With 2.5M downloads, Guidepal travel app spreads Swedish startup invasion

There was a time when the hottest Swedish import to hit American shores was the disco troupe ABBA. Today there’s a growing crop of Nordic startups hoping to make their impression felt.

Travel startup Guidepal hopes to follow in the footsteps of Swedish internet heavyweights Spotify and Skype with its mobile city guides for iPhone and Android. The young company has already announced some pretty impressive stats, with more than 2.5 million downloads since launching … Continue Reading

Michael Dell says confusion at HP has given Dell its opportunity

Michael Dell, founder and chief executive of Dell, said that the recent uncertainty at Hewlett-Packard has been good for Dell in landing new customers. HP is the world’s No. 1 PC maker, but its place in the market became uncertain when the previous CEO, Leo Apotheker, announced he would study whether to spin off the PC division. Since enterprise customers hate uncertainty, Dell said his list of new customers has been growing.

“It’s a great … Continue Reading

Job board for teen hackers & entrepreneurs is redefining the after-school job

Today, teenagers with technological twinkles in their eyes can get resources, find co-founders and even hunt down job opportunities through a new site, Teens in Tech Connect.

Teens in Tech, a network of support and events for young entrepreneurs, has just launched the Connect site, what 18-year-old founder Daniel Brusilovsky called “a social network meets resource center for young entrepreneurs” in correspondence with VentureBeat this morning.

“One thing we’ve noticed about young entrepreneurs is that … Continue Reading

Razr reborn: Motorola announces the 4G LTE Droid Razr

This ain’t yo daddy’s Razr: Motorola today introduced the Droid Razr, its powerful and thin flagship LTE 4G Android smartphone on Verizon Wireless.

An unholy union between Motorola’s former and current top phone brands, the Droid Razr aims to be a reminder of what made the original Razr so cool (Look ma! It’s thin!) while also cementing Motorola’s role as a powerhouse Android manufacturer.

And thin it is: The Droid Razr measures just 7.1 millimeters, … Continue Reading

RIM makes a bid for the mobile future with BBX, its new OS for smartphones

RIM‘s next-gen mobile operating system will be called BBX, RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis revealed today at the BlackBerry developer conference.

The new OS will appear on BlackBerry smartphones and tablets. The company said in a statement that BBX “combines the best of BlackBerry and the best of [real-time OS and middleware] QNX and is designed from the ground up to enable the powerful real-time mobile experiences that distinguish BlackBerry products and services.”

The new OS’s … Continue Reading

Zaarly employee tries to poach Craigslist advertiser

Is it fair to comb through Craigslist ads looking for people to win over to your own online marketplace?

That’s what Zaarly, an online marketplace for people to post items they need, appears to be doing.

In an email thread obtained by VentureBeat, a Zaarly employee reached out to a Craigslist seller about a possible item for sale. Upon response from the seller, the inquirer responded with what appears to be a pretty canned email … Continue Reading

OVIA to make finding jobs less painful, gets $2.5M (exclusive)

Video recruiting software company OVIA, received a $2.5 million first round of funding from DCM today, with the goal of removing the phone screening process and introducing video.

“Productivity process-wise, this is the future of recruitment,” said David Chao, co-founder and general partner of DCM, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Especially in this economy, the jobless are being dragged through terrible recruitment processes more and more. There’s the standard application, phone screen and, if you’re … Continue Reading

Why Facebook, Yahoo & others are celebrating LGBT Spirit Day

GLAAD (that’s the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) is promoting Spirit Day this Thursday, Oct. 20, and encouraging folks to wear purple and display that color on their online profiles. In response, Facebook and other companies are “going purple” for the day.

Diversity in tech is never more contentious than when sexual preference is brought into the mix. So why would major tech companies like Facebook, AT&T, Yahoo, HP and actively celebrate LGBT diversity?… Continue Reading

iOS 5 social integration spurs three times as many Twitter signups

Twitter’s sign ups have soared since the launch of Apple’s iOS 5 operating system last week, with three times as many people now opting into the social network, the company said last night at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

On top of that, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed that the social network is now serving 250 million tweets per day, an impressive statistic. The company has seen major growth in active users, with … Continue Reading

Yahoo CTO steps down, gets back into entrepreneurship

Yahoo CTO Raymie Stata has stepped down from his role as the leader and shaper of the company’s technology strategy.

