Category: Tech news

In November of last year, TechCrunch broke the news that Yardsellr, the eBay for Facebook (without the auctions), had raised $5 million in series A funding from Accel Partners. At the time, the investment seemed testament to the growing interest in the value of bringing eCommerce to Facebook in order to expose it to, you guessed it, your social graph.

Since then, Yardsellr has mostly remained under the radar, building out its platform and quietly growing its user base. Today, the startup is making a couple of big announcements, starting with a high-level rebrand. The motivation? Yardsellr Founder and CEO Danny Leffel tells me that his company wants to do for the eMarketplace what social gaming companies have done with studios. So, that means in practice that Leffel and company have started YellowDog Media, which will become the overarching entity, or studio, behind a diverse catalog of transaction-based titles. Yardsellr was the first title, and today the company is announcing their second: Style.ly.

Style.ly, simply put, is a new social marketplace for women’s fashion. As Yardsellr was formed to be a person-to-person marketplace built on Facebook in which users can connect with other people selling everything from vintage guitars to Hello Kitty collectibles, Style.ly is the same — for fashionistas. (You can see here why Yardsellr has drawn comparisons with eBay — not to mention that Leffel worked at eBay for five years and knows the business well.)

With Yardsellr, users can follow products in their news feed, talk to friends, share, and when they’re interested in making a purchase, move over to Yardsellr.com to use the site’s secure transaction mechanism to complete the sale.

Since launching, Yardsellr built out over 4,000 of what it calls “blocks” — or niche communities based on particular interests — in which users can follow, browse, and connect with like-minded people based on their love of vintage guitars, or whatever the case may be. All they have to do to join one of these blocks is “like” it on Facebook. Compare this to traditional eCommerce, which focuses their verticals based on product categories. The former is inherently more communal, social, and geared towards real engagement with actual people.

Style.ly was born out of both those “blocks”, and obviously the growing demand for eCommerce platforms that target women’s fashion in particular. Thus, with Yardsellr as the template, Style.ly will become a social platform (based on Facebook) for those who want to buy and sell new, lightly-used and vintage items, from designer labels to boutique finds. Voice is what matters in social commerce, Leffel said, and he’s betting that the Yardsellr model — the one that’s a bit eBay and a bit Etsy — will work well for Style.ly’s target audience, and other niche audiences going forward.

And so far, it seems to be working. In a soft launch of Style.ly, Leffel and team found that more merchandise was sold in the first week on Style.ly than Yardsellr sold in its first four months. As for Yardsellr, since November, the platform has grown steadily at a rate of 35 percent per month in terms of gross merchandise sales (in both the quantity and value of products changing hands).

According to Leffel, on any given day, there are more than 120,000 items for sale through Yardsellr, with 6,000 new items listed for sale each day. What’s more, Yardsellr has grown into a community of over 5 million people, 175K of which are monthly active users. If both titles can sustain that kind of continued growth, it takes the pressure off going big with its series B.

Going on from here, naturally, the company plans to add further “studios” for particular interest groups, so that eventually Yardsellr will become the general store-type marketplace for those random odds and ends that will be complemented by Style.ly as well as that future drove of secondary targeted communities (or titles).

But why social? Leffel told me that what used to be so special about eBay was that it’s eFlea marketplace lent itself well to the formation of communities that aggregated tightly around particular interests. Those small communities incubated fierce friendships and bonds among those buyers and sellers that loved, say, first edition novels.

Leffel told me that the eBay team used to joke that there were marriages that happened because of those communities. Of course, eBay has gone on to focus more on commoditized goods, to compete with the likes of Amazon and Walmart, but the goal for YellowDog’s properties is to capture the feel of the old eBay — and find that mix between the loneliness of traditional eCommerce transactions and the scalably social aspects of Facebook.

When the social graph meets the interest graph, Leffel said, commerce is a natural byproduct. It certainly seems that the industry is reevaluating its stance on social commerce, and its long term viability, and if this model proves workable in the long run, Yardsellr, Style.ly, and YellowDog seem poised to be close to the front of the pack.

NoSQL database company Neo Technology has raised $10.6 million in Series A funding led by Fidelity Growth Partners Europe with Sunstone Capital, Conor Venture Partners and Rod Johnson, the founder and CEO of SpringSource also participating in the round.

As the world of data explodes in volume and complexity, many applications and databases need to manage this influx of queries with high performance. Neo Technology provides enterprises with a NoSQL database that can scale to ever-changing data and its associated requirements.

