Technology, Startup | featured news

Happy Cloud, a start-up which is trying to speed up game downloads and make them almost instantly playable like streaming gaming services using progressive download technology, has partnered with content delivery network Akamai to boost its performance and make games playable within a couple minutes.

Spotify, the European transplant that made a big debut splash in the United States last month, has reportedly hit 1.4 million U.S. customers in just under a month. Citing a “source familiar with the company’s operations, All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka reported the numbers, along with the tidbit that the site reportedly has 175,000 paying customers since its July 14 debut.

Investors pile into Internet IPOs and start-ups, making overnight millionaires. House prices and salaries soar. Another dot-com bubble? Maybe, but with differences. As she unloaded groceries in the driveway of her Palo Alto home, Lisen Stromberg was approached by a real estate broker who asked whether she'd be willing to sell her five-bedroom house to a senior Facebook executive.

Rules for building a company in 2011 are different than they were in 2008 or 1998. Startup exits in the next three years will include IPO’s as well as acquisitions. And unlike the last bubble, this bubble’s first wave of IPO’s will be companies showing “real” revenue, profits and customers in massive numbers...

Consumer Internet entrepreneurs are like pro basketball players,” a venture capitalist told me recently while discussing the prospects for a thirty-something founder, “They peak at 25, by 30 they’re usually done.

The Flip video camera had been one of the great hardware-start-up successes of the previous decade, but it lost traction as the smartphone came on the scene.

Google's mergers and acquisitions chief said he plans to be aggressive this year, despite challenges that include soaring valuations for some Web start-ups.

The Chicago-based startup has reportedly declined to sell to the Silicon Valley giant.

On Thursday afternoon, social deals site LivingSocial confirmed rumors of an investment from Amazon, announcing a $175 million in funding from the Seattle-based giant.