Before we introduce them, remember to register for your GreenBeat ticket today. With an all-star lineup including former vice president Al Gore, Cisco’s Smart Grid guru Laura Ipsen and PG&E’s Andy Tang, tickets are going fast. You can sign up and find out more about the conference — located at the San Mateo Marriott — here, or follow us at @greenbeat2009 for breaking news on the event.

We’d also like to acknowledge our strategic partners: Vantage Communications, DEMO, Matter Network, and Fora.TV; and our sponsors: Accenture, Southern California Edison, Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, Oracle Utilities, Schwartz Communications, Cisco Systems, CPower, CSC and KPMG.

Now, joining our prestigious roster of speakers, we have:

Rob Conant — Senior vice president of network products at Trilliant. Having recently landed a deal to manage energy data for major overseas utility British Gas, Smart Grid software provider Trilliant is turning toward a more international strategy — under Conant’s watchful eye. Before joining the Trilliant team, Conant made a name for himself as the co-founder of Dust Networks, an innovator in wireless mesh networking technology and the originator of the Wireless HART standard for industrial wireless mesh communications. Earlier in his career, he invested micromirror technology for MEMS-based fiber optic switches.

Katherine Hamilton — President of the Gridwise Alliance. Charged with bringing together divergent companies of all sizes into collaborative network to agree on Smart Grid standards, storage, communication and common lobbying goals. During her tenure, Hamilton has grown the organization from 70 to more than 100 members, and has helped forge a number of alliances pushing Smart Grid progress forward. She has also played a major role in advocating for the alliance’s interests with Congress and other policymakers. Before joining the alliance, she served as a policy adviser to private energy investment firm Good Energies. She has co-directed the American Bioenergy Association, managed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s government relations and headed up her own consulting company.

Don Wood — Managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Primarily focused on cleantech and information technology investing, Wood has extensive experience with environmental business and policy. He started his green-collar career at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he worked in the policy planning department. After that, he was named senior vice president of sales and marketing at International Power Technology, a company that financed, installed and operated gas turbine co-generation power plants. One of his more recent claims to fame is that he helped major solar firm SunPower develop its original business plan and raise its initial capital. Familiar with the Smart Grid, he served as president of Metricom, a provider of wireless Smart Grid systems pioneering the first wireless mesh-network for channeling energy consumption data.

VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr. Register for your ticket today at GreenBeat2009.com.

Printing seems like it could be a big money-maker, and in fact Flickr previously had more limited partnerships with services like QOOP and TinyPrint. The company now says that Snapfish, with its locations in 22 countries, is “our go to partner for all your printing needs.” After clicking on the “order prints” button above photos and albums or selecting a custom set of photos through the”print and create” feature, users are transferred to Snapfish where they place their order and pay.

One drawback in the launch version — users can only print photos from their own accounts. So if you find and want to print out someone else’s cool phot, it’s off limits for now. There were some problems getting Flickr’s permission settings to transfer to Snapfish, so Flickr says, “we’ve disabled the ability to print other members’ photos for the moment.”

One of the central themes of the discussion was that a simple sales approach doesn’t work with developing technology and online media. Startups need to develop partnerships with large corporations, building a relationship with key personal within each company. “You work on one guy behind the firewall who spreads the gospel,” said Gutman. “Then you need patience, because big companies don’t work as quickly. Don’t sell at the first meeting, cause you’ll just tick them off.”

Meetup.com’s VP of sponsorship Mary Telesco stressed that these relationships should not only be channels to close deals, but also a crucial tool in product development. “Especially when you don’t know exactly what the end product is going to look like, that champion helps you get through the door and develop a viable product.”

The sentiment seemed to be that CEO’s and other C-level executives were not the best “champions.” Instead, key influencers tend to come from lower levels. Dan Herman, head of digital media at ad agency Media Kitchen said, “It often times isn’t the CEO who is your champion. I never found a C-level person as effective because you might get 2% of their mind. The day-to-day people, the analyst and employee two years out of college will become your champion.”

While making that key partnership to lend your brand credibility, many entrepreneurs in the group stressed not to under-price your offering. First Round’s O’Donnell said. “It’s a lot easier to come down in price than come up. If you can’t go and sell a deal for $50,000 or $100,000, how are you gonna make a deal for $10.” Timothy Ehrlich, an IP partner who is working with startups Boxee and Etsy, stressed that price cannot be the only consideration. “On the one hand you’re building value for another company, but on the other hand you want to use it elsewhere. Who owns the intellectual property can be just as important as price, so you need to think ahead before signing exclusives.”

