Over the last few months there have been numerous reports about a new, fully revamped Facebook commenting plugin that would make the social network a viable competitor to the likes of Disqus and the stock comment engines found in WordPress and other CMS platforms. Well, the reports were true, and today Facebook is lifting the curtain on its big new comments platform. If you want to get a taste of them, look down — we're currently testing them on TechCrunch.

Now let's take a look at what makes this interesting. First, you'll notice that if you're already logged into Facebook, you won't have to click though any authentication options. More important, you'll notice that any comments you write are being left under your real name, which spells bad news for you trolls and spammers. And then there are the viral Facebook-centric features that other comment engines simply can't compete with.

Whenever you leave a comment on a site that's using Facebook comments, you'll see a checkbox asking if you'd like to also post that comment to Facebook. Leave it checked (it is by default), and your comment will be posted on your Facebook Wall and in your friends' News Feeds. That's nice, but plenty of other sites let you syndicate content to your Facebook profile. But Facebook is also giving its own comments engine a feature that nobody else can reproduce: comments can be syndicated the other way.

Let's say I leave a comment on TechCrunch and opt to have that comment shared to Facebook, too. Then, if one of my Facebook friends comes along and leaves a comment on Facebook about my comment, their comment will be posted back to TechCrunch. In other words, any discussion that my comment sparks between my Facebook friends will be seen on TechCrunch as well. That's very powerful, and it's something that nobody else can do.

This is the first time Facebook has enabled this kind of automatic external posting (historically everything you've posted on Facebook has stayed on Facebook). The company says that it's making it clear what's going on — you’ll notice in the photo above that the button users click actually says which site they’ll be posting to. But, given that this is a new experience on the site, I'm sure we'll encounter some people who inadvertently have their comments posted to third-party sites.

Aside from the sharing features, Facebook is using its social algorithms to surface the comments that will be most interesting to you — comments left by your Facebook friends will float to the top. Comments will also be sorted according to how much discussion they've sparked (this sounds a lot like the sorting feature in Facebook's new Pages update). Incidentally, it's also now possible to leave a comment on an external site as a Facebook Page, which means we could see brands use Facebook to leave 'official' comments on blog posts.

The new comments system also includes many of the administrative options you'd expect. Admins can moderate comments, and readers can mark posts as spam, and so on.

Drama Brewing

It’s promising, particularly because of the syndication features, but the system is far from perfect. The big reason: there are a lot of people who won’t want to use Facebook to leave comments.

Facebook is working with third parties to include other authentication mechanisms, and at launch it’s including support for Yahoo IDs. But it’s missing some other major options — namely, Twitter and Google.

In fact, Facebook had hoped to launch with support from both providers, but something went wrong and support for both Google and Twitter was pulled. It seems likely that given their tense relationship with Facebook, both services have blocked API access to the commenting widget at the eleventh hour.

Back in December of last year, I noted the existence of the first Foodspotting build for Android just in time for the holidays. Turns out, the app was a little undercooked — still in beta — and the team didn’t really want me giving out the link to download it. Whoops.

Well, for those that didn’t, here’s your real chance. Today, the app officially launches in the Android Market.

It was almost exactly one year ago when we first wrote up Foodspotting’s initial app for the iPhone. At the time, they were getting ready for a big SXSW push. And it worked. The iPhone version has seen some 650,000 downloads since then, which has helped them get over 360,000 food photos in their database. It also led to them getting a fresh $3 million round of funding, which now makes the Android app possible — and an even bigger push for this year’s SXSW.

With regard to the Android app, it is important to note that it’s still a “light version”. I noted this back in December, pointing out that it was missing some of the more advanced profile features that the iPhone app has. But this build is much more polished and does allow you to do the two most important things in Foodspotting: take pictures of food and look at pictures of food.

Of the Android build, Foodspotting says:

A more feature-full version of the app will be released in the coming weeks – which will include a profile and guides. Right now, we’ve focused on the pertinent actions of helping people find foods around them, and upload photos to recommend foods. We’ve had such great demand for an app from our community who are on Android phones, that we wanted to release this, and then continue iterating.

As for SXSW, Foodspotting is hosting The Official SXSW Street Food Fest (in conjunction with BlackBerry). That means Austin’s best street food vendors will be out in full force and SXSW badge holders will get in for free. And there’s going to be a food scavenger hunt.

Look for Foodspotting in the Android Market shortly. It will be a free download.

FuzeBox, the developer of an online meeting software, has released a number of new APIs for software developers to include the company’s collaboration technology in third party applications.

Similar to GoToMeeting or WebEx, Fuze provides a conferencing service that allows users to share screens and run meetings online. As opposed to its competitors, Fuze promises a sleeker more lightweight interface and recently debuted multi-party desktop and mobile video, HD quality conferencing. Fuze also offers apps for the iPad, iPhone and Android.

