Can book retailer Borders survive without its own e-reader?

Book and media retailer Borders announced today that it will hold off on paying some publishers in order to buy time and reorganize its debt amid a year of weak sales in its brick and mortar stores in the era of digital distribution.

The company has seen declining sales in books, movies and music since electronic book readers emerged and consumers started to use digital distribution marketplaces like iTunes. Borders’ revenue was down 17.5 percent … Continue Reading

GM leads Nissan in December electric car sales as supply trickles in

Chevy’s electric hybrid vehicle, the Volt, beat out the cheaper Nissan Leaf in electric car sales in the last month of 2010 as each manufacturer struggled to keep up with demand for their newest rides, the Associated Press reported today.

The Volt went into production in mid-November and hit dealerships a few weeks later, just in time to compete with the Nissan Leaf. So far it looks like the Volt has won out in terms … Continue Reading

Winklevoss twins on Facebook lawsuit: It’s not about the money

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins who (along with their business partner Divya Narendra) accuse Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea, got a big write-up in The New York Times for their ongoing legal dispute with Facebook.

We’ve covered this case a number of times before. The twins settled with Facebook in 2008 for $20 million in cash and $45 million in Facebook shares, but tried to back out of the deal almost … Continue Reading

RunKeeper sprints to the top of the charts with fitness free promotion

Here’s a good example of how going free can boost a mobile startup’s profile. RunKeeper Pro, a popular fitness app that normally costs $9.99, announced its first free promotion yesterday and saw a huge spike in downloads — this morning it climbed to number six on the Apple App Store charts, passing the “lite” version of iPhone game sensation Angry Birds.

RunKeeper was created by Boston startup FitnessKeeper. Runners can use it to track their … Continue Reading

MySpace layoffs: 550 fewer friends at the office?

MySpace, the social networking site that once was social networking, could lay off a staggering half of its 1,100-employee workforce, according to AllThingsDigital.

Sources told the publication that parent company News Corp. has long been looking to enforce drastic cost-cutting measures after the site’s revenues and traffic have been on a decline. While no decision has been made yet, the company is rumored to have given its staff a holiday for the last week of … Continue Reading

Despite state censorship, China's Internet population crosses 450 million

The number of Internet users in China has surpassed 450 million people, a senior official of the country announced in a press conference this morning. The country is now the world’s largest Internet market: The United States has only 230 million users.

That number represents an increase of 30% in Internet users from last year, boosting the country’s Internet penetration to around 34 percent — suggesting there’s much more room to grow.

While the impact … Continue Reading

Image Space Media raises extra $1M to turn photos into cold, hard cash

Image Space Media, formerly Picad Media, has raised an additional $1 million from existing investors, according to an SEC filing.

The startup overlays text ads on Web images, similar to those seen on Google’s YouTube and other video-sharing sites. Publishers can integrate a snippet of JavaScript and start monetizing their images, while advertisers can choose from a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) model to serve their text-based ad. Image Space offers an analytics tool for … Continue Reading

The Cartographer app brings gorgeous custom and offline maps to your iPhone

Mobile maps have never looked this good on the iPhone. The Cartographer is a new app ($3.99 on the iTunes Store) that brings support for custom Google Maps, as well as the ability to download maps for use offline, all in a slick vintage user interface.

It’s one of those rare apps that make you sit up and take notice at first, thanks to its unique design and emphasis on usability, but remains consistently useful … Continue Reading

Where will the location superstars check in this New Year's?

Wondering how to tell your friends where you are for New Year’s? There are a host of hot location-based startups which let you check in to a venue and broadcast your whereabouts to friends. Since I write about these services regularly, I decided to ask the founders of these companies where they’d be for New Year’s. The coolest choice of place meant that service got the honor my check-in.

