A Wall Street Journal article called “The Wizards of Buzz” focuses on the power of the top users on Digg, Netscape and other “social bookmarking” sites. The article highlights 16 or so of these users, along with their real name, screen name, areas of interest and other information. The point of the article, I think, [...]

The “find a group” section of the new Barack Obama social network contains what looks like a hard coded racial and sexual orientation slur. When searching groups, a couple of search options appear along with the hard coded text “Example: Gay Nigger Association of America -#@ for Obama, 16892.” If you are signed in to [...]

Israel-based Zlango will announce a $12 million round of financing tomorrow, led by BenchMark Capital and Accel Partners. The company launched the Zlango icon-based SMS service in the middle of 2006, and has expanded to three countries (Israel, Poland and certain Caribbean cell phone carriers). The press release for the financing (see bottom of post) [...]

Video sharing site Bolt.com is being acquired by GoFish - a smaller but richer rival, in order to pay the settlement the company has agreed to with Universal Music Group for copyright infringement.  The New York Times broke the story tonight.  Bolt will go for an estimated $30 million in GoFish stock; the three year old GoFish [...]

Neat video by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University. [See embedded player at end of post.] The video presents a broad overview of the difference between 10+ years ago on the web and the social web of today (”Web 2.0″) — focusing on how HTML was used for defining structure and [...]

Enterprise RSS vendor Attensa released a new iteration of its attention-data focused RSS service this morning.  The race to see which enterprise RSS vendor can figure out how to drag the business world kicking and screaming into using a technology (RSS) that seems undeniably good for it continues.   New in version 1.1 of Attensa’s enterprise feed server [...]

MySpace announced this morning that it is offering free indexing to any content producers who want to block users from uploading their copyrighted videos.  The site has been offering audio filtering and limited video filtering since late last year.  The biggest question on the table is whether and when YouTube will do the same, as it promised [...]

CrunchGear is attending 3GSM in Barcelona this year so head over to the site to see the latest in cellphones the U.S. won’t see for years and years. If you’re in town and want to talk tech, email me at john at crunchgear dot com and we can enjoy a fine Iberian jamon. Crunch Network: [...]

The more I dig into the new search engine startup Powerset the more I am wondering if it is nothing more than a house of cards. They’re an odd company with a bit of a split personality. For example, in some ways they are very secretive - everyone who gets to see “The Demo” (as [...]

Distributed call-center outsourcing service LiveOps has announced the closure of a Series C round of funding for $28 Million.  The round was lead by Benchmark Capital, a new investor in the company and a fund that rarely makes later stage investments.  Benchmark’s investments in the consumer space, which more readers here may be familiar with, include Pageflakes, [...]

P2P and web video sharing service Veoh will relaunch Tuesday with some important new features and a new look.  Cynics looking for interesting video sites post-GooTube will find Veoh of real interest.  The company has Michael Eisner on its Board, content deals with companies like Us Magazine and United Talent Agency and most important - some very [...]

Electronic Arts announced today that it has acquired San Francisco based online karaoke site SingShot for an undisclosed sum. Kareoke sites are real crowd pleasers and this is the third in a year to be acquired. Fox Interactive Media acquired kSolo in April, then Yahoo! scooped up Bix in November. All three [...]

When I added FilmLoop to the TechCrunch DeadPool last month based on rumors of mass layoffs, it was clear there was more to the story. The thirty person company had raised $11.5 million in capital and by any calculation should have still had at least $3 - $5 million left in the bank. They were [...]

I’m no gamer but I love StumbleUpon Video - so tonight’s announcement that the crowdsourced video discovery tool is going to be available on the TV via a customized version made for the Nintendo Wii sounds like great news to me.  If you’ve never seen StumbleUpon you should make sure to check it out; the company [...]

Yahoo! Music heads Dave Goldberg and Bob Roback, who came to Yahoo! when their seven year old startup Launch was acquired in 2001, have resigned from the company.  We’re hearing rumors that Launch may now be up for sale. Yahoo! Music has seen good traffic but download sales are believed to be disappointing.  Shedding the property could fit [...]

RSS ad network Pheedo will announce a new service tonight - advertising widgets powered by RSS and incorporating several social media tools.  Readers familiar with Techmeme’s advertising program will recognize the ideas here - companies today are producing creative content to drive visitors to their websites and that content can be leveraged explicitly as advertising.  Pheedo hopes [...]

