Mind Candy CEO Michael Acton Smith came to my office today to tell me about Moshi Monsters, his company’s virtual world for kids that is signing up a new member every second. Moshi Monsters was his “last roll of the dice” to save his virtual worlds startup in 2008, and it worked. Moshi Monsters is up to 35 million registered users, with about 7 million of those active every month, says Smith. And it is projected to generate $100 million this year from a combination of subscriptions and gross retail merchandise sales.

The site is geared towards kids between 5 to 12 years old. Each kid gets a monster pet and a room that can be decked out with virtual goods. But instead of trying to create “just another bloody virtual world,” Smith wanted it to be more like a safe social network. “Instead of copying Club Penguin,” he says, “we focused more on Facebook and tried to re-imagine that for kids.” There is pin board where friends can leave messages and a news feed, but there are also games, quizes and virtual world activities. The penny-drop moment for us was that kids like to share and show off online just as much as adults do,” he says. “If we could create the safe place online, we could create Facebook for kids.” In the video above, Smith explains his strategy and gives me a brief tour of the site.

Moshi Monsters started in the UK, where Mind Candy is based, but now the U.S. is its biggest market. It makes money off of subscriptions ($50 a year to unlock different levels and get extra powers), but there are also toys and today it even launched a magazine for kids, Moshi Monsters Magazine (print’s not dead!). Smith wants to create a mini media empire from the little monsters, with plans to develop video games, TV shows, books, and iPhone/iPad apps.

In the clip below he demonstrates the first Moshi Monster iPhone app, which gives you a Moshi Monster mouth that moves as you speak.

Searching Gmail for attachments is basically awful. Because everything in Gmail is so text-based, searches yield results that are also text-based. But what if there was a Google Image-like search option for attachments? And what if it was one that had a social element to better filter results? That’s essentially what Attachments.me is building.

Currently, the service works with your Gmail credentials. You login and it begins indexing all of your email, looking for all of the attachments you’ve ever received. Once it does that, it breaks them up by file type: music, code, archive, movie, image, and document. And the main navigation page is populated with thumbnails of each of these attachments sorted by either the date they came in or alphabetically. But the real key to the service is search.

Currently, Attachments.me allows you to search by file type, email address, or tag. And any of these searches can be saved with one-click in case it’s a search you do often. “Search is something we’re really trying to nail,” co-founder Ben Coe tells us. And he says that they actually already go deeper than they indicate on the site. For example, they index both sending and receiver email addresses, the content of PDFs and text documents, and content from certain external sites like Flickr and YouTube.

Speaking of Flickr and YouTube, those are just the first two external services they’re highlighting. “We’ve built a very extensible approach and plan to branch out into crawling many external sites, along with many other types of structured data within email accounts. I think our coolest tech is built around this,” Coe says.

Okay, but what about Google? What’s to stop them from doing this — and why haven’t they already? “I think we’re approaching the problem from a different direction. Gmail is very good at what it does. Our approach puts more of a visual and social spin on the way you think about your history of email correspondence,” Coe says. “We plan on adding many services other than Gmail. I think every startup worries about competition, to a certain degree, but we’ve got plenty of other things to keep us up at night,” he continues.

Beyond search, the social element to this is the most interesting thing. “Your email is innately social; we want to help bring this out. We’ve added features that make it easy to share old attachments with your friends. We’d like to do a lot more: commenting, for instance,” Coe notes.

One potential issue is power email users. When they indexed my inbox, I was told by Attachments.me advisor Joe Stump that I had by far the most email they had ever seen. And because such a large part are PR pitches that include email signatures with images, that created a problem for my relevant results. But Attachments.me has been working on that too. “This is definitely a problem that’s on our minds,” Coe says. “We automatically hide images under a certain size–which helps deal with spam attachments, such as signatures. We group together attachments received repeatedly, and also avoid indexing anything placed in the spam folder,” he continues.

I assumed that most attachments were images, but that’s not the case. According to the data Attachments.me has so far, documents are the largest category, making up some 44 percent of all attachments. Images are second at 36 percent. Music is a solid 5 percent.

Currently, Attachments.me is just Coe and co-founder Jesse Miller (Stump helped them start the project and is now an advisor). And now that they’re out there in the wild, the next step is funding.

For users with a manageable amount of email mostly coming from people they actually know, Attachments.me should be a very useful service. And it’s clearly a juicy Google acquisition target going forward.

Design, engineering and entertainment software juggernaut Autodesk has acquired Blue Ridge Numerics, a company that develops simulation software, for approximately $39 million in cash.

Blue Ridge Numerics simulation software allows engineers to design and manufacture products that are prepared for real-world conditions. Engineers can virtually test and predict real-world behavior of new and existing designs and eliminate expensive physical prototyping cycles in the lab. Blue Ridge customers include Parker Hannifin, Philips Medical, Top-Flite and Wolf Appliance.

With this acquisition, Autodesk will integrate Blue Ridge Numerics into its Manufacturing Industry Group and to continue developing the simulation software. Autodesk, a publicly traded company, provides software design applications for a variety of industries, including Architecture, Engineering, Media and Entertainment.

