Tango video chat heads to Windows PCs

Video-calling application Tango announced on its blog today that it is now available on desktop PCs. The company originally announced the feature back in July, along with a $42 million second round of funding.

The original Tango mobile app allowed smartphone and tablet users to make free video calls to other Tango users over 3G and 4G networks. The same features will be available on the Windows PC version with the usual tech requirements, such … Continue Reading

Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire costs $210 to build

Amazon will lose around $10 for every $199 Kindle Fire tablet it sells, but the company will make back that amount as a small profit when consumers buy digital content, according to a report by market research company IHS iSuppli.

The news isn’t too surprising, since it has been speculated for some time that Amazon’s tablet would serve more as a conduit to its digital media ecosystem, than a device to give Amazon a huge … Continue Reading

Whoopsie: Microsoft accidentally deletes Chrome from several thousand users’ PCs

This morning, a Microsoft security software program started deleting Google’s Chrome browser from users’ computers.

So far, Microsoft reports that around 3,000 users were affected.

The company has acknowledged the mistake and issued a fix to the software that caused the issue. A Microsoft spokesperson stated, “We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused our customers.”

The security software in question, Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), had accidentally flagged Chrome as malware. Specifically, MSE thought … Continue Reading

Pantheon launches Drupal-based cloud site management for enterprises

Pantheon, a content management service provider for enterprises, has officially launched out of beta and is now focused on helping customers move their site management tools completely to the cloud.

“Pantheon gives you enterprise-class tools with the ease of a consumer site like Twitter or Tumblr.” Pantheon CEO Zack Rosen told VentureBeat. “It runs fast, it’s always on and there’s no need to buy servers or hire IT for content management and hosting.”

Pantheon offers … Continue Reading

Confirmed: Square raises $100M, Mary Meeker, Vinod Khosla and Larry Summers now on board

Earlier reports of mobile payments provider Square raising $100 million that arose in June are now confirmed thanks to a Form D filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Chief operating officer Keith Rabois said the company is processing nearly $4 million in payments every day, and it expects to surpass $1 billion by year’s end. The company is signing up between 30,000 and 50,000 new merchants each month. The new funding round reportedly values … Continue Reading

Dunder Mifflin launches iPad killer, The Pyramid

Are you ready to unleash the power of the Pyramid?

Our good pals at micro-cap regional paper and office supply company Dunder Mifflin have just taken the wraps off their latest offering, the Sabre Pyramid, a tablet to end all tablets.

Weighing in at a husky three pounds, this triangular titan comes with chic accessories, including a battery pack and memory booster (which should help to supplement the device’s “50L” of onboard memory).

While some … Continue Reading

Can a single game reach a billion players?

A growing number of game visionaries are saying a single game can reach a billion people. That idea has become a cause célèbre, providing a target for an industry that is expanding beyond its old boundaries.

For skeptics who believe we’re in the midst of a gaming industry bubble, the idea is just more evidence of mass hysteria among game makers. But the believers say that they can see the stepping stones to the goal, … Continue Reading

The DeanBeat: Skylanders is massive, innovative gamble for Activision Blizzard

EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week, I’m writing a column on videogames called The DeanBeat, while executive editor Dylan Tweney is writing a technology and business column called Dylan’s Desk. They are available to newsletter subscribers a whole day before they appear on the VentureBeat website.

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Bring your toys to life. That was the big idea that drove Activision Blizzard and its game studio Toys for Bob to place a huge bet on a new idea: … Continue Reading

The next iPhone may come in 16GB, 32GB & 64GB capacities

An anonymous tipster has leaked some information about Apple’s soon-to-be announced iPhone 5, including tidbits about onboard storage and device colors.

A “Mr. X,” as well as other sources in the iPhone manufacturing chain, told 9to5mac that the newest version of the iPhone will likely come in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities.

Each version will be available in black and also in white.

The data about capacities could be related to the rumored iPhone 4S … Continue Reading

IBM tops Microsoft as the second-most valuable tech company in the world

Today, for the first time since 1996, IBM is worth more than Microsoft.

International Business Machines, which has been around since 1911, saw its market value reach $214 billion yesterday, while Microsoft’s fell to $213.2 billion.

Both companies still fall behind Apple, which had a market value of $362.1 billion as markets closed yesterday.

