rawdog

The Asus Transformer Prime was the great, grey hope for many Android lovers – until they realized that the bootloader was locked it was impossible to upgrade or install a new bit of firmware onto the device. Asus has finally relented, allowing folks to download an unlocked bootloader and install it over the “official” Asus bootloader.

The best part?

Blam. Want your device to work as advertised? Go for it, cowboy, but don’t expect Asus to hold your hand and consider this thing junk, babies, because no warranty will cover it.

If you’ve ever shopped for a pair of prescription glasses, you’ve probably seen first hand how expensive a set can be. Warby Parker’s co-founders are right there with you.

Both fed-up and puzzled over paying hundreds of dollars for a product that’s been around for hundreds of years, the Warby Parker team is shaking up the eyewear industry by selling prescription glasses online, at a price tag of just $95 a pair.

Having crafted their plan during business school, the foursome launched the company two years ago this month. Three weeks after the initial pair went on sale, co-founder, Neil Blumenthal says Warby Parker hit its sales targets for the entire year and adds “we sold out of our top 15 styles in four weeks”. The company has since ramped up to 60-employees.

Two of Warby Parker’s co-founders, David Gilboa and Neil Blumenthal recently stopped by TCTV to give Founder Stories host, Chris Dixon the backstory on how the company got started.

As lifelong eyeglass wearers, Gilboa tells Dixon the group couldn’t understand why “glasses cost more than an iPhone.” After doing some research they realized “there’s a handful of companies that control the entire supply chain.” Not content to roll with the status quo, Gilboa says the team set out to change the landscape by creating “our own brand of glasses …. so we could sell the same product that normally costs $500 for $95.”

However, because their product was only available online, the team had to figure out a way for customers to try on the frames. Blumenthal says their solution was to create a “first of its kind” program “in the US where you select 5 frames, we ship it to you free of cost and you have 5 days to try them on at home, with no obligation to buy.”

Gilboa adds that this process enables customers to receive feedback from people “they trust” (versus paid sales staffers) and as an added benefit, Warby Parker receives “millions of free impressions” from users who post tryout pictures to their social networking sites.

As the interview unfolds, Gilboa and Blumenthal share plenty more insights, so sure to watch the entire video to hear more.

Past episodes for Founder Stories featuring Jeff Clavier, Cyrus Massoumi, Stephen Kaufer, Mayor Bloomberg and many other leaders are here.

Episode II of this interview is coming up.

Job boards and company profiles on job sites can be fairly uninspiring, and bland. Usually there’s a boring description of a job, followed by a list of skills needed followed by a boring description of the company.

Enter Y Combinator-backed The Daily Muse, which is a community for professional women. Today the site is launching company profiles: a new job board that not only presents company backgrounds in a compelling way, but also aims to make job listings more interesting.

As we’ve written in the past, The Daily Muse itself is a females-focused platform providing daily content across career-oriented topics like entrepreneurship and education as well as touching upon more extracurricular pursuits like fashion and travel. The site was founded by ex-McKinsey analysts Kathryn Minshew, Alexandra Cavoulacos and Melissa McCreery, who say the company has helped 250,000 women advance their careers since launching in September and is steadily growing 30 percent month-over-month in terms of traffic.

So how is The Daily Muse going to make its company profiles and job listings more engaging than the norm? They’re going to write them themselves— each profile will be written by TDM editors. The Daily Muse researches, interviews people at these companies, then writes each profile to give visitors glimpses into the company’s culture (and available jobs).

For now, the site has company profiles for Klout, Kiva, Hipmunk, ZeroCater, and Justin.tv. Each profile contains original photography of the company’s office, interviews with various employees, a look at the company culture, a description of what the company does, links to the company’s Facebook and Twitter pages as well as job listings.

The addition of interviews with current employees is one feature that Minshew tells me is unique to the site. Potential hires can learn what life is like at the company by looking at what it’s like for real people who already work there, which most job posting sites or professional networking platforms can’t provide.

While the company profiles aren’t necessarily exclusively for a female audience, she says that the team built out the site’s features based on the career tools and job search that women would look for. Insight into how current employees felt at the company was one of the areas where women felt job search was lacking, she explains.

In the future, The Daily Muse will be building out the abilities to search for companies and jobs as more content is added. And the startup is working on a number of partnerships with college career centers to help bring younger talent to startups.

With the current talent wars taking place in the technology world, there’s no doubt that companies and startups are looking for innovative and interesting ways to recruit and attract talent. The Daily Muse is able to add a certain amount of trust to the company profile and job board by taking control of the content in these profiles and listings, and adding an employee point of view.

The Daily Muse has raised funding from Y Combinator as well as a number of undisclosed angel investors.

Retickr, a social news reader application for Mac OS X, received a big update today, as well as a new round of funding. The startup just closed its Series A of $1.5 million led by the Lamp Post Group, the investors who had previously put $150,000 into the company’s seed round.

The app, which combines RSS, social networking updates and news, is not your standard feed reader, but rather attempts to personalize your news reading experience the more you use the product.

Explains Retickr co-founder Brian Trautschold, “information overload is an epidemic – content is being created faster than ever before, and people can’t keep up.” But he clarifies that his startup is not a simply a news reader – it’s a big data company. “We are focusing on an algorithmic approach that we believe should be individual-centric…our API learns what people read, like or dislike, and share. As we roll personalization out, users will begin to see content catered to them, and discover news they would have missed before,” he says.

The idea for a personalized, ever-learning news reader is not a new one, but these days, it’s more common to see such things launching as iPad apps, not as desktop software. (See, for example, Evri for iPad or News360). Retickr plans to address other platforms too, including web and mobile, but started with the Mac app instead.

With the updated version of the Retickr app (ver. 2.0), which rolls out today at noon (ET) on the Mac App Store, you can now sync your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader feeds and then incorporate those streams into “playlists” along with the news feeds from over 85,000 sites that the service crawls. This addresses one of users’ bigger complaints about the earlier version of Retickr’s product: an inability to import OPML files or sync with Google Reader. Done!

The app will appeal to the social dashboard user base (TweetDeck users, e.g.), but aims to help cut down on the noise of the real-time streams with customized controls that let you configure how fast news scrolls by. But the name “Retickr” comes from the app’s key feature: its news ticker. The ticker is reminiscent of an older product called Snackr, which I happily used until I couldn’t stand its Adobe AIR-ness any more.

A word of warning for serious RSS connoisseurs, however: Retickr took forever to import my 1,000+ Google Reader feeds. It’s unclear if this was an issue with the alpha version of the product I was using, or a serious bug that still needs to be addressed. But with a million and half now in the bank, I expect the issue to be resolved soon.

Back during the heyday of CrunchGear (now known as TechCrunch/Gadgets), we couldn’t get enough of Borderlands. The game masterfully combined the game play of a FPS with the best elements of an RPG. In a scene full of Call of Duty clones Borderlands is completely novel. Gearbox just released the launch trailer for the second installment and it promises more of the same big gun, big monster madness. The game launches on September 18th. Hey Erick, I’m going to be sick that day, m’kay?

For various reasons (groan) I’m not heading to SXSW this year, but then neither are millions of other people. But that won’t stop the 20,000 attendees from clogging up our Twitter feeds trying to find each other in the nearest bar, tweeting incessantly about some “awesome” panel session you are not at or generally conversing about in-jokes you weren’t there to witness.

That’s why you need a handy way of temporarily blocking those tweets or those people – or maybe even both.

Last year there was a handy browser extension that blocked SXSW tweets. This year the people behind it are now in a former YC startup, Lanyrd, and they’re at it again, this time with an improved product.

The extension blocks tweets with the hashtag for #SXSW, but this time, because Lanyrd also carries an attendee directory, the extension will block all tweets from people there. Relief!

And here it is (no need to sign in first): notatsxsw.lanyrd.com

Enjoy, people!

Meanwhile, for those who ARE going, they can see the Lanyrd guide to the conference to see the sessions their Twitter contacts are speaking at or plan to attend. They can then build up their own session plan and take it with them (saved offline) on their phone using the Lanyrd iPhone app or HTML5 mobile web app. They also get emailed a personal schedule every day during the conference.

It’s clear that Lanyrd is picking up from where Plancast failed to deliver.

For more goodies, there’s a searchable directory of SXSW attendees, list of investors, founders, you name it.

SXSW speakers can also automatically generate Moo MiniCards from the SXSW schedule data help promote their talks.

