Consumer content

Google Earth is extending its satellite perspective to paint a picture of what the ancient city of Rome looked like nearly two millennia ago.

While satellites weren't around to give us a bird's eye view of the city in 320 A.D., Google's "Ancient Rome 3-D" offers a 3D simulation of the ancient city at the height of its power. The new layer for the tool allows virtual time-traveling tourists to fly around the city and zoom in to explore ancient structures as they likely looked at the time, including the Colosseum, the Forum, and … Read more

This post was updated at 10:55 a.m. PST with clarification from a source close to Allen & Co.

According to a TechCrunch report, mobile friend-finding service Loopt has looped in boutique investment banking firm Allen &Co. to land it a buyer or locate financing. However, sources close to Allen & Co. maintain that the $250 million number floated in the TechCrunch report is very high.

Loopt, which reportedly raised $13.3 million in venture funding from Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates, is facing an environment where money is hard to come by.

Mergers and acquisitions took a blow in the third quarter, … Read more

If YouTube and Hulu are to become Web movie houses, will they be the online equivalents of those gleaming multiplexes where all the latest releases appear? Or will they be the revival houses that screen only outdated flicks?

Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) caused a stir on Monday by announcing it will become the first Hollywood studio to post full-length feature films to YouTube. But while long-form movies are unprecedented for YouTube, MGM has plans to offer only a handful of older titles, such as Bulletproof Monk and The Magnificent Seven.

Some of the studios are easing their way into YouTube … Read more

When consulting online traffic maps to form your plan of attack for hitting the streets, how often do you suspect that the red, yellow, and green colors indicating the various speeds of traffic flow are inaccurate, show outdated data, or that they'll change by the time you get there?

The concept of online traffic maps makes a lot of sense, but until they're foolproof, users will always be skeptical. A new collaborative project between UC Berkeley and Nokia is trying to provide mapped traffic data with more accuracy than ever before. How? By tapping into the ubiquity of … Read more

I fear I'm going to be wasting a lot more time in the blogosphere now.

Google Reader is now automatically translating RSS feeds. It's easy to use too. You just subscribe to a feed in any language and when it appears in your Google Reader you click on the "Feed Settings" tab on the top of the feed and then click "translate into my language." Presto! The feed becomes English.

The translation seemed pretty good on the Spanish-language blog I experimented with. You could tell it was machine translation but it was very readable. … Read more

Vacation home rental site HomeAway announced Tuesday it received a substantial $250 million fourth round of funding.

HomeAway, which has raised $405 million to date in private equity, received its latest round from lead investor Technology Crossover Ventures, along with existing investors Institutional Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

HomeAway's $250 million third round represents the largest U.S. venture stake for an Internet company over the past eight years, according to Venture Source.

Companies that tend to raise sizable venture rounds in excess of $100 million tend to be in capital intensive industries, such as networking company Santera Systems … Read more

AT&T isn't the brand that comes to mind when you think of online video search, but let's get past that point: the telecommunications company has announced a beta version of a site called VideoCrawler, which can search more than 1,600 online video outlets. AT&T hasn't released a full list of compatible video sites, but Google's YouTube is one of them.

VideoCrawler was developed in conjunction with start-up Divvio, a search company that constructed the VideoCrawler platform.

VideoCrawler doesn't host any videos, but members can still compile playlists and share them … Read more

Metro-Goldwyn Mayer Studios, better known as MGM, will be the first major movie studio to post full-length feature films on YouTube, the company announced Sunday.

CNET News reported on Thursday that YouTube was preparing to launch a feature-film service after spending months smoothing over fractured relationships in Hollywood.

MGM will likely not be the last studio to post full-length feature films on YouTube, according to an industry source. Last summer, Lionsgate announced a partnership with YouTube, but that deal calls for the studio to offer only short clips from films and TV shows. MGM will also post TV shows on … Read more

It's pretty difficult to find free money these days. With the economy ailing and venture capital money as scare as a Republican sighting in Silicon Valley, it's pretty remarkable that the Clean Tech Open is offering $100,000 prize packages to six clean-tech start-ups.

To be clear, the founders and CEOs of these companies had to work a bit for their money. Forty-three finalists were selected across six categories and put through a mini-business school course load on how to run a company, how to raise money, and how to get a product out of the laboratory and … Read more