Business

After months of hype, it’s been pretty quiet around Pinterest for the last few weeks. According to the latest data we just received from Shareaholic, however, the social photo sharing site is still growing quickly, though judging from the company’s referral data, Pinterest’s growth has slowed down a bit since June. From May to June Pinterest’s referral traffic to Shareaholic’s network of about 200,000 sites grew by 43.7%. From June to July, it “only” increased by 15.97%. Even at this slower growth rate, Pinterest is still on track to surpass referral traffic from Yahoo in August. This, says Shareaholic, means Pinterest will soon be the fourth largest traffic source in the world. Today, Pinterest already drives more traffic to sites that use Shareaholic than Bing and Twitter and it’s only 0.10% away from overtaking Yahoo. Google, of course, remains the largest driver of traffic to the company’s member sites, followed by Facebook and – for the time being – Yahoo. As our own Sarah Perez...

Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More August Capital, the 17-year-old Sand Hill venture capital firm, is raising a new $550 million investment fund, according to documents filed this morning with the SEC. August Partner Howard Hartenbaum has since confirmed the firm’s raise, which is its sixth fund to date. It closed its previous, $650 million fund in March of 2009. The firm’s new raise consists of two funds: Its core fund, which the firm will use to continue investing in early-stage companies and its $250 million “Special Opportunities Fund,” which August will use for opportunistic investments, growth equity, some buyout — a mixed bag of investment types at the other end of the growth spectrum. A potpourri, if you will. All in all, don’t expect any drastic changes in style with August’s sixth fund — the firm isn’t suddenly going to take to v...

By Brad Molen posted Jul 20th 2012 2:52PM We just received a "save the date" email from a Samsung US representative that revealed a new Galaxy device will be seeing the light of day on August 15th. We didn't receive any details on what it could be, though this is most likely a US-bound device -- the email says "please join Samsung Electronics America for a major announcement and unveiling of the newest Galaxy device." With that tidbit in mind, we have a couple ideas: first, it may be the Galaxy S Blaze Q, since internal docs pin the phone's release on same exact day. With that being a T-Mobile exclusive for now, however, we're unsure that it'll be the recipient of so much pomp and circumstance. There's also a possibility that we'll see the Galaxy Note 10.1, which was announced at MWC in February and previewed in March. While we'd love to see the Galaxy Note 2, the odds of it being the mystery device are incredibly slim since the phablet...

After Betaworks acquired Digg earlier this month, there was a lot of speculation about what the company planned to do with the service. Today, Betaworks’ New York-based News.me team, which is now in charge of Digg, posted its first update. The plan, according to this update, is to launch a new Digg v1 on top of a new infrastructure and fresh code base by August 1. With this launch, the team says, it’s “taking the first step towards (re)making Digg the best place to find, read and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet.” The new team argues that it plans to take the lessons it learned from building the personalized news service News.me to Digg. The new site won’t just be a “reskinned News.me” either. Just like News.me, though, the new Digg will focus delivering personalized news based on what your friends are sharing. The new owners are open about the fact that figuring out what exactly to do with the site “will take some time,” though. To get some feedbac...

Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... ? Learn More Here’s a little something to get the ol’ rumor mill churning before the weekend — Samsung has just sent out a save-the-date email for a “major” product announcement on August 15. Samsung goes on to say that the company will unveil its “newest GALAXY device,” though exactly what that’s going to be is left infuriatingly vague. Of course, that won’t stop me from hazarding a few guesses. The company’s long-awaited Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet seems like a strong possibility, considering that Samsung has been reportedly tinkering with its design and internals since it first popped up at this year’s Mobile World Congress in ...