VentureBeat |
- Vator Splash is coming back to San Francisco!
- Amazon launches ultra-cheap Kindle for $79, new Kindle Touch for $99
- Kindle Fire uses a new Silk web browser to boost efficiency
- Amazon unveils Kindle Fire tablet for $199, coming Nov. 15
- Intergi scores ad deal with online game leader Bigpoint (exclusive)
- ClearSlide grabs $11M from Greylock to expand its “quick” sales communication service
- Power Assure helps CIOs manage server power, gets $13.5M
- Wrapp your head around this: Gift giving is now fun… if you’re Swedish
- Son of MeeGo lives! Intel and Samsung team up on open source Linux software
- Oh boy, Amazon’s second (and better) Kindle tablet could land early 2012
- Andreessen-Horowitz gives $1.5M to unlaunched recommendation app Wikets
- Toshiba to launch new 7-inch Android tablet with high-res screen
- Dylan’s Desk: Amazon’s Kindle tablet is ready to take on the iPad
- Superhero online game City of Heroes launches as free-to-play today
- Facebook’s valuation sits at $82.25B based on private sales of stock
- What people are saying about Windows 8 on Twitter (Infographic)
- Glam Media hires new CFO, honing its edge for a likely IPO
- Updated Skype iOS apps add Bluetooth support and (unfortunately) ads
- Windows Phone Mango update is out — gets Web Marketplace, tethering
- Tips for moving from the corporate world to a startup
- Go ahead, open more tabs; Firefox 7 runs even faster
- Myopic entrepreneurs need to “think big,” Get Satisfaction CEO says (video)
- Clean Power Finance connects investors, solar providers and gets $75M from Google
- Delicious team unveils new version of the social bookmarking site
- Y Combinator-backed 1000memories launches Shoeboxes, says revenue in sight
- So long WiMax: Sprint preparing its LTE 4G network for 2012
- SlideShare boosts mobile abilities with new HTML5-powered site
- Kobo Pulse gives ereaders a powerful shot of social
| Vator Splash is coming back to San Francisco! Posted: 28 Sep 2011 09:05 AM PDT
Vator will be holding Vator Splash SF on Sept. 29, at Cafe du Nord in San Francisco. Splash is a single-track event and startup competition. Splash gathers leading entrepreneurs, innovators, venture capitalists and angel investors to inspire and energize the audience about entrepreneurship and innovation. Splash brings together high-caliber speakers to talk about how to build and scale successful companies, how their industries are changing, and the opportunities those changes are creating. Splash also allows the audience to mingle with top venture capitalists and angels who are funding the next Google or Facebook. These influencers will give you insights into how they think when it comes to investments and they’ll talk about their changing investment strategies in light of the emergence of super angels, angels, micro-VCs and incubators. As always, 10 promising young high-tech startups will be chosen to present onstage in front of some 400 investors, fellow entrepreneurs and high-tech influencers.
And, as always, you won't want to miss the afterparty performance by Coverflow, starring Mayfield's Raj Kapoor and Tim Chang, ADHD Labs' Phil Kaplan and Facebook's Prashant Fuloria and Ethan Beard. Get your VentureBeat discount ticket of 15% by using the code “VB001″ when you register here. Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat        
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| Amazon launches ultra-cheap Kindle for $79, new Kindle Touch for $99 Posted: 28 Sep 2011 08:10 AM PDT Along with showing off its hyped Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon today dropped the price of the original Wi-Fi-enabled Kindle e-reader to a jaw-dropping $79 and launched a new touch-enabled $99 Kindle Touch. "We're offering premium products at non-premium prices," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at a Kindle launch event in New York City. "We're going to sell many millions of these." Along with its cheaper price point, the new $79 Kindle is slightly updated. The device still features an E-Ink screen and shaves off the keyboard, making it 30 percent lighter than the previous generation at 5.98 ounces but it will feature moderate advertising (“special offers”), while the model without offers runs $109. The company also unveiled the new $99 Kindle Touch, an infrared-touch-enabled version of the Kindle that looks incredibly similar to the $79 Kindle. It features "EazyReach" tap zones that make it easier to switch pages on the touch screen with a single hand. A 3G-enabled version of the Kindle Touch will retail for $149. The ultra-cheap Kindle and Kindle Touch are available for order now from Amazon. All of the new Kindle models will help Amazon battle Barnes & Noble in the e-reading tablet space, while the Kindle Fire could eat into the Apple’s iPad market share simply because of its $199 price point. A new “cute” ad for the $79 Kindle can be viewed below: Filed under: mobile        
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| Kindle Fire uses a new Silk web browser to boost efficiency Posted: 28 Sep 2011 08:07 AM PDT
With Silk, Amazon is focusing on speed as a key selling point of the Kindle Fire. The company calls Silk a “split browser,” because half of the browsing work is done by Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) to speed up efficiency when using the web via Kindle Fire. In addition to optimizing websites for the Kindle Fire’s screen size, resolution and such, Silk learns uses a person’s behavior patterns to pre-load frequently visited pages. So for example, if you visit about 3 of 5 websites every weekday morning, Silk will pre-load all five of those pages to make the web browsing experience faster and more enjoyable. The process is a lot like Google’s pushing of Instant pages, which pre-loads top search results to speed up the search engine experience. Check out the demo video from Amazon embedded below that explains how the Silk browser works. Note: This story is developing. Please refresh the page for updates  Filed under: cloud, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Amazon unveils Kindle Fire tablet for $199, coming Nov. 15 Posted: 28 Sep 2011 06:38 AM PDT Today we finally got our first glimpse at Amazon’s Kindle tablet at a New York City press event, and the company also introduced cheaper Kindle e-readers with touch capabilities. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos hit the stage to discuss the skepticism many people had about the original Kindle e-reader. He showed off a slide that demonstrated how Kindle book sales skyrocketed, especially in comparison to the trajectory of physical book sales.
For those who don’t want any touch capabilities, Amazon will offer an upgraded version of its original Kindle design for $79. “We’re offering premium products at non-premium prices,” Bezos said. “We’re going to sell many millions of these.” Finally, Bezos pulled out the Kindle Fire. It’s a 7-inch tablet with a dual-core CPU, just as many rumors have suggested. It’ll retail for $199 when it ships on November 15. You can pre-order the tablet today. “From Kindle, Fire is born,” a TV spot for the tablet said, which also explains its somewhat confusing name. As expected, it’ll have full integration with all of Amazon’s services, and everything you purchase will be available on the cloud, even after you delete it. The tablet also expands on the Kindle’s WhisperSync technology, since it will be able to wirelessly synchronize music and movies. You’ll also be able to synchronize what you’re watching on the Fire with your TV (for supported sets). The Kindle Fire features a carousel of your most recently viewed content. You can also pin favorite items to the home book shelf. This definitely doesn’t look like any Android tablet we’ve seen before. Bezos played a clip from X-Men: First Class, which played smoothly.
