Y Combinator-backed design startup COLOURlovers.com, which is a creative community for color, has the honor of being the official Twitter profile design extension. COLOURlovers’ Themeleon, a tool that lets Twitter users create customized and sleek profile pages, has helped design 2 million Twitter profiles in the past year (Twitter co-founder Ev Williams is a fan).

Now that Twitter has released a new version of Twitter with a different layout, Themeleon has updated its offering to adjust to the new interface. The startup has moved the Themeleon tool into the collapsable area at the top of the page and now gives a live preview of what your new profile will actually look like as you click around and design your Twitter page.

While you can access more than 1 million color palettes and 1 million Seamless Patterns created by the COLOURlovers.com community, Themeleon is also offerng ready-made themes from new partner TweetyGotBack.com (which we wrote about here).

If eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is like a mini-Santa for the emerging world, the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting is his Christmas. Last year his foundation, the Omidyar Network, announced a $30 million fund, and today he’s announced another $55 million investment.

Last year’s fund was focused on helping people’s lives by funding high-impact entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa and India, particularly entrepreneurs who provide services and products for the base of the pyramid. This year’s commitment is more directly focused on funding technology that makes lives better around the world. $30 million of the gift will be invested in government transparency programs and tools and $25 million will go towards mobile innovation.

Both are big needs in the developing world. Even much ballyhooed democracies like India can operate in chaotic and opaque ways, and technology focused on government transparency likely wouldn’t get traditional venture capital funding. When it comes to mobile, there’s plenty of investment and innovation throughout the developing world, where even people living on $2 a day can afford basic phones. But programs like mobile banking and delivering basic news and information via SMS are just the beginning of applications that can dramatically revolutionize life in countries where Internet, power, water and food access are all scarce.

The two initiatives could easily go hand-in-hand, since mobile phones are increasingly a way to hold politicians accountable in rural areas. Last time I was in India, I talked to people in remote villages who felt connected to the country’s politics for the first time thanks to phones, and others who would demand local politicians’ mobile numbers, so they can follow up when campaign promises aren’t kept.

The commitment is a three-year fund and can go towards nonprofit and for-profit programs.

While we were talking about Clinton Global Initiative pledges, I asked Omidyar’s team for an update on last year’s fund. It was also a three-year fund and so far $17 million has been invested in about a dozen programs. Examples include everything from D.light Design, which makes solar-powered lanterns, to FrontlineSMS, a powerful mobile messaging platform that supports a variety of NGOs in areas of limited Internet infrastructure, to India’s SEAF Agribusiness Fund to various research and award programs to encourage and reward high-growth entrepreneurship in Africa.

vChatter, a popular video chat application on Facebook, is taking on Chatroulette today, launching a “family-friendly” video chat standalone site. vChatter, which attracts 2.5 million active monthly users on Facebook, has been able to filter out the Chatroulette penis problem, because account activity is tied to the user’s Facebook identity . And the vChatter consistently checks screenshots of chats taking place to make sure users aren’t exposing themselves or conducting inappropriate behavior.

The new destination site brings social video chat outside the walls of Facebook. The service, which requires you to sign in with your Facebook credentials, allows users to pick who they want to meet based on geography, gender, and age. By factoring demographic data into the equation, vChatter claims to actually be able to create valuable matches of users for video-chat. And Similar to Chatroulette, you can click “next” to move on to another video chat.

Along with the destination site, vChatter has rolled out personal URLs for private video chatrooms. Users can then embed their vChatter badge on a blog, email, or website and invite readers and recipients to reach out in a live video chat.

While Chatroullette re-launched to try to clean up its act, the problem of inappropriate behavior on the site still seems to persist. vChatter is hoping to use its model on Facebook to create a safer web platform for families and children. And the site has seen significant traction on Facebook— approximately 15 million calls have been established and average time on site is 4.5 minutes.

Co-founded by internet dating entrepreneur Will Bunker, vChatter has attracted a large international userbase, says Fast Company, including Filipino and Indonesian families and migrant laborers. The startup also recently raised $250,000 in new funding.

Sequoia-backed Bubble Motion, which offers a Twitter-like voice blogging service in India, is bringing its service to Japan today via a deal with Japanese mobile communications company KDDI. The service, which has seen considerable traction in India, will be dubbed "Koe-Now."

Bubble Motion's BubbleBlog platform delivers a voice-blogging phone service so that people can share status updates in their own voice with fans and followers. It essentially takes Twitter’s model and applies this to voice blogging and mobile phones. These 'bubblers' record their voice update into their phone, and their followers everywhere are notified by SMS and prompted to click and listen. BubbleBlog has more than 2 million users in India.

The Japanese service is catered towards allowing Japanese stars such as actors, musicians, comedians and other celebrities to record updates for fans and followers. KDDI's 32 million subscribers can dial short-codes to subscribe to and follow celebrity voice- bloggers, while non-KDDI subscribers can also follow along by dialing in from any phone (mobile or landline) to hear voice updates from Japanese stars.

It should be interesting to see if BubbleBlog will be able to take off in Japan. The service has been popular in India, thanks in part to the fact that mobile phone usage exceeds internet usage in the country. However, in Japan, web-based Twitter is growing at a rapid rate.

Bubble Motion, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., has raised a total of $35 million in funding since the company’s launch in 2003. The company also plans to extend its services to Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia.

At Ad:tech in London today, Twitter product manager Shiva Rajaraman announced an interesting new update to its Promoted Tweets advertising offering. Promoted Tweets, which launched last April, allows advertisers to purchase keywords and select tweets that will appear on top of Twitter Search results for the bought terms. Rajaraman said today that Twitter now allow advertisers to serve Promoted Tweets based on the people and brands Twitter users are following.