Autodesk has previously acquired Illuminate Labs, Algor, SoftImage, 3D Geo and PlanPlatform.

CE manufacturers are scared. They’re scared of competition, they’re scared of unique designs, and they’re scared, most of all, to ship. Take the RIM Playbook, for example. As Jim Dalrymple points out, RIM first announced the Playbook in September 2010. Then it announced a 4G version in January and then 4G LTE, HSPA+ and Mobile WiMAX models this month. RIM, in short, released three products that don’t exist. Jim calls the Playbook vaporware but, given what we’ve seen, it’s a real product that just hasn’t rolled through RIMs front doors yet.

So it’s been six months since RIM announced their device and two months since Motorola announced the Xoom. HP still hasn’t shipped the TouchPad, either. Every tablet you saw at MWC this year is shipping “later this year.” The only thing that you can be sure will ship on time is the iPad 2 and that doesn’t even exist yet.

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Last April, Google converted its Small Business Center into Google Places, where businesses can go to claim a listing on Google and Google Maps, a re-branding effort that has become part of Google’s push into local searches and local advertising. Included in those features was Google Tags, a service that allows local businesses to enhance their Google Maps listings by providing a link to special offers, coupons, or back to their website — indicated by a small, yellow tag. Tags are offered for a flat fee of $25 a month.

In October, Google further ramped up its foray into local, launching Boost, their advertising solution to help local business owners to easily create online search ads from directly within their Google Places account. (Boost remained in beta until late January and is now available in all major cities and on Android and iOS.) This “set it and forget it” service targets local businesses that have stopped using AdWords due to its relative complexity and the time required to manage ad campaigns, essentially re-creating a subscription-based model. A business just has to add Boost to their listing in Google Places, set up a monthly budget, and select relevant categories. Boost does the rest, advertising on Google and Google Maps. (You may have seen the blue pin at the top of a Google Map search? That’s a Boost ad.)

During an “Online Local” panel at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco on Monday, representatives from Foursquare, Yodle, Living Social, and Angie’s List said that they are keeping a close eye on Google’s new product offerings. Yodle CEO Court Cunningham called Google, which now accounts for 40 percent of local traffic, a “frenemy” in the local space. Their rapt attention to the search giant is especially revealing considering the panelists each said that they expect to drastically expand their sales staffs in 2011 due to their impression that local merchants lack the technology prowess to buy through self service models. Living Social, for example, has a sales staff of over 450.

In contrast, Nick Fox, Google’s VP of Product Management, said that Google was very definitely shying away from hiring local salesforces, hoping to instead encourage local advertisers to come online with easy-to-use products. “We’d rather be developing a good product for local businesses than building sales teams,” he said.

What’s more, a big deal has been made recently about Facebook as a rising competitor in display advertising (considering that research firm eMarketer claims that Facebook saw $1.86 billion in global ad spending in 2010), but Fox said that he does not see Facebook’s business as a threat. “I don't think it is us versus them,” he said, acknowledging that Google would like to take a cue from Facebook and begin overlaying social endorsements to enhance search results, though he did not disclose how it will collect those endorsements.

In the end, it will be interesting to see how a cost-per-click method like Google Boost will fare under the growing influence of Groupon, which provides small business owners with a more effective way of tracking the results of their ad campaigns. Under the Groupon model, small businesses know exactly how many of their coupons are redeemed, and, thus, can measure the cost and effectiveness of each campaign. Cost-per-click advertising, like the traditional print model, doesn’t really provide most local advertisers with a way to know whether the clicks are actually converting into sales.

Australian media researcher Media Monitors has bought a majority stake in Singapore-based social media tracking firm Brandtology.

It marks the Asian-Pacific media intelligence company’s first acquisition since it was itself acquired by private equity firm Quadrant last summer.

Terms of the Brandtology deal were not disclosed. Brandtology raised a $1.35 million round in April 2009.

Brandtology will remain a distinct brand in the Media Monitors Group, which says it now boasts more than 1,000  employees servicing 5,000 clients across 17 countries globally.

Bing is rolling out a new version of its toolbar today, that features deeper integrations with search, Facebook, email clients and more. You access your Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Gmail accounts and you can bring in your Facebook network and push status updates from the actual bar.

Unfortunately, it’s only available for Windows and IE right now. Microsoft says the approach for the new version was “make the stuff you do every day online easier,” hence the integration with Facebook, search and email. One notable difference in the new version is that the search box is smack in the center of the toolbar. Search history, suggestions and deep links are all marked distinctly in the box (by color) to help users search faster.

The deepest integration seems to be with Facebook. The toolbar will have notification capabilities for new status updates, messages and more, and will allow you to access your news feed, and comment on or like an update within the toolbar. Users can also view friends photos in a collage format.

The toolbar integrates with Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail and allows users to quickly preview email. Another key component of the new version are alerts, which will appear and fade away unless you click on the notification. For now, the toolbar will include Facebook and E-mail alerts as well as alerts for breaking news (with a short summary of the headlines), weather advisories, translation alerts (when there is web content available for translation), new Bing Rewards offers and more.

Bing’s search share is steadily climbing and this toolbar is surely going to be useful for power Bing users. My only issue with the UI is that it could get cluttered (and distracting) with all of the information, notifications and alerts turned on.

