The social shopping community Wishpot recently announced the closing of a $1 million investment round (Series A). The round was led by Monster Venture Partners, along with Italian internet firm H-Farm and angel backer Adrian Hanauer, who had previously invested. Wishpot is a social shopping service that lets you collect and and share information about items you find online and in stores. By creating a common space in which users can browse, recommend products, get advice, and find new items they are interested in, Wishpot seeks to simplify shopping. Wishpot will launch outside the U.S. later in 2008. Wishpot was founded in 2006 in Seattle by veterans of Microsoft. Co-founder and CEO Max Ciccotosto was previously an Italy-based entrepreneur.

yesterday i visited Lukasz at the spreadshirt / lafraise Office and my first eye-catcher was a nice flat screen hanging on the wall.

this shows logins / sales etc. to the spreadshirt system and is a great instrument to show your staff that “something is moving” and you all doing a great job.

we do something similar at beschenkmich.de (but far more simple). We use a google analytics chart and our internal admin interface:

Europes leading business network, XING, is currently not available. No information found on the XING Blog so far but other blogger have noticed the downtime also within the last two hours. Even the Blog is very slow.

if anyone has futher information, please let us know.

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation released a report about what it takes to start a new business, by surveying nearly 5,000 startup companies that were founded in 2004.