Exclusive: Japan’s Rakuten Wins the Heart of Pinterest in $100M Funding Race With $1.5B Valuation

The largest e-commerce site in Japan is about to get pinned by Ben Silbermann in massive funding round.
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L.A. Stories: Scarfing Up Big Media at Gobbler (Video)

A hopped-up version of Dropbox’s media-in-the-cloud efforts for cool music folks.
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L.A. Stories: HipSwap Tries to Take the Creepy out of Craigslist (Video)

The mobile app-heavy service allows anyone with stuff, including boutique merchants with quirky stuff to move, to quickly snap photos of items, price them and then — presumably — sell.
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Jason Calacanis Has One Miiiiiilllllion Dollars to Give Out to Start-Ups (Video)

Dr. Evil couldn’t make it, so heeeeeere’s Jason!
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News Byte

TasteMakerX Raises $1.8M for Mobile Social App Platform

TastemakerX, a San Francisco start-up that is developing a social mobile platform focused on “targeted taste graphs,” said it had raised $1.8 million in funding from a variety of venture firms, including Guggenheim Partners, Baseline Ventures, True Ventures and Tekton Ventures, as well as angel investors. The company said it will release its TastemakerX Music mobile app as a private beta in early March 2012.

Here’s Gowalla CEO’s Non-Denial Denial Email to Investors About Facebook Acquisition

Let’s put this one in the “done” column, shall we?
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Marc Andreessen vs. Reid Hoffman in Yahoo Savior Face-Off? Not Yet. (But Delicious to Imagine.)

Whoa, Nelly! How fantastic would it be for Silicon Valley tech legends Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman to battle for control of Yahoo? Too fantastic to actually happen. But one can hope.
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Former Color Co-Founder Peter Pham Heads to Former Myspace CEO’s L.A. Tech Studio (Video)

The well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur joins Mike Jones at Science.
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Exclusive: Zynga’s Van Natta Moves to Strategic Adviser; Feld Off Board, Paul In

Big changes at the online social gaming phenom as it gets ready to go public.

Gogobot Goes Mobile With New iPhone App