Category: Tech news

When I first saw the ReadWriteWeb headline: Google Places Now Imports Your Foursquare Check-Ins, I was surprised. Wow, that’s interesting, and could be huge, I thought. Then I wondered why neither Foursquare nor Google was touting this?Again, could be big for both! Then I read the not-so-fine print.

Oh. RSS. Meh.

Turns out, Google is touting this, quietly. On their Google Places blog (one of Google’s 100 or so blogs), they have a post today entitled: Better access to your content is, well, better. Buried in this post, towards the bottom, you’ll see the note that you can now import other feeds of location information into Places. Writes Google:

To do that, just find the URL of a public GeoRSS/Atom feed that contains place information you care about. This could be anything from a feed of your Foursquare check-ins to a My Map you may have created years ago.

In other words, no one is actually going to do this.

You have to go to a special Foursquare page, copy the RSS feed link, go back to Google Places, paste it there, and wait as they import your items. “It’s really easy!,” Marshall Kirkpatrick writes. I’m actually not sure they could have made this less intuitive. If you’re going to make this option, at least make a simple tool for it.

Still, it is a nice option to have for the 13 of you that will use it. As a longtime Foursquare user, I have a long history of check-ins dating back more than two years (and longer if you count the Dodgeball check-ins they allowed you to import way back when as well). And Google notes that they sync those locations up with the corresponding venues in Google Places (or they do their “best” to).

Trying it out, the results seem to sync up well. But I can’t get it to go beyond my ten most recent Foursquare check-ins. So much for my entire Foursquare history.

Again, this is actually a good idea, I just wish it wasn’t such a shoddy implementation on the front-end. My guess is that’s because Foursquare has no idea about this. (And, to be fair, Google says you can do this with any location feed.) After all, there’s a war going on for location data. And Google and Foursquare are sort of like ex-roommates who had a falling out way back when.

Earlier today, Gilt launched the latest addition to its group-buying sites with Gilt Taste—a very pricey online purveyor of produce, meats, fish, cheese, and other “artisinal” foods. While it’s easy to get distracted by the jaw-dropping prices ($50 steaks anyone?), the part I find interesting is that Gilt Taste is also an online magazine.

Mouth-watering food photography helps to move the merchandise. The entire design of the site started with what it should look like first on a tablet and then worked backwards to the tiled view on the Web. In fact, a companion iPad app is in the works. When you are cooking in the kitchen, a propped-up iPad would be perfect for reading recipes, except that you wouldn’t want to touch it with wet or greasy hands. So instead of swiping, Gilt is prototyping a way to use the camera to create “motion-activated recipes.” You would swipe your hands through the air in front of the screen instead of touching it to go through step-by-step recipes, which could include video and more photography.

The editorial side of the site is overseen by advisor Ruth Reichl, who was the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine for ten years and before that was the food critic for the New York Times. Mixed in with the articles on how to cook broccoli and chicken with ramps, is also an in-depth story by Barry Estabrook on the impact natural gas fracking could have on the food supply.

“It is very important to me that we create a new kind of magazine here that is not advertising-based,” Reichl tells me. Foodies love to read about food, learn about food, and related issues. Content brings buyers. There is a chinese wall between the online market and the editorial, just like there is between advertising and editorial at a traditional publication. But this is the direction that lifestyle publishing—from fashion to food—is going (see also, Thrillist or Refinery29)

Reichl comes from the print establishment, but she is already liberated by working online. “This wasn’t even conceived of six months ago,” she says. “In print, there is no way you could do this in six months. We have 8 people. You’d have 50 at a magazine.” And some of those are engineers who like to build things like that iPad app. It also costs a lot less than launching a splashy new magazine, which can easily run $50 million to $100 million. In contrast, Gilt chairman Susan Lyne says the launch of Gilt Taste “is a few million dollars. It is nowhere close to what it would cost to launch a magazine.”

And what of those expensive food items and departure from Gilt’s discount model? Well, there will be weekly specials, but Gilt Taste is not supposed to replace your grocery shopping It is for special occasions, and for foodies who want access to the same farms and culinary sources that the best chefs in the world go to. Also, Lyne knows there is demand for fancy foods because she tested it out on the main Gilt site where flash sales of food items “really flew.” It makes sense. Food is a perishable item, even more so than fashion. But the team at Gilt felt that shoppers needed more context, and in fact, editorial to attract them, educate them and keep them coming back.

