Categorie: social

Lithium Raises $53.4M Fourth Round To Push For Lead In Social Brand Software

Enterprise, Fundings & Exits, social, TC

Screen Shot 2012-01-04 at 10.30.03 PMBig consumer brands generate all sorts of consumer interest and expertise, but they’ve generally struggled to capitalize on these relationships to improve themselves. Lithium has been building itself into a market leader at solving this problem over the last ten years, offering white-label community sites and related products that allow brands to let users share ideas with each other — and tell the brands what they’re doing well, or not.

The company is now doubling down on its business, raising a $53.4 million fourth round of funding on top of the $39 million that it has previously brought in.

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And The First $1 Million Domain Name Sale Of 2012 Is … dudu.com?

DUDU, DUDU Communications, dudu.com, Fundings & Exits, Sedo, social, Startups, TC, WTF

duduDomain name marketplace operator Sedo this morning announced that it has brokered a big domain name sale before the first week of the new year is over. The company has negotiated a sale of the domain dudu.com to a Dubai-based social networking service provider called – you guessed it – DUDU Communications.

Amazingly, the domain name went for as much as $1 million, which is right up there with the sales of furniture.com, sky.com and domainname.com – heck, it even fetched double the purchase price of domains like 3D.com, logo.com and puzzle.com.

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And The First $1 Million Domain Name Sale Of 2012 Is … dudu.com?

DUDU, DUDU Communications, dudu.com, Fundings & Exits, Sedo, social, Startups, TC, WTF

duduDomain name marketplace operator Sedo this morning announced that it has brokered a big domain name sale before the first week of the new year is over. The company has negotiated a sale of the domain dudu.com to a Dubai-based social networking service provider called – you guessed it – DUDU Communications.

Amazingly, the domain name went for as much as $1 million, which is right up there with the sales of furniture.com, sky.com and domainname.com – heck, it even fetched double the purchase price of domains like 3D.com, logo.com and puzzle.com.

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Do Blogs Need Comment Reels? Yes, and Here’s How

Editor's Picks, Opinion, social, TC

Gag The TrollsCommenting on blogs is broken. But what we need is a solution, not an abandonment of the concept. The question comes up every few months, but new social commenting technology means there are better answers now than ever before. Over the last day MG Siegler, MacStories, and mobile developer Mike Gemell have all written about choosing the nuclear option and turning off comments entirely on their sites. Their key reasons for doing so seem to be:

1. Comment reels are full of trolls, bile, and spam links
2. There’s no way for popular sites to keep up with comments on old posts
3. Comment reels give random people too much visibility and distract from primary content

Here are my proposed solutions to these problems.

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Are You The World’s Best Programmer? Compete In Facebook’s 2012 Hacker Cup

facebook, social, TC

Screen shot 2012-01-04 at 11.54.37 AMFacebook has announced its 2012 Hacker Cup, a global computer programming competition. The event will serve as an important recruiting tool to attract great coders to the company, which is constantly battling for fresh engineering talent with other tech giants. In each round, competitors will try to solve complex algorithmic problems as quickly and accurately as possible. Finalists are flown to Facebook HQ, with the winner named the world’s best hacker. Hopefully, the event will go smoother than last year, where instructions were vague and scattered, leading to confusion and frustration.

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IFTTT, A Glue Gun For Sticking The Web Together, Raises $1.5M Seed Round From Top Investors

apps, Fundings & Exits, social, Startups, TC

Screen Shot 2012-01-04 at 8.19.13 AMWant to instantly save all your Instagram photos to Dropbox when you take them? What about automatically updating your Twitter profile when you update your Facebook profile? Or, what about sharing any article you read in Read It Later to Twitter and Facebook, staggered by time via Buffer? A small bootstrapped startup called If This Then That has abstracted a simple set of tools to help you do each of these things, and many more.

And now it’s raising a big seed round of more than $1.5 million from some of the top angels and venture capitalists in tech.

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Spool Raises $1 Million To Let You Cache Content To Mobile And Push It To Friends

apps, Fundings & Exits, mobile, social, spool, Startups, TC

Spool LogoWhen Spool debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in September, the app and browser extension was focused on caching videos, articles, and other web content to your mobile device. It was like Instapaper on steroids. Today, Spool will announce $1 million in new funding and an expanded vision — allowing people to push that cached content directly to the devices of their friends. Investors include, SVAngel, Felicis Ventures, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund and YouTube founder Steve Chen. The funding will go towards scaling the complex back-end caching technology that makes Spool defensible.

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Virtual Currency and Pay Per View 2.0: World Series Of Beer Pong To Stream On Facebook

apps, ecommerce, facebook credits, social, Startups, TC, WTF

World Series Of Beer Pong Stream By MilyoniIn Facebook’s early days the company planned a national beer pong tournament, but then cancelled it out of fear it would promote underage drinking. Tomorrow, that dream will be revived in a new way when social video and ecommerce company Milyoni streams The World Series of Beer Pong through its Facebook app. For 50 Facebook Credits/$5 PayPal pre-sale or 70/$7 once the games begin, viewers can tune in to all the boozy action from doubles to rebuttals. The stream could demonstrate whether live sports could work as Facebook pay-per-view programming.

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Kleiner Leads Klout’s Latest “$30 Million” Funding Round

Fundings & Exits, social, TC

API Billionaire's ClubKlout’s reputation is growing among investors. The startup, which provides a social credit score for more than 100 million public profiles across various social networks, raised C round of financing of around $30 million. Business Insider was the first to report the funding. The company declined to disclose the exact amount it raised, but we’ve confirmed that $30 million is close to the correct amount.

Kleiner partner Chi-Hua Chien, who has been a board observer since Kleiner led Klout’s $8.5 million B round last January, is now a full board member, along with another Kleiner partner, Bing Gordon, Mayfield’s Allen Morgan, and CEO Joe Fernandez.

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Social Network For IT Professionals Toolbox.com Acquired By Ziff Davis

Enterprise, Fundings & Exits, social, TC, Toolbox, Toolbox.com, Ziff Davis

toolboxDigital media publisher Ziff Davis has acquired Toolbox.com, a social networking and knowledge exchange website for IT, HR and Finance professionals that has been around since the late nineties and was previously owned by a company called the Corporate Executive Board. Terms were not disclosed.

For Ziff Davis, which was acquired and ‘relaunched’ as a digital-only media publishing company by former Time Inc. exec Vivek Shah in partnership with PE firm Great Hill Partners back in June 2010, this is the fourth acquisition in the past twelve months.

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