Tech Newz

Internet phone company Bandwidth.com just announced a service that could be a boon to new companies that don’t have an office, much less a phone system — Phonebooth Free.

It’s normal for a startup nowadays to use personal cell phones for all calls. But there are probably many companies that would rather not, either to appear professional or protect their privacy. That’s where Phonebooth Free comes in.

Think of it as either an office phone system for a virtual office, or as ..read more

Posterous, a company that wants to make it super-easy for anyone to publish their own blog, has raised $4.4 million in its first round of institutional funding.

The San Francisco company’s big selling point is its simplicity — just send an email with the title, text, and media that you want to post to post@posterous.com, and Posterous handles everything else. If it’s your first time using the site, Posterous even creates your blog for you. Its closest competitor is Tumblr, but ..read more

Activision Blizzard formed a new division to run its Call of Duty game franchise following the exit of two studio co-founders who pioneered what has become the biggest revenue generator in the video game industry.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based parent company named Philip Earl to lead the Call of Duty unit and announced that Vince Zampella and Jason West, the Infinity Ward studio executives responsible for the smash hit Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, had left the company.

Earl previously ran ..read more

Have you ever thought how cool it would be if your treadmill could take you on a virtual jog through nature so you could watch something more scenic than the gym wall while you run? Well, your day is coming.

Virtual Active, which lets you access a library of running, hiking, and biking workouts filmed live in beautiful outdoor locations, is releasing a free half hour sample of its virtual exercise experience for download on iTunes on March 1.

Virtual Active is ..read more

We’re about a month away from the FCC’s announcement of its National Broadband Plan, and its clear that the agency is in full gear to figure out how exactly it needs to approach the issue of broadband adoption in America. Last week, the FCC released a report that detailed some of their initial goals with the plan, including setting the goal for 100Mbps broadband across the country.

Now the WSJ points to another report centered on broadband adoption trends in the ..read more

Here’s the latest action:

@Shitmydadsays comes to TV, starring Shatner — Twitter user @shitmydadsays, who tweets gems uttered by his curmudgeonly father, has racked up 1,170,507 followers, and now a deal for a TV pilot on CBS reportedly starring none other than William Shatner in the title role.

MacBook Pro gets a graphics upgrade — Apple’s next generation of MacBook Pros will contain new and improved dual graphics chips, according to Apple Insider.

What do 100 billion ..read more

likeZEBRA is a new music site that only carries artists not signed by one of the major labels. Unlike MySpace Music, Coldplay isn’t around to steal Sound of Sulfur’s potential fans’ attention spans. It’s hardly an original idea — think dmusic, WeAreListening, or LaunchYourMusic.com — but my take is that sooner or later, one of these sites will figure out how to make it work.

Company spokesman Braven Greenelsh sent me an email last week in which he said, “Any struggling ..read more

Citrify launched a free, browser-based photo editor earlier this week, that lets you pretty up your headshot by removing blemishes, erasing wrinkles and whitening teeth. It also lets you add effects to pictures — for example, you can Obamify your picture based on Shepard Fairey’s widespread red and blue image. The company launched a desktop version in November 2009, but it didn’t catch on, so the team spent the last few months improving the service for better browser performance.

Citrify runs ..read more

Redpoint Ventures, a Menlo Park, Calif. venture firm whose investments cover everything from cloud application deployment (Heroku) to document-sharing (Scribd) to solar (Solyndra), has raised a $400 million fourth fund for early-stage investments.

Despite the broader economic climate, Redpoint partner Geoff Yang said he’s still excited about the startup landscape, in part because there are so many industries worth investing in. Ten years ago, everyone was investing in “the commercialization of Web 1.0,” he said. In contrast, with the new fund, ..read more

Silicon Valley celebrates its successes, but the failure rate is generally much, much higher. But what makes the Valley different than other entrepreneur-rich areas is how it deals with those failures. Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins, in this entrepreneur though leader lecture given at Stanford University, says that only a company that can deal with failure and still make money has any chance of succeeding. The talk’s an old one – from 2004 – but the themes still resonate today.

..read more