Chartbeat raised $3 million in a first round of funding from Index Ventures

Chartbeat, an analytics startup that provides subscribers with a snapshot of how people are interacting with their sites, in real-time, has raised $3 million in a first round of funding from Index Ventures.

The company, which was incubated at NYC-based tech investor and social media incubator Betaworks and launched in April 2009, pitches itself as an alternative to Google Analytics, saying that while Google Analytics can tell you how many people loaded a page in a given time period, chartbeat can tell you how many people kept the page open and are on it right now, and whether they are actively interacting with it.

Chartbeat says it has 2,500 paying customers, including Gawker Media, the Chicago Tribune and DailyKos.

In addition to Index Ventures and Betaworks, other investors include Jason Calacanis, SV Angel, Freestyle Capital, Founders Collective and Lowercase Capital.

Facebook Sues Teachbook Startup Over The Word Book

Facebook social network  has filled a  lawsuit against the education startup, Teachbook for using the work 'book'  in the startup's name. Teachbook is a social network for teachers.

Faceboook claim that the startup is  using the 'book' to ride on Facebook's coattails.The 'book' work in Facebook has no descriptive meaning, arbitrary and highly distinctive in the context of online communities and networking websites.

The lawsuits says,  "If others could freely use 'generic plus book' marks for online networking services targeted to that particular generic category of individuals, the suffix 'book' could become a generic term for 'online community/networking services' or 'social networking services.'

"That would dilute the distinctiveness of the Facebook marks, impairing their ability to function as unique and distinctive identifiers of Facebook's goods and services."

Greg Shrader, managing partner of Teachbook, denied the site was trying to take advantage of Facebook's popularity, arguing that within the context of a community site for teachers, the word book in the name made sense.

"We weren't aware that Facebook owned the Internet and the word 'book," Shrader told InformationWeek late Wednesday.

"This is a David and Goliath situation," Shrader said. "They're bombing mosquitoes."

Time's 50 Best Websites 2010

Time has revealed its top 50 websites for 2010 and has cut a whole host of big-name sites from the list.

This year, WikiLeaks is favoured over Wikipedia, with Time noting the site "went from being a fringe site to being a central catalyst in the national news cycle almost overnight."

Another wiki-based site makes the list and that is the financial site Wikinvest.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2012721,00.html

MySpace Aquired Social Chat Startup Threadbox

  News Corp.'s MySpace social networ has finalized a deal to buy certain, unspecified assets of social messaging platform Threadbox. Venturebeat had reported last month that a deal was in the works, although Threadbox wouldn?t talk about it then.

Threadbox now says several key members of the Threadbox team have moved over to MySpace and we plan to apply our technology there in a variety of ways, adding that those of you that were using Threadbox socially may even find what we are building at MySpace interesting. Venturebeat says CEO Michael Cerda has joined MySpace as vice president of product, communications.

Threadbox was mainly focused on remaking e-mail as a real-time messaging experience. Like an instant message box, the service showed users who among their list of friends was available online, and let them post and receive messages, files, images. It's possible that the technology is being applied in the major overhaul of MySpace that News Corp. has promised is coming within months.      

TextDigger semantic search startup aquired by Federated Media Publishing

TextDigger, the  San Jose semantic search startup, has been acquired by Federated Media Publishing, a San Francisco company that sells ads for websites such as VentureBeat, BoingBoing and Apple Insider.

TextDigger  helps website publishers pull in readers by automatically tagging content, creating topic pages and identifying keywords to improve a site's ranking on search engines.

The company was founded in 2005 by former CNet employees who had developed the search-optimization technology for the San Francisco online publisher.

Federated also was founded in 2005. "Over the past five years, our technology team has built an extraordinary platform that drives our business and keeps us on the edge of innovation in media," Federated founder and CEO John Battelle said in a news release. "TextDigger provides us with a complementary technology that will build upon the work our team began back in 2005."

Financial terms of the deal announced Monday weren't disclosed.

Wireshark - The Open Source Network Protocol Analyzer

Wireshark captures  the packet flowing across a computer  network  and displays them in  a human-readable form. It supports most known  and used protocols. It can capture a  wide variety of interface types such as Ethernet and 802.11. You can also apply filters  as packets are being  captured.

Most major network and software vendors point to Wireshark in their documentation - including Google and Citigroup . The application is very handy for system and network administrators, but it can also be used by developers, educators, and researchers.

Find The Right Graduate Job With CareersCatalyst

The Careers Catalyst website is the right resource to check if you have just completed University and you are looking for your first job as a graduate. That is tricky if only because there are thousands in your same position out there, and you will all have the same qualifications. When that happens, the one getting the job is the one who can create the most noteworthy resume, and who can handle the interview better when it comes to that decisive instance

Android outsells iPhone

During the first six months  of this year  Google Android phones outsold Apple's iPhones according to  data released by  The Nielson Company. Smartphones running Google's Android accouned for 27% of all smartphones during that period, compared to 23 percent sales of Apple's phones.

"While the iPhone has been the headline grabber over the last few years in the smartphone market, Google's Android OS has shown the most significant expansion in market share among current subscribers," Nielson says in a blog post.

Apple's iPhone 4, which went on sales two months ago has been called the company's most successful product launch to date. Nearly nine in ten iPhone owners said they planned to stay with phones  on Apple's operating system. As for Android owners - 71 percent said they planned to do the same.

Nokia is still the worldwide leader in smartphone sales, that report says.

iLeads - The New Free LeadCheck Service

pioneer in innovative lead solutions since 1996, today announced the launch of its latest free tool to help lead buyers assess the quality of their purchases in real time. LeadCheck delivers instant, highly relevant information about internet leads from any provider, free of charge.

Covering over 99.8% of US homes, (over 145 million properties), the LeadCheck tool is based on the industry leading data set of CoreLogic, and only requires the street address of the lead (no phone or other lead contact information is required) to run.

?We built LeadCheck, because while most lead aggregators have internal systems to check on their lead quality, until now, the customer had no way to check the 'quality' of their purchase,? said Drew Warmington, founder and Managing Partner of iLeads.com. ?Given that the lead buyer is most at risk, we felt that the he or she should have some of the same ?lead quality? tools that the lead aggregators have available."

Read the rest of press release at  PRWeb

Disney Buys Gaming Startup Playdom

The Walt Disney Company bought social game-startup Playdom in a deal that is potentially worth up to $763.2 million, confirming rumours that began surfacing last week. With this purchase, the era of consolidation in social games seems truly well and underway.

There are signs that the market is quickly maturing and will soon be led by a handful of companies. "FarmVille"-maker Zynga is estimated to be taking in around $500-$700 million in revenue annually and is a constant source of IPO rumors. Last fall social games company Playfish was acquired by Electronic Arts-- one of the biggest videogame-makers--for about $400 million. In February CrowdStar was rumored to be in talks with Microsoft over an acquisition deal that has since reportedly fallen through.

In this latest deal, Disney will initially buy Playdom for $563.2 million but may pay an additional $200 million if the social games-maker reaches certain undisclosed targets. The Mountain View, Calif.-based Playdom is one of the bigger social games-startups and has been able to dominate MySpace with titles like "Mobster." It has also become one of the top social games companies on Facebook despite tough competition from players like Zynga.