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Last year, several lawsuits emerged that accused Yelp of extorting businesses to advertise in exchange for positive reviews. Yelp has just announced that a judge granted Yelp’s request to dismiss these suits.

For background, the lawsuits claimed that after declining a request to purchase advertising on Yelp, a number of positive reviews from businesses’ listings on the reviews site mysteriously disappeared, downgrading the company’s rating on the site.

In February of 2010, two law firms, Beck & Lee from Miami and The Weston Firm in San Diego, filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court alleging unfair business practices by Yelp. And in 2009, the East Bay Express ran a story basically accusing Yelp of being in the ‘Business of Extortion 2.0′, which covered similar ground. Shortly after reporter Kathleen Richards published the article, Yelp vehemently denied everything and called her piece inaccurate.  A number of similar copy cat suits also emerged.

As CEO and founder Jeremy Stoppelman writes “our automated system applies the same objective criteria to all reviews regardless of a business’s advertiser status. (Just check a Yelp advertiser’s business page — I bet they have a negative review or two; after all, you just can’t please everyone all the time.)

Last year, Yelp made some adjustments to its review process. For example, Yelp removed a feature that allowed businesses that advertised with Yelp to place their favorite review above others. It also let users see reviews that have been removed by its (automated) “review filter,” which is designed to help prevent business owners from posting all too positive reviews of their own company or malicious reviews of competitors.

Yelp also established a Small Business Advisory Council’ whose members have provided the company’s management with “guidance and perspective regarding the concerns of small business owners”.

Stoppelman admits that there are flaws to the system, writing, Additionally, since protecting content integrity is a difficult task, our automated algorithm isn’t perfect: sometimes legitimate content can get caught. This is an unfortunate reality in an environment where some folks are determined to try to game the system, but it is a price we are willing to pay to protect consumers and remain a useful resource.

The dismissal of the lawsuits means that the plaintiffs can’t sue Yelp again. It’s surely a relief to have these allegations dismissed. Now Yelp can go back to focusing on its potential IPO in 2012.

Sorry RIM, but it looks like the promise of free apps and tech support weren’t enough to assuage the masses. According to the Financial Post, RIM is preparing to deal with a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of Canadian users affected by the company’s widespread service outage.

Filed in Quebec Superior Court by the Consumer Law Group, the complaint seeks compensation for all of RIM’s customers that “were unable to access their email, BlackBerry Messenger service (BBM), and/or Internet for the period of October 11 to 14, 2011.” RIM hasn’t received the complaint yet, but representatives have said that the company will “formally respond” to the matter soon.

The lawsuit’s lead complainant was an avid user who used his BlackBerry to communicate with his friends across the western hemisphere. According to the formula laid out in the complaint, he will only be able to collect $1.25 in damages from RIM — not much, but the payouts could quickly add up if the lawsuit picks up steam. The amount of damages owed is calculated on a person by person basis, and accounts for how long a customer was left without service, so some users will net more than others.

It’s tough to put a finger on how much RIM may have to shell out here, as the company has avoided offering estimates of how many customers were affected. Still, co-CEO Jim Balsillie called the outage the biggest in the company’s history in a recent conference call, so RIM could be looking at a sizable number customers itching for some restitution.

Then again, of all the places struck by the outage, North America seemed to be affected the least. RIM may be able to pay off a few thousand customers and move on, but considering their luck, I doubt things will go that smoothly.

Fans of legalese can find the full complaint reproduced below.

I unintentionally set off a nice little flame war last week when I criticized Samsung’s decision to go with a Pentile sub-pixel matrix for their new Galaxy Nexus phone, a display technology that doesn’t have an illustrious past and, while it may prove itself in this generation, still made me lose confidence in the phone. Sub-pixel layouts are something few people consider, but (as the Engineer Guy explains) all those pretty colors you see on your displays are almost always made up of a few tiny monochromatic dots. E-ink screens use one dot per pixel, but they are of course monochrome, and the Mirasol and Pixel Qi displays we’ve seen also use an RGB matrix. But research being done in Taiwan may combine the best of both worlds.

Wallen Mphepö, a researcher at National Chiao Tung University, has created a new kind of pixel that operates completely differently from existing technologies. The details are a bit scarce, as his research has not yet been published except as a summary in this article at the Economist (the image accompanying this article is just an illustration).

