Editor’s note: Guest contributor Paul Lee is a Partner at Lightbank Capital.  You can follow him @iPaulLee.

A lot has been written about the Series A Crunch.  The gist of the argument is that the number of seed financings have gone up (with the advent of incubators such as Y-Combinator, TechStars, and Excelerate, as well as a new generation of Super Angels, who may or may not be hanging out at Bin 38), but the number of Series A financings have remained relatively steady.  Ergo, the percentage of companies that can't raise a Series A must be going up.

Rob Go, from Nextview Ventures, does a nice job explaining what's happening from his perspective.  His theory is that this is somewhat cyclical, and that there will be a bit of a bloodbath but people should expect it and smart investors have been preparing for this day.

Dave McClure, that swashbuckler (Hi Dave!), is less diplomatic.

So what the hell is really going on?  While a lot has been written about the subject, I think the reality is the Series A Crunch is bullshit and people are misreading the signals here.

There is no Series A Crunch.  There is a huge supply of seed capital but a significantly larger percentage of angel-funded startups are not needing significant capital and thus not seeking Series A financing.

There are two factors driving this development—the supply and demand of venture capital.  First, the supply of venture capital has fundamentally changed.  Angels from the last generation of startups such as Google, PayPal, Facebook, and soon, Groupon, are starting to dabble in venture, doing investments of $50-$500K.

On the institutional side, total fundraising from Limited Partners (LP's) in the asset class has gone up in the last year, but interestingly, fewer firms are actually receiving these funds.  You're seeing the rich get richer.  LP's are flocking to well known funds with great track records and the net result is that several mega funds have raised $1B+.

So what?

Well the reality is that $10 million exit on a seed investment (which may yield a $1-2 million return for the investor) is not going to mean squat for a billion dollar fund in terms of performance or impact on the firm's ability to raise their next fund (this is classic ROI vs. Cash on Cash returns).

So how does that fund play in this space?  They sprinkle a few hundred thousand to as many of the small deals as possible for the option value (of getting to know the entrepreneur loosely) and if there's traction, they bid early and aggressively (hence the run up on these valuations).  At the end of the day, to the venture firm, the most important thing is ownership in the deal.  If they have to pay a premium on the valuation, it's not a big deal because they have a large fund that can absorb the extra money paid for the "hot" company.   The net net for seed stage deals however is that there is even more capital funding more companies and the takeaway for Series A deals is higher valuations (which require more investment for the target 20% ownership for the venture firm).

In addition to the trends on the supply side, the demand for venture capital has fundamentally changed.  We're seeing a lot of two and three person startups that raise $500,000-$1 million in angel funding (for anywhere between 10-20% of the company). Back in the day, that would allow you to buy some servers and equipment, rent some space, and take you to the point of the initial iterations of a product.  With the advent of Amazon web services, communal working space, and an increased skill set of product development (at a younger age—we're seeing founders as young as 18), today's team's are cranking out products that can start generating traction and even revenue.  Modular services such as Braintree, Twilio, and Recurly allow teams to bolt on functionality that would have taken months, if not years, to develop on their own.

As a result of these lowered costs and rapid development, you're seeing businesses that have either scaled quickly to cash flow positive or to a point where they are $10 million acquisitions for larger players like Facebook, Google, and Groupon.  If the founders did one angel round and still own 80% of the business, the net payout would be $8 million to be split evenly between 2-3 founders. Certainly nice scratch.  If you think about that option versus the pain of going out to raise significant venture capital and getting diluted along the way, you can see why it would be an attractive alternative.

So what does all this mean?

It means that a larger than historical percentage of companies are getting seed funding (and we've been seeing companies that, in my opinion, shouldn't be funded—but then again, I've been wrong a lot).  However, the assumption that a huge percentage of these companies are getting screwed since the same number of Series A deals are getting done is just flat out wrong. A significant percentage of these firms don’t need to raise a Series A.

The actionable advice I would give to founders is to think about what you want from your startup (and be real with yourself even if not reflected in your investment pitch).  Would you be happy with a small, yet attractive exit?  Or are you looking to build the next great business?

If the former, raise money from angels (who they are matters to a significant degree, but I'll save that for a future post) and iterate and strive for a business that can sustain itself.

