These teenagers are trying to take my job (video)
While attending the 2011 Fall Demo conference in Santa Clara, I was startled by the sight of a young man helping himself to coffee in between interviews with startup founders and venture capitalists in the conference Green Room. It’s my job to drink coffee and do interviews. What’s more, he was way better dressed than me. Feeling threatened, I went to tower over him in my four inch heels.
That young man was 12 year-old … Continue Reading
Twitter acquires Julpan, makes former Googler director of engineering
Microblogging site Twitter has acquired social information analysis startup Julpan for an undisclosed sum, the startup announced Wednesday.
The move is an acquihire of sorts, since Twitter has appointed Julpan founder and CEO Ori Allon as its new director of engineering. As part of the acquisition deal, Twitter will also get Julpan’s technology and its team of 12 employees, who will continue working from Julpan’s New York-based office.
Allon is well-known for his work on … Continue Reading
How to turn women philanthropists into tech investors (video)
We all know that tech investment needs more women, and Natalia Oberti Noguera thinks that female philanthropists are ripe for the training.
We recently had Noguera into the VentureBeat office to chat about overarching issues of women and technology. In this video, she discusses what her project, the Pipeline Fellowship, is doing to improve the gender split in the industry and visibility of women leaders and role models in technology.
The Pipeline Fellowship trains women … Continue Reading
Your company is not the next TV Guide, says TV Guide Digital
TV Guide Digital has a message for online entertainment guides calling themselves the next TV Guide:
“There is only one TV Guide, and that’s TV Guide,” says Christy Tanner, the executive vice president and general manager of TV Guide Digital.
Tanner reached out to VentureBeat after we published the story “Fav.Tv ain’t your grandmother’s TV Guide.” We received pitches from about a dozen other companies saying they’re the next TV guide, as well. Tanner … Continue Reading
Sony’s PlayStation Networks suffers (another) outage
Update: Sony said around 1:45 pm PST that the service was back up.
The Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) suffered an outage today and the online gaming service, which had more than 77 million registered users earlier this year, still isn’t working.
After Sony’s big PSN outage in April, it’s easy to assume the worst about a little downtime with the network. The six-week outage earlier this year came after hackers found a flaw in the … Continue Reading
Spotify is singing success: 2M paying subscribers
Streaming music service Spotify now has more than 2 million paying subscribers in eight countries, according to a new report today.
Spotify saw a huge boost in premium subscribers after its U.S. launch in July. The company’s premium service is a paid, advertisement-free version of its streaming music service that lets people share playlists.
The startup has added about 400,000 new paying subscribers since the launch, according to comments made by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek … Continue Reading
Your users have multiple online personas — can they all log in to your site?
Patrick Salyer is CEO of Gigya, which makes sites social through plugins like Social Login, Comments, Activity Feeds, Social Analytics and Game Mechanics. You can follow him on Twitter @patricksalyer.
Back in 1999, Microsoft took a first step towards creating a universal Web identity when it launched Microsoft Passport. While the product didn’t catch on in its original iteration, Passport helped bring a critical concept to life that would eventually change the internet: that identity … Continue Reading
HP CEO’s approval rating in a steep decline among employees
With rumors circulating that Hewlett-Packard’s board may fire chief executive Leo Apotheker, it is interesting to note that his approval rating is declining fast among employees.
Apotheker has a 25 percent approval rating so far for the month of September, according to jobs and career community site Glassdoor. Overall, nearly 3,000 HP employees have left reviews and ratings on Glassdoor. For the overall length of his time at HP, Apotheker has an average 58 percent … Continue Reading
Need therapy? Get it cheap and online at PrettyPaddedRoom
Everybody needs to vent sometimes. Most of us occasionally need feedback from trained professionals, too.
If you need an inexpensive and insanely (pun intended) convenient option for therapy, look no further than PrettyPaddedRoom.
PPR is an online space for you to safely and securely vent your stresses, frustration, anxiety and depression, either into an online journal, face-to-face with a therapist over video chat, or both.
“There’s still a stigma attached to therapy, and I think … Continue Reading
Twitter starts running political ads for 2012 campaigns
Starting today, politicians of all stripes are able to buy advertisements on Twitter. Politically flavored Promoted Tweets will be designated by a purple icon in the bottom left corner of the tweet.
