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 »
So you want to “crowdfund” a project? How much should you ask people for? What kind of time frame should you be looking at? Kickstarter, a crowdfunding startup aimed at creative professionals, recently went through data on its successful projects and came up with some recommendations. Read more »
Reports about a secret meeting in San Francisco where “super-angels” discussed ways of fighting back against mainstream venture capital funds and holding down startup valuations has sparked some strong reactions, including responses from angel investors Dave McClure and Chris Yeh, as well as VC Fred Wilson. Read more »
Super-angels like to make themselves out to be the startup’s friend — the one who knows what founders are going through, the one that shares the entrepreneur’s pain, and so on. But in private meetings, some say the angels can be heard singing a different tune. Read more »
After denying rumors of a deal, blogging platform Six Apart and advertising network VideoEgg have confirmed they are merging to create a new social-media company called SAY Media. It’s the end of one of the early pioneers of the blogging world as a standalone entity. Read more »
A new study being released in Britain today says that access to the Internet, and especially to social networks such as Facebook, can improve people’s level of happiness — particularly the well-being of women, those from a lower-income background and those with lower levels of education. Read more »
The Twitter website has been hit by a security breach that allows hackers to send bogus messages and malicious links through a user’s account, and all a user has to do to trigger the spam is to move their mouse over a link on the site. Read more »
Apple is reportedly talking with a number of newspaper and magazine publishers about an iTunes-based newsstand that would allow them to offer subscriptions to readers. But while this seems like an appealing offer, publishers should be aware of how much they stand to lose as well. Read more »
Many different services are going after the location market, but Locationary founder Grant Ritchie says much of the information in the databases they use is flawed or inaccurate, and none of the services talk to each other. His company rewards users for providing updated location information. Read more »
Internet Brands, which operates hundreds of leading vertical service-oriented websites such as Cars.com and UltimateCoupon.com and was spun off from Idealabs in a public stock offering three years ago, has agreed to be acquired by Hellman and Friedman Capital, a private equity firm, for $640 million. Read more »
Google CEO Eric Schmidt made some comments last week about the company’s plans to get more social, and they showed how little the web giant understands what it is up against. Schmidt said the company intends to “add a social component” to its existing products. Read more »
There are plenty of companies and services devoted to helping people manage the ocean of information that flows through the web, but there aren’t that many focusing on trying to help businesses manage the information flow in their specific industries. That’s the market Eqentia is pursuing. Read more »
NewsTilt, a media startup that launched in April, shut down just two months later. Co-founder Paul Biggar has written an analysis of why it collapsed so quickly, and his post contains some useful lessons — not just for media-related startups, but for startups of all kinds. Read more »
Do you know what kind of information your Twitter apps are collecting? According to Mike Champion, VP of engineering at app directory Oneforty, the way that Twitter handles user permissions means that you could be giving those apps access to plenty — including your private messages. Read more »
Twitter needs to become more decentralized and open, says the company’s former chief engineer, or it will wither and die like other “walled garden” approaches to the web. Alex Payne says he recommended that Twitter become a more open platform, but senior executives decided against it. Read more »
Most video- game developers see digital piracy as an enemy to be fought tooth and nail, but not Markus Persson. While he isn’t happy about people copying his game illegally, he sees it as a necessary part of doing business, and even a potential marketing benefit. Read more »
A new digital-music service from Google will likely include a la carte downloads, streaming music, song sharing and a cloud-based “digital locker” where users can store their music for $25 a year, according to sources in the music industry who have reportedly seen the company’s proposal. Read more »
With its redesign, Twitter seems to be reluctantly embracing its status as a media company. Why the reluctance? Because as newspapers and other media businesses have clearly shown, online media is hard to monetize, and Twitter is already under pressure to turn on the cash-flow taps. Read more »
The creators of a software project called Haystack claimed their software would allow Iranian dissidents to surf the web anonymously by encrypting their activity and hiding it among other web traffic, but the project has been shut down after security analysts said these claims were false. Read more »
In addition to teaching traditional skills, some journalism schools are focusing on building their students’ digital chops and entrepreneurial spirit. One of the most recent such projects is Local East Village, a joint venture between the New York University’s journalism school and the New York Times. Read more »
