On March 29, 2011, CIO Australia published an interview with Andy Lark, Dell‘s global head of marketing for large enterprises. In the interview, Lark made a lot of “quotable” statements, among them:

"An iPad with a keyboard, a mouse and a case [means] you'll be at $1500 or $1600; that's double of what you're paying,” he claimed. “That's not feasible."

Let’s forget for a moment that $1500 seems a little high, even for a tricked-out iPad. The fact is that even $1500 is definitely not too much for enterprises to pay for tablet computers.

Read more…

In late 2009, LinkedIn opened up its API to allow select developers make applications that tap into LinkedIn's social network. The professional social network released nearly a dozen APIs which gave third-party developers the ability to access user profile information, message LinkedIn contacts, search LinkedIn and more. Over 1,000 developers tested the platform, which has served one billion page views since November 2009. Today, LinkedIn is opening up access to the network’s new platform to all developers. The network is releasing support for OAuth 2.0 and Javascript APIs, as well as access to LinkedIn’s new customizable Plugins, which are features that can be customized and embedded on websites with minimal effort.

The idea behind plugins is to give developers are more lightweight way to embed LinkedIn functionality and data on third-party sites. ALl of the plugins can be integrated onto websites with just a few lines of javascript and are customizable, says LinkedIn engineer Adam Nash. For example, LinkedIn’s Member Profile plugins brings a snippet of user profiles to a third-party site and can show users who they know within an application in a professional context. Company Profile plugin delivers at-a-glance summaries of companies on LinkedIn’s network, including location, number of employees and more.

And the Company Insider plugin displays in-depth, personalized insights from LinkedIn about companies featured on a site. For example, you can access a summary of who in a visitors’ network works at a given company, a list of new hires, and job changes. Developers can also embed the ability to follow a company within their sites.

Other plugins include a recommend button, which allows users to promote a product on LinkedIn from a third-party site with a link back to the site. And LinkedIn also allows developers to embed a LinkedIn Share button on sites, which is similar to Twitter’s Tweet button and can feature share counts and more.

LinkedIn has also made a number of “infrastructure improvements” to the developer platform. For example, the JavaScript framework loads significantly faster, and the company has added SSL support and
more robust OAuth support. Additionally, LinkedIn has redesigned its Platform and API portal to make it easier for developers to access content and deploy plugins.

LinkedIn just crossed the 100 million member mark, and in order to continue to drive member and visitor growth the network is going to have to present developers with innovative ways to embed LinkedIn functionality on outside sites. Facebook and Twitter have both done this at a massive scale. Launching lightweight plugins that are easy for developers to embed is probably a wise way to spread LinkedIn across the web.

You can’t really tell how slim the Seagate GoFlex Slim drive really is until you see it next something like a paperback book or another drive. This wee drive is .354 inches (9mm) thick and about four inches long – about the size of a larger cellphone – and it includes a removable port adapter for USB 2.0/3.0 compatibility and an internal 320GB hard drive running at 7500RPM.

Read more…

Rewards management platform UsingMiles has raised $2.7 million in new funding led by iSherpa Capital with strategic investors participating in the round. The company is also announcing that eBags.com founder Jon Nordmark is joining the startup as CEO.

UsingMiles, which graduated from TechStars, makes it easy for frequent flyers to aggregate and manage all of their loyalty programs in one place, including airlines, hotels, car rental companies, credit cards and retailers.

So within your dashboard on UsingMiles, you can actually search for and book flights, cars and hotel rooms, see how many points you need to book certain itineraries. You can then book using cash, miles or a combination of the two. Currently, the site integrates with 90 percent of rewards programs for consumers. The site also includes a proprietary recommendation engine that will automatically calculate the most economical use of a traveler's miles and inform the user when it is better to redeem miles versus saving them for another time and paying with cash.

The plot, as they say, thickens. Apple has removed most visual references to the white iPhone on its US and international sites in a surprisingly wholesale manner, a move that points to more trouble with white iPhone availability world-wide.

Obviously this is all Kremlinology, but as Apple Rumors.it points out, Apple removed all references to the white iPhone in a daring, early morning Apple store raid on various galleries and in a manner that suggests complete disavowal of the device.

