Tokyo-based Tonchidot, legendary TechCrunch50 finalist and maker of the popular Sekai Camera augmented reality service, has released a new (free) app for iPhone and Android. But DOMO (Japanese for “nice to meet you” or “thank you”) isn’t an update or variation of Sekai Camera but another (ingenious) way to “augment” reality.

DOMO is being offered as a “pre-social” app, which makes use of your interest graph and location to make it easier to connect with people who are similar to you and physically near you (“pre-social”, because these people are initially strangers).

For that, DOMO pulls interests and “likes” from your Facebook account, creates a DOMO profile based on these items, registers your location via GPS and shares your profile with other DOMO users in the vicinity.

When you encounter a person with a similar profile to yours, you can view their profile, write a short message or send over a friendly “Domo” – and you’re connected (logging in with your Facebook account and customizing the info you want to share is enough to use the app).

DOMO iPhone version:

Android version:
It’s no coincidence that DOMO has become available right before SXSW 2011 in Austin.

Tonchidot CEO Iguchi says the main idea behind his application is to bring the usefulness of Facebook to the real world, for example events, meet-ups, parties, universities and other places where people meet people they don’t know yet. (Iguchi himself will demo his app on Saturday during an SXSW party for DOMO and other apps in Austin).

Again, the app is free on both iPhone and Android, so give it a it a spin and start scanning your vicinity for interesting new people.

Here’s the official DOMO video:

Professional social network LinkedIn is holding a press event today to talk about the company’s new product strategy. We’re liveblogging the announcement. As we heard from Mrinal Desai, LinkedIn is expected to announce a new social news feature today. That product is LinkedIn Today: a social news product for professionals.

LinkedIn has been actively churning out products that allow users to leverage the massive amount of data published from the social network’s more than 90 million professionals. News make sense considering that it is probably one of the more actively shared content categories on the network.

CEO Jeff Weiner took the stage, explaining LinkedIn’s product visions as “changing the way people work.” One of the first objectives for the company is that it wants to become the professional profile of record, across the web. The second objective is to be the essential source for professional insights. LinkedIn is focused on making the massive stream of content valuable to its professionals based on users professional graphs, unique data and more, extracting signal from the stream.

The third objective is for LinkedIn to be wherever professionals work, whether that be on mobile, or web platforms. The company is investing heavily in its Open API platform to bring LinkedIn to third-party applications.

VP of Product Deep Nishar says that we rely on the power of people we trust for social recommendations. “When we make truly live changing decisions, we don’t use search, we rely on the people we trust,” says Nishar. At the heart of LinkedIn’s product strategy are identity and insights.

The third key tenant, says Nishar, is that LinkedIn has to be where every professional actually works. Professionals want the ability to leverage the power of identity and insights across all channels. Here are some of the products that LinkedIn is rolling out that fit into this strategy:

InMaps: These maps are a visual depiction of your LinkedIn network. You can visualize where the deepest pockets are within your professional network.

UPDATING

Hipster, the oddly named local Q&A site that was up for three months in Boulder, CO, shut down in order to relaunch, went viral despite being in “stealth” a month ago, almost got bought by Google and Groupon pre-launch, didn’t end up launching at the Launch conference and so on, has revealed itself to the public today, just in time for yes, SXSW.

Hipster basically provides you with a newsfeed centered around questions about a location (like Austin in the case of SXSW), where you can toggle back and forth between Popular, Recent, My Topics and Friends activity. Like on Quora, you can follow People, Categories, Neighborhoods and Questions and receive notifications on followed activity when you log back in to Hipster. To add a location to a question or answer, use the @ symbol and type the location name like you normally would.

Linking your Foursquare, Facebook or Gowalla account with Hipster will enable you to follow specific locations that you’ve checked in to, as the reasoning is that you’re more likely to have answers to questions about these locations. Hipster also allows you to custom auto-publish your question-asking and answering activity to Twitter and Facebook.

While some have compared Hipster to local business Q&A site Loqly, CEO Doug Ludlow says his greatest competitor is Google, “[But] Google can’t read minds. This is a big problem, because the vast majority of the world's useful information concerning the locations around us (cities, businesses, neighborhoods, etc.) is not yet on the web.” Ludlow says that Hipster, by trying to match people who have questions with the people who can answer them, is trying to bring that untapped information lode online.

It’s a formidable goal and there’s a lot more work done in Hipster’s case, admittedly. Now in public beta, Hipster SXSW has been the realm of around 500 people from the viral signup sheet for the past day or so and already the quality of some of the questions is negligible. Ludlow says he’s planning on fixing the Eternal September problem by giving the community the power to edit and delete irrelevant questions, like on Quora.

Having rebuked Google and Groupon’s advances, Hipster is currently in the process of fundraising and I’m hearing some pretty impressive investors have signed on before today’s SXSW-centered launch.

When asked why he didn’t bite the bullet and launch an iPhone app like everybody else in the world Ludlow explained, “There are 50 to 100 mobile apps competeing for attention at SXSW. We want to be the thing that people check first thing in the morning when they hop on their computer.”

