VentureBeat

We’re broadcasting the Crunchies awards ceremony live from Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. The show is honoring top entrepreneurs for their accomplishments over the last year. Nearly 170,000 people cast votes to pick nominees in categories like “Best Technology Achievement,” “Best Bootstrapped Startup,” and “Best Design. Some 350,000 people have voted for the final winners over the last two weeks.

Together with TechCrunch, GigaOm and Silicon Alley Insider, we’ll be announcing the 16 winning startups from among the nominees. Check out the embedded video and chat widgets below. The show will begin at 7:30 p.m. Pacific Time.

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On New Year’s Eve, large swaths of popular event site Evite went down, leaving folks wandering the streets, unable to access their party information. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, including many users on micro-blogging site Twitter. Meanwhile, chief executive Matt Douglas of upstart competitor MyPunchbowl tells me his site saw record traffic.

Now, let’s be clear: Evite’s failure probably didn’t cause MyPunchbowl’s spike; New Year’s Eve is the biggest party night of the year, and the site’s traffic has growing steadily. Heck, for all I know Evite saw record traffic too, consisting primarily of people frantically trying to reload event listings that wouldn’t come up. But it’s still a nice contrast, and lends a little credence to Douglas’s claim that MyPunchbowl could eventually steal the event website crown.

There’s a crowded field of startups with similar hopes, such as Socializr, Anyvite, Pingg, and more. (Socializr investor Auren Hoffman wrote a column for us about why he hates Evite.) None of them comes close to Evite’s traffic, but if Compete’s data is to be believed, MyPunchbowl leads the pack. The site stands out because it tries to be a full event-planning website, not just a way to send and track invitations. For example, before you invite people, you can poll them for the best date, then create a gift registry. After the event, you can allow people to share photos.

I’ll admit, I still prefer using Facebook Events, but Douglas says MyPunchbowl is particularly popular among people organizing special occasions, such as a birthday or a graduation. (I suggested weddings as another example, and Douglas politely pointed implied that I was nuts. That’s one event that will probably stick with paper invites.) As for momentum, Douglas didn’t give me too many specific numbers, but he said traffic has been growing by 20 or 25 percent for the past 18 months. And when you combine the event side with MyPunchbowl’s eCard service, the site had its most visitors ever on New Year’s Eve.

MyPunchbowl raised a $2.1 million second round in October 2008.

What does news aggregator Fark have that Digg, Twitter and all the other fancy Web 2.0 sites lack? Aside from actual profits (which is no small feat) — Fark has appeared as a category on Jeopardy twice. In November 2007, contestants had a little trouble with the headline-based questions, but tonight, when the second installment aired, one contestant (perhaps a Fark reader herself?) managed to get 4 out of 5 questions correct. How about you?

The questions — all chosen by the Jeopardy producers — were quite funny, Fark owner Drew Curtis told me the question taking a crack at the Pope was “a little stronger than I would have expected Jeopardy to go, considering their middle-America audience. But good on ‘em, I would have picked it.”

I wrote a headline back in May that got quite a bit of play around the Internet: Twitter: Don’t blame Ruby, blame Scoble. The post was based on Twitter developer (now the service’s API lead) Alex Payne suggesting that Twitter’s scaling problems were due to “popular users” (like blogger Robert Scoble) sending messages to their thousands of followers quickly. While Twitter later clarified that statement a bit more, Scoble and other top Twitter users were angry at blame being pointed at them for Twitter’s failings. But Twitter is beyond pointing fingers at its users now, as it writes on its blog today.

In the past week, Twitter had some of its most significant site issues in months, but that wasn’t due to either the Macworld Expo or Consumer Electronics Show events, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes. You see, while Twitter isn’t quite the size of Facebook, which is now larger than several countries like Japan and Russia (in terms of visitors), it’s big enough that even these big U.S.-based tech events are just blips on their traffic radar.

