One of my big predictions for 2011 is that we are going to start to see open databases for places spring up and take hold. Hyperpublic, which just launched today, is doing just that by creating an open database of people, places, and things tied to specific locations. “We are trying to structure the data in your local world,” says CEO and founder Jordan Cooper, who is also a partner at Lerer Ventures. In the video above, he gives me a quick demo of the service.

Hyperpublic has raised a $1.2 million seed round from Lerer Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, RRE Ventures, NextView Ventures, Hudson River Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Softbank.

You can upload any “object” to Hyperpublic as long as it has geo-coordinates. An object is simply a picture with tags and a location. These could be a restaurant on Second Avenue in New York City, used ski boots for sale on the Upper East Side, or a startup founder (with the location being where he works). The site was seeded with about 2,000 objects in New York City and San Francisco, and now anyone can populate it. Objects can be added via the website or simply by snapping a picture on your cell phone and emailing it to add@hyperpublic.com once you have an account set up.

The idea is that you can set your location and then search for things around you. You can filter by places, people, or things, set the radius of your search, or search by tags. If you recognize someone you can send them a message, or clip any object to save it in your own collection.

The point of Hyperpublic is to “capture local experience, organize it, and display it,” says Jordan. He thinks of it as capturing the last mile of data on local objects—not just places, but things inside places. Stores and merchants could use it to show their products for sale. If you are looking for men’s suits within a 10-block radius, and enough stores or shoppers had uploaded and tagged suits in nearby stores, you could search for suits in the vicinity and see what was available as one example.

“People are going to start using the camera on this phone for utility instead of aesthetic value,” predicts Cooper. “More and more it will be used to capture information, and support their memory.” The success of Evernote supports that theory, but Hyperpublic wants to build a foundation for hundreds more apps like that.

The site today is step 1. Once the database begins to fill up, Jordan wants to open it up to anyone who wants to use it to pull data into other apps. Once the database is exposed via an API, Hyperpublic will join other location databases such as those from SimpleGeo and Factual as a resource for developers.

Zynga’s CityVille hit 100 million monthly players – making it the largest Facebook application ever – just a little over a month after launching in December 2010.

We’ve noted that Facebook execs (including Mark Zuckerberg), Google execs and others are playing, and playing long enough that it doesn’t just look like they’re sniffing around. Kleiner Perkins partner and former Chief Creative Officer of Electronic Arts Bing Gordon maxed out at level 60 early on.

Zynga added more levels today, though. The new maximum is 80 levels, and Gordon surged to level 67.

Think it’s all nonsense? It is. But it’s extremely profitable nonsense. Zynga, which uses Facebook credits for payments, is rumored to be paying at least $30 million a month to Facebook for their 30% cut.

Not too shabby for a SimCity knockoff.

Wanderfly, an intelligent travel recommendation search engine, has raised $1 million in new funding from Charles River Ventures, Jason Calacanis, StartupAngel, James Baile, Roger Dickey and other angel investors.

Wanderfly’s search engine allows you to enter a number of parameters, such as date, where you are traveling from, budget per person, areas of interest (food, luxury, family, outdoors, etc.) and specific destination and will then recommend destinations that match your preferences. The site will present you with an actual geographic destination, offer suggested flights, and hotels and suggest sample activities and restaurants.

Beyond glossy photos and an easy-to-use UI, what makes Wanderfly compelling is that it adds a more personalized experience to booking travel. And it streamlines activity planning into developing an itinerary for a trip or vacation.

And since its launch last October, Wanderfly has served more than a half million trips to users in nearly 200 countries. Wanderfly has also signed partnerships with Hotels.com to power its hotel search; Kayak to suggest airfare options, Quintessentially to offer custom concierge packages; and Business Traveler magazine to augment content. The startup is also planning to partner with Jetsetter to supplement hotel offerings with luxury vacations.

Wanderfly says that the new funding will be used towards adding more social functionality to personalize the online travel experience, forming additional strategic partnerships and syndicating Wanderfly’s technology on partner sites.

Website creation service provider Webs has acquired Pagemodo, which enables businesses and individuals to create great-looking Facebook Pages, TechCrunch has learned.

The news comes a couple of months after Webs added another relevant app, lightweight CRM tool ContactMe, to its suite of solutions designed to help small businesses develop an online presence across Web, social and mobile platforms.