Under the new FuzeBox Ignite platform, the company is making Fuze Meeting and Fuze Messenger services, which are used by 2.5 million users, available for outside integrations. Through the FuzeBox Ignite program, FuzeBox will provide developers with technical documentation, software development kits (SDKs), sample source code, reference guides, and "virtual sandboxes" for testing new applications.

Developers will be able to access FuzeBox applications from any platform, on any browser, and will be able to integrate content and desktop sharing, address books and more. And the FuzeBox Ignite API suite debuts with integration with Box.net, Dropbox, Elementool, eFront Learning, Knovial, Health Nation and Thomson Reuters.

For background, the company, which was formerly known as Callwave, was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. The company eventually delisted itself from the NASDAQ and in the summer of 2009, the company rebranded itself as Fuze Box and launched Fuze Meeting. Fuze also launched Tweetshare, a platform for branded Twitter channels, and brought on streaming media inventor Dr. Alan Lippman its Executive Vice President of Media Technology.

With a little over a week until SXSW begins in Austin, Texas, our inboxes have been hemorrhaging with seemingly every startup under the sun attempting to launch something in time for the festival. Many of these are app-related. And specifically, many are iPhone app-related, which means they need extra time to get approved by Apple. And that means getting things out there this week, just in case. And so it begins.

Today, the location-based service Loopt is launching a new feature which will definitely entice users to check out the app at SXSW: Push Deals.

Yes, the Loopt Android and iPhone apps will now be able to send you deals in realtime based on your location by way of push notifications. This means that if you’re walking by a restaurant and it’s a slow night, they can hit a button to send out a notification to give you a deal to come in. This works on a network like Loopt (as opposed to Foursquare) because the app uses background location to keep track of you.

Obviously, all of these push settings can be controlled by the user in the app, so you’re not getting spammed by deals as you walk around a city. You’ll be able to see the deals that you want, founder Sam Altman says.

And the first test of the system will be at SXSW with some pretty killer deals — Loopt will be giving away over $50,000 worth of merchandise to those using the app in Austin. What kinds of stuff? This kind:

• TiVo is giving away TiVo premiere packages
• Microsoft is giving away Kinects
• Jawbone is doing Jamboxes
• Southwest is giving away free roundtrip tickets
• Altec Lansing is giving away Mix Boomboxes
• Yurbuds is doing Ironman Yurbuds
• Tony Hsieh and Guy Kawasaki are giving away signed books
• And a lot more from people like Fox, Gilt City, OkCupid, and more

“These will all be ‘flash deals’–users get a message with the location at the same time if they’re near the rewards wagon, and there are limited supplies,” Altman says. He also notes that there’s no limit on how often you can win — you just have to be first to get to the wagon mentioned in the message.

Once SXSW is over, Loopt will begin rolling these Push Deals out to select cities.

Hour.ly, a New York City startup that matches temporary job seekers and freelancers with prospective gigs and employers online, unveiled two new features and partnerships on Tuesday with Trufina and Tinychat.

Co-founded by Brooke and Lynn Dixon (Left to right, in image below), Hour.ly has been in pre-revenue, beta mode since September 2010. The bootstrapped company’s newest site features should have it generating and sharing revenue in the second quarter of 2011.

Through its partnership with Trufina, Hour.ly will allow temporary job seekers to pay for and run their own identity and criminal background checks, so that employers won’t have to, and so that hiring decisions won’t be delayed. Hour.ly will also enable employers to conduct an in-browser video chat interview with job seekers — through its partnership with Tinychat — rather than requiring them to download and use a service like Skype or Jabber.

Lynn Dixon, EVP of sales and business development at Hour.ly, explained that her company’s early market research found a large number of temporary job seekers online — for example substitue teachers, barristas and cooks who might not require use of this technology at work — do not have existing accounts with (or even familiarity with) standalone video chat services.

Hour.ly started with a focus on temp hiring needs within the hospitality industry, inspired by Ms. Dixon who holds a culinary degree, and worked for a celebrity chef of the NYC fine dining scene, Daniel Boulud, after spending years in media and technology business development.

Among Hour.ly’s 10,000 active users today, she said, 8 percent are employers. Users can create a profile to apply for and get automatically matched with jobs on other sites with listings like Craigslist, or Indeed. Ms. Dixon reported that the greatest demand for qualified workers via Hour.ly, however, is split between tech and web design, hospitality and retail.

Brooke Dixon, the company’s chief technology and executive officer (and Lynn Dixon’s husband) noted that recent economic trends have driven people to seek temporary employment, yet existing job sites [ranging from Monster and CareerBuilder, to Mediabistro and Simply Hired] have not adapted to the quick sales cycle and price sensitivity of this market.

