And our latest and greatest speakers at GamesBeat 2011

Today we’re revealing the fifth set of speakers for our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference. Our slate of speakers will include Neil Young, founder and CEO of Ngmoco; Andrej Naborgoj, CEO of Outfit 7, the maker of Talking Friends; and Jason Citron, chief executive of OpenFeint, which was recently acquired by Gree.

This GamesBeat 2011 conference takes place July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Neil Young is the founder and CEO of … Continue Reading

Ex-Apple security expert becomes Verayo’s chief technology officer

Security startup Verayo has named former Apple security architect David M’Raihi as its new chief technology officer and vice president of engineering.

It’s pretty rare for high-ranking Apple employees to leave the company for a startup. So the move shows that Verayo, which makes a clever security and authentication technology, has an interesting future in the security and authentication business. We’ve followed Verayo closely for a couple of years and its security solutions are becoming … Continue Reading

Popular Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox hacked, prices drop to pennies

The most popular exchange of Bitcoin online currency, Mt. Gox, on Sunday admitted it had been hacked. It made the announcement after the price of Bitcoins dropped from $17 to nearly zero in a matter of minutes. The sell off happened after a Mt. Gox account with a large amount of Bitcoins was hacked, and the hacker sold all Bitcoins in that account.

Bitcoins, an unregulated peer-to-peer currency, has been in the news a lot … Continue Reading

Naratte’s Zoosh enables NFC with just a speaker and microphone

Zoosh, a new technology developed by Sunnyvale startup Naratte, aims to deliver all the benefits of NFC (near-field communication) with any device that has a speaker and microphone. Instead of relying on NFC chips, Zoosh uses ultrasound to perform secure mobile transactions.

The technology — which can be added to any app or device with a simple software update — drastically reduces the barriers to entry for NFC-related tasks like mobile payments and secure data … Continue Reading

Not bad: Zynga’s Empires & Allies hits 30M users in 17 days

Zynga’s Empires & Allies social game has grown to more than 30 million users in just 17 days. The combat social strategy game added about 2 million users today, according to market analyst AppData.

This kind of rapid growth is becoming normal for every new Zynga game launch. That’s going to make it easier for Zynga to go public, if it actually files for an initial public offering, as rumored. Public markets like predictable performance, … Continue Reading

So not cool: Rebecca Black video caught up in legal dispute

It’s Saturday, Saturday — a good time for an update on Rebecca Black, whose “Friday” video irritated folks so much. The YouTube sensation is now in a dispute with the ARK Music Factory, which helped Black create the video and posted it on its YouTube account.

13-year-old Black is evidently complaining that the company is exploiting her image. She became a cultural icon in a not-so-good way because of her saccharine music video, which took … Continue Reading

Week in review: Lulzsec and Anonymous trade blows

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

Hit the deck: LulzSec and Anonymous start trading blows — Hacker group LulzSec has begun publicly attacking hacker group Anonymous, an action that could lead to a civil war of sorts between the two groups.

OMG! Rebecca Black pulls down her “Friday” YouTube video — Rebecca Black became a cultural icon in a … Continue Reading

Entrepreneur Corner: Reinventing the boardroom and important lessons learned

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

Cut-and-pasting legal language vs. hiring a lawyer – If you can’t afford a lawyer, it might be tempting to grab terms of service or a privacy policy from another site and claim them as your own – but doing so can open you up to a slew of legal problems, says attorney Curtis Smolar.

5 lessons learned from a serial entrepreneur – It’s easy to get caught up … Continue Reading

Take-Two’s Karl Slatoff won’t rush blockbuster video games out the door

Karl Slatoff is the executive vice president and chief operating officer at Take-Two Interactive, which has published some of the hottest-selling video games in history, from Grand Theft Auto IV to Red Dead Redemption and this year’s LA Noire. Not everything New York-based Take-Two does is golden (Duke Nukem Forever is getting bad reviews), but Take-Two is definitely carving out a reputation as a haven for some of the video game industry’s most-talented developers.

We … Continue Reading

Obama’s Twitter account: Now with 100 percent more president

Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign announced today that the president himself would be updating his Facebook and Twitter accounts heading into 2012.

