There was some hoopla yesterday about the news that Hulu had broken the 1 billion videos viewed in a month threshold in December. And rightfully so, it’s the first video service to do that other than YouTube. But there’s another hot property that is rising fast in the streaming video realm as well: Netflix. The movie rental giant crossed into the top 20 video sites on the web for the first time in December, according to numbers from ComScore. Specifically, they now sit at number 19, just ahead of Break Media, and just behind Justin.TV. And with over 127 million views last month, and [...]

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Larry Cheng, Managing Partner at Volition Capital recently put together a list of the top VC blogs according to traffic. On that list, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is the top VC blogger, followed by Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures and Paul Graham of Y Combinator. But which VC firm Websites attract the most attention?  Today, Cheng released another list.  This time, he ranked technology VC firms by traffic to their websites during the fourth quarter of 2009 (as measured by Compete). Topping the list is First Round Capital, with 31,632 average monthly uniques. Sequoia Capital, which [...]

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Streaming video site Ustream has just pulled in a massive new round of funding: $75 million. This second round was led by SoftBank, a Japanese telecom giant. Previously, the site had raised just below $13 million in funding, which came from its Series A in 2008 and its angel round in late 2007. Update: While Ustream noted the $75 million number, SoftBank has clarified that they’re investing $20 million now for a 13.7% stake in the company with an option to invest up to $55 million more by 2011 — which would make them Ustream’s largest shareholder with over 30% of the outstanding shares. Perhaps [...]

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Facebook is well on its way to taking Yahoo’s spot as the third largest Web property in the world. (Google and Microsoft are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively). Last summer Facebook took the No. 4 spot globally, displacing AOL, but according to comScore there was still an estimated 241 million unique visitors a month separating it from the No. 3 site, Yahoo. In December, 2009, that gap narrowed to 125 million unique visitors globally. (That was also the same month Facebook passed AOL in the U.S. to take the No. 4 spot domestically). In December, 2009, Facebook attracted 469 million unique [...]

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In the State of the Union Address last Wednesday, President Obama said “the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy and America must be that nation.”  At the same time, on the other coast, 75 clean energy investors, entrepreneurs, and researchers were debating whether the U.S. can gain this leadership position.  They agreed that even though Silicon Valley leads the world in technology, it is not clear if it will ever lead in Cleantech. The Valley may develop some breakthrough technologies, but without government help these are unlikely to [...]

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Intellect Wireless, a tiny company based in Reston, VA has filed suit against Apple over mobile picture/video messaging technology it claims to have successfully patented years ago. The patent infringement suit was filed on 28 January in Illinois Northern District Court. The complaint states that Apple infringed on the company’s patents when it provided wireless portable communication devices (you know, like the iPhone) that “receive and display caller ID information, non-facsimile pictures, video messages and/or Multimedia Messaging Services.” It was easy to retrieve court documents [...]

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For much of the past year, the major criticism of Foursquare was that it only worked in a few select cities in the U.S. and was basically iPhone-only. In the past few months, both Foursquare itself and a growing core of third-party developers have changed that. Today brings yet another expansion in the Foursquare universe with the beta launch of a Windows Mobile app. To be clear, this app is only meant for touch screen Windows phones, and you need to be running either Windows Mobile 6.1 or 6.5. But if you have those, you can submit your email address here to be let into the beta. Once they kick [...]

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I’m going to keep this post short and sweet because no one likes a blogger who says “I told you so.” But, Spotify fans: Paul Carr and I told you so. StrategyEye reports that less than 4% of users of Spotify—the gorgeous online music app with a troubled business model—are paying subscribers. StrategyEye quotes Universal Music International digital VP Rob Wells who says the company needs 10% to 12% of its users to subscribe to be a sustainable business. It’s only at the 10%-12% threshold that Spotify is able to ink revenue share deals with labels, until then, it has to pay for music [...]

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Buried in Nokia’s earnings release from this morning (PDF) is an interesting revelation about the Ovi Store, the centralized application shop for programs fit for Nokia devices that the Finnish giant debuted – not so stylishly – in May 2009. The company now officially acknowledges that the Ovi Store is seeing more than 1 million downloads a day on millions of handsets around the world, after cautiously mentioning that it was approaching that milestone earlier this month at CES. At a recent roundtable event in London to discuss the company’s app strategy with journalists, [...]

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Startup incubators such as Founders Institute and TechStars, are popping up outposts in various metropolises in the U.S. and even in internationally. Today, VC firm DFJ Frontier, an affiliate of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and the City of Ventura, California, are partnering to launch a new incubator in the region, the Ventura Ventures Technology Center. Designed to help encourage technology startups to base or relocate their companies in the Southern California region, the fund will invest anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million in each startup. The venture will not be limited to investing in a particular [...]

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