comScore has just released an interesting study comparing the reach of Apple’s iOS platform to Google’s Android operating system in the U.S. The analytics and data company is reported that Apple’s device with the iOS operating system, including iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches, have a combined platform reach of 37.9 million, outreaching the Android platform by 59 percent.

comScore says that the installed base of iPhones slightly exceeded that of iPod Touches, both of which were approximately twice as high as the number of iPads. Among the 37.9 million consumers with access to the Apple iOS, only 4 million (10.5 percent) accessed the platform via more than one device. And the combined 37.9 million iOS users is 59 percent greater than the 23.8 million combined Android OS installed base, which includes users of both Android phones and Android tablets. Of total mobile subscribers, Apple iOS has a 16.2 percent share compared to a 10.2 percent share held by Android.

Another interesting data point comScore examined in the study is comparing what mobile device manufacturer iPad owners have adopted. While Apple is indeed the most heavily represented OEM among iPad owners, its OEM share (27.3 percent) is only slightly higher than its share among all smartphone subscribers (25.2 percent). RIM accounts for the second highest percentage of iPad owners at 17.5 percent, but this number is well below its overall smartphone market share of 28.9 percent. And 14.2 percent of iPad users had Android phones.

This data seems to indicate something we already know-Apple is not only a strong contender the smartphone race (in a dead heat with Google) but is also dominating the tablet space with the iPad. The fact is that there hasn’t been an Android tablet that has been able to gain the same sort of traction that the iPad as seen. Of course, comScore’s mobile report from a few weeks ago, which focuses on smartphones, shows that while Google is pulling ahead the Verizon iPhone is helping boost usage of the iPhone.

Tagged, the San Francisco-based social network that is most notable because of its ability to grow profitably during the Facebook era, has closed its first acquisition. dotSyntax, the corporation that created the popular Digsby instant messaging and social client, is now part of Tagged. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but all seven dotSyntax employees will join Tagged.

Tagged CEO Greg Tseng says that they intend to keep the Digsby software as a standalone product, and also incorporate features into Tagged over time. Says Tseng: “They have expertise and technology in real-time communications which we want to use to push into instant messaging, group chat, video chat, etc. IM is our most requested feature on Tagged.”

Digsby has 3 million registered users today (Tagged has over 100 million), and the company has raised $500,000 in funding.

If you’re unfamiliar with Digsby, there’s a good overview video here showing how the product works. It allows users to interact with social networks, webmail and instant messaging services. Websites can also integrate Digsby into their sites.

How do you become a startup founder? There are many paths, but often founders grow up at other startups. GroupMe co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci are still pretty young. Both graduated from college only a few years ago, but both also did stints at other startups before creating group-messaging phenom GroupMe at last year’s Disrupt Hackathon and subsequently raising $10.6 million. (Disclosure: host Chris Dixon is an investor in GroupMe through Founder Collective).

In the Founder Stories video above, Hecht and Martocci talk about their previous experience. Hecht was the biz dev manager at Tumblr. Martocci was lead software engineer at Gilt, and before that founded an email marketing image company called Sympact Technologies. There is nothing like learning on the job to prepare you for startup life. Their friends who opted for higher-paying salaries on Wall Street and elsewhere in New York City now want to copy them and start their own companies.

In the video below, Hecht and Martocci explain what GroupMe is for people who haven’t tried it yet. (It’s a group text messaging app that works over SMS or in-app). “We built this originally to go to a music festival,” says Martocci.

You can also check out other previous episodes of Founder Stories or subscribe in iTunes.

Stealth startup Decide announced this morning that it has closed a $6 million series B round of funding. The series B round was led by Maveron, Madrona Venture Group, Google founding board member Ram Shriram, and former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford. Maveron’s Dan Levitan and former Farecast CEO Hugh Crean will be joining Decide’s board of directors.

Decide adds to the $2.5 million in series A it raised last summer, bringing total investment to $8.5 million. Decide will use its series B to continue putting the finishing touches on its shopping service and website, which it plans to launch next month, as well as ramp up hiring efforts.

The Seattle-based startup is being tight-lipped about the particulars of its service, so at this point we don’t know much beyond what Decide CEO Mike Fridgen said in a January blog post — that the company is “building a revolutionary new shopping service that will bring unprecedented levels of transparency to electronics shopping”.

However, we do know that Decide was founded by Oren Etzioni, the founder of Farecast, an airfare predictions service, Metacrawler, a metasearch engine, and Netbot, one of the Web’s first comparison-shopping services. The company also appears to be a re-start of PriceYeti (which allows anyone to track any item on the web and get an email instantly when the price drops) and Eggsprout (which compiled data on resumes), as several founding developers from both companies have joined Decide’s team and are transferring some of the high-level concepts to the shopping service.

