Facebook plays nice with game developers as it rolls out platform changes

Relax, game developers. Mark Zuckerberg, the baby-faced billionaire chief executive of Facebook, does care about games after all.

That was one of the big messages imparted to a collection of about 100 or so key game developers and publishers who showed up at Facebook’s headquarters today in Palo Alto, Calif. Zuckerberg appeared at the event to tell the game makers that, on a very high level, Facebook knows how important they are to the success … Continue Reading

Ad optimizer Rocket Fuel lifts off with $10M from Nokia

Rocket Fuel, a startup claiming to bring honest-to-God rocket science to the online advertising world, has raised $10 million in its second round of funding.

The Redwood Shores, Calif. company says it uses technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics to figure out the best placement for a display ad. It either buys impressions on an ad exchange, or directly from online publishers. A number of ad optimizers look at user behavior, said chief … Continue Reading

RIM to unveil "BlackPad" BlackBerry tablet next week?

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is set to unveil a tablet at its Developer Conference in San Francisco next week, sources tell the Wall Street Journal.

The device — which some RIM insiders are calling the BlackPad (the company also purchased BlackPad.com in July) — is expected to run a completely new operating system, and not the recent BlackBerry 6 OS that debuted with the BlackBerry Torch. The new OS will apparently be built on … Continue Reading

Loopt Star brings check-in rewards to Android users

Loopt Star, an application from location-based startup Loopt that lets users check in to places and get rewards, is now available on Android devices.

The Loopt Star application is different from the original Loopt application as it focuses more on rewarding consumers for checking into certain locations. For example, if you check in to Burger King you’ll get an offer for a free coffee or soda with the purchase of a regular sandwich or breakfast … Continue Reading

Sharp acquires Recurrent Energy for $305 million

Top solar project developer Recurrent Energy announced today it will be acquired by Sharp for $305 million cash.

The deal is expected to close at the end of this year. Recurrent will operate under its own name as a subsidiary of Sharp, and CEO Arno Harris will retain his title. The company won’t be required to use Sharp products, nor will there be any preferential pricing, Harris said.

The deal was necessitated by Recurrent’s growth … Continue Reading

GM, Nissan, Tesla focus on how to recycle used electric car batteries

Electric cars may be coming out in force come December, but the spotlight is now on how their batteries will be resold and recycled several years down the road.

There’s been a recent spate of announcements from Nissan, General Motors and Tesla on this topic. All three companies are looking for ways to reuse the batteries in their electric vehicles once they reach the end of their useful life within the car itself. This aptly-named … Continue Reading

With News Feed changes, Facebook issues a friend request to social game makers

Months after it hurt social game publishers by taking away some of its best viral methods for spreading apps, Facebook is hoping to make amends.

The company is planning to announce today it will make changes to its its News Feed, the system which displays updates from friends, so that aficionados of social games like Zynga’s FarmVille can receive more notifications about their friends’ gameplay. That will help game companies return to the days of … Continue Reading

Location Labs puts location data for over 250M phones in developers' hands

Location Labs, a company that helps developers implement location-based services in mobile applications, announced today that  its cloud-based Universal Location Service (ULS) platform can now locate over 250 million phones.

The milestone comes after Location Labs was granted access to Verizon’s network — giving it location connectivity to all four major US carriers.

The company offers three major services: Geofencing (available for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry) runs in the background to let applications know when … Continue Reading

VideoEgg, Six Apart form online advertising play Say Media

Life never turns out quite the way you planned. Nor do startups. Two San Francisco-based companies, VideoEgg and Six Apart, are formally announcing tomorrow that they’re forming a new company, Say Media, built around online advertising — a business that doesn’t have much to do with either’s origins.

VideoEgg is acquiring Six Apart, which was recently the subject of deal rumors and had hired an investment banker, GCA Savvian, as VentureBeat first reported last month.… Continue Reading

Tumblr lead developer leaves to work on his own company

Tumblr chief technology officer Marco Arment said he has left the company to work on his own startup, Instapaper. His comments came in an e-mail to VentureBeat today.

