News Byte

Sewichi Raises a Seed Round to Track Mobile Analytics

Seattle-based Sewichi has closed a round of seed funding that will be used to discover a new way to measure analytics in the mobile space. Investors in the undisclosed round include Madrona Venture Group and the company’s founder, David Shim. Shim is still being secretive about his three-month-old company, but hinted that mobile has more interesting data points than a PC to track, including location, time of day and information from sensors, such as Wi-Fi and NFC. Shim worked previously at Quantcast and Farecast.

Posterous Goes Bare: Shows Us All Its Stats

The lightweight blogging company Posterous volunteered to open its books recently, coughing up every product stat NetworkEffect asked for during a recent visit.

Man Bites Dog! Web Publisher Pays Writers

Financial chatter site Seeking Alpha, which has relied on free stories from thousands of contributors for the past seven years, shifts strategies.

Fashion Community Strutting User-Generated Trends Down the Catwalk

The fashion industry may be able to better understand upcoming trends, thanks to a start-up called Polyvore, which is launching a tool that will hopefully turn its user-generated content into an actionable database of likes and preferences.

Google in the Library With a Candlestick: Demand Media's Traffic-Murder Mystery (Except It Didn't Die)

Smart investors will decide whether or not they like online content maker Demand Media, which recently filed to go public. Before Wall Street buys into the IPO, those investors will peruse the financial disclosures, assess the management and analyze the market itself. And they’ll also look at the Santa Monica, Calif., start-up’s traffic, which has been growing steadily since its founding several years ago. Except, insisted two bloggers in posts on the exact same day earlier this week, it looked like Demand’s traffic dramatically fell off over the last month. Or did it?

Fox, Yahoo Sports Vet Brian Grey to Run Sports Start-Up Bleacher Report

Brian Grey used to run big sports sites for really big portals, first at Yahoo, then at Fox Sports. Now he’s going to do the same thing at a start-up: He’s leaving an entrepreneur-in-residence perch at Polaris Venture Partners to run Bleacher Report, a San Francisco-based sports network.

Left at the Altar by AOL, Associated Content Hires Allen

Interested in buying Associated Content, which specializes in generating lots of low-cost, search-friendly content? The company isn’t technically for sale, and there’s no pitch book. But if you’ve got an offer, you can go ahead and contact Allen & Company, the media bankers that Associated Content hired late last year.

Quantcast’s $27.5 Million Series C Round: The “C” Stands for Cisco

It’s not the $50 million in third-round funding for which it was rumored to be looking, but the $27.5 million audience analytics firm Quantcast just managed to raise is impressive nonetheless. Led by Cisco, the round will be used to drive adoption of Quantcast’s Media Program, a comprehensive video audience measurement service.
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Google and Others Fish for Acquisitions: Here's What They Might Be Looking For

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave what he just had to know would be a much quoted comment to the Nikkei today, explicitly saying that the company had “begun seriously looking into acquisitions again.” Music to the beleaguered mergers and acquisitions market, to be sure, especially after a recent uptick from other big companies pulling out their wallets again as the impact of the econalypse subsides. According to sources, Google is working on at least a half-dozen acquisition deals, most of which are small start-ups in the online advertising and cloud-computing arenas. That would be welcome news for many.
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Jason Calacanis Rolls Out the New Mahalo: Yahoo Answers-Killer

In October, Mahalo.com founder Jason Calacanis laid off staff at his human-powered search engine. Then he announced he was hiring engineers for a mysterious new “Project A.” Today he’s unveiling it: An “answers” service designed to compete with one of Yahoo’s most successful sites.