VentureBeat

Former Broadcom executive Henry Samueli to plead guilty in backdating case — The Broadcom flameout saga continues, with former chief technology officer Samueli admitting that he previously lied to SEC investigators about whether or not he had illegally back-dated stock options.  Among Broadcom’s two founding Henrys, Samueli was the good cop. That’s why it was surprising that Samueli pleaded guilty to avoid jail time. But the other Henry, former CEO Henry Nicholas, is up for a raft of criminal charges from drug dealing to using prostitutes. [Samueli photo via Forbes.]

Game association trumpets games in the workplace — It’s no surprise that the Entertainment Software Association, the industry cheerleader for companies that publish video and computer games, would produce a positive report about games in the workplace. The ESA-sponsored study, carried out by KRC Research, shows that 75 percent of U.S. organizations that use video game-based training are getting positive results, and looking to expand their usage of games. Meanwhile, more than 75 percent of those without work-focused video games plan to introduce them in the next five years. If we didn’t enjoy any excuse to play games, we’d probably be a little more skeptical. Instead, we think this survey sounds about right.

More than one billion PCs now being used in the world — Research firm Gartner guesses that number and projects it to double by 2014.

Sony has lost $3 billion plus on the PlayStation 3 so far — “Even if the platform is ultimately successful,” an annual Sony company report says, “it may take longer than expected to recoup the investment, resulting in a negative impact on Sony’s profitability.”

LinkedIn may be coming to China — More here.

Review: Psystar’s unauthorized Mac clone is just like a real Mac — Psystar provoked excitement among many bloggers, at least, in April, as it promised to deliver a Macintosh operating system in a machine that it sells for far cheaper than the products that inspired it — in possible violation of Apple’s terms of service. No legal challenge has come from Apple, though. Now, Tom Krazit at CNET has a review of it here, after having used it for a month. He says it’s like using a Mac. [Photo via CNET.]

Five previously-undisclosed features due for Mac’s latest operating system, “Snow Leopard” — According to a scoop published by blog Apple Insider, the new features include a new multi-touch framework, smaller-sized applications, more advanced word processing features, auto activation of fonts, and support for the ZSF file system. Snow Leopard is due next spring. Also, we’ll see how fast Psystar implements it once it’s out.

Old iPhones worth as much as new ones on eBay — Blogger Jason Kottke breaks down observed sale prices on the auction site. And I quote:

- A lot of five never-opened unlocked 16Gb iPhones went for $2,755 ($551 per phone)
- A used unlocked 8Gb iPhone went for $405
- A used unlocked 16Gb iPhone went for $585.

Sun has a massive 256-thread Niagra processor coming in 2009 — The details here.

New York Times: Google News is not growing very fast – This article talks about issues at Google’s automated news aggregator. Although it’s not disclosed in the article, I suppose the New York Times would prefer its readers to use its own automated news aggregator, Blogrunner.

Here’s the latest action:

Sprint and Clearwire to join forces for WiMax venture – The telecom companies, along with Comcast, Time Warner, Google and Intel, are about to announce a $3.2 billion investment in a new wireless Internet company using WiMax technology, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reports that the new company, which will also be called Clearwire, is valued at more than $12 billion. It will launch two years ahead of competing offerings from AT&T and Verizon. The combination of that head start and the formidable lineup of backers should make this quite a coup for Sprint, which is the driving force behind the partnership.

The result: Everyone wins. The Wimax camp needed some help to counter a competing technology LTE, Clearwire needed some money and the carriers get to split up the financing burden among themselves. Google’s role, though, is new. It’s just the latest move by the Internet search giant to push into the wireless communications arena, and comes as it is pushing it new mobile platform, Android.

USA Today reports that Trilogy Equity Partners also put $10 million towards the venture. Trilogy is a VC firm started by John Stanton, who helped found McCaw’s first wireless venture.

Sun previews app platform JavaFX – Sun’s software chief Rich Green gave a demonstration of JavaFX, which should compete with platforms like Adobe AIR for developers of hybrid web-desktop applications, at the JavaOne conference today. Green showed off a JavaFX application that runs Flickr and Twitter feeds in Facebook, then dragged the app onto the desktop. The same application ran on a Java-enabled phone. Rather inauspiciously, CNET reports that the application kept breaking, although the problems were blamed on the venue. The platform is set to launch this fall; I’m hoping more details will emerge about how it’s going to stand out against AIR.

Rocker Neil Young makes collected works available for download — Speaking of Sun, famed musician Neil Young is partnering with the company in an ambitious project to make all of his work available for purchase. Apparently, the content will be delivered on Blu-ray discs that check for and download new content as it becomes available. Young says the Playstation 3 is the best device for downloading all that music. This sounds very cool, although I’m not sure that it’ll lead to quite as many PS3 sales as the new Grand Theft Auto game.

