Khosla Ventures likes social advertising startup MyLikes. The VC firm is leading the startup’s $5.6 million Series A financing. Lightspeed Partners and Metamorphic Ventures, who participated in the $600,000 seed round, ponied up again.

Additionally, seed investor Paul Buchheit is joining MyLike’s board of directors. Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, recently left Facebook to become a partner at Y Combinator (although MyLikes is one of his private investments).

MyLikes tries to match social influencers with advertisers. Anyone can sign up to endorse products and brands to their social networks via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or blogs. MyLikes calculates your social influence based on how many followers you have, how often they click on your endorsements, and other factors. The more social influence you have, the more money you can make.

Today, the company is also launching a mobile app on both iPhone and Android, which allows users to endorse products by uploading and sharing photos or by checking into a business location.

As more businesses turn to Android and iPhones for employee use, there is a need for enterprise-focused mobile security on these devices. Enterproid, which is launching today, hopes to fill this gap by allowing professionals to maintain completely separate professional and personal profiles on a single Android device.

Called Divide, the platform allows users to create a completely separate profile on Android devices that includes enhanced security, access control, remote wipe capability and a set of enterprise-grade versions of applications like email, a web browser, instant messaging, and SMS. Users can switch back and forth between their professional and personal profiles but no data can cross the division, so that no business content is compromised in the personal profile.

Enterproid’s Divide also allows users to manage devices from the cloud. Divide is available exclusively for Android phones and tablets but the startup plans to extend the service to iOS and Windows Phone 7 platforms in the future. For now, Divide is free but will soon adopt a subscription model after exiting private beta.

Founded by former Morgan Stanley, MTV and Smule execs, Enterproid is also a finalist in the 2011 Qualcomm Ventures QPrize competition and was selected as the North American regional winner last month.

While some Android phones already allow you to create separate profiles, Enterproid’s technology gives IT departments the ability to adopt Android phones without making a security compromise. And Enterproid comes with a bunch of useful tools, including the ability to segregate voice and data usage for work, or hand a child a phone without the risk of the child accidentally emailing or calling a contact.

Video chat has been tried countless times on the Web and mostly failed, but a new startup called SocialEyes is giving it another shot. Backed by $5.1 million from RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser and Ignition Partners, SocialEyes is a group video chat service that hooks into your Facebook social graph. SocialEyes is Chatroulette + Facebook, with a little bit of the old video Seesmic thrown in. As soon as I logged on this morning, I was invited into a group chat with CEO Rob Williams and marketing VP Joel Andren (those lurkers!), who are preparing to launch the service today at DEMO.

SocialEyes gets around the Chatroulette problem of creepy guys everywhere by requiring you to sign in with your real identity via Facebook. As soon as you sign in, you see your other Facebook friends who are also members, and whether or not they are online. You can also join groups where you can meet new people. SocialEyes allows you to have multiple video chats the same time, or bring people into a conference call type of situation.

If someone is not online you can leave them a recorded video message (kind of like what Seesmic used to do, except it is one to one or you can leave it to the group). You can also pull in links, photos, and videos to have a discussion around through the text chat feature at the bottom of the page. (SocialEyes uses Embed.ly to embed content from around the Web). The whole thing actually feels more like a Web version of Skype video chat than anything else, but it can support many more simultaneous video streams.

Williams used to work for Glaser at RealNetworks, and before that was a manager of NetMeeting at Microsoft. He believes that the time is finally ripe for massive video chat on the Web simply because of the coming ubiquity of front-facing cameras on most new laptops and tablets. The interface is pretty clean, and SocialEyes does the job out of the gate. The real question remains: do people really want to waste more time on the Web in endless video chat rooms? Wait, don’t answer that.

Amazon still refuses to share how many Kindle devices it has sold to date, short from saying it’s the best-selling product in its history, but you can be sure it will become a whole lot more really soon.

AT&T this morning announced it will begin selling the Kindle 3G digital publication reader in company-owned retail stores across the United States, beginning March 6.

Kindle 3G evidently connects over AT&T’s mobile broadband network, but also over Wi-Fi.

The telecom giant says it will include the Kindle 3G model in its connected devices displays throughout retail stores, offering customers the opportunity to test drive the device on the spot. The new Kindle 3G sells for $189.

According to the press release announcing the distribution deal, the Kindle Store now has more than 810,000 books. Over 670,000 of these books are said to be priced $9.99 or less.

Zipcar, a membership-based car-sharing service that enables members to reserve a car via the Web, phone or an iPhone app, this morning announced the addition of former eBay CEO Meg Whitman to its board of directors. She will be replacing long-time Zipcar investor and board member Jim Gerson, who is giving up his seat.

Whitman led eBay from 1998 to 2008. After her tenure, she ran for Governor of California, won the primaries, but lost to Jerry Brown in the November 2 election despite spending roughly $160 million on her campaign.

(By the way, someone please tell her her website is down).

Former AOL CEO turned investor Steve Case is also on the Zipcar board, as is John Mahoney, vice chairman and CFO of Staples.

