Twitter has hired the team from Cabana. Cabana is a team of developers that is known for creating visually stunning mobile applications. The terms of the deal are unknown, but we do know that Twitter was mostly interested in the talent. The team will be joining Twitter and Cabana as a company will be shutting down effective December 1st.
9GAG is a meme website that competes against websites like KnowYourMeme and Quickmeme. 9GAG, a company that participated in Dave McClure’s 500 Startups incubator, has raised $2.8 million from Silicon Valley investors like True Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Greycroft Partners, 500 Startups, Scott Banister, Chris Sacca, David Tisch, Kevin Rose, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, Ben Ling, Karl Jacob, James Hong, Philip Kaplan, and several others. The Hong Kong-based 9GAG has 70 million global unique visitors and over a billion page views per month. [AllThingsD]
Airbnb is growing at a rapid pace. Last year, they hit over 10 million total nights booked with over 200,000 active properties listed on their website. They are growing like crazy in London because of the Olympics too. About 20% of the company’s bookings happen through mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, Android, and mobile web browsers. Airbnb has acquired DailyBooth and brought out on their CEO Brian Pokorny to head up the design and engineering team.
Facebook has announced that they are acquiring Instagram, a popular photo-sharing application, for $1 billion in cash and stock. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement on a profile post from his account. Zuckerberg said that they are planning to allow Instagram run independently from Facebook. It was only three days ago where it was that Instagram raised $50 million.
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Liftopia is a San Francisco based online retailer of ski lifting and mountain resort transactions. Liftopia has raised $1.3 million in a round of funding led by First Round Capital. Other investors in this round includes Dave Morin, Chris Sacca, Erik Blachford, and Sam Shank.
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Betabeat reports that the rapidly-popular music service Turntable.fm has found an investor in Union Square Ventures. The company is reported to have raised about $7.5 million, having chosen an investment from Union Square-based USV instead of the west coast’s Kleiner Perkins or Accel. It’s possible that other investors from the founders’ other startup Stickybits may join in the funding, including First Round Capital, Lowercase, Polaris, Chris Sacca and Mitch Kapor.
Milk Inc. is a new company that was co-founded by Kevin Rose. Rose is the founder of Digg and co-founder of Revision3. Milk is essentially a company where several developers brainstorm technology and mobile ideas and works away at building them. If there isn’t any sudden traction, then the project gets shut down. Milk has raised $1.5 million in angel funding from well known investors. Investors include Mike Maples, Jr. (Floodgate), David Sze (Greylock Partners), Ron Conway, Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Evan Williams, Joshua Schachter, Ashton Kutcher, Michael Arrington, Philip Kaplan, Chris Sacca, Tony Hsieh, Gary Vaynerchuk, and several others. [VentureBeat]
DotCloud is a platform-as-a-service company that has raised $10 million in Series A. Ron Conway and Chris Sacca was the company’s angel investors. Investors in the Series A round includes Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures. Jerry Yang (Yahoo! co-founder), Marc Varstaen (Apple engineering manager), Peter Fenton (Benchmark Capital), Dan Scholnick (Trinity Ventures) will be joining DotCloud’s board of directors. DotCloud allows developers to build applications through custom components.
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