VENTURE CAPITAL POST

Google just got hit with an outage that brought down Gmail, Google Plus, Google Voice, Hangouts, and other services which lasted for around 20 minutes and got resolved by 12:23 PM Pacific Time.

Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of search giant Google, has warned that technological advances could eliminate a wide variety of jobs, the Financial Times reported.

Research from Mercom Capital Group showed that venture capital funding for companies in the smart grid technology sector was pegged at $405 million in 2013, a dip from the $434 million in 2012.

Amazon is thinking of launching an online pay-TV service and has already approached various media companies about obtaining a license to distribute their TV channels, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal citing sources.

Tech giant Google acquired Redwood City, California-based anti-spam company Impermium for an undisclosed amount, according to an announcement made by Impermium's chief executive on the company website.

Yahoo Chief Operating Officer (COO) Henrique De Castro is leaving the company tomorrow, January 16, according to a regulatory filing, but the exact reason for the departure is unclear.

The mergers and acquisitions activity for companies supported by venture capital has continued to decline even with the sizable acquisition of Nest Labs by Google, The WSJ's Digits reports.

Google has acquired Nest Labs, a startup established by former Apple employees, for $3.2 billion. According to a Financial Times report, the move is seen as a bold bet on what is called the "internet of things."

China based mobile app distribution platform Wandoujia raised $120 million in a recent funding round led by SoftBank Corp, for the acceleration of its growth and development of its mobile search technology.

Tech giant Apple Inc did not infringe on a patented technology owned by Google to make the iPhone, according to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Schaft Inc Co-Founder Takashi Kato has launched 246 Capital, a fund that seeks to invest in technologies by Japanese startups and universities not noticed by investors, Bloomberg reported.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer unveiled new advertising platforms as the internet company looks to turn around its fortunes in digital advertising.

Sales of Apple's App Store surpassed the $10 billion mark last year, reinforcing its lead over Google's Play Store in the arena of mobile computing, the Financial Times reported.

Gartner, a research group, predicted that over 1 billion smartphones and tablet computers installed with the Android operating system of Google will reach customers in 2014.

Photo pinning social site Pinterest bought San Francisco-based image recognition startup VisualGraph for an undisclosed amount to automatically detect items pinned on the site and to tailor future ads.