At least according to the folks at custom badge site Osnapz, who have created a Foursquare brand leaderboard stack ranking the location based service’s many promiscuous partnerships in terms of follower count, with Zagat in the top slot at 48,136.

For the uninitiated, the leaderboard is a glimpse into some of the more obscure Foursquare brand tie-ins and badges, some of them holdovers from earlier campaigns like the “New York Times Olympics” badge, created especially for the Vancouver Olympics and now relegated to the badge deadpool.

Other surprises? The seven Bravo badges! At number two on the leaderboard, the cable channel’s offerings include “Bravo Newbie,” and show-related fare including “Top Chef,” “Looking For Love,” “Real Housewife” and “Hair Aware.” Surprisingly not a surprise? The existence of a Dora the Explorer brand tie-in, as well as the relative high prominence of social web savvy MTV at number four. Sadly, there’s no Jersey Shore-related “The Situation” badge, as of yet.

In the past, I’ve written pretty extensively about my disdain for business cards — they add to clutter, and when you actually need to look up someone’s contact information, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Alas, they’re still here, but fortunately plenty of startups are working to make them better. Today sees the launch of CardMunch, an iPhone app that lets you take a snapshot of a business card and have it added to your iPhone contacts. The application is $2.99 and comes with 10 credits (it costs one credit per card entered). Beyond that, it costs around 25 cents per card.

This isn’t a new idea — we recently wrote about the similar ScanBizCards, and there are plenty of other competitors. The difference here is that CardMunch is actually have humans verify every card that’s submitted through their system — you’re sending each photo you upload to someone on Mechanical Turk, who converts it by hand, not through optical character recognition. Given how important it can be to make sure this contact information is accurate (a wrong digit in a telephone number or email address will render them useless), this could actually prove quite useful.

25 cents may sound a bit steep, but it’s only a little more expensive than Shoedboxed’s low volume plan, which works out to around 20 cents per business card (if you are scanning hundreds of cards, though, it drops to 10 cents per card).

Want an ebook reader in the states? You have two choices: the Kindle or the Nook. That’s it about. Either other manufacturers are pulling out of the US market or they’re avoiding it although. Samsung introduced its ebook reader with much fanfare at CES 2010, but now it's not going to be released here. This isn't exactly a bad thing as both the Kindle and Nook are well-polished devices and are about as good as the form factor gets. Still, the lack of competition will eventually be a bad thing as there won’t be clear motivation for innovation or competitive pricing.

It’s a different story in Euroland or Asia. There are many ebook readers available, as two devices backed by content providers don't dominate the market. This creates true consumer choice and opportunities for new ebook readers. Now, the Kindle is still huge everywhere, but at least manufacturers haven’t totally given up on the market like they have in the US.

But did Apple just destroy the US tablet market in the same way? Are manufacturers really going to invest millions upon millions of dollars in R&D and marketing when consumers are buying the iPad by the millions? Is the US tablet market dead?

AOL reported another lousy quarter this morning. Even ignoring the $1.4 billion goodwill charge, revenues were down 26 percent and cash from continuing operations was down 44 percent (as was free cash flow).

What we are seeing is a very messy transition as AOL shifts multiple lanes from an online subscription business to an advertising one, and at the same time to a new online content production model. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is making this transition in the glare of being a once-again publicly traded company—and public investors are not a patient bunch.

Let’s break down the numbers. In the second quarter, AOL reported total revenues of $584 million, down from $792 million a year ago. We all know that AOL’s Internet access subscription business (including dial-up and bring-your-own broadband customers) is going away. And revenues for that portion of AOL’s business declined by $96 million. AOL is down to 4.4 million subscribers, and is losing 2.6 percent a month.

But AOL’s advertising business, which is supposed to be its engine going forward, did even worse. Its revenues declined by $110 million.

If you drill down into just the advertising portion of revenues, every single segment is down: its third party ad network (down 42 percent), search and contextual ads (down 28 percent), and even display ads (down 13 percent). AOL is de-emphasizing its third-party ad network, so that too was expected. And as it closes down properties in Europe and growth stalls, that means fewer searches (and search ads) on its owned-and-operated sites. But what is going on with display advertising? That is where AOL is supposed to shine. And the rest of the industry is showing a recovery. Yahoo, for instance, saw a 19 percent jump in display advertising revenues during the quarter.