Read more…

Last week, we wrote about Microsoft‘s chief marketer Mich Mathews stepping down from the software company. Today, we’re writing about her replacement, as Chris Capossela was just appointed senior vice president of Microsoft’s Consumer Channels and Central Marketing Group.

The Consumer Channels unit is new and unifies the software giant’s Retail, Mobile Operator and Distribution teams into one organization.

Capossela has been with Microsoft for 20 years. Previously, he served as SVP in the Office division, where he was responsible for marketing the company’s Office, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, Project and Visio products.

In this role, he oversaw the launch of Office 2007 and 2010, and its associated server products. He left the position last month.

In his new role, Capossela will report to Microsoft COO Kevin Turner and work closely with Microsoft’s vast number of OEM, retail, mobile operator and distribution partners for Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox and Office. He will also assume responsibility for Microsoft’s marketing, advertising and corporate communications.

A Seattle resident, Capossela at one point in his career served as Bill Gates’ speech assistant.

Capossela will work with Mathews as he transitions to his new role as chief marketing officer.

Update - as a commenter points out, you might know Capossela from:

We’ve written about startup Pixable previously because of its sleek web photo creation and categorization tools. Earlier this year, the startup launched Photofeed, a Facebook app and companion iPad app which will sort and categorize your friends’ Facebook photos. Today, Pixable is bringing Photofeed to the iPhone, and adding Flickr and Instagram to the mix.

Founded by 3 MIT graduate students, Pixable's service allows people to use of all their Facebook and image sharing site photo content like captions, tagging information, comments, and birthdays to make albums, slideshows, calendars and nor artwork. Pixable's browser-based simplifies the creation of albums, making it easy to use for anyone. Pixable, which has raised $3 million in funding, even launched a nifty tool that allows you to make mosaics of your Facebook photos.

Photofeed for the iPhone aggregates photos from Facebook, Flickr and Instagram, just as it has done for its Facebook and iPad apps. The app allows you to browse, search and categorize all the photos in your Instagram and Flickr feeds and comments and like those images your Facebook friends have posted and will also sort photos into groups such as "top photos of the day," and "Best of the month."

What makes Photofeed unique is its Pandora-like technology that intelligently records what photos from which friends you click on or interact with more. As the app recognizes which friends' photos you like, Photofeed will serve more photos to you from those friends or streams.

Additionally, the app serves push notifications alert users whenever their friends post new photo activity. Personally, I would find this feature annoying but co-founder Inaki Berenguer says that many users actively follow photo uploads from Facebook friends and Instagram feeds.

There are a plethora of photo sharing apps for you to choose from, including the newly debuted and controversial app Color. But Pixable’s app is designed to be an ideal way for to intelligently, and quickly browse your friends’ photos on the fly.

According to Pacific Crest analyst James Faucette, quoted in Forbes, sales of the Motorola Atrix and Xoom devices, darlings of the CES rodeo, have been “disappointing.” Ironically, the very devices designed to bring Motorola out of its 2010 slump have added to its doldrums and Faucette believes that the company must "quickly adjust and refresh its product portfolio" in order to remain competitive.

Read more…

Social media dashboard company HootSuite this morning announced that it has acquired an add-on for the Firefox 4 browser called TwitterBar, which has been downloaded nearly 2 million times to date and enables users to post to a variety of social networks straight from the web address bar.

HootSuite has renamed the add-on HootBar.

In two years, HootSuite says it has grown to over 1.5 million users worldwide.

The company added that it has recently turned cash-flow positive, after introducing paid plans just four months ago. The company currently employs 48 people.

HootBar, initially created as TwitterBar by Tony Farndon and developer Christopher Finke, is software licensed under the GPL v2. It is now part of HootSuite’s suite of extensions.

Terms of the purchase were not disclosed.

The HootBar basically lets users post messages to Twitter and other social networks, directly from the Firefox browser’s address bar and from multiple accounts, using simple commands.

If you’re so inclined, you can get it here.

Xiu.com, a Chinese luxury and fashion ecommerce website, this morning announced that it has raised $20 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), confirming a report published last week by the Wall Street Journal.

