Evri brings topic-based news discovery to the iPad

iPad users have yet another news magazine app option with the launch of Evri’s new app on the tablet today, but Evri hopes to stand out from the pack thanks to its unique topic discovery engine.

Evri says its iPad app is the first to offer topic-based news discovery, while competitors like Pulse and Flipboard focus more on collecting stories from specific news sources or your social networks. Evri originally launched at the DEMO conference … Continue Reading

Quantance raises $11M to create efficient power supply chips for mobile phones

Quantance has raised $11 million to create faster, more efficient power supply chips for 4G mobile phones.

The chips, which took more than six years to develop, could play a huge role in making smartphones more powerful and have longer battery lives.

“Most of these new phones operate at very high speeds and so they need a power supply that operates at high speeds also,” said Vikas Vinayak, chief executive of Quantance, in an interview. … Continue Reading

Beating out HBO, Netflix cuts streaming movie deal with DreamWorks

DreamWorks Animation, the animated movie powerhouse that created hits like Madagascar and Shrek, has cut a deal to provide streaming films and TV specials via Netflix.

In scoring the deal, Netflix managed to beat out HBO, marking the first time Netflix’s web streaming has beat out a major pay-TV producer in securing a distribution deal with a major film maker.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, told the New York Times that consumers no … Continue Reading

Facebook tracks what you do online, even when you’re logged out

Updated 10pm Pacific with comments from Facebook.

Entrepreneur and hacker Nik Cubrilovic reports that Facebook can track the web pages you visit even when you are logged out of Facebook.

According to Cubrilovic’s tests, Facebook merely alters its tracking cookies when you log out, rather than deleting them. Your account information and other unique identifiable tokens are still present in these cookies, which means that any time you visit a web page with a Facebook … Continue Reading

Google about to make Google Docs into a virtual hard drive called Google Drive

Google appears to be close to rebranding its online document service, Google Docs, as a virtual hard drive in the cloud.

A blurry screenshot (shown above) snapped by blogger and social media consultant Johannes Wigand appears to show a slightly modified version of Google Docs, called Drive. The screen appeared for a few seconds in “an event powered by Google,” Wigand reports.

The screenshot looks almost identical to the “new look” for Google Docs that’s … Continue Reading

Feds close huge chip counterfeiting case (exclusive)

VisionTech Components sold a large amount of semiconductor chips to more than 1,100 customers from its office in Clearwater, Fla. Unfortunately, federal prosecutors allege, the chips were counterfeits. In this case, the perpetrators were brought to justice when authorities uncovered the $16 million counterfeiting operation. A sentencing in the case will happen at the end of this month.

The case highlights the growing problem of chip counterfeiting, which can put dangerously flawed electronic components in … Continue Reading

Star Wars: The Old Republic release date is December 20 this year

Game publisher Electronic Arts today announced that Star Wars: The Old Republic, one of the company’s most anticipated online games, will come out in December this year.

The Old Republic is Electronic Arts’ Hail Mary pass in online games and aims to rip users away from rival online games, such as Blizzard Entertainment’s seven-year-old game colossus World of WarCraft. If Electronic Arts succeeds, it will have persistent revenues coming in from subscription fees charged to … Continue Reading

Week in review: Change comes to Facebook — and Silicon Valley

There was a lot going on in the tech world this week. On Thursday Facebook held its annual f8 conference. If you missed the news, read Tom Cheredar’s summary: 7 drastic Facebook changes you will probably hate. Or listen to executive editor Dylan Tweney’s radio appearance on the California Report, in which he discusses Facebook’s news.

Netflix split into two companies, one for DVDs called Qwikster, and one for streaming video called Netflix. (Nobody liked … Continue Reading

Google News introduces new tool to highlight quality articles

Google News introduced a new metadata tag to help news publications highlight their original, quality content. The announcement, made today at the Online News Associate conference in Boston, is the latest attempt by Google News to help readers find relevant articles amid the din of the 24-hour online news cycle.

