The Omidyar-funded SeeClickFix, a site which helps users report and get community issues like potholes and graffiti taken care of, has launched on the Facebook platform today. For the uninitiated, SeeClickFix lets people flag non-emergency problems for local officials in over 14,000 municipalities. Founded in 2009 SeeClickFix now has over 200,000 users and over 50% of its 95,000 user-reported civic [...]

DISH Network this morning announced that it was selected as the winning bidder in the bankruptcy court auction for substantially all of the assets of Blockbuster, which went belly up in September 2010. DISH’s winning bid was valued at approximately $320 million, but after adjustments for available cash and inventory and others, the company expects to end up paying approximately $228 million [...]

Groupon has acquired yet another local group buying clone to expand its network of daily deal sites across the globe. The company has snapped up Indonesia’s Disdus, a portfolio company of venture capital firm East Ventures, reports say. A press release in Indonesian was translated by the folks over at Daily Social. Groupon will rename the daily deal site Groupon Indonesia, marking another addition [...]

This past weekend, I went on a trip and did the unthinkable — I didn’t turn on my computer. Not even once. Okay, that’s sort of misleading. While I didn’t turn on my computer, I did use my iPad. Extensively. But I still fully expected to get the urge to turn on my computer as well. And I never did. That itself isn’t that remarkable; I’m sure a lot of iPad users have [...]

The Austin-based startup Spanning Cloud Apps, a cloud-based app developer, today announced that it has closed a $2 million series A round, led by the Foundry Group, a VC firm based in Boulder. Seth Levine, Foundry Group’s managing director, will be joining Spanning’s board of directors. Founded in 2010 by Charlie Wood, Spanning Cloud Apps is the maker of Spanning Backup, a backup service [...]

By the end of this year, an estimated 2 million households in the U.S. will have abandoned TV for the Web, cutting the cord with their cable companies. This estimate comes from Convergence Consulting Group, a Toronto-based research firm with a new report on The Battle for the American Couch Potato. That 2 million is up from the 1.6 million it was estimating a year ago, but it is still rather small [...]

Marin Software, a startup that creates search engine management software for advertisers and agencies, has raised $16 million in Series E funding led by Crosslink Capital with DAG Ventures, with Focus Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Triangle Peak Partners participating in the round. This brings Marin’s total funding to $51 million. The company also announced that Eric Chin, partner at Crosslink [...]

In February, fellow Four Loko enthusiast John Biggs wrote a post on Fitango, a social marketplace that allows users to learn about and buy action plans for everything from finance to fitness and romance. As Biggs pointed out at the time, many of us have problems self-motivating when it comes to getting in shape or, say, learning to speak Mandarin — and oftentimes, we’re not sure how to [...]

The state of Web security has never been pretty, and a new report from Symantec discussing current and future threats only highlights just how risky the Internet environment has become. The daily volume of Web-based attacks increased an eye-popping 93 percent from 2009 to 2010, the report says — and that’s a particularly significant increase given the high level of attacks prior to [...]

Last week, several media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter targeting the iPad app Zite, which aggregates news based on a user’s Twitter and Google Reader activity. It may not be legal or fair for apps like Zite to collect content and present it absent the originator’s advertisements, but many observers argue that this is where the industry is headed, whether anyone likes it or not. [...]