It’s the shopping website operator’s first round of VC funding.

In a statement, Xiu.com founder George (Wenhong) Ji unsubtly points out where the inspiration for the venture came from, but also why the future looks bright for his company:

“We were inspired by many successful B2C fashion websites in U.S. and Europe, and compared with them, we still have at least 1,000% growth potential in China”.

Ji says the proceeds of the funding will help Xiu.com improve its negotiating and purchasing ability with the major, grasp better cost advantages and thus bring more luxury and fashion brands into China

Xiu.com was founded in March 2008, and self-reportedly follows a “Reverse B2C” strategy, offering middle-to-luxury brand name fashion products – clothing, shoes, bags, ornaments, cosmetics and home decor – to China’s middle class. The company boasts 10 buyer offices in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Australia, Paris, London, Italy, Korea, Hong Kong and Japan.

Populis, the formerly public on-demand content company formerly known as GoAdv, has reported record revenues of 58 million euros ($83 million) for 2010. Its network of blogs and ecommerce sites now reach over 26 million unique visitors per month, says the company, which is often dubbed Europe's equivalent of Demand Media or Associated Content. Populis posits that it's been profitable since day one, and that it still has about 20 million euros in the bank, with which it hopes to realize more acquisitions this year. Content production is up to 35,000 articles and videos per month, says the company, adding that it is hungry for more expansion within Europe and South America through 2011.

.eu, the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the European Union, originally launched 7 December 2005, but full public registration started on 7 April 2006. One day early, EURid, the non-profit that operates the .eu TLD, issued a press release celebrating its fifth birthday. According to EURid, registration of .eu domain names have doubled in five years, which puts it ninth on the list of most popular TLDs in the world. But is it really an achievement worth crowing about? I beg to differ.

The Omidyar-funded SeeClickFix, a site which helps users report and get community issues like potholes and graffiti taken care of, has launched on the Facebook platform today. For the uninitiated, SeeClickFix lets people flag non-emergency problems for local officials in over 14,000 municipalities. Founded in 2009 SeeClickFix now has over 200,000 users and over 50% of its 95,000 user-reported civic issues have been resolved.

Co-founder Ben Berkowitz tells me that he chose to move  SeeClickFix to the Facebook platform because he was inspired by the amount of people planting fake crops on social games like Farmville and thought that he could utilize that sentiment to get actual stuff done in real life.

Says Berkowitz, “Facebook has proven to be a powerful platform for encouraging people to plant virtual trees and improve virtual neighborhoods. When considering recent events, like the revolutionary wave in the Middle East, it's also proven to be a powerful tool for organizing around social and political issues.”

In the same civic engagement space as mobile app Citysourced, SeeClickFix lets users view and vote on complaints based on location, report and assign issues, as well as comment on issues and view the profiles of people who report issues nearby. Right now the ability to resolve issues isn’t available on the Facebook app, but SeeClickFix is considering enabling this eventually for power users.

In addition to crowd sourcing and routing reports about civic issues to the relevant parties involved, SeeClickFix has incorporated Facebook game mechanics into its Facebook app, giving users Civic Points for performing actions that engage with the app including reporting issues, uploading an image or taking action in order to get an issue resolved.

An early sign of the new civic direction, SeeClickFix, which currently has over 30 government clients, is also planning on partnering up with city governments, allowing them to have their own branded SeeClickFix apps and widgets.

DISH Network this morning announced that it was selected as the winning bidder in the bankruptcy court auction for substantially all of the assets of Blockbuster, which went belly up in September 2010.

DISH’s winning bid was valued at approximately $320 million, but after adjustments for available cash and inventory and others, the company expects to end up paying approximately $228 million in cash to acquire Blockbuster.

Yesterday, DISH Network's bid was worth $307.1 million (or $308.1 million, depending the source).

Other bidders included billionaire Carl Icahn, a major Blockbuster shareholder and bondholder, and a consortium of existing Blockbuster lenders led by Monarch Alternative Capital. South Korea’s SK Telecom was also a bidder but dropped out earlier.

A sale-approval hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

DISH says the transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2011, although its completion is contingent upon satisfaction of certain conditions, including bankruptcy court approval.

