Pepperdine has a new study out that attempts to shed some light on the clubby, shadowy world of private finance. Researchers polled experts in lending, mezzanine capital, private equity, venture capital and private businesses themselves. Not a big shock, but things don’t look pretty, especially in...

By Gaurav Kheterpal Somewhat old news here, but you should know that Apple has removed all restrictions that prohibited making Video VoIP calls on 3G networks using the iPhone. The iPhone SDK has also been modified in order to give developers access to the Video VoIP APIs. This means you can use either...

Yammer , the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month. The company made one internal promotion, appointing...

Last July, we reported that the new company by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield had received a name, and was looking to hire. Tonight, Tiny Speck’s first project has revealed itself to the world: Glitch . So what is it? As we suspected, it’s an online game in the vein of Game Neverending,...

By Chris Scott Barr If you’ve never read The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’d suggest picking it up. No, watching the movie definitely doesn’t count. One of the coolest ideas (of which there were many) in the book was the Babel Fish. It was a fish that was inserted into your...

We haven’t heard much from PlayFirst since we covered the San Francisco-based casual gaming startup’s last funding round back in December 2007, but that doesn’t mean things aren’t moving for the venture-backed company. Earlier this year, the startup inked a major deal with Big...

Editor’s note : This is a guest post penned by Ethan Nicholas, developer of the million-dollar iPhone game iShoot and the newly released Kim Rhode’s Outdoor Shooting . Before the iPad was even announced, Nicholas was already conceiving his next game with the tablet device in mind. The Internet is...

CES is very much about showing off the latest and greatest in technology. However, sometimes it gives us the chance for a hands-on look at things that might already be on the market. One such item is the ASUS Crosslink. I remember this coming out a few months back, but wrote it off as yet another terrible...

Don’t count Songbird out yet. The open source media player that’s increasingly positioning itself as an alternative to Apple’s iTunes has forged a deal with global electronics maker Philips. Under the agreement, which will be announced later today at CES, Songbird’s software...

The idea of working at Google is a dream job for many engineers all around the world. So where better to go to get ready for this career than the Googlle Institute of Software of Software Studies , right? Hold on a second. Read that name again. Yes, it appears that some jokers in India are attempting...

When Daniel Raffel emailed and asked if we’d be interested in publishing his list of favorite stuff from 2009 we quickly agreed. He has worked on some of the more interesting projects in Silicon Valley over the last couple of years, and has his finger on the pulse of new technology. His post is...

Music fans looking looking for an alternative to the iTunes/iPod ecosystem are getting a new option this week with the release of Songbird 1.4 , which introduces support for CD ripping and syncing Mass Storage Class (MSC) Devices. The first feature is fairly self explanatory (and frankly I can’t...