It’s hard when you’re new to a city and have no friends. When I visit a new city I tend to hide in trees and behind garbage bins and watch people from afar, seeing where they go to eat and socialize. Then I go to those places at night, when they’re closed, and sniff the air for their scent. However, Drumo offers an improved method for finding out specific things about a city using Quora-style discussion connected to geodata of major metropolitan areas.

As it stands, the service is limited to Sydney, Singapore, and Tokyo, thus limiting your choices. However, it is still in beta and looks to be an interesting way to figure things out on the ground. For example, you can ask about sushi restaurants and the best watch shops and get real answers from real people. You’re rewarded with points and badges for correct answers and there are tie-ins with local businesses.

The questions range from the mundane to the fairly urgent and it seems sparsely populated right now by friends of the devs. However, the design is whimsical and cute and the service, on the surface, seems useful.

Australia’s Design Royale built and funded the app and there is no current public investment. They’re growing the service slowly but surely and they should be adding new cities, including Osaka and Hong Kong, over the next few months. There is an iPhone app available now and an Android app forthcoming.

Now I can satisfy my sinister urges with the help of hundreds of willing volunteers and, given the Quora-like interface, I can now find locations with outdoor seating to sniff. That, my friends, is what the Internet was made for.
Click to view slideshow.

Social games outfit ngmoco, now a DeNA-owned company, is partnering with indie mobile game developer TinyCo in order to bring TinyCo’s games to Android and the Mobage social gaming platform. The first two titles to be ported over are Tiny Chef and Tiny Nightclub.

Mobage, as you may remember, arrived in an English version on Android in summer 2011 following Toyoko-based DeNA’s December’s acquisition of ngmoco for $400 million. The social gaming platform now serves over 30 million users with more than 1,000 game titles for smartphones, feature phones and PC’s. DeNA is now working to expand Mobage globally by building up a presence in the U.S., European and Asian markets.

Currently, Mobage offers developers shared currency, a virtual goods bank system, a payment API, plus advertising management and analytics tools.

San Francisco-based TinyCo is an up-and-comer in mobile gaming, having raised $18 million in Series A funding in February in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. At the time, Marc Andreessen detailed TinyCo’s “impressive execution,” saying it took “the best elements of Facebook gaming—continuous product updates and content additions, virtual currency and goods, and constant, relentless review of user data to improve the overall experience—and optimizes them for mobile devices.”

TinyCo has several App Store top 10 titles now, including Tiny Zoo Friends, Tiny Pets, Tap Resort and VIP Poker.

It’s not often that an iPhone user gets jealous of an Android application, but that’s definitely the case here with Any.DO, the gorgeous new social To Do list app for Android launching today. The app comes from the team behind Taskos, one of the most popular To Do list applications on the Android Market.

More notably, Any.DO is backed by $1 million in angel funding from Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavours, Blumberg Capital, Genesis Partners, Palantir (Joe Lonsdale), Felicis Ventures (Aydin Senkut) and Brian Koo and includes Eric Tseng, head of mobile at Facebook, and Elad Gil, Director of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, as advisors.

Any.DO was founded in 2010 by Omer Perchik, Yoni Lindenfeld and Itay Kahana and now has offices in both Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel.

The interesting thing about this team’s first app, Taskos, was that it was meant to serve as market research only. The founders were surprised how popular it became - something that may serve as a reminder about the need for quality apps on the Android platform. Taskos now has 1.3 million users and handles 150,000+ tasks per day. Those users will now be invited to try Any.DO instead, Perchik says.

When you launch Any.DO, the first thing you’ll notice is its attractive design. After having been on Android myself for over a year, I can say with confidence that this is still somewhat a rarity for the platform. (Go ahead, flame away). But Any.DO looks great, offering a default white theme and a more “Android-y” black theme.

Like any to do list, Any.DO supports the basics, like adding tasks, marking them complete, setting priorities, etc. But it does a number of other things which make it stand out from the crowd. For example, you can create tasks using voice input, it syncs with Google tasks, and you can use gestures to manage your tasks like drag-and-drop for assigning task priorities or organizing tasks into folders or swiping to mark tasks complete. You can also shake your phone to clear off the completed tasks from the screen.

However, the most important feature is the app’s backend. This task list app is actually intelligent, offering to auto-complete entries as you type. The suggestions of common words and phrases are gathered through the analysis of aggregate, anonymized data from the app’s users. For example, start typing “ca…” and the app may suggest “call mom,” “call dad,” “car wash,” etc. It’s like Google’s auto-complete for tasks.

Any.DO also lets you collaborate on tasks with family, friends and colleagues, potentially displacing group texting, email threads and other more socially focused apps like Facebook or GroupMe. It can offer contact suggestions when building collaborative tasks, and for those who are not Any.DO members, the app supports communication via email and SMS. A future version will send non-users’ replies back into the app, too, similar to how GroupMe works today.