As noted by the FT, Rajaraman tells the audience: "As we move forward, we are going to implement targeting mechanisms that allow people to engage their audience in that way," he said. "Right now we are starting with essentially keywords but the basic goal is to build out interests based on who you're following … As that grows to scale, I think we'll see a lot of opportunities beyond traditional brand advertising."

We know Twitter considers advertising as one of the pillars of its revenue strategy. And it makes sense for Twitter to start serving more targeted advertising, similar to Facebook. While its existing advertising offerings, which also include Promoted Trends, are seeing traction, there are plenty of other opportunities for the microblogging network to start pulling in more ad dollars.

The newly designed Twitter lends itself to advertising opportunities, says Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

While Twitter has yet to pitch the targeted advertising model (it is still being tweaked) to brands and advertisers, I have no doubt that advertisers will be receptive to serving highly targeted ads. One only needs to look at Facebook’s advertising revenue to see the massive potential of serving targeted ads to Twitter’s 145 million registered users.

After over a year in development and private beta, Assistly is now making its SaaS customer support platform available to the public. Assistly provides companies with a easy-to-use platform to engage customers on everything from email to Facebook and Twitter.

Assistly helps companies collect and organize all of their customer conversations into a prioritized actionable list and equips support staff with the tools to respond to customers. The application allows businesses to filter conversations, access customer histories, automate processes and even tap into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. And Assistly provides users with key metrics and analytics, such as case volume, interaction volume by channel, response time, service levels, agent performance and more.

In terms of pricing, Assistly offers a per seat pricing model, which ranges from $39 to $99 per seat. The company has also developed a “Flex” pricing model, that allows users to buy usage time for users who are not full-time agents (ie execs, developers, marketing, etc.). You are able to create Flex seats at no charge per seat. Assistly then tracks total Flex login time for the month and bills based on usage.

Even while in private beta, Assistly was able to attract a number of high-profile customers. Currently 100-plus companies using Assistly as part or all of their customer support environment including Twitter, DirecTV, Vimeo, Disqus, Stocktwits, Bonobos, Ticketfly, Mochi Media, Fitbit, Rd.io, Grooveshark, and Brightscope.

As we’ve written in the past, the team behind it speaks to Assistly’s potential. The site was founded by Alex Bard, Gary Benitt, Jeremy Suriel, and Brad Birnbaum, each of whom previously worked together in building customer service-based companies back in the 90′s. The first, called eShare, was acquired in 1999; the second, called eAssist Global Solutions, was eventually acquired in 2004 after stumbling through the dot com bubble burst. Following the eAssist acquisition three of the team members left the space to start Goowy, a Flash widget maker. The teamreunited to develop Assistly in the customer service space.

And Assistly counts Mark Cuban and David Liu as advisors. The startup, which faces competition from Zendesk, has received $2.2 million in funding from True Ventures and Howard Lindzon’s investment fund Social Leverage.

Assistly Story from Assistly on Vimeo.

Last week, venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote a post pointing out that the VC industry is split in two: software-based businesses and everything else (specifically, “cleantech, biotech and other capital intensive businesses”).

Software businesses don’t require as much capital as they once did, and certainly not as much as cleantech or biotech. In fact, I’d go so far to say that the main asset venture capitalists bring to the table for Web startups is no longer capital, but rather connections, advice, and deal-making prowess. Whereas for greentech and biotech, the capital is still the most important thing they bring to the table. Wilson concludes:

I don’t think you can make blanket statements about the VC business anymore. These two industries are very different from each other and will have very different business dynamics and risk and return characteristics going forward.

To get a snapshot of the capital going into these two different VC industries, we ran some numbers through CrunchBase to compare funding rounds for consumer Web and ecommerce startups versus cleantech companies. The data in CrunchBase for cleantech companies is not nearly as complete as it is for Web startups, but the trends they highlight are instructive. (If you work for a greentech company, please add or update your Crunchbase profile).

So far this year through the end of August, CrunchBase tracked $1.87 billion in cleantech venture financings versus $1.35 billion for consumer Web and ecommerce startups. But CrrunchBase captured four times as many deals for Web startups than it did for cleantech.

What is even more interesting is that the amount of venture capital that went into Web companies actually went down 8 percent from the same period the year before (from $1.5 billion). For cleantech, the venture dollars increased by a whopping 77 percent (from $1.1 billion).

When you look at the average deal size, the disparity becomes even larger. The average size of a venture round for a Web startup during the period was $5.2 million. The average size of a cleantech round was $30.7 million. Those numbers are across all funding rounds (seed through series F). Based on this snapshot, cleantech is nearly six times as capital intensive as the Web.

On the exit side of the funnel, of 32 Web startup acquisitions with reported deal values tracked by CrunchBase so far this year, the total in exits was $4 billion. The comparable exit value for cleantech companies was $726 million, but that was only for four tracked companies. When you look at the average exit value, it was $182 million for cleantech versus $63 million for Web. Remember, these are not ROI numbers since the exits were for different amounts invested earlier, but it gives a sense of money in versus money out for these sectors.

Again, our cleantech numbers are far from complete, but the data does illustrate how much more capital it takes to fund cleantech than Web startups. And it also suggests anecdotally that cleantech exits on average are commensurately larger. Although, we admittedly don’t have enough good data on cleantech exits to make any hard conclusions.