Pagemodo enables small business owners to design their own custom Facebook pages using its Pagebuilder product, free of charge.

The products fits into Webs’ existing suite of products nicely – the company has long provided small business owners with tools to build and manage their own websites.

Pagemodo was founded by two Danish entrepreneurs, Thomas Kjeldgaard and Jakob Lykkegaard. To date, over 60,000 small businesses have signed up with Pagemodo and have published over 100,000 custom Facebook pages. The company claims 1.2 million Facebook users view a Facebook page powered by Pagemodo every month.

Webs now plans to enhance the Pagemodo service and offer it to the millions of small businesses that already use its products to create websites.

Founded in 2001 by the Mokhtarzada brothers, Webs has raised $23 million in funding from Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Columbia Capital.

Exclusive - Offermobi, a startup that debuted the first performance marketing network for mobile advertising campaigns in the United States, has raised $1 million in funding. The capital comes from New York-based ARC Angel Fund and some of its limited partners.

According to the fledgling company, the money will be used to bring on new hires in the areas of business development and affiliate management.

In addition, resources will be devoted to the launch of mobile offers in new vertical markets for the company, including finance and entertainment.

Launched back in April 2010, the Offermobi model is based entirely on performance and not the traditional CPC or CPM models that have defined the mobile ad network for the past decade. Advertisers that partner with Offermobi pay only for an action that they want end users to take, such as generating a lead, an SMS list opt-in, connecting to a call center, etc.

The company has attracted some 8,500 publishers and more than 60 mobile advertisers since its launch. Offermobi says it currently counts over 3 million ad clicks, with offers running across 650 million ad impressions, on a monthly basis.

Start your laser beams, it’s time to turn into a robot.

No, seriously. After years of development Anybots, the startup that builds remote-controlled roving robots, is shipping its first devices to consumers. Customers who pre-ordered their robots will start getting their orders this week, and Anybots will begin filling orders placed today in March.

If you haven’t heard of or seen an Anybot before, check out the video below, which we shot last summer in at TechCrunch headquarters. In it, our own Michael Arrington takes control of one of the robots and explores its features — he drives it around the office, runs into my legs a few times (the robot has a gentle touch because of its object avoidance system) and shoots his low-power laser beam at one of Anybots’ lead engineers.

Of course, most people who use Anybots will probably have more serious matters to attend to. The robots are designed to allow executives and employees to wander around their workplaces remotely, and it comes equipped with both two-way video and audio so you can hold conversations with coworkers. The units can be controlled by multiple people (not at the same time, obviously), so you can have different employees popping in and out of the robot all day long.

At $15,000 per unit this isn’t a toy — but it’s still pretty damn fun, and it’s one of those things that makes you remember we’re living in the future. Also, you’ll be in good company: DST’s Yuri Milner used an Anybot to remotely announce the $150,000 investment he and SV Angel will be making in every Y Combinator company.

Cause marketing is taking off, with social networks like Facebook and Twitter providing the fuel, and companies are repositioning themselves to take advantage of these new marketing dollars. Peter Jackson, A silicon Valley veteran who was the CEO of Granite Systems and Intraware in the 1990s and sits on Eventbrite’s board, is putting on his CEO hat again to take the reigns at the Experience Project. The company, which also runs Twitcause and Broadcause, is in the midst of raising $2 million from D.E. Shaw and other investors.

The Experience Project is a niche site that draws a loyal 4.5 million people a month who talk about their life experiences in 300,000 different groups. It started out as a place for MS patients to share what they are going through with each other, but soon expanded to every imaginable type of group from health and education to hobbies and relationships. Typical groups things like I Want To Be More Green or I Love Weird Movies. The site also attracts its fair share of adult content that Jackson wants to clean up.

But the core audience of the Experience Project are people who care deeply about a particular topic and want to share their experiences with others in a place where they can make emotional connections. The site feeds into Twitcause, which alerts followers about new causes, and more recently Broadcause.

Broadcause is really the future of the company. It just rolled out a redesign today (see screenshot below). Broadcause features one cause a week and tries to spread word on Twitter (through Twitcause), the Experience Project, and Facebook. It uses social channels to spread awareness of different causes, and brand marketers who want to align with those causes pay to sponsor different campaigns.

