Week in review: Skype outage affects tens of millions

Here’s our roundup of the of the week’s tech business news. (It’s shorter than usual, owing to the fact that there’s less going on during the holidays.) First, here are the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Skype outage affects tens of millions — Skype suffered a widespread and lengthy outage Wednesday with its Internet calling service.

Microsoft says “Not!” to Kinect sex game — Microsoft got excited when hackers started … Continue Reading

Entrepreneur Corner: Crowdfunding and a look at the Internet sales tax

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

Book excerpt: The Crowdfunding Revolution – Is the model of venture capitalism about to undergo a radical shift? Author Kevin Lawton believes so and makes the case for it in “The Crowdfunding Revolution”. This excerpt sets the stage by laying out the old and new models.

6 more harsh realities of being an entrepreneur – Running a start-up can be rewarding, but it’s not the panacea that it’s … Continue Reading

FarmVille co-creator working on stealthy startup BetterWorks

Is your job about to get a lot more addictive? Maybe — Sizhao Yang, one of the original team members behind insanely popular Facebook game FarmVille, is working on a new startup called BetterWorks that wants to create “rewarding work environments.”

Yang was co-founder and chief executive of virtual environment startup MyMiniLife, whose team worked with Zynga to develop FarmVille. In August 2009, shortly after FarmVille started to take off, Zynga acquired MyMiniLife, and the … Continue Reading

Is Skype about to release video-calling for mobile devices?

Skype, a provider of voice and video calling services over the Internet, might be poised to release video calling for mobile devices equipped with a front-facing camera and running Skype at the Consumer Electronics Show next year, according to a number of reports.

The service already has video conferencing built into its PC and Mac applications. The application uses webcams and can connect to other Skype users. But video calling isn’t available on Skype’s mobile … Continue Reading

Viacom ditches Rock Band, Dance Central after selling off music game developer Harmonix

When Viacom decided to sell music game developer Harmonix, it was a pretty good indication that it didn’t think Harmonix was doing a good job spurring innovation in the genre. But now it’s clear Viacom has no confidence in the music game genre as a whole, as Harmonix will retain the rights to its Rock Band and Dance Central intellectual property after being sold off.

Viacom decided to dump the music game developer after it … Continue Reading

Shopping startup EcoMom raises $2M from Facebook exec and others

EcoMom, a site where moms can shop for healthy and environmentally-friendly goods, just raised $2 million in a first round of funding.

The Los Angeles startup first announced $1.1 million of financing in October, but by the time the round closed last week, the amount of money had nearly doubled. New backers include Facebook vice president Chamath Palihapitiya and Google evangelist Don Dodge.

The site first launched in February 2009 under the name SproutBaby, then … Continue Reading

Calling all developers — we want your apps for VentureBeat's Mobile App Spotlight

You’ve got mobile apps, and we want to feature them. VentureBeat has partnered with Intel for our Mobile App Spotlight, a place where we can showcase cool and innovative apps.

The first Mobile App Spotlight winner was Didiom, a slick app that lets you listen to your music library on your phone from your computer. While there are many other apps that do similar things, we found Didiom stood out thanks to its ease-of-use and … Continue Reading

Moblyng raising $10.9M to make mobile HTML5 games

Moblyng, a developer of games using HTML5 for mobile devices, is looking to raise about $10.9 million and has raised about $7.5 million of that so far, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Moblyng began life as FlipTrack in 2007, when it ported Flash slide shows to mobile operating systems. It then changed direction to help developers of mobile games quickly port them to other mobile operating systems.

The company’s … Continue Reading

Zumbox raises $9.7M to kill the post office with a digital mailbox

Zumbox, which provides its users with digital copies of their mail based on their home address, has raised an additional $9.7 million, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Zumbox lets users send or receive scanned, physical versions of letters, bills or other things they might normally send and receive via paper mail. Each user has a personal mailbox at the Zumbox site to view mail.

The company has created a … Continue Reading

Deals & More: Novariant grabs $4.5M for hands-free farm equipment

Today’s funding announcements include technology to run farms efficiently, monetize videos and monitor theft in stores:

Novariant gets $4.5M for GPS technology: The Fremont, Calif.-based company has raised funding as part of its fifth round, according to a filing with the SEC. The firm, a spinout from Stanford University in 1994, creates products for the agriculture, mining and aerospace industries that perform functions like automatically steering farm equipment and landing aircraft.

