TCDisrupt finalist ChompOn officially launches its major product foray into the deals space with its platform for publishers going live today. Attempting to take on the saturated deals aggregation space among competitors Yipit and 8coupons, the company offers hyper-targeted white label widgets that are drop-in on any site, which means that publishers can mix and match deals, and anyone can embed daily deals on their site.

ChompOn targets niche buying sites like the Jewish community JDeal (tagline: “You have to be meshugeh not to join”) and present at launch today is a lineup of partners including Sitepoint, Campusfood, Allmenus, Yoopra, and Stanford University. Says founder Samuel Yam, “And why should GroupOn have the monopoly on local business deals? All types of sites already have an audience to sell deals to, they just need to connect them to the right deals.”

Drawing from Yam’s background in advertising (he most notably sold AdWhirl to Admob), the crux of ChompOn platform is entirely ad networks driven, i.e. the deals aren’t stuck on your site. By adding in three lines of code, you can distribute ChompOn widgets throughout your publisher network, and ChompOn’s central analytics system will track all your data, across sites.  “Imagine as a user you’re browsing your favorite content site, and because of targeting data from other publisher sites, the current site you’re on shows you a personalized deal. That’s the aim.”

Here’s what I think is notable: Taking advantage of the fact that group buying is driven by collective behavior, ChompOn allows publishers to track deals shared over social media like Facebook and Twitter. Sites using ChompOn can now incentivize users if they shared a deal on Twitter or if they “liked” a business on Facebook. This could be a killer app for group buying, especially as the ability to share deals will only accelerate a mob mentality.

Yam explains why the world needs another daily deals site, and specifically ChompOn:

“Deals are here to stay. Lots of them. They bring in the money,and there’s no reason any one site should have a monopoly on deal inventory (as long as other sites have audiences). We’re positioning our play from an ad network background, and are providing the technology to start arbitrating and networking these deals right now across numerous properties.”

Well, someone must be making money off these things, or there wouldn’t be so many of them.

What do you get when you connect your customers to each other? If the customers like your product (and I’d say 10 billions songs sold shows definite positive bias) you get more sales. This echo chamber is what everyone – from Facebook on down – is trying to create and while I don’t believe Apple will pull it off, I think Ping is the first step in the right direction for online sales.

First, take a gander at what El Gruber has to say about Ping. He notes: “One way or another, though, if Ping proves popular, it shouldn't remain focused solely on music.” He comes at the Ping question from a usability standpoint – shouldn’t there be a separate Ping app? Something completely disconnected from iTunes? In this way, Apple can add books, movies, apps, and the like to Ping and separate it from the lump of code called iTunes.

Read more…

Coulomb Technologies, a company setting up electric vehicle (EV) charging stations across the United States, today announced a $15 million series C funding. The round was led by Rho Ventures, Voyager Capital, Siemens Venture Capital, and Hartford Ventures, joined by Harbor Pacific Capital and LS Cable Ltd., and LS Industrial Systems Co., Ltd.

With its recharged coffers, Coulomb will be embarking on a program called ChargePoint America, and providing 4,600 new charging stations to nine regions in the United States: Austin, Texas, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Orlando, Fla., Sacramento, Calif., the San Jose and San Francisco Bay Area, Bellevue and Redmond, Wash., and Washington DC.

Coulomb’s strategic partners in this program are three automobile makers: Ford, Chevrolet and Smart USA.

So far, Coulomb has set up stations (that can power any plug-in vehicle) in cities worldwide including: New York City, Orlando, Detroit, Amsterdam, Sydney and Dublin. The charging systems installed are for consumer and fleet use, both, and run on the company’s proprietary networking technology and software, a system called the ChargePoint Network.

There’s been a lot of speculation about what will be announced at today’s Google search event. Google has been playing around with its logo, which seems to be pointing at the addition of live-updating results. We have received another clue from CEO Eric Schmidt today with a cryptic Tweet: I predict big things happening today at Google. We’re already fast…fast is about to get faster. Schmidt has only Tweeted 24 times since he joined Twitter last December.