Personally, I can’t wait to try out some of those “motion-activated recipes.”

“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. ” — Marshall McLuhan

“#TwitterMakesYouStupid. discuss” — Bill Keller

For someone so disdainful of the Internet, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller sure fits the textbook definition of a troll. His anti-aggregation screed “All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate” and today’s Twitter-bait “The Twitter Trap” have taken up a good chunk of my New York Times paywall quota. If that was his objective, then well done Bill Keller.

The part of me that wants people to be more clever than they actually are hopes Keller’s “First” column is an attempt to stir the blog fight waters. After all, attacking the entire Internet is definitely punching up. But sadly, instinct (and the fact that his reference to Twitter users as Twits is supposed to be funny but isn’t) tells me that this is not the case.

Says Keller:

“We are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.”

But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.”

“The Internet Is Making Us Dumb” is the song that never ends, and was sung more beautifully than Keller by Nicholas Carr (Caveat: I’ve only read excerpts from Carr’s book, because yes I’m too busy tweeting and also because it is wrong). Essentially Keller is arguing that technologies like Twitter and Facebook make us less human, but seems to have conflated “human” with “old” ”familiar to me.”

But I’ll go deeper than default snark for the moment.

Twitter is a tool. Like any tool you use it as you see fit, within constraints. Apologies to Marshall McLuhan, but arguing that a tool or a medium makes you a certain way (in this case less human) is a bit like arguing that the existence of supermarkets make people fat or that haikus make people brief. Yes, the supermarket makes it easier to buy the food that makes you fat, but how much of it you eat it is ultimately your choice.

Mediagazer Editor and media critic Megan McCarthy explains the conundrum thus, “Keller is being a bit hypocritical in complaining about how Twitter, and other technology, make us less able to connect because he keeps himself at arms length from it due to his own preconceived notions.”

Keller has decided to abstain from going to the supermarket, and is proclaiming thinness as a result.

Because of its opt-in follow system, Twitter allows us to make choices as to what information we consume, how we consume it and how we respond to it, within constraints. There are a plethora of anecdotes to support how Twitter and Facebook foster a greater sense of community and discussion, but let’s take today as an example: Because of Twitter I have read not just Keller’s piece, but read four incredibly insightful meta-media counterpoints to his argument.

Perhaps out of secondhand embarrassment, even Keller’s own employee Nick Bilton responded to his boss’ “#TwitterMakesUsStupid. discuss” tweet and subsequent treatise with an entire post arguing essentially that “stupid is as stupid does.”

“Could Twitter make me stupid? Absolutely. If I only followed funny cats that speak with poor grammar, I’d be on my way to a vapid state of mind in no time. But I don’t. I follow dozens of news outlets and writers; I follow chefs, neuroscientists and the president of the United States; and of course, I follow Mr. Keller.”

To his credit Mr.Keller replied, in the comments section, that his actual argument was not that Twitter makes you stupid, but that Twitter is “ill suited to real discussion.” I don’t think anyone would hold up this stream of tweets as a proud example of an enlightening colloquy,” Keller said, referring to the reaction to his post.

If Keller spent more time on social media, he’d understand that when it comes to the colloquy sparked by the Internet, what you see publicly posted on Twitter and Facebook is just the tip of the conversation iceburg.  Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, I’ve now discussed The Twitter Trap privately (through DM) and publicly with multiple friends, colleagues and industry leaders whom I’ve both met and have yet to meet in person. And his experiment has certainly provided many bloggers with an easy opportunity to prove how well they write. 😉

In addition to all of the Keller analysis I’ve consumed and discussed, I’ve read Sheryl Sandberg’s epic Barnard commencement speech, found material for a news post (about Twitter) and planned a real life meeting with a startup founder (who I met on Twitter). I’ve faced a torrent of human connection and knowledge and I’m still in my pyjamas.

Keller seems to forget that there are links at the end of some tweets, and those links lead to blog posts and newspaper articles and in the comments sections of those blog posts and newspaper articles you can find yes, real discussion. And definitely a lot more REAL DISCUSSION than in the comments section of Keller’s original post, which is currently closed.

Image: Bill Keller Meme Generator

Forty-plus weeks traveling the emerging world has taught me many things. Chief among them is that most entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley learn the wrong lessons looking in.

