Here’s a company you should be paying attention to, if you’re not already: Zong, the mobile payments startup, said today it’s raised $15 million in a round led by Matrix Partners and is now fully spun off from Switzerland-based Echovox. Read more »
The phrase tour de force is frustratingly over-used by movie and restaurant critics, but that’s exactly what Facebook’s f8 conference on April 21 in San Francisco was. The company convincingly laid out an ambitious plan for web domination, pleased web developers with straightforward and far-reaching tools, ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The secret behind Aardvark’s success was acute awareness of how close they were to failure, Aardvark co-founders Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz said Friday. They detailed a process of rapid idea rejection and extensive testing throughout Aardvark’s short startup history. Read more »
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Facebook has been inaccessible to many — if not all — users for the last 30 minutes. This is incredibly bad timing for the company, which is trying to pitch itself this week as a central part of the web’s infrastructure. Read more »
Users who sign up for Blippy, the service that encourages sharing personal transactions online, do so with the expectation of becoming more open about their purchase data. But they don’t expect for their credit card numbers to be posted online. That’s what appears to have happened. Read more »
Facebook has given three carefully chosen launch partners — Microsoft’s Docs.com, Yelp and Pandora — have access to a powerful, inventive and creepy tool called “instant personalization.” The company hopes to extend it to other partners but is testing the waters with these sites first. Read more »
Facebook, with its open graph announcements at the f8 conference today, is digging itself deep into the infrastructure of the web. The implications are thrilling, but also scary — what if Facebook goes down? Read more »
Facebook, as expected, launched its master plan to make the rest of the web social at its f8 conference in San Francisco today. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and director of product Bret Taylor laid out three major initiatives to that effect. Read more »
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus invited social game developers to band together to create an “app economy” at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco. Maintaining the structure of applications built on top of platforms will be key to Zynga and its competitors’ success, he said. Read more »
Facebook is not only launching products this week but also killing them. The company announced this morning it will no longer support Facebook Lite, a stripped-down version of its site meant to load faster and be more accessible in places without broadband. Read more »
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Facebook today is rolling out the first set of launches around its f8 developer conference this week. The site is making user profiles more dynamic, by transforming static interests (like cooking or hiking, or a certain band) into “community pages.” Read more »
A new open platform called XAuth is being released Monday by Meebo, with the support of Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Yahoo, JanRain, Disqus, and Gigya. XAuth detects whether or not a user is logged into web services elsewhere so a publisher can prominently display those preferred sites. Read more »
Collective buying site Groupon has taken $135 million from DST and Battery Ventures, valuing it at more than $1 billion. It has now raised more than $170 million, with previously projected revenue of $100 million for 2010. Read more »
Though the Twitter developer ecosystem is doing its best to move forward after Twitter bought an iPhone client, there’s still fallout to be had. The day after Twitter bought Tweetie, the maker of competing mobile client Tweetarena put its assets up on eBay. Read more »
Could a broad set of patents around collective buying be the ammo Tippr needs to chase Groupon? That’s what CEO Martin Tobias is betting, having bought up the intellectual property generated by bubble-era Mercata from its investor Paul Allen. Read more »
Twitter’s Chirp conference this week was ultimately an overdue kickoff of the company’s developer community. With more than 100,000 applications created on its platform to date, it’s frankly amazing that Twitter hadn’t formalized its roadmap and addressed competition with developers before. Read more »
Twitter will soon give developers access to streams of user activity on its system, and allow them to create their own annotations to send along with tweets, Twitter’s director of platform Ryan Sarver said at the company’s Chirp conference, being held in San Francisco today. Read more »
“Twitter has always been about developers,” Evan Williams told Chirp attendees today. “Twitter is the ecosystem more than any other web services that has ever existed. You’ve helped define it, poured in your time and energy all the while putting up with our growing pains.” Read more »
Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat for a Q&A at the company’s Atmosphere event yesterday pitching its Apps platform to the enterprise. A couple of his remarks stuck with me today and I wanted to share them as well as a video of the session. Read more »
After All Facebook reported this morning that Facebook is testing a new “Questions” feature, someone turned to Quora, the well-funded Q&A site created by former Facebook execs, to ask “Why is Facebook creating a Q&A product to compete against Quora?” Facebook’s Blake Ross answered. Read more »