When you’re a startup with a new product, you will often times be met with skepticism from major brands. When making your pitch, make sure to tailor it to each potential partner, even the personnel in the room. Colin McCabe of American Express Interactive Group said, “A lot of times a presentation just doesn’t match anything we’re doing. If it’s not relevant for what the person you’re pitching is working on, it will fall on deaf ears.

Foursquare’s Crowley said, “We have conversations with brands, and with each one we’re giving a different pitch.” Crowley continued, “When we’re talking with a big company or a VC, it’s not about millions of users right away. It’s about having the right users and them coming back at the right time.” The tireless pace of deal making at his mobile startup has led Crowley to hang up his programming hat to focus on business development and strategy full time. “We’re not doing any outbound business development, only inbound. There’s programmers, a contract guy, and a business development director/intern. They won’t let me touch the code anymore.”

The site, which launched last year and is already profitable, helps you find more than 300,000 episodes of TV shows online and directs you to where to watch them. It just overhauled the site last week, adding sharing so you can send out links to your Facebook network, comment on and “like” shows, and collaborative filtering for show recommendations. (A close competitor, Clicker, also opened to the public today.)

“We’ve taken a very unorganized, fragmented market and made it extremely easy to navigate with episode guides that tell you where to consume content,” said Adam Eatros, Yidio’s chief operating officer. “It’s a one-stop destination to find out where to go, whether it’s paid through iTunes or free through Hulu.”

Yidio’s new backers include Appolicious CEO Alan Warms and James Crouthamel, who sold Performics to DoubleClick.

CEO Brandon Eatros said the round was done more for strategic advice than financing needs. Yidio attracts about 4 million unique monthly visitors and earns revenue off affiliate fees by referring people to buy related DVDs or by signing them up for premium Netflix subscriptions.

UK and Seattle-based Innovative Converged Devices (ICD), an engineering company focusing on the mobile and computing industry, today launched Vega, its first in a line of future Android products. The Vega is a low-cost, large screen in-home device with complete connectivity. The device is a nice mixture of smartphone and PC features with the convenience of a touch screen. Though with the basic memory at 512 megabytes it’s comparable to a standard netbook. Currently, the price is unknown, but will probably be released, along with full specs and a demo, at the 2010 International CES Show on January 7-10.

But don’t be fooled, this device looks to pack a serious punch. Leveraging the Android Eclair operating system, the Vega rocks HD entertainment, 3G connectivity (with automatic updates for software and applications), a Tegra processor, full streaming media and a touch interface into three different size options – 7-inch, 11-inch and 15-inch. IDC is responsible for several products including the Momento, one of the world’s first wireless picture frames and Velocity Mobile phones.

Don’t get your hopes up just yet to find the Vega under the Christmas tree, it doesn’t hit shelves until sometime in the first half of 2010.

The ibankers are the ones who facilitate the massive financing — including initial public offerings and mergers — which in turn produce profits to investors who back the disruptive startups pushing the Smart Grid.

With investment in bouncing back from the recession and more deals being done, ibankers are likely to return to the limelight in a big way.

Anticipating this, our conference GreenBeat 2009 has added two of the most respected Super Grid-focused bankers to its lineup of speakers: Brian Bolster from Goldman Sachs and Bryce Lee from Credit Suisse. Both direct the clean energy practices at firms that caught the green waves early — financing promising companies and brokering their deals — and it has paid off.

Snagging the biggest green spotlight this year, Goldman Sachs and Bolster (left) played a lead role underwriting the $378 million IPO of battery maker A123Systems in September. A123Systems offers energy storage solutions that could eventually be adapted to turn intermittent energy sources like wind and solar into major power contributors, and also help integrate them into mainstream grids. The company’s share price rose 50 percent from $13.50 to $20.29 on its opening day on the Nasdaq, and got everyone talking about cleantech as a lucrative opportunity again.

This galvanized venture capitalists and private equity firms to fund other promising startups, and inspired several other big companies (think Solyndra and Smart Grid contender Silver Spring Networks) to more strongly consider their own IPOs.

Using the A123Systems sale as a bellweather, the Cleantech Group predicted several major green IPOs for 2010, going as far as to say that the nation’s biggest IPOs next year will come out of the green sector. The federal stimulus dollars into the sector are only helping.

