CNN Startups — GigaOM

CNN Startups

Docstoc founder Jason Nazar wants to make it easier for anyone to start a business, any kind of business anywhere in the U.S. To do so, he’s launched License123.com, which is like a one-stop shop for all the business permits and licenses a new business needs. Read More »

Can making email into a game make you more productive, encourage you to develop better habits and make email more fun? That’s the idea behind Baydin’s The Email Game, which applies gameplay mechanics to the process of working through your inbox. Read More »

 
 

Hug Energy, which had developed an application for computer energy management, is shutting down. CEO Marcus Tallhamn made the announcement in a blog post and an email to users, citing weak investor interest. It’s a sign of how crowded the energy management space has gotten. Read More »

CumuLogic Bringing Sun Cloud Roots to Java PaaS

The growing Java PaaS market will soon need to make room for CumuLogic, an startup led by a team of Sun Microsystems veterans. The Sun connection is notable because Sun was the Java owner and development leader before its acquisition by Oracle early last year. Read More »

Feds Promise $571 Million in Biofuel Loan Guarantees

Biofuel production nationwide has been woefully behind schedule as would-be producers struggle to just get their first commercial plants rolling. The U.S. government wants to help and on Thursday announced loan guarantee commitments totaling $571 million for Coskata, Enerkem, and a JV from Valero. Read More »

Silicon Valley startup Law Pivot is introducing a new recommendation feature for its Quora-like Q&A services that aims to democratize access to quality legal advice. Even before today’s news, though, Law Pivot has defied the odds by gaining traction in a notoriously technology-resistant profession. Read More »

Gevo Lowers IPO Target to $100M

Biofuel startup Gevo has lowered its upcoming IPO to $13 to $15 per share. That’s about $100 million, or $89 million after fees, less than the $150 million it targeted in August, but close to what analysts have predicted. Read More »

Electric vehicle drive train system maker KLD Energy is looking to raise $10 million in debt and securities, and has closed on a little over $2 million of that round. The startup has planned to build its business via electric scooters in Asia. Read More »

Intematix: Using Phosphor to Revolutionize LEDs

Intematix, an eleven-year-old VC-backed LED materials company, has an announced a new product called ChromaLit, which uses a new design for a phosphor light source for LED makers. The company says it will revolutionize the way LEDs are made. Read More »

Anant Agarwal of Tilera (far left) at Structure 2010

Tilera, a chip design firm that’s building a 100-core processor for hugely parallel compute problems, has raised $45 million in funding from investors that include Artis Capital Management, WestSummit Capital Management and Comerica Bank. The company has raised a total of $109 million. Read More »

Cheezburger — the blog network that brought you I Can Has Cheezburger, the Fail blog and many other similar humor-oriented sites — today announced that it has closed a $30-million round of funding from a group of venture capital firms including Foundry Group and SoftBank Capital. … Read More »

Database startup Clustrix revealed the identities of four customers today, strong evidence that there’s something to its webscale SQL database beyond the $30 million investment that Clustrix has raised thus far. The customers announced are AOL, Photobox, Box.net and iOffer. Read More »

More Must Reads

GridPoint — the smart grid startup that’s raised lots of money and has a lot to prove — has now raised yet even more funding: a $23.6 million round according to a filing. That brings 8-year-old GridPoint’s total financing to over $240 million since its founding. Read More »

Wireless hotspot provider Boingo filed paperwork for an initial public offering today as it looks to capitalize on the growth of mobile devices. While the number of shares offered and the price range have not been determined, the company said it hopes to raise $75 million. Read More »

More bad news about cellulosic biofuel maker Range Fuels. The financially-strapped company reportedly plans to shut down its plant in Georgia after making just one batch of ethanol. It needs to more raise more money and tackle technical problems at its first commercial plant. Read More »

A plan to bring a nationwide wholesale LTE network to the U.S. is in trouble. LightSquared has a troubled private equity backer and may be losing ground in Washington as it seeks a way around regulations that are making its planned network a long shot. Read More »

For next-generation biofuels to make any type of dent in the fossil fuel industry, oil companies will have to get on board, and here comes one to the rescue for the struggling cellulosic ethanol sector. Oil giant Valero is backing cellulosic ethanol startup Mascoma. Read More »

VoxOx is a great idea: one program that does phone calls, IM, video chat, Skype messaging, conference calling, even incoming faxing. You can select your own phone number. Unfortunately, with an app that does this much, I suppose it’s inevitable that there will be shortcomings. Read More »

Accel Partners, the firm backing Facebook and Groupon, announced has opened an office in New York, giving the city’s growing tech scene another profile-raising boost. It’s further recognition that New York has grown in importance and could signal more eastward migration from Valley VC firms. Read More »

With Demand Media currently planning a high-profile IPO and content farm material spreading out across the web, you’d think companies would be moving in the same direction. But OrganizedWisdom has found it’s better and more profitable to organize free content rather than pay for low-wage material. Read More »

PHP Fog has raised $1.8 million for its PaaS cloud targeting PHP developers. Just as Heroku attracted large numbers of Ruby developers, a PHP PaaS offering certainly should attract users, even if PHP Fog isn’t the only one at that dance. Read More »