So, we can be sure that Decide is likely to be developing complex data mining and comparison models to give the consumer electronic space an innovative new look. Leveraging an impressive team with veteran experience in uncovering consumer insights, and $8.5 million in the bank, there’s no doubt that Decide is a startup worth watching.

I’m also curious as to how much of Decide’s $8.5 million was spent purchasing the “Decide.com” domain name. My guess is that it wasn’t cheap. We’ll just have to hope it was worth it. Stay tuned for more.

Social ticketing company Ticketfly is announcing a $12 million Series B round of financing from Root Music investor Mohr Davidow Ventures.  This Series B will bring the startup’s total funding to $15 million and other investors include High Peaks Venture Partners, Contour Venture Partners and angels Roger Ehrenberg and Howard Lindzon.

Ticketfly has an interesting origin story, the company’s co-founders sold their first startup, TicketWeb to industry leader Ticketmaster for $35 million in 2000 and then left that company in 2008 to form Ticketfly.

Seeing that Ticketmaster was missing out on a tremendous opportunity in social marketing and realizing that there was a market in catering to the small venues that didn’t feel right with having a competitor sell tickets (after Tickmaster merged with Live Nation), Ticketfly co-founders Andrew Dreskin and Dan Teree sought to provide people with a Ticketmaster alternative. “We sort of got the band back together for round two here,” Dreskin tells me.

The company, which makes money off service fees, is now the number two online concert ticketing platform, next to Ticketmaster and is on track to sell 2.5 million tickets this year. Ticketmaster by comparison sold 141 million tickets in 2008, the last time I could find any concrete sales numbers.

What sets Ticketfly apart from its main competitor is its emphasis on the social marketing  and analytics that currently drive ticket sales. It offers promoters a free website toolkit where they can create a Ticketfly Events page, integrated Concert site and Facebook Event in one fell swoop. Concert go-ers can buy tickets and share information about concerts directly from the Events page and a sites Ticketfly integration. Promoters can also set up the event to post concert updates to Twitter and Facebook automatically, without having to manually update.

Ticketfly currently has over a 150 partnerships with venues including Austin City Limits and The Troubadour. In addition announcing funding, the company is releasing an artist database today with records for over 70,000 artists, which means that venues can have access to up to date artist content like photos and videos in order to spruce up their Events pages. In addition it now offers email newsletter integration, allowing venues to automatically populate their email newsletters with events data.

Dreskin will be using the financing to expand the Ticketfly platform and further integrate all elements of the ticketing experience. “The ticketing experience historically has been a abysmal, just not that fun for consumers, so we seek to remedy that as well,” Dreskin adds.

TreatFeed, a newly launched social shopping application, has raised $5.4 million in funding led by Norwest Venture Partners.

TreatFeed, which is characterized as a ‘word of mouth’ rewards system, is the brainchild of HauteLook founders Brett Markinson and Konstantin Glasmacher, who recently sold the flash sales platform to Nordstrom for $270 million a few months ago. TreatFeed provides members with a way to benefit from their 'word of mouth' recommendations and turn them into rewards.

TreatFeed aggregates deals from retailers allows members earn rewards for sharing deals, and for the ongoing transactions of the people in their network. Users are essentially compensated for sharing in their social graph, or ‘social tree.’ Points can then be redeemed for products, exclusive offers and even converted into cash. TreatFeed makes money from affiliate fees.

With a fresh infusion of $4 million from Comcast Interactive Capital, which it raised recently in a series B financing (with previous investor BlueRun also pitching in), hyperlocal places database Fwix is pushing out a major upgrade to its developer API today. Fwix is creating an open database of places in partnership with Factual . Developers will be able to pull data about millions of places into their own apps, and edit the places as well by adding their own data or content.

Fwix started focusing on becoming more of a places database last year, but its API was clunky. Nevertheless, it served 20 million API calls in March, up from 11 million in February. Now with the new developer API, it will be easier to associate places with content such as news articles, Tweets, and check-ins. The API also includes an advertising layer which plugs into various mobile ad networks and geo-specific offers, including ones from Groupon, LivingSocial, YellowPages.com, and Gilt City.

Other efforts to create an open places database exist. What is unique about Fwix’s places database is that it can append location-specific content to a place such as news articles, Tweets, and photos. The Fwix database is set up to make it easy for developers to mix and match places with content and bring both into their apps. They can filter places by popularity (measured by check-ins) or other ways, and write back into the database with data generated by their users.

Companies, like visitors of Chinese take-away restaurants, come and go. Today, we have the unfortunate duty to report that two fine young Internet startups have not survived the never-ending battle for users, relevance and dollars that rages Web-wide.

Making its way to the deadpool are JamLegend, which aimed to compete against Rock Band and Guitar Hero with an interesting online music game, and Skribit, which hoped to help out poor bloggers and website owners suffering from writer’s block.