As far as the bigger pictures goes, Any.DO is working towards building out a smarter, more intelligent system that can help you actually get things done, not just list the things you need to do. Details on how exactly that will work are sparse, but a comparison to Siri’s capabilities was hinted at in our conversation with co-founder Perchik.

And no, fellow iPhone users, Any.DO isn’t going to be an Android-only app for long. The iPhone version is just a few months out. In the meantime, Android users, congrats, you can grab the new app from here.

In part II of Chris Dixon’s Founder Stories interview with Livestream co-founder Max Haot, Hoat offers his analysis of what he encountered while attempting to secure funding between roughly 2007 and early 2008. At the time, Haot feels VC’s were hovering over technology that allowed people to digitally record events and watch the action on their own time.

However, as presidential candidates crisscrossed the country during the ’08 election, Livestream caught a break thanks to an invite from Gannett who started using Livestream (then known as Mogulus) to broadcast the activity. Pleased with the results, Haot says Gannett invested $10-million and delivered a bundle of cash that arrived just in time.

Livestream pocketed the money shortly before the financial sector imploded, and after it did, the team seemed to sharpen its focus. He tells Dixon, we needed “to operate under the assumption that we will never get anymore cash and we started monetizing and deploying our premium business, understanding our customers more and rebranding to Livestream.”

Haot adds renaming Mogulus to Livestream was “one of the single best decisions” the company has ever made.

As Livestream looks ahead, Hoat is broadening Livestream’s offerings by blending various forms of media (text, photos, pre-produced video clips and live video) into a scrolling event pages in order to “extend the event online.” He says Livestream is not just “live video” but “a stream in realtime”

Make sure to hear his full thoughts by watching both videos, and check out episode I of this interview here.

Past episodes of Founder Stories with leaders from Gilt Groupe, BirchBox, Eventbrite, and Flipboard are here.

Any long-time Apple devotee has struggled through the charger situation. Those Mag-Safe T-shaped chargers fray pretty easily, at which point you have to twist and turn the cord to pull in a charge. It’s a huge pain, to say the least. But it appears those struggles are coming to a close, as Apple has lost a lawsuit which will now require the company to either replace MagSafe power cords or hand over a chunk of change.

In 2006, Apple made a smart move by introducing magnetic power cords. The idea was that people would stop damaging the charging port and/or their MacBooks if they happened to trip over the cord. The only problem was that the T-shaped adapters ended up fraying at the end, probably since everyone felt free to trip over them and yank them out of the computer.

Still, they should’ve been more durable, and now Apple has to clean up the mess. After now realizing that the 60W and 85W MagSafe MPM-1 power adapters are defective, users will have until March 21, 2012 to file a cash claim, or until December 31, 2012 to go get a replacement, reports the Register. Simply take your damaged charger into an Apple Store or an official Apple partner and ask for a replacement. But know that any signs of accidental damage (which to me would look a lot like “stress relief” damage, so who knows how they’ll determine that) will invalidate your claim.

Here’s Apple’s official wording on claims:

Strain Relief Damage means fraying, melting, straining, sparking, weakening, discoloration, bubbling, overheating and/or separation of the Adapter's strain reliefs.

If you’re a more recent Mac convertee and own the L-shaped MagSafe charger, no worries. You shouldn’t have the same fraying issues. No word yet on whether non-U.S. MacBook owners will get the same deal.

The Lumia 800 may not have a gargantuan screen or a front-facing camera, but according to The Verge, the U.S.-bound version of Nokia’s flagship Windows Phone may play nice with some of our LTE networks.

It’s a welcome surprise for domestic Nokia fans — when the Lumia series was first announced last month, Nokia slyly omitted any release details for the United States. Nokia U.S. boss Chris Weber also mentioned not long after the big event that the company is preparing to bring a “full portfolio” of Windows Phones to the States starting in early 2012, but wouldn’t shed any light on the Lumia situation.

According to The Verge’s sources, that delay is due to Mango’s currently inability to play nice with LTE out of the box. As such, it’s unclear whether Mango will be tweaked to handle the change or if the LTE Lumias will run on the forthcoming Tango software build.

The Verge does seem pretty confident in saying that AT&T will get an LTE-friendly variant of the Lumia 800 (which is great news considering their new LTE network seems rather snappy) Meanwhile, details regarding other LTE carriers like Verizon are still murky, though Nokia going full-bore with LTE support could only help as the networks continue to grow.

I’d advise everyone not to get their hopes up too much — after all, a lot could change in the next few months — but the prospect of a 4G Lumia has me more than a little giddy.

We’re lucky here in the old U.S. of A. App stores are pretty much monolithic and aside from a few odd stragglers, there’s really only one place to find apps for each of the platforms. However, what if your country does’t support a certain app store or what if you want to send your friends to a certain app, knowing that they each have different phones? That’s where Appitalism comes in.

