Founders Fund offers $100K to teenage entrepreneurs

Everyone’s heard stories about young entrepreneurs who drop out of school and found hot startups like Facebook. Now the Founders Fund is putting up money to make sure that practice continues.

Managing partner Peter Thiel (pictured) announced a new “20 under 20″ program today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. As the name implies, with this new program Founders Fund will offer grants of up to $100,000 to 20 entrepreneurs under 20 years … Continue Reading

NY companies: Get feedback from RRE Ventures

Do you have a technology idea that will change the world?

If you’re based in NY, and you think you’ve built a technology product that will set off the next tech revolution, consider applying for a special session we’re hosting next Tuesday with one of New York’s respected venture capital groups, RRE Ventures. Some partners at that firm will join us in providing feedback on your product.

Two weeks after wrapping up DEMO Fall in … Continue Reading

Chegg adds another $75M to textbook rental cash pile

Textbook rental site Chegg has raised another $75 million in funding, according a report in All Things Digital.

Chegg was already one of the best-funded startups around, previously raising $84.2 million in equity, as well as $55 million in credit and debt, from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Insight Venture Partners, and others. The new funding reportedly comes from Hong Kong investment firm Ace Limited.

Given the massive funding, Chegg is clearly aiming for a … Continue Reading

WordPress.com is now default blogging platform for Windows Live users

Automattic, the creator of WordPress.com, and Windows Live are partnering to make WordPress the default blogging platform for Windows Live users after an announcement by Windows Live’s Dharmesh Mehta (pictured right) at TechCrunch Disrupt today.

The new partnership effectively kills Windows Live’s native blogging platform, Windows Live Spaces, and adds about 7 million blogs to the WordPress platform. Users will have about six months to migrate their blog over to the WordPress platform, Mehta said.… Continue Reading

Greylock Partners announces new $20M seed fund for micro-financing fresh startups

Reid Hoffman (pictured left), a founder of LinkedIn, prominent angel investor, and partner with venture capital firm Greylock Partners, announced a new $20 million seed fund affiliated with Greylock for small-scale investments into startups.

The seed project, announced by Hoffman at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco today, comes from the $575 million fund Greylock partners launched last year, and each partner can invest small portions of it as they see fit without committee … Continue Reading

Zynga's data-junkie leaders aim to improve game design for hit social games

Social game publisher Zynga has become the fastest-growing startup in the valley in part because it is run by “data junkies” who measure every click in every game. At the same time, Zynga is paying more attention to the long-term efforts of its veteran game designers, who have developed an intuition about what games will be popular.

That’s one of the comments made today by Mark Pincus (pictured at top), chief executive of Zynga, and … Continue Reading

Mindflash kills the training coordinator for small to mid-size businesses

Mindflash, which provides a web-based application for training programs, announced today it is coming out of closed beta with a subscription-based pricing model geared toward smaller business that is several times cheaper than most firms offering training infrastructure for larger corporations.

Mindflash allows trainers and company executives to upload content ranging from films, quizzes, PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents and more into a web-based Adobe Flash application. Administrators of the application can get real-time feedback — … Continue Reading

Super angels defend small valuations and 'dipshit companies'

A bunch of high-profile angel investors defended the idea of keeping valuations low and selling companies early at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference today in San Francisco.

TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington, who moderated the panel, had previously criticized some angels for funding “dipshit companies” that think too small and aim to be acquired by Google for around $20 million. But those exits actually make sense, said 500 Startups’ Dave McClure (pictured). After all, he said, a … Continue Reading

IBM acquires Blade Network Technologies for data center switching

IBM announced today that it has entered into an agreement to purchase Blade Network Technologies, a company that specializes in networking switches for data centers.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a source familiar with the news said that it was valued at around $400 million, according to Tech Trader Daily.

