A growing number of early-stage deals and general optimism in the technology industry helped push venture capital investments up 14 percent in the third quarter of this year, to $6.1 billion from $5.3 billion in the prior quarter, according to a report released today from ChubbyBrain, a information services company that tracks VC activity. This should be viewed as good news for entrepreneurs who are currently looking to raise capital for their startups in coming months. Continue »

Social networking and the real-time web are changing how information on the Internet is consumed, as the ability to disperse and share information through social platforms and do it using real-time tools is shifting the focus of content from “historical” news to real-time events. Such a shift is giving rise to what we’re calling the NewNet, and it will impact everyone with a business presence online. As part of our GigaOM Pro subscription research service, we’ve compiled a look at the major trends and emerging issues for this next-generation version of the Internet in a third-quarter wrap-up.

Continue »

Twitoaster, which threads conversations on Twitter, is launching its open API today, allowing developers to integrate the service within their applications so that their users won’t have to piece together disjointed tweets. So far, Tweepz, a web site that lets you search for people on Twitter, is planning on using the API, which is available for free. Continue »

Twitter is a remarkably flexible application -– an efficient news service, a way to keep up with friends, a replacement for RSS feeds, a resource for links worth sharing, a broadcast medium and two-way method of social interaction (if not quite a social network). But I’m not sold on Twitter as a music discovery engine, despite a recent proliferation of ways to push music into a Twitter feed. Simply put, Twitter and music discovery happen at two different speeds, and music discovery works better elsewhere. Continue »

SugarSync, the web service that backs up and synchronizes files across multiple computers and mobile phones, is rolling out a feature today that lets users provide public links to their files. These links can be used to virally spread large files stored on SugarSync to social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. For example, a musician can share a song by posting a link to it on Facebook, or you can post a link to your resume on LinkedIn. This feature replaces the need to send a file by email, which may reinforce the trend of people spending more time on social networks and less on traditional email programs. Continue »

Raising $100 million is newsworthy for any company, but when it happened to Twitter this week, it also seemed to raise a hundred million eyebrows. Most notable was the company’s $1 billion valuation, which was labeled “exospheric” and “a new manifestation of the dot-com bubble” and invoked numerous comparisons to 1999 — aka, the Year of Investing Dangerously. But are Twitter’s new investors really crazy? Not at all. Continue »

Yfrog now lets you send photos and video to Twitter via an MMS message on the iPhone, which is in accordance with the Apple device’s new MMS capability going live today.

If you’re new to Yfrog, sign up for an email address on the site, which you can do through OAuth. After that, open a new text message on your iPhone and select a photo or video to upload. Then just type in your Yfrog email address and hit send. Continue »