The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- PayPal: Holiday Mobile Payments Up 300 Percent
- 12 Days Of Christmas: Zune HD
- Nuthin’ But A “Z” Thang: Zynga Premieres Mafia Wars Music Partnership With Dr. Dre
- Wildfire Launches A ‘Compete.com’ For Twitter And Facebook Accounts
- 9 Spectacular Tron Gifts For You And Yours
- Former Palm CEO John Rubinstein Joins Amazon’s Board
- Kindle For Android Update Lets Users Buy And Sync 100+ Newspapers, Magazines
- HelloTXT Launches Fun Social Dashboard Apps For iOS, Android
- Citrix Acquires Collaboration Software Maker Netviewer
- Opera 11 Sees 6.7 Million Downloads In First Day–Was It The Bacon?
- Ok Tumblr, This Is Getting Just A Little Embarrassing
- EU Summit Twitter Wall Trial Goes Awry As Berlusconi Bashers Flood #EUCO Stream
- Video: A Visit To Tokyo-Based Tech Company AITIA
- Spabba Gives Your Del.icio.us Bookmarks A New Home
- Word Lens Translates Words Inside of Images. Yes Really.
- The iPod Nano Watch Nears $1 Million In Crowdsourced Funding From Kickstarter
- Ten Water Tech Startups To Watch, All 2010 Imagine H2O Competition Finalists
- The Foursquare For Websites OneTrueFan Launches In Beta, Opens Up To Publishers
- ChompOn Turns Display Ads Into Deals
- Note to Estranged Co-Founders: Settle Your Baggage First, Pitch Reporters Second
- Don’t Know What Gifts To Get Your Hipster Friends? Make Them Take The Etsy Taste Test
- Big Day For Facebook: New Pages, Memories, And Downtime
- Foodspotting Swallows Food Sharing Community Eat.ly
- Now You Can Follow Other Commenters On Disqus
- Ask a VC: Live from New York It’s Habib Kairouz
| PayPal: Holiday Mobile Payments Up 300 Percent Posted: 17 Dec 2010 09:11 AM PST
PayPal previously reported a 27 percent increase in total payment volume on Black Friday 2010, compared to the previous year. Generally, PayPal saw an approximately 310 percent increase in mobile shopping on Black Friday. Additionally, PayPal recently updated its iPhone app with the ability to make donations on the fly to a number of charities. The company is announcing today that it has seen a 67 percentage increase in mobile donations from the official start of the shopping season compared to last year. The fact that overall mobile payments for PayPal, which is a popular mobile payments vendor, are up by 300 percent this year is just another sign that e-commerce is going to perform well this holiday season.        
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| Posted: 17 Dec 2010 08:30 AM PST
What do you need to do? Leave a comment below listing your top three albums of 2010.        
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| Nuthin’ But A “Z” Thang: Zynga Premieres Mafia Wars Music Partnership With Dr. Dre Posted: 17 Dec 2010 08:00 AM PST Social gaming giant is partnering once again with a high-profile rap star for its game Mafia Wars. In August, Snoop Dogg joined Zynga in blowing up a 4-ton armored truck in the middle of the desert in Nevada. And today, Zynga is announcing its first ever in-game music partnership, via its popular Mafia Wars game, with rap star Dr. Dre. Mafia Wars, which revolves around a player’s criminal empire by creating clans, is currently being played by 19 milllion people each month on Facebook and the iPhone. The deal essentially allows Mafia Wars players access to watch the music video for Dr.Dre’s first single,”Kush,” from Dre’s soon to be released album “Detox.” A stream of the video, which also features Snoop Dogg and Akon, can be watched within the game. Mafia Wars is also featuring a number of Dr.Dre-inspired game experiences including limited edition virtual goods within a "Hustlin' wit Dre" portion of the game. Players will be able to collect Dr.Dre-inspired virtual goods such as headphones, a vintage car, and weapons. And players can purchase the new single via an iTunes link available within the game. These partnerships and campaigns have proven to be successful in the past. With the Snoop Dogg deal, Mafia Wars reached 10 million visitors in its first two weeks, and more than 2 million viewers dialed in to watch the truck blowup on Ustream. Generally, Zynga’s games are growing like gangbusters even without celebrity deals. The gaming company’s newest game, Cityville, is already seeing 6 million daily active users, making it the fastest growing game in the company's history.        
