In yet another made up "day" to bring our attention to something, yesterday was Data Privacy Day:

Data Privacy Day is an international holiday that occurs every January 28. The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to raise awareness and promote data privacy education. It is currently celebrated in the United States, Canada, and 27 European countries.[1] On January 26, 2009, the United States House of Representatives passed House Resolution HR 31 by a vote of 402-0, declaring January 28 National Data Privacy Day.[2] On January 28, 2009, the Senate passed Senate Resolution 25 also recognizing January 28, 2009 as National Data Privacy Day.

To recognize this day, Google released a fairly comprehensive post of all the privacy options and configurations which are made available. I have covered some of these options previously, but if you are looking for a nice refresher or this is news to you, then this post is a great resource.

Topics covered include:

• Opting out of ad tracking
• Encrypted search
• Google Dashboard (to see what Google knows about you)

At least we didn’t have to send a card or talk like a pirate…

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Google Celebrates "Data Privacy Day"

With all the talk of Playbooks and TouchPads these days, it’s sad that poor old LG hasn’t had much traction with their 10-inch G-Slate aka The Optimus Pad.

Well how’s this for traction? This bit of fanfic shows the Optimus Pad fighting, Michael Bay-style, high over a futuristic cityscape. While we all know Honeycomb is going to be amazing, did you know it could shoot fire and lasers?

Read more…

Six months ago 500 Startups, the angel fund headed by Dave McClure, started investing in dozens of startups — they’re now up to around 90 investments. And today the fund is announcing an incubator program similar in many ways to Y Combinator, TechStars, and the numerous other programs that have popped up to support fledgling tech startups.

As with these other programs, 500 Startups is giving each company some seed funding and access to a roster of mentors, in exchange for a chunk of equity. McClure says that in general these startups are receiving between $25-100k for 5% of equity, with the median around $50k (this is more than Y Combinator, though 500 Startups doesn’t have the sweet $150k Start Fund deal). The program lasts for 3-6 months depending on how long each company wants to stay, and McClure says they’ll probably run three batches this year, each with its own Demo Day to showcase the startups to investors, the first of which will be in early April.

McClure says there are a few other structural differences: 500 Startups is willing to accept companies who have already raised funding from other investors, and he says it’s “follow-on friendly” in that 500 Startups is willing to participate in funding rounds for companies that have completed other incubator programs.

500 Startups will be charging each company that participates in the program for desk space at $1,000 per founder per month (which they’ll pay for using some of the money they received upon entering the program). The program has one design and one UX expert on staff, and participants will have access to other mentors as well.

Finally, McClure says that the program is going to have a big emphasis on distribution platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube.

Here’s the list of the first 11 companies to participate in the program and their taglines (that’s one other difference — startups can choose to stay stealthy before Demo Day if they really want to, but they’re encouraged to be more open than in some other programs):

• InternMatch – “InternMatch’s mission is to help college students discover amazing internships.”
• Baydin – “Baydin’s mission is to facilitate purposeful communication.” (currently working on email trainer)
• 955 Dreams – Made nifty History of Jazz app
• YongoPal – Matches students in Asia who want to learn English from students at top universities in the US
• Spoondate – Dating for foodies
• Ninua – Made Networked Blogs
• Crowdrally – Wants to “provide social influencers with organic digital endorsements, so they can get paid without selling out.”
• Rewardli – “Rewardli lets business owners use leverage their social graph in new and interesting ways.”
• Wednesdays – “Stay in touch with friends and colleagues. Over lunch. On Wednesdays.”
• SpeakerGram – Book speaking engagements
• Punchd – Loyalty cards on your mobile phone

Here’s a video of the office space:

Face.com initially rolled out its REST API, which allows developers to tap its awesome facial recognition technology for use in their own websites and applications, almost a year ago. Today, the startup is moving the API from ‘alpha’ to ‘beta’ mode – and it gets more exciting if you look at pricing.

While over 10,000 developers are said to be using the API since its May 2010 launch already, there were some restrictions to it, as they could only scan up to 200 photos per hour. As from today, developers can scan 5,000 photos per hour (or 120,000 per day) – still at no cost.

It’s a price that’s hard to beat, but that’s not the only thing Face.com says should spark developer interest.

Face.com says the technology has also been improved significantly, enabling third-party developers to pick up more faces in group photos and identifying the people in them more accurately than ever. You can also group similar faces in photos together now, which is great for bulk-tagging support in applications that make use of the API.