JamLegend was one of the most promising startups to come out of the LaunchBox incubator back in 2008, and quickly attracted 1 million members (and has grown on to about 2 million registered users over the years).

As of yesterday, the following features were turned off: new user registrations, new artist registrations, JamCash deposits, new VIP subscriptions, and VIP subscription extensions. On April 29, the service will be completely shut down and all user data deleted.

Why, you ask? Well, according to a blog post, the team is moving on to unknown new ventures after three years of trying to make JamLegend rock the market.

JamLegend had raised more than $2 million in funding, in part from one of its advisors, entrepreneur Hadi Partovi, cofounder of Tellme and iLike and former Myspace exec.

Skribit was an interesting idea as well, although it enjoyed much less traction than JamLegend, as the above tweet shows. Skribit originally came out of the Atlanta Startup Weekend organized in November 2007.

The service aimed to help prevent writer’s block by allowing bloggers and website publishers to get post suggestions straight from their readers, while at the same time helping readers keep track of what their favorite bloggers were cooking.

This is the email the startup sent its users today:

[Notice: This is the last email you'll ever receive regarding Skribit. I will personally nuke the 20,621 user email list. - @Stammy]

On July 31st, 2011, Skribit will be closing its doors. Skribit started several years ago at Atlanta Startup Weekend in November 2007 and has had a good run. As a refresher, Skribit aimed to aid writer’s block by allowing bloggers to receive post suggestions from their readers, while helping readers keep track of what their favorite blogger’s were working on.

Unfortunately, Skribit traction was not as impressive as we had hoped and Skribit had become more of a niche solution for a small percentage of bloggers. Over the past few years, 45,162 blog post suggestions have been completed through Skribit, 2,346 of which were completed/blogged. The vast majority of Skribit users did not receive suggestions from their readers for various reasons.

Only 1,214 blogs had more than 3 active suggestions.

We stopped actively developing Skribit last Spring and decided to pursue other opportunities. Thanks for being part of Skribit! We are in the process of refunding current PRO users. We wouldn’t have been able to keep Skribit running for so long if it wasn’t for a seed investment from Georgia Tech’s Edison Fund and lots of advising from Lance Weatherby of the Georgia Tech ATDC.

Follow us on Twitter to see what we’re working on now!

Best,
Calvin, Paul & Lance

YouTube loves to push its livestreaming capabilities. It’s done U2 concerts and government debates , but now it will stream what may turn out to be its biggest live event ever: The British Royal Wedding. Well, it would be the biggest event ever if it wasn’t starting at 5 AM ET on Friday, April 29.

But you know how crazy people get for royal weddings, and plenty of people will be watching from all over the world. The U2 concert topped out at 10 million streams. The last British royal wedding was decades ago. The people are hungry for their pomp and circumstance, even those who aren’t British subjects. (I don’t understand it, I only report it).

The wedding procession will be streamed live on the Royal Channel on YouTube. Don’t forget to sign the online guest book! And if you miss it, don’t worry. I’m sure all the good parts will be televised in an endless loop that entire weekend on every TV channel.

You’ve been waiting and now it’s here: Sonos has just announced the availability of the free Controller on the Android platform. It is compatible with almost all Android phones and tablets and supports the standard Sonos feature set (music assignment, browsing, search) as well as a few interesting additions.

The app takes advantage of Android’s native speech recognition to offer voice search (“Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute”) and it also highjacks your Android device’s volume keys to control the volume of the Sonos device.

The Sonos system now also supports Airplay but in a very roundabout way. If you have an Airport Express with Airplay support (or Apple TV, for that matter), you can transmit audio from an iPad, iPod, or iPhone to that device using Airplay. You can then take the live stream from the Airplay device and send it to any Sonos device on your network. It’s obviously not ideal, but it works. You can still transmit audio from multiple devices (including iTunes libraries) around your network.

Read more…

According to an AP report, Dish Networks, the soon-to-be new owner of Blockbuster, is keeping the leases on 500 of Blockbuster’s physical stores. The reasoning, while on the surface inscrutable, will give Dish a physical presence and allow it access to Blockbuster’s assets and brand to sell its own satellite TV service to consumers.

Read more…

Listia, a marketplace for free stuff, has raised $1.75 million in funding from an impressive roster of investors and angels. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from SV Angel, Founder Collective, High Line Venture Partners, Max Levchin, Naval Ravikant, Alex Zubillaga, James Hong and others. Listia previously raised $400K in angel funding.

Y Combinator-incubated Listia offers auctions where people use free points to bid on items other users are giving away for free. You can earn these points by interacting on the site (and giving away free stuff of your own), or you can buy some points yourself. The system ensures that the person who gets the item being given away actually wants it.

