At least two startups—and a long list of prominent investors—are now betting that people will happily put aside any privacy concerns in order to share updates with friends about what they are buying: Swipely has raised $7.5 million in a first round of funding, less than a month after rival…

Lithium Technologies, which sells white label social networking tools to businesses, has bought up social media monitoring startup Scout Labs. Reports last week put the purchase price at between $20 million and $25 million. Lithium’s platform lets businesses set up online communities for their customers, including discussion boards, blogs and…

Even more deal activity in the question and answer website market. Travel review aggregator NileGuide has bought up Localyte, a site that lets travelers ask locals questions (Sample: “Where is the best place to kite in Casablanca?” Consensus answer: Near the beach). Localyte claims a community of “tens of thousands”…

Several times during the CBS (NYSE: CBS) earnings call last week, CBS president and CEO Les Moonves made clear his intention to generate subscription and advertising revenue from any online video offerings the company pursues. As the company seeks to boost CBS cable property Showtime’s 8 percent revenue Q1 revenue…

Digg, which saw the departure of longtime CEO Jay Adelson a month ago, is now laying off 10 percent of its staff. In an e-mail sent to employees, founder Kevin Rose says the layoffs are necessary for the “long-term health” of the business. The job cuts—Digg’s second round of layoffs…

HelloWallet, a new paid site designed to help people manage their personal finances, has raised $3.6 million in a first round of funding. The round was led by Grotech Ventures; AOL (NYSE: AOL) founder Steve Case and his wife, Jean, also participated. Like Mint.com and several other competitors, HelloWallet tracks…

Looks like Groupon is plotting a big mobile push. The company has purchased Mob.ly, a mobile development firm which has worked on a number of high-profile products, including Yahoo’s Sketch-a-Search iPhone app and OpenTable’s apps for Android and the Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pre. In a blog post, Groupon—which launched an…

Right in time for video news site Newsy to promote its iPad app, the company says it has raised $2 million in a second round of funding. Newsy is run by Media Convergence Group, which started the company in 2008. Like a lot of media companies, Newsy has high hopes…

“Cloud TV” provider ActiveVideo Networks has bought streaming games provider Tag Networks. Terms weren’t disclosed. The deal will help San Jose, CA.-based ActiveVideo broaden its entertainment offerings to cable operators, while Tag Networks gets wider distribution. Release

Maybe Ross Levinsohn had a worst-case scenario where nearly five years after the acquisition of MySpace for $580 million, top News Corp (NYSE: NWS). execs told analysts MySpace was a “work in progress” with a goal of being cash positive next year. Maybe, but if that was the case, I…

Microsoft’s FUSE Labs group was set up eight months ago to develop new “social” products for the company—and has been busily releasing early-stage products since. The latest: Spindex, a service which “aggregates your social streams (Facebook, Twitter, Bing, etc.), making it simple for you to find what’s new, see personalized…

Former Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) VP-corporate development Bruce Jaffe has been hired as Glam Media’s next CFO. Jaffe, who left Microsoft back in January ‘08, joined Glam as an adviser to the board almost two years ago. He will replace Glam’s current CFO, Stephen Recht, who will stay on through the…

Some more deal activity in the media monitoring space: Traditional and social media monitoring firm Biz360 has been sold to Attensity, which sells a suite of software applications for businesses looking to analyze “unstructured data,” such as customer surveys and e-mails. Biz360—which counts companies including Dell, HP (NYSE: HPQ) and…

Ty Ahmad-Taylor is the founder and CEO of FanFeedr, a real-time personalized sports feed. Previously, he was SVP of Strategy and Product Development at Viacom (NYSE: VIA) and, before that, Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA). He tweets at @tyahma One of the things big and small media companies grapple with is identity,…

Here’s another sign of how much promise investors think there is in the group-buying market: LivingSocial, which runs a group-buying service, has raised $14 million in a third round of funding, only a month-and-a-half after raising a $25 million second round. The company also has several social apps, including its…

Whatever relationship you already have with NYTimes.com, if you aren’t paying for access, it’s not deep enough. At least, that’s part of the message implied in Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.‘s prepared remarks for this week’s annual shareholders meeting. “Creating an online business model with the goal of yielding larger financial returns…

Match.com has sent letters to several rival dating sites demanding that they stop circulating what the company considers to be false statistics about their services. We reported yesterday that Match.com had asked PlentyOfFish to stop making some claims about its site—but Match.com CEO Greg Blatt tells us the company sent…

As expected, Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies says it has reached an agreement with AOL (NYSE: AOL) to buy its instant messaging service ICQ for $187.5 million. DST, which has investment in Facebook and Zynga; South African media giant Naspers, which holds a 30 percent stake in China’s Tencent,…

Tremor Media has raised $40 million in a fourth round of funding—becoming the latest online video ad network to raise a double-digit million round this year. The funding comes as the company, which was profitable for the first time in 2009, has been growing very rapidly; CEO Jason Glickman tells…