Happy Thursday! CafePress, makers of customized T-shirts and books and mugs and stuff, wants to give you, the fine people of CG, 100 CrunchGear iPhone 4 cases. Why? Because you guys are b to the a to the d to the a to the double snakes, that’s why.

This is a random for one of 100 CrunchGear iPhone cases and entering is pretty darn simple.

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For any of you who still use the old version of Twitter, you may have noticed that the company has started to actively encourage users to switch the new version, which was unveiled last Fall. At the top of the Twitter.com page, users see a warning “You're using an old version of Twitter. It won't be around long,” with a button “Switch To New Twitter.” And Twitter is also asking those users who don’t want to switch to take a survey of why they won’t switch.

Using SurveyMonkey, Twitter first asks users why they haven’t switched. Then Twitter presents users with a list of the most common issues users have complained about with respect to the new version and asks users to rank how much they agree or disagree with each of the statements. These include, “I have to click an extra time to see my lists,” “Sometimes I just see a white screen when I log in,” “I don’t like change. Old Twitter is fine,” “There’s too much stuff. It feels cluttered.,” “It hides my background,” “I don’t like the 2 column layout,” and “I can’t find my Direct Messages.”

It looks like many users are participating in the survey. Twitter is nearing the point where it will discontinue use of the old version of Twitter, though we are not sure exactly when that will take place. The site recently suffered a bit of downtime and hiccups which could have been a result of the transition.

The company, which has used surveys in the past, is probably wise to start asking users who may have issues with the new interface how strongly they feel about these issues. Once Twitter does make the full-fledged switch, it should be interesting to see which tweaks the service makes in #New Twitter.

We all saw what Watson did last night, but now the question becomes: what now? So what that IBM created an artificial intelligence that was able to answer a few trivia questions? (That’s a massively simplistic way of looking at Watson, and discounts the incredible capabilities of the human brain and discounts the complexity of having to interpret human language with off-the-shelf hardware and finely tuned software.) Is there an end-game here? Maybe "end-game" is too strong phrase to use, but IBM has announced a deal with Nuance Communications to "explore, develop, and commercialize the Watson computing system’s advanced analytics capabilities in the healthcare industry."

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Editor’s note: Guest author Seth Goldstein, @seth, is a San Francisco based angel investor and start-up entrepreneur. Christopher M. Schroeder, @cmschroed, is a Washington, D.C.- and New York-based angel investor and CEO of the online health start-uphealthcentral.com.

We were in Cairo the week before Tunisia fell, meeting with dozens of Egyptian technology start-ups on behalf of the US State Dept's Global Entrepreneurship Program. The quality of their ideas thrilled us, as did their skill sets, vision and quiet resolve.  It did not surprise us to hear that many of those we met shut their laptops in recent weeks to march through the streets throughout Egypt. Through email, cell, texts and social networks, we have remained close with them throughout this remarkable upheaval.

Even before Tahrir Square became forever etched in the global consciousness, a new generation of entrepreneurs had been emerging as a third voice in Arab politics and society.  Rather than just engaging in political debates or religious interpretations, they have had their heads down focused on building new products, and by extension new industries.  While their frames of reference include successes from Silicon Valley to India, they are a movement distinctively and culturally attuned to their country and region. These young men and women are the progenitors of what we are calling Egypt 2.0.

Who are these pioneering innovators?  Most are college educated, some with advanced technology degrees even from the States.  Many are working on Arab-versions of proven US businesses models: social networks, mobile apps, dating sites, travel engines and alike.  However, many others are inventing entirely new models.   Would you be surprised that the largest selling iPad weather app, a breakthrough chip that improves server processing,  and even a direct assault on Google are all started by entrepreneurs in Egypt?   As one founder who wished to remain anonymous told us, "A start up is great even if it's a copy of something that exists, but it's even greater to think about a start up as a platform for innovation because it will inspire more people."

The events of recent weeks have hardened their commitment. Nader Iskander, CEO of mobile brokerage startup EME told us, "This week has lifted our hopes like never before.  We have witnessed a "new Egypt" being formed through incredible boldness, courage, persistence, hope and sacrifice of millions of our people."  We have heard many versions of what Amr Ramadan, CEO of the iPad app company Vimov shared with us:  "I don't think anyone, including me, knew what patriotism and love for country really means till the last week.  People felt the country wasn't theirs.  Now they do."  With this sense of ownership has come a greater sense of empowerment.  As he continued, "Finally, the government is afraid of its people, not the other way around.  The cutting off of communications confirmed this.  It was the government saying, "I'm trembling," and this was what gave people the feeling of an upper hand."

While many Egyptian entrepreneurs remain (with good reason) skeptical of US foreign policy, they are nevertheless hungry for our involvement as experienced investors and entrepreneurs.  Ameer Sherif, CTO of online dating service BasharSoft implored, "We need mentorship, and help in transferring the entrepreneurial experience in Silicon Valley to the Nile Valley."  Ramadan dreams of "a bridge to Silicon Valley, a bridge that could potentially speed up and foster innovation in Egypt, and create new jobs, both in Egypt and the US."