Basically, Silk splits up the web browser into something that’s stored both locally on the tablet, as well as something that exists in the cloud. “The browser observes aggregate user behavior across a large number of sites,” an Amazon representative said. It can tell which page users will most likely hit next, and make that page faster to access. Best of all, Silk optimizes the browsing experience without any need for user intervention. It invisibly makes web browsing faster. Filed under: media, mobile        
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| Intergi scores ad deal with online game leader Bigpoint (exclusive) Posted: 28 Sep 2011 05:00 AM PDT
Bigpoint has more than 200 million registered users for its 60 online games, which include titles such as Battlestar Galactica Online, DarkOrbit, Seafight, and Farmerama. Bigpoint has been making a push into the U.S. for the past 18 months and is tapping Intergi to provide online ad services. Heiko Hubertz, chief executive of Bigpoint, said that, just as Bigpoint tries to make top-notch games, its advertising has to be top notch as well. Many of Bigpoint’s games are free to play, where users play for free but pay real money for virtual goods. But the games can be monetized via ads as well, and Deerfield Beach, Fla.-based Intergi will find the advertisers who want to place ads next to Bigpoint’s online games. Over the past three years, Intergi has seen revenue growth of 2,383 percent. The company, headed by CEO Jayson Dubin, CEO, creates custom, site-specific, or channel-wide opportunities for advertisers across entertainment and gaming properties. It has 20 employees and was formed in 2007. Rivals include IGN and GameSpot. As one of its services, Intergi has a video publishing platform called Playwire that makes it easy for sites to make money from video advertising. Intergi uses video, mobile, flash and interactive elements to build ad campaigns and provides real-time analytics to manage and track the results. Investors include angel funding from Jayson Dubin, Steven Berger, Ken Greiner, Bruce Gellar and Jonathan Petak. Intergi now has more than 40 exclusive partnerships with firms such as Major League Gaming. Filed under: deals, games        
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| ClearSlide grabs $11M from Greylock to expand its “quick” sales communication service Posted: 28 Sep 2011 12:01 AM PDT Sales communication tools startup ClearSlide has raised $11 million in first-round funding, it announced today. The company helps salespeople quickly share presentations and related content like videos and PDFs with prospective clients. “We’re bringing new kinds of functionality to sales representatives,” ClearSlide CEO and Evite co-founder Al Lieb told VentureBeat. “After talking with thousands of sales teams, we came up with better tools to help reps with pitching.” ClearSlide offers sales professionals a browser-based dashboard from which they can upload PowerPoint presentations, Word docs, PDFs, videos in all formats, interactive web pages, Flash files and more. Once all those files are uploaded, the sales rep can show prospects that content via a branded URL that can be plugged into any browser. ClearSlide also offers analytics that track how customers interact with specific shared content. “Salespeople want to be able to give a less-than-a-minute presentation if need be,” Lieb said. “Our service makes giving a presentation faster and easier than it is through something like WebEx or GoToMeeting.” ClearSlide already has “hundreds” of customers using its service, with notable companies like Rackspace, Expedia and Dow Jones using it for sales. The funding round was led by Greylock Partners, which just led Tumblr’s massive $85M funding round and has invested in the likes of Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn and Constant Contact. Current investor Felicis Ventures also participated in the round. “[ClearSlide] replaces the awful, cumbersome tools with something that’s radically simpler, and they’ve built an incredibly rapidly growing customer base,” said Greylock partner John Lilly in a statement. San Francisco, Calif.-based ClearSlide will use the new funding to more than double the size of its team. The company currently has 30 employees, but Lieb said ClearSlide is “expanding across the board” and plans to have 70 employees by the end of 2011. ClearSlide joins a growing list of startups that are challenging WebEx and GoToMeeting in the presentation space by giving sales teams more varied communication tools. Both MeetingBurner and Vidquik are presentation-focused startups I wrote about recently that offer somewhat unique capabilities, with MeetingBurner being great for colloboration and sales and Vidquik being good for 1-on-1 sales. Do you think ClearSlide will be able to stand out in this increasingly competitive area? Filed under: cloud, enterprise        
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| Power Assure helps CIOs manage server power, gets $13.5M Posted: 27 Sep 2011 11:56 PM PDT
"The data center market continues to grow at 8 to 12 percent per year. However, it is becoming constrained by the availability of power, especially in high density areas where space is a limitation," said Tarak Mehta, Head of ABB’s Low Voltage Products division in a statement. Managing large scale data centers is a cumbersome task when combined with powering multiple computers on one physical server, cooling costs and more. Power Assure attempts to tackle enterprise- to government-size data center management issues, such as dealing with large amounts of collected data, including information on a server’s own performance. The company provides software to track and analyze this data, allowing data center managers to make better decisions on how to run their servers more efficiently as well as how to optimize usage to save power and free up server space. The funding will be used to increase marketing and sales efforts. The company will also invest in product enhancements for its energy management solutions. Power Assure is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. The company has raised $28.75 in total from investors ABB Technology Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Good Energies, Point Judith Capital. The United States Department of Energy also provided Power Assure with a $5 million match-funding grant. [Photo courtesy of Power Assure] Filed under: deals, green        
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| Wrapp your head around this: Gift giving is now fun… if you’re Swedish Posted: 27 Sep 2011 11:19 PM PDT
Wrapp is the brainchild of Andreas Ehn, founding CTO of free music service Spotify, and Hjalmar Winbladh, the founding CEO of mobile VoIP company Rebtel. The only limitations with the Wrapp gift app are you can only use it on Facebook or smartphones and only in Sweden. Ehn and Winbladh have completed testing in Sweden and have started signing up businesses in the United Kingdom. They are just now dipping their toes in the U.S. market. “We were intrigued by the concept that gift giving is much nicer than gift buying,” says Winbladh. Read that again. It will make sense in a minute. “This is not discounting or daily deals. This is turbo-charged gift giving.”