The way the new screens work is that each pixel, normally created by a set of sub-pixels, is instead a single mechanism: a 30-micron piece of zirconium oxide (you probably know it best as cubic zirconia) with a 1.23-micron layer of silver on top. But while you’d think the silver would act as the reflective layer, it in fact acts as the transmissive layer, allowing light to pass through and strike the ZrO₂. By tilting the whole pixel mechanism using a micro-electromechanical system, the wavelengths of light allowed to pass through in and out are changed. And Mr. Mphepö claims that each single pixel can produce a full optical palette, or close to it.

This means that using this new style of pixel would instantaneously triple pixel density, or conversely, reduce the transistors and mechanisms necessary to create a given resolution by two-thirds.

The new screens have not been demonstrated; indeed, it is not clear whether Mr. Mphepö has even been able to stick more than one of these micro-mirror pixels together. And as usual, research like this take ages to arrive in consumer hands. But if it does what it claims to do, there are many companies that would buy it in a heartbeat and fast-track it to market to compete with E-ink (which dominates passive displays) and provide a full-color, low-power alternative to LCD-based tablets.

If you’re waiting in the queue for Google’s Real Time Analytics Beta, we’ve got good news… and we’ve got bad news. The good news: Google has just let in another big round of participants, so odds aren’t too shabby that you’re in. The bad news: they mixed up their “To:” field and their “BCC:” field on the welcome e-mail.

We’re not going to post the list of addresses for obvious reasons — but all in all, I’m counting just shy of 500 addresses spilled. If you’re worried you’re in there somewhere, check your inbox for an e-mail titled “Welcome to the beta trial for Real-Time Analytics!”, then check the To: field for about 495 too many people.

It’s unclear if this is the entire list of folks finding their way into the Analytics Beta today, or if the e-mails were sent out in batches of around ~500 recipients each. If it’s the latter, hopefully this is the only one with the BCC slip-up.

Fortunately, the implications of mistakes like this usually aren’t too nasty. Everyone will get a few dozen e-mails as people jokingly reply-all with pictures of animals, a few tweets singing “Privacy Fail!” will go out, but everyone generally moves on pretty quickly. If you’ve applied to the beta and you’ve got an e-mail address you prefer to keep 100% private, though, you might consider switching it up.

You know, it’s been a while since we’ve seen a good ol’ fashion BCC fail. The last one I recall, actually, was our bad. As Mike put it at the time, “we can never make fun of anyone doing this again without pointing back to this post.“

We’ve reached out to Google to try and pin down how many e-mail addresses could have found their way out. We’ll update this post if we hear back.

Update #1 – Google has apologized quickly. Good on them:

Hi,

We recently sent out an email welcoming you to real time analytics. Inadvertently, we put the email addresses in the To: field instead of the BCC: field. We want to sincerely apologize for this mistake and will make sure that this does not happen again. Thank you for your understanding.

On Behalf of the Google Real-Time Analytics Team.

Update #2 – Hah! The recipients of the e-mail have already formed a Facebook group they’ve dubbed “The Accidental brothers of Real-time Awesomeness“

When startups are choosing investors for their seed round, it is important to pick ones who will stick around for the long run. Otherwise, they may run into what Founder Collective co-founder Chris Dixon calls “signaling risk.”  The risk of getting a high-profile investor in your seed round is that they might not follow on in later rounds, and that sends a signal to other investors that there might be something wrong with the company. Dixon discusses signaling risk in this episode of Founder Stories with Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures.

In recent years, there’s been an uptick in seed stage investing to the point where “large VC’s [are] investing in seed companies,” notes Dixon.  He is of the opinion that it’s risky for founders to take their cash because “if the big VC doesn’t follow on it makes it harder for the entrepreneur to raise the next round.”

Anderson agrees that picking the correct investment partner is paramount and referring directly to high-end VCs pouring into seed funding, he says it is basically illogical to think a fund managing hundreds of millions will give the same attention to small investments as large investments. This becomes an issue when “you have entrepreneurs who are looking for help … and then they didn’t get any.”

This is their opinion as seed stage investors – however the best VC’s would likely tell you: they like to invest early and stick with their companies all the way through.

Nevertheless, “the signaling issue is real” says Anderson, “my advice always is think about the motivations of the people that are coming in, how helpful will they be, how much help do you want, what are you looking for and then size your investment from them appropriately.”

