Facebook announced on Thursday a dramatic new user interface for profiles called “Timeline.” In a keynote speech at the company’s f8 conference in San Francisco, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described Timeline as “a great way to discover all the things people have done their whole life.” Read more »
Twitter has acquired Julpan, a New York City-based startup that analyzes real-time data collected from blogs, Tweets, status updates and news sources. It’s just the latest in a series of moves Twitter’s made to better analyze the huge amounts of data that flow through its service. Read more »
6waves Lolapps, the newly-merged company that develops and publishes games for Facebook and other social networks, has launched a $10 million fund to invest in independent game developers. The 6L Fund is part of 6waves Lolapps’ play to become the”clear number two” to Zynga. Read more »
Adchemy, the six-year-old online ad technology company, has raised $61 million in a Series E funding round led by Microsoft. This round brings the total venture capital invested in Adchemy to $116 million, Adchemy CEO Murthy Nukala told me in an interview on Tuesday. Read more »
Yardsellr, the online marketplace that plugs into Facebook, has launched a new clothing and accessories site called Style.ly, aimed at a younger, fashion-focused demographic. The company is rebranding as YellowDog Media, which will act as an umbrella company to Style.ly, Yardsellr, and other forthcoming specialized marketplaces. Read more »
Facebook’s big f8 conference is now less than two days away, and it’s shaping up to be one of the hottest tickets in tech. Facebook has some splashy launches lined up to keep the crowd at the one-day conference happy — here’s what to expect. Read more »
Everyone’s favorite social network, Facebook, is getting even more personal, announcing that starting late Tuesday it will begin calibrating how it presents its News Feed feature based on how often a user signs into Facebook. That will more accurately highlight the most important news users missed. Read more »
TrustYou, a Munich-based startup that makes semantic search technology for categorizing online reviews, has taken on $5 million in Series A funding to fuel its U.S. growth. The company has already put a significant portion of the funding round toward acquiring ReviewAnalyst, its Texas-based rival. Read more »
Kids love toys. But the sheer number of toys and games continuously coming out on the market can make toy shopping a big drag for grownups. Amazon.com is launching a new site called YoYo aimed at making the toy shopping experience a bit less overwhelming. Read more »
Y Combinator is on the hunt for its next batch of startups, and the competition is stiff: The incubator generally accepts only three percent of the applications it receives. I sat down with YC partner Jessica Livingston to find out what they look for in entrepreneurs. Read more »
News Corporation has named Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer to its board of directors.The 50-year-old Breyer, a Silicon Valley venture capital veteran known for making early bets on AOL and Facebook, could bring some much-needed digital savvy to the New York City-based media behemoth. Read more »
Earlier this week Yelp said it was revising its daily deals strategy after encountering some “real challenges” in the space. According to new data from daily deals analysis firm Yipit, those challenges were indeed severe — and they may not be unique to just Yelp. Read more »
Seesmic, the company best known for making consumer-facing social networking apps, has shifted its strategy for the second time in its four-year history, this time to focus on building mobile apps for the enterprise. Can the third iteration of Seesmic finally bring the company success? Read more »
Summer is certainly the high season for vacations, and that also means it’s high season for taking lots of photographs. New research shows that during the summer of 2011, digital camera use waned as more people used their mobile phones to take photos than ever before. Read more »
This week Inkling debuted the 2.0 version of its software, which makes interactive and digital versions of college textbooks for the iPad. So GigaOM headed over to Inkling’s San Francisco headquarters to get an in-person demo from founder and CEO Matt MacInnis. Read more »
On Friday, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter’s Tasty Labs announced its first product to the public: Jig.com. Essentially, Jig allows people to post questions about anything they need — there are no categories yet, just one big stream — and allow anyone out there to answer them. Read more »
Internet radio company Pandora reported the financial results of its first three months as a public company Thursday. The company confirmed that while it still has a long way to go before it reaches the listener levels of traditional radio, its ads are now just as valuable. Read more »
Ness has launched its debut iOS app, a “personal search engine” that aims to provide highly personalized restaurant recommendations. Essentially it’s like a Pandora for restaurants: From the start it’s almost creepily accurate with its recommendations, and the more you use it, the better it gets. Read more »
Facebook has begun sending out invites for its annual f8 event set for September 22 in San Francisco. Despite its tagline as a developer conference, f8 2011 is not likely to be a snoozy hacker meetup — some splashy announcements are said to be in the works. Read more »
