On the GreenBeat: EnerNOC expands offerings, Think announces pricing for electric cars

Here are the top stories we’re following today on the GreenBeat.

Demand response company EnerNOC has announced it has expanded its business to add building controls and energy efficiency monitoring to its offerings.

Norwegian electric car maker Think will start selling its Think City electric car in the U.S. mid-2011, GigaOm writes. The company plans to sell 2,000 to 3,000 cars at $34,000 (before federal and state incentives) to urban drivers in San Francisco, … Continue Reading

24 reasons not to miss Matt Marshall's business-cloud webinar

Ready to find out what the cloud really means? (Turns out it’s not just a fancy name for the Internet after all.)

According to my boss, Matt Marshall, it’s a set of technologies and business practices that could transform your company. I just got a preview of the webinar, “Demystifying the Business Cloud,” that he’s set to host at 11 a.m. Pacific today with Andy McLoughlin, the sassy Britrepreneur cofounder of trans-Atlantic cloud-collaboration company Huddle. … Continue Reading

Seedcamp, Europe's Y Combinator, closes $4 million fund

Seedcamp, a seed fund that is best described as Europe’s version of Y Combinator, just announced the closing of its second fund of $4 million. This fund is 50 percent larger than the first fund, raised in 2007.

New investors include Notion Capital in the UK, 360 Partners from France, Team Europe in Germany, Ahti Heinla from Skype, and Lars Hinrichs the founder of Xing. Existing investors such as Atlas Venture and Index Ventures are … Continue Reading

Hulu Plus officially launches at $7.99 a month, now on Roku boxes

It looks like rumors of a cheaper Hulu Plus subscription, the video streaming site’s premium offering, were true after all. Hulu announced the official launch of Hulu Plus today at $7.99 a month — two bucks cheaper than the $9.99 subscription offered during its preview period.

In addition, the company announced that Hulu Plus is available on Roku’s streaming video boxes today. We reported in September that the service was coming to Roku this fall. … Continue Reading

Credit Sesame brings consolidation tools to consumers free, online and all in one place

Consumers bewildered by a rash of resetting rates on loans and various outstanding credit lines now have the same tools banks have to aggregate all their debt in one place, after free online personal finance tool Credit Sesame launched a beta version today to help users get a complete financial snapshot all in one place.

Previously only available to banks or brokers, Credit Sesame uses an in-house loan analytics engine to help users instantly view … Continue Reading

GameGround raises $5.3M for gamer social networking app

As the big social networks scoop up users by the millions, specialty social networks are debuting in an attempt to corral users with special interests. The latest of these to emerge is GameGround, a New York startup that will build a services and app to help gamers socialize with each other more easily.

The app is launching in beta testing today. The company got started to deal with the problem that playing games is still … Continue Reading

Dealspl.us ups the ante for holiday shoppers looking to make money as they save

User-generated shopping site dealspl.us is upping the ante for the holiday shopping season, on Wednesday it’s launching a Money Makers Program that will allow deal and coupon enthusiasts to earn money for each deal or coupon they share, the company told VentureBeat.

The site has also launched an easily installable dealspl.us Widget that allows users using Money Makers to monetize their websites or blogs with relevant, money-saving coupons.

Both moves are a sign that competition … Continue Reading

Vudu movie streaming arrives on the PlayStation Network

Game consoles are becoming the portals to entertainment in the home. The latest evidence of that is the impending launch of the Vudu on-demand movie-streaming service on Sony’s PlayStation Network.

On Nov. 23, PlayStation 3 owners will be able to access the Vudu library of more than 4,000 high-definition movies via their game consoles. The movies will feature 1080p HD and Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 surround sound.

Vudu’s movies include a lot of recent Hollywood … Continue Reading

Glam Media hires like crazy, on track to overtake AOL

Glam Media, the media and advertising company focused on women, said today it is forming a global brand sales team in London to continue its global expansion in online brand advertising.

The move means that the company continues to breath down the neck of venerable portal AOL in the race for size in online audience reach.

The remarkable thing about Glam is that it has grown from scratch in just seven years and appears poised … Continue Reading

Twitter adds instant notifications via SMS, push messages on iPhone/iPad

A much craved-for feature by mobile users, microblogging platform Twitter has finally taken notice and added push notifications for mentions to your username (dubbed @mentions) in its iPhone and iPad apps, as well as through SMS.

