Category: Tech news

Photo: Stephen Lewis

The line between computer and TV continues to blur with the new Samsung 950 Series monitor-TV hybrids. The 27-inch model shown here boasts 1920 x 1080 resolution and an embedded tuner for HDTV content. Also hiding inside the 0.45-inch-thin display and asymmetrical chassis is an image processor for real-time 3-D conversion of 2-D content—sports, movies, videogames, even photos (one pair of glasses included). You can also stick with standard 2-D, if you like. Either way, you get LED backlighting—which delivers sharper contrast, lower power consumption, and a thinner form factor than standard fluorescent backlighting—and an Ultra Clear Panel screen, which Samsung claims absorbs ambient light for deeper colors in bright rooms. And should you feel an urge to continue your Crysis 2 campaign while rewatching Doctor Who, the monitor’s picture-in-picture function will let you do both.

“What you see is what you keep.” — This incredibly lame slogan was actually trademarked by the appropriately named Joker Technologies for use in the marketing of its Active-I spy glasses.

But when you use these stealthy shades, with their built-in video camera and microphone that capture everything you see and hear, you can see why you won’t necessarily be keeping anything recorded on them.

On the surface, they look like an ordinary pair of sunglasses. But look closely and you’ll see a minuscule 640 x 480 VGA camera and microphone embedded in the front of the frames.

Master controls run down the right arm, but because those controls are out of sight when you are wearing the glasses, finding the right one can be hit-or-miss. The glasses also have a separate monocular viewer which attaches to the left arm and swivels to the front so you can view videos and snapshots without a computer. What a great idea — if you have 20/20 vision or wear contacts. For those who wear eyeglasses, the Active-I’s design does not easily accommodate them. And, of course, it’s not particular pleasant to watch videos through shaded lenses, either. Fortunately, you also get a set of interchangeable clear lenses.

Playback on the monocular viewer is reduced to QVGA 320 x 240 resolution out of necessity, which is essentially like looking at a moving thumbnail image. And if you want to preview the audio, you’ll have to plug your headphones (not included) into the frames.

The rig comes with cables so you can view the AVI files on computer or a TV. It’s a much more comfortable experience, but it’s also where the true quality of your recordings becomes evident.

The Active-I glasses capture every tiny head movement as you walk, resulting in some jerky images. It’s not handheld video, it’s head-held video, which is even worse. The audio is filled with whooshy wind noises even when it’s not breezy out — the movement of air generated as you walk is enough to crunchify the soundtrack. The audio-input volume is preset and can’t be adjusted. And if you want to shoot a long video, the internal 2-GB memory chip can save up to 55 minutes of footage — but your opus is inexplicably divided in two separate 25-to-30-minute chunks.

So what’s there to like about the Active-I video glasses? Simply, they’re a clever way to capture sights and sounds on the sly while your subject remains none the wiser. In other words, a serviceable — if not particularly great — way to spy on neighbors, stalk your ex, or case the joint around the corner.

WIRED Hands-free filming on the down-low. Lightweight at 2.1 ounces. Interchangeable shaded and clear lenses for different lighting conditions. Preview your perversions with the monocular viewer. MicroSD card slot lets you expand beyond the 2 GB of on-board storage.

TIRED Jerky images are inevitable with the smallest head movement. Mic captures the movement of every air molecule. Audio volume isn’t adjustable. Can’t wear them on top of other eyeglasses.

Photos by Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Cleantech companies— especially in solar— love to talk about how they’re breaking records. They issue press releases left and right about the most efficient this, that and the other. Such claims fizzle if they haven’t been verified by a third-party lab. They can also feel like greenwash, or Cola War style brand standoffs.