Hour.ly lets job seekers and employers build “dynamic work profiles” and job listings for free. Through Hour.ly, workers and potential employers get matched automatically, based on their location, availability within a range of time, keywords, multiple job functions that a worker would be willing and able to do, rate of pay, and experience.

Looks like Uber is putting the $11 million dollars it raised on Valentine’s to good use, expanding its car service into Palo Alto officially today, with one catch. The Uber marketing department has apparently taken its cue from Charlie Sheen and cooked up a wacky stunt contest between Google and Facebook employees. What’s even stranger is that the company does not actually have any marketing staff, yet keeps coming up with this kind of stuff.

What is this contest you say!? Well, because the tech industry did not have enough venues for smackdowns, Uber will be pitting Googlers and Facebookers against each other for two weeks, between 3/1 and 3/15, to see who can rack up the most Uber rides. If Facebook wins, all Uber fares from Facebook to Google are free, and if Google wins all Uber fares from Google to Facebook will be twice the price. Heh.

Says Uber CEO Travis Kalanick on the expansion’s choice of locale, “Our users have been screaming and begging for us to launch in the Peninsula, and we already have the partnerships … And it’s the heart of Silicon Valley.” Uber has tested out its services both in New York and Paris previously, before setting its sights on Palo Alto. When asked why the company chose to give the inauguration period exclusivity to Twitter and Facebook, Kalnick responded, “Because it’s a hell of a lot better than doing MySpace vs. Yahoo!” True.

“Both companies, if they could name a rival, would name each other. We would do all startups, but we wanted to be focused,” Kalanick said, clarifying the decision. When asked what exactly he meant by including the conspicuous hashtags #PoachingInStyle and #PoachingCounterMeasure in the contest rules (below), he explained, “If a Google employee is going to an interview at Facebook, he/she wants to be relaxed and comfortable, in the best state.  And if Google wins they deserve to make it harder to get to Facebook.”

And while winning would be awesome for either Facebook and Google (but more awesome for Facebook) it will be pure entertainment to see how this all pans out. Because aside from the two companies competing on a pure product level, Silicon Valley is in a talent crunch and it is poaching season.

The stunt contest will be awesome for end users as well, as Uber will also be offering discounts for everyone who signs up using their Gmail accounts or for everyone who “Likes” Uber on Facebook depending on which company wins. Everybody gets a car!

In case you work at Facebook or Google and want to own this thing, here are the Uber rules:

Exclusivity

- For two weeks – 3/1 to 3/15 – Facebook and Google employees have exclusivity on all pickups in Palo Alto

- For Palo Alto pickups, Uber users MUST have a Facebook or Google employee email address registered with their Uber account (go to http://www.uber.com to change email settings)

- Palo Alto is defined by [a] geo-fence

- Destination location does not factor into exclusivity

The Race

- The contest is to see which company's employees can do the most Palo Alto rides over the exclusivity period

- The winners will be rewarded handsomely

The Stakes

- If Facebook wins:

*All Uber trips between Google HQ and Facebook HQ (either direction) will be FREE for the next 6 months –#PoachingInStyle

*All Facebook employees registered before 3/15 get $20 in credits

*All Uber users who 'Like' Uber between 3/1 and 3/15 will get $10 inUber credits – just go to Uber.com, login, and then hit the Like button at the top of the home page

- If Google wins:

*All Uber trips between Google HQ and Facebook HQ are twice the price for 6 months #PoachingCounterMeasure

*All Google employees registered before 3/15 get $20 in credits

*All Uber users that have signed up with a Gmail account by 3/15 will get $10 in Uber credits

You can follow the contest on Twitter here, Facebook here and on the leaderboard here. Or just Google it.

Image: Stillnetstudios

Well, well, looky here. GroupMe just got a lot app-friendlier. The group texting app is pushing out a massive new update today for both the iPhone and Android that supports push notifications as the default messaging option instead of costly SMS, maps, inline photos in chats, better Foursquare integration, and contact syncing with Twitter, Facebook, and email.

Up until now, the GroupMe app was basically a way to set up texting groups, but that was it. The actual messages would then go over SMS outside the app. With the new release, you can choose to get your messages inside the app and through push notifications instead. If the cellular data channel is weak, messages can always revert back to SMS in a pinch. Not only is this a much better experience for the user, but it could end up saving the startup a hell of a lot of money. With more than a million text messages a day, anything it can do to offload those messages to the free data pipe is smart. (Which is exactly what I’ve been arguing it should do all along).

All group texting apps start out the same, with support for the lowest common denominator—SMS—as paramount. But then their apps get better, and pretty soon if you have an iPhone or Android phone, you forget about the SMS channel altogether. I believe this will be the case for most of GroupMe’s users who own iPhones or Android handsets.

