BillShrink, a company we previously covered here, has just closed a Series B funding round to the tune of 8 million. This latest round of financing brings their total amount raised to $9 million, after previously raising $1 million in a Series A round this previous year.
The new Series B round was led by Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. Gus Tai from Trinity will join the Board of Directors, which also includes Matt Coffin. Some of us might know Matt as the founder of LowerMyBills. The money will be used for expansion into new arenas, to help their customers in their quest for “billshrinkage”.
In a time where every penny counts, BillShrink couldn’t find better timing to launch new features to help people save money. Despite the recent market fallout, BillShrink manages to prove that Venture Capitalists will invest money into a promising idea, regardless of economic conditions.
Mapquest has decided to step up its one dominant presence today. Both Yelp Reviews and Sports News will now be included on the site.
Last month MapQuest launched a new feature called MapQuest Local, which brought all of your local information into a simplified dashboard. They launched this feature to give you some “what” and “when” to go with your “where”. Since then, they also launched a classified widget and Used Car Listings from AOL 
Autos.
As we all probably know by now, Yelp gives reviews from its members to help other readers discover rated places. You can find restaurants, gyms, car washes, spas and dozen of other categories. Usually their members are locals explaining to others where to go based upon their insight. Now when searching on MapQuest, you can easily see the best of what Yelp members liked nearby your location.
The Sports news will be provided by Topix. Based upon where you are looking on the map, you will be provided with sports news from all arenas. This new widget is MapQuest’s first widget that can be customized beyond your local city or town. This way if you are a Miami Dolphins fan living in Texas you can still stay informed on their news.
All these welcommed features show MapQuest isn’t going to sit idle while Google Maps takes over the space. Although these are innovative additions, will it be enough to make people switch from just using their google pages they are probably on already? I for one will not switch just based on these features alone.
How nice of Ebay. The company has announced it plans to lay off approximately 1000 employees, which equates to 10% of its workforce. Ebay will also remove hundreds of temp positions from the payroll as well.
This comes on the heel of announcing that they have acquired DBA and bilbasen out of Denmark for approximately $380 million and BillMeLater, an amazon funded company for $820 million. The deals were made in cash and over $100 million in outstanding options. The layoffs will give Ebay a restructuring charge of around $75 million dollars, so I can see why they felt the need to spend over a billion to buy these other two companies.
Ebay’s president and CEO John Donahoe, says the purchase of billmelater is complementary to PayPal, he states “Together, PayPal and Bill Me Later will make online payments safer, easier and more convenient than ever.” The acquisition of DBA, Denmark’s leading online classifieds site is obviously to take over a regional big boy.
This year, Ebay’s stock is down almost 50 percent in value. Obviously the investors haven’t been too keen on previous acquisitions. Buying these new companies might give Ebay a quick lift in the short term, but with all the red tape they have, it will lead to trouble in the future. Good luck with these new purchases Ebay, you will need all the luck you can get.
Apple just announced on the front page of the iPhone development site, that they have decided to discontinue the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) that has prevented developers from speaking openly about programming on the iPhone.
Apple says “the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software.”
Apple will issue a new agreement to any developers who previously released software that will not contain any NDA clauses. This will help the piles of books that are waiting to get published, on the best and most proper way for aspiring developers to program applications on the iPhone. You should expect to see plenty of new and innovative applications coming out in the future now that there is open collaboration.
This is a major step for apple and one that I commend them on. Guess all that nagging actually worked guys! Wonder if it had anything to do with the gPhone having no NDA!
We have all unfortunately been the victims of political lies and manipulation. Seems like every promise made by someone running for office nowadays, ends up a lie almost the day after elected. Even during this latest USA Presidential elections, I find myself switching back and forth as to whom I should vote for. Almost every morning one of the candidates says something that is so dumb it forces me to vote for the other. Wouldn’t it be great if we could tell when the candidates or anyone for that matter are lying?
A new startup called RealScoop hopes to help the world figure out when people are lying. RealScoop uses voice analysis technology which is utilized often in different arms of law enforcement, and government agencies, as well as for Insurance Fraud. Most voice analysis programs work in real time, which helps when trying to catch lies when watching someone speak live. Their technologically advanced products analyzes over a hundred different vocal elements when someone is speaking. It performs microsecond calculations to find out if someone is telling the truth. Traditionally, Voice Analysis measures the slight inaudible fluctuations in the voice known as micro-tremors. When someone speaks into a microphone or some other form of analysis equipment, the micro-tremors will let off patterns that indicate when the person speaking delivers the words under stress.
This Tuesday September 30th, RealScoop will be covering the Vice Presidential debate and will be calculating in real time which of the candidates is lying about what they say. This will not be a good time for Biden or Palin to tell a fib.
