We’ve learned exclusively that Appcelerator, an open source platform for building and managing rich web, desktop and mobile applications, has acquired fellow development environment Aptana. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Aptana offers web application development tools with support for a variety of programming languages, including JavaScript, Ruby, PHP and Python. Aptana’s main products are Aptana Studio, Aptana Cloud and Aptana Jaxer. The startup offers an end-to-end developer platform including development, testing, deployment, distribution, and the ability to edit, and debugg.

Appcelerator, which has raised a total of $15.2 million in funding (eBay is a strategic investor), offers a cross-platform development environment for over 10,000 native iOS, Android and desktop applications. Specifically, Appcelerator develops Titanium, an open-source developer platform meant to compete with Adobe AIR and the likes for building rich internet, mobile and desktop applications.

The addition of Aptana brings development tools to Appcelerator’s platform to offer a more complete environment for mobile, web, tablet, and desktop applications. The company says that the two web development communities gives Appcelerator a combined developer base of 1.5 million developers worldwide. And Appcelerator, which is apparently in the midst of another acquisition, says that it is poised to become one of the largest mobile app publishers in Apple's App Store this quarter.

Gogobot is one of my favorite new startups of 2010. The site first launched in November – it gives users an easy way to review hotels, restaurants and activities and share them with friends. It’s not cluttered with ads and it is extremely well designed. So well designed, in fact, that they are a finalist for the Crunchies Awards this Friday in the Best Design category.

Our launch review and interview with cofounder Travis Katz is here.

Today Gogobot is releasing a new feature called Passports. It’s more of a grouping of reviews, automatically, by location. It seems simple and it is, but it’s also a great way to see all of the reviews by a user for a given place. So if you find someone who’s reviews you trust, you can check out the rest of them, too.

Here’s the Passport for Celeny Da Silva, a very active Gogobot user. She’s written 500 detailed reviews in 295 cities and 99 countries – clearly she likes to travel.

Social mobile app directory Appolicious is debuting a new categories feature today, that adds custom taxonomy for both iOS and Android. Now, there are 1,400 individual categories for iOS apps on Appolicious and about 700 for Android apps listed on the app directory. It’s essentially Appolicious categorization on steroids.

Appolicious CEO and founder Alan Warms tells us that app discovery is still nascent, with most people unaware of what apps are in the iOS and Android ecosystems. He maintains that because search and categorization on Apple’s App Store and the Android Market falls short, app directory sites like Appolicious are gaining traction because they help consumers sort through the millions of available mobile apps.

Warms says that his sites are serving millions of searches each month and says that most searches on the site are category-based searches. And Appolicious aims to be a one-stop show for app discovery, including editorial reviews, user-generated content (ratings, reviews, app lists) , social content (who owns what app, who likes what app), and now hyper-categorization.

Appolicious had a big 2010, so it should be interesting to see if 2011 brings a possible acquisition or perhaps new funding. The startup formed a partnership with Yahoo, acquired AppVee, and added a plethora of new features.

Let’s get this out of the way right up front: The name buuteeq is just awful. And if this were a consumer Internet startup, it might be fatally awful. “OK, it’s called Boutique, you know like Boutique hotels? Only you spell it B U U T E E Q… No, let me spell it again for you…” Awful.

Thankfully, Buuteeq is a business software company for boutique hotels. It’s launching today and will no doubt be called “the OpenTable for the hotel industry,” but that doesn’t do it justice. The product is far more impressive, the economics are far more aligned with hoteliers’ needs, and it’s solving a deeper industry problem. The biggest similarity may be that like OpenTable, it takes a decade or more for buuteeq to build a big company. But that’s life selling a product to fragmented small businesses all over the world.

Buuteeq gives mom-and-pop hotels a cost effective way to build and maintain a stunning, user-friendly Web site, optimized to run on the Web, inside Facebook, on the iPad and on mobile devices, jam-packed with SEO goodness in multiple languages. Look at one before and after of one of founder Forest Key’s favorite hotels in China.

