Full of hustle, Los Angeles tech takes on Silicon Valley

L.A. isn’t just a mecca for film and video game studios. In the past three years, the Los Angeles tech scene has evolved from a small cadre of social media-happy party animals to a legitimate and sustainable tech community to rival Silicon Valley.

“Los Angeles is a town that spins a million stories every day,” says local technophile Sean Percival. “It’s the perfect backdrop for a techie looking to tell his or her own … Continue Reading

Nebula aims to enable every company to implement cloud computing

Cloud-infrastructure startup Nebula envisions a day when every company will be able to implement cloud computing as easily as plugging into a an electrical utility.

By taking advantage of open source technologies, the company hopes to create hardware appliances with all of the necessary software for companies to create their own low-cost data center computers.

It fits with the revolution happening in big data, where the amount of data generated by applications such as Facebook … Continue Reading

Regulatory filing indicates Twitter raising $400M round

Twitter is raising $400 million in its seventh round of funding, according to documents uncovered by venture capital information service VCExperts.

The company is issuing around 10.1 million shares of Series G-1 preferred stock and 14.8 million shares of Series G-2 preferred stock. Both sets of shares are priced at $16.09 in the Series G preferred round. The filing was submitted to the Delaware Secretary of State’s Division of Corporations on Tuesday.

There were reports … Continue Reading

Justin.tv launches partner program for pro-gaming broadcasters

Video streaming site Justin.tv announced today it’s launching a revenue-sharing program that professional gamers with a large number of followers can enroll in through the company’s competitive-gaming site.

The best of the best in competitive video-game leagues — called e-sports leagues — already have thousands (if not tens of thousands) of followers. The new program gives those competitive gamers that have generated a large number of followers the same chance to make money off their … Continue Reading

Samsung Galaxy S II sales hit 5M in 85 days, Americans still jealous

Samsung announced today that sales of its new flagship Android smartphone, the Galaxy S II, have reached 5 million units just 85 days after launching in Asia and Europe in April.

Last year’s Galaxy S phones, smashing successes in their own right, took 125 days to sell the same number of units. Samsung ended up selling 10 million Galaxy S phones last year, but it looks like the Galaxy S II is going to perform … Continue Reading

European Venture Capital: A Rembrandt in the attic?

Do European venture capital funds perform better than their U.S. rivals? German VC fund, Earlybird Venture Capital, just published an analysis that claims European venture capital has been producing higher exit multiples than U.S. venture capital in the last two years.

The exit multiple measures how much a fund earns when it sells its equity in a company in comparison to its original investment, e.g. 10 times as much.

“A lot has been written at … Continue Reading

LulzSec, Anonymous call for PayPal boycott, following FBI raids

Hacker groups LulzSec and Anonymous once again have PayPal in their sights, but this time they’re not attacking the company’s servers.

The groups this morning issued an announcement calling for PayPal users to close their accounts. The announcement is a response to a recent string of FBI arrests of Anonymous members who participated in last December’s distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on PayPal.

“We encourage anyone using PayPal to immediately close their accounts and … Continue Reading

SocialNuggets launches portal analyzing data on tablet usage

Social analytics company SocialNuggets is releasing its first free analytics portal Wednesday. The site provides free data analysis for the tablet industry, based on millions of tweets, blog posts and other online content.

Other portals focused on different industry verticals will follow.

Processing and making sense of this kind of data can take a lot of manpower. SocialNuggets addresses that with its language-processing and text-analytics engines, which its customers can employ for decision making.

“Our … Continue Reading

Nexon’s MapleStory Adventures game goes live on Facebook

South Korean online-game company Nexon is formally launching the open beta of its MapleStory Adventures game, its first title aiming to tap into Facebook’s fast growth.

Nexon specializes in making big, downloadable role-playing and action games on the web. Its release of a light Facebook title is a test of whether Nexon can cross the bridge into social Facebook games and compete with the likes of Zynga, which has 262 million monthly active users on … Continue Reading

Luminate unveils a platform for web image apps

There are something like 3 trillion images on the web. But almost none of them are interactive. Luminate hopes to change that with a platform for creating interactive image apps on web sites.