Zipcar says it now boasts more than 530,000 members and 8,500 vehicles in urban areas and college campuses throughout the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

In April 2010, Zipcar bought London-based car-sharing firm Streetcar for $50 million in its latest bid to expand across Europe.

We reported last June that Zipcar was pondering a $75 million IPO to pay off its debts, but at the end of last year the company raised $21 million in venture capital funding instead.

For parents, organizing your kids’ social lives (i.e. playdates) can be a consuming experience. Today, startup RedRover is launching a private social network for parents to research and share everything from child-friendly restaurants to the closest hospitals in an emergency as well as schedule play dates.

Using iPhone and web apps, sers can check-in to locations, or publicize plans to friends within the app. Users are encouraged to leave their tips, thoughts or "their 2cents" for each other. You have to invite friends to join your network via email, as the app does not include Facebook Connect.

The fact that the app doesn’t include a way to import Facebook friends makes it a little difficult to use. The startup says that the virtue of using its network over email, or Facebook, is that RedRover is completely private and simplifies communication with other parents. Founder Kathryn Tucker said that as a parent, social media tools didn’t satisfy her privacy needs. While privacy is a natural concern for parents, I’m not sure if creating a new social network is the answer.

Is this the iPad 2? Nearly everything lines up with the leaked info: flat back with tapered edges, speaker in the bottom corner, camera up top. It even matches-up with most of the leaked cases. If it’s not the real thing, it’s a damn good render. I’m sold.

The only thing missing is the rumored mystery connection found on a couple of leaked cases. It’s widely thought after last week’s MacBook Pro refresh, this hole is for a Thunderbolt port as it would effectively replace a USB connection while providing additional functions. March 2nd can’t get here soon enough.

Read More

Research firm Forrester this morning announced its forecasts for the online retail industry in both the US and Western Europe this morning. No surprise: Forrester expects both markets to grow steadily over the next few years – not an unsafe bet by any means.

Forrester estimates that both US and European online retail (representing 17 Western European nations) will grow at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate from 2010 to 2015, reaching $279 billion and €134 billion, respectively, in 2015.

Growth will be driven in both regions by new business models such as flash sales and group buying, as well as improved merchandising to provide a broad selection of products available online, Forrester says. Also read: How E-Commerce Got its Groove Back.

In Western Europe, the online retail market grew 18 percent from 2009 to 2010 and is projected to grow 13 percent from 2010 to 2011, but Forrester forecasts that growth rates will slow down a bit after that, as the market matures and buyer penetration begins to level off.

Noteworthy sidenote from Forrester Research: the firm says brick-and-mortar stores will get seriously challenged by the continual rise of online retail as a whole. You heard it here first.

(Image credit: Flickr / Robert Couse-Baker)

Kontagent, an fbFund winner and social analytics platform, is adding real time functionality to its social application monitoring system.

Kontagent’s platform gives Facebook app developers, game studios and publishers detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times, social event interaction and other variables. The new version allows developers to track and optimize advertising efforts, user virality, in-app mechanics, virtual goods, currency monetization, and more.

Now, social application developers can gain real-time insights into the behavior and activities of their social applications. Currently, the application monitoring system is regularly processing 10,000 social events per second and growing to tens of thousands a second. One of the virtues of using Kontagent’s real-time platform is that developers can detect technical problems with code release errors or system issues almost instantly.

The company seems to be growing fast—Kontagent is now tracking over 100 million monthly active users and over 15 billion messages per month. Its monthly active user base by over 300% in the past 12 months and counts a number of well known game developers as clients, including EA, Sony, Ubisoft, Take2, THQ, Konami, Perfect World, Gaia and Tencent.

ProspX, developer of an on-demand search and sales collaboration platform for the commercial insurance industry, has scored $8 million round in Series B funding in a round led by Adams Capital Management and joined by HPI Real Estate Services and Investments. ProspX has now raised a total of $14.5 million. ProspX develops a SaaS platform that combines enterprise search, social networking, and sales collaboration technology to connect insurance agents, brokers, and carriers at the initial point of a business opportunity, as well as throughout the sales cycle.

Word leaked out last about cloud automation software maker DynamicOps raising $11.3 million last week, thanks to a pre-announcement SEC filing, but this morning the company confirmed the reports and offered more details. The Series B round of funding was led by Sierra Ventures, with Next World Capital participating, joining Credit Suisse's Next II venture group in ownership of the company.

Ajax.org is today introducing Cloud9 IDE, a fresh cloud-based development platform for JavaScript incorporating HTML5, and supporting Python, Ruby and PHP. The environment aims to enables developers to easily build, test, debug, and deploy Web and mobile applications with a minimum of technical skills and time required. If the name of the project (Cloud9 IDE) rings a bell, you may remember that it merged with Mozilla Skywriter, a Web-based framework for code editing, back in January 2010.

A couple of months ago, an SEC filing unveiled that Scott Lipsky, one of Amazon's first executives ever and later founder of aQuantive (acquired by Microsoft for a cool $6B) was up to something new.

