Yahoo completely overhauls Flickr to "make...

Yahoo launched an Android app, redesigned the homepage and gave each user a 1 terabyte of space

by Steven Loeb - May 21, 2013
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Crowdflower raises $5M to grow crowdsourcing

by Matt Bowman, January 20, 2010 | Comments

Bessemer and Trinity join a top-tier group of investors to boost the ondemand labor company.

That pile of busy work sitting in you’re inbox? CrowdFlower wants you to give it to some bored refugees in Africa. The San Francisco-based company, which provides quality-control for online labor-on-demand, just raised a $5 million Series A led by Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. We wrote about CrowdFlower shortly after their public launch at TC50 in September. The ...

gWallet launches gWallet Ventures

by Chris Caceres, January 20, 2010 | Comments

In hopes to spur innovation and invest in social gaming companies

gWallet, a virtual currency platform for social media developers, announced this morning the launch of gWallet Ventures, an early-stage fund to invest in social gaming companies in hopes to accelerate innovation within the social gaming ecosystem. “There are a lot of social gaming companies out there that have not received the attention they deserve,” said Gurbaksh Chahal, CEO and founder ...

Zynga raises $1.5M for Haiti relief effort

by Ronny Kerr, January 20, 2010 | Comments

In last five days, social gaming users have contributed $1.5 million to Haitian earthquake relief

Facebook users playing Zynga games have donated more than $1.5 million over just the past five days to aid the Haitian relief effort. About 300,00 users from 47 countries have purchased enough limited edition virtual goods via Zynga's top four games on Facebook--FarmVille, FishVille, Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker--to make this massive contribution to the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP).FarmVille ...

Yankees in Chairman Hu's Court

by Matt Bowman, January 19, 2010 | Comments

The Chinese and U.S. venture-backed industries are learning to play nice.

Like it or not, China and Silicon Valley are in the same sandbox. Valley titans may try some strong-arm tactics to get the dragon to play nice (witness Google’s important pullback from the country last week), but in the long run, the U.S. must cooperate with Shanghai to continue building the tech economy. Many valley leaders worry the U.S. is ...

The tug of war between M&A and VC

by Fred Wilson, January 19, 2010 | Comments

VCs are starting to compete directly with the M&A market

Entrepreneurs and the companies they create are the raw material of the startup world. There has been an ongoing tug of war for their hearts and minds between big companies and VCs.For a while the big companies were winning. From the Internet bubble burst until recently, most every hot company to come out of the Internet startup scene was acquired ...

Time acquires StyleFeeder

by Chris Caceres, January 19, 2010 | Comments

Magazine giant looking to step into e-commerce space for new revenue stream

Time Inc. announced on Tuesday it has acquired StyleFeeder, an ecommerce Website. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, although the Wall Street Journal reports the price was, "well into eight figures," based on someone familiar with the matter. StyleFeeder has been offering users online personalized shopping experiences. It's a pattern recognition technology in which users can pick and ...

Sway raises $2 million for Shoutlet

by Chris Caceres, January 19, 2010 | Comments

Origin Ventures and Leo Capital betting on social media distribution platform

Sway, which operates a social media content distribution and communications platform called Shoutlet, has raised $2 million in Series A funding. The round was co-led by Origin Ventures and Leo Capital Holdings. Sway previously raised a $1.2 million seed round back in 2007.Shoutlet is a social media distribution platform. It enabables users to distribute content to social media oriented sites ...

AudioMicro now features 200K tracks

by Ronny Kerr, January 19, 2010 | Comments

Stock music and sound effects database adds 20,000 track-strong "Platinum Collection"

AudioMicro, stock music and sound effects provider, just announced that it has added 20,000 new music tracks to its online library. The tracks, which have been dubbed the "Platinum Collection," span a variety of genres and styles, which strengthen AudioMicro's database in more ways than one: the company says it now offers its users over 200,000 tracks.Last big update we ...

Ed site lands $8 million to train nurses

by Matt Bowman, January 19, 2010 | Comments

Lightspeed Venture Partners leads round in Orbis, sees opportunity in online medical education.

VCs have, for the most part, steered clear of education startups, save for a few areas where consumers are willing to open their wallets — things like standardized test prep and language learning. However, Lightspeed Venture Partners thinks it’s found a goldmine in nurse training. Today, the firm announced an $8 million round for IL-based Orbis Education, which helps universities ...

Flook: Location discovery for stumblers

by Ronny Kerr, January 19, 2010 | Comments (1)

Another Gowalla/Foursquare competitor, but this one comes with serendipity

The location discovery market for mobile apps is starting to look like the social discovery market on the Web. In just the same way that Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon provide varying experiences for discovering and sharing interesting and cool sites online, Foursquare, Gowalla, and others may soon each etch out their own niches in the vast mobile market. And the ...

Think the Internet will replace cable?

by Mark Cuban, January 18, 2010 | Comments

It's cheaper to reach a big audience using traditional cable distribution vs the Web

As is the normal way on the Internet, people love to read headlines. Of course, they rarely read the substance of the article behind the headline. They take the headline and run with it as gospel. This is particularly true of internet video and the presumption by many that the internet will be so vast and powerful that its a ...

Twitter vs. the Twitter ecosystem

by Fred Wilson, January 18, 2010 | Comments

The latter is 3 to 5x bigger than the former and that delta is likely to grow larger

John Borthwick, co-founder of Betaworks, parent company to bit.ly, twitterfeed, tweetdeck, chartbeat, and many other interesting web services, posted yesterday on "Ongoing tracking of the real time web …" Through these various Betaworks companies, John and the team have access to a tremendous amount of data and if you are interested in this subject, you really should read John's post. ...

OneRiot releases realtime ad network RiotWise

by Ronny Kerr, January 15, 2010 | Comments

Innovative RiotWise delivers advertising content directly to the stream

OneRiot has just made RiotWise, the search engine's solution to monetizing real-time Web applications, available to all developers. The product had previously been made available for various iPhone apps, Twitter clients, and third-party search engines, but starting today any and all developers will be able to take advantage of the technology.RiotWise monetizes real-time content by actually inserting advertising content directly ...

Google Suggest knows where you are

by Matt Bowman, January 15, 2010 | Comments

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