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There a few platforms that aim to connect investors and startups on the web, including AngelList, but for the most part investment transactions and venture funding is done face-to-face, many times with a hand shake involved. A new startup, called CapLinked, is hoping to change this by offering a collaborative platform for entrepreneurs, private investors and advisors to find each other, build relationships, and transact business on the site. CapLinked, which was co-founded by PayPal marketing exec Eric Jackson, is announcing a $900,000 round of funding from group of former PayPal execs (a.k.a the PayPal Mafia), including Peter Thiel, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Joe Lonsdale (co-founder of Palantir Technologies); Aman Verjee (CFO of Sonos); and David Anderson. In total, CapLinked has raised over $900,000 in angel funding.

Using CapLinked is fairly simple for entrepreneurs. They can use the platform to raise capital and sell or buy assets, manage and contact investor prospects, centralize document flow on a secure platform and connect with new investors, advisors and companies.

Users can create a pitch, and invite others via email to check out the idea on the site. Entrepreneurs can upload documents, multimedia and other presentations to make a case for their idea and put all confidential company or deal related information behind a secure “walled garden” platform. Once an entrepreneur has an idea he or she wants to share, he can send a link to the platform to potential investors. And CapLinked has provided startups with basic form documents and contracts for investments.

CapLinked provides investors (the site is exclusively for accredited investors) with a Fidelity-like platform to track their portfolio of private companies in one location and encourages investors to build a public profile featuring their portfolio investments, clients, or companies they manage.

The startup, which launched in October of 2010, already has more than 2,100 companies and 1,000 investors on the platform, and $800 million in potential deals. Jackson, who likens the platform to a LinkedIn-meets-Salesforce for private investing, tells us that the platform isn’t just for tech startups—he has hopes of CapLinked being used to fund movies, commercial real estate deals or other professional products. “We want CapLinked to be the go-to platform for anyone who wants to raise capital for a company or project,” he explains.

Thiel says of CapLinked, “Start-ups are tremendous drivers of economic growth, yet the basic mechanics of investing in new companies can be difficult and inefficient, especially for first-time entrepreneurs or people outside venture capital center…CapLinked is providing—for the first time—an efficient online platform that connects entrepreneurs and investors, helps them build relationships, and streamlines the investment process.”

The startup’s founders certainly have experience in both tech startups and the investment world. Jackson, who authored The PayPal Wars, was PayPal’s first Senior Director of U.S. Marketing and served as interim VP of Marketing after acquisition by eBay in 2002. Fellow co-founder Christopher Grey was a managing partner and co-founder of private equity firms Crestridge
Investments and Third Wave Partners as well as a managing director for Emigrant Bank.

Jackson says that he believes CapLinked can succeed because it provides a comprehensive platform for both investors and entrepreneurs. He may be on to something, considering the recent success of AngelList.

The rumor mill got one right. Amazon just launched the instant streaming service for Prime subs. The service opens up “5,000 movies and TV show at no additional cost” to those who pay for the Amazon Prime membership. Yep, if you happen to have a free or even trial account, the content isn’t available for you. Sorry, fellow freeloaders, it’s time for us to pony up the $79.99 a year for access to the shows and 2-day shipping on your Amazon orders.

The service rolled out this morning and seems to work as advertised. Click the button and it starts playing. However, I can’t seem to dig up if the new Prime free streaming content is available on 3rd party boxes. It doesn’t show up on my TiVo or Roku yet. Chances are though these devices haven’t got the memo yet and an update will open the gate to the free garden.

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Video streaming service VBrick has acquired Fliqz, a plug and play video platform for websites. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Fliqz has raised a total of $12.2 million in funding.

Similar to Brightcove or Ooyala, Fliqz provides a white-label video platform for web publishers to create and host video content. The startup’s plug-and-play video solutions includes a branded video player, with an application set that includes capturing, uploading, hosting and monetizing videos. Fliqz customers include Major League Baseball, New Balance, Sony and over 500 others. These brands use Fliqz to communicate with their customers using video – both on their corporate Web sites and via social platforms like Facebook.