AOL’s display advertising took a hit from AOL’s retreat from Germany and France, but the bigger problem seems to be the salesforce reorg that is still reverberating throughout the company. AOL’s strategy depends on its own salesforce selling premium ads on its own sites. But the salesforce is still reeling from the reorganization set in motion at the beginning of the year. AOL is also trying to be less spammy about the types of ads it shows, which accounted for about $8 million of the decline in domestic display ad revenues.

You might think that all AOL has to do is keep its advertising business going and growing as its access business goes away. But what is happening here is a much messier transition, as the kind of advertising revenues AOL generates is starting to come from different sources. Instead of an ad network and massive traffic driven by AOL.com, it is trying to build up a whole collection of new sites and content to help push its audience share back up.

And that is actually a huge challenge because so much of its pageviews (and thus display and search ad revenues) were previously tied to its captive, but dwindling, subscription customers who used AOL as their homepage and guide to the Internet. Nobody is doing that anymore (except for those 4.4 million people, half of whom probably just haven’t yet gotten around to canceling their subscriptions).

Instead, now AOL is pursuing a nichebuster content strategy, where it supplements its AOL.com traffic with search-friendly niche content sites. One area it wants to own is local news, with its patchwork of Patch sites, which now cover 83 towns from 44 last quarter. AOL will also start pushing a lot more video onto its homepage, powered by its StudioNow acquisition. If these strategies start to work and AOL can get its overall audience share up again on its owned-and-operated sites, that should help with both display and search advertising (it is still negotiating a new search deal with Google, which powers its search—and Armstrong is still keeping the Bing option in his back pocket).

Big transitions like these are always messy and they always take longer than expected. The unanswered question is whether AOL will look better than it did before when it comes out the other end.

Photo credit: Flickr/Kelly Hau

We’ve posted videos and interviews of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak before – the man happens to have a lot of interesting things to say.

But do check out this recent video, recorded last week at the Campus Party in Valencia, Spain. In a conversation with a live audience, Woz speaks out on Antennagate (again), Apple and its relationship with Google and his own relationship with chief exec Steve Jobs.

(Thanks to Luis Aguilar Pryde from EFE TV for the heads up)

Unfortunately, the questions from the audience (which were presumably posed in Spanish and needed to be translated on the spot) are not included, but you can guess what they were.

A couple of choice quotes:

On Antennagate

- “I have not really had a problem with the antenna, and I have not heard of people. I think it’s a very tiny, tiny problem that is blown out of proportion because there are a lot of people who want to accuse Apple of a mistake only because Apple has been so good with its products, creating the products that we all love.”

- “Even though I can cause the problem on my iPhone 4, I don’t have the problem in real usage.”

- “A problem that is imagined to exist is that much greater the more you love the product that you’re afraid won’t work.”

On Apple and Google (and Microsoft)

- “In recent times, I’ve been a little saddened to encounter the controversy between Apple and Google.”

- “I love Google, but I’m afraid it has a chance of becoming the Microsoft of the future. You remember how Microsoft used all of their ownership of the operating system to take over the browser … “

On his current role at Apple

- “Although I receive a small salary from Apple, I do virtually no real work at the company.”

- “I like to be more on the outside of Apple, because I prefer to judge products objectively.”

On his relationship with Steve Jobs

- “I chat with Steve Jobs now and then, from time to time, and we have never had an argument. We have always been friends. We are not close friends like we once were, spending every day together.”

A newly discovered security flaw puts any device that runs iOS, including the iPhone and iPad, at risk! At risk from what, you ask? An evildoer could remotely take control of your device, leaving you holding a hunk of plastic that you have zero control over. Symantec, which first discovered the security flaw, says Apple needs to patch the vulnerability ASAP, lest the bad guys cause a bit of havoc.

Have you been looking for a way to call your Facebook friends on your iPhone or your Android device? Haven’t figured out their numbers yet? A new solution from Vonage offers free calls to all you Facebook friends who, virally, have downloaded the same app. The calls work over WiFi and 3G/4G networks.

The app, called Vonage Mobile for Facebook, is an odd, viral solution for voice communications. The app trolls your Facebook profile for compatible friends and shows you that they are able to either take voice calls or chat. Regular updates remind you to tell your buds about the service via Facebook, thereby completing the human centipede of Vonage connected-ness.

Read more…

Online marketing services company ValueClick is buying financial information and investing education website Investopedia from Forbes for approximately $42 million in cash.

The reasons for the purchase: content, traffic, advertiser relationships and its team, says ValueClick – the site had been put up for sale back in June.