Big conferences and events are meant to be satisfying, useful and inspiring, but they often leave people flustered and unsure of exactly what to do. A new app called Bloodhound aims to help everyone involved with events — organizers, presenters and attendees — navigate through all that. Read more »
Lot18 has secured a small investment from some big-name backers, just as competition from Gilt Groupe heats up. The New York City-based daily deals site focused on high-end wine and complementary foods announced Wednesday it has received funding from Quidsi founders Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara. Read more »
Silicon Valley startup incubator Y-Combinator held the first of two demo days for its Summer 2011 class on Tuesday, unveiling 63 new companies. It’s the incubator’s largest class yet, and overall, a very impressive one. Here’s five of the most scene-stealing startups from this YC batch. Read more »
Facebook is poised to roll out a sweeping new redesign that places a significantly stronger emphasis on user privacy. The new features, which Facebook says have been in development long before the launch of Google+, will start to appear to web app users on Thursday. Read more »
Exclusive: Group Commerce, a New York City-based company that sells a software platform to let publishers host their own daily deal applications, has acquired geo-location startup Socialight. The Socialight team and technology will be put toward fleshing out Group Commerce’s mobile strategy, said CEO Jonty Kelt. Read more »
Twitter has launched its own “user galleries” to aggregate all the images users have uploaded into their Tweets in one place. It’s Twitter’s latest effort to up its “stickiness” factor, the quality that keeps users clicking around an app and makes them visit it more often. Read more »
Now closing on its second month, the Google+ social networking platform has seen rapid growth — and lots of attention — in its short lifetime. But new research indicates that the majority of Google+ users do not actually pitch in on the site very often, if at all. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard plans to spend some $10.25 billion to acquire Autonomy, the United Kingdom–based software and services company. HP’s balance sheet currently has $13 billion in cash. Why is the company making such a big bet? According to HP’s CEO, Leo Apotheker, it’s now or never. Read more »
Evernote, the notetaking software program aimed at helping users “remember everything,” has acquired image-sharing app Skitch. The full version of Skitch previously cost $19.99 in the Mac store, but will be free and soon available on “every desktop and mobile platform under the sun.” Read more »
Exclusive: Ask.com is amping up its star power. The Q&A search engine — which provides a mix of user-generated and algorithmically sourced content — has added several heavyweight partnerships with Lonely Planet, Weather Underground, and others to make sure it answers users’ questions in the best way possible. Read more »
Social gaming giant Zynga is the subject of a new patent infringement lawsuit, the latest in a string of such claims. Now that Zynga is under a microscope as it moves toward an IPO, will its legal troubles be too much for potential investors to handle? Read more »
Since its inception, StumbleUpon has worked pretty much as the name advertised, allowing you to stumble upon cool things on the web, rather than through explicit web searches. But a new “Explore Box” expands StumbleUpon’s offering significantly, bringing the app more search engine-like specificity. Read more »
Zimride, the startup that allows people to arrange shared car rides together, has been doing quite well with semi-private, paid networks since its 2007 launch. Now, the company is set to reach a much bigger audience with its first public platform and an in-app payment system. Read more »
Proving that virtual currency can be worth a good amount of real-life cash, social stock market Empire Avenue has landed $1.2 million in funding. Empire Avenue serves a unique and somewhat controversial purpose: It’s a stock market that puts a price on people instead of companies. Read more »
Thanks to a new product from Nielsen and Facebook, the Internet could be on the cusp of become a first-class citizen in the advertising world for good. But there’s just one problem: Do Facebook users want to be part of a Nielsen family? Read more »
Foursquare and Yelp are moving into more direct competition, feature by feature. On Monday, Foursquare launched a new feature that allows users to create lists of the places they’ve checked into or plan to visit, bringing it further into the review and recommendation space. Read more »
Want to help stimulate the economy? You may not need to go any further than your web browser’s search box. Each online search engine adds about 50 cents to the worldwide economy, according to a new research report from consultancy giant McKinsey & Company. Read more »
Twitter has rolled out two new features to help users know which of their tweets resonate with their social graph, and to get a better look at the activity of the people they follow. The new features appear to be designed to boost Twitter’s “stickiness” factor. Read more »
After months of legal wrangling, Cablevision and Viacom announced Wednesday they are putting their differences aside. The two companies have reached an agreement to resolve their litigation regarding Cablevision’s Optimum App iPad application. No financial terms of the settlement have been disclosed. Read more »
Andrew Mason has said that “Life is too short to be a boring company” — and his company Groupon continues to deliver the goods. The daily deals giant has filed an updated S-1 as part of its IPO preparation, and the document is not short on surprises. Read more »
