Quora Expands Beyond Q&A, Launches ‘Boards’ — A Way To Personally Curate Information

Screen Shot 2011-12-19 at 3.45.54 PMQuora is taking a step beyond Q&A this morning with its latest product launch, boards. Users can now set up their own personal-themed bookmarking boards, sort of like a Pinterest for text-based information.

Writes Quora CEO  Adam D’Angelo in a blog post, “As Quora has grown, we’ve learned that people want to read the most interesting content regardless of whether it happens to be in question and answer format or not.” D’Angelo tells me that this shift fits in better with Quora’s new goal, “to connect you with everything you want to know about.” Its old goal was described as “a continuously improving collection of questions and answers.”

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When Did You Tweet That? Twistory Improves Google Calendar Support

twistTwistory, which lets people save their tweet backlog to their favorite calendaring application, has finally come through with full support for popular Web-based calendaring service Google Calendar.

You can now subscribe to Twistory using your existing Twitter account and automatically view in Google Calendar when you’ve tweeted what. Up until now, compatibility with Google Calendar was a little flaky, but the team behind Twistory tells me it is now finally stable.

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The Echo Nest To Power New Spotify Radio (Which Begins Rolling Out Today)

SpotifyFor a long time now, Spotify has had its own Radio experience, but, to be honest, it hasn’t been very good. Then, last week, the Swedish-turned-America music service announced that it was redesigning its radio experience from the ground up, offering unlimited stations and unlimited “skips”. And it’s no mistake that, during his presentation of the new Spotify Radio, CEO Daniel Ek happened to compare his app to Pandora.

Since its IPO, Pandora has been on a kick, but Spotify is doing everything it can to continue nipping at its heels and has added 7 million new users since integrating with Facebook at f8. Enter: The Echo Nest, a music intelligence startup whose technology powers many music apps from media companies and independent developers

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Now At 1.4M Members, Fab.com Turns Up The Social With A ‘Live Feed’

fabfeeddExclusive – Fab.com, the ridiculously fast growing e-commerce startup, is launching a new social shopping feature today that lets members view and interact with any activity on the design flash sales site in real-time.

Dubbed the ‘live feed’ and reminiscent of Facebook’s early iterations of what is now the News Feed, it captures what users are purchasing, sharing, commenting on etc.

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New Data From Pando Offers A Glimpse Into The Massive Global Growth Of Freemium Gaming

freeWell, it looks like hardcore gamers would like to have a word with you, social and casual gamers. Yes, the stories in the media of late have been all about Rovio’s Angry Birds skyrocketing past half a billion downloads, or Zynga and its ilk overtaking social games. Both casual and social games have been growing like gangbusters, but the latest data from Pando Networks reveals some fairly serious growth in the free-to-play gaming industry across the globe.

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Punchfork Tells Foodies Which Recipes Are Hot Right Now

punchforkYou’ve seen too many recipe websites. It’s okay – so have I. But Punchfork is doing things a little differently by leveraging hardcore algorithms to curate the best recipes found on the Web based on social network chatter, in realtime.

Punchfork has built a sophisticated algorithm that measures a how many times a recipe posted by its publishing partners gets shared on social networks like Twitter and Facebook and sites like StumbleUpon. The higher a recipe’s score based on Punchfork’s technology, on a scale from 1 to 100, the more it should have been talked about and shared on the Web.

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Flipboard Adds 1 Million Users Its First Week On The iPhone

FlipboardLogoOnly one week after Flipboard’s highly anticipated launch on the iPhone (and iPod Touch), the company is announcing it has added 1 million users to its service and has tripled its engagement. According to the company, that means it now has over 5 million users in total using the app across the iOS platform.

Before last week’s release, Flipboard had registered 650 million flips per month on the iPad. Now it’s trending towards 2 billion flips per month.

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KidZui Raises $2.4M, Launches Zui Studios To Create More Videos For Kids

zuiExclusive – KidZui, maker of family-friendly Internet products like a safe browser and a video destination for kids, has scored another $2.4 million in funding from existing investors, led by Mission Ventures and Costella Kirsch.

The capital will be used for the development of a new video production division dubbed Zui Studios.

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