The API also boasts easy integration with Facebook (enabling you to recognize Facebook friends in photos across Facebook Connected apps) as well as Twitter (search and tagging for Twitter faces across a variety of photo services).

Face.com previously released a couple of popular Facebook apps, Photo Finder (which allows you to scan all the photos in your Facebook network) and Photo Tagger (which allows you to upload folders of pictures and bulk-tag photos).

The Israeli startup claims its technology has now ‘discovered’ over 18 billion faces across its APIs and Facebook apps, and counting.

Recently, rumors started swirling about the company about the fact that they reportedly rebuffed an acquisition offer from Facebook, and that its technology is actually used to power Facebook Photos' facial recognition functionality.

Face.com has raised (only) $5.3 million to date.

Online gaming startup Raptr has raised $15 million in new funding, according to a blog post on the company’s site. This round was led by DAG Ventures with Tenaya Capital and Accel Partners participating. In total, Raptr has raised $27 million.

Raptr’s mission is simple: to make it easy to play games with your friends. Essentially, Raptr is a social networking platform for gamers to track games and share achievements. Users can also share their stats, rankings, achievements, and characters with friends. And they can automatically broadcast their gaming activity to their friends on Raptr and other social sites including Facebook and Twitter.

The network also supports games on PC, Xbox, and PS3; and allows you to see your friends while they are playing games on a number of consoles. You can then chat and browse the web in-game.

And the startup, which had north of one million members last July, has grown to over 6 million members in less than a year.

Of course, Raptr is an independent social gaming network and faces competition from companies like Zynga and Playdom which are mostly centralized within Facebook.

Apple’s iAds are hitting a rough spot. Across the board, several developers I’ve spoken to confirm that “fill rates” for iAds dropped drastically after the New Year and have yet to recover. The fill rate—what percentage of the ad inventory is actually filled with an ad—for two separate developers plummeted from 18 percent to 6 percent. And in a few instances for some newer apps, none of the ad slots were getting filled, compared to nearly complete fill rates from other mobile ad networks. Others report better fill rates but as one developer says, “They have definitely come down.”

One reason for the dip could be just seasonal. The fill rates and advertising budgets across all ad networks in general take a hit after the holidays. But there seems to be something else going on here as well. “The general consensus among the advertising community is that it is a product they don't want,” says one mobile ad tech CEO. The iAds business, he suggests, “is hurting.”

(I spoke with many iPhone app developers and advertising executives for this article. All of them would speak only on background because publicly pissing off Apple is not considered to be a great career move).

When Steve Jobs introduced iAds last year, he set Apple on a course to reinvent mobile advertising. He wanted mobile ads not to suck, so Apple came up with a new format and standards and imposed them on the industry. Instead of cheap inventory that needed to be filled, Jobs wanted the ads to be viewed as branded experiences in their own right. Apple charged premium rates—requiring a minimum commitment of one million dollars for each campaign.

Jobs is not targeting mobile ad budgets, he is targeting television ad budgets. He thinks iAds can be a better experience than television ads and therefore those are the budgets that should be spent on his mobile ads. It is no coincidence that Apple is touting the performance of iAds against TV ads, not against other mobile ads.

Steve Jobs is perhaps the world’s best salesman. Jobs and iAd chief Andy Miller personally helped convince advertisers and CEOs to buy $60 million worth of iAds right off the bat. “My inclination was it was a great sales pitch by Apple and you had CEOs making advertising decisions,” says one exec at a large iPhone app company. It was “glory spend,” coming out of discretionary or PR budgets (very few companies have million-dollar mobile ad budgets). “You only get to make that decision once as CEO,” notes the exec.

And now the chickens are coming home to roost. After selling the initial campaigns, the relationships were dumped into the laps of junior account managers in Apple’s advertising business (which came out of Apple’s $275 million acquisition of Quattro Wireless last year). They are being tasked to get renewals this year from ad agencies and brands or equal or greater amounts. But the experiment is over (advertisers can now see how the ads perform) and these junior salesmen don’t have access to the CEOs. They need to talk to their counterparts at ad agencies and brands, who can’t spend $1 million on a mobile ad campaign so easily. One ad agency executive tells me that the iAd salespeople are suddenly calling a lot more and becoming very aggressive in pushing for renewals.

