Software responsible for a quarter of Q3 venture investing

Intel has a lot riding on the upcoming release of its new chip line. To add to the excitement, the company released some details about its power consumption, including that it draws 50% less power than the current Core processor line members on “active” workloads. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

SimpleRelevance, a company that gathers customer data to send more personalized mass emails, has raised $1 million. Funding was led by Hyde Park Angels and Hyde Park Venture Partners. [Source: VentureBeat]

Yahoo appears to be tinkering with a new search results page. For some users, when logged in and using Firefox, they are directed to a new results page that looks markedly different than the old one. [Source: Search Engine Land]

iOS music app maker Smule reportedly made $12.6 million in revenue in 2012. It is also supposedly on track to make $20 million this year. [Source: GigaOm]

Facebook today highlighted its developer platform, in celebration of the six year anniversary of being open to independent developers. The company threw around some numbers about third-party apps, such as: more than 500 million users use third-party apps through Facebook as well as those users sharing 1 billion stories a day. [Source: CNET]

San Francisco-based startup Lambda Labs is going to release a facial recognition API for Google Glass apps. The API will be available within a week, according to the company. [Source: TechCrunch]

Despite the videogame industry struggling recently with declining sales, GameStop today raised its full-year earnings forecast. This is based on a potential boost from new gaming consoles like the XBox One. [Source: Reuters]

Apple has announced that it is going to kick off its Worldwide Developers Conference with its keynote on June 10. [Source: CNET]

File-sharing company Box has acquired the technology behind the French app Folders. According to Box, the acquisition is part of a bold plan to make a product “that doesn’t suck”. [Source: VentureBeat]

Ben Ling, who was Badoo’s COO and an ex-Googler, has joined Khosla Ventures. In addition to Badoo and Google, Ling has also worked at Facebook. [Source: TechCrunch]

Google today debuted new Chrome notifications for its beta channel release. According to The Verge, they are capable of displaying formatted text and images. [Source: The Verge]

Even though Bing wasn’t talked about much at Microsoft’s XBox One reveal, it became apparent that the product as a back-end service is gaining some real traction. For the new services Microsoft is offering, Bing will help power them, such providing all the relevant data for XBox’s new voice search. [Source: CNET]

Israeli startup Imonomy has raised a $400,000 seed round. The company creates a software that analyzes webpages and automatically inserts copyright-free images. [Source: TechCrunch]

Today marks e-commerce company ChannelAdvisor’s first day of trading as a public company. As a result, the company’s stocks rose today almost 40%. [Source: VentureBeat]

Jawbone has hired Mindy Mount, a top corporate VP at Microsoft, as its new president. This comes after a few other upgrades in the company’s management and board, including the addition of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. [Source: AllThingsD]

HTC has sold around 5 million units of its flagship HTC One smartphone since its launch, an unnamed exec told the Wall Street Journal. This is despite supply constraints that have nagged at the device since its inception — HTC expects to better meet demand once those issues have been worked out.

[Source: Wall Street Journal]

Microsoft will be bringing its Kinect product, a motion-sensing peripheral currently used by the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, to Windows products next year, the company has announced. Microsoft is expected to reveal more about the change during its BUILD conference in June.

[Source: Microsoft]

Lyft has raised a $60 million Series C from Andreessen Horowitz (whose founding partner, Marc Andreessen, is a personal investor in PandoDaily). The funding will be used to kickstarter Lyft’s global expansion; the company’s COO told AllThingsD that they can “scale globally in the next 12 months.” We’ll see.

[Source: AllThingsD]

Microsoft has announced two new computer mice (as opposed to, you know, mice mice) with dedicated Windows keys meant to make it easier to navigate the oft-befuddling interface introduced with Windows 8. The Verge’s hands-on states that the products’ usefulness is currently limited, but that Microsoft teased more-capable products in the pipeline.

[Source: The Verge]

LoyalBlocks, an Israel-based loyalty marketing startup, has raised a $9 million Series A led by General Catalyst Partners, the company has announced. Founder Collective and Gemini Israel Ventures also participated in the round, which will be used to expand the LoyalBlocks platform and the company’s US presence.