Energy storage system producer 24M Technologies spun out of lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems today to become a separate venture. The company raised a $10 million Series A funding round from Charles River Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners. The company raised an additional $6 million in a grant from the Department of Energy‘s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E). The funding will h...

Hulu is testing the waters for an IPO, hoping to get a valuation of $2 billion, according to the New York Times. A Hulu IPO would be a pure play on the transition of TV to the Web. While the company has not yet filed with the SEC, in the past it claimed to have 2009 revenues of $100 million, and is perhaps on track to double that this year. It is not clear how profitable Hulu can be, or how viable its long-term...

Earlier this year, Twitter got into the event business for the first time with Chirp, a developers conference they put on in San Francisco with the help of Carsonified. Obviously, they’ll be doing another one of those next year. But has the one event caused an itch around Twitter that only more events can scratch? A mockup of a new site indicates that may be the case, but Twitter says no. Mark Otto is one...

As students head back to school, eBay is getting into mobile textbook sales with the launch of a a new iPhone app from Half.com, which eBay bought in 2000 for $350 million. The Half.com iPhone app is also the first eBay buying application to integrate barcode scanning technology, which was implemented through the acquisition of RedLaser in June. The app allows users to scan the barcodes on items to find the best...

comScore has released its July video metrix stats today, with the number of U.S. users watching online video content rising slightly to 178 million viewers compared to 177 million total viewers in June. In July, each viewer watched an an average of 14.7 hours of online video. And 84.9 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video. Unsurprisingly, Google Sites, whose viewership is driven primarily...