Broken records we love to hear about, though, are like these from cleantech ventures Lighting Science Group and Flisom (in Switzerland). Here’s what they’ve done and why it matters…

1. One Million LED Bulbs Made In One Quarter

On May 31, Lighting Science Group — makers of light emitting diode (LED) bulbs that are Energy Star rated — reported that during the first quarter of 2011, they produced and sold 1 million bulbs. In 2010, Lighting Science produced and sold 1 million bulbs in the second half of the year, according to company statements.

Bulk production and sales increases like this suggest that LED lights, which are more energy-efficient and durable than flourescent and incandescent bulbs, are becoming mainstream and more affordable.

2. Flexible Solar Technology Reaches 18.7 Percent Efficiency

Flexible, thin-film solar cells can now deliver more electricity per square inch than ever before.

Scientists from EMPA, Switzerland’s Federal Laboratory for Materials Science and Innovation, along with a Swiss startup called Flisom broke the energy conversion efficiency record for flexible thin-film CIGS solar cells, last week. They hit 18.7 percent efficiency for their CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) flexible solar cells.

A previous record of 15.7 percent was announced by MiaSole in December 2010 (as TechCrunch reported then).

The new record means that electricity generated by thin-film solar will become more affordable, hopefully alleviating reliance on petroleum and coal for power somewhat.

The improved efficiency also means that the flexible, lighter-weight solar panels could catch up to rigid, silicon solar panels in terms of performance which would allow more consumer choice and competition in solar.

Image: Records, under creative commons via Peter Organisciak

Once far off in the distance, iCloud is now quickly approaching. It will be a new service with many layers that Apple will first unveil on Monday during the keynote at WWDC. But the most interesting layer, at least from a consumer perspective initially, is the music one. And the details continue to emerge about what’s likely coming.

Today, two reports state that Apple has finalized deals with all four major music labels. CNet notes that Universal is now on board as are many publishers. The LA Times confirms this and suggests that the publisher deals could be completed tomorrow. That means the service will be set for a Monday debut.

Great, right? Potentially. But there are also some troubling details.

First of all, CNet’s report states that while it will first talked about on Monday, the iTunes aspect of iCloud will not launch right away. Instead, it’s expected “soon”. We had previously heard that Apple was aiming for a fall launch of the service, but that likely got pushed up once Amazon and Google unveiled their (decidedly limited) cloud music offerings.

Second, and more importantly, the report says that the initial version of the service will only offer access to songs that have been purchased through iTunes. In other words, any songs ripped from a CD, or obtained through other online stores, or obtained through less-than-legal means, will not be included. That’s not good news.

It makes sense that the music labels would want such a limitation to ensure that pirates aren’t rewarded. But most of the talk up until now has been that Apple was working hard to ensure that all user music would be available in the cloud. This seems vital given users’ desires to work with existing music collections. Now CNet is saying that Apple is aiming to offer this more complete option “sometime in the future”.

Again, not good.

The LA Times report is a bit more disturbing because it talks about uploading. One killer feature of iTunes in iCloud was supposed to be the ability to mirror songs. That is, for iTunes to scan your hard drive, identify your music, and give you access to those same songs in iCloud without any uploading necessary. Both Amazon’s and Google’s service involve uploading — which is a huge pain in the ass — but that’s only because neither of them have the label (or publisher) deals in place. Apple will have those. So let’s hope LA Times simply misspoke there.

And that’s certainly possible. Other aspects of their report don’t make a ton of sense. For example, while CNET says the label/publisher/Apple split for iTunes in iCloud will be 58/12/30, LA Times says that Apple will give a full 70 percent of revenue to the labels and another 12 percent to the publishers, leaving them with only 18 percent. The former split seems more likely given the current status quo, but LA Times went out of their way to update the post with this new split, so perhaps it is correct.

The oddest part of the LA Times post though is the talk about iCloud being advertising-supported. This would represent a big break in form for Apple — more along the lines of the Google model. It’s simply hard to imagine Apple doing something like that.

Of course, no other details are given, so who knows what that actually means.