His new startup, PhotoRocket, is all about ridiculously easy photo sharing from multiple devices, and it will be formally introducing its service at the DEMO conference later today.

I had a chat with Lipsky and PhotoRocket CEO (and former VP at Yahoo) Gary Roshak ahead of the launch presentation, and came impressed with the product and its potential.

You’d think photo sharing couldn’t be any easier than it has already become today, but you’d be wrong. What Photorocket does, or at least aims to do in the future, is basically obliterate the need to ever click an ‘upload’ button or email photos ever again.

Available for Mac, Windows and the iPhone (iPad and Android ‘coming soon’), PhotoRocket lets you easily share photos with friends and family in a closed circle, but also make it super simple to share photos on Facebook, Flickr, Shutterfly, Twitter and a bunch of other destinations, with more continually being added to the fray.

For sharing photos with individuals, PhotoRocket doesn’t require recipients to register or log in to view or download photos – although they can register if they’d like to spread photos on their own or purchase high-quality prints.

But where PhotoRocket really shines is how easy the service enables users to push photos found on the Web (right-click, select, done) and on your computer (right-click, select, done) to social networking and online photo sharing services with a minimum of friction.

The only small gripe I have is that there should be a number of basic editing capabilities baked into the product that would enable users to do things like cropping or resizing images before sharing, but I’m told some of those features will be included in future releases.

Give PhotoRocket a whirl and tell us what you think.

Citrix Systems recently established a Silicon Valley-based seed investment vehicle dubbed Startup Accelerator. Today, the fund is announcing its first investment (PDF) – Citrix has invested an undisclosed sum in Primadesk, which will be touting its wares later today at DEMO 2011.

The company basically aims to help users search, manage and backup their personal cloud data from multiple devices and browsers, using a single interface. A beta version of the Primadesk technology will be demonstrated later today, but you can sign up for access at some point in March right here.

Primadesk was founded in 2009 and lets users search their personal cloud data, access multiple emails in one interface, securely store passwords and login information, manage, drag-and-drop and backup online documents, photos and whatnot.

Primadesk is also the company behind Fotolink, which lets users drag and drop photos from their computers to Facebook and back, between Facebook albums and from friends’ albums and other photo services such as Flickr, Google Picasa and Smugmug to your Facebook albums.

The Citrix Startup Accelerator program provides companies with seed funding ($100k-$400k) but also business mentoring, office space and technical resources.





With the number of iOS apps now well over 300,000, app discovery is becoming an increasing frustration for users. It’s also become a major challenge for developers as the increasing number of apps is making it more and more difficult for them to attain exposure for their apps.

Now, straight from the “What Took So Long for Something Like This to be Released” department, mobile developer community site AppBoy has released an iOS app check-in SDK.

The SDK requires pretty simple integration. Once wired, users can check-in to apps in much the same manner they check-in to locations on Foursquare. Check-ins can be pushed out, of course, to Facebook and Twitter.

AppBoy included additional functionality that helps developers reward users in contests. Badges are available for most check-ins during a contest, for timing-based check-ins (for example, the 50th check-in past a certain hour), and for checks-ins closest to specified times.

Let’s just face it, being a geek girl on the Internet sucks. Even if you’re relatively smart and a woman your lot in online life is basically relegated to this unless you’re Oprah. My point is that there’s never really been a successful and lasting site targeted only to nerd girls (Village Voice Media’s* Heartless Doll tried to no avail until it entered the deadpool last May). Dan Abrams and the folks behind Mediaite are trying to break this curse, with today’s launch of  The Mary Sue.

Called The Mary Sue in an attempt to subvert traditional female “wish fulfillment” tropes, the new site has a staff of two — Former Geekosystem Associate Editor Susana Polo will be taking helm with the help of intern Jamie Frevele. Polo explains the motivation behind the site in her inaugural post, “Why A Geek Site For Women?”

“The only thing "women's" sites and magazines make me feel regularly is the distinct impression that I'm not in their demographic.  Even though I'm a woman.  Not coincidentally, this is frequently how I feel whenever a game advertisement or comic book cover assumes that I am male.  Even though I am a gamer/reader.”

Under Polo’s guidance, the editorial scope of the site will run the gamut from coding to girl gaming to “here’s a female scientist that’s done an amazing thing,” anything that’s interesting to the female demographic as well as geeks as a whole.  Polo tells TechCrunch, “There’s a perception on the Internet that if you’re a woman on the Internet people pay more attention to you. But revealing your gender on the Internet can open you up to a lot of annoyances.” No kidding.

Dan Abrams’ entire site network, which includes Mediaite, Styleite, Sportsgrid and Gossipcop, is seeing 9.8 million uniques monthly according to internal analytics and is aiming to bulk up those numbers with The Mary Sue. “Our reach is roughly that of a Slate or an Usmagazine.com, with only a fraction of the staff,” says Mediaite’s Andrew Cedotal. The network’s last/broader foray into geek culture, Geekosystem, is now averaging 1.4 million uniques and 3.5 million pageviews a month with a meager staff of three.

