EC Roundup: Financial reform and the lost decade for entrepreneurs

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner:

What effect will the financial reform bill have on angel investing? – The early draft of Sen. Dodd’s financial reform bill could have had disastrous effects on angel investors – but what about the version that passed in mid-July? Attorney Scott Edward Walker looks at the pros and cons of the bill.

You drive traffic on your website – but what about the real world? – Calls to … Continue Reading

Roundup: India eyes iPad rival, Firefox revamps tabs, and more

Here’s the latest action:

Google misses LA deadline — Last year, the search giant won a contract to provide email and collaboration tools to the City of Los Angeles, but now it has failed to deploy them on time.

India pitchs iPad rival — The Indian government has been showing off a prototype for a tablet computer, similar to Apple’s iPad, only with a price tag of $35. The BBC has more.

iPhone 4 Case … Continue Reading

YouTube expands its embrace of HTML5 with new embedding style

Google’s video supersite YouTube has been ramping up support for HTML5 this year, most recently with the launch of a mobile website powered by the new Web format. YouTube’s latest move is a new code style for embedded videos that allows them to be viewed in HTML5.

That’s important because embedding is how videos get distributed beyond the YouTube website itself — that’s how we can share YouTube videos in our VentureBeat articles, for example.… Continue Reading

Study shows Twitter lags other social networks in reliability, load time

Under stress from heavy World Cup traffic, Twitter fell to the bottom of the rankings that compare site load times and reliability for social networks, according to AlertSite today.

“Performance dropped significantly compared to Q1,” the company said. “The time it took the website to load nearly doubled, and availability slipped nearly half a percent.”

The company, which offers products to keep web services at peak performance, tracked the response times of five social networks … Continue Reading

Glam acquires Sportgenic and AdPlatform, expands premium ad tools

Fashion-oriented Web media company Glam Media today announced that it has acquired sports ad network Sportgenic and its spinoff AdPlatform.

Glam chief executive Samir Arora (pictured) said AdPlatform’s technology is part of the new product he’s announcing today, GlamAdapt for Publishers. Arora’s Brisbane, Calif.-headquartered company launched the GlamAdapt display ad platform in June, saying that it could help brand advertisers reach high-quality publishers. Glam said it’s now selling all of its premium advertising through GlamAdapt, … Continue Reading

Playdom CEO John Pleasants: why "social gaming" will die

John Pleasants is in the spotlight as chief executive of Playdom, the third-largest social game publisher on Facebook and the No. 1 game publisher on MySpace. The company has had hit games from Mobsters to Social City, and it has more than 41 million users on Facebook. He has been acquiring about one game development studio per month. Before joining Playdom last year, he was chief operating officer of Electronic Arts. At the time, many … Continue Reading

Starcraft II could generate $350M in sales this year

Game maker Blizzard Entertainment is preparing to release the much anticipated StarCraft II on July 27, and many gamers are salivating over the title, which is a sequel to the hit real-time strategy sci-fi game that came out more than a decade ago. Importantly for parent company Activision Blizzard, investors may be salivating too. The game cost a lot to develop, but less than the reported $100 million reported by the Wall Street Journal. Blizzard … Continue Reading

Facebook adds commenting to the "like" button

Facebook is adding commenting, a much-requested feature to the “like” button it has spread across millions of sites.

Before, publishers had to choose between the older “Share” button, which had comments, and the new “Like” button, which didn’t. If you’ve implemented the iFrame version of the button and want to enable comments, you need to use the standard layout and make sure the button is about 450 pixels wide. Facebook says comments lead to higher … Continue Reading

Crowdflower opens platform, teams with TrialPay to boost crowdsourced labor services

Crowdflower, a startup that helps other companies outsource tasks to crowdsourced labor services like Gambit and Amazon Mechanical Turk, announced today that it released its application programming interface (API) to allow third-party developers to build on top of this framework. It also says it has partnered with TrialPay, an online payment platform that offers unique fee options known as offers, which are special ads.

TrialPay is unique because it allows people to pay for one … Continue Reading

Norwest's Tim Chang dissects the social game landscape (videos)

Tim Chang, a principal at Norwest Venture Partners, is one of the top venture capitalists following the social game market. At the Casual Connect casual game conference in Seattle this week, he identified the big social gaming trends that are developing this year. In the first video below, he recaps the trends of 2009. In the second video, he talks about what’s hot in 2010.