If the latter, think hard and choose wisely.  In particular, I would be careful about large 10-investor syndicates that include participation from large mega funds.  Realize that the seed investment is an "option" for these mega funds.  They may not be committed to the business in a real way (getting the partners' time, advice, and network) until you can show meaningful traction.  Because it's effectively an "option", they are more apt to walk away from the investment if it is not going well and send a strong signal to the investment community.

In any event, it's a great time to be a founder.  Take advantage of all the money out there to build your business.

Image credit: Shutterstock/olly

It looks like someone over at HTC just can’t keep their mouth shut. Not that I’m complaining, mind you: the newly-leaked HTC Ville looks like a device after my own heart.

The Boy Genius himself reports that the Ville has a 4.3-inch qHD (that’s 960×540) Super AMOLED display, with a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor under the hood. Sorry quad-core fans: you’ll have to look elsewhere for your fix. The Ville manages to make up for it with an HSPA+ radio and a remarkably svelte metal chassis that comes in at under 8mm thick. Oh, and who could forget the inclusion of Beats Audio support?

If the lack of hardware buttons wasn’t enough of a tip-off, the Ville will sport Ice Cream Sandwich out of the gate. For better or worse though, Matias Duarte’s stylistic choices may be painted over: the Ville is said to run Sense 4.0 on top of it.

The jury’s still out on whether or not the Ville is actually real, but BGR claims that it will soon make its first appearance alongside the HTC Edge at the 2012 Mobile World Congress. Interestingly, a sizable list of HTC device code names made the rounds yesterday and a similar-sounding device called the “Villa” was included among them.

Considering that other entries included the Ruby (now the Amaze 4G), the Holiday (now the Vivid), and the Vigor (now the Rezound), the Ville may indeed see the light of day soon. Still, it’s equally possible that this is a crafty hoax meant whipped together with a name pulled from the list to give it some credence. I suppose we’ll just have to wait for MWC to see for sure, but considering the string of HTC leaks, new details may surface even sooner than that.

I can’t help chortling a little in Schadenfreude at Adobe’s expected announcement that it is abandoning Flash for mobile devices. For most of the past two years, the anti-iPad contingent has cited flash incompatibility as the primary reason they weren’t going to give Apple their money yet the devices they did back – the Xoom, the Notion Ink Adam, the Playbook, and the like – all shipped with buggy or non-existent flash implementations. But I will not chortle, friends, because this is some serious stuff.

First, I want to say Flash wasn’t a bad idea for mobile. It would have been amazing in the early years of the smartphone revolution. It was comfortable, familiar, and a great way to get app-like functionality onto phones that might not have been powerful or popular enough for a real development platform. However, it was never implemented in a way that added value and what value it had value really peaked a few years ago and has progressively dropped over the past few months. If I’m to pick nits, I’d like to show this video from Lee Owen.

The native iOS application, as you see, worked smoothly and seamlessly. The Android/Flash implementation, on the other hand, exhibited lag, touch insensitivity, and a general “wrong-ness” that disturbs the purists out there. This is obviously evidence of Android’s “familiar lag” but it also part of Flash’s problem: all of the things people wanted to do in Flash, barring viewing web video (an activity that is better in dedicated apps anyway) – play Flash games, view flash animations (why?), and, I assume, see Flash advertisements – are poorly served by these laggy implementations. Flash made Flash look bad.

Adobe never got mobile Flash right but even as they claimed injury at Steve Jobs’ mean comments, they were probably already moving past the issue internally. The depth of that move is now public. In their statement, it’s clear that they’d rather have Flash and Air exist as standalone apps rather than an add-on. They want center stage on your device, not playing second fiddle to someone else’s browser:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming and premium video. Flash Player 11 for PC browsers just introduced dozens of new features, including hardware accelerated 3D graphics for console-quality gaming and premium HD video with content protection. Flash developers can take advantage of these features, and all that our Flash tooling has to offer, to reach more than a billion PCs through their browsers and to package native apps with AIR that run on hundreds of millions of mobile devices through all the popular app stores, including the iTunes App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World.

You’ll also note that they want Flash to run high-end 3D games and other rich content, a possibility that is truncated by Flash in the browser. By going in this direction, they create two interconnected tracks – the direct to PC track and the direct to mobile track. Each track would presumably start at the same point and the differences in coding and development would be trivial, allowing an Adobe user to make a rich app on the desktop and the mobile device at the same time.

