Made.com,  a web-based furniture company, has raised £2.5million from investors to launch its service which connects buyers directly with manufacturers thus cutting out middle men.

The backing comes from Lastminute.com cofounder Brent Hoberman now of mydeco.com, PROfounders Capital (whose investors include Michael Birch ex of Bebo), investor John Hunt and Marc Simoncini through his investment vehicle, Jaïna Capital.

Made.com was created by 28 year-old serial entrepreneur Ning Li, who was a cofounder of Paris based MyFab.com which has proved the feasibility of connecting furniture buyers with makers.

Mozilla platform engineer Rob Sayre has probably had better ideas.

Hoping Microsoft might allow Firefox on their new Windows Phone 7 Series, Sayre wrote an open letter this morning to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "Hola, amigo. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya," is how it starts.

He then proceeds to make fun of Windows Phone 7 Series, the iPhone, Cocoa Touch, and Unix — all in three concise paragraphs. He notes that Windows Phone 7 Series has a "busted" UI, calls the iPhone's UI "ugly jelly beans," and mocks the "allegedly cool" Cocoa Touch "stuff."

It’s almost a cliché that great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don’t go sit on a beach when they make a lot of money, they get back to work building another company or at least investing in other people’s companies. But what did eBay founder Pierre Omidyar do? Moved to Honolulu where he can be found sitting on beaches.

But don’t let the top line narrative fool you, Omidyar hasn’t just been looking at sunsets all these years. He’s been busy making good on his commitment to give away some 99% of his multi-billion dollar fortune and lately has been launching Peer News, a new kind of online news service that won’t have reporters or articles in the classic sense, nor will it allow anonymous comments or make money off advertising. He’s definitely got at least the media world captivated once again.

eBay, philanthropy and now a local Hawaiian news site may seem like wildly disparate ventures for the same man to take, but as Omidyar explains in the video below they’re all connected by the ideas of platform and community—two words that have also underlined much of the Web 2.0 movement.