Roundup: Fox News launches uReport, AT&T doubles 3G capacity, and more
Here’s the latest action:
Fox News gets citizen journalism arm on MySpace — Contributors to uReport can only upload and tag photos and videos, presenting fewer possibilities than CNN’s similarly named iReport.
AT&T doubling 3G capacity — The company, whose 3G network is the source of frequent complaints from iPhone owners, says it will increase downlink capacity from 3.6 to 7.2 megabits per second through base station software upgrades.
Startup icons create seed-stage fund in Europe – European Founders Capital, a fund created by Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo, and Brent Hoberman, co-founder of MyDeco, has raised $29.5m (£20m) of seed funding to invest in early-stage companies. It may eventually raise $74m (£50m) total.
Former Yahoo Music exec Dave Goldbert to head Web-survey company SurveyMonkey, after buyout — Before becoming the survey making and managing startup’s chief executive, Goldbert spent two years as an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital. Meanwhile, Spectrum Equity Investors and Bain Capital Ventures lead a group of investors to buy a majority of SurveyMonkey. Spectrum will be the largest shareholder, according to the WSJ.
An outside developer creates a URL shortener for the New York Times, but it gets hacked – NytUrl.com is a way for readers of NYT articles to shorten URLs and share them. However, it was hacked to work with other sites as well, as widely reported. Marc Frons, the NYT chief technology officer, tells VentureBeat he’s not unhappy about it. After all, The Times launched its API initiative precisely to let other developers build features on top of NYT content, and the outside developer experimenting with NytURL is a good example. Moreover, the hack will help the NYT learn more about how to strengthen restrictions, Frons said. While Frons said he has not decided yet whether or not to endorse NytUrl.com, or some other site, such as Nyt.com, he expects the NYT to eventually move to endorse a particular shortener.
Sunlight Foundation funds six “Apps for America” — Each of the six winning tools helps make government data more accessible and will receive between $1,000 and $15,000. ReadWriteWeb has the full list.
Gear6 releases Web Cache to help scale web sites — Th product, which is built on the memory protocol memcached, is already used by customers like Answers.com, MyYearBook.com, and Veoh.
Twitter client Tweetie comes to Macs – Reviews of the application, which was already popular on the iPhone, are pretty positive.
Google working on YouTube comment-filtering system — At least, that’s what the search giant said in a filing with the Federal Communications Commissions.
Text messaging marketing startup Kadoink goes belly up – Hercules Technology Growth Capital seized the San Francisco startup after it failed to maintain the financial requirements of a $2.5 million line of credit. CEO Scott Cahill says Kadoink is looking for a buyer.
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About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.
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