The gig marketplace Zaarly has launched a clever extension to its business: Zaarly Anywhere. This new service lets users who see a project on a Web site or blog quickly post a request for proposal to the Zaarly user base to get that project done for themselves.

For example, if you see a construction project on Ikea Hackers that you'd like to see also in your own home, but you lack the time or wherewithal do do it yourself, now you can click a Zaarly button on the post about the project to Zaarly's community. Or if you … Read more

Yesterday I posted a review of the news aggregator News360, which I like as a product but fear for as a business. I feel this way about a lot of content aggregation plays.

Zite, for example, was acquired by CNN, otherwise who knows where it'd be. And then there's the heavy-hitter, Flipboard: can $60 million in funding make this business work? If not, it's overpriced for acquisition.

But there is one professional content aggregator that is not just a great product, but a nice business, born of cooperation between rivals. It's also possibly the only way … Read more

Facebook knows who you are, who your friends are, what you like, and where you live. And still the ads suck. Google, on the other hand, gives you ads based only on what you're searching on, and its ads rock.

Can Google's ad performance be brought to Facebook and other social sites? Jeffrey Davitz is trying to do that with his startup, Solariat. The idea, he says, "is to take the Google model of responding to intention and place it in the context of social networks."

Davitz confirms that Facebook can help an advertiser find very … Read more

Last August I covered the news-reading iPad app, News360. I liked the tech, but after I reviewed it, I never used it again. That was as I predicted. It just didn't grab me.

The new one does, though. It shows how much difference a good, clever interface can make for a product.

As before, News360 pores through your declared interests as well as what you post for others to see on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, and what you save for yourself on Evernote. From this analysis it comes up with a bunch of channels and topics within the channels … Read more

Hard-core gamers like a challenge. Just ask gaming business veteran Julie Uhrman.

Uhrman wants to disrupt the gaming industry with an affordable console called Ouya, a name she hopes will become the battle cry of game developers. Her company is soliciting developers to help build an open ecosystem of games on Android, essentially bringing the openness of mobile games back to the TV set.

"It's very ambitious -- it's hardware, it's software, it's building an ecosystem," Uhrman said.

But Uhrman said she believes her team has what it takes to challenge the status quo. … Read more

Geeks love GitHub, an online tool for organizing programming projects and communicating about them. And now GitHub-the-company, which has been bootstrapped so far, is getting a $100 million input from Andreessen Horowitz. It's the venture company's largest investment to date.

GitHub is the online interface for Git, a fine-grained tool for managing software development. Git was created by Linus Torvalds.

GitHub was designed to organize open-source projects but can be, and is, used for all types of projects. The service is free for open-source users, but makes money by selling licenses for commercial and corporate use. Enterprise buyers … Read more

Twitter could be planning a major update to its search and discovery feature later today, according to one of its employees.

Twitter's Pankaj Gupta, who runs the company's Personalization and Recommender Systems, sent out a tweet yesterday congratulating his team on an improvement to its search and discovery tools that, he says, will dramatically change the service.

"Search and discovery in Twitter [is] set to change forever after tomorrow," Gupta tweeted. "Team -- congrats and enjoy the enormity of your impact few understand today."

Twitter has quickly realized that improving the user's ability … Read more

The social-media darling Pinterest is a not a site Joe Einhorn likes to talk about. In fact, Einhorn seems almost annoyed when I lump it together with his startup, New York-based Fancy. Sure, there are similarities: both sites offer ways for people to create streams of images they like -- rather, "pin," or "fancy" -- from around the Web. But Fancy has something more: a growing revenue stream.

Fancy, which is backed by an all-star cast of investors that includes Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey, added a shopping tool in … Read more

Has it come to this? Do we need corporate CRM tools to manage our individual relationships?

The startup Cloze has launched a utility that scores every relationship you have with your e-mail contacts, based on when and how you communicate with people. The scores look like Klout numbers, but they're personal to you. Cloze uses those scores to rank your people, flagging the top-scorers for followup when you don't respond to their messages. Creepy? Maybe. But fairly handy.

Cloze was designed as a work tool. Founders Dan Foody and Alex Cote said they wanted to create … Read more