Honestly? People-review site Unvarnished gets a better name — and funding

Good judgment and patience — the kind of qualities that are vital, yet hard to assess in a potential hire or partner — helped win Peter Kazanjy funding for his startup. And he’s planning to use the money to keep building a site that will help others make similar assessments of people they’re going into business with.

Kazanjy’s site, a tool for reviewing colleagues while hiding your identity from the people you rate, is changing … Continue Reading

Microsoft brings its Office applications online with Office 365

Microsoft is bringing its Office applications online to compete with Web-based office software like Google Apps, the company announced today at a press event in San Francisco.

The new Office is geared toward small businesses, and businesses with remote employees who telecommute. It integrates cloud services like SharePoint and Exchange with its traditional Word and PowerPoint office applications, bringing everything online with a subscription service.

“End users aren’t going to see much of a difference, … Continue Reading

Professional social network Ushi is China's answer to LinkedIn

Ushi.cn is looking to capitalize on the fast growing social networking space in China with its own flavor of LinkedIn targeting Chinese professionals.

Shanghai-based Ushi (pronounced: you-shi meaning ‘outstanding professional’) launched its invitation-only private beta in March 2010 and has grown to over 60,000 members from user invites alone. That’s a pretty small number compare to LinkedIn, which has 80 million users.

But in a country that’s seen the majority of its growth to 350 … Continue Reading

On the GreenBeat: Boeing will test Chinese biofuel, ClearEdge raises $10 million

Here are the cleantech stories we’re following on the GreenBeat today:

Boeing will test biofuel made by PetroChina, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Chinese solar stocks have stumbled since Friday’s news that the U.S. government is investigating subsidies that the Chinese give its solar companies, Investors Business Daily reports. The United Steelworkers unions filed a complaint saying the subsidies have allowed Chinese solar companies to undercut American companies in price.

WeatherBug announced a … Continue Reading

Intel investing up to $8B in new U.S. factories, creating thousands of jobs

Intel said it wil invest $6 billion to $8 billion on its new chip factories in a move that will create thousands of construction and engineering jobs.

The world’s biggest chip maker said it will create 6,000 to 8,000 construction jobs and 800 to 1,000 permenanent high-tech jobs at its manufacturing sites in Arizona and Oregon.

The money will create a new development fab (short for wafer fabrication plant), or a factory for building prototype … Continue Reading

Evernote's "global platform for human memory" lands $20M

Evernote, the startup dedicated to helping the world remember everything, announced today that it has raised $20 million in third round funding led by new investors Sequoia Capital.

The service — which offers desktop, mobile, and Web applications to save notes, pictures, audio, and video to a readily accessible cloud location — has been growing like gangbusters. In the past two months, it’s signed up 10,000 new users every day, and has grown to more … Continue Reading

Say Media study: Live TV is in bigger trouble than you think

Is the future of television entirely online? When you look at new TV products from Apple and Google, it’s clear tech companies think that could be the case. But there’s also a sense that the shift is only coming … sometime, in the hazy future.

Say Media says things are changing faster than you might think. The online advertising company, which was formed when video ad startup VideoEgg acquired blogging technology company Six Apart, recently … Continue Reading

Android revenue exceeds iPhone for mobile ad network Millennial Media

Android revenue has exceeded iPhone-only revenue on the mobile ad company Millennial Media’s network, according to its September “Mobile Mix” report.

Android’s revenue overtaking was bound to happen: Its ad requests grew 26 percent since the previous month, and a whopping 1,283 percent since January. Android has remained the second largest OS on Millennial’s network since July, and grew 2 percent since August to account for a 29 percent share of impressions on the ad … Continue Reading

Revolution Analytics grabs $8.6M to help businesses examine large data sets

Revolution Analytics, a developer of software for computational statistics, has raised $8.6 million in an add-on to its second round of funding, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in Palo Alto, the firm creates software to support users of the open-source R programming language.

Revolution Analytics offers its products to academic institutions for free but charges commercial users for its Revolution R Enterprise product. Clients include Pfizer, Yale Cancer Center and Motorola. Founded … Continue Reading

Former Zynga exec lands at VC firm Maveron

Andrew Trader, an early team member of red-hot gaming startup Zynga, is now joining venture capital firm Maveron, the company told VentureBeat late Monday.