Created by Simon Buckingham, the founder of ringtones.com, Appitalism is a one-stop shop for apps. The system allows you to buy apps for every major platform in one place. For example, you can buy Angry Birds for almost any phone, including Symbian, WebOS, and Android. The system seamlessly submits your order to the official app store in question and, when applicable, supplies a file for side-loading.

The service also offers discounts for new users, including 50 cents just for signing up and a few dollars for connecting your Facebook and Twitter streams, effectively allowing you to grab a few free apps just for logging in.

While this may seem fairly useless in a sophisticated market, it is definitely helpful for developers and marketers. For example, the service offers a link shortener that takes you to a single page for your app, allowing users to pick up the ported app of their choice while reducing the number of links they have to scroll through to find the right app. Appitalism is also the default app store for many countries and their Wings program allows developers to select where their apps will appear, including in the stores of carriers around the world. In countries like China where there are 70 or so different app stores, this definitely helps reduce clutter.

The service is now available in over 50 countries and it works with almost any phone. There is also a Facebook “app” that recreates much of the regular site’s functionality but allows you to share favorite apps with your friends.

The company is a subsidiary of Mobile Streams, a digital content retailer.

Hotspot Shield has long offered VPN services to Windows and Mac users alike, but the company has set their sights on a more secure mobile space with the release of their eponymous iOS app.

As Ron Popeil would say, Hotspot Shield for iOS is a “set-it-and-forget-it” solution. Once the app is launched, the secure connection it creates persists unless you specifically turn it off. Until then, Hotspot Shield encrypts all the data moving between your iDevice of choice and the internet, including data coming from apps running in the background.

Hotspot Shield also packs a data optimization feature that should help stretch your monthly data allotment. The app spots three different levels of data compression, with the most spartan settings stripping out cruft like extraneous photos and ads.

The new app works on any iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad that runs iOS 4.0 or later but the extra peace of mind will cost you. The app itself is free, but the service will run users $.99/month or $9.99/year for those who like thinking long term. The paranoid penny-pinchers among you will be glad to know that one subscription carries over to multiple iOS devices, so you’ll never be caught without a secure connection again.

Amateur bloggers want exposure, while publishers and brands want cheap content they can monetize. Tidal launches today with hopes of connecting the two. Bloggers signup, and Tidal’s licensable content curation platform pulls out the best posts that match what its clients are looking for. These posts are delivered to the editors of apps and sites like Zagat’s Fork and Tell, Condé Nast’s Teen Vogue, and Bob Vila Nation, who have the final say of what to publish. The sites are willing to pay Tidal because the crowdsourced content draws traffic but is cheaper than paying writers or hiring an editor to go find content.

If you’re a blogger and want to be fast tracked through the approval process, sign up at http://tid.al/ using the code “techcrunch” without the quotes.

A beta trial to create a community fashion channel for Condé Nast’s Teen Vogue was a success, with 2,000 blogger applicants and thousands of crowdsourced posts live on the site. Tidal has now signed up over 5,400 bloggers thanks to buttons asking for contributors on the sites it powers. Contributors don’t receive monetary compensation, but get exposure and links back to their original posts. In this way, Tidal leverages the vast numbers of bloggers who are just trying to express their passion.

To sift through applicants and the posts of those accepted, Tidal’s curation engine scores posts based on how well they’d fit the on the sites of their clients. It looks for proper post length, number of photos, keyword density, comment volume, author’s Klout score, similarity to previous popular posts, and the grade level the writing is suited for. It also screens for spam and giveaways.

Posts that qualify are delivered with a confidence rating for how likely they are to fit the host. This curation is what Tidal sees as its value-add. Editors can then scan through the refined list of submissions through Tidal’s dashboard and pick what they want to have appear on their site.

Founder Matt Myers tells me he sees Tidal as a better solution than content farms like Demand Media and Contently because it’s opt in rather than scraping the entire web. The platform can be optimized for sites with different success metrics. For example, it can deliver traffic-drawing posts for publishers, content that encourages purchases for ecommerce sites, and articles that inspire Facebook Likes for brands.

Tidal is part of the inaugural class of new accelerator First Growth. Its advisors have helped the 5-person startup form connections in the New York scene and groom itself for a coming large seed or small venture funding round. Myers tells me, “I don’t think we could have build this company in San Francisco, because publishers and agencies are super important to us and you sort of have to be here to run into those people.”

Similar to Techmeme, Tidal employs a two-tier, algorithm-plus-editors curation model that is efficient yet accurate. It gives bloggers the recognition that can inspire them to keep writing, and gives big websites a sense of community.