Meanwhile, Lee (right) and Credit Suisse have played a major role in one of the Smart Grid companies that could eventually ride the cleantech IPO wave: SmartSynch. Maker of a box that transmits energy use data to and from utilities via public wireless networks (it landed a deal to use AT&T spectrum earlier this year), SmartSynch is poised to become one an important players in the smart metering business — awash with $3.4 billion in grant money from the government.

Credit Suisse, on Lee’s watch, led a $20 million round in the company in May 2008. SmartSynch has raised more than $80 million to date, and says its readying big (undisclosed) announcements for 2010. The firm has also backed Masdar — the fund raising $250 million to build a cleantech research city in Abu Dhabi — energy storage company Isentropic and the Cleantech Group to encourage increased investment and better consulting in the cleantech space.

Lee also has led transactions with some of the biggest companies of the cleantech sector, including First Solar, Trina Solar and EnerNOC, which all went public, as well as China’s Sunergy, Yingli Solar, Sina and ReneSola.

Credit Suisse partnered with Goldman in the $123.9 million Trina Solar IPO in 2006 — a sign that both firms have been ahead of the game.

Goldman, meanwhile, invested $33.5 million two years ago into GridPoint, a Smart Grid company that provides software for utilities to closely manage and deliver electrical data.

Goldman has also backed Smart Grid software maker Current Group and Arcadian Networks — a company stringing broadband service to rural communities that could eventually be tapped to transmit electric grid data between utilities and their hardest to reach customers.

We’re eager to hear where Lee and Bolster think are the biggest opportunities for the grid. Make sure you don’t miss them — buy your ticket for GreenBeat today at http://www.greenbeat2009.com.

We’re also delighted to have the support of our strategic partners: Vantage Communications, DEMO, Matter Network, and Fora.TV; and our sponsors: Accenture, Southern California Edison, Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, Oracle Utilities, Schwartz Communications, Cisco Systems, CPower, CSC and KPMG.

VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr. Register for your ticket today at GreenBeat2009.com.

But those who are fans of awesome hardcore adventure games shouldn’t miss Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which is one of the best games I’ve ever played. It is the prettiest, most entertaining, and most fun game that I’ve played on Sony’s PlayStation 3. In that sense, it could mark a turning point for Sony in the video game console war.

Sony really needs a hit like this. It is in third place, but it has finally brought the PS 3 down to a slimmer size and a more affordable price. And this exclusive PS 3 game helps distinguish the console from the Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360. If Sony has more hits like this one, it could finally start catching up to its rivals.

Uncharted 2 is an impressive achievement by developer Naughty Dog, considering that I thought the original Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was underwhelming. This game isn’t about originality. It is a male version of the Lara Croft Tomb Raider series, so much so that the first game was nicknamed Dude Raider. And its adventure theme in exotic locations is reminiscent of blockbuster Indiana Jones movies.

The main character, Nathan Drake, is a down-on-his luck type who stumbles back into a world of thieves and mercenaries who lead him onto a journey to find Shambhala, a legendary Himalayan valley that Marco Polo supposedly discovered many centuries ago. Drake is joined by his pal Sully and two fierce fighting women who love him but don’t want to admit it and compete for his attention. The game’s best line is when Drake and his fellow thief Chloe Frazer run into Drake’s former flame, Elena. Chloe says, “I sense some history here.” And Elena deadpans, “I’m Elena, last year’s model.”

It may sound formulaic. But what makes this game stand above the rest — and earned it a Metacritic aggregate review score of 96 out of 100 — is its execution. Before I turned to Modern Warfare 2, I just had to finish playing Uncharted 2 because it was just too fun and immersive to put down, like a page-turning action novel.

It has strong, fun game play and it exploits the graphics horsepower of the PS 3 to the fullest. While Naughty Dog lead designer Richard Lemarchand told us that the original Uncharted used about 30 percent of the PS 3’s processing power with its Cell microprocessor and Nvidia graphics chip, this game exploits probably 90 percent of the capability.

That means that you can see some truly stunning scenes. In one scene atop a tall building in Nepal, you can turn your character’s view and see an entire city in 3-D for miles in any direction, with the beautiful Himalaya mountains as a backdrop. At another point, as you’re escaping through a jungle, you can see a view of the distant beach and shimmering ocean from atop a cliff.

