Sarah Lacy is the author of “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good” and a columnist at BusinessWeek. Michael Arrington hired her to write for TechCrunch.com, but she quit shortly after the technology blog was acquired by AOL. Today it was announced that Lacy has started a new website called PandoDaily and it is backed with $2.5 million in funding. PandoDaily is a daily technology news blog and it will focus on the startup community. The website name was inspired by a colony of trees in Utah called Pando Trees.

LinkedIn Corporation (NYSE:LNKD) founder Reid Hoffman was thoroughly profiled by The New York Times this weekend. The story really gave you an inside behind how LinkedIn grew from a small social network that nobody heard about to a public company minting hundreds of millions of dollars. As a venture capital partner at Greylock, Reid Hoffman is also a go-to guy for business advice in Silicon Valley.

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is putting some of his wealth into an interesting cause. He has put $1.25 million in to create and promote floating micro-countries. Thiel made the investment through The Seasteading Institute.

Topguest is a mobile check-in loyalty service that was founded five months ago. The service has raised $2 million in Series A funding and has added Peter Thiel as an advisor. The investors in this round of funding include Founders Fund, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Jeff Clavier, and Naval Ravikant. Topguest is also exiting beta today.

Founders Fund, the venture capital company that has invested in Facebook, Spotify, and SpaceX has closed a third venture fund.  The Founders Fund III LP and the other funds were oversubscribed, reaching a firm cap of $250 million in commitments.  The Fund III suite is the company’s largest fund yet.  Founders Fund is managed by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, and Sean Parker.  The full press release is below:

Founders Fund has raised $107.2 million from several equity funds and investment funds. The company is led by PayPal founders Ken Howery and Peter Thiel. Napster founder Sean Parker is also an exec at Founders Fund. This would be Founders Funds’ third round of funding. VentureBeat dug up a filing from the SEC that showed the funding round. The second round of funding was roughly $220 million. [VentureBeat]

Luke Nosek is a co-founder at PayPal and is a Managing Partner at Founders Fund. Nosek wants to move from the Internet and new media sector and get into science. Nosek is joining Halcyon Molecular, a human genome sequencing firm as a founding president.

Halcyon plans to sequence complete human genomes in less than 10 minutes at a cost of $100. This is a much smaller price and smaller amount of time than currently existing genome sequencing labs. Nosek will continue to lead The Founders Fund’s genomics investing division. Peter Thiel will be joining the board of directors at Halcyon Molecular too.

Halcyon will be competing with 23andme, a genomics company founded by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Halcyon even received a $2 million aberration corrected STEM electron microscope on loan from the U.S. DoE.

Udorse is a visual endorsement engine that launched at TechCrunch50. The company raised $500,000 in seed funding from The Founders Fund and Peter Thiel joined the Board of Directors. The idea behind the website is that people endorse items they love in the form of pictures. This could include t-shirts, watches, cufflinks, etc. Udorse encourages users to endorse items and places in photos by tagging them. They places or items in the photos are tagged to websites.

For example, if you want to endorse the new Ray-Ban sunglasses you bought, you are encouraged to tag them in a picture of yourself wearing them to a website where others can buy it. The brands will appreciate the free endorsement too. Udorse even has several partners. If sales are made by your referral picture, then you get a cut too.

Udorse even allows you to connect your Facebook Photos to your Udorse account, making it easier to tag the photos initially. The person that highlights the item receives a 25% commission fee if another person purchases the item. As of yesterday Armani and American Apparel partnered with Udorse. Udorse was founded by Geoffrey Lewis and Trevor Austin.

Video demo available after the jump.