Microsoft’s media player Zune gets TV shows – For all you Zune owners who have been jealously eyeing those with iPods and wondering, “When will I be able to watch Battlestar Galactica on a tiny, portable screen?” the long nightmare is over.

Cisco revenue up 10 percent in Q3 – That’s an increase from $8.9 billion to $9.8 billion. Since the company, which is the largest maker of networking equipment, is seen as a bellwether for the larger tech industry, that’s a bit of a relief, and particularly impressive after Sun recently reported a loss during the same period and blamed the weakening economy. Cisco’s profit, on the other hand, fell due to acquisition-related charges, and sales are expected to grow more slowly than previously anticipated.

Stephen Colbert is the Person of the Year (on the Internet) — The political comedian will be recognized as part of the 12th Annual Webby Awards next month. Colbert’s mockery of Internet trends has led to everything from Wikipedia vandalism to possibly the largest Facebook group in history. Which is enough to make him an online pioneer, at least in the eyes of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Sun is aiming squarely at the start-up market, making several database and server related moves it hopes will lock start-ups into its services early on.

First, Sun is offering support to companies that integrate Sun’s open source database product, MySQL with the popular Amazon web services hosting, called Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2). That’s big news for developers. They’ve wanted to use the popular MySQL for their database and EC2, but the mix has been dangerous.

That’s because until now, you risked losing data in your database if your instance of EC2 crashed. Now Sun will give you a way to save that data and even a customer service number to call, when you think all is lost and you’re about to jump off the balcony.

Second, Sun is announcing the official launch of its open source operating system, OpenSolaris. In conjunction, it’s announcing that OpenSolaris will now work with the popular Amazon’s web services.

Start-ups looking to build web sites are turning increasingly to Amazon’s web services platform, because it’s so worry free. It’s pays as you go: Amazon increases or decreases your server use, according to how much you need. And until now, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), as it is called, has only worked with Linux-based operating systems, such as Redhat. Now when a company signs up with EC2, they get a drop-down menu to choose what operating system they want to use, and the OpenSolaris option is no extra charge. Redhat charges $19 a month. Besides Redhat, you can also select other free operating systems, such as Fedora or CentOS. However, Sun boasts its OpenSolaris is the better option because it provides a technology called ZFS, which lets a company more easily scale on a large number of storage devices, and also has a debugging tool called DTrace that the others don’t have.

Finally, in a nod to the growing popularity of social networking, Sun is offering developers a year’s worth of free hosting on its servers through a vendor partner, Joyent (Joyent’s servers are based on OpenSolaris). The program is meant for developers who are creating applications on the OpenSocial platform. The OpenSocial platform is an effort led by Google, to corral multiple social networking companies to agree to common standards so that developers can make a single application that works on all networks. Sun will offer a separate program for Facebook soon, the company said.

Joyent says it has 4,000 applications running on its cloud, generating more than 5 billion page views a month. In the past three weeks, Sun and Joyent have offered the free hosting to applications built for the Hi5 network, which was the first to release a complete set of APIs. Those applications are already generating 100 million page views a month, according to Sun.

[Disclosure: Sun Microsystems is a significant sponsor of VentureBeat's digital media coverage]

Here’s the latest action:

Google’s search-within-search bugs some publishers — Apparently some folks such as the Washington Post aren’t looking too kindly on a feature Google added earlier this month, which lets people search within publications like the Post directly from Google. The feature lets you search for a publication on Google, for instance the Post or other sites like Wikipedia, The New York Times, and Wal-Mart, and then gives you a secondary search bar to search within those sites. Here’s the rub: If you search the Washington Post from that bar for say, “jobs,” you’ll see results for the Post’s employment pages, but also ads nearby for competing job sites like CareerBuilder and Monster.com. The NYT has the story.

Modu, a company with a module that can be inserted into various wireless devices, raises $100 million — The Israeli company is expected to close the round within the “next few weeks,” according to the Globes, which also says the company is valued at a significant $150 million before the investment. The company has raised $20 million to date from Genesis Partners, Gemini Israel Funds, SanDisk and founder Dov Moran. The company is making modular hardware products built around its tiny module, a phone-MP3 device that can morph into different functions depending on the cellular device it is snapped into; there’s a video here (or just see below).

Sun gets $44M contract from Pentagon’s DARPA to replace chip wires with laser beams –The wiring between processors on a chip is one of the biggest bottlenecks to increased efficiency in semiconductors. Sun has beat out Intel, IBM, MIT and HP on a government contract to figure out how to use silicon photonics, or light beams, to make chips faster and more efficient.