VBrick will be integrating the Fliqz platform into its streaming service, VBoss, to create a one-stop shop for businesses and organizations to host their live and on-demand videos. VBrick currently has over 9,000 customers and 60,000 installations of its streaming service worldwide.

Ever tried to look up that hilariously funny, wicked smart or straight up historic message you tweeted at that birthday party about three weeks ago? Yeah, good luck finding it if you’re not using a tool like Twistory.

As we wrote when we first featured the app nearly three years ago, the app lets you subscribe to (public) messages from any Twitter user, including your own, in any popular desktop or online calendaring application (iCal, Google Calendar, etc.).

The app has amassed over 40,000 users by now, creator Tijs Vrolix tells me, and he felt it was time for an upgrade.

The update is now complete, bringing better performance and better stability to the tool. Try it: once you authorize Twistory to access your tweets, you’ll see tweets for the past 30 days appear on the appropriate date and time in your favorite calendar application, within seconds.

In the interest of making some money, Twistory now also boasts a premium version. For $1 a month, that Pro version of the tool lets you export your entire Twitter backlog as a CSV file, which Vrolix says was probably the most often user-requested feature.

Note that the backlog is limited to 3,200 tweets due to Twitter-imposed API limitations.

Next on the roadmap: support for retweets.

Hipmunk is one of those things that sells itself. You look at it side-by-side with the alternative ways to search for airline travel and it’s a joke. And that’s exactly why it’s so awesome that they’ve been able to translate that experience over to the iPhone — and perhaps make it even a little easier.

If you’ve used Hipmunk on the web, you’ll know the drill: You enter a “From”, you enter a “To”, you enter the “Dates”. And then, if applicable, you change the “Fare Type” and “People”, and you’re set. Hipmunk does the rest for you, combing over the listings they have to find you the best flights sorted by “Agony”, “Cost”, “Depart”, or “Length”. It really couldn’t be an easier.

What’s nice is that the flight results pages on the iPhone maintain the grid look of the website. And they even look a little better and are a little easier to navigate thanks to the iOS polish. Clicking on a result gives you mini details about it, and clicking through (with the arrow) gives you all the details.

The one downside is that booking has to be done through the airline and/or aggregator’s website using mobile Safari. So after all the work Hipmunk does tidying things up, it can all go to hell if the airline’s mobile site sucks (and you can be sure it does). Of course, the Hipmunk website itself also makes you go through the airline’ and/or aggregator sites to book — it’s just a little more jarring in the app since it kicks you out to Safari.

But Hipmunk for the iPhone comes with the nice feature of being able to email a booking link or being able to use a code to go directly to a “finish” page on Hipmunk.com if you don’t feel like finalizing booking over the phone.

Developer Danilo Campos details his experience making the app on Hipmunk’s blog here. It’s a nice story as he was simply going to build them an app on his own on the side, when they contacted him to do it.

You can find Hipmunk in the App Store here. It’s a free download.

The next time you go out to dinner, look around. Depending on the restaurant, there will be anywhere from a few people with their heads buried in their phones, to a ton of people in that position. If you don’t see any, keep watching, you will.

This topic of discussion came up this past weekend when I took a trip outside of the Bay Area bubble to go visit my parents. My mother has the stance that I can only assume most mothers do: you shouldn’t check your phone at the dinner table. So naturally, to comply with her request, every few minutes I would check my phone under the table.

I’d pretend to read the menu or fix my napkin to just be slyly looking straight down at my device beneath her line of sight — you know the drill. And while I was doing that, I would look around. Sure enough, there were a half dozen other people at the tables around me doing the same thing.

