American Express launches digital payments platform

American Express has ceaselessly driven into our heads, “Don’t leave home without it” as the commercial message for its American Express card. Now it’s launching its Serve digital payments platform, so it can tell us, “Don’t go online without it.”

The move to give consumers new ways to spend, send and receive money online will help American Express go to war with PayPal and Visa, which bought PlaySpan for $190 million in February. And it … Continue Reading

Google teams up with MasterCard, Citigroup for NFC mobile payments

Making payments with your mobile phone is one of the great dreams of technophiles. Wave your phone in front of a reader and buy something just like that. To make that a reality, Google is teaming up with MasterCard and Citigroup to embed the technology in Android mobile phones, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The technology is known as “near field communication” and it has been used in Japan for some time. But it’s not … Continue Reading

Tabula raises $108M, in largest round "in a decade" for a chip company

Updated

Chip company Tabula, which has developed a semiconductor architecture that it boasts gives it a significant advantage over competitors, has just announced one of the largest rounds in a decade for a chip company. It has raised $108 million in a fourth round of funding, from venture capital firms including DAG, Benchmark, Greylock, NEA and Crosslink.

The company makes programmable chips that it says can support almost any electronic device, from HDTVs, to MRI … Continue Reading

Warner Bros. releases five more movies for rent on Facebook

Warner Bros. is broadening its experiment with digital movie distribution by releasing five more marquee movies for rent on Facebook.

As video stores die off and consumers become more comfortable watching digital movies, Warner Bros. and other studios are moving to capitalize on digital revenues through newfangled models such as the deal with Facebook. The social network movie rentals are also a way to bypass services such as Netflix, which is perceived as being increasingly … Continue Reading

Intellectual property theft fuels underground cyber economy

It used to be that cyber criminals hacked into accounts to steal credit card numbers or social security numbers. Now they’re moving upscale, building a huge underground economy around stealing more valuable intellectual property.

The Underground Economies report being released today by McAfee and SAIC reveals that cyber thieves are now stealing secret company information so they can sell it at much higher prices to competitors and foreign governments. Once the data is stolen, the … Continue Reading

Next iPhone software update delayed until the fall?

Apple has been pretty quiet about the next version of its mobile operating system, dubbed iOS 5. That’s not surprising, since it is probably tied to the next version of its iPhone, the iPhone 5. But TechCrunch claims that this unannounced software has, in fact, been delayed until the fall, according to two unnamed sources.

That’s an interesting tea leaf, but it’s not clear what it means. It may mean that the iPhone 5 itself … Continue Reading

Apple out of overseas iPad 2 stock by Saturday afternoon

Apple apparently ran out of its iPad 2 supplies by Saturday afternoon in most of the 25 countries where it launched the new tablet computer on Friday.

If it’s true, then Apple is well on its way to having another worldwide hit with the iPad 2. The company is in a race to hang on to its No. 1 position in tablets and beat rivals using Android, WebOS, RIM’s QNX and other mobile operating systems.… Continue Reading

The IRS isn't playing games with Trip Hawkins

Trip Hawkins, the chief executive of mobile gaming firm Digital Chocolate and founder of Electronic Arts, may be on the hook for $20 million in back taxes after a judge rejected his attempt to use personal bankruptcy to cancel the debt, according to Forbes.

The story is a cautionary for any entrepreneurs who strike it rich and then tangle with the Internal Revenue Service. U.S. District Court judge Jeffrey S. White upheld an earlier bankruptcy … Continue Reading

Nintendo launches marketing blitz for 3DS debut (photo gallery)

Nintendo kicked off sales of its new 3DS portable gaming handheld on Saturday night, midnight Eastern time.

The launch was a managed extravaganza, like other big video game system launches in recent years. The point was to celebrate the launch and create a viral chain of lust for the new system, which can play stereoscopic 3D games without the need for special glasses. Nintendo hopes the hardcore gamers will get excited about the system and … Continue Reading

Nintendo 3DS review: Is it worth $249 and $40 per game?

Nintendo has done its best to launch a new era in video games with the launch of its 3DS portable gaming system, which goes on sale for $249 on Sunday. The appeal of this device, which can display games in stereoscopic 3D without glasses, is growing on me. But I’m not sure it’s the greatest thing since the iPhone.

