Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco, where she covers startups and Silicon Valley for GigaOM.
Prior to joining GigaOM, Colleen was a reporter for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times Group focused on M&A. Earlier, she was a reporter and contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter.
Colleen has a B.A. from Columbia University's Columbia College in New York City.
Glam Media on Thursday is launching a new website called Foodie.com, its first foray into the culinary space. It also serves as the first Glam site that fully incorporates the social networking features Glam acquired when it bought Ning in late 2011. Read more »
Netvibes, the San Francisco–based startup that allows people and brands to create personalized RSS feed dashboards, announced on Wednesday evening it has been acquired by French enterprise software firm Systèmes. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Read more »
Facebook on Wednesday updated its S-1 document to the Securities and Exchange commission for its planned initial public offering, and it’s a veritable data dump of new information about the social networking company. We dug through it so you don’t have to. Read more »
Path came under fire this week when it was discovered that its iPhone app uploads user address book data without notification. In a blog post Wednesday, Path CEO Dave Morin apologized, introduced a revised app, and said the company has erased the data from its servers. Read more »
Klout, the San Francisco-based startup that measures people’s “influence” across a variety of social networks, has made its first acquisition with the purchase of Blockboard, a Twitter-like mobile app that functions as a community bulletin board for posting messages viewable to your neighbors. Read more »
If you’ve ever planned a wedding or a big party, you know that finding and booking a venue is one of the biggest headaches of all. A new startup called Eventup runs an online marketplace to take the pain out of the party planning process. Read more »
Ignite Game Technologies, the San Francisco-based online gaming startup that specializes in car racing games, has raised $5 million in new funding, bringing its total investment to $17.5 million. The company makes massive multi-player online racing games in which people compete in real time Read more »
Well-designed websites and snazzy mobile apps aren’t just for travel search engines anymore. JetBlue Airways just debuted its own native app for the iPhone, along with a redesigned website. It’s a sign of how web startups and new apps are spurring innovation from bigger travel companies. Read more »
The healthcare industry is one step closer to going paperless. Doxo, the Seattle-based startup that makes “digital file cabinet” software, has signed up a number of major healthcare providers who will now use the system to send medical bills and collect patient fees online. Read more »
Facebook is in the process of converting all user profiles to the Timeline design. But according to a poll, the majority of people aren’t so keen on the new look. Seventy percent of all respondents disapproved of Timeline, as did 90 percent of people over 65. Read more »
At just 2.5 years old, Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has become a tech industry institution with holdings in Facebook, Twitter, and more. GigaOM talked with Andreessen to get his thoughts on Silicon Valley and the larger tech landscape. Read more »
Snazzy logos aren’t just for corporations anymore. Occupy.com, the soon-to-be-launched website for the international Occupy protest movement, has turned to crowdsourced design website 99Designs to find a logo. The “Occupy 99Designs” design contest has garnered nearly 400 entries in its first few hours online. Read more »
Vimeo has joined forces with General Electric and video publisher Cinelan to launch “Focus Forward” — a micro documentary series that aims to showcase big, world-changing technology innovations in a compelling way. All the videos will be three minutes long and posted online. Read more »
Path has updated its app for the iPhone with the debut Wednesday of version 2.0.5. The key new part of the update is the addition of a new effect called “Depth” that brings what’s known as tilt-shift capabilities to Path’s photo taking feature. Read more »
In Facebook’s IPO document filed Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg dedicated a significant portion of his letter to something a bit out of the ordinary: Teaching potential investors about “the Hacker Way” and dispelling the negative connotation the word “hacker” has gotten in the mainstream media. Read more »
The most highly anticipated initial public offering in today’s tech world is officially happening. Facebook filed S-1 documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday afternoon to raise a maximum of $5 billion. According to the filing, Facebook made $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011. Read more »
Twitter on Wednesday switched on enhanced brand pages for accounts owned by National Public Radio, NBC News, Volkswagen, and others. This is the first batch of premium Twitter pages from companies other than the handful of launch partners who unveiled enhanced brand pages in December. Read more »
It’s clear that Pinterest is really hot, but a new study shows just how powerful the virtual pinboard company has become. Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn combined, according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 Referral Traffic Report. Read more »
SocialFolders, a freemium application that launched last month to let you store and manage any file created on the social web, rolled out an integration with Evernote on Tuesday that lets users drag-and-drop content such as Tweets, Facebook updates, Instagram photos into their Evernote accounts. Read more »
Codecademy, the startup that makes an interactive and social web application aimed at teaching people how to write computer code, has gone the platform route. On Monday, the company debuted Course Creator, a platform that allows anyone to make educational courses to teach programming techniques. Read more »
Los Angeles-based startup Causecast this week debuted its Employee Impact Platform, a web-based program that connects companies and their employees with non-profits and charitable causes. With Causecast, small businesses can compete with larger, more established companies when it comes to offering employees ways to give back. Read more »
Personalized algorithms and social recommendations are great for a lot of things. But when it comes to getting news, these technologies can create an echo chamber, where our existing beliefs are reflected back to us. Uberpaper, a new site from Dmitry Shapiro, wants to combat that. Read more »
Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC has closed investment on its third fund at $55 million, making Fund III its biggest fund yet.