Tagg is a newly launched iPhone application that uses offline facial recognition to detect the faces of your friends in your photos, so you can tag them and upload them to Facebook or post them to Twitter. The app takes advantage of new frameworks in iOS5, like CoreImage, for example, which among other things also enables dead simple face detection. Because of this, Tagg only works on devices running iOS 5.0 or later.

The app itself is really easy to use. You add people from your address book on your phone, Facebook or Twitter to start, then you either snap a photo or choose one from the camera roll to begin tagging. Tagg automatically recognizes the faces in the photo and highlights them with a red square. You just tap on the square and enter the tag.

When picking the person’s name you want to use as the tag, you don’t have to scroll through a long list – you just start typing to automatically filter through the contacts you imported into the app. Alternately, you can use the iPhone’s voice input to speak the name of the tag instead. When tagging is complete, you then share the photo on Facebook or post it to Twitter. It’s all pretty straightforward, and thanks to Tagg’s simple design, you don’t need a tutorial to figure it out.

For the most part, Tagg worked well for me during tests, but I have to note that it did completely crash more than once, dropping me back to the homescreen. Clearly, there are still some bugs to be worked out here. It’s also not quite as advanced as its competitor AutoTagger, but then again, that app, too, has been hit or miss in terms of accuracy and stability. The great thing about AutoTagger, however, is that when it works, it automatically recognizes the faces for you, so you don’t have to tag them yourself. But unfortunately, AutoTagger doesn’t always see the faces in my photos, so it’s hard to recommend it. (I’m also not a fan of the big banner ad at the top).

Instead of monetizing via ads, Tagg is 99 cents, and is available here on iTunes if you want to give it a try. Tagg isn’t perfect, but after a little more bug fixing, it could easily become a regularly used utility for posting tagged photos to social networks with minimal effort.

At the beginning of the year, Josh Buckley and Tyler Diaz were busy building their new Pokemon-inspired social game, MinoMonsters, among Y Combinator’s spring class of startups. At 18 and 17 years of age, respectively, Buckley and Diaz were the youngest pair of founders the accelerator had ever accepted into the fold, YC Founder and Partner Paul Graham said at the time. And today, Buckley can add another accolade to the list, as he is now the youngest CEO that Andreessen Horowitz has invested in to date.

Yep. The MinoMonsters team today announced that it has raised a total of $1 million in seed funding over the course of 2011 from an impressive group of investors, which includes the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Yuri Milner, General Catalyst, Ignition Partners, Raymond Tonsing, and Reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

Backed by this infusion of new capital, MinoMonsters has opened offices in downtown San Francisco, has expanded its team to eleven, and will finish off the development of its eponymous, flagship social title, MinoMonsters, which is set to make its iOS debut on the App Store on December 6th. (Android and Windows versions are on their way.)

When we first profiled MinoMonsters in March, Buckley (now 19) told us that the startup had just hired one of the youngest engineers from “one of the biggest companies in the industry”.

Well, today, MinoMonsters is officially revealing that it has added 25-year-old TJ Murphy as a co-founder and chief of tech. Murphy is a former product manager at Zynga and is the co-founder of the Social Gaming Network (SGN), where he helped create Warbook, one of the early social games to use Facebook as its core platform. (SGN was later acquired by Myspace.) The founders said that Murphy will lead MinoMonsters development as well as the company’s technology strategy — and original founder Tyler Diaz has opted to be cool, and finish high school.

Back in March, MinoMonsters soft launched with a web client, and following Zynga’s lead, took to Facebook. But the meteoric growth of mobile games and mobile technology has been impossible to ignore, so the founders decided to pivot, removed the game from Facebook, and got busy transforming MinoMonsters into an exclusively-mobile title.

The core of the game remains, however, as the $1 iOS app will introduce players to a series of crazy creatures, which they must capture and train to use in a series of one-on-one battles in an effort to protect the peace of the “legendary Kingdom of Zancardi”. As the story goes, a thousand years in the past, some tremendous cataclysm shook the kindgom and created the so-called MinoMonsters and imbued them with special powers, leaving them to fend for themselves on a series of islands. But, as is so often the case, evil is descending on the land, and gamers must train these monsters to harness their powers and defeat, well, my guess is: The encroaching forces of evil.

Basically, to succeed in the series of battles that makes up the gameplay of MinoMonsters, gamers have to learn how to train and control these monsters, which each have their own distinct personality. The goal is to gain control over the monsters’ special powers (be it fire, water, earth, etc.), and as players become more adept at managing their beasts, the further they advance in the game.

The game offers both single player and multiplayer mode, but the latter is obviously where the team is focused, as they want MinoMonsters to be one of the first iOS titles that nearly forces gamers to play with their friends.