Three weeks after receiving a subpoena from the U.S. District Court in Northern California, YouTube has reportedly identified a user accused by 20th Century Fox Television of uploading episodes of the show 24 a week prior to their running on television.   That user, named ECOTtotal, is also alleged to have uploaded 12 episodes of The [...]

A new startup called Tinbag launched last week. They’ve entered the very crowded Q&A market, dominated by Yahoo Answers. Tinbag’s business model, oddly, is to charge people asking questions and deliver part of the fee to the person answering the question. This is a model that flat out failed at Google, which pushed their own version [...]

Israeli Startup Aniboom has raise $4.5 million in an initial round of financing. At least that’s what TechCrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon tells me this page says. The round was led by Israeli venture firm Evergreen. The site has very good user generated animated videos presented in a Flash player and embeddable in other websites. My [...]

A reader wrote in to suggest we take a good look at Google’s Valentine’s Day logo, which appears to have dropped the “L” and simply reads “Googe.” The strawberry stem arguably is the missing letter, but this sure reads like Googe to me. See all of Google’s past holiday logos here. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool [...]

A key Technorati developer, Kevin Marks, has left the company and is now at Google, according to his blog. Just a month and a half ago Google took the lead as the top blog search engine from Technorait, and the loss of Marks to them is a further blow. Technorati releases very little information to the [...]

Vyew is a new collaboration tool suite that lets users share a common online visual workspace and their desktops. It is impressive. The service came out of beta status today and is now offering premium accounts in addition to the free accounts already available. Vyew is a little like WebEx and other [...]

TechPresident is a new online project tracking and aggregating information about all the US Presidential candidates’ use of online social media.  Though consisting of more Democratic Party aligned contributors than anyone else, the group’s research has already resulted in some fascinating revelations. Candidates’ use of MySpace, YouTube, Google and Yahoo! ads are the primary things being watched [...]

Israeli company BubblePly has significantly upgraded its service for overlaying images and text on video.  Launched in December, the service now allows live links, full control over fonts and extensive use of images.  It’s a much more useful service now than it was before. Users can work with videos added by URL from almost any video site on [...]

This email was sent by Yahoo CFO Susan Decker to all Yahoo employees today at 9:01 AM PST and has the details of who’s doing what in their new Advertiser & Publisher Group. Lots and lots of SVP and EVP promotions from the Yahoo ranks, and other peanut butter being spread around. I want to [...]

BuddyWave is a new browser that’s completely focused on the tens of millions of MySpace users who generate 20 or so page views per day each on the site. The browser is downloadable on Windows machines. Most of the custom functionality requires signing into your MySpace account via the Browser. We had a lot of [...]

The Vista marketing challenge saw an interesting new development today with the announcement that Microsoft has hired Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg as Enthusiast Evangelist.  Gartenberg says in a blog post on his move that he will “find, engage and work with enthusiasts and other influencers and show them all the cool stuff that Microsoft is [...]

CrunchGear reports that Yahoo recently received a ‘Dynamic Page Generator’ patent that has the potential to impact business development, and the futures, of many similarly featured companies including Google, Netvibes, Rojo and many other Web 2.0 companies. More… Patent Monkey Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

In a substantial upgrade this morning, the TV listing discovery service MeeVee has integrated a number of online media types along with its broadcast TV listings, including viral videos.  It’s a good move that will make the company all the more relevant in a world that is increasingly blurring the line between traditional and online media. MeeVee’s [...]

Yahoo is taking some criticism for launching a site that includes a Digg-like voting feature earlier today. The main criticism is coming from Digg users, who can sometimes stop fighting long enough to band together into a very angry mob. But a few bloggers are adding their own fuel as well. I don’t have any problem [...]

FreeYourID is a new web service that allows users to register a personal .Name domain name which in turn can be used as an OpenID identifier, website URL and email host. Your domain name will be in the format of first.last.name and the domain can then be directed to a website, host email aliases or [...]

Sendori is a newly launched service that most of us will never see - and they could make sure we don’t end up seeing web pages defiled by the putrid stench of domain squatters either.  That’s the most charitable way to look at this very interesting Sunyvale company.   Sendori will auction off redirects from parked domains [...]

AllFreeCalls has been taken offline. However, we are not putting it into the TechCrunch DeadPool because the founder promises they’ll be back up and running shortly. The service allows people to make international phone calls absolutely free by exploiting a FCC regulation that provides kickbacks on incoming calls to rural phone companies. Users first call [...]

In what could be an interesting sign of things to come industry wide, Dell today launched a customer relations site called IdeaStorm.  Users can submit product and feature requests, policy changes or whatever else they care to share with the Dell community.  Those submissions are then voted on Digg style.  Dell’s move follows just one day after Yahoo! [...]