You may remember these guys from … Continue Reading

Will Trion World's Rift online game kill World of WarCraft? (interview)

No one at Trion Worlds has promised that the company’s first fantasy role-playing online game, Rift: Planes of Telara, will be a World of WarCraft killer. Indeed, many makers of massively multiplayer online games have tried to knock out Blizzard Entertainment’s online subscription game, but WoW has ruled for six years and it just got a major upgrade with World of WarCraft: Cataclysm, which sold 3.3 million units in a day. But that doesn’t intimidate … Continue Reading

Founder Institute’s Adeo Ressi says you can’t teach entrepreneurship (video)

Adeo Ressi, the founder of VC-review website TheFunded and entrepreneur training program the Founder Institute, says it’s nearly impossible to teach entrepreneurship.

Ressi made the statement at a talk in Singapore back in October, which has just been posted online. If that seems like an odd statement coming from the head of a startup incubator, well, Ressi isn’t arguing that we should throw up our hands and give up on entrepreneurship.

Instead, he said that … Continue Reading

No more manquisitions: 5 New Year's resolutions for the tech world

As we head towards the New Year of 2011, the VentureBeat team has put together a list of things we’d like to see the tech and startup world improve on.

Yes, we’re whiners, and yes, this is skewed toward the topics that we’re personally worked up about. But if there are things you’d like to see changed in the New Year, either in the tech world as a whole, at a specific company, or even … Continue Reading

AskGaijin launches crowd tool to help Japanese companies avoid embarrassing Engrish

While traveling in Tokyo this fall, Daniel Leuck went to the 7-11 for a caffeine hit and encountered a men’s fashion magazine called “Men’s Fudge” as well as a drink called “The Premium Calpis”. Leuck, who speaks fluent Japanese and has lived for extended periods in Japan, had long grown accustomed to these sorts of wacky and sometimes apocryphal slogans. But this time a light bulb went off in his head. Why not create a … Continue Reading

VentureBeat on the prowl for DEMO startups in New York, Toronto

We’re widening our prowl for the best emerging technology products to launch at DEMO this spring.

Our next stops are New York and Toronto, Jan 11-13.

DEMO, for the uninitiated, is the leading conference for emerging technology. Okay, as executive producer of the conference, I’m a smidge biased, but hey, everyone from Netscape to Salesforce, WebEx, Palm, VMware, TiVo, and Symantec have launched there over the years.

So, if  you’re an entrepreneur or executive who … Continue Reading

Gain Fitness wants to start your gym resolution early

As my Facebook friends and coworkers are tired of hearing, I’ve been on a serious fitness kick over the past year and a half, having lost 83 pounds. But I now have a new problem, and I admit it’s a pretty good one to have: My current set of fitness apps, geared around watching calories and tracking workouts, don’t seem ready to take me to the next level.

That’s why I was pretty pumped to … Continue Reading

Projects in 2010 took aim at cleantech's chicken-and-egg dilemma

Green technologies can face expensive and complicated chicken-and-egg questions when it comes to infrastructure. Which comes first, the electric car or the charging station? The wind farm or the transmission lines? There have been some notable efforts this year by companies to take the first leap. Here are a couple worth watching in 2011:

Electric cars vs. public charging infrastructure — Electric cars for the masses are arriving. The Nissan Leaf and partially electric Chevrolet … Continue Reading

The Resumator scores $100K to make hiring less of a chore

The Resumator, a startup dedicated to simplifying the hiring process for businesses, has landed $100,000 in seed funding, the company told VentureBeat.

The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania company has developed web-based social recruiting and applicant tracking tools that let you do everything required to attract and select new hires. The Resumator lets you easily advertise open positions via social networks, post positions to free job aggregators (potentially saving money by avoiding expensive job board sites) and create … Continue Reading

Xpert Financial offers an SEC-approved way to sell startup shares — and raise funding

Updated

As interest in secondary markets for shares in hot private companies like Facebook and Twitter grows (among both investors and regulators), a new startup called Xpert Financial is about to launch its own trading platform.

Secondary markets allow startup shareholders (often former employees) to sell their stock in a company to outside investors. Xpert Financial says it wants to work more closely with the companies whose shares are being sold. Companies will be able … Continue Reading