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The VentureBeat team

VentureBeat is proud to announce a gathering for clean technology entrepreneurs next Monday, May 12. We’ve joined forces with SF Green, a San Francisco gathering founded by Steve Newcomb that aims to help shape the region’s cleantech and environmental future.

The aim is to bring together some of the brightest local entrepreneurs and investors, as well as other interested parties — environmentalists, government representatives and regular citizens — in one place, helping to forge connections and spark new ideas, just as we did last week with our Digital Media launch party.

Keynoting the next SF Green are Ray Lane, the managing partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who invested in Fisker Automotive, the new Think America partnership and the solar thermal startup Ausra; plus Tesla Motors’ VP of marketing Darryl Siry, and a Roadster or two. Both will join us for Q&A sessions at different times during the evening, with the chance for the crowd to ask a few questions of their own.

SF Green was started this March by Newcomb, a founder of Powerset who left to pursue legislative issues and an as-yet-unannounced startup. The first event was a hit, drawing together several hundred people from various backgrounds in the sustainability movement.

By holding an open event, we hope to continue attracting members of all those groups to come together and discuss their ideas. Along with Newcomb, we hope that we can help influence the Green Economy by sparking new discourse. Newcomb has more thoughts on why he founded the event at his blog.

If you’ve noticed a transportation theme for this particular event, you’re dead on: We’ll also have one of the new Smart cars to exhibit inside the venue. Naturally, much of the talk will revolve around the subject we’ve chosen, but if it’s anything like the first event, there will be conversations about every sector of cleantech. And to help round out the night, we’ll have other cleantech companies demoing amidst the crowd.

We’ll also have our generous sponsors on hand: Ernst & Young, Sun Microsystems, Dig Communications, Network Verde, California Cleantech Open, and the SF Chamber of Commerce. Our organizer is Room Full of People, who also plan the popular SF Beta event.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, 111 Minna is a gallery and bar south of Market Street in the Financial District. The place only holds about 400 people, and tickets are going to go fast. If you’ve got $15 and an open night on Monday, swing on by. You can get your tickets right here.

1. Amazon S3, VentureBeat go down
2. Montalvo Systems vs. Intel, with chip for handheld devices
3. Fox Interactive to introduce “music Hulu for MySpace”
4. Yahoo’s board moving against Yang
5. Google searchers are wealthier, buy more online
6. Xobni hires Jeff Bonforte away from Yahoo, to be its new CEO
7. Stormfisher raises $350 million for biofuel project
8. Cable veteran Philip Balboni moving to online news site
9. Nielsen buys Audience Analytics
10. Air commuter conference coming up this spring
11. Report: Online Community Best Practices
12. Wal-Mart chooses Blu-Ray

Amazon S3, VentureBeat go down — Online data storage service S3 went down. Affected startups include SmugMug, 37Signals, Twitter and many others. Lots of coverage on Techmeme. Earlier today, VentureBeat was down because of separate hosting problems.

Montalvo Systems taking on Intel, focusing on a chip for handheld devices — It has designed a chip for smartphones, notebook computers and other portable devices, that should run software that works on Intel or AMD chips. The company’s plans have been outlined in some detail by Michael Kanellos at CNET (our previous coverage ).

Montalvo’s chips, however, will fundamentally differ from the latest Core or Opteron processors from Intel and AMD in that the cores on its chip won’t be symmetrical, i.e. identical to each other. Instead, Montalvo’s chips will sport a mix of high-performance cores and lower-performance cores on the same piece of silicon, similar to the Cell chip devised by IBM, Toshiba, and Sony, according to sources close to the company.

It has received more than $73 million venture and private equity firms including Bay Partners, NEA-IndoUS Ventures, U.S Venture Partners, Leapfrog Ventures, CMEA and Adams Street Partners.

Fox Interactive to introduce “music Hulu for MySpace”– The project, which is still being put together, intends to sign up all the major music labels as content providers — who would get equity. The music would be distributed on widgets and contained in a portal page, similar to video-sharing site Hulu, which Fox is a part of. The music on MySpace would be DRM-free and ad-supported. PaidContent has the scoop.

Yahoo’s board moving against Yang — Founder and chief executive Jerry Yang and a small group sympathetic members are trying to avoid a sale to Microsoft at all costs. But Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock is leading an informal group of board members and billionaire Ron Burkle who think that Yang may be ignoring his fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. The New York Post has more.