Today, Listia is announcing that it is taking its marketplace mobile with the launch of an iPhone app. On the free app, you can browse, bid and list items directly from your iPhone. One compelling feature is the ability to find what people are offering near you so you can find listings near you for local pickup. And you can take pics of the free stuff you want to give away from your phone and list them on Listia. You ca also comment and ask questions directly from your iPhone.

Listia’s founders Gee Chuang and James Fong tell us that the mobile app is a natural extension of the site and a feature that many users were requesting. Both say that the app is expected to boost usage of the site.

Since launching in 2009, Listia’s community is growing by 15 percent each month and the service see thousands of transactions per day from thousands of users. And the company recently launched a business-focused offering that allows companies to hold contests to 'raffle' items away. In total, Listia has coordinated transactions of goods worth $25 million.

Never mind the reviews, if the PlayBook is on your shopping list, you probably don’t need a reminder that it hits a variety of retailers today in both the US and Canada. Pricing is much like the iPad’s with the 16 GB WiFi version starting out the party at $500, the 32GB costing $599, and the 64GB running $699. Of course the PlayBook is only available in WiFi models as of yet with the 3G models still on tap for a later release.

So now the question is whether you should actually buy the PlayBook. MG found it incomplete, which is in line with most other reviews as the PlayBook doesn’t have a native calander, email client, or Android app compatibility. John also has a review sample and notes the same thing along with stating it’s a “very usable device.”

Read More

Personal profile startup About.me, which was acquired by AOL last December, is adding a new feature today—the ability to print business cards for free from personal profiles on the platform.

In case you aren’t familiar with About.me, the site offers people free profile pages. On your dedicated profile pake, can include your name, bio and links to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites that have information about you. Users can also upload high-resolution photos to the site, making profiles look fairly sleek and professional with minimal effort.

Now, any About.me use can register to print 50 free business cards (users will need to pay for shipping) from profile information, courtesy of Moo’s nifty printing business. Moo will add your about.me profile, unique url and QR code to your cards. Users can also upload additional images; edit contact info and more.

Moo is also releasing an API that will allow other small businesses to tap into their printing capabilities. The API program has been under development for a while, but will officially be launched through About.me today.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (which was just acquired by Western Digital) has announced the company’s first USB 3.0 external hard drives, the so-called Touro Mobile Pro Portable Drive and the Touro Desk Pro External Drive (the bigger one in the picture). What’s special about these devices is the personal cloud-based back up solution they come with.

In other words, you can store data on your hardware and online – if things go awry in either one of these “two levels of protection” (Hitachi), you don’t have to worry about losing valuable data. Both drives spin at 7,200rpm.

Read More

Talk about swings and roundabouts. In this case, Silicon Roundabouts. For Tweetdeck holds a special place in the growing galaxy of London tech startups and news today that it is still ‘in play‘ as an acquisition target is fascinating.

Back in February we reported – pretty confidently – that UberMedia had acquired Tweetdeck for $30m, although no party had released any official statement. If true then this would have given Bill Gross' company, after buying EchoFon, another popular Twitter client, 20% of the userbase of Twitter. Tweetdeck reportedly has 11% of active Twitter users.

But oh what users they are.

Samsung and Seagate this morning announced a broad ‘strategic alignment’ in a move to expand their existing relationship and more effectively counter competitor Western Digital.

The most important elements of the agreement include Samsung combining its hard disk drive operations into Seagate, receiving significant equity ownership in the HDD and storage solutions provider and enhancing the current patent cross-license agreement between the two companies.

In addition, Samsung and Seagate inked a NAND flash memory supply agreement under which Samsung will provide Seagate with its semiconductor products for use in Seagate's enterprise solid state drives and other products, as well as a disk drive supply agreement under which Seagate will supply drives to Samsung for PCs, notebooks and other consumer electronics.

The combined value of these transactions and agreements is approximately $1.375 billion USD, which will be paid by Seagate to Samsung in the form of 50% stock and 50% cash.

Upon closing, Samsung will receive Seagate shares 45.2 million shares with a total value of $687.5 million, representing approximately 9.6% ownership of Seagate, plus $687.5 million in cash.

The agreement has no financing contingencies, and is subject to customary closing conditions, including review by U.S. and international regulators. The transactions are expected to close by the end of calendar year 2011.

Samsung and Seagate will also collaborate to develop new enterprise storage solutions, and a Samsung exec will be nominated to join Seagate's board of directors in the near future.

Something like this was bound to happen after rival Western Digital recently announced that it would buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for $4.3 billion in a deal that will expand the company's reach in data storage.

At the end of last year, Seagate reportedly turned down an acquisition offer from Western Digital after being actively courted by private equity firm TPG Capital, which reportedly offered more than $7.5 billion for the company.

Yesterday, reports claimed that Samsung was indeed considering selling its money-losing HDD business for $1 billion to 1.5 billion to raise cash to invest in new growth areas, with Seagate being named as a potential buyer.

