French mobile instant messaging company Miyowa announced a second round of funding today, to the tune of of $8 million, bringing its total financing to date up to $12.7 million. The company has flown largely under the radar in America, but it plans to use this shot in the arm to change all that and [...]

We’ve been covering the ongoing downtime experienced by third-place Chinese online video site 56.com, a company that has received significant backing from Silicon Valley investors. While the site claims technical problems are causing the downtime, the consensus is that the Chinese government has chosen to censor the site entirely off the web, at least for [...]

Microsoft, the software giant flush with billions of dollars in its warchest, has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset, we’ve learned.The purchase price is rumored to be slightly more than $100 million. An announcement is expected next month. Powerset, of San Francisco, has developed a technology that attempts to understand the full [...]

The second quarter, closing Monday, is expected to be the worst in recent history for initial public offerings, as the stock market continues to face stormy conditions. An estimated 44 IPOs were pulled during the year due to lousy market conditions. And that has shareholders, including venture capital funds, looking for alternative sources of liquidity. Among [...]

Mobile-only social network MocoSpace announced today that it generated over 1.5 billion pageviews in May. That’s a larger number than rival MySpace Mobile’s 1.4 billion pageviews for the month of March. MocoSpace’s numbers also indicate a 50 percent growth rate in the last 4 months. This is in an indicator that mobile-only social networks can not [...]

Considering a sizable portion of its upper management has left in the past few weeks, you had to know a reorg at the top of Yahoo was coming. The head (Jerry Yang) and brain (Sue Decker) are still intact, but the eyes, nose, ears, chin, etc are gone. Two of the big moves are that Ash [...]

Dashwire, a program that lets smartphone users access and use their mobile data from the web, released a new version yesterday, and it looks really, really nice. We’ve written about Dashwire before as part of the growing group of programs that let user protect their mobile contacts should they lose their phone and migrate their [...]

Updated with a response from Facebook Slide is one of the largest third-party application developers on leading social network Facebook, and both share an investor in venture firm the Founders Fund. But all that apparently wasn’t enough to stop Facebook from at least temporarily removing one of Slide’s most popular Facebook applications, Top Friends.Top Friends let [...]

MySpace is about to launch its Data Availability project, which will let users make MySpace the center of their web activity. Starting this afternoon, developers can use the application programming interfaces (APIs) available here to access MySpace user data on other sites. For example, users should be able to upload photos to MySpace, then [...]

We can all watch live video broadcasts on the internet thanks to content delivery networks (CDNs), which set up strategic points online where they can send streams of videos to internet users as efficiently as possible without clogging up the entire web. But Andolis, a San Francisco startup with French roots, hopes to disrupt that business [...]

A bunch of sites and publications are writing today about YouTube’s new inclusion of long-form video and how it could revolutionize Google’s video sharing service. In reality, it’s not all that new. Over a year ago, YouTube allowed two aspiring filmmakers to place their 71-minute feature, Four Eyed Monsters, on the site. But it still [...]

This just in from web analytics firm Hitwise. Social network MySpace continues to see the most U.S. traffic — 72.73 percent share of the social networking market — but that’s a slight drop from its April traffic and a five percent drop from the previous May. Meanwhile, the only other significantly large social network in the [...]

Sometimes a race horse stumbles out of the gate and it wins anyway. Such is the case with Mozilla’s Firefox 3. Mozilla put out a lofty goal of 5 million downloads for Firefox 3 on the first day. As of noon today, the number stands at just over 8.5 million. In the United States alone, over [...]

Are you going to buy an iPhone 3G on July 11, launch day? If so, how long are you prepared to wait? A bit of information that started circulating after the WWDC launch of the iPhone 3G was that AT&T and Apple would now require buyers to activate their new phones before they left the store. [...]

Two young web-mail startups, Zenbe and Xoopit, have set out to rewrite the rules of web-mail. They see today’s leading web-mail services as dinosaurs, mired in the bureaucratic inertia of the sluggish internet titans that control them. And they might be right. Sure, in major overhauls last year, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL added some horsepower and [...]

