Facebook and Social Startups Meme.

It all started with a story titled Spread this number. Now

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. It’s the HD-DVD processing key you can use to decrypt and play most HD-DVD movies in Linux. Movie studios are going ballistic over this leak, so Digg the story up and make it reach the front page.

The Digg mob got excited and thought it would be cool to know this to enable fellow geeks to watch HD-DVD movies on linux, but when Chester Millisock tried to digg it, the story was buried and deleted. Well the response from Chester was simple, he copy pasted the entire thing and resubmitted it to Digg with a title “Spread This Number. Again”. The new story hit front page within 3 hours and in the next 12 hours it accumulated more than 15,000 diggs. At the height of its fame the story got buried and deleted again and Chester’s account on digg got banned.

Read More »

FeedLounge, a web based RSS feed reader, has called it quits and are closing operations from 1st June. Apparently the incident that has caused this is a serious injury in Scott Sanders (one of the two co-founders) family, but it was easy for them to come up to this decision because of the relatively small user base of FeedLounge and an uptake in Google Readers user base.

FeedLounge also charges $5 per month or $49.95 per annum, which was another reason for a relatively small user base, specially in the presence of other free readers out there in the market.

Read More »

Sonopia, a service that lets users create their own virtual mobile network for their community, has raised $12.7 million in Series B funding. Cardinal Venture Capital led the round, and was joined by return investors ComVentures and Sevin Rosen Funds. The company has previously raised $9 million in Series A funding.

Sonopia launched in the beginning of April and got a lot of blogger coverage. Sonopia lets users make a virtual mobile network for their community. The service uses Verizon to serve calls and data, so is essentially just a reseller. Users can set up a network around communities such as schools, sports, religious and political groups and so on, and will then get a cut (3-8%) from the revenue that Sonopia will generate from the calls that people within this network makes. Users can also choose from a limited selection of phones and calling plans along with the option to co-brand.

Read More »

Om Malik is reporting that Joost will be officially launching today, although the service is not opened to the general public as yet, but they have allowed their Beta testers to invite as many friends as they want. Previously Beta Testers typically had 5 invitations. For the rest of us, we would have to wait till the end of May to get our hands dirty with Joost.

Joost is the latest adventure of serial entrepreneurs Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström who have now successfully started and sold Kazaa and Skype, both of which were also desktop based applications like Joost. Joost is actually built on the same P2P core which Janus and Friis initially developed for Kazaa. Lets see how many successful ventures could they run on the same technology core.

Read More »

Google’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick has suddenly turned the online advertisement market into a California gold rush scenario. It looks as if everyone either wants to buy a online ad exchange platform or wants to build one to get bought. Yahoo yesterday announced that it is buying the remaining 80% stakes of Right Media that it didn’t already owned for $680 million, valuing the entire company at $850 million, then we have reports that Microsoft wants to buy 24/7 RealMedia by offering to pay as much as $1 billion for the company.

Capitalizing on this hype ContextWeb has announced the launch of their own ad exchange platform called ADSDAQ. According to Anand Subramanian, CEO of ContextWeb, Inc:

Read More »

Google has re-branded its personalized homepage to iGoogle from the previous Google IG acronym. The announcement was made at the Personalization workshop that was held at Googleplex. Google has also recently re-branded Froogle to Google Product Search.

Jessica Ewing the product manager of Google Personalized Homepage product disclosed during the workshop that iGoogle is the amongst the fastest growing Google products and is now available in 40 countries and 26 languages, with more than 25,000 gadgets been developed for the personalized homepage till now.

Read More »

NewYork Post is reporting that Microsoft, which was previously a suitor to DoubleClick is now buying 24/7 Right Media. According to NewYork Post:

Sources said the software giant is considering a price in the $1 billion range for 24/7 Media – a giant leap from the $600 million valuation analysts placed on the firm.

Read More »

After acquiring the remaining 80% stakes of RightMedia for $680 million yesterday, Yahoo has announced yet another big deal within two days. Reuters is reporting that Yahoo has signed a multi-year online advertisement partnership with Comcast.

The partnership includes display and video advertisement on Comcast, which generates 15 million unique visitors and serves 80 million videos each month. Although Comcast will not be integrating Yahoo search into its site but Reuters has hinted that Comcast will award the search deal to Yahoo as well. Search on Comcast properties is currently powered by Google but the three-year contract with Google will be expiring at the end of 2007.

Read More »

VentureBeat has a really interesting scoop. Ticketmaster the owner of social event planning site Evite has threatened to sue rival Socializr alleging that Socializr has ripped off some of their invitation templates and are using them on their site. Evite cited three templates “Holiday,� the “Hawaii Luau� and “Winter Celebration� to be infringing its copyright. Socializr took immediate action and removed Holiday and Hawaii Luau from their template section but have continued to host Winter Celebration. Check out the two templates for yourself.

I think that the reason Socializr has not removed Winter Celebration is because they have really not ripped this one, and Evite listed it in the rip off list for the sake of pumping it up a bit.

This is not so unusual, Viacom did something similar when they slapped Youtube with a massive DMCA take down notice, including some movies in the copyright infringement list that were fair use. EFF took immediate notice of this and counter sued Viacom for acting against fair use. The battle eventually ended in Viacom accepting its mistake and vowing to protect fair use.

Read More »