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 »

Interest in who the real Mark Zuckerberg is has reached an all-time high, given the approaching release of the semi-fictional “The Social Network” in October, a movie about the origins of Facebook made without his consent. Today the New Yorker gives him a lengthy profile. Read More »

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke freely about the company’s user numbers, revenue and product vision in a October 2005 conversation, shortly after its 5 million user party and just after Facebook Photos had launched. He said Facebook was already making $1 million per month on advertising. Read More »

Experts from the tech, business and creative sides of the publishing industry gathered today for a broad discussion of disintermediation as part of our GigaOM Pro Bunker Series. Two key conflicts between attendees were apparent to me, one on the platform side and one on marketing. Read More »

Yes, Flowtown is yet another social media marketing company, but it’s not just another tool for monitoring customer feedback through their tweets. Flowtown helps small businesses engage with existing customers through email and social networks. Today it is announcing $750,000 in seed funding. Read More »

Facebook launched last night a feature called Places that enables users to share their location. Before the launch event had even concluded, the ACLU of Northern California had fired off a missive about how the product fails to protect user privacy. Read More »

Facebook tonight presented its long-awaited Facebook Places product to a large gathering of press at the company’s Palo Alto, Calif. office. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the company had been working on the product for “a little bit more than a few months.” Read More »

Market analysts are spying on us from above. UBS Investment Research has started incorporating analysis of satellite images of the parking lots of big-box retailers into its earnings estimates, forecasting an uptick in sales based on parking lot traffic where a drop was previously expected. Read More »

Back when I joined Facebook in the spring of 2004 as a college student, it had a location feature. There was a space on each user’s profile that automatically indicated the dorm cluster from where they last logged in. It was WAY before its time. Read More »

Social gaming powerhouse Zynga has acquired yet another game development shop, this time Cambridge, Mass.-based Conduit Labs, it announced this morning. The deal, which will turn Conduit into Zynga’s Boston studio, was an all-stock transaction, according to Boston.com’s Scott Kirsner. Read More »

Staying at a tech startup for more than four years — the default stock option vesting schedule — is a rare thing. But it seems notable that at 6-year-old Facebook many early and influential employees have moved on, and many of them recently. Read More »

Redbeacon is just a year and a half old, until recently was bootstrapped, and has deployed its local services marketplace in only one region. But something about what it’s doing makes people think the company’s on to something big. CEO Ethan Anderson explains the appeal. Read More »

Facebook is buying Chai Labs, a small startup founded by the former product manager and launch engineer for Google AdSense that makes a content management system for publishers in the travel, local, shopping and entertainment verticals to help them algorithmically create interesting content. Read More »

The Facebook Movie trailer wasn’t half bad, and the creepy choir, web site overlays and voice overs depicting young men’s ruthless ambition are easy enough to mimic to make it a meme. Today, the best parody so far came out for an imagined Twitter movie. Read More »

Still hoping to plan a last-minute summer getaway? There’s no lack of great web and mobile travel tools, like Kayak and TripIt, but here are a couple of new ones you might find worth checking out: TravelPost’s new Q&A feature and Tripline maps. Read More »

Dave McClure recently stepped out on his own to create 500 Startups, a seed investing incubator. He is partway through raising a $30 million fund, and has wasted no time putting it to work, making multiple new fundings per day in the last week. Read More »

Two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash is preparing himself for a second career in investing, and is currently raising $20 million for a new New York City-based VC firm called Consigliere that will invest in early stage companies in categories including e-commerce and sports. Read More »

Google this morning confirmed what had already been widely reported — that it has bought Slide, the social application maker. Google’s blog post on the matter is incredibly vague as to what Slide will actually be doing for Google, but let’s read the tea leaves. Read More »

Solariat today launched an advertising platform for forums, social media and Q&A sites called AdLib, which uses linguistic analysis to automatically generate sponsored replies to users’ questions. It’s a twist on search-style contextual advertising to seem more native to online communities and conversations. Read More »

Facebook bought the entire Friendster portfolio of social networking patents earlier this year. The company bought the patents from Friendster acquirer MOL in a deal that included advertising,a partnership for payments for virtual goods and cash, and was valued at $40 million. Read More »

Scribd just emailed us to let us know that today’s California Proposition 8 ruling is the most viral document in the history of the site. The document is currently receiving more than 1,000 reads per second, with nearly 150,000 total readsan hour after the ruling. Read More »

Vic Gundotra, who as Google VP of engineering was been responsible for areas of the company’s mobile and developer relations, has been charged with leading the company’s efforts on social, TechCrunch reports this morning and I’ve heard as well independently. Read More »

Rapportive this week announced $1 million in funding from a long list of angel and early stage investors including Dave McClure, Paul Buchheit and Jason Calacanis. The startup makes a Gmail plug-in that gives dynamic social web profile data about the people with whom you’re emailing. Read More »

Amidst widespread discussion and fear of collecting personal data for ad targeting, one of the leading marketplaces for such audience data has raised a big round of venture funding. New York City-based eXelate today announced a $15 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures. Read More »

Facebook said it is adding 160,000 square feet to the 147,000 square-foot data center it’s currently building in Prineville, Ore. The company cited a need for more servers to accommodate its 500 million users, up from 350 million when the data center was first announced. Read More »

OneRiot laid off seven employees Friday, dropping it to a total of 23 with the intent of sharpening its focus on building a real-time ad network. The Boulder-based company elevated president Tobias Peggs to the role of CEO, and moved him from San Francisco to Colorado. Read More »

Last night a group of M&A gurus from the corporate development teams at top tech acquirers Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, Facebook and Twitter gave advice to group of startups. Each has a bit of a different style, and a bit of a different target acquisition. Read More »

Y Combinator put on a tour de force Thursday in Mountain View, Calif. After five impressive years’ worth of molding fresh batches of startups, it packed 150-odd people with money into a room and schooled them in the art of giving its companies funding. Read More »

This week Twitter rolled out User Streams to its users for the first time, a significant architectural change that should make Twitter much faster and more reliable. I talked to members of Twitter’s product and platform team about User Streams at length for GigaOM Pro. Read More »

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