A lot of that is the fault of publications like TechCrunch: We get excited about new things. If it’s exploding like Groupon, all the better. But we even go nuts over things like Foursquare or Quora that have pretty muted user-bases. That’s what being evangelists and early adopters is all about. We tend not to write about all the apps that launch and go nowhere, with good reason: If we’re doing our job well, we probably thought they sucked to begin with.

But the bigger disservice we do is not writing enough about the boring companies who work every day to build something that becomes huge, giving the impression that starting a business is easy in the Valley. That somehow people wake up with an idea, and roll out of bed onto a pile of venture capital, press and adoration. A lot of times the companies we should be writing about more than we do are admittedly boring infrastructure or enterprise software names. But there’s a category of consumer names that should be sexy, but for whatever reason don’t get the hype.

I’ve always thought of Yelp in this category. Local plays like Foursquare and Groupon have always gotten more attention. Another one is Pandora. Spotify has gotten far more attention, despite Pandora pulling off what almost no other music startup has– surviving the full-barrel onslaught of the record labels. But the king of them all for the Web 2.0 crowd is LinkedIn.

You could understand if LinkedIn was just paling next to Facebook. I mean, who doesn’t? Facebook is one of those once-a-decade phenomenons. But LinkedIn started out as the less-sexy social network next to Friendster. And then it graduated to the also-ran next to MySpace. It has officially trounced both now that its IPO has priced at $45 a share, or $4 billion-plus valuation– the highest valuation for an Internet company debut since Google.

More than ten years ago, Reid Hoffman– LinkedIn’s founder– was one of the first people to believe in the comeback of the consumer Internet, investing in a host of startups, but putting the bulk of his money, personal brand, time and firepower behind LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is one of the only social networks that survived from the first social media frenzy. That’s quite an accomplishment when you think about it. Hoffman wasn’t exactly up against entrepreneurial slouches. All the big Valley venture capital guns were behind Friendster. Mark centerfold-of-Vanity-Fair-this-month Pincus was behind Tribe. And Sean You-Know-What’s-Cool? Parker was behind Plaxo.

One of the reasons LinkedIn outlasted that early generation of social networks was that it was boring and practical. In the early days of social networking, the only reason anyone could think to use these sites was for dating. But Hoffman knew that would always be a customer acquisition headache: Either a dating site solves your problem and you stop using it, or it doesn’t and you stop using it. LinkedIn on the other hand would be this thing in the background you would need your entire career.

You could argue the flaw with LinkedIn was the rational strategy that saved it worked too well. For many people, it became an indispensable tool for certain moments of professional panic, but not something you used daily or even monthly. I’ve always compared it to a AAA card, a comparison that visibly annoys Hoffman and usually results in suggestions of other ways I should be using it. But back in 2007, even he admitted the site’s biggest flaw was they weren’t giving people enough to do.

When the Web 2.0 craze took off in 2006 or so, Hoffman’s star soared, but shockingly it wasn’t really because of LinkedIn. It was his angel portfolio that got the bulk of media attention. That includes out-performers like Facebook, but also stars that shined bright and burned out like Digg and Six Apart. Ever the gracious interviewee, Hoffman would answer questions about the sexier companies, but always be sure to work in a LinkedIn plug. A favorite was regularly betting me an expensive dinner at the restaurant of my choice if LinkedIn couldn’t help me do a certain aspect of my job as a reporter better.

Hoffman wasn’t in his early twenties or a college dropout, and he’d be the first to admit he wasn’t a natural CEO. He’s said in previous interviews that he has a hard time firing people quickly enough– a skill that Mark Zuckerberg has excelled at. He’s left the CEO chair several times, only to come back when other candidates haven’t worked out. But even though he could easily throw out that old cop-out of “I’m just the guy who starts stuff; I’m not the CEO type” and wash his hands of the company, Hoffman cared about LinkedIn too much to ever be very far even when insanely sexier jobs were his for the taking. Even now in his role at Greylock, he spends the bulk of his time working on LinkedIn.

And yet, given all this, it’s LinkedIn that is the first social network to go public, the first multi-billion Web 2.0 IPO. It’s more than double the exit of sexy YouTube. And, in a rare case of startup justice, his day-in, day-out work building the social network no one ever wanted to get excited about has paid him handsomely: Netting him a boost of nearly $1 billion to his net worth. Few entrepreneurs who’ve spent a decade building a company get that kind of personal return, because few personally invest so much of their own cash along the journey.