Aside from working on a mobile app, Ludlow’s future plans include launching in multiple cities after SXSW (he plans on holding a “Bring Hipster To Your Town” contest to see which city can clamor the most for it) and iterating on the product, “every time we launch in a new city we’ll get better and better.” Well with 38,000 signups on its waiting list, its got to do something.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday announced an upgrade to its Energy Star requirements for televisions, and cable and satellite boxes. According to a press statement from the agency: Effective in September 2011, these products must be 40 percent more efficient than conventional models in order to win the Energy Star label. Energy Star expects to update 20-some other product requirements this year.

Manufacturers of TVs, cable and satellite boxes in the U.S. don’t have to comply with the new Energy Star standards — unless they want their products to be eligible for rebates, like those highlighted by regional availability on GreenOhm.com and a number of government websites run by states with rebate programs.

Television manufacturers do have to label their sets with information about how much energy they consume annually, and how that compares to a range of similar models, under the Federal Trade Commission’s Appliance Labeling Rule that takes effect on May 10, 2011.

According to market research by In-Stat (recently acquired by The NPD Group), set-top box shipments in North America slowed in 2010, and the trend is likely to continue this year. The NPD Group reported, however, that 2011 holiday sales of television sets, in particular:

“The 46-47-inch flat-panel TV segment was the fastest-growing for the holiday, increasing 31 percent in units. Sales of TVs above 50 inches also showed strong growth with volume jumping 21 percent propelled by exciting new technologies such as 3D, Internet connectivity, and LED backlighting.”

The FTC is still considering energy-related labeling requirements for manufacturers of personal computers, cable or satellite set-top boxes, stand-alone digital video recorders, and personal computer monitors .

Image: 1950s era television set, via John Atherton

We’ve been dreaming of the Quirky Switch for months now, ever since it was first announced back in April, 2010 and now that dream is a reality. The Quirky Switch is basically a modular pocket knife that lets you create three sizes of knife using various pieces. I got a unit and discovered that this thing is truly DIY with a full complement of add-ons including a pen, a bottle opener, and various screwdrivers, that you actually have to screw together using your bare wit and weak little pinchers.

I got a huge kick out building this thing and while the price, at $79, is a little steep, you essentially get three pocket knives for the price of one if you’re careful how you place the pieces.

Read more…

Back to the drawing board. The House of Representatives struck a mighty blow against Net Neutrality yesterday, with the communications and technology subcommittee voting against the recently adopted Net Neutrality rules. The rules will actually remain in place until Congress or the president do something about them, ie, send them back to the FCC for further re-tooling or worse.

The 15-8 vote was along party lines. The committee’s Republican chairman (the Republican Party won control of the House in last fall’s election), Fred Upton, of Michigan, said, "If the FCC was truly weighing the costs and benefits of its actions, the agency would not be attempting to regulate the Internet."

Read More

Realtime search startup Topsy Labs has raised $15 million in Series C funding today from BlueRun Ventures, Western Technology Investments, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund and Scott Banister. This brings the company’s total funding to $30 million.

Topsy indexes and ranks search results based the conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried. What differentiates Topsy is that it focuses slightly more on data from Twitter and also holds on to data forever and results are powered by influencers tweeting about content within the social web. Topsy also says that its fast indexing technology is capable of processing over 1 million documents per second, which makes it well-suited for realtime search.

Topsy also powers realtime search for a number of media properties, including IDG Media, The Huffington Post and Discovery Communications. And Topsy has also started rolling out tools for marketers and publishers to leverage the social web, including social search widgets for publisher sites and analytics, which allows you to identify and quantify what keywords, terms and URLs are trending within the social web.

The startup is one of the remaining independent realtime search portals that is still in operation. OneRiot shut down its realtime search site and platform and actually transitioned all of its partners over to Topsy. Collecta also shut down its realtime search product earlier this year.

While other startups in the space are shifting focus, Topsy says it is thriving because of its technical advantage. In January, the startup served 500 million search queries (mostly through its API).

Topsy is still evaluating how to make revenue from the realtime search model, but is looking at ways to license its API. The new funding will be used to scale Topsy’s infrastructure and to hire more engineers and staff.

In the wake of JC Penney’s link farming issue on Google, SEO firm BrightEdge released to a free auditing tool that tells brands about the quality of the backlinks to their sites and whether they may be at risk from paid links and link farms. It’s been over two weeks since the tool was released and BrighEdge has analyzed audits for more than 1,000 brands.

BrightEdge reports that the “improper black hat SEO tactics” are much more widespread than you would think. While BrightEdge is keeping the names of brands surveyed anonymous, the SEO firm said that a quarter of all brands surveyed probably have these back link issues. Most companies have no clue this is being done because outside contractors are hired to do SEO work.

This report seems to remain consistent with JC Penney’s side of the link farming story. The fact is that many brands may not know that link farming was taking place with their site. The retailer claimed it had been totally unaware that it was benefiting from link farming. And unfortunately, the company paid the price—once Google was alerted, the search engine caused the brand to plummet in search results and lose a huge percentage of its organic traffic.