Not only that, but the founders told me that they have their eyes set on building not just a mobile games development company, or a social games enterprise, they want to build MinoMonsters into a mega brand in the line of Angry Birds. So, for now, the focus is not on adding further titles to a suite of games, (though that’s still in the cards) it’s on pushing out an engaging, socially-enabled game that could lead to stuffed animals, animated cartoons, etc. down the road.

It really is straight out of the Rovio/Angry Birds playbook. And, with these millenials having watched Pokemon focus its brand on the development of console games, they think they have a leg up on Nintendo’s uber franchise by focusing their attention on mobile, an area where Pokemon games really haven’t taken off.

Of course, in the end, funding from big-name investors and having an intimate familiarity with Zynga’s strategy is only half the battle. The key is to offer engaging gameplay, an original narrative, and avoid repetitive characters, levels, and controls. Based on an early look, the animation seems to pop, and it’s a blast learning to control the special powers of your pet monsters. The question is whether this will have broad appeal to young and older audiences alike and if multiplayer mobile gameplay is ready to carry monster battles to widespread adoption and past the tipping point.

That remains to be seen, but so far, so good. Definitely worth checking out when MinoMonsters claw onto the App Store. Chime in to let us know what you think.

Gather round, dear friends, for a tale of courage and heroism is about to unfold. Rising from a year’s worth of ashes, the Windows-powered Nokia Lumia 800 stands to rewrite Nokia’s potentially devastating fate, which is why Nokia dedicated eight whole minutes of video to its design process.

As I said, this isn’t a bite-sized clip so feel free to settle in and learn a little something about how Microsoft and Nokia came together. The video is actually quite interesting once you get past the numerous references to courage and bravery. (It’s a phone; not a bomb that needs to be diffused.) Still, Nokia has been in quite the crunch lately and has put nearly all their eggs in the Microsoft basket, so I guess the Lumia 800 is a bit of a life-or-death situation over in Finland after all.

In any case, I found the bits about the phone’s polycarbonate unibody interesting, as well as the collaboration between the Redmond folks and the Nokia designers. Windows Phone 7.5 Mango is one OS I’m truly excited about, and I’d say the only thing missing from this video is a heartfelt proposition to developers. So I’ll ask instead:

Dear developers, please build some cool applications for Windows Phone 7 if you can. Thanks, Jordan.

Eric Alterman is a quintessential serial tech entrepreneur. He’s founded a fairly diverse set of software, telecom, and semiconductor companies that include Kickapps, which was acquired by Kit digital in 2010, MeshNetworks, which was acquired by Motorola in 2005, Triton Network Systems (which IPO-ed in 2000), TeraNex, SkyCross, and more. In 1997, he co-founded an accelerator that funded and grew companies based on tech licensed from military contractors, like Lockheed, ITT and Raytheon.

In 2004, Alterman founded a video sharing platform that he says was essentially YouTube before YouTube. Though the startup didn’t quite have the legs to achieve scale, the entrepreneur said that the company’s “failure” (coupled with YouTube’s emergence) gave him a valuable insight into how (and how not) to build a SaaS platform that can serve thousands of customers, scale, and become a turnkey solution for an entire space.

With big data all the rage these days, last year, he turned his sights to the next big thing: App data and data interoperability, with the goal of allowing developers to share and exchange the massive amounts of data created daily by the world’s growing collection of web and mobile apps.

Today, Alterman and co-founder Tom Luczak are announcing officially announcing their new venture, Flow Corporation, and the beta release of its eponymous Flow platform — a realtime data platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and content curation platform. The technology is, on the one hand, a data exchange for app developers, and on the other hand, an off-the-shelf dashboard for consumers and enterprises that allows them to create and curate information streams on any subject — like a suped-up RSS reader.

In other words, the Flow platform enables developers to take advantage of a ready-to-use backend for app data (including stream processing and aggregation) in the hopes of increasing efficiency and lowering the cost of implementing realtime data systems for their apps. Using the Flow platform, developers can connect and share data from web, mobile, and enterprise apps with other developers on a permissioned, realtime basis.

For example: A restaurant-focused mobile app may show people looking for good places to eat the best options nearby, but with Flow, the developers of that restaurant would be able to draw from (and present) complementary data from other apps on nearby stores, coupon deals, or local events. By building infrastructure that allows apps to intercommunicate and serve users with a host of contextual information, Alterman is hoping that Flow can begin to break up walled data silos and change the way developers make use of and serve realtime data.

Connecting apps through social functionality was a significant first step for the future of data, the founder says, but connecting apps on a more fundamental and robust level is the next step.

On the flip side, for consumers and enterprise customers, iFlow.com is the other piece of the puzzle, offering everyday web users the ability to discover, create, curate, and share realtime information on any subject — in a filtered and contextual way. Like next-gen RSS. (Example image of iFlow’s consumer UI below.)

iFlow allows users to follow ideas instead of individuals, in contrast to Twitter and Facebook, for example, taking the next step beyond the kind of realtime info streams we see on social networks, to apply that to rich data from any and all sources.

