paidContent has the skinny on an imminent round of financing for the stealth, New York-based "distributed news" venture Daylife:
You’re reading it here first … After a year of mostly veiled references and speculation fueled by the involvement of Jeff Jarvis as an adviser and Craig Newmark as an investor, Daylife, the distributed news platform founded by Upendra Shardanand, is about to see the light of day—funded by roughly twice as many investors as it has employees.
Among the brand-name investors: The New York Times, Mark "TechCrunch" Arrington, Scott "Meetup" Heiferman, Dave "scripting.com" Winer, Azeem "I Don't Know Him But He's a Big Deal British Technology Guy" Azhar, and a handful of other technology mover-and-shaker types.
Upendra is a friend of mine, and he's been nurturing this project for quite some time. I have no inside knowledge to share (as opposed to the insiders listed above, who have knowledge they won't share), but it seems like the core mission—organizing news from multiple sources in idiosyncratically relevant ways—has been pretty constant throughout, and I'm keen to see how it's ultimately developed.
Between Digg, Reddit, Megite, Tailrank, et al, lots of people are trying to add some structure and value to the overabundance of news out there, but none of the crowd-based approaches seems to quite hit home for me. I still find myself working to pick the needles out of the haystack. A different approach couldn't hurt and might help.
Tags: Daylife, investors, distributed news