for W3c validation

Damn, what a day in the tech world. Lots of big news, including two fairly large acquistions of web 2.0 companies.

1. Last.fm (which is an awesome application by the way) was bought by CBS for $280 million. I agree with Fred that it could prove to be a real bargain a couple years from now as internet radio becomes more popular (right now, it’s just the geeks – but that will change). There are dozens of other posts on this subject at Techmeme if you want more insight.
2. eBay announced the purchase of StumbleUpon (another cool site) for $75 million. I really think this is a great investment for eBay as they get into the social networking space. This gives them another great toolbar application to add to their repitoire.
3. Jason Calacanis launched Mahalo, his new venture that is attempting to use humans to improve search results. The main page has a very clean look – it’ll be interesting to see how this venture goes & if it can be proved that humans produce better search results than super advanced algorithms.

   

4. Google released an open source toolkit for developers to build offline/online applications. I haven’t had enough time to really think about the impacts of this one quite yet, but it’s certainly going to be nice when google applications like gmail and google reader (now working offline) work offline in addition to online.
   1. Here’s a podcast if you’re interested.

And of course, I’m still utterly amazed with what Facebook is doing. I seriously think they are going to challenge Google as the dominant internet property over the next decade. There’s some good insights and links HERE.