Digg top users revolt as company tries to appeal to buyers
Digg, the social news site where anyone can submit and vote on their favorite online articles, has changed its method of deciding which articles are featured on the Digg homepage. Top users say their votes now count for less, and are on strike — refusing to submit stories until Monday, unless the company responds to their demands.
The reason for the change is that San Francisco-based Digg is for sale, with an asking price of more… Continue Reading
38 free/cheap music sites — Welcome to the fray, Qbox!
Ever since Napster brought free MP3s mainstream — and subsequently garnered the wrath of the Recording Industry Association of America — the music industry has been reeling.
No single strategy for listening to music online has come to dominate the market, as record labels, managers, artists, fans, Apple’s music offering, Internet radio and recommendation companies all jockey for position. But one thing is clear above all the din: Fans will not be denied their music —… Continue Reading
EveryBlock, an especially slick service for discovering local information
EveryBlock is a newly launched site that gathering data about neighborhoods, such as business reviews from sites like Yelp, crime reports from local police departments and online news stories from local publications.
It puts this information together in an online map-based interface, so you can quickly search through events related to your neighborhood and see where they happen. You can also search for an address and get all related information about what’s happening near it. So… Continue Reading
How Facebook’s international users translate the site for free
Facebook has just announced how they plan to offer the site in other languages. The Palo Alto, Calif. company has both hired professional translators and asked its international users to give suggestions.
The strategy is markedly different from rival social network Myspace, which has done all the translations for localized versions of its site itself. Facebook’s strategy may prove to be a way of translating to any language in the world quickly and cheaply.
First, Facebook employees… Continue Reading
deCODEme’s underwhelming personal-genomics service
(UPDATED: See below.)
Personal-genomics vendors like 23andMe and deCODEme, which promise to give ordinary individuals a peek at their genetic inheritance, have received a ton of press attention since they launched last November (not least of all from us — see here and here for starters). Unless you happened to have a spare $1,000 laying around, however, you were pretty much out of luck if you simply wanted to know exactly what you might be getting for… Continue Reading
Franz, seeking funding, wants to become the foundation for a “semantic web”
Talk of the “semantic web” was deafening late last year, with startups from search engine Hakia to travel organizer TripIt touting specific uses of semantic technology. That trend has continued into this year with fundings. Metaweb got a giant $42 million round, for its semantic database, Freebase; stealth Israeli company SemantiNet just received $1.7 million; and we’re hearing rumors of more fundings on the way.
Semantic technology, which can range from simply tagging of data, as… Continue Reading
Life sciences briefing: Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2008
TODAY’S HEADLINES:
Mauna Kea Tech raises $30M for in-vivo cellular imaging (release)
Knopp Neuro takes in $10M for Lou Gehrig’s drug (release)
Cardiovascular Systems, arterial-plaque device maker, files for $86M IPO (Edgar)
Diagnostics maker BG Medicine withdraws IPO (release)
Signature Genomics Labs sells stake to Ampersand Ventures (release)
Cambridge Temp raises £375K for new ovulation detector (release)
Mauna Kea Tech raises $30M for in-vivo cellular imaging — Mauna Kea Technologies, a Paris, France, developer of cellular-imaging technology, raised $30 million in a… Continue Reading
Box.net offers easy storage, amid increasing competition
Box.net, a company that lets you store and access files online, said it raised $6 million more in a second round financing.
The round of financing comes at a crucial time for the company, because a host of tough competitors have emerged to make online storage de rigueur.
Google, for one, is about to launch GDrive, which let you store large files, like video, music, and images, and could come free like most of other Google products…. Continue Reading
ShareThis, a button for sharing articles on other sites, says it is growing fast
ShareThis is a bookmarking service for social news sites and social networks that helps you easily share an item such as a blog post, on sites like Digg or Facebook.
You click on the ShareThis button beneath a blog article, and the button gives you a pop-out window where you can choose which site to share the article with — a range of social news sites and social networks. You can also install the Dublin, Ohio… Continue Reading
Ad Infuse takes on $12M more, builds market share in mobile advertising
This may well be the year that the leaders in the mobile advertising space emerge, and startup Ad Infuse has taken on another $12 million to try to ensure its place at the table.
As we reported in an October story, Ad Infuse is distinguished by its focus on targeted user data. Stats like age, gender and geographical location are used to determine the best ad to serve to any particular mobile user, a method the… Continue Reading
Microsoft upgrades effort to convert start-ups
Software giant Microsoft is upping its offensive to convince start-ups to adopt its platform.
Today Microsoft said it has backed 30 more young, promising technology companies, lavishing them with software and marketing help in order to demonstrate that its .Net platform and other Microsoft’s tools are superior to other platforms. It comes at a time when open source technologies, such as the LAMP stack, have become increasingly popular among start-up companies (see our coverage of… Continue Reading
CellEra raises $2M for affordable fuel cells
CellEra is an Israeli stealth-mode startup that is planning to bring affordable fuel cells to market, although it has given little detail on the specifics of its technology.
However, the company’s founders do have extensive experience in methanol fuel cell technology, which leads Earth2Tech to speculate that it is working in that field.
The $2 million funding from Israel Cleantech Ventures. A blog maintained by an intern at that firm states that the company is looking for… Continue Reading
Roost, a new real estate search engine, launching today
The days of the real estate boom are over, but nobody sent the memo to the internet companies.
Startups like Zillow and Trulia are still battling to become king of the listings market (see Trulia’s announcement about overtaking Zillow in popularity), while other sites like ActiveRain, which was just funded, seek to explore niches including real estate blogging and social networking.
The latest entrant: Roost, a real estate search engine that says its listings will be more… Continue Reading