“We’re piloting the program with a small group of presidential candidates and national party committees,” a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat. “These partners will be running ads in the coming week. We will expand the pilot to include other candidates and committees as we … Continue Reading
ImagineK12 hatches its first class of education tech startups
Last week the first cohort of the ImagineK12 incubator demoed at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference with high hopes and soaring self-predictive expectations to transform, disrupt and revolutionize K-12 education with the help of internet and mobile technology.
It’s quite a goal! But whereas innovative technology has shown its ability to disrupt the publishing, music and newspaper industries, it’s probably useful to first consider where technology is capable of accomplishing revolution in the K-12 classroom.
Technology … Continue Reading
Microsoft: Mango update coming to all Windows Phones within two weeks
Windows Phone 7 users won’t have to wait much longer for the platform’s major Mango update, as Microsoft announced today it will start rolling it out “in the next week or two.”
Mango, also known as the Windows Phone 7.5 update, will contain more than 500 new features, most of which will serve to make Windows Phone even more competitive against Android and the iPhone.
Microsoft’s Eric Hautala, general manager of Windows Phone’s Customer Experience … Continue Reading
Independa snags $1.6 million to help seniors live independently
Independa‘s service allows family and other caregivers to monitor the well-being of their elderly relatives, and gives the elderly easy access services they need. The company just closed a $1.6 million round of funding from private investors and Southern California venture capital firms Miramar Venture Partners and City Hill Ventures.
At the core of Independa’s system is a customized Android tablet called Angela. Angela gives one-touch access to email, Facebook, video chat and other services, … Continue Reading
Shhh… stealthy Dashlane raises $5 million to solve “a really big problem”
What do you do after the company you founded sells for almost $7 billion?
Raise another $5 million to start a new company that does something. It almost doesn’t matter what. With a track record like that, you can write your own ticket.
The founders of stealthy startup Dashlane won’t say what they do, but they just raised $5 million to do whatever it is they are doing.
That’s a pretty darn clever PR tactic.… Continue Reading
JustFabulous gets new president Kimora Lee Simmons and a blingin’ $33M
JustFabulous, an online style of the month club, announced a $33 million first round of funding from Matrix Partners today and the addition of fashion mogul and celebrity Kimora Lee Simmons (pictured right) as the company’s new president and creative director.
Amongst all the niche deals websites out there, JustFabulous attempts to make its user experience closer to that of a book club. The site targets women and offers a variety of handbags, shoes, denim … Continue Reading
Diablo 3 beta is short, sweet and a sign of great things to come (hands on)
The beta for Blizzard Entertainment’s next potential hit, Diablo 3, finally landed yesterday. We got a chance to blitz through the beta with each of the character classes and try out just about everything available, and it looks like Blizzard Entertainment has hit all the right buttons.
Diablo 2, the last game in the series, was immensely popular when it came out more than a decade ago in 2000. Blizzard Entertainment only released one expansion … Continue Reading
DataStax lands $11 million to further the “NoSQL” data store revolution
DataStax, which sells products built on top of the open source “NoSQL” data store Apache Cassandra, just announced a $11 million investment from Crosslink Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.The company also announced a new enterprise product which will be available in Q4, 2011.
NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, CouchDB and Cassandra have a number of advantages over traditional relational databases of the type proved by Oracle and Microsoft. Instead of rigid schemas, NoSQL databases have … Continue Reading
How Huddle ripped its name back from Google+ (exclusive)
Google recently rebranded a number of the features on its social networking site, Google+. One of those features was Huddles, the site’s group messaging feature, that is now known as Messaging.
That change was apparently always in the works because Huddle, a collaboration startup based in the United Kingdom, held global trademarks to the name “Huddle.” It’s one of the rare cases where a smaller company has been able to fend off a supergiant with … Continue Reading
Facebook is about to feature-creep itself into a usage U-turn
People use Facebook a lot. They use it to share photos. They use it to invite people to events. They use it as an address book and messaging system. They use it as a games platform. The growth has been so staggering that Facebook is by far the most popular website and can’t even fill its existing ad display inventory.
When a company has achieved complete market domination, it usually hones in on its core … Continue Reading
With $100k bonus funding, TechStars startups get Christmas in September
Startup incubator TechStars announced today it has raised a new $24 million fund, providing an additional $100,000 for each of the companies under its wing.
“This additional funding will allow TechStars companies to stay focused on making progress during the three-month program instead of spending that valuable time on early fundraising in order to make ends meet,” says TechStars founder and CEO, David Cohen (pictured). “It’s also enough funding to entice a broader spectrum of … Continue Reading
