BetaWorks

Ifttt Raises Funding for Its Digital Duct Tape Service

Liz Gannes in Social on January 4 at 9:01 am PT

Ifttt, a start-up that helps even nontechnical users manipulate and connect Web services to do their bidding, has closed its first funding round.

Saul Hansell Departs AOL to Be EIR at Betaworks

Kara Swisher in News on November 8, 2011 at 1:57 pm PT

The prominent former New York Times writer is aiming to be an entrepreneur, just like the ones he used to write about.

Qwhisper Is Looking to Solve Social Search With a Dose of Uber-Geek

Drake Martinet in News on September 16, 2011 at 11:01 am PT

Ever tried to search Twitter for something relatively simple? Not good? The high-octane brains behind start-up Qwhisper agree.

Exclusive: Backupify Closes $5 Million in Round Led by Avalon Ventures

Arik Hesseldahl in News on September 8, 2011 at 5:20 am PT

Even in the cloud, data gets deleted by mistake. Backupify aims to have your back.

News Byte

Skype Pays Around $85 Million for GroupMe

Tricia Duryee in Mobile on August 21, 2011 at 3:21 pm PT

Skype has agreed to acquire GroupMe, a company that has developed a way for groups of people to send messages to each across various smartphone platforms. People familiar with the transaction say Skype will pay around $85 million for GroupMe, which was founded at a TechCrunch event in April 2010. Early investors include First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and Betaworks; last fall, Khosla Ventures won a bidding war for a $10 million funding round that valued the company at around $35 million. Skype is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft.

Burp! Bitly Swallows Twitterfeed.

Peter Kafka in Social on August 9, 2011 at 7:00 am PT

This is the opposite of a megadeal, but still worth noting.

Crowdsourcing Platform ChallengePost Raises $4 Million

Peter Kafka in Social on August 8, 2011 at 9:00 pm PT

Start-ups that rely on the Internet as a source of free labor are nothing new. But the idea keeps coming back, in different forms, because it seems to work.

Fox News’s Twitter Triggers: Crime, Murder, Casey Anthony

Peter Kafka in Media on August 2, 2011 at 7:04 am PT

Fox News Twitter followers click on links about scary stuff. New York Times followers pay attention to basketball. And Economist readers are interested in yogurt.

Bitly Gets a New Boss

Peter Kafka in Media on May 16, 2011 at 6:23 am PT

Bitly has raised $14 million in a few years, and shrinks more than 8 billion Web addresses a month, but has never had a full-time CEO. Now technology vet Peter Stern gets the gig.

Bloom.io Raises Funding for Playful Data Visualization

Liz Gannes in Social on April 11, 2011 at 2:44 pm PT

Bloom.io today announced it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Betaworks, SV Angel and Stewart Butterfield. The company plans apps that aspire to display “new ways of seeing what’s important.”