In addition to the push notification feature, now all your group chats appear in the app. You can add photos and see them in the chat stream instead of as a link. Now, you can see where everyone in the group is on a map (a feature already on competitor’s apps such as Fast Society and Beluga). And you can even checkin via Foursquare. This last integration goes beyond the Foursquare friend lookup feature the company recently hacked together. You can checkin to Foursquare locations through the GroupMe app.

It all adds up to an impressive update that puts the app front and center, just in time for SXSW. Fast Society and Beluga, you’d better come up with something equally awesome quickly.

Big shot joining the management team over at social software company Mzinga today: Alan Nugent, former chief technology officer of well-known technology giants like Bellsouth, Xerox, Novell and CA Technologies, has been appointed as its new CEO.

Mzinga provides social intelligence solutions, services, and analytics for businesses. The company has raised more than $42 million since it was founded back in 2007.

Nugent is expected to guide the company’s long-term technology vision and R&D strategies, manage customer acquisition and day-to-day operations. He’ll be based in Mzinga's corporate headquarters in Waltham, MA.

He’s succeeding former CEO Barry Libert, Mzinga's co-founder and chairman.

Prior to joining Mzinga, Nugent served as EVP and CTO at CA. Earlier in his career, Nugent was senior vice president and CTO of Novell, and before that senior vice president, CTO, and CIO at MunichRe/American Re; senior vice president and CTO at Xerox Corporation and chief technologist and software architect for BellSouth Corporation.

He began his career at Hewlett-Packard Company. Oh, and he has apparently also played competitive poker for more than two decades.

The battle between Flash and HTML5 has largely revolved around video, with Flash proponents pointing out how lame it is to open up your browser on an iPad and not be able to play a Flash video. And yet HTML5-friendly video has quickly been adopted by a majority of video websites and video players. Today video search engine MeFeedia released some stats showing that 63 percent of the 30 million videos in its index are now HTML5-compatible. That number is up from 10 percent a year ago, 26 percent last May, and 54 percent in October, 2010.

MeFeedia indexes 30,000 video sites large and small, including Hulu, CBS, ABC, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, and DailyMotion. Among larger media sites, HTML5 video already reached two thirds last May, and is already above 90 percent, according to Encoding.com. In terms of mobile devices that don’t support Flash, they now account for 5 percent of MeFeedia’s video playbacks, up from 1 percent a year ago.

MeFeedia’s numbers may be more conservative, but they point in the same direction. HTML5 video, and the H.264 codec specifically, is the new standard for video. Okay, good. Now that we have that settled, we can all move on and keep watching videos on our iPads. Except maybe not because Google doesn’t like H.264. Uh-oh, here we go again.

Founded back in 2007 by former PayPal, eBay, Luminex and Tesla Motors execs, MaxPoint Interactive this morning announced that it has secured its second round of funding to the tune of $8 million, led by Madrona Venture Group.

Trinity Ventures, which led MaxPoint's initial financing round of $3 million in 2010, also participated.

MaxPoint offers advertisers proprietary targeting technology that allows its clients to “pinpoint” prospects up to neighborhood level, in a bid to increase in-store sales for brands across a variety of sectors.

The company’s system, which it says is already in use by consumer packaged goods brands, retailers, pharma companies and financial service organizations, is said to employ two unique technologies to drive in-store purchases for national and local brands.

By combining multiple data sets to form what it refers to as “Customized Neighborhood Profiles”, MaxPoint says it is able to identify the best potential customer for any brand – those that are both interested and capable of purchasing the product.

To accomplish this, MaxPoint draws from point-of-sale data from more than 65,000 retail stores nationwide, demographics, psychographics and other publicly available data sources – pretty much everything apart from personally identifiable information, in other words.

Subsequently, the company uses its so-called Digital Zip technology to find the best neighborhoods across the U.S. for the product or service in question, based on the characteristics of the people who live there.

The company says it recently moved its sales office in New York City to a larger location in Manhattan and also expanded its sales team.

Pan-european VC Wellington Partners, together with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and angel investor Sherry Coutu have invested in hot new UK startup Artfinder, which is setting out to the ‘the LastFM’ for the global art world, letting people catalogue and follow the art they love.

The first-round funding – which is undisclosed – was led by Wellington (which has invested in Xing, Qype, Spotify, Livebookings, Adconion and others), while Hoffman invested via the Greylock Discovery Fund (which is also in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pandora and Groupon among others). Sherry Coutu, best known in the UK as founder of Interactive Investor International (which went public) and serial Angel, will act as Chairman of the company.