* My former employer.

You Californians sure seem obsessed with this "Oscar" thing. As I write these words, every one of my friends with a 9x zip code is dressed to the nines, snarking their way through one of the forty three billion Academy Awards parties taking place across the state.

I am not amongst them: partly because I am unforgivably late with this column, partly because I haven't seen any of the movies nominated for the major categories, and partly because watching Anne Hathaway and James Franco (pictured left) being funny is like watching a Chuck Lorre remake of Joanie Loves Chachi.

But that's not to say I don't love the Oscars. In fact I adore them. As an unabashed old media snob, nothing pleases me more than an annual reminder that Hollywood still exists. That, for all the ways Internet piracy has chipped away at the bottom line, billions of dollars still churn annually through an area of roughly 24 square miles. And that – forget Zuckerberg and Williams and Pincus – there is still an army of bona fide celebrities earning a crust simply from being glamourous and wonderful and radiant. You wouldn't catch Natalie Portman dead in an Addidas hoodie and a pair of flip flops.

(Speaking of Natalie Portman: if I were Nassim N. Taleb I'd tell my publishers to immediately re-release The Black Swan with a picture of a ballerina on the front. Fuck 'em.)

The spectacle of Oscar night has also prompted me to consider the received wisdom that one day the grand Hollywood dream will die. That piracy will finally claim victory over ticket and DVD sales and the only people able to continue making films will be children with Flipcams and indie documentary makers with trust funds (imagine a very tight Venn diagram). One day, we’re told, all entertainment will be free, and quality will be replaced by quantity: magazines by blogs, newspapers by tweets, movies by clips, stories by SEO. For those of us who care about storytelling and spectacle and five years of hard work for 120 minutes of screen time, it's a depressing future, but it's one we've been warned to expect for some time. Laugh it up, Hathaway, your days are numbered.

And. Yet.

There's no doubt old media is struggling: newspapers are shuttering, Borders and Blockbuster are screwed, movie attendance is down, people are cutting the cable cord — all that crap. But to assume all of those eyeballs are heading online for free content is just plain wrong. Yes, they're heading online, but increasingly they're continuing to spend: buying books on the Kindle (ebooks are now outselling paper books on Amazon), watching movies on Netflix (20 million members, paying at least $7.99 a month is no chump change) and now subscribing to newspaper and magazine apps on the iPad.

It's traditional at this point to give a personal example of the phenomenon, presented with enough availability bias chutzpah to suggest that the author's own experience must automatically be evidence of a trend. So here goes: yesterday I was in a Tiffani Thiessen mood (as I have been since 1996) and went to Hulu to catch up on the current season of White Collar. My God, I love that show. I watched the previous season entirely for free that way, gladly tolerating the "limited commercial interruption" between acts. This time though: no such luck. Episodes are only available 30 days after their original airing. I was outraged. 30 days! I demand satisfaction immediately!

Of course what I could have done at this point – and what experts in digital native behaviour tells us we all do – is to spend twenty minutes trawling the free web for a torrent of each episode, and then maybe another hour downloading them.

But that's not what I did. What I did, and what any grown up with $1.99 to their name would do in the same situation, is to head over to Amazon and plunk down two bucks to watch the current episode on demand. And then another $1.99 to watch the previous episode, and then another $1.99 to… yeah, I know, I should have bought a season pass.

The point is this: both actual and anecdotal evidence tells the same story: paid content is not dead. In fact, it’s making a serious comeback.

Most adults do not want to steal intellectual property if there's an affordable alternative to doing so. As producers of content get smarter; knowing how much to give away for free, settling on impulse price points, streamlining purchasing down to a single click, it becomes easier and easier for those adults not to steal.

Ease of payment is only part of the equation though. The real sea change in our willingness to pay for content has come as a result of dedicated devices – Kindle, iPad, TiVo – that offer a significantly improved media viewing experience to a laptop screen and a built in payment method that's quicker and easier than stealing. It's simply easier for me to pay to read the Economist on my iPad than it is to read it for free on the web. Likewise it’s increasingly more straightforward for me to buy books on my Kindle and Fight Club and movies on my iPad than it is to steal either.

Meanwhile free web content continues its race to the bottom: companies like Demand Media, Associated Content and – yeah – Aol have dropped any pretense of quality journalism in favour of churning out page after page of SEO horseshit. Previously austere publications like Forbes Digital (as was) have turned into link-grabby collaborative blogs. To survive online, newspapers have replaced text with slideshows, news with gossip. It’s no wonder those who produce content that requires more than a ten second attention span – book publishers, movie and tv studios – are fleeing to the safer ground of dedicated devices.