In our conversations with Egyptian startup founders these past weeks, three themes have emerged as ways in which we can provide immediate help:

1. Extend active partnerships between American and Egyptian universities and companies in R&D. The massive disparity of primary and secondary education in Egypt is well documented, but the entrepreneurs we met were equally focused on improving technological R&D.  Dr Hossam Mahgoub is the CTO of Silminds, a pioneering hardware company that shifts decimal processing from software to a chip. He is an Egyptian PhD who studied at Stanford and noted how "there are some great minds in Egypt.  But there is no significant useful research being done in its universities, both on the undergraduate and graduate levels."  Haytham ElFadeel, CEO of semantic search engine Kngine laments,  "Egypt got just three patents in 2009 as compared to 1,525 Israel got in the same year and the whole population of Israel is less than Cairo's population.
2. Facilitate US-Egyptian startup mentorship programs. The regional venture capital community is growing at an exciting clip, but they welcome partners who bring dollars and expertise.  These partnerships, in turn, might provide US companies with access to the 300-million-person Middle East-North Africa region.   Above all, Egyptian entrepreneurs want to meet positive role models that can actively mentor them through the startup-to-exit process.  Learning from constructive mistakes is even more valuable to them than hearing about lucky successes.
3. Remove travel friction.  ElFadeel pleaded, "The process of issuing a visa is long and in many cases they reject the requests of the youth.   To help Egyptians create world-class startups and culture we need to physically network with people in the US."   Vimov's Ramadan concurred:  "I wish for the day when I no longer hear about someone missing a technology conference because his visa took eight months to process."  For those that have been fortunate enough to gain entry to the US, they complain about the humiliation they face by the border patrol.  "Travelling from tyranny only to be judged as a terrorist—this was something very heart breaking."

Despite our optimism, we still do not know how the political situation in Egypt or elsewhere in the region will resolve.   No doubt there will be more cycles of hope and despair but these cycles have already been internalized through the startup journeys of the entrepreneurs we met.  This attitude is perfectly summarized by one entrepreneur who smiled and told us, "Look, this is happening anyhow and most people have nothing to lose!  The last week made them also have nothing to fear!  So to them, how bad can it be in the next couple of years?   All that the people of Egypt really want is to live a fair life and to be judged for who they are and what they do." Isn’t that what everybody wants no matter where they are from?

At least a couple times a week we get tipped about Google testing a new “social search” feature. The truth is that the “social circle” results that everyone is pointing to have been in place since 2009. But Google clearly didn’t think too much of them and shoved them all the way down at the bottom of the results page. I’m not sure I’ve ever clicked on a link served up there. But this social aspect is about to get a lot more interesting starting today.

What Google is sort of downplaying as just an “update” to social search, is actually much more. Google is taking those social circle links at the bottom of the page, pumping them with social steroids, and shoving them towards the top of results pages. For the first time, social is actually going to affect Google Search in a meaningful way.

We had a chance to speak with Mike Cassidy, Google’s Product Management Director of Search, about the updates yesterday. He outlined three key things Google is focusing on: blending the results, increasing the social coverage, and giving users more control. The first two are the meat, and the third is simply overdue.

By “blending” results, Cassidy means that Google is now going to be showing social results in the regular search results stream. The link itself will look the same as every other link — blue, underlined — but it will say something like “YOUR FRIEND’S NAME shared this” below it, along with that user’s profile icon.

So is Google using social signals to alter the actual results? Yes and no. In some cases they are, in some cases they’re not, Cassidy says. He declined to get into specifics, noting that it was a part of their special sauce. But he did say that there are several things that the algorithm now takes into account from a social perspective on top of all the other more traditional signals.

Along those lines, one of the things Cassidy would not confirm but said would make sense is that Google will look at how many of your friends share a certain link. And the keyword there is “share”, previously Google’s social circle mainly highlighted content your friends actually created, like blog posts. But now a key to the social layer are the links they actually share.

“There’s a lot more sharing than creating going on on the web,” Cassidy says. In fact, he said that something like 100 million times a day people are sharing links that Google sees (remember that Google has a deal with Twitter for full access to their firehose).

And it’s not just tweets that Google is taking into account for this new social push. Flickr and Quora content is included as well. The latter is somewhat surprising because the startup is relatively new. But it makes perfect sense, and obviously, we love the move. There’s going to be some excellent data coming in from there.

Cassidy says other services will be added into the system on a rolling basis in short order.

Google is also now making it easier to manage the services you have hooked into your own social circle. Based on your name, they’ll scan some of the popular services like Twitter for what they think may be your account and ask you if you wish to add it. And there’s now a way to remove any connection from your public Google Profile with one click. The key is that this will simply hide the link to your profile, but the connection will still work for your social results.

When I asked about the “F” word — Facebook — Cassidy became a bit more cryptic. “We’re focused on sites where it’s relatively easy to crawl for data,” he noted and didn’t elaborate. But that is the key to a lot of this content — it’s all public. And Google is getting the majority of it by simply crawling it. “We’re interested in including any publicly available content,” Cassidy did say.