Before:

And a few hours later using buuteeq:

At this point in the meeting, Paul pretty much started losing it. His parents are hoteliers and their Web site has been a particular pain point. Like many boutique hotels, they pay a local designer $10,000 every few years to produce a static page that does them little good, isn’t represented on social networks or on mobile, and is costly and cumbersome to update. And it’s only an information site– they have to process bookings through a third party that takes a huge commission.

Buuteeq’s high-end product could fix all of those problems for them in a matter of hours, cost the same amount, be available in two other languages (human-translated, not machine) and be as easy to update as a WordPress account. (It has a free product that’s essentially a rich Facebook page– a nice Trojan Horse because it has more information and photos than most hotel sites. Beyond that prices range from $349/month to $999/month.)

This sounds like we’re fan-boying out, but honestly there’s been so little innovation in the hotel space it’s easy to get excited if you live in hotels like Paul or spend up to half of a year in them like Sarah. It’s near-impossible to find great boutique hotels– especially international ones– over Google, even if you know the name, and as we’ve discussed before online travel agencies are useless.

When Sarah was traveling to Brazil last year, most hotels only had the front page information in English– the rest was all in Portuguese. She had to make an international call and spend 15 minutes or more trying to find someone at the front desk who spoke English to book a room. And, even if you can find the site and it is in your language, it typically isn’t well designed and may not have all of the information you need to have the confidence to book.

There is a lot of low-hanging fruit for buuteeq here. Especially when you consider the stunning rise of the Chinese traveler– expected to be the biggest country for in-bound an out-bound tourism in coming years. Simply by using buuteeq’s Chinese language translation, the Palo Alto Garden Court hotel rocketed up to the first page of Baidu’s results for a Silicon Valley hotel. That’s huge.

If the product’s price point excited Paul, here’s what excited Sarah: The product took just $1.3 million to build, the bulk of it was done by engineers in China. This is one of the best companies she has seen this year and it didn’t raise a dime of Valley money, despite the fact that Key grew up in Palo Alto and built and sold his first company here. He came up with the idea while stationed in China for Microsoft, moved to Chile with his family to get some funding and build it, and now he lives in Seattle. Staying out of the ecochamber has allowed Key to focus on truly solving a global problem– it’s launching with 40 customers, more of them are outside of the United States than in.

The downside with that global focus is that Key likely isn’t charging enough, leaving money on the table in the US, in order to be competitive in places like China and South America. Palo Alto’s Garden Court Hotel– buuteeq’s first customer pretty much told Key as much. That’s a crucial mistake a lot of now-defunct SAAS companies have made. But one that can be solved by building out the product more in the future, and charging for those improvements.

After spending a day paging through some of buuteeq’s clients pages, we think there’s also a missed opportunity in not having a consumer-facing portal, ala Jetsetter-meets-Opentable, where people who’ve stayed at one buuteeq property might want to easily discover and check out others. But again, that’s a problem that can be solved in the future. Even with the dreadful name, we’ll be watching this one closely.

Vook, which bills itself as a digital publisher of mixed-media reading, has raised $5.25 million in Series A financing from investors including VantagePoint Venture Partners and Floodgate.

Vook publishes mixed-media content dubbed ‘Vooks’, uniting video, text, images and social sharing into an integrated experience.

This helps publishers, authors and media companies alike to recreate and distribute existing content in a new form, fit for modern-day tablets, e-readers and smartphones.

The company already has partnerships in place with a number of book publishers and agents, and published ‘Vooks’ with bestselling authors like Deepak Chopra, Seth Godin and Tom Peters.

Vook has also launched its own digital e-book imprint, which will deliver 500 ‘how to’ and educational titles to the market later this year.

Vook was founded in 2008 by serial Internet entrepreneur Bradley Inman, who previously founded Inman News, HomeGain.com (which he sold to Classified Ventures in 2005) and TurnHere.com. Meet the rest of the team here.

The company raised $2.5 million in seed funding last year, from rock star investors like Ron Conway, Baseline Ventures, Founder Collective, Maples Investments and Lerer Ventures.

Flickr’d

Rescuecom, the computer repair service, says that, based on the number of "rescue" calls it has received, HP is the most reliable computer maker out there. HP scored better than traditionally reliable companies like Apple and Asus. Is the end of the road for mighty Apple?

Of course not, no. That would be silly.

Read More

eMarketer predicts that social network advertising will account for nearly 11% of all online ad spending in the United States by the end of this year. According to the research firm, US marketers will spend a little over $3 billion to advertise on social networking sites this year, up 55 percent from the $1.99 billion advertisers devoted to social networks in 2010.

eMarketer projects this number will rise by a further 27.7% next year to reach nearly $4 billion.

The 2011 forecast for online ad spending in the United States is $1 billion higher than eMarketer's last estimate of US social network ad spending, made in August 2010.

The primary driver of the change in projected spending is greater ad spending on – you guessed it – Facebook, the company says.

eMarketer predicts ad spending on Facebook will rise to $2.19 billion in the United States this year, and just over $4 billion worldwide – both more than double last year's figure.

As we mentioned yesterday as well, eMarketer expects ad revenues at once-rival Myspace to drop to a lousy $184 million in 2011, down from $288 million in 2010 and $470 million in 2009.

Flickr’d

Remember that large-scale iPad data breach from a few months ago? Good, because it turns out that criminal charges have been filed.

The district attorney in New Jersey, Paul Fishman, has filed one charge of fraud and one charge of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization against two men. The men are Daniel Splitter and Andrew Auernheimer.

Read More

Data center automation is a hulking $14 billion segment of the enterprise IT industry dominated by hulking giants like IBM, HP (through its $1.6 billion Opsware acquisition), BMC (through its $800 million BladeLogic acquisition in 2008), and VMWare. Companies often have thousands of servers, both physical and virtual, that need to be managed, and on top of that they are trying to keep track of virtual machines on Amazon’s EC2 or Rackspace. A new enterprise startup called ScaleXtreme is tooling up to attack IT systems management from the cloud.

It is backed by Accel Partners, which took its entire $2.5 million series A round last August, and its two co-founders have some serious enterprise startup chops. CTO Balaji Srinivasa was the principal product architect for BladeLogic before it was sold to BMC. CEO Nand Mulchandani founded and sold several enterprise startups in the past (Oblix to Oracle, Determina to VMWare), and was also the CEO of OpenDNS and an EIR at Accel.

ScaleXtreme wants to do the same thing to data automation that Salesforce did to CRM. Replace million-dollar deployments that take months with a five minute download that can have a machine being managed from the cloud in five minutes. And instead of an upfront $1,500 licensing fee per machine, plus maintenance and upgrade fees, ScaleXtreme is shooting for something closer to $150 a year per machine. “This is a radically different model,” says Mulchandani, who started out as an enterprise IT sales guy. “You download the agent and you are done—no sales people, no Italian suits flying across the country.”

Mulchandani sees data center automation as a greenfield opportunity for a cloud-based enterprise startup, much like CRM was a decade ago. “The space has atrophied,” he says, “with very long deployment cycles, and millions of dollars spent on deployment. Nothing has happened in data center automation. These larger guys, like IBM and EMC, are tuned for on-premise. For them, the cloud is this bolt-on thing, not built from ground up. A lot of people are spinning up 100 or 1,000 to 10,000 machines on Amazon in bursts and then they go away. These older products are not designed for this rapid escalation and de-escalation of machines.”

There are firewall issues as well, and IT admins want to be able to manage it all from their iPads or Android phones. The service will aslo add social elements, and offer a way for IT admins to share (or sell) scripts for managing different configurations of virtual machines. It will be like an App Store for data automation scripts.

The service will work both on servers inside a company’s data center and virtual servers on Amazon and other cloud computing data centers. When a company spins up a server on Amazon, that virtual machine still has to be managed like any other: software needs to be deployed, patched and updated. The current data center automation software is so expensive that it doesn’t make much sense to use it cloud-based systems that cost pennis per hour. ScaleXtreme’s pricing model is more in line with other cloud services and is built to scale up and back across to virtual machines inside corporate data centers.

Other startups playing in the same space include Puppet Labs and ScienceLogic.

It’s a classic disruptive strategy—go after the underserved white space (the enterprise cloud), and then start picking off the main market with a radically lower price (first on the poorly-served edges in remote data centers and branch offices, and then in the main data centers). Now all ScaleXtreme needs to do is pull it off.

Wikipedia just celebrated its tenth birthday. As a self-proclaimed fan of the site, I wanted to share with you this video, made for the occasion as Wikipedia enters its second decade.

The ‘State Of Wikipedia’ video is part of the ‘State Of’ series made by interactive agency from JESS3, and is narrated by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Today, the English Wikipedia now stands at 3.5+ million articles (up from roughly 500,000 in March 2005), and more than 17 million across all languages.

No matter what you think about Wales, the foundation or the site, that’s an impressive feat.

(Source: press release)

Click the image below for a larger infographic:

Suddenly people are talking about Hipster.

Ok, let’s clarify that. A group of tech enthusiasts in San Francisco are talking about what Hipster might actually be, since Hipster CEO Doug Ludlow has so far refused to say what Hipster is about. And it’s producing what appears to be a case study in viral marketing.

Luckily, all this talk is producing answers and sure enough TechCrunch readers have come up with the answers in our comments.

For Hipster appears to be a Q&A site built around your current location. Let’s call it a ‘Quora for location.’ And it even looks like Quora. Check out the below screen grab from Google cache.

With reports of a 2011 IPO swirling, professional social network LinkedIn has brought on another notable board member—Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz.

It appears that Moritz will be replacing Sequoia Partner Marc Kvamme, who recently left the venture capital firm to run Ohio’s Department of Development. On LinkedIn’s board, Moritz joins Stan Meresman, Netflix CMO Leslie Kilgore, former Ask.com CEO George "Skip" Battle, LinkedIn founder and former CEO Reid Hoffman, current CEO Jeff Weiner, Greylock's David Sze.

At Sequoia, Michael Moritz focuses on software and services investments. Moritz currently sits on the boards of 24/7 Customer, Aricent, Gamefly, Green Dot, Klarna Kayak.com, Plaxo, Pure Digital, Sugar Inc, WeatherBug, and Zappos.com. Moritz's previous investments at Sequoia include Google, Yahoo, PayPal and Flextronics (he served on the boards of all of these companies as well). Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 1986, he worked in a variety of positions at Time Warner and was a Founder of Technologic Partners, a technology newsletter and conference company.

Weiner said in a statement: "As one of the founding investors in LinkedIn, Mark's vision, passion and insight helped fuel the company long before others had recognized the full potential of our platform…Mike brings an impressive range of knowledge and expertise which will be invaluable to the company as we work to continue to grow our business around the world."

With 90 million users, LinkedIn has shown steady growth, especially in international markets. The professional social network has been eyeing an IPO for some time now. The company is cash-flow positive and has been staffing up for major expansion. Moritz is no doubt a seasoned advisor of many companies that have gone public, so his insight should be very valuable to the company. As we heard at TechCrunch Disrupt last fall, most of Mortiz's value comes outside of the boardroom — he offers the guidance and experience of someone who has been there many times.

HTML5, the next major revision of the HTML standard you’ve most certainly heard of as a TechCrunch reader, now comes with added logo, courtesy of W3C.

The logo is available under a permissive license (Creative Commons 3.0 By). See the FAQ section for more information and check out the badge builder.

Here’s the creative pitch:

It stands strong and true, resilient and universal as the markup you write. It shines as bright and as bold as the forward-thinking, dedicated web developers you are. It’s the standard’s standard, a pennant for progress. And it certainly doesn’t use tables for layout.

And here’s a bit more useful background information, provided by Ian Jacobs:

A number of people have already asked me “What does the logo represent?”

We intend for it to be an all-purpose banner for HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and other technologies that constitute an open web platform. The logo does not have a specific meaning; it is not meant to imply conformance or validity, for example.

The logo represents “the Web platform” in a very general sense.

Ok then.

They’re also selling T-shirts and giving away free stickers!

Seriously, what do you think about the logo?

Kony Solutions, provider of a so-called ‘write once, run everywhere’ mobile platform and vertical market mobile solutions, this morning announced that it has secured $19.1 million in Series A financing from Insight Venture Partners, the investment firm that boasts stakes in companies like Twitter, Chegg, Six Waves, Datacore Software and HauteLook.

Kony initially raised a tranche of $13.4 million from Insight, which it says will enable it to expand its research and development related to its mobile application platform, which serves millions of users worldwide. In addition, the funding will be used to accelerate the global rollout of Kony’s sales and marketing.

Kony says more than 35 Fortune 500 brands have engaged its solutions to develop, design, deploy and manage their mobile offerings, across more than 8,500 mobile devices, from the iPad and iPhone to Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, J2ME, Windows Phone 7 and Palm devices.

In addition, Kony’s platform also supports device-optimized mobile websites for more than 15 browsers, such as Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Firefox with support from WML through HTML5 (depending on browser capabilities and device form factors).

This morning, we reported that Netbiscuits, which also provides a (cloud-based) mobile software platform, raised millions in funding from T-Venture and Creathor Venture.

Salesforce is announcing a new key hire today—former Microsoft vet Matt Miszewski will join the CRM giant as Senior Vice President Global Public Sector. In his new role, Miszewski will help lead Salesforce.com's global public sector initiatives to help governments adopt cloud computing. Miszewski was formerly the general manager of Worldwide Government for Microsoft, where he advised national, regional and local government leaders on technology that supports their individual policy agendas and their citizens.

It’s been pretty quiet about Randy Falco, former chairman and CEO of AOL and president and COO of NBC Universal Television Group, since he was replaced by then Google ad chief Tim Armstrong at the helm of our new parent company back in March 2009.

Now, we’ve learned that Falco has joined Univision Communications, a media company serving Hispanic America, as executive vice president and chief operating officer.

Falco will oversee all revenue-driving functions for the company, including advertising sales and affiliate relations, as well as the operations of the company's television and radio station groups, corporate marketing, research and business development.

Falco will be based in New York and report to Joe Uva, president and CEO of Univision.

Sonian, a startup that specializes in cloud-powered information archiving solutions, this morning announced that it has secured $9 million in Series B funding. Previous backers Summerhill Venture Partners and Prism VentureWorks were joined by strategic investors Amazon.com and Webroot. Sonian says it will use the funds for continued research and development for its information archiving platform, and business expansion.

File-sharing services are getting pretty sophisticated these days, using the cloud to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to not only transferring files, but managing them as well. ShareFile, a fast-growing company founded five years ago which is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, is releasing a new product called Sync today targeted at enterprises that want an easier way to sync files between desktops and servers. ShareFile competes with services such as Dropbox and Box.net, but is more focussed on IT departments.

Like Dropbox, ShareFile allows you to choose a folder on your computer (PC or Mac) to sync to the cloud. Where ShareFile differs from something like Dropbox is that it makes it easier to sync the same files with multiple users and other advanced workflows. For instance, you can set up one-way syncs just for updating files from a master source, as well as two-way syncs to capture updates from all machines. Also, ShareFile maps to your computer’s existing file structure, so you don’t have to place a file in a special folder to make sure it syncs. Once they are synced, the files are accessible via the Web and mobile as well.

ShareFile charges a subscription for its services, and Sync will either cost $10 extra per month, or be included, depending on the subscription level. WIthin the next two months, ShareFile plans on introducing an even more robust Enterprise Sync product which will run on Linux and Windows servers, and allow for file sync scheduling and prioritization.

The digital scrapbooking space is competitive with Flickr, Apple’s iPhoto and other popular photo sharing sites offering high-end scrap booking options for consumers. Which is why smaller startups are dropping like flies, either heading to the deadpool or via acquisitions. Last year digital scrapbooking startup ScrapHD was bought by craft store chain Michaels. And today, Scrapblog, a startup that lets you build rich Flash-based online scrapbooks is being acquired by competitor Mixbook. Terms of the deal are not disclosed.

This actually a positive exit for a company that seemed to be in trouble. As of last fall, Scrapblog’s traffic was minimal, only receiving 84,000 unique visitors in September. And we received a number of reports that Scrapblog was forced to layoff employees last year.

Similar to Mixbook, Scrapblog offers an online editor that allows users to decorate their scrapbook with text, images, colorful themes, and other embellishments, which can then be shared on the web or printed out. By ways of history, the startup was first introduced back in 2006, briefly went offline, and relaunched in March 2007.

In 2009, the startup brought on a new CEO, Jill Braff, to lead the company after startup's founder and CEO Carlos Garcia, stepped aside. And last year, Scrapblog raised $2.5 million from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures.

For Mixbook, the acquisition will add a new userbase, and bring new features and creative tools to its existing userbase.

Looks like investors are increasingly looking at India for financing fast-growing Internet companies. Helion, Accel Partners and Tiger Global just pumped $6 million into ecommerce site LetsBuy.com, and now digital marketing company Ybrant Digital has announced the closing of a $48 million round of funding, as combination of debt and equity.

Ybrant Digital says it will use this new round of funding to grow its reach, develop new technology, expand internationally and explore acquisitions.

Oak India Investments, an affiliate of Oak Investment Partners, participated in the new financing round; joined by current investors, Asia Pacific Capital, as well as ICICI Bank.

If the name Ybrant Digital sounds familiar, it’s probably because of its acquisition of search portal Lycos last year, for $36 million.

Founded in 2000, Ybrant Digital boasts offices in 20 countries, including US, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Ukraine, Serbia, Israel, China, India, and Australia. The company provides digital solutions to brands like SAP, Porsche, UPS, Chevrolet and Lufthansa.

Ybrant Digital has partnerships in place with publishers like Facebook, Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Viacom and About.com.

Assuming the information in CrunchBase is still accurate, the Hyderabad, India-based company has raised a whopping $103 million to date.

LetsBuy.com, an Indian ecommerce site, has landed $6 million in growth capital from renowned investment firms like Helion Venture Partners, Accel Partners and Tiger Global. Launched only a year and a half ago, LetsBuy.com has quickly emerged as one of India’s fastest growing online retail sites, selling mostly consumer electronics from leading brands such as Acer, Canon, Western Digital and Sony.

LetsBuy.com sets up partnerships with these brands in order to offer a wide range of products for sale at significant discounts and short delivery times, via the Web. Its catalog currently lists 150 brands and contains over 5,000 products.

Hitesh Dhingra, founder and CEO of LetsBuy.com says the funds will be used to strengthen the company’s customer service, technology and supply-chain processes.

LetsBuy.com was founded by Hitesh Dhingra, also co-founder of India's first contextual online advertising network, and Amanpreet Bajaj, who boasts over six years of experience in process consulting with a major consulting firm.