Beyond the million-dollar commitments, the rank and file at advertising agencies have other problems with iAds. They only run on Apple devices, not cross-platform like mobile ads from Google and others. And even on the Apple platform, there is no visibility into where they run. Advertisers buy a campaign, and Apple decides where to place them across all the apps running iAd inventory. This black box approach stems from issues Quattro was seeing before the acquisition, where all the advertisers wanted to be in the hit apps, which got sold out quickly while the rest of the apps in the network went starving.

The other issue is the pricing. It is confusing to mobile ad marketers because it is based on a combination of both impressions and performance. There is a floor CPM (cost per thousand impressions) for every time an ad is displayed, and then an additional cost for each time an ad is opened up (known as an “expand”). Lots of people mistakenly hit the ads who really aren’t interested, meaning advertisers are paying for unwanted engagements, driving up the effective CPM sky-high to as much as $50 or $60 in some cases (more typically it is a fraction of that, but still well above the low-single digit CPMs of most mobile ads).

“You can’t even imagine what the CPMs were—completely off the charts,” says one developer who made a killing off iAds in late 2010 and now laments that they are drying up. Even with low fill rates, developers were making more than five times as much as ads from other networks. Now the pressure is on for Apple to repeat that performance.

Lowering the million-dollar hurdle might be one way to make iAds more appealing and accessible to mobile marketers. But Jobs is not targeting mobile ad budget. He is targeting television ad budgets. He thinks iAds can be a better experience than television ads and therefore those are the budgets that should be spent on his mobile ads. It is no coincidence that Apple is touting the performance of iAds against TV ads, not against other mobile ads. Will Jobs bend the advertising industry to his will? Right now, it looks like resistance is setting in.

Given how much data we’re trusting to online sites these days — email, search history, even voice calls — the repercussions to having our account passwords phished, hacked, or guessed are worse than ever. Unfortunately as far as consumers are concerned, account security has been stagnant for years: nearly every service requires a username and password, and that’s it. Cue the scary music and a Dateline special on having your identity stolen.

But today, Google is making things much, much better for those who want it.

The feature is called two-factor authentication, and it’s been available to Google Apps customers since September. Now it’s rolling out to everyone. It’s a bit confusing and the set-up process will probably intimidate a lot of people, but it’s well worth looking into if you value your account data. You can activate it by hitting the ‘two-step verification’ link on this page. So what exactly does it do?

In short, it makes it so that when you go to login to your Google account, you need to enter both your existing password and a special new second passcode — one that you don’t have to write down or memorize because it’s always changing, so it’s nearly impossible to phish. You generate this second password by firing up a new mobile app available for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry called ‘Google Authenticator’, or by having Google call or send you a text message to a phone number you entered when you set up the feature. That password will expire in just a few minutes though, so be quick (and yes, you will feel like a secret agent the first few times you use it).

It’s not as stressful as it sounds, because you can elect to only require this second password once per computer (this still keeps phishers from being able to access your account). There are a few more quirks to it — in order to save passwords in applications like iCal, Mail, and most other desktop apps, you’ll have to generate a unique app-specific password. But again, you can save this so you only have to do it once per app.

There are also a few backup measures in place should you lose access to your mobile phone. You can designate a second, backup phone number to send the passcode to, and you’re also strongly encouraged to print out a set of ‘one-time’ passwords to keep in a safe place. This is only for the secondary password — you’ll still have to keep that ‘normal’ Google password memorized.

I’ve been using a beta version of the system for the last few weeks, and for the most part I’ve been very pleased with it. The setup process, though it’s improved since I first used it, is still pretty involved. You don’t really have to do much thinking and the setup wizard only takes a few minutes to complete, but this whole second-password thing feels foreign after a decade (or more) using the old system. This is probably why Google isn’t heavily promoting the feature to consumers yet — you’ll have to go looking for it in your accounts dashboard.

To be clear, two-factor authentication isn’t a new idea. It’s been used by large businesses for years. But giving consumers access to this same protection is a big win, and I’m hoping other services will follow suit in the near future.

With Valentine's Day fast approaching it's time to start thinking about the dreaded gift for the gal in your life. Even if you think Valentine's Day is a Hallmark holiday designed to rake in millions of dollars in cash – it is – so you better get used to it because your lady friend still expects a gift.

You could get her flowers, candy, or maybe a fondue set, but let's be honest; your more interesting and intelligent girl doesn’t really want any of that. She just wants something sweet, because it's the thought that counts, right? Scratch that, she wants something cool she can show off to her friends. With all the techy toys that 2011 brought, you guys should have no problem finding something your geek girl will love.