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| Wildfire Launches A ‘Compete.com’ For Twitter And Facebook Accounts Posted: 17 Dec 2010 08:00 AM PST
The tool is pretty straightforward: enter the Twitter or Facebook accounts that you want to compare, and the site will plot out the total number of follower/fans they have. If you don’t want to bother finding the appropriate links to each profile, you can just enter the name of the company, and the tool will associate it with the proper social media accounts automatically (enter ‘Wal-Mart’, and it will show you Wal-Mart’s Twitter and Facebook accounts). Media Monitor will add a little context to the data by showing the percentage change over recent time periods, and you can overlay multiple company profiles onto the same graph. It’s a neat tool, but Wildfire isn’t the first service to offer these kind of analytics. TwitterCounter lets you easily visualize a user’s growth over time, and AllFacebook’s Pages tool does something similar for Facebook fans. Disclosure: We recently used Wildfire to run a sweepstakes for the Cr-48.
       
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| 9 Spectacular Tron Gifts For You And Yours Posted: 17 Dec 2010 07:34 AM PST
       
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| Former Palm CEO John Rubinstein Joins Amazon’s Board Posted: 17 Dec 2010 07:10 AM PST Former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein was elected to join Amazon’s board, the company announced today via an SEC filing. Rubisntein is currently a senior VP and general manager at Hewlett-Packard, following HP’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm earlier this year. Before joining Palm, Rubinstein was in charge of Apple’s iPod division and was the company’s senior hardware executive. At Palm, he tried to take on his former employer by developing WebOS smartphones which compete with the iPhone. Going after Apple took him off Steve Jobs’ Christmas list. Amazon also competes directly with Apple on various fronts, including music and movie downloads and digital books. Rubinstein’s experience at Apple with the iPod and how the iTunes Store operated, although a bit dated now, could prove useful to Amazon as it tries to move from selling physical to digital media. Rubinstein will become only the fifth member of Amazon’s unusually small board. He will join Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Madrona VC Tom Alberg, Kleiner Perkins VC Bing Gordon, and academic John Seely Brown.        
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| Kindle For Android Update Lets Users Buy And Sync 100+ Newspapers, Magazines Posted: 17 Dec 2010 06:29 AM PST Amazon this morning announced that its Android app is the first Kindle application to receive an update that enables users to buy, read, and sync over 100 newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times and Newsweek. Kindle for Android users can now purchase a single issue or subscribe to a host of newspapers and magazines, and have them automatically delivered, in color, to their Android-powered device. For a list of newspapers and magazines available on Kindle for Android, head on over here. Other updates to the Kindle for Android app include the addition of an in-app store, (finally) enabling customers to discover, buy, and download over 750,000 Kindle books without leaving the app, as well as social network integration, which allows customers to share their progress in a book using Google's built-in Share functionality. The new Kindle for Android app is available from Android Market, and customers who have already downloaded the app should receive the update automatically. So why start with Android? According to Russ Grandinetti, VP Amazon Kindle, it’s the fastest-growing application. That may be the case, but the real question is when – and if – this functionality will hit the iOS platform. An iPad version, in particular, would be quite exciting.        
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| HelloTXT Launches Fun Social Dashboard Apps For iOS, Android Posted: 17 Dec 2010 06:24 AM PST HelloTXT, a product from mobile media and technology company Buongiorno, is just one of many mobile and Web applications one can use for updating various social networks from a single interface. It is, nevertheless, a smooth and mighty fine one. The company has just announced a slew of improvements across all supported platforms, including for iPhone, iPad, Android and its Web app. New features include in-line media viewing, which lets users see links, photo, videos and whatnot on supported networks without having to leave the feed view, and a new display for blogs and other online content via RSS. Social activities such as retweeting, liking and commenting have also been improved. What makes HelloTXT worth a whirl in my opinion, is the Doodle feature, which lets you draw status updates and make fun of your Facebook friends (sorry Alexia), as well as the Suggestions feature, which gives you amusing suggestions for status updates whenever your mind goes blank. Try it out and tell us what you think.        