Instead, Twitter’s issues this week were due to the system’s interaction with the memcached memory system, which was screwing up user timelines, Stone claims. The team is currently working to correct the issue. While no one likes downtime, especially with services they’re addicted to, it’s definitely a step in the right direction that Twitter updates us on issues and takes the blame for screw-ups. It didn’t always do that.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeatniks Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison, Tam Vo, Camille Ricketts and Dan Kaplan. We have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

Microsoft was set to release the first public beta version of its Windows 7 operating system at noon today, but a rush of traffic has forced it to delay the roll-out, a post on the Windows Blog states. While some potential testers are understandably upset, I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for Microsoft.

On one hand, it’s another example of Microsoft’s failure to meet public expectations, but on the other, it seems to show that demand for Windows 7 is huge (at least if we believe Microsoft, and there seems to be no reason we shouldn’t). Mozilla had a similar issue when it launched Firefox 3 last year, and the initial launch problems didn’t have any lasting effect, as the browser is now at its highest level of usage ever.

While the site that points to the beta download wasn’t working at all earlier in the day, as CNET’s Ina Fried noted, it’s now back up but still doesn’t have the download links. But if you really, absolutely need to get Windows 7 Beta, follow the direct download links below (compliments of Wired):

Windows 7 x86 (32bit)

Windows 7 x64 (64 bit)

Microsoft still expects the actual site to be pointing to the downloads later today after it adds more infrastructure support.

[photo via Eideard]

By now just about everyone is aware of domain squatters — users who buy a web site domain name thinking or knowing that someone else will want it in the future, hoping to get money for it. But with the rise in popularity of services like Twitter, the problem is spreading to usernames as well. How bad is it? Consider this: 93 of the top 100 global brands aren’t in control of their brand names on Twitter, blogger Erik J. Heels points out.

While certainly not all of them will want and/or use their Twitter names, companies like Dell have proven that the service can be useful for promotional purposes. Further, one of the monetization models that Twitter is said to be considering is corporate Twitter accounts for brands, that they would pay for. If a brand doesn’t control its name on Twitter, though, that model could be problematic.

That’s why Heels is calling for the creation of a “Uniform Username Dispute Resolution Policy.” He notes that while a policy exists to thwart domain squatters with the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, none exists for usernames on web services, which are increasingly becoming associated with brands.

I have to agree, I’ve had this problem for a while with the username I use for almost every service, parislemon. Every day in my feed reader, my ego-search feed (a Google alert for “parislemon”) shows me that some squatter is using the parislemon name on some sketchy site called DealsPlus (so sketchy that I won’t even link to it). Each day I get alerts that “parislemon” submits some shopping spam to this site. I would hope that people realize this isn’t me, but really, how would you know?

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeatniks Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison, Tam Vo, Camille Ricketts and Dan Kaplan. We have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel, is urging people to take small steps to help alleviate problems of poverty and illiteracy in the developing world. In his keynote speech today at the Technology For Emerging Countries summit at the CES conference in Las Vegas, he highlighted a handful of new technologies that make it simple to help other people.

His message is a recognition of the problems that nonprofits are running into during the downturn: Money for big charitable projects is drying up.

He pointed to Internet-charged nonprofits such as Kiva, the Silicon Valley company that makes it easy for people to make $25 micro loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Through simple web-based interface, Kiva lets you make a loan to an entrepreneur and updates you on how well that entrepreneur is doing paying back the loan. Micro loans have been around since the 1970s, when Muhammad Yunus first conceived of the idea of making loans to the poor in Bangladesh. But the Internet now enables Kiva to raise $1 million every seven days or so.

Barrett also showed off how doctors can use mobile Internet devices in rural villages in India to broadcast videos of patients to medical experts in cities. The devices can get Internet connections via cell phone signals and transmit pictures or videos with sufficient quality to diagnose problems from afar.

And Barrett also showed off a third version of Intel’s Classmate PC, which has a swivel that converts the laptop into a writing tablet. It also has a touch-screen interface that is more intuitive to learn. Intel is trying to get governments around the world to buy the machines and provide them to schoolchildren. It competes in the endeavour with Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child organization, which recently cut half of its staff.

