VentureBeat

KnowMore tries to find the good stuff from your Twitter, Facebook feeds

New York-based Knowmore is taking a stab at the filter failure problem posed by the overwhelming amount of information flowing through social networks. It’s building a dashboard that surfaces the most widely shared content from the people that you actually follow or are friends with.

When you log on to the site, you can see the 25 most active pieces of content from your social network from the last hour or day, factoring in shares... Continue Reading

EC roundup: Clunkers, mothers-in-law and educational gaps

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner.

Ask the attorney: The M&A risk (Part one) – If your startup has grown to the point where it’s thinking about acquiring another company, there are a number of legal issues that can turn into significant stumbling blocks. Attorney Scott Edward Walker runs them down in this first of a two-part series.

2010 VC outlook: No cash for clunkers – Last year the watchword among the investing world... Continue Reading

SkimLinks’ Alicia Navarro on helping publishers make money (video)

SkimLinks is a startup that automates the process of creating affiliate links, allowing a publisher to link to a product on a site like Amazon and receive a commission from any resulting sales. It’s facing increased competition from a Google Ventures-backed startup called VigLink, but SkimLinks has been pushing forward too, with new products and plans to expand its presence in the United States.

The company is based in London, so the South by Southwest... Continue Reading

MySQL’s Marten Mickos becomes CEO of hybrid cloud startup Eucalyptus Systems

Updated

Marten Mickos, former chief executive of open source database company MySQL, is moving to cloud computing startup Eucalyptus Systems, where he will serve as CEO.

Mickos built MySQL into what seemed like one of the open source world’s biggest successes, with a $1 billion acquisition by Sun Microsystems in 2008. But he left Sun last year, saying he was unhappy with the company’s bureaucracy. He then joined Benchmark Capital, which backed both MySQL and... Continue Reading

Los Angeles airports get serious about slashing emissions

When it comes to calculating your personal carbon output, nothing expands your footprint like frequent air travel. Planes emit tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every day. To at least partially compensate, three Los Angeles airports have committed to slashing their emissions on the ground.

The news is indicative of how many major companies taking their emissions more seriously in anticipation of tough new EPA regulations that will make stringent monitoring and data... Continue Reading

DEMO: Here are the presenting companies

DEMO, the technology launchpad conference co-produced by VentureBeat, kicks off next week in Palm Springs. Companies will be launching new products in five key areas: Mobile, social media, consumer, cloud, and enterprise.

My boss, VentureBeat Editor Matt Marshall, is about to head down to Palm Springs. For the past two conferences, Matt shared the stage with longtime DEMO executive producer Chris Shipley, but this is his first time leading the conference solo — keeping things... Continue Reading

Mobile analytics firm Motally hires Nielsen exec as CEO

John Forese — pronounced for EE see — has taken over as CEO of mobile analytics firm Motally, whose monthly reports VentureBeat usually writes about. Forese was senior vice president of product management for Nielsen, a position he landed after serving as an SVP at mobile analytics firm Telephia, which Nielsen acquired in 2007.

Motally also recently added former Googler Doug Garland, a vice president of product development for the search company, to Motally’s board... Continue Reading

DEMO: Massive disruption starts Monday

We’ve got a very impressive set of companies launching at DEMO this spring — they’re better than I’ve ever seen in past years.

I’m more excited than ever about the trends of innovation we are seeing in Silicon Valley and beyond right now. And this conference — just next week in Palm Springs — is going to highlight them all in a brand new format. We’re breaking companies in key sector trends: Mobile, social media,... Continue Reading

Questions answered by your location history: Who were you with?

The increasingly popular location-based mobile game Foursquare recently announced a new addition to its service. A history function now shows who you were with in addition to where you were at a particular time. You will have a record of all the friends you were with at the Grizzly Bear concert two months ago–and the friends you didn’t invite can see that, too. The function could prove to be more than just a tool for... Continue Reading

Now you can data mine with Google queries too

Geek comic artist Randall Munroe, better known as XKCD’s creator, revealed a little-known Google Spreadsheets secret yesterday. You can plot out the estimated volume of Google search results against different queries.

