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Silicon Valley news about tech money and innovation

Achaogen takes in $5.6M to fight bacterial infectionsToday

Gene Security Network strings together $6M for in-vitro techToday

Twitter moves beyond blaming top users for its issuesToday

I wrote a headline back in May that got quite a bit of play around the Internet: Twitter: Don’t blame Ruby, blame Scoble. The post was based on Twitter developer (now the service’s API lead) Alex Payne suggesting that Twitter’s scaling problems were due to “popular users” (like blogger Robert Scoble) sending messages to their thousands of followers quickly. While Twitter later clarified that statement a bit more, Scoble and other top Twitter users were angry at blame being pointed at them for Twitter’s failings. But Twitter is beyond pointing fingers at its users now, as it writes on its blog today.

In the past week, Twitter had some of its most significant site issues in months, but that wasn’t due to either the Macworld Expo or Consumer Electronics Show event

Windows 7 public beta — hold the “public,” for nowToday

Microsoft was set to release the first public beta version of its Windows 7 operating system at noon today, but a rush of traffic has forced it to delay the roll-out, a post on the Windows Blog states. While some potential testers are understandably upset, I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for Microsoft.

On one hand, it’s another example of Microsoft’s failure to meet public expectations, but on the other, it seems to show that demand for Windows 7 is huge (at least if we believe Microsoft, and there seems to be no reason we shouldn’t). Mozilla had a similar issue when it launched Firefox 3 last year, and the initial launch problems didn’t have any lasting effect, as the browser is now at its highest level of usage ever.

While the site that points to the beta download wasn’t working at all earlier in the day, as CNET’s Ina

93 of top 100 brands don’t control their Twitter nameToday

By now just about everyone is aware of domain squatters — users who buy a web site domain name thinking or knowing that someone else will want it in the future, hoping to get money for it. But with the rise in popularity of services like Twitter, the problem is spreading to usernames as well. How bad is it? Consider this: 93 of the top 100 global brands aren’t in control of their brand names on Twitter, blogger Erik J. Heels points out.

While certainly not all of them will want and/or use their Twitter names, companies like Dell have proven that the service can be useful for promotional purposes. Further, one of the monetization models that Twitter is said to be considering is corporate Twitter accounts for brands, that they would pay for. If a brand doesn’t control its name on Twitter, though, that model could be problematic.

That’s why Heels is calling for the creation of a “Uniform Username Dispute Resolution Policy.” He notes that while a policy exists to thwart domain squatters with the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, none exists for usernames on w