Silicon Valley start-up MetaRAM is announcing its second-generation chip set today with backing from Intel. MetaRAM's technology can quadruple the memory capacity in a server, cutting the server costs as much as 90 percent. The Intel endorsement is a big win for a little San Jose company that has proven [...]

A new startup called HourTown is entering the crowded market for scheduling websites, and it just raised $1 million to improve its product and promotion. We've been a bit skeptical about whether companies can get much traction in this area, even if they offer a smart, simple interface like newcomer [...]

Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel, travels to 30 countries a year. At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this morning, he took his audience of thousands on a tour of how tech is changing the places he visits. While Barrett didn't make much news with his talk, he [...]

DeviceVM, a company that allows you to use your computer while it's booting up, has raised another $15 million in funding. The San Jose, Calif. company's software is called Splashtop, and it comes preinstalled on PCs and motherboards. When those PCs are turned on, or when users hit a special [...]

Jive Software, one of the more successful startups offering collaborative software to large corporations, says it has a big goal for the latest version of its product - to bring its Clearspace software "everywhere." That doesn't just mean wooing more customers, but allowing existing customers to use Clearspace in many [...]

In most cases, when a 17 year old girl wants to attempt to galvanize her generation against global warming, the end product tends to be basically nothing. Things change a bit when that girl's father is Kleiner Perkins' chief rainmaker, John Doerr. The VC, who led early investments in Google, [...]

If you've heard of the movie Star Wreck, then you're already familiar with Star Wreck Studio's operating procedure: Take a community of thousands of online movie-making buffs, and have them collaborate on a feature-length film. Star Wreck, a $20,000 film, is said to be the most popular internet-created feature film [...]

Out of all the tech sectors in the Bay Area, relatively more web companies that raised funding last quarter also saw their valuations rise, according to data analyzed by technology-focused law firm Fenwick & West. Cleantech companies that received backing came in second in terms of obtaining higher valuations, while [...]

Paul Sams is the chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. The Irvine, Calif.-based company is a division of Activision Blizzard, the newly created gaming powerhouse created from the $18 billion merger of Activision and Vivendi Games. Sams is one of the top executives responsible for making sure that Blizzard keeps [...]

Palo Alto Networks is announcing today it has raised $27 million in a third round of funding for its firewall appliance business. Lehman Brothers Venture Partners led the round while other investors included Globespan Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, and Sequoia Capital. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company will use the money to [...]

Venture capital firm EDF Ventures last week subpoenaed the Web site TheFunded, demanding information about a person who left negative comments about EDF. This evening, VentureBeat has exclusively obtained documents requested by the subpeona. TheFunded's owner, Adeo Ressi, will likely hand over these documents to the court (which actually issued [...]

Mike Capps, president of hit video game developer Epic Games announced today that Electronic Arts will publish a new action game from Epic's new subsidiary, People Can Fly. People Can Fly is the game developer based in Poland which created the hit "Painkiller" shooting game. I sat down with Capps [...]

Today, SeedFund, an Indian VC firm backed with Google's cash, announced a $1 million investment in Lifeblob, a Bangalore-based lifecasting company whose awkward name just about says it all. Lifeblob is a kind of digital diary that maps the media you share and thoughts you write onto a timeline. You [...]

Less than one month until DEMOfall08 and while the names of the 72 presenting companies will be kept secret until opening day, Chris Shipley, DEMO's product analyst and executive producer, just released the 12 product theme areas that will be discussed. In her blog post, here, she describes the problems [...]

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When I was a kid in rural Virginia, losing electricity was a yearly event around Christmas. Situated on the outskirts of a large utility's territory, my family was among the last to have its power restored when, inevitably, a big winter storm knocked trees onto lines around the county. So [...]

Two Seattle-based VC firms, Maveron and Voyager Capital, have recently brought on new partners to extend their reach to the south. Maveron, which hit a homerun with an early investment in eBay, but has yet to match that success, has expanded its San Francisco office by making Amy Errett (pictured [...]

TheFunded, a site that lets entrepreneurs rate VCs, continues to stir things up. EDF Ventures, a mid-sized venture capital fund in Ann Arbor, Michigan which has been reviewed negatively by several people at the site, has subpoenaed some records from TheFunded in a court action the firm is taking against [...]

You've probably noticed that the comments on this site aren't your typical WordPress-run blog default comments. Instead, they're run by a third party startup called Disqus. We use this because not only does it offer nice avatars and threaded comments, but also because Disqus is expanding conversations beyond a simple [...]

“War Games” was the seminal geek hacker movie that inspired many a young cyber sleuth when it debuted in 1983. The movie told the story of how a kid found a back door into a military computer and accidentally set off a nuclear confrontation and launched the careers of actors [...]

DAG Ventures, the venture capital firm that became the butt of jokes a few years ago for its strategy of investing in companies that had previously gotten funding from top-tier venture firms, is reportedly raising an $800 million fund to make new investments. The news, broken by PEHub, is surprising [...]

ScanCafe, a Burlingame, Calif. company that professionally restores old photos and other images, is announcing a new landmark in its two-year existence. It has scanned 19 million images. The way the service works is that you send your images in, the company uses software and manual techniques to restore the [...]

Want to fill up your Volkswagen or Hummer on renewables, as Arnold Schwarzenegger does? Biodiesel, a vegetable-oil based variant on petroleum diesel, is your fuel. As we pointed out last week, the fuel doesn't get as much attention as high-tech biofuels like cellulosic ethanol and "green" gasoline. However, substances called [...]

Marketo, a company that helps automate the process of turning web users into customers, has gained more than 60 customers since it launched in March, including Thomson Reuters, Trimble, and Acteva. While the company isn't disclosing revenue, it has raised a second round of $8 million from Storm Ventures, with [...]

Plenty of companies are making the shift from video games to virtual worlds. Knowledge Adventure is the latest as it announced today it has raised $5 million in a second round of funding to shift its focus from educational software to 3-D virtual worlds for kids. Azure Capital Partners and [...]