Facebook and Social Startups Meme.

Kickfire, a company that makes database query performance faster and more efficient, with the first easy to use and cheap high performance database appliance for the MySQL market has raised $20 million in its second round of funding.

The round was led by Pinnacle Ventures along with participation from existing investors namely; Accel Partners Greylock Partners and the Mayfield Fund. The startup’s first product that analyses and reports on data from a MySQL database will be out in the market by October; it is said to be much cheaper than the present offerings of Greenplum and Teradata, as reported by Anthony Ha.

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The controversy had just been tipped in earlier about Google Street View, when it gets a green light to launch it in UK (after facing a bit of resistance from a privacy  group earlier and Google responding) as reported by Bobbie Johnson. Street View has faced quite a lot of opposition from privacy advocates arguing that it is an assault on ‘civil liberty’.

The service has been called an assistant to criminals, giving them a peek into the possible victims; doing all their homework on the Internet. However the Information Commissioner’s Office had a different say about the matter stating:

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Gmail now allows you to bypass the spam filter. All you got to do is to create a filter that will identify the messages which should not be flagged as spam. After creating the filter, you just have to check the option which says, “Never send it to spam”, thats it.

If you think that all of your messages are flagged as spam then you can also bypass all messages. For this, you just have to write label:spam in the text box which has the caption, “Has the words”.

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The Wall Street Journal has reported that Google is flexing its muscles to launch a venture fund; giving Google a chance to invest in startups. Something pretty un-Google, since the giant has been up at buying them out, flat. The fund is set to be led by Google’s SVP Corporate Development David Drummond and Bill Maris.

Google had toyed with the idea before, however the bubble burst before it could be blown enough. The current step; if falls at the right place as planned would help Google’s reputation being transformed from the direct buyer to someone that invests in companies to rise from the ground. A part of the article published in WSJ is given below:

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‘Local Marketers’ is a startup that helps small and medium size businesses to advertise online. The Seattle based startup has raised $4.1 million in its current round of funding.

The current amount has been raised from the Mandora Venture Group. The company publicises its pay-per- contact model. This model is considered as better in terms accountability from the pay-per-click model.

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How often do you bump into an application being shut down and then popping up again in less than a couple of days? Well if you haven’t witnessed it up late, now’s the time to do it. How do you do that? Well, the Agarwalla brothers have the Wordscraper for you.

Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla had previously launched Scrabulous on Facebook that won a lot of appreciation from the users, but then shut it down as Hasbro threatened the game to be a violation of copyright laws. The game was only shut down in the United States and Canada, where Hasbro has all the rights for Scrabble. This enraged the users quite a lot as Scrabble succumbed to some ‘malicious attack’ yesterday.

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The Online Video Giant YouTube, has purchased Omnisio, a small California based Video Startup. The Y Combinator company, Omnisio was launched in March this year and have had gained popularity ever since its release. Though there is not any officially hearing about the final acquisition deal  but VentureBeat reported that it is expected to be around $15million. YouTube in its official blog mentioned that the acquisition will help it to grow its Userbase by enhancing  their social video networking and interaction.

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Google has been a spotlight with accusations, trials and claims of doing one thing against the law or another (let’s keep the results aside for now) and we have just another nail dug in this wall of Google. The reason turns out to be Google Street View service invading the privacy of a Pittsburgh couple. The present response by Google of not doing anything to harm their privacy comes in the wake of the accusations field by the couple in April.

Google says that the claims fail for many reasons; the most basic being the fact that almost any passerby can get a view of ones home as they walk across a street and that Google has done nothing so as to bring the house inside out for the public. Google said (As reported by Stephen Shankland):

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Microsoft has come out with an update to its Live Search home page and has got a pretty positive response in return. And why wouldn’t it? We are accustomed to seeing the same Microsoft outlook at every web page the giant has. The use of scenic beauty as a background image might just tick but then is this how the search market operates?

The background is tipped in to change more often and have ‘hotspots’; interactive areas that highlight parts of images that help you explore search results with respect to the highlighted area. The concept makes it pretty interesting to begin a search with but does that do much to the overall search experience?

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