Incidentally, we’re holding a contest for one lucky lad, so pop over here to enter.

Stock photo marketplace ClusterShot, which once aimed to rival Getty Images-owned stock photography giant iStockphoto, has managed to avoid hitting the deadpool after all. As we reported earlier, ClusterShot was to shut down on the 21st of February.

Now it appears the site will live on, although photo uploading and new account creation will remain temporarily suspended until the switch to a new owner has been finalized.

After setting up an auction for the purchase of the site, 20 or so bidders made an offer for the business, and one of them was apparently tasty enough for ClusterShot parent company silverorange to bite.

The buyer requested not to disclose the final purchase price, but we learned from one of the losing bidders that ClusterShot went for a – measly – $25,000.

In a message posted to the ClusterShot blog, the new owner, investor Dominic Ang, says the long-term plan is to ramp up investment in building new features and new capabilities in the ClusterShot platform.

ClusterShot was one of the ventures of Canadian web development company silverorange, which counts Digg’s creative director and co-founder of Pownce Daniel Burka among its co-founders and partners. We’ve fished it out of the TechCrunch deadpool.

uKnow, a company that provides targeting tools for advertisers looking to create custom distribution channels for their ad campaigns, announced today that it closed a $500,000 round of seed funding. The investment was led by iNovia Capital and The New York Angels and included digital media executives Lynn Wunderman, Geoff Judge, Scott Paternoster and Jeff Silverman.

uKnow’s technology uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to identify the content best suited to connecting brands with their audience. BluePrint, uKnow’s targeting application, leverages this technology to allow publishers to work in conjunction with media traders and marketers to create custom channels that pinpoint a brand’s distinguishing characteristics. The application then selects the websites and pages that reflect the client’s particular attributes and offers them the opportunity to buy ad space on those pages.

uKnow also announced today the hiring of Eric Bingham, who was named the company’s President. Bingham joins founders Gregory Fairnak and Peter Gasparini to assist in launching BluePrint. Prior to joining uKnow, Bingham was Chief Operating Officer of Undertone Networks, a digital display and video advertising network. He is also the co-founder of About.com and formerly acted as the site’s Senior Vice President.

Podio, which describes itself as a connected work platform, has secured $4m in Series A funding. Sunstone Capital led the round and the investment is said be used to further develop Podio's product and to hire "key employees". A sort of collaborative social network for the Enterprise or 'Facebook for the workplace', Podio operates in the so-called Enterprise 2.0 space providing tools such as messaging, calendars, tasks, and contact management. However, it doesn't stop there. Podio also gives users the ability to build their own 'apps' without any technical knowledge. Over 2,000 apps have already been built by users, which include CRM systems, meeting planners, process facilitation, recruiting, contract drafting and employee feedback. Naturally, there's an accompanying app store too.

Glassdoor.com, an online career and workplace community raised $12 million in a Series C funding led by Battery Ventures with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures. This investment brings the startup’s total funding to $22 million.

Glassdoor is a free jobs and career community where people can find and anonymously share information about companies, jobs, CEOs, salary and even job interviews. To access Glassdoor's full database of information, users have to contribute some job-related data of their own, making th site more of a community. The company also uses the anonymous data to publish insights about the job market and sectors, including the most wacky job interview questions and a list of naughty and nice CEOs.

The startup, which first launched in 2008 (with just 250 companies and 3,000 reviews), has roughly 3.5 million monthly unique visitors and includes employee-generated data, including company and compensation data, on more than 110,000 companies in over 100 countries.

The additional funding will be used for investing in international expansion, more data and advertising technology, and hiring.

Kontagent, an fbFund winner and social analytics platform, has hit a milestone today. The startup is now tracking over 100 million monthly active users and over 15 billion messages per month. That’s up from 70 million monthly active users in October.

Kontagent’s platform gives Facebook app developers, game studios and publishers detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times, social event interaction and other variables. The new version allows developers to track and optimize advertising efforts, user virality, in-app mechanics, virtual goods, currency monetization, and more.

The startup, which has raised $6 million, to date, also extends its analytics platform to iPhone and web applications using Facebook Connect.

The company says that it has grown its monthly active user base by over 300% in the past 12 months and counts a number of well known game developers as clients, including EA, Sony, Ubisoft, Take2, THQ, Konami, Perfect World, Gaia and Tencent.

