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Question and answer service ChaCha has just received a $3 million infusion from Qualcomm’s venture arm Qualcomm Venture Partners. This brings the company’s total funding to a whopping $75 million.

In a statement, Scott Jones, ChaCha’s CEO says that Qualcomm’s “experience and insight into the global wireless ecosystem will help ChaCha continue to expand its service worldwide.” ChaCha has been a roll over the past year, achieving profitability, raising boatloads of money, and reaching record traffic numbers for its Q&A product.

The company has nearly 32 million unique inquisitive users monthly and answers over 3 million questions daily. In December, ChaCha hit a record of nearly one million unique visitors to ChaCha.com in a single day and hit another record of two million mobile SMS text questions in one day.

ChaCha’s success have proven that flexibility in a company’s business model can end up paying off on the long run. Launched in 2007, ChaCha started as a human powered search engine but encountered the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people. The company then evolved into a basic Q&A site, focusing on both mobile and web platforms.

And the company has steadily been adding new features to its platform, including a Facebook integration, business listings and ChaCha.me.

Ticketing company Eventbrite has had a banner 2010. In a blog post wrapping up its 2010 milestones on its company blog the company reveals that gross ticket sales in 2010 were exactly $206,899,900, more than double the $99,141,981 in ticket sales raked in in 2009. The total number of tickets sold in 2010 also ran laps around the 5,141,051 sold in 2009, at 11,004,743.

Eventbrite also had 222,353 events posted in 2010, over 9,370 cities from 147 countries represented, bringing in an 17,224,232 average monthly page views. The most trafficked month for the Eventbrite site was October with 6,738,155 unique visitors.

The post also provides some interesting statistics like ratio of tickets sold to stars in the Milky Way (11 to 200,000), orange cups purchased for the Eventbrite kitchen (36), games of Connect Four played in the Eventbrite office, and bags of candy purchased for the candy bowl (92).

Eventbrite is free for people offering free tickets and charges a fee for people selling tickets through the service. The average Eventbrite ticket price is $60.

Facebook has proven to be immensely popular on smart phones: it’s the most downloaded application of all time on the iPhone and probably holds the record on Android as well. But the user experience for so-called feature phones, which still make up the vast majority of cell phone usage worldwide, hasn’t been as rich — users generally have relied on Facebook’s lightweight m.facebook.com site, which gets the job done, but doesn’t really have an ‘app’ feel. Today, that’s changing.

Facebook has just announced the launch of a new application for feature phones that was developed in conjunction with Snaptu. According to Facebook’s announcement, the app will work across 2,500 device models from the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and LG. The application will include a home screen that looks similar to the one seen on the iPhone and Android, and Facebook notes that it also includes contact sync support and faster scrolling through status updates and photos.

If you’re on a supported feature phone, you can download the application right here. To help introduce the new app to users (and get them hooked), Facebook has partnered with 14 mobile carriers worldwide to offer free data access to the application for 90 days. This is probably going to lead to a significant jump in mobile usage for these feature phone users, especially if carriers help Facebook get the word out.

Facebook has another mobile initiative called Facebook Zero that delivers a super-lightweight version of the site to users on certain international carriers, free of charge.

Update: I just spoke with Snaptu CEO Ran Makavy and Henri Moissinac, Director of Facebook Mobile, who shared some additional details.

• The relationship between Snaptu and Facebook isn’t being discussed (i.e. they aren’t saying how much money is changing hands as part of their partnership, though they did say no ads are being shown in the app). They say that the relationship will be long-term as Snaptu continues to help improve the app.
• You can only use the application if you are on one of the supported carriers — even if you’re willing to pay your own data fees, the app simply won’t work if you’re on an unsupported carrier. It sounds like Facebook offered these carrier partners exclusivity to help sweeten the deal, but things may change down the line. Makavy points out that even if you can’t get the official Facebook app yet, you can still download Snaptu (and download their Facebook application from their), which is very similar.
• The 90-day free window begins today, not when the user first gets the app.
• Facebook found that the big hurdles facing feature-phone users were price and a lack of some functionality on m.facebook.com. Facebook Zero is meant to help with the first problem, this application helps with the latter (and Moissinac says that it should also use less data that m.facebook.com, which should make it cheaper as well).

