Mathew's Posts

Russian investment fund Digital Sky Technologies is expected to go public sometime next year, according to reports. The company owns stakes in several of the hottest Internet companies around, including Facebook, social-game maker Zynga and group-buying site Groupon, as well as several leading Russian Internet companies. Read More »

Social-game maker Zynga has signed a joint-venture deal with venture fund Softbank Capital to bring its casual-gaming services to Japan, and Softbank has also invested $150 million in the company, whose Farmville and Mafia Wars games are among the most popular on Facebook. Read More »

All startups want to find the magic recipe for achieving Facebook scale, but former Twitter engineer Alex Payne says it doesn’t exist. And focusing on speed can not only send you in the wrong direction, but leave you high and dry when you need it most. Read More »

The Wall Street Journal has added fuel to recent reports that Google is working on a gaming-based social network as a way of competing with Facebook, saying unnamed sources have confirmed to the newspaper that Google is working with several game developers, including market leader Zynga. Read More »

Amazon has launched a new feature that connects users to their Facebook profiles, and then makes product suggestions based on their “likes” and other activity. But the online retailer also stresses that it will not share any of the data it has about users with Facebook. Read More »

According to a recent survey, fewer than 5 percent of U.S. online users have ever used a location-based application such as Foursquare on a mobile device. And almost 85 percent of those who responded to the survey said that they were not familiar with location-based services. Read More »

The number of Americans who say that newspapers are an important source of information continues to decline, according to a new survey. Only 56 percent of those surveyed agreed, compared with 68 percent who chose television and 78 percent who chose the Internet. Read More »

More Must Reads

Swift River: Trying to Filter the Social Web Firehose

Anyone who has tried to track dozens of Twitter streams or hundreds of Facebook updates simultaneously knows the social web can be an intimidating ocean of information. A startup called Swift River is trying to find ways of filtering and understanding that ocean in real time. Read More »

Flipboard Wades Into Murky Copyright Waters Where Google Lives

Flipboard, a new content-browsing app for the iPad, raises many of the same thorny copyright issues that Google has been dealing with for years on Google News and Google Books. Is it a value-added service that content publishers should be thankful for, or a copyright-infringing parasite? Read More »

Facebook Wants to Own All Your Social Graphs, Not Just One

Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch.com, says there is more than just one kind of social graph — he argues there are actually half a dozen different graphs, relating to things such as location and recommendations. But one thing is clear: Facebook wants to own them all. Read More »

PayPal Still Making the Cash Registers Ring at eBay

PayPal continues to be the primary engine of growth within eBay, judging by the online retailer’s latest quarterly results, and the company’s CEO says that within the next few years, the online and mobile payment business could be larger than eBay’s core online marketplace business. Read More »

Hi5 Launches Developer Portal, Slams Facebook’s Spammy Games

Hi5, a former up-and-coming social network that shifted focus last year and is now trying to become a social-gaming hub, has launched a portal for game developers, and president Alex St. John says that the company is prepared to take on Facebook in a head-to-head battle. Read More »

Facebook Officially Passes the Half a Billion User Mark

Facebook now has over 500 million registered users, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced in a blog post today, more than three times as many as it had in January 2009. Along the way, the company has faced privacy critics as well as unflattering stories about its co-founder. Read More »

Google Tells FTC Enforcing “Hot News” Would Create a Hot Mess

The media industry may be in upheaval as a result of the web, but having the government step in isn’t the right response, Google has told the Federal Trade Commission. The search company’s comments are a response to the FTC’s proposed policy changes to support journalism Read More »

Jive Raises $30M From Kleiner and Sequoia for Enterprise 2.0

Jive Software has raised a $30-million round of financing from legendary Silicon Valley venture capital funds Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and Sequoia Capital, which the company says will help it take the concepts of social media and Web 2.0 and integrate them into the enterprise. Read More »

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