Samsung has about 18% of the HDD market, according to iSuppli.

Users of Google Maps and Bing Maps have enjoyed 3D imagery for a while now, and Nokia is now catching up with the launch of (admittedly very nice-looking) photorealistic 3D models of 20 metropolitan areas from across the globe.

On Maps.ovi.com/3d, you can now explore places in 3D in major cities like London, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Milan, New York, San Francisco and, of course, Helsinki.

The feature is free on Ovi Maps and will be formally introduced later today at the Where 2.0 conference in California.

Starting with a bird’s-eye view, users can scale up and down and move around objects such as buildings and trees from their desktop, provided they install a browser plugin.

Plugins are available for IE 7+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 5+ and Google Chrome. A detailed 360-degree panoramic view of streets is also available.

(In related news, Google this morning introduced 'Map Maker', which lets you edit Google Maps, in the United States for starters).

Nokia’s says Ovi Maps for mobile currently covers 180 countries, nearly 100 of them navigable in 53 languages. On the Web, Ovi Maps covers the same 180 countries, 93 of which are navigable in 29 languages.

Nokia boasts that its 3D offering, while late to the game, is the “most realistic available” and goes beyond rendering limited areas and buildings by making entire cities, including suburbs, available for exploration. You be the judges.

It’s hard to believe, but for the last few years Google Maps users in the United States have been missing out on a pretty important feature (though there’s a decent chance you’ve never heard of it). It’s not particularly sexy, and many of the people reading this post will probably never take advantage of it, but we’ll all reap the benefits over the coming months. Meet Google Map Maker.

The feature is pretty self-explanatory: it allows users to create (or, in the case of the US, edit) Google Maps, and it’s already had a major impact worldwide. You see, in the United States, we’ve been able to access online maps for years because companies have been plotting and licensing the data to services like MapQuest and Google. But in many countries, there wasn’t any data for online maps to speak of — so Google created a web-based tool so people could create their own. Edits are submitted by users, and after a moderation process, they’re added to Google Maps.

The feature has been used to generate maps for 183 countries and regions wordwide, and Google says that the number of people  globally with access to detailed maps of their neighborhoods has jumped from 15% to 30% because of it.

But why is it coming to the United States?

Lalitesh Katragadda and Manik Gupta, who lead the product, say that the tool can be used to give a greater level of detail to Google Maps in the US. We’ll now be able to edit (and access) more detailed maps of university campuses, biking and walking trails, and other areas that aren’t traditional roads.

Each edit submitted goes through a review process — Google looks at your past submission history to see if you’re trustworthy, and a small in-house team reviews each edit before it’s pushed live to Google Maps (users can also flag incorrect data). Once an edit is approved, though, it goes live for all of Google Maps users within a few minutes, so it won’t necessarily take a long time to see a change go live.

For now the feature is only available via the web interface, but it sounds like it will eventually make its way to mobile platforms as well (it would be easier to make submissions and corrections in the field).

Building interiors aren’t included as part of this release, but I suspect we’ll see these added down the line (imagine being able to navigate through a mall or office building). You can, however, add building footprints, including 3D versions of buildings.

To coincide with the US launch, Map Maker users everywhere are getting a couple new features: Street View can be used from within the editor, and there’s now an advanced search engine with more granular controls.

Vokle, a web-based video communication platform, announced today that it has closed a $767K round of seed funding. The round was led by Tech Coast Angels, Sierra Angels, Grammy-nominated singer Imogen Heap, Rafe Furst, and various private investors.

The round was the second part of a $200K angel investment the startup closed at the end of last year (led by the same investors), and adds to the $300K of seed capital it raised back in 2008, bringing Vokle’s total funding to $1.26 million. The startup will be using its most recent funding to continue building and scaling its user base, to step up hiring efforts, and to finish its move into new, larger office space in downtown Santa Monica, CA.

Vokle is a live, web-based video talk show platform that enables you to interact with your audience in realtime. And if that doesn’t get you, the cool thing about Vokle is that it’s a microsite, or an app if you prefer, so you can embed it anywhere, like a YouTube video. Obviously, Vokle isn’t a destination site, so you can add it to your website to give your visitors a one-stop experience, rather than redirecting to Vokle’s homepage, which gives a little boost to those user-retention/bounce stats.

Vokle’s platform also allows users to broadcast their live video and audio to a virtual auditorium of viewers, while taking live video calls and text-ed questions from the audience. So, users see the video window on their browser, plus a feedback and chat area, but the broadcaster is party to a backend that enables a number of different curation and editing tools. It aggregates questions from audience members, can assign remote co-hosts, provide screenings to approve video callers behind the scenes, or work with an editor to cut between single or multi-shots in realtime.