SAP dropped a whopping $3.4 billion on human capital management software company SuccessFactors back in December. Two months later, the deal has finally closed and SAP isn’t wasting any time in releasing a product roadmap for SuccessFactors now that the company is part of the SAP family.

As the New York Times reported back in December, SAP saw SuccessFactors as one entry point into the cloud. Forrester analyst Paul Hamerman told the publication at the time that “The cloud has been a small part of SAP’s revenue stream, about 2 percent; the deal adds to the revenue base and shows SAP’s strong commitment to the software-as-a-service business model.”

Today, SAP says that SuccessFactors’ software will be combined with SAP solutions to provide a comprehensive offering to clients. SAP will continue to offer its own Human Capital Management on premise solution but will be pushing SuccessFactors’ performance, compensation, recruiting and learning management products in the cloud. The talent management components from SAP’s software will be selectively innovated on, says the company.

Basically, SAP’s existing HCM products will be the on-premise offering and SuccessFactors will be deployed in the cloud. There are currently no plans to phase out any SuccessFactors products, says SAP.

SAP explains that data and analytics will be a focus area for further innovations in both SuccessFactors and SAP’s HCM offerings. SuccessFactors software will be integrated with SAP’s data analysis product HANA.

The human capital management industry is huge and big enterprise companies are betting that the cloud is the future of this space. Salesforce just announced the acquisition of social performance platform Rypple, and will be launching a new product and SuccessFactors-rival, Successforce. Oracle just bought talent management software company Taleo for $1.9 billion a few weeks ago. With all these companies throwing their hats in the ring, it should be interesting to see which one can emerge as the leader.

UltraViolet might sound too good to be true, but the service is growing. More Blu-ray titles are featuring the digital media option and consumers are at least trying the movie industry’s alternative to, well, piracy. iSupply just announced that there are now more than 800,000 household accounts, up from 750,000 at the beginning of 2012. But so far it seems most of those accounts are just testing the waters, as iSupply notes that the average account has 1.25 titles. That results in over 1 million digital films for UltraViolet but also paints a picture that consumers aren’t too sure about the service.

“One million may not sound like much compared to the 504 million movie discs sold in 2011,” noted Tom Adams, principal analyst and director, U.S. media, for IHS stated in today’s announcement. “However, we have projected that only 19 million digital film files were sold during the entire year of 2011 by electronic sell-through (EST) vendors like iTunes, Xbox Live and Vudu. This suggests that if UV can continue to gain momentum this year, it could encourage consumers to buy more movies. Movie purchasing represents an important priority for movie studios, which have seen their film sales dwindle in the face of growing physical and digital rentals and streaming services like Netflix.”

UltraViolet is the movie industry’s first major push into digital media. Rather than relying on a 3rd party like Netflix, UltraViolet is run by the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), a consortium of major Hollywood studios, CE makers, retailers and DRM vendors. These companies came together in 2008 and proposed the digital locker service now called UltraViolet that lets consumers store and share digital media. Originally these movie titles were only to be bundled with physical media but Paramount started selling UltraViolet titles seperatly late last month. With UltraViolet, consumers can watch media on up to 12 devices and share between six members of the household. Content can either be downloaded or streamed from the cloud.

So far the UltraViolet selection is still very limited. Paramount has about 60 titles from their online store. UVVU.com keeps a running list of new UltraViolet releases. But in order for people to ditch Netflix (and illegal downloads) UltraViolet needs to have content. Once again, content is king.

Now that UltraViolet has a growing user base, the next milestone should involve seeing the average amount of titles in the digital lockers increase. Sign-ups are easy (and free), retention is hard.

We interviewed DECE’s president Mitch Singer at CES where he explained UltraViolet in detail. Watch the interview below.

Calling all developers: if you know your way around HTML5 and JavaSrcipt and have a great idea for an app, Mozilla wants to hear from you. The web-friendly nonprofit has just announced their intention to launch a new cross-platform app market later this year, and the submission process is slated to start next week at Mobile World Congress.

The initiative ties into Mozilla’s focus on developing the web as a platform for rich content, and they hope to do so by providing developers with the tools needed to create great things.

“By building the missing pieces, Mozilla is now unlocking the potential of the Web to be the platform for creating and consuming content everywhere,” said Mozilla Chief of Innovation Todd Simpson.

To help their burgeoning web apps platform take shape, Mozilla has proposed a number of APIs that “advance the web as a platform.” Mozilla will also aid their web apps platform with the creation of an identity system that binds apps to users rather than their devices. Though Mozilla declined to mention how the identity system would be implemented, it’s likely we’ll see their BrowserID system rear its head once more.

While Mozilla’s platform-agnostic approach means that these apps will be able to run on any HTML5-capable device, the creation of a new app store isn’t just a win for cross-platform idealogues.

Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko (B2G) team has been hard at work since last July on developing a web-oriented mobile operating system, and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich mentioned recently intimated on Twitter that Mozilla would be revealing B2G partners at MWC.

Developer support in the form of apps is critical for the major mobile platforms. Between the development of the app store and the news of potential partnership agreements, Boot To Gecko has the potential to become a viable competitor. While the blocks slowly seem to be falling into place, Mozilla has remained mum on whether or not they’ll have a B2G handset ready to check out on the MWC show floor.

I’ve enjoyed the PS Vita for a couple of weeks now. It’s a fun device, but as John describes in our review, it feels like the last of its kind. Single function devices are no longer relevant and as much as Sony tried, the Vita is still pretty much a dedicated gaming handheld.

The company launched an app store for the Vita today, which folds Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, and Flickr apps into the Vita’s ecosystem. With these apps, along with the powerful hardware and 3G connectivity, the $249 Vita could be a good alternative to a traditional tablet. The only thing it’s missing is a proper web browser.

The apps work as expected. The Netflix app uses the same interface as the company’s Android and iOS apps. The app does not support streaming via a 3G network, though. Flickr is downright gorgeous on the Vita. The interface takes full advantage of the Vita’s widescreen OLED screen displaying the image on the left with the details on the right. This app works on 3G. For some reason Facebook is only available to European Vitas. U.S. owners will need to wait a bit longer.

These apps finally make the Vita slightly more than just a gaming device. They’re key to the Vita’s success, really. Today’s consumers expect a multifunction device, which, as I can attest, the Vita was not until these apps hit. In fact I was getting a tad bored with the Vita, tending to instead to pick up my iPad for a few minutes of gaming followed by some Facebooking.

You see, my gaming attention span is not what it used to be. There was a time when I played Link’s Awakening by flashlight under my bed sheets for hours. Not anymore. I can only handle a few minutes at a time before I get bored and need to move onto something else. I know I cannot be alone. The $249 Vita (or $300 for the 3G version) was a hard sell for me. But now that there are apps, it could potentially fulfill the need of a similar person who wants a gaming device but can’t give up the features of a modern tablet. The Vita already had a Google Maps app, text and voice messaging, and a photo app. If only the Vita had a quality web browser it would be nearly perfect for this demographic.

The Vita’s web browser still needs work. It renders web sites like IE 6 (read: poorly). It doesn’t support even Flash 9 and scrolling is painful because of how slow it renders. But it works in a pinch.

The Vita is a powerful little thing. It rocks a custom ARM Cortex A9 quad-core CPU, 512MB of RAM, and packs the same amount of connectivity options as an iPad. The 5-inch screen is an OLED capacitive touchscreen and then there’s a massive rear capacitive touchpad for additional controls. There’s dual analog sticks, a directional pad and traditional PlayStation controls. The Vita really is the most impressive gaming device ever made. But even with good launch titles in my opinion it was still missing something: apps.

The Vita is launching in a tough market. No other gaming device including Nintendo’s 3DS had to deal with so many competitors. The Vita must combat smartphones, tablets, the 3DS and in the coming weeks, the iPad 3, which will no doubt launch with the force of a mighty backdraft. But Sony seems to know this. The Vita’s hardware and accessories are pricey, hinting that Sony isn’t selling them at a loss. Sony probably knows the Vita won’t outsell the iPad. It doesn’t have to in order to be considered a success. As long as the Vita gets quality games, apps and new features at a steady rate, Sony will continue to make gamers happy. And that’s what it’s all about.

While Apple is busy fighting Proview over the iPad trademark in China, it has lost a separate trademark battle in Europe: Wapple, the mobile web developers, have won a suit filed by Apple over its name.

The suit, originally filed in 2007, claimed that Wapple was trading on Apple’s brand association and name, although Wapple had filed for a trademark on “Wapple” in 2006.

