Amazon funds online cooking encyclopedia Foodista
Foodista, an online encyclopedia about food, has raised a first round of undisclosed size led by Amazon.com. Not only has the Seattle company created a Wikipedia for cooking (launched in December 2008), it also organizes the International Food Blogging Conference. TechCrunch previously reported that the round totaled $550,000.
BookTour gets $350K for author event directory
BookTour, a web site that aggregates author events like readings, book signings and the like, making them easily searchable, has landed $350,000 in a first round of funding from Amazon.com, among undisclosed others, according to PE Hub. Equally notable is that its chairman is Christopher Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine.
The site lets authors create their own profile pages so they can keep their fans abreast of any updates, events, biographical information, etc. —… Continue Reading
Black Friday not terrible; Christmas not doomed?
The big post-Thanksgiving shopping day known as Black Friday wasn’t as awful for retailers — at least for online retailers — as some had feared, according to new data from comScore. That’s a good sign for the online economy, since Black Friday is usually seen as an indicator of how the rest of holiday shopping season will go.
Online shoppers spent a $534 million on Friday, up 1 percent from last year. That’s not a dramatic… Continue Reading
Engine Yard gets $15M for Rails hosting, and a new platform
Engine Yard, a hosting and support company for the popular Ruby on Rails programming framework, has raised $15 million in a second round of financing. Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Tom Mornini says the San Francisco startup will soon expand its offerings with the release of Vertebra, its platform for managing Rails applications in the Internet cloud.
The new funding is kind of surprising, since Engine Yard just announced its $3.5 million first round back in… Continue Reading
Updated: Amazon.com suffers outage
Amazon.com’s web site is down. A message left at Amazon’s PR hotline hasn’t yet been answered. The company’s stock price is also down this morning. It’s not clear why the outage is happening. Readers have noticed it since about 10:30 am Pacific time on Friday. The message that comes up is “http:/1.1 service unavailable.” (as of about 130 pm, the service was back online).
Amazon hasn’t had a big outage for a while. The costs of… Continue Reading
Photo-music video creator Animoto raises round from Amazon
Animoto, a company that lets you create music videos out of your photos albums, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Amazon.com.
New York-based Animoto offers a way to create a more advanced version of the sorts slideshow widgets you see on MySpace, made by companies like RockYou and Slide.
Animoto launched last year with a stand-alone site where users could create 30-second videos by uploading photo albums, choosing a song, and letting the company… Continue Reading
Roundup: The arrived recession, Jaman’s deal with TiVo, Chinese growth, and more
Here’s a pre-weekend roundup of the latest action:
1) Is the recession coming, or already here?
2) Jaman signs distribution deal with TiVo
3) Amazon buys indie film distributor Without a Box
4) Google probably intends to lose in 700mhz auctions
5) The “UltraBattery” has promise for electric cars
6) China on the verge of becoming largest internet market
7) But they’re worried their citizens game too much
Digg’s editing Illuminati
Is the recession on its way, or already here? — While we’ve been… Continue Reading
Amazon backs Amie Street, music site
Amazon.com, continuing its spurt of initiatives to keep up with new technology, has invested an undisclosed amount to music site AmieStreet.com.
This is the first round of financing for New York City’s AmieStreet.com, a year-old online digital music store. The company is different for its radical approach to pricing. All songs are free to begin with. But as more members of the site download a song, indicating popularity, the price of the song goes up, capping… Continue Reading
Buzzillions, offering “power reviews”
Have you ever searched for product reviews online at and come away unsatisfied?
We have. Sometimes we can’t find reviews for a niche product. At Amazon for books, or at Yelp for restaurants, we often get that sneaky feeling a reviewer is biased (written by a friend of the author, or owner). And for cameras or computers at CNET or Yahoo, we’re not sure whether the revenue is targeted to an expert, or beginner. We’re dependent… Continue Reading
The dirt on Amazon, Steve Jobs, Topix, Fatdoor, MySpace, VC tax and more
Here’s the latest action:
Amazon’s odd and scary patent — First, Amazon rolled out a product called Mechancial Turk (image left), where people do tasks for you that a machine couldn’t perform. Strange name, we thought, but nicely couched in history, and the people still ruled. But the latest Amazon patent puts the machine in charge, breaking down tasks, and commanding the human to do them. According to the patent, just awarded, “the humans perform the subtasks… Continue Reading
Imagekind, the Web site for artists, raises cash
Imagekind is a Web site that lets artists upload their artwork for sale, and gives them the freedom to sell it at whatever price they want.
The six-month-old Seattle start-up has just raised $2.6 million in venture capital, which gives it ammunition to go after the industry’s leading site, Art.com. It will announce the funding tomorrow.
Art.com dictates prices more rigidly — it doesn’t let artists set their own price, and apparently only pays them a 10… Continue Reading
Roundup: Amazon-TiVo video punch, Metacafe’s woes, Google’s tracking & more
(Updated) roundup of latest tech stuff:
Amazon.com answers Wal-Mart on video downloads — There are so many video download services, it’s easy to get jaded. Wal-Mart just announced its own download service, but the test site looks awful (it still badly garbled as of this writing). A more promising video service is the offering by Amazon Unbox to download movies directly to your TiVo. This is significant: It’s the first service letting people watch regular TV programming… Continue Reading
Amazon takes major stake in Wikia
Wikia, a San Mateo company that allows groups to share information about their interests with wiki technology, has raised a second round of funding — all of it coming from Amazon.com.
It is not clear how much traction Wikia company has gained. The company says more than two thousand wiki sites have been created on its platform, edited by 30,00 registered users. Wikia wants to users do everything outside of Wikipedia’s collaborative encyclopedia process.
It enables… Continue Reading
Roundup: LinkedIn’s German nemesis, more on Google, Web 3.0?, and Zuckerberg’s flip-flops
The latest in tech-land:
German competitor rains on LinkedIn’s parade — LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke flew to Germany to manage the opening of a new German Web site there. Upon his arrival, however, LinkedIn’s German competitor, OpenBC announced it plans to go public within the next six months on the German and Swiss exchanges, depending on market conditions. Seemed a coincidence for the company to make the statement, and perhaps an attempt to grab the headlines? The… Continue Reading