The truth is that the grand idea of the web as a content platform has failed. To make money on a web it’s all about grabbing more and more eyeballs to compensate for plummeting CPMs. On that web there's no place for quality, and in five years time we'll see the medium for what it really is: a brilliant advertising platform, and very little else. The web continue to be the perfect place to seed clips from TV shows and movies, in order to drive purchases on other platforms. It'll still be a fantastic way to promote Kindle book sales by giving away free chapters and hosting author blogs. It'll remain a wonderful way for news organisations to build their brands through free content, in order to drive subscriptions to iPad apps. And a great way for blogs like TechCrunch to build "mindshare" that allows us to host successful conferences. But as a standalone medium? The web? In five years? Forget it.

But I won't care – I'll have long abandoned the web for my entertainment needs, as will anyone else with even a modest amount of disposable income, a dedicated media device or two and a hankering for the uninterrupted pleasure of watching a good story, told magnificently with nary a hint of SEO.

And with that thought, a text arrives from an Oscar-watching friend. Natalie Portman has won the Best Actress Oscar for Black Swan. Apparently the poor thing is crying.

Don't worry Natalie, dear – it's all going to be fine.

Despite losing Best Picture to The King’s Speech, Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s epic Facebook creation myth The Social Network did pick up three Oscars tonight, more than any film about nerds has ever garnered, unless you count A Beautiful Mind. The Social Network won Best Film Editing (Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter), Best Original Score (Trent Reznor) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin) at tonight’s 83rd Academy Awards Ceremony.

The film, which picked up four awards including Best Picture at the Golden Globes and was nominated for eight Oscars, was definitely the Twitter and tech crowd favorite but apparently not the Academy’s.

We did indeed have something to to root for despite David Fincher losing to The King’s Speech’s Tom Hooper for Best Director, Jesse Eisenberg (who played Mark Zuckerberg) also losing to the very-deserving Colin Firth in the Best Actor category, and the film itself losing to The King’s Speech in the most important category of the night, Best Picture. The King’s Speech, with twelve nominees and four wins, was perhaps the “biggest dog in this fight,” to borrow a term from the film.

Traditionally the Best Editing award is usually an indicator of what film will win Best Picture (only nine films have taken the coveted Best Picture award without winning Best Editing) but that rule didn’t hold in this case. Both Inception and The King’s Speech beat The Social Network at sheer amount of awards won, at four to The Social Network’s three.

Here’s the full list of what The Social Network won, what it was nominated for and who it was up against, via Slashfilm (Bold = Winner).

BEST PICTURE:
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King's Speech
127 Hours
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter's Bone

DIRECTING:
Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan
David O. Russell, The Fighter
Tom Hooper, The King's Speech
David Fincher, The Social Network
Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE:
Javier Bardem, Biutiful
Jeff Bridges, True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Colin Firth, The King's Speech
James Franco, 127 Hours

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:
127 Hours (Fox Searchlight), Screenplay by Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy
The Social Network (Sony Pictures Releasing), Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin
Toy Story 3 (Walt Disney), Screenplay by Michael Arndt. Story by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich
True Grit (Paramount), Written for the screen by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Winter's Bone (Roadside Attractions), Adapted for the screen by Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini

CINEMATOGRAPHY:
Black Swan (Fox Searchlight) Matthew Libatique
Inception (Warner Bros.) Wally Pfister
The King's Speech (The Weinstein Company) Danny Cohen
The Social Network (Sony Pictures Releasing) Jeff Cronenweth
True Grit (Paramount) Roger Deakins

FILM EDITING:
Black Swan (Fox Searchlight) Andrew Weisblum
The Fighter Paramount Pamela Martin
The King's Speech (The Weinstein Company) Tariq Anwar
127 Hours (Fox Searchlight) Jon Harris
The Social Network (Sony Pictures Releasing) Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter

ORIGINAL SCORE:
How to Train Your Dragon (Paramount) John Powell
Inception (Warner Bros.) Hans Zimmer
The King's Speech (The Weinstein Company) Alexandre Desplat
127 Hours (Fox Searchlight) A.R. Rahman
The Social Network (Sony Pictures Releasing) Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

SOUND MIXING
Inception, Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo and Ed Novick
The King's Speech, Paul Hamblin, Martin Jensen and John Midgley
Salt, Jeffrey J. Haboush, Greg P. Russell, Scott Millan and William Sarokin
The Social Network, Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick and Mark Weingarten
True Grit, Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter F. Kurland

AT&T is betting big on location-based shopping alerts through a partnership with Placecast. AT&T is debuting a branded ShopAlerts service, which will deliver special offers and discounts to consumers via their mobile phones when they are near a participating store or brand (initial brands include HP, KMart, and JetBlue).

The program is currently available to AT&T customers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco who have opted-in to receive Shop Alerts, but AT&T plans to roll the program out nationally by summertime and increase the number of participating brands.

All of this is powered by Placecast’s ShopAlerts, which are location-triggered mobile text messages sent from brands to consumers. Consumers can opt-in to receiving text messages in a variety of ways—at the store, online, via text-message, mobile websites or on Facebook.

