Friday, May 4, 2012


Recmnd.Me Takes On Hiring Referrals
Hoping to make it easier for human resources departments to mangae employee recommendations and referrals, a Newport Beach startup, Recmnd.Me, said this week that it has launched a new online social recruiting service. The startup said that its site provides a social recommendation service that allows co-workers to recommend and rate each other, helping HR departments to better locate the "A" players. The startup is headed by Jesse Gant, who the company says has previously served at such firms a (More info...)
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Slacker Apologizes For Friday the 13th Outage With Free Month
Is Friday the 13th really an unlucky day? For one local startup, it sure was. San Diego-based Slacker, the personalized online radio and music service, apologized to its users this week for an outage last month--on Friday the 13th---telling them that it will offer up a free month of its Slacker Premium Radio service to customers. Slacker's outage on April 13th was--literally--due to being struck by lightning, and although the outage was fixed by Saturday morning, the company said it was offerin (More info...)
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Inktank Launches Open Source Storage Firm
A new startup, Los Angeles-based Inktank, said yesterday that it has launched a new company to help support the open source, distributed storage system called Ceph. The new firm--spun out of web hosting firm Dreamhost--said it will provide enterprise-level support for the Ceph storage system, which provide cloud-based storage that runs on commodity hardware. Ceph was created by Dreamhost co-cfounder Sage Weil, from his doctoral dissertation at UC Santa Cruz in 2004. Weil is CEO and Chief Archite (More info...)
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Report: Lynda.com Tops $70M In Annual Revenues
Carpenteria, California-based Lynda.com, the online education site providing online training on a variety of software, ranging from PhotoShop to AutoCAD and much more which was founded by Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin, is now topping $70M in annual revenues, according to reports. The firm is one of Southern California's best kept secrets, and is one of the rare examples of a very successful company which was bootstrapped with no outside funding by its founders. The new revenue numbers came via (More info...)
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Engrade Raises $3M For Classroom Management Tools
Santa Monica-based Engrade, a developer of online classroom management tools, said today that it has raised $3M in a funding round. The round was led by Rethink Education, and also included NewSchools Venture Fund, Greg Gunn, Zac Zeitlin, and Richard Chino. Engrade, which is headed by CEO Zach Posner, said the funding will go to expand its academic and outreach team, plus go towards its tools. Engrade's online software is used for tracking grades and other classroom activities and communications (More info...)
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THQ Sets Saints Row Sequel
Agoura Hills-based THQ said Thursday that it is working on the next sequel of its Saints Row' series, Saints Row: The Third - Enter The Dominatrix. THQ said that it will ship the title in the fall, and will ship on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, for $29.99. THQ said it has shipped more than 11 million units of the franchise so far. THQ did not give an exact ship date on the new title.
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GroundLink Expands Into Los Angeles
GroundLink, the operator of a mobile-app driven car service, said Thursday that it has expanded into Los Angeles with its service. The company--which competes against similar service Uber--allows users to schedule a private car pickup using an iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry app in real time. GroundLink had previously only been available in New York. Unlike Uber, GroundLink provides pricing information upfront through its app. Los Angeles is the first expansion beyond New York for the company.
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LuxeYard Expands Into Art
Los Angeles flash sales site LuxeYard, which is headed by Braden Richter, announced Thursday that the firm is expanding into fine art. The company--which has been offering up luxury flash sales of home furnishings--said the expansion includes limited edition fine art, photography, and sculpture. LuxeYard also said that it will allow its members to upload photos of art pieces they want its art buying team to source, similar to how the firm currently allows members to request specific styles of fu (More info...)
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