Bessemer raises $1.6B fund — enough to own 3% of Facebook

Bessemer Venture Partners has raised a $1.6 billion fund, according to the New York Times. That’s a hefty amount that puts the venture fund in the big leagues alongside other premier VCs.

But to put that in perspective, that amount is only enough to buy a 3.2 percent stake in Facebook at its last known valuation of $50 billion. Luckily for the Larchmont, N.Y.-based fund, its strategy is to avoid the big deals in overheated … Continue Reading

Google's Schmidt beats Apple's Jobs in employee approval ratings

Even as Eric Schmidt steps down as chief executive at Google on Monday, he can leave with the satisfaction that his employee approval rating is at an all-time high. There’s an art to quitting when you’re on top.

Schmidt has an approval rating of 96 percent, up 3 percentage points from a year ago, according to employee approval surveys by Glassdoor.com. Schmidt barely edged out Steve Jobs, whose rating fell 3 points to 95 percent. … Continue Reading

Shopping and apps rule the day at Plug and Play event

Three startups came out on top today in a bake-off at the Plug and Play International Expo event in Sunnyvale, where companies gave 2-minute pitches to a crowd of investors and entrepreneurs.

If there was a theme today among the 34 international startups that made the elevator pitches, it was that e-commerce is hot. In particular, a number of the startups focused on shopping, apps, and payments.

The first place winner was Accedo, second was … Continue Reading

Silicon Valley singles all about queer, decadent robots in online dating profiles

Quick: what words are Silicon Valley singles more likely to use than other Americans when describing themselves on Internet dating sites?

Try these: queer, decadent, robot, raiding, wacky and telepathic, to name a few.

Musician and exerimental media dude R. Luke Dubois aggregated data from 21 online dating sites in order to create this awesome visualization of the 20,262 unique words found in the dating profiles of more than 19 million single Americans. He then … Continue Reading

Retailer GameStop buys its way into digital distribution of games

GameStop is the world’s biggest retailer of video games with 6,670 stores in 17 countries. But the company is hedging its bets when it comes to digital distribution. Today, it announced it would acquire Spawn Labs and Impulse to bolster its ability sell games online. The purchase prices were not disclosed.

Those deals are in addition to its acquisition last year of Kongregate. Officially, this shows that GameStop is like a duck escaping a crocodile … Continue Reading

Shapemix for the iPad will unleash your inner DJ

If you’ve ever dreamed of leaving your desk job and starting anew as a DJ (which isn’t unheard of these days), Shapemix for the iPad will get you started.

Shapemix ($4.99 on the iTunes App Store) takes advantage of the iPad’s multitouch interface to let you mix music in “visual space,” instead of dealing with the complexity of professional mixing software. Shapemix is one of those apps that makes tablets seem like less of a … Continue Reading

Applifier launches a portal to discover social games on Facebook

Applifier helped small game publishers get millions of new users last year by creating a cross-promotion tool for Facebook games. Now it is creating a portal-like app for games on Facebook and other platforms so that consumers can find what they want.

The new Games on Applifier portal app attacks one of the big problems of a world with too many apps: discovery. It’s harder and harder for developers to get noticed with hundreds of … Continue Reading

Tesla Vs BBC: Top Gear Planned Dead Electric Car Shot Before Test

Believe it or not, most of what you watch on television is scripted.

What you may not know is that some shows which appear unscripted, like the BBC’s infamous Top Gear, are also scripted word for word. Everything from the banter between its three middle-aged hosts to its madcap challenges and car reviews has been meticulously planned, before any filming takes place.

Two years ago, Tesla Motors found out what that really meant when its … Continue Reading

Sony slashes three studios, more than 200 game jobs

Sony Online Entertainment confirmed today that it will cut 205 jobs and close three studios as part of a restructuring effort.

The company is the online game arm of Sony and it publishes massively multiplayer online game worlds such as DC Universe Online and Free Realms. The closures show that online games remains a tough business and it remains very difficult to start big MMOs and bring them to completion.