Neo Technology delivers Neo4j, the NOSQL Enterprise Open source database to the enterprise. The company says that Neo4j flexible and scalable graph database engine is the industry’s only NOSQL database capable of solving the complex, connected data challenges that enterprise application developers face today. Unique to NOSQL databases, Neo4j caters to enterprise developers with mature support for transactions, Java support, and ease of development.

With Neo4j, the programmer works with an object-oriented, flexible network structure rather than with strict and static tables promises to offer performance improvements.

The investment will be used to fuel product development and for hiring purposes.

Steer your way to Google.com and you’ll find yourself staring at perhaps its boldest Doodle yet. No, Google hasn’t outdone itself with another musical tribute or interactive game — it’s running an ad directing users to try out Google+. But this isn’t just your average text ad or banner: Google’s drawing a big, blue arrow that points toward your Google+ name on the left side of its top nav bar.  Click it, and you’ll launch into the Google+ homepage and signup process.

You can’t miss it.

The ad coincides with today’s public launch to Google+, which now allows anyone to sign up for the service (up until now you’ve needed an invite). And it’s sure to drive a major surge in new signups.

Granted, this isn’t the first time Google has run ads on its homepage to promote its own products: for example, it’s previously run ads for its Nexus phones, and it recently ran text ads promoting Google Offers to users in some areas. But as far as I can remember, all of these ads have been subtle — some text and maybe a small graphic centered beneath the search bar.

But this blue arrow is much harder to miss (note that the arrow actually moves a bit, as it’s ‘drawn’ when you first land on the page). If nothing else, it’s another reminder of just how serious Google is about helping Google+ succeed, and it shows that it’s willing to leverage its biggest assets to achieve that mission.

Patience is a virtue. Or so people say … While I’ve never been particularly patient, I have a sneaking suspicion that it totally works, like if you stick it out long enough you eventually get everything you’ve ever wanted.

The latest evidence that this principle might be true, for me at least? Facebook, which was a notorious Notifications over-emailer, has started sending out emails telling select users that it will start sending out fewer emails. Now my brain hurts, thank you Facebook.

Users with the feature enabled can check the box after “Email Frequency:” to receive condensed ”important update and summary” emails instead of a separate email for the 83 different Facebook Notifications one can choose to receive emails for, like when someone posts something on your wall, or when someone adds you as a friend, or confirms your friend request, or mentions you in a comment, or tags you in a post and so on and so forth ad infinitum — Not to mention the emails you can receive from Facebook apps!

Sure this could be in preparation for some amazing new product to be announced at F8 on Thursday (Facebook Irony perhaps?), but even on its own it’s still pretty cool considering a lot of Facebook’s stickiness stems from the fact that it emails the hell out of people every time anything minute happens.

From MG’s lips to God’s Zuckerberg’s ears.

This guest post was written by Joe Green, the Founder and President of Causes. Causes is the largest online platform for activism and one of the original Facebook Applications. Green’s approach to building online tools is rooted in his offline experience as a grassroots political organizer for federal, state, and local campaigns. Disclosure: Green was an early advisor to Facebook and has a small amount of stock.

Facebook’s recently-launched friend lists are the most important change to the service since platform, and possibly since News Feed. With them, Facebook further jumps ahead as the truest representation of who people are and how they are connected to others. But they aren’t just helpful — Facebook really needed to launch this to maintain the integrity of its graph.

To understand why this is so important, it’s helpful to look back at Facebook’s history.

Given the virality of many of the apps on Facebook (not to mention the staggering growth of the service itself), it might come as a surprise to some just how carefully Facebook controlled its expansion in its early days. Facebook made it deliberately hard to grow, requiring a .edu email address, and not allowing users to have friends across colleges — thus making direct viral growth from existing to new communities impossible.

The service’s defining feature was real identity: real names, real pictures, real friends. In the course of growing my company, Causes, I have often been called to speak to audiences unfamiliar with Facebook. I tell them that the single most important thing about Facebook is that it made the internet real. It used to be that you went online with a pseudonym, talking to your friends in your usenet group as BobaFett12. Identity has been the holy grail of the internet since its earliest days, with huge but unsuccessful efforts undertaken by major corporations, like AOL’s Magic Carpet and Microsoft Passport. No one expected identity would come from a crowd-sourced model.

