Yahoo considers selling Asian assets, continues fickle CEO search

Yahoo’s board is considering selling its holdings of Alibaba Group and its Japanese affiliate back to the majority owners, a move that would score the company around $17 billion as it tries to find solid footing in troublesome year.

Yahoo has been shaky in 2011 with falling revenues and uncertainty after the firing of CEO Carol Bartz. A cash infusion and and restructuring of assets might be just the thing to help the company find … Continue Reading

GMZ Energy turns heat into electricity, secures $14M in funding

Energy company GMZ Energy has received $14 million in its third round of funding, the company announced Wednesday. Mitsui Venture led the series C round, which included I2BF Global Ventures, Energy Technology Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and BP Alternative Energy.

GMZ Energy specializes in renewable and economically viable energy. “We have a solid state material that lets you generate electricity from heat. There are huge amounts of waste heat, and if that can … Continue Reading

Study: Modern Warfare 2 most addictive console video game

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has been named the most addictive console title by gamers in a new study by video game price comparison and marketplace website Playr2.

About 1,231 British gamers took part in the study designed to discover more about their playing habits. Just under two thirds of those surveyed claimed to feel “addicted” to playing video games. When asked to elaborate on how video games fit into their everyday life, 42 … Continue Reading

Star Wars: The Old Republic attracts crowds, server queues require Jedi patience

Players seem to enjoy Star Wars: The Old Republic – once they can get on a server, that is. Yesterday the new massively multiplayer online game by Electronic Arts finally launched after a one-week early access period for pre-order customers. The influx of new Jedis, Bounty Hunters and Sith Lords resulted in waiting times between a few minutes and more than an hour on about half of the 130 North American game servers. Players enter … Continue Reading

Headset maker Jawbone raises another $40M, bringing its total to $210M raised

Jawbone, the maker of Bluetooth headsets for cell phones and other cool hardware, announced today that it has raised $40 million.

That amount is one of the biggest raised by a mobile hardware company, but San Francisco-based Jawbone has always been ambitious. As we noted when the company raised its $49 million round earlier this year, you could say that “over-engineering” a headset has gotten Jawbone pretty far.

The company makes wireless Bluetooth headsets for … Continue Reading

Google Voice for iOS adds nifty new features, but it’s buggy (updated)

Google has released a feature-rich update to its popular Google Voice app for iOS, but unfortunately it also comes with numerous bugs.

The application catches-up the iOS app to where the Google Voice Android app was a month ago. The iOS app adds welcome features like group texting, multi-line text entry, one-touch copy and paste in the dialer and integration with Sprint phones. The Sprint integration is especially good because it lets the company’s new … Continue Reading

Are you a student, with a sexy enterprise company? We want to hear from you

Here are more details on VentureBeat’s special event in SF on January 5 focused on innovation in the enterprise. Why enterprise? Well, it’s one of the sexier areas for entrepreneurs right now.

Sure, the consumer companies — Facebook, Zynga, Twitter — led the revolution. But now the disruptive social media and cloud computing trends are hitting the enterprise — and there’s a lot of action there.

As mentioned, the first part of the event in … Continue Reading

Microsoft pulls out of 2013 Consumer Electronics Show

Microsoft said today that this year will be the last for chief executive Steve Ballmer to deliver the opening keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show.

This is a big milestone in the history of the big tech show, where Microsoft has been a part of the experience for attendees for a very long time. It is a changing of the guard in the tech industry.

Jason Oxman, senior vice president at the Consumer Electronics Association, … Continue Reading

Kindle iOS app gets a significant update: refreshed interface, cloud support & more

With all the buzz surrounding Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet this holiday season, it’s easy to forget that the company also supports Kindle applications on Apple devices.

Today, Amazon rolled out an update to its Kindle iOS app that brings lots of useful new of features that were previously requested by Kindle customers.

