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INDEPENDENT.CO.UK - May 26 - IGGY (the International Gateway for Gifted Youth), a social network described as a thinking teenagers Facebook, that aims to prepare bright pupils for top universities, has attracted ~ 2,5K members. It challenges the nations brightest 13- to 18-year-olds with a series of questions and puzzles aimed at stretching their intelligence, as well as offering them the chance to network with each other. Membership is open to any pupil recommended by their teacher in the UK and abroad, although 75% of those who have already signed up are from the British Isles. It costs 120 to join but there are subsidies available for disadvantaged pupils.

CITY AM - May 23 - Urturn, a British technology firm raised $13.4M (8.9M) in a round of investment led by Balderton Capital. Urturn is a social networking app which allows its users to customise photos and video clips and then send them to friends.

THE NATIONAL - May 19 - Social networking isnt only for fun anymore. Today, its a serious business. That was brought into sharp focus recently, when American Airlines announced that passengers with a Klout score of 55 or more will gain access to its network of premium lounges all around the world. Klout aggregates information across your social media accounts and comes up with a score that measures your influence. The average Klout score is 40. Klout has partnered with other brands in the past from Sony, to Nike, to Disney to deliver rewards to users with high scores. And Klout is not the only route that popular social networkers can take to a better offline life. Via the advertising platform Instagrid Network, popular Instagram users are now being paid by brands to share branded content with their followers.

WEBWIRE - May 14 - Steve Vachani, Founder of Power.com and Managing Director of Serendipity Ventures has acquired ~100M users via viral growth. He will present at the Viral Summit that is taking place on June 6-7 in Los Angeles.

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SF GATE - May 15 - Google is its strongest push yet to go after Facebook by revamping its Google+ with dozens of new features and enhancements, including self-editing photos, automatic hashtags and improved messaging. With photos, Google is gunning for the most popular activity on Facebook, which also owns mobile photo-sharing app Instagram. Google hopes people will use the photo tools to share more on Google+.

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TECH CRUNCH - May 25 - LinkedIn has aqui-hired Maybe, the social polling startup founded by Omar Hamoui the man who set up, ran and then sold mobile ad company AdMob to Google for $750M. All staff from Maybe, except for Hamoui himself, are now at LinkedIn and working in its mobile division. Its not clear why Maybe closed up shop so st.

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JAPAN DAILY PRESS - May 23 - Last week, Mixi started a transition phase, as the social networks founder Kenji Kasahara handed over the reins to new CEO Yusuke Asakura. This is immediately followed today by Mixi announcing that it has invested funding into two promising mobile-first startup companies. The first startup is CloudStudy, provider of social learning platform StudyPlus, which received ~700K in funding from Mixi. The other investment (of an undisclosed amount) went to social app makers Reventive.

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REUTERS - May 15 - Chinas largest online gaming and social networking company, Tencent Holdings, more than tripled the number of active users for its mobile chat app in Q1. Active user numbers soared 228% to 194M. Strong sales of online advertising and gaming helped Tencent report a 37% rise in Q1 profit to 4.0 billion yuan ($645M).

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EDMONTON JOURNAL - May 14 - The Radisson Edmonton South hotel is rolling out LobbyFriend, a social media platform that enables guests to connect with each other and with staff. Guests will be given a personal identification number when they check in and invited to download the free app.

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FORBES - May 15 - Back in 2011, Oliver Bremer was seeking a partner,new york asian escorts a co-founder, with which to kick off a B2B-type software startup. He was not having much luck. Then it struck him that if people take to social internet sites to find love and find jobs, why not startup co-founders? And so Founder2be was born. Its like Match.com meets LinkedIn for startups, Bremer said. Its online dating to find a cofounder. People sign up for the service and create a profile that reflects what they are all about in the hope of attracting like-minded potential partners. So r there are~ 14K profiles across 100 countries.

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MASHABLE - May 19 - Yahoos board of directors has approved a $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging platform Tumblr. The deal is reportedly an all-cash acquisition. CEO Marissa Mayer was interested in the platforms younger-skewing user base, and had been in talks with the board about Tumblr for the last six weeks. Yahoo has purchased 10 startups since Mayer became CEO. Those companies include Stamped, a mobile app for finding and recommending activities, news browsing app Summly, and to-do list app Astrid. Tumblr has grown to a giant since its launch in 2007. It had ~67M unique visitors in April, according to Quantcast, and 18M of those came from mobile.

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TIMES OF INDIA - May 25 - Prominent gender rights groups from India have petitioned Facebook this week to address the representation of rape and domestic violence on its site. The petition calls for effective action from the website owners to recognise speech that glorifies violence against women and to be intolerant towards such posts. They particularly referred to groups such as Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs that explicitly condoned or encourage such violence.

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TECH CRUNCH - May 17 - Zynga has told the makers of the dating site CupidWithFriends that they need to change the sites name, because it allegedly infringes on Zyngas trademarks. CupidWithFriends was built by the startup Apartment 7. The site launched a couple of months ago, allowing users to build and edit dating profiles for their friends. Theres also Bang With Friends which was recently booted from the Apple App Store.

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TECH IN ASIA - May 21 - Path, a social network app, has been growing in popularity in Indonesia for its more-private circle of friends. Unlike Facebook it limits its users to 150 friends. Almost all internet users in Indonesia are Facebook users too but are increasingly getting overwhelmed by the ads on their Facebook walls. Avid users of sociaSocial Networking Watch News on the Social Networking and Social Media Industryl media in Indonesia on average still have four to seven social networking apps installed and used actively on their smartphones.

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MEETME CORP - May 9 - Revenue was $7.8M, compared to $10.4M in the Q1 of 2012. Mobile revenue on the MeetMe Platform grew 150% to $1.9M in Q1 2013, up from $0.8M in the first quarter of 2012. Total Registered Users surpassed 100M during the quarter, including 8M mobile registered users. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $1.7M, or $0.04 per share, compared to $1M in Q1 2012.

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NY DAILY NEWS - May 26 - The mastermind behind the app, which helps pair Facebook friends seeking casual partners, is a 28-year-old Ivy League grad with a computer science degree. Colin Hodges identity and that of co-founder Omri Mor were unveiled during Internet Week. They had remained anonymous as the popularity of their app increased. More than 1M people use the site, Hodge said, Social Networking and it has put ~200,000 couples in touch.

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TECH CRUNCH - May 17 - MessageMe, a messaging app that launched in March, has raised another $10M. This newest round will be used to help MessageMe keep up with growth in the future, as it ces up to an increasingly crowded field of competitors. They include biggies like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Two months ago, the app was seeing 500 notifications per second among 1M users, despite the ct that Facebook cut MessageMe off from Social Graph access one week after it launched. Facebook apps are not allowed to use Find Friends features to seek out Facebook contacts on third-party apps, when those third-party apps are deemed to be competitive to/replicating core Facebook services.

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