Smashwords expands eBook business worldwide with Shortcovers deal
Two eBook companies are creating an alliance that will help democratize eBook publishing for authors and small independent presses around the world. Smashwords and Shortcovers are teaming up to distribute eBook content in international markets.
Toronto, Canada-based Shortcovers, an eReading application owned by Indigo Books & Music, will distribute eBooks published by Smashwords on a worldwide basis. Shortcovers will distribute the eBooks in 189 countries. Smashwords has more than 5,000 original eBooks from 2,300 self-published...
Go to Story Permalink »Sony embraces small publishers and unknown authors on Sony Reader eBook store
The shift toward digital books is helping small-fry authors and publishers to get in front of wider audiences than ever before. That trend is being reinforced today as Smashwords announces that it has a distribution agreement to get its books published on Sony’s new eBook portal.
Smashwords lets authors publish their books in online formats in a matter of days. Now those books can be downloaded to the Sony Reader, the company’s eBook reader gadget....
Go to Story Permalink »Online food ordering site GetQuik launches an iPhone app, hopes the SDK will open up full potential of the service
Hoping to take advantage of the excitement around Apple’s planned iPhone software development kit (SDK) event taking place later today, GetQuik, a site that allows users to place food orders online, is serving up an intuitive new iPhone application.
The service, which we first covered here, has been functioning on other mobile devices since the middle of last year. However, when we spoke with founder and chief executive Ken Ryu, he made it clear that...
Go to Story Permalink »Smashwords launches as publishers toy with selling books online
Smashwords is a new startup that will allow writers to publish their books in a variety of online formats, although we doubt it expected to be launching the same day two major publishers announced online initiatives.
The news from the publishers is that HarperCollins has decided to place some books online for free, in hopes of boosting sales, while Random House will test selling a book online by the chapter. More on them in a...
Go to Story Permalink »GetQuik raises $200,000 seed round for fast ordering
GetQuik is a Sunnyvale, Calif. company that speeds the ordering process at restaurants with an automated ordering technology.
Users sign up to the service once, then have the option of setting preferences for items they normally order at restaurants (for example, how they would like their coffee made). Later, the user can quickly order from their computer or mobile phone.
The company says it has signed up over 150 restaurants to the service, mainly in...
Go to Story Permalink »AOL guns for Yahoo Finance
AOL’s Money and Finance group this week announced an overhaul of its popular destination site for individual investors. At stake: A battle for the hearts, minds and wallets of tens of millions of individual investors who use the Web each day to track their stock investments.
This is above all an attack on Yahoo Finance, and comes as that popular site’s traffic begins to flag.
In a conversation yesterday with VentureBeat’s Mark Coker, Marty Moe,...
Go to Story Permalink »Launchpad: G.ho.st, Realius, Cleverset and more
[Update: The crowd has voted: Cleverset wins best in show. G.ho.st wins most creative idea. Spiceworks mostly likely to exit first.]
Here are the companies presenting at today’s Launchpad event at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco: G.ho.st, Realius, Cleverset, Click Forensics, TripIt and Spiceworks.
The first three are new to VentureBeat, although two of those have been around for a while. We’ll update this post as we learn more about them. For now,...
Go to Story Permalink »Surprise: Mary Meeker offers skepticism about U.S. tech industry
Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker offered a somewhat skeptical forecast for the U.S. tech industry. The once respected analyst lost much of her credibility in recent years, after hyping Internet stocks during the last boom and making careless errors on Facebook advertising predictions (notably, she revised her numbers upward when she found her estimates to be too bleak).
So it’s worth taking note when she turns bearish. It really means something.
Here at the Web 2.0...
Go to Story Permalink »VCs love Obama, mapping merger, Gravatar, China rage, more
Here’s the latest action:
1) VCs love on Obama
2) Frappr-Platial merge to take on Google
3) Is China is blocking US search engines? Or is it just U.S. jingoism?
4) Wordpress buys avatar company
5) Internet giants agree on copyright protection online — um, except Google
6) Data reveals iLike’s strong music momentum
VCs spend on Obama — Barack Obama is getting the most this year from the private...
Go to Story Permalink »Microsoft’s Ballmer: MSFT will acquire 20 companies a year
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer just said at the Web 2.0 conference here in San Francisco that the software giant will acquire 20 companies a year for the next five years, ranging from $50 million to $1 billion.
This steals from the playbook of News Corp, the media company that generated excitement among Internet companies after it acquired MySpace and others. There’s a tactic here: By declaring you are hungry, you get entrepreneurs coming to...
Go to Story Permalink »Myspace to open developer platform — good for web startups
It’s official: MySpace, seeking to defend its status as the leading social network, will open up its platform to third-party developers over the next couple of months.