Wapple, which has been around since 2003, and incorporated in 2004 – well before the smartphone explosion – has long said that its name was wordplay on the WAP protocol, which was the main format for delivering mobile content before the rise of 3G networks and other protocols like HTML5.

The case went right up to the Intellectual Property Office in the UK, which today made the ruling in Wapple’s favor in three separate filings, numbers 95786, 95787 and 95890.

Wapple’s words on the decision are ironic, going as they do against as iconic and groundbreaking a company as Apple:

“The case is a victory for truth over tactics. Self-belief is always critical when establishing and growing any technology business and even more so when you are early to market as we were,” noted Anne Thomas, co-founder and COO of Wapple. “The action taken by Apple Inc. to oppose our trade mark [sic] has tested our resolve and we are delighted with this outcome.”

Wapple works with a number of third parties on mobile web services and its customers include two of Apple’s big competitors, Microsoft and Google. No one in Wapple’s experience, the company notes, has ever confused the two companies.

Although Apple has asserted intellectual property rights over some of the industry’s biggest players — including numerous lawsuits against Android-based developers Samsung, HTC and Motorola — it has also gone after much smaller companies, but not always with a successful effect. One case in Spain last year saw Apple losing a design patent suit against NT-K, a small Android tablet maker.

ToutApp, the email productivity app that emerged as part of the 500Startups Summer Accelerator program last year, is rolling out a new feature that will let users track their emails right from within Salesforce. With the update, ToutApp customers will be able to see who viewed their emails, when they were viewed, where they were viewed, what the recipient clicked on, and how long they read the email.

Creepy? OK, maybe. But for serious CRM users, it’s kind of great, too.

If you haven’t heard of ToutApp before, a little background: the startup is attempting to address one of the most woefully overlooked pain points nearly everyone deals with today: email overload. To help speed up the process of creating and responding to email, the company launched its service last year which helps users create personalized email templates (aka “canned responses”). After installation, the app digs into your email to identify the types of mass emails you send to help you build these templates.

After your templated emails are sent, you can track nearly everything that takes place with them in the recipient’s inbox: it’s the who, what, when, where and how long of email viewing. It then presents this in a live-updating feed within your preferred email client. While privacy advocates my find this a shocking invasion, I disagree. Privacy, shmivacy. There are real-world benefits to this sort of tracking across multiple industries.

In my (fantasy) world, here’s how ToutApp could improve my life dramatically: a PR person sends a pitch. I open it. Read it. Click the link. Close the link. Then return to reading more email. When the PR person doesn’t hear back, instead of sending out one of those “just circling back” emails to determine interest, they already know I read the email and followed through by viewing the URL it included. If they still had to follow up, the response wouldn’t be a time-wasting “hey, did you read my email?” email, but a more productive follow-on pitch containing different angles or information the first one had neglected to include.

Of course, that’s just one example. As a entrepreneur, you could template different pitches to journalists and investors, and then see if they were read. Salesforce users could craft templates for client emails that help them close deals. And so on.

ToutApp is designed to integrate with Gmail, CRM systems like Highrise, Batchbook, and Capsule, and has been working to support Salesforce. However, until this latest update, the Salesforce integration was limited. The startup was doing some sporadic testing, but nothing was available to the public.

But now, Salesforce users will be able to see real-time updates on when and where emails were read, what was clicked and other analytics data related to email tracking directly from within Salesforce. Templating, automatic file attachments, and performance reports are also included.

In addition, for Gmail and iOS ToutApp users, there are a few other changes rolling out today, too, including a new Email Activity Feed for real-time tracking of emails, an improved interface for ToutApp’s Gmail integration and an updated iOS app that allows you to edit templates, send messages while on the go, and view email analytics on mobile.

ToutApp was founded in 2010 by Tawheed Kader, and closed a seed round of $350,000 last summer from 500 Startups, Esther Dyson, Eric Ries, Daniel Eskapa, NYC Seed Fund, Joshua Baer, and others.

Pricing for the service is based on the size of your team, ranging from a $12/month pack allowing you to send 25 emails a day, make three Tout groups and use 10 email templates, all the way to $199/month, offering support for unlimited groups and shared templates, team-wide analytics tracking, and support for up to 25 team members. More info is available on the ToutApp website here.

When serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavky launched Fon in late 2005, his goal was to blanket the world with easily-accessible, crowdsourced Wi-Fi. While the service hasn’t quite made it everywhere yet, Fon has just announced that they now have over 5 million hotspots in operation across the globe.

It’s a pretty impressive number considering that other big Wi-Fi networks like Boingo advertise “over 400,000” hotspots in their network, but it’s made even more notable when you consider each of Fon’s hotspots is essentially a person who decided to share their own Internet connection.

The signup process is a novel one — in order to access the full list of Fon hotspots out there, users have to share their own Internet connection first with the help a special wireless router. Non-sharers looking to get their own wireless Internet fix can take part in the fun too, but it comes at a cost — they have to pay a fee in order to access a Fon hotspot, part of which ends up with the hotspot’s owner.

Much of Fon’s growth can be attributed to strategic partnerships with companies like SFR, British Telecom, and Belgacom, all of whom have folded support for Fon’s network into their consumer-facing hardware. With other partnerships in the works, Varsavky says on his blog that he expects Fon’s growth to continue unabated:

“This year, I predict that Fon will grow its number of hotspots by at least 50 percent, so there is lots of work ahead to make sure this happens.”

If you want to see what your friends or contacts are up to, you can check out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram for a realtime feed. But what if you want to read news about your friends? That’s a little bit trickier, which is why Newsle was born. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon created the site in early 2011 as a way to find out more about what their friends and people they met at school were up to during the summer, and beyond. At the time, Hansen and Varon were sophomores at Harvard, but they’ve since taken leave and have moved to San Francisco to focus on Newsle full-time. (Sounds like a familiar story, doesn’t it?)

At conception, Newsle mostly focused its efforts on becoming an archive for interesting (older) news about friends and people you care about. (You can read Erick’s early coverage here.) But, in testing the idea with its some 10K beta users, the founders discovered that it turns out most people have friends who are in the news every single week. And this doesn’t just apply to those in the tech industry, nearly everyone has an acquaintance or five that appear in local papers, blogs, and beyond.

The startup’s beta users wanted a better way to keep track of their friends, loved ones, and contacts popping up in the news in realtime. So, Newsle has been heads-down in stealth mode for the past nine months building technology to enable this kind of news-based friend-tracking, and the new version officially launches today.

In its new garb, Newsle has basically built a massive RSS feed crawler that processes more than 100K news sources every day, culling together over 1 million articles from major media outlets, blogs, as well as local publications. The startup allows you to then pull your Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts into its engine so that it can serve you a stream of news content that focuses on the people you want to stay in touch with. Users can then Facebook message or tweet the people they’re following directly from Newsle’s web interface. Or they can drill down, set more specific alerts that get sent to their inbox daily, weekly, and so on.

Users can not only follow their Facebook and LinkedIn friends, but also choose from a list of celebrities, comedians, actors, and business people, staying on top all news related to Lady Gaga. It sounds a little stalker-ish, but it’s a great tool for, say, startups looking to keep tabs on VCs, or for my many fans to keep track of my posts. (You’re welcome!) The founders tell us that they really wanted to pick up where Google Alerts leave off, focusing on friends and people we care about.

As Erick pointed out, if Newsle sounds familiar, it’s because the idea has been tried before in various incarnations, most notably Rohit Khare and Samil Ismail’s now-defunct Angstro, which eventually morphed into Knx.to to be later acq-hired by Google. Previous attempts haven’t been successful, but Newsle has a great UI to recommend it, works well, and looks snappy.

Obviously, tackling the enormous amount of news content out there on the Interwebs is no easy feat. The service will really live or die based on how relevant the content is that it serves to its users. Right now, since quite a few other TechCrunch writers are my friends on Facebook, Newsle is serving me their posts on TechCrunch, but if you’re looking for news about those people, and not written by those people, that could be a strike against. It’s no easy thing to separate the equivocating metadata or profile information that comes with bloggers’ news posts.

The founders have been hard at work creating and fine-tuning these disambiguation algorithms that allows Newsle to, among other things, distinguish between commonly occurring names in the news and those who are actually your friends. With so much content coming into its silo, that can be tricky.

But that’s where funding can come in handy. Newsle is officially announcing today that it raised $600K in seed financing from Lerer Ventures and SV Angel. The startup is using its new capital to hire engineers to help in tweaking its algorithms, and to launch mobile apps (which should be going live in the near future).

