TeachStreet, the startup dedicated to assist teachers in promoting their classes to students in their locality bagged $1.2 million in its second round. The current round takes its total funding to $3.5 million. Along with this, the startup also announced expanding its branches to six cities and presently opened up in Chicago as well. While it provides its services for free, the startup also plans to begin offering premium service that will help teachers utilize better promotion options.
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It’s not just an Android that Google is giving away to attendants at the Google I/O but it has got more for its developers. By developers I am emphasizing on developers in the Android community. To encourage more developers create more for the platform, Google has announced its Android Developer Challenge. The submissions will begin from August and this challenge is open to anyone with an Android handset and each of those owners can also vote via a dedicated app from the Android Market. The purpose of these votes is to determine top 20 apps in ten categories. The categories include:
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Google I/O 2009 was meant to brig new features and with an added free Android G1 giveaway. long with that it also released its new product called Web Elements. The new product would enable developers, site owners to easily integrate/embed numerous Google products to their pages. It works around by offering users widgets of it products that can all appear on a single page. Those widgets total to 8 in number and include Calendar, Custom Search, Conversation, Maps, News, Spreadsheets, YouTube news and Presentations. I particularly liked the YouTube News widget that pulls in news videos from 13 different news agencies as well as the conversation widget. The conversation widget lets you create a comment box on a topic of your choice and users can place their comments by signing in with Google Friend Connect. That’s not it, the widget also has auto translate features as well. The web elements may not entirely be a new concept but how Google has put it makes it more exciting and ever useful. You can view more of those widgets below.
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I had my mouth open when I read this an Android G1 for everyone at Google I/O and to be honest I am envious of all those present there. And to finish it off with a topping, the lucky folks are going to get unlimited 3G access and talk time for a whole month. Now the G1 may not be the most handsome of handsets out there but the software it runs is what adds weight to the device itself. The give away is a thank you from Google to its deserving developer community. We have got another major event coming up, from an even bigger player in the game, Apple’s WWDC. But mind you, there is going to be no giveaways of any devices (I am pretty sure of this), even if it’s the very first Mac ready to be discarded.
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Looks like ad tech providers are having funds coming from every direction. Today another such firm, Peer39 took its total funding to $22 million as it announced the closing of Series C round that brought it $10.5 Million. The funding came from its existing investors Canaan Partners, JP Morgan, Silicon Valley Bank, Dawntreader Ventures and led by Evergreen Venture Partners. Peer39 started off as an independent ad network and eventually changed its strategy to leverage its own semantic ad platform. All that the publishers need to do is add Javascript to their site and each time a page loads, Peer39 analyzes the data and displays ads that most relevant. Such a workaround maximizes the chances of making profits for each ad displayed.
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Here comes another one to make sharing photos easier on Twitter as Posterous released its new features. The startup that let you share/post anything by simply sending an email has added photo sharing as well with the help of as many a dozen Twitter clients. The bigger part of the news is that Posterous has made a huge stride forward in this by integrating some of the most popular clients, including Seesmic Desktop, Tweetie for Mac. etc and the only major player left out is TweetDeck. But does it really matter all that much? This would also enable auto-postiing to various social networking sites including Twitter, Flickr, Facebook as well as maintain your very own photo blog at Posterous. Sounds more than useful and equally enticing to have users adopting it for sharing images. So is TwitPic going to have some serious competition with Posterous? You are more than welcome to be Nostradamus and predict the future of the two as comments.
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When almost half the people on Twitter consider that the purpose of Twitter is primarily having maximum followers it becomes easier for scammers to fish follower hungry users. Earlier today a similar one broke out at Twitter that had the right words to Phish the ever demanding Tweeples. A tweet would appear in your stream with the ever enticing OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from http://twittercut.com. Just watch out and don’t click the link. And in case you do just don’t enter your Twitter credentials when you are directed to the site. The account from which it originated has been suspended but it keeps appearing now and then from those who have fallen victim to it.
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Adify a self service ad network that assists companies build their own ad networks is enabling its customers to extend their reach to more publishers with the release of its API. The company’s Amplified Partner program and its Network Builder both help its members to amalgamate ad technology companies and help customers to build and better monetize their ad networks. The coming of its API would enable ad networks to better target audiences and ad networks by letting them provide media rich ad options.