Hoffman can’t comment on any of this of course. I haven’t talked to him in weeks. These are all my observations after ten years of interviewing him about LinkedIn, watching him shake his head at the unfairness of the hype cycle and keep slogging away at building LinkedIn regardless. Hoffman should be the role model for entrepreneurs star-struck by the seeming glamour and ease of Silicon Valley’s consumer Internet world. He’s the living incarnation of the reality of the Valley: It may be easier than ever to start a product, but building a company is just as hard as its ever been.

As for the brain-dead commentators wondering if LinkedIn’s IPO represents a bubble, somewhere Hoffman has to be laughing and shaking his head again. What part of spending a decade of building a business with more than 100 million users that no one hyped, that represents one of the few large-scale working examples of a freemium business model screams “BUBBLE” to you people? These are the same people that said Google was wildly overvalued when it priced at under $100 a share.

As most people with common sense have argued, we’re not in an Internet bubble now, because the soaring valuations are mostly contained within the frothy insider ecosystem. Secondary markets are starting to change that, but so far, there are exactly two $1 billion + Web 2.0 exits that I can count: YouTube and LinkedIn. Maybe you count a few more. It depends on your definition of “Web 2.0.” I count it as the wave of consumer Web social media companies started with the Friendster explosion. Some could count Skype (twice,) but I’d argue Skype is more of a sandwich generation company. But even if your definition is more generous, I bet you can count them on one hand. Five or fewer isn’t a bubble.

There’s exactly one aspect of Silicon Valley right now that I will concede does feel like 1999: It’s easy to start a company. Stupidly easy. And entrepreneurs like Hoffman are the antithesis of that archetype not a symptom of it.

The backstory of last year’s film Tron: Legacy picks up where the first film left off. Kevin Flynn teams up with Tron to create a new Grid, one meant for programs and users. But Flynn realizes that he can’t be in the system working on this constructed world all the time, so he creates another program, CLU, to help with the effort. Together, the three of them work on creating this new perfect system.

Then something happens.

I’m reminded of this story when reading Kevin Fox’s post last night entitled: Is Microsoft trying to end the reign of mobile carriers? (MSFT+Skype+Nokia). In it, he lays out a scenario in which Microsoft uses their acquisition of Skype alongside Windows Phone 7 and their new deep partnership with Nokia to disrupt the system that we’ve all been familiar with for far too long: carrier dominance. Their aim is to create a new Grid, if you will. And they’re not alone. Google and Apple are also working on this goal. Flynn. Tron. CLU.

When you read it, it sounds great. But just like in the movie, something is going to happen. Because we’ve actually already seen it happen before.

Back in January 2010, following Google’s much-hyped Nexus One unveiling, I wrote a post entitled: Apple And Google Just Tag Teamed The U.S. Carriers. In it, I argue that the biggest part of Google’s announcement wasn’t any one device, it was the new model they were putting out there. Google’s ambition to sell devices directly to consumers would build upon the consumer-friendly mobile foundation laid by Apple with the iPhone. Under the new system, consumers would go to a website and click on the phone they want, click on the carrier they want, and boom, they’re done. This was going to change everything. It was going to be beautiful.

Then something happened.

While Apple (some would say stubbornly) clung to their exclusive agreement in order to continue to bend AT&T to their will, Google backed down. When it became clear that the Nexus One was simply not selling, Google seemingly panicked and went running with open arms to the carriers.

“Open” is the keyword there. Google spun this close relationship with carriers like Verizon as giving consumers more options, more choice. This was “open”. It was also “open” in that the relationship allowed Verizon and the other carriers to begin taking advantage of Android and use it for their own, insidious purposes. And the OEMs too. We’re seeing this now with Android devices that aren’t upgraded to the newest builds for months (and sometimes not at all), pre-installed bloatware apps (that can’t be uninstalled), new carrier-run app stores, etc.

The carriers and OEMs are slowly but surely using Android to ensure that we stay a world in which they’re in control. And I’m sorry Android fans, but Google is letting them. The company showed so much promise in their initial Nexus plan. And as we hear it, Google initially had even more ambitious plans for the Nexus phones — how does a $99 unlocked Android phone sound? But the carriers quickly brought the hammer down on these plans. And Google, making a business decision, abandoned them.

(And all of this is without diving into just how murky the Google/carrier relationship has now gotten.)