Artfinder has partnered with galleries, libraries, museums and artists worldwide to build an extremely comprehensive online catalogue of fine art featuring over 250,000 works from over 400 institutions. I’ve seen the demo and it’s pretty amazing – and you can too as the site goes live today.

Apple’s new JointVenture service is a business-grade Genius Bar for small to medium-sized business. For $499 you get support for 5 employees with the option to add employees for $99 a year. You get priority Genius Bar support and are allowed to attend special events geared to business users. You also receive phone support from folks who know about your specific needs and wants.

Read more…

File storage and synchronization service Egnyte has raised $10 million in series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers with previous investors Floodgate and Polaris Venture Partners participating in the round. This brings Egnyte’s total funding to $16 million.

As we’ve written in the past, Egnyte is essentially a Dropbox-like service that focuses primarily on helping small and medium-sized businesses sync and store their files. The startup uses a hybrid cloud solution, where businesses keep a Network-Attached Storage device linked up to their office's computers, which serves as a 'local cloud' — all files are synced and backed up on this local, network connected hardware. These Local Clouds can consist of Netgear Ready NAS devices, or VMware-based virtual appliances.

The 'local cloud' NAS is also hooked up to Egnyte's servers so any changes made between the client computers and the files on the NAS are also synced up to the web for remote access. Once these files are in the cloud, company admins can enable file sharing between employees and also to business partners, who can be given restricted access to specific files. This cloud portion also serves as a remote backup, and files can be accessed from Macs, Windows, and mobile phones.

As more businesses move to the cloud for storage options, Egnyte has seen its customer base grow exponentially. The startup quadrupled its customer base in 2010 and is syncing more than 5 billion files with more than 500,000 user licenses. Egnyte is seeing than 2 million file operations in a single 24-hour window—an average of more than 3,000 file uploads and downloads per minute.

Egnyte, which faces competition from Sugarsync, Box.net, Dropbox and others, plans to use the new investment to expand into international markets and increase domestic engineering, sales and marketing efforts. The company also plans to launch an enterprise application for the next version of the iPad.

Lightbank, the investment fund of Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky, is announcing its first partner hire today—seasoned media and technology venture exec Paul H. Lee.

​Lee is joining Lightbank from Playboy Enterprises where he was Managing Director and Group Head of the company's digital ventures group. Prior to joining Playboy, Lee was a Senior Vice President for the Peacock Equity Fund, the venture arm of NBC Universal in New York and was responsible for onvesting in emerging ad platforms including gaming and mobile/wireless advertising sectors. As a founding partner of the fund, Lee helped lead investments in 4INFO, Greystripe, Healthline, Ramp, and Rubicon Project.

While Lee’s venture experience has centered in the media world, he plans on making investments in a variety of technology sectors. Lightbank’s venture strategy focuses on four major themes, says Lee, “mobile, social, local and global.” This year, the fund is committing anywhere up to $10 million in seed stage investments, but the firm may look at later stage investment opportunities in the future.

And for now, Lightbank has mostly invested in Midwest startups (including Sprout Social, Where I’ve Been, and Watermelon Express,) but Lee says the firm is not tied to the area anymore and will be looking to fund entrepreneurs regardless of where their startup is based.

Click Forensics this morning announced that it has purchased display ad verification technology provider Adometry and that it will be changing its company name to Adometry as a result of the transaction. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Adometry is today launching an integrated online advertising analytics suite designed to help advertisers verify, measure and optimize campaign performance across a variety of ad networks, publishers and media properties.

Adometry was originally founded in 2006 and raised $450,000 in angel funding according to its CrunchBase profile.

Click Forensics was founded in 2007 and raised $21 million from Austin Ventures, Sierra Ventures and Shasta Ventures.

Boxee has announced on its blog that it has raised $16.5 million in third-round funding. This brings the total capital raised by the company to $26.5 million.

The investment comes from new investors Pitango and Softbank, with participation from prior backers General Catalyst, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.

Boxee points out it has grown from 12 to 34 employees since its last ($6 million) round of funding, and that it plans on hiring some more.

The extra capital will be used to enhance its software, solve bugs and build new functionality into their product(s). In the company’s words:

One of our greatest challenges will be to add more movies, TV shows, and video while at the same time making it easier to discover and watch them. We have ideas on both fronts and are excited to get to work.Many of you would like to see Boxee handle all the video on their TV with no need to switch inputs. We'd like to get there, too.

In addition to product enhancements, the funding will be used to strike more content and hardware manufacturer partnerships.

Also see: Boxee CEO To Big Media: "Resistance Is Futile"

In a quest to start something as big as the Apple in the Big Apple, a number of incubators, funds and fellowship programs have sprung up in New York City in recent months.