Step one: obtain a ton of users. Step two: get brands to leverage your service. Step three: get celebrities to use your service and promote it. Step four: mainstream. While these steps obviously aren’t a one-size-fits-all thing, they have been a pretty standard set of rules for a number of popular startups in recent years. Twitter and Foursquare immediately jump to mind. And now it looks like Instagram just hit step three.

Hip hop artist Snoop Dogg has begun using Instagram. Earlier this afternoon, he tweeted out his first picture to his nearly 2.5 million followers. It’s Snoop in a suit “bossin it up”. And yes, he used a filter.

Snoop’s arrival on Instagram follows the service quickly getting one million users to sign up in less than three months. And it follows a wave of brands coming on board to try it out. Again, step one and two.

But Snoop’s usage of Instagram is particularly interesting because it appears that he’s also promoting a brand. His tweet reads “Bossin up wit dat Blast” — and is appears Snoop is holding some sort of Blast drink that he’s likely endorsing (it looks like this may even be a photoshoot for it). So it’s almost as if he’s crossing step two and three. But I’m sure Instagram loves that. They’ve been thinking about the best ways to get brands to interact with and use their service. This is a potentially great way.

The next question is if Snoop will persuade some of his fellow celebrities to join him on Instagram. Snoop seems to be the rare celeb early-adopter type. Back in August of last year, we noted that he was using Foursquare.

Regardless, Snoop’s Instagram tweets to his millions of followers can only help the young startup. I suspect Snoop will have a lot more than 19 followers there soon.

@SnoopDogg
Snoop Dogg

Bossin up wit dat Blast http://instagr.am/p/BGSQm/

about 7 hours ago via InstagramRetweetReply

eBay just posted strong fourth quarter earnings, announcing that revenue for the fourth quarter ending in 2010 increased a 5% to $2.5 billion, or up 10% excluding Skype, compared to the same period of 2009 (eBay sold Skype in Q3 of 2009). On a GAAP basis, eBay reported net income of $559.2 million, or $0.42 per diluted share. The company’s non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $638.8 million, or $0.52 per diluted share, representing a 24% increase excluding Skype, compared to the same period of 2009. eBay beat analyst expectations of $0.47 per share.

The company’s PayPal business ended the quarter with 94.4 million active registered accounts, adding approximately one million active accounts per month. PayPal’s net total payment volume was $26.9 billion in the fourth quarter (up from $21.3 billion in the same quarter in 2009), with nearly half of PayPal’s revenue in the fourth quarter was generated outside the United States. eBay’s marketplaces segment $15.0 billion in gross merchandise volume, with the number of sold items up by 10%, thanks to the strong holiday shopping season.

eBay CEO John Donohoe said in a statement that “We are driving strong global growth at PayPal and strengthening our core eBay business. And we are innovating quickly in areas such as mobile, which is helping to position us at the forefront of trends shaping the future of shopping and payments.”

eBay’s been making a big push towards mobile buying and it seems to be paying off. eBay just announced that mobile sales (gross merchandise volume) grew from $600 Million to $2 billion in 2010.

For the full year, eBay Inc. posted $9.2 billion in revenue, net income on a GAAP basis of $1.8 billion, or $1.36 per diluted share, and non-GAAP net income of $2.3 billion, or $1.73 per diluted share. On a non-GAAP basis, excluding Skype, net revenue was up 13% for the full year compared to 2009 and earnings per diluted share was up 18%.

We’ll update the post with our notes from the earnings call.

Donohoe said on the earnings call that in 2011, eBay expects mobile gross merchandise volume to double to a whopping $4 billion. And unsurprisingly, PayPal had another strong year, particularly in international markets. And PayPal constituted 70 percent of transactions on eBay in the fourth quarter and PayPal mobile adoption generated 5 times the payment volume it did over the prior year.

StubHub’s revenue was up 18% over the quarter and ticket sales were up 20%+ year-over-year.