Internet security company Comodo has purchased DNS.com, an aptly named provider of hosted Domain Name System (DNS) services. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

DNS.com no doubt benefited greatly from that three-letter domain name in terms of branding.

Comwired, as the company was previously called, acquired the domain in a private transaction less than a year ago.

With the acquisition of the managed DNS services provider, Comodo is launching a new service called ‘Comodo Authoritative DNS’ as it enables the company to roll out secured DNS services for its existing business customers.

Comodo posits that the acquisition will also boost its relationships with datacenters around the world, in order to deploy additional points of presence near major population zones, adding to DNS.com’s network.

DNS.com will join the Comodo family of brands and the founding team – including former CEO Dan Kimball – will join Comodo and keep developing managed DNS services.

FlyScreen, the lock screen replacement for Android and Symbian phones from Israeli startup Cellogic, has landed on the iPhone. But not as we know it. That's because Apple's iOS is locked down as it were (see what I did there) and doesn't allow third-party apps to take over the lock screen. This doesn't mean that iPhone users of FlyScreen don't get access to the app's array of content widgets - they do - but this functionality is accessible like any other app. However, Cellogic has come up with a nice new twist for FlyScreen, something that the company is calling "Ambient Mode", a more fun presentation of content for when the phone is docked.

The news has become muted regarding <a href="fuel cells and their future role in energy supply in recent years, but it seems we’re getting there step by step: Panasonic today said that it has developed a new type of home-use fuel cell [press release in English], which is more efficient and cheaper than its existing solutions.

Read more…

Ah, Sonos. Once you’ve tried it you never go back. The trouble was that it used to cost thousands of dollars to get your home set up to stream music from any wifi connected hard drive to the Sonos speakers. Here’s my Sonos review from way back in 2006.

Then things started to happen. Most notably they released the Sonos ZonePlayer S5, a lower cost Sonos device that could be controlled via an iPhone or iPod Touch. And, last year, they finally had an iPad controller app.

But nothing for Android. Always promised in the near future, but we had to wait. And wait.

And now the wait is over. Sonos says the Android app will be released in March. Details here.

There are some nifty feature that the iOS folks don’t get. Deeper hardware integration allows you to control the volume on Sonos devices via the physical volume buttons on your Android phone, for example.

“We think we make the best wireless music system for the iPhone. Now we make the best wireless music system for the Android, too,” says Sonos marketing director Thomas Meyer.

Good times.

A few weeks ago, we noted that with a few subtle changes being made to their service, it seemed as if Gowalla was starting to connect the dots on travel. That is to say, it seems like they’re starting to use all the of location information they have in ways beyond simply sharing where your friends are at any given time. Some changes being made today further connect those dots.

Gowalla has just rolled out a batch of updates to their website today that enhance usability when it comes to finding interesting things about a city. Venue (called “spots”) activity, people view, and photos are all now easier to see. The mapping feature is improved. And it’s easier to share and bookmark spots. But the biggest additions come by way of the Highlights feature.

Not only can Highlights now be added directly from a spot page, but there are a ton of new categories for you to add spots to. In fact, there are now nearly 40 different Highlight types that you can use. These range from “Burgers We Love” (assign it to your favorite burger place in a city) to “My Happy Place” (assign it to your favorite overall place in a city) to “WTF” (assign it to a weird, random place).

Gowalla first added the Highlights feature late last year in an attempt to turn the world into a “social atlas”. It’s a nice feature and a good idea. The problem was that there weren’t nearly enough Highlights to go around with the limited categories and the restriction of only being able to assign one place per category. Now there are all these new categories and you can assign multiple places to a Highlight category.

And starting next week, Highlights will become a part of your check-in experience on the iPhone. After you check-in, you’ll see Highlights added by friends on your check-in receipt. And soon you’ll be able to browse nearby spots filtered by Highlight categories. This should help create a “best of the city” (as curated by your social graph) experience.

We’re now just a month away from SXSW which is held in Gowalla’s home turf of Austin, Texas. It was there, two years ago, that the service launched alongside rival Foursquare. In those two years, Gowalla users have created and visited over 2.5 million locations around the world, co-founder Josh Williams tells us. They expect to hit one million users some point this month as well. It’s not Foursquare big, but it’s still big.

