OneRiot laid off seven employees Friday, dropping the four-year-old startup to a total of 23 with the intent of sharpening its focus on building a real-time ad network. The Boulder-based company elevated president Tobias Peggs to the role of CEO, and moved him from San Francisco to Colorado. Peggs argued in an interview that the layoffs were not a sign of weakness at OneRiot. Rather, his company’s RiotWise product for matching ads to real-time... 

Music subscription services still haven’t proven themselves in the marketplace, yet new ones keep appearing — the latest being Rdio . Quiet since its existence was first revealed last October , the company co-founded and funded by serial entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis — who previously gave the world Skype, Kazaa and Joost — has now entered invitation-only beta in the U.S. I’ve been using it for about... 

Pandora , the music streaming provider and Silicon Valley darling , has raised additional late-stage funding. The round, of an undisclosed amount, was led by GV Capital and included Allen & Company. Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy said in an emailed statement the funding would be used “to invest in resources we need to continue to execute on our strategy.” The company raised $35 million just last summer in a round led by Greylock Capital... 

Tweetdeck , a London-based startup that builds software to consume rapidly updating information streams, has raised $3 million in funding in what is an internal round, according to John Borthwick, co-founder of Betaworks, a NY-based startup and investment group. Betaworks is a lead investor in the company started by Iain Dodsworth; other angel investors include Ron Conway of SV Angel, Howard Lindzon and Danny Rimer of …  Read More →

Mig33, a mobile social service with 34 million members, in October of last year decided to shift its center of gravity to where its customers were: Asia. It was a high-risk move for the company, which has raised $13.5 million in funding from Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and DCM . But so far, it seems to be paying off. The company is on track to break even by the second half of 2010 and be profitable by end of the year, CEO and founder Steven... 

Heroku, a platform provider built on top of Amazon’s EC2 compute infrastructure, has raised $10 million in its second round of funding, bringing its total investment to $15 million. In the last six months, the Heroku platform, which was developed for Ruby on Rails applications, has seen the number of apps it hosts rise to 60,000 from 40,000 . The funding led by Ignition Partners with participation by existing investors Redpoint Venture... 

Danny Sullivan, the co-founder of venture fund and startup incubator Bootup Labs, has apologized publicly for the failure of the company’s Y Combinator-style startup camp, which fell apart last week after the fund failed to raise enough money to back all of the startups it had accepted into the program. The story came to light when one of the entrepreneurs who had sold his belongings and moved across the country to join the Bootup Labs... 

Fusion-io, a maker of specialty solid-state storage gear, has raised $45 million in a third funding round, bringing the total amount it’s raised since launching in 2007 to $111.5 million. Meritech Capital Partners led the round, and was joined by Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. HP, Samsung and Dell have all contributed in previous rounds. The company, which I was excited about when I…  Read More →

One of the more interesting and fulfilling trends that’s picking up steam is that of using social technology for social good. On Tuesday, Giveo is launching a platform for corporations and foundations to accept donations from and engage with online donors, especially younger ones. Giveo is modeled on the Pepsi Refresh Project and the Chase Community Giving campaign on Facebook, which invited people to vote to help the beverage maker and... 

Burbn , a stealthy startup that brings mobile location check-in gameplay (à la Foursquare and Gowalla) to the mobile browser, has raised $500,000 from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Burbn founder Kevin Systrom confirmed the round to us after it was written up in TechCrunch this afternoon. Burbn is a nifty little HTML 5 mobile web app that offers yet another place to tell your friends where you’re grabbing a coffee or seeing... 

TripIt , the handy travel tool, has raised $7 million in a third round of funding led by Azure Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. “We were on a track to get profitable with that [previous] round but we’re just increasingly feeling like we’re scratching the service of the opportunity here,” CEO Gregg Brockway told us today. (TripIt has now raised $13.1 million, including its last round circa April... 

Mobile applications are often blamed when behind-the-wheel multitaskers put fellow drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians at risk, but some apps are intended to keep drivers’ attention on the road and away from their phones. Launched last summer to deliver real-time traffic reports as audio rather than text, Aha Mobile ’s newly revised mobile application includes news, podcasts, social media streams, and information about nearby businesses,... 

Octazen's contact importer helped Facebook make its userbase viral. Facebook last week acquired a small Malaysian startup called Octazen Solutions , maker of a contact importer that the social network had already been using to grow its number of users by encouraging them to invite their email contacts. Spokesperson Larry Yu described the buy as a “talent acquisition,” saying Octazen’s two employees have joined Facebook... 

In the hopes of another platform gold rush, today comes word that there’s already an “ AppFund ” for developers looking to make applications for the iPad and other tablets. The New York City-based AppFund doesn’t have quite the resume of the Kleiner Perkins-backed and Apple-supported iFund , but it’s jumping in at a time when tablets are top of mind. The “multimillion-dollar” fund will be led by CNET,... 

Amazon, faced with aggressive competition from Apple and its forthcoming iPad , is stepping up its hardware game. According to the New York Times , it has bought a small pre-product startup called Touchco and plans to merge it with its Kindle hardware division, Lab126. Two words: touchscreen Kindles. Touchco, a six-person startup out of the New York University Media Research Lab, has developed a sensitive surface that detects multiple pressure...