Years later, one of the most controversial moves Facebook made was going beyond college. People were worried “their Facebook” would be invaded, and that it would devolve into the Wild West seen on the rest of the web. Thankfully Facebook did a good job maintaining the integrity of the site through this transition, and it stayed (for the most part) about real names and real people.

But despite their best efforts, over time the integrity of the friend graph has become watered down. This was inevitable. Even if you have a policy of only adding people as friends that you know in real life, you inevitably keep meeting new people, but rarely unfriend people you are not in touch with anymore. So people keep getting more and more friends on Facebook, with a higher portion of them being distant acquaintances. Most of the focus in the media on this problem has been around privacy — that people do not want to share with people who are not close friends, or with their boss.

But who shouldn’t see content is only half of the problem — it’s equally as important who does see it. Having a large list of friends means that I miss a lot of content from my close friends, and if I have something important to send to them I am not sure they will see it. For example, at Causes we have a popular feature called Birthday Wish, and we often have user complaints that good friends did not donate, because they never found out about it (or maybe their friends don’t like them).

Facebook has made a few notable attempts to solve this problem. The first was Friend Lists, but they were never given much prominence, and Facebook was shy about creating them for people or putting them in a prominent position. More recently, Facebook re-launched Groups to try to solve the issue of friends communicating with each other. The new Groups were a big improvement on the earlier version, and are very useful for small groups to communicate. But because they have to be symmetrically defined, they are not useful for defining the close friends problem.

The new Smart Lists have finally hit the nail on the head. For one, Facebook has worked around the problems of automatically creating lists effectively but without creeping people out. They automatically create lists where there is objective criteria, such as school or working at the same company. For the most important list, Close Friends, they have given the list special powers such as notifying you every time those people post, and so incentivize you to use the list. They also do an eerily good job of suggesting who should be in the close friends list, making it very easy to create with a few clicks.

It is not a surprise that when Google Plus launched, that among its many features, Circles were the most discussed. But Facebook’s version is better in two critical ways. Firstly, by auto-suggesting who should be in which list, they are far easier to create. And secondly, because there is a canonical concept of a close friends list, developers can utilize this list, while to developers Google Circle names are just a string of text. Google can and should do the same thing, by getting users to organize their address book into circles, and suggesting them based on information they know from gmail and from phone usage.

The effects of these changes will be monumental for Facebook. People will share more and fundamentally different types of content, because they can target it to just their close friends. And people will check Facebook even more often, because their feed will be much more interesting. And for developers this will be revolutionary. There are a whole set of “utility applications” that will finally be possible. Over the past four years most of the apps that have spread have done so through viral channels which have rewarded high volume of communication. But with friend lists, developers can be much more targeted, and get traffic with much fewer messages and higher conversion rates, which is better for everyone. I expect to finally see Facebook platform breed a new category defining set of companies, just as they have done for games.

After many twists and turns, DIY social network Ning has finally found a home. Glam Media is buying the network of social networks. A final price is not being disclosed. It is likely more than the $35 million News Corp fetched for MySpace from Specific Media and Justin Timberlake, but less than the $120M or so in capital that was poured into the company over the years. (Update: A source puts the deal price higher, at $150 million). Ning’s co-founder, chairman, and original investor Marc Andreessen will be joining Glam’s board as part of the deal. With Glam’s strong IPO prospects, a large part of the acquisition was probably in stock. Other serious bidders included Google, Yahoo, and even Groupon.

Ning started out as a platform where anyone could build their own niche social network. It turned out that most people just wanted to be on Facebook (Andreessen also sits on its board). About 18 months ago, Ning laid off 40 percent of its employees, switched CEOs, and started charging for its product. It went from an ad-supported model to a subscription model, and while it is no Facebook, CEO Jason Rosenthal managed to create a decent business with 100,000 Ning-powered sites and 60 million monthly unique visitors. If you just look at the subscription plans and apply a discount, the business is easily doing somewhere between $10 million and $20 million a year in subscription revenues alone.

Glam Media runs its own network of content sites, originally targeted at women, but now broader, with a combined reach of 200 million monthly unique visitors. After taking out duplication, the Ning acquisition should push Glam’s audience count up to about 240 million monthly uniques. Glam also has its own brand-friendly ad network to sell ads against that audience, and a content management platform. Now with Ning it has a social platform as well.

Glam will now be able to incorporate social features into its content platform. With Ning it gets the equivalent of a blogging platform, commenting platform, and social feeds platform all rolled into one. Glam should be able to do a better job selling ad inventory against the visitors to Ning-powered sites.