Web and ecommerce Deals January-August, 2010

DEALS TOTAL = 262
SUM TOTAL = $1,353,564,659
AVG OVERALL = $5.2 million
HIGH = $135,000,000
LOW = $2,500

AVG A = $3,184,273
AVG B = $8,173,998
AVG C = $16,850,000
AVG D = $10,068,750
AVG E = $9,416,628
(F) 1 deal = $33,000,000
AVG SEED = $534,132
AVG ANGEL = $987,201

Acquisitions
COUNT = 32
SUM TOTAL = $4,041,231,000
AVG DEAL SIZE = $63,152,269

Cleantech Deals January-August, 2010
DEALS TOTAL = 61
SUM TOTAL = $1,871,661,959
AVG OVERALL = $30.7 million
HIGH = $350,000,000
LOW = $10,000

AVG A = $5,945,585
AVG B = $48,930,962
AVG C = $35,626,667
AVG D = $40,790,000
AVG E = $42,000,000
(F) 1 DEAL = $12.5 million
AVG SEED = $1,064,600
ANGEL – NONE REPORTED

Acquisitions
COUNT = 4
SUM TOTAL = $726,300,000
AVG DEAL SIZE = $181,575,000

Twitter was taken by storm earlier today due to a cross-site scripting vulnerability, exploits of which spread like wildfire on the micro-sharing network. The company issued a statement a short while ago, saying the security flaw was identified and now fully patched.

Now that Twitter says it’s safe to return to the #NewTwitter (I finally got it this morning), check this out: the web app now comes with two new features, namely reply-to-all and auto-complete of usernames. Yes, many will already be familiar with those features because they use third-party clients or web apps, but let’s not forget a ton of users use Twitter.com.

Both new features are actually two out of ten suggestions recently made by blogger Hillel Fuld; Twitter developer Dustin Diaz had promptly responded in the comments of Fuld’s post and told him to expect some of his beefs addressed shortly.

Looks like Diaz wasn’t kidding around.

Reply to all

Now, when you hit the reply button on a tweet that contains more than one username, all of them will be listed in the response box (you can of course choose to delete some if you wish). There’s no separate option to reply only to the publisher of the tweet, though, which might irk some users.

Auto-complete

This was most certainly lacking, too. Now, when you wish to tweet someone, you can simply start with the ‘@’ sign and type the first letters of his or her name, after which a drop-down menu with relevant usernames will appear.

I tested it a couple of times, and auto-complete suggestions always popped up, but oddly it fails to recognize a lot of people, even when I follow them and they follow me.

Either way, two cool new features even if there’s still some room for improvement. Also read MG Siegler’s previous post: The Best Subtle Things About New Twitter.

What do you think the #NewTwitter lacks that you’d like to see implemented next?

Bonanzle, an eBay alternative that lets people engage in social commerce online, is changing its name to the far more memorable Bonanza.com and launching a revamped website. Coinciding with the rebranding announcement, the company this morning disclosed that it has acquired 1000 Markets.

The latter is a niche marketplace that specializes in artisan merchandise, ranging from jewelry and art to home and garden items. Competitors include Etsy and ArtFire, among others.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Both companies are located in Seattle.

Bonanza is an online marketplace focused on “unique items” that the company says is reflective of real world shopping experiences at street fairs and the like. Working from virtual booths, merchants sell a wide variety of products ranging from old coins and antiques to handbags and candles. Bonanza says its most popular categories are women’s shoes and handbags, home and garden, jewelry, and collectibles.

Founded in 2008, Bonanza currently welcomes more than two million visitors per month, has attracted 300,000 registered users and lists more than 3.4 million items for sale across its array of storefronts. With the acquisition, 1000 Markets’ inventory of roughly 100,000 items will be blended into Bonanza’s inventory over the next month.

Earlier this year, Bonanza raised $1 million in funding from a group of investors, including Ignition Partners, Voyager Capital, Founder’s Co-op and Curious Office Partners, all of Seattle, and Matrix Partners of Silicon Valley.

The investment round also included angel investors such as BuddyTV founder Andy Liu, Wetpaint founder Ben Elowitz and Ontela co-founder Dan Shapiro.

1000 Markets raised $500,000 in funding last year from a group of investors, including Founder’s Fund and True Ventures.

Angie’s List, which offers consumers a way to review and rate doctors, contractors and service companies on the Web, has raised another big round. The privately-held company this morning announced that it has secured a $22.5 million equity financing round from “multiple institutional investors”, including Silicon Valley firm Battery Ventures.

For the first time, public funds managers, including Wasatch Funds and other unnamed funds, joined the round, which brings the company’s total capital raised to a whopping $91 million as far as we’ve been able to track via CrunchBase.

Angie's List says it will use the additional investment to expand its Health and Wellness consumer reviews product as well as its "The Big Deal" local group coupon program.

You can situate Angie’s List somewhere at the intersection of local search, user-generated content and subscription-based services, and the company is keen to differentiate itself from other players in this space by not allowing anonymous postings and barring service providers from reviewing themselves.

The company launched in 1995 with a focus on local home, yard and car services, gathering information door-to-door and offering service through a telephone call-in and a monthly magazine. Angie's List says it now serves more then 1 million paid members, primarily serving them via its website, but still offering call-in service and the monthly magazine.

Angie’s List also has high hopes for its group coupon offering, dubbed “The Big Deal”, which it expects to offer in more than 50 markets by the end of 2010.

It’s not inconceivable for this company to turn to the public markets next year or so.

Source: Inside Indiana Business (the company is based in Indianapolis, IN).