Of course, good scenery is just a starting point. A game, after all, is not a travel video. By comparison, my criticism of Ubisoft’s Avatar the Game is that the rainforest planet imagery looks fantastic, but the game play is weak. By contrast, the weaponry that Drake uses fits the game and it feels good when you aim, shoot and take down enemies. You can run and spray bullets wildly behind you, as you do when you’re trying to flee a jeep that is trying to run you over in a narrow alley.

The art style of the game is artificially vibrant. The colors of the environment are sharper and bright than you would ordinarily see in real life. This effect is so well done that you’ll spend time just marveling at the detailed objects that are part of every colorful scene.

The game has a fascination with heights; many of the puzzles that you have to figure out involve ways to scale big walls or buildings, all the while looking down with dizzying views. The puzzles are not easy, but they are not so difficult that you will give up in frustration, as happens in many games.

You start the game in a very unheroic position. You’re hanging on the edge of a train car which is dangling over the edge of a precipice in the Himalayas. You have to figure out how to climb up the car and scramble to safety before it falls over the edge. After this scene, the game takes you back a few months earlier, when the mercenary-thieves Harry Flynn and Chloe Frazer recruit Drake to hunt down the treasures of Shambhala.

This is where the main character, Nathan Drake, fits in with the way you play the game. He isn’t a superhero martial artist who can run up walls. He wobbles and gasps as he climbs things, and he even jokes in a self-referential way, as if he realizes he’s inside a game, “We always have to climb.” Drake is much more like an ordinary person thrown into breathtaking landscapes and impossible situations where there is no escape. You never know which way he’s going to go. Is he a common thief, or a decent human being? The character changes with the circumstances.

Drake banters with the two heroines in the game, who alternately help or hinder his efforts when he crosses swords with the backstabbing Harry Flynn and the game’s stock madman, Lazarevic. The voice acting of these characters isn’t brilliant, but the cinematics — the canned video-like scenes that are not playable — are extremely well done. The human faces and bodies are remarkably realistic. Naughty Dog includes cinematic sequences that roll on for minutes at a time, far longer than most games. These scenes convey a lot of twists and turns as Drake races against Flynn and Lazarevic to get to Shambhala and its ancient artifacts first.

It’s the action scenes where the game shines. Drake has to alternatively attack, evade, or escape from Lazarevic’s armed thugs. The soldiers are sufficiently well-armed and numerous enough that frontal assaults don’t work. The player has to use stealth, sneaking up on soldiers and snapping their necks. And once combat starts, the firefights are hard to win because the soldiers wear body armor.

The early part of the game takes place in Istanbul, where Flynn and Drake have to break into a museum and steal an artifact without alerting the guards. Then you team up with Sully in the jungles of Borneo, where Flynn’s treachery puts Drake on a collision course with Lazarevic. The lush jungle is spectacular. But the street fighting in the war-torn capital of Nepal is even more riveting. One of the toughest parts is a battle where you have to fight thugs on the ground at the same time that an attack helicopter is destabilizing the building that you’re fighting in. The damn helicopter keeps coming back over and over and it’s quite satisfying when you finally get the chance to take it down.

But one of the most well-executed scenes in video game history is a continuous firefight aboard a moving train, where you have to dispatch enemy soldiers from train car to train car. The physics of the train cars rocking back and forth as they move along the tracks is highly realistic. It makes it hard to aim a gun at the enemies. All the while you have to watch out for bridges and other obstacles that could knock you off the train.

There’s another cool scene in a monastery where you are at the top of a ruined building and you have to shoot down through multiple floors to take all of the enemies out; it’s a like a vertical firefight.

As the game moves on, you run into tougher enemies. Some are heavily armored with SAS shotguns that can take you out at close range. You have to jump from a moving truck onto another one as you fight soldiers.You have to escape a vengeful tank. Fortunately, your weapons get better and better along the way.

There are only a few things wrong with the game. It crashed on me once toward the end. You can sometimes go off the trail of where you’re supposed to be, like when you’re trying to evade the tank. And the facial animations are sometimes imperfect or out of sync. Still, those are small flaws.

The game takes some bizarre twists in the mountains. But one of the most enjoyable parts is a non-combat “Mountaineering” chapter where you have to follow a guide through ice-covered mountain cliffs, jumping from precipice to precipice, always barely making it.