Among the trends this year: Facebook’s changes to its viral … Continue Reading

Microsoft's new license with ARM reveals interest in mobile chip design

ARM and Microsoft signed a license today that indicates Microsoft is getting much more serious about designing its own chips for portable devices.

Microsoft licensed the ARM architecture, not just a single ARM processor design. The distinction is important because it means that Microsoft now has the right to design its own processor based on the ARM chip architecture, which features decent smartphone performance without consuming too much battery power. The deal could mean a … Continue Reading

Amazon.com's exclusive e-book deal with literary agent riles publishers

As e-books upset the publishing industry’s applecart, an announcement by the Wylie Agency Thursday that it would bypass publishers and sell e-books exclusively to Amazon.com for two years is sure to make people talk.

For Amazon, the deal helps ensure that its Kindle e-reader has a supply of books only available on its device. During his company’s quarterly earnings call Thursday afternoon, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos confidently announced that the company is now selling more … Continue Reading

SRI chief: Now's the best time for innovation — just don't choke it

Curt Carlson, the president and chief executive of SRI International, has run the research institute in Silicon Valley for 11 years. SRI was spun out of Stanford University more than 60 years ago to commercialize research. First named Stanford Research Institute and later renamed SRI International, it became independent from Stanford University in 1970 and now has more than 2,200 researchers working on things such as the cool artificial intelligence, speech recognition, natural language processing, … Continue Reading

Casual games expand in new directions at Seattle conference (photo gallery)

Casual Connect is one of the most interesting conferences in video games now because the social and mobile game companies have crashed the party and completely turned the casual game industry — which was previously selling $20 games on web sites to old ladies — on its head. Now the Seattle show, which concluded today, is filled with talk about DAUs (daily active users, a measure of how often users return to a game), and … Continue Reading

Roundup: Web cam Barbie, Zuck on the Simpsons and more

Here’s the latest action:

MOG goes mobile — The internet music service has just released applications for both the iPhone and Android devices, now available for free download. Internet Retailer has more.

Web cam Barbie – A new Barbie doll has been released that contains a hidden camera disguised as the doll’s necklace. TechCrunch ran a video explaining exactly how messed up this is.

AppBackr closes seed round — Appbackr, an online marketplace for iPhone … Continue Reading

Is Disney ready to buy social game company Playdom for more than $600M?

Rumors have surfaced that Disney is in the process of negotiating to buy social game company Playdom for more than $600 million.

Techcrunch reported tonight that it had heard from six or seven sources that a deal was in the works. We also heard the rumor from a credible source earlier today and sent messages this afternoon to Disney and Playdom. Disney did not comment, and John Pleasants, chief executive of Playdom, said in an … Continue Reading

Facebook tweaks bookmarks on the homepage

Developers better keep their MAUs (or monthly active users) up.

Facebook is tweaking bookmarks on the left-hand side of the page so that the apps users interact with most frequently appear “above the fold” or above the “More” button.

Whenever a user signs up for an app, a bookmark will automatically be created for them. This is unlike before, when users would have to make their own bookmarks. Of course, not every user took advantage … Continue Reading

300 million tweets reveal the afternoon at work is the unhappiest time of day

If you go by tweets, Americans are happiest in the early mornings and then gradually become more negative as the work day progresses, according to researchers at Northwestern and Harvard universities.

A team of five researchers at the two schools studied 300 million U.S. tweets from September 2006 to August 2009 and performed sentiment analysis on them. They found that the evenings (presumably when people get off work and are socializing with friends) and early … Continue Reading

Energy Dept. spends $106M to put captured CO2 to use

The Energy Department followed up its pledge today to invest $122 million in converting sunlight into fuels with another announcement: $106 million in new stimulus funding for six projects working to convert carbon dioxide emissions into plastics, fuel, cement, fertilizer and other products. The idea is not only to eliminate harmful emissions from the atmosphere, but also to put them to good use.

Carbon sequestration is still a huge question mark. While efforts are currently … Continue Reading