Founded in 1999, Investopedia provides visitors with a glossary of financial terms, news articles, tutorials, and investing education tools, such as virtual trading simulators and exam preparation materials.

Forbes had acquired Investopedia for an undisclosed amount back in 2007.

The site has self-reportedly built nearly 30,000 pieces of financial related content and develops an additional 7,000 pieces of content on an annual basis. Investopedia is said to generate most of its traffic organically and monetizes primarily by selling cost-per-impression display advertising through its direct sales force.

The site attracts 2.2 million unique U.S. visitors per month according to comScore and boasts some 3.1 million newsletter and 1.7 million email subscribers.

Investopedia's management team and employees have been retained by ValueClick and the business will run as a wholly-owned subsidiary.

The company is expected to generate about $10 million in revenue by the end of this year.

Zulily, a private-sale shopping site targeted at ‘busy moms’ and their kids, has raised $6 million in Series B funding led by August Capital, with participation by existing investor Maveron.

The round brings the total funds raised to date by the niche daily deals site to $10.6 million.

Zulily says moms can save an average of 50-70 percent off retail prices of boutique brands for babies, kids, and maternity using its service. You know the drill of the model by now: daily distribution of limited-time only deals with limited supply of goods.

The company is led by CEO Darrell Cavens and chairman Mark Vadon, former executives at Seattle online jeweler Blue Nile.

Let’s see if Zulily can carve out a nice little profitable niche for itself with the help of the freshly injected capital.

AOL took another hit in revenues last quarter, with total sales dropping to $584.1 million compared to $664 million in the first quarter of 2010 and significantly down from $791.5 million in the same period last year.

Wall Street consensus was total revenue of $602 million for the quarter, so they failed to meet expectations by a margin.

Advertising revenue declined 27 percent by $110.3 million versus Q2 2009.

On a slightly more positive note, the company has managed to reduce costs in Q2 2010 as operating expenses declined $131.6 million year-over-year and $73.2 million sequentially.

But AOL swung to a Q2 loss of $1.06 billion, or $9.89 a share, from net income of $153.7 million, or 86 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Its loss included a significant goodwill impairment charge of $1.4 billion related to its sale of Bebo and decline in its stock price. Without the goodwill charge, which is purely an accounting event, the company would have reported $0.66 earnings per share.

The company sold social network Bebo in June for approx. $10 million, to hedge fund Criterion Capital Partners. AOL had paid $850 million for the company back in 2008.

In April, AOL also sold instant messaging service ICQ to Russian investor DST for $187.5 million. According to the press release, the company also just sold its stake in Kayak.

AOL had $391.6 million of cash, or approximately $3.67 per share of cash, as of June 30, 2010.

Shutl, the home delivery startup that offers speedier options for Internet shoppers, is to trial its service with Argos, the shopping catalogue company that now claims to be Britain's number one online high street retailer. And should the trial resonate with customers - the retailer did £4.3 billion of sales last year - it's potentially a big win for the UK company. The Shutl service will offer Argos' online shoppers in Central London the option to receive their orders within as little as 90 minutes, says the company, using its 'Shutl Now' service, or pick a one-hour delivery window from 9am to 9pm, seven days a week. As well as location, however, the trial is also being limited to Argos' 14,000 items that are currently available for 'reserve and collect' at the retailer's brick 'n' mortar stores. Once a customer selects Shutl as their delivery option, including agreeing to the delivery quote, they can track their order in 'real-time' via a GPS-powered online map, which is pretty neat.

Facebook‘s biggest advertisers are increasingly spending more on the site, while ad prices have held their ground, which means its revenue may rise to $1.4 billion or more in 2010. That’s one major take-away from this Bloomberg article, based on an interview with chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

More interestingly, in my humble opinion, Facebook reportedly plans to make more and potentially bigger acquisitions in the near future, and is in the midst of recruiting another dealmaker to get them closed.

Vaughan Smith, the company’s director of corporate development (whose previous jobs involved dealmaking for the likes of eBay and Move Networks), told Bloomberg’s Brian Womack:

"As we get bigger and our platform gets more stable, I fully expect that we will be doing more significant acquisitions. This is working for us, and it's working for the people that we're acquiring."

He also said Facebook tends to purchase small-sized startups, typically with a dozen or fewer employees, to bring in entrepreneurs at heart who can grow into future leaders within the company. This rings true; Facebook’s recently appointed CTO is Bret Taylor, who joined Facebook thanks to its $50 million acquisition of FriendFeed a year ago.