Apparently the damage that backlinks can have on a company is still unnoticed among senior
management. The vertical industries at highest risk, says BrightEdge, were online services, including real estate sites and photo sharing services. Nearly one-third of these domains had backlinks that put them at risk of corrective action by search engines.

Clovr Media, which bills itself as a provider of ‘loyalty 2.0′ solutions, has raised $8.3 million in a round of funding led by Jeffrey Glass of Bain Capital Ventures. Clovr Media's seed round investors Kepha Partners and Common Angels also participated in this round, as did angel investor Mark Wright.

Clovr has built a platform that converts banners, text links, videos or mobile ads into what it calls card linked offers or CLOs in a bid to lead the way to the next phase of digital couponing and loyalty programs.

Clover Media helps financial institutions bring offers from the brands they prefer to its customers via credit and debit cards. The offers thus link interactive advertising spending to consumer purchasing (‘clicks-to-bricks’ tracking and analytics).

The company allows advertisers to offer special discounts to consumers while in the purchase consideration phase along with providing an immediate reward after the item is bought.

No point of sale integration, no mail-in rebates or paper coupons, and discounts appear directly on the consumer's bank statement. Explanatory video below.

Offermatic, which just raised $4.5 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ron Conway, Omar Hamoui and others, also operates in this space.

Location-based gaming startup SCVNGR, which recently closed a $15 million funding round, is entering new territory: it’s launching a spinoff service called LevelUp, which goes live today in pilot cities Boston and Philadelphia. And it’s taking on some big names, including the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial (in addition to the location-based services it already competes with, like Foursquare).

The goal of LevelUp, says SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch, is to offer the immediate distribution and new customers afforded by the daily deal sites, while simultaneously maintaining the long-term engagement that location-based games are usually better at. Priebatsch says that the big deal sites will often lead to a “one-and-doner” phenomenon, where businesses attract a flood of new customers eager to get in on a deal, and then watch as those customers never come back. LevelUp wants to fix that.

The service is pretty simple. It will offer hot deals comparable to Groupon (say, $10 for $20 worth of sushi), using a website,  mobile applications and a regular email newsletter to contact customers. This initial deal is called “Level 1″ and is available for seven days. Anyone can purchase and redeem the deal, the same way anyone can redeem a Groupon.

Then the differences kick in. Customers will also be able to see even better deals — dubbed Level 2 and Level 3 — which are only available to repeat customers. So, a new student at a rock-climbing club might be able to take their first lesson at a special rate of $50 for $100 worth of classes. But then a followup lesson might be even less expensive (say, $35 for $100).

There are a few more twists. First, Priebatsch is well aware that LevelUp is currently missing one key ingredient that other deal sites have: distribution. SCVNGR will not be adding its existing user-base to LevelUp, and the other daily deal sites already have millions of subscribers to their daily emails. So LevelUp is sweeting the deal. On Groupon, a business has to give Groupon 50% of the revenue generated by their deal — LevelUp is allowing businesses to keep 100% of the revenue generated by their ‘Level 1′ deals (they’ll take 25% of the proceeds from deals at Levels 2 and 3). Priebatsch says that under this system, LevelUp will only get paid if it brings repeat customers back to businesses.

The company has a few other plans that it hopes will help it get some initial traction. First, it’s running $1 million advertising blitzes in both Boston and Philadelphia (the two pilot cities for the service). And some of the initial businesses participating in LevelUp will be donating 25% of revenue from their Level 1 deals to partner organizations, like the American Heart Association and Susan G. Komen for the Cure. These partner organizations may also begin to promote LevelUp, because the more people who use it, the more donations they’ll receive.

LevelUp has an interesting and potentially compelling offering for businesses, especially since they can effectively use it for free for their initial deals. But it obviously has its work cut out to achieve distribution, and there are a couple other kinks that might crop up. First, businesses will have to get comfortable giving out very steep discounts for Levels 2 and 3 (Priebatsch explains that any margins lost here should easily be recouped from the Level 1 customers, because many Level 1 customers probably won’t wind up making it to Level 2 or 3).

Another possible issue is sticker shock — if a customer is getting super cheap discounts for their first three visits to a business, the price jump for the fourth visit could be a rude awakening. Priebatsch says that the company has done a lot of research on this issue, and that after three visits customers have often established a loyalty to the business, even with the price jump.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the only product SCVNGR has aside from its core location game. The company got its start as a scavenger-hunt generator used by colleges for student orientation and businesses for team building.

IK Multimedia’s VocaLive app for recording live audio hits the iTunes App Store sometime today. Coupled with the soon-to-ship iRig Mic, the two make a formidable pair for creating many kinds of audio recordings: vocal performance, field recordings, etc. Video below.

