Webware

OnLive, a cloud-gaming company that had at one time been poised for preeminence in that market, was recently sold for a surprisingly cheap sum.

Venture capitalist Gary Lauder acquired OnLive for just $4.8 million, the company has confirmed in an e-mailed statement to CNET. The Mercury News was first to report on the acquisition, citing a letter it had obtained. The letter, which was reportedly sent to OnLive's creditors, claims that the company owed $18.7 million. The company's creditors will only receive one quarter of that back, according to Mercury News.

Over the summer, reports surfaced, … Read more

What do you do when you have a 1,000-unit-per-month hard-drive habit -- then Thailand floods wipe out your supply?

In the case of online backup specialist Backblaze, whose business could have been crippled when the natural disaster last year raised the price of a $129 3TB drive to $349, you improvise.

The company turned employees, their friends, and their families into an ad hoc supply chain who scoured Best Buy, Costco, NewEgg, B&H Foto, and other retailers across the country for drives. And when they learned that external USB storage devices were actually cheaper than the drives … Read more

The Internet Engineering Task Force has standardized the Opus audio compression technology as RFC 6716.

The move paves the way for much broader use of Opus for anything from playing music to online voice chats. Opus is what's called a codec because it defines how to encode and decode a stream of data for more efficient storage or transmission.

"Opus is the first state-of-the-art, free audio codec to be standardized. We think this will help us achieve wider adoption than prior royalty-free codecs," Jean-Marc Valin, a Mozilla employee and author of Opus, said in a blog post today. … Read more

For more than three years, Skype has worked to improve online audio through involvement in a project now called Opus. But perversely, Skype's new owner, Microsoft, is undermining Opus just as a Web standards effort is poised to carry it into the mainstream.

Opus is an audio "codec" -- technology to encode and decode media streams for efficient transmission over the Internet or storage on computing equipment. Opus backers besides Microsoft's Skype division include Google, Opera, and Mozilla.

Opus has a lot of potential to improve online audio, something that's increasingly important as more communications … Read more

Those of you who use Microsoft's SkyDrive will find a new look, feel, and features the next time you fire up your dedicated page.

The folks in Redmond refreshed the online storage site with a design and functionality that closely mimics the Windows 8 SkyDrive app. What changes will you find? Microsoft's Inside SkyDrive blog provides a good overview of the new features. But here's a quick look as well.

Your SkyDrive page has retired the old details view, at least as the default, in favor of the Windows 8 tile approach. All of your folders and … Read more

CareZone, a startup for organizing and sharing personal information, announced a promotion that grants free access to those with a family member with epilepsy.

Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz, who previously led Sun Microsystems, said a partnership with the Epilepsy Foundation will match what CareZone has done with groups dealing with autism and Parkinson's disease.

(For a look at the executive and his views on Oracle, Apple, Amazon, and Intel, check CNET's accompanying Q&A with Schwartz.)

Schwartz hopes CareZone will catch on as a way to let people privately share information such as instructions for babysitters, emergency … Read more

Instead of leading 30,000 employees at a beleaguered Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz is now leading just a dozen at his new startup, CareZone

But Schwartz remains the same. True to the provocateur culture that helped keep Sun in the headlines despite a relatively small advertising budget, Schwartz clearly relishes holding forth about the trends that will separate the computing industry's winners and losers.

Among some opinions Schwartz shared in a recent interview: that Macs will once again seriously compete with Windows for PC market share, that Oracle lost a chance to innovate rather than just litigate in the … Read more

BackBlaze, an online backup company that for the last five years bootstrapped itself with its own funding, has taken a $5 million investment from U.K.-based TMT Investments to speed its growth.

The funding will be used for advertising, promotional partnerships, and hiring engineers to bring new features such as an iOS app to market, Chief Executive Gleb Budman said.

The 16-employee company, founded in 2007 ago and headquartered in San Mateo, Calif., has been profitable with plans that cost $5 a month, $50 for a year, or $95 for two years. TMT said in its announcement today that … Read more

Many iTunes Cloud users outside the U.S. can now watch their favorite synced movies on any computer or iDevice.

As of yesterday, such countries as the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, along with several in Latin America and the Asia Pacific region, are now on Apple's list for cloud-based movie support. This means that movies purchased from iTunes are automatically synced to the cloud and made available for viewing on any eligible device -- computer, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Apple TV.

Entertainment available through iTunes in the Cloud includes music, videos, movies, TV shows, books, … Read more