Why Hulu Plus isn’t available on Apple TV yet

It’s only fitting that, on Halloween night, we find out the reason streaming video service Hulu Plus has yet to make its way to the Apple TV is that Apple is apparently scared of the competition.

Hulu could take business away from Apple’s TV show and movie purchases via iTunes. Apple’s $99 set-top streaming media box was also recently upgraded to permit  customers to take advantage of past purchases, which can be downloaded through Apple … Continue Reading

Smule to make beautiful music with $12M in funding

Music app maker Smule today announced a new funding round of $12 million to support future expansion plans, and to hire more employees.

Smule is the company behind the I am T-Pain autotune app, Ocarina, a very early hit on the iPhone, Glee Karaoke, and many more.

“This gives us some confidence we should put our foot on the gas,” Smule co-founder and chief executive officer Jeff Smith told VentureBeat. Smith said the money will … Continue Reading

HP technologist Phil McKinney to retire so he can advise startups

Phil McKinney, the talkative chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard’s PC division, announced today he was retiring from HP by year end.

He said in his own blog post he will spend his time promoting his new book, teaching workshops on Killer Innovation, and hopefully taking on board seats and advisory roles at startups “since I will no longer have to worry about conflict of interest or other corporate restrictions.”

While McKinney’s post was positive, his … Continue Reading

London police use cell phone tracking device to snoop on citizens (report)

London’s Metropolitan Police Force has bought a digital surveillance system used by the U.S. Secret Service and other governments to spy on its citizens’ cell phone activity, the Guardian is reporting.

The system is known as “ICT hardware,” and it comes from a Leeds-based company called Datong. In essence, the device masquerades as a mobile phone network, intercepting communications from individual’s cellular phones gather data and allowing police authorities to remotely shut off phones in … Continue Reading

Outfit7 reaches 225M downloads, moves closer to jumping out of mobile

Outfit7, creators of the “Talking Friends” mobile games, announced today it has seen 225 million downloads only 5 and a half months after announcing 100 million.

Talking Friends is a set of mobile applications catering to children. These friends come in a variety of animals and fantasy creatures that “listen” to what a child says and repeats the statement. You can make recordings, play with each character’s unique features and buy outfits.

Since the launch … Continue Reading

Urban Airship acquired SimpleGeo (confirmed)

The rumors are true: Urban Airship has acquired SimpleGeo.

Both companies focus on developer’s tools for cutting-edge mobile technologies. SimpleGeo is a platform for location-based mobile apps, and Urban Airship powers all kinds of mobile tricks, including in-app purchasing, push notifications and more.

“We are confirming that Urban Airship has acquired SimpleGeo in an all-stock deal,” a company spokesperson told us via email. The companies will now operate jointly under the Urban Airship name, and … Continue Reading

Mendix grabs $13M to fuel fast enterprise app development

Leading Platform-as-a-Service provider Mendix has raised $13 million in its first round of funding, with goals of widening the scope of its app development platform and expanding its international reach, the company announced today.

Mendix offers enterprise and mid-size customers its Mendix 3.0 platform, which helps companies plan, develop, integrate and deploy custom-made applications to run smoother. Because of the platform’s flexibility, Mendix’s apps can be deployed in the cloud, locally or through smartphones and … Continue Reading

Google Wallet is hitting the road for a 5-city tour with $10 “bribes”

Google is taking its mobile payment product, Google Wallet, on the road.

The new technology, which allows customers to swipe Wallet-enabled Android phones in front of compatible readers to make purchases, will be available for consumers to test out at retail locations scattered around five U.S. cities. Samsung and Sprint will also be participating in the events.

New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, DC will each see half-day demo events at … Continue Reading

Battlefield 3 sells 5M copies in first week

Battlefield 3, the modern combat game from Electronic Arts, sold more than 5 million units in its first week, the company has announced. At retail, the game has already generated more than $300 million in estimated revenue.

EA said the numbers are based on its own internal estimates and mean that the title is the fastest-selling in EA history. That’s a good start for EA’s battle against Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, … Continue Reading

SolidFire raises $25M to boost cloud provider agility and performance

SolidFire, a solid-state storage provider for cloud services, has raised a new $25 million round of funding to help improve performance and reliability for emerging cloud providers, the company revealed Monday.