Yesterday, Google’s doodle was action-oriented and kinetic, which Google called "fast, fun and interactive.” Today's logo updates in colors as you type in the search box. And this combined with Schmidt’s message about speed points to Google rolling out the live-updating results-as-you-type feature they've been testing.

Search Engine Roundtable notes that people are reporting Google automatically take them to the search results page from the Google home page. And Google could also be launching AJAX-powered search results.

Tune in to TechCrunch to see how fast Google search will be getting at at 9:30 AM PT today.

As Facebook Places becomes a destination for brands and local businesses to connect with Facebook’s 500 million-plus members, there is a need for technologies that help businesses run promotions and track interactions with their Places pages. Context Optional, a SaaS offering that allows users to build, monitor and manage brand presence on Facebook, is debuting a customizable Facebook Places Check-In Leaderboard, a way for brands to recognize users who 'check in' to Facebook Places such as retail stores and restaurants.

Places Check-In Leaderboard allows guests who check in to various locations to claim ownership of said locations via specially-designated categories which are tied to frequency of check-ins. Brands who implement a Places Check-In Leaderboard will be able to create Leaderboard categories such as 'High Roller' and 'Shop-a-holic' and attach special deals and offers to Top Fans on the Leaderboard.

While this is a small feature, I’m sure we can expect many more Places-oriented offerings from Context Optional in the near future. The company recently acquired Buzzeo, a platform for Facebook application creation; and a customized application for retailers to connect with Facebook users.

Of course, it would also make sense for Facebook could start turning on these sort of marketing features for businesses, so Context Optional and others could face competition in the future.

Zoodles, which creates a browser designed for kids, has taken its child-friendly technology mobile today with a free app for Android smartphones. The Zoodles app aggregates hundreds of educational games, videos and puzzles into the app. The app also automatically locks the child into the app, so curious children cannot accidentally make calls, erase emails or access other applications on the phone.

Similar to Zoodle’s web-based app, the mobile app adapts content to each child based on age, skills, the device they are using, and custom parental controls so they can play without needing help from an adult. For example, if a child is not yet able to read, Zoodles will only present content where no reading is required.

Zoodles for Android allows users to create an account, or log in using an existing Zoodles account. Once the app is launched, a child logs in by tapping their picture (no reading required), and selects from a scrolling menu of activities. Zoodles automatically recognizes the Android device and presents the right content for that phone. For example, Android users with Flash installed will have access to games built in Flash, plus videos and more. For those without Flash, Zoodles will videos and others non-Flash content.

The brainchild of Mark Williamson, Zoodles aims to allows children to play and interact with the web through games, puzzles and videos. The inspiration for Zoodles came from Williamson's four year old daughter, who was having trouble interacting with a mainstream browser. Zoodles is free for all but also offers a premium membership that allows parents the ability to customize and restrict their child's online learning experience based on their age, interests, educational needs and skills.

Zoodles is steadily gaining traction as parents are looking for kid-friendly ways to introduce computing to young children. The startup has just crossed over 1 million hours of playtime on its products. And Zoodles plans to launch an iPad app soon.

It’s safe to say we’ve reached the pinnacle of humanity with this next bit of news: you’ll soon be able to update your Facebook status using OnStar. It’s the first "entertainment-y" option to be offered by OnStar, perhaps designed to cash in on some of the goodwill that has gone Ford’s way with its Sync system.

The e-book world is slowly evolving into a number of fairly similar, homogenized ecosystems. No one wants to be shackled to using a single device to read their e-books: the Kindle is both a device and an app on your smartphone; Apple's iBook's is an app on your iPad and your iPhone. And today Kobo is following the trend with the announcement of the Kobo Desktop Application. Like its competitors, the Kobo Desktop Application allows you to consolidate your e-book purchases on your computer, shop for new titles that can be synchronized to your Kobo-powered e-readers, as well as read and bookmark your e-books.