While situations like hanging off the edge of cliffs are predictable, the quality execution of the game play makes those scenes a lot of fun and that is what makes Uncharted 2 such a delight to play. The game is 26 chapters long, but there is never a dull moment in this blockbuster movie, er, game. Even at the very end, there’s a cliffhanger, and you really won’t be able to guess which way things will turn out. I still have a lot of games to play this season. But chances are strong that Uncharted 2: Among Thieves will go head to head in my mind with Modern Warfare 2 for the game of the year.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported:

The micro-blogging service has agreed to sublease a 31,000-square-foot office at 795 Folsom St., now used by another social-networking firm, Bebo Inc., which is owned by AOL.

The approximately 70 full-time employees that work at Twitter were getting cramped in the old offices. Here’s a short video VentureBeat editor Matt Marshall made of their old digs earlier this year. The place had some plastic reindeer, a British phone booth, homemade beer and conference rooms named after various bird species (naturally!).

The follow button lets users opt-in to seeing public waves. Previously, once you clicked on a wave to read or comment on it, it would automatically be added to your inbox, and that meant your private waves might get drowned in public threads that you don’t care about, or at least care less about than your conversations with friends/coworkers. Google is also adopting the follow/unfollow metaphor throughout Wave, so that when you don’t want to see a wave anymore, you “unfollow” it, rather than hitting “mute.”

Google says it’s thinking about adding ways to “follow” people, groups, and searches in Wave too, which makes sense to me. Among a number of other uses, it could give users who are scratching their heads about what Wave is good for (which includes, uh, pretty much everyone I know on the service) a peek at what the more experienced folks are doing. Other promised improvements include more controls over when a wave appears in your inbox and better support for groups.

Today, in sync with co-founder Avner Ronen’s appearance as a speaker at the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco, the company announced on its blog that “a Boxee box is coming.” No further details were released, except a promise to unveil the product in New York on December 7th.

A Boxee box will open up a much larger potential audience to Boxee, as well as raising the potential per-customer profit. Ronen put it as, “The Internet is finally coming to the TV.”

The iPhone can be troublesome for playing video, seeing as it doesn’t yet work with Flash web sites. (Flash powers about 75 percent of web video.) Hence, publishers have to resort to building their own apps if they want to broadcast video live.

The Livestream Procaster gets around this by using new live streaming functionality built into the QuickTime player, so you don’t have to get iPhone App Store approval to launch your own live channel. Competitor Ustream has a special iPhone viewer app, but that means anyone who wants to view your stream on a mobile device has to have downloaded the app already.

If you want to use the Procaster, you download it here for free, connect a video camera, select ‘iPhone 3G Quality’ and then press ‘Go Live.’ A user can then watch it by going to iphone.livestream.com and picking the right channel. It works over a 3G or Wi-Fi connection.

New York-based Livestream was founded two years ago as Mogulus. It raised a reported $10 million from investors including Gannett Co. in July 2008, although exact terms were not disclosed. That came on top of $1.2 million in angel funding.

We can’t say too much about the more than 30 companies who applied to be a part of this year’s contest (much more information on our picks to come), but we can introduce you to the prudent investors and analysts who will be hand-selecting some of the Smart Grid’s earliest killer apps — the devices, software and concepts that will take our aging electrical grid into the future.

We’re especially excited to have Navin Chaddha from Mayfield Fund hosting the contest. As managing director, he specializes in energy technology, among other fields, and has been vocal on the importance of cleantech and the Smart Grid. Preferring the term “energy tech,” he is leading the firm in a more holistic approach to the technology that’s improving energy generation and transmission. So far, he has helped pick portfolio companies CPower, Inphi, Servomax and LatticePower — startups taking on different pieces of the grid. Ranked #11 on Forbes Midas list of top 100 deal makers this year, Chaddha is certainly one of the investors to watch in the space.

Before we get to the rest of our panel of experts, here’s another reminder to register for GreenBeat 2009 before we run out of tickets. Go to http://www.greenbeat2009.com for more information and to sign up. In the meantime, if you want to receive breaking news on the conference, or generally keep up to date with Smart Grid happenings, follow us on Twitter at @greenbeat2009.

We’d also like to acknowledge our strategic partners: Vantage Communications, DEMO, Matter Network, and Fora.TV; and our sponsors: Accenture, Southern California Edison, Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, Oracle Utilities, Schwartz Communications, Cisco Systems, CPower, CSC and KPMG.

