VentureBeat

Texas Instruments says cell phone sales weakening: TI said that sales of chips for wireless handsets were “unseasonably weak,” causing the bellwether company for the cell phone economy to lower its second-quarter earnings outlook. The Dallas-based chip maker said that it expects revenue to be $3.17 billion to $3.28 billion, compared with the previous estimate of $3.08 billion to $3.32 billion. It’s interesting that TI is seeing the slowdown in advance of one of the biggest pieces of news to hit the market: the impending launch of the iPhone 3G on July 11.

Women are driving smartphone sales: In the past year, the number of women using smartphones has more than doubled to 10.4 million, according to Nielsen Mobile. Part of the reason is the popularity of the iPhone among women, who accounted for one in three iPhones sold in March. The trend is expected to continue as prices for smartphones fall and more consumers.

Internet service providers to block child porn: Three major Internet service providers — Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable — have agreed to block access to Internet bulletin boards and web sites that display child pornography. The deal is the first a number under negotiation with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Previously, the providers argued the task was too big to handle, given the size and decentralized nature of the Internet. The agreements apply nationwide and will cover service providers with more than 16 million Internet customers.

SanDisk agrees to buy MusicGremlin: The flash memory chip maker is buying MusicGremlin for an undisclosed price. MusicGremlin makes advanced digital content distribution technologies and is a pioneer in the MP3 player market, known for devices that can download music from an accompanying subscription service without the need for a computer. SanDisk said it will use the technology from MusicGremlin in its future Sansa audio-video products.

Paltalk brings together video chatters on the web: New York-based Paltalk has released a multi-person video chat service on the web. The Paltalk Express software is a Flash-based web service that lets as many as 5,000 people share the same video chat room, Techcrunch reports. In coming weeks, the company will release embeddable widgets that compete with other chat services such as Meebo. Paltalk’s download client already has 4 million active users a month.

NetSpend founders launch $100 million investment fund: NetSpend’s Roy and Bertrand Sosa are putting together the fund to invest in companies in the market for financial services for people without bank accounts or credit cards. The MPower Ventures LP fund also includes investor Jorge Vergara Madrigal, the founder of nutritional supplements company Grupo Omnilife SA. MPower has made investments in Sapphire Mobile Systems (now MPower Mobile Inc.) and Rev Worldwide.

NYTimes.com goes after small businesses: The New York Times and AdReady have launched Self-Service Advertising on the NYTimes.com web site. The online display advertising site enables small businesses to easily create and manage online ad campaigns on the New York Times web site. It allows advertisers with budgets of less than $10,000 per campaign to reach the large NYTimes.com audience.

NextG Networks shoots for IPO: The wireless infrastructure company hopes to raise $150 million with its IPO. Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, RBC Capital Markets and UBS are the underwriters. Oak Investment Partners led a $35 million round for NextG in 2004 and another $50 million in January, 2008.

Merced Systems buys Practique Associates: Redwood City, Calif.,-based Merced Systems bought Practique in the United Kingdom for an undisclosed price. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Practique creates tools for incentive compensation management, including the INCA web-based application that automates sales commission and bonus calculations.

Zoran buys Let It Wave SA: Zoran Corp. agreed to buy fabless chip maker Let It Wave SA for $27.6 million in cash. The deal is expected to close today. In June, Let It Wave raised 6 million euros from Iris Capital and T-Source. Paris-based Let It Wave makes components that reduce motion blur for LCD TVs, among other products for consumer electronics gear.

Intel isn’t going to be alone as it tries to skewer Samsung and other chip makers in portable Internet devices. Nvidia is out to claim that market as well.

Today, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia is announcing its Tegra brand of chips for beefy Internet handhelds that can do serious graphics. This brand will include two different kinds of chips. The previously announced Nvidia APX 2500 is aimed at smartphones.

We noted that Samsung is stepping up the chip battle in portable electronics, squaring off against Intel, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments. Now Nvidia is showing its cards. The Nvidia APX 2500 has the ability to connect via an HDMI cable to a big screen and play a full 720p high-definition video for 10 hours on the equivalent of an iPhone battery. The APX 2500 could also be used in navigation devices and portable media players.

