Liz's Posts — GigaOM

Liz's Posts

Facebook launched a new approach to understanding groups of friends today. CEO Mark Zuckerberg called groups “a fundamental building block” and “the biggest problem in social networking,” and said Facebook has determined the best solution is a social one: to enable users to tag each other. Read More »

Want to apply cool filters to your iPhone photos without paying for an app like Hipstamatic? Try out Instagram, which is launching today. Om already reported on how it comes from the makers of Burbn, a demo HTML5 app that was neat enough to win $500,000. Read More »

 
 

Eventbrite Raises $20M. Ticket Sales Top $200M

Eventbrite has closed $20 million in Series D funding led by DAG Ventures, and including Tenaya Capital as well as previous investor Sequoia Capital. The four-year-old, San Francisco-based company has now raised a total of $29.5 million. Read More »

ATX Innovation, which makes TabbedOut, an app that enables bar and restaurant patrons settle their tabs from their iPhone or Android handsets, has raised $2.05 million in funding from NEA, for a total of $2.8 million raised. Read More »

The American market for virtual goods will grow 31 percent to $2.1 billion in 2011, according to a new report from Inside Network. Virtual goods sold in social games are set to account for 40 percent of the market, or about $840 million in 2011. Read More »

Twilio, a web-based VoIP development platform, is going to get a boost, thanks to one of its investors: Dave McClure and his fund, 500 Startups. Twilio, a San Franciso-based startup, allows web-app developers to add voice-related functionality to their web apps. Read More »

Radian6 dashboard

Twitter plans to roll out a free real-time analytics dashboard in the fourth quarter, said Ross Hoffman of the company’s business development team at a conference yesterday. If true, the announcement has implications both for Twitter’s business model and for startups currently offering analytics. Read More »

Web data API provider Factual is making a play for the hot geo-local space today. Today it came out a huge new dataset for geo-coded information like addresses and phone numbers tied to latitude and longitude for 14 million local U.S. businesses and points of interest. Read More »

Where once Yammer could be described as Twitter for the enterprise, now it will be Facebook for the enterprise. I was interested to learn whether Yammer is returning the favor and innovating and contributing technology and features that might have value for other social networks. Read More »

Layar, the augmented reality platform, is trying to both foster a new form of content and also bring that content to a wide audience. Now the company has develops its own augmented reality multiplayer shooting game to demonstrate what other people might not be imagining yet. Read More »

Though they have demonstrated that they have the capability, tech companies have shied away from deployments of mobile facial recognition, mostly out of privacy concerns. Now Apple may be willing to be first to cross that line with its purchase of Swedish startup Polar Rose. Read More »

Facebook is reportedly working on its own phone. Though the company quickly denied the report, the idea clearly has staying power, and why not? It’s a good one. Facebook should very soon start working outside its core competency and do things like make phones. Read More »

More Must Reads

Facebook today is rolling out its fourth instant personalization parter and the only one since the initial controversial launch in April. New partner Rotten Tomatoes will automatically show users which movies their friends have “liked” across the web using Facebook tools. Read More »

Turning big, opaque datasets into online databases you can query is a worthy pursuit. Two new startups I met recently, Semantifi and FindTheBest, promise to reveal the hidden secrets of the web by understanding them semantically. They’re both using human power to format topic-specific web applications. Read More »

Of 39 startups who have participated in TechStars through this spring, six have been acquired, five have failed, and 28 are still active. If nothing else, you have to love that level of transparency. In an interview, founder David Cohen shared more. Read More »

Twitter today updated its web site to be faster and more modern. After the presentation was over, I had a chance to talk to Twitter product managers, executives and engineers about the new site. Here are some of the tidbits I learned. Read More »

Mobile payments introduce many opportunities for innovation: better accessibility for customers, better integration with web services, flexibility and social features. One new mobile payments startup is trying to do all that without phones or phone numbers. Dynamics is coming out of stealth at DEMO this week Read More »

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