LinkedIn wants your business cards, acquires CardMunch

CardMunch, a startup that automatically transcribes business cards, just announced that it has been acquired by professional networking site LinkedIn.

Cofounder and chief executive Bowei Gai demonstrated the iPhone app for me around the time that it launched in August. It was an impressive demo: We lined up a stack of cards on the table, scanned each of them for just a few seconds, then started to receive the transcribed data (with only minor errors) … Continue Reading

Open question: What is Marc Bodnick going to do at Quora?

Marc Bodnick, the cofounder of Silicon Valley private-equity firm Elevation Partners, is leaving to join Quora, according to multiple reports. (VentureBeat first reported his pending departure yesterday.)

Quora is a hotly watched, much-discussed question-and-answer service that won buzz from the Silicon Valley crowd early on — including from Bodnick, who proudly notes that he’s the service’s 137th user. It also stirred talk of a startup bubble when it raised $11 million at an $86 million … Continue Reading

GM bets on cheaper electric car batteries with Envia, leads $17M round

Riding high on a bout of good press for its Chevy Volt, GM is putting $7 million into its next big bet on electric cars: cheaper, higher-energy batteries.

In his state of the union address yesterday, President Obama called for the U.S. to be the first country to put one million electric cars on the roads by 2015. While there’s great interest in electric cars, mass adoption is still hobbled by availability, battery prices and … Continue Reading

Apple surges, Android stalls in enterprise activations

Apple’s iOS devices, including iPhones and iPads, are increasingly being bought for use in companies. They now account for 65 percent of all devices activated for enterprise use after discounting activations of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry enterprise phones, according to a report by Good Technology.

The report’s methodology ignores that little Canadian company called Research in Motion and its line of BlackBerry enterprise mobile phones. If those were included, Apple and Android would be completely … Continue Reading

How well did Microsoft do with Windows Phone 7? Try 2 million units shipped

A day before its quarterly earnings report, Microsoft finally let loose with some Windows Phone 7 details. The biggest takeaway: it shipped 2 million Windows Phone 7 devices last quarter, Bloomberg reports.

The news is a good sign for Microsoft’s fledgling mobile platform, but it’s clear that the company still has a long way to go before it can compete toe-to-toe with the more entrenched iPhone, or even Google’s Android platform. Consider, for example, that … Continue Reading

Crowd Factory raises $6.5M to track social media marketing to the dollar

Social media marketing service Crowd Factory announced today that it has raised $6.5 million in its second round of fundraising led by Storm Ventures.

The Crowd Factory service is usually an HTML tag that’s dropped into the bottom of a web page that lets visitors share the content with their social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Crowd Factory tracks where the link is shared and who ends up clicking on it. Users can also drop … Continue Reading

Traders send Demand Media shares soaring on IPO

As of this writing, online publisher Demand Media is worth more on the stock market than is The New York Times Company. Of course, this says more about the enthusiasm of IPO investors than it does about the relative merits of the two organizations, but given the overall level of terribleness of Demand’s product –mainly hastily written how-to articles aimed not at readers, but at search engines – it’s still a bit disheartening.

In afternoon … Continue Reading

DEMO deadline in less than a week: Apply now to launch!

With DEMO Spring 2011 just a month away, my team and I are racing to put the final touches on the lineup. Should you be part of this one-of-a-kind event? If your company is about to launch a product that will change the world, remember next Tuesday, February 1 is the deadline to apply. While slots are getting scarce, we’re still looking for the best tech companies from around the world to showcase their latest … Continue Reading

Facebook phone from HTC rumored to debut next month

Update: Facebook has denied rumors of the phone, but hints that HTC will heavily integrate the social network in Sense.
—

Here we go again: Rumors of a potential Facebook phone have emerged once more, this time from the London business site City A.M.

According to the site, which makes no mention of its sources, Taiwanese manufacturer HTC will unveil two Facebook phones next month at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. They … Continue Reading

Amazon launches Kindle Singles: for when a full ebook is just too much

Starting today, Kindle users on the lookout for quick and cheap reads can purchase Kindle Singles, Amazon’s short-format ebooks, which were first announced in October.