LA Times also claims that while iTunes in iCloud would be free at first, there would be an annual fee of “about” $25 eventually. Apple is expected to charge for the service, but it may be bundled with other iCloud services, rather than broken out separately. Also, if they are charging the fee, the advertising talk seems even stranger.

Given that fairly loose-lipped music industry people (and Hollywood people as well) are involved, we can probably expect more to leak out before Monday. And let’s hope so, the talk right now is ranging from confusing to a bit disappointing.

[image: twitpic/@stop]

CodeGuard, a startup that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last week, has already raised a round of funding. The company has just announced a $500,000 round from Imlay Investments.

CodeGuard, which was the audience choice winner from Startup Alley, helps protect and monitor websites from attacks and data thefts. The startup provides a virtual version control system and stores site data in the cloud. Backups are stored hourly or daily, allowing users to see what files have changed. If there is a hack or suspicious change in data, webmasters can quickly revert to the last known “clean” version.

And hacking can be identified and site owners can be notified before they spread malware, have their links pirated, or act as a parasitic host for spammers. As we wrote in our initial review of CodeGuard, the service is similar to the Time Machine feature built into the Apple OS X software; except CodeGuard backsup data found on a server elsewhere. And the product is designed to allow owners with little technical experience to manage and monitor their websites.

You can watch CodeGuard’s demo from TechCrunch Disrupt below:

Today, another early-stage accelerator program hits Quebec’s largest city, joining Year One Labs and others in an effort to support and grow Canadian entrepreneurship. FounderFuel was created by the team behind Montreal Start Up, a venture investor that has backed Beyond The Rack and the recently-launched Real Ventures, a $50 million seed-stage venture fund. Today, Montreal Start Up announced that it will be contributing over $2 million to FounderFuel’s accelerator program.

Ian Jeffrey, who was formerly formerly VP of Tiny Pictures and subsequently Director of Marketing at Shutterfly will become FounderFuel’s General Manager. Jeffrey told TechCrunch that FounderFuel aims to be the “Y Hibernator” for Montreal-based startups. Though, considering Y Combinator accepted 60-plus startups for its summer program this year, FounderFuel has its work cut out.

The program will accept approximately 8 teams into its first batch and will dole out $10K to each team, plus an additional $5K for each founding member. The program is 12-weeks long, beginning August 15th, with a demo day planned for November 7th in Montreal. 85-plus mentors from around the world are joining the board and will lend their knowledge and experience to the selected teams. The program is now open for submissions, with a deadline of July 1st.

With relative proximity to both New York and Boston, FounderFuel will be tapping a number of U.S.-based mentors, like David Cancel of Performable and David Hauser of Chargify in an effort to provide quality mentorship to the founding teams.

“Having spent time in Montreal recently as part of the ‘Do More Faster’ tour, I think I’ve got a read of the place and a good sense of the vibe”, said Foundry Group Partner and TechStars Founder Brad Feld. “And I’ve got to tell you, in terms of the dynamics for Entrepreneurship, it’s a powerful place just to hang out in”.

It’s great to see another support system for Canadian entrepreneurs hitting the streets of Montreal. With any luck, FounderFuel will be the Red Bull for innovation in Montreal.

In Silicon Valley the terms of venture capital deals, the prices of valuations and the real stories of ousters are routinely dished, whether they always show up in the press or not. Sure it’s all off the record or on background or whispered at a coffee shop, but people who live here love what they do and when companies and valuations grow this quickly, it’s hard to keep the juicy details under wraps.

So when they can’t dish, what do they do? Hide.

No one wants to mess with the Securities and Exchange Commission. So I should have realized sooner the reason why so many attendees that I usually talk to at conferences seemed to vanish into thin air during the All Things Digital Conference.