Here’s the coolest part: these retailers are offering free gift cards with no strings attached. WESC, for example, has a 100 krona (about $15 U.S) card you can send to your friend. It’s really $15 for free. Wrapp is taking a gamble that gift senders will up the ante and add a bit more to that initial amount. If people just give free certificates, that’s okay too. According to Winbladh, participating businesses report free certificate bearers end up either spending more themselves or becoming repeat customers. The gift I choose for Bill gets “wrapped” so he cannot see the certificate until his birthday. Other Facebook friends can see the wrapped gift on his wall and can add to the total amount. Winbladh calls this a “gift dialogue.” The certificate grows until Bill’s birthday arrives and the certificate is unwrapped. To redeem the digital gift cards, Bill clicks the link on his Facebook Wall (or, if sent by smartphone, a gift text message from me). When he gets to Bjorn Borg Bill can press “Use” on his Wrapp mobile app and the gift card barcode is displayed. The cashier will either scan or visually confirm the gift card and the transaction is complete. Givers give, receivers receive and businesses get business. These businesses also get to tap into the advertising power of the social network. Friends giving and receiving WESC gifts will get more attention than an advertisement. Wrapp makes money, too. They take a cut of the total redemption amount, but only after the gift card is used. Gift cards are a $100 billion industry in the U.S. according to the National Retail Federation. Besides going from paper printouts to nifty credit card-like plastics, there hasn’t been much innovation in this industry. This comes as a total shock, especially when potential growth is considered. The tests in Sweden revealed people give gifts for events not limited to birthdays, holidays or other anniversaries. There are “cheer-up” gifts and “happy Friday” gifts. “Coupons are not the things that will make this market interesting,” says Winbladh. “We need friend to friend, viral interactions. Then there has to be a reason for you gift on a daily basis or at least a couple of times a week. Giving discounts to each other isn’t fun. We looked at the gift carding business and thought, ‘why not do it digital and connect it on a social grid?’” Also on the Wrapp team are Carl Fritjofsson, strategy advisor to Groupon.se; Aage Reerslev, founder of mobile browser Squace; and Fabian Mansson, former CEO of H&M and Eddie Bauer. Winbladh co-founded Sendit, the first mobile Internet company, where he served as CEO, and took it public in 1997, before being acquired by Microsoft. In 2006 Winbladh co-founded Rebtel. As for the issue of the platform only serving Facebook and smartphones, Winbladh says he isn’t worried. We feel those trends are growing,” he says. “And if you look at a consumer that a retailer would like to have it’s a consumer with a smartphone in their hand.” Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Son of MeeGo lives! Intel and Samsung team up on open source Linux software Posted: 27 Sep 2011 09:56 PM PDT
The Tizen software will be an amalgam of Intel’s MeeGo mobile operating system and Samsung’s LiMo software. MeeGo was dead in the water after Nokia bailed on the mobile operating system and shifted to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 OS instead. Samsung will be the new partner to help Intel get the software to the market and help the world’s biggest chip maker break into the smartphone and tablet business. The move is an attempt to break up the duopoly of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS software in the mobile-device market. The Linux Foundation will host the standards-based project, where Tizen development will be completely open and led by a technical steering team composed of Intel and Samsung engineers. The software will be based on HTML5 and WAC web development environment. Intel said it will help its remaining MeeGo partners transition to Tizen. Tizen is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2012 and devices will be on the market by mid-2012. Tizen will be targeted at smartphones, tablets, netbooks, car computers, and smart TVs. Intel also announced a deep alliance with Google on Android devices recently. But Intel chief executive Paul Otellini told analysts that he had learned his lesson about putting all his eggs in one basket through the Nokia partnership. Filed under: deals, dev, mobile        
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| Oh boy, Amazon’s second (and better) Kindle tablet could land early 2012 Posted: 27 Sep 2011 08:35 PM PDT
That means early adopters of Amazon’s tablet (now rumored to be called the Kindle Fire) could quickly find their slates obsolete. Worst of all, GDGT’s Ryan Block says this second tablet is the one Amazon really believes in — it was reported yesterday that the first-generation Kindle tablet is basically a reworked BlackBerry PlayBook that Amazon rushed out the door. While this may sound downright baffling, Block says that Amazon had always intended to release an updated tablet early next year, but delays with its first tablet has pushed the release of both models close together. In fact, plenty of rumors over the past few months pointed to Amazon releasing a souped-up 10-inch tablet next year that would be a true iPad competitor. In May, the mobile site Boy Genius Report claimed that Amazon was developing a dual-core 7-inch tablet codenamed "Coyote", and a powerful 10-inch quad-core tablet called "Hollywood." That 7-inch tablet is what we’re expecting to see unveiled tomorrow for around $250. If the newer Kindle tablet Block is referring to is actually Amazon’s rumored 10-inch entry, it may not actually be a true successor. For one, it will likely be closer to the iPad’s $499 price, rather than the more affordable 7-incher. If that’s the case, I don’t think most consumers will feel cheated by a second Kindle tablet coming so soon. Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Andreessen-Horowitz gives $1.5M to unlaunched recommendation app Wikets Posted: 27 Sep 2011 06:15 PM PDT
I imagine these recommendation apps to be like little bodies treading water in the Internet ocean. Apps like Where exist in rafts, websites such as Yelp are the ships that float on their own, and companies that provide exit strategies or funding are the lifeboats searching the scene for people to pick up. Not every treading body drowns. Wickets is hoping a classic approach to recommendations will help it edge out competitors, openly acknowledging that the space is crowded. “We are doing it the old fashioned way. Our goal was to come up with a way users can put their best recommendations at their friends’ fingertips,” said Wickets chief executive and co-founder Andy Park in an interview with VentureBeat. Wickets works by allowing you to follow other Wikets members and see their recommendations in a stream. Recommendations are made by searching a particular place or company, finding the product and adding your two cents right on its page. You can save recommendations in wishlists and define a wishlist by topic. Commenting is also enabled on the various reviews. Based on how many people “re-recommend” what you’ve already recommended or add your review to their wishlist, you get points, which can result in gift cards. The company is not releasing the names of all of its retail partners, but does say the first gift cards awarded could be from Amazon, iTunes or other large scale retailers. Park says that the app solves two problems: having to find a product and send an email or text regarding the product, as well as time spent waiting for a recommendation when requested from friends. The app solves these issues by attaching a review directly to the product or place page and, in theory, your friends’ recommendations will already be available on the app, so you won’t have to query the person directly. This requires that people actually use the app, however. The app can’t reach its full functionality until a majority of your own friends are using it. So how will Wikets get people to use the app? The company believes Facebook and Twitter connect, a prompt to find friends, and a natural desire to meet people will bring in the required amount of users. By “natural desire to meet people,” Park means that because you can see friends-of-friends’ reviews, you will want to get to know those people as well. For example, if you’re with someone who mentions a restaurant your friend reviewed, you can offer to invite that friend along since you know they like the place. It’s a little intangible, however, and hard to measure if downloads will directly correlate to people meeting each other. User acquisition is a big problem for app companies today, which have turned to gamification, or a rewards system such as Wiket’s as a way to lure people. A number of crowdsourced products such as CrowdTwist, BunchBall and Needle are all doing this. But as any gamer knows, getting rewarded is great, but its entertainment value will die if the means by which you get rewarded is boring. Parks did, however, say that he is saving specific strategies for the app’s launch. The growth of a company like this is very much up in the air, especially as funding becomes less and less of an indicator that a company is worthwhile. Matt McCall of Chicago venture firm New World Ventures told VentureBeat, “There are just way too many companies getting funded.” For now, however, Wikets has been pulled out of the ocean to develop its app with capital from investors Battery Ventures and Andreessen-Horowitz. It is using the funding to launch the application, which went into full development after the company closed on the round in May. Prior to the round, Park knew Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz when his former company BladeLogic was a competitor of their Opsware, both optimization focused data centers. BladeLogic went public in 2007 and was sold to BMC Software in 2008. The teams grew mutual respect over the years and are collaborating this time around. Wikets plans to launch the iPhone app in October, as well as announce its strategy and partners further. For now, the seed round will keep the project afloat. [Photo courtesy of Andrew Doran/Shutterstock] Filed under: deals, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Toshiba to launch new 7-inch Android tablet with high-res screen Posted: 27 Sep 2011 05:00 PM PDT
The new Thrive 7-inch tablet will come out in December as a companion to the 10-inch model launched in July. The 7-inch tablet weighs only .88 pounds and it is .47 inches thick. So it’s a thinner and lighter option for people who don’t want to get stuck with a tablet that is about as heavy as a laptop.
