By Brian Kovalesky, StartUp Beat Editor
Internet giants dominated tech news this week. Of course, Facebook’s announcements at F8 were the big headlines late in the week. Will the new Facebook be something unprecedented, or will they become the next AOL (the adjective “walled garden” has come up quite a bit over the last day or so). Google was in the news for perhaps a less positive reason—as the subject of an inquiry by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust. It included Chairman Eric Schmidt’s appearance in front of the committee, where he was grilled by Senators that in large part seemed to demonstrate a glancing understanding about how the Interwebs work. Perhaps more alarming for Google, though, were the accusations leveled against the company by Yelp and Nextag, among others, that Google rigs its search results. It’s complicated—stay tuned on this one. Finally, HP made waves by giving the boot to Leo Apotheker and hiring former eBay head and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman as CEO. Good luck, Meg—and you thought running for governor was frustrating.
But tech startups also made a collective splash. If nothing else, the sheer number of funding and acquisitions announcements on a weekly basis continues to be impressive. Highlights included Lookout Mobile Security’s $40 million and JustFabulous’s $33 million Series A.
Other seed and Series A rounds announced this week:
–CrowdTwist – $6 million
–Honestly Now – Undisclosed
–TrustYou – $5 million
–Dropcam – $5.8 million
–Neo Technology – $10.6 million
–Zimride – $6 million
–Yardsellr – $5 million
–Dashlane – $5 million
StartUp Beat this week featured a Q&A with PowerInbox’s founder and CEO. The company offers an app that unifies email and social networking, and recently raised $1.1 million in seed funding. We also featured a pitch from enterprise geolocation apps builder DoubleDutch and a StartUp Narrative from Avi Basu, founder of Connectiva Systems. Found out how he hit it big with his first entrepreneurial venture!