It’s usually a company’s social media reps that get caught tweeting things they shouldn’t be, but ex-Microsoftie Joe Marini was a bit higher up on the food chain than that. Formerly the principal program manager of the Windows Phone web team, Marini has resigned his post at Microsoft after tweeting his first impressions of a forthcoming Nokia-made Windows Phone.

Microsoft typically doesn’t comment on personnel matters like this, but one spokesperson broke the silence to Geekwire to confirm that Marini is no longer employed by the company.

Microsoft has their own set of guidelines [PDF] regarding how employees should approach social media, but all it really says about content is that employees should “be smart” and refrain from sharing “new features, functionalities, or innovations that have not been publicly disclosed.”

The kicker here is that the tweets themselves are hardly what one would call juicy. The original tweet, posted on September 7, simply mentioned that he got to play with a Windows-powered Nokia device:

Subsequent tweets were a bit more open with details, like these two from later that day:

So far, all he managed to confirm that the new device has a camera, a screen, and a body — hardly anything groundbreaking. Marini (probably very carefully) left out any specifics aside from some very general comments on the devices build and UI. Still, it was apparently enough for him to run afoul of Microsoft’s social media policy, which (understandbly) bars using services like Twitter to share confidential information.

Joe, however, isn’t exactly a first time offender. Back in March, Joe tweeted that he would be showing off an unreleased version of IE9 for Windows Phone while attending SXSW. Placed in that context, this new set of tweets could have been the straws that broke the camel’s back, but something about this situation leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Call me naive, but I think Microsoft and Windows Phone need more people like Joe. His Twitter account paints a portrait of a guy who was dedicated to his work, and was very excited for what Microsoft and Nokia have coming down the pipeline. The offending tweets gave people just enough to whet their interest, and left it at that. Considering that Nokia and Microsoft struck their official agreement months ago, it’s no surprise to anyone that a handset was in the works. Why try to fire a guy for stating the obvious?

My money is on Microsoft and Nokia not being too fond of his jab at the device’s screen size — a reasonable remark, but one that probably didn’t sit well with the brass. Still, given Marini’s overall vagueness about what he saw, another interesting question comes to mind: at what point is a leak really a leak?

Ah, the life of young startups is exciting isn’t it? Pivots. Ramen. Courting investors. A year ago, we covered a fledgling startup called numberFire that is attempting to bring a deep, scientific approach to your fantasy football picks. Not long before our initial coverage, numberFire Founder and CEO Nik Bonaddio won $100,000 from Regis Philbin on the one-and-only “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. (Check out Nik’s performance here.) Now, Bonaddio could have taken that money and gone in on a timeshare in Aspen or a one-way ticket to the Caribbean. But, being the pirate that he is, Bonaddio made the bold decision to sink that game show moola right into his startup.

Bonaddio first tested the waters with numberFire last year at the TechCrunch Disrupt DemoPit. Since then, Bonaddio says he’s consumed an entire state’s worth of Ramen, Red Bull, and things are starting to look up. The Pittsburgh native and his small team are part of the current summer class at Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator in New York, were able to officially relaunch numberFire earlier this month, and traffic is on the rise. (Monthly actives, the founder tells me, are near the 6-digit range.)

What’s more, the startup is currently in the midst of raising a seed round from some top New York investors (we’re hearing that the round will be a touch under $1 million). When numberFire first launched in beta last September, there were still quite a few kinks to work out, and the site wasn’t yet ready for the big time.

But a year later, numberFire has come a long way, and for football fans, numberFire is getting close to to being last tool you’ll ever need for your fantasy football picks. Fine, but what exactly does the startup do, you ask?

In tandem with broader trends we’re seeing across the consumer web, numberFire is tapping into the ever-more popular content personalization game — by allowing users to customize their football updates, following teams and players that they are interested in — both as fans or as fantasy gamers. NumberFire curates several activity feeds that present the user with the latest activity around their favorite players (like news, updated projections, etc.) that keep them up-to-date and engaged.

Bonaddio is himself a diehard Steelers fan, and so the idea for numberFire came from the simple need to both keep up with his team and give he and his friends a leg up in their fantasy seasons. As more than 20 million people play fantasy football every year, the founder is not alone. Bonaddio set out to create custom, proprietary algorithms that will do all the stat-crunching for you, allowing users to easily import their existing teams from Yahoo or ESPN’s fantasy websites, and quickly get started.

