What Facebook's Zuckerberg won't be able do in China: End the blockade

Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg arrived in China today and visited the offices of the country’s largest search engine, Baidu.

Facebook faces censorship in China, even as it expands to dominate the rest of the globe. But even if Zuckerberg tries to fix things in China, there’s little chance he’ll get anywhere soon.

Neither Facebook nor Baidu would comment on the reason for the Zuckerbeg visit, which hit the news after a Baidu … Continue Reading

Google TV delayed beyond CES because of lousy reviews

Google TV was supposed to be one of the stars of the show at the Consumer Electronics Show next month in Las Vegas. But the star just got the hook.

Sony and Logitech have already launched Google TV products, which allow users to view web video and other internet offerings alongside traditional TV. But Toshiba, LG Electronics and Sharp were supposed to join the party. Now Google has asked the TV makers to delay those … Continue Reading

Call of Duty Black Ops map pack hits Xbox Live on Feb. 1

There’s no Peace on Earth for this holiday season for hardcore gamers who are busy playing the multiplayer version of the Call of Duty Black Ops combat game. And the online warfare will get a boost come Feb. 1 when the first Black Ops map pack will debut on Xbox Live.

The first map pack for Black Ops — which in its first five days of sales generated $650 million in revenue for publisher Activision … Continue Reading

Online ad sales eclipse newspaper advertising in 2010

Online ads are expected to eclipse newspaper advertising for the first time, according to estimates from market researcher eMarketer.

U.S. spending on online ads will hit $25.8 billion in 2010, compared with $22.8 billion spent on print ads in newspapers, the Wall Street Journal reported. This change has been a long time coming, since consumers have moved to the internet in large numbers and newspaper readers have stopped subscriptions as the papers get thinner and … Continue Reading

Free-shipping day was one of the busiest ever for online retail sales

December 17, also known as Free Shipping Day because it’s the last day you could get free shipping for pre-Christmas online purchases, was the busiest spending day in online history.

Market researcher comScore said that Free Shipping Day generated $942 million in online sales, up 61 percent from a year earlier. The numbers so far show that this season has been the busiest ever for online retail sales. That’s both a good leading economic indicator … Continue Reading

Microsoft says "Not!" to Kinect sex game

Microsoft got excited when hackers started coming up with novel uses for its Kinect motion control system which debuted for the Xbox 360 in November. But it was less than thrilled with the idea of using Kinect for sex games.

If the porn industry finds a way to exploit Microsoft’s new technology, it wouldn’t be a surprise. Sex and technology have an intertwined history. The video cassette recorder was sold as way to watch blockbuster … Continue Reading

Week in review: The top 10 video games of the year

Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

VentureBeat’s top ten video games of the year (vote for your favorite) — Game publishers aren’t thrilled that video game sales are down 5 percent year to date. But for gamers, it’s been an awesome year because 2010 saw the debut of some of the best games ever made.

Google plans to fix broken … Continue Reading

How mobile apps are spying on us

Your favorite mobile apps could be collecting and transmitting your personal information, including your name, contacts, location and even your phone’s unique ID number, to ad networks and other third parties. And worst of all, there’s little you can do about it.

This mobile privacy bombshell was revealed by an in-depth investigation from the Wall Street Journal, which tested 101 popular mobile apps on the iPhone and Android to determine what sort of data they … Continue Reading

Entrepreneur Corner: Domain hijackers and ugly start-up realities

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner.

What to do if your domain is hijacked – Cybersquatters can make things miserable for a business – but there are ways to shut them down. Attorney Curtis Smolar details how best to protect your company’s identity.

5 metrics every software CEO should obsess over – There are innumerable metrics that are available to software executives, but determining the most appropriate to track is trick. Clate Mask, CEO … Continue Reading

An old video game fad returns? Celebrities want to cash in on Facebook games

Zynga teamed up with recording artist Dr. Dre today to debut his new music video in its Facebook game Mafia Wars. And Facebook game publisher 6waves and TV production firm Endemol USA teamed up to produce a game around basketball icon Kobe Bryant.