Seedcamp Week, the week when the startup programme brings its pan-European travels to a head and lands in London, starts next week and they've released the startups they will be running through their intense mentoring wringer. Over 600 teams applied over the last year of nine Mini Seedcamps, finally coming up with teams from 16 different countries and 19 different cities. Although Seedcamp pinged to South Africa, Israel and even Asia this year, their hard-core remains Europe, and the above data points show just how intense you have to be to suck out startups from such a wide area. If you're just in Silicon Valley, thank your lucky stars you only have to drive up and down the 101. Below is Seedcamp's summary of the contenders.

It went by largely unnoticed, but directory services provider WhitePages launched a social buying website called DealPop last July, entering a field played by many notable up-and-comers such as Groupon, LivingSocial and Yelp.

Initially, DealPop was only available in Seattle, but the site is expanding to Los Angeles today and to San Francisco in the next two weeks.

The company has bigger plans for the site than city-by-city expansion too, so its competitors better take notice.

The reason all group buying sites should keep a close eye on the venture, regardless of the lackluster reception by the media, is the sheer size and reach of WhitePages.

The company offers an exhaustive suite of free mobile and Web services that enable people find and connect with each other as well as businesses throughout the United States.

According to WhitePages, its directory offers one-click access to more than 200 million adults, and powers more than 2 billion searches on over 1,500 partner sites including MSN, Ask.com, and the United States Postal Service.

Its DealPop subsidiary, specifically, will build off the 100 million local and business searches conducted by some 20 million people who visit WhitePages.com and 411.com per month.

DealPop says it’s already seeing considerable demand from existing national advertising and WhitePages.com partners, prompting it to roll out nationwide deals (e.g. Groupon’s recent GAP deal) in the coming weeks.

It’s worth noting that DealPop isn’t necessarily a group buying site, as every user gets a deal – there is no minimum of people required for a deal to get unlocked. DealPop has also created a point system that allows members to earn points on future purchases when they share a deal with someone via Facebook, Twitter and/or email who then signs up and purchases that deal. There is no limit on the number of DealPop Points that members can earn.

Two months in, the company is content with the metrics in its home turf of Seattle, where listings have grown fivefold since the launch. WhitePages says over 50% of the people who’ve signed up for DealPop to date have already moved to purchase their first deal, and that every single merchant that has offered a deal on DealPop so far has requested a second run.

Curious to see if they’ll make strides in the rest of the United States as well.

AOL has just announced that Jim Wiatt, former chairman and chief executive of the William Morris Agency, will assume the new role of strategic advisor to AOL. Wiatt will be stepping down from his position on AOL’s board of directors to take on the position.

Wiatt will be spending his time helping AOL create content partnerships across the entertainment and media sectors, similar to this deal AOL stuck recently with the Ellen DeGeneres show. AOL also has a deal with the Jonas Brothers for entertainment video network for teens Cambio.

Clearly, Wiatt’s extensive Hollywood-focused rolodex will help strike similar content deals for AOL. He previously served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the William Morris Agency from 1999 until 2009. Before joining WMA, Wiatt was Co-Chairman and Co-CEO of International Creative Management, a talent management company.

I’m sure we can expect more content partnerships for AOL with celebs and entertainers in the near future.

Can a ragtag group of former newspapermen from the L.A. Times help newspapers fight off the content farms of the Web The founders and backers of Ebyline, which has been in private beta for a few months and launches today more broadly, think they can streamline the way news organizations manage freelancers and syndicate their own articles. Some publishers testing out the system include Variety, ProPublica, and The Texas Observer.

Ebyline is a marketplace for freelance journalists and syndicated news. Freelancers must be invited by an editor at a participating publication, or be vetted through an application. They can pitch story ideas into the open marketplace, or take assignments directly from editors they work with. The freelance writer and editor agree on a price, the freelancer submits drafts through the system, and once the editor accepts it after any necessary revisions, payment is authorized. The story can then be dumped into whatever ancient content management system the newspaper uses.

Similarly, publishers can syndicate their own articles to other newspapers and sites> For instance, Variety uses it to syndicate its movie reviews. Ebyline takes an 8 percent cut from each transaction. Ebyline streamlines the process and helps editors manage and discover many more freelancers than through lengthy phone calls or face-to-face meetings. But there is a big emphasis on maintaining quality by restricting access, as opposed to content farms like Demand Media or AOL’s Seed, which are designed to manage tens of thousands of freelance submissions.

