The online backup provider Carbonite priced its initial public offering last night despite the turmoil in the financial markets. And yes, it priced at $10 per share on the low end of its expectations, but it did make it out. Read more »
DreamIt Ventures graduated its first New York class yesterday, sending 14 new start-ups into the wild. The summer class tackled education, e-commerce and app publishing and a few used video conferencing in interesting ways. Here are few that stood out to me. Read more »
GreenSQL, an Israeli-based startup that offers software that secures databases has raised a second round of funding led by Rhodium and Atlantic Capital Partners. The funding will allow the company to expand to the U.S. and build products for NoSQL tools used today. Read more »
The recent volatility in the stock market has had strong effects on many publicly traded companies, and private firms aren’t exactly eager to join their ranks. Five of the 12 companies expected to price IPOs this week have decided to postpone their public market debuts. Read more »
Greylock Partners, the VC firm backing companies such as Cloudera, Airbnb and ZipCar hired DJ Patil, formerly the chief product officer at Color, as a data scientist in residence. Greylock’s trying to help its companies monetize the rich vein of user data on the web. Read more »
The New York Times has rolled out a site called beta620, to provide a home for all of its experimental web projects and apps. But can the paper successfully adopt the kind of beta culture that drives startups, or is the new site just a sideshow? Read more »
Okta, a startup that makes identity and access management software for enterprises, has closed $16.5 million in new funding. Okta’s software enables multiple people within an enterprise to sign in to the company’s web-based applications, whether they’re in the cloud or behind a firewall. Read more »
It’s been a busy summer for the founders of Parse, a new startup making a software platform that adds a cloud component to any mobile app. Part of Y Combinator’s summer 2011 class, Parse has already launched in beta and is quickly gaining steam with developers. Read more »
In the third part of GigaOM’s Euro 20 roundup, we’ll look at five of the startups we’ve dubbed Almost Famous. They’ve weathered the storm, come out the other side, and have solid products to offer. Read more »
Every developer who makes a popular web or mobile app is eventually faced with a decision: They can either stick with the status quo or swing for the fences. These days, many people are taking VC and going big — but is that the right choice? Read more »
New York doesn’t have to rival Silicon Valley; it can be its own success story, with its own unique culture. And that is what the region should be looking at first, rather than trying to gain some bragging-rights parity with the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more »
Inkling, the digital textbook software startup, has closed on $17 million in new funding to expand its software for converting college textbooks for use on the iPad. Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis says the money will be put toward meeting the “effectively unlimited demand” for its platform. Read more »
Janrain, the Portland, Oregon-based software-as-a-service company, has closed on $15.5 million in funding. Janrain, which makes a social log-in platform, plans to put the money toward general growth initiatives such as hiring and product development, CEO Larry Drebes said in an interview. Read more »
There are hundreds of promising European startups that lie just below the surface of success waiting to break out. For our second installment of GigaOM’s Euro 20, we chose five of these. Here are the ones to watch. Read more »
Startup Flixmaster is making it easier for video creators to make interactive applications. Its platform provides a drag-and-drop interface for creating branching relationships between videos and publishing them online. The platform publishes in HTML5 video, aiming at the growing number of mobile devices that support video. Read more »
It’s been a tough week for peer-to-peer home rental service Airbnb, which has come under fire for its sluggish and inconsistent response to an Airbnb user whose home was burglarized and vandalized. In a contrite blog post, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky laid out new safety initiatives. Read more »
Confirming weeks of speculation, Twitter announced Monday it has closed on a “significant” amount of new funding led by Russia-based venture capital firm DST Global. The specific amount raised has not been disclosed, but various reports have pegged the round at $800 million. Read more »
For years, Europe’s startup community has been painted as the undernourished younger cousin of Silicon Valley. In reality, Europe’s web scene is now thriving. and we’ve compiled a list featuring some of the best and brightest European web startups — what we’re dubbing the GigaOM Euro 20. Read more »
As millions of Americans grapple with unemployment, many technology companies are actually desperate to hire new people. Folks with skills such as software and web development are in high demand nowadays, especially in Silicon Valley. And startups are going to great lengths to lure them in. Read more »
Despite growing competition from ReadItLater, which just raised $2.5 million, VC-backed Scribd and Apple, Instapaper’s Marco Arment is sticking to his now outside funding stance. He said even with the added company, he can make Instapaper work by focusing on his niche and executing. Read more »