The Go BIG Network is the world’s largest site for startup jobs. Startups can use Go BIG to find talent willing to work for equity. Job seekers can use Go BIG to escape cubicle life and find a startup job, some of which have equity/options as part of their compensation package. Recruiting Success Story: Rrankk.com [...]

Nobody really knows how much social networks applications are worth, which leads some people to think that they’re not worth much of anything. But try telling that to the companies that are building businesses through applications, and they’ll laugh at you as they continue on their way to the bank. This new social network application [...]

Sidewalks used to be so much nicer, before the Segway Personal Transporter started hitting the streets. Remember being able to walk peacefully along, happy on the two legs God gave us? Then Dean Kamen brought us the Segway, and suddenly you couldn’t step outside without one whizzing by. Everyone and their neighbor bought one, [...]

There’s been a flood of companies trying to use web technology to improve personal finance — bank account aggregators, social investment sites, and now SmartyPig, which is pitching itself as “the 21st century version of of a piggy bank.”The goal, says co-founders Mike Ferrari and Jon Gaskell, is to help people save for specific goals, [...]

People enjoy epic films. The action, the suspense, the pageantry — it’s larger-than-life and entertaining. Most people would also agree that they tend to go on for far too long. That has been the general consensus about the tech world’s latest epic narrative, the Microsoft takeover of Yahoo. But fear not, signs point to an [...]

The Tesla Motors executive team and a gaggle of reporters and celebrities were out en masse yesterday to witness the grand opening of the company’s flagship store in Los Angeles. Close to 9 months in the making, the store was the culmination of several years of hard work — at times fraught with delays and [...]

VentureBeat threw a party last night to celebrate the launch our new digital media blog. (In truth, the blog is still a glorified tab on our main site, but we’re headed soon to a more separate offering.) Held at the Ambassador club in San Francisco, hundreds of movers and shakers in digital media arena showed up [...]

Competition exists in all walks of life. Ibeatyou capitalizes on that idea with a site that allows users to set up competitions across a wide range of fields, everything from dancing to comedy to music to yes, sports (checkout our full coverage here). As an example, basketball star Steve Nash posted a video [...]

Microsoft is announcing today that it has created a easy-to-use Popfly Game Creator, a software tool that makes it easy for anyone to create their own arcade-like video games. The tool is based on Microsoft’s popular mashup tool Popfly, which is based on the Microsoft Silverlight multimedia platform technology that competes with Adobe’s Flash. It isn’t [...]

World Golf Tour, a company that uses Flash technology to make a realistic game for golfers, has raised a second round of financing in the double-digit millions of dollars. The San Francisco company, which I raved about a year ago when I first tried it out, announced the funding at the VentureBeat party last night. The [...]

China’s online video game market is expanding rapidly, with sales expected to nearly quadruple from $1.7 billion in 2007 to $6 billion in 2012, according to a survey being released Friday by market researcher Niko Partners. The market is expected to grow 32 percent in 2008 to $2.5 billion, while the overall five-year compound annual growth [...]

[Editor’s note: Eric Eldon wrote a rather positive article this week on the proposed $10 billion California High-Speed Rail bond measure. If approved by the state’s voters this November, the bond will lead to high-speed trains stretching from Sacramento and the Bay Area all the way down to San Diego. Martin Engel, a transportation commissioner [...]

Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile phone supplier, is developing a new kind of navigation instruction system for mobile phones. With landmark-based navigation you won’t even need to know your address or cross streets to get directions. You just take a picture of a nearby landmark, like the Golden Gate Bridge, with the camera in your [...]

