On the GreenBeat: Ener1 sells $20 million in stock, Hara's success could attract buyers

Battery company Ener1 is selling $20 million in stock as part of efforts to expand capacity at its plants, Dow Jones Newswires reports. Ener1 batteries are geared towards electric vehicle use. The company announced a $65 million capital raise earlier this month. It has raised over $160 million in equity so far and also earned a government grant.

Energy management startup Hara seems to be on an upward swing and could become a prime acquisition … Continue Reading

Disney's top game and online executive steps down

Disney lost one of its major executives today as Steve Wadsworth, the company’s digital leader, overseeing Disney Interactive Media Group (DIMG), has announced his resignation. In an e-mail sent to staff he wrote, “I have been thinking about this for quite some time, and while it is difficult to leave a great company, an exciting business and a wonderful group of people, my desire and excitement to pursue other opportunities is too great to ignore.”… Continue Reading

Netflix considers streaming-only plan, adds Battlestar Galactica and a slew of NBC TV shows

Netflix may soon offer a subscription plan specifically geared towards streaming video, according to a short blog post by CEO Reed Hastings. The company also announced today that it has landed a content deal with NBC Universal that will allow Netflix to stream more TV episodes from NBC, USA, and SyFy.

Hastings’ blog post was meant as an apology for comments he made earlier to The Hollywood Report. When asked if US consumers would react … Continue Reading

Boston tech startups: Get feedback from Qualcomm and Village Ventures

If you’re a Boston technology startup and are thinking about launching a new product soon, consider joining us on Oct. 6 and 7.

Two weeks after ending DEMO Fall in Silicon Valley, we’re heading back on the road and will be traveling the country and world looking for the best products to launch at DEMO Spring on Feb. 27.

Our first stop on this tour is Boston, where we’re teaming up with Qualcomm Ventures and … Continue Reading

YouTube Instant creator accepts YouTube job, will continue at Stanford

The past few weeks have been good to Stanford student Feross Aboukhadijeh (pictured right with YouTube CEO Chad Hurley), who created the YouTube Instant site earlier this month and was then famously offered a job at YouTube. Aboukhadijeh announced on his blog today that he will accept the YouTube job offer while continuing his studies at Stanford, and he also revealed some interesting statistics and new features for his site.

Aboukhadijeh says that YouTube Instant … Continue Reading

NComputing's market share in thin clients is skyrocketing

NComputing, a maker of a novel kind of desktop computer known as a virtualized thin client, has become one of the biggest computer companies in the world. And it’s because desktop virtualization is finally going mainstream, the company claims.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company has sold more than 2.5 million desktops that use its virtualization software. In the second quarter, it had 21 percent of the thin-client market for enterprises, second only to Hewlett-Packard and … Continue Reading

Insomniac Games’ Ted Price on keeping the workplace fun

You’d expect the video game industry to be one that’s pretty fun to work in. But the hours can be brutal, and a lot of people who enter the field burn out quickly. Ted Price, President and CEO of Insomniac Games (makers of the “Ratchet and Clank” and “Resistance” franchises) talks in this Perfect Business video segment about how his company keeps things light and promotes collaboration among its employees. The methods include a lack … Continue Reading

AngelGate dispute among Valley investors cracks wide open

When TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington barged in on a secret meeting of super angels, the wealthy individuals who are taking an increasingly prominent role in startup investing, the facts were open to interpretation. Arrington alleged that he heard the meeting was about illegal collusion. That seemed so unlikely. But now an email sent by investor Ron Conway (right) shows that there is a real fracture in the angel group about whether there was an attempt … Continue Reading

Dave McClure dials up $250K for Twilio startups

When you think about hot technology platforms, Twilio might not be the first one that comes to mind. But it looks like there’s a big opportunity here — at least according to 500 Startups, the new seed investment firm led by bombastic investor Dave McClure.

The firm announced today that it has created a $250,000 micro-fund for companies using Twilio’s technology, which allows developers to add calls and text messages to their Web applications. Even … Continue Reading

FCC votes to open up empty broadcast TV spectrum for "Super-WiFi"

The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously today to open up empty broadcast TV spectrum — so-called “white spaces” which exist between TV channels — for a next-generation mobile broadband technology it’s calling “Super-WiFi.”

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said that white space networks will “open a new platform for American innovation“ and lead to billions of dollars in industry investment.