The founders, Allen Narcisse and Bill Momary, both used to work at the L.A. Times. Backers include Jeffrey Johnson, the former publisher of the L.A. Times who was famously fired in 2006 for refusing to gut the newsroom, as well as Leo Wallinsky, editor-in-chief of Variety and former managing editor of the L.A. Times.

The idea of news exchanges seem to be gaining in popularity. At our first TechCrunch Disrupt last May, Publish2 launched with ethe concept of a news exchange to replace the AP by letting news organizations and blogs automate their syndication. Tools such as Ebyline and Publish2 are supposed to give print publishers a fighting chance against the encroachments of online media, but these marketplaces will only become interesting once online-only sites start using them too.

Online monetization platform gWallet, which offers social gaming developers a variety of ways to monetize their apps and boost engagement, is debuting a new mobile ad offering today. Mobile app developers can now integrate virtual currency offers within their apps. However, instead of signing up for Netflix or other offers that gWallet uses on its web platform; the mobile offers ask for users to download an app in exchange for earning virtual currency.

For example, within an iPhone app, a user will be given the opportunity to earn virtual currency if they download the Netflix iPhone app. To expand reach of the new format, gWallet is partnering with mobile ad exchange Mobclix to allow developers integrate the branded offers within their apps. Developers purchase installs via a bidding system, with gWallet bringing in the brands to the platform. gWallet Mobile will be available on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and other smartphone platforms.

gWallet launched late last year, positioning itself as a more trusted alternative to other 'Offers' companies in the wake of Scamville. One of the company's more popular products is the video offer, which can reward an app user virtual currency in return for watching a video ad (they also have more traditional offers). But clearly, gWallet sees potential in bringing offers to the mobile advertising world, which is a $1 billion industry and is still growing.

As we’ve written in the past, the offers space is highly competitive; major Offers company OfferPal recently had to downsize in the wake of Facebook deciding that TrialPay would be its preferred Offers provider for Facebook Credits. But gWallet CEO and founder Gurbaksh Chahal says that Facebook offers only accounted for 15 percent of his business, so gWallet wasn’t seriously effected by Facebook’s move.

Still, there's plenty of room to innovate give developers a compelling way to earn revenue from their mobile apps. Competitors OfferPal and Super Rewards also offer mobile offers to brands and developers.

“So ResearchGATE is Facebook for Scientists?” I asked ex-Facebook exec, current Benchmark Capital general partner and new ResearchGATE investor Matt Cohler. “I bristle at that characterization,” he responded telling me that doesn’t adequately describe the company.

Either way he’s invested in the Berlin based startup, along with Accel Partners, Simon Levene, Michael Birch, Joachim Schoss, Martin Sinner, Ulrich Essmann, Christian Vollmann and Rolf Christof Dienst. Cohler, Levene and Schoss also join the company’s board of directors.

Oddly, the company won’t disclose the size of the round, other than to say it’s a typical series A round, which implies $5 million or so.

We first wrote about ResearchGate in May, when Leena Rao called it, ahem, LinkedIn for scientists (I know, but context is always nice):

On ResearchGATE, scientists can create Facebook-like profiles where users can list their education, work experience, skills and interests and attach research papers. Users can add professional contacts by searching for other researchers who have the same focus. ResearchGATE also gives users the option to engage in online discussions by joining or forming groups. ResearchGATE also offers a few applications that help connect scientists in the virtual world. ReStory, similar to GoogleDocs, allows users to collaborate together with colleagues to write and edit documents. ReMeet lets users schedule meetings and conference calls online and ReVote enables users to create surveys and polls on topics.

There are already half a million registered users on ResearchGate – proving that scientist types need a little social networking, too. Just don’t expect them to start playing Farmville any time soon. They’d probably cheat and genetically modify all the crops anyway.

It seems that one of Google’s latest doodles, a homage to the 25th anniversary of the discovery of Buckyballs was, as we suspected, too clever by half. Two, presumably, unintentional consequences have emerged: costing Google’s users money, while making a heck of a lot of cash for the maker of the Buckyballs desktoy overnight.