TODAY’S HEADLINES: Stent maker IDev Tech raises $25M (VentureWire) Xytis gets $15M for brain-injury drugs (VentureWire) Diagnostic maker Iris Biotech plans to go public, launch breast-cancer test (Edgar) RiverVest Venture Partners raises $75M life-science fund (release) Concentric Medical names Maria Sainz CEO (release) [Note: I’m a little sad to announce that this will be my last life-science briefing at VentureBeat, although [...]

Over the past 15 years there have been three certainties in life: Death, taxes and Microsoft Windows’ domination of the OS market. Research firm Gartner believes that last part could soon change. Speaking at a Gartner-sponsored even in Las Vegas a couple days ago, two analysts from the firm gave a presentation in which they laid [...]

Inevitably, one day we’ll look at the first mp3 players as relics. But if researchers at IBM have their way, that day will come sooner than you may think. Researchers at IBM have created what they call “racetrack” memory, reports the Times Online. It’s similar to today’s flash memory (the method of storage on current iPhones, [...]

Voice mobile search is hot. Yahoo, for example, just partnered with a startup called Vlingo, which claims to offer the most advanced mobile search technology. V-Enable, on the other hand, is offering a very different new feature: Live operators. Other free voice search companies, such as the new 411 services — like Jingle Networks’ [...]

Here’s the latest action: The VentureBeat site today: So what happened was… We switched to a new web host, and due to a number of technical issues, the changeover was not especially smooth. In fact, if you were either trying to read our site or our RSS feeds, you probably didn’t see any of the many [...]

Forget cellulosic ethanol: If you’ve been following the biofuel sector lately, you probably already know that algae is the hot new game in town. New Zealand-based Aquaflow Bionomic may be getting close to achieving its goal of becoming the world’s first company to viably produce large amounts of biofuel from wild algae. Barrie Leay, [...]

Cecilia Aronsson, a Swedish business reporter, is a fellow at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford University. Through July, she’ll write columns for VentureBeat.com about her experiences in Silicon Valley. Here’s her first column. The European business press is speculating that the next market Apple plans to target with its iPhone is Sweden, a hotbed [...]

A New York City startup is offering humorous e-cards with a novel strategy: Be funny. Okay, that’s a little unfair to the competition, but Someecards made me laugh a lot harder than what I’ve seen on sites like Funny eCards. Traditional sites may be fancier, but they’re also … cuter. Someecards, on the other [...]

Slide, the most popular widget maker in the world, says it is adding one million new Flash widgets daily across all non-Facebook social networks, such as Myspace and hi5. Slide separately has some of the largest non-Flash applications on Facebook, according to total users, and it has been aggressively cross-promoting Facebook apps with non-Facebook Flash widgets [...]

Silicon Valley chip company Amimon has released what it says is the first ever chip that serves high-definition uncompressed video wirelessly across the whole home. That’s a bold claim, but could be true. The young Santa Clara, Calif. company’s chips stream HD video up to 150 feet, at an effective 250 to 800 megabits per second, [...]

Ripl is a social networking startup started by former Classmates.com executive Bill Messing and others, trying to take on Facebook in its home turf: college campuses. It has raised a small series B round of $4.5 million from angel investors, according to PEHub’s read of a regulatory filing. The Seattle-based site launched last November. Then, Messing [...]

Sequoia Capital, arguably Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capital firm, is big-footing one of its most respected investors. It brazenly demanded that Yale University invest in Sequoia’s risky adventures abroad in places like China, India and in later-stage investing. And when Yale refused, Sequoia ejected the university from access to its well-performing early stage funds — [...]

Conduit is a company that lets Web site owners and bloggers build a customizable toolbar for their visitors, and it says it is growing quickly. We wrote about the company last year. It boasts 12 million sites using its toolbar. Today, the Israeli-Redwood Shores, Calif. company lets Web surfers find toolbars with preloaded groups, for example [...]

The mother-focused site BabyCenter, owned by giant J&J, has acquired Maya’s Mom, a Palo Alto, Calif. social networking site for mothers. This is the first sign of consolidation in the inflated sector of Mom 2.0. A host of sites, from Minti to Mommybuzz, MothersClick, CafeMom and Momjunction have launched recently, raised cash, or otherwise moved aggressively [...]