The FinTech Innovation Lab made its debut in December 2010, and the NYC Turing Fellows program in January. Incubators like TechStars and DreamItVentures moved into town around the same time, too. One program that predated these all by about a year, hackNY, today announced that it has doubled the the size of its summer program, and will match twenty four “computationally expert” students with area startups this year.

The hackNY summer program is distinct in offering free, NYC-based dormitory housing to its fellows. Co-organized by professors from New York University and Columbia, the program also requires startups to pay selected interns at least $400 a week, and requires its young guns to participate in events and attend lectures by technologists, investors, and startup founders. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis from students via the hackNY.org website, here.

Startups that want to bring on top, tech students also have to apply. A co-founder of hackNY, Evan Korth, said the non-profit looks for startups from the earliest to a more mature stage, that can offer fellows “an ideal mentoring environment.” He explained:

“The startup should have a strong technologist who has time and a desire to mentor young people. Believe it or not a lot of technologists really enjoy doing this kind of thing. Typically, this would be a CTO or VP of engineering who wants to work with the student, directly.

They also have to offer a good project for a student to work on — we do not want to send future hackers into a company where all they do is the most basic kind of object oriented programming, like writing ‘getters and setters’ all day. We want the best student technologists we can find to work on more interesting things.”

The summer class of 2010 hackNY Fellows worked with buzzworthy startups including: Aprizi; Aviary; bit.ly; Business Insider; Buzzd; BuzzFeed; Comixology; Designer Pages; Knewton; OkCupid; Parse.ly; and 10gen.

Korth said New York startups that have offered to potentially hire hackNY fellows for summer 2011 include: FourSquare, Bit.ly, Tumblr, OMGPop, SecondMarket, Buzzfeed, YipiT, Knewton, Hunch, BankSimple, Group.me, HyperPublic and others. Participation will be determined through a matching process as summer approaches.

Backers of hackNY include: AOL Ventures [disclosure: part of the company that owns TechCrunch]; Andreessen Horowitz; DFJ Gotham; ff Asset Management; First Round Capital; Firstmark Capital; Google Ventures; Gunderson Dettmer; IA Ventures; Lerer Ventures; Lowenstein Sandler; Techstars NYC; Square 1 Bank and Union Square Ventures; as well as Columbia Technology Ventures at Columbia University; ISOC-NY; Marks Paneth & Shron; NYCEDC; NYCIF; NYC Tech Connect; the NYU Department of Computer Science; and Wilson Sonsini.

Image: Washington Square Park, via Heather Harvey under creative commons license

Qype, the location-based reviews and recommendation service, is to get in on the local coupon market. This is via an acquisition of Munich-based Cooledeals.de, which the company announced today. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed. The acquisition is enabling Qype, which is the largest user-generated local review site in Europe (ahead of Yelp), to add coupons and discount vouchers to its offering. This comes in the form of QypeDeals.com, initially launching in Germany but with plans to "rapidly roll-out" in other European territories through 2011. In other words, watch out Groupon and DailyDeal and a host of other local discount providers and aggregators throughout Europe.

Google was originally set to debut in-app payments support for Android applications in the fourth quarter of 2010, but recently said that the launch would be delayed until the end of this quarter. Now, it appears the real launch date of the much-anticipated (at least by many an app developer or publisher) product is May 2011.

Jambool, the company behind a virtual monetization platform dubbed ‘Social Gold’ that was acquired by Google last August, this morning started sending the following email to users:

Hello,

Thank you for your use of the Jambool Social Gold platform. As you know, Jambool was acquired by Google last August. This acquisition meant that some changes to our business were inevitable, and we’d like to share them with you today.

First, the existing Jambool Social Gold product will be discontinued in favor of a new Google in-app payment product in May 2011. Rest assured that you will be able to sign in to the Jambool merchant console through September 2011, and you will receive year-end financial statements in February 2012.

Second, we’d like to invite you to participate in the pre-release beta of the Google in-app payment system. This system will enable developers to accept payments within an app, but it will not have the full functionality of Social Gold at launch. We understand that this will not meet the needs of all developers currently using Social Gold, but we highly encourage interested developers to join the Google
in-app payments beta by submitting your information at http://google.com/checkout/inapp.

Again, we thank you for your flexibility during this transition period. Please feel free to respond to this email with any questions about your Jambool account or the new Google in-app payment product.

Sincerely,
The Jambool Team

Three big take-aways:

- Jambool’s Social Gold service will be shut down, even though it offers more features than Google’s new in-app payments product will have upon its formal debut (which already ruined one game developer’s day, apparently).

- The Jambool team was commissioned to work on Android in-app purchases functionalities, and not – as some had proclaimed – the monetization of Google’s always-imminent-yet-elusive social networking and online gaming blitz.

- Google’s in-app payment product, currently in beta, will be launched in May 2011.