SolidFire sells powerful solid-state hard drives to cloud service providers, which in turn boost performance and reliability of said cloud services. Along with the hardware, SolidFire gives cloud providers tools that can help automate how they use storage systems, which creates a higher degree … Continue Reading

Domo arigato, Google: zooming in on Roboto, the new Android typeface

In the months to come, you will start associating the Android mobile operating system with beautiful design, if Matias Duarte, the Chilean-American designer who currently serves as Google’s director of Android user experience, has anything to say about it.

Google’s latest version of the Android OS (called Ice Cream Sandwich), which rolled out earlier this month, represents a drastic new focus on the visual. And a big part of that new aesthetic is Roboto, its … Continue Reading

Are you ready for Kinect-like gesture-controlled phones?

South Korea’s Pantech plans to add gesture-recognition functions to its mobile phones.

The maker of Android and messaging phones plans to use Kinect-like gesture technology from Israel’s eyeSight Mobile Technologies. Pantech plans to include the technology in its Vega LTE series of phones due to hit the market in November.

The folks at eyeSight say that touch input is impractical at times, like when driving or wearing gloves. The gestures can answer calls or play … Continue Reading

HP is selling ultra cheap TouchPads again (but there’s a catch)

Hewlett-Packard is offering its previously discontinued tablet computer, the TouchPad, for the low price of $149.

The catch is that you only get that price when you purchase a new PC from Best Buy, according to the retail store’s website.

HP first released the TouchPad at a $499 price point in July to dismal sales, which prompted the company to reduce the price by $100 the following week to spur sales. Eventually, HP decided to … Continue Reading

Tianji kickstarts professional social networking in China

The Internet is different in China, says Derek Ling, founder of Tianji, the country’s largest business social network.

Internet use is driven largely by young people in search of entertainment content, and the concept of doing business with strangers is completely foreign to the culture, so the startup had some real hurdles to cross. However, with 8 million users, Tianji, which means “worldly connection” in Mandarin, is seeing the idea catch on with the Internet’s … Continue Reading

PicPlz adds editing to its photo sharing apps, powered by Aviary

Snap. Edit. Share.

Now you’ll be able to edit pictures on PicPlz’s popular photo sharing apps, thanks to mobile photo editing technology from Aviary.

“It was a logical fit” to include Aviary’s editing tools, PicPlz CTO Jeff Argast told VentureBeat in an interview earlier today. PicPlz previously considered implementing some editing tools of its own, but Argast says it wouldn’t have been as fully featured as Aviary’s offering. “Aviary provided the full package,” he said.… Continue Reading

ABS Capital Partners raises new $500M fund

Investment firm ABS Capital Partners has raised a new $500 million fund to invest in companies that are at a key stage of expansion, the firm announced today.

ABS specializes in four areas of investment growth: business/education services, health care, media and technology. The new fund, which is the firm’s seventh, brings ABS’ total to $2.5 billion raised. The firm’s previous fund, closed in 2009, was $420 million.

The firm said limited partners of the … Continue Reading

The new 500 Startups class is the most international yet, and they’re zombies!

 500 Startups, the accelerator founded by angel investor Dave McClure, today announced its new class of 34 companies, Batch 002, its largest, and most international cohort to date. The group includes eight female founders, and 15 of the companies are from countries other than the U.S., with teams joining from Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Estonia, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal.

The companies are listed below, along with a brief description of what the founders … Continue Reading

With Google TV channels on YouTube, it’s time to chuck cable

Google’s announcement Friday of its plan to bring a hundred channels of new Hollywood-produced content to the Web  may well be a watershed moment for television.

Here’s why: It’s one more big step toward weaning me from the rip-off that is cable TV.

Cable television, known mainly as Comcast in my neighborhood of San Francisco, is charging way too much — about $65 a month for the most basic package.

And now Google, through its … Continue Reading

AT&T’s first two 4G LTE phones arrive Nov. 6

AT&T’s first two phones equipped with 4G LTE — the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket and HTC Vivid — will be available Nov. 6, the company announced. The move will help AT&T better compete with Verizon when it comes to 4G.

In the race to build out 4G LTE, AT&T has been painfully slow compared to Verizon, which is why the company is just now releasing LTE-capable phones. By Nov. 6, AT&T’s 4G LTE will … Continue Reading