BREAKING: Post javascript into your status update on Twitter and you can make something appear in the pop-up as a user mouses over your tweet. This is clearly now causing havoc across the Twittersphere as users either do funny, rick-rollling type stuff, or scammers catch on to the exploit. It looks like many users are currently using the flaw for a joke but cybercrims could redirect users to third-party websites containing malicious code, or for spam advertising pop-ups. [Update: it appears the exploit could also fill and submit a status update form 'on your behalf' leading to it spreading to over 40,000 tweets within 10 minutes.] This is only affecting the actual Twitter web site (which has the highest number of Twitter users), not third party apps like Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc. Here are our top 5 ways to avoid and fix the onmouseover Twitter bug.

Fuze Meeting, which spawned from CallWave, is bringing its online meeting software to the iPad with a new app. Similar to GoToMeeting or WebEx, Fuze provides a conferencing service that allows users to share screens and run meetings online. As opposed to its competitors, Fuze promises a sleeker more lightweight interface.

Fuze, which already has apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry platforms, includes the ability to pull and share any document or file directly from a server. Both hosts and attendees can share, control, and present content from their iPad.

The app allows users to take advantage of the pinch and zoom features on the device and also can transform a users finger into a digital laser pointer, viewable by all meeting participants. The app also includes in-app VoIP, allowing call-ins via the web. And you can chat with and invite colleagues into collaborationsessions via integration with AIM, Yahoo, Google, OCS and others.

Fuze has a pretty unique history as far as startups go. CallWave was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. After reaching a peak soon thereafter of over $15 per share, the stock dropped steadily, dipping as low as 50 cents early this year. Deciding to cut its losses, the company delisted itself from NASDAQ after buying back shares from public shareholders at a 44% premium over the current market value and paying out a total of $10 million. Last summer, the company rebranded itself as Fuze Box and launched Fuze Meeting. Fuze also launched Tweetshare, a platform for branded Twitter channels, and brought on streaming media inventor Dr. Alan Lippman its Executive Vice President of Media Technology.

In perhaps the most inevitable combination since peanut butter and chocolate, the addictiveness of both group buying and irrationally checking into places have finally come together as Groupon clone BuyWithMe partners with geolocational gaming app SCVNGR.

The partnership launches today primarily as a collaboration in which local BuyWithMe affiliated businesses in New York, Philadelphia and Boston will now be able to use the SCVNGR platform to integrate local deals with real life engagement, a SCVNGR speciality.

Basically, if someone buys a deal on BuyWitheMe, the SCVNGR app allows them to complete challenges at that specific local business location for even more discounts or rewards. Users can earn points by doing anything from taking a funny photo, checking in, scanning a QR code or whatever customized activity a business owner can think of that will keep users coming back.

“SCVNGR’s game platform gives them more reason to visit again and again,” says BuyWithMe CEO Cheryl Rosner.

For example at the Mercury Bar in New York, one SCVNGR/BuyWithMe challenge is to make a model of the solar system with cocktail garnishes and take a pic, which earns you 5 points — The more points you accumuluate, the more rewards you get at that venue, rewards ranging from free appetizer, free lunch special to 25% off dinner, etc. Deals are also available/viewable through the SCVNGR app, thus creating a group buying and check-in loop of sorts.

From SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch:

"The similarities between our two user bases are something that couldn't be overlooked. SCVNGR users love to discover new things in their city by using our gaming app to unlock rewards and deals.  In partnering with BuyWithMe, we can bring our challenge-based games to an entirely new set of users and show them that a great discount on dinner or at a local spa is only just the beginning."

The BuyWithMe and SCVNGR partnership may mark the first time a group buying site and a geolocational platform join forces in tying online activity to real world rewards, but certainly not the last. In fact I’m pretty certain this won’t be the last time I write about the newly minted Groupbuy Check-in space.

Antivirus and security software company McAfee, for reasons unknown, has apparently decided the world needs yet another URL shortening service.

The company this morning launched the beta version of McAf.ee, which it purports is a service that lets people create safe short URLs. Which I think means that, unlike all the others, you don’t need to wear leather safety gloves to use it.

Actually, McAf.ee is using, and promotes, McAfee Labs’ real-time Global Threat Intelligence solution, which aims to protect users from new threats before they strike by using millions of sensors to gather real-time intelligence from host IP addresses, Internet domains, specific URLs, files, images, and email messages.

Why the company thought it’d be a good idea to give birth to another URL shortening service (frame included) is anyone’s guess, but according to this brief launch post the idea came from their PR firm and was internally championed by the corporate communications chief.

That explains a lot.

AOL and its subsidiary Patch this morning announced the launch of PatchU, a new network of partnerships between local Patch publications and journalism schools, colleges and universities to help prepare the next generation of journalists for future endeavors in the ever-evolving new media landscape.

The initiative, which debuted this fall, offers internship and coursework opportunities at local Patch publications to students under the guidance of Patch's editors.

Thirteen schools across the U.S. are already participating in the program as members of the PatchU network, which allows their students to learn more about Patch's products, teams, and systems and the company's hyperlocal business model.

Patch recently debuted the PatchU program at Hofstra University on Long Island, NY, where enrollment has begun for a fall/winter internship offered jointly by the AOL company and Hofstra's School of Communication. Through the arrangement, students will gain course credit and practical journalism experience at Patch's Mineola, NY publication, where they will be supervised and mentored by the Patch local editor for that community.

Throughout the internships, AOL says students will work with a faculty advisor to ensure they meet learning objectives of the program. Students learn to pitch and write stories, cover local events, shoot and edit photos and videos, integrate content with social media and produce stories online using Patch's CMS.

