Wikipedia seeks fresh blood

The New York Times reports on the Wikipedia Foundation’s plans to double its staff with 44 new employees and back them with $20 million in fundraising in the next year.

The key passage in the Times’ story is this: “Wikipedia contributors have raised concerns that interest in creating, editing and polishing articles is waning as the site grows older.” The non-profit, San Francisco-based Foundation brought in a consulting group to seek ways to bring newly … Continue Reading

YouTube to bankroll promising video makers

Google-owned YouTube has announced a $5 million fund called YouTube Partner Grants that will identify and reward promising online clip makers.

“We’re starting with proven partners, partners with the most views,” YouTube bizdev guy George Strompolos told AdAge. “We’ll be evaluating proposals based on their projected viewership, their marketing plan, distribution, everything. A lot of these folks have built up big audiences on YouTube, but they may be cash-constrained and not able to take their … Continue Reading

Court denies VeriSign on .com domain dispute

VeriSign is one step closer to losing a big court case that will affect the future of dot-com domain prices.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has denied VeriSign’s motion for a rehearing of its case with Coalition for ICANN Transparency, which challenged VeriSign’s no-bid contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The contract effectively makes VeriSign the default provider of dot-com domains. The coalition, backed by Canadian Internet entrepreneur Rob Hall, … Continue Reading

Sofanatics goes after social-network sports fans

Sports is one of the biggest topics on Twitter, yet until Univision began hosting the World Cup soccer championships online for free, many people seem to have been unaware of high-bandwidth sports services like ESPN3, MLB.TV, and NBCSports.com.

Sofanatics is a Helsinki-based startup aimed directly at people who keep a computer in their lap while watching games on TV. Its differentiating feature (from, say, status-update aggregator Twackle) is video web chat.

The company announced an … Continue Reading

iCrossing founder returns to search marketing

Jeff Herzog founded Internet marketing firm iCrossing in 1998 and turned his fervor for search engine marketing into a company that the Hearst Corporation bought for more than $325 million in a deal that closed earlier this year.

For the past two years, Herzog has been working on ZooLoo, a social network service I described as “Tumblr Pro” earlier this year. I was surprised to receive a press release this week announcing the sale of … Continue Reading

Zivity's clickable new product: Sponsored posts of photogenic women

Zivity founder Cyan Banister (that’s not her in the photo, that’s Zivity model Vivka) based her startup on a simple premise: Some women really like to pose for the camera in varying states of undress. Banister’s unique skill is in keeping the site classy.

After launching in 2007, though, Banister wasn’t making her projected traffic goals, and investors weren’t keen on keeping the site’s home-growney vibe. So Banister and her investors — BlueRun Ventures and … Continue Reading

U.S. venture funding rallies to $7.5 billion for first half of 2010

Dow Jones LP Source, an industry database that tracks private equity fundraising, says venture funds are still down from 2008, when they raised $14.2 billion during the first half of that year.

But things are turning around for VCs. A year ago, Dow Jones measured only $6.6 billion in first-half investing. This year, first-half investing is up to $7.5 billion.

Multi-stage funds did best, says Dow Jones’ report. Early-stage investors also did well, but late-stage … Continue Reading

Second trailer for Facebook movie: Watch it before it disappears

http://www.movieweb.com/v/VI9fd9dh20d7ai

YouTube has removed the second trailer for upcoming movie The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin’s telling of the Facebook founders’ story. YouTube’s page says the video was removed because of a copyright claim by Sony Pictures. We’re embedding a copy from MovieWeb, which hopefully won’t disappear.

This second trailer repeats a lot of the audio dialogue from the first trailer. But instead of flashing words like “punk” and “billionaire” over the soundtrack, this trailer displays … Continue Reading

Competition makes Android, iPhone browsers run faster

Thank the higher power of your choice for the fiercely aggressive, competitive nature of the engineers working on both Apple’s Safari browser and Android’s open-source alternative. Not only have coders done a great job of supporting as much Web content as possible in their pet browsers, they’ve also challenged each other on speed. Not with incremental creeping improvements, but with huge leapfrogs over each other.

In the latest test match performed by the reliable gearheads … Continue Reading

Google clarifies: More "display ads" doesn't mean annoying animations

AdAge reported on last week’s Google press event, where  vice president of product management Neal Mohan explained how the company plans to extend its advertising empire beyond search keywords.

Google will be trying ways to serve more display ads — that’s industry jargon for Internet ads not targeted to search results — throughout its popular properties.