Advertising-supported Web sites serving consumers like you and me may be all the rage. But rarely have other Web sites, those serving companies, tried to rely on ads — because there’s not enough people to look at the ads. But Spiceworks, an Austin, Texas company, has raised $8 million more in venture capital to deliver on [...]

Wis.dm, the site that lets people ask questions, voice opinions, discuss topics and issues, and seek guidance from peers, has raised $5 million. In June, we called it the latest “me too” company, because there are multiple companies doing similar things, including Megabuzz, Avanoo and others. Like these others, Wis.dm says it lets users tap into [...]

Jaxtr, a service for dodging international calling fees using your phone, has raised $10 million in series A round led by August Capital. It says it has doubled in size in the last month to a million users. The Menlo Park, Calif. company (more detail from our past coverage here and here [update: first [...]

Facebook will introduce significant changes to its developer platform in the coming weeks, according to a post this evening by Facebook’s senior platform manager, Dave Morin. He says the goal is to build Facebook users’ trust in third party applications on the site, so the best apps win and growth happens naturally, not [...]

Boston-based MocoSpace, which offers a mobile social network to let you find friends in your area, send them photos, and chat with them, has raised $3 million in a first round of funding. The poor company originally told us the funding round was scheduled for announcement next week, but then rushed out the announcement today after [...]

Here’s the latest action: China’s virtual worlds censored– China’s virtual world Hipihi reflects the real-world culture of its users. Players can have virtual sex in private rooms, but can’t engage in frank political talk. GigaOm has a review here. We mentioned Hipihi earlier, when writing about competitor Leeuu. There’s a YouTube video of Hipihi here (though [...]

Yahoo Mail upcoming redesign is offering text messaging from within email to external mobile phones. It is introducing shortcuts, underlining addresses, places, dates, contact information and other data with blue dotted lines. Click on these link you’ll be taken to maps for the addresses, calendar for dates, and so on — with more to come. Most [...]

Fotolog, a popular photo-sharing service, has been bought by France’s Hi-Media for $90 million, GigaOm reports. New York-based Fotolog is a photo blog that encourages users to post daily photos of themselves; a user’s profile page is centered around a main picture with a date underneath and a place for friends to leave comments. It wants [...]

updated Robert Scoble, the tech blogger, has drawn a lot of attention with a talk about why Google is beginning to fail as a search engine, and how upstarts may eat its lunch within a few years. It is provocatively titled Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years, and here’s [...]

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have signed a revenue-sharing deal with executives at Viacom-owned Comedy Central, their long-time television network, according to a New York Times article on Sunday. This continues a shake-up in the way big-media works, the latest in a trend giving more power to artists — and less to the [...]

Now that the Democrats are the dominant party on the hill in Washington, tech companies and venture capitalists are contributing more to that party than they are to congressional Republicans. For the first half of this year, almost two-thirds of the contributions from the political action committees of Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Google and other tech companies [...]

If there’s one thing tech aficionados dislike about the iPhone, it’s the slow cellular service provided by its carrier partner AT&T. So 17-year-old George Hotz worked through the summer to hack the iPhone, successfully converting it to use another network: T-Mobile. He’s since published details online about how to do it. Mercury News story here. Meanwhile, another [...]

Religions are some of the oldest, strongest forms of social networking — even two strangers will immediately trust each other more if they find they share the same faith. No surprise, then, that they’re finding their ways on to Facebook, the social network known for its strength in complementing real-life relationships. Bible Verses is the most [...]

Federated Media, a popular but sometimes controversial ad network for blogs, has raised another $4.5 million in funding, according to PE Hub’s read of the company’s recent regulatory filing. Returning backers include New Enterprise Associates and Omidyar Network, according to the filing; FM has raised nearly $3 million to date, PE Hub reports. [Disclosure: VentureBeat uses FM [...]