The company’s new technology chief is Ash Munshi

Stata will remain an Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR) at Yahoo, a title usually reserved for serial entrepreneurs advising multiple startups at VC firms or incubators.

Stata served in the CTO role for a year and five months; he has been at the company since 2004 and has … Continue Reading

Livefyre secures $4.5M round to become the ultimate commenting tool

Commenting platform Livefyre has raised a new $4.5 million round of funding, the company announced today.

Livefyre is a social commenting tool for publishers that turns commenting into a live conversation. It also adds support for push notifications and integration with many social networks. Over 14,000 websites are using Livefyre, including The Sun, Sugar Media, The Next Web and MIT Tech Review.

The company said it plans to use the new funding to hire additional … Continue Reading

Waze raises $30M for its crowdsourced driving app, hits 7M users

There’s no stopping Waze, the crowdsourced app that offers free GPS navigation. The company announced today that it has raised another $30 million in growth funding, led by Horizon Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Waze also confirmed that it has topped over 7 million users, thanks to its aggressive global expansion.

The news comes on the heels of Waze’s recently launched 3.0 version, which boasts a revamped design, search integration, and more. The … Continue Reading

Dropbox closes a jaw-dropping $250M round

Cloud storage startup Dropbox has secured a new $250 million dollar round of funding, the company announced today.

Dropbox’s service lets people store their documents, photos, video and other files in a personal folder. The files are easy to share and accessible no matter your location. The company has over 45 million users in 175 countries that save upwards of a billion files every three days. The service is on track to triple its user … Continue Reading

From Napster to Spotify, Sean Parker is planning for “the next music industry”

Sean Parker began his tour in the Internet spotlight by blowing up the music industry, and it apparently became sort of a hobby for the serial entrepreneur.

He co-founded Napster in 1999; a decade and change later, he’s taking on the industry from a new angle as an investor in and board member at Spotify.

Ever since music changed from a physical medium to a digital medium, Parker has been disrupting the space and trying … Continue Reading

Moontoast’s social commerce platform turns fans into revenue

For musicians, celebrities and other entities with a strong following on social networks, it’s difficult to determine the value of a million Facebook fans, or two million Twitter followers.

With that in mind, Nashville-based startup Moontoast set out to create a commerce platform that would leverage the vast reserve of social media fans. It’s premiere product, the Moontoast Distributed Store, can be embedded and shared on a plethora of different affiliate websites, social news feeds … Continue Reading

A tech-savvy U.S. senator comes to Silicon Valley

Hopefully, the days are long gone when a U.S. Senator could get away with saying the internet “is a series of tubes.” Ron Wyden, the Democratic U.S. Senator from Oregon, tried to put that image behind him as he became the first politician to talk on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Monday.

John Heileman, a writer for New York Magazine and author of the bestselling book Game Change on the … Continue Reading

iPhone 4S review: There’s something about Siri

The iPhone 4S is a quietly revolutionary mobile device, even though it looks exactly the same as last year’s iPhone 4. The big pull this time around isn’t the hardware — though the faster processor and revamped camera are certainly welcome — it’s the integrated virtual assistant Siri.

More than a smarter version of the iPhone’s previous voice command feature, Siri represents the first step towards widespread adoption of consumer artificial intelligence (AI). It’s the … Continue Reading

Lookout Mobile Security finally launches iPhone security app

After two years of development, Lookout Mobile Security is launching a security app to protect iPhones. The app doesn’t protect against malware, since Apple has handled that task pretty well. But it does protect users from other bad things that can happen to their iPhones.

For instance, the app warns users when they are using unprotected WiFi wireless networks and instructs them not to send their usernames and passwords over the network while they’re on … Continue Reading

Pepsi and The X Factor embrace gamification with The Pepsi Sound Off

Gamification, or the use of game-like mechanics to make non-game apps more fun, is hitting the big time. Pepsi is announcing today it has created a gamified social network around the hit TV show The X Factor, which is Simon Cowell’s new American Idol-style talent show.

In the past three weeks, Pepsi created two social media platforms to get people more excited about the show, whose winner will appear in a Pepsi spot to be … Continue Reading