VentureBeat

Dell loses false advertising lawsuit: The New York Attorney General won a lawsuit against Dell and its financial services subsidiary for false advertising, fraud, deceptive business practices and abusive debt collection. The suit, brought by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in May 2007, said that Dell pulled a bait and switch on customers by failing to provide timely onsite repair to customers who paid for it.

Amazon.com cuts Kindle price 10 percent: Amazon cut $40 off the price of its Kindle electronic book reader. The company will now sell the device for $359. The device debuted in November but it is unclear how many of the devices for reading books, blogs, magazines have sold.

ABI Research predicts one billion users will view online video in 2013: ABI Research says that increasing broadband penetration and rising connection speeds will prompt more and more people to become consumers of online video. By 2013, the market researcher predicts that a billion people will be watching web video. Mostly, that means they will be watching free video on the web. For pay-TV providers, they better get with the program or find themselves serving a smaller and smaller slice of the viewer audience, ABI says.

Vodaphone gets a new CEO: Vodaphone Group said that Vittorio Colao will become the CEO of the company. He succeeds Arun Sarin, who has been CEO for the past five years. During that time, Vodaphone expanded into Eastern Europe and grew its customers from 120 million to 260 million globally.

SezWho buys Semantic intelligence company: SezWho, which lets readers rate commenters on blogs and other sites, said it is buying semantic firm Tejit to improve context-based reputations for the social web. SezWho creates universal profiles and now it hopes to integrate Tejit’s proprietary semantic intelligence-based discovery engine to improve overall service.

Closing the barn door a little late? Belgian newspapers are suing Google for $77.5 million for posting their copyrighted material without permission on Google News. This sounds a little like approaching Genghis Khan for war reparations.

Akimbo insider details firm’s demise: Akimbo Systems went belly up last week as it tried to launch a video-on-demand service. An insider tells a story about the company’s collapse and blames it on the bad strategy of trying to charge for hardware, monthly subscriptions and content. The insider says that the company failed to get its new service on other boxes, such as Tivo or Windows Media Center.

New Mac OS X update fixes 70 bugs: The new Mac OS X 10.5.3 update fixes a bunch of bugs in the Leopard operating system. Apple says the update improves stability, security and compatibility. The Time Machine backup application is now more compatible with the Time Capsule hardware. A description of the fixes is available on PC World.

Abu Dhabi invests big in solar: Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Initiative puts $2 billion into its own thin-film startup. That’s the world’s largest single investment in solar, made by an emirate that is rich on the old source of energy, oil. The panels the company makes are expected to be used in Masdar City — a zero carbon, zero waste city — in Abu Dhabi.

updated
We’re hearing that Akimbo, the San Mateo, Calif. video set-top box company that raised millions of dollars in fresh funding less than three months ago to make a fresh start in a new direction, has just thrown in the towel anyway.

In February, Akimbo brought in a new management team, $8 million in fresh funding [Update: Apparently, the company only raised $4M; the original announcement of $8 million had been a targeted amount, but it only ever raised $4M] and refashioned its technology to help video publishers deliver their own video online. It also wanted to help publishers monetize the video, by offering them ways to charge for pay-per-minute content, run advertising and subscriptions.

I have no idea why the company closed its doors so fast on this second attempt. The latest batch of money came from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Zone Ventures, Blueprint Ventures and AT&T. DFJ, Kleiner, Zone and Blueprint were original backers of the first incarnation of the company. The company had raised a total of $47 million.

From what we hear, the company shut its doors today, with the entire staff of more than a dozen being terminated except for three to stay on to help an orderly shutdown.

The company had initiated a round of layoffs recently. The company was apparently then trying to sell itself, but time ran out and the board finally decided to call it quits.

I’m trying to reach the company for comment. If there’s a lesson, it’s probably that this video industry is red hot, but also frenetic, and way saturated, and that a company is toast if it’s just a step behind.

Here’s the latest wrap-up of Silicon Valley tech news:

Cisco sues Apple over iPhone name — Who cares? If Apple loses, it will come up with a different name. Like, ApplePhone, or iPodPhone. Details of suit.