The conversation continues in the video below and the two use a Wall Street Journal article titled Web Start-ups Hit A Cash Crunch, to discuss if the start-up sector is suffering a downturn. Dixon doesn’t agree that it is, saying “the market has been very, very strong for quality companies.” Anderson agrees with Dixon and says, “I think that article was really more of a forecast of a possible outcome in the future … but not a reality today.”

Anderson then adds “seed rounds are about product market fit and establishing something of value and in my opinion those will always get funding as long as you are doing those core things, if your thesis was wrong and you tried and it didn’t work out, well of course you are not going to get funding.”

The two end with Anderson offering what he considers to be a strong start-up bets in the future. He says, “the ecosystem that is evolving around Facebook is undeniably going to be one of the most powerful ecosystems going foward.”

Make sure to watch both videos for additional insights and check out episodes I and II to hear the entire conversation.

Past episodes of Founder stories featuring Instagram, BirchBox and Eventbrite are here.

(Disclosure, Dixon is an investor in Baseline funds)

RIM may be pinning their hopes on BBX, but that doesn’t mean they’re done churning out classic BlackBerrys. Case in point: the revamped Bold 9790 has been revealed in a new set of photos that doesn’t look like someone took them during an earthquake.

The 9790′s existence isn’t exactly a secret, but these images (courtesy of @moha87_) represent the most up-to-date look at what RIM is working on behind closed doors. Right off the bat, you’ll notice that the new Bold (on the left) sports a funky new “home row” of keys that already seem to have polarized the BlackBerry fanbase.

The rest of the improvements are a bit harder to discern: a 2.44-inch touch display sits up front, and a 5-megapixel camera rests on the back. It runs the BlackBerry 7 OS (naturally), and finally moves the charging port to the bottom of the device. Anecdotal evidence also reveals that it feels “lighter and slimmer” than the current Bold 9700.

Interestingly, the Twitter account belongs to a gentleman named Mohammad Al Bastaki who just happens to live in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Could it be a simple coincidence that RIM and Porsche Design are holding an event tomorrow in that very city to show off their exclusive new collaboration? Maybe — it doesn’t exactly scream Porsche, but I’m half-hoping that this design takes the stage instead of the angular nightmare we saw last time.

There’s been some chatter about how Conde Nast’s tablet editions of its popular magazines, which have enjoyed a large increase in subscribers since the release of Apple’s Newsstand feature. It must be a pleasant surprise to the company, which as late as April was easing back on tablet content production after a less-than-stellar debut period. A lot can happen in six months, though: for example, 20 million iPads were sold. That’s a big increase in the demographic. And of course the designated channel for magazine-type content helps as well.

As pleasant as this news is (I’m all in favor of bringing print-quality content to digital devices), I think this portion of the tablet experience is still very much an early-adopter, minority share situation. They’re probably patting each other’s backs at Conde Nast, but the champagne is still in the fridge.

The question is whether the growth is a continuing trend, or a one-time bump owing entirely to the fanfare around the new feature and iOS 5. If there are around 50 million iPads out there (just for ease of calculation), and Conde Nast had a 268% increase month-over-month of its <500,000-user base, that puts total subscribers at somewhere just over 1.2 million, with around 2% of iPad users having a subscription, or what is more likely, 1% with more than one apiece. Sure, it's just napkin calculations, but that's not quite the fabulous new playground for magazines that's indicated when you just look at the increase by itself.

Will the novelty wear off? The Newsstand is something that costs people money, which turns off a lot of people from the start. They'd rather use the 90% of the device's functionality that they already bought. The early adopters of the iPad are also the most likely to shell out for magazines and pay apps, so the market isn't growing as fast as people think: the first million sold probably account for a disproportionate amount of in-app and on-device purchases.

Magazines and "print" on tablets is certainly an inevitability, but I don't think we're looking at the breakout moment here. The erosion of the print infrastructure, and the millions of paper-based subscriptions so easy to renew, so high quality (in their way), and so familiar, will take more than a fancy storefront in iOS and more than a year or two of modest increases in sales. Luckily the players involved (especially Conde Nast, which was developing for the iPad before it’s existence was confirmed) are willing to shell out so they'll be in pole position when that breakout moment comes.

Another day, another Tokyoflash watch. The Kisai 7 is a clever, fairly cool watch that looks like something Jeff Bridges picked out of his magisterial beard in the last Tron movie. Priced at $99 for the next 30 hours, you, too, can look like a Program just looking to get out of the CPU.

How do you read it?