Newsle is still early in the process and hasn’t yet solidified its monetization strategy, but one can imagine that a service like this would be appealing to businesses, especially to marketers and sales people. The founders also said that they will add further local news sources as more users come on board, and they get a better sense of which particular outlets are most in demand.

While the goal has really been just to build an open-ended resource that allows people to track news about their friends, it also wouldn’t be surprising to see the startup eventually offer more targeted, subject-specific content and tracking.

For more, check out the new, new Newsle at home here, and let us know what you think.

The European Union says it will refer the controversial ACTA anti-piracy trade agreement to the institution’s highest court, the European Court of Justice, to check whether it complies with the EU’s fundamental rights.

EU trade chief Karel De Gucht is leading the process. He said: “We are planning to ask Europe’s highest court to assess ACTA’s compatibility with the EU’s fundamental rights and freedoms, such as freedom of expression and information or that of protection… Let me be very clear: I share people’s concern for these fundamental freedoms… especially over the freedom of the Internet.”

140 Proof, a startup that says it delivers targeted ads to more than 50 social apps, is adding a video ad unit to its lineup.

Like the company’s existing 140-character text units, the videos can show up in the social stream of any app running 140 Proof ads (and yes, they should work on mobile). Users should be able to click and watch the video without leaving the page, rate it, and bring up a feed of all the tweets mentioning the advertiser’s hashtag.

Co-founder and CTO John Manoogian III told me via email that 140 Proof’s biggest advertisers have been asking for video ads “for a long time.” He pointed to several things that make this a good move for the company. For one, it allows brands to deliver video ads targeted at people with a specific interest, and to deliver those ads in a social stream. For another, it places the videos in the perfect context for further sharing. Manoogian even pitches this as a way to help your standard TV commercial stay relevant.

“The new video ad unit lets brands get more value out of that expensive 30-second TV commercial that lots of viewers aren’t seeing, since they’re now watching shows on Tivo or Hulu or (ahem) BitTorrent,” Manoogian says. “The social video ad unit lets brands reach those users in a context where they are already looking for ‘the next big thing’.”

The company is also sharing some numbers about its recent progress. In 2011, 140 Proof says that it increased revenue by 700 percent, that the average media buy across all customers doubled, and that it tripled its headcount. During that time, the company also raised a $2.5 million Series B from BlueRun Ventures and others. Advertisers include UPS, Nike, Victoria’s Secret, and many others.

More news from Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine, that highlights the opportunity for more growth in digital in Russia and adjacent markets. One day after announcing a new real-time search partnership with Twitter, the company is reporting Q4 earnings: sales were at $200 million with net income of $71.3 million, both representing growth respectively of 56 percent and 51 percent on the same quarter a year ago.

But although Yandex says the figures were at the high end of its guidance, revenues fell short of average analyst expectations of $207.6 million, as polled by Yahoo Finance.

Yandex noted that its share of the Russian search market is now at 60.8 percent, according to LiveInternet. That still makes it the biggest search portal in Russia, although this represents a decline over last quarter, when the company reported a 62.7 percent share of the market.

That underscores Yandex’s move to search for new platforms and mediums, and markets, to serve ads.

Those include services like adding Twitter’s real-time search. But also, like its rival Google, Yandex is putting a lot of effort into its mobile business, and has in the last several months inked search deals with Samsung for its bada devices and Microsoft for Windows Phone — where Yandex will now become the default search window for the CIS and Russia, respectively.

It has also bought its own mobile developer, SPB Software, for a price believed to be around $38 million. SPB has developed mobile payment services, games, and other mobile apps. It’s probably a big leap to think that Yandex will go the whole hog and look at making its own mobile OS, as Google has done with Android (although never discount the possibility). But in any case, SPB already works in enough areas where Yandex could potentially insert ads and power other functions, for its own services and those for third parties.

The company is also expanding outside of its traditional base of Russia and the CIS: it has launched new services like maps in Turkey, where it is currently making a big push.

While those efforts have yet to bear significant fruit for Yandex — at least not enough worth mentioning in today’s results — the company continues to see growth in its existing online advertising business:

Search engine result pages were up 36 percent from last year; and advertisers now number 173,000 – a 43 percent increase over last year – and 10 percent up on Q3. For the full year, advertisers were up by 44 percent to 270,000. The bulk of Yandex’s ad revenues are coming from its own search-based text ads, which account for 68 percent of Yandex’s revenues. But just in terms of actual growth, revenues from third-party sites actually saw bigger gains last quarter. Text based ads altogether accounted for over 80 percent of Yandex’s revenues:

Yandex said it expects that overall, Ruble-based revenue growth for 2012 will be in the range of 40-45 percent.

New York City startup InVision has raised $1.5 million in seed funding to help companies answer an important question: Are we building something that people will actually want to use?

The funding comes from FirstMark Capital. Managing director Amish Jani says he was excited to invest because, for one thing, co-founders Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel are addressing a real problem that they faced. InVision came out of the pair’s web design consultancy, where they say they were frustrated by the lack of tools for creating a design prototype that actually provided a reasonable stand-in for the finished product.

There are other prototyping tools out there, but none, Valberg says, that incorporate everything that InVision tries to do well. He argues that prototypes need to look as beautiful as you want the final product to be, while also incorporating real interactions. They also need to be seen in a real context — namely, a normal web browser. So InVision customers create the screens in Adobe’s designer-friendly tools like Photoshop, then link those screens up to add basic interactivity, and they can share the prototypes through a link (which can be password-protected).

Other features include the ability to create mobile prototypes and to collaborate with other designers. You can play with a sample prototype here.

The funding announcement comes with effusive praise from several startups, including InDinero and LaunchRock — InDinero CEO Jessica Mah, for example, calls InVision the company’s “secret weapon” which has “completely changed our design process.” Jani says FirstMark’s portfolio companies were excited about the product too, and they had plenty of feature requests. At the same time, the InVision website lists some bigger companies like Google and Whole Foods as customers. Altogether, the startup says it has been used by 19,000 designers to create 118,000 screens.

In some ways, the approach that Valberg advocates, where companies run tests on multiple prototypes before writing a single line of code, runs counter to a current branch of Silicon Valley wisdom, which calls for startups to release a real product to at least a limited group of users as quickly as people. Valberg isn’t opposed to iterating based on user feedback, but he argues that it’s better to get much of that initial iteration process out of the way beforehand, before you “lose a lot of control” by making your product publicly available. Valberg also argues that InVision puts the big product decisions back into the hands of the designers, not the engineers.

“Designers are the future of product creation,” he says. “The engineers ruled at the beginning … but now the question is who can create something that’s emotionally appealing and meaningful to our lives. The ones who are best equipped to do that are the designers.”

Valberg says that InVision will become more of a platform this year, incorporating a wider range of ways to collect user feedback.

Well, you have to hand it to the strategy team over at Zipcar. Arguably the largest on-demand car-sharing network, Zipcar went public last year and not long after saw its market cap cross $1 billion. It’s since fallen back, and with collaborative consumption and the market for car-sharing heating up, the big players have to make moves. Zipcar has since forged a partnership with Ford, making it the largest provider of cars for Zipcar’s University program, and, in December, the company took a controlling stake in Spain’s largest car-sharing network, Avancar.

Today finds Zipcar making another strategic move to get its mitts in fellow car-sharing companies, again with a focus on universities, whose students are among the most eager adopters of car-sharing models. What do I mean? The company today announced that it is a lead investor in the $13.7 million Series A financing of Wheelz, a junior, university-focused version of itself.

The Detroit-based Fontinalis Partners, a transportation technology investment firm, also participated in the round. As a result, Mark Schulz, the former President of International Operations at Ford and a founding Partner at Fontinalis, will join Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith on the startup’s Board of Directors. (Former Vice-chairman of Ernst & Young Jim Freer also joins the board.)

This adds to the $2 million in seed funding Wheelz raised pre-launch last summer, which was led by former Facebook VP and creator of the Social+Capital Partnership venture fund Chamath Palihaptiya, and included contributions from Felicis Ventures, Red Swan Ventures, and an impressive list of angel investors, including Freer and Sebastien De Halleax, the founder of Playfish. Wheelz’s total funding now sits just under $16 million.