And, before Scoble undoubtedly breaks the system tomorrow, it should be noted that there are some limits in place for the social graph. As in, if you have 25,000 “friends”, Google may not count them all for these results. But Cassidy says he hopes the team will be able lift any sort of limit soon.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about spam infesting Google. This seems like a great, natural way to cut through much of it. I’m betting I’ll be more more likely to click on results that have been “validated” by my friends by way of them sharing that link.

Interestingly enough, Google’s full push into this arena comes just a day after Greplin, a startup in the social search space that we like a lot, finally opened its doors to all.

Greplin has many more social hooks than Google right now (they ask you to authorize third-party services whereas Google, again, is just going after public data), but the search giant promises that today’s rollout is just one step in the move towards social. There is more to come.

Exclusive - Lendio is a new startup that aims to help businesses secure loans with banks and other lending sources by mean of an online matching platform.

The service hasn’t launched publicly yet, but the young company has just secured $6 million in funding in a round led by Highway 12 Ventures and GSA Venture Partners.

Omniture founder Josh James is also an angel investor in the startup.

Lendio's online platform lets small business owners determine which loan category best suits their individual needs by asking a series of questions.

Based on credit score, industry, revenue, timing, size of requested loan, and other parameters, Lendio matches the small business owner with a selection of lenders that offer loans that best fit his or her profile.

You need an invitation code to get in for now, but look: the first 500 TechCrunch readers can check out the service straight away (on a first come, first served basis). Just use code ‘TechCrunch’ on the company’s website. Subscriptions are normally valued at $99.

Redbox already took down chain DVD rental outlets, and now Coinstar is expanding the popular DVD rental brand to the web with a movie streaming service. Netflix killer? Not likely, but the upcoming Redbox media service is reportedly with another company. Amazon is the popular choice, which will no doubt help boaster both content and credibility rather than going at it alone. That’s actually true for both companies as it’s been rumored for a while that Amazon had a movie streaming service in the works as well.

The company’s CEO stated that the service would do be subscription-based rather pay-to-play like its DVD rental business. No doubt the pricing would be competitive with Netflix, but the key would be the content available and supported platforms.

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Heard about ccLoop? No, probably not. It’s a new stealth startup founded by repeat (and very successful) entrepreneur Michael Wolfe.

The company came out of Wolfe’s stint as an entrepreneur in residence last year at Benchmark Capital. This is Wolfe’s fourth company, the previous three have been huge wins. His last company, Vontu, was acquired by Symantec in 2007 for $350 million.

And they’ve now raised a $3.5 million round, led by Benchmark. FLOODGATE, SV Angel, Felicis Ventures and Ariel Poler also invested in the round. Benchmark Partner Kevin Harvey is joining ccLoop’s board of directors.

So what will ccLoop do? Here’s all they’re giving away on their landing page:

Usually we love email. We can send to anyone in the world and know they will get the message. Our mailboxes have our histories. Our contacts. Our lives.

But sometimes we hate email, especially when we try to work in teams. Endless "reply all" discussion threads. Multiple versions of documents floating around. Getting messages you didn't want and missing ones you did.

We at ccLoop are passionate about solving your email problem with a solution that is powerful yet simple to use. We don't ask you to download anything, learn anything, or change anything.

Stop wasting time. Get more done. Get organized. Stay in the loop.

It sounds like they’re going to fix email. If they do that I’ll love them forever. My understanding is they’re building on top of email with a SaaS offering. But that’s all I know for now. The company says they’ll start beta testing soon.

Another thing to note – this is exactly how EIR positions are supposed to end up. The entrepreneur spends some time at the firm thinking up ideas and meeting with other entrepreneurs, then a company is born and funded by the venture firm. Benchmark does these things by the book, and the results seem to turn out well.

In the third quarter of 2010, BrightCove and Tube Mogul’s Online Video & The Media Industry report showed that Facebook passed Yahoo to become the No. 2 source of traffic to online videos at media sites. (The study measures videos across the Brightcove network, with a focus on newspaper, magazine, broadcaster, brand, and online media sites). Facebook has continued its reign as the second largest referrer of traffic, behind Google, in the fourth quarter of 2010 according to a new report from the video platform companies.

Facebook exhibited the healthiest growth rates in terms of referral traffic, now accounting for 11.8% of all referred video traffic to media companies. The report says that the social network’s growth is mainly attributed to Facebook's increasing support for white-listed embedded video that plays in-stream, allowing for contextual viewing without requiring any redirect of traffic. Google accounts for 60% of traffic whereas Twitter only accounts for around 2% of traffic. Clearly, search drives views.

In terms of growth rate, Yahoo and Twitter both showed dwindling growth rates. Facebook is growing the fastest in terms of referral traffic followed by Bing and Google.

However, Facebook and Twitter elicited higher engagement rates than Google measured by minutes viewed. The report showed that brands (as opposed to magazines, newspapers, broadcasters, and online media) have higher engagement rates across all referring sources, including Google and Facebook, than other content, which could suggest both video discovered with SEO and through social sharing are resulting in increased engagement for brand viewers. Brands saw highest video engagement when referred by Yahoo, reaching 2:30 minutes viewed on average, which may point to the success of syndication efforts of such content.

ClairMail, a company that creates a mobile banking and payments platform, is rolling out a new product for financial institutions today—a mobile fraud management solution.

ClairMail helps power mobile banking and payments for financial institutions (the company counts eight of the top 12 North American banks as customers). ClairMail processes millions of transactions per month for its customers across retail banks, credit unions and card service companies, allowing consumers to make payments and access banking information via SMS, the mobile web and client applications, across a variety of mobile devices.

ClairMail's Fraud Solution allows financial institutions to generate and deliver real-time alerts that allow customers to monitor account spending and identify fraudulent transactions more quickly. In addition, ClairMail will automatically identify suspect transactions and allow users to resolve the issue from their mobile phone.

The alerts themselves (text and in-app) will enable banks and consumers to define and customize alerts based on suspicious activities or on thresholds the consumer sets. So you could set a fraud alert for anytime your card is used for purchases above $2,000, and if the alert is set off, the user can instantly respond confirming or denying the validity of the transaction.

The company, which has raised nearly $35 million in funding, is growing fast in terms of both revenue and customer acquisition. With the rampant problem of identity theft and stolen credit cards, a mobile fraud prevention product makes a lot of sense, especially if it is centralized around mobile devices.

While Google’s YouTube is reportedly in talks to buy Web content producer Next New Networks, the New York-based startup has just filed with the SEC in relation to $19.4 million in equity financing.

NNN also raised $1 million in debt funding last year right when those YouTube acquisition rumors started swirling. Here’s what I wrote back then:

The potential acquisition of NNN, which also manages a network of independent filmmakers alongside producing its own channels, would give YouTube its first step into producing Web videos in-house.

This would be not only a shot in the arm for the video sharing site proper – upping its ability to squeeze more advertising dollars out of the popular service – but also for Google TV.

According to the WSJ, a deal between YouTube and Next New Networks worth ‘tens of millions of dollars’ could be announced in the coming week.

Indeed, there’s this noteworthy statement in the filing:

The securities contained within this filing were offered and issued in connection with several distinct transactions between 2007 and 2010. No individual offering lasted more than one year.

Since the date of first sale was in May 2007, and the filing is marked to come in relation to the acquisition of securities, I believe it pretty much confirms the Google-NNN deal is done.

We’ll update with more information as soon as possible.

NNN investors include Fuse Capital, Spark Capital, Saban Capital Group and Goldman Sachs.

Tradeshift, which describes itself as the "Skype for invoicing", has integrated PayPal into its free e-invoicing platform for customers in the UK and the US. Now customers will be able to make direct payments of their invoices, resulting in faster transactions and reduced rates for international transfers compared to regular banks. All that’s required is a PayPal Business Payments account, which means they only pay a minimal flat rate regardless of how large the payment amount is.

Clicking the "Pay with PayPal” automatically populates the invoice, saving time and reducing human error. Clearly Tradeshift has decided to user PayPal as a way to get around global bank fund transfers. Tradeshift’s ‘social network’ for business transactions plus Paypal’s payment platform look like a killer combination.

Oh The Daily! Rupert Murdoch’s Sisyphean battle with the impassable forces of the Internet really reminds me of those humans playing Watson on Jeopardy, it’s really hard to figure out who to root for. Well this week, New York Magazine made that decision a little bit easier for us, leaking The Daily EIC Jesse Angelo’s ridiculous motivational memo to staffers of Murdoch’s nascent iPad-only offering. Of course bloggers had a field day.

The memo (included below) is absurd for a variety of reasons but namely because it demonstrates a complete editorial disconnect with today’s online media ecosystem as well as a lack of understanding on Angelo’s part of the types of stuff people actually want to read on a tablet.

Plus the “Folks, Egypt is over – time for us to get focus on America” line is real class. Stephen Colbert, who was on fire tonight, rips the whole thing apart above. My favorite line? “If you really want to call yourself a journalist you roll up your sleeves hit the streets and find the richest dog in South Dakota.”

New media is sad, but old media is sadder.

Subject: The News

Folks, Egypt is over – time for us to get focused on covering America.

We need to get out there and start finding more compelling stories from around the country – not just scraping the web and the wires, but getting out on the ground and reporting. Find me an amazing human story at a trial the rest of the media is missing. Find me a school district where the battle over reform is being fought and tell the human tales. Find a town that is going to be unincorporated because it’s broke. Find me a story of corruption and malfeasance in a state capitol that no one has found. Find me something new, different, exclusive and awesome. Find me the oldest dog in America, or the richest man in South Dakota. Force the new White House press secretary to download The Daily for the first time because everyone at the gaggle is asking about a story we broke. Get in front of a story and make it ours – force the rest of the media to follow us.
It’s good stories that will keep people coming back to The Daily – we’ve assembled a crack news team, so let’s show the world what we can do.

Memo via New York Magazine

Aside from Sarah and Paul’s strange Bieber-based attempts at SEO, I haven’t noticed many changes around here since some AOL people and then Arianna Huffington became my uber bosses. I mean I still get paid to work and everything which is cool so + 1!

But really my AOL hat really isn’t enough to keep me from absolutely loving what Stephen Colbert just did in an acutely searing critique of The Huffington Post’s controversial content practices.

On his show tonight Colbert, frustrated with all the free content Arianna Huffington has been glomming off “The Colbert Report” and others, announced that he would build his own site and call it “The Colbuffington Re-Post.”  The Colbuffington Re-Post has “everything you love about the Huffington Post because it is the Huffington Post with a new border around it that says the Colbuffington Re-Post.”

Har har indeed, except that when you actually visit TheColbuffingtonRepost.com, it truly serves up an exact copy of The Huffington Post with Stephen Colbert’s Colbuffington Re-Post logo. a) I’m not sure this is even legal. b) Just wait ’til Arianna gets a load of this.

And sure The Huffington Post might just repost this story and somehow find a way to monetize it all and true we’re getting traffic of this too (Thank you for the free content Stephen) … But aside from what this means in terms of eCPM or whatever the business model is these days, we as consumers and producers of media must sit back and appreciate the sheer ingenuity of The Colbuffington Re-Post, at least for a moment. You win Colbert.

Notable quotes from the above clip:

“I’m a big fan of the Internet, it can answer any question from ‘Where can I get a pair of pants?’ to ‘Where is the porn?’ to ‘Woo boy where can I get another pair of pants?’”

“Huffpo is famous for its extensive comprehensive coverage of things other people produced and put on the Internet.”

“Hopefully HuffPo will be a new source of revenue for AOL, whose income currently depends on 82 year old Delaware resident Claire Meyers and the $10 an hour she still pays for dial up service.”

“You have acheived the impossible, you have made me feel angry while looking at pictures of myself. “

“Where’s my money Arianna? Don’t make me put on my rings”

“And I am proud to announce that the Colbuffington Re-Post is for sale for $316 million. Arianna if I find a buyer, I promise to give you the same cut you give me.”

Ouch.

Yesterday, at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, Googler and PayPal founder Max Levchin and Benchmark GP Bill Gurley discussed “game-changing technology” and the future of the Web. Emblematic of today’s mindset, they attacked this rather large topic by comparing the strengths and objectives of Google and Facebook, using the latter’s jaw-dropping stats (500+ million users, 1 in every 13 people on Earth logs into Facebook each day) and its promotion of the social graph as a measure of what’s to come.

Levchin said that Facebook is fast becoming the new social white pages, i.e. when you don’t know where someone is on the Web, you go to Facebook to find and connect with them. But, in addition to that, he says, the social networking giant is really “the rich white pages,” where you not only locate someone but have the added benefit of finding out what they like, what they read, what their favorite movies are, and so on.

Facebook looks to capitalize on this by “renting” their graph to websites through Facebook Connect, which, he says, “is exceptionally powerful” and in turn may lead to their successfully “replacing core messaging services.” And if Facebook does become the Web’s next communication platform, then it will “be undoubtedly in the running for the most valuable company in the world.” Considering the importance of communication in our digital world, I think few would disagree with his conjecture.

(Though, as an interesting side note, Business Insider published a post last night on this panel and quoted Levchin on his Facebook hypothesis. Google responded directly to BI’s post saying that Levchin was misquoted and implying that he wouldn’t go and give Facebook those kind of props. Well, I was at the panel and have watched video of it several times, and the quote above is exactly what he said. Et tu, Levchin?)

Drama aside, let’s say for a second that Facebook doesn’t become the next Bell Atlantic. How then will Facebook grow into that uber valuable monstrosity? Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that the social graph at the core of their business is integral to the success of Facebook — and the future of the Web.

To be fair, Levchin isn’t blindly drinking the Facebook Kool-Aid, citing demand generation and demand discovery (search) advertising as a prime example of the limitations of the social graph. “Social graph signals have not been helpful in optimizing advertising that is related to search,” he says, which suggests that off-handedly proposing that Facebook will be just as big as Google in every way is — basically — wrong. Considering the multi-billion dollar discrepancy in revenue, Facebook continues to confront different challenges in monetizing at scale. Ultimately, he says, Facebook as a web property is not “going to compete with Google — at least in the near term — at all.”

In support of Levchin’s point, Gurley recounted the similar example of how Netflix had originally implemented a social graph model into their movie recommendation system but quickly found that it wasn’t nearly as effective as other types of recommendation algorithms. For many, it would seem intuitive that socially-generated recs would be great indicators of what we’d like, but it’s also true that most of us hang out with friends that have at least a few special hobbies or passions that are very different from our own.

As such, what everyone in Silicon Valley and “Venture Land” conceive of as the real game-changing model involves capturing and capitalizing on the “interest graph,” he says. The company that succeeds in doing so would be “close to the Google search paradigm because it would be right in line with demand generation and with discovery that relates to product purposes.” Thus, it is the interest graph that defines the middle ground between Google and Facebook — between search, advertising, and the social graph.

I think we can be sure that whoever can collect a record of your current interests and package them for advertisers stands to make a lot of money. Levchin says that Twitter may end up being a more advantageous platform to advertisers because it allows you to follow a brand and get realtime information and updates — through brand discovery and celebrity discovery — which is more likely to be informative than what you get from your friends, who may not be experts. Twitter has said that it believes that it has control over the interest graph, but status updates don’t really provide the depth and contextualization that is really needed. Of course, the interest graph isn't exclusive. Facebook, Twitter, and startups like Gravity are hoping to capitalize on it — though something tells me that Levchin wants to bring a slice of the interest graph to Google as well.

Vitrue, a social media marketing company, has raised $17 million in Series C financing led by Scale Venture Partners and Advent Venture Partners with existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Comcast Interactive, and Dace Ventures participating in the round. This brings Vitrue’s total funding to $32 million. In conjunction with the announcement, former Facebook Vice President of Global Sales Mike Murphy has joined Vitrue as Special Advisor to the CEO.

As we’ve written in the past, Vitrue's SaaS platform allows brands and marketing agencies to
communicate with fans and consumers across Facebook and Twitter accounts, location based services, and via mobile applications. The company’s SRM (social relationship management) platform is being used by a number of high profile brands including Harley Davidson, Mentos, Dick's Sporting Goods, Crocs, Eddie Bauer, Maybelline, Purina, McDonald's, YouTube, Ford, AT&T, Disney and Best Buy.

And Vitrue is growing in terms of revenue and is cash-flow positive. From Q2 2010 to Q3 2010, Vitrue’s revenue grew nearly 100 percent as the company tripled accounts using their SRM platform and expanded its API.

Currently, the service manages over 2,500 Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts for various clients, which adds up to 450 million fans/followers in 47 countries. That’s up from 680 Twitter and Facebook accounts managed in October of 2010.

With the new financing, Vitrue will be opening offices in seven U.S. markets including New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati and Los Angeles. The company is also expanding globally, creating presences in London, Toronto and Singapore. And to support all these new outposts, Vitrue will be hiiring between 100 and 150 new employees in 2011.

JC Penney gets put in purgatory at Google for link farming. AT&T, Siemens and others are buying SEO links on Forbes and get busted. Employees of these brands may or may not have known exactly what was going on. But I’m guessing more than a few execs were unpleasantly surprised by the news.

Wondering who exactly is doing what to your brand out there in SEOland, and how bad of a hit you might take? Then you may want to use a tool that will show you the warning signs of link farming. SEO firm BrightEdge is giving people a free tool to do this. The timing of it couldn’t be better.

The new tool, called BrandSafe Link Audit, is “a new, free analysis and alert product that can expose disreputable SEO techniques to CMOs before they end up in the headlines.” It tells you about the quality of backlinks to your sites and whether or not you may be at risk from paid links and link farms.

It’s also, of course, a lead generation tool for BrandSafe’s other SEO products. But at this point brand managers may not care, they just want to know exactly what their SEO consultants are up to. If you want to use the product, sign up here.

Yahoo’s CFO Tim Morse spoke at a Goldman Sachs Investing conference today and was peppered with questions about Yahoo’s Asian assets, which make up a good chunk of the value of its stock price right now.

On the subject of Alibaba, Morse was very conciliatory, repeatedly praising the job that the Alibaba management team is doing building the business, emphasizing that Yahoo was just a financial stake-holder. He said that Yahoo was in no hurry to name its contractually obligated second board member.

On the subject of Yahoo Japan, there has definitely been a shift in tone when it comes to whether or not Yahoo might divest its incredibly valuable stake. Earlier this month an analyst from Pacific Crest, noted as much in a research report, raising its rating on Yahoo based on the potential for a boost from selling the Japan shares and its price target to a comparative heady $21 a share.

Here’s what Morse had to say today:

“Yeah so we spent an awful lot of time last year, the last 9 months of 2010, doing our homework on all the various possibilities for maximization of this stake. It's in a terrific position in a market that's very tough to crack for non-locals, they're great in everything yahoo does, plus commerce. So it's a terrific and valuable business and I'm in complete sympathy when investors say, well it's a public company and we can decide whether or not to invest – I get that and I'm in sympathy, Carol's in sympathy with that.

“But fact is we do own it and what we need to do is figure out the best way to be sure, whether we keep it or some other transaction was possible, that it would be in the best interest of our shareholders and the other  Y!J shareholders. … So what we said on our last earnings call is we're now working with our partners – Y!J's management team, Softbank – to  collaborate and find a way to best unlock the value of this asset. … So we went with a list of things that we're talking to them about, they've added to the list, we're in good discussion.”

To couch things, he emphasized that Yahoo wouldn’t do anything if they couldn’t figure out a deal with their partners, because the tax liability would make it “very difficult to justify.” Morse’s exact words:

“The one thing I'd emphasize is that I said publicly at our investor event in May of last year, is – selling the stake, some sales require consent and some don't. A lot of the riskier sales we could do in an open market would come at a substantial discount, on top of tax we'd pay on that, very difficult to justify, and then – what do you do with the proceeds, what's the use for them, is there something really accretive you can do. So without – the risks of selling and liquidity discount, not having great use of proceeds – I said at the time I don't see that an outright sale of the asset serves our investors' needs very well. And I still believe that. We don't have a good way to offset tax, we don't have a good way to justify the proceeds. So we're looking at tax efficient options and working with our partners so it works out well.”

Looks like things could finally be budging in this US-Asian stalemate between Yahoo, Yahoo’s investors, Softbank and — who knows?–maybe eventually Alibaba.