VentureBeat

GreenBeat speaker: Vinod Khosla, the Super Grid skeptic

I’m delighted to announce that Vinod Khosla, one of Silicon Valley’s highest profile green investors, will be speaking at our GreenBeat conference next week.

Khosla is important for two reasons. He’s probably the most prolific investor in the sector around, having backed a company in almost every area of clean technology, from ethanol to solar — and was one of the first to make such a bold string of bets. For a while, it became his… Continue Reading

HP to acquire 3Com for $2.7B, to take on Cisco in networking

Computer giant HP said today it has agreed to acquire networking company 3Com for $2.7 billion in a deal it says will create a “networking industry powerhouse.”

Significantly, the move is a frontal attack on Cisco, the Silicon Valley networking giant that has long dominated the business of selling routers and other products to large companies. 3Com sells networking switching, routing and security solutions that are competitive to Cisco.

HP’s executives didn’t beat around the bush about… Continue Reading

Calling great writers: VentureBeat is hiring!

VentureBeat is looking to hire the next David Pogue!

If you’re a good writer with an interest in technology, consider working for one of the most influential business blogs — with syndication across outlets like the New York Times — that hosts exciting events to debate the most disruptive technologies of the day, including DEMO (the leading launchpad event for emerging technology products), MobileBeat, GamesBeat and most recently GreenBeat (our inaugural conference on the Smart Grid… Continue Reading

Google-Admob: A storm for Weather.com?

If you’re looking for some consequences from Google’s bold acquisition of leading mobile ad network company AdMob yesterday, consider Weather.com.

Weather.com, a subsidiary of the Weather Channel, has done well because of its focus. You want weather? It will give it to you, wherever you are. It has roughly 100 million viewers on TV, 40 million viewers on the web, and more than 10 million users on mobile devices.

Weather.com is the fourth most popular mobile destination… Continue Reading

Shazam, the song-recognition app, launches $4.99 version with more features

Shazam, owner of the application that lets you identify a song by holding your phone up to a music source, has released a paid ($4.99) version of its iPhone app that makes it easier to share music and discover what’s popular among other users.

The move is part of the company’s efforts to make serious dough, now that it has a massive base of 50 million users — but it is also part of the company’s… Continue Reading

Skype is finally free — eBay settles with Skype co-founders, clearing way for buyout

EBay has settled with the founders of Skype, clearing up some nasty lawsuits that had stood in the way of a  Skype acquisition. Now the Internet phone company to be sold to a consortium of investors that includes Skype’s co-founders.

Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners leads the investor group, and is joined by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, as well as Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis.

As… Continue Reading

EmSense, the company that reads your brain’s reactions to ads, gets boost

EmSense — the San Francisco company that has created a device to read your mind to assess how you react to TV commercials and other media — has raised $9 million more in a third round of funding.

The company says it is trying to improve on established neuroscience technology called “EEG (Electroencephalography) recording” by offering a better way to tell marketing directors and video game developers which parts of commercials or video games people don’t… Continue Reading

Newest GreenBeat speaker: Google CEO Eric Schmidt

I’m delighted to announce that Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt has agreed to speak at our GreenBeat event on Nov. 19, which focuses on the overhaul of our nation’s electrical grid.

Schmidt has been a vocal proponent of our nation’s need to invest in a cleaner, more efficient electrical grid, arguing that it part of a “second industrial revolution” that, if done properly, will create jobs and new industry.

In fact, Google has emerged as an… Continue Reading

DEMO’s visits to London and Boston show California is great place to launch

I’ve been on the road lately, in a continued effort to find and meet with the best companies around to launch new products at the DEMO conference, and have been developing some cool ideas for DEMO’s next conference in March. I’ll share more about those ideas in future posts.

First, here are a few thoughts, after wrapping up a trip to London this week, and Boston last week.

In each of these places, there are hordes of… Continue Reading

Renewable Funding let’s you easily finance your solar panel investment

Renewable Funding, a company that makes it easier for homeowners to finance solar or other renewable funding projects with friendly terms, has raised $12.2 million in a first round of funding.

The Oakland, Calif., based company’s model is noteworthy because it lets you attach your financing to your property tax bill.

So if you sell your house after investing in an expensive solar paneled roof, the financing stays on your home’s property tax bill, even if you… Continue Reading

Nokia to invade U.S. market — will launch new phone with AT&T

AT&T, the major U.S. phone operator, will launch a Nokia Symbian phone with a Qualcomm chip in the U.S. market, an industry source close to Nokia has told VentureBeat. It’s just the latest in a wide front of attack the giant Finnish company is making on the U.S market.