Smith also told Bloomberg the company intends to keep up its acquisition pace (it recently coughed up $10 million for the purchase of Hot Potato and moved to acquire travel recommendation service Nextstop and, earlier, Octazen, ShareGrove and Divvyshot – this year alone.)

Smith said he plans to hire another corporate development executive, adding to the one person helping him secure deals presently.

The team will be mostly looking at companies focused on virtual currencies and mobile social networking, and startups that can help ramp up advertising revenues from its 500+ million users on its way to an eventual initial public offering.

And to bring more guns to the upcoming war with Google, of course.

Google has chosen a General in their War With Facebook – VP Engineering Vic Gundotra, we’ve heard from multiple sources. This is the person who will control overall product strategy and execution around their new efforts to find relevance in a quickly changing Internet landscape that is increasingly dominated by Facebook.

Gundotra has previously been involved in a slew of product efforts at Google, but has focused largely on Android and Google’s mobile phone applications.

Other product leads were considered, we’ve heard from sources, including other Google vice presidents and outsiders. But Gundotra is now firmly in control.

Google hasn’t officially revealed any of its plans in social, but we’ve heard to expect them to be making a significant effort.

The type of effort that suggests they’ve mortgaged the farm and have just the one crop left to plant. Their backs are against the wall. Etc.

Lose and they give control over the way the web is organized, and monetized for the next decade or so. The Age Of Facebook will begin.

We’ve got an aggressive, zealous Facebook army controlling a third of the world’s Internet population, and they want more. Meanwhile, The old bully on the block, Google, can still rumble pretty well when he gets worked up enough.

I think he’s gotten worked up enough.

If you just switch guns and tanks with notebooks and land grabs with unique visitor grabs, all loaded down with monetizable personal information, the analogy is complete. The Third Reich was to take over the world, as Facebook is poised to do today. All that stands between them and victory is a somewhat slow to move giant called Google (America). And our hero is also fighting another war to the death with Microsoft/Japan, making things more complicated.

Things will get interesting, to say the least.

There may even be a group of recently imported brains from Eastern Europe hard at work on a Manhattan Project-like endeavor to develop the first atomic-powered mobile phone. First to get that sucker to market just wins by default. No one can stand up to that kind of weaponized technology.

But back to reality. Gundotra has product control of Google’s social thrust broadly defined, we hear. Google Me, their new social platform, certainly. But Google Games is a core part of the social experience as well (remember that 40% of all time spent on Facebook is spent…playing games). Google has a deal locked up with Zynga to get the best games right off the bat. And Google’s upcoming music service will be a killer feature that Facebook has shunned to date. Music is a great app to have, and a must-have app for mobile.

And don’t count this Google team out just yet. Gundotra was a key part of moving Android from an idea to the second largest operating system platform in the world in just two years. They’re standing toe to toe with Apple already, something most people said couldn’t be done. And Gundotra has experience at Microsoft in a variety of come from behind and then dominate/kill your competitor – with the Xbox, for example. And before that Internet Explorer, built on the cold, soggy remains of Netscape.

“That team relishes a come from behind situation where everybody is betting against them” said one source. “My guess is they copy what works at Facebook, throw away what doesn’t, and add killer apps like Music to the mix. And they may even use open standards, protect privacy in an easy to understand way, and let people actually take their own data out of the system!!!

You can create any kind of playing field you want to watch this all play out. I take Europe and Africa in WWII and pit the underdog Gundotra/Patton against the guy who had everything to lose – Rommel/Facebook.

A few of my favorite Patton quotes:

Patton: Now there’s another thing I want you to remember. I don’t want to get any messages saying that “we are holding our position.” We’re not holding anything. Let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy. We’re going to hold onto him by the nose and we’re going to kick him in the ass. We’re going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we’re going to go through him like crap through a goose!

Patton: Thirty years from now, when you’re sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you, “What did you do in the great World War II,” you won’t have to say, “Well… I shoveled shit in Louisiana.”

Patton: We’re gonna keep fighting. Is that CLEAR? We’re gonna attack all night, we’re gonna attack tomorrow morning. If we are not VICTORIOUS, let no man come back alive!

Lt. Col. Charles R. Codman: You know General, sometimes the men don’t know when you’re acting.
Patton: It’s not important for them to know. It’s only important for me to know.

