Mobile

People looking for signs of a slowdown in tech funding could find ample evidence in the data for the first quarter. CB Insights, which tracks investments of venture capital firms and some big angel investors, reports that VCs plowed $5.9 billion into startups in Q1 -- a 22 percent drop from the last quarter of 2011 and the lowest amount since the second quarter of 2010.

But not so fast. That's not the sound of a bubble popping. Deal volume was huge in the first quarter, and lack of any mega-deals dampened the sheer dollar amount. (Yammer, the … Read more

The hot mobile startup Path said today it raised more than $30 million from a roster of well-known investors, including Richard Branson, Facebook backer Yuri Milner, and Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus. The round was led by venture firm Redpoint Ventures.

It's a lot of money for the mobile social network, although earlier reports put the amount raised at $40 million.

Dave Morin, who co-created the Facebook Platform, said in a statement that Path would use the money to help with "international growth and expansion as well as user adoption." Currently, Path claims 2 million users. … Read more

Foursquare is celebrating its third-annual 4sqDay in impressive fashion.

Whenever users check in on the service today, they'll be awarded the 2012 4sqDay badge, which is accompanied with a message announcing that the startup now has 20 million users worldwide, and has hit a whopping 2 billion check-ins since it was founded in 2009.

"In 2010, Foursquare fans declared April 16 4sqDay (4/4^2 - nerds after our own heart!)," the message that accompanies the badge reads. "Two years and two billion check-ins later, you're still why we get out of bed each day. … Read more

Path, the popular photo-sharing social network, is about to announce it has closed a $40 million round of funding that values the San Francisco startup at $250 million, according to sources who spoke to All Things D. Update 5:24 p.m.: Path said it has raised $30 million in a funding round.

The report, which came out late last night, said that the new round was led by Redpoint Ventures and could be announced as early as today.

The company, which was founded by Dave Morin, who co-created the Facebook Platform, and Shawn Fanning, the co-founder of Napster, has … Read more

Facebook is amping up its mobile efforts, this time around commerce.

Facebook today bought a San Francisco-based startup called TagTile, a mobile-based customer loyalty business. Like Square, TagTile provides merchants with a free hardware device (see the white cube in the photo) for customers to tap on with their phone when they checkout. That, combined with the app, lets stores run coupon programs and offer loyalty rewards.

In a post on its site, TagTile said that Facebook is "acquiring substantially all of our assets." How much is that worth? Facebook isn't saying. But this acquisition clearly isn'… Read more

Editors' note: This is a guest column by Mobify CEO Igor Falestki, whose bio is below.

The new iPad hit the shelves on March 16, flew off the shelves, and these shiny new devices are now in the hands of more than 3 million people.

If you somehow missed all the hype, the new iPad features a huge jump in screen resolution with the Retina display. Packing in four times the number of pixels in iPad 2 (and a million times more than an HDTV), the Retina display gives end users an unbelievable visual experience.

Yet what feels like beautifully … Read more

Co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger started out with a straightforward but ambitious mission when they launched Instagram: "To change and improve the way the world communicates and shares."

And now they have done the unimaginable: Gone from zero to $1 billion in just 18 months, as the startup -- valued just last month at an already fat $500 million -- is selling itself to the powerhouse that Mark Zuckerberg built.

The $1 billion figure and the speed to get there sounds ripped right from the headlines of 1999. And the news is sure to have app makers … Read more

Aiming to work more closely with top-tier publishers, the popular news reader Zite today unveiled a platform that will prominently highlight stories from its media partners.

Zite, which works on iOS and Android devices, is built around the concept of giving people personalized news in discrete subject sections like "technology," "politics," "sports," and so on. People can choose as many sections as they like, and stories are algorithmically curated at least in part based on people's feedback about whether they do or don't like stories, publications, and even individual authors.

Now, with … Read more

Path, the hot San Francisco startup that ignited a firestorm of privacy concerns when it was revealed that it was absorbing entire address books from users' phones, today said it's come out with a fix.

In a blog post, Path said that with the release of Path 2.1.1, "we are enhancing our security by hashing user contact data so that it is anonymized."

This, the post goes on, will anonymize "last names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, Twitter handles, and Facebook IDs" -- all information that Path collects to make its social network more … Read more