Read more…

As we’ve heard over the past few days, AOL has started implementing layoffs across its properties in the wake of the Huffington Post acquisition. The deal, which amounted to $315 million, closed on Monday of this week. We’ve confirmed the firings with AOL and here is the breakdown of the exact numbers and where the layoffs will take place.

AOL will be letting go a little over 200 U.S. employees, around 120 of which are editorial staffers. The remaining employees that are being let go also work in AOL’s media business but in other operations (technology, product). With the merger with the Huffington Post, AOL will actually be gaining 250 employees from the media property, around 150 of which are editorial staffers. AOL says that after the merger, there is a net gain of 17 editorial staffers. And including Patch, AOL still employs 1,200 journalists in editorial.

In total, India’s casualties are above 700 employees. In India, AOL will be letting go around 400 employees and transitioning around approximately 300 employees to become contractors. We understand that in Asia, AOL wants staffers to focus on creating products for the Asian markets as opposed to providing back-end support to global operations.

So in total, today’s bloodbath has resulted in AOL is shedding just under 1,000 employees.

The layoffs resulted from eliminating the redundancies created by merging The Huffington Post with AOL’s content properties. Arianna Huffington is now the President and Editor In Chief of all of AOL's media properties, which is now called the Huffington Post Media Group (and which includes TechCrunch).

This isn’t the largest set of layoffs for AOL—the company let 2,000 employees go in 2007 and gave 700 staffers pink slips in 2009. And when AOL spun off from Time Warner, it also suffered massive layoffs.

Last November, Meebo took a step into a new territory for them: check-ins. But instead of checking into physical locations in the real world, they decided they were going to allow users to check-in to the sites on the web they were browsing. It’s a concept that a few other startups are trying as well, but Meebo has one big advantage: scale.

But as big as Meebo’s reach is, they recognize that people aren’t always going to be sitting at their desks checking in to website. So they’re taking the experience mobile.

The lastest version of Meebo’s iPhone chat client, launching today, gives users the check-in experience on the go. This way, when you’re browsing your favorite websites from your iPhone, you’ll be able to quickly check-in and share them just as you would from Meebo’s MiniBar.

Of course, this isn’t quite as seemless as on the desktop. Because Apple’s doesn’t allow for system-wide extensions, the Meebo check-in system on the iPhone requires that you’re browsing sites through their app to be able to check-in. But Meebo has built a nice “Updates” area of the app that allows you to view social streams from the likes of Twitter and Facebook, so you can easily find things to browse.

“The mobile app launch is bringing our nascent web checkin system to mobile. This is Meebo’s solution to solve something that we think is lacking in the web today: the ability to harness the discoveries of people with interests like our own while simply browsing the web,” Meebo founder Seth Sternberg says.

“Nielsen data says that people spend about 1/3 of their time on communication hubs and 2/3 of their time in the rest of the web — much of which is exploring points of interest. This interest-driven behavior represents a huge part of people’s everyday browsing and we think it is where the focus of the social web is headed next,” he continues.

Meebo also just rolled out the MiniBar to Microsoft’s IE web browser, still the most widely-used browser in the world.

The larger Meebo Bar is now on some 8,000 sites around the web. And as you can see in the Quantcast chart below, it’s helping Meebo grow very, very quickly.

You can find the latest version of Meebo for the iPhone here.

SnagAJob.com, an online community of hourly workers and provider of hourly workforce management solutions, this morning announced that it has secured $27 million in Series C funding in a round led by August Capital.

Other private equity investors in SnagAJob for this and previous rounds of funding include Adams Street Partners, Baird Venture Partners and C&B Capital. The Series C round brings the company’s total raised to $41 million.

Founded back in 2000, SnagAJob says its online community has now grown to nearly 28 million hourly workers, growing by over a million every two months. The company also claims that it has logged a 1,185% revenue growth rate over the past seven years and 400% website traffic growth rate over the past five years.

SnagAJob says it will use the proceeds to expand its product portfolio, intensify marketing efforts and increase the size of its sales team. The company expects to reach a total headcount of about 300 people by the end of this year.

August Capital partner Eric Carlborg will join the SnagAJob board of directors.

AT&T and Verizon are getting ready for an iPad 2 fight. Both carriers will sell the iPad 2 – running on their own networks – at the same time on March 11. Interestingly, Verizon’s version will run on its CDMA networks natively.

Both are offering competing data plans. AT&T’s includes:

Monthly statements: $14.99 for 250 MB or $25 for 2 GB. Customers who exceed their monthly data allotment will be billed $14.99 for another 250MB on the $14.99 plan or $10 per 1 GB of overage on the 2 GB plan.

Credit card billing: $14.99 for 250 MB or $25 for 2 GB. Customers who exceed their monthly data allotment may choose to purchase another 250 MB on the $14.99 plan or purchase an additional 2 GB for $25 on the 2 GB plan.

AT&T customers get one month free with monthly billing. Verizon is a bit more tiered and includes:

Monthly Usage Cost Data Allowance
· $20 per month 1 GB per month
· $35 per month 3 GB per month
· $50 per month 5 GB per month
· $80 per month 10 GB per month

PR after the jump.