Unlike Justin.tv, which is really one-way broadcasting, Vokle is going for town hall-style, social video broadcasts. It wants to enable every person in the room to ask live questions and contribute to the conversation in everything from fan clubs and virtual meetups to jam sessions and charity events. Imogen Heap, for example, held live auditions for a cello player before a recent tour, and Arianna Huffington used it to interview Carl Honore. Check it out to see Vokle in action.

When Nihal Mehta launched Buzzd with co-founder Deepen Shah, he believed in the power of the check-in and essentially created an city guide that aggregated check-ins from Foursquare, Gowalla, and others. But because of the competitive landscape in the location-based network space, Buzzd never really took off. So Mehta went back to the drawing board, with the hope of creating a service that would combine the element of the check-in he found intriguing with Buzzd and advertising and marketing elements (Mehta’s first startup mobile marketing service Ipsh! was sold to Omnicom years ago). The result, which he calls “a culmination of everything he’s done,” of this is Local Response, a new web-based tool that allows local businesses to respond to the “check-in” on social media sites with marketing campaigns to promote transactions.

LocalResponse aggregates real-­‐time social media check-­‐ins from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Instagram and dozens of other services to provide a simple interface for local businesses to directly respond to their most influential and valuable customers. What’s compelling about the platform compared to competitors is that it analyzes massive amounts of data in addition to check-ins from the Twitter firehose, photo sharing sites and more to find other forms of check-ins. These could be posting a picture on Instagram of a dish from a restaurant or Tweeting that you are visiting a particular bar.

With hundreds of millions of Tweets sent out per day, and millions of check-ins and other data, this is not a simple task. LocalResponse’s proprietary technology collects and prioritizes this information both explicitly (i.e. check-ins on Foursquare) and implicitly (by analyzing natural language on Facebook, Twitter, etc.; e.g. "I'm headed to ShakeShack"). Mehta says most check-ins are actual implicit and many social media platforms catered to helping businesses track check-ins miss this key data.

Not only does Local Response track all of this data but it allows businesses to respond to these Tweets and messages with a marketing campaign, coupon or advertisement. So Shake Shack could send a Tweet back to someone who had just snapped a photo of a burger with a link to a 10 percent off coupon on the next visit. The actual page will feature a logo of the establishment, the original Tweet sent by the consumer, the Tweet send back by the business and the promotion or coupon. Local Response has actually creates a number of canned responses which businesses can automatically send.

For the past six months,  LocalResponse has been running a private beta, with over 2,000 campaigns for local businesses in New York City. The links in the Tweets and messages sent by these local businesses to consumers who “checked-in” to their establishment are averaging a 60 percent click-­‐through rate and 15-­‐20 percent redemption rates. That’s high and impressive.

Mehta says that the platform is so highly-focused in its data collection, that it can send highly targeted Tweets to consumers who are interested in the promotions or campaigns. For example he says that Local Response will run two to three hundred search terms across its data for a particular business. Also, the aim of Local Response is not to overwhelm consumers’ stream with advertisements. Users will never receive more than one message in 7 days, says Mehta.

While today’s release is focused on catering to small and local businesses, a platform for brands and agencies is in the works. In addition, Local Response closed a $1.5 million in funding this past December from Verizon Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Metamorphic. The company plans to raise a new, larger round of funding this Summer. As for Buzzd, Mehta hopes to find the location-based network, which currently has about 1 million users, a new home.

For now, Local Response is free for businesses. Eventually the startup plans to go the freemium route and will also charge for the brand-focused application. And Local Response is launching with half a million businesses that are already pre-indexed (with search terms). All they have to do is type in the business name, and they can get started using the platform.

Local Response faces competition from social media management platforms like Sprout Social, as well as Foursquare, Gowalla, and other networks that offer their own merchant-focused services. But what makes Local Response so compelling is that it captures more intent-focused data beyond the average check-in. Photos, Tweets about a restaurant or neighborhood, and more can also serve as a type of check-in and Local Response empowers local businesses to turn this data into actionable results and possibly transactions.

Editor's note: The following guest post is written by Mrinal Desai, co-founder of CrossLoop and addappt. You can follow him on Twitter.

On reading today's report by the Wall Street Journal that Twitter is in talks to buy TweetDeck, I believe the only reason it is doing so is to protect its turf.

Less than a week ago, CNN wrote a piece that UberMedia will be developing a competitor. Ubermedia, is the same company, that was supposed to have bought TweetDeck two months ago. UberMedia is also the same company that has been on an acquiring binge of popular Twitter clients—UberTwitter, Echofon and Twidroyd, namely.

Shortly after that, Twitter blocked Ubermedia for violation of many of its terms of service.

Lets first look at some major milestones of the Twitter app economy:

• July 14, 2008.  Twitter acquires Summize
• April 7, 2010.  Fred Wilson wrote the post called Twitter Platform's Inflection Point where he mentioned:

I think there are a number of non-obvious places, like desktop publishing was on the Mac, where something entirely new will be built on top of Twitter.

