VentureBeat

Hey bloggers, do you wish for Tumblr Pro? Try ZooLoo

When pushbutton-simple free blogging site Tumblr launched in 2007, friends of mine with a lot to say but no interest in tinkering with HTML jumped onto it. Not only did they create their own personal blogs, they spun off temporary joke blogs for topics of the day. A coworker of mine at Valleywag created fakepaulboutin.tumblr.com, where she posted my wisecracks from Valleywag’s private chat room.

But if you want your own personal domain rather than... Continue Reading

Lead411 buffs up with 1.4 million executive profiles, deeper info options

For some types of searches, Google totally sucks. Are you looking for a senior editor at Wired to pitch? Until recently, Google’s built-in directory returned me as a top result, seven years after I’d lost the job. If you’re a salesperson, marketer, recruiter, or competitor researching company executives, Google is full of non-leads, and its website results are often out of date. That’s because one in four Americans changes jobs each year, according to the... Continue Reading

iTunes music: Higher prices result in slower sales growth

On this morning’s earnings call for Warner Music, CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr said that the company’s $1.29 tracks — a 30 percent price boost over Apple’s standard 99 cents — have been a “net positive” for the company. Yet as media pundit Peter Kafka observed, the entire music industry’s iTunes sales growth is slower than a year ago, when consumer confidence and willingness to spend were much lower:

Industrywide, year-over-year “digital track equivalent album unit... Continue Reading

Twilio adds SMS text support to its phone-to-Web API

Twilio is a company that offers an Internet API so companies can create Web applications that make or take phone calls. For website application developers, getting any sort of connection to telephones can be a show-stopper. Wireless carriers, which are enormous bureaucracies, can take forever to approve and support the connection. Twilio was founded in 2007 to solve that problem at an affordable price. Twilio offers Web app makers an API connection to phone... Continue Reading

A giant table of Super Bowl ads ranked by online results

Gomez is a division of Compuware that does website performance measurement for businesses. Like me, they constantly hammer the point that a slow site loses a lot of business. In fact, 78 percent of consumers surveyed told Gomez they have switched to a competitor’s site because the site they wanted was too slow.

With that in mind, this past Sunday Gomez studied the websites of every company with a Super Bowl ad as their commercials... Continue Reading

An SD memory card adapter for your iPhone

I don’t normally blog about gadget hardware, but zoomMediaPlus‘ new zoomIt SD card adapter for iPhone and iPod Touch fills a gaping hole of utility. Not only does it let Apple handset owners look at photos, play music, and read documents off an SD card, it has smart software that optimizes the experience.

When you first connect the adapter, it prompts you onscreen to download a free iPhone app that controls the media on your... Continue Reading

Is TechCrunch doomed by payola scandal?

Late last week, tech biz bloggers were shocked — and a few were cruelly happy — to read that TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington had fired 17-year-old intern, entrepreneur and Internet fameball Daniel Brusilovsky. Arrington said the teenage overachiever had accepted a computer from a company in exchange for coverage on TechCrunch. Brusilovsky also admitted, Arrington said, to asking a different startup for a MacBook Air, which led that company to complain to Arrington.

Not only... Continue Reading

Ad expert: Google’s Super Bowl spot was a live traffic test

Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants you to believe that Google’s 52-second “Parisian Love” ad that ran in the third quarter of yesterday’s Super Bowl was a spontaneous decision to take a popular YouTube video and “share it with a wider audience.”

Aw, a present. You shouldn’t have!

They didn’t. We got an email this morning from Martin McNulty, director of online ad agency Forward3D. Maybe because he’s a Brit, McNulty can see past Super Bowl... Continue Reading

Mobile ad exchange Mobclix teams with Nielsen to sharpen ad targeting for 890,000 households

Mobile advertising is one of the hottest fields we report on at VentureBeat. Gartner analysts expect it to be a $7.4 billion market by the end of 2014. Not as big as Google’s $20 billion-ish ad economy, but a viable space for which media planners will design and place ads.

For ad buyers, it’s a big deal that Mobclix will soon be hooked up to Nielsen’s ad targeting data. Nielsen’s PRIZM is built around a database... Continue Reading

Charlie Rose hosts Mossberg, Arrington, David Carr on iPad (video)

TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington has become a regular on the Charlie Rose. In his sixth appearance on the show, he joins Wall Street Journal gadget overlord Walt Mossberg and The New York Times’ lyric poet of media reporting, David Carr.