Capt. Richard N. Jenson: They haven’t spotted our positions yet.
Patton: They will get some education in about 10 seconds when they get a dose of our artillery fire.

Patton: You know, Dick, if I had my way, I’d meet Rommel face to face; him in his tank and me in mine. We’d meet out there somewhere… salute each other, maybe drink a toast, then we’d button up and do battle. The winner would decide the outcome of the entire war.

So who wins? The good guys do, of course. Well in this case it’ll be whoever is deemed closest to “good.” Heck, it may just end up being a tie.

Then they can split us all 50/50 and go home super, duper rich. Yahoo can then find a use for itself by coming in and mopping up the mess, I guess. Maybe they can be the official photographers of the war and give Flickr a much needed burst of activity.

Professional social network provider LinkedIn has acquired mSpoke, a small startup that aims to make content more relevant through recommendation technology. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The acquired company builds a so-called adaptive personalization engine, which “marries advanced machine learning technology with consumers’ implicit and explicit feedback to deliver the most relevant content on the web”.

mSpoke is also the maker of RSS content filtering tool FeedHub (website currently down).

Presumably, its recommendation technology will be used to present LinkedIn users with relevant content, such as personalized news and other updates, and what executives in similar careers are reading and doing on the network.

mSpoke is based in Pittsburgh and was founded in 2006 by CEO Sean Ammirati, chairman of the board Dave Mawhinney and CTO Dean Thompson. The company was also co-founded by seed investor and board member Ed Engler.

The mSpoke team has deep ties with Carnegie Mellon University.

Judging from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner‘s quote, the purchase was both for mSpoke’s core technology and its people:

“mSpoke and LinkedIn's shared focus on generating relevant content make this acquisition a natural fit for us. We're actively investing in solutions that help deliver valuable professional insights to LinkedIn members. The addition of mSpoke's talented team of technologists make it an even more compelling opportunity for LinkedIn.”

LinkedIn, which now counts over 75 million members worldwide, isn’t exactly the most acquisitive, despite its profitability and its $100+ million in capital raised.

Update: in fact, this is LinkedIn’s very first acquisition since its inception in 2003, as confirmed by PR manager Krista Canfield on Twitter.

The company has long been rumored to prepare for an IPO, but to date has not confirmed plans to do so in the immediate future.

If you’re a big user of Gmail, Calendar, or any of Google’s other account-based services and have spread your data across multiple accounts, Google has a new feature that you’re going to love: Multiple Sign-In. Yes, you’ll finally be able to quickly swap between multiple Google accounts without having to go through the tedious process of logging out and logging back in every time. Granted, the process generally takes less than a minute, but for those of who have been doing it a dozen times a day, this is a very welcome change.

The feature, which was first noticed by Google Operating System, will only work for some Google Apps: Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Sites, Voice, App Engine, and Google Code. It is reportedly rolling out to users this week, and can be enabled through this page (I don’t see it yet). It’s also a bit confusing — you’ll probably want to read through the help section before you activate the feature (note that you can’t use offline access with Multiple Sign-In activated).

With 13 billion dollars in mutual fund fees generated each year, so much about the investment process is made needlessly complicated by companies who want to sell you funds. Y Combinator-backed FutureAdvisor, which launches tonight, wants to help.

The company likens itself to a Mint for retirement investment, but unlike retirement calculators from funds like Fidelity and Schwab, the web app aggregates all your independent mutual fund data into one place. And, unlike web services Betterment, Plant.ly, and the stealth Blueleaf, FutureAdvisor takes into account what stocks and funds you already own including your 401k.

“We want to provide you with the minimum number of steps to get the most bang for your buck,” says co-founder Bo Lu.

FutureAdvisor imports your investment info from multiple sources, focusing on serving up your retirement plans in convenient and easily understandable graphic formats. You can also enter in data about your age and retirement goals and the FutureAdvisor algorithm provides you with options for asset allocation, how to optimize your return, and, if you currently work at Google, Microsoft or Intel, the app can tailors its advice within your 401k’s limits.

From founders Lu and and John Xu, "We eventually realized that most of our friends were asking the same questions (how should I allocate my money?), making some of the same mistakes (buying high-fee funds), and that the best way for us to help everyone was implement the wisdom of index investing in software."

Bo Lu and Jon Xu's future plans include providing people with the data they need to make better investments, and eventually complete long term goals like buying a house or paying for their children’s education, "You used to have to be rich and talk to some guy in a suit, now you just have to come to our website."