To demonstrate, check out the image below of the blue watch. You can clearly see the inner ring has a dark section pointing to 9 and the outer ring is pointing straight up, so the time is 9 o’clock.

The lights above & below the circles indicate 1-4 minutes. Here they are half way across so that’s 2 minutes. We already know it’s 9 o’clock, but to be exact, it’s 9:02. Like all watches from Tokyoflash, Kisai Seven easy to read once you know how.

Originally called the 7RON, this watch was originally a concept piece but came to life after Tokyoflash lovers all began clamoring for the design. Scott Galloway pitched the design last year and after a year the company pulled the entire thing together, creating something that you can wear to the next ComicCon.

RelayRides, a car-sharing service that lets you rent (or rent out) cars a few hours at a time, has raised an additional $3 million in funding, adding on to the company’s Series A round that now totals $13M. More important than the money is who took part in the round: it was led by General Motors Ventures, with participation from the company’s existing investors.

The funding is connected to a recent deal that RelayRides forged with GM, which will allow RelayRides users to tap into the OnStar system that has come equipped on all GM cars since 2005 (that’s around 15 million cars). After connecting their OnStar accounts to RelayRides, renters will be able to remotely unlock the cars they’ve signed up for using their mobile phones, without having to deal with swapping physical keys.

This isn’t a new idea — RelayRides competitor Get Around has an aftermarket car kit that you can install, which will allow renters to unlock the car using the service’s mobile app. But RelayRides will do this one better with the OnStar integration, as no kit is required for remote unlocking.

This OnStar functionality will be rolling out in early 2012. Which, as it happens, is around when RelayRides plans to expand its service area to more cities (right now you can only rent cars in San Francisco and Boston).

Kobo is about to launch their new Vox ereader/tablet and I think it’s important to remember that the reader race isn’t just down to two contestants: this Canadian company, while comparatively small in the US, is performing quite admirably on the international stage, hitting 2.5 million users in the US and over 5 million total in the world.

The Vox is a fairly nondescript Android tablet running a slightly modified version of Android 2.3. It is compatible with most Android apps and ships with the Kobo app pre-installed. As it stands there’s little to be excited about except the price and the bright, readable screen that is purported to have excellent visibility in direct sunlight. At $199, the Kobo Vox is probably one of the most affordable “big name” Android tablets that may actually gain some traction this holiday.

Clearly the Vox is up against still competition against the $199 Kindle Fire but there is a certain breed of consumer that will enjoy the ostensible “openness” of the Kobo platform as well as the unfettered access to over a million free, public domain books out of the box.

Because it’s an Android tablet it is actually fighting against the Nook as well as any number of bargain basement tablets that could grab consumer’s attention. However, the Kobo app is one of the top downloads on both the Android and Apple app stores and they’re the de facto choice in Canada and Europe, two areas where B&N and Amazon have failed to make much of a dent.

You can think of Kobo as the Nokia of the ereader world while Amazon and B&N are Apple and Google respectively. While I won’t bet on Kobo in the long term – I think it will be a tough road to keep selling ereaders when facing the other two juggernauts – I’m happy to report that their latest product is not to be dismissed out of hand.

We’ll have a full review when this thing begins shipping on Friday but until then we had a brief hands-on and I’m happy to report that the Kobo Vox is an impressive – and inexpensive – ereader worth a second look.

Click to view slideshow.

What. The. Bleep.

Not to say that Nokia’s new smartphones aren’t interesting, but this crazy flexible smartphone-like device CNET spotted over at Nokia World has to be the coolest thing to grace the showroom floors. Unfortunately, CNET reports that its strictly in the prototype phase, and may never become an actual product that’s for sale.

Either way, the Nokia Kinetic device feels like a step into the future, with a real OLED display and all the innards of your standard computing device — but this thing bends! The device scrolls through media collections (whether that be photos or music) when twisted in opposite directions by both hands. Bending the display inward or outward controls zoom for photos, as well as the pause and play functions while listening to music. You can also tap the corners to pan through photos.

While we won’t be seeing this flexible interface on consumer products anytime soon, Nokia may have some interesting implementations in the pipeline. I, for one, will surely have my eyes peeled. CNET has a video of the UI in action here.

It took 8 years for Pastebin.com (which, for the unassociated, is sort of like the Internet’s clipboard. Anyone can paste in a big ol’ wall of text and share it with anyone else, often anonymously) to reach 1 million “active” (read: not spam or expired) pastes. In the year and a half since, it’s spiked all the way up to 10 million.