Auditude brings in $4M … Continue Reading

Pruning rotten apples from your company

The Osmond Brothers got it wrong. One bad apple CAN spoil the whole darn bunch. And that’s especially true in the startup world. A negative and selfish employee can start a contagion throughout the company, causing other employees to act the same way and sucking up more of management’s time, says Stanford Professor and author Bob Sutton in this entrepreneur thought leader lecture given at Stanford University. Reforming those bad apples is possible, but there … Continue Reading

Merry Christmas, Zynga: CityVille eclipses FarmVille as the world's biggest game

In just 22 days, Zynga‘s CityVille has eclipsed FarmVille as the world’s biggest game.

Today, CityVille added an astounding 6.9 users to end the day at 61.7 million monthly active users, compared with 56.8 million for FarmVille, according to stat collector AppData. Before today, FarmVille, also made by Zynga, was the biggest social game on Facebook, and it also happened to be the biggest game on any platform in terms of the sheer volume of … Continue Reading

Solve Media makes Captchas easier on your eyes with video ads

Even if you don’t know what they were called, you’ve probably been annoyed by Captchas — the often distorted letters and numbers that websites sometimes ask you to enter. Well, a startup called Solve Media wants to make that process a little less painful, while also creating a new moneymaking opportunity for websites — and it just announced a new ad format.

Captchas help sites ensure that the person creating an account or purchasing an … Continue Reading

LTE 4G phones for Verizon on the horizon from HTC, Samsung, Motorola

The first wave of smartphones for Verizon’s LTE 4G network will include entries from HTC, Motorola and Samsung, judging from the rash of early hardware photos hitting gadget sites over the past few days.

We’ve known for some time that Android manufacturers were working on LTE 4G phones, but the photos in the wild tell us that they’re closer to release than we’ve previously thought. Manufacturers are most likely gearing up to finalize their hardware … Continue Reading

Could Kodak's patents threaten photo-sharing sites?

A patent dispute is unfolding between Kodak and photo-sharing site Shutterfly that could have ramifications for some of the broader photo-sharing sites on the web, such as Yahoo’s Flickr, the widely-used Picasa by Google, and Facebook’s Photos feature.

Kodak has filed a lawsuit against Shutterfly over five patents it claims Shutterfly’s online services are infringing on. Shutterfly is a popular way for people to purchase print photo books, stationery, and calendars out of their personal … Continue Reading

Hulu gets more YouTube-like with playlists

Hulu unveiled some new features today that could help users discover more content on the TV- and movie-watching site, as well as make it a little more social.

The biggest addition is the ability to create playlists. The way it’s described on the Hulu blog, this feature should work the way you’d expect — whenever you find a video that you want to add, you just hit the “+” button and then either create a … Continue Reading

Obama praises the success of Apple's Steve Jobs

President Obama praised Apple chief executive Steve Jobs as an example of someone who has lived the American Dream and earned his wealth.

Responding to a question from CBS reporter Mark Knoller, who asked about the divide between the middle class and the wealthy, Obama said it was a fact that the top 1 percent or even a smaller slice of the population have a larger proportion of the income share than at any time … Continue Reading

When Tesla's lockup expires Monday, will its stock drop? Short sellers think so

updated

Tesla’s IPO has been one a few super-successful cleantech public offerings this year, if not the most successful. But will the good news continue after the 180-day post-IPO lockup period expires Monday and new shares flood the market?

Maybe not. There’s tremendous short interest in the electric car company’s stock — that means there’s a lot of buyers looking to bet that shares will fall. On Nov. 30, the ratio of short interest to … Continue Reading

iPads, super angels, and Facebook's trip to the movies: VentureBeat's 10 biggest stories of 2010

Now that 2010 is almost over, we’re looking back at the year in tech business news. Any “top stories” list that’s not based purely on traffic is going to be ridiculously subjective, but with the help of VentureBeat’s writers, I’ve tried to focus on the news that had the biggest effect on the tech world and drew the most interest from readers, while also touching on the biggest companies and trends of the year.

Here’s … Continue Reading