Here’s how Tom Cullen, EVP of Sales, Marketing and Programming for DISH Network, pitches the deal:

“With its more than 1,700 store locations, a highly recognizable brand and multiple methods of delivery, Blockbuster will complement our existing video offerings while presenting cross-marketing and service extension opportunities for DISH Network.

While Blockbuster’s business faces significant challenges, we look forward to working with its employees to re-establish Blockbuster’s brand as a leader in video entertainment.”

Established in 1998, DISH currently serves more than 14.1 million satellite TV customers.

Groupon has acquired yet another local group buying clone to expand its network of daily deal sites across the globe. The company has snapped up Indonesia’s Disdus, a portfolio company of venture capital firm East Ventures, reports say.

A press release in Indonesian was translated by the folks over at Daily Social.

Groupon will rename the daily deal site Groupon Indonesia, marking another addition to the company’s network in Southeast Asia after recent acquisitions closed in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Terms of the Disdus acquisition were not disclosed.

The collective buying site currently serves Jakarta and Bandung with daily deals – actually a deal every 2 days – and aims to expand its market throughout Indonesia by the end of 2011.

As a result of the acquisition, Groupon is now operational in 46 countries, and boasts more than 6,000 employees worldwide.

Disdus, co-founded by Jason Lamuda and Ferry Tenka last year, raised an undisclosed amount of seed financing from East Ventures at the end of 2010.

Further reading:

Ask a VC in Indonesia: Is East Ventures Early or Crazy? [TCTV]
Penn Olson: The Groupon Clones in Indonesia

This past weekend, I went on a trip and did the unthinkable — I didn’t turn on my computer. Not even once. Okay, that’s sort of misleading. While I didn’t turn on my computer, I did use my iPad. Extensively. But I still fully expected to get the urge to turn on my computer as well. And I never did.

That itself isn’t that remarkable; I’m sure a lot of iPad users have experienced the same thing by now. What is a little remarkable it is that I’m a heavy, heavy computer user. As in pretty much every hour I’m awake. And I used to think the iPad could never fully break me of that. Future generations? Sure. But not me. Now I’m starting to sway the other way.

On a deeper level, I’m realizing something else: the iPad (and iPhone) is changing the fundamentals of computing for me.

Since I’ve been back from my trip, I’ve started using my traditional computers extensively again because I have to for work. (There’s still no denying that a laptop or desktop are far better for typing than an iPad.) But I’m finding myself continually confused when I go to use the trackpad. I swipe my fingers up expecting a page to scroll down and yet it doesn’t.

I’m trying to interact with a Mac as if it’s an iPad.

It’s actually pretty frustrating. I keep doing it. It’s like my brain is locked in. I’m someone who has had an iPad for a year, but I’ve never used it for days in a row without touching a computer like I just did this weekend. And it seems to have re-wired my brain.

The good news is that help is on the way. OS X Lion, the latest version of Apple’s Mac operating system launching this summer, actually reverses the scrolling mechanism. This means that when you swipe two fingers up on a long web page, it goes down, and vice versa. Again, it’s like the iPad/iPhone, not the way it has been on the Mac.

Among developers who are testing OS X Lion right now, this switch is driving some of them absolutely nuts (though it apparently is changeable in the settings). That’s understandable, it’s changing something we’ve all gotten used to over the years. It’s also may seem a bit odd because you’re not directly manipulating a screen as you are on the iPad/iPhone.

I’m in the opposite camp. I think Apple is genius for making this switch. Why? Because eventually most people that use Macs will have come to the systems by way of iOS devices. And they’ll be going through exactly what I’m going through now — only it will be much worse.

OS X Lion represents a transition. We’re moving from the “point & click” to the “flick & swipe”, as I’ve previously written about. But I’m not sure I realized just how big of a change some of these interactions would be at the time. They’re big and important because computing as we know it is changing.

And this matters not only to the next generations of computer users, but also to current computers users. There will be backlash to some of these changes — hell, there already has been. As much as people love the idea of future technology, they hate change. And that’s especially true if something is so ingrained that it requires a re-wiring of your brain.

