Two financing-related startups announced new funding of their own today: Lending Club, a peer-to-peer loan company, closed a Series C round of $24.5 million from a series of venture groups and DebtGoal, which provides online debt-management tools, closed its own Series A round of $2 million. Read more »
Facebook has upgraded its Safety Center, which contains advice for parents, young people, teachers and other groups about how to use Facebook responsibly and safely. But the site has not added a “panic button,” which is something critics and advocacy groups in Britain have repeatedly requested. Read more »
Google Buzz has launched Buzz buttons that web site publishers can add to their pages to make it easier for readers to share content on the Gmail-based social network. GigaOM is one of the launch partners for this new feature, along with several other media outlets. Read more »
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TweetPhoto, which allows users to share photos through Twitter, announced a funding round of $2.6 million today from several venture investors. But is the company just a “hole filler” for Twitter? Tweetphoto says its service also works with other social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Read more »
Cuil, a widely panned search engine that debuted in 2008, has launched an automated encyclopedia called Cpedia that produces articles on topics by generating them from pages found in its index. But the only thing Cpedia manages to do is make Wikipedia look really, really good. Read more »
Mary Meeker, the head of Morgan Stanley’s global technology research team and the woman once dubbed the “Queen of the Net,” says in her latest State of the Internet report that two trends will continue to dominate over the next decade: mobile and social networking. Read more »
In its latest acquisition — and its first in the UK — Google has bought a small visual-search startup called Plink, maker of a mobile app that recognizes works of art. The acquisition appears to be an attempt to add horsepower to its Google Goggles project. Read more »
Location-based services such as Foursquare have become so popular that rumors have been swirling the company might be acquired for $100 million. But angel investor and startup advisor Dave McClure says such services will have to show users the money in order to achieve mass appeal. Read more »
The relationship between Twitter and third-party app developers has become strained, after comments by Twitter investor Fred Wilson sparked a debate over which features the company might copy or buy. But while Twitter is big enough and well-funded enough to ignore app developers, it probably shouldn’t. Read more »
Twitter has acquired Atebits, the maker of Tweetie, one of the top Twitter apps for the iPhone. According to a post by co-founder and CEO Evan Williams on the Twitter blog, the app will be renamed Twitter for iPhone. Read more »
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All Voices, a citizen media venture that is trying to create a kind of global wire service, says it is expanding into 30 countries including Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt and China and hopes to expand into 30 more soon. It has over 335,000 contibutors in 180 countries. Read more »
Twitter designer Doug Bowman has uploaded a screenshot of a potential redesign of the web site, giving eager users a glimpse of some changes that could be rolled out soon. New features appear to include more analytics based on how active a user is on Twitter. Read more »
Kontagent, an analytics platform for social applications that describes itself as “Google Analytics for the social web,” announced new features and an enhanced dashboard this morning, along with a new round of funding. The company says it now tracks over 50 million active users a month. Read more »
Twitter investor Fred Wilson’s comments about the company’s evolution have sparked fear among developers of third-party apps that rely on the network. But even if his comments do mean Twitter is going to compete with them, shouldn’t they have seen this coming a long time ago? Read more »
Parker Liautaud is on an expedition to the North Pole, where he plans to check in via Foursquare and be the first to earn the Last Degree badge. But he has some company: a British insurance executive wants to be the first to check in, too. Read more »
Union Square Ventures investor Fred Wilson says he believes Twitter has reached an inflection point, where it is big enough and important enough to become the center of a new marketplace of businesses. But it’s not clear if the social network will ever fill that role. Read more »
In a recent interview as part of a National Press Club event, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch reiterated his belief that Google and other news aggregators are stealing his content, and his commitment to paywalls. But so far Murdoch seems to have a bandwagon of one. Read more »
Former superstar gadget bloggers Peter Rojas and Ryan Block have raised $3.2 million in financing from a group of venture capital firms and private individuals to fund their “crowdsourced” gadget review site, called gdgt. The company says it has hundreds of thousands of registered users. Read more »
Former equity analysts at Second Shares estimate that social-gaming market leader Zynga would be worth as much as $5 billion if its shares were publicly traded. They say the company will likely have revenue of close to $500 million this year from games such as Farmville. Read more »
While most 15-year-olds are happy playing video games, Parker Liautaud is on an expedition to reach the North Pole, where he will check in with Foursquare and earn a specially-created Last Degree badge on the network. The expedition is aimed at raising awareness about the Arctic. Read more »