Over the course of the year, IBM has grown in market value by a total of 22 percent. Microsoft has, for … Continue Reading

Announcing the CloudBeat 2011 Innovation Showdown

At our new CloudBeat 2011 conference (Nov 30-Dec1), we’ll be holding an “Innovation Showdown” to showcase the coolest, most disruptive products leveraging the cloud.

We’re opening the nomination process today, and we’ll be selecting 10 finalists on Oct 31 to present their products/services to the event’s full audience. The event will be at the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood City.

To be nominated, a company’s product or service will need to be leveraging the cloud in … Continue Reading

No joke: Google promotes Will.i.Am’s Google+ profile on its search page

In an attempt to promote its new social network, Google has placed a link to musical artist Will.i.Am’s Google+ profile on its search engine homepage.

In July, Google launched a new strategy to get more celebrities to join Google+ in an effort to help publicize the social network. The strategy is one that greatly benefited microblogging social network Twitter’s early popularity.

And it seems to be working. Will.i.Am’s Google+ profile is currently in 270,706 people’s … Continue Reading

Why was the first Kindle so ugly? Because Jeff Bezos loved his BlackBerry

The first-generation Kindle e-reader was a revolutionary device, but it was far from pretty.

Now the reasoning behind that ugly design has become a bit clearer: Jeff Bezos pushed his designers to replicate elements of his beloved BlackBerry, the New York Times reports.

“Jeff Bezos would come into our design meetings and say he loved his BlackBerry and the ease with which he could find e-mails and respond to people,” a former Amazon designer told … Continue Reading

Samsung updates 7-inch Galaxy Tab with dual-core processor and Honeycomb

Samsung has updated its 7-inch Galaxy Tab with better specs like a dual-core processor and Honeycomb Android OS, the company said today. It’s calling the upgraded device the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. The Galaxy Tab, first released at the end of 2010, was the first Android tablet Samsung brought to market in the U.S.

The tablet market got big news earlier this week when Amazon announced its $199 Kindle Fire, a 7-inch Android tablet connected … Continue Reading

Search startup Blekko closes $30M funding round

Ambitious search engine startup Blekko has closed a new $30 million funding round, the company announced today.

Unlike search giant Google, Blekko uses slashtags to help filter results, which means it searches only the sites you want and discards the bulk of spammy and artificially-gamed SEO sites. The startup launched its search engine in 2010.

The new round was led by Yandex, the top Russian search engine company that also operates in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus … Continue Reading

Famigo makes it easier to discover family-friend mobile apps on Android and Apple

Famigo launched a review site that makes it easier to discover family friendly Android apps in July. Now it is adding support for Apple iOS apps today. The Family App Review is a web site with app reviews that makes it easier to discover mobile content that is appropriate for your kids.

All of the reviews on the site are written by humans and are curated to feature the best kid-friendly apps, games, eBooks, and … Continue Reading

Quantum dot technology brings richer colors to TVs (video)

Nanosys, the nanotechnology materials company, has really come through with a technology that makes flat-panel displays much brighter and more colorful without increasing their cost, energy consumption or size.

Yesterday, I got a good look at the “wide color gamut” displays that the company can enable with a plastic film that can be used in liquid crystal display (LED) TVs. The Nanosys technology is called Quantum Dot Enhancement Film (QDEF). It increases the color gamut … Continue Reading

Chrome to surpass Firefox in market share by December

Google Chrome is well on its way to surpassing Mozilla Firefox’s No. 2 market share position and should overtake the fox no later than December, according to Irish analytics company StatCounter.

We reported at the beginning of August that Chrome had overtaken Firefox in the UK, but now that trend appears to be intensifying on a worldwide scale. Chrome has gained an incredible eight percentage points in worldwide market share since January, which is a … Continue Reading

Ultimate fanboys create gorgeous, realistic iPhone 5 replica

As we near Apple’s official iPhone 5 announcement (set for Tuesday, October 4), we have our closest look yet at what the mystical device may look like, thanks to the creative geeks at BENM.AT.

The stunningly realistic mockup shows off a thin and slightly curved design that makes the iPhone 5 look a lot like the iPad 2. The curved design will be a welcome change for those who never got used to the sharper … Continue Reading