When you go to Amazon.com and start typing in the top search box, you will automatically see a number of search suggestions for items on sale before you finish typing your query. The company also offers such enhanced search capabilities via browser add-ons and toolbars as well as its mobile applications for the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone.

MasterObjects, which offers AJAX and Flash-based software solutions that provide immediate search results and suggestions to Web users, now says it owns a patent that covers the technology used for said search suggestions.

The company earlier this week filed a formal complaint for patent infringement (see below).

The patent-in-suit is no. 7,752,326 and is titled “System and method for utilizing asynchronous client server communication objects”.

This is the summary of the patent, which was originally filed in August 2001:

A session-based client-server asynchronous information search and retrieval system for sending character-by-character or multi-character strings of data to an intelligent server, that can be configured to immediately analyze the lengthening string and return to the client increasingly appropriate search information.

Embodiments include integration within an Internet, web or other online environment, including applications for use in interactive database searching, data entry, online searching, online purchasing, music purchasing, people-searching, and other applications. In some implementations the system may be used to provide dynamically focused suggestions, auto-completed text, or other input-related assistance, to the user.

Needless to say, Amazon.com is far from the only Internet company that offers search suggestions based on what you type – both Google and Bing offer instant search, for example, as do Apple’s App Store and eBay to name but a few.

Heck, you’d be hard-pressed to find modern ecommerce sites and applications that do not serve custom search suggestions upon typing in their respective search boxes.

I’ve contacted Masterobjects to learn why they singled out Amazon.com specifically and why they waited until this week to file suit – I will update this post when I hear back.

Important to point out: unlike most patent infringement suits we cover here on TechCrunch, Masterobjects isn’t a patent troll but a real company that has been actually making and selling software products powered by the technology it claims to have invented.

You can learn more background about the case in the patent infringement complaint.

Hat tip goes to patent litigation news site PriorSmart.

amazon

Untappd is a beer-sharing system. You note which beer you drank where and then watch as said beer rises or falls in the ranks of beerdom. You can also find out where odd brews have popped up in your vicinity, thereby allowing you, like some inebriated, marauding Ash in Floaroma Town, to attempt to catch ‘em all.

The app itself runs on multiple devices but they’ve just announced a special SXSW version for you and yours. This allows you to compete with fellow tipplers in the streets of Austin.

If you’re thinking there’s more to this, there isn’t. Presumably you could pitch a certain beer to folks who check in, but that functionality isn’t live. It looks like a couple of dudes, tired of being ostracized for their love of the suds, have taken the necessary steps to bring their hobby mainstream. Like Beerby, the app allows you to find odd brews in odd places, a boon to the burgeoning drinker.

Product Page

Rovio, the Finnish entertainment media company who famously operates the Angry Birds franchise, has raised $42 million in Series A funding.

The round was co-led by Accel Partners and Atomico Ventures, the VC firm created by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, who will be joining Rovio’s board. ‘Super angel fund’ Felicis Ventures also participated.

Currently, Angry Birds is played by 40 million monthly active users. The company has 50 employees in Espoo, Finland – up from 40 in December 2010.

Rovio says the investment will enable the company to increase its reach internationally, and across markets including mobile, social media and other platforms, and via merchandising and media production and partnerships. The company announced earlier plans to roll out an online Angry Birds experience towards next Summer, as well as developing games for all major consoles later in the year.

The company recently announced that sales of Angry Birds plush toys have passed 2 million units. Angry Birds virtual goods are also in demand: 40% of new customers on the iOS platform purchase the Mighty Eagle downloadable content.

(Image credit: Bad Piggy Bank/Rovio – via Laptop-DRV)

Apple is setting up a pop-up store at West Sixth Street and Congress, a few blocks from SXSW proper, in order to abate the fears of the hordes of hipsters who will arrive in the city this week and find themselves far from the comforts of their hometown Apple store. The store will sell iPads 2 and the like and last for the duration of the event.

According to the American-Statesman, SXSW believes that the move is in Apple’s favor:

“There’s a huge opportunity to get brand recognition to a large audience during” SXSW, Wilemon said.

Read more…

Big news from Sony: big S announced a radical internal reorganization of the entire company today, essentially “dividing” Sony into two different groups as early as April 1. At the same time, Kazuo Hirai, the head of Sony’s PlayStation segment, will be promoted and is said to have good chances to succeed Howard Stringer, the company’s current CEO.

Read more…

Bandwidth.com, a North Carolina-based provider of Internet and VoIP services to small and medium sized businesses, has raised just south of $20.5 million in equity funding according to this regulatory filing.

Notably, the financing round comes about two weeks after the company acquired Dash Carrier Services for an undisclosed amount in cash.

That deal will lead to a combined entity with projected 2011 revenue exceeding $100 million, the companies said at the time the acquisition was announced.

Bandwidth.com provides millions of phone numbers annually and billions of minutes of calls for over 6,000 business customers in the U.S., including Skype, Pinger, Yext, and IfByPhone. For small and medium sized businesses, Bandwidth also provides integrated office phone systems, smartphones, as well as business-grade Internet connectivity.