But if my experience is any proof, that re-wiring is a lot simpler than it would seem to be. It’s not just the trackpad issue, I also find myself constantly trying to touch my MacBook screen after using the iPad for an extended period of time. These are more natural methods of computing. It’s the way it should be. It’s the way it should have always been. The technology just wasn’t there yet.

Now it is.

[photo: flickr/open exhibits]

The Austin-based startup Spanning Cloud Apps, a cloud-based app developer, today announced that it has closed a $2 million series A round, led by the Foundry Group, a VC firm based in Boulder. Seth Levine, Foundry Group’s managing director, will be joining Spanning’s board of directors.

Founded in 2010 by Charlie Wood, Spanning Cloud Apps is the maker of Spanning Backup, a backup service for Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google’s other cloud-based apps. It’s probably safe to say that Google Apps is the most widely used cloud computing suite out there, and yet, while it’s true that the search giant has great disaster recovery services, Google Apps is missing a fairly important feature — data backup.

So, Google protects you from any kerfuffles that might take place on their end, but if, say, your colleague Bob is distracted by his TPS reports and accidentally deletes a shared company calendar or presentation, Google will not be coming to the rescue.

That’s where Spanning Backup comes in. The service continually backs up your Google Apps data, so that you don’t have to worry about what will happen to your data should disaster strike. Spanning Backup is built on Amazon Web Services and stores user data using a combintaion of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service and Elastic Block Store, which safeguard your Google App data in a purely cloud-based app. It’s also pretty reliable. And can store your Google Apps domain.

Spanning will be competing with the well-established and funded cloud backup and restore service, Backupify. Though Backupify currently offers a wider array of services that it can backup and restore (like, most importantly, email), the company has been a bit unreliable of late, suffering from at least one prolonged outage. So, there’s plenty of room in the field, and Spanning hopes to compete by remaining focused on cloud apps, security, and scalability.

The startup currently has a staff of six, and plans to use its series A round to ramp up hiring efforts and expand into other cloud services. Founder and CEO Charlie Wood said that Spanning’s goal is to be the “Norton Computing of the cloud computing era”. In other words, the startup hopes to provide cloud consumers with the services that should have come in the box, but didn’t. It aims to be a one-stop solution for all the major cloud service providers, be it Google, Salesforce, Workday, Oracle, or Apple.

In terms of pricing, if a business chooses to use Spanning’s services, your first 3 employees would be free. Beyond that, Spanning charges $30 per person for one year of backup. So if you have a business of 6, you pay $90 a year.

For more on Spanning Cloud Apps and Spanning Backup, check out the video below:

By the end of this year, an estimated 2 million households in the U.S. will have abandoned TV for the Web, cutting the cord with their cable companies. This estimate comes from Convergence Consulting Group, a Toronto-based research firm with a new report on The Battle for the American Couch Potato. That 2 million is up from the 1.6 million it was estimating a year ago, but it is still rather small and the number of cord cutters may very well have peaked last year as cable companies begin to fight back with TV Everywhere offerings.

Nevertheless, the big beneficiaries of cord cutting are Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV.  They benefit even if people keep their cable but add Internet TV streaming or downloads to their viewing repertoire, as is much more common. According to Convergence , 18 percent of viewers in the U.S. watched free, full episodes of TV on the Web last year, and that is growing by a percentage point every year:

Estimated Percentage of Average Weekly US Viewers That Watch Free Broadcast and Cable Network Online Full Episodes, 2009-2012

2009—16%
2010—18%
2011—19%
2012—20%

Streaming has helped Netflix in particular in terms of driving new subscriber growth, and it is also arguably a gateway drug to cord cutting.  Convergence estimates that Netflix revenues from online-only subscribers in the U.S. will grow from $172 million this year to $578 million in 2013.  And if you add in Hulu Plus, the combined streaming revenues from both companies will reach an estimated $800 million in two years.

Netflix may be paying up to be able to stream TV shows and and movies left and right, but it is still paying only a fraction of what the cable companies shell out for programming. For instance, Convergence says that this year Netflix will double the amount it is estimated to pay for programming to $1.1 billion, while Apple will pay about $450 million, and all the other online providers will pay almost $400 million. Not quite $2 billion total from the Interent for TV and movie programming rights. Meanwhile, traditional TV access providers are expected to pay $38.7 billion for programming.

