Deals & More: Just-Eat gobbles up $48M for takeout meals

Today’s funding announcements include services for ordering food, buying gifts and getting advice from doctors:

Just-Eat raises $48M for easy restaurant orders: The London-based website for online ordering and delivery has raised a new round of funding led by Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures with participation from Index Ventures. The company, which already has a presence in 10 countries on three continents, plans to expand further internationally using this investment.

GoLocal grabs $2M for personalized … Continue Reading

Why Retrevo thinks it can outsell Amazon.com

Watch out, Amazon.com: Someone’s trying to bump your shopping cart.

Consumer-electronics review site Retrevo today launched a marketplace that combines e-commerce and research for tech shopping. It’s aiming to simplify shopping for electronics — and muscle in on the $35 billion business of helping consumers decide what to buy and the most convenient way to buy it, cofounder Manish Rathi told VentureBeat.

Retrevo’s software, which it calls a recommendation engine, currently processes 100 million data … Continue Reading

Atari to launch big online game Tera from Korean developer

En Masse Entertainment is announcing today that its blockbuster-wannabe online game Tera will be launched by Atari this year in the North American market.

In one sense, that’s not a big deal as there were scores of massively multiplayer online fantasy games such as Tera commissioned in recent years by game companies that wanted to unseat the market leader, Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. But the unique thing about Tera is that it looks like … Continue Reading

Movie special effects shop The Foundry is sold

The Foundry makes digital visual effects software that has been used in motion pictures like Tron Legacy 3D, Avatar, Harry Potter and many others. Private equity firm The Carlyle Group just acquired a majority stake in the Foundry from Advent Venture Partners and other stakeholders. The details of the transaction have not been made public.

Making a movie involving digital visual effects is a complicated and technically sophisticated business. In fact, the visual rendering farms … Continue Reading

Mobile headset maker Jawbone raises $49M

Jawbone, the maker of smart wireless headsets, said today it has raised $49 million from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The amount is one of the biggest raised by a mobile hardware company, but San Francisco-based Jawbone has always been ambitious. You could say that “over-engineering” a headset has gotten Jawbone pretty far.

The company makes wireless Bluetooth headsets for cell phones, but its latest devices are more like motion-sensitive computers that you wear in … Continue Reading

Nuclear crisis doesn't panic cleantech investors

An escalating crisis at nuclear power plants in Japan following a massive earthquake and tsunami has not changed the investing thesis about clean technology, according to a number of leading venture capitalists and researchers.

Fears of a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan sparked a new wave of criticism of nuclear energy — and a rally in clean-energy stocks on Monday. But that interest quickly waned as stocks in the sector dropped … Continue Reading

Heyzap lets users "check-in" to Android games

Shifting to the hot mobile market, social game platform firm Heyzap is launching a “check in” network for Android games.

With the network, users can check into the system and tell their friends what games they are playing at any given moment, said Jude Gomila, co-founder of San Francisco-based Heyzap.

The announcement shows that the check-in craze is moving from location games to standard mobile games, and it shows once again that a company can … Continue Reading

Angry Birds' Vesterbacka: Tablets are killing console games (video)

Frequent VentureBeat readers already know that Peter Vesterbacka, who leads business development at the company behind mobile gaming hit Angry Birds, thinks that mobile games are killing consoles. But now you can listen to his remarks yourself.

Vesterbacka spoke at a mobile gaming panel that I moderated on Sunday at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin. His company, Rovio, has become the big success story in mobile gaming, with more than 100 downloads … Continue Reading

EA's Dragon Age Legends Facebook game unlocks features on console version

Taking a leading console brand into social games, Electronic Arts formally launched its Dragon Age Legends online game on Facebook. The hook for the game is that it allows players to unlock features in the Dragon Age II console or PC versions.

The release shows that EA, one of the world’s largest game makers, is getting serious about coordinating the release of its games on the console, PC, Facebook and other platforms as it adapts … Continue Reading

Tesla CEO: Model S will support third-party apps

Does your car have an app for that? If Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has his way, it will.

The electric-car maker’s CEO said at a conference today in San Francisco that the much-hyped Model S electric sedan will support third-party apps and text-to-voice capabilities.

Musk made the announcement during the question-and-answer portion of his keynote speech at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt in a standing-room-only … Continue Reading

Google adds comment streams to Docs

Google has introduced a new comment stream feature in its online document sharing and editing program, Google Docs, in an effort to promote the service as an online collaboration tool.

The new commenting system amounts to a chat stream for specific parts of the document. Users can highlight specific parts of the document and begin a discussion stream where anyone in the document can comment. There’s also a general discussion stream that collectively shows all … Continue Reading

Zediva wants to stream DVDs directly to consumers — seriously

Zediva, which is launching today, is yet another contender in the online movie streaming arena with one curious twist: It literally streams DVD discs to viewers over the web.

By doing so, Zediva is able to offer new DVD releases far sooner than  competitors like Redbox and Netflix, both of which have signed rental delay deals with movie studios in exchange for access to content. The service currently streams video to computers, Android devices and … Continue Reading

North Bridge Partners: If there is startup bubble, it's rational

Bubble or no bubble, the conditions brewing in Silicon Valley around hot new startups now differs greatly from the tech collapse of 1999 to 2001 because most of today’s new companies are actually making money, Paul Santinelli, partner at early-stage venture capital fund North Bridge Venture Partners, told me today.

“There is a bubble mentality in venture financings, absolutely. But there are significant differences with this bubble compared to the one that existed in 1999-2001,” … Continue Reading

Critical vulnerability in Flash and Acrobat

Adobe warned yesterday that its Flash, Acrobat and Acrobat Reader products all have a critical vulnerability that will allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

The vulnerability is currently being exploited via a Flash file embedded in Microsoft Excel (.xls) file. The file has been distributed as an e-mail attachment. There are no reports yet on attacks targeting Acrobat software.

Users should be very careful with e-mail attachments until a fix has … Continue Reading

China's Tencent growing fast in internet messaging and gaming

China’s chat and gaming service Tencent reported revenues and earnings today that should make everyone take notice. As the company prints money in its domestic market, it is amassing more capital to become a player on a worldwide stage in the social and gaming markets.

Rich with cash from its QQ games and chat, Tencent recently agreed to buy U.S. online game maker Riot Games for $315 million. Observers believe that the company will acquire … Continue Reading

Look out PayPal: Visa jumps into personal payments

Updated

Visa took on PayPal today in the personal payment space, announcing that consumers in the U.S. would be able to receive and send funds to any eligible Visa account.

Consumers will have the option to send personal payments from a bank to a Visa account by simply entering a recipient’s 16-digit Visa account, email address or mobile phone number. The process is comparable to how users would send payments on PayPal.

The new Visa … Continue Reading

Wi-Fi-only Motorola Xoom hits stores on March 27 for $599

After all the hoopla surrounding Apple‘s iPad 2 launch has settled, Motorola announced that a Wi-Fi-only version its Android-based Xoom tablet will be available in stores on March 27.

While the lack of a 3G wireless connection may limit its appeal, the device may appeal to cost-sensitive device buyers who will primarily use the tablet at home or work and don’t want to pay an additional monthly fee for connectivity on the go

The device … Continue Reading

Rotten Tomatoes owner Flixster in acquisition talks with Yahoo, others

Social movie site Flixster, which purchased the popular movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes early last year, is in acquisition talks with Yahoo and other potential buyers, sources tell All Things Digital.

The sources say the acquisition talks are “substansive,” with a price range between $60 and $90 million.

If true, that’s a decent return on investment for Flixster, which has raised $7 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pinnacle Ventures and others. News Corp. … Continue Reading