Another technology Barrett highlighted was a game that educates young Africans about HIV and the risks of unprotected sexual behavior. The game is set in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, and the gamer can play one of five different young characters who have to make choices about their behavior and deal with the consequences. The 3-D game for the PC was created by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, the game publishing arm of Warner Bros.

Barrett enlisted the help of celebrities such as Adam Levine of the band Maroon 5 and Adam Duritz of Counting Crows to urge people to help through a new web site, dubbed www.smallthingschallenge.com. Barrett and his various guests noted that places such as Bangladesh see 80 percent of students drop out of school between fifth grade and 10th grade. While the rest of the world is happy to adopt high-end technology, it’s simpler, low-end technology that provides the basic tools for education to help such students.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently reported a 78 percent spike in the number of land-use applications received from solar projects interested in setting up shop in the millions of desert acres west of the Rocky Mountains. Last year, it saw 125, this year 223 — which, all told, would take up about 2.3 million of those acres, according to Greentech Media. This is a drop in the bucket relative to the 258 million acres BLM oversees, but not all of those are sufficiently sun soaked.

Most of the projects in question aim to build solar power plants capable of generating 10 megawatts and up. Many of them are listed on a downloadable Excel file here. California garnered the most interest, with 107 applications — the Mojave Desert is apparently a prime piece of real estate in the solar world. Nevada got 71 and Arizona 35. Others applied for space in New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. As Greentech notes, some of the plots are so ideal for solar operations that multiple parties applied for the same tracts.

However, a lot more stands between these projects and plant construction than just BLM’s stamp of approval. Extensive permitting and environmental reviews are required for any initiative to even break ground. To give you an idea of how stringent these standards are, only two of the 223 candidates have actually made it to the environmental review stage: proposed solar-thermal plants out of Oakland, Calif. company BrightSource Energy and Phoenix, Ariz.-based Stirling Energy Systems, producing 400 and 1,750 megawatts, respectively.

BLM officials told Greentech Media that the organization needs to hire more staff members to sift through the avalanche of applications but that any growth will depend on the priorities of the incoming Obama administration. To facilitate development in the meantime, California’s state government has looked into easing its permit procedure and streamlining the process used to determine projects’ environmental and economic footprints.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has recently emphasized the elimination of red tape for cleantech startups. In November, he signed Executive Order S-14-08 aimed at streamlining the approval process for renewable developers, couching it as both an environmental and economic necessity.

Right now, existing solar plants in the Mojave generate about 354-megawatts and power 380,000 homes. Download a map of proposed California desert solar facilities here.

Expedia, a publicly traded travel planning site, may be going private, we’re hearing from within the financial bowels of New York. This is just a rumor but we’re publishing it anyway because the move could make sense, and our readers deserve to know the idea is out there.

Expedia’s site is from another era, by which I mean the 90s. It’s boring and it hasn’t changed much in recent years. A range of smaller travel sites have sprung up, meanwhile, that offer sophisticated new features for helping people save money on travel. Farecast, for example, predicts future airline ticket prices for trips you’re interested in making (and Microsoft bought it for $115 million). Expedia has also seen its share price plummet over the last year, presumably because people have less money to spend on traveling. Given the ongoing recession, it’s hard to see when travel spending is going to go back up.

What’s more, Dara Khosrowshahi, the longtime chief executive of the company, is a known deal-maker. It would be well within his nature to make a move like this.

By going private, Expedia would be freed from trying to meet investors’ quarterly revenue expectations. It could then focus on revamping its product to compete with the new competition. Then, when the market improves, it could go public again.

AboutUs, a website with user-written and -edited profiles of other websites, has raised another $2.5 million in venture funding, according to TechFlash.

On its profile page, the Portland-based company describes itself as “your guide to websites,” with profiles of more than 10 million sites already in the database. When I first heard of AboutUs, I wondered if it was addressing a real need — isn’t it easier to just visit a website itself, rather than reading about it elsewhere? It sounds like there are plenty of people who find value in the service, though, since the site reports 7 million unique monthly users and says it was profitable last year. AboutUs makes money through advertising; businesses can also pay the company to write and design profile pages.