American Express recently used Broadcause to promote its Members Project, and Broadcause was able to generate nearly 5,000 retweets. While that may not sound like a lot, it is more than ten times as much as Ellen DeGeneres, who also supported the cause on Twitter, was able to generate. It was able to do this despite having only one tenth as many followers as DeGeneres, who has 5.7 million followers on Twitter versus 564,000 for Twitcause.

Jackson wants to build out better tools for cause marketers to launch and measure their campaigns. If cause marketing keeps growing, it could be a good bet. If it turns into a fad, well, I’m sure there will be a group bemoaning its loss on the Experience Project.

Fon, the WiFi network company backed by Google and Skype, says you can find 3.35 million Fon hotspots all across the globe these days. That's impressive growth, which comes down to more to 200 percent year-over-year. Last time Fon shared numbers, the company revealed that it tracked 2.5 million hotspots (this was in October 2010). Clearly, growth is accelerating for the company, in large part thanks to distribution partnerships it has struck with telecommunication companies all over the world. Fon also reveals that they've ended 2010 with revenues of €28 million, up from €5 million the year before, growth it attributes to the surge in use of WiFi devices worldwide.

If there’s one problem with any fitness, wellness, musical instrument training, or spiritual regimen, it’s backsliding. Not every rebirth and renewal can be like the boat repair scene in Summer Rental where John Candy and his kids help get Scully’s boat seaworthy in time for the big race against the nasty Mr. Pellet while 80s music plays in syncopation with their on-screen antics. Real life doesn’t work like a Carl Reiner picture, and that’s a problem.

To solve it, we have Fitango, a fairly unique take on the old “I’ll pay you to make me do something” transaction popular with personal trainers and the one dude who puts up fliers all over town advertising guitar lessons (there’s one in every town). Fitango allows you to buy life plans for yourself including scheduled work-outs, music lesson plans, and language training. You perform one task per day – “Play Banjo for an hour,” for example – and then rate how you felt afterwards. This feedback loop is further reinforced by reminders and the fact that you actually pay for some of these. Things you pay for, you see, you tend to use.

The services offers a number of exciting plans including a 17 day detox plan that presumably forces you to bury yourself in Utah caves for all eternity and a 52 week wine tasting plan that I feel I could potentially get behind. Some of the plans are free and some cost between $1.99 and $5.99.

The main thrust of the site is the breakdown of various difficult tasks into easily manageable sub-tasks and if you’re thinking of doing a half-marathon or planning on becoming a vegan, this could be a considerable help. The site is pretty dead right now and the focus seems to be on health, although I could definitely see this as being useful for more intellectually rigorous endeavors including programming lessons and learning to draw. The framework seems to be there, but the content is a little lacking.

The site is hitting about 50,000 users monthly and they are currently working on a mobile app that will bring your plans to your smartphone. You can check it out here.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my 36-year “Becoming Abhorrently Lazy and Grotesquely Obese” plan.

Start to finish party planning site Punchbowl is taking its platform mobile today with the launch of an iPhone app and a new mobile site for smartphones.

Punchbowl’s platform allows users to create beautiful online invitations and track RSVPs. The startup also provides tools that let you find supplies, organize an after party and even set a date, via an algorithm that recommends the best date for your party. The site also allows you to set up gift registries, save-the-dates, message boards, integrate Google Maps' to display the location, and share comments, photos, and videos.

Via both the iPhone app and the mobile site, party hosts can view their guest list, invite new guests, check their Potluck and To Do lists, and see guest comments on their Message Board. And the app will use a host's location to provide a list of local party vendors in their area.

Punchbowl, which recently acquired party planning site Socializr, has grown to one million registered users over the past three years.

Exclusive – Fotolia, a major online marketplace for royalty-free stock photos, has invested in stock music and sound effects site AudioMicro, TechCrunch has learned.

Fotolia, itself massively backed by private equity firm TA Associates, has injected $750,000 into AudioMicro along with previous backers DFJ Frontier and an angel investor.

Fotolia also owns Flixtime.com, a site that turns photos into videos, and subscription photo service Photoxpress.com, we should note.

Oleg Tscheltzoff, co-founder and chief exec of Fotolia, has joined AudioMicro's board of directors in conjunction with the investment.

AudioMicro and Fotolia plan to incubate several new projects targeted at specific new content licensing verticals, four of which will be launched by the end of this month according to the information we’ve received. The companies will also collaborate by cross-promoting products and services to their existing customers.