The 3DS offers hope for portable games on a lot of fronts. The video game industry … Continue Reading

Week in review: Rebecca Black is unstoppable on YouTube

Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories that VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Rebecca Black’s awful “Friday” song could be unstoppable on YouTube — 30M views and counting — Rebecca Black’s “Friday” single has been uniformly panned as the worst song ever on the internet. And that has helped turn the 13-year-old girl’s song into an instant hit.

Firefox 4 blows away Internet Explorer 9 with … Continue Reading

Silicon Valley is abuzz with bubble and recovery stories — too soon?

The bulls are back in Silicon Valley in a variety of ways. Let’s hope reports of the recovery are true and that the optimism doesn’t get overheated too fast and turn into a bubble of the dot-com era’s scale.

The front pages of the San Jose Mercury News and the New York Times both have stories today about the return of good times in Silicon Valley (and let’s not forget the Los Angeles Times). They … Continue Reading

Google enters group messaging fray with Disco

Google has just quietly launched a group messaging offering, Disco, both as an online service and as an iPhone app. The new service will face competition from apps like GroupMe, Fast Society, Kik, and Beluga.

Disco lets you organize group messaging with your contacts in a unified interface. Almost exactly like competing services, Disco requires that you sign up with a cell phone number; after that, you can set up groups of friends and contacts … Continue Reading

Entrepreneur Corner: Domain woes and building a sales machine

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

Want a domain that’s not available? Here’s what to do – Picking a perfect company name only to learn the URL isn’t available is frustrating – but it doesn’t mean you have to start the process over. Attorney Curtis Smolar looks at five ways you can secure the domain of your choosing.

5 tips for building a well-oiled sales and marketing machine – Sales and marketing often put … Continue Reading

Larry Page already cracking the whip at Google, a week before he takes the reins

Larry Page may not take over the reins as Google’s chief executive until next week, but he’s already begun cracking the whip amongst senior management, including holding daily brainstorm sessions at the search behemoth’s headquarters, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Page is reportedly trying to streamline the organization ahead of his succession from Eric Schmidt, who Google says will stay on to oversee the company’s outside relationships, but who is also widely rumored to be … Continue Reading

Take that, iAds: Greystripe has run 100+ iPad ad campaigns

Apple’s iAds advertising program finally came to the iPad early this month, but it seems a bit late to the party. Mobile ad network Greystripe just announced that it has served more than 100 iPad ad campaigns in the last nine months.

So how are those iPad ads actually doing? Greystripe says they’re outperforming the advertising it runs in iPhone and Android apps as well as on mobile websites. 20 percent of the users who … Continue Reading

Fitango helps anyone share their self-improvement knowledge

When self-help startup Fitango launched in December, it offered a marketplace where users could learn about and commit to action plans for fitness, nutrition, and more. Now it’s adding features that help users share their knowledge.

The idea is that if you really want to get in shape or learn more about being a good parent (to pick examples from two of the site’s more popular categories), you need a detailed, step-by-step guide. So when … Continue Reading

Samsung unveils new Galaxy Tabs (video)

Samsung unveiled the next versions of its Galaxy Tab tablet computers at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference — an 8.9-inch and a 10.1-inch tablet that are aesthetically comparable to Apple’s iPad.

The actual build of each tablet is solid. After playing around with the 8.9-inch and 10.1-inch tablets, I liked how each felt — they were both light, but quite sturdy. Both devices are thinner than Apple’s iPad. But both devices still suffer from the … Continue Reading

API downtime: Who's asleep at the wheel?

Many popular applications use the application programming interfaces (APIs) of other services, from your favorite Twitter client to Facebook apps. So downtime on the most popular APIs has a serious knock-on effect on other services and (up)time is money.

Performance monitoring company WatchMouse just published a study on the downtimes of the 50 most popular APIs including Google Maps, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Wikipedia.

WatchMouse tracked these APIs between February 16 and … Continue Reading

LinkedIn’s early users get bragging points … on Twitter

After announcing earlier this week that it passed the 100 million user mark, professional networking site LinkedIn sent emails to its early users today thanking them and telling them exactly when they joined.

It’s an ego-flattering gesture, likely designed to provoke responses from eager self-promoters. And that in itself is notable from a site that often comes across as bland and functional — a major handicap in LinkedIn’s push to become a hub for news … Continue Reading