Week in review: Lulzsec and Anonymous trade blows

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

Hit the deck: LulzSec and Anonymous start trading blows — Hacker group LulzSec has begun publicly attacking hacker group Anonymous, an action that could lead to a civil war of sorts between the two groups.

OMG! Rebecca Black pulls down her “Friday” YouTube video — Rebecca Black became a cultural icon in a … Continue Reading

Music service Spotify has (probably) raised another $100M

Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists are reportedly making a big bet on streaming music service Spotify. There have been reports for months that Spotify was raising a big round of funding, and now it has closed a $100 million round, according to a report in AllThingsD, which GigaOm says it has independently confirmed.

A Spotify spokesperson declined to comment.

The reported funding values Spotify at $1 billion. It comes from DST (the Russian firm that … Continue Reading

True Ventures is raising a $200M fund

True Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm founded by some big names in the startup world, is raising a $200 million third fund, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The firm is headquartered in San Francisco’s Pier 38, and its partners include Toni Schneider, the chief executive of Automattic (the company behind WordPress, the popular blog service used by VentureBeat and many others); Tony Conrad, the founder of Sphere and About.me; … Continue Reading

LiveShare photo app takes off with 4M+ active users

Palo Alto startup Cooliris’ mobile and Web photo-sharing application LiveShare hasn’t attracted as much publicity as some of its competition, like Instagram or Color, but it looks like the app has built a substantial audience nonetheless.

Co-founder and chief executive Soujanya Bhumkar shared some numbers today to illustrate that point. First, he said LiveShare sees more than 4.2 million active users each month. That number seems almost crazily impressive for an app that only launched … Continue Reading

Pulse raises $9M for its slick news reader

Pulse, which created the popular Pulse news reading app, has raised $9 million in its first round of institutional venture funding.

The app aggregates news stories from RSS feeds and social networks and presents them in a design that was apparently impressive enough that Apple chief executive Steve Jobs showed it off on-stage last year. It started out as an iPad application created by two graduate students for a class at Stanford Institute for Design, … Continue Reading

Facebook, Groupon investor Accel raises $1.35B

Accel Partners, the firm whose recent successes have put it in the top tier of the venture capital industry, just announced that it has raised two new funds — $475 million for its eleventh venture fund and $875 million for its second growth fund.

Most famously, Accel was one of the first investors in Facebook, a deal that put partner Jim Breyer (pictured) at the number one spot on Forbes’ most recent Midas List of … Continue Reading

Google Ventures-backed Shopobot tells you the best time to buy

If you buy that shiny gadget now, you may be paying a lot more money than necessary. At least, that’s the message of a new startup called Shopobot.

The San Francisco company leaves private beta testing today, and it also announced that it has raised seed funding from Google Ventures, AOL Ventures and others.

Chief executive Julius Schorzman and head of product Dave Matthews told me that while it may not be obvious to shoppers, … Continue Reading

Yahoo wants to navigate the flood of mobile apps

“Discovery” is one of the most common complaints about the ever-growing number of smartphone apps: With hundreds of thousands of apps, how can people find the best one for whatever they’re looking for? Now Yahoo is making an effort to solve the problem, both on your computer with a new Yahoo App Search service, and on iPhones and Android devices with a new Yahoo AppSpot app.

Shashi Seth, Yahoo’s senior vice president of search and … Continue Reading

Color co-founder Peter Pham left a month ago

It looks like mobile photo- and video-sharing startup Color has lost one of its seven co-founders: Peter Pham, the company’s president.

Along with its massive, $41 million round of funding, the Palo Alto, Calif. company’s long lineup of founders was one of the reasons that Color’s launch was greeted with a fair amount of skepticism — which only intensified when people tried the app and found it confusing. Color has since launched a redesign to … Continue Reading

Ning lets you charge for your social network

Build-your-own social networking startup Ning says it has finally found a business model that works by requiring all of its customers to pay for the service. Now it’s expanding that initiative, by allowing those social networks to charge their members too.

Chief executive Jason Rosenthal said that with Ning’s new Paid Access option, the owners of Ning social networks will be able to monetize, whether it’s by charging for premium features, subscriptions, or specific content. … Continue Reading

Pandora shares climb in IPO

It looks like investors still have a healthy appetite for consumer Web companies. Online music service Pandora started trading on the New York Stock Exchange this morning, and as of 10:35am Eastern time, it was trading at $20.75 per share.