He that the fast touchscreen has a resolution of 1280 x 800, good enough to set the tablet apart from the competition. The tablet has Toshiba’s LED (light-emitting diode) backlit AutoBrite multitouch display, with Toshiba’s adaptive display and resolution technology. The tablet will run on Google’s Android 3.2 sofware and it uses Nvidia’s dual-core Tegra 2 mobile processor. The tablet has two high-definition cameras, including a front facing five-megapixel camera with an LED flash. Toshiba will offer the tablet with either 16 gigabytes or 32 gigabytes of flash memory. In contrast to the Apple iPad, the Toshiba Thrive has multiple ports, including Micro USB (universal serial bus), Micro SD, and Micro HDMI slots. It has built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Adobe Flash support. It has high-quality speakers and an optional dock and keyboard. Users will have the option of getting either Intel Core i5 and Core i7 microprocessors.
The all-in-one computer is targeted at consumers who want to use computers in bedrooms, offices, kitchens or dorm rooms. The Toshiba DX735 replaces an earlier 21-inch model with a 23-inch screen. The goal is to bring the touchscreen interface to new computers. It offers high-end audio, good video performance, and other features in a standard Windows computer. It has a 1.3-megapixel web cam and wireless mice and keyboard options. The all-in-one will be available around mid-October. Filed under: games, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Dylan’s Desk: Amazon’s Kindle tablet is ready to take on the iPad Posted: 27 Sep 2011 04:44 PM PDT
—– Like a backroom brawler, Apple’s iPad has taken on one tablet challenger after another, and kicked the ass of every single one. Now comes a new contender: Amazon.com, which we expect will be launching a $250 tablet on Wednesday, September 28. Will the new tablet, rumored to be named the Kindle Fire, have what it takes to knock out the champion? A year and a half after its launch, the iPad still holds about 70 percent of the tablet market — a market which essentially didn’t exist before the device was released. After selling 15 million iPads in 2010, Apple demonstrated conclusively that millions of consumers were interested in a simple, flat touchscreen device, even if it did cost $500 and up. How other tablets have tried, and failedNaturally, many other manufacturers tried to get in on the action. Most competing tablets have been based on Android, Google’s mobile operating system. While Android has a lot to recommend it, including flexibility and openness, no one has yet succeeded in making a commercially successful tablet using it. Motorola’s Xoom looked powerful and promising, but flopped. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is a well-designed piece of hardware, and appears to have sold a few million units, but its sales pale in comparison to the iPad’s. Acer’s Iconia Tab: Have you ever seen one actually using one of these? Archos has been making tablets for longer than Apple has, but its Android tablets are a joke. Then there are the non-Android competitors. They’ve fared even worse. HP pulled the plug on its much-hyped TouchPad after just 6 weeks on the market, and the future of its webOS operating system is in doubt. Research in Motion’s PlayBook has its fans, and holds 5 percent of the market. That’s not much, but it’s pretty good for a tablet that lacks basic features, such as native email and calendar apps, found in nearly every other tablet, and that requires you to own a BlackBerry in order to get its full functionality. As it turns out, it’s harder to clone simplicity than you’d think. Thanks to its attention to detail and smart engineering, Apple probably has a two-to-four-year lead on other companies. Everything from the machined aluminum back of the iPad to its custom A4 processor represents years of behind-the-scenes R&D, an investment in development that other companies can’t quickly reproduce. Four reasons a Kindle tablet could succeedSo what makes Amazon think it can succeed where others have so abjectly failed? First, the company will set its sights lower than other tablet makers. Rather than trying to make a universal, do-anything tablet that imitates everything the iPad does, Amazon is making something closer to a Super Kindle. It will be a device that’s meant primarily for media consumption, from reading books to watching movies and listening to music. If rumors are correct, it will have a 7-inch backlit screen, substantially smaller than the 9- or 10-inch screen favored by most tablet makers. It will run a modified version of Android 2.2, and probably won’t sport the powerful dual-core processors found in other tablets. In this respect, it might be similar to competitor Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color, also an Android-based super-reader, which has seen some modest success in the e-book reader market. Second, Amazon has a well-established media marketplace that most tablet competitors lack. Amazon has been selling music and movies for years, and has deeply-established relationships with content producers that will serve it well in negotiating digital distribution rights for its tablet. It already offers streaming music through its Cloud Player and streaming video through its Instant Video library. Third, Amazon’s already got familiarity with Android, having launched its own Android App Store earlier this year. That gives it a built-in library of vetted apps, ready to run on its new tablet as well as any other compatible Android device. And fourth, and perhaps most importantly, Amazon’s tablet will surely be well-integrated with Amazon’s massive, powerful cloud infrastructure. That could be a big advantage for a device with limited storage, because you could get all your movies, books, documents and music from Amazon’s servers, rather than having to keep them locally. The cloud is one of Amazon’s strengths, too: The company has been operating cloud services for years, including Amazon EC2, S3 and other services that it sells to companies as an outsourced provider of hosted computing resources. Amazon’s cloud is so good that Apple is even using it as part of its own iCloud service. That product expertise means Amazon both owns and understands the infrastructure issues required to provide excellent cloud services to millions of consumer devices. In short, Amazon is not just trying to reinvent the tablet by following Apple’s lead. It’s planning a device that builds, incrementally, on the company’s previous experience and infrastructure in a variety of areas. The pieces to this obviously well-planned, growing ecosystem have been in place for years, and a Kindle tablet is merely another piece in the puzzle. Reality checkWill it succeed in knocking out the iPad? Probably not, any more than the Kindle did. It’ll be a special-purpose device that will do far less than the iPad. But if it really only costs $250, that might be enough for many people, and Amazon could sell a lot of these devices. If not, the worst-case scenario is that the Kindle tablet doesn’t sell, and Amazon gains valuable experience in the consumer device market. That experience in turn will help it with future Kindles as well as improving its media and cloud services, which could help it sell those services to users of many devices, not just Kindle tablets. In other words, Amazon is making a pretty safe bet. Top image: Mockup of a Kindle Tablet, courtesy Gizmodo. Filed under: cloud, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Superhero online game City of Heroes launches as free-to-play today Posted: 27 Sep 2011 04:12 PM PDT
All City of Heroes players can now play until they reach level 50 without paying a cent. The game will now give players the option to purchase new content and items — such as boosters that will help them become more powerful faster — in an a la carte model similar to the virtual goods markets pioneered by social gaming giant Zynga. That model has become so popular that entire companies have emerged from scratch built around it. Zynga, the largest company in the space, has filed for an initial public offering and looks to raise up to $1 billion in its IPO. It’s already profitable, too, which is better than many other recent IPOs like cloud music player Pandora, which had not generated a profit when it filed. City of Heroes is another online subscription-based game that had to go up against supergiant online game World of Warcraft, which now has around 11.4 million users. World of Warcraft came out in 2005 and quickly became the most popular online game. The game cost players around $12 a month, making it hard to justify paying for a second game's monthly subscription. Other online games have had a lot of success converting from a subscription-based model to a free-to-play model. Revenue from Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online doubled and its player base increased by 400 percent in the month after it went free to play last fall. Revenue for the company's first experiment in going free-to-play, Dungeons and Dragons Online, jumped by about 500 percent after the shift. Hellgate: London, another subscription-based game shut down in 2009, recently returned as a free-to-play game in June. That game was made by former members from Blizzard Entertainment, the development studio behind World of Warcraft, but still fell to the online gaming titan before reviving as a free-to-play game. You can check out a trailer for the freemium version of the game below.  Filed under: games        
