VentureBeat

Mobile rating site Thummit analyzes Twitter to rate Super Bowl ads

[Disclosure: The author's own startup has been mentored by another Sean Greene company, Launchbox Digital.]

Mobile rating service Thummit is launching an app for the Super Bowl today. Thummit allows users to rate “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” for different restaurants they’ve eaten at, both via… Continue Reading

Social search product Aardvark: Yahoo Answers meets Twitter — but better

Public details have been scant about the social search product from The Mechanical Zoo, a company chock full of former Googlers that just announced it raised $6 million from August Capital and Baseline Ventures. But for the last three months, I’ve actually been a beta… Continue Reading

Weebly scores 1 million users, reaches profitability

Weebly, an AJAX-based drag and drop web page creator, today announces it has reached a million registered users — and perhaps more importantly — that the three-year-old company is now profitable.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based start-up, seeded with $650k by Ron Conway (who participated in… Continue Reading

Groupsites, a white-label social network with a productivity bent

Groupsites, a white-label social network product somewhat similar to well-known competitor Ning, has relaunched. Like Ning, its allows users to create their own networks, but focuses more on collaboration and productivity than leisure and casual connections.

Groupsites gives you sites that feature a drag & drop… Continue Reading

E-Commerce marketing co. ChannelAdvisor raises cash, trims staff

ChannelAdvisor, a company that lets online retailers manage product marketing across marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon.com, Overstock.com and a series of shopping comparison sites, has raised an additional $20 million, VentureWire reports. The company has also laid off 70 of the company’s 350 employees —… Continue Reading

Social stock site Cake Financial launches new stock ranking and recommendation features

Cake Financial, a startup that lets you compare stock picks with other investors, is unveiling three features that may help separate it from a large pack of competitors.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based company already lets users import historical stock-investment data for up to 10 years… Continue Reading

Video startup Eatlime raises the bar on upload speeds

Eatlime, a video uploading and sharing service, says its application delivers video uploading speeds one hundred times faster than its competitors, including Yousendit, which just raised another round of funding.Eatlime has raised more than $400,000 in its first round of funding, with $300,000 from Tim… Continue Reading

Mobile video messaging company MoGreet raises $2.5 million

Venice, Calif.-based MoGreet, a mobile video messaging company, has raised $2.5 million in a second round of funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson Frontier Fund. DFJ remains the sole investor, after a first round of $1.2 million. Users browse the video collection on MoGreet’s web site,… Continue Reading

LetsProve social-presence platform has all the bells and whistles, but will it get traction?

Four months ago, I wrote about a one-man machine in Thailand, Peerapong Pulpitpatnan (aka Pete), who pumped out a YouTube clone and a Twitter clone within three months.

Now, Pete has re-launched LetsProve as a fully integrated social updating platform that lies somewhere between a Twitter… Continue Reading

Tunewiki launches location-based music network for iPhone

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There’s a young startup called TuneWiki, that has a karaoke-like lyric and music synching app out for jailbroken iPhones and is the first commercial developer (that we know of) to release a demo of an app on Android, Google’s mobile development platform.

Tunewiki’s first product, the… Continue Reading

Weebly, a simple web page creator, launches AdSense feature and pro accounts

Weebly, a simple web-page creator, has seen some decent growth since it launched almost two years ago, currently gaining around 10,000 new users per week. The San Francisco-based company has already been trying to make it easier for anyone to create simple sites — now,… Continue Reading

Rap star Ludacris launches online record label Wemix

Christoper Bridges, the rapper and actor better known as “Ludacris,” has put his celebrity power into an online music community called Wemix.

The recently launched startup isn’t your run-of-the-mill music site. It’s a community for unsigned talent in the music industry — singers, songwriters, rappers,… Continue Reading

Coolspotters off to a strong start with wiki-like celebrity spotting site

What happens when a celebrity gossip magazine like US Weekly collides with a wiki-like web application? Coolspotters.

A few sites (including Like) already match clothes with celebrities, but Coolspotters is a place for users to see, generate, and connect information about the products, places, people, fashions,… Continue Reading

Sports teams social network My Team Zone raises $2.3M

Florida-based My Team Zone, Inc. a social network for youth sports teams, leagues, players, coaches and parents raised $2.3 million from private investors. Competitors include WePlay, which has raised $4.5 million in funding, Highschoolsports.net, Rivals.com , Eteamz, and Digitalsports.com.

Longtail, meet Fashion social networking

You’ve heard of MySpace, Facebook, and you might have even heard of Twitter.

But there’s another “space” targeting the long tail of the social networking crowd — those who have a burning fashion itch to scratch.

Fashionspace, a UK-based company, is a social network for fashion designers… Continue Reading

Indie music label Fuzz launches Twitter-like music sharing

Blip, engineered and launched on Fuzz — an indie label music discovery and management platform — by lead engineer Arin Sarkissian, lets users search for song tracks via music search engines Skreemr and Seeqpod and add them to short messages a la Twitter.

In fact, the… Continue Reading

Startup Genomni offers one-click screen sharing for product demos, distance learning

While some used the Web 2.0 conference in San Fransisco a few weeks back to reiterate bubble forecasts, some entrepreneurs were pitching their companies with frenzied fervor.

Marc LeFrancois was one of them.

The Canada-based entrepreneur crisscrossed the continent to present his company’s flagship product, Camwii, a… Continue Reading

New internet radio service MiRoamer could catch on fast

While social music sites are taking off and the search for a new and relevant business model for the music industry is on, Torian Wireless is reaching millions of users the old-fashioned way: radio.

Torian Wireless recently re-launched MiRoamer, an online portal where users can select… Continue Reading

Karaoke app launched on iPhone, demoed on Android

The next-generation iPhone will launch soon, and development for it will only heat up, partially thanks to the $100 million iFund raised by Kleiner Perkins.

It comes as no surprise then, when a start-up that has little more than an application for jail-broken iPhones raises capital.

TuneWiki,… Continue Reading

Plurk: Twitter meets FriendFeed

(Update: One of the founders, subtly nicknamed “Plurk Overlord,” has contacted me, to correct the misinformation I had posted about Alvin Woon being a sole founder of the service. Plurk is funded, based in Ontario, Canada, and has a team of seven)

While perusing the internet… Continue Reading