Reddit founder heads home

Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of the news aggregation site Reddit, announced today that he has returned to the site as an advisor after selling it to Condé Nast in 2006.

Ohanian left to pursue his own projects, which included flight search company Hipmunk and advocating for the startup incubator Y Combinator on the east coast. He isn’t the first founder to return to his roots in recent weeks— Jack Dorsey, one of the initial founders … Continue Reading

AT&T’s John Donovan makes the case for “the new Ma Bell”

AT&T chief technology officer John Donovan argued today that his company has become faster and more innovative, responding to the needs of both developers and consumers.

Donovan was speaking at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit in Sausalito, Calif., where he said he was ready to answer “tough questions” from my boss, VentureBeat Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall. Of course, many of those questions revolved around continuing complaints about AT&T’s service in iPhone-dense areas like New York City and … Continue Reading

YouTube launches movie rental service

YouTube will soon begin offering its users major Hollywood movie titles as an on-demand service, according to TheWrap. The service is a direct competitor to Apple’s iTunes.

The official announcement is expected soon, and the service may launch as early as this week. Pricing details and titles are not yet available. Neither are the details about video quality, but high-definition options wouldn’t be a big surprise. The movies will be available from at least three … Continue Reading

URLs are the new Deep Throat

Remember the golden age of journalism when getting a scoop required a rendezvous in a parking garage with a shady character named after a porno? Well those days are over, my friends. The journalists of today rely on the Interwebs to find their stories, and few sources are more generous than the URL.

Yesterday, for example, the New York Times briefly posted an article about the launch of Facebook Deals and then hastily removed the … Continue Reading

AT&T CTO: Subsidizing 3G microcells won't fix our network

AT&T’s 3G microcell, which uses your home internet connection to improve your cellular reception, isn’t the savior for the company’s beleaguered network that some may think.

Speaking at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit today, AT&T Chief Technology Officer John Donovan said the company hasn’t pursued subsidies and other methods for getting microcells in more homes because they don’t fix the underlying problems with its network.

Instead, AT&T has focused on improving its infrastructure over the past few … Continue Reading

Will developers and gamers flock to other consoles as Sony's Playstation Network remains down?

Today marks the sixth day of the Playstation Network (PSN) outage and Sony is still mum about when the online gaming network will go live again, which could spark an exodus of gamers and developers to other online networks like Microsoft’s Xbox Live.

Sony said the network would be down indefinitely as it rebuilt it to make it more secure after an external attack forced the company to bring its online network down. The downtime … Continue Reading

EA's No. 2 executive leaves for Zynga

Electronic Arts‘ No. 2 executive, John Schappert, has resigned from the company and will reportedly join Zynga.

Reuters said that Schappert, who joined EA as president and chief operating officer in 2009, is leaving EA to head Zynga’s game division. That says a lot about the evolution of the video game business, with new companies like Zynga posing greater and greater threats to stalwarts such as EA. Schappert, who once talked about a “social gaming … Continue Reading

Deals & More: Pixelpipe snaps up $2.3M to publish on 100 social networks

Today’s funding announcements include solutions for publishing photos, hiring employees and speeding up innovation:

Pixelpipe brings in $2.3M for social network photo sharing: The developer of a web gateway for sharing images, videos and other content has raised a first round of equity funding, according to a filing with the SEC. The San Francisco-based startup has created tools that allow users to distribute content to more than 100 social networks, photo-sharing sites and blogs at … Continue Reading

ZangZing unveils group photo-sharing for people who don’t like photo-sharing

As startup after startup tries to create a new photo-sharing experience on mobile phones, the founders of San Francisco-based ZangZing say they looked at photo-sharing on the Web and found it lacking.

When I met with ZangZing last week, co-founder and chief executive Joseph Ansanelli argued that there’s a huge swath of people who aren’t interested in sharing their photos on existing services, for privacy or other reasons. So by taking a very different tack … Continue Reading

Outfit7 hits 100M downloads with Talking Friends iPhone apps

Move over, Angry Birds. Outfit7 is announcing today that its Talking Friends apps have been downloaded more than 100 million times after just ten months in the Apple App Store.

