Micro-payment service Tipjoy attempted to sell itself, but it turns out that they will be shutting down instead. Facebook even offered Tipjoy $5 million in stock. Facebook walked away from the deal and Tipjoy shut down shortly after.
Even though Tipjoy decided to shut down, Facebook was able to hire one of the company’s executives. Facebook hired Tipjoy co-founder and CTO Ivan Kirigin. Although it is uncertain about what Kirigin will be working on, it is expected to be something related to Facebook Payments.
The reason why Tipjoy shut down was because Kirigan was not around after Facebook made him an offer. PayPal and Twitter were both interested in buying out Tipjoy too. Y-Combinator, Chris Sacca, The Accelerator Group, and Betaworks invested over $1 million in funding.
Twitterfeed was started by Mario Menti. Menti created Twitterfeed in London through the BBC developer program. The service converts a blog or website’s RSS feed into tweets. The tweet contains the title and a link to the article of an individual blog post or news story. About 170,000 publishers are converting 330,000+ feeds as of right now. Earlier this month, Betaworks and The Accelerator Group bought a majority stake in the Twitterfeed.
Twitterfeed is becoming so overused that Menti was having a hard time scaling the service. However Twitterfeed relaunched earlier this week in order to offer an analytics service. The analytics reports how much traffic a website is receiving through Twitter and how many people are clicking on short URLs. The new Twitterfeed analytics service also offers a side-by-side comparison of what Feedburner RSS is doing for them.
To create a Twitterfeed account, an OpenID account is needed, but now they are starting to accept Google, AOL, and Yahoo login capabilities. One of Twitterfeed’s biggest drawbacks is the length of time that is between RSS conversion to Twitter reporting. TechCrunch is reporting that in some cases, it takes Twitterfeed half an hour. That is way too long considering that Twitter prides itself on reporting real-time data.
Twitterfeed is a service that allows blogs and news agencies to syndicate their articles through Twitter. Twitterfeed is able to syndicate the articles using the RSS feed of the website and combine it with a URL shortening service. In some cases, using Twitter to syndicate articles is working better than RSS because of the speed difference.
Twitter is able to deliver news instantly. As a matter of fact, one of the most followed Twitter users is @BreakingNews. BreakingNews is generally able to deliver news much faster than 24/7 news agencies like CNN.
Twitterfeed has 170,000 users syndicating 300,000 feeds. Twitterfeed accounts for 10% of all the tweets that are sent out. This is why Betaworks and TAG have bought a majority stake in the service. Before the investment, Twitterfeed was merely a side project.
Analytics is one of the newest additional services made on Twitterfeed. The analytics helps track what is going on with the links that are sent out.
Betaworks is a previous investor in Summize, which was eventually purchased by Twitter itself. Other Twitter-related services that Betaworks invested in includes TweetDeck and Bit.ly.
Songkick is a website that does everything to help you find concerts. They can find concerts near you by having you entering your location. They can e-mail you alerts when concerts come up. They’ve got a plugin that helps you find concerts of the artists that you have in your iTunes, Winamp, iTunes, and Windows Media Player libraries.
“We’re always adding more listings because we want to make sure we have every single concert in existence—no matter how obscure the band or tiny the venue,” states the company’s About page. “We even index bands’ MySpace pages to make sure we have all their dates.”
Songkick is based in East London and was founded by Ian Hogarth, Pete Smith, and Michelle You. The investment was provided by several personal investors. One of the investors is Saul Klein, founding partner of The Accelerator Group. Y-Combinator provided Songkick with their initial funding.