How do you do it? Alex Chitu at Google Operating System says:

If you are familiar with Google Spreadsheets, try to create a sheet that lets you enter a query like “My IQ is X”, a variable name and... Continue Reading

Yoichi Wada’s Final Fantasy: 96 million and counting

Yoichi Wada is kind of greedy. His company, Square Enix, has shipped more than 96 million copies of its Final Fantasy games since 1987. But he wants people to buy more, more, more. On March 8, the Japanese company began selling Final Fantasy XIII, the latest edition in the long-running role-playing game. This title has a lot more action in it and loads of movie-like animations in between the fighting sequences. But it remains true... Continue Reading

Real-time search engine OneRiot makes it ads more mainstream

Real-time search startup OneRiot is making its content ads fit in with industry standards, as it pushes for broader distribution across the web.

It’s launching ad units today that match Interactive Advertising Bureau guidelines (see right). Before, partners had to integrate OneRiot’s raw data feed and design their own user interface for the ads, so that was a natural barrier to widespread adoption.

The company’s ads usually have links to recently published content related to certain keywords.... Continue Reading

RealGames hires execs to pivot into social gaming

RealNetworks‘ game division has hired two new executives as part of a push into social games.

The Seattle-based group said today it appointed Wilf Russell as chief technology officer and Jeffrey Revoy as vice president of social games.

The moves are part of the company’s attempt to adapt its business, which has struggled to keep pace with the changes in the game industry. RealNetworks still plans to spin off RealGames into an independent company sometime... Continue Reading

Twitter’s commercial accounts may finally land at Chirp conference next month

Commercial accounts for businesses on Twitter may finally make their debut next month at the company’s inaugural developer conference, Chirp.

Twitter’s head of product management and monetization, Anamitra Banerji, will be leading a session on commercial accounts in the afternoon at the conference. Last summer, co-founder Biz Stone told us the company was planning to launch a commercial layer over its ecosystem by year-end. They’re several months behind, but it looks like it may finally... Continue Reading

Gift card swapping startup Plastic Jungle raises $7.4M

Plastic Jungle, a site where you can sell unwanted gift cards or buy those cards at a discount, has raised $7.4 million in a second round of funding.

I actually wrote about new site with a similar idea called CardPool just a few hours ago. Both CardPool and Plastic Jungle are part of a larger category of gift card marketplaces, which also includes Swapagift. One of Plastic Jungle’s more attractive features is the ability to... Continue Reading

YouTube founder pushed for growth “through whatever tactics, however evil”

Steve Chen, co-founder of the wildly successful video sharing site YouTube, sold the site to Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion. No doubt he’s since internalized Google’s “Don’t be evil” ideology, at least as a talking point. But in January of that year, Chen’s thinking was exactly the opposite. In the text of an instant message to a YouTube product manager, he used the e-word.

Here’s the quote from a court brief filed by... Continue Reading

SXSW wrap-up: Maybe it really does suck now

San Franciscans complain that Burning Man used to be better. New Yorkers claim that everything used to be better. While it’s no surprise that some attendees of the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference this past week in Austin, Texas, deemed SXSW to be “over” compared to previous years, what’s interesting is the why. The complainers cited three major themes.

Bigger event

This year’s Interactive portion of SXSW (there are also separate multi-day events... Continue Reading

Microsoft rumored to allow external USB storage on Xbox 360s

Microsoft is preparing a software update that will allow Universal Serial Bus (USB) mass storage devices to be used with the Xbox 360, according to a report by Joystiq.

This will allow gamers to store and load saved games via external USB storage devices. Until now, users had to use Microsoft Xbox 360 hard drives or flash memory units, also from Microsoft. The change is supposed to happen with a software update this spring.... Continue Reading

Stonetrip’s 3D game engine will bring high-quality games to Android phones

French company Stonetrip announced today that it has created tools to help developers create cool 3D games and apps on Google Android phones.

The ShiVa 3D engine for Android will be released in a couple of weeks. The engine is a software platform that lets 3D games run on Android phones. It will compete with Unity Technologies, whose Unity 3D game engine is used to make a lot of games that run on the iPhone,... Continue Reading