Participating PatchU partner institutions include:

- Hofstra University School of Communication (founding partner)
- The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism
- University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication
- Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism
- Missouri School of Journalism
- University of Connecticut Department of Journalism
- Indiana University School of Journalism
- Stanford University Graduate Program in Journalism
- Columbia College Chicago Journalism Department
- University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
- University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism
- Seton Hall Department of Communication and The Arts
- Quinnipiac University Department of Journalism

Sounds to me like an elaborate recruitment and/or brand awareness campaign, but perhaps I’m being overly cynical here. Perhaps it’s their publicly announced wish to hire an additional 500 journalists for Patch and become the largest hirer of full-time journalists in the U.S. by the end of this year that triggers said cynicism.

Patch launched its 100th community-focused site in August, now operates about 186 and plans to expand to more than 500 U.S. neighborhoods in 20 states by the end of 2010.

Needless to say, it needs a ton of editors to keep content coming, and communities buzzing on these sites, and now future journalists will be able to check out how things work over at Patch before they graduate.

My question to them if they consider this to be beneficial for them, the j-schools as well as AOL / Patch, or merely the latter two.

After investing some 15 million euros in France-based OneDirect a few weeks ago, Belgian VC fund Gimv has just announced that it is dropping 4.9 million euros on a Vente-Privée competitor called Private Outlet. This investments brings the company's second round of funding to 9 million euros and should add a bit of monetary fuel to its international development. Today, the company which refers to itself as Europe's "private online shopping club" counts some 1.8 million members in 5 countries, including France, the UK, Spain, Italy and Germany. Like a majority of the other private sale sites out there, Private Outlet offers up to 70% discounts on fashion accessories and clothing from roughly 150 luxury brands (Christian Dior, D&G, Chanel, etc.).

Online real estate company Move has acquired Threewide, operator of online real estate listing syndication service ListHub and provider of market intelligence solutions for brokers, real estate franchises and websites. Move is spending $13 million in cash for the company.

ListHub products and services include syndication of 2.4 million property listings from 270+ multiple listing services and 38,000 brokers to more than 70 real estate marketing web sites, as well as data management services and reporting analysis used to monitor online listing performance.

Here’s how Move CEO Steve Berkowitz pitches the buy:

Through our combined strengths, we’ll successfully aggregate and connect vast amounts of data from a variety of sources, ensure the data remains accurate and fresh, and standardize the market reports real estate professionals rely on to guide their online marketing efforts and demonstrate value to clients.

With this acquisition, Threewide, founded in 1999, becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of Move Sales, a subsidiary of Move. ListHub will join Move’s other B2B brand solutions used by real estate professionals to market client listings and their brands to buyers and sellers.

ListHub products, services and the management team will remain with the ListHub brand, now backed by Move.

In a further step in the direction of transcending all world government, Google has decided to post a Transparency Report or a map of where its services are blocked in different foreign countries, in an effort to discourage “censorship.”

For those of you that haven’t been following along, Google has had some governmental run-ins lately. Most recently in the news were the several hundreds of thousands of people who opted out of Google Streetview in Germany. A closer look at the Germany situation would have made it more clear that movements to restrict privacy in this case were actually a win for Google, as the German government came to the conclusion that yeah it’d be great if Google would volunteer to protect data, but the company was not actually party to any governmental regulation.

From the Google blog:

“When Google's services are blocked or filtered, we can't serve our users effectively. That's why we act every day to maximize free expression and access to information. To promote transparency around this flow of information, we've built an interactive online Transparency Report with tools that allow people to see where governments are demanding that we remove content and where Google services are being blocked. We believe that this kind of transparency can be a deterrent to censorship.”

And while the examples of the firewall in China and YouTube still being down in Iran will be the talking points on this, let’s take a look at what country has more combined removal requests and data requests than any other (for many complicated reasons). That’s right none other than the bastion of Internet freedom, the good ole U.S. of A.

And China isn’t even included on the report, because apparently this data is considered a state secret, not to be published!

How transparent is that?

A quick peruse through the Google Transparency FAQ reads like something out of a special intelligence briefing.

You may have noticed that there's a question mark for content removal requests from China. As noted in the map, Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time. During the period that Google's joint venture operated google.cn, its search results were subject to censorship pursuant to demands from government agencies responsible for Internet regulation. As we announced in June, users visiting the landing page on google.cn now see a link to google.com.hk – where users can conduct web search or continue to use google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering.

The courts in Argentina issued two orders in the first half of 2010 that sought the removal of every search result mentioning a particular individual's name in association with a certain category of content. The number of search results at issue well exceeds 100,000 results. On the map for Argentina, we did not attempt to approximate the number of individual items of content that might be encompassed by those two court orders. Google has appealed those orders.

Libya, which did not appear on our list in 2009, issued 147 requests to YouTube in the first half of 2010, requesting the removal of more than 1,000 videos. We have not removed most of those videos, although we did partially comply with the majority of the requests (i.e., removing one or more videos in response to any given request, for violation of YouTube's Community Guidelines).

For Brazil, government requests for content removal are high relative to other countries in part because of the popularity of our social networking website, orkut.

The list of exemptions continues …

Let’s get some perspective here: What if any other company in any other industry decided to do this? Like Oscar Meyer posting realtime updates of countries that didn’t eat hotdogs, as part of some initiative against hotdog censorship? Now I’m not saying that hotdog eating and the right to search freely are equivalent, just that regardless of whether you think lack of access to Google is censorship, business should not be confused with what is right, even if, like in this case, it happens to be.

So Google, you’re really serious about this taking over the world thing? Enough at least to build a page of realtime updates to the status of your conquests.

