General

Design-friendly online invitations and stationery startup Paperless Post has raised $6 million in funding from RRE Ventures, SV Angel, Tim Draper and others. This brings the startup's total funding to $12 million. Previous investors include Ram Shiram and Mousse Partners. The startup is sort of like the anti-Evite, aiming to allow consumers to create sleek, design-focused, personalized invitations that deliver the same quality as paper stationery. Users can send out invitations for any occasion and monitor as guests receive and reply to their invitations. The New York company was launched in 2009 by brother and sister team James and Alexa Hirschfeld.

Hot on the heels of its $70 million round, Evernote is making quick use of the new funds: today it announced that it has bought Penultimate, a digital handwriting app designed for the iPad. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we understand that it is a cash-and-stock deal "to acquire the whole company and get Ben [Zotto, the founder] on board." While many acquisitions of this kind often lead to the original app getting shut down, that doesn't appear to be the case here: Evernote says that it will extend Penultimate to become available on "more platforms and devices," while at the same time using Penultimate's technology to enhance handwriting functions on its own app.

The modern online newsroom is a 24/7 operation. It needs power tools to work efficiently, like modern carpenters need electric drills to build houses. The problem is that most content management systems, including web-native ones like WordPress, Tumblr, etc, are intended for smaller organizations or slower-paced writing. Which is why I'm so interested in Vox Media's Chorus. The rest of us have been stuck turning screwdrivers. Features from last decade like admin interfaces full of buttons that need to be clicked, as well as heavy metadata entry requirements, static site designs, and weak distribution options. Chorus has evolved to solve these problems, and much more.

uTest, a company known for providing a variety of testing solutions for desktop, web and mobile, is launching a new solution designed to grade mobile apps' performance under real-world conditions, and then compare the app's rating with that of its competition. The solution, for obvious reasons (i.e., desperate need) is arriving first on Android, with an iOS version to follow soon. The app testing process takes just a few minutes, the company claims, and will then return a report grading the app on a scale of 1 to 100.