According to Amazon, each Single is “intended to allow a single killer idea — well researched, well argued and well illustrated — to be expressed at its natural length.” Like every Kindle ebook, Singles will be available to read on Kindle devices, as well as Kindle apps on the iPhone, … Continue Reading

Obama urges 80 percent clean energy by 2035, gives electric cars a shoutout

In his state of the union address last night, President Obama called for an end to oil subsidies and set a national goal of reaching 80 percent clean energy by 2035.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re doing just fine on their own,” Obama said. “So instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy, let’s invest in tomorrow’s.”

While Obama urged Congress to back legislation that would support such a lofty goal, the energy legislation has … Continue Reading

The road to green is paved with data

This article is brought to you by Thomson Reuters and the Knowledge Effect. To learn more, please click here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity. Thomson Reuters had no involvement in the content of this post.

Could information be the ultimate renewable energy source?

Perhaps. According to Jennifer Pulliam, director of innovation for electricity retailer TXU Energy, data is one of the most exciting opportunities in the smart grid — a much-needed … Continue Reading

Mobile app revenue will hit $15B in 2011

It’s good to be Apple. This is true in many ways, but especially in the mobile applications business. According to research firm Gartner, nine out of ten downloaded mobile applications in 2010 came from Apple’s App Store.

Last year was a booming year for mobile apps. Mobile apps hit globally 8.2 billion downloads and $5.2 billion in revenue, but 2011 will blow those numbers out of the water, as Gartner predicts that worldwide mobile app … Continue Reading

Verizon iPhone hot spot to cost $20 a month with 2GB of data

Just as we suspected, Verizon will be charging $20 a month for its iPhone’s mobile hot spot feature, the same as it does for other smartphones, the company told Macworld yesterday.

The feature will allow up to five wireless devices to connect to Verizon’s iPhone and share its mobile data connection. The hot spot will come with a 2 gigabyte pool of data separate from the iPhone’s own data pool. Each additional gigabyte of data … Continue Reading

Greystripe partners with MNI for local mobile ads

Mobile ad startup Greystripe just announced that it has signed a deal with Media Networks, Inc. that will bring local advertising into the Greystripe ad network for the first time.

Director of marketing Dane Holewinski said that until now, Greystripe has focused on national ad campaigns for large brands. Now, the San Francisco startup wants to start tapping into the growing market for local, mobile ads. It points to a study from BIA Kelsey predicting … Continue Reading

SiXits ready to wade into Facebook games with Babies Everywhere

As Facebook games become a bigger and bigger business, new social game startups continue to launch. The latest is SiXits.

Zynga may dominate the market with nearly 300 million monthly active users, but latecomer SiXits is hoping to crash the party with titles that have more engaging game mechanics than the top-ranked apps on Facebook today.

It may not be easy to compete against Zynga, but the social and mobile gaming markets are becoming so … Continue Reading

With 32M kids online, Moshi Monsters invade toy market (video)

Hybrid models of online games and toys are getting fashionable. Yesterday, Mind Candy announced that its Moshi Monsters online game characters are now moving into the real world in the form of toys.

Michael Smith, chief executive England-based Mind Candy, said in an interview that more than 32 million kids have registered to play Moshi Monsters since the company launched the online game in 2008.

Akin to Pokemon, Moshi Monsters are cute and collectible monsters … Continue Reading

Mobile ad optimizer Smaato caps year of rapid growth with new funding

Smaato, a company that helps mobile publishers find the most lucrative ads across multiple networks, just raised $7 million as it prepares to expand its efforts in Southeast Asia.

When I last spoke to Smaato at the end of 2009, the company was crowing about how it had grown from serving 100 to 1,000 publishers in a year. Now cofounder and chief marketing officer Harald Neidhardt said the company has grown by yet another order … Continue Reading

News Corp. chief James Murdoch wants to toss the newspaper onto your iPad

James Murdoch is the chairman and chief executive of News Corp. And he’s the son of Rupert Murdoch, the mogul who created the far-flung media empire that includes everything from Fox Broadcasting to the Wall Street Journal.

Murdoch offered a window into the tough problem of straddling two different businesses, new media and old media in a talk at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich this week. While News Corp. is anchored in the … Continue Reading