Betable, where users can literally place a bet on anything and have their friends bet with them, has secured a million first time funding led by Atomico, the venture fund set up by former Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Former Skype chief strategy officer Geoffrey Prentice joins the board. It’s an unusual move [...]

As one of the founders of the original Napster and CloudMark (an anti-spam service), Jordan Ritter, has always been fascinated by the idea of combining the power of the cloud and the potential of human capital. Last April, he met up with Alex Edelstein, a former CloudMark executive, to hammer out their next business plan. [...]

You’ve heard the term “betting the company,” but have you ever known anyone who has actually done that? I mean literally. As in, they’re playing poker with shares of the company on the line. Because that’s exactly what Yammer founder David Sacks and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis are doing at The World Series of Poker [...]

Adobe’s much-beleaguered Flash is about to take another hit and online documents are finally going to join the Web on a more equal footing. Today, most documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint slides) can mostly be viewed only as boxed off curiosities in a Flash player, not as full Web pages. Tomorrow, online document sharing site [...]

Tonight is the 82nd annual Academy Awards. Some people watch the show for the movies. Some watch it for the glamor. And some, watch it to gamble. And Google is making that easier than ever. While the show is almost always way too long, one way to get into it is to have an Oscar [...]