The current credit crunch caused by the subprime loaning crisis may help venture capital returns, and therefore start-ups. That’s the argument of venture capitalist Keith Benjamin, of San Francisco’s Levensohn Venture Partners, as posted on his blog a few days ago, and which has been picked up by several publications, including this morning’s New York [...]

[Editor’s note: This is an Op-Ed piece written by Keith Benjamin, a venture capitalist at Levensohn Venture Partners] Looking back at the public markets, a few strategies have worked very well over the last five years. Hedge funds have stood out with great returns and a perception of limited risk. Investing in cash generating companies [...]

Orkut, Google’s growing social network that gets no love back in the United States, has announced a number of design changes. Before/after shots can be found here. Orkut continues to show growth in unique visitors, even if its far behind MySpace and Facebook, according to Comscore data released last month (see table after the jump below). However, [...]

The outage of internet telephone service Skype last week helped several companies, including apparently the Gizmo Project and Grand Central. The latest company to say it benefited is Jajah, which claims users registrations surged by 50 percent more than usual when Skype was down last weekend (though it didn’t release specific numbers) [Update: Jangl, another VoIP [...]

Venture money continues to flow into video and music content creators, at prolific rates. Today’s there’s news from London that a London investment group, Ingenious Media, has raised $79 million to invest in media deals, including to finance comeback albums from past-their-prime rock bands. (Last month, it signed UB40, a reggae band that had a [...]

Sony is using a sugar (glucose)-operated battery to power an MP3 player, although the battery is about ten times the size of the player. Because of the low output of the cell, you need to string several of them together. See picture here, where this woman has four of them in her pack. Check out [...]

Two notable posts at VentureBeat LifeSciences: 1. The bionic eye — See here. 2.  Globus Medical raises $110 million, the largest venture capital deal of 2007.

Vtap is a new mobile phone service that lets you search for Web videos and other useful Internet content with impressive speed. The company will launch Sept. 10, but VentureBeat got an early look. Most Web search technologies are excruciatingly slow, relying on plodding cellular networks or slightly better networks such as Edge. Many people have given [...]

A legal case brought against the US before the World Trade Organization could undermine the United States’ decision last year to broadly enforce laws against online poker and many other forms of gambling over the internet, according to a New York Times article today. The tiny island nation of Antigua and Barbuda has successfully charged that [...]

In response to criticism by some, Google has quietly changed its policy on its Street View product. Now, anyone can alert the company and have an image of a license plate or a recognizable face removed, not just the owner of the face or car, says Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience [...]

[Editor’s note: This is an op-ed by Perry Wu, chief executive of BitGravity, a content distribution company, a long-time entrepreneur and former venture capitalist.] I was up in the mountains this past weekend, watching the kids run around with big smiles, savoring the s’mores they had just made over the campfire. Those white, fluffy things [...]

mShopper, a price comparison and shopping service for mobile phones, has just launched. There are a few companies, ranging from giants like Amazon and Yahoo to start-ups like Frucall and mPoria, making moves in the mobile e-commerce market, but it’s early and a clear winner has yet to emerge. mShopper has a destination site, but the key [...]

uPlayMe, the latest in a ever growing pile of companies offering a desktop application to let you connect with people through shared tastes in music, said it has raised a “multi-million” round of funding. The New York company uses a recommendation engine, looking at the music you’ve played [...]

Facebook, the booming social network company, is quietly creating a technology that would let advertisers target Facebook users based on the “massive amounts of information people reveal” about themselves, according to a story in today’s WSJ. The new ad plan, reportedly being led by Matt Cohler (pictured top), vice president of strategy and business operations, and [...]

Pluggd, a Seattle company that lets you search audio and video files for words or themes, has raised just under $6 million in financing. Pluggd is a hot company because it does something well that few others have been able to match. You can search for “iPhone,” and Pluggd will give you a heat map showing [...]