But what truly sets numberFire apart is its “cumulative” approach to making projections. In projecting whether or not Eli Manning will fare well this weekend, for example, numberFire might compare Manning’s stats to quarterbacks playing today as well as those that played years ago. The idea is to match Manning’s physical characteristics to others, as well as taking into consideration what particular fields he performs well on, at what times of day, in what conditions, etc. numberFire also takes the Giants’ collective offense into account, what types of plays they run, whether they have a strong running game, and so on, in an effort to decipher whether or not next week’s game at Philadelphia will be a good matchup for Manning (and, by extension, the Giants).

But, beyond this holistic approach and its top-down analytics features, numberFire also allows users to crowdsource their decisions and engage other users in conversation through a “Q&A” feature, which capitalizes on a trend started by Quora and StackOverflow. Neither site targets sports fans (or really time-critical questions), so numberFire wants users to take advantage of its Q&A section to receive insight from a community of like-minded individuals. The questions, answers, and ensuing comments all pop up in a user’s curated newsfeed around the players and teams they’re following. Pretty cool.

Of course, for a young startup growing a business in the consumer web, it’s all about acquiring and retaining users. numberFire met with some problems early on in this area (like so many before it), so to address this problem, the team has struck partnerships with SB Nation, BleacherReport, CineSport, and other sports media companies to reach a broader audience than it would be able to capture on its own. The startup accomplishes this by offering the ability to embed its data widgets into third-party sites and by delivering video content developed by its team.

The idea here, says Bonaddio, is to begin encouraging sports fans to demand a more thorough analysis from sports media pundits and journalists. And I have to agree with him here. Most sports media today is filled with talking heads and blowhards, whose projections are unreliable, biased, and far from fact-based. BleacherReport writers, for example, can use numberFire’s analytics and projections to drill down into some interesting data in their coverage, rather than relying on fluffy statements like, “Oh, Cam Newton is looking good, Panthers by 7!”

With these strategic partnerships, a soon-to-close round of seed funding, and Entrepreneurs Round Table demo day fast-approaching, numberFire has come a long way in the last year, and I’d say is offering a great value proposition for fantasy football enthusiasts and regular old sports fans alike.

Now, if numberFire can just quickly expand to baseball so that I can finally make some money on the Red Sox, then we’ll really have something going.

For more, check out numberFire at home here.

London-based Top10, which operates an eponymous social recommendation and discovery platform, has raised $3.5 million in a Series A round of financing led by Accel Partners, with Founder Collective, Idealab, Forward Venture Partners and Shakil Khan – an early investor in and advisor to digital music startup Spotify – also participating.

Top10 basically enables people to create and share recommendations (evidently, in the form of Top 10 lists) about products, entertainment, travel and other topics, in an effort to crowdsource the online population’s opinions on the Web and thus help people make informed purchasing decisions.

Top10 allows anyone to make or contribute to lists of recommendations on subjects they care about, and share them through their social networks. Examples in abundance.

The startup was founded in early 2011 by Tom Leathes, Harry Jones and Alex Buttle.

Comments Top10 CEO Tom Leathes:

“We’re [creating] a new kind of intuitive and engaging platform for buying products based on real people’s views. People everywhere love to rank and share what they’re passionate about. Top10 is creating a great new way for everyone to discover and buy new things”.

Similar services include Ranker, Amen, Listal FindTheBest and TopTenREVIEWS.

Google made a series of announcements this morning, most notably opening up its Google+ social product to everyone as its 100th feature. Not content to stop there, Google followed up with Google+ features 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107… 107 being a name change for its Google+ Group Messaging app Huddle.

When Google announced the Huddle product back in July, enterprise collaboration software startup Huddle — which has its own group messaging element — was like, “What gives?” and had their people contact Google’s people. Says Huddle co-founder Andy McLoughlin, “We let them know that we held the [Huddle] global trademark across all countries, so it was pretty clear that they had to consider renaming.”

McLoughlin tells me that Google was cool about the name change and that the dispute never entered arbitration. Google was just like “ We think we should find a better name for this product,” he tells me.

The Google+ Group Messaging feature is now known as, drumroll please, Messenger. Uh guys … Guys …

So while I can’t wait until the Facebook Messenger (or Yahoo Messenger, or Microsoft Messenger …) team gets a load of this, McLoughlin, for one, is pretty pleased with Google’s decision, “We’re just very happy that an amicable end was reached that didn’t conflict on our trademark.”

