Venture capital investments continued to grow at a rapid clip during Q2 2011, with investments in Internet-specific companies rising to the highest quarterly level since 2001. But some industry experts are saying that the current level of VC activity may be unsustainable. Read more »
Zillow, the real estate search website, has priced its initial public offering at $20 per share. The stock will begin trading under the single-letter ticker symbol “Z” on the Nasdaq exchange on Wednesday morning. Zillow will raise a total of about $75 million in the IPO. Read more »
Scribd has launched a new iPhone and web application called Float aimed at putting all of a user’s reading materials — from books, to blog posts, to newspaper and magazine articles — in one integrated format. But will the app be too ambitious for its own good? Read more »
Even in these days of social networking over-sharing, some of the most important details of our lives remain in completely unwritten form. Proust, a startup that bills itself as a private place for families and friends to share memories, is trying to change exactly that. Read more »
On Monday, Cisco announced plans to layoff a total of 6500 employees worldwide, or about nine percent of its full-time staff. The large-scale layoffs are just the latest in a series of recent moves Cisco has made to get back in its investors’ good graces. Read more »
At nearly ten years old, web discovery engine company StumbleUpon is certainly well past the point where websites can attract users by being a new and hot trend. But the San Francisco-based company has proven that slow and steady growth can still lead to success. Read more »
Our collective addiction to smartphones translates into some big money for the consumer electronics industry. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, the industry is on track to surpass $190 billion in overall shipment revenues this year, and a primary driver of that growth will be smartphones. Read more »
Social game developer Lolapps has signed an agreement to merge with game publisher 6waves The newly combined company will have one major competitor in its sights: Zynga. “We’re going to be the clear number two in the space very quickly,” said Lolapps CEO Arjun Sethi. Read more »
Many white-collar workers end up sending slight variations on the same email over and over again. Web application startup Tout has announced a new integration with LinkedIn that could be a major boon to a number of potential power users in fields like sales and PR. Read more »
When it comes to the social networking crowd, sex apparently sells. Victoria’s Secret ended June as the top retailer on Facebook with more than 14.3 million fans, according to the latest data from e-commerce software provider ChannelAdvisor. Walmart, the world’s top corporation by revenue, ranks fourth. Read more »
Astrid is best known for making a popular web and mobile app that allows users to create to-do lists with social features. But with a new batch of funding from Google Ventures and others, the San Francisco-based startup has a much bigger picture in mind. Read more »
Spotify’s journey to the US has been highly anticipated almost since the on-demand music streaming service first launched in its native Europe in October 2008. But with all the Spotify buzz, let’s not forget about the great music services that were born here in the US. Read more »
Thanks to the rating systems in place on such popular websites as Yelp, Amazon and eBay, many people are comfortable evaluating things in absolute terms: a two-star restaurant, a B movie and so on. But new MIT research says this approach is fundamentally flawed. Read more »
UPDATED. Spotify U.S. is now in T-minus territory. A spokesperson for Spotify has confirmed that the popular European on-demand music streaming service will be available stateside on Thursday morning. GigaOM reported last month that Spotify’s U.S. launch would occur in mid-July. Read more »
If you’re curious about the technology behind Google+, you’re in luck. The project’s technical lead, Google engineer Joseph Smarr, is currently hosting an online question and answer session about the service, sharing details about the social platform’s development, technology, and plans for the future. Read more »
UPDATED: Last week, Facebook and Skype launched a new video calling application, hosted at facebook.com/videocalling. But Samuday Web Technologies says it was at that domain first. Samuday now says its video chat app was unceremoniously kicked off of Facebook to make way for the new Skype feature. Read more »
Web security startup CloudFlare has raised $20 million in a series B funding round. The San Francisco-based company, which has seen impressive growth since its September 2010 launch, makes a cloud-based software program that purportedly helps protect websites while also making them faster. Read more »
When Google discontinued support for QR codes in its Places product earlier this year, many saw it as an early death knell for the barcode scanning technology. But Google’s latest acquisition is evidence that the company may not be completely abandoning QR technology just yet. Read more »
Underneath Twitter’s fun and trendy public image, the data streamed through the microblogging service is apparently worth some big bucks. DataSift, one of only two companies authorized to re-syndicate Twitter’s content using its “firehose,” on Monday announced a $6 million venture capital funding round. Read more »
Much is being made lately of a potential new bubble forming in the tech industry. But some say things aren’t quite as frothy as they’re being made out to be. Many of today’s most well-funded startups may soon find themselves without necessary second round investors. Read more »