“We’re turning a page on the President’s Facebook account. From now on, Obama 2012 staff will use this account to keep you up to date not just on what the President’s doing every day, but on how millions of supporters around the country are building this campaign,” members of Obama’s campaign wrote via … Continue Reading

Microsoft’s $8.5B Skype purchase gets antitrust approval

Microsoft’s proposed $8.5 billion deal to purchase Skype has won antitrust approval, the Federal Trade Commission announced today.

The news means that Microsoft is one step closer to finalizing its Skype purchase, barring any other unforeseen difficulties. Microsoft previously said that it expects to close the Skype deal by the end of the year. Given Skype’s recent string of outages, the sooner Microsoft can help out the video chat company, the better.

And once Microsoft … Continue Reading

Will Sprint benefit from LightSquared’s broken LTE network?

Troubled wholesale mobile broadband provider LightSquared has confirmed today that the company has entered a 15-year deal with Sprint to provide high-speed wireless service for the carrier’s 4G LTE network, reports Bloomberg.

The news comes on the heals of an announcement last week that government agencies had completed tests showing that LightSquared’s 4G LTE network interferes with GPS signals, affecting aircraft and automobile navigation systems and emergency response services like OnStar. Fixing the problems will … Continue Reading

Entrepreneur of the Year finalist: “It’s always a matter of cash”

This sponsored post is part of a series of profiles on Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” finalists. Click here to keep up with the rest of the series.

I recently met with Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, Jim Marggraff, Chairman, CEO, and founder of Livescribe. I asked Marggraff about how he got his start with Livescribe, what it takes to be a good CEO, and what he would tell … Continue Reading

U.S. warns of dangerous security flaws in Chinese software

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Thursday warned that Chinese-made software used by chemical, defense, and energy firms contains major security holes that hackers could exploit and use to harm critical systems.

With so many hacking incidents in the news right now, including events with Lockheed Martin and Sony, the Homeland Security advisory is particularly worrisome. If a hacker had a clear path to, say, a nuclear power plant’s systems, who knows what damage … Continue Reading

Google Chome 13 beta is out, adds Instant Pages and print preview

Google on Friday released its Google Chrome 13 beta, a version of the browser that includes the newly introduced Instant Pages feature and the long-awaited print preview function.

Both Instant Pages, which preloads your most likely search result, and print preview are important additions to Chrome, which is arguably the most innovative browser on the market. As a still young browser, Chrome’s market share worldwide has had remarkable growth. As of May, Chrome has an … Continue Reading

Reddit’s first employee bids adieu

Jeremy Edberg, the first employee of social news site Reddit, has announced that he is leaving the company after working there for 4 years.

Edberg joined the company when it first started with co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman and site engineer Chris Slowe. He served as the site’s “Information Cowboy,” which involved serving as the site’s sys admin as well as handling a hodgepodge of outreach, public relations and general hellraising. While working at … Continue Reading

Apple delaying MacBook Air refresh to wait for Lion OS?

Apple plans to wait until its new Lion operating system is out in July before releasing new MacBook Air models loaded with refreshed hardware, according to a report by AppleInsider. Just a week ago, reports were circulating that Apple would likely release refreshed Airs in June.

If the report is true, Apple must feel pretty strongly that Lion is an important, necessary upgrade for customers. The new MacBook Airs are reportedly ready to ship but … Continue Reading

Music service Spotify has (probably) raised another $100M

Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists are reportedly making a big bet on streaming music service Spotify. There have been reports for months that Spotify was raising a big round of funding, and now it has closed a $100 million round, according to a report in AllThingsD, which GigaOm says it has independently confirmed.

A Spotify spokesperson declined to comment.

The reported funding values Spotify at $1 billion. It comes from DST (the Russian firm that … Continue Reading

LulzSec’s real agenda? Who knows, but they love the Dreamcast

Well, that tears it. LulzSec, a band of hackers that has made headlines for a number of high-profile hacking incidents, are a bunch of gaming hipsters.

The hacking group has been gleefully attacking a lot of gaming networks such as online role-playing game EVE Online and indie sandbox game Minecraft. But LulzSec hackers have also avoided sabotaging certain games that have niche appeal in the gaming community -— indicating the group has some kind of … Continue Reading