Can GameStop's Kongregate app help Google catch up with Apple in mobile games? [Update: and it's gone!]

[Update: Well, that was short-lived. Google has pulled the application from the Android Marketplace, citing a violation of its terms of service.]

Kongregate, the GameStop-owned casual flash game site, has gone mobile with an application for devices running Google’s Android mobile operating system. This is either some very good news or very bad news, depending on your penchant for addictive flash games.

Hundreds of those addicting flash games are coming to phones running on Google’s … Continue Reading

Social publishing startup Scribd raises $13M

Scribd, a popular site where users can publish and share documents, just raised $13 million in its third round of funding.

The San Francisco startup’s ambitions seem have expanded quickly over the past couple of years. It launched a marketplace for selling documents and e-books, and even added an option for users to turn those documents into printed copies. The company also said it wants to make its documents available on every mobile device and … Continue Reading

Toyota, Tesla give China's rare earths the electric car snub

Looks like one company has had enough of the rare earth shortages.

Toyota is in the advanced stages of creating a hybrid car “induction motor” that doesn’t use rare earths, Bloomberg reported today. Rare-earth minerals are used in a number of clean technologies and consumer electronics. They can be found in magnets that power electric cars and hybrids like Toyota Prius, Nissan Leaf, Chevrolet Volt, as well as cell phones, wind turbines and hard drives.… Continue Reading

Venture capital legend Michael Moritz joins LinkedIn board

LinkedIn just announced that Michael Moritz, the Sequoia Capital partner whose past investments include Google and Yahoo, is joining the company’s board.

The immediate reason for the move is the departure of Mark Kvamme, who is leaving both Sequoia and the LinkedIn board to become the director of Ohio’s department of development. But there are larger ambitions suggested by the fact that Sequoia’s most famous partner is joining the board (back when Forbes was still … Continue Reading

Acer's new tablets a step in phasing out netbooks

Goodbye netbook, hello tablet.

Taiwanese computer maker Acer is phasing out its netbook series of ultra-small computers with the forthcoming release of new Android tablets, which are due in the first half of 2011, according to a Computerworld report.

Acer’s announcement marks for the company a move away from the netbook-style computer — a category which helped fuel Acer’s rapid growth and profitability — in favor of the tablet.

Tablets are seen as a vital … Continue Reading

Kony Solutions grabs $19.1M for "Write Once, Run Everywhere" apps

Kony Solutions, the application tool for creating mobile apps that can run on any mobile system, today announced it secured a first round of funding for $19.1 million from Insight Venture Partners. An initial $13.4 million tranche of the funding will be used to expand research and development as well as global expansion of sales and marketing.

The company dubs its service as “write once, run everywhere” which allows users to create a single source … Continue Reading

Stoke scores $17M to help carriers deliver better mobile broadband

Stoke, a company that specializes in mobile broadband gateways to help carriers manage massive loads of mobile data, announced today that it has landed an additional $17 million in funding led by new investor Focus Ventures.

Given the explosive growth of mobile broadband data with the advent of powerful smartphones and tablets, Stoke’s success is to be expected. The company says it has shipped over 200 units of its SSX-3000 mobile broadband gateway since late … Continue Reading

Apple stock dips on news of Steve Jobs' medical leave

Apple stock fell as much as 4 percent this morning as investors absorbed news of Steve Jobs’ latest leave of absence for medical reasons.

Apple said Monday in a statement that Jobs, the iconic chief executive of Apple was leaving again for an unspecified time on a medical leave. Chief operating officer Tim Cook is running the company’s day-to-day operations in the meantime. Jobs has taken leave for health reasons three times in the last … Continue Reading

Software bug testing on the go: uTest heads to the iPhone, iPad

Crowdsourcing is proving to be highly useful these days, whether it’s used for getting real-time traffic data, providing accurate business listings, or testing for software bugs, which is the business the Southborough, Mass.-based uTest is in.

Now the company is taking software testing truly mobile, as it has launched a native testing app for both the iPhone and the iPad (available free on the iTunes store).

