The Value Of Virtual Currency: The Real Price Of Super Rewards Was Closer to $50 Million
Last week saw an unusual burst of acquisition activity among Web companies. Yahoo bought email add-on Xoopit for about $20 million, Nokia bought social address book provider Cellity, and overshadowing them all was Amazon’s $928 million purchase of Zappos.
But the week started off with another acquisition which quickly got lost in all [...]
Status Search: A Search Engine For What Your Friends Are Saying Online
Sifting through public status updates posted on Twitter and Facebook can be quite useful for instantly tapping into people’s thoughts on any given topic and links to more information about it.
But sometimes it’s even more useful to search only the status updates published by your friends and family, like when you’re looking for something [...]
lifeIO: A Social Media Dashboard That Combines Email, RSS, And Just About Everything Else
For many people, the web has fallen prey to information overload — from RSS readers to Email to social networks, we’ve all got vast amounts of data coming in at any given time, oftentimes to entirely different places. Many services have sprung up to try to tackle this problem, including FriendFeed, but most of them [...]
Yahoo confirms that it’s buying Xoopit
Yahoo just published a blog post confirming yesterday’s reports that it plans to buy Xoopit, the startup that adds social and media-sharing tools to email .
What’s the reasoning? Well, if Yahoo’s post is to be believed, this deal is all about photos:
With the integration of Xoopit’s platform technology and capabilities, the task of sending photos [...]
As Ning’s U.S. Audience Flattens, It Raises Another $15 Million.
Do-it-yourself social network Ning has added another $15 million to its coffers from LightSpeed Venture Partners, the company has confirmed to us. This brings the total capital raised to $119 million. Its other investors include Allen & Co., Legg Mason, chairman and co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Reid Hoffman.
Ning offers a counterpoint to the [...]
Another Yahoo Exec Departure: Chief Scientist Mobile Marc Davis Out
Yahoo Chief Scientist for Mobile and VP of Early Stage Products Marc Davis has left the company, we’ve heard from multiple sources, marking yet another of countless executive departures over the last couple of years.
Davis first joined Yahoo in 2005 and had the enviable job description of being able to sit around and think up [...]
Spammers Running Wild In Latest MySpace Phishing Attack
In the last 24 hours there has been a sudden surge in the amount of spam being sent and received by MySpace users, suggesting that the site has fallen prey to a security exploit that grants spammers access to accounts. Many users are logging in to find that they’ve commented on their friend’s status [...]
Why Zynga Is Worried about Playfish
When I wrote my BusinessWeek column on Zynga a while back, every venture capitalist in the Valley told me that Playdom was the company’s biggest competitor.
After all, it competes game-to-game, with similar mob-style and poker games, and was said to be doing the same revenues as Zynga with much higher profitability. (As my column pointed [...]
MobileBeat: Making mobile software social
Mobile software on compelling new devices like the iPhone is creating huge new industries, but the world is a year or two away — at least — from seeing the results really manifest themselves.
Or that was the unsurprising consensus among the panelists I moderated yesterday at our MobileBeat 2009 conference (this is one of our [...]