The Google News team is asking publications to use a new Standout tag in their HTML to mark “exceptional original reporting, deep investigative work, scoops … Continue Reading

How online freelancing is changing the bootstrap ethos

Fire extinguisher inspector David Kneer bought an iPad so he could generate paperless inspections in the field. Then he hit a snag: The PDF inspection reports were unnecessarily lengthy and Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, prevented him from deleting individual PDF pages on his iPad. Kneer decided to make an app to solve his problem, which he did with help from a freelancer named Maverick26.

“Maverick26 helped me through the process,” says Kneer. “Maverick26 helped … Continue Reading

Google+ iPhone app gets Hangouts video chat and more

As promised, Google has updated its Google+ iPhone app with a slew of new mobile features, most notably the ability to participate in Hangouts group video chat.

Google announced the new features earlier this week, when it unveiled an updated version of its Google+ Android app. And with the iPhone app, Hangouts has instantly become the best way to perform group video chats across the desktop and mobile devices. (Add another notch to Hangouts’ collaboration … Continue Reading

Comcast’s new AnyPlay service streams live TV to your iPad

Cable TV and internet service provider Comcast is working on a new streaming video service for Apple’s iPad, reports MacRumors.

The service, called AnyPlay, will compete with similar offerings from rival companies Cablevision and Time Warner. Presumably, AnyPlay is a separate service that doesn’t replace Comcast’s Xfinity TV streaming service.

AnyPlay lets Comcast subscribers view live TV from an iPad, provided that the device is connected to a Motorola wifi router supplied by the company. … Continue Reading

Paul Carr’s next move? A new startup backed by former TechCrunch boss Michael Arrington

Former TechCrunch staff member Paul Carr announced today on his blog that he was starting a new company based in Las Vegas, Nevada with investments from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund.

Carr resigned from TechCrunch last week after a conflict with the publication’s parent company AOL over the firing of Arrington. At the time, Carr said he didn’t have any specific plans for the future, but the move to start a company … Continue Reading

Get paid for your spare parking spots with Parking Panda

If you’ve ever been to a large sporting event, you’ve likely run across intrepid homeowners who open up their yards and spare parking spots to earn some extra cash. Parking Panda has taken that idea to the next level by creating a community marketplace for spare parking spots.

Think of it like Airbnb, the service that lets you rent out spare rooms to travelers in your home, for parking.

Parking Panda is a win-win for … Continue Reading

Kindle Tablets coming? Amazon sets press event for Sept. 28

Online retail giant Amazon could announce its own tablet at a press conference next week, according to This Is My Next, which received an invite to the event today.

Amazon has long been rumored to create a tablet computer as a follow-up to its Kindle e-reader device that could compete against Apple’s iPad and various Android tablets.

As we reported earlier this month, Amazon’s Kindle Tablet will likely retail for $250 and come with a … Continue Reading

The DeanBeat: The video game industry’s grudge matches

EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to VentureBeat’s new newsletters. Each week, I’m writing a column on an aspect of gaming world that GamesBeat covers. My colleague Dylan Tweney is writing a column on technology and business called Dylan’s Desk. Together, these columns will be available to newsletter subscribers a whole day before they appear here on the website.

The blockbuster video game season has begun, and so has the trash talk. Gamers love to set up “us … Continue Reading

Mintigo reads your customer code to find leads, gets $9M from Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital has turned its eyes toward lead generation in its latest investment, Mintigo, a company focused on streamlining the customer acquisition process. The second round of funding was announced today and was capped off at $9 million.

Mintigo describes finding sales leads not as a needle in a hay stack, but rather a needle in a needle stack. There are so many potential customers out there and many of them seem as worthy of … Continue Reading

Blockbuster’s new streaming service is lame, only for Dish subscribers

We thought Dish Network would launch a Blockbuster-branded Netflix competitor, but instead it used a somewhat hyped event Friday to launch Blockbuster streaming movies and DVD-by-mail to just Dish subscribers.

Dish could have used this opportunity to introduce its own streaming service to compete with Netflix, which has had troubles in the last few months. Netflix has angered its customers by instituting a 60 percent price hike on combined streaming and physical DVD rental plans … Continue Reading