For those unfamiliar with Wheelz, you can check out our coverage of their launch back in September. But, essentially, Wheelz aims to bring P2P car-sharing to campuses with a platform that enables students to connect safely and swiftly through Facebook integration, mobile apps, and its proprietary in-car hardware system called DriveBox. The startup initially launched at Stanford and has since popped up at UC Berkeley, USC and UCLA.

Among other things recommending it, Wheelz offers a wide selection of cars (sedans, hybrids, luxury cars, convertibles, vans, SUVs, and trucks), free, 24/7 customer support and roadside assistance, and users are protected by Wheelz’s million-dollar insurance policy, without affecting the individual’s own auto insurance.

As to how it works, once a student installs DriveBox in their car (for free), and has listed their car on Wheelz, other users can rent it, unlocking the car using the company’s iPhone app or Wheelz card. What’s cool is that the owner doesn’t have to be there to hand off the keys once they’ve agreed to sharing their car, as the company provides a “Key Box,” in which owners can leave their keys. The key box also comes with a gas card, so that when gas falls below a quarter of a tank, renters fill ‘er up using the card. The owner of the car decides how much the renter pays, setting hourly, daily, and weekly prices.

It’s a cool model, and one that looks to capitalize on the fact that on campus, P2P car sharing is on the rise. In a statement today, Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith said that he thinks P2P will have a big effect on the car-sharing market going forward: “We chose to make this investment because we believe that Wheelz has the right leadership, technology and business model to succeed in the emerging P2P space,” he said in a statement.

Wheelz does indeed have an experienced leadership team, as CEO Jeff Miller is a veteran of building sustainable transportation solutions, having worked for electric vehicle network provider Better Place. And co-founder and CTO Akhtar Jameel (also the architect of Wheelz’s technology platform) was formerly the CEO of Mercedes-Benz R&D and has held senior product and technology positions at Daimler, Better Place and Xerox PARC. (He was also awarded a Smithsonian Computer World Innovations gold medal for developing the world’s first Internet-connected car back in 1997.)

But what the Zipcar CEO didn’t mention was that there’s a lot of interest in the space, and competition is heating up. General Motors funded RelayRides in a very similar move and is offering its cars to the Google Ventures-backed startup to help it expand its reach, and, of course, there’s TechCrunch Disrupt winner GetAround, which has been getting a lot of buzz and has raised $5 million from a number of high-profile investors.

Again, it’s no surprise that Zipcar wants to tap into startups focusing on colleges and universities, something it’s done itself through its universities program. Campuses are early adopters and since a lot of students don’t own (or can’t afford) cars, they get used a lot more than they do in other places. Wheelz has a good-looking platform, some great technology, so the move makes a lot of sense. It will be interesting to see how the car-sharing tug-of-war plays out in 2012.

For more on Wheelz, check ‘em out at home here.

Nokia isn’t all that great with teasers. In August the company posted a teaser for the newest version of Symbian which just so happened to include the release date in it. Today, the teaser (at least) doesn’t give away the name of the product or anything huge like that, but it’s pretty clear what Nokia is hyping right here.

Obviously the big news here is some form of camera technology. We’re promised pure detail, pure depth, and pure definition — all in all, a pure view.

Nokia is clearly trying to play this up with the snowy magic and barely visible (but also totally visible) white text. The Finnish phone maker must have an imaging flagship ready to roll at MWC. Of course, we’ll be there with eyes peeled so stay tuned on what exactly Nokia has to offer that will give us a “pure view.”

Are you ready for a revolution? Today, after 3 years of machine learning development in stealth, BloomReach reveals its big data solution for website relevance optimization. BloomReach is capable of boosting organic search traffic by a whopping 80%, and will flip the search engine optimization and marketing industries upside down.

With a huge problem, a team of industry rockstars backed by $16 million from Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, and the patented technology capable of executing, BloomReach could become the first $10 billion enterprise marketing company, joining other core solutions like Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce. SEO is dead, long live big data SEO.

BloomReach’s cloud marketing platform attacks the lack of search result presence that plagues the content and products filling up the subpages of most big websites. Despite advertising, potential customers can’t find what they want or are dumped on generic, low-relevance, high-bounce rate pages. Sites could make so much more money if the could just connect what they’re already selling with the people who already want it.

Here’s how BloomReach’s core product BloomSearch fixes this. First, it crawls billions of web pages per day and analyzes your site’s user behavior, including browsing, buying, and searching activity. A semantic interpreter teases out the underlying purpose of your content by referencing it against 10 billion synonym pairs and 1 billion phrases. Content is then compared with what potential visitors are searching for on the web. Your website’s structure and content are then optimized to supply what users demand, and exposed to crawlers to score you a big increase in organic search discoverability.

For example, BloomSearch could determine that an ecommerce store sells “garden shears” but potential customers are searching for “garden scissors”. It would then add metadata and aggregated content from across your site to the “garden shears” page to make both vistors and search engine crawlers see it as relevant for “garden scissors” searches. BloomReach says it can give sites a whopping 80% increase in traffic, far beyond what most A/B testing systems or SEO consultants can provide.

The other two products BloomReach launches today maximize conversions from search advertising and social curation. BloomLift dynamically cobbles together landing pages for ads so visitors see exactly what they were hoping to buy or consume. The product can make the CPC-wasting 55% bounce rate of the average ad landing page a thing of the past.

Say you buy search keyword ads for “red sweater”. If someone searching for “red v-neck sweater” is shown your ad and clicks through, BloomReach generates a landing page of the products most relevant to their original search. It might show red scoop-neck sweaters and brown v-neck sweaters rather than just standard red sweaters. In a pilot program for an education company, BloomLift delivered 15% more conversions and a 50% increase in advertising profits.

BloomSocial crowdsources themed product pages by analyzing browsing patterns and surfacing clusters of related products. It could determine all the products people browse when they’re planning a picnic, and create special “picnic”-themed page. Visitors can then socially follow, comment on, and share products and opt to be notified of new deals.

In Fall 2008, Raj De Datta, a former Director of Product Marketing at Cisco and Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Mohr-Davidow Ventures met with Bain Capital Ventures about the idea to replace SEO. Bain Capital Ventures and angels including Chris Dixon gave Raj a $5 million Series A in February 2009 to recruit a team of geniuses capable of tackling the serious big data technology problem.

De Datta convinced world expert on machine learning Ashutosh Garg, formerly a Chief Scientist for Google who was working on his own search engine, to become CTO. Garg now has 50 approved and pending patents in online advertising, search, machine learning and bio-informatics. An $11 million series B round was secured from Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners in September 2010. It’s gone towards building out the product and bringing the Mountain View-based BloomReach’s employee count to 60 with talent poached from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Bing.

The biggest threat to BloomReach will be the need to adapt to new traffic sources beyond current search, ads, and social, as well as avoiding demotion from Google PageRank. However, Palo Alto Managing Director Ajay Agarwal of investor Bain Capital Ventures tells me “judging by time and effort spent building the team and product, it would be very difficult to compete with BloomReach, plus it’s built intellectual property to protect what it’s invented.”

Over the last year, 70 big brands including Orbitz, Crate&Barrel, and Oodle Marketplace have been testing BloomReach in verticals such as ecommerce, travel, and listings (jobs, cars, real estate). While in stealth the service was already generating 52 million additional page views and 25 million extra visits to client sites per quarter. It expects to generate $145 million in incremental revenue for clients in 2012.
Luckily, those clients only pay if their site performance improves, making it a sure-fire return on investment for enterprises. Because spend so directly leads to results, big data optimization could pull spend away from every other marketing channel, especially offline advertising where impact is almost impossible to measure.

BloomReach is the single most disruptive enterprise technology I’ve seen in years. CEO and co-founder Raj De Datta breaks down the company’s value proposition like this: “There is a stream of demand that will generate money for you, would you like to tap in?” Yes, enterprise will. So don’t be surprised when the acquisition bids flood in, SEO gurus get the axe, and you start actually finding what you search for.

Atlassian, which makes product management software for software development, is debuting a new version of its collaboration software for product teams, JIRA. As you may know, JIRA is a product and issue management tool that connects people, applications and activity to accelerate the software development process.

JIRA 5 is debuting today with a number of new social features such as mentions, sharing and live activity streams. JIRA 5’s new sharing and mention features make it easier to pull team members or co-workers into the conversation. Live activity streams update team members on all related activities and information, much like Facebook and Twitter activity streams.

An expanded plugin API and improved REST APIs allows third-party developers to integrate with JIRA. More than 30 integration partners, including Box, Gliffy, New Relic, Zephyr, Zendesk, Salesforce.com, Tempo and GetSatisfaction are launching JIRA 5 compatible third-party products. And more than 100 commercial and free plugins are also available with today’s launch.

