t’s happy days in startup land, especially for those just getting started. Angel investors line up at industry gatherings to take flyers from young companies and their equally young founders. However, in stark contrast to the ebullience of early-stage ecosystem is the dreary reality facing some of the large technology companies. Intel Takes a Dive Many of the large tech companies, forced to confront the bleak reality of economy beyond... 

VSS Monitoring, a network traffic monitoring company, has taken $20 million in growth equity from Battery Ventures. The funding was the first for the company — founded in 2003 — and it will be used for R&D and to accelerate the company’s expansion. What’s noteworthy is that until this point, VSS had built network monitoring software and hardware and sold it for five years without taking venture capital. &#…  Read More →

After warning analysts that its financial results for the latest quarter would be disappointing, AOL couldn’t even manage to hit those lowered expectations , thanks in part to a $1.4 billion writedown on assets — primarily Bebo, the European social network that it unloaded earlier this year. AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive who joined the company last year, said that he was “pleased with this quarter’s... 

It didn’t get as much attention as some of the other things that Facebook rolled out during the F8 conference in April , but one of the changes the social network made was to link user profiles to “community pages” — in effect, a kind of wiki-style page about a topic or an issue, but one created by an algorithm rather than individual contributions. If your profile states that you’re a fan of a specific movie or... 

Heading up the team at that’s responsible for Dell’s server products, Forrest Norrod leads a kind of startup within the PC giant’s organization. Other groups typically consider anything less than five-for-five record of success for any given project a failure. But Norrod said today that the Data Center Solutions team launched in 2006 with a less rigid goal — seven wins out of 10 attempts — in hopes of having the... 

To paraphrase Yoda: Begun, the e-book wars have. Barnes & Noble started the week off by cutting prices on its Nook e-book reader to $199 from $259, while also introducing a new, $149 Wi-Fi model. Not to be left behind, Amazon, which helped jump-start the e-book reader craze, decided to cut the price on its entry-level Kindle model to $189 from $259 . The punch and counterpunch has prompted more than one watcher of the space to declare that... 

According to a number of reports from users of Q&A startup Quora , the site is unavailable to Facebook employees who are on the corporate network (although some have been able to reach the site using non-Facebook IP addresses). At first, some users thought that this was a result of the social network blocking its staff members from using the service while at work, but several of those affected — including a number who identified themselves... 

Computing is finally transitioning from a long-in-the-tooth, client-server paradigm to a network-centric one, and in the process opening up opportunities for companies that want to duke it out with incumbents such as Microsoft and Oracle. Among them is Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware , which has made a fortune selling virtualization products under the leadership of CEO Paul Maritz. Maritz will be participating in a fireside chat with me at our... 

Can VMware buy the keys to the cloud? VMware, the company that took the hypervisor mainstream and still controls the virtualization of some 80 percent of servers worldwide, is indulging in some retail therapy as it seeks to change its image to one of concierge of the cloud through its higher-end software and services. Indeed, nowhere is its evolution and ambition more clear than in its recent acquisitions. Let’s take a look. …  Read More →

It's too early to cheer for TAG. Major Internet service providers along with Microsoft, Intel and Google have created a broadband technical advisory group to offer an engineering perspective on issues associated with broadband networks. Dale Hatfield, an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a former FCC employee, will head up the effort, which has been dubbed the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG... 

Before Raymie Stata was named Yahoo CTO today, he stopped by our office for a broad discussion (we didn’t know at the time about his impending promotion). When he first joined the company in 2004, Stata started off by focusing on search and later incorporated work on advertising before being named chief architect early last year. Stata won the CTO role for his efforts to move Yahoo from “a set of vertical silos to a horizontal platform... 

It hasn’t gotten a lot of notice, but Google isn’t the only one that’s been adding social networking features to its email, the way the search giant did via the much-criticized Google Buzz: fellow web giant Yahoo has been gradually rolling out a similar suite of features called Yahoo Updates, which integrates connections to Twitter and other services into the company’s email. Users will soon be able to post updates to... 

If you’re the type to measure your self-worth by how many people follow you on Twitter — and perhaps more importantly, who — this morning was rather exciting. Gizmodo published directions for a simple way to make other Twitterers follow your account, resulting in some users gleefully playing with the loophole to make it look as if they were tight with the likes of Ashton Kutcher and even Jesus . Twitter’s clunky way of... 

By now we are quite aware of cable companies’ plans to offer 100 Mbps connections to their customers, thanks to DOCSIS 3.0 technologies. Our friend Dave Burstein of DSL Prime reports that cable companies are considering drastically boosting upstream speeds in coming years. Comcast, Cox and Liberty Global have all done trials that have produced shared upstream speeds of about 75 Mbps. U.S. cable companies expect that by 2015, nearly 100... 

The tension between Facebook and its users — and governments, and advocacy groups — over privacy is one of the biggest thorns in the company’s side right now, as it tries to balance the demands of the network (and of advertisers) with the desires of users, and with the law. And all of this is taking place in an environment where the very meaning of what is “private” and what is “public” …  Read More →