As for the content itself, it’s a mixed bag, as you’d expect from any wiki. For example, the only content on the VentureBeat.com page is a one-sentence description, while Editor Matt Marshall’s old site, SiliconBeat, has a more detailed profile.

To a certain extent, AboutUs competes with user-edited databases like CrunchBase and TradeVibes, although it focuses on websites instead of companies. Chief executive Ray King told TechFlash that he wants AboutUs to eventually become a collborative workspace for people to exchange ideas. That seems like a bit of a stretch from what’s available now and would force AboutUs to compete with many other collaborative software companies.

The new funding comes from Voyager Capital. AboutUs has raised $5 million in all; its most notable employee is probably Ward Cunningham, who created the first wiki.

Update: Here’s AboutUs’s blog post about the funding.

Reports are lighting up the web that Google has a new favicon, those little icons associated with a website that show up in the web browser. I just reloaded my iGoogle homepage, and sure enough, there it is. Gone is the boring silver and blue “g,” now we get a more colorful “g.”

It was only this past June that Google last changed its favicon after not doing so for eight and half years previous to that. At the time, Google’s senior vice president of search product and user experience, Marissa Mayer, wrote a post on the Google Blog explaining the change and the difficult selection process:

We tried in total more than 300 permutations. It was much harder than we thought at first. We wanted something distinctive and noticeable, so we aimed toward transparency or semi-transparency, so the image would have a more distinctive noticeable shape than just a block. We wanted something that embraced the colorfulness of the logo, yet wouldn’t date itself.

She went on to note that, “By no means is the one you’re seeing our favicon final; it was a first step to a more unified set of icons.” It looks like they finally got the “colorfulness” they were looking for.

The new favicon appears to be slowly moving throughout all of Google sites right now, including Gmail.

No word yet on whether this means Google’s iPhone application will be getting a new icon as well. It’s currently a boring blue and white lowercase “g” logo, but consider it on death watch.

Update: Mayer has weighed in once again on the new favicon. As she notes, it was inspired by a student in Brazil:

André Resende, a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil, submitted the design that inspired our new favicon. His placement of a white ‘g’ on a color-blocked background was highly recognizable and attractive, while seeming to capture the essence of Google.

updated
David Siminoff, now former general partner at Venrock, has left the venture firm after a little over a year and a half. The move, confirmed by the firm, is significant considering Siminoff’s stature in the Silicon Valley venture community. It’s unclear what prompted the change — whether he left of his own accord or was somehow caught up in the wave of downsizing hitting funds of Venrock’s caliber. Further details have yet to be disclosed.

[Update: We've since been told by a Venrock spokeswoman that Siminoff wanted to left to focus more on his love for digital media. He'll be working with his wife, Ellen, on her new company, Shmoop, an online homework and writing helper for high-school and college students, among other things. He'll consult for Venrock in a partner role through June, and will not leave the company boards he joined while making investments at the firm.]

It’s highly likely he decided to quit — he certainly has the wealth and prestige necessary to operate independently from an established firm. One of the heroes of the late-90s tech bubble, he made investments in Yahoo, America Online and eBay that yielded several billon dollars before retiring stylishly early. He made his comeback in April 2007, joining Venrock’s $600 million fund, but had already financed a few enteprises of his own, including mobile search service 4INFO. During his time at the firm, he worked with video messaging provider Tapioca Mobile, presentation-sharing site SlideShare and anime streaming site Crunchyroll.

There’s an outside chance his area of expertise — media companies — contributed to his departure. As former chief executive of dating-site umbrella Spark Networks, he was clearly closely-tied to the area. But the challenges facing this sector, flagging advertising models chief among them, are formidable and highly visible. And many firms are turning their attention, preferring instead to place safer bets on cleantech companies that continue to perform well despite the downturn. Even when Siminoff first joined, a good chunk of the fund was devoted to alternative enery development. Other marquee names like Kleiner Perkins have grown their green activity, and Steve Jurvetson of DFJ just spoke to us about shifting his focus to cleantech.