In response to requests from probably thousands of other online publishers, Google announced today that it will begin reporting the number of subscribers any RSS feed has through Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage.  Other feed reading Google products may be included in the future but these are the two big ones. FeedBurner requires reporting from feed [...]

Atomic Moguls has reportedly raised nearly $1 million in first-round funding from VC firm Second Avenue Partners and Amazon.com. Atomic Moguls has launched FantasyMoguls.com, which is essentially a fantasy league for movies. You can draft movies and earn points based on how well they do at the box office, number of weeks in the top [...]

The new “all legal” P2P service from Azeurus called Zudeo announced this morning that they saw more than 1 million unique visitors last month in the service’s first full month online. The announcement provides great evidence that P2P is a viable avenue for legal distribution of online video. We covered the company’s content deal with [...]

Tree-Nation is a Barcelona-based entity that wants to plant 8 million trees in Niger, in the shape of a giant heart. Their hope is that this re-forestation campaign will help the environment and the people of the country. They’re going about it the right way. People go to the site and peruse a mapping application to [...]

Two new health related services came our way this morning; they couldn’t be more different but both could prove useful.   The first is Healthline’s new Symptom Search.  The successful online medical resource site Heathline has added a new search function that is definitely worth a look.  Symptom search lets you enter one or multiple symptoms you’re experiencing and [...]

The latest Flash photo/video/sound editing tools that we mentioned last week are now enabled at Photobucket for premium users, and will go live for all users in March. Geoff Baum at Adobe confirmed that these tools are not yet available anywhere on the web except for Photobucket. The new tool allows PhotoBucket users to mash up [...]

The guys over at Synapse Life (a productivity suite) released today a new mobile nightlife service called Down2Night. Down2Night lets you use your cell phone to post and receive notices of events that are going on at your favorite local venues. Seattle is the first city covered by the service. In contrast to a mobile coupon [...]

TextMarks will announce a new product tomorrow that allows publishers to charge people to receive breaking news and other information via text messages. It’s available now under a new “monetize” tab on the home page of the site. To use this, a publisher signs up for a TextMarks account and chooses a price to subscribers (either [...]

The company SimpleStar released a new version of its PhotoShow product Friday and brought the popular photo and video sharing service up to speed with a number of developments pioneered by early adopters you’re more likely to have read about here on TechCrunch.  The service now supports the social sharing and online categorization that’s typical of [...]

Jyte is a new service that leverages OpenID to allow users to start a discussion on any “claim” they care to make. Other users can then vote and discuss those claims.  Users can give each other credibility points regarding any topic by tag.  It’s a nice, full featured site that could come in handy for all [...]

A new social network named Trusted Opinion came out of private beta over the weekend. It has the single worst logo I’ve ever seen ( a circle with a check mark and some unreadable text), and a name that suggests they are a bland reputation based service like TrustedID. But actually they’re a new recommendation-based [...]

Online retail was an over $100 billion industry last year. Jupiter Media expects that to grow to over $140 billion by 2010. Comscore has attributed the growth to lower prices and just how damn simple it is to buy things online. This week, two new Amazon powered shopping visualization services rolled across our desks. Here’s [...]

Last week we saw first Yahoo! and then Dell launch sites that were largely acknowledged to be Digg inspired.  Digg may not have invented the vote-on-news motif but it may have been most important in popularizing the paradigm so far.  Now LiveSide, a great place to follow all things Live.com, reports on three European Microsoft sites currently [...]

Two weeks after Viacom ordered Google to take down more than 100,000 allegedly copyrighted videos from YouTube, the media giant is about to sign a content deal with Joost, the Wall Street Journal is reporting tonight.    Joost, the P2P online television service soon to launch from the founders of Skype, is purportedly aimed to challenge traditional [...]

Evan Williams, the man who co-founded blogger.com foundation Pyra Labs with Meg Hourihan, has put his beleaguered startup Odeo up for sale.  Odeo is a consumer facing audio service that’s been remarkably high profile about its struggles over the past year; Williams discussed mistakes candidly and bought the company back from investors in October.  The site continues [...]

XM and Sirius have confirmed their merger plans. The companies have a combined 14 million subscribers. The merger depends on shareholders’ consent, as well as approval by antitrust agencies and the FCC. I can’t imagine there’ll be a hold-up on this — despite the creation of a “monopoly” on satellite radio programming. As wifi starts [...]