If you’d like to check out AudioMicro yourself, you can use the special promo code “2TechCrunch” while signing up to receive 2 free credits.

Be quick, this is only for the first 500 TechCrunch readers.

Toronto-based ad targeting startup Chango has raised $4.25 million in new funding led by Rho Canada, with iNovia Capital, Metamorphic Ventures, Extreme Venture Partners and 24/7 Media co-founder, Geoff Judge; participating in the round. This brings Chango’s total funding to nearly $6 million.

Founded by Chris Sukornyk, Chango is an ad platform that targets display ads based on people’s previous search history. Unlike other ad retargeters who show ads to people based on the fact that they have visited a particular Website, Chango targets ads based on the searches those people have done in the past.

How does Chango accomplish this? The startup buys browser cookie data from data exchanges, toolbar companies, and vertical comparison shopping sites. When you click through to a site from a search engine, that site captures the referral data, along with the search terms that brought you there. Sites often resell this data along with identifying cookies. When you show up at a site with Chango ads, it matches the cookie on your browser with what it knows about your search history and tries to serve up relevant display ads.

Sukornyk is a serial entrepreneur, previously co-founding the X-Stream Network (a free ISP in Europe sold to LibertySurf for $75 million), Bubbleshare (photo-sharing site sold to Kaboose for a couple million dollars, and then deadpooled), and FiveLimes (a green shopping site sold to Avid Life Media, which now appears to be defunct).

Social calendaring service Mixin will soon be no more. In an email to its users, the Swiss startup has announced that the service, which was launched back in 2008, will be unceremoniously shut down on the 18th of February due to lack of significant revenues.

All data will be deleted, although users are given the opportunity to export their current agenda items.

We’re putting Mixin in the deadpool, although the team is still happy to talk to potential buyers. You can find out how to contact them, should you be interested, in the email.

Dear mixin user,

Just letting you know that mixin will close on the 18th of February. We’d like to thank you for your support since we launched the product in 2008.

Why?

To be very transparent, although the product received a warm welcome when we launched, we’ve found it hard to generate sufficient revenue to operate the business.

We know you really liked our many features. We also got a lot of interest in our offer for professionals, but even with this we have to step down.

What's next for mixin?

mixin is for sale, the complete django-facebook-twitter platform with all brands and domains (mixin.com, mix.in). If you have any idea who could be interested or are interested yourself, please send us an email to mixinisforsale@gmail.com

What's next for you?

Don't worry, we will delete all agendas when we shut down the service. In between if you want to extract your current events, go to your agenda and click on "subscribe to your feeds" to view all export options. If you like the idea of social agenda and want to continue using a good one, we invite you to use the great Plancast from our friend Mark.

All the best for 2011,
The mixin team

Social networks and games go well together, for obvious reasons. Quepasa, the popular social network for the Latino community, emphasizes this once more with its acquisition of XtFt Games, owner of a Brazil-based social game development studio dubbed TechFront.

Founded in 2006 as a developer of multi-platform console, Web and mobile games, TechFront originally started developing social games for Orkut in 2010, in partnership with various international publishers, including U.S.-based eGames.

John Abbott, CEO of Quepasa, says the addition of the game studio’s 41 developers will provide the social networking company with the means to offer and monetize culturally relevant social games to not only its own community, but also other audience networks like Orkut and Facebook and eventually to mobile users across Latin America.

Quepasa will acquire XtFt Games for net consideration of approximately $4 million, comprised of $3.7 million in shares of Quepasa common stock and a $300,000 brokerage fee. XtFt’s key partners have also been offered option-based retention packages.

Quepasa says it now boasts more than 27 million registered users, and logged 184 million page views across its online network in December 2010.

Recyclebank — a loyalty rewards program that encourages people to lower the environmental impact of their lifestyles, for example, by recycling more and tossing less — introduced a redesigned website and mobile apps, and began offering new services to customers and partners on Monday.

Chief executive of Recyclebank, Jonathan Hsu, said some of the new features he’s excited about, include:

1. “Learn and earn” quizzes that give RecycleBank users a small number of redeemable points for correctly answering questions about ecology, energy and the like.

2. Local search capabilities, encouraging users to do more “green” things around their communities, or to buy from more green service providers and suppliers near their homes, for points.