The Greylock partners– four of them were here– were all conspicuously absent the last few days. LinkedIn founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman was here….supposedly but I never laid eyes on him. Ditto James Slavet. And John Lilly was around opening night, but I didn’t see him again. I saw David Sze at check in, but he only resurfaced again an hour or so ago looking for a lost phone. It was the first time I’ve ever seen him refuse to stop and chat. Moments later, the Groupon S1 came out and Pandora priced. I don’t know if he ever found his phone, but fortunately he’ll soon be able to buy about zillion replacements.

Andrew Mason was supposed to sit down with us after his fireside chat, then suddenly had to leave immediately. And of course Mark Pincus pulled out of the conference at the last minute altogether, spurring Zynga IPO speculation. This after Hoffman, the Pandora founders and several others politely declined our invitations to speak at New York Disrupt, saying our San Francisco conference was far better timing. (I should note that Marc Andreessen was also nowhere to be seen except on stage last night, but that’s just Andreessen.)

It’s tough days to be a tech reporter trolling the halls for news, when the newsmakers vanish. Nearly all of Groupon’s investors, its press people and its CEO were all in the same hotel with the tech press elite and somehow the story didn’t leak. Score one for the SEC and a big fail for the tech press. I’d resign in shame, if every reporter here didn’t fail just as terribly.

So who was visible in the hallways this week? Two people of note: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg. Indeed both were quite cordial and easy to find, roaming the halls for several days without handlers. In absence of other news coming out of this event, take that tidbit for whatever it’s worth.

Groupon finally filed for its IPO today and now we can see it’s finances laid bare (click for full financial table). Groupon has been growing at an astounding rate. Last year, it’s revenues grew more than 22,000 percent to $713 million. And in the first quarter of 2011 alone, it nearly matched all of its revenue from last year with $644 million in sales, up 13,575 percent from a year ago.

If you annualize Groupon’s first-quarter numbers, you get a revenue run rate of $2.6 billion for 2011, and that is not even factoring in any growth in subsequent quarters. So the $3 billion to $4 billion estimates that were thrown out a while ago for 2011 revenue look very achievable.

Groupon had 83.1 million subscribers as of March 31, 2011, up from 3.4 million the year before. In the first quarter of this year alone, it added 32.5 million subscribers and it sold 28 million Groupons across all 83.1 million subscribers.

But what about profits? Groupon lost $456 million last year, and another $147 million last quarter. And don’t expect those losses to go away anytime soon. CEO Andrew Mason warns future public shareholders, “We aggressively invest in growth.” Groupon spends a lot of money “acquiring new subscribers.” About 54 percent of its operating expenses goes towards marketing. The other 46 percent goes towards sales.

Half of its workforce of about 8,000 people are in sales, a number CEO Andrew MAson threw out yesterday during an interview at the D9 conference. As of March 31, 2011, however, according to the filing, there were 7,107 employees and 3,556 sales people. Of those sales people, the majority (2,895) are international. They represent 81 percent of the salesforce, but only 54 percent of Groupon’s total revenues in the first quarter. That is where Groupon is investing for growth—overseas. That is also where Groupon is losing most of its money. The U.S operations lost only $10.4 million last year, whereas the international operations lost $170.6 million.

Groupon and its bankers will be pointing to its gross profits instead, which are much healthier. Gross profits were up about 24,600 percent last year to $280 million, from $10.9 million the year before. And gross profits in the first quarter of 2011 came in at $270 million, which nearly matched all of last year’s gross profits. Those were up from $20 million the year before.

Investing for growth is fine, but ultimately a company (and its shares) are measured by how much of those profits the company actually keeps.

Music streaming service Pandora has just filed a new version of its S-1 that indicates the company will be pricing its stock at $7 to $9 per share. Pandora’s stock will be traded on The New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “P.”

According to the filing, Pandora aims to raise as much as $141.6 million in the offerring, and will offer offering 5,000,682 shares of its common stock with the selling stockholders are offering 8,683,318 shares of common stock in the IPO. The pricing of the stock puts Pandora’s valuation at over $1 billion.