The company’s idea is to outsource software testing, a … Continue Reading

Facebook holds off on controversial address and phone sharing feature

Facebook announced a few days ago that it would offer developers access to users’ address and phone number information. Not surprisingly, that’s sparked a bit of an uproar. Now, according to Facebook’s director of developer relations Douglas Purdy, the company is putting the feature on hold as it works to make the process clearer to users.

Honestly, I’m surprised Facebook didn’t see this coming. The feature was announced on its developer blog on Friday, and … Continue Reading

In a rare chip funding, Tilera raises $45M for multi-core communications chips

Tilera is one of the leaders in designing chips with many brains, or cores, with as many as 100 on a single chip. The San Jose, Calif.-based company is announcing today it has raised $45 million in a fourth round of funding.

The deal shows that funding for semiconductor companies, particularly those with strong customer traction, hasn’t completely dried up. Chip companies often require $80 million or more just to bring a product to market, … Continue Reading

Cheezburger transforms Internet memes into $30M of funding

Sites like I Can Has Cheezburger, Fail Blog, and The Daily What may seem frivolous (because, well, they are), but they’ve just attracted $30 million in venture funding for Cheezburger Network, the company that owns them.

Cheezburger’s flagship site was founded in 2007 as a place for users to post “LOLcats” — pictures of cats with funny text, like the image accompanying this post. Chief executive Ben Huh and his initial investors purchased the I … Continue Reading

Perfect Market raises $9M to fund newspaper moneymaking tools

Perfect Market, a startup aiming to help newspapers make more money from their articles, just raised $9 million in new funding.

The Pasadena, Calif. startup works with publishers to optimize their content for search engines, delivering a customized (usually stripped-down) version of an article page for users visiting from search engines, with advertising targeted at that particular audience. It also offers data to publishers about what articles could earn the most money. Customers include the … Continue Reading

Black (Ops) Tuesday: Prepare to get nothing done February 1

They walk — or rather, sit — among us. At any given time there are hundreds of thousands of people playing the multiplayer version of the Call of Duty Black Ops combat game. And you’ll know them from their absence from the rest of the world on Tuesday, February 1.

That’s the day when the hot-selling online warfare game, whose sales racked up $650 million in five days and have already topped a record-setting $1 … Continue Reading

Plastic Logic announces $700M investment to make its plastic e-readers in Russia

Plastic electronics developer Plastic Logic is raising $700 million in funding, the company announced today. The investment will be used in part to build the world’s largest commercial plastic electronics factory in Zelenograd, a Russian city often likened to Silicon Valley.

The factory will be the second for Plastic Logic, a company known for its never-released Que e-reader for business professionals. The device was originally announced at DEMO Fall 2008, and after several production delays, … Continue Reading

Will eBay reveal street artist Banksy's secret identity?

Secret identities are pretty valuable. Street-artist Banksy knows that pretty well, having never revealed his (or her) own.

But not all things can stay secret in the age of the internet. An intrepid seller on eBay is offering the identity of the anonymous artist for a cool $1 million.

Banksy is the pseudonym for a British street artist known for painting traditionally satirical and black humor paintings on the walls of buildings across the world. … Continue Reading

Goldman cuts US investors from Facebook deal, blames the media

Goldman Sachs today revealed a big change to its private offering of Facebook shares — it’s only making the deal available to investors outside the United States.

In a statement released to the Wall Street Journal and other publications, Goldman (in what I believe is its first public comment on the deal) said it made the decision in response to “intense media attention”, leading the firm to decide that “the level of media attention might … Continue Reading

23andMe raises $9M more to help customers understand genetics

Personal genetics company 23andMe, co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, has raised $9 million from MPM Capital and Johnson & Johnson Development Corp., the company recently announced. Including the $22 million raised in November, that makes nearly $31 million 23andMe has raised in third-round funding.

After taking a simple saliva sample, the company analyzes DNA to provide customers with personalized genetic information on ancestry, the risk of getting specific diseases and … Continue Reading