Early-stage venture firm Y-Combinator is getting a boost of money from Sequoia Capital and a few angel investors. In these rather tough economic times, stories like this are quite welcome.

Y-Combinator estimates that with the $2 million raised, it will be able to increase the number of startups it seeds from 40 to 60 per year. Typically, Y-Comb puts in $5,000 plus an added $5,000 for each founder in exchange for between 2% and 10% in equity, with the median being 6%. This is how Reddit got its start, along with Disqus and Dropbox.
[more...]

You heard it right, straight from the horse’s mouth. Quite sensationally, details of Facebook’s recent settlement with the guys who Mark Zuckerberg may or may not have stolen code and ideas from (ConnectU) have been uncovered by the Associated Press by simply copying and pasting covered-up parts of electronic versions of the settlement’s documents.

That’s right: Facebook apparently tried very hard to keep this under wraps, but were undone by a simply copy and paste. Truly spectacular.
[more...]

Some actual good news for the American economy as Intel has announced they will spend $7 billion building and revamping plants to build its new 32 nanometer chips here in the United States.

The plan will create an estimated 7,000 new high-wage jobs in places like my home state of Oregon, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Intel has managed to weather the financial crisis fairly well by holding $15 billion in liquid assets, so while most companies are scraping by, Intel is able to announce large scale investing. Interestingly, Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini made the announcement in Washington as the economic stimulus is being debated.
[more...]

First of all, there will always be a place for the big city tabloids out there. They are cheap, easy to read, and sleazy enough to appeal to a wide range of customers.

But what about high-end newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times? The cost of printing a newspaper, while ostensibly low, requires not only resources (ink, paper, etc.) but electricity, labor, and gasoline. Silicon Alley Insider suggests it would be cheaper to send every long-term subscriber an Amazon Kindle than to print and deliver papers.
[more...]

TheKnot, which owns such properties as Weddingchannel.com, Lilaguide.com, Babynest.com, and TheBump.com has acquired breastfeeding help site, Breastfeeding.com.

The site has tons of breastfeeding content, including the largest online community of breastfeeding moms on the web. They also have extensive expert input, including from over 4,000 lactation consultants and a medical advisory board that includes some of the world’s foremost breastfeeding experts.
[more...]

Is there money to be made with YouTube advertising? Just ask Universal. Their relationship with the Google-owned video site is netting them huge traffic and big money in advertising revenue.

While Viacom and NBC battle YouTube with lawyers or their own sites, Universal took the approach that it’s hard to stop a speeding train, and sometimes it’s best to just jump on board. Universal’s YouTube channel has racked up 3 billion views, the biggest of any channel in YouTube’s history.
[more...]

As we wrote last week, Cyber Monday is a very accurate predictor of what the online holiday shopping season will look like. Many feared that the economic downturn this year would lead to a very modest online recession, or at the very least, a significant slowing in growth.

There was some slowing, but it wasn’t much: Cyber Monday was 15% bigger than last year, which isn’t bad at all. It represented the second biggest online shopping day in history, with nearly $850 million spent.
[more...]

Twitter asks, “What are you doing?” Yammer asks, “What are you working on?”

Yammer is basically Twitter for businesses. Unlike Twitter, is is tailored for the enterprise market, offering desktop, iPhone, and Blackberry apps, IM support, email support, and SMS. And, unlike Twitter, it appears to have a viable monetization model.

In an effort to keep it clean, Yammer only works for corporate email addresses. While it’s obvious to say that Twitter should have done something like this, they it may not be as easy to pull off as it seems. The security issues and needs to larger companies, especially those where privacy is a primary and grave concern, would require some hard work, and Twitter has had enough scaling problems to deal with to keep them pretty busy. Yammer is on the ground floor with enterprise concerns in mind.
[more...]

Apple wasn’t exactly promising anything that would set the world on fire with today’s “Let’s Rock” event. In fact, many were forecasting that the stock would fall in reaction to what would be little to get excited about, in comparison to some of Apple’s past blockbuster announcements.

But there was some news made today, and Steve Jobs was there to deliver it. Perhaps the biggest news was the new iPod Nano, which is no longer short and fat, but tall and skinny. It also has a new tapered design and an accelerometer that allows for vertical and horizontal display on the new screen. The accelerometer can also be used to “shake-shuffle” your songs, which is kind of cool (but available on other MP3 players, not unique to Apple). Additionally, the price has not changed but the Nanos have more storage capacity, with 8GB models for $149 and 16GB for $199.
[more...]

In what would spell the end of microfiche and be an unparalleled research resource, Google is launching an initiative to archive newspapers in their original form from all over the world, every one of them, in their entirety.

In addition to showing these newspapers in their original form, Google will of course make them fully searchable, so users will get both the text and the original image from the paper.

The platform Google is using is not unlike the one used for Google Books, except with advertising being a lot more prominently featured than with Google Books. Interestingly, Google does not have a “beta” tag attached to this launch, whereas Gmail is still in beta after what seems like years.
[more...]