Then again, Venrock just drafted David Pakman in October to work on digital media investments in New York, so the firm doesn’t seem to be shying away from media startups [Update: The firm's spokeswoman said the firm is also actively recruting for new partners]. More on Siminoff’s plans is sure to be released in the next day.

MySpace has joined forces with the Wall Street Journal for “MySpace Journal,” a competition to send one lucky MySpace user to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The winner will be a “special correspondent” on behalf of the entire MySpace community and get to join the Davos press corps. If this sounds familiar, it’s because YouTube has a Davos contest too.

The World Economic Forum is an annual meeting of political and business leaders, intellectuals and journalists to discuss pressing global issues like the environment and poverty — this year is aptly themed “Shaping the Post-Crisis World.”

Starting today, aspiring reporters can upload a video of themselves explaining why they deserve to attend the forum, responding to one of three pre-selected questions. For example, “If you were given the opportunity to take one person (living or historical) to Davos in order to make an impact on the conference, who would it be and why?” Entrants must keep their answers to 90 seconds or less, so I wonder if those crazy speed-talking college debate kids will have an advantage.

The winner will be selected by a panel of expert judges, including Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and MySpace co-founder and chief executive Chris DeWolfe. The prize includes an all-expense-paid trip to Davos, a press pass and “Congress and Media Centre access.” The MySpace community doesn’t get to vote, but users get to rate their favorites.

What’s unclear is exactly what this MySpace correspondent will get to do besides write about the experience on a special MySpace blog linked to the Wall Street Journal’s web site (the blog won’t be part of the WSJ’s coverage of the forum). They will also attend a lunch with Wall Street Journal editors, and “upload conference photos and interact with other reporters on-site,” according to MySpace’s press release. Fortunately, Davos is also the largest ski resort in Switzerland. Schuss!

While my idea of the average MySpace user (a 16-year-old who overuses acronyms — LOL — and loves sparkly things, iPhone applications and Beyonce) doesn’t totally mesh with the idea of the average Wall Street Journal reader (a 52-year old male who enjoys traveling, the opera and golf), the partnership between MySpace and the Wall Street Journal makes sense. They’re both owned by News Corp, Rupert Murdoch’s mega media empire. Interestingly, anti-globalization activists frequently stage protests in Davos against what rocker/philanthropist Bono has called the meeting of “fat cats in the snow.”

This isn’t MySpace’s first time at the citizen journalism rodeo. The social network previously partnered with the New York Times for a contest to send two individuals to Africa as traveling companions to columnist Nicholas Kristof. The winners posted reports and videos to a blog on NYTimes.com, with excerpts available on MySpace and mtvU. MySpace also hooked up with NBC to send correspondents to the Democratic and Republican conventions last fall. So, snickers and “OMG, economics!” comments aside, it’s clear that the winner of the Davos contest will not be stumped by the questions on the application. Although one of the official entry questions on the contest site and press release is confusing me, if only for its lack of proofreading (perhaps the contest winner can also add copyediting to his or her duties):

SolFocus, the most heavily-funded concentrating solar startup around, has just drawn a bit further ahead of the pack with $47.5 million in fresh capital. With the money, the company has edged near $150 million in total funding, and with luck, widespread installation of a currently rare type of solar panel.

In the concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) arrays of SolFocus and similar companies, a tiny, highly-efficient solar cell becomes the focus of sunlight intensified many times over by lenses and mirrors. The technology’s creators claim it’s a better, cheaper way to harvest solar energy than a regular solar panel. But in the eyes of the energy industry, it’s still a young, unproven technology.

SolFocus has stood out by being one of the earliest founded, and most heavily supported, of the CPV outfits. The company was founded in 2005, and spent its early years at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where some of today’s most uniquitous technologies were first conceived.

Also of note is a deal the company struck in November of last year, a $103 million purchase of its panels by Spanish company EPME Solar. The agreement was the largest of its type so far and should help prove whether CPV is a worthwhile technology.