Microsoft’s search engine has taken over from Yahoo as the second most-popular search in the U.S., according to new figures from Nielsen. The latest survey by the traffic-ranking firm shows that Microsoft’s MSN/Windows Live/Bing search had almost a 14-percent share of overall search volume in August. Read more »
Primal, which launched at the DEMO conference today, thinks its content-publication service has something extra: Its semantic tools allow publishers to create an entire site of inter-related webpages around a topic automatically. Unfortunately, this could be very useful for spammers as well as regular content publishers. Read more »
The woes of the traditional media industry have fuelled concerns that traditional offline news sources are being replaced by online sources. But a new study by the Pew Center has found that online news consumption has actually increased as more people go online for their news. Read more »
The shutting down of Bloglines and the decline of traffic to Google Reader has led some to predict (again) that RSS readers are dead, killed in part by the real-time nature of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. But the truth is somewhat more complicated. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard has agreed to buy security software maker ArcSightfor $1.5 billion in cash, as the computer giant tries to expand the range of services it offers corporate clients. ArcSight’s software is used by companies and governments to track and identify suspicious activity on corporate networks. Read more »
Some see the revolt against Digg’s redesign as yet another sign of how fickle social-media users can be, or how poorly many people tolerate change. But the most important lesson is just how vital it is that such services communicate with users when making fundamental changes. Read more »
USA Today is the latest media company to open up its data via an API, the software interface that makes it easy for developers to use another company’s data in applications. The newspaper joins a group that includes The Guardian, the New York Times and NPR. Read more »
Seesmic, the social-networking startup, today launched a new version of its desktop application that not only allows users to log in to more accounts from a single dashboard, but also includes an open plugin marketplace that offers support for 40 other related social applications and services. Read more »
Plenty of startups want to revolutionize how journalism is done, but Ebyline says it just wants to drag the process of producing and syndicating news content into the 21st century and make it more efficient, by creating an open marketplace: a kind of iTunes for journalism. Read more »
DataSphere Technologies, which has developed a hyper-local news and advertising software platform for content publishers, today announced that it has closed a $10-million Series C financing round led by OVP Venture Partners and will be using the funds to expand its operations into more local communities. Read more »
There’s been plenty of debate about whether Twitter has become “mainstream” or not, but examples continue to pile up of how the microblogging platform has worked its way into our lives, to the point where it has become a form of media, and a powerful one. Read more »
Kno, a California-based startup that plans to launch a two-screen “digital textbook” later this year, today announced that it has raised a $46-million financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital also participating in the debt and equity funding. Read more »
Hunch.com co-founder and angel investor Chris Dixon has some advice for big venture capital firms: Try to think more like, and behave more like, the startup companies you invest in. That includes cutting down on excessive management fees and not tweeting about your golf game. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard is suing its former chairman and CEO, Mark Hurd, alleging breach of contract and potential misappropriation of trade secrets. Hurd left the company last month, after allegations that he was involved in a number of improprieties related to a human resources consultant the company hired. Read more »
As Twitter focuses on building up its own services and applications, financing for pure-play Twitter-based startups has dropped sharply, according to CB Insights. The investment-tracking firm says figures show funding for Twitter apps and services has fallen by more than 50 percent over the past year. Read more »
Author Nicholas Carr has argued that hyperlinks in online content impose a “cognitive load” on readers that distracts them and makes them less capable of understanding what they are reading. But Salon founder Scott Rosenberg says that links are the heart and soul of the web. Read more »
Facebook has started integrating social activity from the network into its search results, by showing how many people “liked” or shared a page. This is the first step in rolling out the network’s social-search engine, which could become a competitive threat for Google and other companies. Read more »
A chart of the traffic that Gawker Media gets from social networks shows Facebook in number one position and Fark as number 5 — but the most interesting part is how much influence Stumbleupon has on traffic, despite the lack of attention the site gets. Read more »
Facebook has confirmed it is testing a new feature that allows a member of the network to “subscribe” to another user’s updates, in the same way Twitter allows users to “follow” each other. But implementing a full “follow” feature would be a big risk for Facebook. Read more »
