New companies launch: Yap, Cognitive Code, Viewdle, Faroo & more

New companies launch: Yap, Cognitive Code, Viewdle, Faroo & more

Ten companies presented during today’s morning portion of Techcrunch40 conference in San Francisco. If we were able to have stock in these companies, here’s how we’d rank them: CastTV, Cubic Telecom, Yap, Cognitive Code, Viewdle, Powerset, Trutap, Faroo, Ceedo and Loudtalks. Summaries of each company… Continue Reading

CastTV raises $3.1M to launch better video search

CastTV raises $3.1M to launch better video search

Corrected: Motwani is merely an advisor

San Francisco’s CastTV, a site that says it can search video better than leading players like Yahoo and Google by turning up Javascript-hidden files and other information, has raised $3.1 million from well-known venture capitalists.

Video search is a huge potential… Continue Reading

Roundup: Bombs, don’t do Delaware, MySQL IPO & more

Roundup: Bombs, don’t do Delaware, MySQL IPO & more

The latest Silicon Valley round-up:

Correlation between bomb building and entrepreneurship? — Former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel reportedly says four of six founders of the online payment service built bombs while in high school. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson designs rockets.

MyYearbook.com, a social networking… Continue Reading

Pluggd “perfects” audio and video search, raises $1.65M

Pluggd “perfects” audio and video search, raises $1.65M

Declaring it has “perfected the user experience” for audio and visual search, Seattle start-up Pluggd has raised $1.65 million from Intel and angel investors to help it start distributing its technology.

If you haven’t played with Pluggd, you should. It provides that “wow” experience, giving you… Continue Reading