February 11th, 2013

Yardsellr, The “eBay For Facebook,” Becomes The Latest Casualty In Social & Local Commerce

yardsale_CMYK

In the fall of 2011, we caught up with social commerce startup, Yardsellr, which the founders claimed at the time had grown into a community of over 5 million people. The Facebook-based social commerce platform was listing 6K new items for sale each day (at the time) and had over 120K items for sale in total. This, by the way, came after the company raised $5 million from Accel in 2010. → Read More

February 7th, 2013

NBC Shutters Hyper-Local News And Information Site EveryBlock After Failing To Find The Right Business Model

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It’s not easy trying to make money as a hyper-local network these days (just ask AOL’s Patch), but in a surprising move, NBC just announced that it is shutting down EveryBlock, the Knight Foundation-backed news and information site MSNBC acquired in 2009. In an email to Poynter.org, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of NBC News Vivian Schiller wrote that the service “wasn’t a… → Read More

November 16th, 2009

Rdio Recruits Star Designer Wilson Miner (Apple.com, EveryBlock)

I wasn’t kidding around when I wrote that Rdio, the latest online music venture backed by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis – the original founders of Kazaa, Skype and Joost – was assembling a killer team by hiring away top talent from some of the most promising startups in the digital music space while still in stealth mode.

The latest name to surface on LinkedIn is that of Wilson Miner, a… → Read More

October 1st, 2009

An App Contest For San Francisco

This guest post was written by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was elected to the position in 2003 and reelected in 2007. Newsom is also running for governor of California in the upcoming 2010 election. In this guest post, Mayor Newsom announces a contest to create apps using city data from DataSF.org,.

Last week, we announced a City App Store to highlight and centralize software… → Read More

August 17th, 2009

MSNBC Picks Up Hyperlocal News Aggregator EveryBlock

Even though they haven’t really found a big audience yet, hyperlocal news sites are becoming a hot commodity. In June, AOL bought Patch for $7 million, and today MSNBC acquired EveryBlock. EveryBlock was previously funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation, which ended in June. The five employees will now work at MSNBC.

The price was not disclosed, but like the Patch acquisition, it is not… → Read More

May 10th, 2009

Calling All Coders: Journalism Schools Want You To Save The News Industry

As newspapers struggle for viability, and media managers attempt to shift presence to the web, a need has arisen for talent with the technical skills of a programmer and the creative skills of a journalist. Over at TechCrunch, we are fortunate to have talented developers who have poured their blood, sweat and tears into making the site what it is today.

Northwestern University’s journalism school… → Read More

January 23rd, 2008

EveryBlock Launches as Local News Aggregator for SF, NYC, and Chicago

EveryBlock launches today as a geographically-filtered news and data aggregation service for San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago. The site attempts to answer one deceptively simple question: “What’s happening in my neighborhood?” For EveryBlock, it boils down to three types of information: geographically-relevant news and blog entries, civic information, and “fun from… → Read More