—What if there were a site that tracked every conference you’d been to or are planning to go to, and did the same for your friends—a kind of IMDB for the event world? That’s exactly what Lanyrd is, and it means you’ll never have to fear missing a good conference again. I profiled the Y Combinator-backed startup, founded by the husband-and-wife team of Natalie Downe and Simon Willison.
—Back in April, San Francisco-based video search provider Blinkx acquired a Massachusetts online advertising network called Burst Media. I got a behind-the-scenes look at the rationale for the Burst purchase from Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake, who says Blinkx is now on a path to become a niche publishing network with enough eyeballs to pull advertisers away from television.
—San Francisco-based Levi’s and American Express have teamed up with LevelUp, a spinoff of Cambridge, MA-based SCVNGR, in a test of a new deals technology designed to encourage repeat visits to retail locations. LevelUp’s technology, which offers American Express card holders a series of escalating discounts if they make repeat purchases, will be tested in Levi’s stores in San Francisco, Boston, and King of Prussia, PA.
—I profiled SwipeGood, a Y Combinator-backed startup that hopes to change the way non-profits raise money. The company tracks consumers’ credit- and debit-card spending, rounds up each transaction to the nearest dollar, and donates the difference each month to the users’ favorite charity. I interviewed co-founder Steli Efti about the startup, which he hopes will grow to rival other huge fundraisers like Salvation Army and United Way.
—San Francisco-based Riverbed Technology announced a collaboration with Akamai in Cambridge, MA, to build technology that will help enterprises run their applications across hybrid public-private cloud computing infrastructures, as Greg reported.
—In deals news, Palantir Technologies raised $50 million, Funzio raised $20 million, Pageonce raised $15 million, Demandbase raised $10 million, BranchOut raised $18 million, and ThredUp raised $7 million.
