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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.

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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.

If you are of the opinion that two screens are better than one, I come bearing good news. LG’s new DoublePlay smartphone has today been made available at T-Mobile.

We first got a peek at the device back in June, though we were pretty uncertain on details at that point. Then a leaked T-Mo roadmap shed some light, which leads us to today’s official launch. The LG DoublePlay’s claim to fame are its dual screens — one 3.5-inch primary screen, with a 2-inch secondary screen landing square in the middle of its split QWERTY keyboard.

The screens can work in tandem on a single task, or can be used separately to, say, update your Facebook and send a text at the same time. The DoublePlay touts a 1GHz Snapdragon processor and runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread. You’ll find a 5-megapixel camera on the back, equipped with LED flash, auto focus, and the ability to capture 720p video. Unfortunately, there’s no front-facing cam for the DoublePlay, so hopefully multi-tasking is more important to potential buyers than video chat.

LG understands that not everyone enjoys QWERTY keyboards, and has preloaded the Swype application along with T-Mobile’s Group Text and Cloud Text services.

We originally thought the DoublePlay would go for $149 on-contract (courtesy of that leaked roadmap), but it would seem that the phone gods are in a good mood today. The LG DoublePlay will retail for $99 on a new two-year contract, and is ready to be picked up at a T-Mobile store today.

The popular social gaming network for Android, PapayaMobile, is announcing today that it’s now expanding its gaming platform to iOS. The company is making its social development toolkits available to iOS developers as a beta release, allowing them to connect users on both platforms (iOS and Android) for in-game features including challenges, game invites, leaderboards and more.

In addition, developers who have built their social games using Papaya’s Social Game Engine can now export both iOS and Android versions of their game from a single code base, the company says.

To kick off the iOS support, several third-party game developers will bring their new games to the Papaya network in the coming weeks as iOS releases. The current list of expected games includes X-City by Aidi Game, Contagion by 2Clams and Burger Joint by Arctic Empire. All developers will also have access to PapayaMobile’s recently launched Gateway to China program, which localizes, distributes and promotes Western games in the Chinese market.

Earlier this summer, Papaya announced it had reached 25 million users – 940% growth since the beginning of last year. The growth was attributed to the ever-increasing size of the Android market. Now, the company says it has over 30 million users. And all this before it hits the iPhone.

PapayaMobile raised $18 million in a Series B round led by Chinese venture firm Keytone Ventures and DCM this April, bringing Papaya’s total funding to $22 million. Last week, the company announced, too, that it will be one of the first startups to receive an investment from DCM’s A-Fund.

The $100 million Asian A-Fund is intended to support early-stage startups focused on Android. DCM partnered with gaming giant Tencent, Japan’s largest mobile gaming social network GREE and Japan’s second largest mobile operator KDDI, to fund the startups, each which will receive anywhere from $250,000 to $5 million.

In June Justin.tv launched one of its first verticals, TwitchTV, a live-streamed video game portal and community for gamers. The platform has since taken off in terms of usage, and today, TwitchTV is expanding to the iPhone.

For background, TwitchTV features competitions of a variety of games and platforms with top gamers, tournaments and commentary. The platform aims to be a one-stop-shop for live video for ‘eSports,’ which Justin.tv says is synonymous with competitive video gaming. TwitchTV features live video game battles and commentary from titles like Halo:Reach, Starcraft II, World Of Warcraft, Call Of Duty: Black Ops and others.

With the new free iOS app, you can watch all of the content on the site. Users can watch videos in High Definition in full landscape mode; and browse by game, featured and more. You can also follow your favorite channels directly from the video stream, and see a list of the channels you follow that are broadcasting live. Plus, you can chat with your friends on the video stream via in-app chat.

Considering the success of TwitchTV on web platforms, it should be interesting to see if the gaming site can build a base of users on mobile.

Sports+ (formerly Hitpost) has launched a new iPad app for sports fans that features socially-powered feeds for every league, team and player you care to follow. These feeds include latest news, crowd-generated stories, and polls.

Hitpost’s apps allow you to follow your teams, players and leagues to get a comprehensive view into photos, Tweets, user-uploaded reports and news coming out of an organization. Currently Sports+ has 250,000 mobile users on its iPhone and Android apps.

The iPad app’s Feeds are updated 24-7 by these users, and the feed also includes crowd-curated news and blog posts from sports writers, and tweets from professional athletes. The iPhone and Android apps also allow users to make and share their own sports poll using a live professional sideline photo.

Sports+’s apps have seen a high rate of growth recently. The app’s usage grew 300% last month, and 2 out of 3 new mobile users use the app again the next day. Hitpost is backed by a number of high-profile angels and investors including Keith Rabois, Shervin Pishevar, Naval Ravikant, Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures.