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In This Update:

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Clearspring Acquires AddThis, Moves Towards Universal Sharing Widgets
VENTUREBEAT
Clearspring, the widget creation platform, has acquired AddThis, the bookmarking and sharing button, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition moves Clearspring closer to becoming a service that allows any users to share content from any website. AddThis will initially remain its own service. Through the acquisition, Clearspring reports that the two services combined will be reach approximately 200 million users and 300,000 publishers.
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AT&T, Nokia, Others Invest in Zvents
REUTERS
Zvents, a local online search engine and advertising network, said on Tuesday that it had raised $24 million from several investors, including Nokia’s venture capital unit, AT&T Inc and digital map data company Navteq. Zvents plans to use the money to expand its ad network of local listings and to invest in its technology, which helps people using mobile telephones and other devices find information on events.The technology focuses on events such as store sales, dining specials, sporting events and concerts, and lets local businesses pair their ads with those events.
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Report: Lenovo Ready for Next Acquisition
REUTERS
Lenovo Group, world’s No. 4 personal computer maker, is ready to make its next major acquisition despite a slowing global economy, the South China Morning Post newspaper said on Tuesday. “Although we remain cautious, it is time for us to take on another challenge,” the newspaper quoted Chief Financial Officer Wong Wai Ming as saying. It was the strongest hint to date of China’s largest PC maker, which bought IBM’s PC arm in 2005 for $1.25 billion, moving to further consolidate the industry amid the current economic crisis, it said. Media reports said earlier this month that Siemens was planning to sell its stake in the Fujitsu Siemens Computers NIXG.UL joint venture to joint venture partner Fujitsu.
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SocialText 3.0 Blends Facebook, Twitter, and the Enterprise
TECHCRUNCH
SocialText 3.0 is an enterprise mashup of Facebook, FriendFeed, enterprise microblogging, and the wiki. If you were to take any one of these constituencies – social networking, conversation aggregation, Twitter, or vanilla wikis and the leveraged sites the technology has produced – you might not think of SocialText as a major player or competitor with the exception of the enterprise wiki space. But add these together and get out ahead of both the market and the logical expansion plans of larger players, and SocialText 3.0 may have something hard to disrupt.
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Joost Adds Wizzard’s Producer Line-up to Their Inventory
MASHABLE
Wizzard Media, one of the industry leaders when it comes to professional podcasting solutions, has announced this morning that it’s forming a content partnership with Joost in an effort to both increase circulation for their producers as well as offer the web video portal Joost a wider variety of content and programming. The specific piece that I thought was wrong with Joost’s strategy wasn’t that they followed a very contrarian model of creating a third party app which provided access to top-shelf entertainment via the Internet, but that they never followed that up with a hardware solution for their users.
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GigaOM White Paper: The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps
GIGAOM
Beginning on Wednesday, Comcast, the largest broadband service provider in the U.S., is going to start capping the total amount of data you can transfer using their broadband connection – to 250GB per month. With this move, the cable company will become the symbol of a new Internet era, one that is both monitored and metered. It is an era that threatens to limit innovation and to a large extent, the possibilities for new startups.
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Game Social Network Cafe.com Opens Up to Developers
VENTUREBEAT
Cafe.com, a social network for game playing, has opened its previously invite-only platform to all developers. While most of the attention in the social games space is focused on bringing games to existing social networks, Cafe.com is going the opposite way by creating a social network entirely dedicated to playing free online games. The company is now competing for developer attention with the big social networks like Facebook and MySpace, but unlike these platforms, Cafe.com supports multiplayer gaming. This may turn out to be its ace-in-the-hole. Neither Facebook nor MySpace have multiplayer game support and, as a result, real-time games have failed to take hold on those sites.
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We7 Adds the Orchard for Ad Supported Streams
HYPERBOT
We7 has added more than 1.3 million tracks from digital distributor The Orchard for ad-funded, on-demand streaming, downloads and paid-for mp3 downloads. We7 users will be able to listen to full tracks and albums on an unlimited basis at no cost, create personal playlists, and share them with friends. We7 plays short, targeted audio ads before each streamed track.
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RealDVD Launches for Those Who Don’t Mind DRM
TECHCRUNCH
Real Networks announced that RealDVD, its latest solution allowing users to copy DVDs onto their hard drives without facing legal troubles because the ripped copy keeps the DRM, is now available on the company’s site . We profiled RealDVD a few weeks ago and found that it may suit some of those who want to create a media server and don’t mind DRM, but the software’s hefty price tag of $49.99 for your first license and $19.99 for the additional four licenses if you want to watch the films on five computers, should be enough to shy many away. It does have a 30-day free trial so you can try it out though.
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TSMC Says to Use 28nm Chips by Early 2010
NEW YORK TIMES
TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chip maker, said on Tuesday it would start using advanced 28-nanometer technology in early 2010 to produce chips used in new, higher-performance tech gadgets. In a highly competitive foundry market, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd , United Microelectronics Corp and other smaller rivals are racing to develop new process technology for chip production. The new technology, which will support applications like cellular baseband and wireless connectivity, is expected to provide up to 50 percent more speed or 30-50 percent lower power consumption than TSMCs’ 40-nanometre low-power node, TSMC said.
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Send Word Now Raises $14 Million for Emergency Notifications
VENTUREBEAT
Send Word Now, a New York startup that allows organizations to send out mass alerts, has raised $14 million in a fourth round of funding.The company’s goal is to provide government agencies, universities, nonprofit groups and others with a way to disseminate information, particularly in emergency situations where getting the news out quickly can save lives. For example, Tufts University hired Send Word Now to implement an alert system last year in the wake of Virginia Tech shooting. In a test earlier this month, Tufts was able to send out more than 46,000 alerts – SMS text messages, emails and phone calls, usually reaching each person through multiple avenues – in less than 10 minutes.
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Video Site HealthiNation Raises $7.5 Million Second Round
PAIDCONTENT
Online video network HealthiNation has raised $7.5 million in a second round of funding led by Intel Capital and existing backer MK Capital. The New York-based company plans to use the proceeds for general expansion plans, CEO Raj Amin told paidContent. The company secured a first round of $4.2 million in September 2006, he added. The funding comes as HealthiNation has laid the groundwork for a handful of new partnerships it’s announcing in conjunction with its new investment.
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