After quality misfire, Dropcam begins selling new HD camera

Dropcam founder and CEO Greg Duffy argues passionately that cloud is creating huge opportunities for startups to build hardware, just as his company does.

He's also learning first hand just how hard that can be.

This morning the company began taking general orders for its newest cloud-based home-monitoring camera -- about two months behind schedule. The setback stemmed from a good problem (big customer demand) and a painful one (sloppy manufacturing by the factory in China).

And so Duffy and his team have spent the last few months scrambling to figure out why the image quality wasn't up … Read more

Path starts encrypting user contact data

Path, the hot San Francisco startup that ignited a firestorm of privacy concerns when it was revealed that it was absorbing entire address books from users' phones, today said it's come out with a fix.

In a blog post, Path said that with the release of Path 2.1.1, "we are enhancing our security by hashing user contact data so that it is anonymized."

This, the post goes on, will anonymize "last names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, Twitter handles, and Facebook IDs" -- all information that Path collects to make its social network more … Read more

Pinterest: Now with executive drama!

When a startup is hot, there's often drama -- and now the startup world wants to know what exactly is going on at Pinterest, the virtual pinboard site that has quickly become a phenomenon.

One of the company's three co-founders, Paul Sciarra, is on his way out of the company, according to Startup Grind. There is speculation that Sciarra will join a venture capital firm.

What's it mean for millions of Pinterest fans? Most like, not a thing.

The man who's the public face of Pinterest, Ben Silbermann, will now officially become the CEO, and the … Read more

CNET's live event: A good time to start a business? (video)

We hosted a panel last week at CNET's San Francisco headquarters with three top investors who shared their take on booming tech startup world and, more importantly, what they're looking for among the throngs of people trying to create next big thing.

So is the opportunity big now for budding entrepreneurs?

"Hell, yeah," said the Dave McClure of 500 Startups (beginning around 1:45).

George Zachary, with the VC firm Charles River Partners, said the "tension in the air is definitely higher" as his inbox is filling up faster and faster with eager pitches … Read more

Personal search app Found scans cloud and local data

"There's a lot of cynicism about search," Stephen Brady told me when we first met in August last year. He was working on a new personal search utility, then called BitLev and now called Found, that, he said, would help people find all their stuff, no matter where it was.

People have tried this before, and most have failed. X1, Copernic, and even Google's own Desktop Search app never got mainstream traction. And then Microsoft and Apple built desktop search into their operating systems. They made desktop search work better, but not soon enough. Nowadays, people … Read more

SecondMarket confirms layoffs

SecondMarket confirmed today that it has executed a round of layoffs in response to the impending Facebook IPO. CNET first broke news of layoffs at the online private equity market yesterday.

Although we previously reported that the layoffs would affect over 20 percent of its staff, SecondMarket now tells us that the number is closer to 10 percent.

While we were unable to obtain a comment yesterday, a SecondMarket representative said this in an official statement:

In a post-Facebook market world, we have decided to eliminate some positions that are no longer core to our company's long-term mission. We … Read more

Another sign Facebook IPO's getting close

Facebook's upcoming monster-size IPO has led to plenty of speculation -- about demand for the stock, about what it will mean for Facebook, about how it might drive up the valuations of the zillions of startups hoping to ride the Facebook exuberance wave.

And, more to the point, about just when exactly it will happen.

For all you tea-leaf readers out there, clues abound, and I'm here to offer up some fresh ones. Check out the video clip below from a panel I hosted here at CNET headquarters last night with three big startup investors: Dave McClure of … Read more

VC: There's no Series A crunch, there's a 'seed glut'

SAN FRANCISCO--An article last fall suggesting investment was getting scarce for early stage startups stirred a major commotion in Silicon Valley. But one of the Valley's most prolific investors said tonight that the real issue is there are simply too many companies getting seed funding.

At the inaugural CNET Community Series event here this evening, Naval Ravikant, the founder and CEO of AngelList, rejected the notion that there is a so-called Series A crunch, saying instead that there is a "seed glut."

During the panel on "Startup Funding: Strategies and Opportunities" hosted by CNET's … Read more

SecondMarket expected to lay off 20 percent of staff

Update: SecondMarket confirms layoffs and gives specifics in a statement.

The online private equity market SecondMarket will layoff 30 of its 130 employees, a source familiar with the company's plans told CNET. The company has risen to prominence in recent years as a venue for buying and selling stocks for private companies, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga.

With Facebook set to go public this spring, the layoffs could be indicative of a forthcoming drought in private equity. Just yesterday, reports began to surface that Facebook would this week halt secondary-market trading, a move that will weigh heavily on … Read more