Update: Google I/O will be held on May 10 and 11. It would make sense for the company to announce the new product at the developer event.

In-app payments are of course vital because they enable app developers and publishers to sell virtual goods and premium features, both major sources of mobile revenue in addition to paid apps and mobile advertising.

In a recent blog post, Jambool specified that its Social Gold product will function through May 31, 2011, after which all payment processing will be discontinued:

We are hard at work developing a web-based, in-app payments solution that combines the simplicity of the Jambool API with the power of the Google Checkout and Google accounts infrastructure. We're very excited about the ease of use of the new system, with features such as one-click purchasing.

While this work is underway, we made the difficult decision to close new signups to the Social Gold platform today and will discontinue all payment processing on May 31, 2011. Existing developers will be able to continue processing payments through Social Gold until the end of May and log in to the Social Gold merchant console through September.

The Google in-app payments system will enable developers to easily accept payments within an app. This is the first version, and we will focus our investment in this API moving forward. Developers should expect the same innovation, and more, from us on this new platform.

The FTC will no doubt be watching with wary eyes.

(Thanks to Sagada Hapiness for the tip)

P.S.: Through carrier billing, Android developers were already able to process in-app transactions using solutions from the likes of Zong, PayPal and BOKU. Angry Birds developer Rovio even went for payments by SMS, underscoring the need for Google to get this in-app payments product up and running as fast as possible.

How influential are the people who check in to your startup space? Physical tech incubators and startup spaces like Dog Patch Labs or Kicks Labs, and counterparts like TechHub and WhiteBearYard in London or Innovation Works in Beijing often make a lot of the hot young talent they attract. But there’s never really been a way to sort the wheat from the chaff – until now.

As we’ve mentioned before, having an awesome 404 Page is a source of pride among startups. From the Twitter Fail Whale, to the Google Fail Whale (of course) to the Digg Fail Ox to Blippy’s Fail Double Rainbows you have to admit that these things freaking make your day.

Social gaming startup EightBit.me (which has yet to launch whatever its planning on doing with its armies of 8-bit Twitter avatars) has moved a step beyond fail animals and memes, to yes, a Fail Nintendo Game Cartridge, above. The “Blow me …” here is referring to the once sacred art of blowing into video games to get them to work AND NOT ANYTHING ELSE.

And while they’re not the first ones to match this image with this phrase, this is definitely the best, most relevant use case I’ve come across so far.

Don’t want to wait until the March 9th launch? Learn how to make your own bootleg avatar here.

h/t @Fromedome

A month or so ago, I wrote about how Google’s apparent willingness to secretly hand over user data to the feds had made me rethink my obsession with cloud storage. Not – natch – because I have anything in particular to hide from Uncle Sam, but rather because if I'm going to have my data subpoenaed, I'd rather know about it so I can write blog posts and make self-promotional hay about it.

I also have a bit of a thing for physical security: storing my mail in a physical location rather than in the cloud so, even with access to password, no-one can hack into my old correspondence and share it with the world. Mentioning no names: TechCrunch.

Anyway, I followed through on my threat a few weeks ago, switching my mail from the cloud to a more traditional POP provider based outside the US. I store my mail offline in a lightly encrypted folder (as I say – nothing to hide. I'm all about paper and pen for sensitive stuff) and backup regularly to a disk stored somewhere else.

I admit, though, I did miss some of the convenience of the cloud: particularly the peace of mind that comes from knowing I can immediately access all of my old mail from anywhere in the world. And the fact that I'm not at the mercy of a corrupt disk or having to trek and get my backup drive.

Fortunately over the weekend Google made that regret go away. Not only did they manage to temporarily lose over 40,000 users' mail but, as MG explains, they also admitted that their only backup was stored on a physical tape drive, somewhere in the back of beyond. So as it turns out, my method of mail storage is both more reliable (I haven't lost any of my mailboxes; Google have lost 40,000) and easier to restore (I could have my mail restored in about an hour, Google’s users are still waiting).

Another score for keeping things old school.

Yesterday, the tips started flowing in. “Google has deleted all my email.” “Check Twitter, massive Gmail failure.” “Gmail just melted down.” Users were freaking out. And that’s understandable. Many were apparently opening up Gmail to find that all of their emails had vanished. Had it happened to me, I would have been on Twitter swearing at the top of my digital lungs and promising to do something crazy — like switch to Hotmail. Of course, the reality of the situation wasn’t quite so dramatic.

While the initial reports had around .29 percent of Gmail users affected by the bug (about 600,000 users), those estimates were quickly revised to .08 percent (about 150,000 users). And today, those numbers were further revised to .02 percent. This means that only around 40,000 of Gmail’s 200 million (or so) users were affected.