Although $47.5 million is a rather large amount, SolFocus is looking to cap off the round at $60 to $70 million, which may happen later this quarter. The investment was led by Apex Venture Partners, with help from New Enterprise Associates and NGEN Partners. The Mountain View, Calif. company also promoted president Mark Crowley to the role of chief executive.

Social networking applications generally aren’t known for making tens of millions of dollars. But Zynga, a company that makes casual games for sites like Facebook and MySpace as well as Apple’s iPhone, is making somewhere between $30 million and $50 million, according to reports. It’s one of the larger companies to take advantage of virtual goods — a revenue stream that’s looked increasingly promising over the last half year.

We’re hearing these numbers may be on the high side, though not entirely off.

“Social gaming site Zynga is another [promising app company],” investor Tim Chang tells paidContent. “They’re making something like $30 million to $40 million per year mostly from people buying Texas Hold ‘Em chips on Facebook.” Chang and his firm, Norwest Venture Partners, don’t invest in Zynga, so he presumably talked to someone who knew more.

Meanwhile, Silicon Alley Insider has a source saying the company has raised $50 million.

We’re hearing that these reports are “pretty accurate,” yet the company is telling employees that the numbers are too high. It’s probably worried that such estimates will inspire competitors. But clearly there’s some good money coming in. Zynga has 150 full-time employees and it’s profitable. Its applications have a total of 5.5 million daily active users and 30 million monthly active users.

In a somewhat atypical move, news and information aggregator LexisNexis provided a $2.09 million tranche of a targeted $3.09 million second round of funding to spanking new startup Rocket Lawyer, a site that gives regular people the tools they need to generate legal documents for any occasion.

What’s strange is that LexisNexis rarely invests in other ventures — usually opting to acquire smaller companies it’s interested in like CourtLink, Univentio, Axxia, and, in the last couple years, Image Capture Engineering and Juris. It’s unclear why it broke from habit for Rocket Lawyer, a company whose apparent mission is to reduce the time it takes to complete legal paperwork to ten minutes or less. Clearly, it’s part of the company’s long-time goal to remain a dominant resource for legal information (and competitive with rival Westlaw, notes peHUB), but more detailed plans haven’t been disclosed.

In addition to providing legal document formats ranging from employment contracts and living wills to apartment leases and bills of sale, the site gives users a checklist for filling them out and ensuring that they are legally binding. It also connects lawyers with users looking for legal advice. Lawyers can create profiles for themselves for free on the site to advertise their services. At the same time, regular folks can find lawyers offering online legal consultations — sometimes for free.

Many of the documents on the site can be downloaded at no cost, others carry a small fee or come with a paid membership. Rocket Lawyer’s Easy Legal Care Personal plan is $19.95 a month or $119.95 a year, it’s Professional plan is $39.95 a month or $295.95 a year. This is pretty steep considering that the site itself says the Personal membership can save a family up to $200 a year. And how many families need unlimited access to legal forms? Rocket Lawyer has also developed a software package with Bluecase Software that provides the same documents for $39.99.

Rocket Lawyer claims that it has 1.2 million users. Previous investors are unknown.

Taking a jab at rival Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices is introducing a series of new mobile graphics chips today designed for everything from low-cost laptops to high-end gaming notebooks.

The new ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 series is aimed at raising the bar for graphics performance in mobile computers. The company is unveiling the chips at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where AMD chief executive Dirk Meyer is giving one of the keynote speeches.

The products are low-power versions of the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series launched six months ago and could give Nvidia some serious competition. The desktop chips were so good — hitting at the sweet spot of the graphics market — that AMD took a lot of market share away from Nvidia. Nvidia, in turn, has scored some good business with Apple. But AMD hopes to pull the same feat in the mobile market now. The question is whether people really want to pay more for good graphics on their laptops.

The company has segmented the market to target four types of consumers: gamers, consumers who want high performance but thin laptops, mainstream users, and those who want cheaper and lightweight laptops with good battery life.

The graphics are good enough to run the most popular video games and play high-quality videos. The chips will be available at the end of the first quarter in new laptops. AMD will announce its customers at a later date.