A while ago, Nokia held a contest to star in a short film with Pamela Lee. It would appear that the video is out, and you can see it above. It doesn’t really star Pam Lee, but Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire and The Last Airbender. Pam makes a cameo, but what is most impressive [...]Read similar

VantagePoint Capital Partners, a global cleantech fund focused on energy and efficiency, today revealed that former Best Buy executive Kal Patel is joining the firm as partner. Patel is expected to grow VPCP's "European presence," and lead its international "strategic partnerships" according to a press statement from the fund. At Best Buy, Patel worked as executive vice president and president of the comapny's Asia regional business. He lead a major acquisition of a Chinese company, worked on building Best Buy's business in transportation, mobility, health and home energy management, and h... Read similar

Satya Patel joined Twitter in March of 2011, after a four-year stint as an investor with Battery Ventures. He took on the big job of managing the company's core product as well as its growing advertising business. But now, as its ads are starting to take off, he's leaving the company. The decision was amicable, I've heard from a source familiar with the matter. Twitter's executive leadership is looking to separate the ads and product teams more fully, with each one getting a new leader. Patel's options were to take one of those roles instead of continuing to run both. “Satya has done a great... Read similar

Over the past week, we took TechCrunch on the road for our Southeast Meetup tour. Of the five cities we visited in seven days, Durham had one of the hungriest entrepreneurial scenes. But the majority of the city is relatively run-down, aside from the lovely American Tobacco Center facility you see in the background. But North Carolina's tech scene is on a mission, and it's not just about cleaning up the city, it's about branching out of the usual life science industry to have a varied portfolio of young companies in the Raleigh-Durham area. I pulled aside Dhruv Patel, who is the program dire... Read similar

Earlier today, CNNMoney broke the news that well-known Googler/YouTuber Hunter Walk and former Googler Satya Patel would be starting a new VC firm called Homebrew. What wasn’t known was whether Walk would be leaving Google to pursue Homebrew full time, but he has confirmed that to be the case. The last time that we spoke with Walk, he was passionately explaining all of the things he gets to work on with the YouTube For Good team, which was a team that I didn’t know existed. It consisted of people with all types of skill-sets, including forward-thinkers and leaders like Walk, who wo... Read similar

#film On a hair-raising morning commute, Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel encounters a gun-toting traffic cop, ninja bankers, and... Chuck Bass. It's eight minutes of slick, silly fun, and it was shot entirely on a smartphone. More » Read similar

Hey, remember when HP fired former CEO Mark Hurd for fudging his expense reports in connection with some shady potential hanky-panky surrounding a former marketing contractor? And then gave him a $40-50m severance package that included $12m in straight cash to keep his mouth shut and not sue anyone? And then Oracle CEO Larry Ellison called HP's board "idiots" for firing Hurd? Well, over the weekend Larry put his money where his mouth is and hired ol' Mark as Oracle's new president, and that seems to have been the last straw for HP -- the company just announced that it's suing Mark Hurd for br... Read similar

Hey, remember when HP fired former CEO Mark Hurd for fudging his expense reports in connection with some shady potential hanky-panky surrounding a former marketing contractor? And then gave him a $40-50m severance package that included $12m in straight cash to keep his mouth shut and not sue anyone? And then Oracle CEO Larry Ellison called HP's board "idiots" for firing Hurd? Well, over the weekend Larry put his money where his mouth is and hired ol' Mark as Oracle's new president, and that seems to have been the last straw for HP -- the company just announced that it's suing Mark Hurd for br... Read similar

Well well -- what's this? Look like all those rumors about Nikon licking its wounds and gunning hard for the high-end compact camera market were true: this hot little piece is the new Coolpix P7000, Nikon's answer to the Canon G11. Like we'd heard, it actually drops the megapixel count from the P6000, with a 10.1 megapixel CCD sensor that can hit ISO 6400 sensitivity natively and 12,800 when boosted behind a f/2.8-5.6 7.1x VR zoom lens and a three-inch 921,000-dot LCD display. It also has full manual controls for virtually every setting, an optical viewfinder and accessory hot shoe, RAW suppo... Read similar

Well well -- what's this? Look like all those rumors about Nikon licking its wounds and gunning hard for the high-end compact camera market were true: this hot little piece is the new Coolpix P7000, Nikon's answer to the Canon G11. Like we'd heard, it actually drops the megapixel count from the P6000, with a 10.1 megapixel CCD sensor that can hit ISO 6400 sensitivity natively and 12,800 when boosted behind a f/2.8-5.6 7.1x VR zoom lens and a three-inch 921,000-dot LCD display. It also has full manual controls for virtually every setting, an optical viewfinder and accessory hot shoe, RAW suppo... Read similar