Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Traackr is a free web service that lets you aggregate data about your media presence on the Web. Just create an account, add your “subscriptions” (flickr username, last.fm username, etc.), and wait about 24 hours for Traackr to get statistics.

Each day Traackr will get information like number of views, comments, and ratings, with trend graphs to make the data pretty. It will also show you which of your tags get the most views (helpful for getting user attention). You can also create campaigns to track how well certain media objects are “performing” which could be very useful for a photographer to see how popular certain groups of photos are.

Traackr could be a great tool for musicians, photographers, videographers, and the ego-centric social-site user. It’s a central location to see how popular you (or your work) are, and it gives you seemingly arbitrary “Buzz” and “Populartity” scores.

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Filed under: Raising money, Investments

Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC) spinoff GainSpan Corp. landed $20 million in a second round of venture capital to move into volume production of extremely low power WiFi chips the company recently launched in the fast-growing industrial sensor market.

Opus Capital of Menlo Park, Calif., led the deal, which includes previous investors Intel Capital of Santa Clara, Calif., New Venture Partners of Murray Hill, N.J., OVP Venture Partners of Portland, Ore., and Sigma Partners of Menlo Park, which initially invested $1.5 million to spin the company out of Intel in September 2006.

The new investment is positioned to fully fund the company to positive cash flow as it expands marketing of chipsets and software for a wide range of commercial and industrial applications.

Continue reading at TechConfidential.com.

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Filed under: World wide web, Social Software

If you like the social bookmarking site Digg, but hate actually having to visit the internet site to submit and vote on stories, you might want to check out Digg Firefox Extension. Like the Smart Digg Button, which we’ve previously covered, Digg Firefox Extension will let you see at a glance whether a page you’re visiting has been submitted to diggs and how many votes it has received. If the page hasn’t been submitted, you can click the button to submit it yourself.

But that’s where the similarities end. While Smart Digg Button hangs out in your status bar, Digg Firefox Extension adds a toolbar to Firefox, which makes sense as it has a ton of submenus. For example, you can see the last 10 people who dugg the page you’re visiting, and even read current comments without clicking through to Digg’s web site.

You can also forget about the page you’re on altogether, and use the Firefox extension to see a list of recently popular, recently submitted, and hot stories. Or you can use the extension sort of like the StumbleUpon toolbar by clicking on “Random Story” to be taken to a random site submitted to Digg.

[via Digg]

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Filed under: Fun, Social Software, Beta

CloudFire, a soon-to-be-released offering from the maker of p2p sharing application BoxCloud, is looking to revolutionize the way you share media.

Before CloudFire, if you wanted to share a file with a friend or family member, or access that file on the go, you would have to upload the file to a media sharing site. CloudFire skips the laborious uploading process and allows you to share your media files directly from your desktop or media application (such as iTunes or iPhoto).

This kind of media sharing can be classified as peer-to-web, because the recipient of a file can view them anywhere a browser and world wide web connection is available, even on a mobile phone.

Details are scarce for now, because the service has yet to launch. The website has some screenshots and snippets of information; as for the prestige, we’ll just have to wait.

Hopefully our invites are coming soon so we can provide a more in-depth look at CloudFire. Or do you think we just drop the name Download Squad and get all the invites, like some celebrity at an A-list nightclub?

[via Gigaom]

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Filed under: College, Debt

Back on February 16th, Democratic Congressman Paul Kanjorski and 20 other members of his party sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asking him — without being specific — to do something to shore up the student loan market: “We urge you to work without delay … to address this problem before it significantly decreases access to higher education opportunities for students and their families.”

Student lenders have since been insisting that everything is peach in that market but now the first shoe seems to have dropped. The Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Bureau, one of the largest student lending agencies in the country, has announced that it will stop making federal-guaranteed loans starting in early March.The agency’s interim chief executive James Preston stated that “Widespread lack of confidence in the capital market has spilled over into other asset classes, driving up our cost of borrowing and denying us the capital needed to fund new student loans.”

The agency says that it has referred students to other agencies and that “From a student perspective, there should be no disruption or difficulty.” Of course, that might be true for a while but the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Bureau can’t be the only one that’s having problems with its cost of borrowing — Things could get a lot worse if similar agencies follow suit.

Long-term, a decline in student lending would probably be, dare I say it, a good thing. The abundant availability of student loans has led many students to take on more debt than is wise, attending costly private colleges when more affordable alternatives are available.

And getting ahead financially — saving for retirement, buying a house, saving for your childrens‘ college education — is tough when you’ve big debt service payments for your education.

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