Image: ldandersen

Lately there’s been a backlash against blogs and open information on the Web, in general. It started with newspapers putting up paywalls again, but even former blogging kingpins are now hiding behind email subscriptions. And now Dave Morin, the CEO of stealthy startup Path and Facebook’s former platform chief, is arguing that information is more valuable when it is locked up behind a subscription paywall.

If you want to actually read Morin’s argument, “The Age of Premium Information,” you have to pay $3.99 a month for his email newsletter, The Dispatch, on Letter.ly. Or you can just read on below and I’ll summarize it for you. Before I start, keep in mind that Letter.ly is a project started by Sam Lessin, the CEO of Drop.io, another person who famously quit blogging. Letter.ly is a service that allows people to create and sell subscription newsletters, and publish them on the Web behind a paywall.

Morin’s first newsletter is a paean to the paywall. It is essentially an advertisement for Letter.ly, backing his friend Lessin’s endeavor. My favorite line in his post, which I agree with actually, is that: “Advertising is simply information which has no audience other than the one that the advertiser purchases.” Yet, here he is charging for what amounts to an advertisement:

I have been a student in the school of Sam Lessin for several years now, but I believe that Letter.ly is, to date, the best manifestation of a set of ideas that Sam has had for a very long time around the evolving line between private and public information and its interaction with capitalism and society.

His argument boils down to the fact that information is no longer scarce on the Web, and thus, it is not valuable. To make information valuable, you must charge for it. (Yup, he sounds just like Rupert Murdoch). Except he’s wrong because information does not exist in a vacuum. It becomes richer and more valuable the more it informs and links to other information, the exact type of thing paywalls prohibit. If someone says something interesting behind a paywall, it will find its way onto the open Web, just as Morin’s argument is here. I’ve extracted his key point below so that we can all discuss it:

I believe that we are sitting at the dawn of a new age of premium information and content. For the last 10 – 30 years we have been working intensely as a society to build out the first manifestation of the web. According to a recent speech by Eric Schmidt of Google, the web has brought us information abundance to the tune of close to 5 exabytes every two days. That is more information created every two days than was created by the human race throughout all of time leading up to 2001. As I mentioned in my blog post leading up to this letter, information is subject to the same simple economic rules of scarcity as anything else. Information by definition is scarce. Because of the mostly open (and by open I mean open in the public sense) nature of most of the most popular networks on the web (Google, Facebook, Twitter), when you publish information onto today\’s web it faces an immediately diminishing marginal utility curve.

Most information on the web as we have currently defined it is now a commodity. As those of us whom have attempted to build web companies throughout this time period know well, the tension between different types of information, user, and business value has been increasing. Because of the commodity nature of most information moving around the web, it has been hard to develop business models for web businesses which do not involve the lowest quality kind of premium information: advertising. Advertising is simply information which has no audience other than the one that the advertiser purchases. An advertiser hopes that they can purchase a relevant and contextual audience. At best, with social and local technology, advertising is beginning to find a more relevant audience than it ever has before. But, it remains to be low quality content in most cases. Until only recently, most information, services and communities on the web were open and therefore quickly trending towards zero.

There have been examples of premium services and communities on the web, but they have never been broadly accepted. And, so most entrepreneurs have spent their time building broad, generalized, businesses which rely on advertising to run the business. I believe this is changing. And, that the age of premium information, service, and community is here.

Morin then cites the Wall Street Journal and other news paywalls as examples of premium information, along with virtual goods and the types of mobile applications you pay for on the iPhone and iPad as proof that people will pay for articles and opinions.

Yet, just putting something behind a paywall, does not make it valuable. But it does certainly make it harder to find. The way Letter.ly works is that you subscribe, then you receive the newsletter via email. Because what the world needs more of is email.

Photo credit: Flickr/Steven Depolo

Today, SocialVest is launching its online and in-store shopping platform that makes it easy for consumers to support non-profit organizations while making purchases. The free service works by rewarding users with cash back for purchases from retailers. Money earned by SocialVest users can then be donated to over one million registered non-profits with the service.

Here’s how it works. Consumers sign-up for SocialVest with their info and credit card details and can then start shopping in its online mall or at physical stores with whom SocialVest has partnered. The startup currently has partnerships with over 500 retailers including Target, Macy's, Home Depot, Best Buy, Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdales. When the user make a purchase at one of these stores using the registered credit card, SocialVest will give users a cash rebate ranging from 1% to 15% of qualifying purchase prices. Funds are accrued in users' SocialVest accounts, and can then be pledged to any non-profit.

SocialVest has also partnered with Causes, and will be the exclusive registered credit card shopping partner for the community. The startup, which has raised $500,000 in seed funding, faces competition from CauseOn, Causeworld and Endorse For A Cause.

For online merchants, the process of selling and delivering a product can be complicated. Sellers need to know where all of their available inventory is at one time (a seller may have multiple channels where inventory is being shipped from). Once retailers knows where this inventory is, they have to display the lowest possible shipping rate to a buyer. For any online merchant this entire process can be daunting and complicated to automate via software. Instead, many merchants can outsource all of this to Shipwire, a company that offers retail businesses a service for order management.

The company's SaaS platform gives businesses on-demand access to warehouses in the U.S., Canada and Europe allowing merchants to access inventory closer to buyers so that they can cut shipping costs and delivery times.

Shipwire will be launching a new product, called Shipwire Anywhere, which allows merchants to manage inventory and route orders to anyplace a seller has inventory stored e.g. a warehouse, garage, office closet, retail store, storage unit. The application essentially allow SMBs to manage orders and inventory regardless of where it is sold or where it is stored. The only cost associated with this inventory and order management software is the cost to actually print out the labels through Shipwire.

