VC portfolios improve in Q2, but funding pipeline runs low

A survey of the venture capital industry released Wednesday shows that the valuation of startup companies funded by VC firms improved in the second quarter over the first, but the amount of money raised by VC firms to fund those companies declined in the same period.

The Fenwick & West Venture Capital Barometer, published by the Silicon Valley law firm, showed that the average increase in the valuation of start-ups receiving funding was 30 percent, … Continue Reading

Anybots launches "telepresence robots" to handle your business travel

Silicon Valley startup Anybots is entering the increasingly competitive field “telepresence robot” market today with the release of its first robot. Telepresence robots work as stand-ins for people who operate them remotely.

A telepresence robot can, for example, tour a plant in China while the person controlling it follows along from their office in California. The tour guide could talk to the robot like they’re talking to the person on the other end and can … Continue Reading

How green are solar companies, really? SVTC ranks them for you

An environmental group pushing the solar power industry to adopt best practices for “greener” manufacturing has released a scorecard showing which companies rated highest on solar panel recycling and other environmental efforts.

The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), a nonprofit based in San Jose, Calif., released its SolarScorecard — the first of what it plans to make an annual survey. The report lists 24 leading makers of photovoltaic (PV) solar modules and one maker of … Continue Reading

Wistia pulls in $775K for video sharing business

Wistia, a startup that helps businesses share video with customers, partners and others, as well as track who watches it, has secured $775,000 in new financing from its angel investors.

The Lexington, Mass. company offers “video sharing for the average business user, not someone in IT,” said Christopher Savage, co-founder and chief executive of the three-and-a-half-year-old company.

But Wistia’s business model is more than just uploading a video and sending someone a link to it, … Continue Reading

DEMO: Systems Thinking Institute takes risk out of innovation efforts

Systems Thinking Institute is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.

Systems thinking is a broad concept that concerns the process of understanding how things influence one another other within a whole, be it the ecosystem of a forest or the process of product innovation within a company. … Continue Reading

DEMO: Permission to Send uses PIN-based system to block spam

Permission to Send is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.

Euros Evans, the founder of Permission to Send, believes he’s found a 100 percent accurate spam killer. Legitimate senders of e-mail are given a personal identification number (PIN) to add to an e-mail address so it goes … Continue Reading

DEMO: BrandFolium offers online marketplace for social networking ads

BrandFolium is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.

Two-year-old BrandFolium will turn on its Navid (pronounced nah-VEED) website today at DEMO, calling it an online connection between advertisers and publishers of social networking sites.

The Navid marketplace works pretty much like the way advertisers and publishers have … Continue Reading

uTest rates the best TV network web sites, and catches bugs

NBC’s ratings are in the basement compared to its broadcast rivals. After that messy Jay Leno-Conan O’Brien fiasco, it’s scrambling to reprogram its 10 o’clock time slot. But they are No. 1 on another list: Apparently, tech-savvy viewers say NBC.com has the best web site of all the major U.S. broadcast networks, besting CBS, Fox and ABC, in that order.

The honor was bestowed on the peacock network by uTest, a software testing marketplace that … Continue Reading

Yahoo's new crowdsourcing Predictalot app picks NCAA winners

Forget the brackets in the office NCAA Tournament pool. This year, Yahoo is offering an application drawing on the wisdom of crowds to make sense out of March Madness.

Yahoo Labs last week launched Predictalot into beta, an application that takes predicting the winners and losers in the tournament “to entirely new extremes.”

“You can invest virtual points on almost any prediction you can think of about the men’s college basketball tournament, like ‘Duke will … Continue Reading

People Power releases SDK for wireless home energy sensors

Serial entrepreneur Gene Wang started People Power, a maker wireless network devices that monitor energy consumption, because he knows how much energy is wasted by the average household. Thermostats are not set properly, TVs draw power even when they’re off and sprinkler systems operate oblivious to weather patterns.

“About the dumbest thing you see happening is it’s raining and your lawn sprinklers turn on because they’re just on a timer,” said Wang, founder and CEO … Continue Reading

Storage SaaS vendor RainStor lands $7.5. million in new funding

RainStor, a SaaS provider of software for storing and retrieving structured data in an enterprise or in the cloud, today said it raised $7.5 million in second round funding.