On a per subscriber basis, last year Netflix only paid one tenth the amount for programming ($34/subscriber) as did cable and satellite TV providers ($359/subscriber).  As a percentage of revenues, it is approaching what TV access providers pay for content.  Last year it was 25 percent of revenue going towards content, and this year it will be an estimated 39 percent, versus 42 percent for cable companies (and 70 percent for Apple TV).  But the absolute gap will remain massive for the foreseeable future.

Photo credit: Flickr/Schmilblick

Marin Software, a startup that creates search engine management software for advertisers and agencies, has raised $16 million in Series E funding led by Crosslink Capital with DAG Ventures, with Focus Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Triangle Peak Partners participating in the round. This brings Marin’s total funding to $51 million.

The company also announced that Eric Chin, partner at Crosslink Capital, will join the Board of Directors as an observer and that former Shutterfly VP of Finance John Kaelle has joined the executive team as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.

Marin Software offers a browser application to help advertisers and agencies managing paid search advertising campaigns across Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search sites. In the past year, the company expanded its product offering beyond paid search and now offers applications for managing Facebook ads, as well as Marin Retargeting, a complete workflow, analysis, and optimization solution for advertisers and agencies. In addition, Marin also launched Marin Professional, which offers a simple version of the company’s platform for search marketers who spend less than $100,000 per month.

The company plans to invest the Series E funding to support the growth of its customer base which includes advertisers and agencies industries such as retail, education, financial services, insurance, travel, lead generation, automotive, B2B, and local. Marin currently serves 800 clients worldwide and manages 600 million keywords and more than $2 billion in annualized paid search spend for its customers.

And could the addition of a new CFO could mean that Marin may be eyeing an IPO in the future? John Kaelle joined the company from Shutterfly, where he was Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations. While at Shutterfly, Kaelle managed company growth from 150 to over 600 employees, revenue growth from $54 million to over $300 million, and an IPO in 2006.

In February, fellow Four Loko enthusiast John Biggs wrote a post on Fitango, a social marketplace that allows users to learn about and buy action plans for everything from finance to fitness and romance. As Biggs pointed out at the time, many of us have problems self-motivating when it comes to getting in shape or, say, learning to speak Mandarin — and oftentimes, we’re not sure how to best attack these goals.

As such, Fitango offers its members step-by-step guides, or action plans, which include videos and detailed instructions on how to approach your education. The idea behind the plans being that you are more likely to confront your self-improvement if these efforts are broken down into manageable, bit-sized subtasks. And it helps if you have to pay for it. After all, becoming a concert-ready jazz pianist doesn’t happen overnight, and it isn’t free.

Then, once you embark on your education, Fitango gives you the ability to track your progress, ask questions of experts, and post messages and notes to help others in their educational pursuits. There’s even a badge system to help reward users as they progress, most notably a “mother-in-law” badge for members that religiously nag their friends and keep them from back-sliding.

Since launching in December, Fitango’s action plans have been determined by experts, who are chosen by the company. But the fact of the matter is that everyday users have valuable insight into performing certain tasks, too, and many of us are more inclined to listen to self-improvement advice if it comes from our friends. So, the startup is now offering regular users the ability to create and share their own action plans.

Now you can make your own action plan, and you don’t even have to know how to code. Huzzah! Embedding a video in your plan is as easy as dropping in a Youtube link. And, what’s more, if you think that your action plan is of value to your fellow Fitango-ers, you can distribute your plan through the Fintango Marketplace.

But, you won’t be able to sell your plan, because Fitango wants to ensure that when a user purchases an action plan, he or she is receiving Fitango-certified expert instruction. So you won’t be able to make big bucks (or, really any bucks), but you can have the satisfaction of knowing that you helped other people achieve their goals. And that has to be worth something, right?

Action plans are also easy to view and interact with on your iPhone or iPad. Fitango’s mobile version offers the same features as its Web version, with the exception of being unable to upload video or mp3 files. Fitango has also updated its iOS apps, which are pretty slick, and even offer retina graphics — if you’re cool like that. Fitango does not yet offer apps for Android, but those are in the works.

