VentureBeat

Norwest Venture Partners raises $1.2B fund

Norwest Venture Partners, the Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that has invested in companies from Rackspace to Peoplesoft, has raised a new fund of $1.2 billion.

It is the eleventh fund in the firm’s history, and its largest.

Managing partner Promod Haque says the new money will help the firm expand — in terms of geography, industry, and the type of deal it gets involved with. The fund is so much larger than Norwest’s $650 million tenth… Continue Reading

Salesforce.com profits up, but analysts disappointed

Salesforce.com saw its revenues and profits rise substantially in the third quarter of this year, but that reportedly wasn’t enough for some analysts, or for Wall Street.

The company, which delivers sales and business applications via online subscription, brought in $330.5 million in revenue in the quarter ending Oct. 31, up 20 percent from the same period last year. Its made $20.7 million in profit, or 16 cents per share, double its profits from last year.

Those… Continue Reading

Twitter/Facebook app Seesmic may ditch Adobe for Microsoft

Loic Le Meur, founder and chief executive of Seesmic, demonstrated a new Windows version of Seesmic’s desktop console for managing your alerts and accounts in Twitter and Facebook today at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. After the presentation, Le Meur told me this is part of a big bet that Seesmic is making on Microsoft and Windows.

The current version of Seesmic Desktop is built on Adobe’s AIR technology, which allows applications to run… Continue Reading

Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie: Apps don’t make your phone special

Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie weighed in at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference today on the battle between different smartphone platforms (including Windows Mobile). 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.

“All the apps that count will be ported to every one of them,” he said. “I don’t think there’s going to be differentiation at… Continue Reading

AdMob launches interactive video ads on the iPhone

AdMob, the mobile ad network that Google plans to acquire for $750 million, announced that it’s supporting a new kind of iPhone ad — interactive video.

This is the first interactive video ad unit for iPhones, AdMob says. Mainly, the new feature allows application developers to run a video ad while the application is loading, the way video sometimes plays when you load a website. (You’re a big fan of those ads, right?) Advertisers can also… Continue Reading

Daily Endeavor helps you figure out what kind of job to search for

There are tons of job listing sites out there, but few that try to answer a far more important question, says Matthew Mahoney, founder of a new site called Daily Endeavor: What kind of job should I actually be looking for?

Sometimes, of course, you’ve already figured that out. But people often want to change careers, plus younger job-seekers are still uncertain. And while there are books and sites that provide an overview of the more… Continue Reading

Mobile-friendly versions of Adobe Flash and AIR available now, without mobile (yet)

Adobe is releasing new beta test versions of its Flash and AIR technologies today. Those new versions don’t just include much-requested features, Adobe says — they also represent a big push onto devices beyond the PC, starting with smartphones.

One big caveat, however. Although Flash 10.1, in particular, is probably most noteworthy for being in development to work on most major smartphone platforms except the iPhone. Today’s release only works on personal computers (Windows, Mac, and… Continue Reading

Google Sites now offers templates for company web sites

Google is about to make it easier for businesses to get started with Google Sites, its tool for internal collaboration sites and public websites, by offering templates for creating starter sites.

Sites is intended primarily as a way for companies to share their documents, videos, and other material either internally or externally. (It’s pitched as a competitor to Microsoft SharePoint.) For example, Google’s PR team uses it as a way to share all the relevant materials… Continue Reading

Former Microsoft evangelist Don Dodge joins Google, discovers Gmail

Don Dodge, the Microsoft startup evangelist whose layoff earlier this month was much-bemoaned in the tech community, has landed on his feet, and then some. He has accepted a new job at Google, where it sounds like he’ll be occupying a role similar to his job at Microsoft — convincing startups and other developers to build using Google’s technology and platforms.

In his blog post announcing the move, Dodge sounds pretty mixed in his feelings about… Continue Reading

Intuit gets into the customer management business

Intuit, the company best-known for financial software like Quicken and QuickBooks, is expanding its lineup today with Customer Manager, an application that brings Intuit into competition with established sales software companies like Salesforce.com.