Atlassian, which has over 20,000 customers of the product, says that JIRA is currently used by more than 70 percent of Fortune 100 companies. Because of the increasing number of large deployments, Atlassian is introducing a new JIRA Enterprise offering with additional support, training and engagement. Customers with 500 or more JIRA users can now receive 24/7 phone support, end-user training, and administrator certification, among other services.

Atlassian has been seeing success as one of the go-to software platforms for the software development world. Revenues for 2011 were $102 million, up 35 percent, and the company tells us it did $10 million in revenue in January alone.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Done right, it can also help the imitator tap into the zeitgeist and pick up more followers as a result.

That looks like it might have been some of the logic behind the relaunch of the website of Easy Living, a UK magazine published by Conde Nast, which relaunched this month with a Pinterest-like grid interface on its home page.

To be clear, the site is not about Easy Living turning into a social network itself — there are no followers in different categories, and users cannot “pin” content on the site (not yet, at least) — but the borrowing of the image-based layout, big on images and shorter on text, is unmistakeable.

There are others that have noted how Pinterest has affected the development of web-based content: sites like Quora have topic boards, for example, that also speak to the evolution of content discovery from straight linear timelines to those based on subjects.

This could be one of the first examples of a magazine’s website taking that to heart. It’s a fitting one: Easy Living’s subject matter is squarely in the area of lifestyle, home and fashion, three areas where Pinterest has particularly done well, picking up millions of pinners in the process.

The drive to make magazines more in the mold of hot web properties is something that we may see a lot more of in future, as publishers take tips in their attempt to keep their readers (and advertisers) loyal in the face of a wave of sophisticated (and free) online content. Let by companies like Pinterest.

At Conde Nast, this looks like it is just one part of a big push that Conde Nast is making into digital: today the publisher revealed in London that it is now selling 200,000 digital editions of its UK magazines, and now has 965,000 Facebook fans for its various magazines. Those magazine’s twitter feeds, it said, has nearly has many followers.

It now has a total of 13 iPhone apps, but it looks like tablet content might be a major point of investment in the months ahead:  it said that Vogue UK will start publishing a monthly iPad edition from September; and that 28 percent of its readers now own a tablet, with that number even higher among some of its titles: in the case of Wired UK, 50 percent of its readers own a tablet. With GQ, it’s 42 percent. Smartphones still blow all that out of the water: 90 percent of Conde Nast’s UK readers use smartphones, with more than half of them iPhones.

Still, there is more opportunity to get those mobile types more engaged in Conde Nast content: the company says that only 10 percent of its site traffic is coming from mobile devices.

The landgrab for music streaming customers is on, and Rdio — the U.S.-based startup from Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis — is joining that race in earnest.

The company today announced that it is now live in Spain and Portugal, just one month after it launched its first European service, in Germany. The total number of countries where Rdio now works is up to eight, including the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Germany, Australia and New Zealand — and hints that there will be more to come.

The market for music streaming services is getting increasingly crowded – we highlighted one of the more recent, from the music magazine Spin, just yesterday – and while some of these do not directly compete against each other for straight subscriptions, they are competing against each other for attention from consumers. And it’s not just limited to what is happening in the U.S., either. Rhapsody last month expanded its hitherto U.S.-only service to Europe.

For now it appears that Spotify is the one to beat. Last month, the company revealed that it has now racked up 3 million subscribers, up from 2.5 million in November 2011, and its conversion rates, taking free/trial users to paid services, is also on the rise.

Rdio has not released an updated subscriber figure — although we have reached out to the company to try to pin one down.

Unlike Spotify — which offers different service tiers including an ad-funded, free listening option in some markets — Rdio has taken a different approach, offering only paid services but guaranteeing no ads in the process.

(That might also have stemmed from a lesson learned by Zennström and Friis from their Skype days: that service, which is now getting acquired by Microsoft, to this day has not managed to convert most of its free users to enhanced, paying options.)

Here, users get access to 12 million songs, either for €4.99 for web-only access or €9.99 for web, mobile and other platform access. The latter can be used on iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices, as well as through the Sonos wireless audio system.

In addition to straight song search-and-play options, Rdio also offers users an offline listening mode, recommendations, and various of social features such as playlist sharing and collaboration.

While music streaming has had a lot of buzz in markets like the U.S. – due in part to the growth of services like Pandora and Rhapsody, but also because of the delayed and much-anticipated entry of Spotify last year – it will be interesting to see how services like Rdio gain traction in markets like Spain and Portugal. There could be a greenfield opportunity in any case: as TNW points out, Spotify only has a limited service in both markets at the moment.

Here are some recent stories on TechCrunch Gadgets:

Googlighting, Microsoft’s Latest Viral Attack On Google Docs [Video]

Samsung Galaxy Note Review: Who Do You Think You Are? Mr. Big Stuff?

Tokyoflash Releases The (Readable) Kisai Stencil Watch

This Kit Lets You Print Out The Internet

This Twin-Lens Reflex Camera Is Built Out Of LEGO

Twitter, Facebook and other social networks have long counted on the rise in smartphone usage to help fuel their growth: that trend, however, seems to also be taking a toll on mobile carriers — specifically in the form of revenues.

The analyst firm of Ovum, part of the Informa Group, has estimated that operators lost $13.9 billion in SMS revenue in 2011, as a result of their customers using services like Twitter and Facebook to message each other instead of the carriers’ own text messaging services. A separate report from mobile analytics firm Bytemobile has also charted huge growth in the use of social media on mobile — with operators getting virtually no benefit as a result.

Bytemobile, using data it gathers from its tier-one carrier customers, found that the average mobile user spends around nine minutes per day each on Facebook and YouTube on mobile. YouTube, being a video service, generates 300 times more traffic on data networks. In both of those cases, it notes, neither service generates any mobile operator revenue.

There is a caveat, of course: carriers are still making money from people using their phones to use social networks: users are, after all, still buying 3G and 4G data plans; and many (but not all) carriers also roll public Wi-Fi connectivity into those plans.

It’s questionable, though, whether in the short term that incremental data revenues for tweets, status updates and check-ins, and the more substantial data usage from services like YouTube, are able to offset the loss from the more lucrative messaging services that operators built up and still count on for revenues.

Longer term, Ovum predicts that by 2016 mobile data will bring in $419 billion in revenues for operators, out of a total service revenues of $1,047 billion.

Putting aside forecasts, today, the amount of revenue lost from messaging to social media appears that the figure is growing: Ovum points out that a $13.9 billion loss works out to some nine percent of messaging revenues for carriers worldwide, a rise from the six percent of revenues lost in messaging revenue to social messaging in 2010, when carriers lost $8.7 billion in SMS revenues to social media messaging.

Ovum’s suggestion? For carriers to work more closely on making their messaging and other services more collaborative — that is, more partnerships with social networks so that they use the carrier infrastructure to underpin their own communication tools.

There is some of that happening already, particularly in developing countries. France Telecom-owned operator Orange last week announced that it would be launching a new way of accessing Facebook in developing markets, using USSD functionality on GSM devices. It is offering this as an extra paid service to users.

But by and large, operators have missed the boat in more developed markets, where smartphones and mobile apps are the order of the day.

There is still an opportunity in those advanced markets. Carriers, if they got the lead out, could act as mobile app developers and make their own clients to access those social networks, which link in better with the services they already have in place — say for messaging or billing services. That’s something that has been relatively untapped so far.

Storify has become one of the best ways to create stories from social media — the startup says it has been used by 22 of the top 25 news sites in the United States, and that its users have curated a total of more than 3 million social objects. Now, you can do that curation from your iPad.

The company was already mobile, in the sense that stories (which are essentially timelines of content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and more) created with Storify tools could be viewed on smartphones and tablets. But with the new Storify iPad app, you can do more than look at a story — you can create one on an iPad, too. In fact, co-founder and CEO Xavier Damman argues that this may be the first great app for content creation (rather than consumption) on the iPad.

That may be selling other apps short, but maybe not — while there are (say) blogging or drawing apps that work adequately on the iPad, those aren’t really the ideal tools for creating content. (Put another way: There’s a reason I’m writing this post on my laptop.) Yet when Damman and his co-founder Burt Herman demonstrated Storify on the iPad earlier this month, I was impressed by how it seemed perfectly suited for the tablet. There’s a responsive, drag-and-drop interface for moving social network updates into the timeline, so it really feels like you’re building something with your fingertips. You can see the interface in action in the video below.