Photo: Mark Hardin

Recurly, a startup that makes it easy for other companies to manage their subscription billing, has closed a $1.6 million round of seed funding. The round is being led by Polaris Ventures, with participation from Harrison Metal (Michael Dearing), FreeStyle Capital (Dave Samuel and Josh Felser), Larry Mohr, Dave McClure’s recently-launched 500 Startups, Dharmesh Shah, Sherry Coutu, Nivi Babak, Naval Ravikant .

Recurly’s service allows businesses to quickly implement a subscription billing system, handling tasks like credit card number storage (it also supports integration with financial software like QuickBooks). Recurly recently changed its pricing structure to a hybrid fee/usage model, which President Dan Burkhart says this was a result of user feedback. Under the new system, which went into effect July 1, new members can start using Recurly for $29 a month, plus 20 cents per transaction; pricing scales up from there, with the price per transaction dropping as volume rises. With these fees Recurly obviously isn’t going to be ideal for a company dealing with microtransactions of only a few dollars, but it’s affordable enough for many businesses.

The service has over 1,300 companies signed up, though not all of those are paid; Burkhart declined to give exactly how many paying customers Recurly has, but says that they have “hundreds” of them so far. He also noted that Recurly is getting traction with more than just web services — he says that they’ve also seen some offline businesses, including yoga studios and a law firm, use the service as a virtual terminal to manage their recurring fees.

When Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg took venture money from True Ventures in 2005 and others he was just 21 years old. Now the firm has invested in someone even younger – 19 year old Brian Wong.

Wong founded Kiip.me (pronounced Wii-style as “keep me”), a mobile advertising platform that is bridging the mobile and gaming worlds. I don’t know much more about it, but whatever he’s doing it was enough to catch the attention of True Ventures partner Phil Black. He’s invested $200,000 in Kiip.me, he tells me, as part of a round that is still filling out.

As young as he is, Wong has experience with startups. He briefly worked at Digg and helped launch their Android application. And he founded Followformation, an automated categorized Twitter discovery tool. He’s Canadian, skipped four grades and finished college when he was 18.

He may be the youngest entrepreneur to raise venture capital – Mark Zuckerberg was just 20 when he raised early money for Facebook. Mullenweg as I said above was 21. We’ve got our crack team of research interns looking into exactly who holds the record as the youngest entrepreneur to have raised a proper venture round.

Kiip.me is still a few months away from launching. Stay tuned.

Earlier, we wrote about shopkick, a company with a different take on the whole check-in revolution as it relates to retail. But it’s one thing to read about it, it’s another to see it. That’s exactly why shopkick invited several members of the press to a Best Buy in San Francisco this morning to see the app in action.

As you can see in the full 15-minute walk-through video below, the execution is impressive. The minute you enter a Best Buy location, your phone recognizes it and you get points and a message that there are deals available at this location. You can also use it to scan items and get more points and other potential deals.

Unlike other location-based apps, this doesn’t use GPS (or even WiFi triangulation), instead this is a custom hardware plus app system shopkick created and installs in partner stores. This means no more fake check-ins and it allows the app to do some other potentially interesting things.

The most impressive element may be one that is still in the works. As you can see in our demo, as we walk around the Best Buy, our phones get pinged as we enter a new area with special deals — the home entertainment area, for example. That type of technology is already working obviously, but shopkick says that at first they’re going to focus on the more basic walk-into-the-store experience.

While shopkick isn’t a full-on rival to the popular Foursquare and others in the check-in space, it is interesting that they’re going after the type of experience that those guys are trying to establish between consumers and retailers. As Foursquare’s Tristan Walker said at our CrunchUp event last week, they’re attempting to “socialize loyalty.” He also noted that everyone was looking for a location-based coupon Holy Grail that doesn’t exist.

Shopkick seems to think it does, and that they’ve found it.

Update: Walker clarified to say that he meant the whole “show your phone” part of the coupons isn’t going to work. He does think the location-based coupon Holy Grail exists. Something tells me he doesn’t think shopkick has found it though.

Back in May we reported a rumor that Telefonica was in talks to acquire Tuenti, the 'Spanish Facebook', for €80 million" ($104 million), but Tuenti vehemently denied it at the time. Now, according to Spanish news site Expansion, the two sides have "virtually sealed the deal" whereby Telefonica will take 90% of the share capital of Tuenti, valuing the company at around €75 million or close to $99 million. There is further confirmation from Martin Varsavsky, founder of FON who has been informally advising the company, who repeats the Expansion story and adds that "all shareholders of Tuenti but management sold all their shares to Telefonica."