The company’s recently launched Google Voice competitor Phonebooth is a VoIP service for individuals and small businesses that provides users with a free local phone number that can be forwarded to any cell phone and landline.

It also offers voicemail transcriptions, and an auto attendant feature that allows users to route callers to different employees.

From what I can gather, this is Bandwidth.com’s first round of institutional venture financing, even though the company was originally established back in 1999.

Browser developer Opera Software has established a joint venture with Telling Telecom, a major mobile phone distributor in China. The goal is to develop a customized mobile browser for the Chinese market.

The joint venture will enable the partners to combine Opera’s core browser technology with local content, operations and Telling's distribution network within China. The registered capital of the joint venture will be 135 million RMB (roughly $20.5 million).

Through an investment over three years, Opera Software will own up to 40 percent of the joint venture company. Opera also disclosed that it is guaranteed a minimum amount of revenue from the JV, corresponding to its initial investment.

Opera says more than 100 million people use its mobile browsers on a monthly basis. There’s a chance you’ve never heard of the other party, Telling Telecom, though it boasts more than 9,000 employees and an 18 percent market share of the mobile phone distribution industry in China. The company ships more than 30 million mobile phones every year.

Telling says it will use all its resources, including 116 branch offices from some 25 subsidiaries (which control more than 40,000 retailing outlets across the country) to put Opera’s mobile browser(s) into every single mobile phone.

Over the past week, there’s been a major dilemma in Geekland: what do we do on March 11?

You see, we’ve known for months that it’s the first day of the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. But last Wednesday, Apple announced it would also be the day that the iPad 2 officially goes on sale. The questions immediately began: do we keep our plans intact and head to Austin? Or do we hang back and wait in line for the iPad 2 at 5 PM? Luckily, Apple thought ahead.

Apple will be opening a temporary store in downtown Austin for two weeks beginning on yes, Friday, March 11. This will be in the Scarbrough Building on Congress Avenue, according to Statesman.com. Work began on the 5,000 square-foot space on Wednesday, and they’ll undoubtedly be working around the clock to get the space done in time.

Any why go to all this trouble? Naturally to sell a metric ton of iPad 2s.

Over the past several years, Apple has transformed the consumer electronic retail space into one big money-making machine. And they’re smart enough and prepared enough now to apparently take that show on the road. While Austin already has two other Apple Stores, neither is close to the Austin Convention Center, where SXSW is held. People had already been planning trips to the further-away stores to wait in line for the iPad 2 on Friday. Now Apple is bringing the action to them.

If there’s one thing SXSW is good for, it’s for flash mobs and hive-think. Once a few people see others with iPad 2s in their hands, everyone is going to want one. This temporary Apple Store is probably going to be the hottest venue in Austin for the week.

I just hope the temporary store has the rock-solid free WiFi that regular stores do.

Editor’s note: The following analysis is written by Robert J. Moore, the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, an on-demand database analytics and business intelligence startup. Robert blogs at The Metric System and can be followed on Twitter at @RJMetrics.

Since launching just six months ago, Instagram has quickly become one of the web’s top photo sharing services. The company recently passed the two million user mark and announced the launch of their API.

We sampled data from that API and loaded it into an RJMetrics Dashboard for analysis. This yielded detailed new insights into Instagram’s growth and user adoption.

Please note that these are estimates extracted from a sample set, so there may be a small margin of error (more details on our methods can be found at the end of the article). I provide a full breakdown below, but here are some highlights:

• Instagram is currently adding 130,000 registered users per week
• Instagram’s 2.2 million users upload 3.6 million new photos per week (or 6 photos per second)
• 37.5 percent of registered users have never uploaded a photo
• 5 percent of users have uploaded over 50 photos
• 65 percent follow nobody, and only 12 percent of users follow more than 10 people
• For users who upload at least one photo, there is a 45 percent chance they will upload a photo the following week
• Those same users have a 25 percent chance they will upload a photo 12 weeks later, representing a significantly stronger retention rate than Twitter.

Users and Uploads

The chart above shows weekly new user additions since Instagram’s launch. The company is registering approximately 130,000 new users per week, and that number hasn’t fluctuated much since the new year.

When we view this chart on a cumulative basis, we can see overall user growth curve looks more linear than exponential (although its slope is quite impressive).

If it maintains its current pace, Instagram will continue to add a million new registered users every two months. Things get more interesting when you look at what these users are doing once they join.

Engagement

Unlike with registered users, the number of new photos uploaded on a weekly basis is clearly climbing, with 2.6 million new images uploaded in the most recent week.

This is a strong indicator that users continue to use the service long after joining. As thousands of new users join each day, the millions that have joined in the past continue to use the service, creating an increasing flow of photos into the system.

When we view this chart on a cumulative basis we can see this exponential effect in action:

It doesn’t get much nicer than that. Despite this impressive trend, however, not all of Instagram’s 2.2 Million registered users are actively using the service.

