If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed of Startup Meme.

WSJ is reporting on tip from an insider that eBay is in advanced talks to acquire StumbleUpon. According to WSJ:

The potential price for a deal is in the range of $75 million, these people say. One of the people said that no final agreement has been reached and the talks could fall apart.

Read the rest of this entry »

YCombinator clones are now popping up like wild rabbits. Earlier this week we wrote a post YCombinator Gunners to cover the VC firms who now offer seed stage funding on a model drafted by YCombinator. Highland Capital Partners is a new to this club and have launched the Summer Entrepreneurship @ Highland program. I think the summer internship programs offered by companies will also be modified to summer entrepreneurship programs.

The summer entrepreneurship program offered by Highland is open to all graduate and undergraduate students, and Highland Capital Partners will be selecting 8 groups for funding this summer. Selected students will have to re-locate to Lexington, Massachusetts for the summer. A single founder team will receive $7,500 in entrepreneurship grant, whereas a multi-person team will get $5000 per founder. Highland Partners will allocate office space in the Highland E-Center in Lexington and expects founders to reside within the same premise and there is something more

Read the rest of this entry »

Techforward, a Los Angeles based company that allows users to recoup the value of their consumer electronics devices via trade-ins, has raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding from First Round Capital. The funding will be used to expand the reach of the company’s Guaranteed Buyback product through partnerships with leading retailers and manufacturers of consumer electronic devices.

Guaranteed Buyback of products is beneficial to the users because it reducs the cost of their next device, a laptop for instance and contributes to the environment by ensuring that the previous device is properly re-cycled. If you have a new or used laptop you could go to the TechMyLife website and enter the specifications of the laptop. The system will generate a buyback plan for you enumerating the buyback price if you wish to sell it in 6 months, 12 months, 18 months or 24 months from now. The buyback guarantee will cost you around $50-$70 but will ensure that you don’t have to bother about selling the laptop later on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Techcrunch and GigaOm are reporting that eBay is about to close the acquisition of StumbleUpon, a very addictive social service that lets users discover websites based upon recommendations by people having similar interests. StumbleUpon has been in acquisition discussions since last November with Google, AOL and eBay and the price tag is rumored to be between $40 - $45 million range.

StumbleUpon lets users discover new sites and content around the world via a browser toolbar. All you have to do is to click on Stumble! and it will take you to a random page according to the preferences specified in your profile. After viewing the site you could rate it by by giving it a thumbs up or down. The more you will use stumble upon the better it will get to know about your likings. With this information about you StumbleUpon will begin to serve you highly relevant content that is rated positively by people with similar preferences. People who have once used this service have not seen back, even more so because of the surprise factor in what they might see next, and also because of delivering highly relevant and interesting content.

Read the rest of this entry »

VideoEgg, one of the leading video solution provider that has also built an enviable video ad network, announced a strategic investment round from WPP, one of the world´s leading communications services groups. The details of the investment were not disclosed.

VideoEgg initially started as a video editing and publishing service. The VideoEgg Publisher allowed users to easily capture, edit and publish videos anywhere on the web, across any social network. Thus removing the complexity of video formats, editing softwares and players. VideoEgg is powering the video hosting/streaming for dozens of other websites, including Bebo, AOL, Dogster and many others. Rather than create yet another video destination site, VideoEgg lets any website owner integrate video into their site for free – providing the hosting, transcoding, editing seamlessly. In a way VideoEgg adopted the same approach to video that Photobucket adopted for photos, i.e to become a back end storage space for other social networks and online communities. Since this space is usually hidden away from geeks and rarely comes to light, we ought to see very little competition in companies trying to do backend jobs. However the success of Photobucket proves the point that the online photo and video game will be won by a company that works with existing destination sites rather than building competitive new destinations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Krugle has announced an important partnership with SourceForge to provide contextual code search across the world`s largets open source code repository. SourceForge hosts more than 1,45,000 open source projects, including some of the very popular ones like- eMule, FileZilla, GIMP and GTK+. SourceForge and Krugle have worked together to embed Krugle´s search engine into SourceForge repository and developers could from now onwards search for projects alongwith its entire codebase.

This partnership will benefit both SourceForge since it previously just searched for the projects and didnt even looked at the code, and Krugle since it will now not only have access to code of such a huge project base but also to the meta data of those projects, which would significantly increase the search results and relevancy. This gives Krugle a thumbs up against Google Code Search and SourceForge against Google Code Hosting- the open source hosting platform from Google.

Read the rest of this entry »

Aggregate Knowledge, a company that gives recommendations based on aggregated user behavior has raised $20 million in Second Round of funding from DAG Ventures, while previous investor Kleiner Perkins also participated in the round. Aggregate Knowledge has previously raised $5 million in First Round of funding and has also received angel investment from Josh Kopelman.The company has been valued north of $70 million, which is really healthy.

The company works with content and eCommerce sites and provides recommendations to the users to visit a certain page or make a certain sale. It does so on the basis of similar behavior expressed by other users. The company has 15 customers, including Overstock and Wahsington Post and is generating millions in revenues for them. The company will be launching a new product called Collective Discovery, that apply similar patterns to discovering products. Like if you have read a useful soccer article from one site, Aggregate knowledge will recommend buying a ticket from another site.

Read the rest of this entry »