This Tumblr is just hypnotic: Our Incredible Journey collects the deadly combination of "We've been acquired, now our company will be amazing!" with the inevitable "We've suspended service to focus on Google/Facebook/Yahoo's core products" announcements. (via)
"AppData, a service that collects data about sites and services that connect with Facebook, indicated that Airtime had just 400 users a day and 10,000 over the course of a month, but Mr. Parker and other executives at the company suggested those figures were off. Nielsen and comScore, two independent analytics firms, both said that traffic to Airtime was so small that it did not yet register on their charts." —Aggressive Facebook-harvesting startup Airtime is surely going to pivot to a dong-related market.

"Ongo," founded in 2009, was going to be the centralized newspaper paywall system. Companies like the Washington Post, the New York Times Company and Gannett poured in a few million dollars to find a solution to delivering ad-free news to people who would pay for it. They launched their product in January of 2011, and at the end of this month, they will close their doors (and, as you do, lay off their employees). Here's the now-former CEO, Dan Haarmann, on his way out the door, talking to Nieman Journalism Lab: “I hate advertising in my news. I cannot stand people trying to send me a mortgage or [...]

Say that Peter DaSilva is coming over to take your photograph. The San Francisco-based photographer has shot them all, from Ev Williams to Mark Hurd to Hunter Walk to Carol Bartz to, now, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, the Instagram darlings of the moment, to accompany the front-page New York Times story about their sale to Facebook (for a billion in cash and stock, basically about a week after Instagram raised $50 million, at a $500 million valuation). And Peter's done it all without kicky filters! Tee hee! Anyway so of course maybe this photograph will end up on the front page of the New York Times and you [...]
With Buzzfeed announcing a fresh $15.5 million in funding today, on top of its previous $11.5 million in funding, all web properties should stop and ask themselves: what would you do with that cash? We already have it planned!
• office radio with AM and FM.
• tiny house collection in the middle of the office's sculpture courtyard.
• a "sympathy big board," displaying only least-viewed blog posts.
• Ben Smith's younger, weirder cousin from Ditmas Park, Yaniv Smith.
• an actual awl.
• basement meth lab (because media companies just becoming tech companies is very 2011; 2012 is about dreaming bigger).
• a fearsome, extremely [...]

"When Betabeat first visited General Assembly a few weeks before it opened, co-founder Adam Pritzker told us that the vision was to create an educational space free from the pressures of venture capital so often tied into startup incubators and accelerators.
That has all changed now." —Yup: with investments of $4.5 million (asdfasdjfl???), General Assembly can do all kinds of things! But they've got a plan, writes their cofounder: "So will we open a bunch more campuses? Put all our classes online? Start training executives? We don’t know."
Oh, no. Coming in September to Bloomberg TV (I think that's channel 547803 in New York?), it's TechStars! A TV show based on the entrepreneurial mentorship bootcamp program! This is formatted as a reality show, and was shot at TechStars' last three-month incubator program in New York. It's all about winning that big check for your hot startup, just like in real life. (Ha.) But it's not just about tech! It's about stars too! Because money = fame, and fame = money, and both of those = validation. This all fits into my theory that the current bubble is more of an emotional bubble, not actually an economic bubble. [...]