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| Citrix Acquires Collaboration Software Maker Netviewer Posted: 17 Dec 2010 05:33 AM PST  Citrix Online, a division of Citrix Systems, this morning announced that it is to acquire Netviewer, a privately-held SaaS vendor in collaboration and IT services based in Germany. Netviewer will become an integral part of Citrix' online services division, but the terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
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| Opera 11 Sees 6.7 Million Downloads In First Day–Was It The Bacon? Posted: 17 Dec 2010 05:27 AM PST
It looks like the release was a success; Opera just announced that it saw 6.7 million downloads of the new browser in the first day alone. So how does that compare to downloads of Opera 10? Well, the company says that in its first week open to the public, Opera 10 was only downloaded 1.7 million times per day. One factor that helped increase downloads, says Opera, is the auto-update feature which sends existing users a message to download the new version of the browser. But the company admits that not every user received the auto-update message. And Opera advertised Opera 11′s release, including a mouth-watering ad on Reddit using bacon as a lure. A survey of people downloading Opera for the first time had 53% of its respondents coming from Firefox, and 43% coming from IE. And none from Chrome? Opera’s iPhone app saw 1 million downloads in its first day in the app store earlier this year. And Opera just announced that it hit 150 million users worldwide across its desktop and mobile browsers. For comparison, Microsoft’s beta version of IE9 was downloaded 2 million times in the first two days the browser was open to the public.        
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| Ok Tumblr, This Is Getting Just A Little Embarrassing Posted: 17 Dec 2010 04:54 AM PST
I’m not even a Tumblr user, but this is getting out of hand. Update: and they’re partially back up now, but still terribly unstable. I mean, even Twitter is up for the moment, but their status blog – hosted on Tumblr – is down. How’s that for irony? Worse, my colleague MG Siegler’s personal blog is also – gasp – down! We’ll check back in a day or so to see if Tumblr is back up. At least they’re aware of the issues. Update 2: wow they totally deleted that tweet! Here’s what it said:
       
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| EU Summit Twitter Wall Trial Goes Awry As Berlusconi Bashers Flood #EUCO Stream Posted: 17 Dec 2010 04:43 AM PST  Twitter is undeniably a great way to catch the vibe on what's going on pretty much anywhere in the world, and trending topics and search / hashtags facilitate this tremendously. Kudos to the EU for experimenting with live Twitter stream projections at official summits in that regard ... but they still need to learn that moderation is important, too. Using Tweetwall Pro, a way for event organizers to feed live tweets onto screens, an experiment in the atrium of the EU summit building in Brussels held yesterday didn't quite proceed as planned. The live tweet stream, which was displayed on multiple plasma TVs throughout the building, was abruptly shut down after Italian Twitter users hijacked the #euco stream with anti-Berlusconi messages, calling the politician a mafioso and a pedophile.
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| Video: A Visit To Tokyo-Based Tech Company AITIA Posted: 17 Dec 2010 02:00 AM PST  Being based in Tokyo has many advantages, and one of them is to be able to visit awesome tech startups like AITIA: the Tokyo-based startup consists of just two people (a CEO and a CTO), having hired a third person (to run the business side of things) just three months ago. What's more important is that they have developed pretty impressive mobile technology: the company's CTO single-handedly developed what is supposed to be the world's first augmented reality "motion camera app". Read the rest on MobileCrunch.
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| Spabba Gives Your Del.icio.us Bookmarks A New Home Posted: 16 Dec 2010 11:53 PM PST Spabba is a service quickly put together by Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan to help you preserve all of your Del.ic.io.us bookmarks, because its days are numbered apparently. Kaplan wrote most of the Spabba code while grocery shopping in Safeway, using an FTP program on his iPhone. While there are quite a few services (including Yahoo itself) that let you export Delicious bookmarks, Spabba (which you probably shouldn’t Google) also lets you export tags, is searchable and was built in 30 minutes. And while the service nostalgically only supports pre-Yahoo Del.icio.us accounts at the moment, Kaplan plans on post-Yahoo support as well as an export feature, if there’s enough demand. Spabba is most definitely part of a groundswell of grassroots Del.icio.us nostalgia. It seems like only yesterday we were reporting on the acquisition, and now … Bathetic posts like “R.I.P. Delicious: You Were So Beautiful to Me”, the #savedelicious hashtag and website and very ambitious tweets like this one all say the same thing, :(. Hey Yahoo, killing this has hurt your brand more than keeping it would have.        