We’re seeing some smart people create very targeted web applications and flipping them just a couple of months after launching. First was MyBlogLog, which launched in October 2006 and was acquired by Yahoo just three months later for a reported $10 million. Confabb may on an almost identical path. The company, which has created a social [...]

Semantic web Firefox plug-in provider Adaptive Blue announced today that the company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Union Square Ventures.  The company’s product, called Blue Organizer, is a tagging and search tool with an incredible array of features and a focus on parsing the semantic meaning of web pages it interacts with.  Union Square [...]

Kevin Rose, speaking here at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, just announced that Digg will adopt the OpenID decentralized digital identity platform. Don’t expect this right away though - adoption will begin “later this year” according to Rose. It’s definitely time to declare OpenID a winner and the hope for a single-sign on [...]

Real estate search company Trulia announced the availability of its new API this morning as well as two interesting mashup examples made possible by that API.  Outside developers will now have access to the company’s real estate data and aggregate user search data. To demonstrate the types of things made possible by the API, the Trulia team [...]

VideoEgg and its content delivery network Akamai Technologies have announced this morning that the two companies have passed 3 million video uploads together.  Akami provides the webcam capture and video uploading service for users of some AOL sites, Bebo, hi5, Piczo, myYearbook, Dogster, Tagged and others.   VideoEgg says it’s now serving 15 to 20 million video streams [...]

A new open source cross-site social networking service called Explode launched today and looks like a very appealing alternative to the now Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog.  Built by UK open-source social network provider Curverider (whose primary product, Elgg, is similar to PeopleAggregator), Explode offers an embeddable widget that links out to users’ respective profile pages on any [...]

SMS call-and-response service Mozes will announce in the morning that the company has raised $5 million in series A venture funding from Northwest Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.  The SMS services space is one of the most active we cover and Mozes has a strikingly smart approach to the market. The Palo Alto [...]

The already highly competitive startpage space saw an interesting new play tonight when YourMinis.com relaunched with a changed site and a new strategy.   YourMinis is a beautiful aggregation of RSS feeds and web functionality that competes with Pageflakes, Netvibes and a long list of other startpage services.  YourMinis reports having more than 800,000 user accounts but remains [...]

We have a well placed but single source rumor that Google may make a major announcement tomorrow, possibly a statement of its “official” strategy around their small business focused products. If this is the case, it would likely involve bundling Docs & Spreadsheets with Google Apps for Your Domain into a single hosted offering. An [...]

Ever since the social video market boomed through 2006, some video services have sought to differentiate themselves by adding online editors. Jumpcut and Motionbox launched their editors last April and Jumpcut was acquired by Yahoo! 5 months later. Eyespot launched its editor a month before Jumpcut, last March. Last December Gotuit launched their SceneMaker video [...]

Documentary film maker Steve O’Hear announced today that his film In Search of the Valley is now available for download using an innovative service called Streamburst - a move he hopes will raise the project’s sales after disappointing initial DVD sales. Streamburst offers a way to discourage and track piracy without limiting the use [...]

The fragmentation of widget platforms presents a problem for developers, who need to develop and then maintain different versions of widgets for the various desktop widget platforms (Vista, Mac, Google, Yahoo) as well as online platforms like Pageflakes and Netvibes (and lots of others). The W3C has a working draft of a 1.0 Widget specification, [...]

Got an idea? Willing to hustle for a summer to see it grow? Y Combinator just announced their summer application drive. Applications are due by April 2nd and by the 10th, a few will be selected to present in Mountain View on April 21-22nd. If selected, your team will relocate to work and learn in [...]

We’ve all seen this before. Passionate users want more or different functionality for a given product, and they build it themselves rather than wait. Sometimes it is done purely for passion, other times there’s a profit motive. But the result is often a kick in the pants to the original startup. How the company responds [...]

PBwiki closed $2 million in funding this morning from Mohr Davidow Ventures.  Founder and CEO David Weekly confirmed that previous investors Ron Conway and Chris Yeh also put in an additional $100k. PBwiki advertises itself as the easiest way to quickly create a hosted wiki and the company’s product is particularly well executed.  It recently added [...]

The day that everyone knew was coming has arrived with the announcement that Google has launched Google Apps Premier, its subscription package of premium, hosted business applications in direct competition with Microsoft.   Michael Arrington posted this afternoon about a rumor of an undetermined major announcement from Google set for tomorrow, now the Wall St. Journal reports [...]