A lot of venture capitalists and super angels are not only active investors, but also active bloggers. Below is a list of the top 20 VC power bloggers as compiled by Larry Cheng of Volition Capital based on traffic data from Compete. The metric being used here is average monthly unique visitors during the fourth quarter of 2010.

Compared to last year’s list, there’s been a big shakeup in the VC blogging world. Paul Graham of Y Combinator took the top spot, pushing Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures to No. 2. And four new names appear in the top ten, including Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz), Charlie O’Donnell (First Round Capital), and Larry Cheng himself. They pushed down Bill Gurley (Benchmark), Josh Kopelman (First Round), Bijan Sabet (Spark)—who are all still in the top 20—and Guy Kawasaki (who was pulled off the list because he is not as active as a VC anymore).

The bigger change is that many VC blogs saw a drop in audience across the board. I suspect this is because many of them stopped blogging as much as they used to. Out of the VC blogs that Compete had enough data on, about 72 percent saw a drop-off in traffic. Only nine VC bloggers increased their traffic by more than 1,000 readers per month, including Graham, Dixon, Horowitz, Mark Suster, and Jeff Bussgang (see bolded names in the list below). You can read the full list of all 73 VC blogs on Cheng’s blog. Which is your favorite VC power blogger and why?

1. Paul Graham (@paulg), YCombinator, Essays (97,227)
2. Fred Wilson (@fredwilson), Union Square Ventures, A VC (81,483)
3. Mark Suster (@msuster), GRP Partners, Both Sides of the Table (53,655)
4. Brad Feld (@bradfeld), Foundry Group, Feld Thoughts (38,821)
5. Chris Dixon (@cdixon), Founder Collective, cdixon.org (20,988)
6. Charlie O’Donnell (@ceonyc), First Round Capital, This is Going to be Big (13,970)
7. Larry Cheng (@larryvc), Volition Capital, Thinking About Thinking (13,215)
8. Dave McClure (@davemcclure), Founders Fund, Master of 500 Hats (11,127)
9. Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz), Andreesen Horowitz, Ben’s Blog (10,686)
10. Jeremy Liew (@jeremysliew), Lightspeed Ventures Partners, LSVP (9,344)
11. Bijan Sabet (@bijan), Spark Capital, Bijan Sabet (8,256)
12. Ryan Spoon (@ryanspoon), Polaris Venture Partners, ryanspoon.com (7,828)
13. Albert Wenger (@albertwenger), Union Square Ventures, Continuations (7,469)
14. Roger Ehrenberg (@infoarbitrage), IA Ventures, Information Arbitrage (7,182)
15. Rob Go (@robgo), NextView Ventures, robgo.org (6,934)
16. Josh Kopelman (@joshk), First Round Capital, Redeye VC (6,778)
17. David Cowan (@davidcowan), Bessemer Venture Partners, Who Has Time For This? (5,993)
18. Mendelson/Feld (@foundrygroup), Foundry Group, Ask The VC (5,963)
19. Bill Gurley (@bgurley), Benchmark Capital, Above The Crowd (5,428)
20. Jeff Bussgang (@bussgang), Flybridge Capital Partners, Seeing Both Sides (5,223)

Photo credit: Flickr/Bryan

We’re now just three weeks away from the launch of the iPhone on Verizon’s network (or two weeks if you’re already a Verizon customer). There’s no question it’s going to be a massive seller. And we already knew that AT&T would attempt to do everything in their power to make sure that their customers don’t jump ship. But now it appears that they may have a partner in this perilous mission: Best Buy.

A document obtained by GearLive, which they say is confirmed as an internal Best Buy playbook, details how the company is instructing employees to deal with questions about the Verizon iPhone. Specifically, they’re to use the following argument:

No 4G

Verizon’s entire presence at CES last week was focused on one thing and one thing alone: 4G. Its LTE network is now live in 38 markets and a flurry of 4G phones will launch in the coming months. But the iPhone… the smartphone millions of Verizon Wireless subscribers have been dying for… is a 3G device.

We knew Verizon’s iPhone 4 would be a CDMA phone for a number of reasons, but 3G is so 2010. Sprint launched its first 4G phone with minimal WiMAX coverage and it ended up being the fastest-selling phone in the carrier’s history. Now, we won’t see a 4G iPhone from Verizon until 2012. That means while millions of Android phones are surfing Verizon’s 4G airwaves later this year, iPhones will still be puttering along at EVDO speeds.

