Banksimple has just raised $2.9 million in a Series A round to fund their ambitious alternative online banking startup for full-service, fee-free banking. The round includes investments from First Round Capital, IA Ventures and Village Ventures, a collection of industry veterans with extensive startup portfolios. Banksimple’s mission is to reinvent the way consumers bank, both online and off. In 2011, the startup will offer bankers an online-only banking solution designed to eliminate traditional service fees, provide stellar customer service, offer predictive money management and integrate social media into the system. The funds will allow Banksimple to forge ahead with crucial banking partnerships that will form the financial backbone of the platform. The money will also help the company finance its initial test run of the service with friends and family before the end of the year. “To get customer service right for banking, we need to build ...

It may not be the most socially acceptable way to check in, but Vlingo has created a way for Android app users to check in on Foursquare with their voices. It’s a speech-to-checkin feature that will save time, even if it does raise a few eyebrows. With the new app , Android users can speak a simple “check in to [insert place name]” command after tapping the home screen button. The command will prompt Vlingo to automatically pull up the location in question, and other nearby venues, on Foursquare, providing users with a fast alternative to touch-based Foursquare checkins. Vlingo’s voice-activated Foursquare integration not only includes support for checkins, but also lets users post voice shouts and ask Vlingo, “Where are my friends?,” or “Who’s nearby?” to pull up a list of Foursquare friends who have checked in recently. Vlingo for Android also supports voice-activated, speech-to-text status updates ...

Mashable is excited to announce MashBash BlogWorld, the opening party for this year’s BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas on October 15-16. To kick off the Expo, we’ll be hosting the first night’s official party at Haze at Aria Hotel. We would love for you to join us, so we?re giving away passes to BlogWorld. To enter, answer the following question — “What is the future of blogging?” — in the comments below. Readers with the best answers will win one of five ?full access? tickets to BlogWorld, which includes MashBash. Winners are invited to attend this industry celebration where the online world comes together to meet, relax and make important business networking connections. Date: Friday, October 15 Time: 8:00 p.m.-10 p.m. Location: Haze at Aria. 3730 Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, NV. Tickets: Must have BlogWorld Badge to enter. How To Win Tickets Simply click the ?Like? button on our Fac ...

Alexander Hotz is a freelance multimedia journalist and public radio junkie based in New York City. Currently he teaches digital media at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Follow Alex on Twitter at @hotzington . With another long hot American summer coming to a close, many students are scrambling to get back into “learning mode” before school starts. One of the simplest ways to ease that transition is with podcasts. Whether your passion is American History or Algebra, there?s probably an educational podcast out there for you. While these programs probably won?t mirror your lesson plan, they will explore topics covered in class. Below is a sampling of some of the exceptional podcasts that both teach and entertain. Best of all – they?re free. Read on for your “2010 Downloading Curriculum.” Science Radiolab investigates some of world?s most intriguing scientific questions in a unique conversa ...

Google and AOL have signed a deal that extends the search and advertising partnership between the two companies for another five years. The agreement also includes mobile search and adds a content sharing partnership with YouTube. In a statement , AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said, ?After nearly a decade-long partnership in search, we?re looking forward to expanding our global relationship to mobile search and YouTube. All aspects of our partnership will be improved by this deal.? The extension of the deal wasn?t a given by any means; the $1 billion investment Google made in AOL back in 2005 proved to be disastrous financially . Further, Microsoft has been aggressively making deals to grow marketshare for Bing, most notably with Yahoo, which now sees Bing powering Yahoo search and its related advertising. With the renewed AOL deal, Google locks up about 2.3% of the search market according to the most recent numbers from comScore. Google currently has 65.8% o ...

clickz Google will supply search results and search ads across AOL properties until at least 2015.

A picture is worth a thousand words. But if you include an entire database, make it interactive, and add filtering options, the word-to-picture exchange rate is even better. Infographics at their best are more than just pictures — they can provide new understandings, succinct summaries, or just plain old fun. In that respect, reading newspaper archives isn’t the only way to get a deeper understanding of current events. Infographics can help us get a better grasp on what’s going on. Check out these 10 visualizations to learn more about the news with a quick look. 1. Google?s Appetite for Acquisition Last month alone, Google acquired social-search service Angstro , visual shopping search engine like.com , and social currency company Jambool . Google has been on an acquisition binge for some time, and it?s getting tricky to keep track of its appetite. This graphic shows a timeline of Google?s activity in three categories: &#8 ...

Think what you will about the ultra-widescreen, 21:9 format Philips is pushing, but you can’t deny that its cinema-proportioned Full HD LCD TV is gorgeous . Now, Philips plans to push it even further, with a 58-inch, 3D version of the device. The device, called Philips 3D Cinema 21:9 Platinum, sports a direct lit LED screen with a 2560×1080 resolution, 400Hz picture processing, and Philips’s Ambilight technology, which illuminates the area behind the TV in order to reduce eye fatigue and produce an immersive viewing experience. And if you think you’ll never use all that horizontal screen estate due to the lack of titles available in 21:9 format, you can watch regular TV programming on one side while browsing Philips’s Net TV on the other. The price tag, of course, is too high for most consumers. At around ?4000 ($5,100), there are plenty of high-end TV sets to be found on the market, but this TV is truly unique. For those ...

Sorry!!! Missed some variable name changes during merge of wishcraft's patches and had to fix them. They are now in xNews 1.69 Final . To upgrade xNews 1.68 Final to xNews 1.69 Final : Quote: Copy all folders to xoopsroot You can overwrite already installed xNews (do not copy files to clones) Goto xNews-Clone Manager and click on Update... If you created clones click on Force Upgrade on each clone. To upgrade xNews 1.68 beta, rc1 etc. to xNews 1.69 Final : Quote: Copy all folders to xoopsroot You can overwrite already installed xNews (do not copy files to clones) Goto xNews-Clone Manager and click on Update... If you created clones click on Force Upgrade on each clone. Goto admin-control panel-modules and update each clone... Download from here

clickz Intrepid is a 40-person firm with offices in Seattle and London.