Insider Pages, a user generated review site for local businesses, has been acquired by a public company, according to sources close to the deal. I also spoke with Insider Pages’ VP Marketing Anne Raimondi, who declined to comment. The company, originally founded by idealab, has faced heavy competition from Yelp and others. They closed a $8.5 [...]

Fox Interactive Media announced this morning that it has acquired the thrillingly named Strategic Data Corporation (Google cache of site). SDC offers ad optimization technology that it claims helps clients “typically see network-wide revenue increases of 50-150%.” Fox Interactive spans a large number of sites from AmericanIdol.com to AskMen.com but is dominated by [...]

RSS management megavendor FeedBurner released an interesting report this morning about the relative market shares of the various leading RSS reader vendors.  The statistics go beyond mere subscription numbers and focus on what FeedBurner says is more important - reader engagement. That engagement is measured in two ways, the number of times the feed’s items are loaded [...]

After months of intense and very public debate, closely tied to the Google acquisition, YouTube is reported to have licensed copyright filtering technology from AudibleMagic. The San Jose Mercury News cites two unnamed sources as saying that Google will soon unveil filtering technology for YouTube from the leading third party filtering provider, Audible Magic. What [...]

Digg users have begun calling with increased volume for the creation of a special section of the site designated for photographs and pictures.  Two requests to this effect have received more than 6 and 8 thousand diggs in the past 2 weeks.  It’s hard to imagine that some sort of photo section of the wildly popular news [...]

Yahoo!’s recent addition MyBlogLog is making news again — and not for another security exploit (that was last weekend) or spammer gaming. Well, it is related to those two topics — Shoemoney, a notable blogger in the affiliate marketing world with a fairly large following of readers that like his insight on all things related [...]

San Jose based company Pramati announced its product Dekoh this week and gave me a look around the application. Dekoh’s goal is to bring the web and the desktop together and to give developers the ability to create applications on top of that platform. Those applications can be shared and deployed anywhere in the network. [...]

PBWiki is on a bit of a roll. After confirming a $2 million round of financing last week, they’ve just launched a partnership with 30Boxes that allows users to insert a calendar into a wiki. Actually getting the calendar into the wiki requires way too many steps, and I agree with 30Boxes founder Narendra Rocherolle [...]

Digg has started to unblock many sites that were previously banned for “bad behavior,” which usually consisted of a suspiciously high number of stories making it to the home page. If too many stories were buried by people voting it down, or too many users otherwise complained, a site was banned, most of the time [...]

MySpace has been acting a bit odd all year. Last month all Flash embeds on the site were turned off for a few hours. Some people speculated that they were testing the waters, seeing what kind of backlash they would see from user complaints. MySpace PR flatly denied these speculations, however, saying it was nothing [...]

We’re hearing that Amazon has invested $1 million or so in Seattle based Shelfari, beating out at least one venture firm that competed for the deal. Shelfari is a website where users input all of the books they own, and have an online visual representation of their library to share with others. Users can share their [...]

It looks like Fonpods, which allowed users to listen to podcasts over the phone, has become the latest victim of the big carrier lawsuits against startups leveraging a FCC regulation that provides kickbacks on incoming calls to rural phone companies. Like AllFreeCalls, which shut down on February 16 and is yet to come back online [...]

This video presents a fairly compelling case that Apple will be getting into the Ringtone business with the release of the iPhone. Ringtone sales are big business, accounting for 10% of so of the global music market, and well over $1 billion per year in sales (see this old study for 2003-2004 industry numbers). This news [...]

Google has a hefty lead in getting small publishers to put Google-powered ads on their websites. There is no negotiated deal - advertisers agree to take whatever Google decides to give them. Revenue share terms are not disclosed to these small publishers. The publisher simply places a piece of JavaScript code in the code of [...]

We reported last month that Seattle-based ImageKind, where artists can upload their work and sell custom framed prints to others, was in acquisition discussions with Amazon. ImageKind competes with Art.com’s new Sistino project - rumor had it that Art.com was also looking at the company late last year for a possible acquisition. At the time of [...]

A new online dictionary and thesaurus launches today called WordSource. It’s main benefit over sites like Dictionary.com is the fact that the site is very cleanly designed and contains no advertisements. You can also look up a word by simply adding it to the URL (so word.sc/example will pull up the definition of “example”). The site [...]

Update: I was too quick to pull the trigger on this one. TellMe is saying that they have not been acquired by Microsoft, adding only “conversations are happening across the board.” More on this if/when it develops. Take TellMe off the IPO list for this year - We have multiple sources saying that Microsoft has acquired [...]