So you’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical when I read Fox’s grand plan for how Microsoft is now going to come along and reshape the industry. As he notes:

Making calls, placing calls, searching for signal and scrimping minutes hasn’t changed much since the mobile phone came out, because carriers have little incentive to innovate. Mobile carriers make their money either way, and ‘innovation’ comes down to increasing the bottom line, whether it’s charging $1,300/megabyte for text messages or adding 20 seconds of instructions on how to leave a voicemail so that the carrier might get an extra minute’s revenue.

Not only do the carriers have little incentive to innovate, there are plenty of disincentives if they innovate — or let others innovate. Everything that changes has the potential to ruin their model. And worse, changes that are adopted take away their control. Now that Verizon has given into (most of) Apple’s demands and gotten the iPhone, they’re saying all the right things about their love of the device. But the truth is that they hate it. They hate its very existence because it’s a very slippery slope for them. It points to a future where they’re no longer in control.

So why bother offering the iPhone at all? Because consumers demand it. Again, this is what really scares the shit out of the carriers. Consumers in control.

And that’s where Fox’s Microsoft plan may run into problems. Using Windows Phone 7 with Nokia hardware and Skype built-in all sounds great, but how is Microsoft going to sell them in any meaningful capacity? By pretty much all accounts, Windows Phones are not selling very well at the moment. Nokia phones have never sold well in the U.S., and their market share is quickly declining worldwide. That’s not to say both of those things can’t be turned around, but it will be very hard. Google and Apple are now the entrenched players with RIM also strong (though also seemingly in decline).

The easiest way for Nokia Windows Phones to get traction will be with the help of — surprise — the carriers. And do you think they’re going to help if Microsoft/Nokia plans to screw them? Perhaps Google can best answer that question.

As I see it, Apple is now the only short-term hope for true carrier disruption. Why? It’s simple, really.

Apple Stores.

Apple’s insanely successful retail stores give them one huge piece of leverage that the others don’t have. If a consumer wants an iPhone, they don’t have to go to an AT&T store or a Verizon store, they can just go to an Apple store. If a consumer wants an Android phone, it’s carrier or bust. (Again, this is why it’s so disappointing that they killed the website idea — it would have taken a long time to take off, but it deserved more time.)

Microsoft has their own retail stores as well, but there are only a handful currently. And it’s far from clear if they’ll ultimately work out or not. If they do, great. Then maybe Microsoft will have a shot at mobile industry disruption. But without them, they need the carriers.

It’s because of the retail stores that Apple is able to possibly do things like create a carrier-crippling SIM card, as has been rumored. Imagine having an iPhone that you buy at an Apple store that can seamlessly hop between Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc, as a consumer sees fit? That’s the dream.

Of course, even Apple is far from that dream at the moment. They too rely on the carriers for the all-important subsidy that brings the iPhone down to a reasonable price point. (Remember when the iPhone first was released and sold for $600? Apple had to learn a lesson the hard way as well.) But the talk of Apple working on a significantly cheaper iPhone may be related to this. Or there are other options…

…such as the “soft carrier” idea Fox talks about. If these phone makers can start getting customers to transfer more and more of their airtime minutes over WiFi, using things like Skype and FaceTime, things will get more interesting. But that’s going to be a very slow road.

Talk of change and disruption is great. But I’m skeptical since we’ve been here before. I have no doubt that things will eventually change — everything does. But it just seems like it’s going to take a long time and be more of a natural progression because the carriers aren’t stupid — they know that they still hold most of the cards. The only real hope in the near term may be for Apple, Google, and Microsoft to team up to turn the tables on the carriers. It would take a coordinated effort. But Google already walked away from one such effort.

It’s starting to sound like Google may be interested in trying again. And perhaps the shake up under new CEO Larry Page alongside Android’s now powerful market position will lead to that. But Apple and Microsoft have their own issues that they must overcome as well before we can start talking about the creation of a new, perfect system.

We’ll see. All I know is that it ultimately didn’t end well for Flynn, Tron, or CLU.

Professional social network LinkedIn has priced its IPO at $45 per share, according to a release issued on the company’s site. This is at the high end of the range, which was estimated at $42 to $45 per share yesterday. This puts the company’s valuation at $4.5 billion.

As we wrote yesterday, the company originally stated the price per share range as $32 and $35 but increased this by 30 percent to $42 to $45 per share yesterday. The company is offering a total of 7,840,000 shares and is looking to raise as much as $406 million in the offering. In addition, LinkedIn Corporation has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 1,176,000 shares to cover over-allotments, if any.

