News Byte

RelayRides Tops Off the Tank to Fuel Car Sharing Service

RelayRides, a car-sharing service which connects people with available cars nearby, has added an additional $3.6 million to its first round of capital. It has now raised $10 million. Shasta Ventures and Lisa Gansky, author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, are joining Google Ventures and August Capital in the round, which will pay for its expansion in San Francisco and Boston.

PayPal Enables Peer-to-Peer Payments on Android With NFC

According to Laura Chambers, the senior director of PayPal Mobile who appeared at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference in San Francisco today, the company has doubled its mobile payments projections to $3 billion this year, and is investing heavily in new ways to make it easy to pay with the phone.
paypal_laura chambers

Skype Updates Its Pre-IPO Numbers, Plans to Sell Display Ads

Skype has boosted its subscriber base by more than 100 million users since last summer. That’s among the disclosures in an updated filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Skype Postmortem: Overloaded Servers and Desktop Bugs Brought Us Down

Two problems conspired in a strange confluence of events to knock millions of users off Skype last week.

LimeWire Laid Off 30 Percent Of Staff Following Shutdown

Not a surprise: Following a court injunction that turned off its primary file-sharing service, LimeWire laid off a third of its staff last week. A bit of a surprise: The company insists that it can keep its remaining employees working on a new music service.

IPhone Cannot Make or Receive Payments–Please Restore from iTunes

In the past two years, Near Field Communication expert Benjamin Vigier has helped develop mobile-wallet solutions for Starbucks, Paypal, Sprint, a Top 3 U.S. bank and two Top 5 U.S. telecoms, so news that he’s been hired on at Apple as the company’s mobile commerce manager is an interesting indication of the company’s designs on the virtual wallet space.

Comcast Owes You Money

Were you a Comcast subscriber between April 1, 2006, and December 31, 2008? Did the company’s network management techniques during that time screw up your Fedora downloads? Then why haven’t you filed your P2P Congestion Settlement Claim yet?

Big Music Wins One: LimeWire Loses Court Fight

A big victory for Big Music: A federal court has ruled in favor of the music labels in their fight against LimeWire, one of the most prominent file-sharing services on the Web.

Court Rules Against FCC in Comcastic Net Neutrality Decision

In the end, the federal appeals court reviewing the Federal Communications Commission’s sanctions against Comcast was as skeptical of the FCC’s authority to issue them as Comcast itself. This morning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the agency overstepped its bounds when it censured Comcast for interfering with peer-to-peer traffic on its network.

Chatroulette Dude: I Don’t Want to Sell. But I’d Like Google to Pay.

Meet Andrey Ternovskiy, who built the voyeur/chat site everyone loves to talk about. He’s too young for AdWords, but old enough to play hard to get with investors.

Skype: A $1.9 Billion Legal Nightmare

Facebook Breaks Even