It’s similar to Amazon’s Fulfillment by Amazon service, which allows online merchants to outsource their shipping to Amazon's fulfillment centers. Amazon also offers an API that automates shipping, tracking orders, and printing branded labels.

We have 100 free invites to use Shipwire Anywhere which you can access here.

A few days ago, Facebook made what seemed to be a small tweak to its Friend Requests area. As first noted by Inside Facebook, the social network changed the way friend rejections work. Previously, you could either Confirm or Ignore (deny) a request. Now, Ignore has been replaced by “Not Now”. This new option takes some of the pressure off you having to reject people as it instead moves them into a state of limbo, where they’re neither accepted nor rejected. But it actually does a lot more as well.

You see, when someone requests to be your friend on Facebook, this automatically subscribes them to all of your public (“Everyone”) posts in their News Feed. Facebook doesn’t talk about this much, but it’s a very real feature, which we reported on in July of last year. You see these posts until this person rejects you (because obviously if they accept you as a friend, you’ll keep seeing them). So with this new Not Now button, and the removal of the simple rejection mechanism, Facebook has basically created a de-facto follow feature.

With the Not Now button, Facebook took what was a one-step rejection and made it at least two steps — and that’s only if you want to truly block somebody (after you click the Not Now button, they ask “Don’t know XXXX XXXX?” and if you click that, it will block them from making any further friend requests). If you just want to deny a person’s request without blocking them, you have to go to the Requests page — the limbo area that Facebook sends the Not Now people to. This area isn’t particularly easy to find; it’s buried in the Friends -> Find Friends area. In other words, it’s now quite a few steps simply to reject a person’s friend request as you previously could.

Facebook has to know that most people are probably going to hit this Not Now button once and forget about it. And that’s exactly why this change creates a de-facto follow feature. It’s not really a feature they’ve explicitly created, but it exists nonetheless. And thanks to this change, it’s going to be in use a lot more.

It’s almost as if they’re saying “as long as you don’t want to block this person, why not let them follow you?”

Now, to be clear, all of this information seen by “followers” is information that is already public. A random person could visit your profile page and see all of this stuff. But it’s interesting that for pending friends (which again, will now be a ton of people), Facebook starts pumping this info into people’s News Feeds. Remember, this was basically the cause of one of the early backlashes against Facebook when the News Feed was first implemented. Even though it was just showing information that everyone already had access to, it was doing it in a more streamlined way that freaked everyone out. Now they’re doing something similar again, just in a more stealth manner.

For its part, Facebook says this feature is to help with overly aggressive friending behavior (someone continually friending you over and over again after you keep rejecting them). But wouldn’t it just have been easier to put a more obvious “Block” button in the Friend Requests area? Instead, this feature allows the social network to slyly beef up its social graph a bit more with a feature I think they need anyway: follow.

Cue the music on Project Dance Party.

If you use Twitter on a daily basis, chances are you’ve run into a DM Fail. The dreaded DM stands for the direct message, Twitter’s version of a private one-on-one message. I call it dreaded because if you rely on Twitter as a primary means of communication, you are often wondering just how private those DMs really are. Sometimes they inadvertently become public, usually when you are trying to reply to another DM via text message on your mobile phone.

This happened to me just this weekend when I was trying to edit a headline from the road. It turns out I am in good company. Even Twitter CEO Evan Williams runs into the occasional DM Fail, it would seem from a fleeting Tweet of his that is now deleted:

on phone w/bill. will call in a minute

Inadvertent DMs that show up in your regular Twitter stream are often banal like that, yet cryptic and intriguing. Who is Bill? And what was Ev talking to him about? What is even stranger, however, is that this particular message was from the Web, presumably the new Twitter.com, which makes it really hard to mix up your DMs with your regular Tweets. (It’s a different tab with a pop-up box). Perhaps Ev was using a keyboard shortcut and hit “m” for new direct message instead of “n” for new public Tweet. It can happen to the best of us.

But Twitter should really be designed to make it near-impossible to mix those two up. A couple years ago DMs would appear in the public timeline more frequently, before Twitter plugged some obvious holes. Maybe it is time to take another look. (Really, what’s the deal with the DM always failing when I respond via text or through the Twitter iPhone app?)

When stickybits launched at the SXSW conference last March, it was conceptually intriguing but a bit too vague in its open-endedness. With the stickybits iPhone app, you can append a message, photo, or video to any barcode. The next time somebody scans that barcode, your message will appear. The problem is that nobody scans barcodes without a reason.

The next version of stickybits, which is coming out in October, aims to give people more reasons to scan and share their scanned objects by honing the product and making it into more of a platform for unlocking rewards and coupons. Stickybits wants to reposition itself as an app for object check-ins.

The new app, V2, will offer brands and businesses four ways to create object check-ins: coupons, group deals, location, and product combo rewards. The first one is just a regular coupon. You scan a product’s barcode and get a discount off your next purchase. The others are more creative. A group deal is requires you to get a certain number of your friends to scan the same item in order to unlock a reward. (Get 5 more friends to scan a Pepsi before 5PM today and win 2 free movie tickets to any AMC theater”). Location-based rewards are only unlocked when a product is scanned at a specific place (“Scan a can of Pepsi in Times Square”). The combo deal tries to get people to scan multiple items—for instance, five different flavors of the same drink.

These object check-ins add a layer of game mechanics to what was before an unstructured activity. If you scan stuff, you might get a reward, and it’s a bit like a scavenger hunt with real-world items. When you do scan an item, of course, in addition to unlocking a reward, you will also potentially be unlocking a marketing message from a business left in the form of a video, photo, or comment.

The new stickybits will also offer a complete analytics dashboard for brands, showing them how many times their products have been scanned, who is scanning them, where they are being scanned, who has scanned a product the most, and who is the most influential.

The app will also amp up the social sharing via Facebook and Twitter. For instance, a Facebook Like button is built right in. All of these are good moves. The product could use more focus. Consumers need hand-holding, especially when it comes to unnatural acts like using your phone to scan barcodes. It’s just something that hasn’t caught on as a mainstream activity outside of comparing prices in the grocery aisle. If they can turn scanning products into a game that is actually fun, people would be much more likely to give it a try. But then, that is kind of up to the brands to figure out.

For about the past six months or so, I’ve been using an app called Burbn. Despite being in stealth mode, the app attracted quite a bit of buzz as it was in the location space and built entirely in HTML5. Oh, and the $500,000 investment from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz helped gather interest as well. But it turns out Burbn was a red herring of sorts. Or perhaps more appropriately, it was a testing ground. The product that emerged is much better: Instagram.

Unlike Burbn, Instagram is neither a location-based app (though that is one component), nor is it HTML5-based. But it did spring out of the way co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger saw people using Burbn. That is: quick, social sharing — and a desire to share photos from places. That’s the foundation of Instagram.

More specifically, Instagram is a iPhone photo-sharing application that allows you to apply interesting filters to your photos to make them really pop. The app will be launching in the coming weeks, but as a longtime Burbn user, I’ve had the opportunity to try it out over the past few weeks. And I’m happy to report that it’s very good.

A couple of my favorite apps on the iPhone currently are Hipstamatic and CameraBag. Like Instagram, both are photo apps that allow you to apply filters to pictures you take with the device. But both are fundamentally flawed in that neither has good sharing or discovery mechanisms. Put another way, neither are very social — at all. Instagram is. And it provides the same type of photo filter manipulation — and maybe even a little better.

“Most mobile photos are like ‘meh’,” Systrom told me when I met with him and Krieger earlier today. But at the same time, cameras like the one found on the iPhone are replacing more expensive cameras because they are so much more convenient. So the team set out to make these pictures look better.

To do that, it actually involved quite a bit of math. Each of their filters mean doing math on every single pixel, Systrom noted. Currently, Instagram has 11 such filters, with more on the way. These filters range from Apollo (sort of moon-like) to Nashville (an orange/sepia tinge) to Gotham (dark). They can make even the most bland photo look interesting.

Once you take a picture and apply a filter (there’s also an option not to), the photo is shared into your Instagram Feed. From here, your friends on the site can “like” or comment on it. But another key to Instagram is that it’s just as easy to share these photos to other social networks — like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. To do that with CameraBag, for example, you have to use email — ugh.

And perhaps the best part is that all of this sharing is really, really fast. Systrom wouldn’t reveal how they get photos to seem like they upload so quickly, he would only called it their “special sauce.”

Once your photo is up on Instagram and accumulating likes and comments, you can see the activity around it in the “News” tab. This area current goes back three days and allows you to quickly reply to comments your photos may have received.

Another tab, called “Popular”, allows you to see the photos on Instagram that have received the most likes. This also serves as a good way to find new people to follow, Krieger noted. He said that going forward, discovery is going to be a key feature they’re working on.

But first, of course, they have to actually launch the app. As I noted above, it should be out in the next few weeks. When it launches, it will be a free download — another difference with CameraBag and Hipstamatic. So how will they make money? With plenty of funding for the two-man team, they’re not too concerned with that right now, but Systrom said that the app will launch with 7 of their 11 filters for free, and the other 4 will be available for in-app purchase (with more coming).

This model has worked well for Hipstamatic, as they’re the number 8 app overall right now in terms of top grossing apps in the App Store (these numbers include in-app purchases).

When I asked about the pivot away from location, Krieger noted that sometimes it’s useful for pictures, but sometimes people just don’t care — they just want to get the picture out there as quickly as possible. “We’re not a check-in app, we’re a life-sharing app,” Systrom added.

That said, there is still an option to check-in with Foursquare when you tag a picture to a specific venue (they are using Foursquare’s place database).

Krieger said that the idea for Instagram was to take what they learned from the relatively complex Burbn and focus on doing one of those things perfectly — in this case, social photo sharing. As regular readers may know, I’m a big fan of this idea.

Systrom also cited Fred Wilson’s recent post noting that startups are beginning to focus on mobile first now. The idea is that Instagram will start with the iPhone app and expand from there. While they haven’t even started thinking about Android yet, clearly that’s in the cards. And the web will be an important component of this too, Systrom noted.

Beyond Hipstamatic and CameraBag, Instagram faces a ton of competition from photo sharing apps such as Picplz and Treehouse. Systrom thinks a number of them are good, but feels their approach is different enough to separate from the pack.

Both Systrom and Krieger gradutaed from Stanford and were a part of the Mayfield Fellows Program – a joint program between the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and the Mayfield Fund. Most recently, Systrom was working at NextStop (recently acquired by Facebook) while Krieger was at Meebo. Before NextStop, Systrom spent a couple of years at Google, and before that he was an intern at Odeo — the company that eventually stepped aside to give birth to Twitter. Systrom noted he actually shared a desk with Twitter creator Jack Dorsey back in the day, and that Dorsey has been very helpful with Instagram/Burbn.

The duo is currently working out of the Dogpatch Labs in San Francisco. We’ll have a bit more on the app when Instagram actually launches in a few weeks. You can sign up here to get notified when it will be available.