VentureBeat

Google takes another stab at location-based services with Buzz

Much of the talk surrounding Google Buzz, the search giant’s new social sharing tool, has focused on new capabilities it will bring to the web through its integration with Gmail. But the new mobile features are also an important part of the announcement, because they add a compelling location-based component to the service.

Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra said Google Buzz is being integrated into three of Google’s mobile websites and applications —... Continue Reading

How Sergey Brin uses Google Buzz as a business tool

Google Buzz, the social sharing tool that Google just announced at a press event in Mountain View, Calif., isn’t just for fun. The company said it’s going to be launching an enterprise version of Buzz as part of its Google Apps bundle of business applications.

During the presentation, Google was pretty vague about Buzz in a business context, both in terms of how it might be used and when it will launch (“soon” is all... Continue Reading

Google socializes Gmail with Google Buzz

Google announced a new product today called Google Buzz, bringing credence to previous rumors that social networking features would be added to Gmail. Buzz is a service for sharing and talking about content. In the same way that the company calls Gmail “a Google approach to email,” it’s calling Buzz “a Google approach to sharing.”

Todd Jackson, a product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, demonstrated the product on-stage at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View,... Continue Reading

WorldMate helps you find LinkedIn connections while traveling

Mobile travel application WorldMate just announced new integration that should help users tap into their connections on business networking site LinkedIn while they’re on-the-road.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based WorldMate isn’t the first travel service to connect to LinkedIn — TripIt actually integrated with the networking site back in 2008. But TripIt’s integration works within the LinkedIn site, so users log into LinkedIn and see their travel information. WorldMate’s integration works the other way around, so users... Continue Reading

Redpoint Ventures raises $400M fund for investments in social, mobile, and more

Redpoint Ventures, a Menlo Park, Calif. venture firm whose investments cover everything from cloud application deployment (Heroku) to document-sharing (Scribd) to solar (Solyndra), has raised a $400 million fourth fund for early-stage investments.

Despite the broader economic climate, Redpoint partner Geoff Yang said he’s still excited about the startup landscape, in part because there are so many industries worth investing in. Ten years ago, everyone was investing in “the commercialization of Web 1.0,” he said.... Continue Reading

BlueKiwi lets companies build a community for free

BlueKiwi, a French startup that helps companies manage customer conversations, says it’s starting a big push into the US market. As part of that effort, it’s announcing new pricing that could be hard to resist — companies can build a BlueKiwi-powered community for free.

The company’s tools center around managing customer forums, and finding ideas within them. That sounds like something a lot of other companies including are doing, but Vice President of Marketing Erica... Continue Reading

Week in review: Displax turns any surface into touchscreens, Facebook launches redesign

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Displax plastic film can turn any surface into a touchscreen — Displax revealed a new plastic film with multitouch sensing. It can be placed over any display or even non-display surfaces, making them into interactive devices. If the film works as billed, it could become an easy way to retrofit passive surfaces —... Continue Reading

Scrapblog raises $2.5M for online scrapbooking

Scrapblog, a website where users can create and share scrapbooks, has received $2.5 million in funding firm Walt Disney’s Steamboat Ventures.

The San Francisco company touts the ease-of-use it offers for creating online scrapbooks. The scrapbooks combine user photos with themes, animations, and text of your choice into a slick-looking presentation built on Adobe’s Flash technology. Once you’ve created one, you can share the content on the site, on social networking sites like Facebook, and... Continue Reading

Payola allegations prompt TechCrunch to fire teen intern

Teen entrepreneur Daniel Brusilovsky has been fired from his internship at TechCrunch following allegations that he traded startup coverage for compensation.

TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington broke the news in a post last night titled, “An Apology to Our Readers.” He said that “someone I trust” had accused an intern of asking for a Macbook Air in exchange for writing a TechCrunch post about the startup. The allegation was supported by a subsequent investigation, and Arrington... Continue Reading

Siri launches an iPhone personal assistant that actually works

The “personal assistant” label gets attached to a lot of websites and applications, but it’s always an exaggeration. Usually the service in question can only tackle a small slice of what a human assistant would do, such as organizing your emails. Plus, you can’t just tell the app what you want, you have to learn how to use it.

