How Comma Launched on a $13 Budget

Ben Ling, who was Badoo’s COO and an ex-Googler, has joined Khosla Ventures. In addition to Badoo and Google, Ling has also worked at Facebook. [Source: TechCrunch]

Google today debuted new Chrome notifications for its beta channel release. According to The Verge, they are capable of displaying formatted text and images. [Source: The Verge]

Even though Bing wasn’t talked about much at Microsoft’s XBox One reveal, it became apparent that the product as a back-end service is gaining some real traction. For the new services Microsoft is offering, Bing will help power them, such providing all the relevant data for XBox’s new voice search. [Source: CNET]

Israeli startup Imonomy has raised a $400,000 seed round. The company creates a software that analyzes webpages and automatically inserts copyright-free images. [Source: TechCrunch]

Today marks e-commerce company ChannelAdvisor’s first day of trading as a public company. As a result, the company’s stocks rose today almost 40%. [Source: VentureBeat]

Jawbone has hired Mindy Mount, a top corporate VP at Microsoft, as its new president. This comes after a few other upgrades in the company’s management and board, including the addition of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. [Source: AllThingsD]

HTC has sold around 5 million units of its flagship HTC One smartphone since its launch, an unnamed exec told the Wall Street Journal. This is despite supply constraints that have nagged at the device since its inception — HTC expects to better meet demand once those issues have been worked out.

[Source: Wall Street Journal]

Microsoft will be bringing its Kinect product, a motion-sensing peripheral currently used by the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, to Windows products next year, the company has announced. Microsoft is expected to reveal more about the change during its BUILD conference in June.

[Source: Microsoft]

Lyft has raised a $60 million Series C from Andreessen Horowitz (whose founding partner, Marc Andreessen, is a personal investor in PandoDaily). The funding will be used to kickstarter Lyft’s global expansion; the company’s COO told AllThingsD that they can “scale globally in the next 12 months.” We’ll see.

[Source: AllThingsD]

Microsoft has announced two new computer mice (as opposed to, you know, mice mice) with dedicated Windows keys meant to make it easier to navigate the oft-befuddling interface introduced with Windows 8. The Verge’s hands-on states that the products’ usefulness is currently limited, but that Microsoft teased more-capable products in the pipeline.

[Source: The Verge]

LoyalBlocks, an Israel-based loyalty marketing startup, has raised a $9 million Series A led by General Catalyst Partners, the company has announced. Founder Collective and Gemini Israel Ventures also participated in the round, which will be used to expand the LoyalBlocks platform and the company’s US presence.

Those users who rely on Evernote to manage their To-Do list got a gift this morning in the form of a new “reminders” feature. Available at launch on Mac, iOS and web and for both to Evernote and Evernote Business users, the new alarm clock icon will allow users to create reminders, more quickly created to-do lists, and pin notes to the top of their Note list based on time. [Source: TechCrunch]

Palo Alto-based Gamgee, a “stealth mode mobile health care startup,” has raised $2 million from Khosla Ventures and one other unnamed investor, according to an SEC filing. [Source: FinSMEs]

With 30 percent of its revenue coming from small businesses, TaskRabbit has introduced a business product that will allow clients to hire its workers for more than 15 hours per week. TaskRabbit will manage the necessary W-2 forms in exchange for a fee of 26 percent, up from the standard 20 percent. [Source: AllThingsD]

Keeping its acquisition binge going, Yahoo acquired another early stage startup today announcing the addition of cross-platform gaming software company PlayerScale. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. [Source: TechCrunch]

WibiData, a big data startup focused on software for building customer-facing applications on Hadoop, has raised $15 million in Series B funding from Canaan Partners. Existing investors NEA and Eric Schmidt participated. [Source: WibiData]

AlephCloud, which makes technology to help manage content privacy in public clouds, has raised $7.5M in a Series B round of financing led by Handbag, LLC, a venture capital firm founded by Seth Neiman. The company has raised $9.5 million total. [Source : AlephCloud]

Interactions Corporation, which builds Virtual Assistant applications raised $40 million in a funding round led by SoftBank Capital with participation from Sigma Partners, Sigma Prime Ventures, RED LLC, Cross Atlantic Capital Partners, North Hill Ventures and Updata Partners. [Source: Interactions Corp.]