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| Word Lens Translates Words Inside of Images. Yes Really. Posted: 16 Dec 2010 06:01 PM PST Ever been confused at a restaurant in a foreign country and wish you could just scan your menu with your iPhone and get an instant translation? Well as of today you are one step closer thanks to Word Lens from QuestVisual. The iPhone app, which hit iTunes last night, is the culmination of 2 1/2 years of work from founders Otavio Good and John DeWeese. The paid app, which currently offers only English to Spanish and Spanish to English translation for $4.99, uses Optical Character Recognition technology to execute something which might as well be magic. This is what the future, literally, looks like. Founder Good explains the app’s process simply, “It tries to find out what the letters are and then looks in the dictionary. Then it draws the words back on the screen in translation.” Right now the app is mostly word for word translation, useful if you’re looking to get the gist of something like a dish on a menu or what a road sign says. At the moment the only existing services even remotely like this are Pleco, a Chinese learning app and a feature on Google Goggles where you can snap a stillshot and send that in for translation. Word Lens is currently self-funded. Good says that the obvious steps for Word Lens’ future is to get more languages in. He’s planning on incorporating major European languages and is also thinking about other potential uses including a reader for the blind, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we did French next, Italian and since my mom is Brazilian, Portuguese.” Says Good, modestly, “The translation isn’t perfect, but it gets the point across.” You can try it out for yourself here.        
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| The iPod Nano Watch Nears $1 Million In Crowdsourced Funding From Kickstarter Posted: 16 Dec 2010 05:28 PM PST
With just about 2 hours to go before the funding closes, the project to turn iPod nanos into watches is closing in on a million dollars in funding. Yes, they’re now way more than double the next closest project in terms of funding through Kickstarter. In total, over 13,000 people have contributed just over $918,000 for the project. What’s especially insane is that the initial goal for the fundraising was $15,000. Clearly, the project’s creator, Scott Wilson, underestimated demand. So will it become the first $1 million Kickstarter company? It should be close. More than 1,000 people have pushed the total up over $100,000 in just the past day. “We’ve seen numerous projects rally strongly in their final 24 hours. We’re unsure if it can make the $1M milestone, but we’re excited about the prospect and we’ll be watching!,” Kickstarter’s Justin Kazmark tells us. The first batch of watches are set to launch at the end of this month, with the rest coming early next year. You can watch it being manufactured in China here.        
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| Ten Water Tech Startups To Watch, All 2010 Imagine H2O Competition Finalists Posted: 16 Dec 2010 05:13 PM PST
Sure, oil and water don’t mix. Neither do electricity and water. There’s still a serious connection between energy and H2O. We use huge amounts of power to get our water, and vice versa. According to the American Council For An Energy Efficient Economy:
Further research by the River Network found:
At utilities and in the home, where consumers use a significant amount of energy to heat their water, reducing water consumption almost always leads to lower costs, reduced energy consumption and less air pollution. Imagine H2O seeks to halt a widely anticipated global water crisis, but also views global water problems today as an estimated $500 billion market opportunity for providers of water products and services. In 2009, Fruition Sciences took the Imagine H2O grand prize for a system that monitors vineyards with wireless sensors, weather stations and software, ensuring that vines are irrigated efficiently, leading to optimal berry (or grape) yields. The Fruition Sciences website explains:
This year’s IH2O grand prize winners will receive at least $20,000 in cash, $15,000 of in-kind legal services and the same amount in consulting services. IH2O’s second and third place winners will each receive at least $10,000 in cash, $7,500 of in-kind legal and the same amount in accounting services. They will be chosen by and announced in March 2011. A list of the contenders, with company-provided descriptions, follows below: Agua Via develops a 1-atomic layer thick nanotech membrane that enables desalination at a 66% energy reduction and 50% cost reduction, providing energy-efficient purification and wastewater remediation. BlackGold Biofuels – Recovers energy from wastewater streams, creating lucrative renewable energy assets from pollution liabilities. FogBusters Inc. – Treats petroleum, biofuel and food processing wastewater "better, faster, cheaper, cleaner and greener" while capturing the FOG (fat, oil and grease) to make into biodiesel. Hydrovolts – Makes portable floating turbines that make renewable energy and clean water from an untapped global resource of hydrokinetic energy in water canals. mOasis (no website publicly available yet) – Harnesses water on any land in the world so that plants grow and the planet can restore its ability to sustain life. NLine Energy, Inc. – Converts wasted energy found in water transmission and distribution systems into renewable energy. Pilus Energy – Harnesses genetically enhanced bacteria in scalable electrogenic bioreactor and harvests the electricity and biogases from their metabolism of organics like those found in wastewater. Puralytics – Solves critical water contamination problems with environmentally superior products. Solar-Machines – Innovative, non-PV based technology directly and efficiently converts solar energy into mechanical work for water pumping applications. Water Resources Management Co. (WRMC) – Helps water utilities realize the full benefits of their investments in advanced meter reading, system control and asset management.        
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| The Foursquare For Websites OneTrueFan Launches In Beta, Opens Up To Publishers Posted: 16 Dec 2010 04:00 PM PST
OneTrueFan is a service for web publishers that allows visitors to earn badges for interacting and sharing content on the site. The startup revolves around a game-format for visitors that allows you to see who is reading content in the site, compete for the most engagement and encourages you to share content within the service and on social networks. As users share via OneTrueFan, they can earn points, and special badges from publishers. Users can see a leaderboard of fellow users who have been sharing content on a particular site and can mouse over fellow contributors to see more information about how they've been interacting with a site. All of this info can be seen on an interactive player bar at the bottom of a publisher's website. With the beta launch, the OneTrueFan player bar has gotten a massive visual and UI upgrade. And publishers can now install OneTrueFan on their site (previously only visitors could use OneTrueFan through its browser add-on). The startup has also rolled out a news feed, which taps into your Twitter feed to give you a list of links you should visit based on what your contacts shared. Links are ordered based upon a combination of friends who have shared and visited the URL, strangers who have shared and visited the URL and how long ago the page was posted. Publishers will ultimately have access to a version of this news feed that lets them know in real-time what their fans are most interested in around the web. The appeal of OneTrueFan for publishers is that it goes beyond a check-in to creates an element of interactivity around sharing of their content. If the startup can gain enough publisher and user participation, it could be an interesting model for news sites, in particular. OneTrueFan is the brainchild of MyBlogLog’s founders Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson. MyBlogLog was acquired by Yahoo in 2007 (although we found out today that Yahoo is shuttering the service) Unsurprisingly, some of OneTrueFan’s interface is similar to MyBlogLog. OneTrueFan has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, First Round Capital, David Cohen and Bob Pasker.
       
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| ChompOn Turns Display Ads Into Deals Posted: 16 Dec 2010 02:39 PM PST
Niche websites can now get the monetization of ecommerce sites like Groupon applied to the scale of a display ad with ChompOn’s embeds. The ChompOn platform also allows deal providers to bid on getting their ads sold and automatically tracks sales and other analytics for both merchants and publishers. Deals like this one can now be distributed across any affiliate site whether it’s part of the Chompon network or not. Thus far Chompon is working with 50 partners including Blackbook Magazine, JDeal and as of today the wine branch of Beyondtherack, a flash deals site and their largest partner thus far. While CEO Samuel Yam wouldn’t get into specifics, the service currently has a few hundred thousand dollars in monthly gross revenue and will be announcing additional partnerships in the coming months.        
