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Unsurprisingly, real time search engine OneRiot is now tapping into Facebook’s recently launched Open Graph API. So now, actions made by Facebook users who publicly share links on their profiles or like stories across the web will now be indexed in realtime search results available through OneRiot’s API and the the third party developers who build apps on top of the search engine’s API.

To date, OneRiot, which just revamped its search engine, has been indexing and ranking links shared by users on Twitter, Digg and MySpace. Last month, OneRiot rolled out a small bucket test on its site to test the addition of Facebook shares/likes and now the startup is opening this data stream via the API for the developer ecosystem to innovate with.

Facebook likes and shares from users who have made their actions completely public will now contribute to the ranking of realtime search results available through OneRiot’s API. For example, a search for “World Cup” on OneRiot will reveal the most popular links about the soccer tournament being shared by Facebook users right now.

The API, which powers over 100 realtime web and mobile applications, has also been updated with improved monetization algorithms to optimize revenue for every individual third party developer. One Riot has added self-optimizing algorithms to determine which ads will be displayed to different third party applications, based on the behavior of their users, helping to increase click-through rates and engagement.

It’s not surprising that that OneRiot is now tapping into the Open Graph API for its own API. The startup’s API, which is used by over 100 applications, drives close to 97 percent of OneRiot’s search volume.

OneRiot has also ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. The search engine also launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, that has since been integrated into the search engine’s API. And the startup recently launched self-refreshing realtime trending ads and a self-service version of RiotWise.

Mobile ad network Millennial Media, which claims that its network reaches 82 percent of 72 million mobile web users in the U.S., is reporting that iPad ad requests grew 160 percent from April to May with global Apple ad requests dropping 33 percent in May. Apple OS U.S. ad requests dropped by nearly 14 percent month-over-month after an 8 percent decrease in requests in April.

That being said, the Apple OS is still the leading mobile operating system in Millennial’s U.S. network, with a 48 percent share of Smartphone impressions. RIM’s BlackBerry remained the second largest OS on Millennial’s network for the tenth consecutive month with a 3% increase month-over-month and a 19 percent share of impressions. Android’s share rose by 5 percent to a 15 percent share of impressions for the month of May.

Android total ad requests grew by 15 percent in May, which is slower growth than the OS has seen. Last month, Android saw a 77 percent jump in impressions, and a 72 percent jump in May. But the jump in impressions for Android over the past six months is staggering, with requests having grown by 338 percent since January.

Android Smartphone manufacturer, HTC received the largest share increase month-over month for the second month in a row with a 2.5% impression share increase in May, rising to the fourth spot of the Top 15 Manufacturers. Apple leads the manufacturing list but dropped by 10 percent in terms of device impressions. In terms of type of device, the majority of ad impressions took place on smart phones (46 percent), with Feature Phones seeing 35 percent of ad impressions, and Connected Devices, like the iPad, seeing 20% of impressions.

Millennial added a new measurement this month, focusing on mobile developer channels and trends. For May, Gaming apps placed in the number one spot and accounted for 58 percent of app revenue on devices. Social Networking claimed the number two spot and experienced a 124 percent growth on Millennial’s network since the beginning of 2010. The Entertainment channel, which placed in the number four position, has experienced the largest percentage of growth in 2010 – a 648 percent increase since January and is expected to grow with the summer blockbuster movie season. In May, of the developers who focused on a single platform, 56% were focused on Apple and 29% were focused on Android.

If Millennial’s numbers are accurate, Android impressions may be slowing down in terms of growth. Of course, we need to see another few months of slow growth before determining making any definitive judgements but it should be interesting to see if Android’s growth plateaus. The significant growth in iPad impressions is also significant as the device is growing in usage.

As one of the largest mobile ad networks in the arena, Millennial has been seeing strong growth, just launching an iPad SDK, and is now one of the largest mobile ad networks in the space. The Baltimore-based startup is growing; in February Millennial Media acquired mobile metrics and analytics firm TapMetrics. Additionally, the ad network raised $16 million in Series C funding last November.

However, with Apple’s iAd platform entering the mix, the mobile ad network space may be facing some significant changes. At the moment Millennial seems to be in a good place with Apple’s new iAd policies on outside networks advertising on the iPhone. But Millennial’s future may be in question if the network is looking to be acquired by a major tech giant, like Microsoft. But the FTC is reportedly looking into Apple’s iAd policies to determine if they are anti-competitive, so an big exit for Millennial could still be a possibility.