The company’s latest product, RainStor 3.5, was introduced in December 2009 and coincided with the six year old UK-based company’s entrance into the U.S. market, a name change from Clearpace and the opening of an office in San Francisco.

RainStor earned kudos from William Fellows, an … Continue Reading

Spigit offers social media platform for company contests

Spigit, the maker of a social networking platform that lets businesses use crowdsourcing to solve internal problems, is launching a new platform today that will allow external crowdsourcing as well.

ContestSpigit is a $5,000 a month software-as-a-service offering for businesses that want to interact with an external audience of customers, partners or the community at large, said Richard Tso, head of marketing for the Pleasanton, Calif.-based firm. “It’s like the next generation of crowdsourcing, if … Continue Reading

Multicore chip maker Tilera raises $25M

Chip maker Tilera, whose multicore products have as many as 100 computing “brains” on one chip, today announced it’s closed a $25 million third round of financing.

New investors in this latest, oversubscribed, round are communications chip maker Broadcom, contract manufacturer Quanta Computer and Japan-based NTT Financing Corp. This brings the total amount of venture capital in the six year old, San Jose, Calif.-based company to $64 million.

Tilera’s TILE family of products includes the … Continue Reading

Researcher creates 'Facebook for Scientists'

Imagine how much sooner Dr. Jonas Salk could have discovered the polio vaccine if in 1955 if he was on Facebook. Often, researchers work in a vacuum. They can be stuck on a problem blocking progress on their research that someone on the other side of the world has already solved. Yes, there’s a wealth of information online and in scientific journals, but what if there were one central place online where a researcher could … Continue Reading

Privacy group argues Buzz breaks wiretap laws

Updated

Google today said it is willing to hear a privacy group’s concerns about its Google Buzz social media platform, even after the group filed a complaint with the FTC over the controversial service.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed the complaint Tuesday in Washington, arguing that Buzz, which builds a network of friends for Gmail users from the contacts in their e-mail program, violates users’ privacy.

“Our door is always open to organizations … Continue Reading

Look for more blue splotches as AT&T improves its network

AT&T is budgeting up to $19 billion this year to improve its nationwide phone network, a 5 percent to 10 percent increase over its $17.3 billion investment last year, the company said today.

Although AT&T didn’t break out how much of the budget it plans to spend in California, it said it will add 200 new cell sites and upgrade 500 existing sites to 3G capability in the Golden State this year on top of … Continue Reading

Google Buzz: Do I really have to learn another social media app?

The 1976 Mel Brooks film “Silent Movie” depicts an evil corporation “Engulf & Devour” whose slogan is “We’ve got our fingers in everything” beneath a logo of a pair of hands clutching the planet Earth. The release of Google Buzz this week reminded me of that.

Not that Google is evil; quite the contrary given its “don’t be evil” mission statement. But do they have to have their fingers in everything? Google Search (brilliant), Google … Continue Reading

App makers expect to rewrite their iPhone apps for iPad

When Apple introduced the iPad last week, it sought to reassure application developers that nearly all of the 140,000 apps created so far for the iPhone will run fine on the iPad unchanged. But developer Marine Leroux asks, “Why would you want them to?”

“You could make richer apps on the iPad because you’ve got more real estate. When you’ve got more space, why not make the most of it?” said Leroux, founder and CEO … Continue Reading

FCC seeks answers from carriers on early termination fees

The Federal Communications Commission today asked each of the major US wireless carriers and Google to explain how early termination fees (ETFs) are set and imposed on subscribers, in the wake of the doubling of some fees in recent months.

The FCC’s letters to AT&T, Google, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless ask each of them the same 12 questions about how the ETFs are calculated, how subscribers are informed of the fees, and how … Continue Reading

European Commission okays Oracle-Sun deal

The European Commission today gave its approval to the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, ending nine months of uncertainty about the $7.4 billion deal.

In a published statement, the commission (which is the regulatory authority for the European Union) wrote that “the transaction would not significantly impede effective competition.”

The acquisition was announced in April 2009 and won approval of U.S. regulators in August, but the EC began investigating the deal in September after … Continue Reading