We’ve been digging on this story for weeks, but the company wouldn’t confirm the rumors and actually asked one of our writers to leave their office when we sent him over there to figure out what was going on. Apparently nothing was final then.

The size of the new financing isn’t being disclosed, although we’ve heard that it was just shy of $20 million. Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group led the round. The company had previously raised around $3 million.
Source:TechCrunch

Google just made the world a slightly smaller place today. They’ve added a feature to their highly popular Google Reader that will auto-translate any site with a feed to your native tongue. Not only that, it’s very easy to use and it works really well.

Just subscribe to a blog or other feed like normal, then pull down the feed settings menu on the right and choose “Translate into my language.” The text is instantly translated.

We tested it with TechCrunch Japan, and the translations came through well enough to understand. Definite winner.

Tell us your favorite foreign language tech blogs in the comments so we can subscribe immediately!Source:TechCrunch

Friendfeed co-founder Bret Taylor joined the Gillmor Gang this afternoon to discuss Friendfeed’s XMPP stream of its Home and Friends List feeds. I sat with Taylor at the Friendfeed offices and Marc Canter joined intermittently by phone. Canter took the opportunity to vent about Friendfeed’s responsibility to exert leadership in the XMPP space before his line unexpectedly went dead.

The video below joins the conversation just before that point, and continues with discussion of Friendfeed’s new direction and role with the release of the realtime technologies. While Taylor acknowledged the possible threat to some companies (read Twitter) of providing access to the full firehose of data, he indicated building confidence in allowing businesses on top of the Friendfeed APIs was more valuable for Friendfeed.