AOL, a little over two years after paying $850 million for social network Bebo, has admitted in an internal memo to employees that the business is “declining” and that it will sell or shut down the unit by the end of May. Read more »
Facebook is still trying to clarify recent changes to its privacy policies and guidelines, after receiving more than 4,000 comments from users, regulators and privacy advocates. A Facebook spokesman says that many of the comments either requested features that already exist or misunderstood the site’s policies. Read more »
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark says that he believes social networking and the rise of distributed trust and reputation networks are helping to shift the balance of power in society away from those with nominal power and money and towards people who emerge from the grassroots. Read more »
Will the iPad help or harm media companies? Early indications are that iPad users prefer downloading free media apps to paid ones, with a few notable exceptions. Some publishers are also reticent about the device because they are nervous about how much control it gives Apple. Read more »
Google is rolling out a confirmation screen where Buzz users can check who they are following and see whether they are displaying that information publicly. The service has seen a number of changes as a results of privacy concerns raised after it went live in February. Read more »
Clay Shirky says large media entities are like ancient societies such as the Mayans and the Romans, in that they have grown so complex that they are no longer able to function in any other way. The media theorist says that could cause their eventual collapse. Read more »
O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly wrote a post recently looking at the state of what he calls an “Internet Operating System.” But does such a thing even exist? And if so, what does it look like, how does it function, and what does it mean? Read more »
Yahoo has been on a media hiring spree, snapping up journalists from existing traditional and online outlets to ramp up its original content efforts. But that sounds a lot like the strategy Yahoo pursued just a few years ago, and that didn’t turn out so well. Read more »
As the launch of the Apple iPad approaches, media outlets from Conde Nast and the New York Times to Associated Press and Bloomberg have been releasing screenshots of their media apps. Unfortunately, most appear to be quite boring, and few really take advantage of the device. Read more »
A researcher who had collected and was analyzing public data from more than 210 million Facebook profiles has deleted his entire database after he was threatened with a lawsuit by the social networking site. Peter Warden says he couldn’t afford to fight the case. Read more »
If you couldn’t make it to Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley’s presentation at the Where 2.0 conference, here’s a selection of the most interesting tweets posted by attendees who were watching the presentation. It’s just a sample though – Crowley went through 70 slides in 15 minutes. Read more »
In its first-ever State of the Internet report, the Mozilla Foundation says that the Firefox browser has close to a 30 percent share of the browser market around the world, with usage growing most strongly in Russia. Firefox has been under increasing pressure from Google’s Chrome. Read more »
With the launch of the Apple iPad just days away, magazine and newspaper companies are putting the finishing touches on their apps for the tablet, hoping to lure both new and existing readers. What magazine and news apps are you are looking forward to the most? Read more »
The idea behind Unvarnished, a new web service that launched this week, is that your online reputation is already being crowdsourced via the web and various social networks, and that you need the tools to manage it better than you can through sites such as LinkedIn. Read more »
Plenty of authors take to Twitter to promote their new books, but few of them have the stature of Margaret Atwood — and even fewer of them take to it the way the Canadian fiction writing legend has. She says it’s like “having 33,000 precocious grandchildren.” Read more »
Microsoft has been awarded a patent on a virtual assistant called “Guardian Angel” that would monitor a user’s behavior and take action to help improve their health and protect them from danger, including monitoring their heart rate and doing background checks on people they speak to. Read more »
The world of digital content is in a state of almost continuous upheaval, but a new report from GigaOM Pro analyst Paul Zagaeski estimates that the worldwide market for digital goods will grow to $36 billion by 2014, up from $16.7 billion in 2009. Read more »
Some younger Facebook users are changing their names — using their middle name instead of their last, and so on — to try and keep their profiles hidden from prospective employers. But that could play havoc with Facebook’s claims about the verified identity of its users. Read more »
Google’s mobile services are at least partially blocked for users in mainland China, according to the page that Google set up recently to track which of its services are available to users in that country. Read more »
Random Guardian is an app that Guardian developer Chris Thorpe and a colleague came up with after an offhand remark during a Clay Shirky presentation about “ChatRoulette for news.” But while it may be trivial, it taps into a powerful force — a desire for serendipity. Read more »
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