That’s a big achievement that has been matched only by a handful of developers, and it means that Outfit7 will likely be able chart its own destiny as a developer of mobile apps and games. By comparison, it took Rovio‘s immensely popular Angry Birds about … Continue Reading

GameTree TV launches interactive TV gaming in France

It’s been a long time coming, but TransGaming is finally announcing today that a French set-top box maker is deploying TransGaming’s GameTree TV games-on-demand service.

The service will test whether there is a market for casual video games played via remote controls on smart, internet-connected TVs. If it catches on, it may prove that people who don’t buy video games may still want to play light, family-friendly casual games. And it may show that the … Continue Reading

Facebook launches Deals against Groupon and LivingSocial in five major cities

Facebook is kicking off its long-awaited Deals program to users in five major cities starting Tuesday with plans to expand in other cities soon after.

Facebook Deals, which will offer online discounts and deals from businesses to its users, marks the company’s entrance into what’s becoming a crowded group-buying deal market that already includes Groupon and LivingSocial.

Facebook will best competition from others by leveraging its massive user base and diverse social platform, the company … Continue Reading

Verizon: 4G LTE launch has been (mostly) smooth sailing

Verizon Wireless hasn’t seen too much trouble with its 4G LTE deployment, according to the company’s VP of network operations Nicola Palmer.

In a chat with VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall at our Mobile Summit today, Palmer said that she had expected the Ethernet backhaul upgrades for Verizon’s network to be a problem, but thanks to assistance from telecom and cable companies, those upgrades have gone smoothly.

But other problems that the company didn’t initially foresee did … Continue Reading

Sony launches two Android 3.0 tablets

Joining a fight that Apple began in April 2010, Sony launched two tablet computers based on the Google Android 3.0 operating system today.

Like many Sony products, the Japanese company argues that its tablets will work together with other Sony products, such as TVs and Sony’s network services for games and music.

The new Sony Tablet models are code-named S1 and S2. The S1 focuses on rich media entertainment while the S2 is aimed at … Continue Reading

Evernote CEO: Apple users are more valuable than non-Apple users

Evernote, a note-taking and reminder app that works across computers, phones, and mobile devices, said today that users of Apple devices are more valuable to the company than non-Apple users.

The comments, from Evernote chief executive Phil Libin today, confirm what many are already seeing in the mobile industry.

Libin said that iOS was its leading platform for overall revenue, accounting for 28 percent. iOS also topped all other platforms when it came to total … Continue Reading

Possible iPhone 5 photos leaked

Blurry images of what could be Apple’s next version of the iPhone have been posted online that reveal subtle design changes to the device like a wider screen, curved back and thinner body.

If the pictures do prove to be genuine, it would be the world’s first glimpse of the iPhone 5.

The design shown in the leaked photo is consistent with earlier rumors about what to expect from the next iPhone, with the exception … Continue Reading

Twitter VP: We're focused on discovery, relevance, and mobile

Want to know where Twitter’s taking its microblogging service next? Well, Twitter vice president of engineering Michael Abbott spelled it out today at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit.

Abbott said the three main areas of the company’s product focus are discovery, relevance, and mobile. As evidence of how important mobile is for Twitter, he repeated the statistic that 40 percent of tweets now come from mobile devices. And it’s growing fast — mobile signups increased by 50 … Continue Reading

Square's Keith Rabois: Websites are dead, reinvent for mobile

Keith Rabois, a startup veteran who’s now chief operating officer at Square, didn’t mince words today when he talked about the potential of mobile startups. He said “the website as you know it” is “dead, dying, will be dying,” and that the future lies in reinventing Web experiences on the mobile phone.

When you take that approach, the large, eyebrow-raising investments in mobile social startups like Instagram and Color make more sense, Rabois said — … Continue Reading

Tapjoy limits certain promotions to ease Apple's concerns on gaming the top ranks

Mobile app distribution is kind of in a state of limbo on Apple’s App Store, thanks to a recent change in policy on running promotions that use one app to market and install other apps on user’s phones.

Mobile app distribution service Tapjoy said last week that a number of its developers have found that Apple has rejected their apps because they were running incentivized app installations, where one app encourages users to download another … Continue Reading