Cuban

NBA makes Mark Cuban pay $50k over critical tweet

A little advice to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban: if you don't agree with an NBA referee, it's probably best to keep your fingers away from Twitter. It can cost you big time.

Following a three-point Mavericks loss to the New Orleans Hornets on Saturday, the Cuban took to the microblogging service to gripe about some officiating that occurred during the game:… Read more

CNET's Next Big Thing: The connected revolution

It's been called the Internet of Things, the connected future, the post-PC and even, in our minds, the post-mobile world: however you want to refer to it, the trend toward ubiquitously connected devices and people is inescapable and poised to change everything about the consumer electronics world.

At CNET, we're calling it the post-mobile future: mapping the next frontier of consumer electronics. Because let's be blunt: consumer electronics has been kind of a boring world for the past couple of years. It seems like all we talk about is smartphones and tablets, tablets and smartphones. Last year'… Read more

Facebook caters to businesses, others with separate news feed

As Facebook works to keep its users happy by minimizing the number of promotional posts that appear with friends' posts in the News Feed, businesses have asked for a new way to reach fans.

Enter a separate "Pages Feed," rolled out today.

Unlike the standard News Feed, which mixes posts from friends with some posts from promotionally oriented Facebook "Pages" that users have Liked -- and that Facebook's spam filter has deemed relevant -- the Pages Feed is unfiltered and features only the promotional posts. Users can click to it from a button on the … Read more

Mark Cuban: An Apple box designed for TV would be game-changer

Apple's plans for television will have nothing to do with killing cable companies and everything to do with playing nice with them, famed investor Mark Cuban believes.

Speaking to Adweek in an interview published today, Cuban said the idea that Apple would invest its bundles of cash in trying to "blow up cable companies" with its own deals with programmers is pure nonsense.

"I think there is zero chance of that happening," Cuban said. "Apple tries to do everything on commission. It's not big on upfront deals, and I don't see that … Read more

Retelling history, 140 characters at a time

Spoiler alert: The Cuban Missile Crisis ended without the United States and the Soviet Union launching even a single nuclear weapon, and the Allies won World War II.

You're no doubt well aware of those ultimate outcomes, but what if you don't remember, or never knew, the myriad individual moments, big and small, that led to those famous conclusions? There are plenty of thick history books you could pick up, but maybe you're someone who wants a more dramatic sense of what happened -- even, perhaps, to feel like you're right in the thick of the drama.

To be sure, there's no time machine that can take you back to London during The Blitz, or to the White House Situation Room as JFK stood firm against belligerent military leaders wanting to engage the Soviets over surreptitiously putting nukes in Cuba. But these days, in little 140-character snippets, many of those moments are being played out for the whole world to see. And if you close your eyes, you can almost imagine you're there. … Read more

Mark Cuban lead VC in online-influentials startup Little Bird

A new service aiming to help media and PR companies determine which influencers can best amplify their messages launched today, with Mark Cuban as lead investor.

Known as Little Bird, the San Francisco startup was founded by former ReadWriteWeb reporter Marshall Kirkpatrick. Cuban led the $1 million round, along with additional investment from the Social Leverage Group, Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah, and former Twitter engineer Blaine Cook.

For now, Little Bird is in private beta. In an e-mail to CNET, Kirkpatrick explained that the service is mainly used to help companies with their social-media or content-creation strategy. "For example, … Read more

Mark Cuban dumps his Facebook stock

The Dallas Mavericks' losses this year weren't the only ones that upset Internet mogul Mark Cuban.

The sports franchise and billionaire entrepreneur owner told CNBC that he sold all 150,000 shares of Facebook stock he owned after suffering through the stock's weak initial showing.

"I already sold it, I took my hit, my thesis was wrong. I thought we would get a quick bounce just about the excitement about the stock. I was wrong, and when you are wrong you don't wait, you just get out. So I took a beating and left," he … Read more

Mark Cuban leads funding of video startup Switchcam

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban is leading a round of seed funding in a new video startup called Switchcam that has technology that can be used to stitch together different videos of the same event so viewers can switch camera angles as they wish.

Other investors in the $1.2 million round, raised via AngelList, include Dave McClure's 500 Startups, Turner Media Camp, Vikas Gupta, Niket Desai, Reed Morse, David Beyer and Jeffrey Schox, Switchcam announced today.

Switchcam CEO Brett Welch told CNET that he got the idea while using his phone to take video of live music concerts. Unlike … Read more

Mark Cuban flings funding at Flingo

Smart TV software company Flingo announced today it has received a $1 million dose of Series A funding from billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban and venture capitalist Gary Lauder. This money will go toward helping the company expand its presence with smart TV and device manufacturers around the world.

That financial injection brings Flingo's Series A funding total to $8 million, and comes just weeks after August Capital led a $7 million round of financing.

The idea behind Flingo is smart TV technology that mixes social networking with broadcast content on both TVs and second screens, such as tablets, laptops, … Read more