TECHCRUNCH — PowerReviews, a company that provides customer review technology for retailers and e-commerce sites, has raised $6.1 million in funding led by current investors Menlo Ventures and Tenaya Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to over $30 million. The additional funding will be used fuel customer acquisition and for new product development...

VENTUREBEAT — ThreatMetrix is announcing today that it has launched the ThreatMetrix Fraud Network, a service that protects e-commerce companies and social media firms from online fraud. The service can recognize devices -- computers, laptops or phones -- that are being used to log into a site. It associates some 200 characteristics of the device with a user and then decides whether there is any fraud involved. Then it helps the customer decide whether to proceed with transactions related to payments, logins, or the creation of new accounts...

E-CONSULTANCY.COM — In March the UK’s Daily Telegraph reported that 700,000 businesses in the UK had active accounts. and across the blogosphere and in company boardrooms the platform is being breathlessly talked up as the future of online customer communication. But, hyperbole aside, how well does Twitter work as a channel for reaching customers and generating sales? With one or two exceptions (most notably Dell, which has claimed several million dollars in revenue from Twitter), few businesses have used Twitter to drive significant sales. Studying the Twitter profiles of some major UK online retailers and analysing available data suggests that, as far as business is concerned,Twitter is yet to live up to its hype...

TOP RANK ONLINE MARKETING BLOG — If you run an ecommerce business, chances are your customers – regardless of their age, gender or economic status – are active on social networks and social media sharing sites. Just consider the statistics from social media monitoring site Pingdom...

VENTUREBEAT — Hardly a week goes by where we don’t receive a company pitch from a hopeful startup trying to crash the group deals scene. And for good reason, since venture capital firms seem happy to throw cash at well-executed takes on the business model. LivingSocial is the latest to score a large amount of funding. It raised $25 million in a round led by U.S. Venture Partners, with Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution, LLC. That’s fresh on top of a $5 million round announced only two months ago and all of Living Social’s existing investors made sure they got in on this round too...