Skyfire gets $8M to stream mobile videos without any wait

Mobile browsing and video optimization company Skyfire announced today it has raised $8 million in its third round of funding.  The round was facilitated by Verizon Investments, Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Skyfire gained popularity as an alternative to the stock browsers on Android and iOS devices. Since Apple does not provide Flash support for its mobile devices, many people flocked to Skyfire’s browser apps to watch in-browser Flash videos on their … Continue Reading

Cloudability raises $1M, helps keep your cloud spending in check

Cloudability, a company that helps people manage cloud services spending, has secured $1 million in its latest investment round. This seed investment round was led by Trinity Ventures and Walden Venture Capital, including $250,000 in funding from Portland-based angel investors.

In November, Cloudability launched its beta service to help companies become more efficient with their cloud spending.

“We are focused on three main tasks: preventing big overages, saving time, and identifying areas of [spending] waste,” … Continue Reading

Best Buy and Hooked Media hold contest to find best Android game developers

Best Buy and Hooked Media have launched a competition to find the best Android mobile game developers, and VentureBeat is helping out. The Get Discovered! competition will give the winner and finalists distribution on mobile platforms, media recognition and seed funding from Trinity Ventures.

The point of the contest is to find talented developers, who are a scarce commodity these days as competition in the mobile gaming market heats up. Contests of all kinds are … Continue Reading

Dylan’s Desk: How I learned to stop worrying and love “the cloud”

As I write, the VentureBeat offices sit enveloped by a cloud. In all directions, the fog wraps our office building in a soft, gray fuzz, obscuring the views of downtown San Francisco, the bay, and the ocean.

It’s not unlike the cloud of marketing and hype surrounding “cloud” technologies. A fog of jargony words and needlessly ugly acronyms obscure understanding and make everything look like the same, soft grayish fog.

IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, cloudware, private … Continue Reading

Cloud technologies are a huge, untapped market, says Trinity Ventures’ Dan Scholnick (video)

Dan Scholnick is a general partner at Trinity Ventures. In this conversation with VentureBeat editor-in-chief and founder Matt Marshall, he discusses the future and potential of cloud technologies.

Scholnick will also be speaking at CloudBeat 2011, VentureBeat’s upcoming enterprise cloud conference, so you can catch him there for more perspective. He’ll be moderating a case study session with Thomas Kelly, Enterprise Architect for Cloud Services at Best Buy.

For Scholnick, “cloud” is a vague term, … Continue Reading

Trion prepares to host third-party games on its online gaming platform

Game maker Trion Worlds, which successfully launched its first major online role-playing fantasy game, Rift, back in March, is now unveiling a game platform to publish games created by other companies.

While Trion will continue making massively multiplayer online games such as its upcoming End of Nations and Defiance titles, the platform, called Project Red Door, is a way for the Redwood City, Calif.-based company to make a lot more money than it otherwise would, … Continue Reading

Taulia raises $8.5M to help suppliers avert their own debt crises

Taulia, which offers discounts in exchange for timely payments, announced an $8.5 million second round of funding yesterday. DAG Ventures joined existing investors Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures to lead the round.

In a sluggish economy, San Francisco-based Taulia is offering suppliers an alternative to the traditional – and expensive – modes of external financing. This means suppliers of all sizes can avoid resorting to lenders and keep paying their employees.

And even though borrowing … Continue Reading

Badgeville raises $12M to lead the way in gamification

Gamification startup Badgeville has raised $12 million in a second round of funding to add game-like features to non-game applications.

Kris Duggan, chief executive of Menlo Park, Calif.-based Badgeville, said that the funding will help the company accelerate its growth and help it leave the other dozen or so gamification startups behind.

With its Dynamic Game Engine and Widget Studio, Badgeville makes it easy for companies to increase customer loyalty and engagement in a way … Continue Reading