Electric Imp Raises $7.9M From Redpoint & Lowercase Capital To Power The Internet of Things

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One trend we’ve been tracking is the “Internet of Things” — the idea that at some point, all devices will be intelligent and connected, allowing for things like whole home automation.

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Credit scores, with a little help from your friends

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Would you want your Facebook friends or LinkedIn contacts to help determine your creditworthiness? An emerging crop of companies believe that our online identities – and our social data in particular – are valuable sources for evaluating and even managing credit risk. This week, Lenddo , a New York-based startup that helps the middle class in emerging markets use their online social connections to build credit, announced that it had raised $8 million in new funding . Almost like a Grameen bank for the digital era, Lenddo provides an online microlending platform that uses social dynamics and positive peer pressure to keep people creditworthy and provide capital they might not otherwise be able to access

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Is There a More Awesome Combination Than Pizza and Animated Gifs? Doubt It [Video]

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If you've ever had one of those days when you're blindly poking around the internet, wondering what value the world wide web really has to offer, this is your answer. Visionary Andrew Salomone has created a tutorial on making animated gifs and pizza at the same time.

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Create Your Series B Deck Immediately After Closing Your Series A

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Editor’s note: Joe Kraus is a partner at  Google Ventures , focusing on mobile, gaming, and local services. In 1993, he co-founded Excite.com, an early Internet search engine.

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Baidu’s New Forked Android Phone: China’s Search Giant Wants To Make Windows Phone, iOS Versions Too

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Big mobile plans afoot for Baidu, the Google of China that leads in search and has launched a host of other services in the wake of that business. The company today unveiled the first smartphone to be built on its own platform , the Changhong H5018. And while that device is designed on a “forked” version of Android — forked Android devices being very popular in China — Baidu says that it doesn’t want to stop there: the idea is to take its platform, the Baidu Cloud Smart Terminal, to other operating systems like Windows Phone and iOS.

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Why Niklas Zennstrom thinks Brazil’s startups are hot

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Sao Paulo, Brazil — Niklas Zennstrom, the founder of Skype and Kazaa and the founding partner of investment firm Atomico , has been spending a significant amount of time in Brazil looking for and meeting with Brazilian entrepreneurs. He first noticed how big the Brazilian market was when Brazil emerged as one of the larger markets — between the third and fifth largest — for Skype back at the end of 2003, Zennstrom said in an interview following a panel that he participated in Monday night organized by the Institute for Education and Research in Sao Paulo

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Service As A SKU

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Editor’s note:  This post was written by  Alex Rampell , the CEO of  TrialPay . Rampell is a regular contributor to TechCrunch – see his previous guest posts  here.

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On getting video right — 5 questions for Sugar Media’s Brian Sugar

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Brian Sugar and his wife, Lisa, have built a women’s media and e-commerce empire that grew out of the company’s flagship celebrity site, Pop Sugar. We caught up with Brian to learn more about how he made it in media. Here’s some edited highlights from the chat: Making Video Work paidContent: You swear by video as the future of media sites.

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Stream Music to Every Radio in the House—Cheap! [Home Mod]

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You can broadcast streaming Internet music throughout a house over Wi-Fi using products from Sonos or Grace Digital.

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Thompson maybe out, but Yahoo still a mess

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Yahoo chief executive officer Scott Thompson, who has been caught in a resume gate, is leaving the company, reports AllThingsD . He is going to be replaced by Ross Levinsohn, who is currently global media head with the company, Kara Swisher adds

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