European startups have a long history of trying to break the American market — a move that works for some but not all. Now the CEO of print-on-demand website Photobox says that Europe’s entrepreneurs should learn from history if they want to build strong companies. Read more »
Pixazza, a digital ad platform that embeds e-commerce links to items within online photos, has renamed itself Luminate. The newly branded company is broadening its services, turning into a platform for apps that generate in-photo links for a wider array of categories beyond clothing and accessories. Read more »
For years, the world of venture capital was largely shrouded in a veil of secrecy. But in the past 18 months, AngelList has started to change that in a big way. The social network for VCs and startups has grown impressively since its February 2010 debut. Read more »
The future of coupons is moving toward digital and mobile, something that startup SavingStar is taking full advantage of. The company told me it has hit half a million users since it launched its ecoupon product in April, putting it on a faster pace than Groupon’s. Read more »
AirBnB, a San Francisco–based person-to-person room-, apartment- and house-rental startup, has raised $112 million in Series B funding from a group of investors including Russian Internet investor DST Global, General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz. AirBnB has raised about $120 million. More details after the fold. Read more »
Gojee, a recipe search site that knows what I have in my pantry and uses that knowledge to deliver fresh ideas for dinner, has reached 50,000 users. But it may be most useful as a lesson on bringing big data to applications and the masses. Read more »
The FinTech Innovation Lab, an accelerator program for financial tech startups, graduated its first class on Friday. This first batch of companies is bringing some impressive ideas to bear on data, analytics and payments and showing there’s room for new approaches in the financial sector. Read more »
It’s been clear for years now that cloud storage technology is hot — even Amazon, Google and Apple have made big moves into the area. But judging by the latest funding news out of storage startup CX, heavyweight investors are still bullish about newcomers to the space. Read more »
Venture capital investments continued to grow at a rapid clip during Q2 2011, with investments in Internet-specific companies rising to the highest quarterly level since 2001. But some industry experts are saying that the current level of VC activity may be unsustainable. Read more »
Affectiva, a Massachusetts start-up spun out of the MIT Media Lab, has nabbed $5.7 million in Series B funding to help it pursue technology which helps recognize and measure human emotions. The company sees big opportunities in helping companies understand and gauge how people are feeling. Read more »
GigaOM readers agree that encouraging European entrepreneurs is vitally important to the long-term health of local startups. But they have differing opinions about the sharp growth of accelerator programs and bootcamps across the continent: will startups end up being fed to the sharks? Read more »
Even in these days of social networking over-sharing, some of the most important details of our lives remain in completely unwritten form. Proust, a startup that bills itself as a private place for families and friends to share memories, is trying to change exactly that. Read more »
At nearly ten years old, web discovery engine company StumbleUpon is certainly well past the point where websites can attract users by being a new and hot trend. But the San Francisco-based company has proven that slow and steady growth can still lead to success. Read more »
Car-sharing companies highlight the fact that people only use their own cars less than 10 percent of the time. But when it comes to boats, owners use them even less, or about two weeks out of the year — that’s according to startup Nautical Monkey. Read more »
SeaMicro, a low-power server maker, has managed to increase the amount of computing power under its hood by 50 percent while decreasing the power consumption of its machines by a quarter. But perhaps most interesting, it has managed three new products in the last year. Read more »
Astrid is best known for making a popular web and mobile app that allows users to create to-do lists with social features. But with a new batch of funding from Google Ventures and others, the San Francisco-based startup has a much bigger picture in mind. Read more »
UPDATED. Spotify U.S. is now in T-minus territory. A spokesperson for Spotify has confirmed that the popular European on-demand music streaming service will be available stateside on Thursday morning. GigaOM reported last month that Spotify’s U.S. launch would occur in mid-July. Read more »
The profile of Sheryl Sandberg in the New Yorker this week purports to be about women in technology, but it’s also a glimpses into the evolving state of the workplace in an entrepreneurial and highly connected world -– the future of work for the professional class. Read more »
Web security startup CloudFlare has raised $20 million in a series B funding round. The San Francisco-based company, which has seen impressive growth since its September 2010 launch, makes a cloud-based software program that purportedly helps protect websites while also making them faster. Read more »
Underneath Twitter’s fun and trendy public image, the data streamed through the microblogging service is apparently worth some big bucks. DataSift, one of only two companies authorized to re-syndicate Twitter’s content using its “firehose,” on Monday announced a $6 million venture capital funding round. Read more »