Facebook for Android, long something of an ugly stepchild to its iPhone counterpart, has just gotten another major upgrade. The new version adds some key new features like Events (which you couldn’t access in the old version), friend requests, and video playback. There’s also a nifty feature that the iPhone doesn’t have: a stream of thumbnail photos that sit at the bottom of the Facebook homescreen, each of which represents a friend’s recent shared photo, video, or photo album.

Here’s the full list of feature changes:

An updated homescreen with:

• The ability to post a status update or search for friends with just one click
• A new photo reel that enables easy viewing of photos and videos from friends in your News Feed
• A draggable Notifications drawer where you can easily see if a friend posted a note on your wall, commented or liked a post or tagged you in a photo
• Video playback from the app. Similar to the Facebook for iPhone application, we are using the H.264 baseline profile for encoding videos
• Support for Events. You can now review your upcoming events, read your event details, and even RSVP – all from the application
• Respond to friend requests without leaving the application

Another small change that’s going to save a few headaches: it’s now easier to open links that your friends have shared on Facebook. Before now, tapping on a friend’s status update that contained a link would take you to your friend’s wall — in order to actually open that link, you had to long-hold the update until a menu popped up. It was quirky design, and I suspect some people never figured this out. In the new version tapping a link will take you your friend’s wall; tapping a second time will actually open the link, no long-hold necessary.

In general, the app feels nicer than the older version, from the more polished header image to the fact that most of Facebook’s main features are finally available. Still, they aren’t all here yet — it looks like Chat didn’t make the cut.

Launching today on the Android Platform is meetMoi NOW, a mobile dating app that alerts users when a match is nearby and lets the brave find a date on the spot.

What’s unique about meetMoi is that it weds geo-location and push with dating; You can download it from the Android Marketplace, login or use Facebook Connect, and then just walk around while it searches for potential beaus.

The app runs in the background persistently updating your location (when you choose) and then pushes matches to you when they are within 1 mile of wherever you are. When a suitable person is spotted their photo is pushed to your screen, with a 60 minute expiration time on the option to meet. If you both say “yes” then you have the option of chatting for 30 minutes and then meeting up in real life.

Says former SixDegrees founder and meetMoi NOW CEO Andrew Weinreich, “There’s lots of people into mobile dating, but nobody is saying ‘What is dating going to look like 10 years from now?’”

When asked about competitors, Weinreich responded that while traditional sites like Match.com and OkCupid (who both have mobile apps) are about browser pulling,  meetMoi is entirely push based. Weinreich’s philosophy is that people looking for dates should not have to sit at home browsing, “There is intelligence in the cloud and it should follow you wherever you want to be followed.”

The initial launch of the app, available today, is in beta; MeetMoi expects to add premium features like Yelp API integration in a future release. An iPhone app is also expected to be in the App store within the next four weeks.

Creating 404 pages (the error page you get when a page on a site cannot be located) has become something of an artform. Startups can earn major bonus points in the geek community for having a humorous one. And Blippy has just tapped a perfect meme for their’s.

As you can see here, Blippy’s 404 page features a glorious rainbow. And while it’s not exactly a double rainbow, the cute unicorn child creature seems to think it may be. “What does it mean…,” he wonders.

Well if you click on him, you can find out…

It’s a double rainbow all the way!

Keep clicking…

OMG A TRIPLE RAINBOW!

As a sidenote, some people may think Twitter has the most famous 404 page these days with the Fail Whale. But that’s not actually a 404 error. Technically, the Fail Whale is a 503: Service Unavailable, error. The Twitter 404 page is much less exciting (below).

A new report by CNET’s Greg Sandoval yesterday gave an update on Apple and Google’s race to deploy music to the cloud. Basically, according to his sources, Apple isn’t close to doing anything massive in the space. Google, meanwhile, is likely closer but may have a hard time getting traction early on due to iTunes’ dominance. But the most interesting bit is buried a few paragraphs in.

According to Sandoval, the core Lala team (the music-streaming service Apple bought last December) inside Apple hasn’t been working on the cloud music solution. Hell, they haven’t even been working on music at all. Instead, they’re apparently working on “an undisclosed video feature.”