The news was confirmed tonight at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, where News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch and MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe were featured guests.
Like rival Facebook’s move six months ago, MySpace’s move will let developers build applications within MySpace and make money from them.
The full...
Go to Story Permalink »Web 2.0 Summit: MadeIt, Nokia’s new phone, and Zennstrom’s disappearance
Web 2.0 Summit, co-hosted by O’Reilly Media and CMP, kicks off this Wednesday at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. A who’s who list of Web 2.0 digerati will converge for three days of deal making, partying and more deal making.
If you didn’t have the budget to nab one of the $3,595 tickets for the event, fret not – VentureBeat reporters will be on hand to bring you frontline dispatches.
In preparation for the event,...
Go to Story Permalink »MeshWalk, the latest unconference, lets you walk & talk
Yesterday, one hundred aspiring entrepreneurs were joined by a few VCs and angel investors for MeshWalk, a walking conference organized by MeshForum and sponsored by Mohr Davidow Ventures. VentureBeat’s Mark Coker in the following personal account, says the innovative “unconference” has a few kinks to work out…
I must admit, when I received VentureBeat’s invitation to attend MeshWalk, I was intrigued and excited. I had never heard of a walking conference before.
I’ve always...
Go to Story Permalink »Startup Epicenter — rumbles with the latest start-ups
Eighty entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists gathered yesterday at Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West’s headquarters for Startup Epicenter to hear funding pitches from ten early stage startups.
Despite the comic regularity of business plans predicting explosive revenue growth and profitability one to two years out, several promising startups emerged at the event. VentureBeat’s Mark Coker was on hand and here are his notes.
Anyone who thinks Facebook has the college social networking...
Go to Story Permalink »Publishers move to split ebooks into pieces
Ever wondered what happened to the promise of the ebook?
In the ‘90s, when the Internet took hold in a big way, publishers half-heartedly looked to ebooks — electronic versions books as a way to boost sales.
The efforts generally failed, due to poor reading devices, customer reluctance to pay full retail prices for digital versions, and overly cumbersome DRM and competing document standards that restricted ebook portability from one reading device to another. ...
Go to Story Permalink »Sedo, and the Boobtube.com problem
Sedo, the world’s largest domain name auctioneer, sold a popular URL, Boobtube.com, for $41,688 last week, but then turned around and canceled the sale because the seller didn’t really own it.
This auction had lasted more than two weeks, and was frenetic.
The cancellation raises prickly questions about the nascent domain name exchanges, which are handling several hundred million dollars of trades. Are they trustworthy? Are they open to market manipulation?
This might be pardonable...
Go to Story Permalink »Cleantech startups of note: D. Light Design, ReadySolar, Redwood Renewables
Three green technology companies emerged as among the more interesting companies at the Launch Silicon Valley pitch-fest yesterday.
Several hundred entrepreneurs and investors gathered in Mountain View, Calif. for the annual ritual, where 30 hand-picked companies gave a ten-minute pitch.
D. Light Design Wants to Eliminate Kerosene Usage
Sam Goldman and Ned Tozun, both second-year Stanford MBAs and co-founders of startup D. Light Design, want to eliminate the use of kerosene lanterns in developing...
Go to Story Permalink »eBay’s Meg Whitman – “eBay is the last business job I will ever have”
Meg Whitman says she’ll never leave eBay for another company. “eBay is the last business job I will ever have, for sure,” said Whitman, answering an audience question this morning at her keynote presentation on the final day of the TiECON 2007 entrepreneurs conference here in Santa Clara.
The audience member wanted to know – considering her considerable professional and personal financial success at eBay – if she’d consider leaving for another company. After...
Go to Story Permalink »Elementeo’s 13-year-old CEO, highlight of TiECON
TiECON 2007, the big technology conference in Santa Clara, Calif., kicked off yesterday.
The buzz on the expo floor was about Silicon Valley gaming startup Elementeo and its precocious 13-year old founder and chief executive, Anshul Samar. “We inject fun into education,” the fast talking entrepreneur confidently proclaimed, touting his new fantasy role playing board game which he believes will change the way kids learn chemistry.
The conference featured keynote presentations from the...
Go to Story Permalink »Signet Solar Enters Crowded Solar Field
A team of semiconductor industry veterans today announced the launch of Signet Solar, a solar photovoltaic (PV) module manufacturer that hopes to disrupt the fast growing solar industry by significantly reducing the manufacturing costs of solar panels.
The company will target large projects such as solar farms, commercial installations, building-integrated photovoltaics, and remote habitation.
The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., although its R&D operations and first manufacturing plant will be based...
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