Nick D'Aloisio, who previously founded news summary app Summly, which he famously sold to Yahoo aged 17 for a reported $30 million, has raised funding for a new stealthy startup that promises to help you find and instantly chat to an expert on a range of topics.
Too bad when traveling around the country, the most commonly-found news station on public TV sets is Fox News, be it at the airport, a doctor's office, or my former journalism building.
But for Marlene Werner, the vice president of Vernon Devices, a tool manufacturing company that her father founded, the news of the sale was distressing.
The 49-year-old, who made his fortune mostly through stakes in banking and insurance companies and Russian airline Aeroflot, is not a newcomer to the industry, having founded the news magazine Korrespondent.
It is rumored that Count Rothschild used the early news of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, delivered to him by pigeon, to manipulate investments; in the nineteenth century, Paul Julius Reuter founded his news service as a string of pigeon posts; London stock-market quotations were regularly conveyed from London to Antwerp by bird.
A programmer from an early age, Mr Swartz helped create the RSS standard and co-founded social news site Reddit.
Kramer founded financial news service MarketWatch, which was acquired in November by The Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones.
Aron also co-founded two news-related startups: DocumentCloud.org and Hacks & Hackers.
She then went on to similarly revitalize then-struggling publications like Vanity Fair and the New Yorker (where she was the first female editor in chief) before founding her own powerhouse news site, The Daily Beast, where she is still reigns editor in chief.
The common perception is that founding families are bad news for investors in public companies.
For those of you not familiar with Om Malik, he happens to be one of the forefathers of professional tech news blogging, founding GigaOm in 2006 when he realized he was seeing more engagement on his personal website than at his then-employer Business 2.0.
