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.

Google´s market domination is staggering. Those guys attract far more search users and thus revenues than all its rivals (Yahoo!, MSN etc.) together.

Trends in search engine marketing tracked by the SEM report from eMarketer estimates that Google search accounts for as much as 75% in the US paid search advertising market in 2007. The Search Engine Marketing report tracks the trends that are driving the massive but still-growing search advertising market.

Second in the list is Yahoo!, accounting for a pathetic share of 9% share. Leaving behind others in the search engine market with a 16% maket share.
However, 16% is still big business. Assuming that as much as over $8.6 billion have been spent in search engine advertising in 2007, a 16% share accounts for almost $1.4 billion. According to predictions that search spending might doubble to $16.6 billion in 2011, even a small slice represents huge revenue.

Morgan Stanley offers a interesting slide (download here) sowhing the growth of web 2.0 sites. The slides are based on Alexa statistics. In favor of the right (green) sites, the left (red) sites dropped out of the TOP 10 list.

Social Networks and Social Media Services can now claim six of the top-10 slots.

According to Morgan Stanley, worldwide Internet usage has passed the 1 billion mark last year, and is estimated to hit more than 1.3 billion this year. The provided chart also shows the reach of Internet users by region.

During his speech at the Web 2.0 Summit, MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe and Rupert Murdoch (NewsCorp CEO) announced that MySpace will open up the platform for third-party applications. This strategic move will position MySpace to a direct head-to-head competition with number one rival Facebook and its successful F8 application platform.

According to DeWolfe, Myspace will be opened up within the next few months, and that MySpace will set up a sandbox on the site as a staging system for new applications. Also, within the next days, MySpace will come up with a catalog for all current widgets on MySpace, making it easier to find and install them.