ReadWriteWeb

Point and click web mashup startup ifttt ("if this then that") has raised financing from cutting-edge tech incubator Betaworks. News of the funding came to us via NeuVC's bot watching the firm's portfolio page, which is fitting given the nature of the startup.

ifttt allows anyone to set up a chain of conditional actions between a wide variety of web services, like "If I post a photo to Flickr, save it to my Dropbox." The company calls these "recipes." We wrote about the service when it launched to the public in September. Microsoft's Scott Hanselman also wrote up a nice review of the service and says "this is going to be huge." ifttt isn't just a single service, though, and it isn't even just an amalgamation of multiple services strung-together; it's a great example of a whole paradigm of DIY mashups. As Blogger and WordPress were to self-publishing and YouTube was to video publishing, so ifttt could be to working with interlinked web applications for everyday people. Can this startup herald a new era of lay hackers? The UI is good, the only question is whether there's really enough demand for such a service.

Findings.com is a new service that gives users a way to highlight and save quotes from digital texts and e-books, and send that information into a central, socially oriented news feed. The idea came about four years ago, when writer Steven Johnson wondered what it would be like to capture what someone was reading. Finding and capturing quotes is only one part of this service, though - its magic lies in the discovery aspects of the metadata.

"It's all about discovery, discovery of ideas, clips, people and other related materials. Over time we hope to conceptually connect peoples' findings to enable discovery," says BetaWorks Founder and Findings.com Co-Founder, John Borthwick. "We aren't collecting what people are reading right now on their devices (e.g. Kindle). We are collecting what they annotate."

Twitterfeed, the popular tool for publishing links automatically to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, has been acquired by URL shortener Bitly. Both are loosely associated projects of seed investor and web tech incubator Betaworks, part of what Betaworks CEO John Borthwick calls a "glorious connected ecosystem of things we have going on here."

For Twitterfeed to move in-house with the analytics provider that is the basis of so much of its value makes sense. Twitterfeed itself has steadily added features in recent months though, from geocoding published messages to publishing into LinkedIn. Is it a good idea to automate publishing of links into social networks? The jury is still out on that one.

Last week at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit, our COO Sean Ammirati spoke to Betaworks CEO John Borthwick. Betaworks has funded and incubated a number of companies in the real-time Web market, such as TweetDeck, Bit.ly and Chartbeat.

John Borthwick is doing a fireside chat with me next week at our 2WAY Summit. If you aren't familiar with John, he is the CEO of Betaworks, one of the most fascinating companies focused on building internet-focused startups today.

You may not be familiar with Betaworks but you certainly are familiar with some of their companies: Tweetdeck and Summize (both acquired by Twitter), as well as other startups still independent (at least for now) like Bitly, Social Flow, Chartbeat and news.me.

There was a time in the United States when anything that called into question moral clarity, the black and white of a clear perspective on right and wrong, was deeply distrusted - if not actively shut down. Seeing the world through other peoples' eyes was considered not an essential act of empathy but a slippery slope into drug use, homosexuality and communism.

Fortunately, brave pioneers of intellectual freedom helped us bust out of the 1950's and begin to appreciate the world in all its rich and painful complexity and subjectivity. As of today, with the launch of News.me on the iPad - there's now an app for that. (iTunes Link) A collaboration between the New York Times and the data wonks at URL shortener Bitly, News.me shows you the news from other peoples' perspectives - and other people are very different from ourselves! I have found it quite appealing to use for the last several months - it's been one of my very favorite ways to learn about the world using my iPad. Even before launch, hundreds of publishing partners are intrigued as well. It's a strikingly new model for both users and publishers.

Mobile apps are proliferating so quickly that getting yours discovered is a big challenge. Leading New York startup incubator Betaworks (Twitter, Tweetdeck, Bitly, Tumblr), in collaboration with technology shop Prehype and NYC tech community organizer Nate Westheimer, have launched a new app promotion service that brings a familiar formula to a new mobile app context. It's called Allify.

The idea is simple: run ads for other iPhone apps on your app or web page and get credits to apply toward promotion of your app in other peoples' ad space.

News.me, the stealthy social news project being developed by Betaworks in conjunction with The New York Times, has just started accepting invite requests. As part of the partnership deal, The New York Times took an equity stake in Bit.ly, a URL-shortening service from Betaworks, the technology incubator behind several notable social Web companies, including Twitter dashboard TweetDeck, real-time analytics service Chartbeat and audience engagement platform SocialFlow.

How exactly Bit.ly will be used in the upcoming News.me service is still unknown, but we do know that it will debut in the form of an app for the Apple iPad. And now you can request to be first on the list to try it out.

Continuing our series on product innovation and the people driving it, this week I spoke with the CEO and co-founder of Betaworks: John Borthwick. If you're unfamiliar with the name Betaworks, you will recognize the products under its umbrella: Bit.ly (the leading link shortener), TweetDeck (desktop Twitter client), Chartbeat (real-time analytics service) and SocialFlow (a social messaging service). As well as growing companies, Betaworks is a seed-stage investor in a range of real-time web companies - such as Tumblr, Twitterfeed, Superfeedr and Songkick.

In this two-part post, we give an overview of John Borthwick's product development philosophy. Then in part 2, to be published tomorrow, we will outline the evolution of one of Betaworks' products: Chartbeat.

As we profiled in our Never Mind the Valley series last month, New York is increasing its stronghold on the east coast startup scene. The city's rich media and international business ecosystems make it the perfect launch pad for startups looking to leverage these markets. One other reason the city has seen successful growth of entrepreneurship is the holding company Betaworks, which shows no signs of slowing after raising $20 million from Intel, AOL, RRE Ventures and several others.