Once the technology has been activated, consumers will be alerted when they are near a location that they are interested in or when the brand is offering sales and specials. ShopAlerts' technology uses "geo-fences," which are virtual boundaries that can be targeted via location-based marketing. Retailers can customize alerts to fit their brand and strategy.

This isn’t the first large-scale deal for Placecast. The company recently partnered with European carrier O2 to enable geo-fence marketing campaigns for a number of brands for the carrier’s users. And Placecast has licensed ShopAlerts to a number of retail partners, including American Eagle Outfitters and the North Face.

Lots and lots of buzz today in all the major newspapers about how J.P. Morgan is trying to buy 10% or so of Twitter for $450 million.

As far as I can tell, all of the stories are wrong. In particular, say my sources, Twitter isn’t negotiating with anyone – J.P. Morgan or otherwise – about a new funding round. The last round with Kleiner Perkins seems to have more than satisfied their near term capital appetite. Also, J.P. Morgan isn’t currently trying to buy Twitter shares through the secondary market, either, say my sources. That’s because they already indirectly own 10% of Twitter.

Here’s what’s really going on, as far as I can tell from sources:

J.P. Morgan owns no Twitter shares directly. They have, however, committed the bulk of capital in a secretive new $1+ billion fund by angel investor Chris Sacca. Over the last several months, that fund has acquired around $400 million in Twitter stock from current shareholders, at prices ranging from $16 – $21/share. At $21/share, that implies a Twitter valuation of $4.5 billion.

That fund is now the second largest shareholder of Twitter, say our sources. Cofounder Evan Williams is the largest shareholder.

Who’s sold all that stock to Sacca? They bought $100 million from Williams, sources say, beating out General Atlantic in a bidding war for the shares. Early investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital make up most of the remaining $300 million, as well as some other employees.

Of note, the recent $80 million Twitter stock purchase by Andreessen Horowitz was actually done through a rival fund controlled by angel investor Ron Conway.

The fund still has some $700 million in fresh capital to spend, and it’s clearly aiming at investing in other companies, too. They’ve expressed interest in buying shares in Facebook, Zynga and other companies, we’ve heard. That makes them a very real competitive fund to DST, which has purchased primary and secondary shares in Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon to date.

Founded by Rich Morrison and Jud Gardner, Y-Combinator backed Comprehend Systems is launching the first iteration of its comprehensible data analysis platform today, Comprehend Clinical. Comprehend Clinical’s browser friendly interface allows its clients to analyze the results of clinical drug trials across multiple data sources, combining those stored in diverse data structures and databases.

In the same space as Sas Institute and Pitco, Comprehend Clinical attempts to empower people bringing drugs to market to “ask the questions they need to ask.” When you’re dealing with lengthly drug studies you need to know whether the drug is safe and effective, and whether people are dying as a soon as possible. “A clinical study lasts four years, and who uses software that’s seven years old?  By default you’re going to have to interface a lot of stuff,” says founder Rich Morrison.

Comprehend’s customizable dashboards provide easily downloadable data visualizations and reports. The service also allows you to view data analysis in realtime and perform drill down data queries. Comprehend plans on monetizing through direct enterprise sales, charging companies per Comprehend user.

Morrison and Gardner decided to go into pharma because of their familiarity with the space (Rich was at Integrated Clinical Systems and Jud was a pharmaceutical consultant before they built Comprehend). The industry also seemed ideal for what they were attempting to accomplish because of its overreliance on multiple data sets and different storage formats. The founders plan on expanding to other verticals like inventory management and utility automation sometime in the near future.

The folks over at online analysis service Meltwater, who Wired’s Epicenter hilariously called out for not doing so hot at predicting the The Grammys, have once again tried to use “chatter in social media” or whatever the hell that means to predict who will win the 83rd Annual Academy Awards tonight. Their call? The King’s Speech, followed by Inception for Best Picture, James Franco followed by Colin Firth for Best Actor and Natalie Portman by a landslide for Best Actress, trailed by Nicole Kidman.

Meanwhile over at Mashable we’ve got another infographic bet on Inception winning for Best Picture, followed by The Social Network, James Franco as Best Actor, followed by Colin Firth, Natalie Portman (our only consensus) as leading actress followed by Nicole Kidman, Christian Bale as Supporting Actor, followed by Geoffry Rush, Helena Bonham Carter as Supporting Actress and David Fincher as Best Director for The Social Network, followed by Tom Hooper from The King’s Speech.

And while there are countless others, where would a discussion about infographics be without a check-in with the ambitious Online Schools who should give up on whatever they do and just go into the infographics business altogether have made an Oscar’s “Cheat Sheet” based on critics pics (which surely should be worth more than social media reach). Critics favored The Kings Speech, followed by The Social Network for Best Picture, David Fincher followed by Tom Hooper for Best Director, Colin Firth for Best Actor and Natalie Portman for Best Actress and so on and so forth

In my opinion anything on a infographic should be taken with a grain of salt, but especially an infographic about Facebook and Twitter shares predicting winners. This kind of analysis will always fail to take things into account like how James Franco might have gotten more social media mentions because aside from being a nominee, he is also the show’s host (I’m rooting for you Colin Firth!). Anyways, I’m pretty sure a majority of the Academy’s 5,755 voting members are not on Twitter and aren’t using a “social buzz” as a deciding factor.

