Top Items:
Marc Andreessen / blog.pmarca.com:
Ning news: new investment round — If you follow such things, you may have seen a report that my new Internet company, Ning, has just raised a new investment round. — To date, Ning has been mostly internally financed by me and a small group of angel investors who are close friends and colleagues of ours.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Big, Big Round of Funding For Ning — This is just a rumor at this point, and I haven't confirmed it with the company (update: this is now confirmed, see below), but I'm hearing that Ning has closed a very large round of financing, led by Legg Mason - $44 million total on a $170 million pre-money valuation.
Anick Jesdanun / Associated Press:
Nielsen scraps Web page view rankings — NEW YORK - A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites. — The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday …
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Heather Havenstein / Computerworld:
New Web metric likely to hurt Google, help YouTube — Nielsen/NetRatings to use total time spent by users of a site as its primary measurement metric — In a nod to the success of emerging Web 2. technologies like AJAX and streaming media, one of the country's largest Internet benchmarking companies …
Reuters:
Apple plans cheaper, Nano-based phone: JP Morgan — NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) plans to launch a cheaper version of the iPhone in the fourth quarter that could be based on the ultra-slim iPod Nano music player, according to a JP Morgan report.
Discussion:
Infinite Loop, CNET News.com, GracefulFlavor, The Register, Engadget, Macsimum News and The Next Net
Wall Street Journal:
Facebook Names Ex-AOL Official Marketing Chief — Social-networking company Facebook Inc. has hired a young Web veteran to fill its top marketing role in a bid to bolster its management ranks and find new ways to make money. — Chamath Palihapitiya, a former executive at Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit …
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Valleywag:
Facebook: "F— you, Yahoo, they're going IPO!" — "F— you, Yahoo, they're going IPO!" — Just in case you had any remaining doubts that Facebook is going public — a fact that Mark Zuckerberg's sister, Randi Jayne, profanely sings about in a video that's since been taken down — check out this job listing:
Discussion:
Insider Chatter, Webware.com, WebProNews, bub.blicio.us, Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab, ParisLemon, VC Ratings and digg
Dean Takahashi / Mercury News:
Microsoft's next move? Code-name Falcon — Here's a trade secret that Microsoft is unlikely to publicly acknowledge. — Sony's cutting the price on the PlayStation 3. How will Microsoft react? We'll find out soon. But a key part of the strategy is going to be a project code-named Falcon.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Bay Partners Launches Facebook-Apps-Only Fund — Here's another indication of the importance of the new Facebook platform: Silicon Valley VC fund Bay Partners has earmarked millions of dollars for investments in startups creating applications for Facebook. The new program, called AppFactory, will be officially launched on Tuesday.
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Kasper Jade / AppleInsider:
Next-gen iMacs to bundle new Apple keyboard — An overhaul to Apple Inc.'s popular line of iMac computers, now due in a matter of weeks, will see the company's latest industrial design efforts extend beyond the systems themselves, AppleInsider has learned. — The new all-in-one signature desktops …
Discussion:
CNET News.com, ParisLemon, Gizmodo, Infinite Loop, Engadget, Gadgetell, CrunchGear and Forever Geek
Darren Rowse / ProBlogger Blog Tips:
Buy Blog Comments - A Sick New Comment Spam Service Launches — I just had a rather disturbing email from a company advertising a new service called Buy Blog Comments (no follow tags used) promoting a new service offering to leave comment spam on blogs for those wanting to increase their SEO ranking.
Matt Marshall / VentureBeat:
Quantcast becomes latest widget traffic tracker — More and more publishers and retailers rely on so-called "widgets," little boxes placed on other web sites, to deliver their news, entertainment and product advertisements. — So measuring Web traffic to those widgets is important …
Jon Stokes / Ars Technica:
Intel buys into VMware — Intel and VMware announced today that Intel Capital is taking a $218.5 million stake in virtualization company VMWare. Intel will purchase 9.5 million Class A shares at $23 per share, which, at the completion of VMware's forthcoming IPO, will give Intel about a 2.5 percent stake in the company.
Discussion:
CNET News.com, eWEEK.com, Bits, TechSpot News, The Register, Inquirer, The Tech Report and Compiler
Steve Willis / Compete Blog:
June Search Market Share: Big Surprise from MSN — Google finally has a competitor join it in the (until now) exclusive, positive-year-over-year-growth club. MSN/Live increased their query volume by 67% from May, and 48% from a year ago. Search volume was up all across the board in June …