Google searchers are wealthier, buy more online — Hitwise numbers here. See chart for more.

Xobni hires Jeff Bonforte away from Yahoo, to be its new chief executive — Bonforte was previously a vice president who helped lead the growth of Yahoo Messenger. Company blog post here.

Stormfisher raises $350 million for biofuel project — It turns agriculture and food-industry byproducts into methane gas, which reduces the levels of waste in landfills. The investor is private equity firm DenHam Capital, which has already sunk many millions into biofuel projects.

Cable veteran Philip Balboni moving to online news site — He’s leaving New England Cable News to join online international news company Global News Enterprises LLC, which is slated to launch in April with more than 70 international correspondents. The new company has taken on around $8 million from angels. (Photo via Columbia University.)

Nielsen buys Audience Analytics – The web measurement company says the Provo, Utah-based startup will improve its ability to handle large quantities of audience measurement data

Air commuter conference coming up this spring — Tech commentator Esther Dyson and publisher Imaginova are teaming up to organize the fourth annual Flight School from July 4-6, an event that brings entrepreneurs together to talk about innovation in aviation and space travel. The focus is still on “air taxis” — basically, smaller planes making local flights on-request — but Flight School’s scope will be broader this year, Dyson told us. Since the conference began, air taxis have become a marketplace reality through companies like DayJet, and commercial space flight is becoming more and more practical too, Dyson said. She added: “When I was a kid, I took it from granted that I would go to the moon. Now it looks like I’m going to have to work pretty hard to get there.”

Report: Online Community Best Practices — Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang delivers the report (buy here). Its tagline is “Communities Are A Powerful Tool, As Long As You Put Members’ Needs First.”

Wal-Mart chooses Blu-Ray — More here. Meanwhile, Toshiba may be ready to give up on HD DVD.

We launched early yesterday morning, but an overwhelming spike in traffic, a subsequent server crash and no fallback combined to shut down the Web site for a whole day.
We’ve learned some lessons.

1) It is hard to launch a start-up. It is surreal to be on this side of the Internet meltdowns, something we covered smugly in our previous role of employed reporter. I recall how we at SiliconBeat wrote about blog search start-up Sphere on the morning of its launch a few months ago, and linked to them — only to discover they’d been stymied by some last-minute bugs. All this traffic hit their site, when they were down, and much of that traffic may not have returned. Tony Conrad, Sphere’s chief exec, at the time, had a very rough morning. Tony, now it’s your turn to chuckle. We feel your pain.

2) Got to think big. We were paying $30/month for our old SiliconBeat server. So when people suggested we upgrade to a special stand-alone server for VentureBeat, at $100/month, we thought it a prudent move — placing us at the top end of what we thought appropriate for our old traffic at SiliconBeat. But when high-profile bloggers pointed to our site from their blogs (such as Om, Arrington, Primack. Jessica Guynn, among others) yesterday morning, we crashed and never recovered. We didn’t figure out the whole story. But we’ve changed our minds since this morning, and decided to pay $400/month. Be cheap, but not too cheap. And because we’re boot-strapping, this isn’t always an easy call.

3) If something can go wrong, it will. Murphy’s Law. Toni Schneider at WordPress warned us about this a couple of months ago. He even stood by, ready to host us on WordPress servers for free. Still, Murphy’s law kicked in. We had nailed everything else. Thor had crafted the site, I’d proofed it. But we didn’t take the servers seriously enough. We launched, it felt great to be in the air — “until the wing fell off,” as Thor, my developer put it.

4) Have friends. A dead server makes one panic, and we want to thank the folks for their support, in particular Nik Cubrilovic, over at TechCrunch, for lending sound advice. Read this post he shared with us about the overload earlier this year at Techcrunch.

5) The fight goes on. No point whimpering, or pointing fingers about blame. The next day is coming, and you got to try flying again. We remember Tony Conrad’s smile on his face a week after his botched launch, when everything was going dandy for him again.

Welcome to VentureBeat •the successor to SiliconBeat!

VentureBeat’s mission is to provide news and information about private companies and the venture capital that fuels them. People are at the heart of this project. VentureBeat will be a resource for entrepreneurs and other interested professionals facing some the biggest decisions of their careers.