Most of Storify’s traffic comes in the form embedded versions of stories on major media sites, and Damman and Herman lay out a plausible scenario where a reporter could use Storify for iPad to file their report. For example, imagine a reporter at a conference who, instead of lugging their laptop around, just breaks out their iPad to curate the social media version of what’s happening, which in turn is embedded on their website.

Damman and Herman are hopeful that the app will see serious usage at the upcoming South by Southwest conference — which is, of course, a hub for social media sharing and oversharing. If you’re wandering around eight or 12 hours at a time, it’s easier to share the experience via iPad rather than a laptop with only a few hours of battery life.

At the same time, the vision isn’t limited to journalists. The pair says Storify has also gotten a strong response from brands, and they see it as a “social typewriter” that can allow anyone to tell a story.

“We always talk about how social media empowered people to create content,” says Herman (a former journalist himself). “It’s getting simpler and simpler, from 300 words to 140 characters. Now we’re overwhelmed by all this media, so this is the next big step — the curation of all that media that’s out there, extracting the meaning in the noise to tell stories.”

Damman says his team has been focused for the past seven months on creating a great experience for the iPad, though he isn’t ruling out expanding to other platforms like Android in the future.

Storify’s investors include Khosla Ventures.

The addition of the iPad into the point of sale system or cash register isn’t a new trend. Many small businesses are swapping out traditional cash registers for iPads and credit card processors like Square. But large restaurant chains and other establishments still need a complete front-to-back-of-house (i.e. a system that can send receipts to the kitchen) solution. Revel Systems hopes to be the go-to iPad-powered, comprehensive POS platform for restaurants.

Launched in August 2011, Revel Systems’ iPad software, cash register, weighing machine, and receipt printer are all optimized for restaurant and retail establishments. Along with the iPad-friendly cash register, Revel Systems can be completely customized for payroll, inventory tracking, web ordering, email receipts and more.

Lisa Falzone, co-founder and CEO of Revel System, explains that the platform is going after chains and restaurants that have at least $500,000 in yearly revenue. Revel, which resells the hardware and has created its own software for the iPad, charges these customers upwards of $3,000 for the full system plus a software licensing fee. Falzone says this compares to traditional point of sale systems which costs at least $6,000.

Currently Revel is seeing around $80 million in processing business with major brands. Beautiful Brands International has just tapped the startup to power POS systems at its multiple franchised locations nationwide under the Beautiful Brands International umbrella, including Camille’s Sidewalk Café, Dixie Cream, FreshBerry Frozen Yogurt Cafe and Rex’s Chicken.

Revel has raised $3.7 million from DCM.

…. Whether or not Facebook’s in-house analytics product, Insights, is working. Due to product changes in recent weeks, the tool has been particularly slow to update with the latest metrics, as the site’s creator, PageLever, has discovered. The startup uses Facebook’s API to provide an advanced custom interface for page owners who are trying to track impressions and a variety of other key numbers. Because of the problem, it has been getting all sorts of questions from clients lately asking a slightly different question: “Why isn’t PageLever working?”

Yes, WhyIsFacebookInsightsNotworking.com doesn’t actually try to answer what its name would seem to indicate. Only Facebook engineers working on the tool know exactly why Insights is not functioning at any given time, after all, and they are probably busy working to fix it instead of dealing with questions.

As cofounder Jeff Widman tells me, the real goal is to direct his clients — and anyone else in the industry — to a single site for a quick answer, instead of having to deal with one-off support tickets like they have been. Normally, as he and the site both note, delays take around 48 hours. (And clearly, the inspiration for it comes from the web standard, DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com.)

Longer term, Facebook could provide its own version of WhyIsFacebookInsightsNotWorking.com if it can’t get updates happening more regularly. The social network took a similar step in recent years in response to platform stability issue, introducing a general “Platform Live Status” note at the top of its developer blog. But obviously, since the company is months away from an IPO and working hard to lure in as many marketers as possible, it needs to get this situation taken care of ASAP. Otherwise, the analytics tool and the developer ecosystem around it are going to dampen the buzz.

Quora has fiddled around with its Credits system and unveiled some new features today, making two very notable changes. The first one is the elimination of the original “Pay to show to Topics” feature of Credits, where users would have to pay credits to have their questions show up to people following specific topics. Instead, users will have to pay 50 credits to ask a question, any question and all topic additions are “free.”

Users can earn credits by having their questions and answers upvoted, answering “Ask to Answer” questions or having users gift them credits.

In addition to the universal question fee, Quora has added Quora ‘Promote,’ a way to use credits to give desired content more visibility throughout Quora. With Quora Promote, a user pays one credit for every two people he or she would like to have the chosen content promoted to (i.e. 100 credits for 200 people). The people are people who would have seen it anyways, a.k.a. followers of the topic and/or of the person who posted it.

When asked if ‘Promote’ was just a Trojan Horse to test out whether Twitter-esque branded promoted content will work, Quora co-founder D’Angelo responded, “We don’t have anything planned like that. This is not a monetization product for us. The goal of this is to make Quora better … We try to connect you with everything you want to know about.”

D’Angelo thinks that giving people the opportunity to get more eyeballs on a question, post or answer is in line with Quora’s overall vision, which has expanded beyond Q&A since its January 2010 launch.

“Quora is this place that gives you access to people who are interested in particular topics and an audience for things you want to share,” D’Angelo tells me, “It’s about connecting you to these other people, experts who want to answer your question or people who follow topics you’re interested in.” Quora doesn’t share traffic stats publicly but D’Angelo assures me that the demographic has diversified beyond the tech industry to other sectors like fashion and entertainment.

It remains to be seen whether or not all these complicated and somewhat arcane gamification elements will catch on with mainstream or even power users. In the meantime, at least the barrier to entry will cut down on the Newsfeed noise.

When Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and several others in the organization were arrested in raids a month ago, it was noted by prosecutors that Dotcom’s rather wild lifestyle and propensity for spontaneous international travel, combined with his vast wealth, constituted a serious flight risk. He was denied bail at the time, at least until Feb. 22, when the US was to turn in its extradition paperwork.

And today in New Zealand, or rather tomorrow (it’s the 22nd in NZ), Dotcom was released under a number of conditions: he will have no Internet access, will not travel 80km from his home except in emergencies, and no helicopters would be permitted to fly to his property.

[image: Elliot Kember]

The reason for his being granted bail appears to be that investigators found he did not in fact have the resources to flee New Zealand. They say he is “highly disorganized” in money matters, and his main resources had been seized. It seems hard to believe that a person running a site the size of Megaupload, living in a $30 million house and with contacts all over the world, wouldn’t have any kind of backup plan in case of exactly this event (he is not entirely without foresight: there was a shotgun in the room where he was arrested). But the burden of proof is on the police to show that he does have those resources, and they could not do so.

Dotcom was released to a swarm of reporters, who asked him all manner of questions; he responded only that he was happy to be returning to his wife and kids, that he planned to fight his extradition, and that the way the cops treated him “felt a little bit like an audition to American Idol.”

On the legal front, the U.S. now has until March 2 to get its extradition paperwork in, but the extradition hearing for the four arrested will not be until August. Last week U.S. prosecutors added wire fraud to the heap of charges, and noted that not only were Megaupload’s user counts inflated, but less than one out of ten of those users had actually uploaded a file. Dotcom’s lawyers, on the other hand, insist this is at best a civil case and that the U.S. was overplaying its hand. The charges, they say, don’t merit extradition.

The fate of the site, meanwhile, is still hanging in the balance. It’s a simple matter of fact that whatever illegal activities in which the site may have been engaged, there were also perfectly legal files on there, access to which was abruptly cut. One hopes that a solution will be presented that allows, perhaps, one day’s access of users to their own files, but the U.S. Government doesn’t appear to be very concerned with this particular kind of collateral damage.

Last week, a Mountain Lion roared “Mac is the next big gaming platform.” Apple is bringing Game Center to Mac, it will support cross-platform iPhone vs. Mac play, and the Mac App Store will likely become more prominent. It’s time for mobile developers to decide if they’ll bring their games to Mac OS, and how they’ll port their controls and levels. Otherwise they risk having to claw their way up much more competitive charts.

Tomorrow, after 100 million downloads across platforms, ZeptoLab will release its hit Cut The Rope for Mac OS. After hooking me up with a pre-release download, the Moscow-based founders gave me the low down on the biggest challenges of porting to Mac OS, and why they think it’s critical that mobile developers don’t get left behind on the small screen.