These kinds of deals are old hat for video game publishers. In fact, they’re so old hat that many game companies have moved beyond celebrity endorsements to produced higher-quality fare based on … Continue Reading

Bioplastics startup Ecospan pitches DEMO on bubble wrap, not more bubble rap

This week’s DEMO meetups in Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California were a breath of fresh air across a startup landscape that’s crowded with consumer Web startups. Among the diverse ventures we saw this week was a company called Ecospan, which is aiming to disrupt the packaging space with a proprietary biopolymer-based, biodegradable material.

Companies like Ecospan, which aim at fundamental technological innovations which reshape the physical world, not just the virtual world, … Continue Reading

White Collar Brawler delivers Web TV with a literal punch

This is a big night for Nate Houghteling and Kai Hasson. After months of training, they’re going to face each other in the boxing ring — and the match will also serve as the climax of the Web TV show they star in, White Collar Brawler.

The show is a full-time job for Houghteling, Hasson, and the two other members of their production company Portal-A Interactive. Over the course of 22 episodes (so far), the … Continue Reading

Tumblr brings in $30M despite stability woes

It looks like it’s easy enough to forget about 24 hours of downtime.

Lite blogging service Tumblr has raised $30 million in a recent round of funding that includes the likes of Sequoia Capital, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing confirms some earlier rumors buzzing around that Sequoia was dropping some serious cash into the casual blogging service.

Tumblr, despite having some growing pains and seeing frequent outages, … Continue Reading

Apple secures future iPhone displays, joins Sharp for $1.2B LCD expansion

Sharp is gearing up to spend around $1.2 billion on expanding its product lines for small and midsize LCD panels, most of which are meant for Apple’s iPhone, Reuters reports.

Apparently, Apple will cover a large portion of the $1.2 billion investment and is going to purchase much of Sharp’s LCD output for the iPhone. Apple is clearly securing more displays in anticipation of high demand of it’s next-generation iPhone. It’s also likely trying to … Continue Reading

Ding-ding-ding! Electric cars likely to be required to make noise

In one particularly hilarious scene in the TV show Weeds, Mary-Louise Parker’s soccer mom/drug dealer character inspires a scary drug lord to buy several Toyota Priuses after he successfully carries out a drive-by shooting while riding in hers. The selling point? The quietness of the hybrid.

“Good for sneaking up on mother******s,” he cackles.

That might no longer be the case with a piece of legislation that recently passed the Senate and looks to be … Continue Reading

Delicious dilemma: Who will buy Yahoo's faded Web 2.0 star?

Social bookmarking site Delicious, once one of the shining examples of the Web 2.0 renaissance, will not be shutting down. But it will be looking for a new host after Yahoo, its owner since 2005, determined that it was not a strategic fit, according to a blog post by the company.

Reports surfaced that Yahoo was going to “sunset” the service — a software geek’s way of saying that it would shutter the site — … Continue Reading

Will RIM buy social data aggregator Gist to strengthen its hold on enterprise market?

Research in Motion, the maker of the popular BlackBerry business smartphone, is in talks to pick up social data aggregator Gist to maintain its stranglehold on the enterprise smartphone market, according to a report by GigaOm.

Gist takes email contacts and scours the web for other types of information about them, using anything from news feeds to LinkedIn pages to build a better contact profile. The company claims it’s built profiles for around 100 million … Continue Reading

On the GreenBeat: Cadillac plans plug-in hybrid, DOE grants $1.3 billion loan guarantee to world's largest wind farm

Here’s the latest action we’re following today on the GreenBeat:

DOE grants world’s largest windfarm $1.3 billion – The Department of Energy has finalized a partial loan guarantee for the Caithness Shepherds Flat project, an 845-megawatt plant in eastern Oregon. The wind farm is sponsored by Caithness Energy and GE Energy Financial Services and will use 338 GE wind turbines. All energy generated from the farm will be sold to Southern California Edison at a … Continue Reading

Surprise, surprise: Apple's iPad expected to dominate tablets into 2012

Even though we’re seeing a slew of Android tablets on the horizon, Apple’s iPad is expected to maintain its leading place in the tablet market into 2012, according to J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz.

This, of course, should surprise no one. The iPad sparked the most recent tablet craze when it was announced early last year, this after the tablet market saw several false starts over the past few decades.

Moskowitz predicts tablet revenues will … Continue Reading