 | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Consumer and digital information company The Nielsen Company announced today a set of impressive new social media statistics. According to the company’s blog, in December 2009 consumers spent 82 percent more time on social networking sites compared to the same period a year ago.
The average global consumer now spends more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, up from 3 hours in December 2008. In correlation, the overall traffic to social networking sites by unique visitors increased as well. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: GigaOM | Category: Media
On the text web, arbitrage has become the word of the day as whole ecosystems have sprung up to optimize and monetize the link economy. But when it comes to online video, the arbitrage model is failing badly.
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
BrightSource Energy, one of the companies making solar thermal energy look better and better, has just landed a $1.37 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy, to build three utility-scale plants pumping out 400 megawatts — enough to light up as many as 140,000 homes in California. These projects alone would double solar thermal’s presence in the U.S.
Based in Oakland, BrightSource has been talking about its large Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating System for a while now. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
It’s time to add another huge player to the video streaming business. The New York Times is reporting that Wal-Mart has agreed to purchase Vudu — a startup that has been struggling to make a dent in the video streaming marketplace since 2007. The news comes from two anonymous sources close to the deal, and there still isn’t any official confirmation from reps at Wal-Mart and Vudu.
Wal-Mart is one of the world’s biggest DVD retails, and the company also dabbled in Netflix-style online DVD rental several years ago. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: GigaOM | Category: Media
Twitter is finally stopping to catch its breath and report its own stats. The company said in a blog post today that it is now receiving and distributing 50 million posts per day, or 600 tweets per second.
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Twitter blew a hole through talk that the microblogging network’s growth has come to a halt.
The company said that it’s seeing 50 million tweets a day, up from 35 million last fall. That’s 600 tweets per second or ‘TPS’, in a joking reference to the movie “Office Space.”
From the new statistics, Twitter’s pace of growth is definitely slower than in 2009, when tweets per day grew by 1,400 percent that year. But it shows that Twitter is by no means stagnating: it’s gone from 5,000 tweets a day in 2007, to 300,000 in 2008, then 35 million last year and 50 million today. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
GreenRoad, maker of a dashboard system that judges how dangerous your driving is at any given time based on road conditions, speed and spacial orientation — targeted mostly at commercial fleet drivers — has just raised $10 million from a notable source: former vice president Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management. It joins existing backer Richard Branson’s Virgin Green Fund. Why so much interest from green investors? GreenRoad’s system promotes fuel efficiency too. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Jive Software, a company that builds social networking tools for businesses, just announced that it’s looking for a new chief executive.
Dave Hersh, the outgoing CEO, is switching roles to become Portland, Ore.-based Jive’s chairman of the board, where he will take a less hands-on role in managing the company. Board member Tony Zingale is taking over as interim CEO while Jive looks for a permanent replacement. Zingale’s past experience includes serving as president and CEO of Mercury Interactive. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Jive Software, a company that builds social networking tools for businesses, just announced that it’s looking for a new chief executive.
Dave Hersh, the outgoing CEO, is switching roles to become Portland, Ore.-based Jive’s chairman of the board, where he will take a less hands-on role in managing the company. Board member Tony Zingale is taking over as interim CEO while Jive looks for a permanent replacement. Zingale’s past experience includes serving as president and CEO of Mercury Interactive. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Polyvore, which is like a do-it-yourself online fashion magazine, grabbed Google’s former Asia-Pacific and Latin America president Sukhinder Singh Cassidy as chief executive today. She most recently served as CEO-in-residence at Accel Partners.
Polyvore’s users make 30,000 fashion collages a day, sharing them and their favorite products and brands with friends. The site attracts 6 million unique visitors a month at a time when the underlying business model for high-end fashion magazines is being challenged following the recession and as advertisers move to the web. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: GigaOM | Category: Media
Every once in a while, a new service or feature comes along that crystallizes everything that is both wonderful and shocking about the Internet and the social web. ChatRoulette is one of those services, drawing both revulsion over its X-rated content and investment interest from VCs.