For years now, the world’s largest phone maker, Nokia, has been in cold decline in the U.S. market. Right now, it seems left with a few trial… Continue Reading

Q&A with Cisco’s Laura Ipsen: Telepresence reduces carbon at Copenhagen

Laura Ipsen is senior vice president and general manager in charge of the Smart Grid for Cisco, and she’ll be speaking at our GreenBeat conference next month, where we’ll be discussing the most disruptive technologies bringing change to the old carbon-based grid system. Below is a Q&A I just had with her over the phone.

The Smart Grid is the more efficient electrical grid that the nation is moving toward, one that relies on more renewable… Continue Reading

Augmented reality company Layar gets $1M boost, launches on Symbian

Layar, which has forged early leadership in the nascent but inspiring field of “augmented reality,” is about to finish raising a round of more than $1 million.

The Dutch company, which superimposes images and other data on top of a mobile phone browser, so that you can see things like how much a house costs simply by pointing your phone camera at it, will also distribute its technology on Symbian-Nokia phones, it announced today. Nokia phones,… Continue Reading

Wikia, site for user-generated topic pages, sees “explosion of growth”

Wikia, a site that its founders liken to a Web version of a library — offering user-generated “books” of content about specific issues — is seeing explosive growth after some recent software changes.

Jimmy Wales, founder of the popular site Wikipedia, and later cofounder of Wikia, a for-profit version of Wikipedia that goes into more detail about specific topics than Wikipedia does, said the site now ranks as the No. 78th most popular site in the… Continue Reading

Will Shanghai become the Silicon Valley of “green revolution?”

First Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and now the Obama administration, are fretting that China might overtake the U.S. as the leader in green innovation.

And their fears are well-placed. A survey of Americans about their views on greenhouse gases, released yesterday, shows fewer Americans see evidence that global temperatures are rising. Only 35 percent of people polled by the Pew Research Center earlier this month said they see global warming as a very serious problem, down… Continue Reading

Massive funding to lift Smart Grid companies. Look for it next month

The federal government has earmarked $4 billion dollars for companies promising to build out a Smart Grid and improve power efficiency, but Silicon Valley’s startup community hasn’t seen much of that money yet.

That may change later this month and in November, when the Department of Energy will begin dishing out as much as billions of dollars to the nation’s utilities to support investments in smarter, more efficient technology. Those utilities will then finally have money… Continue Reading

VentureBeat-DEMO meetup in London — see you at the Sanderson Hotel

VentureBeat is coming to London!

We’re hosting cocktails on Wednesday, Oct 28., at the groovy Sanderson Hotel in London’s Soho from 6 to 8pm. I’ll be in London to moderate at the Symbian mobile conference SEE next week, but wanted to take the opportunity to meet up with local technology entrepreneurs, too. We’re meeting for casual conversation at the Hotel’s Long Bar Courtyard, where we have a private table area reserved with a hostess. Register here.

If… Continue Reading

Stoke clings to dream of seamless WiFi-to-cellular roaming, raises $5M more

A few years ago, companies like Stoke and Bridgeport Networks emerged with a noble vision: Create a super phone network technology that lets you move seamlessly back and forth from your home WiFi connection to the cellular network outside. That way, you’d use the strongest and least expensive network available to you at the time.

While the vision has partly been realized — there are phone plans that let you do this — the sector has… Continue Reading

GreenBeat spotlight: Picarro’s “sci-fi” box may prevent cap-and-trade fraud after Copenhagen

As the United States and world consider new policies and legislation to help stop climate change, verifying whether they actually work is going to be a big deal.

And it’s really encouraging to see a bunch of companies already trying to help. Picarro is one of them. It helps monitor the atmosphere’s gases to determine whether one of the main ideas for fighting global warming, a “cap-and-trade” system, is working.

By the way, startups that help verify… Continue Reading

Demo ‘10 begins in Boston — calling all awesome startups

It’s been a few weeks since Demo took San Diego by storm, and I posted a few days ago about a few of the cool things that happened to some of the demonstrating companies.

More on that in a sec. But here’s a reminder that we’re gearing up to do it all over again with DEMO ‘10, March 21st-23rd in Palm Desert, CA.

The applications are already rolling in, which means it’s time for myself and other… Continue Reading