VentureBeat

Now anyone can try Brizzly’s app for Facebook and Twitter

Brizzly, an application for managing messages in Twitter and Facebook, expanded its beta test today — now you don’t need an invite code, so anyone can use it.

The application was created by San Francisco-based Thing Labs, and includes features like expanding links and photos, the ability to “mute” people who you want to stop seeing updates from temporarily, and recently-added support for Twitter Lists.

In addition to opening the beta, Brizzly also added a new feature… Continue Reading

GreenBeat: Big thank you and media roundup

Thanks to everyone who made it out to GreenBeat 2009 yesterday and Wednesday!

We were thrilled with the turnout, and couldn’t be more grateful for all the support we received from attendees, speakers, sponsors and the press. It’s clear that the Smart Grid has gained the momentum it needs for serious work to be done, and we are excited to play a big role in this conversation going forward.

With Al Gore, and several of the biggest… Continue Reading

GreenBeat: Al Gore says Smart Grid part of ‘the single largest solution’ to climate change

Nobel Prize winner and former vice president Al Gore gave a wide-ranging, passionate talk at VentureBeat’s GreenBeat 2009 conference yesterday in San Mateo about combating global warming. We already liveblogged Gore’s talk, but for folks who don’t want to read the blow-by-blow description, here’s a summary.

Perhaps the most significant point: That energy efficiency is “the single largest solution to the climate crisis,” and the Smart Grid will “play a crucial role” in achieving that efficiency.

The… Continue Reading

New speakers, sponsors for DiscoveryBeat; today is last day for early-bird discount

We’ve got some great momentum for VentureBeat’s upcoming DiscoveryBeat event, which will attack the problem of how to get attention for an app in the midst of a lot of noise.

One of our newest speakers is Randy Breen, chief operating officer at Social Gaming Network, where he oversees game development, business development, strategy and executive management. He has worked in the game industry since 1986 at companies such as Electronic Arts, LucasArts and Emotiv Systems.

Today… Continue Reading

LaDiDa brings reverse karaoke to your iPhone

There are tons of karaoke applications for the iPhone, but a startup called Khu.sh is introducing a twist on the concept, “reverse karaoke,” to the App Store.

There have been other reverse karaoke products, most notably Microsoft Songsmith, a Windows application that lets you record your singing, then automatically generates musical accompaniment. Songsmith even prompted a series of YouTube videos highlighting the hilarious badness of many of the resulting songs.

Khu.sh’s iPhone app, LaDiDa, lets you do… Continue Reading

French game maker Gameloft ditches the Android platform

[Updated] French mobile phone games publisher Gameloft said it is giving up on the Google Android platform.

The company said it is cutting back investment in making games and other apps for Android-based cell phones, even though Android has won a lot of attention lately with new models from Motorola and Sony Ericsson, according to Reuters.

“We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others,” Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said… Continue Reading

Hot Potato launches event streaming, storytelling in real-time

Expect big things from this location-based service.

Brooklyn-based Hot Potato launched a site and iPhone app today that lets groups of people share and create streams of content around events.

You can create an event like a concert or a football watching session and let other people check in to it. Everyone “checked in” at an event can post their thoughts, photos and videos about what’s going on, creating a stream of activity for others to see.

All… Continue Reading

Playhaven creates lots of fan communities for iPhone game developers

Playhaven is making it easy for gamers to create fan communities around iPhone games. It does so by creating online forums for fans on its web site, with a new fan section for every iPhone game. Developers can then claim those game communities as official fan sites.

To date, 40 developers have launched official communities at Playhaven in its first month. Fans can join the online communities for free, and developers can claim the communities for… Continue Reading

Google search marketing gets all touchy-feely

Google hasn’t traditionally engaged in large-scale advertising campaigns. Instead, it has relied mainly on word of mouth to become the $180 billion company it is today. However in the last year, the company has rolled out bigger and bigger paid advertising efforts (as many mature brands start to do). That includes the Go Google campaign back in August, promoting Google apps as a reliable alternative to Microsoft Office for businesses.