VentureBeat will focus initially on Silicon Valley, and gradually, when possible, expand to cover innovation hubs around the globe.

Dear friends,

On Friday, I will serve my last day at the San Jose Mercury News and will no longer be blogging at SiliconBeat. VentureBeat has become my sole occupation and focus.

My Mercury News colleague Michael Bazeley and I launched SiliconBeat.com almost two years ago, in an effort to respond to the new reality of online media. The blog began as an experiment, taking up an hour or so of my day. Soon, it became much more: Baze and I found ourselves spending several hours daily on a blog that was supposed to be outside of our day jobs at the Merc. Baze, showing more sanity, pulled back from SiliconBeat and has taken a job managing the Mercury News’ Web site. For me, SiliconBeat continued as a labor of love, a way to filter the goings-on of this fascinating place we call Silicon Valley. Yet I was doing too much. So I approached the Mercury News, and told them I wanted to go out on my own.

To my delight, the Mercury News has become my first customer. It will syndicate the content I produce here. It has the right to run it in the paper, and to put it on their Web site. For me, it is a great deal. The Merc is the valley’s paper of record. It is my first read in the morning, and what I do here at VentureBeat is linked with the Merc’s mission. Like most of the people at the Merc, I care about the community in a broader sense. That is why I’m covering things from a geographical standpoint, as opposed to an industry niche.

You as my readers are the core of that community. Through your encouragement and daily comments of support and rebuke • it comes in all forms • you have spurred me to spread my wings. You are the ones I serve and listen to as I experiment going forward. I will strive to supply the same insights as I did at SiliconBeat, my fear is that I may lose some of you. I will have to focus. This will be a place only about private companies, the technology they are pushing — and the shenanigans they face as they launch from a seed idea, get funding (if they need it) and either flame out or join the ranks of sustainable companies. While readership counts, and is valuable for advertising (which pays my bills), quality is paramount: I’d rather have a core of very interested, loyal readers, than a wider, promiscuous one.

Here are a few more details about the site.

1) You will see on the left hand side, a column of hard news about the Silicon Valley start-up world. I will link generously to other news sources, when possible. Think of it as my opinion of what ranks as top news VC/start-up news of the day. You can bookmark this link separately, or subscribe via RSS (see RSS button on homepage at bottom of the wire).

2) In the middle column will be my own discussion of the news as it unfolds, where I hope to provide my own insights, and cover major milestones, just as I did at SiliconBeat. You can bookmark it here, or subscribe via RSS (see RSS button on top right of homepage). If you already have the SiliconBeat feed, you will continue to get this main VentureBeat feed. (Note: Some of the basic news items will move to the column of hard news, discussed above.)

3) On the right will be contributors, with insightful opinion • this is the place where we will try to provoke and debate. Anyone can be a contributor. I will solicit contributions from people, but am open to suggestions. If you know of anyone with a good idea, let VentureBeat know. The main targets will be entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, though other start-up professionals will be considered. I will hold a high threshold. Readers will have a chance to comment, too, and we will hold the more popular ones longer on the front page. These contributions will show up in the main RSS feed, but can be bookmarked separately here. Finally, beneath, we link to the other threads going on in the blogosphere.

4) On the far right and elsewhere will be advertisements (ahem, none yet). I am independent, and will avoid taking direct payments personally from companies or people I write about. Advertising will be a large part of VentureBeat’s income. Anyone willing to sponsor VentureBeat contact FM Publishing to place ads. I will be grateful, and I have given a free hand to FM Publishing to work with advertisers on proper wording that makes sense for this site.

5) We will continue to tinker with our direct “unfiltered news” submission feature. We’d kicked it off at SiliconBeat, but we’re trying to decide where to feature it on this site. For now, you will find a “story tips” link on the top of the homepage to submit upcoming releases or story ideas.

Finally, a word of thanks to everyone who has given me feedback and support on this project. They know who they are.

Of them all, Thor Muller, a Web application specialist at Rubyred Labs, stands out. He conceived this site’s design with me in the early days, and developed it patiently even as I went way over budget. He’s been outstanding — offering everything from business strategy savvy, to knowledge of obscure Web code. I can’t thank him enough.

Matt Marshall