Trader, known as “A.T.”, built and managed all business operations at Zynga as vice president of sales and business development before quietly exiting the company in March to “pursue other entrepreneurial opportunities and to spend more time with my family.”

Since then, speculation has been rampant about where Trader might land, … Continue Reading

Facebook's Causes reels in $9M and defends online activism

A former Facebook president’s pet project for philanthropy, Causes, is coming into its own, announcing today it has closed a $9 million round of mezzanine funding.

The for-profit Causes bills itself as “tactical philanthropy,” leveraging Facebook and other social networking sites as a way to raise money for fighting everything from cancer to genocide. The notion of online activism has recently faced criticism from New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, prompting a passionate response from a … Continue Reading

Why Foursquare doesn't owe its success to the iPhone

Location-based check-in service Foursquare saw a massive amount of success, both globally and in the United States, because it focused on multiple mobile platforms rather than a single one like Apple’s iPhone operating system or Google’s Android, according to Foursquare executive Holger Luedorf.

Foursquare went against the grain in embracing the fragmentation of the smartphone marketplace, said said Luedorf (pictured left), vice president of mobile partnerships with Foursquare, in an interview with VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt … Continue Reading

Gaming legend Brian Reynolds on how FrontierVille might change Zynga

Veteran game designer Brian Reynolds said today that FrontierVille, the game that launched earlier this year, was a way for Zynga to experiment with a new kind of social game design. And the experiment paid off.

Unlike Zynga’s previous games, FrontierVille was put together by the company’s new Zynga East team, which consisted of more traditional game designers and was under the leadership of Reynolds, whose background was in traditional PC strategy games.

Reynolds was … Continue Reading

Lots at stake at GreenBeat 2010: New speakers, early-bird extended to Friday

Our next GreenBeat 2010 conference is just three weeks away. If you’re an entrepreneur or executive focused on energy or the environment, you should sign up soon. Early-bird tickets, which offer a 30 percent discount, end on Friday.

Who else should come? Well, we’re debating the billion-dollar opportunities emerging from the build out of what we’re calling the “Super Grid.” The Super Grid is the more efficient electric grid being built across the country — … Continue Reading

SuccessFactors snaps up YouCalc, debuting 'massive calculator in the sky'

Danish business analytics shop YouCalc has been acquired by cloud-based software firm SuccessFactors, as the latter continues its buying spree and pushes further into providing a suite of cloud applications to businesses hungry for the newest technology.

The choice of YouCalc as its latest buy seems to pencil out. SuccessFactors today unveiled YouCalc’s new Calculator in the Cloud platform, which lets businesses collect and rehash data from a host of sources all in one central … Continue Reading

Apple's iPad sales secret? It's all business

Apple has shipped 7.5 million iPads since it launched in April, turning it into the largest player in the tablet computer market. The company grabbed that position in just six months thanks to its focus on a single device and surprising contributions from enterprise sales, Apple executives said on its quarterly conference call to discuss earnings.

Apple sold 4.19 million iPads in its most recent quarter, and 3.27 million iPads in the quarter before that. … Continue Reading

Apple's Steve Jobs trash talks the mobile competition

“We’ve now passed RIM, and I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future,” Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs said today. And with that, he began ruthlessly tearing down Apple’s mobile competition.

Jobs was referring to the iPhone’s sales win over RIM this past quarter. He went on to say that it will be a challenge for RIM to create a competitive platform, and even more so for RIM to convince developers to … Continue Reading

Apple crushes earnings as usual, but misses outlook

Apple says it generated more than $20 billion in revenue this quarter after selling nearly twice as many iPhones as it did during the same quarter last year.

The iPhone manufacturer brought in $4.31 billion in net income, up about 70 percent from $2.53 billion a year ago. Its quarterly revenue jumped 67 percent to $20.34 billion, compared to $12.21 billion the same quarter one year ago.

The lion’s share of Apple’s revenue came from … Continue Reading

Goodbye cloud? Chief software architect Ray Ozzie to depart Microsoft

Ray Ozzie, the Microsoft executive who has been the traditional software giant’s face as it refocuses on cloud computing, is stepping down from his role as chief software architect.

The company announced Ozzie’s departure through an internal email today that was also published on the Microsoft website. Chief executive Steve Ballmer credited Ozzie with thinking up and launching the company’s cloud computing service, Windows Azure (a launch that Microsoft announced with the phrase, “Hello cloud”), … Continue Reading