RedSeal takes $12M for security software
RedSeal Systems, developer of cybersecurity software that estimates and manages risk, has raised $12 million in a third round of venture funding led by OVP Venture Partners. Based in San Mateo, Calif., it is also backed by Venrock, Jafco Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Leapfrog Ventures. It has now raised over $43 million to date.
What makes a Bing homepage?
I asked Bing homepage editorial director Stephanie Horstmanshof to explain it to me: What is the recognizable quality of a Bing homepage photo that makes it Bing-worthy?
“There are three things we look for,” she told me over the phone. “A sense of exploration, a sense of discovery, and a sense of delight. It should make you want to know more about it.”
Portions of each page are interactive, so that you can roll over the photo… Continue Reading
Should you be able to “abhor” Facebook posts? Threadsy says yes
Oh, “I bought new socks” status update. How I hate thee….
And now you literally can hate them.
Threadsy, which puts e-mail and social network updates together in one stream, is experimenting with an “abhor” button to flag lame Facebook posts.
Facebook, which adopted a “like” feature in January to let people voice approval for posts, has never offered any negative reinforcement to prevent boring updates. (However, Facebook lets you “hide” updates from users you don’t want to… Continue Reading
4Home logs $525K for central home electronics control
4Home, maker of software dashboards capable of remotely controlling all of the electronics and appliances in your home, has raised $525,000 in convertible promissory notes, according to a filing with the SEC. The company recently brought in another $770,000 in notes.
Indirectly related to the Smart Grid, the Sunnyvale, Calif. company makes technology that allows users to control some of their appliances remotely — particularly their thermostats. The system also serves as a hub for home… Continue Reading
5 O’Clock Roundup: Oracle results are meh, PC sales drop, funding you missed this week while reloading TechCrunch
Oracle’s profits up 4 percent despite lower sales – Quarterly revenue was off 5 percent, but the company kept costs down and grew profit margins by 4 percent. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company earned $1.124 billion, or 22 cents a share, on sales of $5.054 billion. In some areas the company was hit hard. New license revenue was off 22%, and revenue from consulting fell 23 percent. On a conference call, president Safra Catz said Oracle’s operating profit margin… Continue Reading
Google poaching Yahoo engineers in public
Mountain View’s largest ad network with a search engine attached is looking to hire more software experts. Specifically, Google wants to hire one or more “excellent Yahoo engineer(s) with solid experience in search.”
Normally, Silicon Valley companies hire recruiters to identify and solicit senior technical people. Google uses them, too.
But Google engineer Matt Cutts has a high profile among Internet engineers because of his role at Google in cracking down on search engine spam. So the… Continue Reading
OpSource launches virtual private cloud, says it’s better than Amazon’s
OpSource just announced a new product called the OpSource Cloud, which it says will provide the benefits of cloud computing — where the computing takes place remotely, on someone else’s infrastructure — without sacrificing the control and security of traditional IT. Amazon made a similar announcement yesterday, but the startup’s chief executive Treb Ryan claims the OpSource Cloud goes further in addressing the needs of large, enterprise-scale companies.
Basically, OpSource allows a company to create a… Continue Reading
Chip maker Amalfi gets $24M funding for cellphone guts
You may be holding an Amalfi product to your head right now. The company designs CMOS power amplifiers, an integral part of any mobile phone. But Amalfi Semiconductor can’t name its customers, not to me nor to anyone else.
Battery Ventures led this round of funding, Amalfi’s third, followed by unnamed “existing investors.” DCM, Globespan Capital Partners and Trinity Ventures also participated. Battery Ventures partner Ken Lawler has joined Amalfi’s board.
I couldn’t get a meeting by… Continue Reading
Utilities jockey for position following deadline for DOE stimulus funds
(Updated List of known utility applicants for DOE stimulus funds below)
Yesterday, we reported that three new utilities had filed applications for the $3.3 billion the U.S. Department of Energy plans to hand out as part of its Smart Grid Investment Grant Program. But these are just three of more than two dozen power companies that will go head to head for funds in the first round of applications now that yesterday’s deadline has passed.
The bulk… Continue Reading
Roundup: Ad market reset, Windows 7 pricing, Pogue’s voicemail crusade continues
Online advertising stops its nose-dive — Second-quarter global ad revenues, at $7.864 billion, were down 3.4 percent from a year ago. But admit it: After the past year, a 3.4 percent drop almost feels like growth. Is this a “reset” of base level from which the ad market can now grow again? TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld plots the line and explains the economist-speak. Erick, I hate to be all VentureBeat fussy, but do you have more granular… Continue Reading
Apple beats the street with $1.23 billion profit
That darned iPhone! Sales of iPhones and Macs turned out to be stronger than expected during the three-month period that ended on June 27th. Apple’s revenue for the quarter jumped up to $8.34 billion, with $1.23 billion of that logged as profit. That whumps last year’s $7.46 billion revenue and $1.07 billion profit.