The Innovation Competition accepted applications from companies of any size and shape innovating for the Smart Grid. The goal is to recognize new submissions to the space that not only change the way we’re thinking about our electrical system, but that embrace what we believe to be the three most important objectives behind Smart Grid development: 1) To decarbonize our modes for distributing energy; 2) to quickly and efficiently transmit data along side power; and 3) to drive increased energy efficiency and conservation.

The following judges will decide which of this year’s submissions best fulfill these criteria.

Tim Carey — Partner and head of the U.S. cleantech practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Charged with determining what makes green companies successful, Carey has seen his share of winners and losers in the space, especially during the recent economic turbulence. He is one of the thought leaders that has his eyes fixed on cleantech’s rebound from the recession, accurately predicting that the sector would begin to grow back in the third quarter of this year, but still miss 2008 levels of investment. He is often called upon to decipher and remark on cleantech trends. Earlier this year, he said he believed that the stimulus funds being handed out by the U.S. Department of Energy will result in more green IPOs in 2010. Carey is keeping a close eye on the evolution of the Smart Grid as it plays a growing role in its energy and manufacturing practices.

Craig Lobdell — Director at KPMG. As a seasoned management consultant, Lobdell has spent years working with clients to reengineer process designs and planning to boost revenue, mitigate risk and evolve with the times — particularly in the cleantech and renewable energy sectors. He has worked closely with electric and gas utilities to navigate the transition to deregulation, as well as with independent power producers, solar energy companies and municipal construction firms to make their operations greener and more profitable. Before arriving at KPMG in 2004, Lobdell served as a senior manager at BearingPoint and Andersen LLP.

Sunil Paul — Founder of Spring Ventures and co-founder and chairman of the Clean Economy Network. Paul is a longtime entrepreneur of and investor in clean energy companies. As the founder of Spring Ventures, he helps incubate startups that have the potential to become major, disruptive forces in the fight against global warming and energy dependence. Right now, the San Francisco-based firm’s portfolio includes thin-film solar company Nanosolar, and Oorja Protonics, maker of alcohol-based fuel-cell systems. In 2008, Paul joined forces with a number of other leaders in the cleantech and investment businesses to found the Clean Economy Network, a national advocacy group that lobbies for policies consistent with the growth of green employment, sustainable work practices and energy independence. Paul was also an investor in Advent Solar, which sold its assets to Applied Materials earlier this week.

Richard Wong — Partner at Accel Partners. Wong may have established his expertise in the mobile  and enterprise software sectors, but he’s also jumped on board to make the firm’s energy holdings some of the most ambitious in the business. Just one example of his foresight in cleantech — he threw his support behind SunRun, a residential solar power company that utilizes photovoltaic panels and their interaction with the grid in bold, innovative ways. Owning and operating the panels itself, SunRun hooks its equipment into the grid, and charges residents only for the amount of power they use. The company is a natural segue into Smart Grid technology — a perfect example of how smart metering, real-time energy data transfer, and new data points will give vendors of renewable energy the boost they need to become widespread. Seeing more than simply how these innovation fit together, Wong has a bird’s eye view of how both private and federal dollars will flow into grid development moving forward. Wong will be a judge in GreenBeat 2009’s Innovation Competition, showcasing the most promising and disruptive Smart Grid technology on offer.

VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr. Register for your ticket today at GreenBeat2009.com.

The sales in the rest of the world will likely add to that opening day record, which beats out other titles such as Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV as the biggest launch among all forms of entertainment. Modern Warfare 2 went on sale worldwide Tuesday, with 10,000 stores in the U.S. holding midnight openings.

“The Call of Duty franchise has become a cultural phenomenon showing the power of video games as an entertainment medium,” said Mike Griffith, chief executive of Activision Publishing, a division of Activision Blizzard, in a statement. “The shattering of these entertainment records is a testament to the compelling, cinematic and uniquely engaging experience that the Call of Duty brand delivers. Modern Warfare 2 has taken interactive experience to unprecedented heights setting a new standard for entertainment.”

But the game is already generating a lot of controversy. There’s a scene early in the game (spoiler alert) which I just played in which the user has to perform the role of a terrorist engaged in slaughter at an airport. The game gives players the option of skipping such controversial scenes at the beginning of the game, but it doesn’t describe what those scenes are. The game is rated mature.

