News Byte

Sailthru Raises $20 Million to Spread the Gospel of Personalization

New York City-based Sailthru, which makes a software suite that helps media companies and marketers personalize editorial content and marketing messages for individual users, has raised a $20 million Series C investment led by Scale Venture Partners. Benchmark and RRE Ventures were among the other investors who chipped in to the round.

Gravity’s Amit Kapur Talks About the State of the “Interest Graph” (Video)

How can you find what you want on the Web?

Chegg Set to Go Public Tomorrow in Next Post-Twitter Tech IPO

Which came first: The chicken or Wall Street investors?

News Byte

Yahoo Loses New Top Data Scientist to eBay

Tim Converse, one of Yahoo’s higher-ranking data scientists, who arrived at the company early this year via an acquisition, has been hired away by eBay. He will lead its search-science engineering team, reporting to search technology VP Dan Fain. Converse is co-founder of Jybe, a mobile app for recommendation and social discovery that the Silicon Valley Internet giant bought in March. His LinkedIn profile notes that, at Yahoo, he “worked on machine learning techniques for the personalization group.”

Breaking News Takes a New Approach to the Personalized News Feed — A News Feed That’s Only Partly Personalized

NBC’s popular Twitter handle takes on the filter bubble.

Google Turns On Social Advertising, but Holds Back on Larger Personalization Play

Google announces plans to include users’ names and photos in select advertisements beginning next month.

News Byte

Staples Acquires Personalization Startup Runa to Customize Deals for Online Shoppers

Staples announced today that it has acquired Runa, a San Mateo, Calif.-based startup that sells technologies that online retailers use to customize deals and shipping offers on a shopper-by-shopper basis. Runa’s entire staff of about 20 will be joining Staples.

News Byte

Yahoo Product Exec Mike Kerns Gets Big Promotion to Run Homepage and Verticals

According to his LinkedIn page, Yahoo has promoted one of its more talented and entrepreneurial execs, Mike Kerns, to a fancy new job (at least the title is). Kerns — who came to Yahoo several years ago after it bought the company he founded, Citizen Sports — had been VP of social and personalization. Now, he’s SVP of product homepage and verticals, which represents a much wider swath of products, including its powerful homepage and more.

Motorola Mobility’s Moto X Offers Customized Colors and More

Motorola’s Moto X adjusts to meetings and moving cars, and its camera is always ready.

Moto X Stands Out in Sea of Phone Sameness

New $200 smartphone from Google-owned Motorola Mobility aims to use personalization of color and inscriptions as one of its key components.