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, Product Reviews Net, GracefulFlavor, The Register, hypebot, 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, bub.blicio.us, WebProNews, Webware.com, 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.
Discussion:
Inside Facebook
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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, Infinite Loop, Gizmodo, Engadget, Gadgetell, Forever Geek and CrunchGear
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 …