Clavier talked to GigaOM about why SoftTech decided to go so big, how the new cash will be invested, and the larger tech industry landscape. Read more »
San Francisco startup 1000memories has integrated its ShoeBox app for scanning and sharing old physical photos online with Facebook’s Timeline user interface. This means that people will be able to easily fill in the gaps on their Timeline between their birthdates and when they joined Facebook. Read more »
Apple reported impressive financial results on Tuesday, setting new records in its quarterly revenue and profit. Now, data from online portfolio manager SigFig indicates that the old Wall Street adage of “buy on the rumor, sell on the news” did not hold true in this case. Read more »
According to Facebook, reporters have been especially receptive to the Subscribe button feature launched in Sept. 2011. The number of journalists who have enabled the subscribe button is now in the thousands, and the average journalist has seen a 320-percent boost in subscribers since November. Read more »
SquareTrade, a San Francisco-based company that provides warranties for gadgets like the iPhone, landed a $238 million investment from Bain Capital. The new investment is being made jointly by Bain’s private equity and venture capital affiliates. Further financial details about the deal have not been disclosed. Read more »
Yahoo’s newly appointed CEO Scott Thompson wants the discussion over whether Yahoo is a media or tech company to come to an end — according to him, Yahoo can be both. But in this age of increasing specialization, is that a realistic goal? Read more »
Social Q&A site Formspring has experienced a dip in monthly unique visitors, as the two-year-old startup transitions out of the role of hot newcomer. The company is looking to aggressive mobile web and app development and an updated design to get the growth back on track. Read more »
Facebook said Tuesday it will convert all users’ profiles to the new Timeline interface over the next few weeks. Soon Timeline, which shows each user’s life over an expandable Timeline that dates all the way back to his or her birth, will be the only design available to all Facebook users. Read more »
LuxeYard, a site selling high-end home decor products, is launching Tuesday. Yes, it’s technically another flash sales site. But what’s interesting about LuxeYard is that it’s doing things a bit differently from the established players in the space such as One Kings Lane and Gilt Groupe. Read more »
Codecademy, which teaches users how to program for free with an interactive and social web application, has garnered more than 1 million users in less than five months. We talked to co-founder and CEO Zach Sims about how Codecademy started and where it’s going. Read more »
Summify’s sale to Twitter this week was good news for the startup, but bad news for many of its users, who expressed frustration that the news aggregation service would be mothballed post-deal. But startups News.me and Percolate are now vying to take on Summify’s users. Read more »
If you thought 2011 seemed like a big year for web startup funding, you were absolutely right. According to the latest MoneyTree report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, 2011 saw the highest level of VC investment in Internet companies over the past decade. Read more »
At a press event in San Francisco on Wednesday evening, Facebook unveiled a host of new apps — more than 60 in total — that integrate with its Timeline user interface. The social networking company also announced it will begin approving Timeline apps from all developers. Read more »
Eater.com, the popular blog network that covers bar and restaurant news across 15 metropolitan areas, has teamed up with online matchmaking service HowAboutWe to launch “Eater Dating.” The service will encourage people to set up foodie-centric first dates, such as “Eat oysters at the Ferry Building.” Read more »
Social gaming company 6waves Lolapps (which is now going by the shortened moniker “6L”) is continuing its stated quest to take on industry leader Zynga. The company is announcing Wednesday the acquisition of Escalation Studios, a Dallas, Texas-based mobile game company. Read more »
The anti-SOPA and PIPA demonstrations don’t stop with site-wide blackouts planned for Wednesday by a number of web giants. People also have plans to meet up in real life and take the protest to the streets in cities such as San Francisco, New York and Seattle. Read more »
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang has resigned from Yahoo’s board of directors and all his other positions with the company, effective Tuesday. Yang has been with Yahoo since he co-founded the company in 1995; his departure comes less than two weeks after Scott Thompson joined as CEO. Read more »
It’s been a long time coming, but the worlds of fashion and technology have finally begun to combine in a serious way. A new crop of companies is using the web to make the process more data-driven and social than ever before. Read more »