Post updated to remove a reference to FaceTime over 3G, which will not be available on Verizon’s iPhone 4.

What’s hilarious is that this excerpt was copied word-for-word from a Boy Genius Report article from January 11, entitled: Here’s where the Verizon iPhone falls short. Best Buy didn’t even bother to remove the post update. I hope BGR is getting consulting fees for setting Best Buy’s strategy.

So why is Best Buy trying to dissuade customers from the Verizon iPhone? Presumably because they won’t be carrying it at launch. Instead, they will carry the AT&T version of the device, so the aim is to apparently tout that instead. Makes perfect, if disingenuous, sense. The problem with the argument is that they’re saying Verizon itself touted their new 4G network throughout CES and the Verizon iPhone isn’t 4G — but neither is the AT&T iPhone. So perhaps Best Buy’s goal is to move more Android 4G devices? Their partner Apple must love that idea.

MacRumors has a bit more about AT&T’s Verizon iPhone defense as well:

We’ve similarly heard from AT&T employees, even those who are not involved in customer-facing positions, who have received “talking points” from the company about why the iPhone on AT&T is better than the Verizon iPhone. Among the key talking points being highlighted by AT&T: network speed (memo claims 35% faster than Verizon on average nationally), ability to talk and surf simultaneously (memo claims one-third of customers use it daily), global network coverage, and Wi-Fi hotspots.

The memo goes on to note that AT&T is proud to have partnered with Apple over the last three and a half years on a ground-breaking device and that it continues to be on “great terms” with Apple. Finally, AT&T points to the fact that two-thirds of its iPhone users were already AT&T customers to begin with, and 80% of iPhone subscribers are on family or business plans, which make it more difficult to switch carriers.

Blah. Blah. Blah.

All of this defense overlooks the fact that AT&T had over three years to be on offense and fix their damn network. Had they just done that, none of us would really care about the Verizon iPhone. No amount of spin is going to change that fact.

In his important new book, What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly – the legendary Silicon Valley provocateur and Wired magazine’s Senior Maverick – introduces technology as a thing with needs, wants and appetites. What Kelly thinks of as “technology” might not quite be God, but it’s something that reflects the laws of the universe and is thus central to our experience as human beings.

For Kelly, technology is “stuff we make with our minds” – which includes everything from this post to his book to your iPhone to Facebook to the Internet. This is what Kelly – whose ideas seem to be simultaneously religious, Darwinian and transcendental – calls the “technium” and it, he says, is what is driving today’s seemingly unstoppable and inevitable digital revolution. So where did this technium begin and where will it end? If anyone knows the answer to this question it is Kevin Kelly, who, twenty-five years ago predicted the future before most of us knew it existed.

This is a two-part post on my interview with Kelly. The first part can be found here.

What Does Technology Want?

What Is the Future of Technology?

Is Technology God?

The one disappointing thing about the Nintendo event from this morning: we still don’t have the exact list of launch titles, with Nintendo instead opting to draw attention to the system’s “launch window,” the several week period between its March 27 launch and E3. What are you gonna do? Me, I played a couple of these “launch window” games right after the press conference. Here’s a quick breakdown of what I saw, and played.

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It’s no secret that Yahoo is in a troubled place. And has been for awhile. We just learned of the news that Yahoo is looking to sell bookmarking service Delicious and “sunsetting” a number of other web services. Preceding this debacle was a massive round of layoffs that affected over 500 employees. Many have tried to pinpoint where Yahoo went wrong (i.e. product strategy, leadership etc.), but this infographic, titled “The Rise And Fall Of Yahoo,” gives you a play by play of the company’s history, acquisitions, highs, lows and more.

Produced by Focus, the timeline ends at February 2010. Of course, Yahoo’s downward spiral continued past this point, culminating in December’s events. And the infographic, which begins the timeline in 1994, does miss some of the more intricate details in Yahoo’s history. But it does capture the fact that there have been more failures in the past few years than successes for Yahoo.

