Venture Capital Roundup

Nerites Corporation completed a $5.7 million Series A round of funding; New Earth Solutions Ltd attracted Gbp4 million; ActionBase raised $6.5M; Q Therapeutics, Inc. raised $15 million Series B financing; Sparkplay Media Inc. secured $4.25 million in financing; Albireo raised $27 million and anticipates receiving up to $40m in a Series A financing round; Coverity has raised $22 million.

Read at www.unitedBIT.com

Meet the Googlers

Google is different, even on a list of distinctive companies. But its employees still type their email one letter at a time. We may not understand precisely how Google’s algorithms work, but we can understand how the people at Google do their work. Here, more than a dozen describe what life is like at a place where no goal is too audacious, agility means more than power, and even cafeteria food represents an opportunity to change the world.

Read at www.unitedBIT.com

VCs putting money into personal finance sites

Venture capitalists have been busy investing in personal-finance Web start-ups, attempting to tap into a new generation of consumers who have never balanced a checkbook and increasingly view online money management as they would any other kind of Web service.

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Widgets: Moving Your Web Store Into The Community

Social media has grown to become a serious tool in a merchant’s marketing arsenal. However, perhaps the greatest social media advantage to merchants is still emerging — the ecommerce widget.

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New Capital Connections For Entrepreneurs: Person-to-Person Lending

Credit-market carnage makes it all the more important for small businesses to understand the full range of potential sources for capital. A growing alternative to traditional sources: person-to-person lending Web sites.

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FastCompany: 50 World’s Most Innovative Companies

From visionary upstarts to storied stalwarts, here are companies that dazzle with new ideas– and prove beyond a doubt how business is a force for change. They are called the 50 World’s Most Innovative Companies.

Find who are they here

Turning Innovation Into Cash

Ideas are good, but if they don’t make money, they’re useless. That’s the premise of Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation, by James P. Andrew and Harold L. Sirkin, who have seen the best and worst innovation practices from their perch as senior vice presidents of the Boston Consulting Group. Their new book is a helpful “how-to” for companies looking to refine their innovation process.

Read at www.unitedBIT.com

Is bad news for banner ads equal to good news for ‘featuretisements’?

In 2007, BlueTie has developed a new Web marketing technique, called ‘featuretisement.’ For advertisers or retailers, featuretisements blend the targeting of AdSense with the one-click sale of an auction or store listing. For users working inside a Web application such as BlueTie’s hosted e-mail and collaboration software, they minimize disruption.

Read at www.unitedBIT.com