Windows 7 sells 234% more copies than Vista
It looks like all the positive buzz round Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system paid off in sales. Windows 7 sold 234 percent more copies during its first few days on the market than Vista did during the same period of its release, according to… Continue Reading
LinkedIn gets a cleaner layout
Professional networking site LinkedIn says it’s experimenting with a new layout. The redesign has only been rolled out for some users, so I’m not seeing it in my own account yet, but the company’s blog post suggests it’s making subtle improvement.
Right now, the site’s navigation… Continue Reading
Happy Droid Day!
After weeks of speculation, followed by a real announcement, followed by more waiting, Motorola and Verizon have finally released the Droid, the supposed iPhone-killer which is the first device using version 2.0 of Google’s Android operating system.
The reviews have been positive so far, with gadget… Continue Reading
Pixorial uses home movies to liven up your Christmas e-cards
Christmas e-cards are probably among the five most boring things ever, but Pixorial is offering a nice improvement, by embedding your movies within them. After all, if you’re going to get all warm-and-fuzzy, isn’t it better to do so on-camera? And I’m sure you get… Continue Reading
Google offers search tools for the Amazon.coms of the world
Google is taking the next step in offering its search technology to businesses with a new product called Google Commerce Search. It’s basically Google search for web retailers.
In the same way that Google is taking on traditional enterprise search companies with the Google Search Appliance… Continue Reading
PayPal woos developers with $150K challenge
PayPal has been making a big deal about convincing developers to build cool applications using its global payments platform. Today it added a little more incentive, by announcing the PayPal X Developer challenge, where the creators of the most innovative payments apps will receive a… Continue Reading
Enterprise 2.0 advocates launch vague defense that industry is not a crock
A panel at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco today tackled the juicy-sounding topic “Is Enterprise 2.0 a Crock?” The speakers fired back against a piece from August by ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett declaring, “Enterprise 2.0: What a crock.” They delivered some interesting, but disappointingly… Continue Reading
Facebook Era author Clara Shih: Make that the Facebook and iPhone era
Author and entrepreneur Clara Shih gave a keynote speech at today’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco that distilled many of the ideas in her book The Facebook Era. I already interviewed Shih about the book, but it was still compelling to see how her… Continue Reading
Google’s music search gets exclusive songs
Updated
Just in case Lala and MySpace’s partnership with Google isn’t doing enough to boost the music services, the company is announcing that quite a few musicians and record labels are offering exclusive content through Google’s new music search to promote the new feature.
Under the partnership,… Continue Reading
PayPal loves developers so much, it’s giving them free netbooks
PayPal and eBay executives are wrapping up their keynote presentations today at PayPal Innovate 2009, where they’re offering details about how application developers can use the newly-opened PayPal platform. A lot of their rhetoric has emphasized the idea that developers form PayPal’s next big set… Continue Reading
Pixetell’s multimedia emails get more customizable
Pixetell is a service that tries to liven up boring, text-based emails by letting you send links to multimedia presentations (incorporating screen recording, voice, documents, and more) to someone’s inbox. It’s like a richer form of email, or an asynchronous web meeting, where people don’t… Continue Reading
Open source database company 10gen raises $3.4M
10gen, a New York database company with some well-known customers and investors, has raised $3.4 million in a second round of funding.
The New York company developed MongoDB, an open source database for web applications that’s being used by open source repository SourceForge, commenting startup Disqus,… Continue Reading
Smart.fm launches a new site and iPhone app to help you learn anything
An ambitious educational site called Smart.fm has made inroads in Japan, and starting today it’s setting its sights on the United States, with a revamped website and a new iPhone application.
Smart.fm’s strong point has been teaching languages, but theoretically you could use its technology to… Continue Reading
Greylock Partners recruits LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, raises $575M fund
Reid Hoffman, the founder and chairman of popular professional networking site LinkedIn, is joining venture firm Greylock Partners as an investing partner. The firm also announced today that it has raised a $575 million fund, its thirteenth.
Both Hoffman and Greylock partner David Sze said Hoffman’s… Continue Reading
PBWorks speeds up collaboration with real-time tools
Collaboration using PBWorks‘ technology is about to become more fast-paced — the San Mateo, Calif., company plans to add real-time communication and editing to its tools on Nov. 17.
Though it now includes features like document management, the heart of PBWorks platform (as suggested by its… Continue Reading
Xobni launches an enterprise version of its improved email inbox
Xobni, the company that improves Microsoft’s email application Outlook by showing you more data about your contacts, is aiming for bigger and bigger customers — it just announced an enterprise version, which includes new features like integration with Salesforce.com’s sales application and Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration… Continue Reading
Week in review: A pop quiz for startups, Google’s free GPS navigation
Here’s our rundown of the week’s tech and business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
Start-up studies: A pop quiz — “There’s a classroom exercise that’s a part of the Stanford technology venture program hits its students with each… Continue Reading
IBM tries to make government IT more open, especially for startups
It has become a cliche that government technology tends to be stodgy and out-of-date — President Barack Obama’s chief technology officer has even complained about the software in the White House. IBM said today that it wants to make things better, with a new software… Continue Reading
Box.net raises another $7.1M for collaboration tools
Collaboration company Box.net has raised another $7.1 million from its previous investors, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and US Venture Partners. PEHub first spotted the regulatory filing, and chief executive Aaron Levie confirmed the news to me.
The new money is an addition to the Palo Alto, Calif…. Continue Reading
Billing Revolution adds PayPal to its mobile payment service
Billing Revolution is adding more partners to its platform for single-click mobile payments, with just-announced integration with PayPal’s PayFlow product.
As more and more web activity and commerce takes place on mobile phones, Seattle-based Billing Revolution wants provide the technology powering those transactions. It’s far from… Continue Reading