You really want a heads up as to who the real Oscar winner will be? Check out this informative infographic about the price of Oscars media buys.

In February of 2007, 83.24 percent of users visiting TechCrunch did so from a Windows machine. One year later, in February 2008, the stranglehold remained firm at 80.44 percent. In February 2009, the number was at 74.04 percent. Last year, it was 61.59 percent. And this year? The number of people visiting our site from Windows machines dipped to 53.84 percent.

The writing is on the wall.

Look at those numbers again for a second. In four years, Windows share among TechCrunch readers has fallen 30 percentage points. That’s incredible.

The knee-jerk reaction in the comment section will likely be something like “it’s because you guys cover Apple so much”. But the fact of the matter is that Macintosh share, after rising for three of those four years, fell last year as well. It’s the mobile devices — specifically the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices — that are eating away at Windows.

In fact, if the trend over the past four years continues at about the same pace, in two years, devices made by Apple (Macs, iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads) will surpass devices that run Windows as the top visitors to TechCrunch. And depending on how popular the iPad 2, iPhone 5, and OS X Lion are, it could easily happen next year.

Here are the broken down numbers:

Feb 2007

• Windows: 83.24%
• Mac: 13.59%
• Linux: 2.51%

Feb 2008

• Windows: 80.44%
• Mac: 15.15%
• Linux: 2.97%
• iPhone: 0.77%
• iPod: 0.15%

Feb 2009

• Windows: 74.04%
• Mac: 20.48%
• Linux: 3.01%
• iPhone: 1.60%
• iPod: 0.28%
• Android: 0.09%

Feb 2010

• Windows: 61.59%
• Mac: 28.62%
• iPhone: 4.07%
• Linux: 3.49%
• Android: 0.87%
• iPod: 0.53%

Feb 2011

• Windows: 53.84%
• Mac: 27.64%
• iPhone: 6.72%
• iPad: 3.44%
• Linux: 3.28%
• Android: 3.06%
• iPod: 0.62%

While even the last batch of stats shows that Windows still has a nice cushion over number two, Mac, if you add the Apple products put together, it’s a different story.

• Feb 2007: 13.59% Apple products
• Feb 2008: 16.07% Apple products
• Feb 2009: 22.36% Apple products
• Feb 2010: 33.22% Apple products
• Feb 2011: 38.42% Apple products

In the four year span, Apple has added 25 percentage points to their share among TechCrunch readers. That nearly all of the 30 percentage points that Windows lost in that same span (Android’s growth pretty much fills in the rest).

So it currently stands at Microsoft’s 53.84 percent versus Apple’s 38.42 percent. Again, a big year for iPad, iPhone, and Mac could mean a changing of the guard as soon as next year. But unless something drastic changes, you can be sure that Apple will be dominant among TechCrunch readers in two years.

The latest rumors have Windows 8 showing up sometime in mid/late 2012. But the fact of the matter is that Windows 7, much more widely praised than the disaster that was Vista, hasn’t helped Microsoft buck this trend among our readers. Perhaps they’re only hope of gaining back share at this point is Windows Phone. So far, that hasn’t been going too well. Nokia should help that, but will it be enough to offset the Windows losses?

Humorously, Microsoft’s best hope for not falling to Apple may well be Android. If Google’s platform continues to make gains, it could prolong Apple passing Microsoft.

But again, Apple has iPhone 5, iPad 2, and OS X Lion on the immediate horizon — all within the next few months. And then there’s the very real possibility of another iPad in the fall.

The iPad 2 and iPhone 5 are likely to push the Apple share forward immediately. But don’t sleep on OS X Lion either. The early indications are that Apple has indeed made it much more iOS-like. That means millions of iPad/iPhone/iPod touch owners who have traditionally been PC users, are going to feel a lot more comfortable on a Mac than ever before.

And a new PC-to-Mac data migration system built in to Lion will only help that.

OS X Lion is going to feed off of iOS users, and vice versa. And the Mac ecosystem is going to continue to expand. Just as happened in the browser world with Chrome taking over, a transition is happening among TechCrunch readers in the ecosystem space. The numbers don’t lie. And Microsoft better pray that our readers aren’t leading indicators of overall trends in the space — which is exactly what you have been in the past.

I was in the air an average of 30 hours a month for the last two years, so I watched a lot of movies — typically semi-delirious on Ambien– that I wouldn’t ordinarily. One of those was the star-studded rom-com “He’s Just Not That Into You.” Note: You won’t see this movie at the Oscars tonight, or any night, and that’s not because it was cruelly overlooked. But as a plane movie, it sufficed.