With set to Yahoo report earnings next week, all eyes will be on the company as it attempts to regroup and possibly find a way to dig itself out of this mess.

Click the image for a larger version:

Talk about vaporware. The Fisker Karma hasn’t necessarily been promised on time. We first heard that the luxury plug-in was to be delivered in 2009, making is one of the first PHEVs out in the public. But that was later rescheduled to 2010, and then again to 2011.

A spokesperson for Fisker has stated that “regular production will start in March with deliveries expected to begin soon after.” No specific delivery dates have yet to be mentioned.

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Adeo Ressi’s incubator the Founder Institute is expanding to its fourth continent, South America, with new local chapters opening in Bogata, Colombia in April and Santiago, Chile in September. Closer to home, the Founder Institute is also opening a new chapter in San Francisco, due to increasing Bay Area demand. This will allow the incubator to run four semesters a year in Silicon Valley, graduating more than 100 local companies.

The three new offices bring the total number of chapters to 16– and Ressi says he wants to add at least four more this year. In the US, the incubator is in Boston, San Diego, Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, Seattle and of course Silicon Valley. In Europe, it has chapters in Berlin, Paris and Brussels and in Asia, it has a thriving chapter in Singapore.

The Founder Institute is different in a few ways. It operates several four-month long semesters per year where mentors help develop pre-seed entrepreneurs for the wild world of running a startup. Unlike TechStars and YCombinator, they don’t invest, but they do take 3.5% of the graduating companies and put it into a pool for the founders, mentors and people who operate local chapters. It’s basically a large startup exchange fund and a clever way of systematizing how the money naturally flows in Silicon Valley, as founders have exits, invest in and mentor other friends’ companies, take investments from their friends for their next companies and everyone in the scene generally helps each other become successful and, in the process,  shares in the wealth.

But a bigger difference is the geographic scope. There just aren’t many incubators that take such a global approach, and the few that do, like Seed Camp, typically don’t have as wide of a footprint in Silicon Valley and the United States. If you believe that all the best entrepreneurs can’t be in Silicon Valley, and that the biggest growth opportunities are in emerging markets, Ressi is rapidly becoming one of the better positioned bridges and mentors between the experience and money of the Valley and the raw opportunity of the emerging world.

Of course, not everyone does believe that. “I have had this argument with so many people,” Ressi says. “They’re like, ‘Dude? What are you doing?’ In the scheme of other countries America is only big when it comes to GDP.” (I feel you, Adeo. Michael Arrington still tells me I was an idiot to leave the Valley and spend the last two years on the road.)

Another plus in opening these international chapters? The governments are way more supportive, Ressi says. In Singapore, the government backs 100% of Founder Institute grads with investment grants, market access and other service, and Chile and Colombia are aggressively trying to follow the model of what’s worked well for attracting investment in places like Israel and Singapore. In Colombia, incoming President Juan Manuel Santos has a plan to invest more than $2 billion in communications and information technology sectors, including a $30 million fund to stimulate the development of a local venture capital industry. In Chile, there are so many aggressive programs to support founders and venture capitalists that there is actually more money than there are local entrepreneurs. Founder Institute is going to help change that. Compare that to the US where we have some new capital gains tax benefits for angel investors, but little movement on solving real startup problems, like allowing startup visas to help alleviate the brutal talent war for engineers.

It’s a curious strategy to focus on smaller countries, over giants like China, India and Brazil. Ressi says he’s been put off by the corruption and unfriendly regulations towards setting up new businesses in some of those larger countries. Given how crowded they are already with investment, he prefers a more fledgling ecosystem where the government frankly needs Founder Institute more and will work to eradicate red tape and help support these companies.

So, where should Founder Institute go next? I challenged him to look into two cities I’m fascinated with: Jakarta and Nairobi. But Ressi also wants to know what you think. He asked me to ask our readers to make the case for their city in the comments, and he’ll not only read them, but strongly consider what you say. For those of you who complain you don’t have local angels and mentors, now is your chance to get some.

If you’re an entrepreneur in one of the 16 existing cities the schedule for 2011 semesters is here.

This article is a must read.