When asked if he had used Google+ Messenger himself, McLoughlin complimented Google on its look and feel but admitted app fatigue, “There are so many group messaging tools right now, it’s sort of hard to distinguish one from another.”

No kidding (For the record, I would have gone with ‘Skype’).

A while back, rumors surfaced about a new Android smartphone built by HTC. Rumors and leaks happen with just about every phone, but for this particular Android handset, we were hearing quite a lot about it.

Eventually specs trickled out, but before that all we knew was that it was a phone targeted to women: The HTC Bliss (now known as the Rhyme).

Leak:

We heard it would launch in a “calming” sea foam green, and come with an LED-powered dangling charm to let ladies know if the phone in their purse was getting calls. We even heard that women-centric dieting and shopping apps would come along for the ride.

This was unsettling.

Joanna Stern of TIMN felt the same way I did, writing:

To be honest, we’ve had a really hard time believing some of this information — not because there’s anything here that’s technically impossible or because we didn’t trust our source, but because we simply can’t imagine a company creating a phone specifically for American women in this day and age (it reminds us of the Petticoat 5 spoof).

Even our own Sarah Perez tagged her own thoughts to the end of her leak post:

What bothers me about the idea of a “girl’s” Android phone is that somehow my gender has different needs and expectations than their male counterparts do when it comes to smartphones. Colored devices and cell phone charms are not necessarily “womanly” things – they may appeal to a younger demographic, or to those who concern themselves with appearances, perhaps. But that doesn’t mean only women.

I second, +1, and “Like” all that was said. And what’s worse (that these ladies neglected to touch on) is that the phone itself wasn’t* all that great. By no means was it a “bad” phone, but the specs we heard about were average and likely to be outdated a few months later. With a single-core 1GHz processor and a 3.7-inch WVGA touchscreen, Sense 3.5 can’t really make up for what is very clearly a mid-range Android device.

So why target something mediocre towards women? Because we don’t know what kind of processors we should want? Because we don’t enjoy beautiful, large touchscreens? I was at a loss.

*I continue to use the past tense in this section as I’m referring to rumors, and what we knew then.

Revamp:

No doubt whatsoever, HTC saw the reaction. Many tech bloggers are male, so of course it wasn’t as fiercely disputed by the boys as it was by us woman-folk, but the reaction seemed pretty collective and HTC heard what was being said, which was: “Are you guys really doing this?”

As the launch announcement drew closer and closer, specs, press shots, and even pictures of the accessories were leaked, and it looked like not much had changed from the info in the original rumors. The only new information we got on the Bliss was an invitation to the launch event (that happened this morning), in which HTC didn’t actually disclose the product they were announcing.

But from the way that things were worded here in New York, this phone isn’t just for women. HTC was super serious about not using any female-centric words or pronouns once during the entire thing. In fact, they made a push to say that this phone was for “everyone.”

I even asked an HTC rep at the event why we had heard no mention of women during the announcement. He robotically replied that this phone is for “everyone,” and that the Rhyme is more about following you through your daily life than being catered to a specific gender.

Words vs. actions is an interesting thing, isn’t it?

To be quite honest, not much has changed from what we had thought, save for a couple last minute switcharoos. The Bliss is now the Rhyme, which I guess has a bit of a more masculine feel to it than Bliss does, but not by much. Then there’s the “calming” sea foam green we had all expected, which has changed over to a dark plum color. Again, not too much of a shift toward “unisex” here either, but I guess it’s a small step in the right direction. And those dieting/shopping apps that were probably the most insulting part of the whole thing? Those are no where to be found, which is an entirely welcome announcement after all those rumors.

But that silly purse-friendly charm is still alive and well, and even worse it glows pink. That same rep mentioned how men could hang the charm out of their work-out bag when they’re at the gym, but that seems like more of a hassle than a step towards making life easier. Purple may be a step up from a light shade of green, but still doesn’t scream “A man’s man should own this phone!”

My point? HTC listened to the rants in the rumor phase, and in my opinion they at least attempted (albeit weakly) to calm the storm. By never actually saying that the phone was designed for women, HTC can technically get itself off the hook. The problem is that no man will buy a phone that comes with a “charm,” so no matter how much they say the phone is for “everyone,” it just takes a quick glance at the Rhyme to see how misleading that is.