The three-way interview is nearly 25 minutes long. If this were a weekday, I’d tell you which thirty seconds to skip to. But it’s the weekend. Kick back with your non-tablet computer and watch the... Continue Reading

How Apple’s A4 chip lets iPad run cooler, save battery life

Updated

Apple broke with the consumer electronics industry’s accepted wisdom by designing its own processor chips for the upcoming iPad tablet computer. In the past, Apple persuaded Intel to build a custom central processor chip for its super-skinny MacBook Air. But iPad design goes one further by bringing the chips in-house, using the talents of a company called Palo Alto Semiconductor — PA Semi to insiders — a maker of power-efficient chips that Apple acquired in 2008.... Continue Reading

Apple’s A4 chip: Engineers correct stupid journalist

Updated with several more emails.

I have no clue about computer chip design and manufacturing. So I trolled VentureBeat’s readers with a challenge: Explain to me how Apple’s switch from third-party chip manufacturers to its own in-house design for the A4 chip that powers the new iPad tablet computer makes the iPad better, either for Apple or for iPad customers.

Former Apple employee Prabhakar Kotla sent me not one snappy answer, but ten of them.... Continue Reading

Publishers line up against Amazon’s $9.99 e-books

The ten-dollar e-book may soon be gone, replaced by the fifteen-dollar eBook.

Last week, VentureBeat broke the news that Amazon had removed all Macmillan titles from its U.S. site and its Kindle downloads. You could look up the books, but you could only buy them from third party sellers, not from Amazon.

The move turned out to be a reaction against Macmillan’s shift from a wholesale-retail relationship with Amazon to what the book industry calls... Continue Reading

Carly Fiorina’s crazy attack video

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is running for the US Senate seat currently held by Barbara Boxer. So is former Silicon Valley House representative Tom Campbell. Fiorina’s campaign has produced a video accusing Campbell of being a “fiscal conservative in name only … a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Campbell, it’s true, played a major role in California’s spendy 2005 budget. He criticized President Bush’s tax cuts. He refused to sign the Taxpayer Protection Pledge against tax... Continue Reading

Hi Media, European leader in mobile micropayments, invades USA

It’s OK if you don’t know about Hi Media. The Paris-based, publicly traded company (they’re traded on Eurolist B) has been around for 10 years but has kept its focus in Europe. Only last year did it set up shop in the UK.

But Hi Media is somewhere between Microsoft and Yahoo in reach for its display ad network in nine European countries, with 130 million monthly unique visitors served worldwide. The company also owns... Continue Reading

80% of American mobile sites have global audience, says Motally report

Mobile analytics firm Motally publishes a monthly report on mobile website and application usage. This month’s report, to be published later today, finds that 80% of mobile websites have substantial traffic from around the world.

To be specific, if you divide the world into seven regions — North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa , Middle East and Oceania — 80 percent of websites get traffic from at least three regions outside their own. 72... Continue Reading

A pretty chart of top apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry

Mplayit, maker of the mobile app catalog that lives inside Facebook, will release a report later today that lists the top games in their collection. Tetris, The Sims 3, and Wheel of Fortune are among the winners. So are Tap Tap Revenge and Rock Band.

On Mplayit, users can rate, comment on, and recommend individual apps to their social network on Facebook and Twitter. They can browse friends’ app collections, and follow their interests.

The... Continue Reading

Factual lands $1M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz, Idealab

Factual, an online data management company whose stated goal is to help people create as many open databases on the Internet as possible, has apparently pulled in $1 million in seed funding. The company was founded last fall by Gil Elbaz, whose previous company, Applied Semantics, was bought by Google as core technology to the search engine’s unique AdSense ad-serving system.

VentureBeat has obtained the text of a blog post going up later today, in... Continue Reading

JooJoo will be manufactured by Malaysia’s CSL Group

Mobile handset manufacturer CSL Group is unheard of here, but in Southeast Asia it claims to sell more handsets than anyone besides Nokia. CSL stands for “Commitment Service Loyalty,” and Malaysians buy a lot of CSL’s flagrantly-named Blueberry smartphones.

They’re more than big enough to handle manufacturing of Fusion Garage’s JooJoo tablet computer, which began life as TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington’s CrunchPad. Compared to Apple’s iPad tablet, the JooJoo has a much larger screen that... Continue Reading

Apple patents iPod-like wheel on iPad touchscreen

Rumors are one thing, but patent application drawings are another. The latest illustrations picked up by the Patently Apple blog show what looks like the iPod’s famous clickwheel on the screen of an iPad. It’s not a physical wheel, it’s an interface that appears on the touchscreen.

The patent explains that the “intelligent bezel,” as it’s called, adjusts itself to the orientation of the tablet screen, either horizontal or vertical. It is accompanied by touchable... Continue Reading