Interestingly enough, Pastebin’s original owner chose to sell it off just before the massive uptick — bet you can’t guess why!

Pastebin lulled along at a fairly steady pace for most of a decade, driven largely by IRC users. Pasting a massive length of text into IRC is bad practice, akin to suddenly shouting over everyone else in a conversation. Instead, users paste their epics into a site like Pastebin, sharing the link in IRC for anyone interested.

Then came Twitter. Suddenly, being succinct wasn’t just polite — it was mandatory. Wordy twitterers flocked to the service as a means of getting their lengthier rants out there. Usage began to spike.

Then came Anon. Best known for their myriad acts of online mischief, Anonymous turned to Pastebin (with its fittingly anonymous uploading) as a means of distributing their news releases. As these releases spread around the Internet, it acted as a free word-of-mouth campaign for Pastebin. Usage exploded.

Alas, the legal attention that the more nefarious Pastes drew were a bit too much for the site’s original owner, Paul Dixon. Dixon sold the site for an undisclosed amount in 2010. In a post we wrote on Pastebin back in August, Dixon commented:

I started pastebin.com in 2002 but sold it to its present owner in 2010 after it became too much of a time drain dealing with the posts which had piqued the interest of law enforcement agencies! I’m glad I did, as I don’t think I’d have enjoyed dealing the Lulzsec exposure. I applaud the present owner though, I think they’ve added a lot to the original idea…

Onsite targeting solutions provider Cognitive Match has teamed up with independent advertising technology company Adnetik to increase the effectiveness of online campaigns. The partnership builds on Adnetik’s Audience Investment Management (AIM) system for display advertising and enhances its capabilities through combination with Dynamic Creative Targeting™. While AIM helps advertisers to buy targeted display ads on an impression by impression basis, this collaboration places the solution in a real-time environment. It provides a dynamic creative solution that is capable of targeting different elements of creative for each user. The goal is to maximise user engagement and increase the effectiveness of online campaigns.

Thanks to services like iCloud and Google+, snapshots flow like water between mobile devices and the web these days. But many of those photos never make the jump from pixels to paper. And, as it turns out, people still love to stick photos and cards to their family refrigerator.

That’s where Sincerely comes in. The company builds products that revolve around easily creating and sending physical, real-world postcards at a low cost. And today it’s announcing that it’s raised a $3 million Series A funding round led by Spark Capital, with Spark’s Bijan Sabet joining the board. Other participants in the round include a strong roster of investors: First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, SV Angel, Chamath Palihapitiya, Drew Houston, Paul Buchheit, Adam Smith, Ariel Poler, Shan Sinha, and Paul Freedman.

So far Sincerely has built three products. The first is Postagram, an app available for Android and iOS that lets you snap photos with your phone’s camera and quickly shoot off postcards to friends and family. The second is Sincerely Ship, an iOS library that lets other developers quickly bake Postagram-like functionality into their own apps.

Finally, Sincerely is announcing a new product today: Sincerely Ink, which will let you create and ship holiday cards personalized using your own photos, which can be inserted into one of 40 professionally designed templates. These holiday cards will begin at $1.69 apiece including postage, and will be printed on 5×7 inch postcards. If that sounds up your alley, the first 200 people to sign up at www.sincerely.com/ink with the code ‘TC’ will be able to send their first holiday card for free. The app isn’t out just yet, but will be released for iOS and Android shortly.

Of course, Sincerely now has another, very large, competitor: Apple. The company introduced the Cards app for iOS, which also lets you send real-world postcards letterpress greeting cards to friends and family. Apple’s offering is significantly more expensive though — it’s charging $2.99 to send a greeting card to someone in the US, and $4.99 to send it anywhere in the world. Postagram’s price? 99 cents wordwide for its standard postcards, and $1.69 for greeting cards.

Zingaya, a Russian VOIP startup HQ-in London has raised $1.15 million in a Series A funding. Investors include Esther Dyson and Russian private investors. . I one “Untitled Venture Capital Company”. I kid not. Zingaya, founded in 2009 by the three young Russian geeks who previously developed flap hone, a web-based VOIP app, is effectively a click-to-call service aimed at support calls for e-commerce sites. They are by no means the only player in this market but are getting traction with customer at a reasonable click with over 100 paying customers including the largest Russian payment system – Qiwi, and major Russian airline S7 Airlines.