Klip launches an easy way to watch videos on smartphones

Watching videos on smartphones is getting more and more popular. But it isn’t necessarily getting easier and easier. That’s where Klip comes in. The mobile video startup is launching an app by the same name today that reinvents the way you watch video on a mobile device.

The app could help us deal with the flood of video coming to the web. Cisco predicts that there will be 7.1 billion mobile connected devices by 2015, … Continue Reading

Magisto raises $5.5M from Li Ka-shing to automate video editing

Cloud video editing service Magisto on Tuesday announced it has received $5.5 million in second-round funding, with the intention of automating the painstaking editing process for the masses.

“Video editing is not just challenging — for 99 percent of people, it’s a barrier,” Magisto CEO Oren Boiman told VentureBeat. “We’re the first company to make automated video editing into an easy-to-use service.”

The funding round was led by superstar Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing‘s Horizon … Continue Reading

Logitech Harmony Link lets you use your iPad as a remote control

Lots of people use their iPads as companions when they surf TV channels. But Logitech‘s Harmony Link device takes that one step further, turning the iPad or smartphone itself into a one-touch remote control for your TV.

The product being announced today is a fresh take on how to integrate a traditional TV with a touchscreen tablet that is a more natural user interface than a remote control with too many confusing buttons. As such, … Continue Reading

Myspace delays relaunch event, new design coming next month

The once popular social network Myspace has scraped plans for its summer press event to show off the revamped music-focused version of the site.

The purpose of the event was to show that the social network still had life in it yet, despite much lower traffic numbers and interest from advertisers. Myspace attracted a mere 33 million visitors to the site in August — a 44 percent decline compared to a year ago, according to … Continue Reading

Intel’s Ivy Bridge integrated graphics to support luscious 4K resolutions

It used to be that integrated graphics chipsets could barely run a simple DVD properly. But come next year, the integrated graphics in Intel’s upcoming Ivy Bridge processor will be able to power eye-bleedingly sharp 4K high-definition video at massive 4K resolutions, VR Zone reports.

In comparison, Intel’s current Sandy Bridge graphics chipset only supports a maximum resolution of 2,560 by 1600. The additional graphics horsepower in Ivy Bridge means that a mere laptop will … Continue Reading

Exclusive: TrustYou brings semantic analysis to US hospitality industry, acquires Review Analyst

You’re a US hotel and you need to know what customers think of you. Are bed bugs a bad thing? Did they like the bidet?

German Radian6 competitor TrustYou purchased Review Analyst and received a $5 million first round of funding today to help hotels make the most of their reviews.

TrustYou analyzes the thousands of hotel and restaurant reviews made available through sites like Trip Advisor and Yelp. The company focuses on sentiment analysis, … Continue Reading

PETA launching its own porn site, peta.xxx

No animals were harmed in the making of this pornographic website. In the wake of new top-level domain option .xxx’s release, animal-rights group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) announced today it is launching its own .xxx site to save the critters.

“A lot of organizations were gun shy about the triple-x domain, but when PETA saw it we thought this would be triple-extra effective,” Lindsay Rajt, director of campaigns for PETA told … Continue Reading

Identified mines Facebook professional data to beat LinkedIn

Identified launched a search engine for professionals today, in a move that makes the founders either a) crazy  b) smart or c) both. The startup will be competing with giant social network LinkedIn for the attention, and participation, of people busy at work or busy looking for work.

“There are a bunch of problems with LinkedIn,” said Brendan Wallace, co-Founder and CEO of Identified, in a VentureBeat interview (pictured on the left). “They don’t give … Continue Reading

Multimedia software maker Arcsoft raises $20M to build mobile and cloud apps

Multimedia software maker Arcsoft on Monday announced it has raised a $20 million round of funding, with the intention of creating mobile and cloud-based browser applications, and investing in core technologies.

“We want to be more aggressive in areas like imaging, video, gestures, facial-recognition and 3D,” CEO Michael Deng told VentureBeat. “Our codecs and software greatly improve many devices being used today, and we can do more.”

The $20 million in funding was led by … Continue Reading

Xbox as a set-top cable box? Microsoft in talks with Comcast and Verizon

Microsoft is committed to securing a spot in your living room. The technology giant is in talks with both Comcast and Verizon to make its Xbox 360 gaming console a set-top cable box, according to a report from Digiday that cites anonymous sources familiar with the company.