The consumer platform is built using Flow’s APIs and really functions as an example of the kind of realtime stream processing functionality developers can take advantage of when building their web and mobile apps.

As to what’s next, Alterman says that he wants to offer developers (and consumers) the opportunity to buy and sell subscriptions for realtime data through a flow marketplace, which would give content owners the ability to control business rules and monetize data streams — from product reviews to proprietary research.

The startup has also recently closed a two-part $3 million round of seed funding from Cloud Capital Partners, BH Ventures, Blantyre Partners, Kappa East, Redstonne LLC, and Venetia Kontogouris of Trident Capital, which the startup will use to continue rolling out new features and developing its data marketplace.

For TechCrunch readers interested in getting an early look at the data platform in action, Flow is offering invites to its beta to the first 50 readers that send an email to “EarlyAccess@flow.net” with “TechCrunch invite” in the subject line.

newBrandAnalytics, a company that provides business intelligence from social media customer feedback, has raised $26 million in Series B financing led by New Enterprise Associates with Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures, Jeff Webber's The Entrepreneur's Fund, Barry Sternlicht (Founder, Starwood Hotels), Neil Shah, Quest Hospitality Ventures, and Ted Leonsis participating.

newBrandAnalytics, which has been in stealth for the past two years, provides a monitoring and analysis product that mines customer reviews from social sites like Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Trip Advisor. But instead of just serving as a monitoring product, the startup actually analyzes all of this data and will make intelligent, operational recommendations to businesses based on customer feedback.

Currently, the newBrandAnalytics social intelligence products are being used by thousands of hotels, restaurants, retailers, and leisure companies worldwide. The company’s flagship product, called Social Guest Satisfaction, harvests credible customer feedback and then uses patent-pending algorithms to interpret, qualify, and categorizes each customer mention. The company has built a number of social algorithms to determine how company makes operational decisions around this social feedback, as opposed to delivering marketing advice.

newBrandAnalytics was founded by Neil Kataria, Kam Desai and Ashish Gambhir. Prior to this, the team actually founded e-commerce company Riva Commerce, which was acquired by Oracle.
Currently, PF Changs, Applebee’s, San Francisco restaurant Michael Mina, The SLS Hotel Group and New York City Burger empire Shake Shack are all using NewBrandAnalytics’ offering. The beauty of the product is that it works for both small businesses and enterprise customers, says Kataria.

The new funding will be used to accelerate customer acquisition and towards building a scalable sales model.

With an enormous professional social network consisting of over 100 million users, LinkedIn is undoubtedly a great business — and a valuable service. Of course, the problem with LinkedIn and other professional networking and job platforms is that there’s a lack of real conversation between individuals and businesses. Hands down, businesses are looking to hire great talent, but they want more robust ways to find the most relative candidates for their open positions and job seekers want better tools to find the top ranked companies that are relevant to their backgrounds, what those companies are looking for in candidates — and they want feedback.

In September, two Stanford Business School, grads Brendan Wallace and Adeyemi Ajao, launched the beta build of Identified, a professional job search engine built on Facebook data that looks to take on LinkedIn and BranchOut (among others) in an effort to give job seekers and companies a better way to connect and find talent. The main feature of Identified is its so-called “Identified Score”, which assign a numerical rank (out of 100) to professionals based on their work history, education history and social network.

Wallace and Ajao call these rankings “Google Page Rank for people”; just as the search giant ranks websites based on their relevance to certain search terms, Identified uses its scores to do just that with professionals. The ranking is a proxy for relevance, so based on a user’s most up-to-date background information, they will show up in searches for categories that are relevant to their most recent jobs, etc.

Working with metadata from Facebook, Identified has already created listings for more than 50 million people, although only 150K of those people are active monthly users. But that’s just in six weeks since the launch of its beta. Already, tens of thousands of people are accessing Identified Scores each day to evaluate professionals for recruiting, sales, networking, background checks, and more. What’s more, over 1.8 million scores have been viewed to date, and Wallace says that thousands of companies have already requested access to these scores to pre-screen candidates for recruiting.

But the real value here, Wallace said, is that the average age of the Identified user is 24, and over 90 percent of its users are under the age of 30. With companies vying, categorically, to hire the best young talent, Identified offers businesses an easy, score-based (and relevance-based search) method of finding that talent.

Today, Identified is officially launching out of its public beta, and will now be offering free and open access (for both companies and the public) to the scores of those 50 million-odd professionals. This means that all Identified Scores are now public and will be searchable and accessible to anyone on the Web (and will pop up in Google searches) — companies included. Privacy settings will be included, thankfully.