Playboy, the granddaddy of porn, is trying to penetrate college campuses — and this is no special edition magazine featuring nude students. Copying Facebook’s early playbook, it is launching a social network called PlayboyU that only people with .edu addresses can sign up for. Notably, for Playboy, it says it won’t feature nudes. Instead, it will try [...]

Lending Club, the Sunnyvale, Calif. lending service where people borrow and lend money among each other, bypassing the banks, and theoretically getting better rates, said it has raised $10.26 million in a first round of financing. Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners made the investment. The deal makes the the social lending industry very crowded, and the [...]

Here’s the latest action in green technology: Phoenix Motorcars, latest electric vehicle company — The Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., company makes electric SUVs and SUTs that can get 130 miles from a 10-minute charge, and is close to signing a $15 million first round of capital from investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Virgin Fuels and AES [...]

Frazr, a German-language clone of online messaging service Twitter, has not been growing fast enough to suit its founders. Its solution: Partner with a company named Onlinetvrecorder, that plays in the legal gray-zone by allowing people to make free recordings of broadcasts from German TV stations, P2P Blog reports. It works like this: OTR users can get [...]

Here’s the latest action: Skype trying to buy back customer love — Skype is sending out notes to users saying they’ll get a week’s worth of free service. The San Jose Internet phone company says it has 196 million users and reported earlier this year that it was profitable for the first time. As Jeff Nolan [...]

 Updated Microsoft has decided yet again to play Goliath. The heavy-handed giant is demanding that a small venture-backed company, called XBux, change its name. Despite the fact that XBux which helps extreme sporting event promoters and athletes find sponsors, is nowhere near the video game world, Microsoft alleges that XBux is infringing on its [...]

Google releases a new product within Google Earth today called Sky that will allow users to view the skies, along with stars, as seen from Earth. There’s a demo here. The New York Times has a review here. Sky will let users fly around and zoom in, exposing increasingly detailed imagery of some 100 million stars [...]

After several months of testing ads on its videos, YouTube is finally unleashing an ad format it hopes will make it some money. The format will be semi-transparent ads that appear as strips across the bottom 20 percent of a video. Here’s an example. The ads show up after a video plays for 15 seconds. If a [...]

CafeMom, a no-frills social network site for mothers, has raised $5 million in funding. The site is owned by New York’s CMI Marketing, and gets its backing from Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who have supported the company for seven years, helping pump $50 million into the company — much of it coming during [...]

Conduit Labs is a secretive new company, not launched yet, but which says it wants to build a new social network: One built around virtual world gaming, but with networking components that reflect real life, just like Facebook does for students on college campuses. It has just received $5.5. million from Charles River Ventures and Prism [...]

For years now, the so-called “Form D” has bedeviled companies wanting to remain secretive, because the regulatory filings alerted news reporters to their existence. Obtaining a Form D, however, was a cumbersome process for most of us, and so some companies managed to stay under the radar anyway. However, now the SEC is proposing making [...]

Yahoo continues to increase its offerings in mobile services. Earlier this month, it bought a small game startup called Actionality. Yahoo’s expanding line of mobile services already includes games, and this purchase gives Yahoo another place to sell ads. Actionality sticks ads into mobile games and other applications as they’re being downloaded from a mobile web [...]

Large music companies are struggling to do end-runs around Apple’s iTunes+iPod hegemony. The big problem with their plans is that cool music-playing hardware is where the money is in music sales these days, something these companies don’t have (as Om points out). Meanwhile, profit margins on selling digital music tracks are tiny. gBox launches, in partnership with [...]

SelectMinds, a New York company that provides companies with their own social networks, has raised a $5.5 million round of financing from Bessemer Venture Partners. SelectMinds is just one of at some 34 companies that are letting companies or other groups build their own networks, and it’s hard to see how each of them will survive. On [...]

The company that runs The Filter, a music recommendation service, has raised $5 million from investors including musician Peter Gabriel. The Filter provides you a software download, which searches your library of music and then generates playlists of other music it believes you will like based on what other people with similar tastes have liked. It [...]