Apple didn’t win this battle – if it even was a battle. Instead, Adobe ceded ground to the future in hopes of surviving another decade as the go-to tool maker for creative professionals. It’s fun to think that Steve Jobs had a hand in this, humiliating big bad Adobe with his Zen trickster techniques. However, it’s clear that Adobe is a business in crisis and that posturing doesn’t pay the bills.

[Image: Brett Mulcahy/Shutterstock]

Parse, a hot startup that serves as a ‘Heroku for Mobile’, has raised a $5.5 million Series A funding round led by Ignition Partners. Ignition’s John Connors will be joining the Parse board of directors — which is notable because he was a board member at Heroku prior to its acquisition by Salesforce for $212 million (Connors is also on the boards of Nike and Splunk). Parse had previously raised $1.5 million from Y Combinator and some top angel investors.

Parse’s mission is to help streamline the development process for mobile apps, effectively allowing developers to outsource their application’s server-side backend. Most smartphone apps today use server-side functionality for something — user accounts, data management, real-time updating, and more — but the knowledge required to implement these features tends to be totally different from the skills needed to build a solid iOS app in Objective C, or an Android app in Java.

That’s where Parse comes in: developers focus on building the client side of things, then add key features like data storage, Facebook integration, and user management using Parse’s SDK, which makes implementing these features much easier (creating a new user account, for example, takes four straightforward lines of code).

Parse now has 3,500 developers building with its platform, and the apps running Parse are exchanging “millions” of data transactions per day. Most important, though, is their growth — traffic from Parse-enabled apps is growing 40% week over week.

Parse’s founders say they’re seen a pretty broad array of apps being built on the platform (there isn’t any one specific use-case). And some of the apps are already doing quite well — Band of the Day, which was recently chosen by Apple as its App of the Week, was built entirely using Parse.

The company now has seven employees, and they’re hiring aggressively.

BiteHunter, the new mobile app for finding nearby dining deals, has just completed a $800,000 funding round. The round was led by angel investors Avraham Kadar, M.D. and Eyal Chomsky. The funding will be used to provide additional resources for the development of new features, an expansion to other platforms, and ongoing maintenance of BiteHunter’s deals database.

The app, sometimes described as a "Kayak for restaurants," launched on iOS back in June, initially in New York, San Francisco and Chicago. In October, the company launched a major upgrade which included integration with hundreds more dining deals sources including Yelp Deals, Groupon Now and LivingSocial Instant. The newly added time-limited deals are now featured within the app's new "BiteNow" section, showing you discounted dining options you can access on the go.

With the new funding, BiteHunter says it will soon add a personalized deal recommendation notification system and the option for its users to purchase deals on the go, without having to register at all the different deal providers. BiteHunter plans to serve as the middleman between you and the deal you want, so you can purchase the deal in the mobile app with credit card information you have on file. The plan is for BiteHunter to house 70-80% of the deals in the U.S., BiteHunter CEO and Co-Founder Gil Harel told us recently.

BiteHunter 1.3 is available here in iTunes.

E-commerce spending continues to rise as more consumers look to online retail channels to purchase goods. comScore just released its online retail numbers for the third quarter of 2011, and online retail spending in the U.S. reached $36.3 billion for the quarter, up 13 percent versus year ago.

This is the eighth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth and fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth rates in e-commerce. In Q2 of this year, spending was up 14 percent from last year.

The top-performing online product categories were Digital Content & Subscriptions, Event Tickets, Jewelry & Watches, Consumer Electronics and Computer Software. Spending in each category grew at least 15 percent compared to a year ago.

comScore says the growth in overal spending in the quarter was due to an increase in the number of buyers, which is up 22 percent. According to the report, 74 percent of all Internet users mad at least one online purchase in the quarter. That’s up from 70 percent in Q2 of this year.

And 40 percent of e-commerce transactions included free shipping. Of course, this is down from a peak of 49 percent in Q4 2010 but free shipping offers tend to peak during the holiday season.

Despite the unrest in the financial markets, comScore still believes in the ‘continued health’ of the holiday shopping season. Especially as more consumers rely on online shopping deals, free shipping, comparison pricing products and more, online shopping may continue to be strong in Q4 of 2011.

Of course, we’ll start seeing signs of whether holiday spending has seen an uptick soon. Now that we’re weeks away from Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it will be interesting to see if the current state of the economy has any effect on spending this year.

It may not be immediately obvious that you’re looking at a clock, but that may just be the point that creator Scott Thrift was going for. The Present is what Thrift calls an “annual clock” — it takes an entire year for its single hand to sweep across its psychedelic face.