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| Facebook’s valuation sits at $82.25B based on private sales of stock Posted: 27 Sep 2011 04:09 PM PDT
Shares of the company’s stock on SharesPost, a marketplace for stock of privately held companies, are currently priced around $32. Overall, Facebook’s valuation has fallen slightly from a peak of $87.5 billion, according to SharesPost prices. In 2008, our reporters determined that Facebook was valued internally at around $4 billion. In the fall of 2009, Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies bought shares at a $6.5 billion valuation. Then, at the beginning of 2010, a new report pegged Facebook’s valuation at $12 billion. That number quickly climbed to $34 billion by the end of the year and an astonishing $50 billion at the start of 2011. Finally, a summer investment this year put Facebook’s valuation at $70 billion. Significant f8 announcements that may have had an impact on share price include a complete overhaul of Facebook Profiles, both in terms of design and user experience. The company also announced expanded media features and developer tools. While interface changes always lead to some rumbling among end users, Facebook’s incremental shifts in design and functionality have not yet alienated them to the point of mutiny or abandonment. With nearly one billion users on board, the new look and feel is even less likely to lead to a mass exodus from the network and its platform. In other words, as the network of users grows and the company’s ad products and virtual currency continue to bring in multi-billion dollar annual revenues (currently estimated at $4 billion for 2011), expect Facebook’s valuation to keep on rising. Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
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| What people are saying about Windows 8 on Twitter (Infographic) Posted: 27 Sep 2011 03:16 PM PDT
Social media listening firm MashWork recently created an infographic (below) showing what people are saying about the new operating system on microblogging social network Twitter. The data collection yielded some interesting results. For instance, about half of all tweets favored Windows 8 and it’s metro-style user interface design when compared to both Apple’s iOS operating system and Google’s Android operating system. “The most interesting thing I found was that people were so receptive to Windows 8 on a tablet,” said MashWork founder Jared Feldman, adding that the data does skew toward tech savvy people. “A lot of times when you get very well-educated people, who know all the products on the market, they evaluate new things and immediately start hating and ripping it apart. “What we found for the most part was that people are genuinely excited about Windows on a tablet — so much so that we actually have developer clients who are using this infographic to drum up excitement for Windows 8 before getting their hands on a developer kit to create apps (for the new platform),” he added. For the infographic, MashWork studied 65,968 messages shared between June 15 and September 22 on Twitter about Windows 8. About 42 percent of all the messages analyzed occurred during the Microsoft Build Windows developers conference — meaning most of the opinions are initial reactions to Windows 8 announcements. The firm analyzed discussion about initial reactions to the operating system, Windows 8 hardware options, comparisons with other operating systems and Windows 8′s feature set. According to MashWork’s results, the most discussed Windows 8 feature wasn’t its well-received Metro UI for tablet devices, its integration with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 or the news of the Windows App store. With 34 percent, the most discussed feature was Windows 8 quick boot time. “Of all the new things Windows 8 has to offer, boot time is probably the last thing we expected people to be talking about,” Feldman said. Check out MashWork’s infographic below for the full set of results from the firm’s analysis of Windows 8 discussions on Twitter. Infographic via MashWork Filed under: dev, mobile, social, VentureBeat        
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| Glam Media hires new CFO, honing its edge for a likely IPO Posted: 27 Sep 2011 01:46 PM PDT
Samir Arora, Glam’s chairman and chief executive officer, described Seeley as “one of the top Silicon Valley CFOs,” due in part to her extensive experience at Apple, where Arora also previously worked. “Apple really has one of the best operationalized businesses in the world. There are very few companies that do the types of business globally that Apple does,” Arora told VentureBeat. “What really impressed me on top of that is that she’s been at three public companies,” Arora said. Seeley has held CFO roles at Quantum Corporation, Palm Source, Access Co. Ltd and Occam Networks. Seeley replaces Bruce Jaffe, who joined Glam as CFO in May, 2010. Jaffe remains at the company, with other duties. Glam is a content and media company focused on women but with increasing ambition and a variety of vertical sites: Glam.com for women, Brash.com for men, and Bliss.com for health and wellness. It works with a network of 2,500 publishers to match content with display advertising and with users. It seems likely that the move positions Glam for an IPO in the next quarter or two, although the company would not confirm this fact. Other companies that have hired CFOs recently include Yelp and Zynga, both of which are also on track for an IPO. Glam recently acquired Marc Andreessen-backed social network service Ning, increasing its reach to 240 million unique viewers, according to Glam. That makes it the second-largest social network after Facebook, Arora said, which has 800 million. Arora also added that it has the third-largest number of registered user profiles, at 100 million, after Facebook and LinkedIn. The company also acquired the domain Foodie.com for $100,000 in June, 2001 Glam has 450-500 employees worldwide. It is based in Brisbane, Calif. Investors include Information Capital, Accel, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Walden Ventures, Hubert Burda Media, GLG and Aeris. The company raised $50 million at a reported $750 million valuation in its most recent round, in February, 2010. Photo of Jeanne Seeley courtesy Glam Media. Filed under: deals        
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| Updated Skype iOS apps add Bluetooth support and (unfortunately) ads Posted: 27 Sep 2011 01:08 PM PDT Skype on Tuesday updated its apps for the iPhone and iPad, which now include Bluetooth functionality and image stabilization. Unfortunately the updates also introduce advertising for non-paid users for the first time. Skype is trying to better monetize its service after Microsoft announced plans to acquire the company back in May for $8.5 billion. While Microsoft product integration is still in the planning phase, Skype is slowly changing into a company that wants to make more cash, perhaps at the behest of its soon-to-be owner. First, the good news: The apps claim to offer better image stabilization, and Skype for iPhone adds in Bluetooth headset support for the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and the fourth-gen iPod touch, while Skype for iPad now supports Bluetooth for the iPad 2. That can definitely come in handy for anyone who prefers Bluetooth headsets to the speakerphone or regular earpiece. And now the bad: Take a look at the photo above and you can see a new, somewhat annoying advertising bar that takes up screen space inside of the Skype for iPad application. The ad bar appears for unpaid users while they chat with friends or browse their contacts page. In a test I performed, the app thankfully did not show me ads while I was on a video call. And funny enough, the only ad I saw while testing was for GroupMe, the messaging company Skype acquired in mid-August. While the advertising is a little annoying, I understand Skype’s rationale for adding it. Most users don’t pay for the service, so the company is trying to make a little scratch with ads. As long as they don’t pop up during my video calls, I’ll be content. Outside of the ads, the Skype for iPad app is a top-notch video chatting application. In my hands-on with the Skype iPad application, I noted that it blows Apple’s FaceTime app out of the water with better video quality and more versatility. The iPhone app is also generally high-quality for a video chat if you have a strong Internet connection. What do you think of Skype’s mobile apps? Filed under: mobile        
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| Windows Phone Mango update is out — gets Web Marketplace, tethering Posted: 27 Sep 2011 12:25 PM PDT