The professional social network is set to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange tomorrow morning, under the symbol LNKD.

It’s certainly a strong pricing and valuation for the company, which only posted $2.08 million in net income for the first quarter of the year. Hopefully, LinkedIn doesn’t face the same fate as Chinese social networking giant RenRen, which priced its IPO at $14 per share and saw the value drop after trading began. We’ll report back on the Street’s response tomorrow.

Exclusive – U.S.-based mobile games developer ngmoco was acquired by Japanese social games publisher DeNA in October 2010, but that doesn’t mean it stopped looking at opportunities to grow through acquisitions of its own, particularly in regions other than Asia and the United States.

TechCrunch has learned that the company has just acquired longtime game development partner Rough Cookie to boost its presence in Europe (the mobile games studio was founded in late 2008 and is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands).

Rough Cookie, developer of Star Defense for iOS, We Farm Android and We City Android, among other titles, was acquired by the company to add ‘creative power’ to ngmoco’s internal game development studios. It’s also a way for ngmoco to establish its first office in Europe as the company preps the international roll-out of its (or rather, DeNA’s) social network for mobile games, Mobage. Rough Cookie develops games for iOS, Android and Windows 7.

The game development outfit has long been collaborating with ngmoco, for example for its new owner’s Touch Pets series.

The Netherlands-based studio is already working on new ngmoco games for Mobage, we’re told, although we were unable to pin down the name of the upcoming “flagship title”.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but we’re told that this was an all-cash deal.

This is obviously not a mega-acquisition – Rough Cookie boasts roughly 10 full-time cookies employees – so consider this mostly a talent acquisition with the added value of ngmoco gaining a European presence in one swift move.

WaterSmart Software, a green tech startup that’s frequently compared to the energy management startup OPower has closed a $900,000 round of seed financing led by Menlo Incubator and joined by Sand Hill Angels, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Physic Ventures.

The company’s co-founder Peter Yolles explained the concept of the technology in an interview with TechCrunch ahead of the funding announcement:

“WaterSmart Software is really about creating a relationship between the water utility and the homeowner. Most residential consumers don’t understand how much water they use and where it goes in the home. We’re trying to create a way for them to ask and answer questions like: how do I compare to my neighbors, in terms of water use? What are the two or three best things I can do in or around my own home to save water? What costs me the most money?”

Another WaterSmart Software co-founder, Rob Steiner said:

“We white label our analytics, so they appear online and in print like a tool from the water utility that helps people monitor their water use, break down the meaning of their water bills, and take advantage of all the incentives, rebates and freebies a utility already offers.

We have hundreds of parameters and variables that we analyze, including: water consumption and water billing, census, demographic, real estate, climate and weather information. We even include some details that are about how much you can cut down on gas and electricity use, when you cut down on things like hot water.

We’re making it easier for consumers to save money, and making it easier for utilities to market water and energy efficiency better.”

WaterSmart’s executives found — through a combination of the company’s own research and outside market intelligence — that a typical household of 4 people including children in the U.S. will use between eight and ten thousand gallons of water per billing month, and that in most U.S. markets, the price of water is going up 1.5 times faster than any other utility bills each year. They believe they can help utilities and consumers reduce water consumption by 2 percent, this year.

Does that amount to significant savings on a dollar basis? In some markets more than others, perhaps.

According to Circle of Blue: “In the last year, the price of water in 30 U.S. metropolitan areas has increased an average of 9.4 percent for residential customers with medium consumption levels… Yet the median increase for medium consumption was 8.6 percent.”

Steiner said the startup will use its new-found capital to complete pilot projects already under way with major water utilities in California, and to get beyond the proof of concept phase with their technology. They also seek to hire ten people this year; they currently have six full-time employees and are based in San Francisco.

Not affiliated with the WaterSmart Innovations conference, or U.S. Department of Interior program to help states and water companies adhere with the SECURE Water Act — WaterSmart Software won the inaugural, ImagineH2O competition in May 2010. The competition rewards businesses with technology that can curb, and help people cope with a growing, global water crisis.

Scott Bryan, director of operations with ImagineH2O said:

“Natural resources are over drafted, and there’s an increasing risk affiliated with climate change that makes water supplies more variable around the world. Companies like WaterSmart will make it easier for anyone to understand their water footprint. Most importantly, they have hit upon a capital efficient way to make a difference and to raise awareness. Many other water and cleantech ideas require tens of millions of dollars to even try to get something up and running.”