Version 3 for Android is also expected to drop soon, and you can bet that Gowalla has some other big things planned for SXSW. One thing we know for sure is a party featuring the band Matt & Kim.

IAC’s Mindspark has just acquired pop culture gaming platform VoxPop. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

VoxPop creates embeddable pop culture contextual games for publishers like Entertainment Weekly, E! Online, and Maxim.

VoxPop’s games, which are often ad-supported, are based on opinions and predictions on topics and current events (like the Oscars or the Grammy awards). Games range from an E! Online game on what celebrity wore the best outfit to an awards show to picking brackets for March Madness at NCAA.com. VoxPop’s technology also turns pop culture games into free, shareable widgets for anyone to post on a blog, social networking site or website. Users can even create a "game lobby" of sorts by adding multiple games to a page.

Founded in 2006 by Bill Armistead, Mike Derezin, and Michael Hoffman, the startup has raised $3.5 million in funding from Hearst Interactive Media, and True Ventures.

Mindspark says that the VoxPop platform’s trivia engine will be used to add trivia game mechanics to the network’s gaming sites, particularly in IAC’s IWON gaming brand.
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TigerText, a company that develops a private SMS app, is launching an enterprise version of its product today. Called TigerTextPRO, the service allows companies to deploy their own private and secure mobile network in hours.

As we reported last year, TigerText’s mobile apps allows users to send text messages or photos that can then be deleted off both the sender's and receiver's phone after a selected period of time. Once a sender selects the message lifespan (from 1 minute up to 30 days), expired messages are not only deleted from both phones, but are not stored on any server and they cannot be retrieved once expired. Users can also select a "Delete on Read" option, which will delete the text 60 seconds after the recipient opens the message.

TigerTextPro allows organizations to deploy a private, secure mobile network to allow employees can privately communicate on their existing mobile devices within a company.

With the enterprise version of the app, users download the app on their company smartphones (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows 7) and perform a one-time login to get authenticated. Administrators can then use a web-based tool to control archiving policies, create groups and perform simple user management. The PRO version provides companies, health care institutions and government agencies with administrative and policy-level controls reduces liability and risks of data leakage while enhancing employee communication and productivity.

Already a number of companies in the healthcare and financial sectors are using the Pro version so employees can communicate via SMS without the risk of privacy issues. The startup, which faces competition from Kik Messenger, has raised $1.9 million in angel funding from Herb Madan and the co-founder of Akamai, Randall Kaplan.

SoundCloud, the audio platform originally targeted at music makers but now a wider consumer play, has announced that it's reached three million registered users. And considering that the Berlin-based startup was at a million users as recently as last May - pre-pivot, if you will - the change of direction would appear to be paying off or at least hasn't affected the company's growth trajectory negatively. That said, these are registered users-only not active users as it were but nonetheless growth does look steady.

If you live and breathe the web—as most TechCrunch readers do—you may have noticed that the minute a child enters your life, you tend to start viewing the web differently. It’s almost comical how many Internet entrepreneurs I’ve come by, who as soon as they become parents, grow a new-found desire to create web products for children.

Being a father of two myself, I’ve seen my fair share of web products and sites for children. In my kids’s case, none outrank YouTube. So much so that I set up Posterous sites for my 5.5yo son Cole (here), and my 3yo daughter, Zoe (here), so they can easily scroll through and enjoy their favorite videos.

The main issue I’ve come across is that sites and web products for children are built for age groups that are too far apart. From my experience, a product or site can’t target 1-3 year olds, and 3-5 year olds, at the same time. Again, from experience, that just doesn’t work. That’s why I find what BabyFirst (a cable and satellite channel) is doing with BabyU to be interesting.

Designed specifically for toddlers aged three and younger, BabyU houses a variety of online games and activities. These span some basic developmental building blocks such as music, math, art and vocabulary. Unsurprisingly, child development experts were consulted throughout the design of the activities, which: 1) are meant for parent/child interaction (as opposed to throwing the child in front of the screen to play alone), and 2) typically range between 5-7 minutes in duration, to meet the youngster’s attention span.

If you’ve ever raised a child, you know that a mouse and touchpad are quite intuitive, but do require a certain level of fine motor skills. Most sites and products I’ve seen don’t take this to heart. BabyU has. The activities are all built upon the use of two keys, and two alone: the space bar, and enter/return key. Unless you’ve raised a child this wouldn’t impress you as very important, but it really is—again, I speak from experience.

