VentureBeat

LinkedIn’s platform gives Facebook Connect a professional spin

LinkedIn aims to be an even more central part of your professional identity, by expanding its platform today with the site developer.linkedin.com.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based professional networking site already offers a platform for third-party developers, allowing them to build widgets and apps that run in LinkedIn itself. What it’s announcing today is another piece of that platform, one that’s arguably more exciting — the site is allowing developers to access your LinkedIn data from their… Continue Reading

Week in review: Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie on apps, Al Gore at GreenBeat

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

Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie: Apps don’t make your phone special — “It’s not the applications available on the various platforms that will be the differentiators, Ozzie said, even though that’s what many companies and writers seem to focus on.”

Microsoft’s Xbox Live chief on banning modders and browsing Facebook photos on TV — “It’s a cat… Continue Reading

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: 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

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

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

Fluidigm raises another $7.5M for stem-cell analysis chips

Fluidigm, which makes chips that for genetics lab, has raised $7.5 million in new equity, according to VentureWire. That’s part of a new $18.5 million round that the South San Francisco, Calif. company is raising. The funding comes from existing backers Alloy Ventures, EDB Investments, EuclidSR partners, Fidelity Contrafund, Interwest Partners, Lehman Brothers Venture Capital Group, Smallcap World Fund, and Versant Ventures, as well as an undisclosed new investor.

Fluidigm tried to have an IPO a… Continue Reading

Business intelligence company Manthan Systems raises second round

Manthan Systems, which provides business intelligence and analytics software to retailers, has a raised a second funding round of “up to” $15 million. The round was led by Fidelity International, with participation from existing investors IDG Ventures India and DFJ ePlanet Ventures. The company is based in Bangalore, India.

MyFit raises $1M to help parents with college applications

MyFit, a new services that helps parents figure out how to get their children into the college of their choice, has raised $1 million in a first round of funding, led by New Enterprise Associates. The Mountain View, Calif. company says it looks at data about graduates from more than 3,500 higher learning institutions, and uses that information to tell users where they should focus their academic and extracurricular energy to get into a specific… Continue Reading

Textbook rental site Chegg.com raises another $57m

Popular textbook rental site Chegg.com continues to raise tremendous amounts of money — today it announced a $57 million fourth round, as well as $55 million in credit and debt.

The Santa Clara, Calif. company says it will use the extra $112 million (!) to meet the demands of its rapid growth. Chegg applies a Netflix-like model (where you check out the books you need at the beginning of the semester then send it back to… Continue Reading

Google aims to release Chrome OS for netbooks by holiday season 2010

Google gave its first public demonstration today of Chrome OS, the operating system it’s developing for PCs (primarily cheaper netbooks). It presented the demo via webcast from its headquarters in Mountain View, and it looked pretty solid.

Although there’s been some hope that Google might launch the OS in early 2010, Vice President of Product Marketing Sundar Pichai said Google plans to work with manufacturers to bring Chrome OS netbooks to market in time for next… Continue Reading

5 O’clock Roundup: Office web app impressions, AT&T’s legal skirmish with Verizon

Here’s the latest action:

Microsoft releases beta test downloads of Office 2010 — This is basically the first time the public has a chance to play with the much-vaunted web application versions of Office. Due to a bunch of restrictions, I wasn’t able to try the apps out myself, but Harry McCracken at Technologizer took a look and said they were so rough he has to give them “an Incomplete rather than trying to grade them.”

Judge won’t… Continue Reading

Network equipment company IPWireless restarts with $15.5M

IPWireless, a maker of mobile network equipment, has raised $15.5 million in a new first round of institutional funding. The company previously raised $235 million and was acquired by NextWave Wireless in 2007, but NextWave sold the company back to its founders last year, according to Dow Jones VentureWire. The new round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from Lockheed-Martin and Northrup Grumman.

Outright raises $5.5M to help small businesses with their finances

Outright, which offers a free online application to help small businesses manage their finances, has raised $5.5 million in a first round of institutional funding led by Sequoia Capital. The firms that invested in Outright’s seed round — First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures, and SoftTechVC — also participated. The Campbell, Calif., company has now raised a total of $7.5 million.

Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff: Don’t call Chatter a social network

Salesforce.com announced a new product today called Chatter, which it describes as Facebook and Twitter for enterprises. But during a press and analyst session at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, chief executive Marc Benioff said he doesn’t want you to think of Chatter as a social network.

That’s some, uh, creative thinking there — Chatter has employee profiles, status updates and news feeds, so it sounds a lot like a social network to me. And… Continue Reading

GoodGuide lets you scan barcodes to find the most ethical products

GoodGuide, one of my favorite applications for the iPhone, just got a cool new feature — barcode scanning. Users could already consult the app for data on whether a product was healthy, environmentally-friendly, and socially-responsible, but now you don’t have to type in a search. Just scan the barcode, and the app brings up the relevant information.

The San Francisco company also announced a $5.5 million second round of funding led by new investor Physic Ventures,… Continue Reading

Salesforce.com announces Chatter, another social network for companies

Salesforce.com announced today that it’s going to join the hordes of companies offering a social networking service for your business. With a new product called Salesforce Chatter, companies get their own secure, private social network where they can collaborate and communicate in real-time.

It’s a crowded market, with existing products from Jive Software, Socialtext, and many others, but Salesforce is one of the biggest companies to throw its hat in the ring. (Cisco recently announced social… Continue Reading

As Midas List dies, AlwaysOn offers a new selection of top VCs

Folks wanting to identify the top venture capitalists will have to look at a new source from now on. Forbes’ annual Midas List, in which the magazine ranked the VCs who saw the best returns in the past five years, is reportedly dead. Meanwhile, online network and conference company AlwaysOn has released its own list, the 2009 Venture Capital 100.

Forbes’ decision to drop the Midas List was reported by peHUB, which said the news was… Continue Reading