Fired Facebook Acquisitions Exec Lands at Twitter

Mike Brown, the former Facebook corporate development executive who was dismissed for buying its stock on secondary markets, has taken a similar job at Twitter.

Formspring Absorbs What's Left of Q&A Competitor PeerPong: The People

Q&A start-up PeerPong has closed, and competitor Formspring has already picked up PeerPong CEO Ro Choy to serve as its COO.

Video of RockYou Founders Talking About the New $17 Million Funding for Asian Expansion

Widget maker RockYou announced today that it has nabbed a $17 million investment from two Asian firms, SoftBank Group and SK Telecom Ventures. The investment will be added to $35 million from the Redwood City, Calif.-based start-up’s C round in June. Overall, RockYou has raised a total of $67 million and–before the current econalypse–had previously reported a $400 million valuation. In a video with BoomTown, the company’s co-founders, CEO Lance Tokuda and CTO Jia Shen, said the new funding would be used to expand into the Asia-Pacific market, add offices and staff and make acquisitions.

RockYou: The $400 Million Widget?

RockYou, widget maker, is the latest example of a sane valuation heartbreaker, as it is undertaking efforts to secure an investment from mainstream financing firms that would value the company at between $300 million and $400 million. First reported by Valleywag last night, the start-up, said one source, “is being squired around Wall Street” by investment behemoth Morgan Stanley, in search of the same kind of deal its rival Slide got in January.

Kara Visits Dailymotion in Paris

After my visit to Netvibes, I also went over to another cool Web company here that I have been following for a while: Dailymotion. Based in Paris and funded with $32 million from Atlas Venture and Partech International, the video-sharing site positions itself these days as kind of an anti-YouTube–better at programming, easier to use [...]

Kara Visits the Offices of RockYou

So I recently ventured into the heart of the empire of toddler developers with a visit to the San Mateo, Calif., HQ of RockYou, the super-popular maker of third-party apps on hot social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. I have been on a bit of a grumpy tear of late about the juvenile nature of [...]