Why Port?

“We see opportunity with the Mac App Store because it’s not as occupied as the mobile App Store. There are several quite nice games, but the competition is not as huge” said ZeptoLab’s twin brother founders Semyon and Efim Voinov. Angry Birds and Plants Vs. Zombies are already available, but other staples like Fruit Ninja, Words With Friends, and Where’s My Water are absent. Without these apps occupying the charts, there are places for other developers to swoop in and get discovered.

As expensive console and PC games like Call Of Duty and Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic appear in the store as well, paid apps ported from mobile may be able to get away with charging higher prices. On a phone $5 may seem steep, but the bigger screen size and history of $50 disc-based games may make $5 appear cheap on the Mac App Store.

“We started quite a while ago doing this in-house. It took a bit longer than we expected, but from a technical standpoint the process of porting to Mac was pretty straightforward. The tools are pretty good. The majority of work was on the design and art side.”

From Touch To Trackpad

In Cut The Rope, users cut ropes attached to pieces of candy, working with gravity, momentum, and other forces to guide the sweets into the mouth of a hungry baby dinosaur named Om Nom.”It was challenging porting to Mac OS, because Cut The Rope was intended for touch controls” the Voinovs admit.

“It’s tricky to move from one point of the screen to another very quickly. It’s pretty natural with fingers, but different with the mouse.” When the game was ported to HTML5, some laptop users reported difficulty holding down the mouse click button while using another finger for precise movements.

To keep the original feel intact but give players an optimized control scheme for the track pad and mouse, the Voinovs added the option to hover near a rope to highlight it and click to cut it, rather than swiping. If it helps, users can leave it on, or disable it if they find it too different from the mobile version. During testing, the team noticed that levels where you had to make several quick cuts could leave users cursing the controls. To compensate, they made the physics of the Mac version work just a little slower.

Developers should determine which controls might be harder with a mouse and consider adding similar options, keyboard shortcuts, or on-screen buttons that make use of the extra real estate. If those aren’t enough, similar tweaks can be made to a game’s physics to reduce player frustration.

High Resolution Landscape Level Design

Meanwhile, many of Cut The Ropes levels were designed for a portrait orientation screen, while most Mac monitors stay fixed in the landscape position. The Voinovs took a methodical approach, playing each level of their mobile game and noting which were too tall and would need lay out adjustments. “We realized it was more half of the levels”, making level redesign a significant time-suck. Other devs should factor this into their decisions to port and release schedules.

Bigger screens also require higher resolution artwork. Rather than seeing this as busy work, ZeptoLab took the chance to differentiate the Mac OS experience. “We made sure it would look great, really crisp and sharp. It makes it special and give people who already played on mobile a reason [to buy the Mac OS version]. You can see all the little details of the graphics in the game.” Now as the team makes new level packs, they’re using the Mac OS resolution standards that are much easier to scale down than scale up.

Diversifying Revenue Streams

“This is our first experience releasing a Mac OS game. We believe it will develop into a bigger thing over time” Semyon told me. ZeptoLab will be closely watching the success of the game, but is simultaneously seeking other revenue sources. Last week it released Cut The Rope for the Barnes & Noble Nook reader. Apple TV and Siri are two other big platforms that developers should have on their radars.

At the New York Toy Fair, ZeptoLab announced licensing deals with Mattel, Hasbro, JAKKS Pacific, and Li & Fung to create Om Nom plush dolls, a board game, and clothing line based on Cut The Rope. “We’re trying to keep the balance. Merchandise is important, but there’s no merchandise without a good product” the brothers say. Merch has been huge for Rovio‘s Angry Birds, and now Zynga has struck licensing deals, legitimizing offline revenue streams.

Finally, while Cut The Rope is in 4th on the all-time App Store paid app chart, ZeptoLab is eager to invent new intellectual property, ”We have this creative urge to do cool new things.”

Developers shouldn’t limit themselves to porting existing games. The Mac OS gaming platform comes with unique characteristics like the trackpad to be designed for, rather than around. “Cut the ropes to your imagination” a some hack writer might say. I’ll just leave you with, “Go make people happy, that’s your art.”

For more game design coverage, check out:

How Evil Monkeys Chased Temple Run To App Store #1 – thoughts on freemium vs premium from the game’s developers

CCP Games, the makers of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game EVE Online, says the company brought in $66 million in revenue last year.

The game, a science fictional adventure set in a star cluster dominated by five major civilizations, first launched in 2003, and its subscriber base (currently about 400,000) has grown every year since launch. Revenue has been growing too, at a compound annual growth rate of 53 percent, bringing in total revenue of $300 million over the game’s lifetime. As for profits, CCP would only say that it has “very healthy margins” — a claim backed up by the fact that it has grown to more than 450 employees despite only raising $3 million in seed funding.

This might seem like an illustration that traditional online gaming, overshadowed in the media by casual social games like those from Zynga, can still work as a business model. At the same time, CCP’s new CMO David Reid says the company has been excited to embrace new models, in addition to the traditional subscriptions offered by EVE.

CCP has already been experimenting outside the standard subscription model in EVE, by allowing rich subscribers to essentially pay for others to play, in exchange for virtual currency — something that has been used by 40,000 people, the company says. Its next game, DUST 514 is scheduled for release this summer, and will go further in this direction, charging players for in-game items rather than subscriptions or playing time.

That’s not the only ambitious thing about DUST. With its first-person shooter gameplay, this is CCP’s attempt to reach the audience that made franchises like Call of Duty a hit, while also connecting to the EVE universe. Through mechanisms like orbital bombardment, the space-based players in EVE can actually affect the planet-based combat in DUST, and vice versa.

As a result of its plans for DUST, as well as Asian expansion for EVE, CCP says 2012 will be its biggest year yet. In fact, the Icelandic company’s CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson says an IPO is a possibility, though predictably, he wouldn’t commit to anything.

“We want to be ready for an IPO from a policy standpoint,” Petursson says. “We’re quite a substantial company, so we’re thinking, ‘Okay, what is the next step?’”

If you run a big website, you have a range of good options for staying protected from malicious hacks: hardware from enterprise-oriented companies like Cisco or McAfee, your own in-house support, or hosted professional blog services like WordPress VIP (which is what TechCrunch uses). If you’re a smaller site out on the open web, you have weaker options — at least if you want to get auto-updated responses to a wide range of security problems.

Israeli startup 6Scan is out to change that, launching a WordPress plugin today that automatically scans and updates to protect against the latest issues coming up across the web. By “automatically,” I mean that the company’s security team monitors the web and does its own research to find problems, then pushes an update to all of its users. These go out about every hour, according to co-founder and chief executive Nitzan Miron, as they’re discovered and added to the company’s system.

Key problems it fixes include SQL injections, cross-site scripting, directory transversals, remote file inclusion and the other top security risks. The scanning software is offered for free, but it will fix remove risks and provide other features, like zero-day research and additional email and SMS support for $10 a month. Although the Israeli company has only been around since April of last year, Miron and his co-founder Yaron Tal worked in web security in their country’s military over the previous years — they’re not new to the space.

Other website guards that serve small to medium-sized sites include Dasient (now part of Twitter), Armorize, StopTheHacker (also recently funded) and CodeGuard. They each provide a range of competing services for cheaply and quickly identifying threats, and they all offer various methods for containing or removing problems. Miron says that the ability to fix existing vulnerabilities instead of requiring users to take additional actions helps separate 6Scan’s offering from web-based competitors. (Note: I haven’t tested every web site security system around, but so far I haven’t seen others that do this, exactly. Tell me if otherwise in the comments).

More generally, another type of competitor here are companies that offer hosted, supported sites for smaller businesses, that accomplish the marketing goals at stand-alone websites. This can include anything from Facebook pages to Tumblr accounts to hosted site creators like Weebly or Webs.com. On that front, Miron says that they’re also talking to hosting companies to get their software auto-installed, and they’ve been getting some interest — so, they’re not only going straight for consumer-style smaller businesses running their own sites.

While WordPress is the first live version, Miron says support for other content management systems are coming soon, with Joomla and Drupal in the next few days. In its private beta, 6Scan has already added up a few thousand customers, he adds, many of whom are already paying.

The company has so far raised an undisclosed round from YL Ventures, following on seed funding from Israeli incubator Venturegeeks last year. Miron is coming through town now, and planning to present at the SF New Tech cloud meetup at Might tomorrow.