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Bloom Energy finally emerged from stealth mode, unveiling its “Bloom Box” fuel cell during a 60 Minutes segment with Lesley Stahl yesterday (click here for bonus videos). Capable of powering more than 100 homes while producing close to zero emissions, just one of these boxes could radically alter how people get their energy. But is it the god send that some are saying it is?
Wireless and neatly compartmentalized, the Bloom Box could one day be a fixture in your backyard or basement, transmitting clean energy to your home as needed, Bloom CEO K. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Ad market Reply.com has put in its SEC S-1 form to go public. The company, which offers targeted buying and selling of advertising and sales leads. TechCrunch has a rundown of the company’s current financials, which include a 75% revenue increase in super-tough 2009.
Here’s what I wrote about Reply last October:
Targeted search and display ads are the bread and butter of online advertising today. But ad networks like Reply are learning how to deliver qualified leads — in Reply’s case, potential buyers for cars, homes, home improvement, and insurance deals whose self-selected qualifications that result in up to double the conversion rate from ad to purchase. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Maybe if there is a utopian future where humans and robots live in peaceful co-existence, those robots would serve lots of beer.
That was the loopy idea behind BarBot 2010 last week, where inventors showed off mechanical creations that could mix a stiff Long Island iced tea or serve a cold one.
Some were expectedly silly. But others had a potential business model behind them, with the ability to mix dozens of complicated drinks and relieve packed bar counters. It seems like there could be a market for cocktail-mixing or beer vending machines, barring alcohol restrictions for minors and the violent nature of intoxicated humans. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Maybe, if we’re headed for a utopian future where humans and robots live in peaceful co-existence, those robots would serve lots of beer.
That was the loopy idea behind BarBot 2010 last week, where inventors showed off mechanical creations that could mix a stiff Long Island iced tea or serve a cold one.
Some were expectedly silly. But others had a potential business model behind them, with the ability to mix dozens of complicated drinks and relieve packed bar counters. It seems there could be a market for cocktail-mixing or beer vending machines. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: GigaOM | Category: Media
Austin is still betting on hardware statups even as venture firms stop funding them. In a video interview with Bart Bohn, a director at the Austin Technology Incubator, we talk about where hardware startups can find funding, and which ones to watch in Austin.
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Google revamped its ad server technology to help itself and small publishers monetize ads on their sites.
The upgrades include more detailed forecasting data to explain which ads are valuable and where revenue comes from to publishers. Google also released a new application programming interface allowing publishers to build their own apps to handle sales and workflow. Publishers can also open up ad space to bids from multiple networks.
Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion two years ago to refine the way it shows relevant ads to users and to help advertisers optimize their spending across the web. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Publishing powerhouse Macmillan recently made headlines with its demands for pricing control on e-books sold through Amazon. To recap: Amazon at first dropped Macmillan’s books from its store (including print editions) because the publisher wanted to charge more than $9.99 for Amazon e-books. Amazon later begrudgingly accepted Macmillan’s demands, and moved towards an agency model which allowed the publisher to set its own e-book pricing (between $12.99 to $15.99).
Now the publisher is making news with e-books once again — this time with its own software platform, DynamicBooks. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Google announced this weekend that it’s going to be ending support for Google Gears, its product for allowing offline access to applications like Gmail and Google Docs.
Instead of developing Gears, Google said in a blog post it will be focusing on using HTML5 to support offline capabilities from within the applications themselves, rather than needing an add-on like Gears.
Google will continue to support Gears, because “Gears has helped us deliver much-desired functionality, such as the ability to offer offline access in GMail, to a large number of users. [...]
Read more | Monday, February 22, 2010
Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology
Disruptive companies are getting a lot of attention at our upcoming GamesBeat@GDC executive game conference. The event is set for March 10 in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference in the Moscone Convention Center. Today we’re announcing the following speakers have been added to our lineup:
Jules Urbach, CEO of Otoy and Lightstage. Urbach will join our panel on Disruptive Innovation and talk about the latest efforts at Otoy to create a games-on demand service with partners such as Advanced Micro Devices. [...]
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