3. Rewards from more local, small-to-medium sized businesses, so members can cash in points for a discount at a sustainable grocer or dry cleaner within their zip code, not just redeem points for freebies and discounts from large chains.

4. Facebook, Twitter and further mobile integrations that let RecycleBank users interact with or access the site’s content and features via their iPhones and iPads now, and in coming quarters their Android devices.

Hsu recently completed his first 100 days as CEO at Recyclebank. The New York City startup is venture-backed by Kleiner Perkins, RRE Ventures and Sigma Partners, and was originally founded by Ron Gonen. Hsu said that the site and its new features hint at some of the changes to come for Recyclebank, overall:

“Today, Recyclebank is an innovative program to increase recycling in over 300 cities in the U.S. and U.K. The site redesign is all about the member experience. [It will] let members see their impact from recycling, and a number of other sustainable and community enhancing behaviors, beyond that, now. It helps people understand the context of their actions and where they fit in the world.”

With the ramped up search and content, the company stands to double its advertising and sponsorship revenue within two years. Hsu confirmed about 10 percent of RecycleBank’s revenue comes from ads and sponsored content now, and that even at maturity, it won’t likely comprise more than 25 percent.

Recyclebank’s move to offer points to users who implement energy efficiency measures at home — whether that’s by installing solar panels, turning off the lights more frequently, or insulating their homes better — could spell competition for other startups in the green consumer web space, from OPOWER to EnergySavvy.

Hsu says, however, he envisions Recyclebank as an agnostic provider of rewards programs to motivate and reward environmentally sound behavior, and help other companies do the same.

The CEO explained:

“In order to make a real impact, and move what's going on in our communities and environment in a better direction, we have to collaborate with one another rather than compete.

Here’s an example, some waste haulers have their own incentive programs [editor's note: like Waste Management's Greenopolis]. However, we still work with three of the largest waste haulers in the world, Waste Connections, Republic, and Veolia.

In energy, there are a lot of individual device makers — including smart meter and solar companies — who have approached us to offer their products within our rewards catalog, to reach new members through our service and turn them into customers. Even more of them have asked us to allow their businesses to utilize our green currency to incent people to go ahead and make purchases [so they'll earn points for using the devices over time].

Now, we’re lead generating for energy businesses, and motivating people through incentives around more than recycling. We are already working with Efficiency 2.0, but also hope to work directly with utilities like Duke Energy on this.”

Today, only a small amount of the company’s revenue comes from companies paying to offer green points to RecycleBank users, or “affiliate commerce.” Hsu says that should come to comprise the largest piece of Recyclebank’s business, over time.

The bulk of the company’s revenue currently comes from municipalities and waste hauler partners who pay Recyclebank a percentage of increased savings they generate by diverting trash from the waste stream to the recycling stream per city or campus.

Social application developer Seesmic has raised $4 million in new funding from enterprise giant Salesforce.com and Softbank Holdings, a subsidiary of Softbank. This brings Seesmic’s total funding to $16 million; Seesmic’s last fundraising round took place in 2008.

Founded by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, Seesmic helps both individuals and companies monitor and track the social web. Seesmic’s desktop, web, and mobile clients integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. One of the bonuses of using an app like Seesmic is the ability to aggregate your streams from a number of social web services, like YouTube, Foursquare, Techmeme, LinkedIn and others. Last year, Seesmic launched a deep integration with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise, Chatter.

We had actually heard that Salesforce was looking to invest in Seesmic’s next round of funding last Fall. I’m actually surprised that Salesforce didn’t just buy Seesmic, considering the CRM company’s big push into the social web with Chatter.

The investment will be used to expand Seesmic’s enterprise base of customers, says Le Meur.

(Disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington was an early investor in Seesmic.)

Google has gone all high brow on us, unveiling its Art Project, a collaboration with art museums around the world to enable people to enjoy their collections without leaving the house. It's powered in-part by Google's Street View 'indoor' technology and started off as a '20% project' - the time set aside for Google engineers to work on their own ideas.

On demand billing and recurring subscription management company,Aria Systems has raised $20 million in new funding led by InterWest Partners with Hummer-Winblad and Venrock participating in the round. This brings Aria System’s total funding to $34 million.