Ah, but there’s a method to the apparent madness. As the weeks and months pass, the Present’s hand passes over color gradients that correspond to the seasons. The pure white of the winter solstice slowly melts into the green of spring, which in turn gives way to the vivid yellow of summer and the vibrant red of autumn.

Speaking in purely practical terms, The Present is sort of useless. You won’t use it when trying to make an appointment, or catch a train, or any of the other things that we rely on clocks to help us do. What it does do (or aims to do, anyway) is force to us step back and stop looking at time in terms as fine-grained as minutes and hours and days. After all, how can we live in the present when the present slowly and constantly ebbs into the past?

The Present has already blown past its $24,000 funding goal, but there’s still time for you contemplative types to get in on the ground floor. A donation of $120 locks you in for one of the first Presents to be made, which are slated to be released sometime in February.

This must be the day of Kickstarter projects. This project turns an original Gameboy into a unique music instrument complete with analog controls and a stereo/mono switch. While this may be of use only to hard core knob twiddlers, but for $174 you can get a fully modded Gameboy and 6 volt power supply so you and your band can add some boops and beeps to your latest song.

The kit actually “improves” the Gameboy audio, adding controls for Cutoff, Resonance, Bypass, Envelope Follower. This is obviously some hardcore chiptune action so I won’t pretend to explain it. Here is how the creator describes it:

The filter can operate in mono mode, effecting the entire signal from the Gameboy. In stereo mode, the clean signal from the Gameboy is panned hard left, while the filtered signal is panned hard right. This allows the performer to selectively program what elements of their audio will pass through the filter.

The Envelope Follower allows the filter to be automatically animated by the dynamics of the signal. This is particularly useful for imparting filter characteristics to resonant basslines.

You can have the creators mod your own Gameboy for $160 and buy the kit for $90.

Project Page

Location-based social planning platform Hotlist (formerly “The Hotlist”), is launching a revamped website and iPhone application today, with an increased focus on ease-of-use, improved discovery of upcoming activities and events, and better tools for coordinating plans with your friends.

According to Co-founder and CEO Chris Mirabile, the company is also nearing the close of its next round of funding to the tune of approximately $1 million+, raised primarily from angel investors (via AngelList) and previous investor Centurion Holdings, among others.

“When you think of other location-based services, like Facebook and Foursquare, it’s about what’s already happened in the past, it’s a more historical view,” explains Mirabile. Hotlist, instead, wants to help you find out what’s going to be happening in the future. It does this by tapping into users’ Facebook profiles to see what events users’ friends plan to attend. It also aggregates public data to show which places will be trending nearby. Hotlist users are then offered recommendations based on a combination of factors: their friends, places, events and the brands they follow.

With the update, Hotlist has added the ability to take “virtual peeks” into venues hours or days ahead of the actual events in order to see event details, photos of those planning to attend, and who among their Facebook friends plans on going.

The other notable new feature is the “Planner” which helps users determine the best place and time to meet up with friends. Users can specify up to 5 locations and times and friends select which ones work best.

However, the best part of Hotlist’s update may be the redesign. If you remember what the app and website used to look like, you’ll likely be pleasantly surprised by the changes which make the service much easier to use.

Hotlist says it now has over 100 million plans in its system for over 2.7 million venues in over 40,000 cities. Mirabile says that the service has also grown to half a million users since launch.

The new app is in iTunes now, but an updated version will arrive in just a couple of hours with additional bug fixes.

Flash sales site Beyond The Rack has raised $36.6 million in new funding led by Panorama Capital with Export Development Canada, Tandem Expansion Fund, Rho Canada, Inovia Capital, Highland Capital Partners and BDC Venture Capital participating in the round. This brings the startup’s total funding to over $50 million.

Similar to Gilt Groupe, Beyond the Rack is a members-only shopping site that offers steeply discounted (from 50 to 70 percent) on designer brand clothes, accessories, home decor and other goods. The site 5 million members, which is up from 1.5 million members in July of 2010.

The new funding will be used to enhance logistics and distribution and to accelerate growth. Beyond The Rack isn’t the only flash sales site to raise a heft amount to expand. Gilt raised $138 million in May, and Ideeli raised $41 million in April. Home decor and accessories site One Kings Lane just raised another $40 million and last week, wine-focused flash sales site Lot18 nabbed $30 million from Accel and others.