A new iPhone application called Siri has limitations too, but it’s already further along than the... Continue Reading

Email helper Cc:Betty ditches Betty, becomes Threadbox

Cc:Betty, a services that helps users stay on top of their communication and projects by organizing their email, had one of the most memorable names among the startups I’ve covered at VentureBeat, but now it’s ditching that name in favor of a new one — Threadbox.

Why the change? Well, the Cc:Betty name was cute, but not necessarily a great fit as the product found that its real audience was business users. Chief executive Michael... Continue Reading

CNET co-founder announces AppFund for iPad developers

A pair of Internet entrepreneurs announced today that they’ve launched a fund for developers creating applications for Apple’s much-hyped tablet device, the iPad.

The new venture, from CNET and E Online co-founder Kevin Wendle and MusicNation and Original Signal co-founder Daniel Klaus, is called the AppFund, and the pair says it will invest between $5,000 and $500,000 in each application, depending on the complexity and business opportunity. The AppFund is based in New York City,... Continue Reading

Roundup: Textbook publishers strike iPad deals, AOL beats expectations

Here’s the latest action:

Textbook publishers making iPad deals — We’ve already covered Inkling, one of the startups moving textbooks onto Apple’s new device. Now the Wall Street Journal looks at ScrollMotion, another company developing iPad textbook applications.

AOL earnings beat low expectations — This was the company’s first earnings report since it spun off from Time Warner. On one level, things looked pretty bad for chief executive Tim Armstrong — the company’s already weak... Continue Reading

Remote wipe, other new features make Google’s mobile apps more business friendly

Google has been working over the past year to make Google Apps, its bundle of productivity applications like Gmail, work better with smartphones. Now it’s announcing several new features that may be crucial to winning over enterprise IT administrators.

Most of Google Apps’ previous smartphone features were focused on convenience and ease of use, such as synchronization with the iPhone and Windows Mobile. Those are the kinds of things that make an employee want to... Continue Reading

Analyst: Email will lose ground to social networks

Gartner recently published a list of five new predictions about “social software” that show mix of optimism and pessimism about whether these tools will be embraced by businesses.

The most grandiose prediction is the first — that by 2014, social networking services will replace email as the primary communication tool for 20 percent of business users. Companies will either build out their own corporate social networks, or they will allow greater use of existing networks... Continue Reading

SlideShare launches Channels for branded presentations

Presentation-sharing site SlideShare continues to roll out new features aimed at businesses. Today it launched SlideShare Channels, which are basically microsites within SlideShare that companies can use to promote their content.

The channels can take two forms. First, they can be built by specific companies — that’s what Microsoft has done with the Office Parent Toolbox, where users can browse and upload presentations and documents about parenting (most of them created in Microsoft Office,... Continue Reading

Content distribution startup 3crowd wants to shake up online video

The un-profitability of video sites has become a cliche — high infrastructure costs and advertising challenges have combined in a way that even ostensible winners, like YouTube, can’t necessarily make the finances work (though Google keeps saying that YouTube will be profitable real soon). On the startup side, new video companies hoping to reach consumers are pretty scarce. But Barrett Lyon, founder of startup called 3crowd, said he wants to change the economics of online... Continue Reading

Adobe CTO defends Flash

The lack of support for Flash-format media on Apple’s iPad has caused a fresh round of debate about the technology’s value, including a bunch of posts from Flash owner Adobe. The latest is a post from Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch laying out his case for Flash’s relevance.

Lynch begins by taking a couple of small jabs at Apple, first by referring to the iPad (presumably sarcastically) as a “magical device,” then by saying Adobe... Continue Reading

Makara smoothes the road to cloud computing

As more and more companies are looking at cloud computing, a startup called Makara is announcing new tools that should make it easier to get traditional software applications onto cloud infrastructure.

Plenty of other startups, such as Heroku, help companies deploy and manage their cloud applications. But Redwood City, Calif.-based makara says that with its Cloud Application Platform, developers can build applications as if they were meant to work in a traditional data center. Those... Continue Reading

The ‘nirvana phone’ turns your phone into a portable computer

As far as I’m concerned, no one has completely solved the problem of delivering all the on-the-go computing capabilities I need in a truly portable device. You may have experienced this yourself, if you’ve tried to use your laptop in a cramped space (say, the backseat of a car or the front row of a press conference) or tried do any extended writing on your smartphone. Now virtualization companies Citrix and Open Kernel Labs are tackling this... Continue Reading