VentureBeat

When Toshiba conceded the defeat of HD DVD to the Blu-ray format, most consumers (beyond those who were unfortunate enough to be HD DVD early-adopters) cheered. The thought was that one option would finally create a viable high-definition disc format (our coverage).

It did, sales are way up. However, the downside to the lack of competition is that the prices of the Blu-ray players appear to be rising.

A scan of price aggregator Pricegrabber.com shows that the average price of a Blu-ray player is now $400 — just as it was one year ago, Tom’s Hardware noticed.

Prices had been coming down as Blu-ray tried to finish off HD-DVD once and for all with deep discounts on the players. Now, with no reason to lower prices, manufacters aren’t.

Don’t look for this trend to continue for too long though — Hollywood isn’t stupid. When the majority of the studios came together and decided that siding with Blu-ray was the way to go, they did it because they knew a new market being created (for Blu-ray discs) would boost up their bottom lines amid falling DVD sales. If Hollywood starts to see sales of Blu-ray players tail off, they will pressure the manufactures to lower the prices.

There have been cost breakthroughs in the creation of new, smaller Blu-ray lasers, the key component of the Blu-ray player. These parts now being cheaper and easier to make will also lead to prices coming down in the not-too-distant future.

Our piece talking with Sony Electronic’s U.S. chief Stan Glasgow, offers more insight.

Here’s the latest action:

1) Classmates.com IPO called off
2) Microsoft buys Multimap for $50M
3) StyleHive picks up StyleDiary
4) Toshiba’s new lithium-ion released
5) Venture Hacks on legal fees and VCs
6) Zoho Show adds on functions
7) Six Apart sets Movable Type free
8) Guardian Analytics launches product

United Online cancels Classmates.com IPO — One less for the story books of internet success: United Online has nixed the nearly $180 million Classmates.com public offering, planned to take place on the Nasdaq. PaidContent points to an analyst forecast that sums up the lack of investor excitement over Classmates: “We expect the Classmates.com subscriber base to peak in the first half of 2008, followed by a steady decline to zero by 2012,” opines Cowen & Co.’s Jim Friedland. If he’s a betting man, we’d guess his money is on Facebook.

Microsoft buys Multimap for $50 million — Multimap is a U.K. company that offers interactive online maps, much like Google Maps or Microsoft’s own, less successful Live Search Maps. Multimap also has two mobile apps with rather self-explanatory names: Storefinder4Mobile and Multimap2Mobile. Microsoft likely has plans to use the company to flesh out its mobile advertising efforts. The company’s founder, Sean Phelan, cashed out to the tune of $25 million, according to the Times Online.

StyleHive pulls StyleDiary off the rack — StyleHive, of San Francisco, is one of a handful of social bookmarking sites for fashionistas. It acquired StyleDiary, of Los Angeles, for an undisclosed amount, to provide professionally produced editorial content as a complement for its user’s contributions. Our past coverage on StyleHive’s $2.62 million funding is here.

Toshiba releases fast-charging lithium-ion battery — Toshiba’s Super Charge ion Battery (SCiB) contains an advanced lithium-ion technology that extends the life of the battery up to 10 years and allows charging in as little as five minutes. The battery should be especially useful for motorcycles, automobiles and construction equipment, and may help foster the market for fast-charge electrical stations, as well as the vehicles that visit them.

Sneaky VCs trying to pass off their legal fees — Venture Hacks has a good post on a tricky practice that new entrepreneurs should look out for. “When you pay your investor’s legal bill, you’re paying their lawyers to negotiate against you. You’re paying their lawyers to make your deal worse,” goes one piece of cautionary advice. For other nuggets of wisdom, go read the original post.

Revamped Zoho Show released – Zoho, an online office suite that we’ve covered several times before (here, here and here), has continued to be just as active in releasing new iterations of its products. The latest is Zoho Show 2.0, an upgraded version of their online presentation application, which is similar to PowerPoint. The new features include a new interface, support for shapes, symbols and clip art, and integration with their chat and meeting applications. For a video of it in action, look here.

Six Apart sets Movable Type free — The popular blogging platform will henceforth have an open-source license, much like larger competitor Wordpress. Some have speculated that Movable Type’s smaller market share had much to do with remaining proprietary, while Wordpress remained completely open, although Movable Type always allowed user modifications to its code. Six Apart will continue to offer paid licenses for bloggers who need professional support.

Guardian Analytics launches anti-fraud product — Guardian Analytics (previous coverage) released FraudMAP, one of a number of new applications aimed at preventing identity theft. It’s one of a new generation of startups using web analytics to identify online activity not consistent with a user’s normal behavior patterns, with FraudSciences Corp. (previous coverage) being another. Given the rising incidence of identify theft (read a Dean Takahashi rant on the topic here), we’d expect this field to grow fairly quickly.

Nuclear power is a bit of a land mine in the field of clean technology. Mention it in any given room of environmentalists, and opinions will explode. Some say nuclear’s terminally unsafe. Others say it’s the only true cleantech solution.

Detractors have kept nuclear innovation limited for years. However, increasing demand for non-carbon-dioxide-emitting, high-output electricity generation has put nuclear back on the front burner. And projects like Hyperion Power Generation are showing that new ideas are potentially ripe for investment.

Despite the nuclear market’s many regulatory restraints, Hyperion expects to be able to privatize technology developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in its home state of New Mexico. The company hopes to build and sell thousands of what it calls nuclear “batteries” — essentially small, self-contained reactors that produce about 27 megawatts of electricity for a period of several years.

The idea behind Hyperion’s generators is that small towns or villages could install a unit to handle all their local power needs. The technology could especially find demand in remote locations like oil fields or the developing world, where many localities are not yet on the grid.

The company says the material it uses, uranium hydride, is stable and simpler to dispose of than nuclear waste from large-scale reactors. However, critics will point out that, as in Soviet-era lighthouses, under-funded local authorities may simply neglect to remove small nuclear installations once their effective life is done.

Hyperion is not the only company with ideas for small-scale nuclear projects. Another, Adams Atomic Engines, claims to be able to build reactors ranging from 1 megawatt to 50 megawatts. And Toshiba has proposed building a tiny reactor called the 4S to power Galena, Alaska.

Separately, companies like Unistar and AREVA are also making efforts to innovate in nuclear energy, fielding new designs like the so-called evolutionary power reactor. The EPR is a design for a typical commercial reactor capable of producing thousands of megawatts, but with gains in safety and efficiency.

By developing improved nuclear technology, these companies hope to convince more localities that might otherwise build new coal- or gas-fired plants to build nuclear reactors instead.

Governments and utilities may not take much convincing. A couple dozen new plants are already being built worldwide, and uranium prices are over ten times as high as they were a few years ago, with demand running ahead of production.

While the main investors in reactors will of necessity be organizations with plenty of capital — banks, large energy companies and government — new innovations ranging from heightened efficiency to safe disposal leave some room for venture investment.

Hyperion, for example, is backed by a little-known firm called Purple Mountain Ventures. And Venrock Capital’s own Ray Rothrock has written a contributor piece for VentureBeat advocating nuclear investment.

We’ll be interested to see whether nuclear’s potential for non-emitting electricity generation outweighs the concerns of its critics. Heard of an interesting technology? Let us know.