Microsoft first announced that a live TV service would be coming to the Xbox at E3 in June, but the company didn’t offer up many details. Of the … Continue Reading

Netflix’s Qwikster game rentals may have short shelf life, thanks to cloud gaming

Netflix today spun off its mail-order DVD business into a new service called Qwikster, which will include mail-order video game rentals. Given Netflix’s immense success with the movie business, you might expect the games rental business to fare just as well.

But this is not the early 2000s, and the game rental service will face stiff competition from what might be one of the biggest revolutions in gaming since the advent of digital distribution: cloud … Continue Reading

Flix Futures: Media Predict pays people to bet on Netflix growth

Media Predict is a marketplace where people get paid to place bets on which media will fly and which will flop.

As we publish this story, Media Predict is launching a real-money Netflix futures market (image below). It lets people with a Media Predict account put down real money and bet if Netflix will have more or fewer than 20 million users in the fourth quarter of 2011.

After recent pricing changes and last night’s … Continue Reading

How to change the world: advice from Facebook, the Kinect team, Elon Musk & Salman Khan

Rockets, electric cars, motion-sensing interfaces, free math education for all, and a social network that’s closing in on a billion people.

Don’t you wish you could ask the legendary innovators behind these great ideas what it really takes to change the world with technology? We got the opportunity to do just that, and here’s what we learned.

Too often in the tech world, we focus on innovation to the point of ignoring whether or not … Continue Reading

With 100M active users, Twitter adds new East Coast data centers

Twitter is adding to its network of data centers with a new East Coast location that should help the service keep pace with its over 100 million (and growing) active daily users, reports Data Center Knowledge.

In the past, Twitter has struggled to keep up with its growing user base, and in 2010 it built a data center in the Salt Lake City area to provide a long-term fix to down-time related issues. The new … Continue Reading

Ad innovation takes the stage at Y Combinator event (video)

A few lucky people got a peek at the future of online advertising recently, thanks to a Y Combinator event.

Close to 200 entrepreneurs, marketers, publishers, and venture capitalists packed Y Combinator headquarters in Mountain View on Sept. 14 for the startup incubator’s first ever Ad Innovation Conference. The two-hour event was open to the public and designed to showcase companies developing ad-related technologies.

What with Demo, TechCrunch, Intel Developer Forum and Microsoft Build last … Continue Reading

Exclusive: Tribalfish creates plugin for forum on Twitter

Tribalfish, a social network focused on real-time, interest-specific dialogues, announced a Twitter browser plugin today, allowing for long form conversations on the 140-character site.

“The whole story is that we hope to extend the billions of interactions that take place on social networks and news sites or e-mail,” Lyle Ball, chief executive of Tribalfish told VentureBeat.

Once installed, the Tribalfish plugin shows a button next to tweets saying “discuss on Tribalfish.” When you click the … Continue Reading

AT&T makes desperate bid to save T-Mobile purchase with rivals’ help

AT&T is reportedly approaching Sprint, MetroPCS, Dish Network and others to help the telecom giant save its proposed purchase of T-Mobile.

Today, Bloomberg said sources close to the matter have been involved in private talks between AT&T and the aforementioned companies as well as Leap Wireless and CenturyLink.

The sources say AT&T wants these companies to buy certain assets, including customers and wireless spectrum, in order to break the company up just enough to make … Continue Reading

Home decor flash sales site One Kings Lane raises $40M

One Kings Lane, a flash deal site that sells high-end furniture and home decor products, announced today that it has raised $40 million in its third round of funding led by Tiger Global Management.

Luxury brands dispose of excess inventory in flash sales to a defined membership, rather than trying to move it in conventional e-commerce channels like Amazon.com, eBay, or their own stores. One Kings Lane then sells those products at steep discounts — … Continue Reading

Qwikster fiasco proves Netflix still doesn’t know how to talk to customers

Poor Netflix just can’t catch a break. The company already caught hell from subscribers over its recent pricing changes, and last night it announced that it’s spinning off its DVD rental business entirely under the name Qwikster.

The response from consumers — judging from over 11,000 comments on CEO Reed Hastings’ blog post — has been overwhelmingly negative. While there are some interesting elements to Netflix’s latest plan, the company botched any chance of making … Continue Reading

Microsoft creates its own walled-garden with Windows 8 Metro apps

Microsoft will adopt a familiar Apple policy for the tablet applications on its new Windows 8 operating system.

Microsoft’s Windows 8 is the latest operating system to adopt a walled-garden approach to mobile app sales.

Windows 8, as Microsoft explained at its developer conference last week, will be an operating system for both desktops and tablets. However, the company is creating a separate sets of rules for its “Metro-style” apps — apps that are optimized … Continue Reading