Now, 40,000 pissed off people is still 40,000 pissed off people. But there was even better news out of Google today: all of their data is safe and sound. But it isn’t safe and sound in some remote server attached to the cloud. Instead, it’s safe on back-up data tapes somewhere in an undisclosed location.

Yes, despite all the ‘cloud this’ and ‘cloud that’ talk, when it comes down to it, Google still backs up everything on tape.

And thank god they do.

Just imagine if this bug had affected a significant percentage of users? All of those affected plus millions more would have likely never trusted Google with their data again. Worse, it may have slowed the flow of such data to the cloud across the entire industry. That may have made Microsoft smile, but we’d all have been worse off for it.

But again, luckily, that didn’t happen. Still, it’s fairly alarming that all of those insane data redundancy policies that Google has in place fell because of what seems to be a fairly standard “storage software update”.

Google notes that it’s going to take a little bit more time to get all of the data off the tapes and back into the cloud. But at least it will get there, instead of being gone forever.

[photo: flickr/akakumo]

This week, Sarah is in New York doing various book-related things – but WITN is all about life outside the valley so she dialed in via Skype to give us an update in what’s happening on the East coast.

Spoiler alert: NY is still no Silicon Valley, but it’s increasingly proving that it doesn’t have to be. We also discussed whether New York’s status as a multi-industry town is a pro or a con when it comes to technology startups. Video below.

(Next week Paul will be in LA, a trip which he vehemently denies is about finding a new American girlfriend/wife. Instead, he claims he’ll be on the look out for interesting start-ups to rival Machinima and – uh -  MySpace. If you know of a company that fits the bill, let him know.)

The two-year trajectory of Bump Technologies, the designers of the app that makes it easy to swap contact information, music, and other data between mobile devices,is a somewhat interesting case study in the evolution of early-stage app startups.

Speaking from the DEMO Conference today in Palm Springs, Founder Jake Mintz told the audience that Bump started as a “nights and weekends project” among close friends. Co-founders Mintz, David Lieb, and Andy Huibers launched Bump in March of 2009, and a month-and-a-half later, their nights and weekend project had already pulled in 1 million users.

The founders then decided to move their operations to San Francisco, where they began couch hopping in earnest. Mintz said that between May 2009 and February 2010, even though Bump raised nearly $3.5 million in Series A in November 2009 from Sequoia, they slept on couches, devoting all waking hours to their project.

Originally, Mintz said, Bump was conceived as a “replacement for business cards” and had more “serious” contexts in mind, but when they began to see that Bump was being used to share more than just CV data, they began adapting. Contact sharing remains at the core of Bump’s business, but Mintz said that, in the last year, many users have come to Bump as a way to share photos, and maximizing the value of both aspects of their mobile business has been “a delicate balance”.

Somewhat serendipitously, Bump went to Marc Andreesen, Ben Horowitz, and John O’Farrell for advice on how to grow the business, although they were not looking for investment at the time. Mintz said that the partners later came to them saying they would like to invest in spite of Bump’s reluctancy to raise additional funding. So, in January, Andreessen Horrowitz invested a sizable $16.5 million in Bump, with Andreessen joining Bump’s board.

When asked what they wanted to do with so much money, Mintz said that it would be used primarily to hire designers and developers, indicating that, as Andreessen had said to him, there will be multiple social networks in the future — beyond Facebook — and the team wants to build a social technology that “interfaces with the real world.”

It remains to be seen, he said, whether Facebook would eventually become a competitor for Bump, but today they continue to collaborate and make strides in areas that Facebook does not yet control.

Part of this growth, Mintz said, is from recognizing the important element of user experience. Bump remains determined not fall victim to spamming its users with notifications: "We all know apps can also be used as a tool for evil — an app that will send you a push notification every 15 minutes," he said. "Some apps have used that mechanic and grown very quickly, and you have this really powerful opportunity to be a part of someone's life — but in the long-term you have to focus on the user experience."

Early Bump incarnations essentially allowed customers to download and begin using immediately without having to register or specify user settings. And while this approach worked initially and avoided breakage, a few core features went unused, because the app didn't guide its users through a setup process, Mintz said.

The Bump team is now looking to add a short registration process and tutorial that will offer detailed instructions and walk users through how to optimize the niche features that will be arriving later this year. As to what to expect from Bump’s future additions, Mintz added, “if your vision involves finding the best and easiest ways to use a smartphone in the real world, we know that our users might walk into store and want to interact with a brand, or interact with a product, and we want to ask ‘how do we facilitate our growth around that?’”

Keeping an eye on customer experience has worked so far for Bump, as Mintz said that the application has become the eighth-most downloaded app on the Apple App store, attracting 8 million active monthly users, and 27 million downloads. Not too shabby.