Analysts at Wall Street’s major financial firms initiated wholesale coverage of LinkedIn on Tuesday, putting forth their opinions of the company’s future growth prospects and estimates for how the stock should perform. Wall Street’s predictions for LinkedIn, in a word? Bullish. Read more »
Facebook has come under fire for implementing an anti-spam system that mistakenly shut off a number of legitimate third-party applications. For all the impressive growth Facebook has displayed, it looks like the company still has a ways to go when it comes to managing public perception. Read more »
Formspring.me has hit a major milestone in its relatively short lifespan. The 18-month-old San Francisco-based startup, which allows users to create profile pages on which anonymous people can ask them questions, now has 25 million registered users. Read more »
Foursquare has raised $50 million in a new funding round led by venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, bringing Foursquare’s total venture capital investment to just over $70 million. The new backing will certainly come in handy as Foursquare works to keep its own edge in a growing space. Read more »
UPDATED: The buzz around European music streaming service Spotify’s United States launch just keeps getting louder. Our sources reveal that Spotify’s US launch will happen in mid-July and feature a tiered pricing plan. Spotify US may initially be invite-only, an anonymous report said. Read more »
In Silicon Valley, happy days are indeed here again: Investors are feeling generous, the IPO market is percolating, and the tech industry’s biggest players have worked up a very healthy appetite for mergers and acquisitions. Read more »
Our 12 LaunchPad finalists — Acunu, Beyondcore, BigSwitch, Cloudability, CloudFloor, DotCloud, GenieDB, PHP Fog, Real-Status, vCider and Zerto — reflect the growing maturity in the cloud space Read more »
In recent years, the increasing abundance of open APIs have changed the way companies do business — in a major way. Some even say that a company having an API today is just as common, and important, as having a website in the year 2000. Read more »
Cloud computing technologies have helped remove many of the intrinsic barriers programmers used to encounter when developing, deploying and scaling software applications. Now, the biggest hurdles developers often face are human: their own corporate IT teams. That’s the problem DevOps aims to solve. Read more »
Facebook announced Thursday it has added Reed Hastings, the chairman and CEO of Netflix, to its board of directors. The addition of Hastings to Facebook’s boardroom is the latest signal of the Palo Alto, California-based social networking giant’s growing focus on the entertainment industry. Read more »
The old days of securing information with virtual barbed-wire fences are over. Today, security aspects have to be incorporated into software applications from the ground floor to ensure safety. And whether an application is hosted in the cloud or on a native server is almost moot. Read more »
It would be understandable for people to view Microsoft Azure, the company’s enterprise cloud hosting service, as a direct competitive play. After all, the product was launched in February 2010, well after Microsoft’s fellow software giants Amazon and Google had positioned themselves in the cloud computing […] Read more »
Sequoia will be crowdsourcing its job application process through Talenthouse, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that allows companies and artists to hold design contests for things like album art and logos. Sequoia isn’t an investor in Talenthouse– yet. Could this essentially be a public tire-kicking session? Read more »
Pinger, a San Jose, Calif.-based startup that initially dealt in web-based voice messaging, has launched a free service for sending texts over a web browser. The new feature, dubbed Textfree Web, could well bridge the gap between traditional SMS and the quickly growing mobile messaging market. Read more »
Travel search startup Hipmunk is bringing its super slick user interface (UI)– and arguably the web’s cutest mascot– to the iPad, just in time for the summer travel season. The San Francisco-based company has launched a custom iPad app and an update to its iPhone offering. Read more »
Wildfire Interactive has had solid success with its flagship product, CEO Victoria Ransom tells me. Since the company’s public launch two years ago, Wildfire has attracted big name clients, grown its staff, and become profitable. But the Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup isn’t resting on its laurels. Read more »
It looks like rumors of display advertising’s death were greatly exaggerated. Nearly all the tech industry’s largest players are expected to report growth in their display ad businesses for 2011, with Facebook leading the pack. Why are display and banner ads on the upswing? Read more »
If you think downloading yet another mobile app featuring photo-sharing, geo-location, and social networking is crazy, prepare yourself for a moment of insanity. MeetTrover, a nifty new iPhone app launched in May that perfectly fills the gaps left by Instagram, Foursquare and Yelp. Read more »
UPDATED. Spotify, the European on-demand music service, has closed on about $100 million in a new funding round from DST, Kleiner Perkins and Accel Partners that values the company at $1 billion. The fresh funding will be put toward Spotify’s highly anticipated US launch. Read more »
Lot18, the membership-only daily deals website for high end wine, is set to expand into three new product categories: food, epicurean travel, and spirits. Lot18 will start rolling out the new verticals, starting with food, within the next several weeks, CEO Philip James tells me. Read more »