Love it or hate it, this is becoming the norm. And when it fully becomes the norm, there will no longer be the same stigma attached to checking your phone at a restaurant. Naturally, my mother refuses to believe this will happen, but it’s happening already. Go out to dinner with people in their 20s or 30s. Or worse, go out to dinner with teenagers.

When I go out to dinner with my peers these days, it’s not considered weird at all to pull out your phone. In fact, the situation has sort of reversed itself: you feel awkward if everyone else is using their phones and you’re not. It happens. A lot.

Obviously, at a fancy restaurant this behavior is less prevalent than at a bar. But it’s still increasingly happening all around you.

And it has made going to dinner so much better.

I shouldn’t have to state the obvious, but I will: using your phone in this context does not mean talking on the phone. That is still very frowned upon in restaurants for a very good reason: it’s annoying. A person talking on their phone is making noise, a person using their phone (as in surfing the web, sending texts, using apps, etc) is often doing the exact opposite.

Of course, the stigma around using the phone at the table stems from the same idea: it’s considered rude. But again, it’s not rude as in annoying, it’s rude as in you’re ignoring those around you. It challenges the social norm that when you go out to dinner with people, you’re supposed to have conversations with them.

That itself is a bit odd since it’s also considered rude to talk and eat at the same time, but I digress…

Here’s the thing: the common misconception that my parents and others have about using the phone during dinner is that it’s antisocial. But increasingly, it makes dinner even more social.

In the situations where I go out to dinner with my peers, use of the phone often augments the conversations being had. Don’t know who won game 3 of the 1995 World Series? Don’t know who directed that movie you all saw? It’s all right there in your pocket.

But even more fascinating is when the topic of conversation now often revolves around the phones themselves — or more specifically, what is on them. Tweets, Instagrams, Belugas, etc. These all now spark new conversations or tidbits of personal connection.

And then there are the shared experiences of doing things like checking-in or Foodspotting. One person at a table doing it often trigger everyone else to as well.

Forgive me, but it’s Dinner 2.0. And again, I’m having more fun at these dinners than I ever have.

Is part of it antisocial? Sure. Can it lead to distractions if you read a work-related email that you need to respond to? Of course. But this is the way the world works now. We’re always connected and always on call. And some of us prefer it that way.

What’s annoying to me isn’t someone using their phone at the table, it’s the people who really believe I shouldn’t be allowed to use my phone. Why? So I can repress the desire I have to check the phone while failing to engage in a conversation so I can be able to quickly excuse myself to go to the bathroom to check the phone?

My mother’s answer: yes.

Makes sense. It’s exactly why things are changing. Get with the program, or get out of the way.

What’s more likely? In ten years, everyone goes to a restaurant and talks to one another without pulling out their phones at the table — or in ten years, the table is designed in a way to enable you to more easily use your phones? That’s an easy one.

From the folks that brought you FlickSquare now comes 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, a simple app that emails you with a reminder of where you checked in on Foursquare a year ago. All you need to do is sign into the app on FourSquare and the app will email you with last year’s checkins. That simple. And if you didn’t check-in on any given day the email skips.

Built at Foursquare Hack Day by Jonathan Wegener, Benny Wong and Matt Raoul the app has caught the attention of Foursquare founders as well as bloggers and industry notables. Says Wong, “You know that mode in Mariokart where you can race against yourself as a ghost?  Yeah, it’s kinda like that.” Indeed, plugging into the app and receiving the email is a delightful lesson in nostalgia, “Oh, I went there!” Don’t know how long it will endure, but for now it’s cool.

Wong is also thinking of including milestones like the top New York Times story for the day, the weather on the day, as well as other milestones in the daily email. He is even considering a making physical (paper) calendar for checkins as well as a checkin browser, when you can search for places you have checked in in the past.

But for right now though Wong is just reveling in the serendipity caused by the app, moments like this and the one below where someone checked in an ungodly number of times (the app fought back) making the execution totally worthwhile.

Top image: Dens