Enterprise social networking platform Yammer, has just raised $25 million in new funding led by U.S. Venture Partners with Emergence Capital, Charles River Ventures and Founders Fund also participating. This brings the startup’s total funding to $40 million. Additionally, U.S. Venture Partners’ Principal Mamoon Hamid will be joining Yammer’s board.

Yammer, which launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, recently expanded to become a more comprehensive platform for social networking within the enterprise.

As we wrote in our initial review of the new platform, Yammer added number of applications to its platform that increases its functionality beyond just a communications platform, including polls, chat, events, links, topics, Q&A, ideas, and more. And a new Activity Feed will aggregate stories about co-worker actions within all of their enterprise apps (both on and off Yammer) and will allow users to follow content.

The company has been growing by leaps and bounds as more businesses turn to in-house social networking platforms for internal communications and now has more than 1.5 million verified corporate users, including employees at more than 80
percent of the Fortune 500. Plus, the startup is doubling revenue every quarter.

The new funding will be used to scale its operations, triple the size of its engineering team and significantly grow its sales organization. The company will also open offices in Europe and Australia.

Yammer has also added two new executives to the team. David Stewart, former director of product at Playdom and product lead at Google, has joined Yammer as vice president of product management. Mark Woolway has joined Yammer as vice president of corporate affairs, and was formerly managing director at Clarium Capital and the vice president of corporate development at PayPal.

Yammer faces competition from Jive, Salesforce’s Chatter, CubeTree and others. But the company’s founder David Sacks tells us that the ability to create a go-to corporate social network is a Facebook sized opportunity. If this is true, then there’s plenty of room for a number of players in the enterprise social networking space.

Sacks says that he believes Yammer is a head of the curve when it comes to bringing a social network to the enterprise, and feels confident that the platform will continue to grow despite being in a competitive space. And clearly, the company will now have the financial resources to help make that happen.

Last week Facebook was hit with yet another patent lawsuit, this time by Walker Digital, an “invention company” founded by Jay S. Walker, co-inventor of Priceline.com.

And boy does this one come straight out of left field.

Bloomberg Businessweek first reported the news last Wednesday, but for whatever reason got the number of the patent-in-suit wrong (should be 5,884,272 and not 5,884,271), causing a great deal of confusion in subsequent reports.

I got hold of the complaint this morning (see below), and it actually makes for a great read.

Let’s start by looking at the patent-in-suit, entitled “Method and system for establishing and maintaining user-controlled anonymous communications”. It is described thusly:

A system for establishing anonymous communications includes a plurality of party terminals, a plurality of requester terminals, and a central controller. The system receives and stores party data about respective parties.

Upon receiving criteria for parties of interest from a requestor terminal and authorization from respective parties, the central controller releases to the requester party associated with the parties. The system also establishes communications channels between parties and the requester, while maintaining their anonymity.

Basically, the patent describes how users can manage and control the release of information about themselves or their identities. Additionally, it shows how such personal information can be disclosed, at once or incrementally, through the use of an authorization request, such as for example, enabling strangers to become friends.

Pretty broad for a patent, but okay, that happens (a lot). The funny part of the lawsuit is in the way Walker Digital claims Facebook infringes its (decade-old) patent.

According to the complaint, Facebook is a social utility that permits users to interact with friends and communities of other individuals, but, the plaintiffs say, “the sharing of user information is nonetheless controlled through user-selectable privacy settings.”

It goes on:

“The ‘social utility’, like the patent, is about sharing. Facebook’s privacy controls give you the power to decide what and how much you share.

And, like the patent, once you locate the person you know and then click on the 'Add as Friend' button, a friend request will be sent to that person.”

In short, because Facebook enables people to have some control over their privacy on the popular social networking sites by effectively letting users decide which information you share with whom, Walker Digital believes the company infringes one of its “inventions”.

Provided I’ve understood the complaint correctly and the whole thing isn’t an early April Fools joke, this whole suit is just plain laughable.

In a reaction to the Bloomberg piece, a Facebook spokesperson said they would fight the suit vigorously, calling it “completely frivolous”. This time, I can’t help but agree with them.

Raising funds for a small business can be a daunting task for any fledgeling entrepreneur. Whether it be from friends and family or from the general public, finding investors, setting terms of the funding, assigning equity and filing compliance documents is a challenge. Enter ProFounder, a stealth startup that launches today to ensure that all entrepreneurs and small businesses have access to an easy and simple fundraising platform.

ProFounder, which has been in private beta for the past year, offers entrepreneurs two ways to raise money on the site: through a private fundraising round, and/or a public fundraising round. The private fundraising rounds allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues with investors (their friends, family, and community) over time. Essentially, this type of fundraising round is an offering of securities, and ProFounder helps facilitate compliance with state and federal laws related to this offering.

Public fundraising rounds allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of revenues with both investors (anyone can participate – friends, family, community, and general public too) as well as a nonprofit organization. For both public and private fundraising rounds, ProFounder has a limit of $1 million raised.

Entrepreneurs can apply to Profounder, upload a pitch to offer to potential investors and then create a term sheet with Profounder’s templated forms and compliance sheets. As stated above, the term sheets are based on a revenue-share model. ProFounder then gives businesses a page where they can invite friends, family, and investors to a destination page that allows users to make contributions and investments directly on the site.

The bonus of using ProFounder is that the platform allows unaccredited investors (i.e. friends and family as opposed to a venture firm) to participate, so anyone can be an investor. And entrepreneurs can set their own investment terms and ProFounder facilitates all of the compliance, including tracking the number of investor seats in each state where each of their investors live, making sure entrepreneurs know which compliance documents they need to file, making sure entrepreneurs know which filing fees to pay, etc.

ProFounder, which was is the brainchild of Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley and fellow Stanford Business School alum Dana Mauriello, also manages payouts and will pull funds from the entrepreneur’s bank account every quarter to pay investors their share of the business’ revenues.

ProFounder makes money by charging a 5 percent fee (of a public raise) and/or a flat $1,000 fee for any private raises.

If a company pays out investors before the terms of the deal end, then founders can choose to donate the rest of the revenues to a non profit organization. For example, if you offer two percent of your revenues to investors over the next five years and within two years, everyone has been fully paid, then the next three years of two percent of your revenues will go to the nonprofit.

To date, ProFounder has facilitated 5 successful private fundraising rounds, raising a total of $155,000 and engaging a total of 108 investors. For example, Bronson Chang, a recent USC alumni moved back to his native Hawaii to help out with the family business—a candy shop in Honolulu. Bronson wanted to open another shop in the area and raised $54,000 from 19 community members including friends, family, and USC classmates. Bronson is also currently raising an additional $60,000 through a public investing round.

Another private beta tester, BucketFeet, is a start-up from two recent college grads that makes hand-painted sneakers. The fledgling entrepreneurs managed to raise $60,000 from 37 investors including friends, family, and classmates across the country.

ProFounder’s model is similar in some ways to Kiva’s microlending, which recently opened up its platform to American entrepreneurs. Other companies playing in the space include Kickstarter, European fund ProFounders Capital, and Prosper.

But Jackley and Mauriello say that with the 27 million new and existing small businesses in the U.S., there are plenty of opportunities to offer fundraising and investment platforms to this demographic. Eventually, ProFounder will include social networking integration and possibly a convertible debt option for term sheets, say Jackley and Mauriello. In the end, Mauriello says, it’s about making sure that small business entrepreneurs have access to much-needed resources in terms of raising money.

Today Winamp for Android is coming out of beta, a month after its initial launch and more than 500,000 downloads later. The public Android release lets you manage your music downloads on your Android and will offer a couple new features, including wireless syncing over WiFi with Winamp on your desktop computer and the addition of Shoutcast radio stations. (Both Winamp and Shoutcast are owned by AOL, as is TechCrunch). The wireless syncing requires a new desktop version for Windows computers, which is also available today.

Winamp is a popular music management software for Windows, with 60 million users predominantly overseas. In fact, only about 5 percent of its users are in the U.S. But AOL is making a big push with Android, hoping to attract a lot of new U.S. mobile users and become the iTunes for Android devices. AOL has no plans right now to release Winamp for iPhone where it is pretty much impossible to compete with iTunes. “There is a lot of inertia around the iPhone. We have to nail this first,” says Jeff Bronikowski, the new VP of AOL Music who was hired away from Yahoo Music earlier this month.

Instead, AOL is going to ride the Android wave. “Now with the Android OS beating out iOS, it is a foregone conclusion that it will beat out iOS over time,” argues Kerry Trainor, senior vice president of AOL Entertainment. Winamp is going to be positioned as the best music management app for Android. Of course, there are other contenders for that title, including doubleTwist and Songbird

Just like with iTunes, Winamp lets you mange and play your digital music collection. You can even do a one-click import of all your non-DRMed music from iTunes. You can create playlists, search by song, artist, or album, and listen to Shoutcast Radio. Click on an album cover as you are listening and you get discography information, news, and meusic reviews from AOL Music. And while Android and Google will support over-the-air syncing for music, Winamp’s Wifi syncing solves the problem of getting music from your desktop to your phone effortlessly.

People spend a lot of time with their own music collections. The average Winamp user spends 80 minutes a day listening to music through the desktop app. Extending listening opportunities to mobile phones should extend that average time.

Could Winamp become a Trojan Horse for a future music streaming service from AOL beyond Shoutcast radio? Probably not. Bronikowski says AOL Music is “not planning on launching our own subscription service.” Winamp is currently a profitable business, he notes, and he wants to keep it that way. But if it does take hold on Android devices, it could become a strong distribution partner for other subscription music services.

Gilt Groupe has made a name for itself, particularly in the United States, for operating a successful flash sales site that offers its members products and experiences at heavily discounted prices for a limited period of time.

Now, the company is turning to traditional e-commerce for its next trick.

Gilt this morning announced that it will be debuting a full-price men’s business as a dedicated website in Summer 2011 (to coincide with Pre-Fall 2011 collections).

The company says the new site, the name of which hasn’t been disclosed yet, will offer a selection of men’s apparel, accessories, athletic gear, gadgets, and more. Aside from a “state-of-the-art shopping experience”, the site promises to throw editorial content into the mix.

John Auerbach, currently General Manager of Gilt Groupe’s $100 million+ Gilt MAN business, will be President of the new site. Brooke Cundiff, formerly Director of Men’s Brand management at Gilt rival Rue La La and Associate Divisional Merchandise Manager of Saks Fifth Avenue, will become Divisional Merchandising Manager of the new business.

Brian Kalma, formerly head of user experience at Gilt and prior to that head of user experience and web strategy at Zappos, will be in charge of user experience for the new site.

Gilt Groupe says the mixture of brands on the full-price site will be similar to the curated assortment currently available on Gilt MAN, and items will live on the site according to seasonality in contrast to its current flash sales model.

Kevin Ryan, founder and CEO of Gilt Groupe in a statement says the company has already signed up 400,000 male customers and 350 brand partners to date.

Online fashion retail stores seem to be having quite an upswing of late, with Google launching Boutiques.com and eBay running a one-stop-shop for all things fashion.

Open source software giant Red Hat has acquired cloud application deployment and management platform Makara.

Makara, which was rumored to be in talks with Red Hat a few months ago, allows organizations to provision, deploy, manage, monitor and scale their Java and PHP applications on both public and private clouds, such as Amazon EC2 and VMWare-based clouds. Makara offers both on-demand and on-premise deployments.

Red Hat, who is best known for enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux, plans to integrate the JBoss Enterprise Middleware infrastructure with Makara’s Cloud Application Platform to offer organizations a comprehensive platform-as-a-service.

Red Hat bought open source company JBoss for $350 million in 2006 and has created a Platform As A Service based off of the technology to allow cloud service providers, ISVs and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to take existing assets and develop new applications and deploy them to a wide range of public and private clouds.

Sequoia-backed Bubble Motion, which offers a Twitter-like voice blogging service in India and Japan, is bringing its service to Indonesia today via a deal with Indonesian mobile communications company XL Axiata. The service, which has seen considerable traction in India, will be dubbed 'XL CUAPS.'

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.

Similar to the Japanese and Indian services, service is catered towards allowing Indonesian stars such as actors, musicians, comedians and other celebrities to record updates for XL’s 38.5 million subscribers. Users can become a voice blogger on XL by dialing *1* on an XL mobile phone, recording a status update, and followers everywhere are notified by SMS and prompted to dial and listen.

Social networking in Indonesia is a huge market, so it should be interesting to see if voice blogging can take off.

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 Philippines and Malaysia.

While News Corp. is now openly admitting that it is exploring options for Myspace (don’t call it MySpace anymore!), the company is still executing, albeit slowly, on its mobile strategy.

This morning, the company announced that it has launched a new mobile website to extend its “social entertainment experience” to mobile devices across the board.

The company will soon release a brand new iPhone app to boot.

Unsurprisingly, social interactions when on the go remains a popular activity within the Myspace demographic, so it makes sense for the social networking company to make the core experience of its service portable as efficiently as possible.

Myspace CEO Michael Jones refers to the company’s mobile strategy as “a two-pronged approach”:

"We are creating the best experience for Myspace mobile web users by taking the most compelling entertainment elements of Myspace.com and making them portable, while simultaneously building a portfolio of independent mobile applications tailored specifically to entertainment categories."

The new Myspace mobile website is accessible today on all iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm and select Nokia and BlackBerry devices and features (mostly music-related) celebrity news, videos and whatnot, as well as the ability for users to share photos, videos, links, status updates and more across multiple social networks (cough).

The Myspace iPhone app isn’t available yet – the company says it will only be made available in the coming weeks – but will focus on the site’s activity stream. It actually sounds pretty nifty: Myspace says that, if a user has music from specific bands on his or her device, the app will automatically populate the user's stream with updates from those bands.

Neither the new mobile site or the iPhone app will require users to log in.

According to comScore, Myspace received some 60 million visitors to its website last month, but it’s continuously losing traffic and mindshare to rivals like Facebook and Twitter.

Payvment, a startup that allows anyone to create and operate a retail storefront on Facebook, has raised $6 million in Series B funding led by Sierra Ventures with a BlueRun Ventures participating in the round. This brings the startup’s total funding to $8 million.

Payvment's Facebook App lets anyone create a retail store on the social network. The app lets you set up products, categories of products (i.e. shoes, T-shirts, sweaters), import photos, list terms of service and shipping options and more. Once you set up your online shop on Facebook, it will show up in a separate tab on your profile or page under "storefront".

Since the company launched in November of 2009, over 40,000 businesses and individuals have started to sell goods on Facebook and over 500,000 Facebook users have shopped for products in stores using the Payvment app.

Most recently, Payvment launched the ability for for retailers to provide instant discounts and coupons to users that become Fans or "Like" their fan pages. Users can also review items from within the store and the ability to allow shoppers to carry their goods with them across thousands of Payvment-powered storefronts on Facebook. It makes shopping on Facebook almost like shopping at Target, where you can visit multiple departments and buy all of your diverse purchases at once. Payvment currently lists over 750,000 products on its storefront.

Payvment plans to use the funding to hire employees in engineering, online community support, marketing, product integration, retail coordination and other areas.

RingRevenue, which offers a call performance platform that allows companies to complement their marketing efforts with phone-based campaigns, has raised $4 million more in a round led by led by GRP Partners and Rincon Venture Partners, bringing its total financing to $7.5 million.

Call performance marketing basically extends the tracking, measurement and accountability of online performance marketing to those transactions that occur over the phone.

RingRevenue says it currently boasts more than 25,000 publishers and runs hundreds of call-based campaigns for some 10,000 advertisers across its partner networks. According to its About page, RingRevenue has struck partnerships with online juggernauts like Google, ValueClick, Commission Junction and Rakuten.

The company was initially founded in 2007 by a host of Callwave veterans.

With the additional capital, RingRevenue plans to ramp up product development and improvements, expand its customer development and support teams and ultimately expand its presence outside of the United States.

The headlines are pretty rough: Comcast hates Netflix! Net neutrality is dying! Communist forces from Russia and Cuba are attack a small town in Colorado and a ragtag band of high school students band together to fight them (although, arguably, this may have nothing to do with Comcast/Level 3)! But what’s really going on here?

First, let’s understand how data gets from the cloud to you. Back in the old days, when you wanted serve something on the web you rented a T1 line, set up a machine, and hoped someone would arrive to view your wares. This server, in turn, connected to a backbone and then ISPs – which used to be small mom and pop shops offering dial-up and are now faceless corporations – gave that data to you. It’s like a series of tubes, you know? That was before sites like Slashdot and Digg created a massive surging effect on popular content and the general public thought it would be nice to watch movies on their television via the Internet. As a result, digital traffic rose to alarming rates and everyone involved – from the dude with the T1 line to the T1 line providers to the person at home using a cable modem – had to upgrade. And upgrade. And upgrade. To put this in perspective, we only really had this problem for the past decade or so and the technology has improved so quickly it’s almost like the carriers are sprinting – and they are. In turn, it makes the 30 year move from Public Switch Telephone Networks (which were partially mechanical) to digital switching of telephone calls look like a leisurely walk from New York to Antarctica.

So this stuff costs a lot of money and carriers didn’t do it out of the kindness of their hearts. They want to be paid for their data centers. That’s where Level 3 comes in. Level 3 acts as both a backbone – meaning a massive, nationwide carrier of data – and a Content Delivery Network. Back in the old days, the backbone would be the only thing on the net. But once it became clear that hosting all your data on one server was a bad idea, CDNs grew up and allowed content providers to cache their data in different physical locations. You’d hit one CDN in California and I’d hit one in New York. Things worked faster that way.

CDNs also became massive sources of traffic but they didn’t have many network resources so they tried to pay less to deliver their traffic as a “service” rather than an “insurance policy.” Now in a perfect world my bits are worth as much as Netflix’s bits. And, for the most part, that’s true. But when Comcast sees Level 3 as a CDN, things change. Here’s what Comcast said:

Comcast has long established and mutually acceptable commercial arrangements with Level 3′s Content Delivery Network (CDN) competitors in delivering the same types of traffic to our customers. Comcast offered Level 3 the same terms it offers to Level 3′s CDN competitors for the same traffic. But Level 3 is trying to gain an unfair business advantage over its CDN competitors by claiming it’s entitled to be treated differently and trying to force Comcast to give Level 3 unlimited and highly imbalanced traffic and shift all the cost onto Comcast and its customers.

To quantify this, what Level 3 wants is to pressure Comcast into accepting more than a twofold increase in the amount of traffic Level 3 delivers onto Comcast’s network — for free. In other words, Level 3 wants to compete with other CDNs, but pass all the costs of that business onto Comcast and Comcast’s customers, instead of Level 3 and its customers.

Level 3′s position is simply duplicitous. When another network provider tried to pass traffic onto Level 3 this way, Level 3 said this is not the way settlement-free peering works in the Internet world. When traffic is way out of balance, Level 3 said, it will insist on a commercially negotiated solution.

Here’s what Level 3 said:

"On November 19, 2010, Comcast informed Level 3 that, for the first time, it will demand a recurring fee from Level 3 to transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast's customers who request such content. By taking this action, Comcast is effectively putting up a toll booth at the borders of its broadband Internet access network, enabling it to unilaterally decide how much to charge for content which competes with its own cable TV and Xfinity delivered content. This action by Comcast threatens the open Internet and is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access markets as the nation's largest cable provider.

"On November 22, after being informed by Comcast that its demand for payment was 'take it or leave it,' Level 3 agreed to the terms, under protest, in order to ensure customers did not experience any disruptions.

"Level 3 operates one of several broadband backbone networks, which are part of the Internet and which independent providers of online content use to transmit movies, sports, games and other entertainment to consumers. When a Comcast customer requests such content, for example an online movie or game, Level 3 transmits the content to Comcast for delivery to consumers.

So Comcast is all like “They’re a CDN!” while Level 3 is all like “They’re strong-arming us! They’re anti-competitive!” Well, they’re both right.

To be fair, Level 3 is a CDN. However, it is also the world’s largest backbone. It’s akin, to use the series of tubes analogy, a sewer operator offering special toilets that can really blow through the system very quickly for folks with those sorts of… needs. The sewer is the backbone while the super-toilets are the CDNs. Where, then, is the line drawn? Should Level 3 pay twice for the same traffic it would carry anyway? CDNs like Akamai already pay Comcast CDN rates, after all. And can Comcast prevent folks from gaining the benefits of those special super toilets, especially if they have their own super toilets to sell?

Now, if you read Comcast’s side, they’re saying “Level 3 is a CDN. They want to serve popular, populous data. They need to sign a new contract.” while Level 3 says nothing has changed. Comcast also suggests that Level 3′s content is clogging up its tubes. After all, movies are bigger than emails, right?

Wrong. What Comcast is really doing is holding a certain set of bits hostage. Level 3 does act like a backbone and it is an extremely important backbone. Anything you do online probably touches Level 3 at some point. Therefore, to force Level 3 to pay what a CDN does to blow content through Comcast’s network is non-competitive, one of the problems that net neutrality hopes to prevent. In fact, given the value of Internet connectivity to the average user, Comcast could do itself a favor and offer faster, better service to its current subscribers for a little more money instead of shaking down Level 3 (and then probably shaking us down by telling us it can offer “Gold++ Netflix Streaming Service” for $50 a month). As it stands, cable and DSL service is abysmally slow and underperforming in the first place. Clearly Comcast needs to get its own house in order before crying victim.

This is the worst kind of inside baseball because the players don’t induce much sympathy in the first place and there’s another game going on called Net Neutrality and it, too, is delightfully unpalatable. A bit is a bit is a bit, says the NN crowd while the ISPs see themselves as aggrieved sherpas, forced to carry the rich man’s heavy gear alongside the poor man’s light gear. However, everyone should, in theory, pay the same for the same service. In practice, it’s cases like this that will help decide who pays whom for what and, as we all know, we’ll end up paying in the end.

It’s no secret that professional social network LinkedIn is actively working on making its platform more socially connected. In the past year, the company has launched a deep integration with Twitter, the ability to follow a contact or company, a better groups functionality and enhanced sharing on the site. And a few months ago, the professional social network launched LinkedIn Signal, which allowed users to apply the professional social network's filters to Twitter's firehose. Today, the network once again adding another social feature with the release of a brand new official Share button.

Similar to the Facebook Like button or the Tweet button, publishers can now embed a branded LinkedIn share button with a few lines of code onto their sites. The "Share on LinkedIn" button will allow readers to share content (i.e. news, white papers, presentations) with your professional social network on LinkedIn.

If you click a LinkedIn Share button on a publisher site you’ll be asked to login with your LinkedIn account, and then you’ll be able to share a URL (with the network’s shortener) in your status update box. The button will also show how many shares have been made for a particular piece of content.

At launch, Bloomberg.com, Forbes.com, and SiliconValley.com will be integrating the new button. The network initially rolled out the Share button on the Huffington Post a few months ago.

A universal Share button definitely makes sense for the professional social network, whose members tend to share content like news and presentations with contacts. Developers has created WordPress-plugins to add similar functionality in the past, but an official Share button from LinkedIn gives both publishers and the network compelling data on what type of content readers are sharing with their professional contacts.

But with the growing number of “Share This” buttons on the web (Tweet, Like, Buzz, Digg), the “Share” real estate on blogs is growing competitive. Not every publisher will want a plethora of share buttons populating their site.

Of course this is part of LinkedIn’s broader strategy of bringing LinkedIn to any sites or platforms that people may use in their professional life, including Twitter and now blogs. The big question remains as to whether LinkedIn will plug-into Facebook’s social graph. CEO Jeff Weiner said recently that a social hookup with the world’s largest social network would depend on the value of the integration.

American Express and Zynga are teaming up to make it easier than ever to turn your money into virtual cows, tractors, and whatever else the folks at the multibillion dollar social gaming company can cook up. And this time, it doesn’t involve actually forking over cash — at least, not directly.

You see, American Express is now allowing its customers to exchange their ‘membership rewards’ points for virtual goods and/or ‘game cards’ that can be redeemed for Zynga’s in-game currency. These points are earned as American Express customers use their cards — the AmEx site says that you get one point for “virtually every dollar you spend on your Card.”

Some of the rewards come fairly easy, with prices beginning at 200 points; others run into the thousands. To help make these rewards more appealing, Zynga is offering exclusive virtual items like a Purple Cow in FarmVille (540 AmEx member reward points), a Café World Amex Lightning Stove (1945 points), and other goods that can’t be acquired any other way in the games. More items will be coming on December 6, with support for more games, including FarmVille.

In addition to these virtual goods, users can buy game cards, with denominations starting at $2 for 200 points and running up to $50 for 5000 points (you can get both physical and virtual game cards). Do the math and you’ll notice that this is 100 points for every $1 of in-game credit. This works out to 1% of your spendings, which is a pretty standard ‘cash back’ amount seen in credit card rewards programs (some programs will do better than 1% for certain items, like hotels).

Obviously none of this is actually free — you’ll be giving up cash, discounted hotel rooms, or whatever other reward program you might have chosen instead of Zynga’s. But you can bet that plenty of people will make the switch regardless, if only because they want access to the exclusive items that Zynga is offering through the program. And the relatively small number of points needed to ‘purchase’ a new virtual good will mean that users can reward themselves more often, which they always like. After all, who doesn’t want an elusive purple cow wandering around their farm?

Startup incubator Y Combinator has announced this morning that it is partnering with Yodlee, the provider of personal financial management an payments data to give the incubator’s startups access to Yodlee’s technology.

While Yodlee’s technology is used in a vast number of financial-focused startups, it is probably most well known for powering Mint.com’s core technology of aggregating account information from banks and credit card companies. For example, if you log into your bank's website and they offer you the ability to aggregate accounts from other banks and financial institutions, Yodlee powers this technology.

With the new partnership, companies in each Y Combinator funded class will be able to tap into Yodlee’s firehose of financial account and transaction data through the platform. Four Y-Combinator-funded startups, Indinero, WePay, FutureAdvisor, and ReadyForZero; are already using Yodlee’s technologies.

Y Combinator has struck similar technology deals with Twitter (for stream access), Justin.tv (for live video), and Facebook.

With the growing number of startups helping disrupt the personal finance and banking space, a partnership with Yodlee makes sense.

Enterprise cloud management software provider Abiquo has raised roughly $10 million in Series B funding led by Balderton Capital, with existing investors Nauta Capital and Eurecan participating. Bernard Liautaud, a Partner at Balderton Capital and well known for being the founder and former CEO of Business Objects, will join the Abiquo Board of Directors. Abiquo offers cloud management software that enables companies to create and manage private, public and hybrid clouds.

The European Commission has launched an investigation into Google after some vertical search engines submitted formal complaints that the firm had used its dominant position to crowd out and ‘disappear’ their results in its index – as reports various outlets including Bloomberg and the BBC.

The EU is obliged to look into whether Google as purposely lowered the search rankings of price comparison sites Foundem (UK) and Microsoft-owned Ciao, and French legal search engine ejustice.fr in its results.

The EU investigatation will also take in Google’s ad platform, which covers Google’s unpaid and sponsored search results and “an alleged preferential placement of Google’s own services.”

We’re going to take a look at what all this means.

Xerox' Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is spinning out PowerCloud Systems, the cloud-managed networking solutions provider that it has incubated through the Startup@PARC program since early 2008. PowerCloud has also gained more backing, with Walden Venture Capital and Javelin Venture Partners joining the line-up. PowerCloud offers cloud-based technology for OEM vendors that is designed to make business networking devices easier to deploy, secure, and manage. The company builds on intellectual property developed at PARC, including two exclusive and eight shared patents in areas ranging from cloud-virtualized network controllers to "usable security."

Exclusive - Totsy, a private sale site targeting moms of kids aged 0-7 (and moms-to-be), has raised $5 million in Series A funding from DFJ Gotham and Rho Ventures. The financing round follows the startup’s recent “acquisition” of competitor bTrendie's member base.

Totsy is the umpteenth niche-specific (in this case, for everything from prenatal care products, baby gear, travel accessories to children’s clothing and toys) to emerge, following in the footsteps of successful flash sales sites like pioneer Vente-Privée.com, Gilt Groupe and Rue La La.

If you’re in any familiar with the tried model of these sites, you know the drill: Totsy offers its members brand-specific sales on products for expecting moms, parents, babies and kids at sample sale prices, for up to 70% off the retail price. Shopping events are designer-specific and held over a limited-time period, 48 to 72 hours to be exact, for ‘invited’ members only.

One thing I admire about Totsy: the company puts a lot of effort into being completely eco-friendly in its operations, and actually plants trees in the name of members’ kids to help reduce the effects of deforestation.

I know – shopping isn’t really going to ‘save the world’, but I like to think every bit counts.

A new report from Juniper Research forecasts global mobile games revenues to surpass $11 billion by 2015, nearly double what they were in 2009.

All in all, it’s a fairly conservative prediction in my opinion, but what’s interesting is that the research firm also says in-game purchases will overtake the traditional pay-per-download model, with Apple’s in-app billing mechanism leading the way, as the primary source of monetizing mobile games in about two years (by 2013).

At the same time, Juniper Research acknowledges that, with the ever-increasing amount of apps on all popular platforms (and app stores for that matter), discoverability remains a problem for game developers and publishers alike.

Sounds like an interesting time to be a mobile games developer or publisher, although this quote from the report’s author, Daniel Ashdown, should serve as a big red warning flag:

“Discoverability can be a ‘chicken and egg’ problem: high downloads lead to prominence, but achieving a high number of downloads is largely dependent on already being prominent.

Consequently, a small minority of games achieve very high downloads, whilst the vast majority achieve very small download figures.”

This is obviously an excellent opportunity for fledgling app discovery platforms such as Appsfire, Chomp, Mplayit, AppAware, Appolocious and, increasingly, StumbleUpon.

Awkward “video white paper” / interview below:

As expected, Virgin’s new iPad-only magazine Project has hit the App Store. Most had been anticipating it at some point later today, but it actually went live in the U.S. store right around midnight PT. We’ve just managed to snag a copy after a pretty lengthy download (these magazine makers really need to get these file sizes under control).

We’ll do a more thorough walk-through once we’ve actually sat down and read the thing. But at first glance, Project looks nice. The interactive movie cover reminds me a bit of the newspapers in the Harry Potter films. Of course, once I got past the cover, it took me a bit of time to figure out how to navigate through the damn thing. But I eventually got the hang of it.

The Project app itself is a free download, but you have to buy the issues. The first one, with Tron: Legacy star Jeff Bridges on the cover, is $2.99. But apparently that’s a one-time price for the whole month and you’ll get new content every once in a while — at least I think that’s how it’s going to work.

More to come. For now, find the app here.

Update: As a reader notes in the comments, the Project app requires iOS 4.2, the latest version. So if you haven’t updated yet, now would be the time if you want to see this app in action.

Facebook co-founder and former Obama social media guru Chris Hughes has just launched Jumo, a social network for charities, in beta today.  Jumo aims to help you discover what causes matter to you by allowing you to follow specific charities as well as keep tabs on what your friends are following. Seems simple enough.

On Jumo each cause/charity has its own relevant news stream, sort of like what would happen if the Facebook app, “Causes,” coincidentally started by Sean Parker and former Zuckerberg roommate Joe Green, had its own social network that allowed you to actually “friend” charities.

At first spin, the necessity for a niche social marketing platform for charities makes sense — I am usually too busy to think about how much I am actually concerned with stuff like global children’s health and usually don’t contribute to charity unless it hits me smack dab in the face, like our recent TechCrunch UCSF Challenge For The Children fundraiser did. Being able to easily track the narrative of the social and political issues that interest me the most would actually lead to more donations, at least in my case.

The best thing about Jumo is that after a quick Facebook Connect (of course) the service lets you pick from seven large scale issue topics, Arts and Culture, Education, Environment and Animals, Health, Human Rights, Peace and Governance, and Poverty and then narrows them down by specific charity. I had forgotten how much I cared about 826 National until I saw the option to follow them under “Education.”

Jumo has raised $3.5 million from the Omidyar Network, the Knight Foundation as well as other angel investors and plans on making money through user payments and sponsorships. The site, much like a health food store, does give you the uncanny feeling of doing something good simply by visiting — though it remains to be seen whether people will put their money where their clicks are.

There seems to be a common cycle for many startups. First, you capture users. Then, you capture brands/celebrities. Then you capture revenues. Most startups never make it past step one, let alone steps two and three. The mobile photo sharing service Instagram rocketed past step one in about a week. And then kept going. Now it’s time to explore step two. Which is exactly what they’re doing with their first major brand partnership: National Geographic.

The partnership seems like an obvious one since Instagram is all about great-looking pictures, and National Geographic is known for great-looking pictures. “National Geographic makes a ton of sense as an initial partner – they’re a fantastic company with such a rich visual history. Given that they’re so visually oriented, it’s a no-brainer that we’re going to be trying some interesting stuff out with them over the next few months,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom tells us.

He notes that they’ve been talking to National Geographic for weeks about a potential partnership and what it could mean and how it could work. “Basically, we’ve been going back and forth — brainstorming ideas for how NG can participate in the community,” Systrom says. He says that it remains to be seen exactly how National Geographic will use the service, but says that engaging their fans will be a first priority.

“They’d like to participate more actively with their fans through photos – whether it’s enabling people from around the world to tell their story through an interesting prompt/contest, or crowd sourcing images for an upcoming story — everything’s on the table,” he says.

“They’ve also got a huge photographer/reporter base that could contribute images ‘on the ground’ as things happen — imagine a ‘live’ version of National Geographic. But again, this is all very early, and we’re excited to figure out how NG and other brands can fully utilize our platform,” Systrom continues.

Systrom also notes that while they have been talking to other potential partners, they have nothing else to announce just yet. “Talking with brands has always been on our todo list – but doing so only really makes sense when you reach a certain scale to provide a big enough audience. Instagram is quickly becoming a standard tool in people’s social media toolkit, and it’s natural to start talking to brands about how they can leverage the visual nature of Instagram,” he says.

He also declined to give any specific numbers in terms of their current userbase nuumbers, but it seems pretty likely that they’re already close to a million users (if not past the milestone).

Things are pretty busy at the old Twitter office.

The Google-Groupon acquisition rumors are coming in hot and heavy now. The day began with a rumored price of $2.5 billion, which was way too low. Now it ends with a more likely price somewhere between $5 billion or $6 billion. Whatever the price, it will likely be Google’s largest acquisition ever if it goes through (beating out DoubleClick’s $3.1 billion, and certainly YouTube’s $1.65 billion price tags).

But why is Google even interested in Groupon? It is essentially an e-commerce site, bringing consumers daily deals from local and national merchants. Google doesn’t do e-commerce very well (although it is trying through sexier product search). Buying Groupon would be a very risky $5 billion bet for Google in an unproven area outside its sweet spot of search I won’t even get into valuation, which at $5 billion would be somewhere in the neighborhood of ten times whispered revenue run-rate of $500 million. But Groupon is the clear market leader in the fastest growing new category on the Internet, and Google seems willing to pay whatever it takes to buy market leadership. As one CEO in the local commerce industry put it to me on Monday, “I think the way Google will evolve is they will want to control everything significant on the Internet.”

Local commerce is one of those opportunities where Google is putting a lot of wood behind the arrow. Google Places is increasingly front and center on the main search results page for local searches, and VP Marissa Mayer recently switched from Search to now running Location and Local Services. She is known to be a big fan of Groupon, and now it will likely become a business under her direction.