The way the doodle itself had been designed put a very heavy load on users’ computers, increasing power consumption at a cost to those users, as well as causing many a browser crash. That’s kind of clumsy and, arguably, irresponsible when you consider how many people have Google as their browser’s default start page.

But more bizarrely was another side effect, which surely Google must have anticipated: sending a massive amount of traffic to GetBuckyballs.com, a site that sells the Buckyballs desktoy, described as “a set of building spheres containing 216 powerful Rare Earth magnets that can be shaped, molded, torn apart and snapped together in unlimited ways.”

That’s because clicking on Google’s doodle brought up search results for “Buckyballs”, and GetBuckyballs.com was one of the top results, sending over 2,000,000+ unique visitors to the site and generating 10,000 unit sales in a single day. Which translates to more than $250,000 in revenue, at least according to the announcement the online retailer distributed today.

That’s one way of making your search engine positioning efforts pay off – but it’s certainly a rare occasion to see Google lending such a big virtual hand.

Amie Street is one of those startups that just got me – love at first site if you will. I first discovered them in 2006, calling it an awesome new music model. Artists upload songs and those songs are free to download to start. As more downloads occur the price goes up. A cent, fifty cents, etc., up to $1.

The price of the song is an indication of how good it is, as friends share the good stuff with others.

Over time a lot of artists tried out the service, songs were downloaded over 10 million times, and the company raised venture capital from Amazon and others.

And today, the company will announce that Amazon has acquired the Amie Street business. Going forward the team will focus on Songza, which they acquired in 2009.

Amazon will redirect Amie Street to a new cobranded Amie Street/Amazon Music Service site and give users a $5 coupon to purchase songs on Amazon. But while the users and the brand are being acquired, Amazon will most likely ditch the business model, say the founders (stressing that they don’t know for sure).

Much like imeem’s acquisition by MySpace, this is more of a traffic acquisition than anything else. The terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed.

The team seems bullish on Songza, which lets users create custom playlists/radio stations and share them with friends. Since relaunching less than a month ago 20,000 stations have been created and some users are listening for an average of half an hour at a time. Here’s a station that Yelp employees in Miami created, for example.

RIP Amie Street. I once had you on the list of products I couldn’t live without. Somehow, I’ll have to find a way to move on. And I’m looking forward to seeing how Songza evolves.

We originally wrote about ZumoCast, a new cloud storage service, brought to us from the folks who brought us Zumodrive. ZumoCast’s application streams music, videos and files directly from your home desktop computer to another Internet connected device. Today, the startup’s free iPhone and iPad app is available in the App Store.

ZumoCast is the brainchild of Y Combinator startup Zecter, which also launched a cloud storage service Zumodrive. Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But instead of syncing those files with all of your other devices, Zumodrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them. HP has tapped Zecter to provide a cloud storage app on netbook devices and Zumodrive offers a number of mobile products.

ZumoCast was launched as a way to avoid cloud storage costs on multiple devices. Via the web and new iPhone app, you install ZumoCast on your devices and tell it what files to make available to the app. You can then stream those files directly from your main computer on your iPad or iPhone. The app allows you to stream video and allows users to play their entire iTunes libraries from their iPads and iPhones. You can also download your videos, music, and other files directly to your devices so you can enjoy them later, even if you are offline.

The app essentially turns your computer into a personal cloud server that streams your media libraries to your mobile devices upon demand. And it eliminates the cloud when syncing video and music on devices. And the service is free, with ZumoCast planning to offer a freemium option in the future.

CEO David Zhao says they use the same technology behind ZumoDrive to automatically adjust for bandwidth fluctuation, and transcoding on the fly means most file types, as long as they don’t have DRM, stream fine.

While Apple’s iTunes products may compete with ZumoCast, Zhao maintains that Apple’s offerings are more oriented towards sharing around the home. He counters that ZumoCast is meant for both home sharing and being able to access and stream files on your devices while you travel or are away from your home computer.

