As website owners try to boost the amount of time their users spend online, the all-in-one site toolbar is becoming more popular. Wibiya, which makes a toolbar that allows users to chat and share links on Facebook and Twitter, is launching a developers platform and API. Read more »
AOL’s reported interest in merging with Yahoo seems more like a desperation move or a Hail Mary pass than any kind of coherent strategy for success on the part of either company. Neither has shown any evidence that it understands the new realities of the web. Read more »
As social networks become more popular, the challenge of finding relevance amid all the noise becomes exponentially harder. Klout, which is trying to build a comprehensive database of social influence online, says it is now integrating activity from Facebook into its service as well as Twitter. Read more »
The rapid growth of Groupon has gotten the attention of newspaper chains, with Cox Media the latest to announce that it’s launching a similar social-shopping service called DealSwarm. But news publishers may be too late to this particular game, just as they were with Craigslist. Read more »
Digg’s new CEO has written a blog post in which he apologizes for the missteps in the recent redesign, and promises to restore almost all the various features that die-hard Digg fans complained about losing. But can all this apologizing restore Digg to its former glory? Read more »
Social gaming is at the forefront of the drive for real-time data, as companies like Zynga look for any information that will help them target users, and that in turn has created a market for analytical tools such as Kontagent and its “user-centric” data model. Read more »
Angels are winning the startup-funding race, and that appears to be accelerating an ongoing shift in the venture capital market. As more startups are turning to angels for funding, recent data shows that the amount of money raised by traditional VC funds continues to shrink. Read more »
Esquire’s new magazine app for the iPad is only the latest example of something that is becoming increasingly clear: publishers are hoping you will forget about the Internet and social media and all of those other things that get in between you and their content. Read more »
Union Square Ventures investor Fred Wilson came to Toronto earlier this week for a series of meetings with startups and venture investors, and to judge some young companies at a local DemoCamp, and said that the startup atmosphere in Toronto reminded him of New York. Read more »
Three out of four parents don’t believe social networks are doing a good enough job of protecting the privacy of their children, according to a new survey. Common Sense Media also found 92 percent of parents are concerned their children share too much information online. Read more »
Bit.ly, the URL shortening service that was spun off by John Borthwick’s Betaworks incubator, has closed a $10-million Series B financing, which the company’s CEO says will be used to build out new features and also to make further moves to monetize the service’s growing traffic. Read more »
Google is reportedly testing the integration of Twitter within Google News, which would allow users to login and see news stories shared by people they follow. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said the web giant would be adding “a social layer” to all its services. Read more »
Angel investor Dave McClure has added a roster of mentors and advisors to the team at his recently launched seed fund/incubator 500 Startups, a group that includes Google’s “open advocate” Chris Messina, Josh Elman of Twitter, Slideshare CEO Rashmi Sinha and Hunter Walk of YouTube. Read more »
Some Facebook users don’t like the fact that the new Groups feature allows them to be “tagged” and automatically added to a group, saying the company should stop opting people in to new services by default. Others, however, said the new features could actually replace Twitter. Read more »
During a recent interview in Toronto, venture investor Fred Wilson shared some thoughts about the recent “AngelGate” clash between “super-angels” and traditional VCs, as well as some of the big trends online that he is thinking about as he makes investments for Union Square Ventures. Read more »
When it comes to live-blogging news events, plenty of bloggers and journalism outlets use their own in-house tools — but more and more news organizations are turning to all-in-one, cloud-based solutions such as ScribbleLive, which wants to become a fully fledged content-management system for journalists. Read more »
If you’re looking for tips on what not to do with your startup, reading about the failure of someone else’s company can be a good place to start. Today, it was entrepreneur Ben Yoskovitz’s turn to write about the recent failure of his startup, Standout Jobs. Read more »
Analytics service Trendrr today launched a new version of its social-media dashboard that incorporates location along with the usual Twitter tracking. The service pulls in data from Foursquare and Gowalla, as well as aggregating “like” activity via Facebook’s open-graph protocol and reputation scores via Klout. Read more »
Marketers have been lured by how easy it is to set up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for their brands, but according to a new report, their content often doesn’t get through, because Generation Y users are overwhelmed with Facebook friends and Twitter messages already. Read more »
Twitter founder Evan Williams announced today in a post on the company’s blog that he is stepping down from the CEO position at the rapidly growing social-networking startup, and that former chief operating officer Dick Costolo will take the CEO position, effective immediately. Read more »
