Cloud storage provider Box.net: Build your apps on top of us

Cloud storage provider Box.net is unveiling a new set of code libraries that will let app developers quickly embed the company’s storage and collaboration tools into their apps, the company announced today.

“We have 40 developers building that back-end stack, and people want to be able to deploy that instantly into their applications,” said Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box.net. “Developers don’t want to have to manage the user management, the access controls and the … Continue Reading

Onavo, Roar Engine dominate MobileBeat startup contest

We chose 16 mobile startups to take part in our MobileBeat 2011 startup competition today, but only two could win our coveted Tesla prize.

Onavo, a company that compresses mobile data on smartphones and tablets, and Roar Engine, which impressed judges by building a social game in four minutes, were declared the winners by our panel of judges for the consumer and infrastructure categories respectively.

The two companies each landed a Tesla prize (named in … Continue Reading

LiveDibs wants to give you deals you actually care about

LiveDibs has just been named People’s Choice winner in the Infrastructure category at this year’s MobileBeat Startup Competition. The startup defines itself as a geo-location oriented social deals marketplace.

“LiveDibs gives you access to the deals you might actually care about,” said Lindsey Rosen. It does this by giving vendors access to location data in addition to pricing data, which is pulled from the user’s preferences. After reviewing the data, vendors can make more accurate … Continue Reading

Japanese monster social network Kaiju’s got game at GamesBeat 2011

This year’s winner of VentureBeat’s “Who’s Got Game” startup competition is Kaiju Empire, a social games maker that creates games built around outlandish Godzilla-style monsters.

This company makes games that bring comically outlandish Japanese-style monsters back to video games. It will launch Kaijuland later this year, a social game that lets players create a ridiculous monster and wreck a city. The game will be available for mobile devices, the web and home consoles. Kaiju Empire … Continue Reading

Here are GamesBeat’s 2011 startup standouts

VentureBeat’s GamesBeat conference features a competition for gaming companies that have some kind of innovative or disruptive technology. This year, the competition features a lot of cool hardware and social games.

The winner gets an iPad 2 from Trinet and is enrolled in the August round of Yatizen’s game accelerator class. That is similar to incubators like Y Combinator, which offer companies advice and a little bit of funding to get them rolling.

Here are … Continue Reading

Google Ventures partner: Venture capitalists are bad at picking games

Investors haven’t been very good at figuring out which gaming companies will be successful, said Google Ventures partner Joe Kraus.

That’s not limited to social gaming companies like Zynga or Kabam but also hardcore game makers like Trion Worlds, he said.

“Half the deals for fund makers were under-subscribed in A and B rounds,” said Kraus (pictured right) in a panel at GamesBeat 2011 Tuesday. “The data suggests that we’re actually really bad at picking … Continue Reading

Meet the 8 consumer/app startups for the MobileBeat 2011 competition

It’s that time of the year again: VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2011 conference is coming up on July 12 – 13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. This year our theme is “Who wins in the 4G nirvana?” We’ll be focusing on the rise of 4G and what it means for every aspect of the mobile industry.

This year we’re looking to showcase the top 16 companies with the coolest mobile ideas. Today we’re announcing the … Continue Reading

Cloud storage provider Box.net to throw two-day conference in September

Conferences are one way enterprise vendors build excitement and support for what could otherwise be dry and obscure technologies. Now Box.net is joining the party with its own cloud-centric conference.

Box.net announced that it will host a two-day conference in San Francisco, called BoxWorks, to plug its cloud storage and online collaboration technology and touch on some major enterprise cloud topics.

Done right, a conference like this can be way more entertaining than the word … Continue Reading

Our third round of MobileBeat 2011 speakers includes Rich Miner, Tim Schaaff and more!

Preparations for our fourth annual MobileBeat conference are speeding along. Today, we’re announcing our thirdround of speakers for the event: Rich Miner, partner at Google Ventures; Tim Schaaff, president of Sony Network Entertainment; Laura Chambers, senior director of PayPal Mobile; Omar Green, director of strategic mobile initiatives at Intuit; and Humphrey Chen, executive director of new technologies development at Verizon Wireless. You can find all of our current speakers here.… Continue Reading

Meet our next set of MobileBeat 2011 speakers

Preparations for our fourth annual MobileBeat conference are speeding along. Today, we’re announcing our second round of speakers for the event: Jeremy Stopppelman, CEO and co-founder of Yelp; Stephanie Tilenius, VP of payments and commerce at Google; David Temkin, head of mobile at AOL; and Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net. You can find all of our current speakers here.