But if there is one thing that explains Google’s affinity for Groupon is its pay-for-performance model. Groupon doesn’t get paid by merchants unless it delivers customers to their doors in the same way that Google does not get paid by search advertisers unless it delvers clicks to their websites. Through its online-to-offline coupons, Groupon has figured out how to track that last mile in local online commerce between the ad and customers showing up at a store.

Google could start showing Groupon deals as tags on local searches or within Google Maps. The ability to add deals to their Places pages could make Places more appealing to local businesses as well. The biggest challenge for Google will be scaling the business from one which deals with a few hundred businesses per day to tens or hundreds of thousands. Groupon still requires a large local sales force to manage these deals, and an army of copy writers to make the deals appealing. The larger Groupon gets, the harder that becomes. And those reputed 50 percent margins are begging to collapse. With a $5 billion price tag, there will be no margin of error for Google on this deal.

Photo credit: Flickr/Matt Smith

While it seems as though every other post we’ve written lately can be taken as evidence that Silicon Valley is currently in a very optimistic phase, “Facebook Now Worth $50 Billion In Secondary Trading” pretty much took the cake, until this one.

Perhaps a better marker of the “good times” tipping point than the rumored Groupon acquisition (AND the subsequent Groupon for Groupon spoof), the highly contested Tech Bubble of 2010 now has its own Twitter address at @the_tech_bubble. And judging by the timing of its first tweet, it looks like Mike’s astronomical Facebook valuation post inspired the account. In fact I’m not entirely convinced Arrington isn’t somehow behind this.

While there were plenty of snarky blogs during the early Web 2.0 era including uncov and Dead 2.0, I’ve never seen a bubble with it’s own Twitter account. Perhaps the account itself explained it best, “Of course I have a twitter account. Twitter wouldn’t exist without me.”

Hmmm. I see what you did just there.

The Founder Institute, a very early stage startup accelerator and entrepreneur training program, was launched in 2009 by Adeo Ressi. The company now has programs in a variety of cities in the U.S. and around the world – ten cities at the last count.

That’s a lot of startups flowing through the program, and Ressi often gives advice to young companies even after the program is over. One thing he doesn’t like are people and companies that do things that add friction to the already difficult task of building a company (or otherwise piss him off). And he usually doesn’t waste a lot of time before jumping right in and slamming anyone he thinks is guilty of being an “unsavory character.”

Today, for example, he began publishing a blacklist of these companies, available only to people who’ve gone through the program. First on the list is a law firm, Gunderson Dettmer, that often represents venture capitalists and startups. Over-lawyering by the first apparently caused one venture deal to fall apart.

Here’s the email he sent out to companies today. The blacklist is here, but you have to have credentials to view it.

Let me start out by thanking everyone for their hard efforts to launch enduring and meaningful technology companies in honor of the US Thanksgiving holiday. It's a great time to pursue your dream company, and I am proud to be associated with your current and future successes.

The Founder Institute is introducing a new service to help Founders avoid bad actors. Unfortunately, there are many people in the world that seek the opportunity to take advantage of entrepreneurs, including employees, service providers, law firms, consultants, advisors, technology companies and investors. Unsavory characters and disingenuous firms will promise the impossible, overcharge, steal equity, destroy value, waste time, hurt your reputation and sabotage your success. It's time to put a stop to this.

The Founder Institute helps talented entrepreneurs succeed by making the right decisions and by avoiding deadly mistakes, which often include bad business relationships. If an accounting firm botches your taxes or a law firm ruins a financing, your business will suffer and possibly fold. A bad employee can destroy your team productivity, and a bad partnership can overwhelm you. In response, the Founder Institute is launching a private Blacklist (http://www.founderinstitute.com/guides/103) for enrolled Founders, Graduates and Mentors to access that will include individuals and companies to avoid doing business with, either directly or indirectly, around the world.

An example of one blacklisted company to avoid is the law firm, Gunderson Dettmer (http://www.gunder.com). This firm has caused problems for Founders around the country. In New York, Gunderson has told Founders that Class F stock hurts entrepreneurs and allegedly spread negative rumors about other law firms to secure clients from the program. In San Diego, associates at Gunderson billed Founders for cosmetic changes to template agreements that have been accepted "as is" by dozens of lawyers from other firms across the country. In the Bay Area, Gunderson billed multiple rounds of cosmetic changes to standard investment agreements that caused at least one Graduate financing to fall apart needlessly. The Institute has contacted various attorneys at Gunderson and had unsatisfactory responses.

If you know any individual or company to be included on the Blacklist, email blacklist@founderinstitute.com with a message titled, "BLACKLIST: [Company / Individual]". Please include the full name and contact information for any individuals, and write one paragraph to describe the reason for blacklisting. If you recommend blacklisting a company, identify the specific individual or individuals at the firm to avoid. Please also attach any related correspondence or supporting information. The Institute will review each recommendation before adding them to the blacklist. Depending on the severity of the situation, a blacklisted entity will remain on the list for 6 months, one year or even permanently.

While this action appears negative on the surface, as a seasoned entrepreneur, I can tell you that you will be taken advantage of, and, if you can avoid bad actors, it will increase your chances for success. In the end, this may be one of the more helpful things that Institute provides.

Keep up the great work! – Adeo

Gunderson Dettmer must be pleased as punch. There’s nothing like having an “unsavory character” blacklist launched with you as the founding member.