Below, we show a distribution of users based on how many photos they have uploaded.

As you can see above, 37% of Instagram’s users have never uploaded a single photo and 65% have uploaded fewer than three photos.

Our sample population indicated that about 35% of Instagram’s registered users uploaded a photo last month. This is down from previous months, which is typical in the early months of a new product’s life as the growth/churn ratio stabilizes. This number is clearly still in decline, and where it ends up will be a critical metric for Instagram. Based on its current base of 2.2 million users, this trend implies that around 800,000 Instagram users uploaded a photo last month.

This glut of inactive users is common in free online services, as we saw in our studies of Twitter Data and Foursquare Data last year. This isn’t necessarily a lack of total engagement, as users can use the app to simply follow their friends’ photo streams.

The distribution of followers (how many users a given user is following) is shown below.

Interestingly, over half of Instagram’s users are following exactly one other user, with another 13% not following anyone. We checked into that, and it looks like the vast majority of users who follow only one other user are following the “Instagram Team” account, which was likely automatically added to their list at signup.

This means that 65% of users effectively follow no one.

Only 12% of users are following more than 10 people. Note that Instagram takes you through a process to find friends and other people to follow upon any new installation, explaining why more users are following someone than have uploaded a photo.

Repeat Upload Rate

We know that only 63% of users ever upload their first photo. We were curious about what happens next, so we used the distribution of photo uploads to approximate a “Probability of Incremental Upload” based on how many photos have been uploaded so far.

As you can see, every time a user uploads photo they become increasingly likely to upload another. 76% of those users who upload their first photo go on to upload a second, 85% of those users go on to upload a third, and so on.

Time Between Uploads

The average time between any two uploads made by a single user is 43 hours (obviously users who have uploaded one or fewer photos are excluded from this number). If we map out the average “Time Since Previous Upload” by upload number, we see another impressive engagement trend.

With each new photo uploaded by a user, the expected time until they upload their next photo decreases.

(Note that Instagram’s short history could make this chart a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since most users are less than a few months old, users who upload more frequently are obviously the only ones who have been capable of racking up those big upload counts.)

Cohort Analysis

Cohort Analysis is a powerful tool that we use to track user engagement and loyalty over time.

Each “cohort” is a group of customers who joined at a similar time, and we use cohort analysis to compare how different cohorts behave over the same relative periods in their lifecycles. User cohorts are typically grouped by month, but since Instagram has such a short history we used the Weekly Cohort feature in RJMetrics instead.

In the chart below, each line is a cohort of users who uploaded their first photos in a distinct week of Instagram’s history. The chart shows the percent of users in that cohort who came back to upload another photo in each subsequent week of their lifecycle. Note that, by definition, this excludes users who never uploaded a photo.

The decay we see here is typical in a cohort analysis. As each week goes by, a smaller percentage of the cohort’s users come back to upload again. Eventually, the lines stabilize, indicating the percentage of users in that cohort that have become “hooked” and are likely to stick around for quite some time.

These cohorts all appear to behave similarly. Typically, 45% of users are still uploading photos in Week 2, but that number drops down to around 25% by Week 12.

This may sound like a low number, but in the universe of free applications it’s actually quite impressive.

By way of context, Twitter’s weekly cohort numbers were notably lower at a similar point in their history. Instagram’s challenge will be retaining that core group of users and trying to push these cohort lines upward by luring their existing users back as time goes on.

Another interesting cohort perspective is to view the cumulative average number of photos uploaded per cohort member over time. This shows how each cohort contributes to the universe of photos during its lifecycle.

You can see a slight decay in the slope of these cohort lines, but they are pretty close to linear. In other words, despite a decreasing number of users uploading photos (as shown in the previous chart), the total number of photos uploaded by the cohort remains strong as time passes.

This suggests that users who continue to upload are uploading photos at a faster rate as time goes on. This is supported by the “Repeat Upload Rate” and “Time Between Uploads” charts discussed above.

Finally, it’s noteworthy that the “Week of November 7th” cohort is the poorest performer in both of these cohort analyses. If you look back at the user growth charts, you’ll see that this cohort was created during Instagram’s peak user growth period (its initial press wave upon launching).

This is evidence that users acquired during such press flashes are, on average, more likely to churn than new users who came in through other channels. We’ve seen this trend in countless other businesses.

How We Did It

Four things allowed us to conduct this analysis: Instagram’s new API, their use of incrementing ID numbers to represent users and photos, the central limit theorem, and the tools in the RJMetrics hosted business intelligence dashboard.

The central limit theorem tells us, among other things, that a large enough random subset of a large data set will behave like its parent set with a high degree of statistical confidence. Since the API allows us to retrieve content by ID number, we conducted a random sample of the data and extrapolated its properties to draw our insights. Our sample consisted of 9,200 users and their 116,000 photos.

Since user registration dates were not directly available via the API, we used the “first upload date” of a user (and its users with surrounding IDs) to approximate the join date of any given user.