We don’t do many movie reviews here at CrunchGear, mostly because we’re into gadgets and movies are, in a way, the anti-thesis of the physical. Semantics aside, Toy Story 3 was great.

The story is simple: Andy, the toys’ owner, is leaving for college. His toys, resigning themselves to a life in the attic, prep themselves for the coming change but, instead of the must and heat of the rafters, they end up in a garbage truck. Only Woody is going with Andy to college, and when he sees his friends in danger he runs to save them.

The tale winds through a day care center overrun by misfit toys, the home of a little girl who owns a gruff toy unicorn and a sad clown, and then to the very maw of heck itself – the incinerator at the city dump. All of this is tinged with the sadness of growing up and leaving behind things that you loved as well as hope for better things to come.

Read more…

Last August we broke the news that angel investor Chris Sacca was expanding his operation and bringing in outside capital to leverage his investments. This has been a bit of a trend recently – successful angels like Ron Conway, Jeff Clavier and Mike Maples have all transitioned from pure angel investors to raising funds.

Sacca’s fund, called Lowercase Capital, was meant to be a $6 million fund. But he’s closed on a total of $8.5 million based on heavy demand, he says. Part of that demand is surely due to the fact that Sacca has transferred some of his earlier angel investments – including Twitter – to the new fund. His investments include SimpleGeo, Fanbridge, DailyBooth, Posterous and Stickybits.

Sacca’s investment philosophy is fairly simple – It’s cheap to create new companies relative to ten years ago, and there are lots of investors to choose from. He promises to invest more than money, though. Like other hyper-successful angels, Sacca says he’ll go to work for you, too:

We dive in to work with teams that obsess over user experiences, customer happiness, and that, to quote Paul Graham, “make something people want.” Along with relatively small amounts of money, we give them the time, attention, and the empathy that catalyze winning outcomes for all involved. Rolling up our sleeves, we help design front pages, invent new services, prioritize product features, negotiate partnerships, and deal with the everyday professional and personal challenges of startup life.

A sign of the times, although many may find it distasteful, or much worse: Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff used a mobile Twitter client to send out a tweet announcing the impending execution by firing squad of convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner.

As the BBC notes, quite a modern way to announce a very old-fashioned death.

In total, the AG sent out 3 tweets about the event from his iPhone only a couple of hours ago, the most recent one an all-too-familiar (on Twitter) self-promoting one.

1) A solemn day. Barring a stay by Sup Ct, & with my final nod, Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer. Mourn his victims. Justice

2) I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.

3) We will be streaming live my press conference as soon as I’m told Gardner is dead. Watch it at www.attorneygeneral.Utah.gov/live.html

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this in comments.

We’ve fiercely debated the merits of the iPad (here and here and here and here) and whether Apple’s “magical” device will transform the mass market. The question, of course, is not whether the iPad is the leader in the tablet market but whether the iPad will become the iPod of its market. And if the iPad is indeed the iPod, how does that shape the digital strategy of publishers?

At the Big Money Untethered conference in New York this Thursday, a cluster of top publishers including Donald Graham (CEO, Washington Post), Carolyn Reidy (CEO, Simon Schuster), Vivian Schiller (CEO, NPR) and Sarah Chubb (President, Conde Nast Digital), gathered to answer those questions and evaluate the explosive tablet market (according to Forrester Research, there will be 59 million tablets in use by 2015). We pitched a simple question to the panelists, does the iPad change everything and how is it transforming their business? Their answers in the video above.

Excerpts :

Vivian Schiller, CEO, NPR

It’s definitely a transformative device…[iPad] is the most distributed, well known tablet, there’s no question other manufacturers will come in with other variations of the tablet but the idea of this new form factor is a really exciting one.

And for us, the way that it’s transforming our business is we have created an application for the iPhone, excuse me for the iPad, there’s too many i’s out there! That is really designed specifically for the form factor of the tablet…and it is designed for the size and scale of the iPad…it’s been tremedously popular we’ve had over 350,000 downloads so far and there are only 2 million iPads in circulation. So what is that 1 in 6?

I would never bet against Apple.

