Jive Teams With Bunchball and Forces Us to Learn the Word “Gamification”

Don’t get enough praise at work? As companies embrace social enterprise applications, expect a wave of “gamification,” bringing with it badges and funny titles and lots of little competitions.
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Exclusive: LinkedIn Has Bought Contact Management Start-Up Connected

LinkedIn has acquired Connected, a small contact management start-up that unifies and dynamically updates users’ connections on email, social networks, calendars and phones.
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InboxQ Inverts Twitter Q&A Product to Help People Find Experts

InboxQ will today launch a Q&A site that directs users to experts who might be able to answer their questions, and then gets out of the way.
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Badgeville Awarded $12 Million in Fresh Capital

Badgeville, which is building loyalty programs for everything from media companies to e-commerce and enterprises, has raised $12 million in additional capital to ramp up its business.
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ShopIgniter Also Gets Funded to Pursue Social Commerce

ShopIgniter has raised $8 million in capital to go after the social commerce market, making it the second company today to announce funding for such a cause.
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ThredUP Raises $7M for Swapping Kids Clothing

ThredUP, the kids’ clothing exchange site, has raised $7 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Brian Swette.

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.

Perfect Market Raises Another $9 Million to Help Papers Sell Old News

Perfect Market doesn’t promise to save the newspaper business. But the company says it can help papers wring more money out of the stuff they’re already making.

BillShrink's Pham Speaks About the T-Mobile Deal, the Econalypse and More!

Last week, BoomTown paid an economically-minded visit to the Redwood City, Calif., offices of BillShrink, a Silicon Valley start-up aimed at helping consumers find cheaper prices on gas, cellphones and plans and credit cards via a Web-based comparison and alert system. Launched about a year ago and armed with about $9 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures, it has aims of moving into a range of other money-saving arenas too. But today, it got a major boost in its existing business by inking a deal to be part of a huge national advertising campaign by T-Mobile aimed at boosting price awareness among consumers, an apt message for these econalyptic times.
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The Real News of Wetpaint's $25 Million Funding: Fidelity Kicked In

While Wetpaint’s $25 million new round of funding was leaked to one and all under embargo until 12:01 am EST today–including BoomTown, so don’t assume any of us report our little hearts out on all these bits of news–what the press release did not disclose, sources said, was an intriguing new investor: Fidelity Investments. What’s interesting about this wrinkle is that it is yet another validation in Web 2.0 world from a large traditional institutional investor.
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