• April 9, 2010, 2 days later: Twitter acquires Tweetie: this also gave them the desktop app (at least for Mac).
• Sept 14, 2010: Twitter launches the #newTwitter which I thought was strongly influenced by Loren Brichter’s Tweetie for iPad
• Feb 9, 2011: Twitter suspends UberMedia for violation of its TOS
• March 14, 2011: Twitter explains why developers should not make Twitter clients when they say:

This massive base of users, publishers, and businesses is a giant playground for developers to build their own businesses on, and this means the opportunity has grown for everyone. With more people joining Twitter and accessing the service in multiple ways, a consistent user experience is more crucial than ever.

• April 6, 2011: Tweetdeck launches #NewTwitter Rival
• April 16, 2011: UberMedia reported to be building a Twitter competitor
• April 18th, 2011: Twitter in talks to acquire Tweetdeck, a Twitter client for the desktop

Having laid down the context, here are 5 reasons why Twitter will kill Tweetdeck

1. Too many apps is too confusing.

When Twitter bought Tweetie, they said:

People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up. It’s important that we optimize for user benefit and create an awesome experience.

Will they now have two different official Twitter clients on the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Web with very different experiences to keep them confused?

2. Buying TweetDeck is a purely defensive move.

Twitter fears that Ubermedia might run away with its users and convert them.  TweetDeck today asks users to create a separate TweetDeck account.  As TweetDeck adds in more unique features that users begin to rely on, their loyalty could shift to TweetDeck.  To developers, Twitter is signaling that the deal is more about protecting itself rather than to develop TweetDeck further in-house.  Sure, if you are a developer and can capture market share as large as TweetDeck’s, you are welcome to try. But we all know that is very hard and is capital intensive as being exhibited by UberMedia which has raised $30 million, and is still being slapped around by Twitter.

Alternatively, Twitter is giving mixed signals to developers yet again. Having said it is not good business to develop clients, it is now talking about acquiring one within a month. I assume, it does not want to "screw up" again.

3. Twitter is all about Twitter.

Twitter does not care about supporting Facebook, Foursquare or any other social networks that TweetDeck currently supports. And Deck.ly for catching messages that spill longer than 140 characters? Forget it.

4. The past Is prelude

Look at what happened to Tweetie. It was killed and came back as Twitter for iPhone. The #newTwitter on twitter.com has Tweetie developer’s Loren Brichter’s fingerprints all over it. Developing Twitter for Mac further and taking it to Windows would definitely lead to a consistent user experience (which Twitter seeks, as suggested in the quote above to developers). Managing and maintaining two distinct codes bases/ products and growing them is very hard.

5. The TweetDeck experience can be reproduced

It would be relatively easy to create the TweetDeck user experience on the desktop with Twitter. Here is what it would take to convert Twitter for Mac into Tweetdeck: “Detachable” columns. A right click on any sidebar menu item should give me the option to ‘detach’. (Below is my very artistic mockup). As long as my lists stay intact, my Twitter experience can be replicated from one client to another.

If Twitter does end up buying Tweetdeck, the product as we know it is a goner.

Google Inc.’s putting another $100 million into large-scale, renewable energy projects. The company’s director of green business operations, Rick Needham, revealed Monday in a post to the corporate blog:

[Google] invested approximately $100 million in the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm…currently under construction near windy Arlington, Ore. When completed in 2012 [the plant] will produce 845 MW of energy. This will be the first commercial wind farm in the U.S. to deploy, at scale, turbines that use permanent magnet generators…The electricity produced at Shepherds Flat will be sold under long-term agreements to Southern California Edison.

Prior to financing the Oregon wind farm, Google Inc. invested $168 million in the Mojave-based, Ivanpah solar power tower plant, another renewable energy project that inked a power purchase agreement with Southern California Edison. The Ivanpah solar plant is expected, upon completion in 2013, to generate 392 gross megawatts of energy.

As with their investment in Ivanpah, a Google spokesperson said the company would not be purchasing energy directly from the Shepherds Flat wind farm but would become part owners through its investment. The money for the investment comes from the Google Inc. treasury, or cash holdings.

Besides Google, GE also previously invested in the Shepherds Flat wind farm. GE serves as a supplier of turbines, as well as operations and maintenance services, there. Caithness Energy is the developer of the massive, Oregon renewable energy facility. Co-investors with Google in the wind farm included Sumitomo Corporation of America, and Tyr Energy.

Tel Aviv-based Yotpo announced today that it has raised $800K in seed funding. The funding was led by 2B Angels and PLUS Ventures, two early stage Israeli investment firms focused on communications and new media.

According to Yotpo Co-founder Tomer Tagrin, the startup will use the funding to expand its user base, ramp up hiring, and position itself for launch later this year.