If that doesn’t quite match LinkedIn’s meteoric IPO, when shares more than doubled on their first day of trading, well hey, it’s early. It has been a steady climb since Pandora first filed for its … Continue Reading

LinkedIn members to get more Klout

It looks like influence measurement startup Klout has completed the social networking trifecta. The San Francisco company announced Tuesday it now incorporates LinkedIn data into your Klout score, as well as Twitter and Facebook.

As the name suggests, a person’s Klout score measures their influence on social networks on a scale of 0 to 100. (When I was on a panel with founder and chief executive Joe Fernandez earlier this year, he said that Klout … Continue Reading

Google adds voice search, search-by-image to desktop

Google unveiled a number of improvements to its search products today at its Inside Search event in San Francisco. One of the big changes involves bringing technology that Google has used to improve mobile search to the desktop.

Now people can search by voice on their desktops. Using the built-in laptop microphone, Googlers performed a number of searches just by speaking, including “recipe for spaghetti with bolognese sauce” and “Worcester, MA”. Not only is speaking … Continue Reading

RockMelt’s browser becomes even more social with a Facebook partnerhsip

In the months before its launch, Mountain View, Calif. startup RockMelt was sometimes called the “Facebook browser.” That phrase still isn’t literally true, but it’s getting closer now that the company is releasing a version that was developed in partnership with Facebook.

Co-founders Eric Vishria and Tim Howes told me that they consulted with Facebook team members while working on their latest release. And while RockMelt already included a number of Facebook-related features, like the … Continue Reading

SGN’s Shervin Pishevar joins Menlo Ventures, plans incubator

Shervin Pishevar, the entrepreneur and investor who founded the Social Gaming Network, has joined Menlo Ventures as a managing partner.

The move was first reported in The New York Times and was then confirmed on Twitter by Pishevar himself.

He’s is a much-liked and much-respected figure on the startup scene. In addition to starting SGN (which was acquired in April by MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe’s social gaming company MindJolt), Pishevar also founded publishing startup Webs, … Continue Reading

Instagram: We have 5M users, nearly 100M photos

Mobile photo startup Instagram is still growing like crazy, according to TechCrunch. The San Francisco-based company says that it now has more than 5 million registered users, that those users add 896,000 photos per day, and that the service will probably crack 100 million total photos sometime this week.

Achieving those numbers after only eight months is particularly impressive. At this point in their history, services like Twitter and Foursquare hadn’t even reached 1 million … Continue Reading

Y Combinator’s latest partners are also alums

Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator is bringing some of its most notable alumni back into the fold — as partners.

In a blog post today, partner Paul Graham announced that Loopt founder Sam Altman (pictured), Justin.tv founders Emmett Shear and Justin Kan, and Posterous founder Garry Tan are all joining as “part-time partners” who will “do the same sort of work regular YC partners do advising startups, but only 1/5 of their time.” Three of … Continue Reading

Everloop raises $3.1M to bring social networking to tweens

Everloop, a social networking service aimed at children 8-13 years old (who are too young to use Facebook), just announced that it has raised $3.1 million in funding.

There has been a lot of talk about a possible tech startup bubble, particularly in social networking, but it sounds like Danville, Calif.-based Everloop has been running without much capital. Even though Everloop raised some angel funding before this, when I spoke to co-founder and chief executive … Continue Reading

Week in review: U.S. government goes after Bitcoin

Here’s our roundup of the week’s top tech business news. First, the most popular stories that we published in the last seven days:

Forget piracy, U.S. government is going after Bitcoin — Two U.S. senators want to crack down on Bitcoin, an open-source digital currency.

Bethesda finally opens up Skyrim’s massive world — There are more than 300 books embedded in the game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It’s a reminder that the developers at Bethesda … Continue Reading

Custom fashion site CafePress files for $80M IPO

CafePress, a site where people can design and sell custom goods like T-shirts, just filed for its initial public offering.

This follows a number of high-profile Web IPOs and IPO filings, including Groupon’s filing last week. CafePress is a bit less sexy — it’s older, having been founded in 1999, and it isn’t social in the way that (say) LinkedIn is.

The company also appears to have passed the rapid-growth phase seen by some Web … Continue Reading