Twitter and Facebook will hold their developer conferences this Wednesday (April 13) and next Wednesday (April 21) in San Francisco. It’s a juxtaposition that begs for comparison, so here you have it. Read more »
In advance of his keynote at the Ad Age conference on Tuesday (not to mention Twitter’s own Chirp conference on Wednesday), COO Dick Costolo shared details of the company’s new ad platform, Promoted Tweets, with a couple of news outlets. Read more »
Google today is unveiling a rewritten Google Docs, tweaked to present information in real time as well as to enable better syncing across browsers — the goal being to persuade CIOs that instead of upgrading to Microsoft Office 2010 they should switch to Google Docs. Read more »
Of all the times to launch into the Twitter ecosystem — with developers quaking from last week’s revelation that Twitter would compete with them head-on, and Twitter expected to launch a monetization platform this week — Bill Gross is announcing his new company TweetUp. Read more »
Facebook’s U.S. search queries grew 48 percent in March, bringing the company to 2.7 percent market share, making it larger than AOL and almost as big as Ask. Read more »
Swoopo, the crazy “entertainment shopping” site where users buy bids to compete against one another and lengthen the time until an auction closes, has spread to seven countries, facilitated 200,000+ transactions, and inspired tens of behavioral economics academic papers over the last 4.5 years. Read more »
Apple today previewed its big push into mobile advertising, including plans to sell and host all ads on a new iAd platform coming with the launch of iPhone OS 4 this summer. Apple will sell and host ads directly, giving developers a 60 percent split. Read more »
Recommending relevant content can be dramatically effective. After The Filter, a white-label content recommendation system, was implemented on the video site Dailymotion in March, the site experienced a 40 percent increase in time spent and a 25 percent increase in video streams per visit. Read more […] Read more »
One Groupon competitor I’ve found, San Francisco-based HomeRun, has innovated in useful ways around the social motivations that entice people to purchase coupons. The company has added at least four major social features that encourage impulse buying and engagement. Read more »
Recommending relevant content can be dramatically effective. After The Filter, a white-label recommendation system, was implemented on the video site Dailymotion, the site experienced a 40 percent increase in time spent. Now The Filter has secured its biggest media partner to date, NBC. Read more »
Box.net, the cloud-based content management platform, has brought in $15 million in Series C funding led by the SaaS-focused firm Scale Venture Partners, and including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and U.S. Venture Partners. It brings the company’s total funding since 2005 to $29.5 million. Read more »
The Apple-Google breakup poses a promising opportunity for other existing and emerging technology powerhouses. But which one of them will be Apple’s new most-favored nation? Signs and logic point to Facebook. Read more »
New Digg CEO Kevin Rose is wasting no time in changing the direction of the site, killing the DiggBar and reinstating banned sites. But the big challenge he faces is to restart Digg by making it more social, real, personalized and engaging. Read more »
Stitcher, a company that creates personalized talk radio streams (like Pandora but for non-music content), has raised a $6 million Series B round. It’s trying to help people bring audio to their mobile devices and cars, and along the way introduce them to new content. Read more »
Though Yelp steadfastly denies allegations — and now lawsuits — that its salespeople pressure businesses to buy advertising to remove negative reviews, the company tonight addressed them head-on. Specifically, it will become more transparent about its filtering process and give less favorable treatment to advertisers. Read more »
Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg for the last five years, is stepping down from the gig in order to pursue his “entrepreneurial calling,” he said today. Kevin Rose, founder and long-time public face of the company, will become chairman and CEO. Read more »
Facebook has acquired the group photo-sharing site Divvyshot, a three-person team that will shut down its product and work on Facebook Photos as engineers. Divvyshot was a beautiful product that launched to the public in February after participating last year in the Y Combinator program. Read more »
Earlier this month Google preannounced a feature that would allow apps to embed themselves directly into email messages called “Gmail Contextual Gadgets.” That previews a future where email is rich, dynamic and integrated with services across the web — AKA an app platform. Read more »
We like companies that use real-time data to help customers battle variable pricing, so we brought Yapta CEO Tom Romary in for a video interview. Yapta tracks travel prices to alert users to the right time to buy, and when they’re entitled to a refund. Read more »
The wonky “knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha, under the leadership of new managing director Barak Berkowitz, is now moving from polishing its product to getting people to actually use it by changing up its distribution strategy. Read more »
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