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Kleiner Perkins today reasserted itself as a powerhouse and relevant venture capital firm by rounding up Facebook, Zynga and Amazon to announce a $250 million fund for social web startups, called the sFund. Kleiner partner John Doerr today won on-stage testimonials from Facebook, Amazon and Zynga. Read More »

Posterous, the email-based blogging platform, aims to keep things simple and easy to use, but it can’t resist adding new more advanced features such as increased support for groups, premium accounts for businesses, proximity-based geoblogs, and a better bookmarklet to bring in outside content. Read More »

 
 

Esther Dyson, Chairman of ED Ventures

In light of recent outcry about social networking privacy lapses and potential misuse of users’ personal information, long-time web thought leader Esther Dyson had this to say at the marketing conference Pivot in New York City today: online privacy a marketing problem. Read More »

Have a hankering to take a few days off and go somewhere? A new startup called Wanderfly, which launched today, wants to help inspire you. Type in your approximate travel dates, budget, duration and interests, and Wanderfly will serve up a set of glossy options. Read More »

Now angel investing seems to be becoming an industry, complete with its own tools, services and even an iPhone game. Today comes the beta launch of CapLinked, a web-based tool for managing fundraising that helps startups and investors communicate with each other and share documents. Read More »

Today I attended Y Combinator’s annual Startup School at Stanford University. From the 11 talks from startup founders and funders full of first-person lessons, these were some of the most resonant tips for other entrepreneurs about what to do and what not to do. Read More »

For the most part, as soon as I lose connectivity, my mobile apps are mostly broken. Musing over to my most-used apps — Gmail, Facebook and Twitter — only gets me error messages and frustration. And even Angry Birds and Word Warp are handicapped when they’re… Read More »

More Must Reads

Google today on its quarterly earnings call broke out some numbers that it doesn’t historically give (and doesn’t promise to give in the future): revenue and monetization rates for display, video and mobile advertising. The intent was to show that Google isn’t just a search company.… Read More »

Mozilla Corporation, which makes the Firefox browser, has named its next CEO: Gary Kovacs. This was a planned transition — current CEO John Lilly wants to become a VC at Greylock Partners — but perhaps not an expected choice, given Kovacs comes from outside the Mozilla… Read More »

Facebook has done a remarkable job of getting developers to adopt its Credits virtual currency before the program was fully fledged. Today, the company announced a partnership with PlaySpan to add 20 additional ways for users to pay for credits and plans to accelerate rollout. Read More »

Microsoft today launched social search features for Bing created in partnership with Facebook. The two companies are teaming up to take on their common enemy, Google. The implementations are basic, but significant because they will automatically show up to all users of both Bing and Facebook.… Read More »

i/o Ventures, the new San Francisco Mission District tech incubator, invited an audience over last night to see what its first class of startups have been working on. i/o has a friendly and non-pretentious vibe, in keeping with its founding partners. Read More »

Former Google CIO Douglas Merrill has set out to provide an alternative to payday loans that uses data analysis to determine whether borrowers are likely to pay him back. Called ZestCash, Merrill’s Hollywood-based startup is launching tomorrow in the Utah market. Read More »

“Laughable,” “absurd,” “ludicrous” and “pointless” were words Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone used Monday night to describe a recent Malcolm Gladwell story in the New Yorker about the futility of social media to create real social change. Read More »

The average Malaysian Internet user has 233 friends on social networks, which is the most in the world, according to interviews with nearly 50,000 online users in 46 countries. By contrast, the least social web users appear to be the Japanese, who count only 29 friends. Read More »

Crowdsourcing is often used for fairly menial tasks: correcting databases, screening offensive images, transcribing audio. But what if you could make those little bits of human labor even more menial, discrete and interchangeable? That’s what the Finnish company Microtask does. Read More »

Google today announced it is shutting down its free U.S. and Canada directory assistance service, 1-800-GOOG-411, to put its focus on its other speech recognition services and extending them to new languages. As of Nov. 12, the number will go dead. Read More »

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