GigaOM is reporting that video calling startup Tango (Tango.me) has raised $42 million in a series B funding round.

A couple of weeks ago, TechCrunch posted an article about the phenomenal growth that Tango is experiencing as users are adopting the service at a pace faster than that of Skype when it was first released.

According to the Tango.me website, the company is preparing to launch an app for Windows PCs in the next few weeks that will bring the service presently geared for the mobile market to the desktop.

Leatherbound.ME is an eBook search engine that was built in a 48 hour coding session during Rails Rumble 2010, a web app development competition.

First, the interface design which resembles an open book is simple, straightforward, and clutter-free. On the searches attempted, we were impressed as we found it returning relevant results rather quickly. The site submits your ebook title, author, or keyword query to the Kindle, Nook, and iBooks stores and returns a list of books that match your search term. When you select a particular book, the prices from each of the stores is displayed which you can compare.

Try it out at Leatherbound.me

We regularly check Google for new and interesting .ME websites and today we discovered NonstopAwesomeness.ME, what a name.

(You can browse .ME sites on Google through this link.)

Interestingly, the publisher of this particular blog holds the .COM version of the name as well but chose to redirect it to the .ME. On his site, he explains why:

Why the .ME?
It’s all about living the best version of yourself possible, finding the “top me.”

Nathan Agin is the publisher of NonstopAwesomeness.ME and the site is a chronicling of his travels and adventures. He shares his personal techniques for staying positive and feeling inspired.

One particularly insightful post features a list of responses from people he knows about things they do to “build momentum” and stay motivated throughout the day.

How 58 Creative, Positive and Productive Dynamos Build Momentum

We recently wrote about the wildly popular mobile news reader app Pulse launching its new Web service at Pulse.me.

Last week, the company announced that it had closed a $9 million series A funding round from New Enterprise Associates, Greycroft Partners, and Lerer Ventures.

Read the financing announcement on the Pulse.me Blog

The company also just announced that it has entered into a partnership with Groupon to deliver local daily deals to users of Pulse.

Read more about the Groupon partnership

The growth of Pulse’s user base has been extraordinary. The LA Times interviewed Akshay Kothari, one of Pulse’s co-founders, regarding the company’s success:

By the end of November, Pulse was downloaded 200,000 times, “and in just six months from that, we’ve passed 4 million,” he said. “It really feels like a dream sometimes.”

Read the LA Times article on Pulse

Link to Pulse.me

We wrote earlier about a couple of websites that had dropped their .COM domain names in favor of .ME domains and today we found a site that switched from the .ORG version of their name to the corresponding .ME. The site which recently rebranded itself as FootballSchedule.ME appears to have been formerly known as FootballSchedule.org as some of the pages still make reference to the old address which now redirects to the new. The website features a blog that offers frequently updated NFL and college football news. In addition, the site provides a team-by-team listing of NFL and college football schedules with links to an integrated ticket marketplace.

We believe that as the popularity and public’s awareness of the personally connecting, engaging, and versatile .ME domain continues to grow, more websites will join the trend in making the change to the uniquely brandable .ME extension for their web addresses.

Pulse is a mobile news application developed by two Stanford graduate students who took the Launch Pad class at the school’s Institute of Design where the assignment was to create and deliver a product before the end of the course. Pulse was born there and since its launch a little more than a year ago, it has been downloaded over 3 million times. It was selected as one of 50 apps in the Apple App Store Hall of Fame, Time magazine featured it as one of the top 50 iPhone apps of 2011, and Steve Jobs even praised it during his 2010 WWDC keynote address, calling it “a wonderful RSS reader.” Last fall, the company raised $800,000 in a seed funding round.

Pulse is a stylish news feed reader application that brings elegance to RSS feeds on mobile devices. The app’s interface presents the feed links from your favorite sources as a vibrant mosaic of tiles.

Now, the application’s functionality has been extended to the Web at Pulse.me and expanded with the introduction of Pulse.me accounts allowing you to star content to be saved for reading later. Your account is portable across the various platforms so what you save on one will be synced allowing you to continue on another. So, stories can now be saved by starring them from within the application on your device to be read later via the Web on your home or office desktop or any other supported device.

The app is available for the iPhone, iPad, and Android at Pulse.me

Read more about Pulse.me:

Introducing Pulse.me: An Easy Way to Save Stories on Your iPad, iPhone, Android device – or the Web! – The Pulse Blog

Social News App Pulse Lets Users Save Stories for Later – Mashable

Pulse reader now lets you read stories later with Instapaper and more – The Next Web

It’s cool to fail, says Pulse News’ Akshay Kothari, one of the new kings of apps – First Post

Stanford creator of Pulse app tells student entrepreneurs to ‘focus on the product’ – Peninsula Press

The iPad Pulse Reader Scales the Charts – NY Times

Zero to Revenue in Six Weeks – dschool

We recently came across a UK based website built on a .ME domain that currently ranks on the first page for the search term free stuff on the UK version of Google. According to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, the term free stuff receives about 90,000 exact match local monthly searches (UK).

We point out instances like this when we encounter them to convey through examples that websites built on .ME domain names have the potential to rank well in search engines if the content of the site is of a quality that meets the standards of search engine algorithms and other off-site factors and signals are also taken into account.

We recently wrote about examples of high ranking .ME websites on the US version of Google:

.ME domains can rank on the first page of Google for high search volume keywords

CodeInterview.me is a new service that was initially developed in a 48 hour coding session at a Garage48 event with the complete site debuting this past week. The idea behind CodeInterview.me is to make the process of interviewing potential developer candidates easier by providing an environment that is best suited to accomplishing this task. The key element that sets this service apart is the ability for programmers to code in the IDE that they prefer.

Read more at the CodeInterview.me blog

We recently discovered Intervue.me which allows website publishers to pose questions and gather responses in video form. The process of adding the feature to a website appears to be as painless as merely adding a link to the question you create on Intervue.me. The concept is intriguing and had us contemplating whether video responses would soon find their way into areas such as blog comments. Perhaps, such a feature would be integrated in blog platforms in the future, but for now blog publishers can add an Intervue.me link to a blog post to offer visitors the option of responding by way of video. The potential applications for this service are numerous and could bring an interesting new form of engagement to websites beyond the traditional text-based commenting systems.

We serendipitously stumbled upon a new social application currently being developed when typing in the web address Duet.me. The tagline for this new app is “do things with people you love.” Sounds interesting. A deeper explanation of the motivations behind the creation of the application are described by one of the co-founders of Duet.me, Nathan Heleine, at the following link:

Introducing Duet