VentureBeat

SoundCloud raises $3.3 million for audiophile file-sharing

SoundCloud, an audio file sharing site for music professionals, has raised €2.5 million ($3.3 million) in its first round of funding. The Berlin-based startup entered the crowded file-sharing market last year with a private beta, but its executives say the service has since grown to 100,000 registered users.

The site works by providing a web-based platform for storing and sharing uncompressed audio files. But, rather than focusing on the average file sharer, SoundCloud targets its service… Continue Reading

Survey: iPhone has biggest potential for games

Apple’s iPhone will be the games industry’s favorite platform going forward, according to a survey just conducted of industry executives and interested readers.

The survey also found that micro-transactions, such as purchases of virtual goods in online games, are expected to have the highest impact on the video game industry in the next five years.

The results are from VentureBeat’s first game industry survey, conducted on the eve of our GamesBeat 2009 conference being held tomorrow in… Continue Reading

Intel’s Mark Bohr: Look to biology for the future of computing

Intel Fellow Mark Bohr told attendees at an engineering conference in San Francisco this morning to look to biological systems to figure out how to engineer the future of computing.

Bohr said that the human brain is far better at computing because it operates on very low power (barely perceptible electrical signals), computes in a parallel fashion, and integrates many more senses than computers currently do (i.e.: sound, sight, touch, smell and taste). He made the… Continue Reading

AMD launches Yukon platform for ultraportable computers

Advanced Micro Devices is introducing technology today that can make notebook computers lighter, faster, and more versatile.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker’s Yukon platform is a collection of chips aimed at the ultraportable notebook computer market. Such laptops will likely blur the line between full-fledged laptop computers and lesser machines known as netbooks.

The first major customer for the Yukon platform is Hewlett-Packard, which will use Yukon in its new high-end notebook, the HP Pavilion dv2, which… Continue Reading

Square Connect turns your iPhone into a remote control

Maybe the iPhone should be called the “Jesus Phone” after all. SquareConnect is creating an application that turns your iPhone (or iPod touch) into a remote control for all of the consumer electronics gadgets in your home.

SquareConnect chief executive Mat Henshall said that the company can turn the four-inch display of the iPhone into a virtual remote control for any consumer electronics gadget that ordinarily requires a separate remote. You could use an iPhone to… Continue Reading

Intel Developer Forum: Chairman Craig Barrett takes us on a world tech tour

Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel, travels to 30 countries a year. At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this morning, he took his audience of thousands on a tour of how tech is changing the places he visits. While Barrett didn’t make much news with his talk, he gave useful updates on where we stand in the global adoption of technology. I found his talk akin to a compass.

I can remember years when… Continue Reading

Black Hat: An interview with Dan Kaminsky, the DNS dude who saved the Internet

Dan Kaminsky showed up at the Black Hat conference in a Pac-Man T-shirt and jeans. But he was the man of the hour at a presentation yesterday that held 1,000 people spellbound during his ninth talk in 10 years. The 29-year-old self-described DNS guy talked about the flaw he discovered earlier this year and managed to keep secret as security researchers prepared a patch for it, thereby allowing the Internet to avoid a train wreck…. Continue Reading

Delta loves to fly and it shows (in the form of Wi-Fi)

The promise of Wi-Fi on planes continues to creep closer to reality. Today, Delta Air Lines announced that its entire fleet of over 330 planes traveling throughout the continental U.S. will be equipped with wireless Internet.

The service will be provided using Aircell’s Gogo system which promises Internet access to laptops, smartphones and PDAs. Included will be VPN access for corporate fliers and interestingly, SMS text messages, according to the press release. The use of cell… Continue Reading

Cloud company Elastra gets $12M from Amazon

Elastra, a company that helps manage applications in the Internet cloud, has raised $12 million in new funding.

This is Elastra’s second venture round, and it was led by Bay Partners, with Amazon.com and existing investor Hummer Winblad Venture Partners also participating. Amazon’s backing is particularly impressive, since its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) makes Amazon one of the most important companies to cloud computing in general, and to Elastra in particular, since the San Francisco startup… Continue Reading

Google creates a mashup of Omnisio and YouTube

We thought pretty highly of the online video mashup site Omnisio at this year’s Y Combinator Demo Day, and liked it even more after it launched back in March. Apparently, so did Google. Its YouTube property purchased Ominisio today as a way to expand how users interact with the videos they create online, according to the YouTube Blog.

Terms of the deal were not announced, though TechCrunch is hearing it was an all cash deal in… Continue Reading

Could a big geothermal energy play be next for Google.org?

Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, has taken a number of stakes in solar and wind startups over the past year, most recently joining a $115 million investment in solar thermal firm BrightSource Energy. It now seems to be focusing its attention on the bustling geothermal energy sector, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently expressing a strong interest in Ormat, a geothermal startup headquartered in Reno, Nevada.

During an interview with the Israeli newspaper, The Marker, Brin confirmed… Continue Reading

Live blogging: Conversation with Ning’s Marc Andreessen at Web 2.0

(This is a continuation of live blogging from the Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone West convention center in San Francisco) On the second day of the Web 2.0 keynotes, John Battelle of Federated Media is interviewing Internet wunderkind Marc Andreessen, the CEO of Ning, a maker of social networking platforms. He is, of course, the man behind the original Mosaic web browser and (once upon a time) wildly popular Netscape Navigator browser.

Andreessen recently raised $60… Continue Reading

Nurien Software raises $15 million for Asian social networking and gaming service

Nurien Software, a Korean social networking and online gaming company, has raised $15 million in a first round of venture capital from investors in the U.S. and China.

The company lets users create their own avatars and then socialize in a variety of topic areas. Its service has been in development for three years. Investors include Beijing-based Northern Light Venture Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and QiMing Venture Partners.

The company is a closed beta… Continue Reading

In a first, China removes profit repatriation tax for U.S. investor

For the first time, the Chinese government has exempted a U.S. venture firm from having to pay a hefty 10 percent withholding tax for repatriating profits, in a major move that could spur another major wave of U.S. investment in China.

Patrick McGovern (pictured here), head of IDG Ventures, the venture arm of major publishing group International Data Group (IDG), disclosed the Chinese move in a recent interview with VentureBeat. He said the Chinese government made… Continue Reading

Hi5’s developer platform growing, worth a closer look

With more than 35 million monthly active users around the world, Hi5 is one of the largest social networks behind social network leaders MySpace and Facebook. It never seems to get much attention in the tech press, for whatever reason, but that may change if the San Francisco company’s developer platform continues growing like it has been since it launched three weeks ago.

Last week I wrote that applications built by leading widget company RockYou were… Continue Reading

Social network Hi5’s developer platform is more successful (and spammier?) than MySpace’s [updated]

Updated with commentary from RockYou

It’s a tale of two social network developer platforms. Hi5, a site popular in some Spanish-speaking Latin American countries and other regions around the world, launched its platform at the beginning of this month — and the third parties that have applications on the site are reporting impressive growth.

Leading widget company RockYou, for example, says its “SuperFive” application has already been installed two million times in the last couple of weeks…. Continue Reading