Billions have been made in Silicon Valley by wrapping HTML angle brackets around 1980s protocols and calling it “innovation”. IRC became instant message, email became Facebook, and SMS became WhatsApp and Twitter. But the latter, having failed to add anything interesting for years, should cut its losses and find a buyer. So …

Workplace chat app Slack has confirmed it has raised $160m (£106m), valuing the company at $2.8bn (£1.9bn), according to reports. The Slack service allows employees to create and manage internal message boards for individual projects and departments. Previously the company was valued at a mere $1.2bn (£800m). In an interview …

Social link-sharing site Pinterest has taken in a new round of funding that gives the firm at a hefty US$11bn valuation. The company said in an SEC filing that it had already agreed to sell off $367,099,927 in equity and hopes to move another $210,816,979 (for a total of around $577.9m) in venture capitol investments. That …

Open source supremo Hortonworks has announced a rather lacklustre IPO, falling miles short of the billion dollar valuation big data tycoons were hoping for. It hopes to raise $78m by flogging six million shares at a cost of between $12 to $14, which roughly works out to a disappointing market valuation of $659m. Hortonworks …

San Francisco-startup and bane of taxi drivers Uber is in talks for funding that would value the startup at an astronomical $10bn. Despite its increasing trouble with regulators and cabbies, the upstart must still look like a pretty good bet to investors, since it’s hoping to raise a little less than $1bn from private equity …

In the latest WTF valuation, music streaming site Spotify has raised around $250m in fresh funding, valuing the firm at a hefty $4bn. Spotify scooped the new financing from investors led by Technology Crossover Ventures, an early backer of Netflix, sources familiar with the deal whispered to the Financial Times. It's not …

Kittens'n'cupcakes site Pinterest has won another $225m in funding that values the firm at an actually incredible $3.8bn. Earlier this year, the scrapbooking site got a whopping injection of $200m, which put the profitless firm at a valuation of $2.5bn. That means that a site which has made no money and consists of endless …

Online scrap repository Pinterest is trying to raise a new round of funding that would value the as-yet-profitless firm at $2bn to $2.5bn. Undeterred by the lack of an actual business model, the cupcake and kitten scrapbook firm reckons that existing backers like venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners …

Daily deals website Groupon is reportedly set to jack in a controversial accounting metric that it previously considered to be a good way to measure how well the company was performing. According to All Things Digital, which cites sources close to the matter, Groupon will tweak its S-1 public offering filing to scrub out a …

Twitter closed a "significant round of funding" yesterday, with lots of help from the Russian venture outfit that has already pumped large sums of cash into Facebook, Groupon et al. The micro-blogging site said that serial Web2.0 investor Digital Sky Technologies Global (DST Global) led the Twitter funding round, but didn't …

Court papers have told the world what it already knows: Facebook is not worth $15bn. That was the value Microsoft slapped on the social networking poster child last October when it forked over $240m for a 1.6 per cent stake in the company. But according to papers from the recently settled court case between Facebook and …