Editor's note: Guest writer Joseph Puopolo is an entrepreneur and start-up enthusiast, who blogs on a variety of topics including green initiatives, technology and marketing.

Have you been waiting for a taxi to come take you to an airport and it never comes? Or worse yet, you have ordered a car and don't know where it is. A Toronto based company named Winston aims to change the way you call for a taxi or limo. Launching today exclusively in Toronto, Winston is going direct to cab or car companies and pitching a different way to operate. Instead of high overhead dispatch, which can be hit and miss they are leveraging the customer, GPS and integrated credit card functions to change the game.

Sounds a lot like  Uber, but Winston's prime focus is around the business user. The business traveler typically has very different needs than an average traveler. The launch of the app is currently limited to Toronto, Canada, but they will be rolled out in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco by the end of the year. Winston is negotiating agreements currently with international providers and will be in multiple markets in Europe and Asia in 2012.
Winston believes it will win out by leveraging broader distribution and greater adoption across more cities. Uber is currently available in 5 cities.

"Our customers will be everywhere, we need to be everywhere they are" says Aidan Nulman CEO of Winston.

With Winston, rather than picking up the phone, you will be able to order a cab at the touch of a button using the Winston app. While waiting for your ride you can track it approaching via GPS. When you complete your ride, rather than having to reach for your wallet, you just leave the car and the payment is handled via Winston. The payment is tracked via the app, it tracks the pick-up and drop-off location and time spent and charges a credit card on file appropriately.

Whether you want either a cab or a limo, a prospective passenger can order either. Limousines obviously come at a premium and a minimum cost of 50 dollars. Winston has already negotiated numerous agreements with cab and limousine companies.

Winston has received significant interest from corporations looking to manage employee expenses. One of the key reasons for this is that tax chits can often be abused by employees while traveling. As well, for employees, keeping track of travel expenses is often the last thing they want to do. All in all, this is ideal for a busy business traveler who is getting off a flight to catch a business meeting. This expedites and automates the entire process. Winston derives revenue by taking a percentage of each ride and sees many other potential revenue streams.

Winston was founded In January 2011 by Aidan Nulman, Yilun Zhang, and Krista Caldwell. Winston is in The Next 36 program, an entrepreneurship program designed to groom the next generation of entrepreneurs. Winston has worked closely with advisors from Canadian incubator MaRs and other entrepreneurs to get this venture off of the ground.

The Winston app is now available on the App Store here, check it out.

Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo has developed a real-time Japanese <-> English translation service for mobile phones, the first of its kind. The way it works is that you speak something into the device and wait to hear a voice interpretation of what you just said in another language.

As you can see in the videos embedded below, the service, which uses the cloud for the heavy lifting, isn’t quite “real-time” but pretty close. NTT Docomo says the service can be used for communicating over the phone but also face-to-face.

The company also claims the success rate for speech recognition stands at about 90% in the case of Japanese and about 80% for English (other languages will be added soon). That’s significantly more than the 15-20% back in May, when we introduced the service first.

A test with 400 end consumers in Japan started today and runs through March next year. If everything goes according to plan, NTT Docomo plans to offer the service to all of its 56 million subscribers in the second half of 2012.

This video [JP] shows the service in action:

Here’s another one:

Gnip, a provider of social media data to enterprise applications, is now delivering over 30 billion paid social activities per month to its customers. This is the largest number of paid social media activities that have ever been distributed in a 30 day period in Gnip’s history.

For background, Gnip serves as an API hub for social streams, collecting data from services like Twitter, Facebook and other social sources, and pushing it out to other data-consuming applications and Websites. Applications using Gnip's platform can get public data streams for over 100 feeds and sites, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, and now Google+ without ever visiting those sites or accessing their individual APIs. And Gnip also has premium access to the Twitter firehose of data.

For basis of comparison, at the start of 2011, Gnip was delivering 300 million activities per month. By May, that number was up to 3 billion activities per month. And in October, Gnip delivered 30 billion activities. At this rate, Gnip says it will be be delivering 300 billion
activities per month by March of next year.

So what’s causing this increase in demand for social data? Gnip says that more customers are signing up to tap into and mine the social data stream. Second, Gnip says that there is major interest in the premium-access to the Twitter firehose. Hedge funds are using the data stream to drive trading strategies, business intelligence companies layering social data onto their existing structured data sources and more. And more customers are using multiples sources to enrich their product capabilities.