Companies like Google, Microsoft, Dell, and HP have been planning on ways to use the … Continue Reading

The search for the best business smartphone to buy right now

The fall of 2010 is shaping up as a wonderful time to buy a smartphone for work — but if you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for, it can also be a particularly confusing time. It used to be a simple matter of picking up the latest BlackBerry. Now business users can safely choose the iPhone or any number of Android devices.

We write about the ins and outs of the mobile industry. While … Continue Reading

HP Slate tablet with Windows 7 embarrasses, Samsung Galaxy Tab impresses (videos)

We couldn’t have asked for a better-timed tablet comparison. A cunning YouTube user managed to record a quick overview of a prototype HP Slate tablet running Windows 7, and not surprisingly, the results are thoroughly disappointing.

Meanwhile, Samsung unveiled the latest video demonstration of its Galaxy Tab Android tablet, and it doesn’t fail to impress.

The veracity of the HP Slate video is still in question — but the hardware resembles an earlier preview of … Continue Reading

Is Foursquare using user data for a new recommendation engine?

Location startup Foursquare is working on a new concept in its New York office — a recommendation engine.

Founder and chief executive Dennis Crowley described the project today while speaking at Picnic, an annual three-day festival for sharing concepts in Amsterdam. The feature, which is only an experiment at this point, takes advantage of the large amount of data that Foursquare has on its users and their friends. Currently, the feature tracks all the check-ins … Continue Reading

AMD's revenues drop due to slow PC sales … and competition from iPad?

Advanced Micro Devices warned today that its sales for the third quarter ending Sept. 25 will fall short of expectations. The culprit could be a weakening economy, which is hurting all PC sales, but it could also be the rise of the Apple iPad, the tablet computer whose popularity is hurting laptop sales.

AMD makes PC chips such as microprocessors and graphics chips. Sales are expected to be down 1 percent to 4 percent from … Continue Reading

Can Microsoft afford losing its Silicon Valley ambassador?

Microsoft has a sprawling campus in tech’s heartland, right by the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. It has thousands of employees in the Bay Area. But the departure of a high-profile evangelist once called the software giant’s “ambassador to Silicon Valley” raises questions about whether its strategy can work.

Anand Iyer, whose formal title is senior product manager and who led Microsoft initiatives to woo startups and mobile developers, wrote on his blog today that … Continue Reading

You can't escape Facebook's downtime

Update: Facebook says (via Twitter) that all of the issues have been resolved.

Unless you’re the most diligent worker on the planet, you’ve probably seen that Facebook has had an outage for most of the afternoon. The site appears to be up right now, at least for me, but its availability has been erratic (it’s about 2pm Pacific as I write this).

When I emailed Facebook for an update, I got the following response: “We’re … Continue Reading

Foursquare looks beyond location: Is your check-in startup in trouble?

Foursquare announced a new partnership today, hinting at how the startup’s ambitions extend beyond location check-ins.

The new partnership is with Runkeeper, a mobile application for tracking your running and jogging activity. When users connect their accounts, they can earn Foursquare badges for their activity in Runkeeper, for example earning a Marathon badge when they run a marathon. Foursquare says this is “the first badge you unlock by doing something, not just checking in.” That … Continue Reading

Cisco, Duke offer $5.3 million make offices greener

Cisco and Duke Energy are teaming together on a $5.3 million effort to green commercial buildings in Charlotte, N.C., and they landed quite an announcer for their latest project: former president Bill Clinton. Clinton kicked off the initiative this morning at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York.

The project’s overall goal is to reduce Charlotte’s energy consumption by 20 percent by 2016 and also create a public-private partnership blueprint that can be replicated in … Continue Reading

Rental giant Blockbuster files for bankruptcy, finally caves to Netflix and Redbox

Movie- and video game-rental giant Blockbuster finally filed for bankruptcy today after swimming in $1.46 billion of debt and failing to adapt to a new order of movie delivery dominated by Redbox and Netflix.

Blockbuster hopes to trim its debt to about $100 million. A group of bondholders that control about 80 percent of Blockbuster’s secured debt agreed to provide $125 million in funding to keep the company running as usual while it’s in bankruptcy. … Continue Reading

Atari launches platform for mobile and casual online games

Game maker Atari is launching a new initiative today that has created a platform to host mobile and online games created by third-party developers.

The Atari Go initiative will take games created by others and publish them using the company’s existing online games infrastructure. Thom Kozik, head of the business-to-business initative, said in an interview that the company is tapping the infrastructure it inherited when it bought Cryptic Studios at the end of 2008. Cryptic … Continue Reading