Aria’s platform handles the entire online transactions process, from start to finish, for online companies who have subscription models. Companies rely on Aria Systems to automate their recurring revenue models and manage the entire lifecycle of their subscribers.

Aria works with a suite of payment processors, which include the likes of Authorize.net, Chase Paymentech, Cybersource, PayPal, TransFirst, and RBS Worldpay, to offer consumers a way sign up for subscription payments.

Clients include Disney, Taleo, Internap, DreamWorks, VMware, Roku, and Ingersoll-Rand. Aria plans to used the funding for product development, marketing and sales, and international expansion in Europe and Asia.

Voddler, the Netflix / Hulu / Spotify-for-movies of Scandinavia, whichever comparison you fancy, has raised $8 million in funding in a round led by Nokia’s venture capital arm Nokia Growth Partners.

The video-on-demand company’s previous backers (undisclosed private individual investors) also participated.

In 2010, Voddler says it served 5 million movies from a catalog of some 3,500 titles (it has been securing distribution agreements with studios since 2009).

Not too shabby for its first full year in operations.

Content comes from both international and domestic media companies, and videos are made available to over 850,000 customers throughout Scandinavia. More than 80% of the content on Voddler is said to be made available free of charge, though it comes with ads.

Voddler is now focusing its development efforts on making its content available on handheld devices like smartphones and tablets, as well as on Internet-connected TVs and set-top boxes. Hence the partnership with Nokia.

Founded in 2005, Voddler is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, and builds its service on patented peer-to-peer technology for managed distributed streaming. The service is currently available in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark.

Candytech, a Czech company that helps companies create and measure Facebook marketing campaigns, has gathered a wealth of Facebook-specific data over the years via its statistics portal SocialBakers.

The company has put together this great infographic, offering an overview of Facebook’s growth and population throughout 2010. Some key stats:

- Facebook ballooned from 337 million to 585 million users in 2010
- That means roughly 7.9 new users signed up every second of the year, on average
- USA and the UK are in the top 3 countries, but Indonesia is second with 32.1 million users
- The top 10 countries make up nearly 60% of all users
- The large majority of users is between 18 and 34 years old
- … but the fastest growing age group is 65+ (+124%)
- Three food brands (Coca-Cola, Starbucks and Oreo) make up the top 3 brands on Facebook
- Michael Jackson may have passed away, but his legacy is strong: 26.2 million fans

Here we go again.

It has been a few weeks since we had a story about how Apple is evil, or how the relatively closed system that fuels the iPad and iPhone will be the downfall of society. We were due. And tonight we got such a story. Maybe. Or maybe not at all. It doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that Apple is closed! Closed, I tell you! The empire is going to collapse any moment now.

Tonight, The New York Times is reporting that Apple is “further tightening its control of the App Store”. How? Apparently, they rejected a Sony e-book reader app. Here’s the key blurb:

The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store.

While no one actually cares about the Sony eReader app, everyone is quick to jump on the Kindle angle here. This means the Kindle app on the iPad is dead, right? As my colleague Jason Kincaid wrote earlier, “An alternative title, should the report prove accurate, could be, Apple Underscores The Downsides Of Its Closed Platform. Really, things look like they are going to get nasty.“

Here’s the thing: apps like this have actually never been allowed to sell their content within their apps. Instead, Amazon’s Kindle app dumps you out onto the web where you have to buy it. So there’s absolutely no difference there.

Now, if Apple were to block the Kindle app from recognizing content bought outside of iTunes (through Amazon) that would be a change of policy. And yes, that would be very annoying. But it’s simply not clear if that’s the case yet. Again, here’s how NYT puts it, “Apple rejected Sony's iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store.” Did Apple reject it because Sony was trying to let users buy e-books through their app (again, an old policy)? Or because it simply allowed them to access those e-books bought outside the app? Hard to say.

Later, NYT specifically notes that this change in policy “could” affect Amazon’s Kindle app. But they only say it “may” change, and cite a Sony president on the matter — no one from Apple, no one from Amazon.

Regardless, here are a few bigger picture items that everyone seems to be overlooking. If Apple really wants their iBookstore to succeed, playing hardball is inevitable. Right now, you can’t buy books within the Kindle app. The reason for this is probably twofold. First, since the purchases wouldn’t go through iTunes, Apple wouldn’t make its 30 percent in-app purchase cut. And second, Amazon still has a much better selection of e-books than Apple does. So allowing users to easily buy Amazon books through the Kindle app would be cutting their own product off at the knees. That’s not evil. That’s business.

