Latest Silicon Valley round-up:
IPO window opening? — Lots of companies filing to go public lately. In just the past couple of days, there’s WiMax company Clearwire (see our story), game company Glu Mobile (see story), WiFi company Aruba (see story) and now rumors of software company Netsuite preparing one.
Redback Networks comes long way — This San Jose company went big, and then bankrupt in 2003. Now we learn the company, which manages 50 million broadband connections, has been bought by telecommunications equipment maker, Ericsson for $2.1 billion.
Google offers multiple destinations — You’ve probably noticed that Google has improved its directions service on Google Maps. It started storing previous addresses you’ve looked, and now has offered a way to look up multiple destinations in one go. You just hit the “add destination” button (see image below)
U.S. dumps VaxGen — In an unusual dose of tough medicine, the U.S. government canceled its $877.5 million contract with Brisbane’s VaxGen for an improved anthrax vaccine because the company didn’t meet its deadlines. Good overview of the debacle here in the Merc.
Zoho continues its barrage of software offerings, offers Wiki product — We’ve written about this scrappy, low-cost, but impressive software provider before. It has one of the widest arrange of online software products out there, many of them free. It told VentureBeat yesterday that Zoho Wiki is now available. You can create it for public use, or private use among a group. Zoho’s previous weakness was that many of its products weren’t integrated within the same platform, but it has moved to change that lately. The Wiki, for example uses Zoho Writer as the editor, and appears to have most of the other features you’d want (spell check, integration with spreadsheets, immediate syncing when those spreadsheets are changed, YouTube video embedding, RSS for pages). More details here.
Podaddies, yet another advertising start-up — Gigaom reviews San Francisco start-up, Podaddies, which wants to place advertising in user-generated video. We don’t see much new here. It does want to customize the service to each site it serves, but there are others that do that too. It is a self-admitted “tortoise” among many hares.
Milpitas is wired with WiFi — Earthlink announced that its service in Silicon Valley city of Milpitas is now ready for use. However, it is not free. After 30 days free testing, a user must pay $21.95 a month. Occasional users can pay rates ranging from $3.95 for a one-hour pass to $15.95 for a three-day pass.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings.