I’m assuming most TechCrunch readers are far to Y-chromosomey to have seen it or even admit they’ve seen it, so I’ll fill you in on the thrust of the film. Like most things in life, the simplest explanation is usually the right one: If a guy doesn’t call, he didn’t lose your number, he isn’t away on business in Yemin, he wasn’t kidnapped and held at gunpoint– he just didn’t want to call you. All these fairy-tale stories that lonely girls thrive on about how the jerky guy one day woke up and realized how great you are may have happened to somebody, sometime, but that person was the exception, not the rule.

The somewhat cold message of the film is that you shouldn’t live your life assuming you are the exception. (Of course as rom-coms go, the main character does end up being the exception, undercutting the wisdom of the point. But for the purposes of real life, let’s pretend she didn’t and moved on to someone else.)

Believe it or not, this movie came up in conversation at a dinner party in Silicon Valley the other night. The conversation was about the impact of the over-the-top valuations of Facebook, Groupon, Zynga and Twitter. While there’s a lot of hand-wringing about how crazy these prices are– they’re not reminiscent of the bubble for several obvious reasons. In the late 1990s hundreds of companies were going public at multi-billion dollar valuations in less than a year of operation without revenues. In contrast, we’re talking about four companies, who are still private, mostly raising private funds at these crazy prices, and who — other than Twitter– have very substantial revenues and sharp growth rates. We can argue whether Facebook should be worth $10 billion or $30 billion instead of the recent $70 billion, but no one is arguing that a shift in the stock market would force the company to file bankruptcy and go out of business. That is what happened in 2000. Indeed, Facebook’s valuation grew during the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

But the venture capitalist sitting next to me argued that there is one legitimate gripe with these four companies’ prices: Every startup wrongly assumes these four companies are the new rule, and not the exception.

Similarly, every company that says they have no idea how they’ll make money – but that’s ok because Google didn’t either – is confusing the exception with the rule. And likewise, Fred Wilson’s post this week that great companies with great products– like Zynga– don’t need marketing is confusing the exception with the rule. Wilson is right, if he’s talking about the exception. The uproar over the post was because most startups are the rule. In fact, most of the debates you see amid VCs and Super Angels boil down to this distinction: One group is trying to fund only exceptions, the other accepts it’ll probably mostly fund the rule. Recently, a startup came to pitch me that refused to give me any details about its market traction, users or growth– even off the record. When I asked why we should consider the company newsworthy without any information to show the product was well-received, the founder answered, “Well, Quora doesn’t have to give user numbers and TechCrunch writes about them all the time.” Yes, I said, but you aren’t Quora.

Unfortunately the inverse of these exceptions aren’t true: Just because you don’t spend money on marketing doesn’t mean you are a great startup, just because you’re planning on spending two years building a product before you generate revenue doesn’t mean you’ll be the next Google and just because you’re a consumer Web company at this moment in time, doesn’t mean you deserve an outrageous valuation just because Facebook, Groupon, Zynga and Twitter got them.

The economics of venture capital are based on finding the exceptions, but there are typically only a handful in every cycle. The cold truth is it’s binary: You are huge or you are the rest, and there are typically at least four zeros between a number one player, and a number two player. And in the consumer Web, you typically know early on which camp you’re in. Facebook’s valuations have been considered ridiculously outsized since Accel gave it a $100 million valuation.

This isn’t to say there aren’t great successes, millions made and worthy products that come out of companies that are the rule. I’d put TechCrunch in that camp. We weren’t worth a billion dollars, and we probably have made far more money for other people than we ever made ourselves. I’m insanely proud to have been a small part of it. But while great entrepreneurs are dreamers, they’ve always got a foot firmly planted in reality. It’s important to know what camp you’re in, before you burn bridges, pick the wrong partners simply for a higher valuation or get seduced to start a company for the wrong reasons.

For any retailer that is selling goods online, it is incredibly important to be able to retain customers and identify when purchasers are about to leave a site. While many online retailers and companies develop these analytics in house, there is a need for a simple application that smaller shops can use to determine behavior of visitors. Today, Y Combinator-backed Custora is launching a SaaS that tells online retailers and web apps which of their customers are most valuable, and suggests actions to keep them.

The startup is best described by its tagline: “Google brings you customers. We keep them around.” For retailers, the software can analyze order logs and distinguish between customers that simply haven’t ordered anything for a while, and customers who have left the site. The application also manages and optimizes email campaigns to keep customers engaged.

For example, Custora will automate the process of sending emails to customers who are in danger of leaving a retailer’s site, or will send emails to customers who are repeat purchasers. Custora determines where the repeat customers are coming from and will also recommend specific incentives the retailer can use to reclaim lost customers.

In addition to retailers, Custora is being used for SaaS providers with freemium offerings as well. These clients are using the software to determine which users are most likely to convert to paid options and what kind of incentive would make them convert to a premium level. For example, Salesforce.com, Foodzie and GetSatisfaction are using Custora in-house.

For now, Custora’s platform optimizes customer retention with email campaigns but the company plans to add new technologies in the future. It seems like for any retailer or SaaS company, using Custora to prevent customer churn is a no-brainer.