Pandora initially filed its S-1 in February and now has 94 million registered users. Last week, the company released its most recent revenue numbers, which reflected an increase in both sales and usage for the internet radio service.

Groupon has just filed its form S-1, paving the path for an IPO in the near future (the news isn’t a big surprise, as an impending IPO has been rumored for some time). As part of the process the company has to disclose many of its key stats — like the fact that it has Q1 2011 revenues of $644 million but is actually still losing money because of its rapid expansion. It also outlines the cap table, giving an overview of who owns how much of the company.

As you can see in the table below, Groupon has Class A and Class B common stock, which are identical save for the increased voting rights given to class B (how many more votes each Class B share gets is yet to be determined or disclosed as there’s actually a blank in the S-1 where it says how many votes per share Class B gets).

Here are the largest shareholders of Class A Shares, which make up the bulk of the outstanding shares:

Eric Lefkofsky, who was a cofounder of ThePoint (which became Groupon) and originally financed the company, has 21.6%.

New Enterprise Associates, which invested in ThePoint and then invested again once the company had become Groupon, holds 14.7% of the company.

CityDeal Management has 10.3% (Groupon acquired CityDeal in May 2010).

Groupon Cofounder and CEO Andrew Mason has 7.7%.

Bradley Keywell has 6.9%.

Accel has 5.6%.

Also important is the distribution of Class B shares, which, while making up a small percentage of the overall shares, likely have much higher voting rights:

Both Lefkofsky and Mason have 41.7% of Class B shares.

Bradley Keywell has 16.7% of the Class B Shares.

After CEO Andrew Mason gave an IPO death stare to Kara Swisher at D9, looks like Groupon has filed an S-1 to IPO, looking to raise $750 million. According to the form its 2010 revenues were $713 million and revenues grew 22.7X in 2010. Quarter 1 2011 revenues were at $644 million. The company lost $456 million last year and lost $146 million last quarter.

Groupon has 83.1 million subscribers, 15.8 million of which have purchased a Groupon. There have been over 70 million Groupons sold as of today with 30 million sold in 2010 and 28 million bought in the first quarter of 2011.

The round is being underwritten by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Cleverly worded press release below:

LETTER FROM ANDREW D. MASON

June 1, 2011

Dear Potential Stockholders,

On the day of this writing, Groupon’s over 7,000 employees offered more than 1,000 daily deals to 83 million subscribers across 43 countries and have sold to date over 70 million Groupons. Reaching this scale in about 30 months required a great deal of operating flexibility, dating back to Groupon’s founding.

Before Groupon, there was The Point—a website launched in November 2007 after my former employer and one of my co-founders, Eric Lefkofsky, asked me to leave graduate school so we could start a business. The Point is a social action platform that lets anyone organize a campaign asking others to give money or take action as a group, but only once a “tipping point” of people agree to participate.

I started The Point to empower the little guy and solve the world’s unsolvable problems. A year later, I started Groupon to get Eric to stop bugging me to find a business model. Groupon, which started as a side project in November 2008, applied The Point’s technology to group buying. By January 2009, its popularity soaring, we had fully shifted our attention to Groupon.

I’m writing this letter to provide some insight into how we run Groupon. While we’re looking forward to being a public company, we intend to continue operating according to the long-term focused principles that have gotten us to this point. These include:

We aggressively invest in growth.

We spend a lot of money acquiring new subscribers because we can measure the return and believe in the long-term value of the marketplace we’re creating. In the past, we’ve made investments in growth that turned a healthy forecasted quarterly profit into a sizable loss. When we see opportunities to invest in long-term growth, expect that we will pursue them regardless of certain short-term consequences.

We are always reinventing ourselves.

In our early days, each Groupon market featured only one deal per day. The model was built around our limitations: We had a tiny community of customers and merchants.

