the smart grid software space last year, when it launched an end-to-end solution for utilities integrating smart grid systems into their offerings. This bundle includes Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management and … Continue Reading

Yammer, the Twitter for businesses, crosses 1 million users

Yammer, a status update tool for businesses, said it crossed 1 million users today and added that the number of paid users has grown by more than 57 percent from the first quarter of this year.

Sometimes called Twitter for business, Yammer is an internal social network that lets co-workers and teams share what they’re working on continuously. More than 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies are working with it now and overall, the company … Continue Reading

GetGlue gets a good start with social recommendation service

GetGlue, the social recommendation service from startup Adaptive Blue, shared some impressive growth stats today: Its users are logging an average of 150,000 check-ins and reviews per day over the last month, up from 100,000 a few months ago.

While those may not seem like huge numbers, the whole area of social recommendation is still early, and it’s worth taking note when the first movers are showing traction.

GetGlue is a social network where users … Continue Reading

Yahoo's second-quarter revenue rises by 2%, misses estimates

Yahoo’s net income rose by more than 50 percent from the same period a year ago, but overall revenue fell short of analysts’ estimates.

Analysts had estimated on average that the company would pull in $1.16 billion in sales excluding revenue passed onto partner sites, Bloomberg reported. The company had sales of $1.13 billion instead. Its overall revenue rose 2 percent from the same period a year earlier.

The company pointed to a number of … Continue Reading

Apple's Tim Cook: iPads aren't just selling to early adopters

One of the criticisms leveled at Apple is that it sells its products to the fanboys and early adopters, not so much to a mass audience. The strong sales numbers reported in the company’s most recent earnings seem to refute that, and Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook argued that’s specifically untrue in the case of Apple’s new device, the iPad.

“It’s beyond an early adopter stage already,” Cook said. He didn’t offer many specifics to … Continue Reading

Nissan considering Leaf-based electric sports car

As the upper echelon of the world’s carmakers proceed merrily with plans for all-electric supercars, and the econo-car market begins to get crowded with announced EV entries as well, it seems like the sports car enthusiast is being left out. But that may be fixed sooner than you’d think if rumors of an all-electric LEAF-based Nissan sports car prove true.

At this point we endow the idea with little more than wishful speculation, but since … Continue Reading

Apple beats analyst estimates again, sells 3.27M iPads

Apple continued to beat predictions with its earnings report today, which covered the quarter ending June 26.

Wall Street analysts estimated the company would report $14.75 billion in revenue and earnings of $3.11 per share, which would have been a substantial increase over Apple’s numbers from the same quarter last year ($9.73 billion in revenue and earnings of $2.01 per share). Nonetheless, the estimates were too low, as they have been in previous quarters — … Continue Reading

Lenovo developing LePad Android tablet for late 2010 release

Computer maker Lenovo is planning for an Android tablet it’s calling “LePad” to compete with the iPad, and to match its recently released “LePhone” Android smartphone in China. The company is aiming to release the device by the end of the year, according to statements made by Liu Jun, senior vice president and president at Lenovo’s Consumer Business Group, PC World reports.

Liu Chuanzhi, Lenovo’s chairman and founder, recently said “we would be in trouble” … Continue Reading

Game-streaming firm Gaikai raises funding from Intel Capital and Limelight Networks

Game-streaming firm Gaikai has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Intel Capital and Limelight Networks.

The company, based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., will use the money to build out its ability to stream games to large numbers of users from the cloud (a network of web-connected data centers around the world).

While its rival OnLive is focused on providing cloud-based games to consumers via subscriptions, Gaikai is focused on a business-to-business strategy, partnering with … Continue Reading

Late to the party, Honda unveils plug-in vehicle strategy

With General Motors, Nissan and Mitsubishi all moving forward on plans to launch plug-in and all-electric vehicles in the next two years, Honda — one of the largest automotive companies in the world — has been conspicuously absent. But no longer.

Today, the company announced that it will have both a plug-in hybrid and an all-electric model on the market in the U.S. and Japan by 2012 — the first time the company has committed … Continue Reading

Zuckerberg had a contract with man suing for 84% ownership of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg did have a contract with the New York man who is suing him and who claims that he is entitled to own 84 percent of Facebook, a company lawyer said.

But the lawyer is “unsure” of whether it is the contract that allegedly hands over a majority stake in the world’s largest social network, according to Facebook lawyer Lisa Simpson in a Bloomberg report. The company has so far stopped short of calling … Continue Reading

Google enters the energy market with deal to buy, sell wind power

Google announced today that it will be buying wind-generated power from a company called NextEra Energy Resources to sell back to the local grid operator in exchange for Renewable Energy Certificates (basically, credits to offset its carbon emissions).

The company made the purchase via its relatively new Google Energy unit — an entity that won the rights to buy and sell energy just like a utility from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in February.

This … Continue Reading

Google introduces visual ads to revamped Image Search

Google has just announced a host of new features for its image search product at a press event in San Francisco. Director of Search Products Ben Ling described the revamp as “the largest redesign” in the product’s history.

A number of those changes should improve the experience for searchers (and I’ll get to those changes in just a second), but the most significant upgrade, from a business perspective, is the introduction of a new type … Continue Reading

Digg rival Reddit gives Freemium model a whirl

Reddit, a social news aggregation site like Digg — with a smaller but seriously loyal audience — has decided to turn its week-long donation drive into a formal business model by launching Reddit Gold, a premium membership that includes new privileges.

The site, gobbled up by publishing empire Conde Nast (of Vogue and Vanity Fair fame) in 2006, has been unable to convince its owners to funnel more money into the company to support its … Continue Reading

RIM's new touchscreen BlackBerry 9800 likely to land on August 15

BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion is apparently gearing up to release a new touchscreen device on August 15 on AT&T, according to the BlackBerry Partners Fund’s John Albright, who spoke today at the paidContent Mobile Conference in New York.

We’ve known for some time that RIM is readying a touchscreen BlackBerry device with a slide-out physical keyboard. Gadget sites have been referring to the device — which would compete directly with Apple’s iPhone and Android smartphones … Continue Reading