Repeat:

Purposeful leaks aren’t unheard of. Not only do leaks build hype around a phone, but they give the developers a chance to gauge our first reactions. HTC didn’t do an excellent job of nixing all the obviously girl-centered features of this phone, but in small ways you can tell that we were heard.

My hope is that HTC, and every other phone maker, will pay attention to the coverage of their products before announcement. Whether the rumor itself is true or false, anonymous internet commenters give the most brutally honest feedback you could ask for. Take the hints.

I don’t know about you, but I’m awful at remembering the lyrics to songs, and I often find myself turning to Google search to answer my lyrical questions — and frequently, to lose arguments. Apparently, I’m not alone, as “lyrics” is one of the most searched-for terms on Google. While a quick search is often all one needs to flick on the light switch, overall, lyric search remains a pretty disappointing (and frustrating) experience. There are tons of lyrics sites out there, but most of them are unofficial, don’t have rights to broadcasting free lyrics, or they’re hiding malware.

Founded in 2010, musiXmatch is a startup trying to solve this very problem by building a database of legal song lyrics on the web in the hopes of becoming the IMDB for legal song lyrics. So far, the site has collected over 5.5 million songs (in 18 languages) and is not only building a database that meets with international rights management standards, but it is also developing an API to distribute its lyrics to music publishers, services, app developers, and hackers. Phew.

Today, musiXmatch is announcing the official launch of its “musiXmatch Lyrics App” for Mac OSX, which is available for $5 on the App Store. The plug-in enables users to automatically view full screen lyrics for the music they’re currently playing and includes support for iTunes and Spotify.

The widget is still in its early stages, and the team said that it will soon be giving music fans the ability to search for lyrics by artist, song name, or keywords, and browse discography info on albums and artists — and share that info with friends through social networks. (Another cool update coming down the pipeline: Enabling listeners to automatically embed the lyrics into the id3 tag of your songs.)

For iTunes and Spotify users like myself, musiXmatch’s widget is a pretty cool little add-on to the existing listening experience, as it automatically matches your iTunes and Spotify libraries (and automatically opens both), works with both platforms’ “radio” features, allows you to share lyrics to Facebook and Twitter, and receive Growl notifications. (And it works with Lion.)

In addition to today’s launch of its iTunes and Spotify compatible iOS plug-in, musiXmatch also shared with us that their mobile applications, which are available on iOS, Android, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, have been downloaded more than 1 million times. Over 50 percent of those users are active on a daily basis.

musiXmatch’s mobile solution allows users to easily find and match lyrics for their entire mobile music library, and with desktop availability, a sweet API that lets developers easily distribute kosher lyrics, the startup is becoming a very appealing service for everything from radio streaming platforms and video services to tablet apps and OEM manufacturers. With partnerships that include BMG, Kobalt, Universal Music Publishing Group, and Sony ATV Music, among others, musiXmatch is becoming a very interesting business and platform.

But, what about competition, you say? Well my friends, look no further than TuneWiki. While musiXmatch is an up-and-comer, the well-funded TuneWiki has been going mobile with its lyric-centric social music player for quite some time now. MusiXmatch is, now, essentially the European equivalent. It will be interesting to see how the two vie for marketshare going forward.

Which would you choose, or both? Check ‘em out.

Bell & Ross, not content to rest on their aviation laurels, has released the WWI-92 edition, a watch based on a World War I era pocket watch. The watch is strikingly simple – just a black face with silvered hands and case – and the 97 version has a reserve de marche and all models feature welded lugs, a wonderful detail that hearkens back to the days when wristwatches were actually pocket watches with bars soldered onto them so they could be worn on the wrist.

If you want to go totally retro you can check out the PW1, a handsome B&R pocket watch that takes design cues from the WWI-92. Both watches are probably wildly expensive but man if I’m not hungry like a wolf for them.

Product Page [Warning: Scratchy, tinny WWI-era radio noises]

One of Facebook’s most important products is getting much smarter — and a little easier to use.

Less than 48 hours before its f8 developer conference, Facebook is rolling out an updated version of News Feed that does away with the two-tabbed interface that it’s had for two years now. Before today you’d have to swap between ‘Top Stories’ (a feed of stories that Facebook thought were important) and ‘Most Recent’ (a feed of your friends’ most recent actions on the site). Plenty of users clicked both of these tabs — over 50% as of last year — but Facebook has long been convinced that it wasn’t the optimal solution.