Yahoo signs deal with Akimbo to deliver video to televisions — Just the latest move in a huge number of deals pushing video to your TV. More details here.

Avvenu shares music via link in email — Avvenu, a Palo Alto start-up has been around for a while, but has introduced a new service for sharing music. By downloading a free music player, users can select tracks they wish to share (250 for free) and send links to friends via email. Recipients click on the link to listen for up to five days. Users sharing their music must have iTunes software downloaded, though recipients don’t. Works on Windows mobile software, too.

The latest on Jeff Bezos’ space project – Here’s the scoop from Amazon.com’s Bezos on Blue Origin, which reveals a cone-shaped vehicle to be used “to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system.” Tests have already been made, though the program has some ways to go.

MyBlogLog sold for reported $10M, after no venture capital, and then spammed — The service, which lets bloggers and others see who is reading their blogs, and where those readers tend to go afterward, has sold to Yahoo for a reported $10 million. MyBlogLog became popular last year, after its little widget started showing up on blogs with the pictures of their readers. Some 45,000 bloggers had signed up for it. Om talked with chief exec Scott Rafer. Lately, though, some have showed it is relatively easy to spam.

Update on Techdirt’s analyst service — As reported (see here), Techdirt raised $600,000 to build out its Insight Community product, which hooks up expert bloggers with companies that seek their advice. Mike Masnick (left), of Techdirt, who has built the company without outside investments over the past decade, tells VentureBeat he finally bit the bullet, realizing it made sense to raise money to help build out the project — given all of the interest he’d received in it. It is still in testing mode, but he’s now building more interactive features, letting people in the network communicate with each other, rather than limit it to one-to-one relationship originally envisioned. Entrepreneur Mark Fletcher, one of the investors, joins the board. Also, investors were all outsiders. Insiders didn’t participate, as suggested earlier by the PEhub report, Masnick said.

Slideshow company Slide raised $20 million — We’d reported Slide’s venture round last year. Reports suggest Slide raised $20 million, giving it a valuation afterward of $60 to $80 million. This gives it some runway, even as competitor Filmloop lays off most of its workers. Here is our earlier story.

Weatherbill, an online site to sell weather insurance policies to individuals and businesses — Sounds boring, but it has all the Map mashups and other Web 2.0 candy to make it worth a look (via Techcrunch)
It has raised a first round of round of financing from NEA, Index Ventures and a number of angel investors.

Second Life has opened its application to developers — Many people find the virtual world Second Life difficult to get the hang of, which has no doubt limited its growth. Now it has opened its software for developers to provide alternatives. It isn’t clear whether this will spark a vibrant developer community or not.

Podzinger searches words in YouTube videos — Podzinger gives you a way search for words that are mentioned in YouTube videos. Podzinger has a tab letting you do this on its front page, and it tells you how many minutes and seconds into the video the reference is (although we couldn’t figure out how to zip automatically to the reference, like Pluggd does). More details here, at Splashcast blog. Blinkx is another company that searches audio and video files.

PayPerPost drops its purchase of Perfomancing assets — Details here.

Aaron Swartz, of Reddit, not done dreaming — Good piece in the Chronicle mentioning the impressive rise of Swartz, who built his first web site at 13, got bored, and then, circuitously, ended up building Reddit, which was bought by Wired Digital. Now 20, he says he’s headed back to academia soon. Re hanging out: “I’m so shy I don’t even hang out with the people I know now.”

Hype at Asiatech? — Days ago, we reported on the purchase of software developer Mediabolic by Macrovision. Sources told us the return was marginal, giving later investors slightly more than the money they invested. But it was no where near a two-fold return claimed by AsiaTech investor Katherine Jen in an interview with VentureWire recently, they said. Jen did not respond to a request by VentureBeat for comment about her “2x return” claim.

See Jobs’ demo of iPhone — It is striking, and worth it. See here, and click on “touch navigation” for starters.