XIHA Life, the world’s first truly multilingual and multicultural social network, received $1 million in seed funding. Veraventure led the round, joined by international angel investors and the company founders.

XIHA Life also announced that Jyri Engeström, former Google Product Manager and co-founder of Jaiku, is coming on as a new member of the board, joining Jan Achrenius and chairman Ville Miettinen.

“New features like the unlimited HD video uploads and knowledge exchange have ratcheted up our organic growth to an astonishing rate, giving us over 700,000 members to date,” said Jani Penttinen, XIHA Life co-founder and CEO.

XIHA Life connects the people of the world through a multilingual, cross-cultural exchange. Simultaneous, real-time trans/> [...]

Mon Jan 25, 2010 11:20 am

Experian Hitwise announced that it has found Facebook to be the top search term overall for the year 2009 after analyzing the top 300 search terms for the year. This is the first year Facebook has been the top search term, and it accounted for 0.67% of all searches, according to the research firm.

Variations of the term Facebook actually accounted for four of the top twenty-five terms, the firm says. "Facebook" itself moved up from the 10th spot in 2008 to the top spot in 2009.

Although MySpace has taken a lot of flack in recent memory, as Facebook has gained popularity, MySpace was still the second most-searched term in 2009, according to Experian Hitwise. It had been the top term for the previous three years.

Following MySpace on the list was Craigslist, YouTube, and Yahoo Mail. "Analysis of the search terms reveals that social networking–related terms dominated the results, accounting for 2.48 percent of the top 300 searches," a representative for Experian Hitwise tells WebProNews. 

"Adding up common search terms — e.g., facebook and facebook.com — Facebook terms accounted for 1.09 percent of all US searches," he says. "MySpace terms accounted for 1.02 percent, Yahoo terms accounted for 0.95 percent, Google terms accounted for 0.63 percent, and Craigslist terms accounted for 0.62 percent."

Google was unsurprisingly the top-visited website for the second straight year, accounting for 6.7% of all U.S. visits between January and November 2009, according to Experian Hitwise. Yahoo Mail accounted for 4.44% of visits, followed by Facebook (4.26%), Yahoo (3.36%) /> [...]

Thu Dec 17, 2009 08:15 am

Google is sharing its FTC Roundtable Comments document it submitted last week in response to the FTC's recent "Exploring Privacy" roundtable series. This series was designed for the discussion of ways to protect consumer privacy, and included leaders from government, advocacy, academia, and industry.

"Fair warning, it can be a bit of a dense document, particularly for the privacy layperson, says Will DeVries, Policy Counsel for Google. "But if you’ve ever wanted to know more about privacy at Google, then it’s definitely worth a read."

The document outlines Google's support for:

* Strong industry commitments to ensure transparency, user control, and security in Internet services for consumers. Self-regulatory standards, such as the recent work done in online behavioral advertising, have encouraged companies to innovate in the area of privacy and have enhanced user choices in the environment as a whole.

[...]

Tue Apr 20, 2010 04:55 am

Twitter has just announced a number of partnerships with a companies engaged in "real-time search and discovery". According to the blog post, the company is "happily turning the Firehose on for some new partners focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery."

This partnership is sure to dramatically increase the number of people reached by Twitter's current user-base and could mean some big things for the microblog, not only in terms of exposure but in terms of its much rumored ad platform.

Sponsor

According to the blog post, the full spectrum of data available in the "Firehose" was previously only available to Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. With this announcement, Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search will all join on as partners with Twitter and have access to the entirety of Twitters data stream in real time.

The Firehose, as compared to standard API access, does not have the same limits on how much a program accesses the data, which means much more real-time interaction is possible.

Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta, said that these partnerships show that "real-time is real," calling this "the natural progression of the validation of real-time as a mode of information gathering."

Twitter's blog post, titled "Enabling A Rush of Innovation", reads like a proclamation from above, but we have to admit we're excited to see what can come of this. "Full investment," reads the post "in this ecosystem of innovation, means all our partners should have access to the same volume of data, regardless of co/> [...]

Mon Mar 01, 2010 14:30 pm