It’s the biggest update yet for the mobile platform, and it includes a slew of new features that users have been anticipating for months now. Mango also contains two surprises that Microsoft announced for the first time today: Tethering, to let your share your phone’s mobile Internet access, and a Web Marketplace, which will let you browse apps from a computer and remotely install them on your phone. The Mango update will reach 98 percent of all Windows Phone users within four weeks, Microsoft’s Eric Hautala said in a blog post today. “This is a simultaneous, coordinated, global update that cuts across carriers, phone models, and countries,” he said. “This time, almost everybody is going first.” The company has created a handy “Where’s my phone update?” section on its website that will let users easily check on the status of their update. It is currently being delivered to all U.S. carriers, though it appears there are a few delays with some specific devices: AT&T’s HTC HD7S, the Samsung Focus (version 1.4) and the Dell Venue Pro. Once the update is available on your phone, you’ll need to connect it to your computer and update it with the Zune application (on Windows) or the Windows Phone 7 Connector (on Macs). As for the new features, tethering doesn’t appear to be too different from the same feature on the iPhone or Android. Supported Windows Phone 7 devices (it will only work on newer phones with broadcasting-capable wireless radios) will be able to share its wireless connection with up to five devices. But, as is usually the case with tethering, the feature is only supported on certain carriers and will cost an extra monthly fee. More intriguing is the Web Marketplace, which will let Windows Phone 7 owners search, share, and install apps on their phones from their desktop web browser. The Web Marketplace puts Windows Phone 7 on par with Android, which also lets you remotely install apps from the Android Market website. This is one area where Apple sorely needs to catch up — finding apps manually on the iPhone, or synchronizing via iTunes, is getting old. (As a commenter mentions below, you can enable Automatic Downloads via iTunes to automatically send apps to your phone. Still, that’s not as convenient as a web interface for the App Store.)  Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Tips for moving from the corporate world to a startup Posted: 27 Sep 2011 12:05 PM PDT
Here are a few important points and comparisons to keep in mind when making the transition from the corporate side to steering your own startup: Creating a market versus extending a marketCorporate: In a corporate setting, the ability to get reports for the relevant market, analyst estimates for your market and comparisons to competitors’ products are common practices. Often times you’re extending a product line or creating a new version of an existing product. Branding has already taken place — it's recognized, so anything you do is to keep up with the market and maintain the level of success the corporation expects for their product or service. Startup: Instead of maintaining an already recognizable product or service, startup founders must focus on the actual creation of a new product category, service or market. By taking an entirely new approach to solving a problem, startups are forced to make an innovative point in a market that might already be booming, or one that has yet to be created. Their mindset is about changing the world, not necessarily taking over the world … yet. Trusting your guts and your users is a top priority. Approach product launches differentlyCorporate: Many corporations plan a product or service release around a multi-month timeframe, allowing sufficient time for development, testing and support training. You need to release a stable and ready product as well as train a large customer base and support staff in its usage before it meets the public eye. New releases are expensive in this part of the business, so more precaution takes place prior to launch. Startup: It's a bit more risky here. If startups use the same model, they've just lost months of feedback from their potential users. It's more important to release the minimum viable product — which is probably 40 percent less than your already minimal list — and see how users actually use the product. Since a strong customer base doesn't already exist, you are your own support staff. Releases should be cheap and quick, and they should be made to work for you. Once your product is live, conduct a lot of A/B testing (a test that shows different users different views of the site to see what works better) and improve site conversions — clicks, registrations and purchases. Re-define business rolesCorporate: It's a well-defined role in the corporate business model: you're the engineer, the product manager, the team lead. Responsibilities are clear and someone else deals with the "other" stuff, such as customer support. There are very few "fine lines" when talking job titles and responsibilities. Startup: In a startup, you're it. The one and only. You're in charge and answer to yourself. Product ideas, website code, testing and technical support are on your shoulders. You rent an office, handle the payroll and manage the insurance plan. Did we mention the trash needs to be taken out at least twice a week? You get the idea. Stability or flexibility?Corporate: People are hired for specific roles at corporate offices. Brain power, stability, ability to stick around for two years — those are all criteria considered in the hiring process. Training is standard and usually expected when hiring recent college graduates or those taking on unfamiliar roles and responsibilities. There is a system, if you will. Startup: Flexibility is the key because your website for cat-food connoisseurs could turn into a mail-order sushi-grade tuna service next week. People are hired for their execution skills because there’s no program manager checking up on them every day. Traditional work hours don't apply. Every new release, which can be daily, requires late nights and early mornings until the product is up and running. You hire people with common sense (which is surprisingly uncommon) who can hit the ground running with little direction. The brand isn't what attracted them (because it isn't a brand just yet), so it's important for them believe in what you're trying to do, too. Network from the bottom upCorporate: Existing customers, a trained sales force with nationwide (or even international) contacts, and established sales channels are all readily available in corporate businesses. They also usually have a budget that blows startup budgets out of the water, say a marketing budget that's 10x your seed round. Yikes. Startup: A rolodex of networking contacts, LinkedIn connections and Facebook friends are your step one. A very compelling product needs to be in place to have your users jump the fence to download, install it or create a user account. If they like it, they'll likely spread the work to their friends who can then do the same. It's all about going viral, word of mouth referrals and grassroots marketing. If you succeed, you just might get to that marketing budget one day. While the end goals are all the same — to succeed — the process of getting there is not. After spending 15 years in the corporate world, I found the most important path for success in the startup world was to unlearn what I had focused on in my daily routine for so long. Doing so is exactly what leads to success. Eran Davidov is the co-founder, CTO and Geek in Residence at Lifesta, the first and largest secondary marketplace for daily deals. Prior to Lifesta, Davidov spent 12 years at Sun Microsystems where he did everything from write code to manage a 200-person team as director of engineering for mobile Java. [Images via Vladitto (top) and Alita Bobrov (bottom)/Shutterstock] Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner        
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| Go ahead, open more tabs; Firefox 7 runs even faster Posted: 27 Sep 2011 11:47 AM PDT
The update is especially helpful for the hardcore web junkies among us who browse with scores of open tabs and browsing sessions that span multiple days. Firefox 7 reduces memory usage by 20 to 50 percent, which translates to quicker response times and fewer crashes. These improvements constitute the first publicly available implementation of MemShrink, Mozilla’s project focusing on decreasing Firefox’s memory consumption to make browsing faster and more stable. The hackers at Mozilla are still working on accurate benchmark tests for quantifying Firefox’s memory usage and improvements. Mozilla says Firefox 7′s improvements should be most noticable to users who leave browser windows open for many hours or days on end, who browse with multiple tabs at once, who open image-heavy pages or pages with large amounts of text, who run Firefox on Windows machines or who use the browser simultaneously with other programs that take a large toll on memory. Firefox 6 was released just last month. The six-week cycle is part of Mozilla’s plan to iterate rapidly and bring users a better browser experience as quickly as possible. This release also brings some new features for developers. Firefox now supports the ellipsis mode for the text-overflow property. Also, the HTML5 Canvas element in Firefox 7 is even faster. Finally, the browser now supports the Navigation Timing spec, which lets you monitor parts of a page’s performance within the page itself. Mobile web developers in particular will see some specific improvements in Firefox 7. WebSockets is now enabled by default for Firefox for Mobile, allowing for faster communication between Firefox and web servers. Mozilla said this should be most helpful to developers building low-latency mobile apps and interactive mobile games. In general, the Firefox for Android team has taken steps toward a more seamless PC-to-mobile browsing experience. Interested parties can read more about those steps on the company blog.