Will Fed make taxpayers pay more for Bear Stearns? — Shareholders of Bear Stearns, a third of which are Bear Stearns’ own employees, were so upset by the deal to bail out Bear Stearns at the low price of $2 per share that they’ve revolted and are pushing for a higher price of $10 per share. This is the bank that got caught up in the worst excesses of the subprime bubble, was apparently literally gambling while the ship sank and refused to participate in bailing out other companies (Long-Term Capital Management) in the past. So why would the Fed and JPMorgan want to make taxpayers pay the higher price to bail these guys out?

Search arbitrage company Geosign disintegrates after receiving record $160M investment last year – The Canadian company’s saga shows the danger of trying to use an arbitrage strategy with Google’s ads. It was buying Google keywords and sending people to landing pages with Yahoo ads on them. When Google found out about the trick, it changed its terms and shut off Geosign’s ability to conduct its arbitrage. The company’s business model disintegrated. American Capital, the lead investor in the company last year, is looking pretty foolish. Why make an investment in a company that isn’t producing anything of sustainable value? We reported on the company here last year when it raised the money.

The X Prize Foundation offers $10 million to team that produces vehicles that can get 100 miles per gallon or more — Details here. The winning cars must carry four or more passengers and have climate control, an audio system and 10 cubic feet of cargo space. Qualifiers also must have four or more wheels, reach 100 mph, and reach 60 mph in 12 seconds and have a range of 200 miles.

Battery companies LionCells and Seeo raise cash — Seeo, of Berkeley, Calif., has raised nearly $1 million in capital from Khosla Ventures, to make safe, high-density batteries. This comes after the company (which doesn’t have a web site) took in $1 million last year, according to a California regulatory document cited by VentureWire. Last month, another company, Menlo Park’s Lion Cells, which makes high-power lithium ion batteries, raised approximately $12 million, according to the SEC. Battery Ventures and Nth Power participated in the second round, according to the filing.

GotVoice, the speech-to-text company, now wants to raise money too — Perhaps jolted by the announcement last week that competitor SpinVox raised $100 million in a carrier land-grab for its own speech-to-text technology, GotVoice is now saying it too wants to raise financing. To give it more time, the Kirkland, Wash. company has raised a $1.78 million “bridge round” of funding to supplement the $3 million in raised in 2006 from Ignition and other individual investors, according to VentureWire.

Silicon Valley venture firm Morgenthaler Ventures raising funds — The venture capital firm is trying to raise another fund, totaling about $400 million, but VentureWire reports that the firm’s 2001 fund is below median in its performance and suggests investors are on the fence on the firm, founded in the 1960s.

Azul Systems, a hard-charging Silicon Valley company that wants to knock Sun off its perch by providing a more efficient server processor to run popular Java applications, has raised $40 million in financing.

This company rivals football player Terrell Owens in generating controversy, though. It got sued by Sun last year (see coverage; scroll down) for not properly licensing some technology, after already tense relations caused by Azul’s hiring of about a dozen former Sun employees.

The company settled in June, and Sun won a small stake in the company in return. The stakes are high, because the company says it is going after a market worth between $5-$6 billion, a sizable chunk of the overall $50 billion server market.

Over the past year, Azul has laid off a good chunk of its sales force, after its sales didn’t ramp as quickly as expected. It is now at 125 employees, down from a reported 207 last year when BusinessWeek did a notable look at the company. And its CEO, Stephen DeWitt (at left, courtesy of BW) is experiencing some “personal issues,” according to a source close to the company, forcing co-founder Scott Sellers to take over the “President” title so that he can represent the company temporarily. DeWitt had earlier sold Cobalt to Sun for $2 billion in 2000, and that company required a big write-off in 2003, which some people said has caused resentment.

VentureBeat talked with two other Azul representatives this morning, Sellers and Michael Rolnick, a partner at ComVentures and an original backer of Azul. They both said the company is doing “great,” is adding customers and is focused, but they conceded that the company had ramped up too quickly beginning two years ago. They said changes of course are normal for young ambitious companies. Selling the product required more focus on key accounts than they’d expected. But the market direction remains in their favor, they said. Large companies are increasingly using java applications such as those offered by Oracle, BEA, IBM and Jboss, all of which run better on servers with a dedicated processor such as the one supplied by Azul, says Sellers. “We’re bullish,” says Sellers.

The round latest round led by JVax Investment Group, which invested $15 million. JVax had requested the staff cut before investing, seeing it as a way to lower burn and make the money go further. The rest of the round came from existing investors Accel Partners, Austin Ventures, ComVentures, Credit Suisse, Meritech Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Worldview Technology Partners.

Sellers would not comment on the valuation of the company.

The company previously raised at least $60 million.