Gnip’s CEO Jud Valeski explains that Gnip will be adding Twitter-like premium data source relationships with other social services in the near future. The company also plans to increase the ability for more complex filtration of social data streams.

Crowdsourced SEM management startup Trada is released its version of a crowdsourced Facebook advertising marketplace. Trada, which launched in March of 2010, is launching a marketplace that lets advertisers and agencies leverage Facebook ad experts to create campaigns on the social networks.

Here’s how Trada works. Agencies and advertisers can specify a budget they are willing to spend on ads, decide which advertising platforms they want their ads to appear on (the site currently supports Bing, Yahoo, and Google), and enter how much they willing to pay-per-click or per acquisition. The site then sources the heavy lifting, like choosing thousands of keywords to target and writing ad copy, to its community of SEM experts to build and manage and advertiser or business' paid search campaign across search engines. Trada coordinates the payments and takes a small cut of each transaction between advertisers and SEO experts.

With the Facebook integration, marketers can enter their parameters and Trada's Facebook optimizers and creatives will build hundreds or thousands of hyper-targeted profiles and ad creative combinations. Trada says optimizers and creatives earn money on a performance basis by generating low-cost clicks, conversions and social interactions such as "likes" for advertisers.

Since launching in March of last year, Trada has added more than 500 advertisers and 2000 paid search experts to its crowdsourced paid search marketplace. The company says its model is helping advertisers with budgets as small as $3,000 per month and as large as $500,000 per month successfully and scalably run PPC campaigns.

With the massive growth in advertising on Facebook, a crowdsourced offering from Trada could be appealing to businesses who don’t have massive advertising budgets.

Trada has raised $8 million in funding from Google Ventures, Foundry Group and angel investors.

Maybe the Kindle Fire isn’t as “media-deficient” a tablet as BN CEO William Lynch would have us believe. Amazon has just announced that they too will have support for Netflix and Pandora, as well as “several thousand more apps” when the Kindle Fire ships next week.

Usual suspects like Facebook and Twitter will run fine on Amazon’s tablet, as will games from big players like Zynga and EA. Amazon’s smaller Android Appstore runs parallel to Google’s, but Amazon claims that the apps they “carry” are tested for Kindle Fire compatibility.

Amazon’s focus on apps is probably meant to highlight the small size of BN’s own app store, but there’s no question that Amazon is feeling some pressure from their long-time rivals. The Nook Tablet came out swinging just a few days ago, and it received more than a little attention thanks to the full suite of media services that would come preloaded on the device. Meanwhile, CEO Lynch lobbed another mortar at Amazon when he referred to the Kindle Fire as a “vending machine” for Amazon’s services.

With Lynch’s claim, BN seems to have forced Amazon into a war of positioning. Amazon clearly has more meat when it comes to their media ecosystem, but BN smartly spun Amazon’s focus on their own services as a lack of choice for consumers. With both tablets nearing launch, watching the two of them slug it out for holiday supremacy should make for quite a show.

With button locks, 78 macro commands, and 13 programmable switches, the Mat Catz M.M.O.7 is the ultimate in gaming geekery. Based on Mad Catz’s original R.A.T. 7, the mouse has not yet been officially priced but it should be about $99 when it launches this holiday.

The mouse has a 6400 dpi sensor and the finger rests can be moved and modified. A built-in weight system also allows you to fine tune the mouse’s tracking. The mouse supports Mad Catz’s software platform. The software allows you to assign various commands any of the buttons. You can also drag and drop spells and commands right into the mouse’s configuration, assigning various commands to any one of the variegated buttons.

It also has presets for games, so you can totally rock out on King’s Quest like a pro.

Product Page

Restaurant reservations service OpenTable is launching a completely redesigned mobile website today based on HTML5. The company says it was prompted to make the changes due to customer demand. Since 2008, the company has seated more than 15 million diners through both its mobile website and apps, representing over $600 million in revenue for its restaurant customers. These days, OpenTable mobile solutions account for more than 1 million diners seated per month.

The updated website offers a new look and feel, and was designed with a focused effort to better mirror the mobile app experience. Like OpenTable’s native apps, the site can now use geolocation to find nearby restaurants with tables available. Diners can also refine searches by neighborhood, cuisine and price, plus access photos, maps, menus and parking info. In addition, it also offers the most highly requested feature: reviews from other OpenTable diners.

