digg popularity and digg trends

Startups of a feather flock together. Wefollow, a company that was spun out of Digg, has been acquired by About.me, a company that was spun out of Aol. And get this, there's more: Lead About.me investor Kevin Rose was also a co-founder of Wefollow, and About.me co-founder Tony Conrad was the lead investor in Kevin Rose's Milk which sold to Google and eventually staffed...

Betaworks has been in the news a lot lately for, well, disrupting the news. It recently purchased Instapaper and before that Digg, and it's currently working on an alternative to Google Reader. But on Wednesday, the company announced something that might seem a bit random at first: It's releasing a game. That's right, Betaworks released its first-ever mobile game called...

Tama-chan is a portable watermelon refrigerator on wheels. The Japanese device retails for 19,950 yen (about $200) and can handle watermelons or similarly shaped comestibles, such as poultry, roasts, or severed heads. The device itself weighs 6.3kg, and charges from a car lighter socket.] ポータブル温冷庫/The Portable Watermelon Fridge — Could It Be The Perfect...

Last summer, New York-based hybrid investor/incubator/holding company thing Betaworks acquired social news site Digg and relaunched it soon after, hoping to bring back some of its mojo in the process. Nine months later, Betaworks has acquired news-oriented company, this time bringing Marco Arment’s popular story-saving app Instapaper into the fold.

Summit to feature ‘broader range of events’ including pitching sessions and workshops    

Google search is making it more difficult to surface iOS applications using typical user queries, like "Whatsapp iTunes," "Whatsapp iPhone,"  or searches by app name, for example. In the past, this would return a page of search results where the iTunes URL would be ranked highly. Today, those links are further down in Google's results pages.

Cary Walkin, an accountant in Toronto, knows a thing or two about Excel. So great is his expertise that he was able to create a full-fledged RPG inside of its scripting environment, called Arena.Xlsm. I couldn't get it to run in LibreOffice, but it sounds like it's very featurful and fun, provided that you're willing [...]

If judged by my Twitter stream last week, the shutdown of Google Reader is the biggest story ever in the history of news. Of course, the reality is that Google is likely shutting down the product for a good reason: relatively few people used it, with less using it over time. More wood, fewer arrows, and all that. But that doesn’t mean this move isn’t a mistake for...

Corporate storytellers need to master a new narrative technique.

Google Reader being shut down by its malevolent overlords leaves a gaping, Google Reader-sized hole in the market where it used to be. Many are stepping up today to announce that their products or services can act as a replacement, but one source is specifically saying it will build a functionally complete replacement – news aggregation service Digg.

"In the Studio" welcomes a co-founder of a company which went public, a native Texan who studied engineering in Silicon Valley and business on the east coast, and who, upon returning to the Valley to begin investing, encountered a different path than he originally anticipated.

FitStar, a fitness app startup backed by Floodgate and Google Ventures that uses the iPad to transform home video workouts, just announced its first creation. In it, Atlanta Falcons tight end Tony Gonzalez becomes a user’s personal trainer, leading them through about 60 different video exercises. The idea is that the iPad is much better-suited toward helping people achieving...

Digg today took to its blog to share a bit of information about its user growth and monetization plans, now that it's been at Betaworks for nearly six months. The company said that Digg's user base has doubled since the Betaworks takeover in August, and it also confirmed that Digg's "Apps We Like" section is one of the site's first efforts to monetize the new property....

What was the most significant tech event of 2012? No, neither Apple after Steve Jobs nor the Facebook IPO. Not at least according to John Borthwick, the CEO of Betaworks and one of the shrewdest observers of the tech scene.

A new Apple iPhone news app aims to be a one-stop shop for local news about food, the arts and the overall flavor of a city. "We love cities," said Spun CEO Andy Hunter. The app, launching today, is powered by human editors in each city, who curate stories from local Web sites based on their own judgment and social media buzz. Work on Spun began before Betaworks relaunched...

"We could theoretically load up our pages with ads and probably make enough to cover our costs. However, that would significantly degrade the experience of using the site," said Reddit CEO Yishan Wong in a post asking users to "Invest in Gold" -- the site's newly enhanced subscription program. If people pay for ad-free Reddit and new Gold features like filter saving the...

The CEO of Betaworks, which bought content aggregator Digg, explains why the site had to be retooled so quickly.You may have noticed social content aggregation site Digg's recent facelift, which was unveiled this month shortly after its purchase by technology investment and development company Betaworks was announced in July. And behind the scenes, things have changed,...

Servers at YouTube failed Thursday afternoon, making the website and its videos across the web temporarily unavailable. The downtime sent people into a panic between 4 p.m. ET and 4:30 p.m. ET. The site is now back up, but "YouTube Goes Down" is still a worldwide trending topic on Twitter. "A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation,"...

Brett Bullington, long-time Silicon Valley advisor, board member, and angel investor, suffered severe brain trauma in a bicycle accident outside of Bartlesville, Okla. last Monday. He remains unconscious at the ICU at Freeman Hospital in Joplin, Mo. According to his family, his condition is stable, but he may have suffered permanent brain damage and is facing a long road...

Manuella Muerner Marioni shared their photo on DiggArtZurich-Kopie

Whether it's in response to the over-stimulation of banner ads and animated gifs, the proliferation of mobile and tablet devices whose screen size dictates simpler navigation and layout options, a reaction to our information-overloaded society, or, likely, all the above, a new class of web startups are adopting the minimalist look in terms of their user interface and design....