Perhaps the biggest addition included in the update is a new magazine-style view for the iPad, which optimizes content for a larger … Continue Reading

Ticketmaster looks inward to mine for gold, hires data science expert (exclusive)

The science of selling tickets may appear simple, but ticketing giant Ticketmaster is sitting on a treasure trove of unexplored transaction data, and even social data, it can use to better understand its customers and sell more tickets. To lead the expedition, the company has hired data guru John Carnahan.

Carnahan, a veteran of the online advertising industry, most recently CTO with the Rubicon Project and the former CTO of Fox Audience Network, brings 13 … Continue Reading

Rainn Wilson calls on Silicon Valley to give back this holiday season (video)

There are a few ways to give back to your community. Have a bake sale,  donate clothes to the Goodwill, or call up your good buddy Rainn Wilson and throw a party in Palo Alto for charity.

That’s exactly what Payam Zamani, chief executive officer of Reply.com, did to raise awareness for an organization close to his heart: the Mona Foundation, which is focused on improving education around the world, particularly for women.

“He’s one … Continue Reading

6waves Lolapps’ first mobile game Yeti Town shoots to the top of the charts

Just in time for Winter, a Yeti game has sprung to the top of Apple’s most downloaded iOS games chart. 6waves Lolapps published its first iOS game, Yeti Town, just last night. The title is the first of dozens that the San Francisco company plans to launching in the coming year.

The Yeti Town game is a puzzle title for the iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone created by Escalation Studios in Texas. It’s a variant … Continue Reading

Search underdog Blekko gets serious, makes major improvements (exclusive)

With 1.5 million unique users and 70 to 80 million queries per month, search upstart Blekko isn’t big enough to sit at the adult search table with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. But don’t tell that to Blekko.

Fed up with the prevalence of spam in search results, Blekko launched in late October 2010 as a search engine with an opinion. It takes a stance on good and bad sites and attempts to deliver only high … Continue Reading

Cyber criminals attack U.S. Chamber of Commerce, China footing the blame

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently uncovered an attack on its systems, and fingers are pointing toward China.

The Chamber represents over three million US businesses, 96 percent of which are small businesses with 100 employees or less. The agency, situated in Washington D.C., lobbies for free enterprise, competition between US companies and entrepreneurship. Some of its bigger members include Adobe, Microsoft, Visa, and Google.

According to the Wall Street Journal which first reported on … Continue Reading

Dylan’s Desk: Meltwater aims to build a billion-dollar business without venture capital

Can you build a billion-dollar business without venture capital?

Jorn Lyseggen thinks he can. He’s the founder and CEO of Meltwater Group, a major player in marketing intelligence services.

I spoke at a Meltwater event recently, and got to know a bit about the company. I was intrigued by the company’s unusual strategy and its unique sense of corporate culture, so I decided to find out more.

Meltwater got its start with Meltwater News, a … Continue Reading

Nielsen and comScore reach settlement over online measurement patents

Nielsen and comScore, two of the largest research/ratings firms, have settled a dispute over measurement patents, the companies announced today in a joint statement.

Nielsen is best known for its television program ratings, which measure the size and demographic of an audience for specific shows. More recently, the company has branched off to include online measurement of content, display advertising, social interaction and more. It faces competition from online research firm comScore. In March, Nielsen … Continue Reading

HTC testing new phones to work around Apple patent violation

After taking a major hit in court this week from an Apple patent lawsuit, HTC is already in the process of testing new devices and software that workaround the patent violations.

Two days ago, the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that HTC violated two claims of an Apple patent, which will lead to a ban on infringing HTC devices in April 2012. The ruling only effects HTC-made Android phones at this point.

HTC CEO Peter … Continue Reading

Tactus Technology raises $6M for very cool dynamic touchscreen buttons

Tactus Technology said today that it has raised $6 million to develop its next-generation touch interface components for all sorts of touch-enabled devices.

The interface enables buttons to morph out of the surface of an electronic device. The physical buttons rise from the surface on demand, as needed, and then recede back into the screen, leaving a flat, transparent surface when gone. These physical buttons help someone get oriented and then confirm the location that … Continue Reading