Daily Tidbits: PayPal jumps on OpenID bandwagon, joins board
PayPal has joined the OpenID Foundation Board, HealthCentral has acquired Wellsphere, and CoveritLive has received $1.2 million in funding.
The OpenID Foundation announced Wednesday that it has added PayPal as a corporate member of the board. Andrew Nash, PayPal's senior director of information risk management, joins the board, which is populated by representatives from Google, IBM, and Microsoft, among others. According to Nash, PayPal elected to become part of the OpenID board because "open standards-based user-centric identity is clearly becoming an increasingly important part of the evolving web infrastructure" and his company believes it can add to OpenID's desire to bring more security to the Web.
HealthCentral, a site that provides a collection of condition-specific consumer health information, announced that it has acquired Wellsphere, a health technology company, that aims at informing the public on specific health issues. According to the company, the acquisition will create a combined entity that has 10 million unique visitors per month and creates "the largest organic aggregation of online health and wellness communities." The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed.
CoveritLive, a company that offers a free hosted live blogging platform, announced that it has received $1.2 million in funding from Flagstone Capital to help it increase its customer base and improve its business model. According to the company, Flagstone Capital's commitment will provide support to the company until it can break even.
Bemba Media, a company that offered a bookmarklet that allowed users to bookmark pages across the Web and share them with others, announced Wednesday that it will shut down on February 8. According to a post on the company's site, the company's founders were forced to shutter their business "because the amount of Bemba users is not growing fast enough to pay" its expenses.
Radar, a photo-sharing site that allows users to upload pictures and connect with others, has launched an iPhone app. Users can take pictures with their iPhone camera and immediately upload those to their Radar page. That page can be kept public or private and other users can comment on pictures or send private messages to each other. The tool features basic editing tools for those who want to fix photos and a statistics page to see how many people have looked at the pictures. The app is free and available now in the iPhone App Store.