Other new chips being announced today under the Tegra brand are the Tegra 600 for phones and Tegra 650 chips for mobile Internet devices (MIDs). These are wireless broadband-enabled portable devices with screens ranging from four inches to 12 inches. All of the products are descended from Nvidia’s $357 million PortalPlayer acquisition in 2006.

“Tegra is a tiny computer on a chip designed to power these new devices,” said Mike Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia’s mobile chip business.

The company’s Tegra chips are shipping now and are much smaller than Intel’s current Diamondville solution, which uses the new Atom low-power microprocessors. The Tegra chips are about 10 times smaller than Atom and yet can run movies for 26 hours, compared to four hours for Atom. It consumes a single watt of power, compared to 10 watts for a Diamondville board.

A half-dozen or so devices are expected to debut with the Tegra chips by the end of the year. The company is making the announcement at the Computex trade show in Taiwan. Besides Intel, Nvidia will likely have to square off against Samsung, which we wrote about a few days ago, and Texas Instruments.

Major tech companies are expected to announced tomorrow that they have created a “HomeGrid Forum” in order to advance the cause of broadband networking over wiring in the home, VentureBeat has learned.

Members of the group include Infineon Technologies, Intel, Panasonic, Texas Instruments, Aware (DSL chip maker), Gigle (a home-networking chip maker), Pulse~Link (a home-networking chip maker) and DS2, a powerline networking start-up in Spain.

The forum’s goal is to promote a next-generation standard for transporting data over home wiring in response to a growing need in homes to move high-definition video from one place to another. The forum will to a companion to the ITU-T G.hn group which includes computer makers, consumer electronics firms, service providers and networking companies.

The wires include coaxial cable, power lines and phone lines. With the forum, equipment makers will be able to eventually create equipment that can transfer data over any of those lines. Currently, the manufacturers have to make separate gear to work over each kind of line. That complicates the task of networking in the home and makes it more expensive to network digital media in the home. The group will promote a worldwide standard and launch a certification program.

The standard group will have a preliminary specification in 2008 and a final draft by September, 2009. The group’s goal will be to reduce the cost of sharing digital video, music, and other content over existing home wires. Any networking device should be able to plug into the wires and start working.

The group says it will not compete with other home networking alliances and it will try to ensure backward compatibility with a variety of devices already in the market.

[photo: flickr/kk+]

Here’s the latest action:

Google moves ‘Sky’ into the browser — Google has a layer for Google Earth that is known as ‘Sky.’ Now the company has created a version for web browsers as well according to the Google Lat Long Blog. This browser-based ‘Sky’ features three separate optical sky surveys (microwave, ultraviolet and x-ray), has galleries of images from things such as the Hubble Space Telescope, and offers a search engine that lets you find thousands of named stellar items in the sky. It has the same look and feel as well as controls of Google Maps. This launch is notably close to Microsoft’s announcement of the WorldWide Telescope project.

Harvard grad server gets hacked — A Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences web server that contained applicant data for the Fall 2007 academic year as well as some housing data for this year and last was compromised by an outsider according to the Harvard University Gazette. The University took the site down for four days to investigate, and was forced to notify everyone whose data could have been comprised, as well as issue an apology. The hacker has not yet been caught.

MSN executive leaving for ad company — Microsoft chief media officer Joanne Bradford is leaving to join Spot Runner, an Internet-based ad agency in Los Angeles according to the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Bradford oversaw the MSN Media Network and in the past ran Microsoft online advertising initiatives. Greg Nelson has been named to take her place on an interim basis.

Nerve-tapping neckband enables telepathic chat — Way out of left field is a new device that translates thoughts into speech by picking up nerve signals according to New Scientist Tech. This technology, which requires training to operate, was used to place the first public voiceless phone call at a conference put on by Texas Instruments. Eventually this technology will be used for those who have lost the ability to speak.

Viruses are showing up pre-installed in some devices — Everything from iPods to navigation systems are showing up on store shelves with pre-installed viruses on them according to the Associated Press. These viruses can be used to steal password and open backdoors for hackers to get into. In most of the cases looked into, Chinese factories have been the source.

Specific Media acquires the ad network Adviva – The online ad network Specific Media has bought Adviva, a display ad network based in the U.K according to CNET. Specific Media made the deal to move into the European market. This deal follows Google just-cleared $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick and Microsoft’s $6 billion purchase of aQuantive last year. Terms of this deal were not disclosed.