But Google spokesperson Rob Shilkin explained to VentureBeat that “display ad” doesn’t necessarily mean gaudy, dancing images.

“The Google … Continue Reading

Borders launches e-book store

Ann Arbor-based Borders Group this morning announced the launch of  the Borders e-book store.

Built atop existing e-book store Kobo, the store carries a catalog of 1.5 million books that can be read on a PC, a Mac, an Android phone, a BlackBerry an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. For the smartphones, Borders has a free app for downloading and reading the books. Books can be downloaded in three formats: ePub, a mobile format for … Continue Reading

New report pegs Facebook valuation at $12 billion

A week after a report by Facebook investor Elevation Partners pegged the social network’s value at $23 billion, a report by pre-IPO analysts Next Up Research has reached only half that amount. Even so, the report says a lot for Facebook’s future.

Next Up’s report is hosted by SharesPost, a trading site for pre-IPO sales similar to Second Market, which brokered $100 million in Facebook employee stock sales to Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies. … Continue Reading

Prince says "the Internet is completely over"

In the middle of a starstruck interview by a reporter for London’s Daily Mirror, the artist currently known as Prince launched into a short, punchy tirade against Internet music distribution.

Prince, in case you haven’t followed him lately, has shut down his own website. He has ordered clips of his music removed from YouTube. Asked to explain why his next album will be sold as CD only and won’t be downloadable, he said:

“The Internet’s … Continue Reading

Bill Gross buys his way onto Twitter for Android

In April, Idealab founder Bill Gross launched a new startup called TweetUp. The new company would, he said, provide a way for publishers to include ranked tweets on their sites, as well as ads in the form of sponsored tweets. The idea is that people and companies will pay to promote their own tweets, while publishers will incorporate TweetUp’s ranked results on their own pages, rather than an unsorted or weakly sorted (i.e. keyword match) … Continue Reading

51,972 app developers vastly prefer Apple, only 3% also do Android

AppStoreHQ founder Chris DeVore, whose site tracks apps for Android, iPhone, iPad and HTML5 by crawling their respective app stores, created an eye-opening Venn diagram of how app developers for iOS (the iPhone/iPad operating system) and Android are clustered.

DeVore says he and his team crawled their own database and manually checked 4,500 entries by hand to make sure there were no major bugs in their approach.

The resulting chart speaks for itself. Of the … Continue Reading

Steve Jobs "calm down" email is a hoax, says Apple

Update: Boy Genius Report has updated its post, most importantly saying that BGR’s original post this morning misattributed words written by “Tom” as written by Steve Jobs, including the dubious “Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone.” This makes a lot more sense.

A widely-published email exchange allegedly between an upset iPhone owner and Apple CEO Steve Jobs is, according to Apple’s PR department, a fabrication. The denial is notable because Apple … Continue Reading

M&A action is meh, say reports

A total of 79 mergers and acquisitions raised $4.3 billion in the second quarter of 2010, according to a report by Dow Jones VentureSource. That’s a slight 4 percent drop from last year’s report. Overall, this year is slightly up, 12%.

The largest deal by far this past quarter was Google’s $750 million acquisition of AdMob, the large mobile advertising network.

Separately, the National Venture Capital Association counted 92 deals with a total disclosed value … Continue Reading

IPOs make a comeback, but it's a shaky one

There were 15 or 17 venture-backed initial public offerings in the second quarter of 2010, depending on who’s counting. That’s the most since 2007. But both Dow Jones VentureSource and the National Venture Capital Association, which issued reports on the IPO market today, agree that IPOs are still on unsteady ground. That’s why several companies canceled their planned IPOs during the quarter.

Most newly public firms are now trading below their entry price. A few … Continue Reading

Mobile advertisers turning to interactive ads, says report

The latest monthly report from mobile ad network Millennial Media says advertisers spent 85% more on interactive “rich media” mobile ads in May than in April. The report doesn’t offer much detail as to why the sudden extra kick in spending, nor does it reveal the dollar amount being spent. It’s likely that rich media spending is not very high, hence the ability for it to nearly double in one month.

A Millennial spokesperson said, … Continue Reading

Why is Yahoo buying back $3 billion of stock?

According to an SEC filing, Yahoo’s board of directors has approved a stock buyback program that will pay cash for up to three billion dollars’ worth of shares over the next three years. The repurchases may take place on the open market, or in privately negotiated transactions.

It’s generally assumed that a stock buyback means Yahoo’s directors have no compelling ideas for what to do with the money. They don’t think they can invest it … Continue Reading