More than 10,000 developers behind some of the hottest mobile apps are using Foursquare’s application programming interface to tap into its location and places database, the company said Friday. The most popular apps running on Foursquare’s API include Instagram, Tweetdeck and Gowalla. Read more »
The web may be more social now than ever before, but according to a recent study, there’s still a lot more room to grow. Fewer than half of the world’s top websites link to Facebook or Twitter on their front pages, according to a new research. Read more »
Netvibes, the San Francisco-based startup that allows people and brands to create personalized RSS feed dashboards, has added social analytics capabilities to its web content monitoring platform. But can the company hold its own in today’s world of hyper-funded and hungry social media analytics startups? Read more »
Last month, Facebook came under fire for enacting new spam controls that disabled developer apps without prior notification. Facebook has softened its spam control policy and is now giving developers tools with more insight into when their apps are setting off spam alarms. Read more »
It looks like Zynga is polishing up the proverbial silver in the run-up to its planned IPO. The social gaming company has launched “PrivacyVille,” a new game-like tutorial that rewards users with zPoints, Zynga’s virtual currency, for learning more about the company’s privacy practices. Read more »
If you think people are over-sharing on the Internet today, brace yourself, says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. As the sharing booms, so will the online data. And Facebook plans to build more of its own data centers to deal with the coming data boom. Read more »
Facebook has announced a partnership with Skype that enables one-on-one video chat within the social networking website.The video chat debut is just the first of what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would be a series of launches the company has planned for the near future. Read more »
The team behind Diapers.com has made a new e-commerce site aimed at the other baby in the American household: the family pet. Quidsi, which is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, is announcing Wednesday the launch of Wag.com, an e-commerce site selling pet-related products. Read more »
Web discovery engine StumbleUpon is now the biggest traffic driver among social media websites in the US, according to global web analytics service StatCounter. The company unseated Facebook at the top during June 2011 .The ten-year-old StumbleUpon has been working diligently at its comeback since 2009. Read more »
The new Google+ social product includes a group chat application named “Huddle.” At least one company is particularly nonplussed with the app: Huddle, a London-based startup that provides cloud-based communication software. But this is not the first time Google has stepped on Huddle’s brand name turf. Read more »
Twitter announced Tuesday it has acquired BackType, an analytics platform aimed at helping companies and brands gauge their social media impact. The possible rationale for the deal is BackType’s Storm real-time big data processing platform that could help Twitter offer well-defined analytics. Read more »
With all the great languages, databases and cloud hosting options available, now is a great time to be a software programmers. But that same variety makes it very difficult to be the IT manager tasked with configuring applications. That is where PaaS startup DotCloud comes in. Read more »
Zynga has shown a notable uptick in acquisitions in recent months. But although much has been made of the volume and frequency of Zynga’s M&A activity, the S-1 Zynga filed Friday for its planned IPO revealed exactly how savvy it has been in making those deals. Read more »
Zynga on Friday filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $1 billion. The IPO filing comes just one day later than many people expected — reports have been bubbling for weeks that Zynga was planning to file its S-1 sometime in June. Read more »
Is Facebook’s long-awaited iPad application finally set to launch? Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly said the company plans to “launch something awesome” next week. The new product was developed entirely at Facebook’s Seattle office, the company’s only engineering outfit outside of its Silicon Valley headquarters. Read more »
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was not bluffing. On Wednesday evening, Amazon followed through with its threat to terminate its associates program in California after Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that will impose state sales taxes on online purchases made by California residents. Read more »
Amazon is taking its sales tax war to one of the biggest arenas of all: California. Amazon warned that it will shut down its Amazon Associates Program for California-based participants if the state passes a proposed bill that would impose new taxes on online retail sales. Read more »
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is stepping away from the site’s day-to-day operations. While many folks in the industry have seen this coming for months, the news has still raised eyebrows. But Stone is not the first person to step away from a company he helped start. Read more »
Apture, the San Francisco-based startup, has made a very useful addition to its “contextual exploration engine” technology with a new feature called “HotSpots” that automatically creates new visible hyperlinks within online content based on what readers are likely to want to know more about. Read more »
RockMelt has raised $30 million in a series B funding round led by Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Although Rockmelt has already seen interest from potential acquirers, the social browser company has opted to “double down” on the opportunity to grow independently. Read more »