Serial startup CFO, and angel investor Steve Bennet, with both Menlo Incubator and Sand Hill Angels, said the company locked the substantial seed round because:

“The co-founders are water geeks with a lot of domain expertise. They had already developed a great portal, and analytics. They also managed to sign up two, municipal water providers to homeowners in Northern and Southern California to use their software. Having these pilots lined up made us enthusiastic. Though there are a lot of unknowns, here, the investment will help the company get proof points about how well software, including some game dynamics, can drive efficiency.”

Yahoo has just announced that it will be acquiring advertising platform 5to1 for $28 million. We originally broke the news of the acquisition last week.

5to1 first launched at TechCrunch50 in September 2009, and raised around $13 million in various rounds of funding. The startup is an online advertising alliance consisting of major media publishers. Built on a proprietary publisher-controlled platform, 5to1 offers advertisers premium inventory at mass scale.

Yahoo says that the acquisition of 5to1 will enable allow the company “to build upon its publisher partnerships and expand its premium inventory.” 5to1 works with more than 20 premium publishers. The 5to1 team will be joining Yahoo as part of the Ad Marketplaces group.

An acquisition by yahoo isn’t particularly surprising. As we wrote previously, the company has deep ties with Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo’s EVP Americas and formerly the President of Fox Interactive Media. Levinsohn is actually a cofounder of the company and a former board member and shareholder (he divested himself after joining Yahoo). Cofounder and CEO Jim Heckman worked with Levinsohn at FIM. We first covered the company, including their management team, in June 2009.

Wayne Powers, SVP, Advertising Sales for the North America region, said in a release: 5to1’s innovative platform and premium private marketplace will further enable Yahoo! to extend our advertising leadership…5to1 provides additional access to publishers and unlocks the value of unsold inventory for premium brand advertisers.

BERLIN– Yesterday at the Next 11 conference, I interviewed Rovio’s Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka on stage. You may know him as the man who brings us all different versions of Angry Birds, Angry Birds toys, possibly an Angry Birds movie, and– as you’ll see in the clip below– an Angry Birds line of hoodies.

He has a big announcement: Angry Birds downloads have topped 200 million. To put that in perspective, another app store darling Foursquare recently reached 10 million downloads.

Of course, while the iPad and iPhone are responsible for much of Angry Birds’ success, the franchise has moved well beyond it. It has already hit five million Web downloads after last week’s Chrome announcement.

I really got an appreciation for how different Rovio thinks from other game studios yesterday. Most of us know that the team developed more than fifty games before hitting gold with the now famous birds and (as he describes them below) the somewhat misunderstood pigs. That’s often touted as an inspiration for entrepreneurs not to give up. But the flipside of it is Vesterbacka knows incredibly well how hard coming up with a blockbuster is, so he’s not committing to being in the serial blockbuster business.

Instead, he sees Angry Birds as a huge entertainment platform that is just getting started. This doesn’t just include merchandize and movies– he’s experimenting with Angry Birds oriented location based services and other schemes to blend the game’s footprint into the real world. See? That Foursquare user comparison I used at the beginning of the post wasn’t quite as random as it seemed.

We’ll be hearing a lot more from Vesterbacka this year, as his ambitious vision starts to play out. He’s particularly bullish about China– where he’s following the model of a Sanrio (ala Hello Kitty) to try to create an iconic $100 million cutesy brand in short order. Vesterbacka tentatively committed to joining the roster of global speakers at TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing this fall, which will hopefully time up with some pretty interesting announcements for the company. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, video below.

Twitter has just announced that it will be drilling down on third party app permissions, and will be taking away automatic OAuth access to Direct Messages for apps that need it. As of today Twitter clients that need access to your DMs will ask you for permission to access them. Apps that no longer need access will no longer have access.

In addition to the new DM permission level, the app permissions screen (above) will now give you more details as to what the third party app is allowed to do with your account, drilling down into specifics like reading tweets from your timeline, updating your profile and posting tweets on your behalf.

From the Twitter developer forum:

“In particular, users and developers have requested greater granularity for permission levels. In response to this feedback, we have created a new permission level for applications called “Read, Write & Direct Messages”. This permission will allow an application to read or delete a user’s direct messages.

When we enforce this permission, applications without a “Read, Write & Direct  Messages” token will be unable to read or delete direct messages. To ensure users know that an application is receiving access to their direct messages, we are also restricting this permission to the OAuth /authorize web flow only. This means applications which use xAuth and want to access direct messages must send a user through the full OAuth flow.”