BabyU is currently only offered in English, but considering BabyFirst broadcasts in a total of six languages such as Spanish, French and Hindi, it’s likely they will be manifested in the web offering as well.

Additional features will be rolled-out in the future, including a child-oriented video chat offering powered by Vikido, whose founder, Amit Knaani, I profiled in a previous post. In fact, it was the team at Vikido that headed BabyU’s product design and development (as a way to supplement Vikido’s funding as an autonomous play).

BabyU is priced at $1.99-3.99/mo, or $19.99 for an annual subscription.

SocialGO, the community building platform which in the past positioned itself against the likes of Ning, has secured $2.2m in funding from nine institutions in its largest fund raising to date. Since the startup is already floated on the AIM public market in the UK, the fund round was lead by First Columbus, its secondary broker, and values the company at $24m. Prior to this it raised $800,000 from Veddis Ventures.

A Chicago-area startup that sells natural consumer goods online, Abe's Market, closed a $3.4 million series A investment the company announced today. Accel Partners led the round, joined by the company’s earlier investors, Index Ventures and several angels.

Abe’s Market calls itself the equivalent of an online farmer’s market, and focuses on selling non-food category natural products like beauty, bath, baby or cleaning items, though it also sells some packaged comestibles.

The site provides shoppers with tagging, reviews, and social media sharing tools and incentives. The company has also put shoppers in touch with the people behind the products sold on its site, via live “online shows” and other site content.

Abe's Market co-founder Richard Demb said in an interview Wednesday night that his company plans to use its series A funding on expanding its reach via digital marketing initiatives, taking advantage of social media technology and trends.

Longer term, Demb said Abe’s Market will seek to build features and services that can help sellers who work with the site to grow their small businesses. In particular, the company wants to leverage the collective buying power of small sellers, for products and services that they all need — for example, labels, tags and printing services they need to package their goods, hopefully using sustainable materials.

Demb explained:

“The community of sellers we're tapping into loves talking about what they are doing. We will frequently get groups of our sellers together, in meetings to learn about what's going on in their lives, and not just what's going on in their online business. We want to know how we can be a facilitator to help small businesses that make great products, and let them grow.”

Prior to starting Abe’s Market (with co-founder Jon Polin) Demb co-founded Popcorn, Indiana the company behind those bright red bags of Dale And Thomas kettle corn you see at Whole Foods. His co-founder in that endeavor, serial entrepreneur Warren Struhl, is now an investor in Abe’s Market.

Demb said the experience of working with massive retailers online and off helps him relate to his sellers as much as consumers who are curious about their products. Abe's Market now works with some 300 brands. Demb would not comment on how much revenue he expects the company to reach by the end of the year or how many customers it has.

According to an Organic Trade Association 2010 survey referenced by the company in a press statement, the U.S. organic food and non-food sales reached $26.6 billion — up 5.3 percent from 2008-2009 — with non-food products up over 9 percent.

Adam Valkin, a partner at Accel Partners — which had earlier invested in other online marketplaces including Etsy, Diapers.com and Modcloth — told TechCrunch:

“Abe's Market may have overlap with a lot of segments, and there are a lot of players in [specialty commerce]. But both co-founders have strong marketing backgrounds, and understand what it takes to build a differentiated brand experience and awareness about their own brand, and their sellers, too.

Building this media and marketing machine that you know gets the word out, in turn affects their ability to recruit the most desirable sellers and brands.”

Abe’s Market will compete to sell its premium, natural products against ecommerce players from fellow startups like SaffronRouge which focuses on all organic beauty products, to DailyGrommet which focuses on products made by small businesses, and against sections within goliath ecommerce sites like Wal-Mart.com/Sustainability.

As New York Fashion Week ramps up, Google’s fashion-forward designer search engine Boutiques.com is adding a few new features today. Launched last November, Boutiques.com is both a search engine for all things fashion and is a personalized storefront of boutiques curated by celebrites, stylists, and designers. Powered by Like.com’s visual search engine technology, the site allows users to create their own boutiques and receive personalized clothes and accessory recommendations based on preferences and actions.

Google says that since the site’s launch, it has been collecting data on which products are popular and “trendy” and has mined this data for designers on the site. Designer Analytics is a tool that gives retailers and designers insight into how their products are searched and shopped. Specifically, the tool will be able to show which colors and styles are most liked or hated. Designers can also see how their stats compare to similar brands. It’s similar in some ways to an analytics feature that virtual styling site Polyvore launched recently.