Did you know eight out of ten women wear the wrong bra size? Of course you didn’t. Now, thanks to Israeli iPhone app dev house, Digital Relations, you can celebrate the Jewish New Year with the correct support your loved ones’ bosoms need. Say hello to FITS, the iPhone app that helps you measure breast size. Happy new year indeed!

The story behind the app is that one of the developers at Digital Relations had an “embarrassing session with the saleswoman at the bra-shop”. As he made his cowardly escape, and evidently being a full-fledged dork, he thought to himself “hey, there should be an app for exactly these situations.”

You can either use a frontal photo, or a combination of one frontal and one profile photo. In both cases you can either take the shot on the spot, or browse your iPhone’s photo gallery. You then need to size and position a female silhouette over the body of the woman whose breasts you’re trying to measure. The next step is to superimpose a pink bra over the bust. Then you need to enter height and you’re done.

Bra sizes are given in five standard measurements systems: US, UK, AUS, EU & FR.

I can’t say I thoroughly tested the app, but I tried it out thanks to the kind indulgence of a friend who requested only to be known as ‘Jessica’. See her photo above.

No need to take this app too seriously of course… Just a bunch of geeks developing a dorky iPhone app that could be a hit with frat guys. Sometimes, putting a smile on people’s faces is good enough. Better yet when you can also put a cartoon character over their bodies.

You can download FITS, here for $0.99. Remember, beads not included.

Shana Tova everyone!

Symantec this morning released two new security software products, Norton AntiVirus 2011 and Norton Internet Security 2011.

Coinciding with the release, the company has also published its latest cybercrime report, dubbed The Norton Cybercrime Report: The Human Impact. The company claims two-thirds (65 percent) of global Internet users have already fallen victim to cybercrimes, which includes computer viruses, online credit card fraud and identity theft.

I’ll say it right off the bat: Symantec just so happens to sell security software, and they have new products to promote, so it’s in their best interest to scare people into awareness and try and push them into purchasing mode. Take any research findings from commercial companies with a big grain of salt, always.

That said, cybercrime is prevalent, there’s no question about that. I can imagine the 65 percent of global Internet users is likely close to the truth, and suspect that percentage to increase for the foreseeable future.

Zooming in on nations, Symantec claims almost three-quarters (73 percent) of U.S. Web surfers have fallen victim to cybercrimes, ranking it third according to Symantec (fourth according to myself), behind China (83 percent) and Brazil and India (both 76 percent).

The company also surveyed 7,000 Web users in order to assess the emotional impact of cybercrime. The study shows that victims’ strongest reactions are feeling angry (58 percent), annoyed (51 percent) and cheated (40 percent), and in many cases, they blame themselves for being attacked.

Only 3 percent don’t think it will happen to them, and nearly 80 percent do not expect cybercriminals to be brought to justice, which Symantec says ironically results in a reluctance to take action and a sense of helplessness.

Only half (51 percent) of adults saying they would change their behavior if they became a victim. Fewer than half (44 percent) reported the crime to the police.

Also, nearly half of respondents assume it’s legal to download a content such as music and movies without paying, which Symantec posits opens people up to a range of security threats.

Again, Symantec wants you to buy Norton products, but it’d be foolish to dismiss that cybercrime is a genuine security threat, and a growing one at that. Buy (or use any free) security software you wish if you haven’t already done so, and make sure to update it regularly – it’s worth the money and hassle. And if you do get hit with a virus or malware, or fall victim to identity theft, sexual predation or credit card fraud, report it to the authorities.

There’s no way cybercrimes are going to be stopped any time soon, but we should at least try and stop making it easier for scammers by not taking action.

Jesper Buch who co-founded Just-Eat, the European company that took fast food online, has launched his latest venture: Mentaline, a platform for therapists, life coaches and psychologists to deliver services to clients. Ambitiously, it's not a marketplace in which sessions eventually take place offline but instead the whole thing operates on the Web. Users browse the site by specialism to identify the right therapist and then book and pay for an online consultation which is delivered via webcam. In addition, the system scales so that sessions can be delivered to groups of people or couples, and a separate section of the site is tailored to 'Masterclasses' or life coaching-style lectures.