London’s TickEx wants to help you find the best deal on tickets to live events. The company has just launched stateside. When most people want to buy tickets to concerts and sports games, the first place they turn is Ticketmaster. If Ticketmaster has sold out, avid fans turn to the secondary market , where they [...]

Updated Investors have poured $30 million more into video site Metacafe, the popular online video site. This is a significant amount of money for a company that already raised $15 million. But the support may be necessary if Metacafe is to stay among the front-runners. It is the seventh most popular video site, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, [...]

Mobile phone interfaces are notoriously difficult to use — hence, the hype around Apple’s iPhone and its unique two-fingered method of navigating its mobile web browser. Vlingo has a different answer to clumsy mobile interfaces: speech recognition technology so sophisticated that you can speak what you want into your phone. This helps avoid having to tap your [...]

[Editor’s note: This is an Op-Ed piece by Kevin Barenblat, co-creator of SpotDJ] Facebook and its developer platform f8 are the hot topic of conversation among many in Silicon Valley since its launch May 24. The site is quickly growing up, as folks 35 and older now make up almost half of the site’s new [...]

Here’s the latest action (updated): Google buys stake in China’s Tianya, launches two Chinese social sites: Google has invested in Tianya, a Chinese online community of twenty million registered users. A Google spokesperson confirmed the investment with VentureBeat, but didn’t say how much of the company it now owns. Reuters has more. The two companies [...]

Venture Vehicles, a Los Angeles company developing a three-wheeler car that you can plug into a electrical outlet, with a glass canopy roof that can reportedly out-accelerate a Porsche Boxster — and get 100 miles to the gallon — has just raised $6 million in a first round of funding. NGEN Partners made the [...]

The Silicon Valley start-up Tilera has unveiled a powerful chip with 64 cores, or electronic brains that is getting widespread coverage today. The Santa Clara, Calif. company’s product emerges after a decade of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and improves performance by making use of a new way to connect its cores [...]

Check out the latest jobs on VentureBeat: They include openings for the following: Director of Software Engineering at 4INFO, the San Mateo, Calif. mobile search company; Network Design Engineer at Executive Direction in Santa Clara, Calif.; Software Developer at Farallon Capital Management in San Francisco, Calif.

If there are three constants in life, the Internet’s arrival on your living room TV has probably claimed its rightful spot alongside death and taxes. There have been numerous failed attempts to bring the Internet to television, and even the recent success of Apple comes with an asterisk. AppleTV, originally touted by Steve Jobs as [...]

We have a fairly long way to go before computers comprehend human language well enough to translate it elegantly, and until that day comes, the language barrier on the internet seems hard to breach. Brian McConnnell, founder of the Worldwide Lexicon Project, wants to harness human energy to knock that barrier down. He hopes [...]

Navigenics, a new secretive Silicon Valley company, wants to let you access your genetic information, so you can see what sort of diseases or sicknesses you may be prone to. It has backing from high-profile venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. It joins another company, 23andMe, doing something very similar — each exploiting the [...]

Scientists from the University of Bath in the UK are mashing up Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones and Facebook to better understand how people interact in cities. This effort is part of a larger project called Cityware looking at a range of urban issues, including the spread of viruses — both biological and digital viruses. The Facebook application [...]

Microsoft Office, the popular office software, works great for most purposes, but it lacks good software for employees to collaborate on products — co-writing documents simultaneously, for example, or letting them archive online conversations. Sharepoint, Microsoft’s offering, started as a simple file-sharing system, but its features have been limited. For Wiki features, for example, Microsoft established [...]

Ntag, a Boston company that makes interactive name badges for people to wear at conferences and other events so that they can interact socially with people with similar interests, has raised $8.3 million in a second round of funding. A helpful demo on the company’s home page shows how it works (see “networking” chapter for basics). [...]