A case in point is … Continue Reading

China sheds light on new solar plans after Japanese nuclear disaster

China will ramp up its deployment of solar power and cut its power capacity target for nuclear power by 2020 in the wake of the nuclear crisis in Japan, according to the country’s National Development and Reform Commission.

The country’s previous goal was to create nuclear plants capable of producing 80 gigawatts of electricity by 2020 and enough solar power and wind power farms to generate 20 gigawatts of electricity. The new plan involves reducing … Continue Reading

Google joins NFC Forum to help promote mobile payments

Google is once again throwing its weight behind near-field communications (NFC) technology by joining the NFC Forum, an industry association that has been advancing the technology for years.

The news is yet another sign that Google has high hopes for NFC, which will let you make purchases and transfer information securely using your phone, or other mobile devices simply by swiping the device over a reader. The announcement is especially intriguing since it was revealed … Continue Reading

Twitter kills the QuickBar, mumbles an apology

Twitter announced today that it’s eliminating a feature that has received some loud criticism — the QuickBar, a bar at the top of Twitter’s iPhone app showing trending topics.

After the feature was introduced earlier this month, I started seeing lots of complaints (on Twitter, naturally) about how ugly and intrusive it was. Blogger John Gruber said he was staying with an older version of the app to avoid the QuickBar, and he wasn’t the … Continue Reading

GameSalad raises $6M in quest to make everyone a game developer

GameSalad, a maker of game development tools, has raised $6 million in a second round of funding. The company’s goal is to enable anyone to make mobile and web games.

The Austin, Texas-based company has made a suite of tools with a drag-and-drop user interface, making it easy for users to develop their own games even if they don’t know any programming. The technology is another example of how we’re becoming a “creator economy” in … Continue Reading

TidalTV raises $30M to optimize video advertisements

TidalTV, a video ad technology company, announced today that it has raised $30 million in funding.

The company’s product helps advertisers deliver ads to target demographics across online video, mobile video, and television. TidalTV offers what it calls “zero waste advertising”, where it optimizes the distribution of in-stream ads so companies can reach the market they’re looking for. The company says that if its platform doesn’t allow your ad to reach the audience you want, … Continue Reading

Netflix planning overseas invasion, slowly but surely

It’s been a long time coming. The video-on-demand provider Netflix has been talking about launching its service as a streaming-only version outside the U.S. for a while, but only now does it seem that the company is really getting ready to test its service globally, Engadget reports.

Netflix has put out job listings seeking people for its Hillsboro, Oreg. customer service call center. While based domestically, the positions will support Netflix customers outside of North … Continue Reading

Google demands order in Android land

How open is open? Google is reportedly tightening access to its open source Android mobile operating system and restricting the sort of tweaks manufacturers can make to the OS, multiple executives tell Businessweek.

That seems to go against Android’s open source nature. When Google first launched the OS in 2008, it was heralded as a completely open platform that would compete against Apple’s closed iPhone OS. That meant any manufacturer could install Android in their … Continue Reading

Google's VP of payments: Mobile commerce still needs "big leap forward"

The tech industry still has a lot to do if it wants users to pay for goods with smartphones and tablets.

To get consumers to convert to mobile payments, the payment system needs to go digital, says Google VP of payments Osama Bedier. Credit cards, debit cards, and gift cards all need to move into the cloud so they can be used more conveniently.

Inventory needs to live in the cloud, so that consumers can … Continue Reading

Forget swapping headphones: MyStream lets you share music wirelessly

Have you ever sat next to a friend on the train and wanted to listen to the music he or she was listening to, only to be forced to uncomfortably share headphones? MyStream, which is launching its free iPhone app today, wants to change this by allowing you to share your music wirelessly with friends.

MyStream allows you to see what other people in the same wireless or Bluetooth network are listening to. It lets … Continue Reading