MobileBeat 2011 is taking place on July 12 – 13 … Continue Reading

MobileBeat 2011 — Five reasons 4G/LTE is about to jolt your company

Look out, a development in mobile is about to impact your company in a big way.

Major carriers, from Verizon to AT&T, are steadily upgrading their networks, and their speed and power are creating the next wave of capital chaos.

This is potentially pernicious, if you’re not ready, but it’s also an opportunity.

Superphones are here. Users are here. Ad dollars are finally flowing. But now, the arrival of super plentiful mobile broadband via LTE … Continue Reading

Introducing our first wave of MobileBeat 2011 speakers

Preparations for our fourth annual MobileBeat conference are speeding along. Today, we’re announcing our first round of speakers for the event: Mihir Shah, president and CEO of the app monetization and distribution service Tapjoy; Jason Spero, director of mobile at Google; and Matt Murphy, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.

MobileBeat 2011 is taking place on July 12 – 13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. We’re convening the brightest … Continue Reading

Pitch your hot mobile startup at MobileBeat 2011!

It’s that time of the year again: VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2011 conference is coming up on July 12 – 13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. This year our theme is “Who wins in the 4G nirvana?” We’ll be focusing on the rise of 4G and what it means for every aspect of the mobile industry.

This year we’re looking to showcase the top 20 companies with the coolest mobile ideas. You can sign up … Continue Reading

Who wins in the 4G nirvana? Find out at MobileBeat 2011 on July 12-13

MobileBeat 2011 — VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on the future of mobile — is convening the brightest minds in the industry to explore who will win in what we’re calling “the 4G Nirvana.”

The mobile industry was already on fire. But the arrival of 4G wireless networking this year the will drive the industry through an even more radical transformation: Joined with faster mobile chips, new operating systems and tablets, the promise of full mobile … Continue Reading

VC True Ventures co-founder: There is no bubble, period

There is no bubble forming around Silicon Valley or tech startups because white-hot companies like Twitter and Facebook are able to show they have fundamental value and are capable of making money, Phil Black, co-founder at early stage venture capital outfit True Ventures told me today.

“There is no bubble at current moment. There are very successful Internet businesses being created that are growing very rapidly and are making a lot of pretax profit,” said … Continue Reading

Here's what happened at MobileBeat 2010

We just wrapped up MobileBeat 2010, our annual mobile tech conference. Over the course of two days, we brought speakers including HP’s Phil McKinney, AT&T’s John Donovan, and Facebook’s Erick Tseng on-stage to talk about their vision of the mobile industry’s future, and 20 companies demonstrated new products to compete for our Tesla Awards for best startup.

The big theme was “The Year of the Superphone.” If you didn’t make it to the conference, you … Continue Reading

GetJar names Gettie Award 2010 mobile application winners

GetJar, an online mobile application store, last night announced the winners of The Gettie Awards, an annual mobile app competition, at VentureBeat’s annual MobileBeat conference in San Francisco.

Second to the Apple App Store, GetJar is the second largest application store. Though the company offers an open market for apps across all major operating systems, including Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Symbian.

The Gettie Awards 2010 had hundreds of developers submit their applications for … Continue Reading

MobileBeat panel: Location-based services need brands more than brands need them

As large, national and international brands begin to show interest in advertising on location-based services, the check-in games are finding they’re on the winning end of the deal. This is a point that came up in one of the MobileBeat 2010 breakout sessions on location and advertising today.

Dinesh Moorjani (pictured), senior vice president at internet conglomerate IAC Mobile referred to a scavenger-hunt-style promotion shoe designer Jimmy Choo organized with the popular check-in service Foursquare, … Continue Reading

Catching up at MobileBeat 2010 (photo gallery)

Aside from the panels and breakout sessions going on at MobileBeat 2010, one of the major attraction of conferences is the chance to catch up with colleagues and new companies. The hallway is the place where networking happens, and MobileBeat 2010 is no exception.

The second floor of the Palace hotel is a favorite hangout between sessions.

Plenty of mini-sized basketballs around this conference.

“The ball represents our ideas,” said Tyler Bell (pictured left) from … Continue Reading

MobileBeat panel: Most profitable markets for location services still unclear

Who’s going to be making money from location data? That’s the question that got a lot of attention today at a breakout session in VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2010 conference.

None of the panelists — from small location-based players like Placecast and LikeList as well as giants like Nokia and Google — had a definitive answer. LikeList, a company that refers businesses to consumers based on peer recommendations, said the value of location-based services resides in the … Continue Reading