For those of you who don’t think voicemail is counterproductive, there is a new app on Facebook called Voicetag that lets you send voicemail messages to individuals or groups. This is not the first such app on Facebook (see Voicemail or TringMe), but it works with regular phones and incorporates SMS messages.
The app is [...]

You know those engineer elves at Google like to do things their own way. That build-it-better ethic also applies to Christmas toys. If you click on the Christmas Doodle on Google’s main search page, you will see the five images below, which shows what I can only assume is one of Google’s older [...]

Y Combinator startup Scribd has raised its second big round of financing - $9 million from Charles River Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group. That comes on top of a $3.7 million Series A round in the middle of 2007, plus some scattered angel investments.
Scribd is a site where users upload PDFs and office [...]

Hamburg, Germany based XING, a global professional social network that’s strong in Europe, has acquired New York based socialmedian for an undisclosed amount approximately $7.5 million in total, a mix of $4 million in cash up front and an earn-out valued at between €0.5-2.5 million payable over three years. Socialmedian’s founding CEO Jason Goldberg is [...]

Today Yahoo announced the purchase of 30% of the shares of an Indian telephone information service called Network Management
Company. The size of the investment wasn’t disclosed, although Yahoo will take a board seat.
I’m sure Yahoo has great reasons for the investment, but this seems like a bit of a side show. Their core U.S. business [...]

When Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher launched his Blahgirls project at Techcrunch 50 this year, one of the first things investor Ron Conway said on the judging panel was that the idea would tap into the emerging billion dollar market for branded content. Media plays like Blahgirls aren’t normally so well received in the tech community, [...]

The digital mixtape is dying on the Web. The RIAA is killing it just like it tries to kill anything that smacks of consumer-driven innovation. Digital mixtapes are nothing more than shared playlists. Sites that make it easy to create and share music in this fashion are shutting down left and right. [...]

Joost’s two year old online video service was a pretty darned smart idea when it first launched.
Instead of streaming video through the Joost website, users would download a Mozilla-based client and watch it there instead. The user experience could be more tightly controlled. And more importantly, the Joost client had built in person-to-person file [...]

How many cooks does it take to produce the perfect recipe? I’d say one, a really good one. Barnaby Dorfman thinks that 1,000 cooks can come up with a better recipe than any single chef, and earlier today he launched Foodista around that premise. It is a Wikipedia for food. Each [...]

Twit Or Fit launches today - effectively an idea borne of combining Twitter with a site like Hot Or Not, where you rate the appearance of people displayed. HotOrNot was recently sold for a rumored $20 million, but since TwitOrFit relies on Twitter and therefore has little inherent intellectual property, I somehow doubt it will [...]