VentureBeat

5 O’Clock Roundup: Murdoch threatens Google again, Craig joins Wikipedia

Here’s the latest action:

Rupert Murdoch plans to remove News Corp’s content from Google within a few months -- News Corp’s chief digital officer, Jonathan Miller, says the media mogul’s plan to charge for content and remove The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, and other publications from Google’s index is real and will happen in “months and quarters — not weeks.” Miller repeated one of Murdoch’s talking points: “The traffic which comes in from… Continue Reading

Verizon boosts smartphone cancellation fee to $350

Ditching a BlackBerry, Android or other smartphone from Verizon will cost twice as much as it used to starting next week. Canceling a two-year service contract early on top-of-the-line phones will cost $350 at first, sliding down to $110 at the end of two years.

New York Times gadget guy David Pogue asks the fairly obvious math question about Verizon’s charges: “If the premise of the early-termination fee is to help Verizon recoup its original cost… Continue Reading

Google’s Chrome OS rumored to launch next week

Google’s browser-based operating system for personal computers will be released to the public “within a week,” claims TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington, who says he has inside sources.

The small, fast, and hopefully bug-free system, called Chrome OS, is a direct attack on Microsoft’s dominant operating system, Windows. Chrome OS exploits the fact that the browser has become a better place for people to work, because it’s more direct. For example, it takes advantage of the fact… Continue Reading

Apple’s app review process continues to alienate coders

“Slow replies, delays and dithering” from Apple’s app reviewers demoralize many iPhone app developers, claims a developer at respected Mac software maker Rogue Amoeba who says he has abandoned iPhone app development.

A day after the developer of Facebook’s iPhone app, Joe Hewitt, announced that he would no longer work on iPhone apps, Rogue Amoeba developer Paul Kafasis posted a similar resignation from iPhone-dom.

Kafasis’ iPhone app, Airfoil Speakers Touch, plays music from an iPhone or iPod… Continue Reading

Nielsen’s challenge: Signing up three-screen viewers

Nielsen’s Brian Fuhrer laid out the future of television ratings at today’s NewTeeVee Live conference in San Francisco. Nielsen’s Extended Screen program, on which Fuhrer gave an overview talk, is a project to collect Internet usage data from Nielsen’s existing TV households on both computers and mobile devices, covering what’s become known as the three-screen viewing landscape of TV, computer and mobile handset.

Fuhrer’s talk didn’t go into technical details, but he explained the biggest challenge… Continue Reading

Boxee box to be unveiled December 7th

Boxee, maker of free “media center software” (software that lets you hook up your computer to your TV and navigate movies, TV shows, music and other media content), has been gaining in popularity. But potential customers have one big request for the company: Give us a dedicated Boxee box, rather than requiring us to run your software on our laptops.

Today, in sync with co-founder Avner Ronen’s appearance as a speaker at the NewTeeVee conference in… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: Twitter adds built-in retweet, Facebook programmer quits iPhone app

(Tonight’s roundup is foreshortened so we can go meet with attendees at i9 NewTeeVee conference.)

Twitter finally added a built-in retweet button today – Co-founder Evan Williams posted a long blog entry explaining the company’s thinking. Twitter users suffered from bugs and t

In short, they’ve built an automated retweeter that avoids the truncated text, confusing avatar/text mismatches, and river of redundant retweets in the ad-hoc manual retweeting ecosystem that users had concocted.

They’ve used internal metadata and an… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: Up rounds, more fiber, Google Flu

Some positive news in the land of VC – A survey by law firm Fenwick & West found that 41% percent of new financing in the third quarter was for up rounds, which means the company’s valuation was raised from the previous round. OK, that still leaves 59% of non-up rounds, but it’s a change from the we’re-all-doomed early days of 2009. As one lawyer puts it,“There’s the feeling that the world just didn’t fall off… Continue Reading

Analysts: Either 100,000 or 400,000 Droids sold

How many Droid phones has Verizon sold? It depends which respected industry analyst you ask.

Telecom analyst Mark McKechnie from research firm Broadpoint AmTech told Bloomberg reporters that Verizon began sales with 200,000 units in stock last weekend, and that most stores had sold roughly half their stock. That multiplies to 100,000 units sold. (Mark is not pictured at right. These guys just had the best Droid team spirit in a Google image search.)

The number is impressive, but… Continue Reading

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft offer free WiFi, but no game change

Google one-upped the WiFi offerings of Yahoo and Microsoft this morning, announcing that the company will be sponsoring the WiFi at 47 airports through mid-January, covering the holiday travel season. The list of airports is at freeholidaywifi.com.

There won’t be any new Google Airport technology. Google is simply picking up the tab on WiFi service already offered by other companies — Boingo, Advanced Wireless Group and others.