This works on the assumption that at least some percentage of users will upload a photo within a very short time of joining. These earliest “first upload” dates within small ID ranges were applied to deduce approximate join dates, which we estimate to be accurate within a day at most.

We also explored the data to ensure that we weren’t overestimating due to “dead IDs” from deleted accounts and photos (which turned out to be a negligible percentage). Finally, we made sure to properly account for users and photos marked “private” that were not accessible via the API (although info from those accounts is not influencing account-specific insights such as cohort analysis).

Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Mrinal Desai, an early employee of LinkedIn who is also co-founder of CrossLoop and addappt. You can follow him on Twitter.

A lot has been written about social news and how Twitter and Facebook are in the running for defining and dominating it. There’s also a lot of hand-wringing about how journalism will be disrupted by social.

I might be a bit biased as a former employee, but when it comes to social news, I think LinkedIn could become the Wall Street Journal of social news—not Twitter or Facebook. In fact, LinkedIn is expected to announce a new social news product this week. In what may or may not be a precursor to that anticipated product, a few days ago I received a curious email from “LinkedIn Headlines” (the actual email address news@linkedin.com). It was an email digest of the most shared news in my network about the Internet industry (see screenshot below). There has been no official launch of a product by that name nor have I seen anyone else write about it. But that email made me think a little more about the different types of news I consume.

I write this post from a perspective of a news addict—I wrote a guest post here on TechCrunch called Screening the News and am known on Twitter as a “tech news junkie”. No matter what the source, eventually all news is curated—just differently.

The Curation Types are:

• By The Editor/writer: Blogs, physical magazines and newspapers that I read like Fortune, The Economist and The Wall Street Journal
• By my network: Twitter, FlipBoard, Facebook
• By Editors and Algorithms (based on “popularity” amongst writers): Techmeme
• By Algorithm: Google News and then finally
• By Editor and popularity of the general audience via most read, commented, emailed, retweeted, or liked: TechCrunch, nytimes.com, wsj.com
• By general popularity only: possibly bit.ly, tweetmeme

I started networking building long-term relationships consciously when I was “vocationally challenged” in the last dotcom bust. News was the single biggest tool I used to engage people I wanted to know well over the long-term during that time. I don’t do short-term relationships well. In other words, without knowing it, I was behaving like their personal curator over the long term. Understanding my ‘audience’s’ requirements was of paramount importance. Tending to my relationships, independent of business agendas, has always been a priority for me.

Based on my own personal experience, I think LinkedIn has a significant opportunity in an industry reeling with disruption. It has many parallels in terms of audience with the top daily print publication, The Wall Street Journal. A publication focused primarily on business, the WSJ grew circulation 1.8% last year, when the rest of the newspaper industry’s fell by 4.46%.

LinkedIn could bring curation by popularity within my network: there is absolutely nothing that does that for me today.  And since it is much more structured by industry and work interests, it has the potential to become the ultimate business news filter.  How could LinkedIn make social news better?

• LinkedIn can suddenly become an information network, something that Twitter likes to call itself but with analytics built in based on my network
• Fred Wilson wrote a post comparing Techmeme and Hacker News for the technology industry. Suddenly LinkedIn can bring users both with an ability to slice a vertical from the highly technical to more general news about companies like Apple or Google
• LinkedIn could help me learn about the sources of news that is important to my network. This can lead to discovery and further curation
• LinkedIn could bring a personalized newspaper that I can change based on industries that its users come from. For example, venture capital from people who have worked in venture capital.
• With the recent introduction of “Skills” by LinkedIn, readers could find news that helps them develop a skill they care about. For example: If I wanted to dig deeper into learning about SEO, LinkedIn could bring stories from sites like SearchEngineLand
• Based on the structured data from my profile including industry, companies, and job title, LinkedIn could recommend great articles to me
• Trending—this is a no brainer. Apart from my profile information and my network, LinkedIn Headlines can also leverage industry groups I belong to on LinkedIn
• Significantly enhance Twitter. LinkedIn enabled Twitter sync last year and from what I see in my network, many have autosynced their tweets and a majority, which should come as no surprise, are links. With analytics, LinkedIn could surface shared URLs that are most popular within my network
• Like the Priority Inbox, LinkedIn could help me mark some users as important so that I get the news they shared first. I have many favorite reporters and respected colleagues.  I would love to see their stories independent from the “wisdom of the crowd”
• Since LinkedIn enables me to save a search for Jobs or get Email Alerts, it could also send me news around particular companies or the industries
• LinkedIn could show me the all connections around the link/ news article—a little like Facebook's 'Like' but in a "magazine" format

Can Twitter do some of this this? Maybe sharing analytics but it lacks the deep industry and profile information that LinkedIn houses to build a powerful and personal recommendation engine.  Can Facebook do this? Maybe with some sharing analytics but again, it does not have the deep business profiles that LinkedIn has amassed.  And personally I really do not care about Justin Bieber or Charlie Sheen, although I am sure they will pop up even in LinkedIn headlines.