Clearwire takes on $920M more to build out wireless networks
Clearwire is raising a lot more cash as it attempts to build a national high-speed, 4G wireless network using WiMax technology. Today, it announced $920 million in debt financing.
The company already raised a little less than $2 billion from strategic investors and the sale of bonds, so its funding now totals $2.8 billion. Clearwire says it has the option to raise another $295 million from public shareholders.
The company was born last year from a partnership… Continue Reading
Driving app Waze turns the highway into a Pac-Man game with ‘Road Goodies’
Mobile driving application Waze is adding a little extra inventive for users to help build out its crowdsourced maps. It already offers users points for “munching” up the road — i.e., driving around with Waze and validating the app’s directions. The latest version adds “road goodies,” special spots on the map that you get extra points for driving over.
Those goodies (hammers, cherries, and presents) are placed on Waze maps wherever the company has identified problems…. Continue Reading
EVO Media Group raises $1.5M to help you build a moneymaking website
EVO Media Group, which runs the DevHub.com service, says it’s making headway in the website-building market by adding a crucial ingredient — money. And the Seattle startup just raised $1.5 million in new funding itself.
Like Weebly, Yola, and others, DevHub makes it easy to build a web site by just dragging and dropping the elements into place. But the people who use those services tend to be individuals who want personal web sites, or small… Continue Reading
Google Calendar testing an easy event scheduler
Updated
A number of companies offer better ways to schedule meetings than the standard back-and-forth over email — Huddle, TimeBridge, and Presdo are a few that come to mind. Now Google is experimenting with a feature that tackles the same problem, though a bit less ambitiously.
Here’s how it works: When you create an event in Google Calendar, you can add a list of the guests that you’d like to invite. Then, if you have access to… Continue Reading
Milo.com gets big-name investors to help you find local deals
A company called Milo.com wants to stand out from the hordes of e-commerce sites by providing users with information about what’s on the shelves of local stores. Investors just backed this mission with a $4 million first round.
That’s a respectable amount, but more impressive than the sum is who’s providing it. True Ventures led the round, while a number of high-profile angel investors also participated, including Jeff Clavier of SoftTechVC, Ron Conway of SV Angel,… Continue Reading
Plato’s Forms raises $545K to correct bad journalism
Plato’s Forms, a San Francisco startup that describes itself as “a professional messaging platform focused on the problem of the rapid proliferation of misinformation in media,” just announced raising a $545,000 seed round. The company was founded by Darryl Siry, senior vice president of marketing and sales at Tesla Motors, and Ben Metcalfe. The investment comes from Siry, Zelkova Ventures, and individual angel investors.
Plato’s Forms plans to launch its first product in Spring 2010.
BookRenter raises $6M to challenge Chegg in textbook rentals
Textbook rental site Chegg.com may be raising tremendous amounts of funding, but competitor BookRenter isn’t sitting still — it just announced a $6 million first round.
That number is dwarfed by the $84.2 million Chegg has raised (not counting debt), but BookRenter chief executive Mehdi Maghsoodnia says his Campbell, Calif., company is building a much more capital efficient business. Both services allow students to check out books at the beginning of the semester, then return them… Continue Reading
Vidly adds video comments to your blog … and Chamillionaire’s
Video startup Vidly is holding true to its promise to expand beyond Twitter with a new tool called Vidly Express, an easy way to add video comments to any blog.
The San Francisco company says publishers just add some code to their site, and the code creates a button for video replies next to every post. Vidly Express also integrates with commenting system Disqus (used by VentureBeat, among many others).
You can see the feature live on… Continue Reading
Google prepares to launch Chrome extensions
Google says it’s getting close to adding extensions (which users install to add features to their web browsers) to its Chrome browser.
Specifically, Google announced today that developers can not only build extensions, but also upload them into Google’s gallery showcasing Chrome extensions. That way, “developers have time to publish their extensions ahead of [Google's] full launch.” The post doesn’t include any specifics on when that full launch will come, but it sounds pretty close.
Google also… Continue Reading
LinkedIn expands platform in attempt to one-up Facebook Connect
LinkedIn aims to be an even more central part of your professional identity, by expanding its platform today with the site developer.linkedin.com.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based professional networking site already offers a platform for third-party developers, allowing them to build widgets and apps that run in LinkedIn itself. What it’s announcing today is another piece of that platform, one that’s arguably more exciting — the site is allowing developers to access your LinkedIn data from their… Continue Reading
Week in review: Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie on apps, Al Gore at GreenBeat
Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie: Apps don’t make your phone special — “It’s not the applications available on the various platforms that will be the differentiators, Ozzie said, even though that’s what many companies and writers seem to focus on.”