Apple could conceivable try to force Amazon (and others like Sony) to use iTunes for e-book in-app purchases — similar to how Facebook is now starting to force app developers to use their credit system. And who knows, maybe this even plays into their upcoming iTunes revamp that will allow for new models like content subscriptions. But would Amazon really play along and pay Apple 30 percent off of every sale? Probably not.

Actually, that’s too weak. No way in hell, is more like it.

Sony’s statement sounds as if that they were looking forward to taking advantage of the success of the iPad to bolster their own struggling e-book products. But it’s not like they can sell their books on the Kindle either. Instead, the Kindle exists so Amazon can move their own products. And no one is calling Amazon “evil” because of it.

But the larger point goes back to what I poked fun at in the beginning of this post. There seems to be this desire to paint Apple’s relatively closed system as “evil” in some way. But the reality, of course, is that it’s not evil. If anything, it has just proven to be good business. In fact, one of the most successful business models ever. Once again we’re simply seeing that the case against Apple is just as much a case for Apple.

The larger public simply doesn’t care about this whole open versus closed debate. And it doesn’t really seem like developers actually making the apps do either. But the press certainly seems to for some reason. We get so damn angry about things like this — when we read them on our iPads.

Apple sold nearly 15 million iPads in just 8 months last year. Does anyone really believe the product is going to crash and burn this year? I can hear the masses, “You know, I was going to buy an iPad, if only they had accepted that Sony eReader app. Damn…”

[photo: flickr/atmasphere]

Blekko, the perky little search engine startup that lets you customize your search results, is taking the fight against web spam to a new level. It already allows searchers to mark results as spam and keeps a spam clock that counts how many spam pages are on the web (743 million and counting). Now it is about to block content farms like Demand Media’s eHow and Answerbag entirely. The top 20 sites its users have marked as a source of web spam will now be blocked (see full list below).

Concerns are rising that spam is increasingly taking over search results. So much so that Google recently vowed to become more vigilant and downgrade content farms specifically in search rankings.

Now Blekko is going to do one better and ban the worst offenders entirely. Here is the list of banned sites:

ehow.com
experts-exchange.com
naymz.com
activehotels.com
robtex.com
encyclopedia.com
fixya.com
chacha.com
123people.com
download3k.com
petitionspot.com
thefreedictionary.com
networkedblogs.com
buzzillions.com
shopwiki.com
wowxos.com
answerbag.com
allexperts.com
freewebs.com
copygator.com

Your move, Google.

Groupon gets all the attention, but another deal juggernaut that should be on your radar is New York City-based Next Jump. The company runs group discount shopping programs for 90,000 corporations and organizations, and powers MasterCard’s loyalty rewards program. Investment bankers are sniffing around.

Merchants offer deep discounts through Next Jump as a way to acquire new customers (read my initial profile for more info). Last November, Next Jump started to let people buy things with loyalty points as well. Its 60 million active shoppers are now spending 100 million loyalty points every month (each loyalty point is worth a penny, so that comes to $1 million a month). Before November, they were only burning through about 1 million loyalty points per month. CEO Charlie Kim believes that combining deep discounts with loyalty points is the best way to keep consumers coming back for more.

Next Jump is on a hiring spree. It just hired its first chief financial officer, ex-Googler Angus Kelsall, who used to run Google’s international businesses in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Another new addition to the executive team is Andrew Beranbom (he once ran Yahoo Shopping), who will take on the roles of chief social officer and VP of products. It acquired Y Combinator startup Flightcaster for its talent and plans to hire about 100 more engineers in San Francisco, mostly mobile. They will work under Sandeep Gupta, Next Jump’s chief mobile engineer it nabbed from Yahoo last summer.

Mobile shopping apps are going to be a huge area of concentration for the company this year. Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim derides most mobile shopping apps as either being meer extensions of websites (eBay and Groupon) or “built for the wrong audience—men not women.” He is looking to change that equation.

This evening the New York Times published an article titled Apple Moves to Tighten Control of App Store. An alternative title, should the report prove accurate, could be, Apple Underscores The Downsides Of Its Closed Platform. Really, things look like they are going to get nasty.