While he has left Tumblr as an official executive, Arment (pictured left) said on his blog that he will still be involved with the company as a consultant. Arment served as Tumblr’s lead developer for four years.

“Tumblr’s technical management needs have evolved to require types of … Continue Reading

Google on track to acquire a new company every 2 weeks

Google is now on track to acquire a new company every two weeks this year. It’s on quite the shopping spree, but for a company that made $24 billion last year alone, it might be exactly what the doctor ordered to keep up with significant competition in the smartphone and search markets.

Google has so far announced 19 acquisitions in 2010, well past the seven deals it closed last year and accounting for 28 percent … Continue Reading

Adobe working on technology to refocus blurry photos, after you take them

Adobe showed off a cool technology that will help everyone who takes bad, blurry photos turn them into good, focused ones.

Speaking at Nvidia‘s GPU Technology conference, Adobe researchers David Salesin and Todor Georgiev showed how they can fix bad photos using a technology that is not yet commercially available. They showed that they could take an out of focus photo and use computing techniques to put the photo into focus.

Once this technology is … Continue Reading

With code-named Kepler and Maxwell projects, Nvidia promises far more power-efficient graphics chips

Nvidia announced today that its next-generation graphics chips will be increasingly power-efficient in an age when power requirements are limiting what computers can do.

Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based graphics chip maker, said at the company’s GPU Technology conference today that Nvidia will introduce new graphics chips in 2011 and 2013, the first code-named Kepler, the second Maxwell.

The Kepler chip, slated for 2011, will be three to four times more … Continue Reading

Coda unveils $45,000 sedan pricing, high above competitors' price tags

Electric car startup Coda has announced the pricing for its all-electric sedan, and it’s a big pill to swallow: $44,900, or $37,400 if you factor in a $7,500 tax incentive.

The price tag is almost $4,000 more than the partially-electric Chevrolet Volt, and over $12,000 more than the all-electric Nissan Leaf. All three cars hit the market this December, and Coda’s high pricing is leaving plenty of questions about how this relatively unknown startup can … Continue Reading

Imax, others back Laser Light Engines for brighter 3D future in movies

Laser Light Engines, which develops super-bright laser-driven light sources for projection devices, announced today that it raised $13 million for development of a 3D-movie light source.

Imax, a strategic partner, joined existing investors in the round.

The funding will help produce a custom light source for Imax theaters that is two to five times brighter than a typical xenon bulb used in projection devices — which would be particularly useful in 3D film screenings. Splitting … Continue Reading

Nvidia's new software is strategic move to beat back Intel

Amid a bunch of cool stereoscopic 3D demos, Nvidia announced today that it can run its graphics-based programming technology on any computer regardless of whether it uses an Nvidia graphics chip or not.

In short, Nvidia has worked with software company PGI to create a new compiler to take code for its graphics chips and run them on machines without its graphics chips. Before you dismiss this announcement as a narrow one, you have to … Continue Reading

Vchatter takes video chat outside Facebook walls

Vchatter, a video chat application originally launched on Facebook, announced Tuesday that it has expanded its service  to a standalone website.

As a Facebook app, the service has seen impressive growth since its launch in May, with 2.5 million active monthly users. But it’s now betting on growth outside Facebook, by providing personal URLs or website addresses for users, akin to the profile pages they have on other social networks like Twitter or MySpace.

The … Continue Reading

On the GreenBeat: Clean energy bill sees revival, GM partners with ABB, SolarCity teams with Telsa

A clean-energy bill sees revival on Capitol Hill. A bipartisan group of senators will propose legislation that would set a goal of 15 percent renewable energy by 2021. The bill would require utilities to start drawing from renewable energy sources starting in 2012. It’s set to be voted on after the Nov. 2 elections.

GM announced today it will be collaborating with electrical giant ABB to develop secondary uses for the Volt battery. The companies … Continue Reading

Omidyar Network promises $55M in transparency and mobile investments

Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar (pictured) and his wife Pam, plans to spend a sizable chunk of its money over the next three years on government transparency and mobile services.

Specifically, the firm announced today at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative that it’s committing $30 million to for-profit and non-profit groups that use technology to increase government transparency, and another $25 million to organizations offering … Continue Reading