Carolyn Reidy, CEO Simon & Schuster

I would say that it has transformed our industry because it is the first reader that has enabled us to combine text with video…It’s the first thing that will enable us to do children books, to make digital children books, to make enhanced e-books, and to actually make a combination of video and reading book that is not an app. In our world it’s very difficult to do an app it gets lost…the audience for a book is not the size for most of these apps that sell hundreds of thousands.

Jacob Weisberg, Chairman, The Slate Group

I think when the history of the era is written, it’s the Kindle that will be seen as the breakthrough device…even though it’s already been superseded in many ways by the iPad…It was really the Kindle that ushered in the post-Gutenberg and showed that a printed book was no longer necessarily the best way to read a book.

The iPad is a great toy…Everybody wants one, but the question is, is everyone going to need one?…In the short to medium term, I think the iPad is going to be very dominant…but long term I’m not sure I would bet on it as the dominant device because I think Apple does have the tendency to make the same mistake again and again, which is that it likes closed systems….It doesn’t like the messiness of the internet but unfortunately messiness is part of what makes the internet the internet.

Sarah Chubb, President, Conde Nast Digital

I think that the iPad is transformative because it’s changing how consumers think about the mobile web and how they think about content consumption…

To me it’s not really about the iPad itself, it’s about consumers seeing that they can do things differently and enjoying it which will make them do it more…Even just one year from now, we’re going to look back on it and many, many things will have changed as a result of that.

Tonight at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, Y Combinator invited dozens of programmers to a new event called Work at a Startup. The event, which was announced last month, is meant to help expose programmers to what they should expect when they go about joining a startup (YC’s Paul Graham thinks that a lot of them tend to join more established companies like Microsoft simply because startup life seems so nebulous). The event is complementary to Y Combinator’s Startup School, which is meant to help entrepreneurs start a company from scratch. My notes from the event are below, and you can watch an archived video of the event here.

The event kicked off with a talk from Graham, who detailed what programmers should think about when they’re debating whether or not to join a startup.

Graham says that the two main things that prospective employees should be gauging are fun and money. You obviously want to maximize both, and the startup end of the job market is the “bargain”, because you can have fun and make a lot of money. Assuming, of course, you pick the right startup.

The second thing you need to figure out, Graham says, is whether or not the startup lifestyle is really for you. In general, he’s found that startup founders who join a large company after being acquired aren’t as happy in their new home as they were when they were running the show. The reason? Bureaucracy. There are meetings and you have to ask for permission to get things done — things that aren’t issues at most startups.

Graham says that some people (and all founders) are like that. But others aren’t. The way to tell, he says, is to ask yourself if you like the prospect of having (and implementing) many ideas at work, in which case a startup is probably the place for you. If you don’t think having ideas are a part of the job, then he says you’re probably better suited for corporate culture.

The next step is figuring out which startup you want to work at. Graham says this is actually a lot like being an investor, the difference being that investors are giving startups their time and money, while you’re giving them your work. So how do you tell which startups are promising? The secret, Graham says, is to look at the founders — even if they have an unsexy company or domain, if you have great founders, the company is more likely to go on to great things.

Alright, so you’ve found a great startup — can you expect to make a lot of money? This varies a lot, depending on how early you’re joining. Graham says that if you’ve found a startup that you want to join, you should do it quickly, because things can change fast (and the amount of equity you can expect can drop precipitously). He relayed an anecdote about a company Yahoo was thinking about acquiring for $1 billion a few years ago. After mulling it over for a few months, Yahoo agreed to pay $1 billion, at which point the company told them they’d grown and now wanted $2 billion (the unnamed company sounds a whole lot like Facebook). Moral of the story: don’t sit around thinking about things too long when startups are involved.

As for how much equity you can expect, Graham says that at the high-end, for a one-founder company with no employees, you may be able to get 50%. From there, things drop quickly — if you’re talking to a company with two founders and angel funding, you may be able to get 5-10%. Post series A, it’s hard to get more than 1%. The trade-off here is risk — most companies never get to their Series A.

Ultimately, Graham says that when you’re joining a startup, you’re looking for a company that is undervalued for the stage it is at, and that’s most likely to eventually IPO. Of course, that’s all easier said than done.

The event then switched to pitch mode, when over thirty startups gave a whirlwind series of presentations telling the audience why they should join them (it was like a speed dating job fair for startups).