Webware

Walmart will soon be able to convert your DVD movies to online digital content right from your own PC.

The company's Disc-to-Digital service already handles that type of conversion. But the current process requires you to hop over to your local Walmart store to get your DVD converted.

Starting sometime this month, the expanded service will handle the whole conversion with you driving it from your PC. Using its Vudu video streaming service, Walmart will convert your DVD and Blu-ray movies and TV shows into UltraViolet digital copies. Those copies are then stored in your own online libraries where … Read more

People who want to convert their physical DVDs to an online digital format can now do so via Best Buy, and without leaving home.

Now available as a beta program, Best Buy's CinemaNow service promises to convert your discs into an UltraViolet format that you can store and watch online. UltraViolet is a system that lets you house your movies and TV shows in the cloud and then access them from an Internet-enabled device.

To use Best Buy's CinemaNow service, you have to create an account and then download the CinemaNow Player for your PC or Mac. Choosing … Read more

Cloud Sherpas, a startup that helps customers move to Google Apps and Salesforce.com, raised $40 million in second-round funding and acquired a rival, CloudTrigger.

The 350-employee company plans to use the money to fuel further acquisitions and to expand its existing business, a move that it expects will increase 2013 revenue to $100 million.

First-round investors Columbia Capital and Delta-V Capital invested in the second round as well, and new investors Greenspring Associates and Queensland Investment Corporation joined. Cloud Sherpas didn't disclose the company valuation. It's raised $80 million in total so far.

Acquisition is par for the course at Cloud Sherpas. … Read more

PARIS -- After a year doing its Apple-centric groundwork, start-up Everpix is ready to find a wider audience for its photo sync and organization service.

Today, the company announced version 1.0 of its Windows software, an out-of-the-way utility that slurps photos from people's hard drives and uploads them to company's servers. There, Everpix analyzes each photo mathematically for a variety of characteristics then synchronize the files with iPhones, iPads, and the Everpix Web site.

Everpix, though, isn't really about syncing files like Dropbox or Google Drive. It's also not about online photo communities such as … Read more

PARIS -- Silicon Valley is famed for its role in nurturing startups, but companies there often suffer problems from not looking beyond the insular region to the rest of the world.

So warned Brad Garlinghouse, chief executive of YouSendIt -- one of those companies in Silicon Valley "echo chamber" -- speaking here at the LeWeb conference.

"The hype factor that has impacted Silicon Valley is an unhealthy thing," Garlinghouse said. "Companies focus more on the hype than building a great experience."

Garlinghouse is a high-profile voice in the echo chamber. Perhaps his greatest claim … Read more

PARIS -- Dropbox plans to launch a version of its software that will let Windows 8 customers use the file-sharing service on the Microsoft's new operating system.

"We are going to be launching our client app for Windows 8," said Aditya Agarwal, Dropbox's vice president of engineering, speaking at the LeWeb conference here. The software will of course work in the traditional desktop mode shared with earlier Windows versions, but also with the new touch-centric user interface of Windows 8 spotlighted with Microsoft's new Surface tablet, he said.

The move isn't a major surprise; … Read more

Retailers have engineered Black Friday to whip consumers into a buying frenzy, but it turns out it can be good for startups looking for a good deal, too.

Backblaze, the online backup company that headed off a hard-drive price-hike crisis by enlisting friends and family as deputy procurement officers, found itself scouring the ads for good deals again during the holiday buying season. The result: another round of "drive farming" by people willing to help the company.

This time, though, the drive farming was open to the first 200 people who signed up to participate, and Backblaze paid … Read more

After using the new Samsung Chromebook for the better part of a workday, I have to say I'm impressed -- as long as you consider the constraints of its $249 price tag.

Google announced the Samsung Chromebook today along with new ambitions to spread its browser-based, cloud-focused Chrome OS laptop much more widely. Google envisions it as good for an extra machine that lies around the house or as a laptop for students.

I find it a reasonable device for those categories, especially for people like myself who already have their head in the Google cloud with Google Docs, … Read more

Google introduced a new 11.6-inch $249 Chromebook today that lowers the entry price and raises the expectations for its Chrome OS products.

Chromebooks are cloud-computing laptops use Google's Chrome OS, which is built on Linux under the covers but which actually runs applications in the Chrome browser. When Google released two second-generation Chrome OS products, the $550 Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook and the $330 Series 3 Chromebox in May, it aimed for increased processing horsepower.

If the Chromebook Series 5 550 drew inspiration from a MacBook Pro, the new Chromebook did so from a MacBook Air. It'… Read more