Many of the small businesses that buy Intuit software use relatively primitive tools like a spreadsheet or a whiteboard to track their customers, said Intuit product manager John Flora, because more sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) software doesn’t really address their needs,. Even… Continue Reading

Week in review: Droid vs Eris, Google acquires Admob

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

Which phone should you buy: Droid or Eris? Go with the Droid! — “Like many phone buying Americans, my budget is tighter than the average consumer’s pants after Thanksgiving dinner. With two Droids to choose from, I had a bit of a mental tug-of-war as to which one to buy.”

YouTube to support 1080p high-definition… Continue Reading

Google’s Dave Girouard: Google Docs could be an Office killer next year

Google Docs seems to get a lot of flack — not surprising, since it’s pretty bare bones, as word processors go. But that will change next year, Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard told ZDNet Asia.

Specifically, Girouard said Google plans to make 30 to 50 improvements to Docs’ features, performance, and more — it might not match Microsoft Word (which Girouard described as “an overkill tool”) feature-for-feature, but it will make be capable of serving “the… Continue Reading

Crederity tells you who to trust on the web

Background checks are old hat, but Crederity wants to bring an easier, web-oriented approach to verifying that someone is trustworthy. In addition to its business tools, the New York company is also rolling out a way for individuals to create a single verified identity across the web — a “seal of approval” that can be part of your identity on social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Crederity, based in New York and Bangalore India,… Continue Reading

Paragon Lake will let you customize jewelry online

If you’re the stylish type and want to customize your clothing orders, there are lots of options for you on the web. Now it’s time to take that bring that approach to jewelry, says Matt Lauzon, founder and president of a company called Paragon Lake.

The Lexington, Mass. company has created a product it calls a “virtual display case,” an online service accessed by jewelry stores as they’re trying to make a sale, which allows customers… Continue Reading

Meebo socializes The Hollywood Reporter

Meebo’s chat and sharing tools continue to spread around the web, with the company announcing the Hollywood Reporter as its latest partner. Over the next few months, THR publisher Nielsen Business Media will add the Meebo Bar to other sites too, such as MediaWeek and AdWeek.

The Meebo Bar started out as a way for social sites like myYearbook to add instant messaging abilities, but it has spread to news publications like TechCrunch, and even to… Continue Reading

More money for online real estate: Redfin raises another $10 million

Real estate site Redfin announced today that it has raised $10 million more in a fourth round of funding.

The round was led by Greylock Partners, meaning that the firm (which just raised a new fund) is the latest high-profile venture capital firm to enter the online real estate market. Real estate search engine Zillow’s venture backers including Benchmark Capital, while Sequoia Capital invested in Trulia. Unlike those companies, Redfin describes itself as an “online real… Continue Reading

Snapfish prints your Flickr photos (but only your own)

Popular Yahoo-owned photo site Flickr announced today that through a deal with Snapfish (itself owned by HP), users around the world can now print the photos they’ve uploaded into the site, turning them into prints, books, calendars, and more.

Printing seems like it could be a big money-maker, and in fact Flickr previously had more limited partnerships with services like QOOP and TinyPrint. The company now says that Snapfish, with its locations in 22 countries, is… Continue Reading

Wave adds ‘follow’ feature, promises more inbox improvements

Google Wave, the still-very-much-in-development communication tool, got a new feature today that should make it easier to navigate your inbox — the option of following public waves. And there are more changes coming, as the Wave team introduces other tweaks to how the service highlights conversations and updates.

The follow button lets users opt-in to seeing public waves. Previously, once you clicked on a wave to read or comment on it, it would automatically be added… Continue Reading

Nominate your favorite companies for the Crunchies Awards

Now that the end of the 2009 is in sight, it’s time for you to start thinking about the year’s coolest companies and products, and to tell us about them — because we’re opening nominations for the third annual Crunchies Awards.

Just like we did for the past two years, VentureBeat will be co-hosting the awards with TechCrunch and GigaOm. You can submit your nominations here; we’ve added categories like “Best VC firm” and “Best PR”… Continue Reading

Bing gets geekier thanks to Wolfram Alpha

Users of Microsoft’s Bing search engine will soon be able to bring up much more scientific/mathematical information, thanks to Microsoft’s deal with Wolfram Alpha.

In its blog post, the Bing team says it will be “providing access to Wolfram Alpha’s advanced algorithms and expertly curated data within the Bing experience,” and offers a couple specific examples of how that might actually be useful. The first couple are focused on fitness and health — you could bring… Continue Reading