And to that point, Identified also offers scores for over 60,000 companies and more than 8,000 universities, and Wallace said that many of the early signups the company has seen have come from employees wanting to add more relevant information to the listings of their company or university to up their scores. It’s this kind of gamification that can be a huge legup for Identified.

As Identified Scores go up based on interest from other users or companies (by way of number of views, clicks, and actual hires), the more one adds to their profile, the higher the likelihood becomes that their score will go up, presumably based on their being placed higher in search rankings. Wallace believes that this “the more you add, the higher you’re ranked”, gamified approach presents a higher degree of opportunity for engagement among users, as interaction with their rankings have real world, and career implications.

Of course, having made their scores public so that anyone can now view the scores of 50 million people, there’s some potential here for controversy, but Identified has built in controls so that non-Identified users can only view those profiles of companies and individuals that are registered users.

Yet, the other question for Identified’s ranking system is: What if you didn’t go to an Ivy League school, but you’re still an awesome engineer, for example? Since the point of building its platform on top of Facebook data is to allow people to create networks around the friends and associates they actually interact with (and count as “Friends” on Facebook), if a user shows impressive career history and strong connections/relationships to top engineers, then not having gone to a “top school” becomes less relevant.

Of course, Identified Scores are not meant to be reflective of a person’s “actual worth” — just because you have a “65″ and your friend has an “80″, doesn’t necessarily mean that your friend is a better person, is smarter, etc. In a sense, the company’s scores are like stock prices, in that they don’t necessarily reflect one’s true inherent value, they are based on relevant criteria — in this case to search terms. The scores aren’t perfect.

Even so, Identified adds a level of transparency to the labor market and opens a channel of communication between companies and professionals that has been incomplete to date. Being able to see how “in demand” you are based on your professional history, which companies are looking for employees like you, and how, in turn, you can make yourself more attractive to employers — is a valuable step forward for the professional networking space.

It’s not perfect yet, but it’s a step in the right direction. Whether or not Identified becomes a potential target for acquisition by LinkedIn or just a flat out competitor remains to be seen. But, according to Wallace, they’ve seen that some recognizable names at LinkedIn have been checking out the site.

And investors are certainly interested, as the startup has already raised $5.5 million from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Bill and Tim Draper, former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya, Farmville Founder Zao Yang, among others.

For more on Identified, check ‘em out here, or see Robin’s initial coverage here.

Recipe search engine Foodily is arriving on mobile today, with an all-new iPhone application that will allow users to search recipes while on the go, see what recipes their friends have liked and share their own recommendations via photos snapped with the iPhone’s camera.

In addition to the social features, the app provides mobile access to Foodily’s recipe search engine, so you can find the ingredients you need for a dish while you’re out and about.

There’s a little bit of a Foodspotting feel to the new Foodily iPhone app, as it also lets you snap and share photos of delicious creations and share them with friends. Recipes and photos can be shared directly to Foodily’s website as well as to your wider social network via the app’s Facebook integration, which takes full advantage of the new “Open Graph” features introduced at F8. But while Foodspotting is about finding and sharing great dishes at local restaurants, Foodily’s photo-taking feature is about sharing dishes you’ve created yourself.

It’s not just about bragging, though. The photos you take via Foodily are attached to the recipe online, so people can see how it actually turned out. There’s even a so-called “Yummify” feature that enhances mobile photos so they appear more like high-quality pics when shared on the network. (Specifically, the app increases the contrast optimizing for white point, sharpens the image and increases the color saturation, if you must know).

To discover new recipes, there’s the Foodily recipe search engine which supports email, in case you need to remind yourself, a friend or family member about the ingredients you’ll need to buy later on.

Although there are plenty of competitors in the recipe search space, Foodily has some momentum, having already raised $5 million from Index Ventures. The service was founded by former Yahoo’ers (Yahooligans?) Andrea Cutright and Hillary Mickell.

StubHub co-founder and investor Jeff Fluhr is launching his next project today—social video broadcasting platform Spreecast. Simply put, Spreecast is a social video platform that lets people broadcast together.

Fluhr tells me that he saw a gap in providing a video communications platform that is inherently social and allows multiple people to broadcast their conversations live. While broadcasting startups like Justin.TV and Ustream allow for live broadcasting, the social element of conversation is missing.

Thus, the idea for Spreecast was born. In a Spreecast social video stream, up to 4 people at a time can be face-to-face, streaming their conversation live while hundreds of others can watch, chat, and participate by submitting comments and questions to those on screen.

The producer controls allow the creator (and other co-producers designated by the creator) to control who gets on camera and when. And people can come on and off camera allowing for more than four people during the course of the Spreecast. When a viewer requests to join on camera, the creator can screen them by previewing their video and text chatting with them privately before deciding whether to allow them to go on camera.