We all know mobile app stores are booming worldwide, and a new market research report by MarketsandMarkets acknowledges that trend. According to the research firm’s ‘World Mobile Applications Market (2010 – 2015)’ report, the total global mobile applications market is expected to be worth $25 billion by 2015 (up from about $6.8 billion in 2010).

MarketsandMarkets projects Apple’s App Store to hold nearly 20.5 percent of that particular cake, while the global market is forecast to record a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 29.6 percent from 2009 to 2014.

The research firm reiterates the various factors that will be contributing to that growth, from advancements in network technologies to the lowering of mobile data usage cost, growing adoption of smartphones around the world, and a continuous increase in application usability.

MarketsandMarkets cites the risk of data theft through delivery of phishing and spyware in mobile applications as the biggest downside of the surge in the number of available applications and capable phones.

According to the report, North America led the market since 2009 with a 41.6 percent revenue share. However, Asia is the largest market in terms of downloads with 36 percent.

The European mobile applications market stood at $1.2 billion in 2009, but is expected to become the largest market by 2015, at $8.4 billion and growing at a CAGR of 33.6 percent during 2010 – 2015.

The firm segments the global mobile applications device market into submarkets for on-deck (i.e. carrier managed) and off-deck mobile apps (selling directly to consumers). The former is the larger segment, MarketsandMarket says, accounting for approximately 75 percent of the global mobile applications revenues.

However, the off-deck mobile applications segment is expected to experience faster growth in the future, thanks to lowering of entry barriers and faster establishment of new independent stores, the research firm adds. MarketandMarkets expects that, by the end of 2015, off-deck mobile application stores will just surpass the number of downloads from on-deck stores.

For more reports on this topic, check out:

Report: In-Game Purchases To Blow Mobile Games Revenues Past $11 Billion By 2015

and So Much For FREE!: Apple Will Sell $2B in Apps in 2011

(Image via Flickr user dougbelshaw)

In France, it seems January is always full of surprises. This time last year, new seed funds Kima Ventures and Jaina Capital were announcing their plans to fill a gaping void in the French investment landscape.  And now the same French internet titans (more or less) are announcing the launch of the Ecole Européenne des Métiers de l'Internet (EEMI), a European internet startup school set to kick-off in fall 2011. The news first broke in Paris Match (not traditionally known for tech news, but hey) in December. The initiative comes from the founders of three of the most well known companies in France: Meetic (Marc Simoncini), Vente-Privée (Jacques-Antoine Granjon) and Iliad (Xavier Niel)

Netbiscuits, which enables development, publication and monetization of cross-platform mobile websites and apps, has raised 'several millions of Euros' worth of funding from T-Venture, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom, and Creathor Venture. The extra capital will be used to grow Netbiscuits' business in the United States, and for expansion in key markets like Asia and Europe.

Just before the weekend, Facebook announced that it had expanded the information users are able to share with external websites and applications, to include home addresses and mobile phone numbers.

This enables developers of e.g. an ecommerce site to more easily fetch the address and phone number of a potential customer to streamline the checkout process.

For the record: users needed to explicitly opt to share this data before any application or website could access it, and they were evidently not able to share their friends' addresses or mobile phone numbers with applications.

Sure enough, the dialog box (see below) wasn’t super clear about that, so Facebook was unequivocally opening itself up for a new sh*tshorm to hit the deck.

This morning, Facebook announced that it has temporarily disabled the sharing feature, looking to relaunch it in the next few weeks after making some changes.

Facebook dubs these future changes ‘improvements’ repeatedly, but of course the company is responding to the wave of criticism it has received for quietly releasing the new sharing feature, on a Friday evening no less.

Here’s how Facebook puts it:

Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so.

We'll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready. We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks.

No doubt, much of the changes it will need to make revolve around the way it asks users for permissions. Sharing a home address and/or mobile phone number isn’t something its 600 million or more users should be able to do without thinking things through a little.

It’s Facebook’s responsibility to explicitly warn users about the risks involved.