Luminate, formerly known as Pixazza, wants to unleash the creativity of consumers so they can create their own apps that reside within individual images on their favorite web sites. The platform is the logical extension of Luminate’s earlier platform, which shows off … Continue Reading

DeNA and Ngmoco launch Mobage mobile social network across globe

DeNA and its American subsidiary Ngmoco announced today they have launched the Mobage mobile social network in English-speaking territories around the globe.

The Mobage service sits on top of Google’s Android operating system and essentially creates a portal and social network for games. The service is a platform for developers to deploy their games so that they can be discovered and shared by mobile game users. Already launched in Japan, Mobage is generating $1.3 billion … Continue Reading

Taulia raises $8.5M to help suppliers avert their own debt crises

Taulia, which offers discounts in exchange for timely payments, announced an $8.5 million second round of funding yesterday. DAG Ventures joined existing investors Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures to lead the round.

In a sluggish economy, San Francisco-based Taulia is offering suppliers an alternative to the traditional – and expensive – modes of external financing. This means suppliers of all sizes can avoid resorting to lenders and keep paying their employees.

And even though borrowing … Continue Reading

Fab.com, profitable at 6 weeks old, nabs an $8M Series A

Fab.com, a design-focused flash sale site that launched June 9, has announced an $8 million Series A round of investment led by Menlo Ventures.

Fab co-founder and CEO Jason Goldberg also told VentureBeat exclusively that the company is already turning a profit and has just hit the 400,000-user mark.

The flash sale model has turned out to be a goldmine for Fab.com, and the pigeonhole-defying mish-mash of beautifully designed stuff has been popular, as well. … Continue Reading

Amazon’s ad-supported Kindle is its best-selling e-reader

The digerati pooh-poohed it, but Amazon.com’s advertising-supported Kindle 3G with Special Offers is now the company’s top-selling e-book device.

Amazon made the revelation in its quarterly earnings report Tuesday. The $139 device is $50 cheaper than the comparable Kindle 3G, and costs the same as a Kindle with Wi-Fi connectivity only (and no 3G). The advertisements appear only in screensavers (which appear when the reader is in an idle state) and at the bottom of … Continue Reading

Amazon net sales up 51%; investing in digital

During Amazon’s quarter two earnings call, the company reported the strongest growth it has seen in ten years, in addition to digital offerings growth.

In this past quarter, Amazon’s net sales increased 51 percent to $9.91 billion compared year-over-year with $6.57 billion in Q2 of 2010.

In the earnings call, chief financial officer Tom Szkutak supported the increase by saying, “The growth rate you see in Q2 really stems from investments we’ve made over a … Continue Reading

Social and mobile push online video use to new heights

More online American adults are using video-sharing sites than ever before, according to a new study from Pew Research Center.

In May 2011, 71 percent of online adults reported watching videos from a site like YouTube or Vimeo. On top of that, 28 percent of adults polled said they visited such a site on a typical day.

“Video is a much more integral part of the Internet experience than ever before,” Lee Rainie, director of … Continue Reading

EA continues to drive world crazy with vague comments on Star Wars: The Old Republic

Analysts, gamers and investors want to know more details about Star Wars: The Old Republic, the big online game coming from Electronic Arts. But the video-game giant isn’t ready just yet to talk about the biggest details of the game, as evidenced by vague comments on today’s earnings call for EA.

The Old Republic is EA’s Hail Mary pass in online games and meant to take away a lot of users from rivals such as … Continue Reading

Windows Phone 7 Mango update now one step closer to consumers

Microsoft announced today that the first major update for Windows Phone 7, codenamed “Mango”, has been released to manufacturing — a major development milestone before it makes it way to consumers.

“This marks the point in the development process where we hand code to our handset and mobile-operator partners to optimize Mango for their specific phone and network configurations,” Microsoft’s Terry Myerson wrote on the Windows Phone Blog this morning. “Here on the Windows Phone … Continue Reading

Cloudbees lands $10.5M to move Java development into the cloud

CloudBees, which offers a Java platform as a service (PaaS) for developers, has raised $10.5 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

CloudBees was founded by Sacha Labourey, the former chief technology officer of JBoss. Its first investors included JBoss founder Marc Fleury. Kohsuke Kawaguchi, creator of Hudson, the most popular continuous-integration tool in the Java world, also works for the company, making CloudBees something of a Java dream team.

In a … Continue Reading