What you need to know - Thursday 9/9/10

NY Times going digital, $15 million for charging smart cars, Livescribe rises $39 million

Ebyline, a new social media community that connects freelance journalists and syndicated news, launched on Wednesday. The site, which requires either an editorial invitation or a rigorous application process, will not only allow freelancers to take on work, but will also allow publications to syndicate their work.

Amazon streamlines its payments system. The new Checkout by Amazon will allow consumers to make purchases on non-Amazon sites with their Amazon credentials, by adding in the contacts and payment system.

Jibe, a social networking site that uses the power of your social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, launched Wednesday at 8pm. The site, after being in Beta for several months and raising a significant amount of capitol in March.

Tokyo-based myGengo raised a $750,000 seed round. The funding came from several well known angel investors including, Dave McClure, Felix Miller co-founder of last.fm, Joshua Schachter the found of Delicious, Brian Nelson,Christoph Janz, and Benjamin Joffe.

Coulomb Technologies raises $15 million in their third round of funding. The company makes charging stations for electric cars will use the Series C funding in order to help accelerate product development of the ChargePoint® Network.

The New York Times plans to go all digital at an undetermined future date. Chairman and publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, implied that the NYT might print its last edition in 2015. They are also working on a First Click Free program with Google.

Livescribe, the maker of smart pens, just received $39 million in Series C funding. Funding came from Crosslink Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Qualcomm, TransLink Capital, Presidio Ventures, Keating Capital and existing investors VantagePoint Venture Partners, Lionhart, and Aeris Capital.

Google Instant, Google's new smart search feature, launched this week. Instant will show results as you are typing in the results field while you are searching. They estimate that this new technique can save 2-5 seconds per search.

PlacePunch launched this week its own location-based marketing platform, and signed up InterContinental Hotels as one of its first clients. The PlacePunch platform allows businesses and franchises of any size to create online marketing campaigns for location-based social networks and build loyalty programs to reward customers for checking in at their venues.  For example, the aforementioned coffee shop might be part of a chain of coffee shops (we’ll call it Smarbucks) and it might reward you with a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for checking in at one of its venues 10 times on Foursquare.