Here’s how it works: whenever someone you follow mentions you with your username, Twitter’s iPhone and iPad apps will open up with a push notification. Alternatively, if you’re not an iPhone user, you can turn on text message notifications … Continue Reading

Exit41 wants you to order dinner on Facebook

Exit41, a company that powers the food-ordering experience for a number of big-name restaurants, just announced that it wants to make Facebook Fan Pages more useful — for both hungry customers and restaurants looking to measure the value of their social networking presence.

Most big restaurants have built Fan Pages on Facebook, but those pages don’t usually offer much in the way of features. For example, the Domino’s Pizza page includes some basic restaurant information, … Continue Reading

Mark Zuckerberg credits games for Facebook's rapid growth

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he fully appreciates the value of games to the growth of Facebook.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Zuckerberg said that games took off on Facebook and generated a lot of early buzz for the social network. Titles such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Zynga Poker are a big part of why Facebook has more than 500 million users, 50 percent of whom log in every day. … Continue Reading

Mark Zuckerberg defends Facebook's aggressive social strategy

Facebook has taken a lot of flack for an aggressive, “opt-out” strategy around some of its products — specifically, the fact that your Facebook friends can tag you in Photos without your permission, and that they can now add you to Groups without your permission. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg described some of the thinking behind that approach on-stage today at the Web 2.0 Summit.

The social networking company credits this design with fueling the rapid … Continue Reading

Google investor John Doerr: Zynga is our best company ever

John Doerr, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, gave high praise to Zynga, the leading social game company, saying it was one of the best investments his firm had ever made.

Doerr’s firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has invested in a lot of companies from Google to Amazon. So Doerr’s comment, spoken at the Web 2.0 Summit in conversation with fellow VC Fred Wilson and journalist John Heilemann, is particularly worth noting.

Doerr said … Continue Reading

Kleiner's John Doerr: "We were wrong" to turn down Twitter

More venture capitalists have an embarrassing, “I can’t believe we didn’t invest in that company” moment. For Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ John Doerr (whose past investments include Amazon.com and Google), it sounds like one of those moments involved turning down a chance to invest in Twitter.

When Twitter’s founders approached Kleiner, Doerr said it was very early, the company didn’t have any users, it didn’t have any traction, “It wasn’t Twitter.” Doerr said that … Continue Reading

All Points Bulletin goes free to play, but will that save it from being a bad game?

Well this is awkward. GamersFirst, an operator of free-to-play online games, announced today that it has acquired the rights to the 2010 flop of the year, All Points Bulletin (APB), and will re-launch it on a freemium revenue model later next year.

GamersFirst is essentially betting that switching All Points Bulletin, which was formerly on a monthly pay-to-play subscription model before it shut down in September, to a free-to-play model that makes money off the … Continue Reading

Third fund for Union Square Ventures looks likely, but size is always an issue

Well-known venture capital investor in Twitter and Foursquare, Union Square Ventures, is raising a third fund likely to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million, peHUB reports. That’s more than twice the size of its $156 million second fund that closed in 2008.

In the peHUB article, Union Square investor Fred Wilson (pictured) said the amount wasn’t that high, although he didn’t dispute that a third fund is in the pipeline.

“The rumors of … Continue Reading

Facebook fixes bug disabling female user accounts

Thousands of female Facebook users started reporting on Twitter this morning that their Facebook accounts had been inexplicably disabled. Facebook confirmed the incident a little later, stating that the cause was a bug in the system and that it had been fixed, with affected user accounts being reactivated.

Users first started noticing the bug sometime around midnight (PST), using Twitter as a platform to share their annoyance. “My facebook account was disabled for reasons unclear. … Continue Reading

What October's drop in video-game sales means

U.S. video-game store sales fell 4 percent in October, largely because of a weak sales month for new hardware.

Is that good or bad? Store sales are getting harder to interpret as the industry moves away from shipping games in boxes — but they still represent seven out of 10 dollars spent on games in the U.S., even with the runaway growth of digital downloads and virtual-goods sales in social and multiplayer games.

In stores, … Continue Reading