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| Note to Estranged Co-Founders: Settle Your Baggage First, Pitch Reporters Second Posted: 16 Dec 2010 02:33 PM PST
And then all Hell broke loose in Bonobos land. As far as I can tell, Dunn didn’t say anything inaccurate, and so I didn’t write anything inaccurate. But by all accounts the details of his co-founder’s role in launching the company were glossed over. To Dunn’s credit, he was the first one to call me this morning and ask me to make some changes to reflect what he’d left out. I’ve since updated the original story to explain that Brian Spaly was really the one who designed the pants in the early days, and the ideas for how to fix the problem with how pants fit were his. Afterwards the two had a falling out, the accounts of which are mixed and I won’t hash out the he-said/he-said debate that I’ve been dragged into today. None of this is uncommon when two friends or roommates start a company. Startups are pressure cookers, and in the early days there are daily forks in the road about which a lot of founders disagree. And it doesn’t distract from how impressive of a job Dunn has done taking Spaly’s designs and building them into a burgeoning brand that captured a large funding round from two of the most prominent VCs in the space. And Spaly himself has gone on to found a new company called Trunk Club. But what was uncommon about it was that Dunn didn’t lay his cards on the table in the interview, and that I have been dragged into a nasty aftermath, instead of the two handling the disagreement between themselves before or after the fact. I bring this up to clear up any confusion, first of all. I’m not comfortable continually tweaking a story that dramatically without an explanation, especially since a lot of our stories are syndicated right when they are published, and other things are written based on what we write. But I also bring it up, because it’s an important lesson for every founder team. Lately, I’ve been hearing some anecdotal accounts of co-founders doing everything with a handshake and having huge misunderstandings later on. Have we learned nothing from Facebook’s lawsuits? Even if you are best friends and will be forever, formalize relationships on paper. And if one of you leaves the company, negotiate what that means, who is called a co-founder and who isn’t, what each of you gets credit for and how you will handle it when someone asks you about it. Because if you are successful, someone will. Neither Dunn nor Spaly should have been surprised this would become an issue when the company was raising large amounts of money and seeking press as part of its customer acquisition strategy. “Why’d you start this company?” shouldn’t be an unanticipated question when you’re pitching TechCrunch, and if your answer isn’t the unvarnished truth, at least make sure you’re all on the same page about what that answer is.        
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| Don’t Know What Gifts To Get Your Hipster Friends? Make Them Take The Etsy Taste Test Posted: 16 Dec 2010 01:43 PM PST Gift giving can be so hard, especially if you have a bunch of hipster friends who turn their noses at anything even slightly pedestrian. (“A box of See’s Candy that you bought at the airport? Are you kidding me?”). Well, fear not. All you need to do is make them take this little Etsy Taste Test on the commerce site for hand-crafted goods. After selecting a series of product photos that match their taste, they wil be presented with a grid of recommended products, along with other people on Etsy who have similar tastes. Or you can take the test yourself and pass around the link to people who might want to buy you a present but have no idea what to get (because your taste is so discerning). If you want to get me a present, here is my page. The results are sort of hit or miss. I like that modern table, but it’s going a little crazy with the wallet suggestions (6 of the first 12 items—I only picked one wallet!), and I really don’t need a pair of Candy red high heels. But at least the suggestions are all original. This is just an experiment for Etsy, but it’s a fun way to find new products. And if you can’t find anything there, try the Hunch Gift-O-Matic.        
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| Big Day For Facebook: New Pages, Memories, And Downtime Posted: 16 Dec 2010 01:40 PM PST
Unfortunately, you can’t see any of these right now, because Facebook — and the myriad Like buttons scattered across the web — are all down hard. Update: It’s back up for me as of 1:45 PM PST. Given its massive distribution and the fact that it services as the primary login system for many sites, any downtime for Facebook is a big deal. We’ll update once the site comes back up — looks like it’s been down for around 15 minutes so far. For the time being though, let’s recap the features that Facebook rolled out (apparently a bit too quickly). The new Facebook Pages look a lot like Facebook Place pages and the updated user profiles. Application tabs have been moved from a nav bar resting on top of the Wall to the left side-bar, just beneath the Page’s main image. Pages can also now feature lists of Facebook users, the same way you can feature your friends on your Facebook profile. There’s also a new button that lets page administrator ‘Login as Page’, which lets you receive notifications for just your page, and not your personal account. Facebook Memories is still a bit mysterious because it was only showing up for a few minutes at a time, according to numerous tweets on the feature. The Next Web nabbed a shot of the navigation bar for Memories (seen below) but it doesn’t do much to show what the feature actually looks like. From the reports on Twitter, Memories lets you jump through your entire history on Facebook, allowing you to scan through all of the comments, photos, and connections you’ve established over time. Some users are describing it as creepy, and it’s not clear if you can look at the Memories tabs of your friends (which would be a little weird) or just your own. Let us know in the comments if you got a chance to try out the feature, we’ve reached out to Facebook for more information.