Asymco, a Helsinki-based app developer / industry analysis advisory firm, ironically founded and led by a longtime Nokia manager, just posted this telling chart on its blog:

According to the firm’s research, iTunes download rates for music and iOS apps are both still growing, but accelerating much faster for the latter. In fact, Asymco posits, based on data from the recently updated Music and App Store, that the total number of app downloads has already reached the same level as that of songs in less than half the time.

Assuming Asymco’s numbers are correct, it took roughly 2.2 years for the App Store to serve up 6.3 billion apps, while it took approximately five years for the iTunes Music Store to reach that same number.

If current trends persist for both, Asymco considers it likely that app downloads will overtake song downloads by year’s end.

Cumulative unit rates aside, Asymco last weekend posted another graph, depicting how music downloads continue to slow, particularly compared to apps.

Asymco says iOS users are currently downloading 17.6 million apps compared to roughly 7.5 million songs per day, on average.

(Thanks to @ScepticGeek for the pointer)

Marc Andreessen is normally enthusiastic about the startups he’s invested in. Still, when I spoke to him last week about Kno, he surprised me by saying it will be “the most powerful tablet anyone has ever made.” And he’s backing up that claim with a new investment – Andreessen Horowitz has put even more capital into the company as part of a new $46 million debt and equity round. Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital also invested in the round. Kno has now raised over $55 million.

The company is still planning on getting its first dual-screen tablet computer to market by the end of the year, says CEO Osman Rashid, although he won’t get specific on the price. It will be less than $1,000, but that’s as close as they’ll get.

Why is the device compelling? Andreessen and Rashid talk about how Kno is offering a total product – software, hardware and services – that will be compelling to the college user. They can purchase textbooks and view them just as they look in printed format. Users will be able to take notes, draw on the pages, etc., just like the print versions. And they’ll be able to access those books on a variety of devices – even eventually their desktop and laptops – because Kno’s software is built on webkit and designed to run on a variety of hardware setups. And there’s a normal web browser too for the Internet in general.

As for textbook pricing, Rashid says the model will work. Imagine an iTunes for college textbooks, he says, and users who purchase the tablet and all their books will be paying about the same amount v. just buying print books over the first 13 months. That means individual books on the Kno will be priced lower than the average of $100 for the print versions.

Will it all work? It’s probably best not to bet against this founding team. Rashid also cofounded Chegg, which rents textbooks to students. No one thought the idea would work, but the company is absolutely killing it right now. The best evidence so far that Kno may work is this – Early student testers are telling the company that they’ve stopped bringing their laptops to class and just use the Kno now.

How businesses and brands deal with social media has become one of the defining issues of the recent web era. Today a pretty big leap is taking place which may define the next phase. Two of the biggest players have come together to create certainly one of the slickest and most seamless integrations I’ve yet seen of the realtime social web and enterprise worlds. Seesmic is to integrate Salesforce’s internal Twitter-like app, Chatter, into their platform. That makes Seesmic the first realtime social consumer app to go directly into the enterprise space. Seesmic will also suddenly have the potential to access to over 20,000 Salesforce customers who have used Chatter so far.

The news was unveiled at a 3,000-strong Salesforce conference in London today. Below we have an exclusive interview with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.

Once you see Seesmic working with Salesforce’s Chatter it make perfect sense. Suddenly you can be having internal and external conversations at once.

It’s clear this is part of a long term strategic partnership between the two companies, and the rapport between the two CEOs is evident. While Seesmic has made a virtue of its ability to develop strong social clients on Adobe Air, Android, BlackBerry, Windows and (via Silverlight) Mac, Salesforce is clearly gunning for the space opened up by ‘enterprise social’ services like Yammer. We’re seeing the first integration of the realtime web and the enterprise, and there is plenty more to come.

At an interview in London, Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur told me “It’s not enough to have these two worlds silo’d any more… What we bring is the connection to the outside world without making it scary. With chatter you can directly send someone on the social web [via Seesmic] directly into the enterprise.”

For Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, it’s all about the movement to what he calls Cloud 2: mobile, social, realtime.

Indeed, he wrote a TechCrunch guest post this year, “The Facebook Imperative”, where he said “New realtime cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure offer the path to redefine the future of collaboration.”

