With Users In Over 83 Countries, Social Discovery Platform At The Pool Wants To Be The Anti-Facebook

Screen shot 2013-03-07 at 4.07.40 PMAt The Pool, the Los Angeles-based social discovery platform, is today rolling out a big re-design that sees the startup becoming laser-focused on creating the “anti-Facebook” social network for young people. In its February 10-K report, Facebook said that it is at risk of losing young users to other services that are similar to or act “as a substitute for Facebook.”

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Pandora’s Long-Time CEO Joe Kennedy Abruptly Steps Down, Just As Pandora Starts Making Money On Mobile

149288v1-max-250x250Hot on the heels of a relatively strong quarter for the streaming music service, Pandora has announced that its long-time CEO and President, Joe Kennedy, will be stepping down. In a statement this afternoon, Pandora said that he will “continue in his current role until his successor is named.”

Kennedy, who has been at the helm of the streaming music service since July 2004 and helped take the company public, and led it to a platform that now has over 67 million monthly active listeners. Pandora today has over 8 percent of total U.S. radio listening market share.

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Pandora Shares Jump 18% After Better-Than-Expected Earnings, Mobile Revenue Up 111% To $80.3M

Pandora-logoVeteran streaming radio platform Pandora released its fourth quarter earnings today, in which it saw its fiscal 2013 revenue of $427.1 million, representing a 56 percent year-over-year increase, and fourth quarter revenue of $125.1 million, an increase of 54 percent year-over-year. In turn, mobile revenue for the fourth quarter grew 111 percent year-over-year to $80.3 million.

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EQuala Launches On iOS And Android To Bring More Context And Control To Social Music Discovery

Screen shot 2013-03-06 at 4.46.12 PMOver the last decade, the rise of mobile technology and the maturation of the Web as distribution and consumption channels has had a devastating effect on the music industry, among others. Yet, on the bright side, more recently these technologies have produced a litany of new ways to discover great music, empowering both fans and musicians in the process. While it seems that each day brings a new music app or product — a net positive for music fans — there’s also a lot of noise.

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Now 18M Users Strong, Edmodo Makes Its First Acquisition In Root-1 To Become The App Market For Education

edmodo_logo_colorAfter spending years working as technicians at public schools, Jeff O’Hara and Nicolas Borg launched Edmodo in 2008 to address what they had come to see as a huge gap in the teacher-student relationship: The need for a better, safer way for teachers to connect and communicate with their students. However, with the launch of its APIs early last year to allow developers to build apps on top of its platform, what began as a social networking tool — a sort of Facebook or Yammer for education — has more recently evolved into a marketplace for education apps.

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Ev Williams: Medium Wants To Help Build A Sustainable Economic Model For Journalism

2118601809_4fb4b88e70_z1At the Launch Conference in San Francisco today, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams took the stage to talk to conference founder Jason Calacanis about everything from his experience at Twitter and the rise of Vine to sharing his take on Google and Facebook as well as the latest from Medium, his latest effort to shape the future of digital publishing.

For those unfamiliar, a serial entrepreneur, Williams has played a key role in helping to shape the way we create and share content on the Web, as the co-founder of Pyra Labs, which produced Blogger — and was bought by Google in 2003. In doing so, Williams is often credited with coining the term “blogger” and helping to popularize both the term “blog” and the medium itself. After leaving Google, Williams went on to co-found Odeo and “idea incubator” Obvious, which produced both Twitter and, most recently, Medium (among others).

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LockerDome Lands $6M From Square Co-founder & More To Help Sports Fans Connect With Their Favorite Teams & Athletes

Screen shot 2013-03-04 at 2.06.26 AMLockerDome, a social media publishing platform designed to connect sports fans with their favorite athletes, teams, brands and sports properties, announced today that it has raised $6 million in series A financing. The round was led by Cultivation Capital Growth Fund, a new venture fund created by Square co-founder Jim McKelvey, with contributions from St. Louis Cardinals President William DeWitt, III, a Milwaukee Brewers exec and veteran NHL defenseman (and Hart Trophy winner) Chris Pronger, among others.

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After Recruiting Founding StubHub CTO, Buzzmob Overhauls Its Social Events App To Help Brands Connect With Fans

Screen shot 2013-02-28 at 1.57.21 PMIf you’ve been to a live event recently, like a football game or a, you’ve probably noticed that the majority of people around you spent most of their time huddled over their smartphone. It’s true of life now, too, as people now interface with the world through Instagram rather than their eyeballs, but this even more true for live events.

BuzzMob launched in 2011 to capitalize on our mobile obsession with a location-based fan engagement app, designed to help facilitate and channel the social chatter at live events. The app aims to create a more engaging experience at live events by offering a focused, virtual community message board, which allows users to tap into a realtime community feed of images, tips and status updates from fellow event-goers.

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With $1.5M In Fresh Funding, Social Calendar App UpTo Now Lets Any Group Create & Publish Its Own Event Stream

UpTo Stream PublishingFounded in 2011, Detroit-based startup UpTo set out on an important mission: Turn your daily calendar into a social network. Sure, social calender-ing may not reach out and grab you, but, when the startup launched its iPhone app last March, it seemed worthy of another chance. Event-sharing apps are hardly new (see Facebook, Eventbrite, etc. etc.), but UpTo is taking an approach that many can empathize with when it comes to the social experience around events.

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Rock Health Launches Its Fourth Batch Of Startups, As Total Funding For Grads Hits $43M, $900K Each

DSC_03871After five months of testing, iterating, spit balling and pavement pounding, today Rock Health’s fourth class of HealthTech startups took the stage at Demo Day to pitch their fledgling businesses to investors. More than anything, these fourteen startups confirmed that digital health is not just alive and well, but beginning to gain some real traction. (More on that here.)

Like education, the healthcare industry is in the early stages of a massive sea change, and Rock Health’s startups collectively addressed some major pain points for the industry — from leveraging better coordination and patient engagement to lower the costs and simplify the tangled mess of health insurance, to incentivizing healthy behavior and improving secondary care.

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