Although you probably know MC Hammer as that guy with that song with those pants, the 49-year-old pop-rap pioneer has become quite the tech nerd in the last few years. He’s dipped his toes in startups and is a fixture …

It hurts to get close to something that you want and then not get it, doesn’t it? When we’re talking about money and business, this situation is even more painful. Furthermore, talking about the situation does nothing but add more grief to an already complicated situation.

It’s clear that bloggers have helped many companies improve their rankings in search and also their position across social media sites. However, the challenging part for both bloggers and companies is connecting.

Justin Bieber is investing in at least one startup, according to a report from Business Insider. Alyson Shontell reports, “We’re not at liberty to announce which startup just yet.  All we can tell you is that the Bieber-backed startup will …

Update: Arrington is “not employed by Aol” according to this report quoting a Huffington Post spokesperson. Update 2: Peter Kafka at AllThingsD is reporting that Arrington is indeed an AOL employee, though he no longer works for AOL’s Huffington Post …

Obvious, the company that Evan Williams and Biz Stone left Twitter to work on has announced its first official partnership called Lift. Earlier this month, Stone posted an update on what the company is doing at the company, which originally …

Earlier this month, it was revealed that Google Ventures is investing in coupon startup Whaleshark Media. Then reports came out about Google Ventures investing in Rocket Lawyer. Google has so many of its own projects going on at any given …

Remember photo sharing website Photobucket? The service slid off the radar for a few years, but according to company CEO Tom Munro, it’s back and ready to compete.

“Community marketplace for unique spaces” Airbnb announced today that it has received $112 million in Series b financing from Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, and General Catalyst. When you add that to their previous funding, Airbnb now boasts total funding of …

The tech space has seen a lot of activity lately. With numerous IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, and venture capital investments on the rise, a lot of people are speculating about a tech bubble. It does make sense to a degree given Groupon and LinkedIn’s recent successful IPOs.

Ashton Kutcher continues his expansion into all things internet, as it has just been announced that he has made a significant investment in travel startup Airbnb. Airbnb is an online company that provides travelers the opportunity to ditch the hotel …

We all know about eBay and Craigslist, but now there is new startup that hopes to shake up the commerce space. It is called Keepio, and it allows users to buy, sell, and trade while utilizing the social graph.

Today, StartUp Britain was launched, an initiative offering support and resources for businesses just starting out or looking to grow.  The initiative has the backing of many companies known intimately by those of us on this side of the pond …

Qwiki, the startup backed by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim is, not surprisingly, gaining a lot of attention. The company can add winning TechCrunch Disrupt to its resume as well. So, what is this startup doing to gain all this attention?

Outside innovation is a systematic process for sourcing, evaluating, and driving ideas through to funding and measuring success but it starts with understanding your internal innovation process. Innovation is an important topic for most companies, it is the essential source …

hipmunk [hip-muhnk],   1.  verb:  To bring sexiness and simplicity into an existing industry with a fresh approach that delights people.  Example:  The real estate mortgage industry really sucks.  Someone should hipmunk it.  2. noun:  Startup funded by Y Combinator that makes it easier to find flights. 

Doxo, a startup looking to overhaul the payments industry, has raised a new $10 million round of funding from new and existing investors like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions.

What Doxo does is enable consumers to securely receive, manage, store and now PAY their bills and other documents from multiple service providers from one place with one password, online. CEO Steve Shivers told WebProNews how he plans to disrupt the payments industry. He gave us four points:

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) announced that it has acquired Gist. 

Gist provides information about contacts, by creating a business profile for each one that includes recent news, status updates, and work details. It works by pulling contacts from various inboxes, address books, social networks, and other sources, then adding news, status updates, blog posts, etc.

We’ve written about Greplin a couple of times – once after the service launched, and again last week, when the company sent users an email with some new updates. If you’re unfamiliar with the service, the best way to describe it is truly personalized search. 

Slacker has raised $3 million in debt funding according to a SEC filing. This adds to the growing number of music startups that have gained additional funds in 2011. While Slacker is known more commonly as a rival to Pandora in the coming months, they will be taking MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, and Thumbplay Music head-on in the subscription music service sector.

The word startup seems to be used too loosely in this day and age. Some people think something built in a weekend or over the course of time on the side is a full fledged startup, when it is often just a side project. Building things is great, more people should do it and do it often. The problem is, most people either take the leap at the wrong time OR they don’t take a leap at all, when the signs are there.