VatorNews - Category

Hot Potato serves up social event stream

by Ronny Kerr, November 20, 2009 | Comments

Launching today, this startup's iPhone app geo-locates you and geo-locates the party

Hot Potato, a startup focusing on an iPhone app that streams updates from friends at events in your area, launched on Friday, just one month after the completion of its Series A round of funding. The Brooklyn-based early-stage startup has raised $1 million so far for its mobile brand of social networking via events.Backed by Vimeo co-founder Zach Klein, Hot ...

Social networking sites are media portals

by Chris Caceres, November 20, 2009 | Comments

Time spent viewing video on social networking destinations up 98% year-over-year, reports Nielsen

One of the things I love about Facebook is how simple it is to view videos on your live feed. For the most part, videos from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, or those uploaded directly to Facebook play right in the feed without ever having to stray away to another destination. It just works. It makes sense that this ease of ...

Twitter's new question: What's happening?

by Ronny Kerr, November 19, 2009 | Comments (1)

Biz Stone says "What are you doing?" was never the most important question

From the beginning, Twitter has asked its users one simple question: "What are you doing?" The original idea assumed the network would be a place for people to keep in touch with each other and the occurrences in their day-to-day lives.But, as co-founder Biz Stone acknowledges in a Twitter Blog post today, that question has taken a backseat to a ...

YouTube launches automatic captions

by Chris Caceres, November 19, 2009 | Comments

Feature will grant online video viewing access to hearing impaired and translate to 51 languages

YouTube is taking initiatives today to help the hearing impaired by announcing a new automatic captioning feature across its millions of videos.This isn't your traditional hand written captioning either. Google is combing its automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions. So basically, the machines understand what is being said in the video and ...

GettingHired gets $3 million

by Chris Caceres, November 19, 2009 | Comments

Career site focused on serving disabled, raises funds for its audience of 22 million

GettingHired, an organization focused on careers and community for people with disabilities, announced on Thursday it secured $3 million of additional investment from Zenith Insurance Company, Kamine Development Corp and Fisher Capital. Launched back in November of 2008, GettingHired.com serves as an online career center with social networking features for people with disabilities. People looking for jobs can use the ...

Microsoft announces Office 2010 public beta

by Ronny Kerr, November 18, 2009 | Comments

Releasing a line of productive applications in beta, Microsoft introduces social networking features

Microsoft released a slew of 2010 iterations of its Office-related products in public beta on Wednesday, including Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Project 2010, Visio 2010, Office Web Apps for businesses and Office Mobile 2010.Office, comprised of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other software, will likely be held under the closest scrutiny as it is one of the most popular ...

Salesforce launches Chatter

by Chris Caceres, November 18, 2009 | Comments

Cloud computing giant stepping into social networking, launches a "Facebook for the enterprise"

With Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference kicking off this week in San Francisco comes a major announcement from the company. It's launching a product called Salesforce Chatter, which the cloud computing giant describes as a "Facebook for the Enterprise."Salesforce is stepping into a market already touched on, social networking for enterprises. Some startups playing in the space include CubeTree, a freemium enterprise ...

A dating site worth hooking up with

by Bambi Francisco, November 18, 2009 | Comments

Angel investor Aydin Senkut is our guest host analyzing Thread, the dating site leveraging Facebook

The online dating market is a $1 billion annual business. One company - Thread - is trying to go after that market by leveraging the connections on Facebook by creating a dating filter on top of the massive social network. The value proposition? Why not meet friends of friends rather than some random person considered psychologically compatible? We take a ...

Facebook adopts new privacy policy

by Ronny Kerr, November 18, 2009 | Comments

Lacking the minimum 7,000 commenters needed for a vote, policy changes go into effect unchallenged

On Tuesday night, Facebook announced that it has adopted its revised privacy policy changes, without the need to submit the changes to the site's user base for a vote. Facebook said that if 7,000 users commented on the proposal revision, then it would organize a poll, wherein all the site's users could vote on whether or not to approve the ...

Zynga raises $15.18 million

by Chris Caceres, November 17, 2009 | Comments

Social gaming giant raking in more cash

Can't make money off apps on social networks

by Bambi Francisco, November 17, 2009 | Comments

Angel investor Aydin Senkut on where he'd invest and sectors he'd avoid

Aydin Senkut, an early-Google employee-turned angel investor, is becoming known as one of the more prolific seed-to-early-stage investors in Silicon Valley, having invested in 40 companies since 2006. His portfolio consists of some well-known consumer Internet companies, such as Mint, which was recently sold, Disqus, Dogster, BrightRoll and Rapleaf. to Intuit for $170 million, Aardvark, In this second segment of ...

Twitter homepage still most popular client

by Ronny Kerr, November 16, 2009 | Comments

Second-place winner, TweetDeck, beats out the third-party clients by a long-shot

Do you pay close attention to where the users you follow tweet from? "About 3 minutes ago via twitterfeed." "About 5 minutes ago via bit.ly." "About 6 minutes ago via Facebook."Despite the overwhelming abundance of third-party applications, Web sites, and clients from which users can tweet from, a new study from business intelligence and analytics provider for social media, Sysomos, ...

Local business center listings

by Derek Gordon, November 16, 2009 | Comments

	… and tips for tweaking them In August we ran a post about getting your site listed in Google’s 10-pack. This post has been our number one read post to date, so I thought you might appreciate additional tips on tweaking your local business center listings across Google, Yahoo, and Bing. 1. Submit complete forms. All three local search centers include a wealth of information that’s ...
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Social shopping

by Brenda Powell, November 16, 2009 | Comments

	The next generation Discount shopping Web sites are hardly new; Amazon has been around for almost 15 years and has reinvented itself time and time again to keep up with the changing landscape. But, with the recession taking such a strong hold of the American consumer over the past year, you can’t help but wonder how the shopping industry has been able to ...
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