VentureBeat

Amidio launches Touch DJ with ‘visual mixing’

Mobile music app maker Amidio launched its Touch DJ application for the iPhone today, allowing users to spin and mix music right on their handsets. Since a demo of the app appeared on YouTube on Nov. 17, it has received 35,000 hits. People are excited worldwide.

One of the major hurdles standing in the way of a mobile DJ in the past was that the iPhone and iPod Touch only have one stereo output — so… Continue Reading

Youtego launches more personal approach to social networking

Startup Youtego is bringing a new experience to social networking. It’s all about using images to define yourself, your life, and your interests, and in the little while that I’ve been playing with my account, I’m already having more fun than Facebook ever provided.

Youtego’s main screen is a layout of tiled categories. It starts you off with six: “I love”, “I know”, “I can”, “My work”, “My education” and finally “I”. In each category you… Continue Reading

EVO Media Group raises $1.5M to help you build a moneymaking website

EVO Media Group, which runs the DevHub.com service, says it’s making headway in the website-building market by adding a crucial ingredient — money. And the Seattle startup just raised $1.5 million in new funding itself.

Like Weebly, Yola, and others, DevHub makes it easy to build a web site by just dragging and dropping the elements into place. But the people who use those services tend to be individuals who want personal web sites, or small… Continue Reading

Smart Grid handouts keep rolling: DOE earmarks $620M for demo projects

Less than a month after it handed out $3.4 billion in stimulus grants to utilities working toward a cleaner, more efficient electrical grid, the U.S. Department of Energysays it is doling out another $620 million to projects working on demonstration-scale Smart Grid technologies. Today, it named 32 recipients working on every aspect of the grid, including smart meters, transmission equipment, storage devices and energy monitoring systems.

The idea is to support demonstration projects that have the… Continue Reading

Sony’s MAG can stage massive online combat (with video and beta codes)

Sony’s MAG is an experiment in group psychology. In this online game, 256 players can engage in first-person combat in the same online session. The question is whether the games will be organized duels between armies, or a crazy free-for-all where it’s every soldier for himself or herself.

I played the beta of MAG (which originally mean Massive Action Game), a multiplayer-only online game debuting on the PlayStation 3 early next year. If the game works… Continue Reading

Telegent files for IPO as public market thaws even more

Chip design firm Telegent has filed for a $250 million public offering, capping off an exciting few days of IPO action. Last week, network security provider Fortinet sold 12.5 million shares of common stock for $12.50, raising just over $156.2 million. And web marketer QuinStreet filed for its own $250 million IPO.

Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Telegent provides designs for semiconductors that allow people to watch live television broadcasts on their computers and phones. It sells… Continue Reading

Toys R Us finds hordes of fans on Facebook

Facebook announced today that Toys R Us has become the fastest growing brand on Facebook, growing between 40,000 to 95,000 fans per day over the past week. Toys R Us recently released a new catalog on their Facebook Fan Page, called the “Big Book” and currently has 396,301 fans.

Unsure of the exact reason for the tremendous growth, Facebook “assumes it’s the result of an ad campaign,” juxtaposed with a number of features on the company’s… Continue Reading

Google Calendar testing an easy event scheduler

Updated

A number of companies offer better ways to schedule meetings than the standard back-and-forth over email — Huddle, TimeBridge, and Presdo are a few that come to mind. Now Google is experimenting with a feature that tackles the same problem, though a bit less ambitiously.

Here’s how it works: When you create an event in Google Calendar, you can add a list of the guests that you’d like to invite. Then, if you have access to… Continue Reading

Facebook establishes dual-class stock structure

Facebook is establishing a dual-class stock structure, a move that could help pave the way to an initial public offering in the future. The company gave no time-line for such an offering and instead said it will help give current shareholders more power to guide the long-term vision of the company.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is converting all current shareholders to Class B stock, which carries ten times the voting power of Class… Continue Reading

Facebook co-founder’s Asana raises $9M from Benchmark, Andreessen-Horowitz

Asana, the productivity management startup from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and lead engineer Justin Rosenstein, has raked in $9 million from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz.

Asana is probably one of the more anticipated startups in Silicon Valley right now. Moskovitz, Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes founded Facebook together during college at Harvard University. Rosenstein was another early Facebook employee. The pair are trying to re-imagine productivity management in a way that’s completely native to the web… Continue Reading

Siri raises $15.5M more for virtual personal assistant

For those of you awaiting the next generation of personal assistants, San Jose startup Siri, who’s product aims to be a virtual personal assistant (VPA), has just raised $15.5 million in round two funding from Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures says VentureWire.

Siri leverages speech-to-text technology and artificial intelligence to allow users to “just say what they want to do.” The VPA then takes over and does the rest. Siri explains: “You can discover things to do over the… Continue Reading

How do you rid your iPhone of the malicious “Duh” worm?

[updated]

A new, malicious worm, dubbed the “Duh” worm, has hit jailbroken phones, grabbing personal information, including banking codes. But there are apparently a couple of ways to protect yourself.

U.K.–based security firm Sophos, which confirmed Duh’s existence says you’re likely to know when you’ve been hacked. Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisory with Sophos, notes that “Duh’s” accessing information rapidly drains the iPhone’s battery. “And anyone playing by Apple’s rules is, of course, safe.” He recommends… Continue Reading

HootSuite lets you schedule status updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

HootSuite, which started as a way to navigate your Twitter stream, is broadening its grasp on the social web — it’s adding LinkedIn updates and letting you schedule status updates on the social networks it tracks.

The idea is to become a social media dashboard, so you can update your Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm and Twitter status and track what friends are doing on each network directly from HootSuite instead of visiting each web destination. After LinkedIn… Continue Reading

Adconion Media Group buys Joost assets, ending a long saga

Content network firm Adconion Media Group said today that it has acquired the assets of Joost, the online video service founded by Skype founders and the subject of a lawsuit drama this fall.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company was founded by Skype and Kazaa founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Adconion, which has 300 million monthly unique users, said it will pursue Joost’s new strategy, announced in June, of focusing on… Continue Reading

Roboni-I: The wandering robot that lets you play video games

South African firm Robonica hopes to conquer the hearts of gift givers this holiday season with hybrid entertainment that combines the interactivity of video games and the physical fun of toy robots.

The company’s first product, Roboni-I, is a robot with two wheels that wanders around on its own. Since you can play games with it and engage in robot activities on the web, Tom Dusenberry, head of North America for Robonica, refers to the launch… Continue Reading

Pixable lets you print out customized calendars from Facebook content

Online photo service Pixable, which lets you print albums from your Facebook content, is launching its Calendar Creator feature today. The new feature will let you print out calendars to remember important dates from your information stored on Facebook, which is where many of us now have all of our photos (Facebook claims more than 2 billion photos are uploaded to the site each month).

Facebook’s birthday reminders have turned all of us into those great… Continue Reading