YouTube is on a roll. Last night, the world’s largest video site rolled out HTML5 support, its first video rentals, and even a nifty music feature called Disco. Today, it’s making an even bigger change: the site is launching a new ‘Watch’ page, stripping it down to its most key elements and ensuring that nothing is drawing your attention away from the video on the screen. To most people, this Watch page is really the heart of the YouTube experience ? it’s where you view clips and browse for the next thing you want to watch, so any significant changes are a big deal. The new streamlined page is opt-in for now, and you can activate it here. (more…)

Facebook has 350 million users now and thanks to worldwide growth, shows no signs of letting up. While still technically a startup ? though one with around $750 million in funding ? its size and traffic puts it in the same league as some of the biggest sites on the web. That’s why it’s pretty incredible that they’ve gotten away without having their own data center. Until now.

The service broke ground on its first data center in Prineville, Oregon, it announced today on its blog. The artists rendering of what the building will look like when done shows a massive facility (that sort of looks like a Playstation 2). Facebook notes that it will be ” highly efficient and cost-effective for our operations today and into the future.”

But why build it in Oregon? Well, a number of large companies choose the state for some of their data centers, including Amazon and Google, despite not being headquartered there. The state offers cheap power, a good climate (read: cooler), and tax incentives for companies to build these centers there. (more…)

Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder and philanthropist, held a press conference this morning to talk a little bit more about his new venture Peer News. And by a little– I mean very little.

The news was that John Temple former editor and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, will be taking over the role of editor and moving to Honolulu and the service will be launching early in the second quarter of this year. And good news journalism grads: They’re hiring!

The idea behind Peer News is to reinvent local, civic-minded journalism in a profitable way. It’s a big hole and a big problem– something Temple knows well. The Rocky Mountain News ceased publication about a year ago after some 150 years in business.

So far Omidyar and Temple are playing their cards incredibly close to the vest. They won’t disclose business model details, the scope of the organization, what form it will take or even what name they’ll do business under. The only thing we do know is the site will be almost totally Hawaii-focused, which would seemingly restrict the money they could make from traditional online ad revenues where the size of audience means everything. (more…)

TimeBridge, the company devoted to making business meetings easier by connecting your calendar with others? regardless of what software they?re using, today launched TimeBridge Business Plus, a premium version of of the service that adds a number of new features for businesses large and small.

TimeBridge?s new offering is all about making your meetings better. In addition to the initial product, which coordinates schedules of employees whether they use Outlook, Google Calendar, iCal or something else, TimeBridge is focusing on what happens during the meetings themselves. They?ve improved their already-cheap web meeting feature, and added free conference calling for users.

TimeBridge now also works with two popular productivity systems: Evernote, a note-taking service, to make taking and sharing meeting notes easier, and Google Calendar, which TimeBridge says 30% of its users rely on, to provide a way to schedule and even start meetings directly from within GCal. (more…)

Startup KnowEm, which helps both large companies and small businesses stake their brand claim in social media landscape and manage their presence on these sites, has recently acquired FriendsCall.Me, a similar service, for an undisclosed amount.

FriendsCall.Me launched in April 2009, and like KnoweEm, helped both individuals and companies mange and secure their identity in the social web. FriendsCall.Me was the brainchild of Darius Monsef IV, the creator of the design community, COLOURlovers.com, and community organizer for Microsoft’s Photosynth.com. Existing FriendsCall.Me customers will automatically be transferred to KnowEm’s service. (more…)

Twitpic might be in a bit of a pickle. In what looks like a cruel joke, its main competitor, ImageShack (the company behind the yFrog Twitter photo hosting service), went ahead and filed to trademark the name “Twitpic” before Twitpic did. According to filings from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (via Trademarkia), ImageShack filed for the Twitpic trademark in August of 2009. Twitpic filed for the same trademark only in October of 2009. Both Twitpic and yFrog serve the same purpose: they are image sharing sites for Twitter. But it’s hard to see how Imageshack can justify its claim to the Twitpic trademark.

According to ImageShack’s filing, the application is in non-final action mode, which means that the USPTO’s attorneys are investigating the application since the documents and images that Imageshack filed don’t contain the word “Twitpic.” Meanwhile, Twitpic’s filing is in suspension mode, which indicates that the USPTO has suspended action on its application (perhaps pending its decision on ImageShack’s application). I’ve embedded all of the filings and correspondence to and from the USPTO below. (more…)

The World Wildlife Fund for Nature is the world’s largest conservation organization, and works to raise awareness, research, and find ways to protect and restore our environment. Whether or not you agree with or support their cause, there is one thing that everyone can agree on: they have really clever and interesting advertisements! They hire many of the most talented designers and photomanipulators to help raise awareness for their cause.

So, in this post, we’ve rounded up 31 clever, interesting and meaningful advertisements and awareness posters from the WWF for your viewing enjoyment. Hopefully you find them interesting, and maybe they will motivate you to help conserve the environment that we rely on so heavily.

Thanks for viewing! Hope you enjoy, and don’t forget to subscribe for future updates! (more…)

(Editor?s note: Jeff Bussgang is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. This column originally appeared on his blog Seeing Both Sides.)

For decades, the venture capital industry was like a Yale Secret Society – very clubby, discrete and opaque. VCs had all the power in the VC-entrepreneur equation – and entrepreneurs had to work hard to decode the mysterious VC process to obtain funding.

My, how the world has changed in a few short years.

Pundits will tell you that in terms of trends, 2009 was the year of the real-time Web/Twitter, smart phones/iPhone and the mainstream emergence of digital advertising. But 2009 was also the year VC-run blogs and Tweets really became mainstream.

Today, over 100 VCs blog regularly (including all five of the Flybridge general partners!). One blogroll puts the number at 129 VC bloggers. That’s 10-15 percent of the active VC population of 1000.

Here’s how I get that number: Tthe National Venture Capital Association says there were 882 firms in existence in 2008, but with many firms no longer investing new money, I would estimate that approximately 400-500 firms are truly active. With an average of 2-3 senior investors per firm, there are therefore probably 1,000 VCs that are actively seeking deals and sitting on boards. (more…)

Document-sharing startup Box.net is getting a major upgrade today. It has always been a site where you can share all kinds of files and documents — but if a co-worker or colleague wanted to actually use those files, they’d have to download them and open them with the right software. Starting today, however, users can view those files online in Box.net, with the company’s new document viewer.

Now, if they don’t want to bother with downloading a file, users can just open it in their web browser. From the demos I’ve seen, the viewer opens files almost instantaneously, beating the time it would take to download and open a file in, say, Microsoft Word, and without any of the garbling or weird formatting that can result when you open a file with software other than the application it was created with — when you open a Word document in Google Docs, for example. There’s also limited interactivity, such as the ability enlarge and click through PowerPoint slides during a live presentation. (more…)

The typical Twitter client might resembles rocket science to grandma. With two, three, or four columns of tweets and sometimes embedded photos and videos streaming down an interface continuously, it’s understandably bewildering to a mainstream audience.

With that in mind, Seesmic, which is behind several mobile, desktop and web-based social media clients for keeping track of tweets and Facebook updates, is going after regular consumers with a new product Seesmic Look today.

Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur explained: (more…)