Google’s 2009 Holiday Gift To Ad Partners: $20 Million To Charity

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- Despite multiple news reports last week that Google (NASD:GOOG) was in late-stage
negotiations to buy user-generated reviews site Yelp, TechCrunch reported on
Sunday that the company has walked away from Google’s estimated $550 million
offer. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes it takes a while for a site to find its legs. Hunch, which launched last March to much fanfare, is only now in the past few months capturing the attention of consumers. As the comScore chart above shows, Hunch recently hit a growth spurt, jumping from an estimated 130,000 unique U.S. visitors in August, 2009 to 371,000 in November, 2009. While the overall size of the audience is still small, nearly tripling it in three months certainly makes for an eye-catching chart.
In spite of an armada of competitors sailing into the e-book reader waters, Amazon’s Kindle has apparently had its best month ever in terms of sales, or so the company says.
In 2006 I was horrified by Jigsaw, a website that encouraged users to upload people’s contact information (often from business cards) for money – $1 per contact. Other people then bought that contact information.
Google, which is currently on one heck of a spending spree, is closing an acquisition of San Francisco based DocVerse, a service that lets users collaborate around Microsoft Office documents, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. The purchase price is supposed to be around $25 million.
Rummble, the location-based social ratings mobile startup, has just released a new version of its iPhone app containing what is effectively its answer to Foursquare.