TweetPhoto is expanding beyond Twitter, which is a smart move considering the current social networking environment. The massive changes to the service of course warrants a major name change, seeing as the company will no longer be pigeon-holed as a Twitter app. The new name is Plixi, which I found to be pretty darn cute. Turns out, that was the idea CEO and founder Sean Callahan had behind the name change, as nearly two-thirds of its user base is female (by the way, that's generally becoming the case for several social networking and media-sharing tools, particularly those that interact from a location-based, mobile vantage point). And what else do girls like to do? Socialize. While TweetPhoto already supported media-sharing

Etsy has landed $20 million in its fifth round of funding, led by Index Ventures. The latest round values Etsy around $300 million, bringing its total amount of funding raised to $52 million. Joining the team is Adam Freed, former Google International executive, bringing some heavy-hitting management to the online craft retailer. Another new addition to Etsy is Index Ventures Partner Danny Rimer, now sitting on the board with founder Rob Kalin and Union Square Ventures Partner Fred Wilson, among others. Etsy isn’t a company I get to discuss very often, but I visit the site daily. User-generated and consumer-driven, Etsy is an online marketplace that epitomizes a self-regulated community. The funding comes no surprise, given the

An acquisition by Google hints at more development around the GoogleMe project. Angstro, a social news aggregation startup founded by Rohit Khare, is the latest in a stretch of socially-oriented Google acquisitions. Launched in 2008, Angstro scours blogs and news sites to find the information most relevant to individual users’ needs. It added Knx.to last year, layering in real-time search componnents for more contextual results. An accompanying API has introduced the social componnt for Angstro, bringing it full circle for many of today’s current search trends. While Khare will be joining Google, details surrounding the full acquisition of all Angstro’s technology and platforms have not been revealed. He posts on Angstro's

How much media content should I produce? As a professional journalist this has been a question that I've struggled with over the past five years since leaving the Financial Times. I can produce a lot of media content, and hopefully, it is all quality media content. But my concern is that if I produce too much, it will cause my readers and subscribers to switch off because there is too much from one source. I know that if some of my sources are too noisy on Twitter, Facebook, even on their blog or web site, I will switch them off because it is too much -- even if all their content is good. I don't want my readers doing the same to me. This question of how much media is too much media is not just my concern, it should be a concern for ot

Today,   is launching a location-based publishing platform to go along with its hyper-local business directory.  This move is designed to put MerchantCircle on the map with competitors like AOL’s local content network Patch, Facebook Places, and FourSquare. With this system, local merchants both make money off their expertise and also guide further customers to their stores via participation in the app. This is all part of a growing trend of hyper-local mobile applications and social networking. Earlier this week, a story ran about the release of a hyper-local travel content network released by Nileguide. A content system dubbed “Ask Locals”, which adds the participation of locals to their tourism and exploration guide.

Technology truly is groundbreaking as it quickens the pace of our everyday activities, and shrinks the world down to a small screen. The improvements around efficiency have led to marketplace  breakthroughs, like TaskRabbit, which received $850k in its latest round of funding from First Round Capital. Task Rabbit is a site that pairs customers with personal assistants, called 'runners,' to do the tasks they don't have time to do. Some these activities could be running money to the bank, picking up your clothes from the dry cleaner, jump-starting a car, etc. These runners have undergone background checks, and TaskRabbit takes 12 to 28 percent of the runners pay for the marketplace service it provides. While the company is relatively n

I just read Paul Graham’s excellent post on what happened to Yahoo and this one paragraph jumped out at me: I didn’t realize the answer till later, after I went to work at Yahoo. It was neither of my guesses. The reason Yahoo didn’t care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If they merely extracted the actual value, they’d have made less. [From What Happened to Yahoo] There are two very important lessons here that companies of all sizes should take away and the first is that much of the web economy is built on arbitrage, the selling of something for more than you buy it for. When you are in an arbitrage business and the market forces do not demand e

With expectations of Facebook’s geo-location launch to go down this week, the question around hyper-localized consumer tools moves even further down the path of monetization, usefulness and appeal. Geo-location is something we’ve anticipated from Facebook for months, and given the ripeness of mobile marketing as a current trend, it was only a matter of time before Facebook found a way to incorporate it into its own feature sets and kits for developers. An event invite posted by Kara Swisher at All Things D indicates that Facebook’s next “big thing” is imminent, presenting us an opportunity to dig a little deeper into the phenomenon overall. As far as Facebook is concerned, the mobile and gaming crossroad of geo-location appears t

Magpie, one of the first ad bidding networks built entirely around Twitter, is now up for sale. Turns out, the team has decided to move onto bigger and better things. Two years after launching, the European startup is looking for an exit. CEO Jan Schulz-Hofen explains in a blog post, We have decided to sell the company in order to focus on this idea, and we’re taking offers now. To make this very clear: we know that we have only seen the dawn of social media marketing, and we continue to believe in the huge potential of Magpie. To any buyer who understands online advertising, Magpie will be of enormous value. If we do not get a reasonable offer by someone who is willing to take good care of Magpie, treat our twitterers and our

I’ve got a pile of work to do today that (unfortunately) has very little to do with writing blog posts directly. I’ve also got a number of “must write” blog posts that are timely and need to go out as soon as possible. And then Chris Brogan has to go out and write one of the most intriguing posts I’ve seen in weeks. The topic he address almost demands that I drop everything for the next hour or so and publish my thoughts on the topic. The topic he brings up is something he’s termed the “impending social crash,” and rather than paraphrase his words, I’ll directly quote him: Old days: I’d see you at a family event. We’d talk. I’d send a letter or call you some time after that. We’d not see each other for month