LinkedIn today launched a new feature for college students at over 60 universities that it calls “Career Explorer,” which will allow students to explore different career paths based on their school, their level of education, and the industry they hope to join when they graduate. Read more »
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed in the new movie The Social Network as being obsessed with impressing a girlfriend and getting noticed by an exclusive club at Harvard, but early Facebook employee Matt Cohler says the character is nothing like the Mark Zuckerberg he knows. Read more »
Tweetbeat, a new service that launched this week from Kosmix, uses the company’s filtering algorithm and semantic-analysis engine to make sense of the Twitter firehose, and then allows viewers to zoom in on topics, pause the live-stream and even rewind to view past events. Read more »
Eager to get over the embarrassing departure of former chairman and CEO Mark Hurd, who joined Oracle and was subsequently sued by his former employer, Hewlett-Packard has named a new CEO — but the response to its choice has been underwhelming at best. Read more »
Eager to get over the embarrassing departure of former chairman and CEO Mark Hurd, who joined Oracle and was subsequently sued by his former employer, Hewlett-Packard has named a new CEO — but the response to its choice has been underwhelming at best. Read more »
The touch interface has effectively taken over, thanks to the success of the iPhone, and every mobile device maker is trying to catch up and figure out how to use it, mobile designer and former Nokia staffer Christian Lindholm told the GigaOM Mobilize conference on Thursday. Read more »
As bandwidth use increases, the key to generating value from telecom data networks is the ability to understand the context of the users on those networks, what they are doing and what they want, Openwave Systems CEO Ken Denman told the GigaOM Mobilize conference today. Read more »
Storify is one of a number of startups focusing on “curation” of the real-time stream. Founder Burt Herman, a former Associated Press correspondent, says he wants to help bloggers, journalists and others pull content from social media and social networks and build it into coherent stories. Read more »
Rypple, which wants to free the enterprise world from “HR software that sucks,” has closed a $7-million funding round from Bridgescale Partners that the two-year-old startup says it plans to use to expand its new San Francisco office and ramp up its word-of-mouth marketing. Read more »
If you’re self-employed and you want to network with others in your field who might be able to help you find opportunities, there’s no dedicated service to help you build a social graph around your specific area of expertise. New startup Namesake wants to be that service. Read more »
AOL said it has purchased the technology blogging site TechCrunch for an undisclosed amount, a story Om broke last night. While we don’t know yet how much AOL paid for the blog network founded by Michael Arrington, we’ll update this story as details emerge. Read more »
Although the number of people who are using social networking services and engaging with social media continues to climb, the number who describe themselves as “creators” of content — those who publish their own blogs, upload videos, and so on — is falling, new research shows. Read more »
Forbes magazine has been talking with major advertisers about giving them blogs on the magazine’s website that would blend their marketing message in with Forbes’s editorial content, but blurring the line between advertising and journalism is a hugely risky bet for the business publication to make. Read more »
E-books and tablet-based digital textbooks may be the cool new thing, but renting old-fashioned paper books still seems to be attracting plenty of interest: Chegg, the leader in the textbook-rental market, has just closed a new $75-million round of financing, according to multiple news reports. Read more »
It sounds like something out of science fiction, but 3D printing is becoming a reality. Shapeways, which makes objects out of plastic, metal and even glass, just closed a round of financing and some companies plan to make limbs and even entire houses using the process. Read more »
As legendary investor Ron Conway has pointed out in a strongly-worded email to some of the super-angels who were at a recent secret meeting, the most important part of the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem is the entrepreneur — something certain angels seem to be forgetting. Read more »
Facebook suffered one of its worst outages in years today, an event that lasted for several hours and took out all the Facebook-powered “like” buttons on sites across the web. This caused a stream of jokes on Twitter, and we’ve collected some of the best here. Read more »
As part of the company’s continuing attempts to move beyond the “check-in,” Foursquare has announced a partnership with the app RunKeeper that allows users to win badges based on a range of achievements, and Foursquare’s CEO says the company is also testing a recommendation service. Read more »
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s reported pledge to donate $100 million in stock to Newark schools has sparked a heated debate over the valuation of the company, which has been estimated at $33 billion. Some argue this is absurd, but the truth is not quite that simple. Read more »
LinkedIn has agreed to acquire ChoiceVendor, a startup that allows companies to rate and review business-to-business service providers. The acquisition appears to be designed to improve LinkedIn’s ability to offer recommendations and other social features to its members and the companies that use the social network. Read more »
