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Drop.io

The Silly Putty age of social media

For something that seems very rudimentary in a world of iPhone apps and fancy smartphone operating systems, text-messaging services were getting a whole lot of love at October's edition of the monthly New York Tech Meetup.

Along with about a dozen other start-ups eager to pitch the audience of potential partners, investors, and advisers, two back-to-back presentations from new companies called GroupMe and Fast Society showed off different takes on the same basic concept of group text messaging.

They have extremely similar premises. Both GroupMe and Fast Society require a single user with an iPhone (or also, in GroupMe'… Read more

Facebook acquires file-sharing service Drop.io

Facebook has acquired most of the assets of Drop.io, a New York-based start-up that lets users privately and sporadically share files through a drag-and-drop interface with additional options like phone calls and even faxing, the company announced Friday on its blog.

Founder Sam Lessin will be joining Facebook full time. Drop.io's service, meanwhile, will be shutting down, making this yet another "acqui-hire" on Facebook's behalf--buy a start-up primarily for its founder, and put that new hire to work developing a new feature at Facebook or improving an old one.

"In the coming weeks, … Read more