If you’ve ever used a networked road tolling service then you know how convenient it is. Well, what if cars had connections in them at all times that turned them into driving credit cards. That’s the idea behind a Toronto-based startup called Skymeter. Read More »

Bump Technologies has grown from a novel way to share contacts into a full fledged content sharing network that is moving beyond its bump mechanic. Now the company has raised $16 milllion to further pursue its vision of transforming the way people interact through their phones. Read More »

Square, the mobile payment start-up co-built by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, has taken on $27.5 million in new funding to help it compete in the increasingly competitive mobile payments market. The latest funding comes from Sequoia Capital, giving the start-up a reported valuation of $240 million Read More »

Intel Capital and Braemar Energy have invested an undisclosed amount of funding into Viridity Energy, a startup which makes software that dynamically manages power loads on the grid in terms of energy pricing, renewable energy generation and energy storage. Read More »

Klout — one of a number of services that are trying to measure influence in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter — has closed an $8.5-million funding round from Silicon Valley powerhouse Kleiner Perkins, and adding Kleiner partner Bing Gordon to its board of directors. Read More »

First Solar’s own power generation projects have always been mounted on racks that don’t tilt throughout the day to follow the sun, but the company is exploring the use of trackers. First Solar announced Friday it has bought RayTracker for an undisclosed sum. Read More »

Hadoop startup Cloudera has rounded out its support of the Apache Software Foundation by becoming a Silver-level sponsor. Cloudera already contributes code and personnel to the Apache Hadoop project and Cloudera’s Doug Cutting (and Hadoop creator) is the ASF chairman. Read More »

Zipcar had until the end of 2010 to decide if it wanted to buy majority share of Spanish car sharing company Avancar, which it invested $300,000 in for a minority share. The answer? Undecided. Zipcar has extended the option to buy majority share another year. Read More »

SCVNGR, a location-based gaming start-up, has announced it has raised $15 million based on a $100 million valuation. The funding from European venture capital firm Balderton Capital includes support from previous investors Google Ventures and Highland Capital Partners and brings SCVNGR’s total to $20 million. Read More »

Skytap has closed a $10 million Series C round for its business-friendly IaaS cloud. The funding comes after some interesting IaaS developments late in 2010, and might signal that 2011 will be a big year for IaaS cloud providers targeting traditional businesses. Read More »

The inevitable future of clean(er) power is natural gas. Startup Ciris Energy, which uses biotech to convert coal into methane gas, announced this morning that it has brought on high-profile venture investor Khosla Ventures for a Series B round. Read More »

Consumers are expected to send more than 7 trillion short messages next year, up from an estimated 6.1 trillion in 2010. These messages were once the sole domain of network operators, but thanks to mobile software, huge opportunities are opening up for third-party service providers. Read More »

icloud, a “web operating system” with a growing selection of apps that can be included in a customizable virtual workspace, is now offering mobile apps for iOS and Android that include access to files, document viewing, and uploading of photos, along with an updated mobile website. Read More »

Qwiki presents search results in a montage of images, video, animations and other visual resources, and overlays it with real-time narration, using text-to-speech technology. The result is information as a watchable experience. For me, the experience of watching the content is eerie and unsettling. Read More »

Biofuels took a step away from the limelight in 2010, replaced by the buzz surrounding electric vehicles. But there were still a variety of policy decisions, and economic milestones that made the sector interesting in 2010. Here’s the year in review for biofuels. Read More »

This year has turned out to be a boom year for the solar industry. What will 2011 bring? Here are key trends that can emerge next year, in terms of policies, financing, project development, new markets and technology. Read More »

Lithium-ion battery startup ActaCell, which has already raised funds from such high profile groups as Google.org, DFJ Mercury and Applied Ventures (Applied Materials venture arm), is out touting over $3 million in newly acquired financing this morning. Read More »

Car sharing is a particularly high capital business to be in. You might say “Duh,” but as of September 2010, Zipcar had 8,541 cars in its fleet, most of which it leases, but 1,692 of which it owns outright. Read More »

2010 was a year of ups and downs for the smart grid industry. Here are my thoughts on what needs to happen — both across the industry and with some of the individual players — for this sector to hit a home run in 2011. Read More »

It’s that time of year again: time to get rid of your old, busted or just plain out-of-date gadgets, cell phones and computers to make way for your brand spanking new ones. Here some new, old and innovative ways to do it: Read More »

The “other” electric sports car company, Fisker Automotive, has bumped up the price of its inaugural vehicle the Fisker Karma — yet again. According to Green Car Reports, the Fisker Karma will now cost $95,900 for the baseline price. Read More »

When it comes to real-time responses from your social graph, Twitter has a lot going for it that even Facebook can’t duplicate. And it looks like the company plans to do more to support that kind of feature, since it just bought Q&A startup Fluther. Read More »

Banks are willing to invest in putting solar panels on rooftops, but not surprisingly, are only willing to back established project developers. The latest example is Rabobank’s $50 million construction loan to SunEdison. Read More »

ETacts, one of the many social CRM companies, is shutting down, according to an email sent out to its users. ETacts competes with the likes of Rapportive and Gist. The company, which was incubated by YCombinator had raised $650,000 from angel investors earlier this year. Read More »

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