The content-discovery service, StumbleUpon, has gotten itself back to start-up status, after being bought by eBay two years ago.

It announced today that it was returning to being an “investor-backed startup” by a roster of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners and August Capital.

Its founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, are also back, with Camp now in place as CEO.

“We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths,” said Camp, stating the very obvious.

That’s quite a boomerang since it was acquired by the auction giant in 2007 for $75 million.

Read More »

There was no doubt, given the continuing economic collapse and all the joy that brings, that Demo09 was going to be a much tamped-down and sober affair this year.

But there were still a lot of interesting start-ups being featured in the main ballroom and demo “pit,” such as a cool “touch book” offering, a strange hooking-up-in-a-bar smartphone app and a plethora of ideas that obviously got their inspiration from the iPhone from Apple.

As in: touch, swipe, interact! (Which is the official BoomTown motto, in point of fact.)

Here’s a video I did of Demo09, which ends today.

Read More »

With the naming of Oracle President Charles Phillips to President Barack Obama’s 16-Member Economic Recovery Advisory Board a few days ago, another Silicon Valley tech mandarin fell off the list to become America’s first chief technology officer.

The job–which was promised by President Barack Obama during his campaign and underscored when he released a memorandum on transparency and open government that outlined some of the CTO duties the day after he was sworn in–remains unfilled.

While everyone is rightly focusing on the economic crisis, inquiring minds still want to know who is getting the job as head geek.

Read More »

Last Friday, BoomTown paid a visit to James Joaquin, who has just been officially appointed the new CEO of Foxmarks, the Mitch Kapor-backed start-up that makes a free bookmarking and password syncing add-on for the Firefox browser.

The San Francisco-based company had also has gotten $5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures earlier this summer.

With the arrival of Joaquin, Foxmarks is trying to move into a mode of carving out a business with its assets, including using its data and expanding beyond the Firefox browser.

Here’s a video interview with Joaquin about it.

Read More »

I went to a dinner last night hosted by John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly of the Web 2.0 Summit, and it was one of the more schmoozy events I have been to in a while.
The event–this year at Foreign Cinema in the Mission District of San Francisco–is held to elicit feedback from the Internet’s movers [...]

Read More »

So soon enough, you will be hearing a lot about the joint interview with tech legends–Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs–that Walt and I will be doing exactly a week from tonight at our D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif. (You can read Dow Jones’s press release on the May 30 event [...]

Read More »