Apple sold 2.6 million Macs, 10.2 million iPods and 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter.
The next three months are looking up as well…. Continue Reading
Yahoo will launch new homepage months early on Tuesday
The Wall Street Journal has obtained reliably-sourced insider information that Yahoo’s overhaul of its flagship site, a project code-named “Metro,” will go live tomorrow. The new site will encourage users to customize Yahoo with links to other sites, says the Journal:
The biggest change in the new design is a left-hand menu users can customize with links to dozens of potential third-party software, such as micro-blogging service Twitter and Google Inc.’s Gmail, said the people briefed… Continue Reading
Use Cc:Betty to follow MobileBeat 2009 on the iPhone
Virtual assistant Cc:Betty started out by organizing the information in your email, but chief executive Michael Cerda says the vision goes far beyond that — starting with the Twitter integration launched last week. It looks like Cc:Betty isn’t limiting itself to standard web access either, since the service just launched an iPhone-friendly mobile site.
You can watch Cerda describe the Palo Alto, Calif., company at the DEMO conference in this video, but the basic idea is… Continue Reading
Microsoft Office 2010 — where’s the part where they get paid?
Microsoft Office 2010, which gets its official debut at Microsoft’s international partner conference in New Orleans on Monday, will be based around a free, ad-supported Web version of Office. And it’s not a jokey one, from what our embargoed friends in the press have told us.
Conceptually, this is brilliant. Microsoft, faced with competition from free or cheap browser-based apps like Google Docs and Zoho, cuts them off by building its own competitor.
But MS Office is… Continue Reading
VCs pass $100M in iPhone funding
Among companies developing solely for the iPhone, social network startups have drawn more VC investment money than games, according to startup investment tracker Chubby Brain’s latest set of charts. Listing 22 rounds of funding for 17 companies, Chubby accounted for over $100 million in investments, with a median level of $3.45 million.
The most active investor is Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, which has a $100 million iFund from which it has invested in at least five… Continue Reading
Video: How to surf faster with Internet Explorer
A few enterprising Microsoft employees have produced a low-cost video that shows how accelerators, a feature of the Internet Explorer 8 browser, reduce the number of steps to perform common tasks.
What Microsoft’s doing is attempting to beat Google by changing the game. Instead of trying to lure Googler users away with higher relevance, more pages in a search index, or faster search response, Microsoft is focusing on saving the Internet user’s time by keeping them away… Continue Reading
Facebook debuts live chat pages, Ustream live video
Facebook’s new Live Stream Box is a cut-and-paste HTML widget that can be added to a website to let Facebook users chat alongside a live event. Updates to the stream post quickly and then wash off the screen, to maximize the live-event feel.
In the example shown below, Mashable founder and poster boy Pete Cashmore has set up a Live Stream Box next to a video window.
At the same time, Facebook and Ustream have integrated Ustream’s… Continue Reading
HTC Hero phone will have a Flash player
If you’ve got an iPhone in your pocket, you know what’s most conspicuously missing from it (besides a keyboard): a Flash player.
Adobe’s Flash technology has evolved in the past four years from being hated for the proliferation of “Skip Intro” website home pages, to being loved as the Internet’s default TV-watching technology. Flash made YouTube work reliably in 2005. So why isn’t it on our phones yet?
Well, now it will be, although not on an… Continue Reading
New York Times appoints a “social media editor”
How’s this for a dream job? America’s paper of record has reassigned one of its editors to be the in-house expert on Facebook and Twitter.
You can read up on Jennifer Preston’s background in this morning’s entertainingly cruel Gawker post. More important is that the New York Times as an organization takes social networks seriously as a work tool. A leaked internal email describes Preston’s role:
Jennifer is our first social media editor. What’s that? It’s someone who concentrates… Continue Reading
TiVo’s still watching you, but by region now
It’s no secret TiVo has been watching its subscribers. But now the DVR company has announced it’s giving advertisers up-to-the-minute info on what users are watching (and fast-forwarding through) based on specific geographic regions.
As a web-enabled DVR/TV guide service, TiVo already collects a wealth of data on its users’ viewing habits on a national level. Today’s announcement is an expansion of those efforts by repackaging this data for advertisers and content providers on a local… Continue Reading