Blade offers embedded and top-of-rack Ethernet switches that are low power, low cost, and low latency. It also provides software “to virtualize … Continue Reading

On the GreenBeat: SolarCity eyes 2013 IPO, Serious Materials makes building management push

SolarCity could be looking at an IPO in 2013, CEO Lyndon Rive told the Wall Street Journal. The solar installer is expanding — it hired 300 people in the past year and expects to add 100 more to its staff in the next six months. Key to its growth: the company’s energy savings for primarily residential customers has started to attract commercial customers. The company announced its biggest deal to date last week with … Continue Reading

Nokia had iPhone-like prototype in 2004, but killed it

Nokia apparently developed an internet-ready prototype phone with a large display and touchscreen in 2004 — three years before the iPhone debuted — but killed the concept for fear of it being a flop, a former Nokia employee who demonstrated the device tells the New York Times.

Ari Hakkarainen, the former employee in question, was a marketing manager for Nokia’s flagship Series 60 phones at the time. “It was very early days, and no one … Continue Reading

Unity Technologies to enable high-end games on web browsers

Slowly but surely, the web is becoming a more hospitable place to host high-end games with sophisticated 3D graphics. That’s one of the reasons Unity Technologies says that version 3.0 of its game development platform is its most important yet.

Games with cool 3D graphics must often be loaded onto a computer via a DVD. Or they can be downloaded over the web in a very long transfer of gigabytes and gigabytes of data. That … Continue Reading

What top app developers really think of the app stores

App developers want approvals by the big mobile players who manage app stores to happen much faster and more transparently, a new study set to be released this week found.

Open First, a research advisory firm based in the U.S. and Europe, learned that in a survey of top application developers on the Apple, Android and Ovi app stores in which they evaluate their experience with the stores. Some surprising patterns emerged in the results, … Continue Reading

Quantenna brings in $21M to carry faster Wi-Fi into the home

Semiconductor chip company Quantenna Communications has closed a $21 million fifth round of funding, the company announced today. The Fremont, Calif.-based company enables consumers to wirelessly stream high-definition video to home devices.

Quantenna improves data transfer speeds across long distances to 100 megabits per second over 100 to 150 feet. This lets consumers reliably stream videos from Netflix or games from online game service OnLive, which announced its Wi-Fi beta this month. CEO David French … Continue Reading

Truste gives the seal of approval to mobile privacy policies

As debates continue to spring up about how smartphones and mobile applications use our data, there’s a growing opportunity for companies that say they can help protect our privacy — like Truste.

San Francisco-based Truste, once a non-profit and now a venture-backed for-profit company, already offers a “trustmark” certifying that websites meet its privacy standards. Chief executive Chris Babel said that doesn’t mean the sites don’t give away any information ever, but rather that they … Continue Reading

Feds want to expand wiretapping to include mobile email and social networks

Federal law enforcement and national security officials want to hunt down criminals and terrorists in the places where they have fled in order to escape telephone wiretapping. And that’s why the authorities want to be able to wiretap services such as BlackBerry emails, social networks such as Facebook, and peer-to-peer messaging services such as Skype.

The New York Times reported that law enforcement will seek to get lawmakers to approve a bill that will expand … Continue Reading

Security vulnerabilities are holding back Web 2.0 in the enterprise

It remains very difficult to protect web-based user-generated content — also known as Web 2.0, from cyber hackers. That’s why enterprises have been slow to adopt Web 2.0 in their business practices.

McAfee, the antivirus software vendor acquired by Intel, said that its survey of 1,000 global business decision makers in 17 countries found that half were concerned about the security of Web 2.0 applications. We wrote about this as early as mid-2008.

Those businesses … Continue Reading

Adobe wants to glitz up the mobile shopping experience

Adobe is moving its mobile efforts into a new industry today — shopping.

Over the past couple of years, Adobe has been fighting to make a place for its Flash technology on the wave of new smartphones from Apple, Google, and others.

But Adobe’s mobile plans are not just about Flash. Today, the company announced an upgrade to its Scene7 offering, a rich media service that allows retailers to create an online catalog that goes … Continue Reading

Meshin brings semantic smarts to organizing your email (video)

Chris Holmes is the general manager of Meshin, a startup that is being incubated inside Xerox PARC.

Meshin uses semantic technology, or artificial intelligence techniques that allow a computer to parse natural language and understand it. The semantic web has a lot of promise for simplifying our lives; semantic search, for instance, could be much smarter about delivering the results we want when we ask for something.

Holmes said that Meshin, which is still a … Continue Reading