Microsoft’s Xbox Live chief on banning modders and browsing Facebook photos on TV — “It’s a cat… Continue Reading
Now anyone can try Brizzly’s app for Facebook and Twitter
Brizzly, an application for managing messages in Twitter and Facebook, expanded its beta test today — now you don’t need an invite code, so anyone can use it.
The application was created by San Francisco-based Thing Labs, and includes features like expanding links and photos, the ability to “mute” people who you want to stop seeing updates from temporarily, and recently-added support for Twitter Lists.
In addition to opening the beta, Brizzly also added a new feature… Continue Reading
GreenBeat: Al Gore says Smart Grid part of ‘the single largest solution’ to climate change
Nobel Prize winner and former vice president Al Gore gave a wide-ranging, passionate talk at VentureBeat’s GreenBeat 2009 conference yesterday in San Mateo about combating global warming. We already liveblogged Gore’s talk, but for folks who don’t want to read the blow-by-blow description, here’s a summary.
Perhaps the most significant point: That energy efficiency is “the single largest solution to the climate crisis,” and the Smart Grid will “play a crucial role” in achieving that efficiency.
The… Continue Reading
LaDiDa brings reverse karaoke to your iPhone
There are tons of karaoke applications for the iPhone, but a startup called Khu.sh is introducing a twist on the concept, “reverse karaoke,” to the App Store.
There have been other reverse karaoke products, most notably Microsoft Songsmith, a Windows application that lets you record your singing, then automatically generates musical accompaniment. Songsmith even prompted a series of YouTube videos highlighting the hilarious badness of many of the resulting songs.
Khu.sh’s iPhone app, LaDiDa, lets you do… Continue Reading
Microsoft misses the boat on web applications
Editor’s note: Chuck Dietrich is the chief executive of online presentation company SlideRocket, and previously served as general manager and vice president of mobile at Salesforce.com. He contributed this column to VentureBeat.
There is a lot of chatter over the impending arrival of Microsoft’s Office 2010. Delayed as it may be, it has prompted an enormous amount of discussion over the potential value of Office-type applications moving online. Some say it is a game changer and bound… Continue Reading
FunMail livens up your iPhone messages
FunMobility, the developer of a bunch of social mobile applications, is releasing a new iPhone app that chief executive Adam Lavine says will finally convince people to use their phones’ multimedia messaging (MMS) capabilities.
It is called FunMail, and it automatically offers up suggestions of images you should send along with your text messages.
Lavine points to a study FunMobility commissioned from Frost & Sullivan showing that only one out of every 70 mobile messages is sent… Continue Reading
Adobe’s Acrobat.com comes to smartphones
Updated
Adobe just announced a bunch of upgrades to Acrobat.com, its suite of web collaboration applications. The most important: It’s releasing an application for the iPhone and BlackBerry.
Mobile support has been a big missing piece for Acrobat.com, since a big selling point of applications like Adobe’s (as well as Google Docs and the upcoming web versions of Microsoft Office) is the ability to access your documents anywhere. Now Acrobat.com users can not only read and share… Continue Reading
Fluidigm raises another $7.5M for stem-cell analysis chips
Fluidigm, which makes chips that for genetics lab, has raised $7.5 million in new equity, according to VentureWire. That’s part of a new $18.5 million round that the South San Francisco, Calif. company is raising. The funding comes from existing backers Alloy Ventures, EDB Investments, EuclidSR partners, Fidelity Contrafund, Interwest Partners, Lehman Brothers Venture Capital Group, Smallcap World Fund, and Versant Ventures, as well as an undisclosed new investor.
Fluidigm tried to have an IPO a… Continue Reading
Business intelligence company Manthan Systems raises second round
Manthan Systems, which provides business intelligence and analytics software to retailers, has a raised a second funding round of “up to” $15 million. The round was led by Fidelity International, with participation from existing investors IDG Ventures India and DFJ ePlanet Ventures. The company is based in Bangalore, India.
MyFit raises $1M to help parents with college applications
MyFit, a new services that helps parents figure out how to get their children into the college of their choice, has raised $1 million in a first round of funding, led by New Enterprise Associates. The Mountain View, Calif. company says it looks at data about graduates from more than 3,500 higher learning institutions, and uses that information to tell users where they should focus their academic and extracurricular energy to get into a specific… Continue Reading