Vook, the Emeryville-based digital publisher has raised a series A venture round of $5.25 million, the company announced today.

Samsung and IBM have announced plans to jointly developed semiconductors for use in mobile handsets.  Earlier this month At CES, we spoke with Yiwan Wong, VP for Business Development for Samsung. He  explains that advancement in chips is essential to many core functionalities of smart phones. Andy Plesser  

The Financial Times is enjoying a big rise in digital revenue, the publisher announced on Friday.   As much as 10 percent of new digital subscriptions are coming from iPad users alone, says Richard Edgar, Global Head of Video for the paper, in this video interview with Beet.TV We spoke with Edgar in the New York bureau of the Financial Times on [...]

LAS VEGAS -- With the broadcast of the new Spartacus series on Starz, the Liberty Media unit is launching a big social media game around the television show, says Mark Debevoise, SVP for Digital. The new game launches next week. DeBevoise tells Beet.TV that Spartacus show has one million "friends" on Facebook. Our West Coast producer Jeff Brooks spoke with him at CES. [...]

LAS VEGAS -  Fandango, the Comcast unit which sells tickets online and via mobile for movie theater showings, is finding that as many as 10 percent of ticket sales are purchase via its mobile APP, says Fandango's Harry Medved in this interview with Beet.TV We caught up with Medved earlier this month at CES where the company released an App for [...]

LAS VEGAS -- The success of 3-D TV in the near-term could be determined by the number of theatrical films released.  Andy Parsons, Chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association tells Beet.TV that the industry will release 70, 3-D Blu-ray discs in 2011. In this interview  at the CES show, he says that Blu-ray is growing so quickly that "it will be [...]

SundaySky, Tel Aviv/New York-based start-up with 50 employees, using no video camera or production staff, will produce 1.4 million video clips this month for a range of big retail and real estate corporate customers including Overstock.com and the History Channel. The company pulls customer data into a customized template which creates videos with movement, music, narration and graphics and video.  This [...]

The Beet.TV Online Video Journalism Summit Exploring the digital transformation of video news reporting and distribution Live from Moderated by Alex Weprin Editor, TVNewser - and - Andy Plesser Executive Producer, Beet.TV   Guest Speaker Chris "The Fix" Cillizza The Washington Post   With Panelists Ann Derry - Editorial Director, Video and Television, The New York Times Steven King - Editor of Video, The Washington Post Mark Larkin - Vice President, CBSNews.com Kevin Roach - [...]

LAS VEGAS --  The iPad App for the New York Times has had 1.5 million downloads since it launched in April, says Ray Pearce, who heads circulation for the newspaper.  We interviewed him at CES last week. This number puts it ahead of weekly circulation for The Times which is about 950,000.  Sunday is 1.3 million. While only some [...]

Los Angeles-based Demand Media has cleared the SEC for an IPO and has set its pricing according to  report by Kara Swisher.  The company is in the business of content "farming" -- creating print, photo and video content for newspapers and magazines.  The content is primarily lifestyle focused. Earlier this year, to get an overview of the company and its strategy, we [...]

One of the biggest uses of social media has been philanthropy and a new report from the social media software company Context Optional shows that brands can raise a tremendous amount of money and visibility for charities via Facebook. Kohl's, for instance, donated $10 million to schools via a Facebook campaign; Chase also gave $10 million to a range of charities [...]

For many in the industry who have wondered about Google's plans to develop a universal codec for the Web, the big news is that Google will support its WebM codec on the Chrome browser, the company announced today. The company says it will not support H.264 - a widely used codec for online video. Google Chrome will also support the Theora codec, [...]

While the imminent introduction of Verizon's 4G smart phones created a good bit of buzz at CES, the highly anticipated Verizon iPhone will likely run on the company's existing 3G network, at least initially, says Maggie Reardon, lead telecom reporter for CNET News.com in this interview with Beet.TV Whether the iPhone will run faster on Verizon than on AT&T, is not [...]

Foodspotting, the San Francisco-based social media site for sharing photos of food dishes, has raised its first venture round of $3 million, according to Liz Gannes at All Things Digital. Last month, we interviewed co-founder Soraya Darabi.  In this second of two segments, she frames Foodspotting a new form of crowd-sourced food journalism. Below is the first video segment we published last [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Yahoo! Connected TV, a software program installed in a number of Internet-ready television sets, will soon allow producers and advertisers to enhance the viewing experience with a variety of interactive features, the company announced at CES. At CES, we spoke with Ronald Jacoby, VP of the Connected TV Group at Yahoo! for this overview on the product and [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Fresh on the heels of the announcement to stream CBS television programming on the Boxee platform, the service will launch Vudu this week and will soon provide Hulu Plus and Netflix, says Avner Ronen, CEO in this interview with Beet.TV We caught up with him at the CES show earlier this week. Andy Plesser Editor's Note:  Many thanks to our [...]

LAS VEGAS, Cisco Systems expects that there will be 12 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2014 and plans to deliver video to many of these devices through Cisco Videoscape, says Murali Nemani, Director of Video Solutions in this interview with Beet.TV We caught up with him at CES on Wednedsday afternoon when Videoscape was announced. Andy Plesser

LAS VEGAS - While much has been said about the aging population for network news, the distribution of news via mobile devices is reaching a younger audience, says Charles Tillinghast, President of the MSNBC Digital Network, in this interview with Beet.TV We caught up with him Wednesday for this overview on online and mobile video news distribution.  While he is enthusiastic about [...]

How quickly the distribution and consumption of video has transformed in the past year with connected TV's and the emergence of mobile video.   So much has changed, says Jayant Kadambi, president and cofounder of the big online video technology platform company YuMe, that the term video "site" has become an anachronism.  Video is now about "contextual pieces of content," he says. In [...]

The newly expanded Dealbook section of The New York Times, is adding several video elements to its offering in an effort to capture the "character-driven drama" of Wall Street, says Mac William Bishop, Video Producer, in this interview with Beet.TV In addition to traditional three-camera shoots and voiced news packages, Bishop is producing a series of Dealbook Portraits -- interviews done [...]