Word on the street had it that Tesla's $50 million deal with Toyota wasn't formal back in late May, but evidently things have made positive progress since. According to a new (though admittedly brief) report over at CNN, Toyota is currently working with the electric automaker on a pair of prototype vehicles. As the story goes, Tesla will be delivering two prototypes to Toyota "by the end of the month," with the vehicles using "Tesla's electric motors and battery packs and the bodies of Toyota vehicles." Tesla Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel has been quoted as saying that the two outfits have "made a lot of progress in a short amount of time," and we couldn't be more excited [...] Continue Reading...
Google has quietly (secretly, one might say) invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming behemoth Zynga, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The company has raised somewhere around half a billion dollars in venture capital in the last year alone, including $150 million from Softbank Capital last month and $180 million late last year from Digital Sky Technologies, Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. The Softbank announcement was never officially confirmed by the company, however, and the Google investment was likely part of that deal as well.
The investment part of the deal closed a month ago or so. A larger strategic partnership is still in process.
The investment was made by Google itself, not Google [...] Continue Reading...
Sony Ericsson's Xperia X10 has been out and about for some time, facing off against the competition and predictably getting ripped to shreds. Now it has reached the next natural step of its evolution: receiving the root treatment by a bloke at xda-developers. User Bin4ry over there has posted step-by-step instructions on how to locate your device ID, re-flash your phone, and then enable superuser abilities. It all looks particularly straightforward, as far as these things go, and so if you're looking for a bit more control this weekend don't hesitate to click on through.Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 has been rooted, all is right with the world originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:31:00 EDT. [...] Continue Reading...
It appears that Foursquare has just crossed the 2 million users mark this morning. The location based social network has been growing fast, adding 100,000 users per week. Only three months ago, Foursquare passed one million users after taking a year to accumulate one million members.
Over the past several months, Foursquare has had a number of impressive stats for a startup. Some of them involved SXSW, some involved overall check-ins numbers. And it seems to be growing faster than its main competitor, Gowalla.
Of course, to expand upon this growth Foursquare has just raised $20 million in funding at a $95 million pre-money valuation, led Andreessen Horowitz with existing investors Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures participating. [...] Continue Reading...