Twitter outage: Don’t know what you got until it’s gone

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Twitter appears to be gradually coming back online after an outage this morning that lasted at least a half-hour for many users. Maybe this is their way of reminding us how central the service has become to the way many of us communicate online. “That. Was. Agony. ‪#TwitterColdTurkey‬,” tweeted TV personality Piers Morgan, reflecting the sentiment… Read More…

Casino giant IGT goes social, launches Vegas slot machine favorite on Facebook

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International Game Technologies — which purchased Seattle social game maker Double Down Interactive for up to $500 million in January — is bringing its popular Da Vinci Diamonds slot machine to Facebook. But this won’t be the full Vegas experience. After all, in the Facebook version, only virtual coins are at stake (for now). The game will be… Read More…

Facebook buys facial recognition startup Face.com

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In a deal that was widely anticipated, Facebook announced today that it has acquired facial recognition upstart Face.com. TechCrunch reports that the price tag was in the $100 million ballpark. “Our mission is and has always been to find new and exciting ways to make face recognition a fun, engaging part of people’s lives, and… Read More…

PopCap Games cancels Bejeweled Blitz on Google+

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PopCap Games is pulling its popular Bejeweled Blitz puzzle game from Google+, saying that it wants to focus efforts on other areas. The company issued this statement on the decision: “PopCap has decided to suspend Bejeweled Blitz on Google+ to redeploy our resources to other adaptations of Bejeweled. Certainly, Google is a valuable gaming partner… Read More…

Evri spins out SportStream with $3.5M from Paul Allen

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Seattle startup Evri was founded in 2007, designed to help people make better sense of news and information. A lot has changed since then, especially given the rise of tablets and mobile computers. Now, the company is evolving, announcing today that it has spun off a new social sports startup called SportStream with $3.5 million from… Read More…

LinkedIn: No accounts hacked as result of stolen passwords

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LinkedIn today updated its users on the stolen password fiasco that arose last week in which 6.4 million passwords were illegally obtained and posted on a Russian Web site. According to a blog post from LinkedIn’s Vicente Silveira the company has received no reports that member accounts have been breached as a result of the… Read More…

Social network for gun lovers moving to South Dakota, can’t hit funding target on West Coast

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Internet entrepreneur Dan Hall’s 2-year-old social networking company attracts more than two million unique visitors per month; counts some big-name clients as advertisers; and has already generated its first profits. But despite that success, Hall just couldn’t line up the investment capital that he needed when pitching the idea up-and-down the West Coast, including in… Read More…

Facebook’s first 8 days: One of the worst tech debuts we’ve seen

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Just how bad has Facebook’s stock performance been since its IPO? Well, consider the visualization below from Tableau Software’s Daniel Hom who compared the social networking giant’s first eight days to other recent technology IPOs. As you can see, Facebook’s debut has been pretty rough, with the stock losing more than 25 percent of its… Read More…

Voicepic: Add 5-second audio captions to your favorite photos

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A picture may often be worth a thousand words.  But for those instances when images alone can’t tell the story, there’s Voicepic. That’s the name of a new photo sharing app from Bellevue’s UIEvolution which allows users to easily add 5-second audio captions to personal photos. UIEvolution CEO Chris Ruff said the goal with the… Read More…

Another bad day: Facebook shares tumble nearly 10%

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Investors are continuing to hammer Facebook just 11 days after its initial public offering, sending the stock of the social networking powerhouse down 9.6 percent in trading Tuesday. The stock closed at $28.84, the first time it has finished below the $30 mark. Facebook went public at $38 per share earlier this month, with many… Read More…

Evri CTO Deep Dhillon jumps to Alliance Health Networks

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Alliance Health Networks isn’t wasting anytime bolstering its Pacific Northwest operations following the purchase Medify, a Seattle upstart that it gobbled up two weeks ago. The Salt Lake City company, which operates niche-oriented social networks for more than three dozen diseases, plans to announce the hiring of Deep Dhillon as chief data scientist. Dhillon most recently… Read More…

Lockerz buys online fashion site Chick Approved

Megan Parken of MeganHeartsMakeup

Lockerz continues to bolster its ranks through acquisitions, with the fast-growing Seattle social shopping company announcing that it has acquired online fashion community Chick Approved. Chick Approved — founded by Jeff Turnbull, Brett Miller and David Dripps – allows its users to get feedback on fashion choices. As part of the deal, Lockerz will continue to… Read More…

A little piece of Facebook: Would you invest in Zuck’s big IPO?

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Facebook has the Internets abuzz this week in advance of its IPO announcement. It is coming with plenty of speculation: Is the wunderkind of Silicon Valley worth its reported $105 billion valuation? We’re wondering, would you buy Facebook stock, its value tottering between $34-$38 per share? In a piece today in the The New York… Read More…

Facebook sets IPO range: Social networking giant to be valued at more than $75 billion

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Facebook is getting one step closer to becoming a publicly-traded company, with the social networking powerhouse today disclosing in a SEC filing that it intends to sell shares in the price range of $28 to $35 per share. The deal would value the company between $77 billion and $96 billion, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s stake… Read More…

Chirpify lands $1.3 million to sell music and concert tickets through Twitter

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Twitter is great for sharing content. But when it comes to actually conducting commerce, the fast-growing social networking service leaves something to be desired. Portland’s Chirpify wants to solve that problem, and it just landed $1.3 million in a first round of funding from a group of angel investors that includes BuddyTV CEO Andy Liu;… Read More…

Baby’s first turd and other unshareables: How Mom is too Mom?

You didn't want to know that, did you?

There was no way she was serious. “Please tell me you’ve never actually seen someone post a pic of their baby’s turd, and that it was just a joke on ‘Friends with Kids,’” I typed on a friend’s Facebook post last week. “PLEASE TELL ME THAT. ” She didn’t. She couldn’t. A Facebook friend had… Read More…

Live from Facebook’s new Seattle engineering office

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UPDATE: The live broadcast is now over, but you can watch the archived version above. I’m over at the new offices of Facebook’s Seattle engineering operations for an open house this afternoon, marking the company’s move to a larger space in the city, to accommodate more employees. The operations have grown from 17 to 90… Read More…

The battle to train a market: Instagram is what Facebook has been telling you guys to do for like a year, okay?

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By now, it’s probably been brought to your attention that Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars on Monday, valuing the two-year-old photo-sharing service at approximately $100 million per employee. Predictably, everyone is asking why. More than one reputable journalist has covered this story by referencing Facebook’s continued inability to create a compelling, intuitive mobile… Read More…

Say, what? Myspace moves up in ranking of top 50 U.S. Web sites

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Facebook and Pinterest may be all of the rage. But a social networking site of another era is having a bit of a resurgence, at least according to a report out today. ComScore reports that MySpace is now the 42nd most visited Web site in the U.S. with 25.4 million unique visitors. Myspace ranked 50th… Read More…