Google’s official blog post says over 100 million people will… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: Google gets Gizmo, Timberlake as Facebook prez

Google has acquired VoIP startup Gizmo – The deal for the Skype-alike startup was done for around $30 million in cash, says the rumor mill. eBay had come close to buying Gizmo as the company’s backup infrastructure, says TechCrunch, but walked away after the company’s founders settled with Skype.

Sun – Oracle deal meets stiff opposition from European antitrust regulators — The European Commission issued a list of objections t0 the deal. Unlike U.S. antitrust authorities, the… Continue Reading

Will Google’s deal with Admob invite antitrust concerns?

Google announced its acquisition of mobile display-ad company AdMob today. It feels a bit like a replay of Google’s 2008 acquisition of online ad company DoubleClick. The question is, will the Department of Justice’s eager anti-trust crime fighters scrutinize this deal to the extent it did the DoubleClick deal? Google has said it expects the deal to close in the next few months. And while it said it doesn’t anticipate any regulatory concerns, it also… Continue Reading

Murdoch says he will remove News Corp. sites from Google (video)

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch told Sky News interviewer David Speers that he will remove his news sites — The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Times of London and many more — from Google’s search index. It’s all in the video below, but here’s the crux of it:

Speers: “The other argument from Google is that you could choose not to be on their search engine, that you could simply refuse … so that… Continue Reading

MSN changes the butterfly

MSN’s new home page, which you can see at preview.msn.com, is the first one that doesn’t look like it was designed by Microsoft. The new page has the same cheery look and feel as the Bing search box that perches at its top, waiting to grab your next search away from Google.

The MSN butterfly logo has been redesigned to match the new look. It’s pretty, but I doubt many users will notice the change. It… Continue Reading

Roundup: Les Moonves rocks it for CBS, Google’s privacy dashboard gets hated on

CBS beats analysts with $207 million profit for Q3 — Bloomberg reports that CEO Les Moonves “is leading the industry”  in getting satellite and cable TV systems to pay retransmission fees that may bring CBS $200 million by 2012 or 2013.  Audience members heckled Moonves when he stepped onto the stage at Google’s CES keynote performance in 2006. It was almost too easy to pick on him for his awkward out-of-touch-ness with the Google fan… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: FTC vs Intel, EMI vs BlueBeat, eBay vs common sense

The FTC may sue Intel, too – FTC Chairman Jon Liebowitz and Commissioners Pamela Jones Harbour and Thomas Rosch are, according to Reuters, in favor of filing a complaint.

“The basic allegation is that Intel entered into relationships with IBM and Dell and H-P designed to stop AMD’s growth,” antitrust lawyer John Harkrider told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s not really a question of the impact of AMD, but on the impact of the competitive process.”… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: Droid reviews, Apple’s secret TV plan, Sprint’s dubious netbook deal

Intuit completes buyout of Mint.com – Mint.com CEO Aaron Patzer will suck it up and shift from CEO to vice president and general manager of Intuit’s personal finance group, which also includes Quicken products.

Yes, Disney’s new film is a hand-drawn musical – “I’ve never understood why the studios were saying people don’t want to see hand-drawn animation. What people don’t want to watch is a bad movie,” Pixar co-founder John Lasseter told the Wall Street Journal. He’s… Continue Reading

How to make 8x your money: Chinese IPOs

Enjoyor Technology Group, a new company that debuted on the Chinese Growth Enterprise Market, closed its first day up 81%. Intel, which had invested 20 million Renminbi or about $23.7 million, is looking at a paper profit of $162 million, roughly eight times what they put into the company.

Intel Capital president Arvind Sodhani told peHUB writer Deborah Gage that he expects more such companies in Intel’s Chinese p0rtf0lio. Going public in America, he said, is… Continue Reading

TeleNav IPO: If Google starts a free navigation service, we’re doomed. Whoops

TeleNav, which provides voice-guided navigation services on mobile phones, filed for an IPO today. The company’s offering, though, goes head-to-head with Google’s recently announced Google Maps Navigation offering.

Did Google rush its announcement to block TeleNav, or did TeleNav rush its IPO to block Google?

Probably both. TeleNav’s public S-1 filing with the SEC today has a lengthy Risks section that includes this clause:

“Google recently announced that it would offer free voice guided, turn by turn navigation… Continue Reading

5 O’Clock Roundup: Sony still failing, Google jumps comparison ad train, Zuckerberg employee wears penguin outfit to work

OK, who dressed as Mark Zuckerberg for Halloween? Click it for full size. That’s the real Zuckerberg at left in this photo being sent around the Internets, taking an important meeting at Facebook with an employee whose passion for Linux led him to dress as Tux the penguin on the day before Halloween.

But no worries about the costume. It’s 100% certain that any lonely male readers will take one look at this photo and see only: Girls!

Sony… Continue Reading