The updated website is currently supported on Android, iPhone, Windows Phone and BlackBerry devices, which is kind of funny, considering that the company already has apps for all those platforms. It seems that no matter how big you get, you can never ignore the biggest platform of them all: the Web.

OpenTable also recently added a new Android Honeycomb (tablet) app, updated its Windows Phone app to support Mango’s Live Tiles for reservation reminders and updated its iOS apps to allow users to export reservations to their calendars.

In an accompanying infographic, OpenTable revealed a few more tidbits of data, including the following:

• OpenTable diners have spent $10+ billion at OpenTable restaurants worldwide
• 250+ million diners have been seated
• 7+ million diners are seated per month
• There are 20,000+ OpenTable restaurants worldwide and 12,000+ in the U.S.
• 9% of all reservations in North America are seated via OpenTable (as of Dec. 2010)
• 49% of OpenTable diners have booked an out-of-town reservation in the past year
• OpenTable diners have generated over 10 million reviews since 2008
• 400,000 diner reviews are created each month
• 30% of reservations are booked when the restaurants are closed

Lightbank-backed oBaz,, a crowdsourced haggling service that launched in August, is shifting its focus towards product discovery today with the launch of a new Aisle-system on the site.

As we reported previously, oBaz, short for online bazaar, lets anyone create their own group of like-minded buyers looking to get a good price on the same product or service. You simply post the item you’d like on oBaz, wait for people to join the group (a minimum of 25 people have to be in a group to haggle for a product), and then let oBaz work its magic. oBaz hagglers will reach out to merchants or manufacturers and leverage the group and their own negotiating expertise to get the best possible deal.

With oBaz Aisles, users join groups based on their product interests (i.e. Parents, Musicians, Chefs, Gamers, Dog Lovers). oBaz experts in these aireas will curate interesting buys, make product recommendations for their respective Aisles and will get deals on these products for oBaz users.

Once in an Aisle, users can participate in daily discussion questions, vote for upcoming products, or purchase exclusive deals. Additionally, users must submit answers to lifestyle questions before being granted access to an Aisle. For example, Photographers may be asked about their favorite lens while Hackers are asked a question using binary code, and Chefs must come up with an impromptu recipe when given three ingredients. oBaz members can join any number of Aisles for free and there's no limit on the number of Aisles that can be created.

By sourcing unique products, oBaz seeks to bring visibility to lesser-known brands. Recent deals include a high-quality guitar stand for $125 (Retail: $200) and a gaming iPad accessory for $56 (Retail: $99) from relatively unknown manufacturers.

If you have more money than sense, I have an iPhone case for you. Watchmaker De Bethune has created the DW4 aka the Dream Watch 4, an iPhone case made of bead-blasted titanium with an embedded mechanical watch in the back. Why? Because the poor can suck it is why.

Only twelve of the limited edition cases will be made, with one given to John Corzine as a retirement gift. The rest will be flaunted on the streets of various famine-torn nations by impossibly thin Russian models who will order huge plates of food that they won’t eat.

No pricing, but seriously?

via Ablogtoread

Chicago-based startup Sprout Social, the developer of a comprehensive social relationship management platform for businesses, has rebuilt its offering from the ground up, adding support for personalized dashboards multi-users, full iPhone functionality, and more.

For background, the startup’s platform, which launched to the public last year, allows businesses to connect to customers and monitor key metrics and the overall competitive landscape using social media tools. Sprout Social integrates with social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, and LinkedIn and includes lead generation, business intelligence, offer and promotion distribution services, as well as brand monitoring and analytics.

Business users can aggregate all of an organization's social media messaging into a single activity stream, automate cross-network posting of promotional messages, conduct targeted searches for new customers and more.

Because the new version supports multiple users, teams and groups, users can now have personalized dashboards that display the streams and modules that they need to be effective. Sales, marketing, product development and customer service departments can have different profiles and permissions while community managers or others can be assigned administrative roles.

A new assignment capability allows tasks to be placed in user task queues, and the entire platform has been redesigned with a new UI. Sprout Social users can now access the application via an iPhone app, and can monitor their social media inbox, send replies, create and schedule new messages, view assignments on the go. Android is coming soon, says founder Justyn Howard.

Pricing starts at $9 per month. As Howard explains, the new version aims to go beyond just monitoring to measuring and creating engagement for brands, helping them grow their social media presence and find who they should be listening to.

Sprout Social has raised over $11 in funding from Lightbank and NEA.