So how will the integration work?

Here’s an example: A Salesforce user on Seesmic will be able to push, for instance, a Tweet onto the Chatter wall of someone inside a company. That could mean pushing it to a sales rep or a social media response team. You name it. The upshot is a great ability to respond, in realtime, to social conversations around brands or products.

That could mean much better customer service – or more some interesting sales pitches, depending on which side of the fence you are on. But suddenly, instead of needing to physically cut and paste a reference to a Tweet or a Facebook Group or whatever, people who monitor social media can bring that data directly into the enterprise and work out a response. It’s going to make a lot of social media community managers pretty happy – at least the ones who use Salesforce (for now).

When companies need to respond to customer complaints on social media, they need to see context in terms of the prior conversation, internal company feedback etc – this Salesforce Chatter/Seesmic integration effectively makes the whole process a lot easier. It’s like the Missing Link between the enterprise and the realtime social web just got invented.

And by moving first on this plane, Seesmic is in a prime position to open up a completely new front against its competitors, like Tweetdeck, which remain locked in the social web and not at all integrated into enterpise systems.

Seesmic’s integration with Chatter has been made possible by its switch to the Miscrosoft Silverlight platform which allows for plugins. Adobe Air does not afford this, so, on the face of it, competitors could well struggle to create the same kind of ecosystem around their core product.

Much of this is discussed in our exclusive video interview with Benioff and Le Meur below.

As Salesforce's foray into social collaboration, Salesforce Chatter, gains traction amongst enterprise users, it makes sense for the company to launch complimentary mobile apps to the platform. And as the enterprise increasingly relies upon mobile devices for connectivity; there is a strong demand for native mobile use of Chatter. Today, Salesforce is taking Chatter to mobile phones; unveiling Chatter Mobile apps for the iPad, iPhone, Google Android and BlackBerry devices. Salesforce Chatter, which was originally announced last November, was launched into public beta in June after four months in private beta. In the realtime collaboration platform's firts three months open to the public, Chatter has been adopted by 25,000 companies; with 25 percent of Salesforce's client base using the platform. .

It has been roughly one year since Yahoo! made waves in the Middle East, by buying Maktoob, the region’s largest web portal for $164 million.

From Silicon Valley’s observation deck that may seem like small peanuts— these days we barely bat an eye when HP and Dell get into a multi-billion dollar tug-of-war game. However, for the Middle East and in particular Jordan, the Maktoob takeover was a flash point for the fledgling tech scene.

That’s not to say that Jordan has become a premiere tech hub overnight. Indeed, the region still suffers from a dearth of angel investors. But there is a palpable rise in confidence among the region’s entrepreneurs, like Ammar Ibrahim founder of Asuaq.com. The young site, which touts itself as the Craigslist of the Middle East (minus the “censored” controversy), has only garnered about 300,000 unique visitors since its launch earlier this year, but it’s growing at a healthy clip. Traffic has doubled in the last five months.

On this week’s episode of Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur, SGN Founder Shervin Pishevar talks to Ibrahim about his new site, Jordan’s startup community, the Maktoob deal’s effect and the challenges of funding. See video above. Many thanks to Shoo Fee TV, a content provider and aggregator of Arab satellite channel listings based in Jordan, for shooting this video.

For all the progress in Jordan, it was interesting to hear Ibrahim discuss the ongoing challenges of raising capital in the region. Although he says the investment environment has improved significantly in the last 2-3 years, a site rich in traffic is still tough sell in this traditional market: “The thing that is still happening today is that people are still evaluating internet businesses on the balance sheet. So it’s pretty much like a grocery store, like gasoline station… So this is one of the biggest problems, if you’re a website and you do have significant traffic…it’s a bit difficult to monetize traffic…[so] internet businesses are undervalued because of the internet business model.”

To see episode one of Entrepreneur To Entrepreneur, featuring Yahoo’s former Chief Data Officer, Dr. Usama Fayyad, click here. On next week’s episode, we’ll meet the man Pishevar calls the “Ron Conway of the Middle East.”