Filed under: dev, VentureBeat        
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| Myopic entrepreneurs need to “think big,” Get Satisfaction CEO says (video) Posted: 27 Sep 2011 11:05 AM PDT Get Satisfaction CEO Wendy Lea has a few choice words for entrepreneurs, and the women and men in the business of creating and running startups would be well served to tune in. “If you’re going to get into the entrepreneurship game… I think it’s our responsibility to think big,” Lea said in a recent interview with VentureBeat. She continued to admonish startup folks who are myopic in their aims while huge needs still abound in areas such as hunger and healthcare. And then, we got into the topic of gender. You won’t want to miss Lea’s words on that topic. She thinks women entrepreneurs who focus on topics such as fashion and beauty are limiting themselves, if that’s all they focus on. Lea currently heads up Get Satisfaction, the startup that’s transforming customer service, and she recently stopped by the VentureBeat offices to chat about her experiences in technology and in business. Before she accepted the CEO role at Get Satisfaction, Lea founded The Chatham Group, a business consultancy where she currently serves as an angel investor, advisor and board member for a slew of startups. She is also the board chairperson for women’s entrepreneur group Watermark. Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, video        
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| Clean Power Finance connects investors, solar providers and gets $75M from Google Posted: 27 Sep 2011 10:38 AM PDT
Clean Power Finance connects solar panel providers and installers with investors looking to drop money into residential solar providers. Those investors provide financing to home owners, who are then able to purchase or lease out solar panels at a more reasonable cost. There are some major companies that provide financing options, but Clean Power Finance could be more attractive for smaller installers that don’t have a large market share and can’t price their systems as competitively as companies like SolarCity and SunRun. It’s a web-based interface that streamlines the connection process between installers and investors. The installer builds the photovoltaic panel system, the investor owns that system, and homeowners make monthly payments to the investor until they completely own it. Google made the announcement at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum in San Francisco, Calif., today. This is the company’s second investment in a residential solar provider. The search giant recently created a $280 million fund for residential solar power projects run by SolarCity. The fund gives SolarCity the capital it needs to create more reasonable financing options for homeowners who are interested in installing solar panels on their roofs but don't have the cash to buy panels outright. So far, Google has skirted around tying up with SunRun, another large provider of residential solar panels. SunRun has a market share of around 28 percent, though it fluctuates between 26 and 28 percent depending on the month, SunRun founder Ed Fenster told VentureBeat. That means that 28 of every 100 homes installing solar panels on their roofs are leasing panels from SunRun. “We certainly think residential solar financing is compelling and are interested in good investments — in residential solar, or elsewhere in renewable energy,” Google clean energy spokesperson Parag Chokshi told VentureBeat. A study done by the University of California at Berkeley found that home values increase when solar panels are installed. The study found that homes with solar panels sold for an extra $5.50 per watt of solar power installed, for an average of $17,000 more per house. Google’s $75 million investment today brings its total residential solar investment to $355 million and its total clean energy investments — which includes investments in wind power — to $850 million. Filed under: green        
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| Delicious team unveils new version of the social bookmarking site Posted: 27 Sep 2011 10:27 AM PDT
The changes mark the first major updates to Delicious since the height of the site’s popularity, despite being owned by giant tech company Yahoo from 2005 to May 2011 (when Avos purchased it). “We realized that in order to keep innovating over the long term, the eight-year-old site needed to be rebuilt from the ground up,” the Delicious team wrote in a blog post announcing the new site. “The result is a new homepage, interface and back-end architecture designed to make Delicious easier to use.” One major change to the site is a new feature called Delicious Stacks, which are collections of links that can be shared with others. The company calls it “playlists for the web”. Stacks can have custom images, titles, descriptions and comments for each link. For example, podcasts that reference news from around the web can create a Delicious Stack of links for each episode or for the entire show. Some minor additions that make the site easier to use have also been added in the revamp. For instance, tagging something is much more in tune with other bookmarking features. The old method of tagging treated each word as a separate tag — meaning “Doctor Who” would have to be entered as “DoctorWho”. The new site, by comparison, allows people to use tags with multiple words and supports commas (instead of spaces) as a way to add multiple tags to a particular link. The revamped Delicious also supports profile pictures, which should make the overall experience more personable. And while the term “bookmarks” has been replaced with the term “links”, they essentially function the same way. Also, something that carried over from the old version of Delicious is support for all Delicious APIs and feeds. The company said it plans to add more API support in the future. However, not everyone is happy with the changes Delicious’ new owners have made — namely the changes to the site’s navigation. “I like the design, but where are all my tags? I have my bookmarks arranged alphabetically, but that doesn’t appear in the new design,” a long-time Delicious user commented on the company’s new demo video posted on YouTube. To access the list of old tags, users have to click-through to their profile. The list of organized tags in the right side is now gone, replaced with a search navigation tool. Also gone are the number of links (bookmarks) that show how many times a person has used that tag. “You’d think a site hoping to attract new users and more traffic by changing things up a bit and improving it would — in fact — go and improve their site,” said another YouTube commenter, sterlingman. “I understand we’re back to beta — but fix it, please!” Check out the demo video of the new Delicious site embedded below.  Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
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| Y Combinator-backed 1000memories launches Shoeboxes, says revenue in sight Posted: 27 Sep 2011 10:22 AM PDT
1000memories, which got its start in life at startup incubator Y Combinator, creates landing pages for individuals. Anyone can jump to a page and write a few words or post a picture or song. The result is a collage of photos, music and thoughts that's supposed to capture the essence of that person. With Shoeboxes, 1000memories is trying to distance itself from being solely an obituary-focused site and hopes to become a more general story-sharing site. “One of the main things we want to communicate with this announcement is that we’re not longer a ‘site for the dead’ — we’re now a place for you to share your old photos and stories of anyone, whether it’s yourself or your great-great-grandma,” 1000memories spokesperson Helena Price told VentureBeat. With the Shoeboxes feature finished, the company might now turn its gaze to creating photo books and finding a way to monetize a site built around strong emotional investments. “We’ve recently been testing out photo books, and they were received really well by our users — we’re going to wait on a full launch for them until we develop software to better automate the process,” Price said. “Otherwise, we’ve been totally focused on building a solid product for now, and our investors have been happy with that.” When I last spoke with 1000memories’ co-founder Rudy Adler, he said the company wasn’t yet planning on monetizing the service. 1000memories isn’t alone, either — GroupMe, another zero-revenue company, was recently picked up by Skype for an undisclosed, but large, amount. There's a long history of companies with zero revenue being acquired and receiving large investments. “Most companies that enter an incubator are in the idea phase — especially those that go through Y Combinator,” Greenstart, a cleantech company incubator, co-founder Mitch Lowe told VentureBeat. “They don’t have real revenues or have them on the horizons.” The new Shoeboxes feature is a faster, more efficient way of uploading photos and other pieces of content. Similar to Facebook, you can now edit tags and other parts of the photos in bulk and organize them around specific topics. Other users can visit any Shoebox and add comments or adjust tags for the photos. Most crowd-sourced sites run into the problem of ruffians and trolls infiltrating the community and trying to disrupt — such as at sites like news aggregator Digg and online message board 4chan. 1000memories seems to have avoided that problem thus far. 1000memories participated in the summer 2010 class of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley-based incubator run by super angel Paul Graham, and has raised $3 million in funding to date. Greylock Partners led the company’s most recent $2.5 million funding round. A number of other angel investors including Keith Rabois, Ron Conway and Chris Sacca also participated in its recent funding round. Filed under: social        