These changes mean that apps that use xAuth will now have to go through OAuth in order to provide users granularity on the access levels of a given app. Developers have until the end of the month to get their apps in gear.

Twitter says that these new changes were the result of developer and user feature requests, but inevitably some developers are seeing the move as yet another Twitter land grab for ecosystem control.

Zynga is continuing its shopping spree today with the acquisition of social game developer DNA Games, marking its 14th acquisition in the past 12 months. It’s important to note that this is an actual acquisition of both the talent and company, as opposed to the recent ‘acq-hires’ Zynga has been making in the past few months. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

DNA Games was founded in 2009 by a trio of former execs from SEM firm Bazaar Advertising (including Jon Lee and Shaun Haase), which was acquired by AzoogleAds in 2007. Since 2009, the gaming startup has developed a number of hit social games on Facebook, including Casino City, Slot City and Bar World.

Casino City has been steadily growing in monthly usage on Facebook. In total, DNA reaches 2.4 million monthly active users on Facebook. Currently Casino City has 1.5 million monthly active users, Slot City has 438K users, and Bar World has 382K active monthly users.

As DNA writes on its site, “We are one piece game design “art”, another piece user recruiting optimization “science” and a third piece top-flight software engineering.” The startup has raised $2 million in new funding from Battery Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures.

Zynga says the DNA team will form the core of a studio focused on creating new games with DNA Games’ Founder and CEO, Jon Lee as the General Manager reporting to Mark Skaggs, SVP of Product Development. It’s unclear if DNA’s games will become part of Zynga’s game portfolio, but we hear Zynga is evaluating whether this actually makes sense.

Zynga’s past acquisitions this year include the team behind cocos2d, Wonderland, JamLegend, MarketZero, Floodgate, social browser Flock, and New York’s Area/Code.

The Next conference in Berlin is an international, English language conference covering of the latest in “digital”, and serves as a useful platform for German startups to present themselves. One of the best – and the one that won the startup competition this year – was Wahwah.fm. I actually really liked this company, but the downbeat presentation of its founder belies quite an innovative idea. Imagine being able to get your iPhone and start broadcasting a local radio station that other people nearby with the same app could pick up, live.

SkyGrid, a startup that offers a powerful business news aggregator, has upgraded its free iPhone and iPad app with a number of new social and interactive features today.

SkyGrid’s app allows you to add filters to news streams, with the aim of giving you the most important news right as it’s happening. Using the startup’s patented algorithm, Information Velocity; SkyGrid measures what news is spreading the fastest across the world, and brings that content directly to its apps. The app itself streams information from mainstream news, social sites, and blogs and allows you to share news articles and streams on the app via email, Twitter and Facebook.

Now, you can filter your news stream on the app by following topics. You can follow topics like tech, and receive a realtime stream of news from tech news outlets. Skygrid even allows you to follow more detailed topics, like “Zynga games,” for users who want to access news about a specific topic. You can also now follow news sites like TechCrunch or The New York Times. And the app has deepened its social integrations, giving its users the ability to add your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn streams to the app. The new version of the app includes a more seamless browsing experience with one box to search and navigate.

CEO and founder Kevin Pomplun also tells us that the app has been updated with the company’s “Fast Page” technology, which brings faster load times for sites. He says this technology combines Safari from the iOS SDK with SkyGrid’s real-time processing pipeline.

Of course, the startup is playing in a competitive space in terms of news and social content aggregation, including well-funded startup Flipboard. But SkyGrid’s filtering and new follow options make the app ideal for tracking specific topics in the news, and it offers a compelling option for any power user.

Online ticket seller Eventbrite has raised another $50 million in a Series E financing round led by Tiger Global, according to a release issued by the company. This infusion comes only eight months after the company raised $20 million in funding last October. This latest investment brings the company’s total funding to $80 million.

To date, Eventbrite has helped over 120,000 event organizers in 150 countries host more than half a million events. Over 10 million people have attended an event ticketed by Eventbrite, and the company is on track to process nearly half a billion in gross ticket sales this year. Last year, the company sold 11 million tickets for $207 million in gross sales.

Founded by Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz, the company says that it plans to use the new funding for product development, global expansion and to scale to larger events. Last year, the company launched a deeper integration with Facebook, and the social network now drives more traffic to Eventbrite than Google.