As we grew, we ran into the opposite problem. Overwhelming demand from merchants, with nine-month waiting lists in some markets, left merchant demand unfilled and contributed to hundreds of Groupon clones springing up around the world. And our customer base grew so large that many of our merchants had an entirely new problem: Struggling with too many customers instead of too few.

To adapt, we increased our investment in technology and released deal targeting, enabling us to feature different deals for different subscribers in the same market based on their personal preferences. In addition to providing a more relevant customer experience, this helped us to manage the flow of customers and opened the Groupon marketplace to more merchants, in turn diminishing a reason for clones to exist.

Today, we are pursuing models of reinvention that would not be possible without the critical mass of customers and merchants we have achieved. Groupon NOW, for example, allows customers to pull deals on demand for immediate redemption, and helps keep merchants bustling throughout the day.

Expect us to make ambitious bets on our future that distract us from our current business. Some bets we’ll get right, and others we’ll get wrong, but we think it’s the only way to continuously build disruptive products.

We are unusual and we like it that way.

We want the time people spend with Groupon to be memorable. Life is too short to be a boring company. Whether it’s with a deal for something unusual, such as fire dancing classes, or a marketing

After selling out on our original mission of saving the world to start hawking coupons, in order to live with ourselves, we vowed to make Groupon a service that people love using. We set out to upturn the stigmas created by traditional discounting services, trusting that nothing would be as crucial to our long-term success as happy customers and merchants. We put our phone number on our printed Groupons and built a huge customer service operation, manned in part with members of Chicago’s improv community. We developed a sophisticated, multi-stage process to pick deals from high quality merchants with vigorously fact-checked editorial content. We built a dedicated merchant services team that works with our merchant partners to ensure satisfaction. And we have a completely open return policy, giving customers a refund if they ever feel like Groupon let them down. We do these things to make our customers and merchants happy, knowing that market success would be a side effect.

We believe that when once-great companies fall, they don’t lose to competitors, they lose to themselves—and that happens when they stop focusing on making people happy. As such, we do not intend to be reactive to competitors. We will watch them, but we won’t distract ourselves with decisions that aren’t designed primarily to make our customers and merchants happy.

We don’t measure ourselves in conventional ways.

There are three main financial metrics that we track closely. First, we track gross profit, which we believe is the best proxy for the value we’re creating. Second, we measure free cash flow—there is no better metric for long-term financial stability. Finally, we use a third metric to measure our financial performance—Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income, or Adjusted CSOI. This metric is our consolidated segment operating income before our new subscriber acquisition costs and certain non-cash charges; we think of it as our operating profitability before marketing costs incurred for long-term growth.

If you’re thinking about investing, hopefully it’s because, like me, you believe that Groupon is better positioned than any company in history to reshape local commerce. The speed of our growth reflects the enormous opportunity before us to create a more efficient local marketplace. As with any business in a 30-month-old industry, the path to success will have twists and turns, moments of brilliance and other moments of sheer stupidity. Knowing that this will at times be a bumpy ride, we thank you for considering joining us.

OpenFeint is announcing a pretty big partner today for its plug and play mobile social gaming platform-Sega. The Japanese video game company is using OpenFeint to provide social gaming for its newest mobile title, Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing for iOS.

OpenFeint’s plug and play mobile social platform and application for smartphones includes a set of online game services such as leaderboards, virtual currencies and achievements running in a cloud-based Web environment.

With OpenFeint, Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing players can add friends on OpenFeint’s gaming network, access leaderboards and achievements, and post updates to Facebook and Twitter. SEGA can also send players direct, actionable messages. The app will be available on iOS later this summer.

Previously, OpenFeint has helped other gaming giants like Taitu and Capcom go mobile. For OpenFeint, a deal with Sega is another well-known partner to add to the list of its rapidly growing community of developers.