Many recent headlines have been devoted to Facebook’s focus on HTML5, and specifically on an internal HTML5-based project at the company dubbed “Project Spartan.” But Facebook’s investment in HTML5 is nothing new — and it’s certainly nothing that the company has been secretive about. Read more »
The folks over at San Francisco startup Sincerely have been fast and furious since the company’s April launch, with several iterations of the Postagram app. Next up is PopBooth, an app for taking and printing photo booth-style photos with an iPhone or an iPad. Read more »
WayIn is a new startup being developed by Sun Microsystems’ co-founder Scott McNealy. But so far, the tech industry veteran is going about WayIn’s launch in a slightly unexpected way: entirely over Twitter. On Wednesday, McNealy took to Twitter to answer questions about his new company. Read more »
In the web’s most popular marketplaces, such as eBay and Craigslist, anonymity is still the norm. A new San Francisco-based startup called Copious is looking to change that. Copious has built an online marketplace in which all buyers and sellers are linked to their Facebook identities. Read more »
The power balance between desktop computers and mobile devices has finally shifted. Google debuted improvements to its web search that show an increased prioritization of the mobile experience. Two of the three features make desktop search like mobile and the other is made for mobile. Read more »
Facebook’s S-1 could come as early as October of this year, CNBC reported on Monday. Facebook is said to be targeting the first quarter of 2012 for its IPO, which could value the social network at more than $100 billion, according to the report. Read more »
The “uncanny valley”– the quality of an animation or robot looking close to, but not exactly like, real life — may be set to get even smaller. MIT researchers have developed new computing techniques for reproducing the slight natural blur of moving objects in animation. Read more »
Bunchball, the social gaming software company, has raised $6.5 million in a new funding round. The San Jose, Calif.-based startup has recently received “knocks on the door” from potential acquirers, but opted to raise money instead to bet on growing more, CEO Jim Scullion told me. Read more »
The summer of the tech S-1 continues: CafePress has filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $80 million in an IPO. The S-1 reveals the e-commerce company made $2.7 million in net income on $128 million in revenues in 2010. Read more »
Apple appears to be getting a little help from its frenemies in getting iCloud off the ground. A series of screenshots posted at InfiniteApple indicates that iCloud may be utilizing Amazon’s cloud storage system AWS and Microsoft’s Azure cloud service to help run iMessage. Read more »
Interactive fashion website Polyvore has officially entered into inflection point territory. The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup, which is backed with $8.2 million in venture capital, has achieved profitable operations and is currently seeing record web traffic, co-founder Jess Lee told me in an interview this week. Read more »
Postagram is a product with a huge potential for mass appeal. While the product launched on Instagram, which is popular with an influential set of early adopters, with Postagram for Android, the company’s product is now accessible to a much wider audience. Read more »
Online advertising platform startup Taykey officially launched out of stealth mode Thursday with the announcement of a $9 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. The round officially serves as the two-year-old company’s series B funding and brings Taykey’s total investment to $11 million. Read more »
Another week, another Facebook privacy firestorm. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking giant has come under fire for potentially violating user privacy by turning on facial recognition technology worldwide. Here’s a look at some of the things people around the web are saying about the issue. Read more »
Digital coupon company Coupons.com has closed on a $200 million funding round. About half of this round will be used to provide liquidity to early investors and employees at the 13-year-old company, and the rest will be put toward meeting growing demand, CEO Steven Boal said. Read more »
The travel web search has been one of the tech industry’s most crowded and cutthroat spaces since the launch of Expedia 15 years ago. But the stiff competition didn’t stop Adam Goldstein, the CEO of San Francisco-based startup Hipmunk, from throwing his hat in the ring. Read more »
World IPv6 Day, a 24-hour test of the new version of the Internet address protocol IPv6, is slated to begin on Wednesday June 8th at midnight UTC. With Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and many others participating, how will the Internet handle the big test? Read more »
UberMedia, the independent maker of apps for Twitter, continues to go Hollywood. On Tuesday, the company launched Uber50 for iPhone, a customized UberSocial iPhone app designed by rapper 50 Cent. Celebrity endorsements are an age-old marketing strategy, but not typically for tech companies. Read more »
Apple’s WWDC keynote address, to be presented by Steve Jobs and other Apple executives, kicks off at 10 AM PDT. We’ll be liveblogging the presentation for you right here, so you can stay on top of Apple’s exciting new software announcements as they unfold. Read more »
Google’s acquisition of social analytics technology startup PostRank indicates the company is also looking beyond its own walls to get its social efforts off the ground. Scouting for fresh talent externally is a smart move for Google, an aging player in an increasingly cutthroat industry. Read more »