So what is Yotpo? It turns out this is a surprisingly open-ended question, as the startup only opened its doors to public beta testing a few days ago. But, in the big picture, the company describes itself as a social business-to-business tool that “makes your customers happy” by facilitating a better user experience — specifically for the owners of blogs and eCommerce sites.

Though “making your customers happy” may sound appealing, I think that’s what most businesses might say they’re trying to accomplish. So what does that mean for Yotpo, in application? To begin with, as mentioned, Yotpo will be targeting bloggers and eCommerce sites, with plans to expand beyond these venues down the road.

So, for example, let’s say you own your own blog. You may then be familiar with the challenge of attracting new readers to your site, and once you’ve got them reading your content, with the challenge of how to keep them coming back. Not to mention, the tricky task of getting your readers involved and engaged by commenting, re-tweeting, sharing, and so on.

In turn, bloggers often struggle with creating content that is truly valuable to their user base, and keeping that content applicable as new users arrive and the tastes of existing users change. Of course, this isn’t a problem we at TechCrunch are familiar with, but it’s been known to happen.

So, say you’ve just written a post about a new Apple gadget, Yotpo is creating a tool that will read the content of your post and serve your readers with real opinions about the new gadget from elsewhere on the Web. As a blogger, you would embed Yotpo’s tool on your site, enabling it to read your post and (in realtime) scour the Internets to search for related content. Using its algorithm (“special sauce”), it will aggregate opinions on identical subjects, rank them based on how valuable they will be to your users, and then serve them to your faithful.

The idea being that your reader, now informed about what others are saying about this very gadget, will be more likely to engage with your content, share a comment, re-tweet, and continue to visit your site. As is often the case, there may be loads and loads of content about the particular subject you’re writing about, and your reader may not have been able to wade through each and every article. Thus, serving him or her with targeted excerpts (the “bottom line”, as Tagrin calls it) from the most relevant articles and blogs on equivalent topics could very well make them feel more informed, fitter, happier, and stronger. Or at least one of those.

The application of this idea to eCommerce is easy to see — if marketplaces can serve their shoppers with opinions, reviews, and analysis from others who have bought similar products, for example, then you’ll have more intelligent (and presumably happy) buyers. Obviously, sites like Amazon and Yelp (and hundreds of others) already offer thorough reviews by customers who have enjoyed (or not enjoyed) similar products, or restaurants — and offer recommendations for similar products. That idea is not new.

But applying the instant, realtime review and analysis option to bloggers and smaller eCommerce sites is appealing. The ability to use one widget or plugin, (or in whatever capacity Yotpo’s tool is realized), to aggregate and serve users with relevant opinions across the Web is a valuable goal. Hey AdSense makes tons of loot based on not-so-dissimilar model.

Of course, creating an algorithm that smartly serves readers with real analysis and opinion and not just content based on some keyword that happened to match up with the aggregating algorithm is easier said than done. And, of course, how the tool’s interface is designed, whether it shows 1 opinion or 30, a single line of text, or entire paragraphs, remains to be seen. That’s the real kicker. Good design, easy-to-use, and works everywhere. Now that could have lasting effects.

The startup is still in beta, so there is time to work these things out and do necessary testing and due diligence. At the very least, it will be interesting to see how the startup puts its idea into practice.

Social ad buying platform Adaptly has raised a total of $2.7 million in seed and Series A funding from First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, Kirschenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners and Lerer Ventures. Angel investors also include Gary Vaynerchuk, Invite Media founder Nathaniel Turner and Interclick CEO Michael Katz .

Adaptly, which caters to clients like Pepsi’s Lipton/Brisk, makes it easier for brands to advertise across social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and Plentyoffish by thinking outside of the display ads box. “Social is NOT display,” co-founder Nikhil Sethi tells me. “What’s really important for us is to socialize the evolution of display ads. Those two dots don’t get connected and they need to be.”

Adaptly has two components: A white-label ad platform as well as a fully managed service where a team member helps brands through the process, “Imagine spending $5 million dollars on StumbleUpon ad. It’s not an easy thing to do, that scale is what we bring to the table,” says Sethi.

The ads space right now is dominated by Facebook specific-buying agencies like Blink, AdParlor and the companies that apply search metrics right next to social like Efficient Frontier.

What Adaptly does differently than the other players is that it understands that integrating ads into a site like Twitter or LinkedIn is an entirely different process and extends beyond Facebook, “Our bet is that social is not just Facebook, but that it will evolve into other sites like LinkedIn and Tumblr. Facebook is roughly 47% of the pie.” 

Adaptly recently moved its headquarters to NYC, and currently operates with a team of seven who mostly come from engineering backgrounds. Sethi tells me he will use the $2.7 million in recent funding to “build the most badass team” and has as an overall goal to put the “tech” in AdTech by building a really strong engineering-focused company.