Ok, the CNET news we hinted at is starting to roll in. They’ve sold Webshots, a photo sharing site, for $45 million in cash to American Greetings. The reason, says CNET Neil Ashe, is to allow CNET to “focus on key areas of growth.”Webshots seemed to be growing pretty fast, though. The site attracted 7.2 [...]

  We tend to focus so much on online advertising that it is easy to forget there are other ways to make money online. Like good old-fashioned sales. Online sales in the third quarter across all categories (excluding travel) rise 23 percent to $28.4 billion, according to comScore. (Including travel, e-commerce sales are [...]

  Update: See announcements here. CNET has sold Webshots for $45 million in cash as well as other announcements. They have not announced a stock buyback or any acquisitions, but its clear that they are preparing to make some moves with all this cash.CNET Networks has $250 million burning a hole in its pocket. The [...]

  Consider this a rumor at this point. Forbes’ Elizabeth Corcoran is reporting that two NYC hedge funds have each matched Microsoft’s investment in Facebook for about $250 million each, at the same $15 billion valuation. If true, that would give Facebook a $750 million war chest, which is more than most [...]

  Someone just shot the monkey. Patent Monkey, a Web-based patent database, is closing up shop and selling its assets to domain-name holding company Internet Real Estate Group (IREG) and Monster Venture Partners (MVP). (Disclosure: Patent Monkey is a CrunchGear affiliate). The Patent Monkey search and index capabilities will serve as the [...]

  Yesterday came news that Microsoft invested $240 million into Facebook, valuing the company at $15 billion.How much is $15 billion? It’s hard to understand how much money that really is. But this evening a friend helped put it into perspective in a conversation about the deal: among the pure-play U.S. Internet companies, only Google, eBay, [...]

  Yahoo’s most valuable property is still its homepage. It drives tons of traffic to any site it links to. That’s why all the links on Yahoo.com either go to other Yahoo properties or to Yahoo partners. Until now. Starting today, visitors to Yahoo’s homepage will start to see links going to [...]

  Scandinavian web browser provider Opera will be announcing today a new feature that allows users to access their bookmarks and favorite websites list (called “speed dial”) wherever they go. Out of Opera’s three consumer offerings - Opera for Desktop, Opera Mini, and Opera Mobile - the first two will be able to natively load the [...]

  Good thing we launched the CrunchBase widget, because you may need it to refresh your memory about a certain social networking company called Friendster that’s announcing its own developer platform today (okay okay, to be fair, they do have 50 million users and are very popular in Asia).Friendster’s platform announcement comes five months after that [...]

  We first wrote about virtual worlds meet email inbox provider 3D Mailbox in July when I called it the worst app ever. Subscribing to the adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity, the folks from 3D Mailbox have submitted their latest version for review by TechCrunch.Have you ever wanted to see you [...]

  Fake Steve Jobs aka Daniel Lyons has written that he’s heard that PodTech will be closing up shop with an announcement imminent.We can’t confirm the rumor although I have pinged Robert Scoble asking him to comment. If we get a response we’ll publish it.PodTech has taken $7.5 million over two rounds led by US [...]

  Last Spring we quietly launched a new website in our network called CrunchBase. It’s a front end for our database of company information (address, executives/founders, funding info, etc.). We accumulate all this data about startups, but much of it doesn’t make it into actual posts on TechCrunch or the other blogs. And even when it [...]

  Facebook is holding a press conference at 2 pm PST to discuss and presumably confirm the Microsoft investment. We’ll be liveblogging the event here. Stay tuned.Call NotesCall is beginning at 2:07 pmViveck Varma, MS, Owen Van Natta, Facebook, Kevin Johnson, Facebook, Brandee Barker, Facebook are on the call.Viveck is saying the press release below has [...]

  While the storyline would have been more dramatic if Facebook had spurned its current ad-serving partner Microsoft for Google, it is confirmed that Microsoft has won the deal. It will invest $240 million in Facebook and expand its existing relationship to international markets, according to the WSJ. (The previous advertising relationship was only [...]