Although this technology is currently in use, there is still very little scientific evidence to support the idea that voice-stress technologies can consistently detect lies. High levels of stress do not correlate with deception. Should be interesting on Tuesday.
Having been down for the better part of a month, Muxtape’s creator, Justin Ouellette, has announced that the service is springing back to life, albeit with an entirely new direction.
In his post, Ouellette chronicles his experience dealing with ambivalent record labels that simultaneously sought to shut him down and broker a business deal, as well as the suspension of his account by Amazon Web Services after receiving a complaint lodged by the RIAA, seemingly operating autonomously of the labels he was in talks with.
As a result of all this drama, Ouellette has elected to cut ties with the labels altogether for the moment and is poised to reposition Muxtape as a distribution platform for bands, with the altruistic goal of, “offering an extremely powerful platform with unheard-of simplicity for artists to thrive on the internet.” Good luck.
Disqus, you have made me proud by launching a full public API. The details can be found here. If you read my previous post about the Automattic acquisition of IntenseDebate, you will notice I am a big fan of Disqus, and use it on several sites.
This move comes right after many started to lose hope for the commenting service. By opening their API to the public, Disqus has proved they will not just sit still while WordPress moves to have their own commenting system. Disqus has now made it possible that commenting can go mainstream into many sites that otherwise might have not found use for it by allowing developers to custom make tools that work on Disqus.
The API itself isn’t totally new, it has actually been working as a plugin with WordPress, and instead of having javascript to deliver the commenting it used an API. On their Blog, Disqus says that “The methods provided are enough to let you write your own comment import tools, export tools, or even a custom Disqus plugin for your platform.”
Personally I am psyched to see Disqus stay ahead of the curve. It is exciting to think what great tools and applications will be made using their new API. I will cover them as they happen!
Wordpress, which is easily the number 1 or 2 blog platform on the worldwide web made by Automattic, has announced today that they have acquired the third party comment service IntenseDebate. IntenseDebate competes with such services as SezWho, JS-Kit and Disqus (which we use on Rev2).
It could easily be assumed that by offering IntenseDebate on the WordPress platform, IntenseDebate will quickly become the number one used comment service on the web. During the development stage, IntenseDebate will head back into Private Beta, but their current users will still be able to use it. 
Anyone who uses WordPress has obviously noticed the lack of an interactive commenting system. Disqus is a great service and makes the commenting much more friendly. This could be a huge blow to Disqus, as most users of WordPress will most likely use a commenting service built into their blogs without having to install additional code. One thing Disqus has going for it, is the comments you currently have on your site will not transfer over, so it would seem unlikely current users will switch.
The new commenting features will most likely be released during WordPress 2.7 and will include some of IntenseDebate’s enhanced features automatically, including threaded commenting, and voting. The service will also unveil a plugin that easily integrates the rest of their other features, like aggregated commenting across multiple blogs.
To add to all our excitement today, Twitter finally redesigned parts of the site. The extremely popular microblogging site made the move, as they have numerous new features they will unveil soon and there wasn’t enough room on the site to hold them. Although they have not revealed what these new features are, I am sure they will be awesome. The new change is strictly an aesthetic one.
One of the most noticeable changes to the interface is the smaller tabs that were annoyingly placed on the top, have been moved to the right sidebar, which makes them much easier to notice.
In an attempt to speep up the site, they blended in AJAX calls to the database, this will help reduce the number of manual refreshes that are needed when members are trying to reload information. A feature I really like it is the profile editor. You are now able to close from a number of color choices and make your background and other designs blend in.
A new startup called BillShrink that is quite similar to LowerMyBills, has announced that they will now help their users cut costs on their Credit Cards, using their automated advisor. Prior to helping with Credit Cards, billshrink mostly helped users save money on phone bills. Their free advisor engine would analyze a cell phone bill and plan, and then monitor the usage and make suggestions for lowering costs.
Using billshrink’s new feature, users can find the best match in a credit card. It is almost like a matchmaking service for finding love in a credit card. Afer deciding which kind of card is right, a user enters in the amount that they usually spend in a month. Once Billshrink has gathered a good amount of data about your usage, they provide a list of the best credit card matches, and shows with is the most compatible for your spending habits. Billshrink monitors the card and if a more cost effective card comes out, or perhaps a fee is changed, they will notify their users. They do not stop there, Billshrink also keeps abreast on promotions, rewards programs and other features credit cards offer, making new recommendations along the way to help the consumer save money.
BillShrink is run by Peter Pham, who once worked at Photobucket.
So here’s my problem: I have a bad memory. A really bad one. If you asked me what happened five hours ago, I couldn’t tell you to save my wallet, let alone day, week, month, year. I forget fast, and the pictures I take on occasional trips and my daily tweets are not enough for me to catalog my life. I can feel the ten-year-later Sid hating himself for not preserving the events, moments, and actions which surrounded his life in 2008.