The New York-based startup currently has over 10,000 registered users and is drawing 20,000 monthly visitors, according to founder Dov Biran. And Biran and one outside investor have seeded Fitango with cash "in the millions”, according to VP of Business Development Parinda Muley.

After launching a new search feature yesterday, and rolling out a new interests-based homepage today, Twitter has been acting mightly strange for the past hour or so, with people reporting seeing random chunks of other user’s tweets in their timelines, including retweets while using the Twitter web client and browsing. Twitter is aware of the problem and tells me it’s not a security issue — and that it’s working on getting it resolved.

The solution apparently involves disabling #NewTwitter, which has lead to retro jokes galore on where else, Twitter. As of yet there’s no word on when it’ll bring the redesigned site back.

Maybe the should revert their name back to twttr while they’re at it? See what I did just there …

Update: And #NewTwitter is back, from the looks of it.

We just got word that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted 8-to-3 to approve the Mid-Market incentive plan that would give Twitter– and other companies– a six year payroll tax deferral for net new jobs if they move their headquarters into the city’s most blighted area. The plan will require a second and final vote next Tuesday to be implemented. That looks likely now, but go here to sign the petition if you feel strongly about it, just in case. The area in question includes three million square feet of commercial space, most of which has been empty since the 1950s.

David Chiu, the President of the Board of Supervisors and co-sponsor of the legislation, said in a statement, “Today's vote is a vote to keep jobs in San Francisco. This policy is a crucial positive step in the ongoing effort to revitalize the Central Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods. Twitter's commitment to move to this challenged stretch of Market Street and stay in San Francisco shows that we are not content to simply become a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. The companies that are born here should grow here. Finally, I support the efforts of community members to craft community benefit agreements with Twitter and other companies that avail themselves of this payroll tax exclusion. I look forward to the final passage of this legislation next week."

No official word yet from Twitter on whether this satisfies its issues with the city’s tax laws. It doesn’t come close to solving the broader issues with San Francisco’s payroll tax, but it is certainly a big step in the right direction to keep tech jobs in San Francisco. Said Supervisor Scott Wiener as he voted yes: “We in City Hall do a lot of talking about keeping jobs in San Francisco. Now we have an opportunity to actually take action.”

Expect the pressure to continue on supervisors to solve the problem broadly, which would eliminate the need for these company-by-company negotiations with the city in the future. There are already several other proposals on the table including Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi’s legislation to exempt all San Francisco companies from paying payroll tax on stock options for two years, Supervisor Mark Farrell’s plan for a permanent way to take stock options out of the payroll tax completely, and Supervisor David Chiu’s broader efforts to get rid of the payroll tax entirely. As the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association noted today, we may need all of those to solve the broader problem for the next generation of Twitters, Zyngas and Yelps. As Supervisor Farrell said during the vote, “It is no secret that we all seem to realize that our payroll tax system is broken.”

It may take years to get some of these problems solved, and we’ll see if the Board of Supervisors stays as committed without a headline-grabbing impending departure of a big name. Likewise some of the resolve could soften as Supervisors approach 2012 elections– union groups are among many who see this as nothing more than a wasteful corporate giveaway. Either way, we’re going to stay on the story.

Back in October we wrote about Baydin, a startup that managed to land some of its seed funding with some very unusual tactics: by giving Dave McClure a ride to his mechanic and pitching him along the way.

McClure committed to invest by the end of the ride — and the startup has been working to close other investors (though more traditional means, presumably) since then. Today, it’s announcing that it’s closed its $375,000 seed funding round, with investors including Manu Kumar (K9 Ventures), David Cohen (TechStars), Peter Weck (Keepsy, SimplyHired), Meng Wong (Pobox), McClure, and Mike Simonoff.

As a nod to our earlier post, in which Michael Arrington suggested McClure take an UberCab next time, Baydin asked Manu Kumar to sign their closing documents in… an UberCab.

