Following ourannouncementearlier today that DataSift has secured $6m in VC funding, The Next Web caught up with founderNick Halsteadat the company’s office in Reading, 40 miles outside of London. DataSift is one of only two companies that are globally licensed to re-sell Twitter’s firehose of data, the other one beingGnip. That’s quite a scoop for a company that had been entirely bootstrapped, and whose home was a small, inconspicuous town an hour west of London....

FashionStakeis a New York City fashion startup based in Midtown’s Garment District. CEO Daniel Gulati and his co-founder launched the community marketplace for independent fashion in September 2010 while they were students atHarvard Business School. Since launch they’ve seen rapid growth and now have direct relationships with over 200 designers, most of whom hail from NYC. “We’re seeing an entirely new shopping trend unfolding- a shift from e-commerce (electronic commerce) to p-commerce (participatory commerce)....

Last monthHerokuannounced its acquisition toSalesforcefor $250 million dollars, which is an amazing exit for a company that only raised $13 million dollars in funding. Heroku, a Ruby application platform-as-a-service was founded byJames Lindenbaum,Adam WigginsandOrion Henryin 2007. Last week, I had the opportunity to have a chat with James Lindenbaum about the acquisition. Congratulations, can you tell me how did the acquisition happen? Lindenbaum: We were not looking to get acquired, things were going very well and we were pretty happy....

As Internet savvy individuals use social media to change the way they view the world, custom social site providerNingsits at the epicenter of this shift. Ning has just released a powerful study on social media tools citing that custom designed destination sites that integrate with the best social media tools into a single, seamless community give brands and a companies a huge market advantage to organize, rally, lobby, create or effect change....

We work online, we order food online atSeamlessWeb, we tell people when we’re sleeping online in Skype mood messages, we get jobs online on Linkedin, we invite friends to parties online on Facebook and we meet interesting people who can turn into friends online on Twitter. So why are some of us still hesitant to start meeting people to date online? Maybe you’re not, maybe you have profiles on Match,eHarmony,JDateandOKCupid, but I know a fair share of you think online dating is cheap, or you don’t need it and that it somehow kills the romance....