Thursday, July 29, 2010X Prize Foundation Puts Up $1.4M Prize For Oil Cleanup InventionThe X PRIZE Foundation has detailed the plans for a new competition to develop technology to clean up crude oil, on the heels of the environmental disaster caused by BP's oil spill in the Gulf. The foundation said Thursday that it is launching a new, $1.4M award--the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge--which will award the prize to the top team which creates technology to efficiently and rapidly clean up oil on the ocean surface. The award is being personally funded by Wendy Schmidt, the pres (More info...)
posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010(Full story)
Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp., Led By Jeffrey Stibel, Gets $100MLos Angeles-based Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp., a new firm headed by Jeffrey M. Stibel, the former CEO of Web.com and former GM at United Online, said Thursday afternoon that it has secured $100M in financing from Great Hill Partners. The firm said it has also acquired the North American Credit-on-Self division of D&B (NYSE: DNB), in a deal worth approximately $100M. The firm said that Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. will provide a service to help businesses to establish, monitor, and b (More info...)
posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010 (More)(Full story)
Quest Software Buys SurgientAliso Viejo-based enterprise software maker Quest Software announced Thursday afternoon that it has acquired Surgient, a developer of private cloud automation software. Financial terms of the buy wer enot disclosed. Surgient is based in Austin, Texas, and is privately held. Quest said that the buy will give its access to a platform to quickly implement private cloud infrastructure. Quest says that Surgient has more than 60 customers with 160 successful deployments. Surgient was venture backed by (More info...)
posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010(Full story)
Four Sites To Add Adventure To Your Summer Travel PlansPlanning out the rest of your summer travel plans? Hoping to get out of the office before the summer is over? Trying to figure out what/where you will go in August? We've dug through our database of high tech companies, web sites, and startups and found four Southern California companies and web sites looking to cater to that adventure traveler in you.
Adventurelink [Profile]
AdventureLink is backed by Allegis Capital, Anthem Ventures, and the Mailroom Fund, and is run by adven (More info...)
posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010(Full story)
Invested.in Powers Business Education Fundraising SiteLos Angeles-based Invested.in, the online fundraising site run by Alon Goren, is powering a new effort to help educators raise money for educational programs from the BizWorld Foundation. According to The BizWorld Foundation and Invested.in, the two are partnering on a fully customized fundraising portal, which will help educators raise money to purchase BizWorld's educational programs for their classroom. BizWorld provides programs for teaching business, entrepreneurship, and finance to element (More info...)
posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010(Full story)
Insights and Opinions: Where are the Social Media IPOs?For today's Insights and Opinions piece, we have an article from Michael Terpin of SocialRadius, who asks: Where are all the social media IPOs?.
Yesterday was the start of the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford, which I've always seen as a midsummer touchpoint for how Silicon Valley's venture economy is doing headed into its annual August snooze (like July in northern Europe and August along the Mediterranean, the last two weeks of August are widely recognized in Silicon Valley as the times ever (More info...)
posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010(Full story)
VYCON Wins Fortune 500 CustomerYorba Linda-based VYCON, a venture-backed developer of flywheel-based energy storage systems, said today that it has shipped 7MW of its systems to an un-named, Northweast Fortune 500 company. According to VYCON, the customer--a supplier of large data storage applications and services--is using its flywheel systems as part of an uninterruptible power system for its data center. The firm said the customer is using its flywheels, instead of lead-acid batteries, as part of its green initiatives. VYC (More info...)
posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010(Full story)
Bluebeam Launches New ProductPasadena-based Bluebeam Software, which develops software which created PDF documents from CAD files, announced today that it has rolled out a new product called Bluebeam Q. The firm said that new software creates PDF from CAD and Office files, and also can apply batch operations such as automatic rotating of PDFs, addition of cover pages, and application of security and text stamps. The firm said it had previously sold the title as Bluebeam Conversion Server. Pricing on the new software was not (More info...)
posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010(Full story)
VMIX Adds Android SupportSan Diego-based VMIX, which develops an online platform for managing and publishing Internet video, said today that it has extended its Mobile Video SDK to support Android. The firm said the upgrade allows users to pull and display video thumbnails, titles, and descriptions, and stream video, to Android based devices. The firm released its mobile video SDK at the beginning of the month, but only with Apple iPad and iPhone support. The firm's new SDK is targeted at helping developers implement vi (More info...)
posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010(Full story)