The original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare game debuted in 2007 and has sold 14 million copies to date. It is a gritty fighting game where you play British and American soldiers fighting terrorists in ultra-realistic terrain in the Middle East and the former Soviet Union. The fighting is extremely violent and intense. Broadpoint AmTech analyst Ben Schacter estimates that global sales topped 7 million units for Modern Warfare 2, and first week sales could top 11.7 million units.

In the antitrust litigation, AMD accused Intel of using its incentives to force customer PC makers into exclusive or near exclusive arrangements that prevented them from buying large numbers of AMD chips. The settlement of the litigation that began in 2004 will presumably be good for consumers, who will benefit from the competition that ensues between a financially viable AMD and a less-cutthroat Intel.

The deal will likely save AMD’s business; just yesterday, AMD executives said they had $3.6 billion in debt, with a big chunk of it coming due in 2012. Asked how they were going to pay off that debt, with only $1.5 billion of cash in the bank, the AMD executives provided no real answer.

The settlement means that AMD will drop its mammoth private antitrust case in Delaware and two pending cases in Japan and withdraw all of its regulatory complaints worldwide. But government agencies can still bring cases against Intel. The European Union fined Intel $1.45 billion in May, and Intel just got hit with a new antitrust suit by the New York Attorney General’s office. Intel is appealing the fine and fighting the New York action, and so those cases will continue.

The cross license agreement between the companies has now been updated to legally allow AMD’s move to split itself into two companies. AMD designs chips, while its Globalfoundries subsidiary — partially owned by the Abu Dhabi government — makes chips. Now Globalfoundires is free and clear to operate independently without risk of lawsuits from Intel.

It’s hard to say what forced the settlement. The private antitrust suit was headed for a trial in March. It seemed like AMD stood to gain a lot from a successful lawsuit, based on the magnitude of losses that it blamed on Intel. But the outcome wasn’t guaranteed, despite the big EU fine, and AMD also needed the patent litigation cleared out of the way to ensure a smooth supply of its chips. It also has a big payment coming due in 2012.

According to AMD, Intel has agreed to stop the following practices:

• Offering incentives to PC makers in exchange for their agreement to buy all of their microprocessor needs from Intel, whether on a geographic, market segment, or any other basis

• Giving inducements to customers in exchange for their agreement to limit or delay their purchase of microprocessors from AMD, whether on a geographic, market segment, or any other basis

• Incenting customers in exchange for their agreement to limit their engagement with AMD or their promotion or distribution of products containing AMD microprocessors, whether on a geographic, channel, market segment, or any other basis

• Rewarding customers in exchange for their agreement to abstain from or delay their participation in AMD product launches, announcements, advertising, or other promotional activities

• Offering inducements to customers or others to delay or forebear in the development or release of computer systems or platforms containing AMD microprocessors, whether on a geographic, market segment, or any other basis

• Giving inducements to retailers or distributors to limit or delay their purchase or distribution of computer systems or platforms containing AMD microprocessors, whether on a geographic, market segment, or any other basis

• Withholding any benefit or threatening retaliation against anyone for their refusal to enter into a prohibited arrangement such as the ones listed above.

In a joint statement the two companies commented, “While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development.”

On a conference call, AMD chief executive Dirk Meyer said, “Everybody is a winner here including Intel. They should be congratulated for trying to put this behind them and listen to everyone’s concerns as well as defend their rights.”

The Los Angeles-based company indexes all available video online, from Netflix movies TV shows to Amazon film downloads. There are more than 400,000 episodes indexed online, all available as legal content. It lets you discover what’s available to watch and where to view it on the web. The site draws from 1,200 sources and categorizes shows into 1,200 areas.

There are 30,000 movies available fro Netflix’s Instant Streaming service and Amazon’s Video on Demand service. It also catalogs more than 50,000 songs from 20,000 artists. If you want to share film lists or other info, you can do so via the site’s integration with Facebook Connect.

Users can use it much like Tivo for the Internet. They can queue shows to watch, get season passes, and get alerts when new episodes show up online. The company is headed by Jim Lanzone, former chief executive of Ask. He says that the idea is that there is so much available on the web now, you have to have an easy way to search it.

The service has been in private beta testing since mid-September. Fans can make their own comments and upload their own content. You can search for topics within a specific program. For instance, you can look for “Bill Gates” appearances on the Charlie Rose show. The index will also suggest shows based on what you’ve watched.

The company was founded in January and it raised $8 million in a first round from Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. Blake Krikorian, founder of Sling Media, has joined the company’s board of directors. Rivals include Hulu.com and Blinkx.