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Yammer acquires OneDrum for Google Docs, Office tools

Yammer is expanding its repertoire of file-sharing and collaboration services for businesses with the acquisition of OneDrum.

The U.K.-based startup brings even more social-minded work tools to the enterprise social network. OneDrum has developed a peer-to-peer desktop application that connects Google Docs with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), enabling users to be able to collaborate, co-edit and share these documents in real time.

Thus, Yammer will be able to boost its own real-time document editor feature, Pages, with desktop sync capabilities, enabling file folders to be shared across multiple users' desktops. Furthermore, new versions and changes to … Read more

Wavii groks the news so you don't have to

Has Techmeme met its match? Or Flipboard? New semantic news analysis company Wavii is launching its automated, personalized news "feed" app today. It's a more modern and more pretty, deconstruction of the overwhelming news barrage we're all buried under. Wavii CEO Adrian Aoun's pitch: "Facebook is good for keeping up with friends, but it's kind of annoying that you can't keep up with your world this way."

Wavii is a smart timeline of the news. Its core value is that it runs its semantic engine against several hundred news feeds and … Read more

Who says Silicon Valley forgets you if you're over 40?

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--It's nearly 10 a.m. in the City Council chambers here, and 43 people are waiting for their turn to speak.

These are not citizens with civic matters on their minds; divided into two lines that stretch out from either side of the podium in the center of the room, these veterans of Google, Cisco, NASA, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Microsoft, Boeing, Sun, and others, are here looking for a new lease on their professional lives.

One by one, they lean into the microphone to introduce themselves. They mention where they've worked in the past, list their skills, … Read more

The only thing hotter than Instagram? Pinterest

I wanted to do a comparison of other companies that are likely big acquisition plays, like Instagram just was today for Facebook. As I was constructing my list, it became clear that while there are a lot of very good companies that could easily get acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars, few have the same, critical values that Instagram has. And not just to Facebook. There's really only one startup that emerges as most Instagram-like: Pinterest. All the others are battling for position as distant followers.

Facebook bought Instagram, it appears, because it offered a unique combination of … Read more

Instagram: How to go from zero to $1B in under two years

Co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger started out with a straightforward but ambitious mission when they launched Instagram: "To change and improve the way the world communicates and shares."

And now they have done the unimaginable: Gone from zero to $1 billion in just 18 months, as the startup -- valued just last month at an already fat $500 million -- is selling itself to the powerhouse that Mark Zuckerberg built.

The $1 billion figure and the speed to get there sounds ripped right from the headlines of 1999. And the news is sure to have app makers … Read more

Dave McClure's 500 Startups raising $50M fund

Dave McClure, one of the most active early stage investors in Silicon Valley, is trying to add to his arsenal.

McClure's incubator and seed fund, 500 Startups, revealed today in an SEC filing that it's raising a new fund. The target size for the new fund: $50 million fund. That's not a lot for a VC fund, but for a fund like McClure's it represents a lot of investments. He plows an average of $50,000 into about two startups a week. To date, 500 Startups has made about 260 investments, including Twillio, Hipster and Udemy.… Read more

Yammer's $25K Yahoo bounty finds first takers

When Yahoo launched its giant patent lawsuit against Facebook a few weeks back, David Sacks, the CEO and founder of Yammer, took to Twitter to blast out an offer to any Yahoo employees pissed at their company's ways: Quit your job within 60 days, he wrote, and Yammer will give you a $25,000 signing bonus.

It's working.

Sacks tells me that since then, Yammer has received 70 resumes. Of those, Yammer has made five offers, and two people have accepted jobs and will collect their bounty.

"All this is moving in real time," said Sacks, … Read more

How much is that patent lawsuit going to cost you?

So you're facing a patent lawsuit. Or maybe you want to sue someone. Get out your checkbook, because this isn't going to be cheap.

A survey conducted last year by the American Intellectual Property Law Association to find median litigation costs for patent infringement suits produced jaw-dropping (at least for a startup) numbers: For a claim that could be worth less than a $1 million, median legal costs are $650,000. When $1 million to $25 million is considered "at risk," total litigation costs can hit $2.5 million. For a claim over $25 million, median … Read more

Zite launches platform to highlight partners' stories

Aiming to work more closely with top-tier publishers, the popular news reader Zite today unveiled a platform that will prominently highlight stories from its media partners.

Zite, which works on iOS and Android devices, is built around the concept of giving people personalized news in discrete subject sections like "technology," "politics," "sports," and so on. People can choose as many sections as they like, and stories are algorithmically curated at least in part based on people's feedback about whether they do or don't like stories, publications, and even individual authors.

Now, with … Read more