According to the report, Apple blocked Sony’s e-reader application from the iPhone and mandated that it would need to sell content via In-App purchases:

The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store.

Apple rejected Sony's iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store.

Apple told Sony that from now on, all in-app purchases would have to go through Apple, said Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division.

The implications here could be huge, particularly for Amazon.

Amazon’s Kindle platform has proven to be very popular, and not just because of the millions of Kindle hardware devices that Amazon is selling. In addition to the dedicated e-reader, Amazon has developed applications for a slew of devices, including iPhone, iPad, Android, desktop computers, and more. And while the platform isn’t open in the same way that Google Books is, it’s still very convenient and far more flexible than Apple’s iBooks, which is only available on the iPhone and iPad.

In fact, at this point there’s no reason to buy books through iBooks when you can just as easily download Amazon’s Kindle app from the App Store, which has access to a larger catalog of books, and lets you read those books on more devices. But instead of beating Amazon on price or features, it looks like Apple might just cut them off. Or force them to use in-app payments, which give Apple a 30% cut and would kill Amazon’s margins. Amazon has avoided using Apple’s in-app payments system by kicking users to a browser to complete their transaction, but according to the NYT report (see the bolded section above) it sounds like this will be banned.

I’m sure Apple apologists will be quick to back their logic here. Of course they don’t want competitors selling premium content through channels that Apple doesn’t control — otherwise Amazon or Google will start selling movies and TV shows and music through their own media stores. Of course Apple wants its cut of all content that is sold on iOS devices. And then there’s the magazine publishers, who will surely cry foul if they have to run their purchases their Apple but the e-book vendors don’t.

But the fact that Apple is apparently changing the rules so late in the game is unnerving. Sony, Amazon, and others have already built these applications and have developed their strategies under the impression that they would be able to sell their own content. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have gotten used to jumping between reading on their iPhone and Kindle device depending on if they’re sitting in their living room or on the subway. That’s the beauty of this one-platform-multiple-device approach.

Perhaps Apple will grandfather existing applications (namely, Amazon’s Kindle app) in under the existing rules. But I can’t think of a time that’s happened on iOS. And Apple hasn’t been afraid of pulling the rug out from competitors before — Google Voice was rejected for arbitrary reasons in summer 2009 (it was accepted a few months ago), and who can forget Apple’s decision to block all apps developed using Adobe CS5 (which it later reversed course on).

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.

The crowdsourced funding craze is picking up steam. Tonight we see the launch of 33needs, a site where socially-minded startups can raise initial seed funding from individual contributors on the Web. It is Kiva meets Kickstarter.

Social startups post their “needs” in terms of how much money they are looking to raise, what problems they are going to solve and how they are going to do it, along with a video to help spread the word virally. People can invest $10, $100, $1,000 or more, and in return instead of getting shares in the company, they get a promised percentage of revenues for a specified period of time like 5 percent of revenues for three years.

The startups seeking funds are for-profit ventures, as is 33needs. Some of the launch startups include Emergent Energy Group, which wants to bring renewable energy projects to different communities in the U.S., and HalfUnited, a new clothing company which feeds hungry children with part of its profits (see video below).

33needs itself takes a 5 percent cut of any money raised, and nothing if the goal is not met. Generally, thee social startups are trying to raise anywhere from $50,000 or more get their businesses off the ground. They all try to mix profits with creating social good, which increasingly also resonates as a marketing strategy to consumers who want to feel like they are making a difference in the world. Whether or not they actually are is a different matter, but the most enduring social startups will end up being those who create a measurable impact.

The company was founded by Josh Tetrick, a social entrepreneur and former Fulbright Scholar who worked in Africa and for President Clinton. He doesn’t see 33needs as a replacement for angel or seed capital, but rather as a launching pad for ideas that may otherwise never have made it beyond a dinner conversation. “It’s a launching pad that builds fans, breeds a loyal base of people who’ll buy your stuff and use your product,” he argues. “There is so much pent up demand to invest in this stuff—not donate, but invest.”

But using crowdfunding to help start companies, as opposed to microloans for projects (Kickstarter) or people (Kiva), sets a higher bar. These require more money than a simple project. One of the key learnings from Kickstarter, for instance, is that small projects can grow into full-blown startups, but they don’t have to (watch this interview with Kickstarter founder Perry Chen). With 33needs it will be all or nothing. So the startups better make their pitches really good.