Shoppers can also now checkout a public version of the data, called Trend Analytics, which shows what products are most popular in terms of searches and likes on the site and in Google Search. Other enhancements include a slew of new designer boutiques and the ability for users to upload video to their own boutiques and feature a photo gallery of styles.

Boutiques.com is a radically different products than Google’s other search properties in terms of both features and its sleek, photo-centric interface; so it should be interesting to see how it performs among consumers and designers. It’s still yet to be seen if Boutiques.com can be a thriving success. The blog post states that usage of Boutiques has soared since launch but I’m curious to see the data on visits.

You have to love Twitter and you have to love Vic Gundotra.

This morning, the Google Vice President decided he was going to have some fun on Twitter. “#feb11 “Two turkeys do not make an Eagle”.,” he tweeted. To anyone outside of the tech space, that sounds like gibberish. Hell, even to many of those in the tech space, that seems like a completely random thing to say. Except it wasn’t random. It was cool and calculated.

The February 11 date that Gundotra references is clearly meant to signify Nokia’s annual Capital Markets Day, which takes place this Friday, the 11th, in London. There, new CEO (and former Microsoft president) Stephen Elop is expected to announce radical changes to the company’s plan and vision. For weeks, rumors have swirled that Nokia may ally with either Microsoft or Google going forward in the smartphone business. Gundotra’s tweet this morning made it very clear who Nokia is going with. The other guys.

How cool is that? A pretty well-known figurehead for Google just dropped a tweet bomb on both Microsoft and Nokia, subtly exposing their news early. And he did it by blatantly insulting both companies. Oh, and by the way, he used to work for Microsoft! For 15 years!

Could it be that Gundotra was just taking a stab in the dark with his quip on Twitter? No way. Gundotra, while now believed to be heading up the social stuff Google is not-so-secretly working on, is also very familiar with Android. He’s been the guy on stage at Google I/O evangelizing the mobile platform to no end. He’s so good at it, that he could almost sell Android to an iPhone user. Almost.

If something as significant as Nokia/Android talks were going down, Gundotra would know about it. On the flip side, he would also know who else the Nokia guys were talking to. You can be sure that he wouldn’t tweet about anything unless he knew something and knew it was a done deal. And you can be damn sure that he wouldn’t tweet calling anyone a “turkey” until he was sure it wasn’t going Google’s way.

A more, um, nuanced report tonight in BusinessWeek confirms that Nokia will partner with Microsoft to put Windows Phone 7 on their smartphones. It’s something we actually first reported hearing earlier this week. And it’s something we’ve been talking about for months, after we heard about Elop’s cordial exit from Redmond. The writing has been on the wall.

That said, Google did have a shot at this partnership. We know that Elop was talking to Google CEO Eric Schmidt a few month ago as Nokia’s MeeGo group was in turmoil. And in recent months, you can bet the discussions between the two sides intensified as Elop considered what was best for his new company. But going with Android, while perhaps smart, would have been the equivalent of Elop punching Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in the face. It wasn’t going to happen.

Instead, the company which still has an absolutely massive mobile reach (Nokia) will partner with the company with endless pockets (Microsoft) that has actually managed to develop a pretty damn good mobile operating system. The problem is that it hit the scene at least a year too late, and perhaps two years too late. A Nokia partnership is exactly what Microsoft needs to have a chance to get back into the game. And it’s what Nokia needs to enter the smartphone game (and maybe even the American market) in a meaningful way.

And that’s why Gundotra’s tweet, while awesome, is perhaps ill-advised. Two turkeys may not make an eagle, but they might look pretty tasty to some new customers hungry for smartphones. This deal makes some sense.

But wait, the tweet actually goes even deeper. It’s actually even more of a mind game.

As Engadget points out, there’s quite the history behind the statement “two turkeys don’t make an eagle.” Specifically, former Nokia VP Anssi Vanjoki said it in 2005 in reference to rival BenQ buying Siemens’s handset business. And you may recall that Vanjoki is the guy who earlier this year compared people using Android devices to Finnish boys who pee in their pants for warmth during a cold winter. Yes, he really said that. And we know for a fact that Google didn’t like that too much.

So yes, there are many layers in such a short tweet. One layer of malice, one layer of intrigue, one layer of humor, one layer of irony, and at least four layers of awesome.

[image: flickr/pen waggener]