And the company just got bought by Japanese gaming giant GREE for $108 million. With GREE’s resources, OpenFeint could be cooking similar

Condé Nast has unveiled a new iPad app called Idea Flight that they claim “is a new tool designed to share ideas, presentations, documents and designs easily and effectively.” One iPad user is a the “pilot” for a presentation and up to 15 “passenger” iPads can follow along via WiFi or Bluetooth. Idea Flight isn’t a general purpose presentation app, but it does look to make the iPad a more useful business device. Video and more after the jump.

Read more…

A la 2006, today, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo collectively announced that they will be partnering to create schema.org, a resource for site owners and developers to learn about structured data and gain insight into how to improve their sites’ search results. The site adds more than 100 new forms of website markup for content ranging from movies to places in an effort to standardize, and thus improve, how websites are crawled and presented in search results. “The site aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages”, Google’s announcement reads.

Yahoo was first to break the news, drawing historical comparisons to the last time the three leading search companies put their heads together to create sitemaps standards. It’s a very interesting move, and will no doubt have website creators the world over paying attention to the new standards advocated by schema.org.

Schema has elements of Yahoo’s longtime Search Monkey project and Google’s rich snippets, which enable websites to improve their position in search results by giving them tools and guidance as to how to do so, and uses meta data to enhance the search results display.

In other words, the site will provide a collection of schemas, or HTML tags, webmasters can add to their pages to make it easy for search providers to recognize their sites, which rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages — and for search engines to display them.

As Google pointed out, it’s a tricky and time-consuming process to add markup to webpages, especially if each search engine asks for data in different ways. How to fix this? Standardize the vocabulary. Which is exactly what they’ve done. And, hey, it might even work on other search engines. Whatever those are. Just kidding, Blekko.

For more, here’s Schema.org’s description of what they’re up to: “Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.”

And for good measure, here’s Yahoo’s announcement, Google’s announcement, and last but not least, Bing’s.

A New York City startup that provides small businesses with a social media dashboard, Postling, is rolling out three new features this week. They are meant to help small business owners see who their company’s most influential advocates are on social media; and get actionable ideas from brands that are doing a good job of using social media already.

Using Klout’s reputation monitoring, Postling will now present users with information about their latest follower(s) on Twitter. If anyone highly influential — from Lady Gaga to Ron Conway — follows your company, Postling founder and chief executive David Lifson reasons, you may want to write a personalized thank you to them, and follow them back immediately— even if you don’t usually take the time to interact with every follower your business gains.

Klout and Postling share some investors, including: Thomas McInerny, Dave McClure and Paige Craig.

In addition, Postling will now alert business owners when a new, favorable — meaning four or five-star review — appears about their business on Yelp or Citysearch.

Finally, if Postling detects that a small business hasn’t shared anything on their blog or via social media profiles in a while, the app will offer some good ideas about what the company owner might do to get or keep the buzz going.

Lifson elaborated as to the reasons these features were a priority for Postling users:

“We hear a lot from SMBs that they ‘don’t know what to say,’ and ‘don’t know what to do.’ This is our way of leveraging the infrastructure we have and the data we have to go from a time-saving tool to something that can really make SMBs more effective.

Now, when you log in in the morning to Postling, we’ve got five or six different things lined up for you that we thought would be important things to bring to your attention.

We paired each thing with some action you can take based on the best practices we see among Postling’s users. About 19,400 businesses use Postling now. We’ll show you what they’re doing that works, like one of their Tweets that got a lot of retweets or replies, or a blog post that got a lot of comments, for inspiration…”

With five, full-time employees and nine consecutive months of 10 to 20 percent growth in users, Postling is also developing an iPhone and Android version of their web app.

[Update Jun. 2, 2011 6:30 PM ET]: Ron Williams, the founder and CEO BellTag, wrote to TechCrunch to inform us that Postling graduates from the First Growth Venture Network class of 2010. The company graduates tonight. Williams is on the incubator’s executive committee.

Congratulations Postling and all the graduating FGVN startups!