Seeking Alpha has a long story outlining Yahoo CEO Terry Semel’s failings since his hiring in 2001, and basically calls for his head on a platter. The bottom line: Google has grown its shareholder value 21 times more efficiently than Yahoo during the time Semel has been at the company. Semel supporters point out the [...]

At around 8 AM PST this morning, Moscow-based search engine Quintura will relaunch its visual search engine with a new user interface (if it looks like the screen shot below, it’s launched). The company, which is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners (Skype, AllPeers, Piczo, Nimbuzz) and OpenView Venture Partners, has developed technology that clusters related [...]

After developing their product on their own for six months, New York based Outside.in received financing from angels and three venture firms: Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, and Village Ventures. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures discusses the financing here. Outside.in aims to aggregate posts from local bloggers (placebloggers) into one tagged and searchable directory. [...]

I’m at the Adobe Engage event with a bunch of other bloggers including David Berlind, Tim O’Reilly, Robert Scoble and James Governor. We’re getting demos from Adobe customers (and in some cases products the company is working on) which I’m covering over on my ZDNet blog, The Universal Desktop. The big highlight so far has [...]

Second Life has had music, but has otherwise been rather mute. That’s all soon to change when Linden Lab rolls out a beta test for person-to-person speech. Like a lot of other in-game speech systems, you’ll need a headset, but Second Life will provide a different peer-to-peer chat experience than those World of Warcraft conversational [...]

The NY-based team at Clipmarks just launched 2.0 of their product, a unique web clipping system that allows you to take just the paragraphs, sentences, or multimedia you want from a page while maintaining a link to the original document. Their CEO, Eric Goldstein, was a lawyer who was fed up with cutting and pasting [...]

If you haven’t taken the time to try out the new Ning today, Robert Scoble has filmed an excellent demo of the product (basically the same demo I saw yesterday) from CEO Gina Bianchini. There’s a lot of coverage from other bloggers as well. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

I have to hand it to Ning - it took them well over a year after their initial beta launch to fulfill their promise of allowing “anyone” to create social applications, but they’ve done it. Ning relaunches tonight with new functionality and an interface that allows even the most novice of web users to [...]

MySpace PR has replied to our request for comment on the Imeem blockage that we reported over the weekend. Julie Henderson, SVP Corporate Communications at Fox Interactive (MySpace’s parent company), says: If a widget violates our TOS, we block them. Breaches would include any person, widget or software that violates copyright, poses security risks, distributes [...]

Later today music social network iLike will report that they’ve reached half a million registered users in the first four months since launching. What won’t be disclosed, but I’m hearing from insiders, is that around 20,000 new users are joining daily. The company, along with MOG, will present at the Digital Music Forum East conference in [...]

Berkeley, California based Wesabe will announce a $700,000 round of financing tomorrow from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (as well as a couple of individual investors), and Tim O’Reilly will join the company’s board of directors. A good overview video of the service, which launched in December, is below. Wesabe is best described as a web version of [...]

Seriosity has a solution for over-crowded email inboxes. If you want someone’s attention, you’ll be paying for it. The company’s hook is that they’ve studied World of Warcraft and other multi-player games and believe they’ve found the right way to get people’s attention - virtual currency. You attach a payment to an email, called a Serio, [...]

There were a bunch of product demos today at Adobe’s Engage event, but there were a few that stood out and should have a big impact on the startup world. They also happened to be some of the best demos of the day. Virtual Ubiquity - Rick Treitman demoed their word processor application, BuzzWord, which was [...]

One of the risks of trying to find a niche to build a startup is that the big guys can land on your face at any time. That’s why all of these startups are going to be in serious trouble when Adobe releases a free, ad supported online version of Photoshop in six months. This announcement [...]

A new site called Spotplex launched today that arguably sorts news in a better way than Digg does. I’ve been testing the service for the last couple of weeks and like what I’ve seen. News stories are not submitted by users, as with Digg. Instead, sites that want to participate include some javascript code on their [...]

The Insider Pages acquisition rumors that we posted on last week were accurate - later today Citysearch, a division of InterActive Corp., will announce that they have acquired the company. The size of the transaction is not being disclosed, although our understanding from a source close to the deal is that the price is in [...]

Wired Magazine seems hell bent on convincing the world that Digg is falling apart. I have a problem with that because Wired Magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, owns Digg competitor Reddit. And because Wired isn’t just reporting Digg news - they are actively engaged in using Wired to undermine Digg. Reddit was acquired in late October. [...]