Yesterday, Google rolled out a series… Continue Reading

Twitter COO Dick Costolo: Revenue is on and advertising is coming soon

Twitter COO Dick Costolo is on-stage at the Real-Time CrunchUp in San Francisco. I’m taking some notes as we go.

The big takeaways are that Twitter is making more than $4 million a year, but won’t specify how much and that’s through the recent data-sharing deals with Microsoft and Google.

Next, Twitter is going to roll out advertising soon. Costolo says, “You’ll see an advertising strategy from us in the near future. It will be fascinating and… Continue Reading

Cloud Engines launches next generation Pogoplug

San Francisco startup Cloud Engines, maker of a box-like device called Pogoplug that makes external hard drives accessible from any computer or iPhone, today launched the next generation of the device, supporting more hardware and software capabilities.

Listening to customer feedback, the new Pogoplug now hosts four external drives for expanded data capacity as well as additional software features. With an emphasis on automatic synchronization of new content and advanced sharing benefits, the device allows users to… Continue Reading

FunMail livens up your iPhone messages

FunMobility, the developer of a bunch of social mobile applications, is releasing a new iPhone app that chief executive Adam Lavine says will finally convince people to use their phones’ multimedia messaging (MMS) capabilities.

It is called FunMail, and it automatically offers up suggestions of images you should send along with your text messages.

Lavine points to a study FunMobility commissioned from Frost & Sullivan showing that only one out of every 70 mobile messages is sent… Continue Reading

Adobe’s Acrobat.com comes to smartphones

Updated

Adobe just announced a bunch of upgrades to Acrobat.com, its suite of web collaboration applications. The most important: It’s releasing an application for the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Mobile support has been a big missing piece for Acrobat.com, since a big selling point of applications like Adobe’s (as well as Google Docs and the upcoming web versions of Microsoft Office) is the ability to access your documents anywhere. Now Acrobat.com users can not only read and share… Continue Reading

Facebook bans offer providers Gambit and Tatto Media due to questionable ads

Facebook has banned offer providers Gambit and Tatto Media from providing offers in games and apps on the social network.

The development is one of the results of the recent scandal around the quality of offers in social games and apps. Some of the offers have been tainted as scams because they don’t tell consumers about hidden obligations or fees. Earlier today, Offerpal said that it was issuing a set of standards for its advertisers to… Continue Reading

Battery company R2EV and Fuel 2.0: Changing the electric vehicle paradigm?

If you’ve followed coverage on R2EV, you already know that some are skeptical about the company’s battery, designed to be swapped out in a network of “Greenbox” facilities nation wide.

Perceived problems with interoperability, improper installation or short circuiting and decreasing life cycle of a fleet of batteries have all been cited as reasons to stick with a more conventional battery pack. Talking to chief executive Alex Livingston, though, one gets the impression he’s already thought… Continue Reading

GreenBeat: Live-blogging Nobel Prize winner Al Gore

Straight from VentureBeat’s GreenBeat 2009 event, we bring you former vice president and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore. I’ll be live-blogging this session — so it won’t be perfect or word-for-word, but it will be fast! We’ll pull out the gems as soon as we can.

Laura Ipsen, Cisco Systems’ smart grid guru is introducing Al Gore right now, highlighting his many achievements and awards. He’s been a mentor for Cisco in linking climate change to… Continue Reading

eBay completes sale of Skype at $2.75 billion valuation

eBay said it has completed the sale of a 70-percent stake in Skype communications service for an amount that values the company at $2.75 billion.

The buyer is an investor consortium led by Silver Lake Partners, the private equity buyout firm. It includes participation from Joltid, the company founded by Skype’s founders. Other members include Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

eBay is getting $1.9 billion in cash and a note from buyer… Continue Reading

Seesmic jumps on Twitter’s new location feature with map previews

Seesmic, the Twitter client that was the first to incorporate lists, has now jumped on the social network’s new location-tagged tweets. You can roll over tweets that have a special marker to show a map of where they are, without ever leaving the client.

Twitter finally rolled out its location application programming interface earlier today. It lets you pair a tweet with data about where you are. It could be extremely valuable for real-time data about… Continue Reading