VentureBeat

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, senior VP… Continue Reading

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 Summit in San… Continue Reading

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, here’s a quick… Continue Reading

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 enjoyed startup-focused… Continue Reading

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 market locked… Continue Reading

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.

Even today, while… Continue Reading

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 if it were… Continue Reading

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 countries with a… Continue Reading

Khosla’s tips on how save the environment

Cleantech investing poster boy, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures today presented potential solutions to the man-made global warming he said is pushing the earth’s environment toward cataclysmic disaster.

Speaking at the Cleantech 2007 conference in Santa Clara, Khosla targeted the two primary carbon-emitting culprits — oil and coal — which he said collectively account for 70 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.

He believes biomass and solar thermal offer the greatest potential to signifantly reduce the world’s… Continue Reading

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 all, as… Continue Reading

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 likes of… Continue Reading

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 in Dresden,… Continue Reading

Live Ink offers better way to read text online

Did you know our primitive brains weren’t wired very well to read this paragraph?

Scientific research conducted by Walker Reading Technologies, a small Minnesota startup that has been studying our ability to read for the last ten years, has concluded that the natural field of focus for our eyes is circular, so our eyes view the printed page as if we’re peering through a straw.

And a very bad-behaving straw at that, because not only… Continue Reading

Inpowr creates a social network for ME

There’s a social networking site for nearly every person, animal, and interest – but what about a social network for the person who matters most? That’s right, a social network for YOU, the proud recipient of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.

Look in the mirror. Do you really know yourself? Could you be happier? Thanks to a new web site called Inpowr, which launched yesterday at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, you can… Continue Reading

Ignite lights up Web 2.0 Expo

O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo kicked off yesterday in San Francisco, with 10,000 attendees from 59 countries. VentureBeat’s Mark Coker took notes from the day.

The highlight was the evening’s Ignite event: Imagine packing a large conference room with about 600 geeks, giving ‘em all the free beer they can drink, and then entertaining them with a rapid-fire procession of sixteen fast-talking techies who each deliver a twenty-slide PowerPoint on an eclectic subject with only fifteen… Continue Reading

Start-up advice for entrepreneurs, from Y Combinator Startup School

Here’s a summary of the more compelling tips given by several tech industry luminaries — including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, Sequoia Capital venture capitalist Greg McAdoo — at the Y Combinator Startup School event at Stanford this weekend.

The event attracted more than 650 aspiring entrepreneurs. Mark Coker, a VentureBeat contributing writer, was on hand and here are his notes.

FaceBook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Hire only young technical people

FaceBook’s founder and CEO, 22-year old… Continue Reading

Zecco gains traction with commission-free trading

Zecco, a company wanting to disrupt America’s online brokerage industry by offering free stock trading to the masses, is making progress.

The company says it is opening a thousand accounts a week, and its growth is accelerating. Yet the company is also facing growing pains, and is in a race to reach critical mass before the big online brokerages drop their trading fees as well.

We first covered Zecco in September, right before its launch.

We wanted… Continue Reading