Which brings us to today’s launch. Facebook will now merge both types of content into the same feed, intelligently determining how much screen real estate to allocate to ‘Top Stories’ based on how recently you’ve logged into the site. If you’re checking Facebook ten times a day at work, then most of the items in your feed will be recent; if you’re logging in for the first time in the few days, Facebook will try to give you an overview of the most important things your friends have shared. These important stories will be denoted with a small blue triangle in the corner, and you can manually tell Facebook if it missed an important story, or if you don’t care for one of the items it deemed important (in this sense, it’s a bit like Gmail’s Priority Inbox).

This is a big change, and it’s been a long road to get here — as the site’s home page, News Feed has seen plenty of iterations over the years, particularly around the way real-time content is displayed.

In the early days of News Feed, users would see a listing of posts that Facebook felt they’d be most interested in. It worked pretty well, but it had one downside: posts were often hours old, which made the content feel stale compared to services like Twitter. Facebook unveiled its solution to this in March 2009, which it first introduced a real-time News Feed. No longer would all posts be delayed by at least 10 minutes — the new Feed would show them as they happened.

Which, of course, brought with it other issues, like the fact that it was harder to tell which posts were actually important. Facebook used a ‘Highlights’ section in the sidebar to showcase the most important stories, but those were easy to look over. So it wasn’t a big surprise when Facebook later merged highlights back into News Feed, allowing users to swap between a ‘Live Feed’ and ‘News Feed’ view (which were later renamed to Top News and Most Recent).

How’s that for a history lesson?

The second major change today is the official unveiling of the Facebook Ticker, a stream of content in the right sidebar that some users have been seeing for the last few weeks (Facebook’s VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer says that the company has put a lot of work into making sure it gets Ticker right, hence the extensive testing).

The purpose of Ticker is pretty straightforward: it shows you a stream of your friends’ most recent activity on Facebook, as it happens. This means that every time one of your friend ‘Likes’ a piece of content, posts a photo, or comments on a status update, you’ll immediately get a notification in your Ticker. And if you mouse-over one of the updates, Facebook will show a pop-over with relevant information (for example, if a friend checked into a venue, you’ll see a Bing map).

At first glance Ticker may not sound like a big deal (after all, you’re going to see the most important updates in your News Feed), but it may well become one of the site’s most important features. The immediacy of these updates means it’s easy to tell if a piece of content is quickly going viral among your friends, or if they’re participating in a particularly active discussion. And, perhaps more important, it gives you a near-constant stream of stuff to look at, which means it’s probably a great way to kill time (this is one reason, I suspect, why Twitter has become popular). Ticker will also be accesible throughout the site: it shows up next to everyone’s News Feed, and if you widen your browser window, the Ticker will show up in a persistent right sidebar, above the chat box.

Finally, Facebook is boosting the size of photo thumbnails in your feed, which makes them nicer to look at (and more inviting to click on).

There were quite a few thoughts running through my head when I purchased an iPad, but I can honestly say that “I wish I had an iPad as big as a coffee table” wasn’t one of them. Now, after having seen Crunchy Logistics’s Padzilla case, I can safely say it’s all I’m thinking about right now.

Crunchy Logistics seems to have a thing for creating absurdly big touchscreens, a great example of which is the conference table-sized display they showed off last month. The Padzilla is their newest product, and it allows users to interact with their iPhones and iPads on a completely ridiculous scale.

To call it a case is a bit of a stretch: you’re not putting the Padzilla on your iOS device so much as you’re mounting your iOS device inside the Padzilla. The name is pretty apt, for sure: the Padzillas are custom made, and assuming you’ve got the green for it, they come in sizes as large as 150″ diagonal. To give you an idea of scale, the model demoed in the video below comes in at a slightly more reasonable 70″ diagonal.

The Padzilla is a purely plug-and-play solution to boot; the iDevices don’t need to be jailbroken, but anything older than the iPhone 3GS isn’t supported. If playing Angry Birds and its ilk get old, feel free to connect your choice of game consoles or computers into the display too.

While I’m sure the Padzilla has some practical uses (they’d give your local news station a bit of pizazz, for one), the wow factor alone is enough to make it tempting. Better start saving your pennies though, because CrunchyLogistics CEO Neil Dufva says that buying a 70″ rolling display like the one in the video would cost roughly between $30-40,000 (iPad included). If that seems a bit steep, don’t worry: Neil says CrunchyLogistics is open to renting these things out to interested parties.