Update 2:: Facebook is also apparently testing a new option for News Feed called ‘Outside World’. It’s unclear what this is, but it may be a ranked list of hot news stories, videos, and other content that’s been shared online. This image is from Casschin on Twitter: Update 3: Facebook has just tweeted that “some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It’s now back to normal.” So looks like we won’t be seeing Memories or the ‘Outside World’ view just yet.        
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| Foodspotting Swallows Food Sharing Community Eat.ly Posted: 16 Dec 2010 12:35 PM PST
Foodspotting, the service that allows you to take pictures of your food to share with others, is acquiring a competitor in the space: Eat.ly. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eat.ly’s team writes: With a best-in-class iPhone app, awesome integration with the Foursquare API and a number of other exciting moves ahead, Foodspotting will be a great place for the Eat.ly community. Eat.ly, which was founded by current Foursquare employees, is sort of like a Flickr for food—it allows you to keep a visual record of meals you've eaten, and then share your images with friends, family, or social networks. Users could also rate meals using our 'healthiness scale' of 1 to 100. Foodspotting goes beyond just the sharing component and allows users to rate foods, find food they might enjoy by their location and more. Foodspotting currently has nearly 500,000 users and 10,000 new photos are uploaded to Foodspotting each week worldwide. Foodspotting, which offers a popular iPhone app, is on a roll. The startup hjust secured $750,000 in new funding and scored deals with both Zagat and The Travel Channel for partnerships.        
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| Now You Can Follow Other Commenters On Disqus Posted: 16 Dec 2010 12:06 PM PST
For those who haven’t used Disqus, the service lets you create one profile for all of your comments across any of the hundreds of thousands of sites that support it (we use it on TechCrunch). The Disqus Dashboard gives you a central hub to view all the discussions you’ve participated in, but until now it hasn’t done such a great job helping you find your friends’ comments, or letting you discover users that you may enjoy following. That’s changing with today’s update. The biggest new feature is the ability to follow other users. It works as you’d expect — once you’ve followed someone, you’ll see their comments show up in your main activity stream. The Dashboard also includes a ‘Find friends to follow’ widget to help you find interesting content. Of course, you don’t really have to use the Dashboard if you don’t want to (and my hunch is that many Disqus users only visit it very sporadically, if at all). That may start to change with these new features, though. Other improvements include the ability to remove or edit comments you’ve left directly from your Dashboard, instead of having to visit the publisher’s sites.        
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| Ask a VC: Live from New York It’s Habib Kairouz Posted: 16 Dec 2010 11:31 AM PST
He lead the round in iVillage back in 1997, taking the company public in 1999, before it sold to NBC in 2007 for $600 million. In 2001, he led the investment in Intralinks, which went public in 2010 and has a market cap of more than $1 billion. In 2006, he invested in Tacoda, which AOL bought for about $300 million in 2008. He funded EverydayHealth, which has more than $100 million in annual revenues and has filed for an IPO. And the one I know the best: He owns more than 30% of Bluefly, a publicly traded fashion site with $100 million in annual revenues. From what I understand, Rho is a New York firm that focuses on companies that can get to more than $100 million in revenues. In other words, entrepreneurs looking for a quick flip need not apply. He’s joining me via Skype in a few hours so get your questions in now to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com.
       
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We know that mobile sales have been performing well for PayPal’s parent company eBay, with the marketplace hitting 
For many years, the tech industry has gauged the success of websites by tracking usage stats like the number of unique visitors and page views the site receives each month. 
Opera
Micro-blogging sensation 
About a month ago, 
A competition for water-related clean tech startups, 
We 
Facebook’s having a pretty interesting day. This morning the site pushed out a nifty new 
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