For those that aren’t familiar with it, Baydin develops software that makes your email inbox a little more tolerable. Their most popular product is Boomerang, which allows you to schedule certain email messages to send at some point in the future (in other words, you could write a slew of messages over the weekend, and automatically send them as the workweek kicks off Monday morning). You can also use the service to resend your important email messages to yourself as a reminder, in case you can’t act on an important message immediately. Boomerang is available for both Gmail and Outlook.

The company’s second app is The Email Game, which, as the name suggests, adds some game mechanics to your inbox to help keep you motivated.

Baydin will be presenting as part of 500 Startups’s Demo Day later this week.

Kiip, the in-game ads startup founded by teen entrepreneur Brian Wong, as well as Amadeus Demarzi and Courtney Guertin has just announced a $4 million Series A round. The round was lead by Omniture investor Hummer Winblad and rounded out by Dave Morin, True Ventures and Crosslink Capital, who also invested in Pandora. Hummer’s Lars Leckie and True Venture’s Phil Black will be joining the Kiip board.

Along with the funding, four new employees will be joining Kiip, former Digg VP of Sales Chris Kobran, EA’s Dan Silberberger as VP of Business Development, Vagrant creator Mitchell Hashimoto as head of Development Operations and Punchd co-founder Grantland Chew as a mobile engineer.

Said Leckie, "We believe Kiip can effectively and successfully enhance monetization opportunities for game developers and maximize user engagement for brands. We believe in the team they have assembled, the technology it's developed, and Kiip's tremendous market potential."

So what sets Kiip apart from in-house networks like iAds or AdMob? Wong tells me that there currently is no mobile ad network that focuses on games, “Game mechanics are what makes games, and there has not been an ad network so far that leverages those mechanics to engage users at the same time.”

Wong says he will use the funds for hiring and for building out the platform and product. Kiip is in stealth, but will be revealing what it actually does at AdTech next week.

Yesterday, at the Data 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Twitter took the stage with DataSift to announce a new partnership to sell curated tweet data. But there’s another company that’s been working on some of the same stuff in stealth mode for over a year, and their option will be consumer facing: Bottlenose.

While the service isn’t quite ready to open its doors just yet, Bottlenose is essentially a real-time data interpretation layer on top of tweets. Well, right now it’s tweets, but eventually the plan is to open this data analysis to all types of social information — things like Facebook, Foursquare, etc. The Bottlenose team built an entirely new architecture with from scratch (an extension of the work co-founder Dominiek ter Heide had been doing for a couple years prior) to handle this data coming in. And it matters for consumers because it “totally changes the game in personalization,” co-founder Nova Spivack says.

If you’ve heard Spivack’s name before, it’s because he’s long been associated with data plays — everything from Twine to Live Matrix (which launched at Disrupt nearly a year ago). And this is the project that he views as his next big thing.

Currently, Bottlenose is a web app that looks a bit like the older version of Twitter (the view can also be changed to look more like TweetDeck with multi-panes). But it’s much more powerful. Each tweet in your stream is given a score (which is determined by many different factors including things like Klout scores, which Spivack is an investor in) and tagged with category metadata. Thanks to this, tweets can be easily sorted and filtered.

Essentially what Bottlenose has built is sort of like what Twitter Annotations were supposed to be. But Twitter has since put that project on indefinite hold.

When you send a tweet from Bottlenose, you can choose to post it as a certain type of message (metadata). This might be “news”, “humor”, “event”, “service”, etc. This helps the system learn, but Bottlenose is also doing the work behind the scenes to categorize all the tweets.

They also look at your past tweets and determine your interests (they nailed mine). This is a big part of what they serve up to you, and in that way it’s somewhat similar to what others like my6sense are doing with tweet streams.

The plan right now is to launch sometime around May in closed beta, and to the public sometime after that. While the focus will be on the web at first, there are plans for mobile apps as well. And they’d like to have a full API ready to go so that others can take advantage of the data they’re producing as well.

So what will Twitter, which has been taking tighter control of their ecosystem, think of this? Spivack notes that this is primarily a big-time data play, they just need a way to surface that data effectively with their own front-end. The team notes that they have met with Twitter and say that they have a “close working relationship” with them. Of course, as we’ve all seen, such things can change quickly.

If you hit Bottlenose’s site now, you’ll be able to request an invite for early access.