On the face of it, that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. But actually, it might make perfect sense. As Sandoval hints at, music in the cloud is nice — but it’s video content in the cloud that’s needed. And I would argue it’s needed soon if Apple ever hopes to be a serious player in Hollywood content.

I’ve been arguing this for some time now: the iTunes ecosystem is on the verge of a major storage problem. And it’s quickly getting worse.

Each feature length movie you download on iTunes is already over a gigabyte in size. If it’s in HD the file size plumps up to a few gigabytes. That’s per movie. Apple’s latest iPhone, the iPhone 4, has a maximum storage limit of 32 GB. If you’re lucky, that means 10 of these movies.

Obviously, that’s not a huge problem right now as most people don’t need that many HD movies with them at all times. But if Apple truly believes that these mobile devices, devices like the iPad, are the future of computing, they’re going to need a better solution. The iPad has a maximum storage of 64 GB right now. That’s maybe 20 of these movies — and nothing else.

But the problem is just as daunting for traditional computers too. Full seasons of television shows in HD on iTunes take up dozens of gigabytes. I have what I would consider to be a modest collection of shows (Mad Men seasons 1 – 4, Lost seasons 4-6, The Office seasons 4-6, Dexter seasons 1-3, and a few others here and there). I had to buy an external drive to handle just those. Considering how cheap external 1 and 2 terabyte drives are now, it’s not a huge deal for me — but most consumers aren’t going to want to do that. Especially going forward.

The iPad is a lot less sexy when tethered to an external hard drive. Actually, you can’t even do that because there are no USB ports.

The situation is completely untenable. The more popular video content on iTunes becomes, the more serious the storage problem becomes. Customers will begin hitting walls and will be forced to delete content because they can’t store it all.

That’s why cloud storage makes so much sense. Netflix is the big success right now in terms of Hollywood content online. How do they do it? Increasingly, it’s through streaming. Hulu? Streaming. Apple’s model will obviously be different. But if they can convince the studios to allow customers to store their purchased movies on Apple servers (maybe in that new massive data center in North Carolina) and stream them as they need them, it will solve the storage problem.

Further, perhaps Apple could allow customers to download files as they need them to take on the road. And then they could delete them when done.

Piracy is obviously a concern here. But the process shouldn’t be too different from the way it’s currently set up (especially with rentals). You could still have a maximum number of traditional computers you would sync your files with (since, unlike music, they’re all still loaded with DRM).

The rumors of a new cloud-centric Apple TV go along with all of this as well. You could argue that the Apple TV is weak for a number of reasons, but again, just look at the storage. It currently offers 160 GB of storage on board. If you actually wanted that to be your one media hub going forward, it would be a joke. I would need about five Apple TVs to store all my video content just right now.

Instead, I stream it from my desktop machine. And I would love to replace that desktop machine with the cloud.

Have you noticed that iTunes doesn’t show you how big TV show files are? At one point, they did. I imagine there are two reasons why they don’t now.

First, Apple likes to keep things as simple as possible. You shouldn’t see the size of the files you’re downloading because it shouldn’t matter. But that’s the thing here. It absolutely does matter. If I buy four seasons of a TV show in HD, I could max out my hard drive without even realizing it. That’s very un-Apple-like.

Second, those numbers are extremely daunting. 30 GB for a TV series? Ugh. (Interestingly enough, they still show the file sizes for movies.)

All of this hasn’t mattered for music because the file sizes are so much smaller. Your computer can almost always store all of your songs with no problem. For most users, their iPods or even iPhones can store all their songs. That’s not the case with these video files. And that’s why the cloud is so important going forward. For music, it will be convenient. For videos, it will be vital.

And perhaps that’s why the cloud music team Apple purchased is working on video.

[images: Warner Brothers]

According to SEC documents, Entech Solar raised $6.95 million, primarily from Quercus Trust, which owns 54% of the company.

The Fort Worth, Texas based company makes concentrating photovoltaics and tubular skylights meant to replace office and school lighting with sunlight.

Entech Solar was founded in 1984, though its current name was created in 2008 when photovoltaic installer WorldWater & Solar Technology bought Entech, Inc. Quercus Trust invested $35 million then, and the fund’s David Gelbaum stepped in as Entech Solar CEO in February of this year.

The company’s solar modules provide both heat and electricity by concentrating sunlight into its cells, and Entech Solar claims its electric and thermal energy output can generate up to five times as much energy as traditional photovoltaics.