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| So long WiMax: Sprint preparing its LTE 4G network for 2012 Posted: 27 Sep 2011 10:05 AM PDT
The LTE network is expected to arrive during the first or second quarter of 2012, CNet reports, citing people familiar with the carrier’s plans. It will be a part of Sprint’s previously announced Network Vision plan, which will cost the carrier somewhere between $4 billion and $5 billion over the next three to five years to revamp its network with new equipment. The new network would give Sprint a more competitive offering against Verizon and AT&T’s LTE 4G networks. Sprint currently relies on Clearwire’s 4G network, which uses the slower WiMax standard. By relying on Clearwire (which Sprint also has a majority share in), the carrier was able to launch its 4G network long before its competitors. Now, LTE technology is trouncing WiMax in network speeds, leaving Sprint with the task of modernizing its network quickly. As CNet’s Roger Cheng explains:
Cheng says that Sprint will use the same FD-LTE standard as Verizon and Lightsquared, which recently signed an agreement to pay Sprint $9 billion to use its network infrastructure. Lightsquared is still having trouble getting its network off the ground, due to concerns from the FCC that it may interfere with GPS equipment. Sprint will also maintain its relationship with Clearwire, which recently announced plans to build its own LTE network, though with the differing TD-LTE standard. Cheng says that Sprint will use equipment that runs both LTE standards, allowing Clearwire devices to run on its future network. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| SlideShare boosts mobile abilities with new HTML5-powered site Posted: 27 Sep 2011 09:33 AM PDT Presentation sharing startup SlideShare on Tuesday launched a new HTML5-powered site that eliminates the need for Adobe Flash for slideshows and works seamlessly on mobile devices like Apple iPad and iPhone. The popular service follows others like LinkedIn and Pandora that have based their sites completely on HTML5 to improve the mobile experience and work seamlessly on Apple iOS devices, which are growing more popular by the day and famously don’t support Flash in the browser. "SlideShare Mobile is now available on the world's biggest app store: the web," said SlideShare co-founder and CTO Jon Boutelle, in a statement. "By choosing to build our site in HTML5 rather than develop native apps for several different platforms, we've made the SlideShare site and its content available to anyone on any platform." SlideShare allows people to easily share presentations, documents, and videos with virtually anyone. The new HTML5 site uses a patent-pending document conversion technology to render everything you’d normally find in a PowerPoint or Word doc into an HTML5 item. And the company claims the site now works 30 percent faster — something enterprise clients and sales teams will appreciate. Ideally, the new site will support salespeople who have embraced tablets and mobile devices for giving and sharing presentations. Many of the site’s pages render differently on mobile than on the desktop, and mobile users can now view private content or content shared directly from friends. The site’s homepage, which you can see a glance above, has also been optimized for mobile, with quick access to recent presentations. San Francisco, Calif.-based SlideShare has thus far raised $3 million in funding from Venrock, Dave McClure, Mark Cuban and Jonathan Abrams. Filed under: cloud, mobile, social        
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| Kobo Pulse gives ereaders a powerful shot of social Posted: 27 Sep 2011 09:21 AM PDT
Today Kobo, the maker of the third most popular ereader in the world with 4.9 million users, announced Kobo Pulse, a social reading platform that gives each page of every book a “pulse.” The strength of the pulse is dictated by who and how many people are reading, what they are saying and what they are thinking. Kobo Pulse readers can give a book a life. Readers can connect with friends, share their opinions of the story and engage in discussions. The coolest part is the ability to connect with anyone reading the same book. Friends, strangers, even the President, if he happens to have a Kobo. Kobo Pulse, an extension of Kobo’s Reading Life platform, is also integrated with Facebook. Which is interesting, because Kobo was the only ereader present at the recent F8 conference. “We’re the only ones the view social as a core part of the experience,” says Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis in an interview with VentureBeat. “That has been our mission from day one. We believe ereading is about shopping and reading but, most importantly, it’s about sharing and expressing.” Serbinis describes Kobo and its social reading platform as “a natural fit” for Facebook’s new Open Graph (turns Web pages into a social graph) and Timeline (a new way to share who you are with photos on your Facebook profile). Kobo Pulse activity will show up in the new Facebook Ticker, and a person’s reading activity will be reflected in Timeline. Just in case you were wondering, Serbinis says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a black Kobo. Kobo Pulse will be available for free initially in Kobo’s eReading App for iPhone and iPad users, and will be quickly extended to Android, Kobo eReaders and additional platforms. The new Facebook integration features will roll out gradually over the coming months. “Every book has a life of its own and that pulse ebbs and flows based on the time of day and time of year,” says Serbinis. “We are opening the book and enabiling readers to tap into that pulse as they are reading. This is a revolution in books and how we read.” Kobo is backed by majority shareholder Indigo Books & Music Inc, Cheung Kong Holdings and institutional investors. Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
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This post is sponsored by Vator.
The lineup so far includes Brian Sharples, who co-founded HomeAway, and led it through an IPO this year, and Jim Lanzone, who became President of CBS Interactive after selling his company Clicker to the media giant last year. The venture capitalists onstage include: David Blumberg (Blumberg Capital), Noah Doyle (Javelin Venture Partners), Richard Hsu (King & Spalding LLP), Brian Jacobs (Emergence Capital), Cindy Padnos (Illuminate Ventures), Mark Goines (Morgenthaler), Andy Ross (Grant Thornton), Adam Smith (AOL Ventures), Bill Tai (Charles River Ventures), Rob Theis (Scale Venture Partners), Josh Felser (Freestyle Capital), Joe Kraus (Google Ventures), Eghosa Omoigui (EchoVC Partners) and Alex Rosen (IDG Ventures).
Amazon’s 
First, Bezos announced the Kindle Touch, an upgraded E-Ink Kindle with an infrared touch screen. It features “EazyReach” tap zones, which make it easier to switch pages on the touch screen with one hand. There’s also an “X-Ray” feature, which includes definitions and short Wikipedia snippets which are easily accessible while reading a book. Additionally, there will be a 3G version of the Kindle Touch for $149. Both will ship Nov. 21.
Intergi Entertainment
Facebook’s valuation climbed significantly this year, settling at figures in excess of $80 billion just after the company’s developer conference this month, 
With its 
Mozilla 
Avos
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