You can email guests by entering email addresses or importing your gmail contacts. You'll also be able to Tweet, Google+ or post to your Facebook feed so that your followers and/or friends will be notified about your Spreecast. You can also invite viewers at any time from the Spreecast page – before, during or after a Spreecast (to view the archive). Spreecast is also integrated with Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ so that producers and creators can broadcast their conversations to their friends, followers, circles, contacts and connections.

Once live-streamed, Spreecasts are recorded and then made immediately available for playback and sharing. The platform is browser-based and built on Flash. By default, Spreecasts are public and designed to be social but users can also create private Spreecasts as well.

The platform, which has raised angel funding to date, has been in beta for the past two months and has seen a number of use-cases by participants. For example, Olympic gold medalist Summer Sanders used Spreecast to share her thoughts after running the Chicago Marathon. Klout CEO and founder Joe Fernandez announced Klout Insights via Spreecast and Zaw Thet from 4INFO unveiled a $40 million funding round and a spin off company. And a number of radio personalities have Spreecasted with their listeners.

Of course, Spreecast isn’t the first video-based social broadcasting platform out there.
Google Hangouts has a similar functionality, but resides in Google+. Fluhr says that the beauty of Spreecast is that it is independent and can integrate comments and interactions from Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Sean Parker’s Airtime may also play in the same space as well. There is also a Chatroulette element at play here, but the site seems to frown on that type of content and will ban users who use it for that purpose.

Kontagent, an fbFund winner and social analytics platform has raised $12 million in Series B funding led by Battery Ventures, with Maverick Capital and Altos Ventures participating. To date, Kontagent has raised $18 million in funding.

As we’ve written in the past, Kontagent’s real-time platform gives Facebook app developers, game studios and publishers detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times, social event interaction and other variables. The new version allows developers to track and optimize advertising efforts, user virality, in-app mechanics, virtual goods, currency monetization, and more.

In July, the startup moved beyond simply tracking analytics for developers on Facebook and added tracking for web and mobile apps (not on FB) as well. The new platform, called kSuite, gives developers a way to track and optimize advertising efforts, user virality, in-app mechanics, virtual goods, and currency monetization.

Kontagent is now tracking over 1000 applications, over 150 million monthly active users and is handling over 1 billion messages per day. The company’s clients include EA, Warner Brothers, Popcap, Ubisoft, Gaia, and A&E.

The startup says the new funding will be used to support research and development efforts, and to expand into mobile. Kontagent is also going to be investing in further developing data
mining and predictive analytics capabilities.

Shareaholic, a plugin that makes it easy to share content across a variety of social and bookmarking sites, has raised $1.9 million in funding from 500 Startups, Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot), David Cancel, Brian Shin, Roy Rodenstein, Nicole Stata, Nextview Ventures and General Catalyst Partners.

Shareaholic allows you to find a site you like, click on the plugin’s button nestled in your browser toolbar, and choose which service you’d like to share it to. And Shareaholic is compatible with every major browser, including support for IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. The company also launched publisher sharing tools for WordPress last year.

The company has also announced that Shareholic has reached 250 million unique monthly visitors after 12 months of working with publishers. Shareaholic has also seen more than 2 million browser downloads (up from 1 million in 2009) and 1.4 million WordPress plugin installs. Shareaholic is also releasing a widget for Tumblr.

Virident, a company that offers flash-based storage solutions for enterprise, announced today that it has closed a $21 million series C funding round. The investment was led by Globespan Capital Partners, with strategic investments from Intel Capital, Cisco and contributions from existing investors, Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures. The series C round brings Virident to a total of $37 million in funding.

So why the interest in Virident? For starters, the startup’s management team counts former Google, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, SGI, and Intel employees among its ranks. So it has some talent. Second, the (enterprise) storage space is hot. And Virident has built flash solutions that are compatible with any servers and allow enterprises to enhance not only the speed of their applications but to ensure reliable performance under heavy workloads, specifically for data-intensive workloads, like databases, business analytics, simulation, visualization and high-performance computing.

Virident is operating under the belief that bringing flash memory to the storage space (both for data centers and enterprise storage) will fundamentally disrupt how information is stored. As Virident CEO Kumar Ganapathy told infoTECH, a future may well be coming in which the very flash memory chips that are built into billions of smartphones today force data centers “to adopt a completely new storage architecture with massive cost reductions and a significantly smaller footprint”. For Virident, the future is all about solid state devices.

Thus, the funding announcement today goes hand-in-hand with the company’s introduction of the next generation of its flagship product, Virident FlashMAX. The new product, according to the company, allows enterprise application performance to be optimized and, something that they reiterate over and over — consistent over time, across a wide variety of dataset sizes and diverse workloads — while “providing at least twice the performance of comparably flash-based solutions”. The product also comes with built-in, Flash-aware RAID.

Virident will use its series C round for market expansion and product iteration.

For more on FlashMAX, check it out here.