Love it or hate it, but Klout is one of the key players in today’s influence/reputation market. Even if the whole concept of ranking people based on popularity feels a little icky to you (I feel you), the startup has the potential to form the basis of something bigger, something less spammy, and something less easily gamed by “social media marketers.” Or so we hope.

In the meantime, for those of you who care about things like this: hooray, your score just went up today thanks to Google+!

Although people have been able to add Google+ to their Klout profiles since September, the company announced today that Google+ is now directly impacting Klout scores.

The service has begun measuring the influence for users who have already connected their Google+ accounts to Klout and, of those, 62% are considered “active” users of the social network. For these active users, their Klout scores should have increased based on the popularity of their public Google+ posts.

Those who have added Google+ but are not active on the network will not see a drop, however. In other words, there’s no penalty for not using Google+, which seems fair, given that the network’s true influence and importance is still debatable.

After calculating the score changes, the median score change for active G+ connected users is 0.4742 and the mean score change is 2.1577. Klout notes that some people who really embraced Google+ as a platform saw their score jump up as much as 40+ points. Users who are active on all three top social networks (Google+, Twitter and Facebook combined) will likely see smaller score increases as opposed to those who are only active on two of the three (i.e., Facebook and G+ or Twitter and G+). But for the most part, active Google+ users, who tend to have scores ranging from 30 to 60, will see a score increase of 2.177 today.

New startup accelerator Advise.me, home to the global startup initiative which encourages entrepreneurs from around the world to apply for seed funding, is today announcing new partnerships with LinkedIn, GoSquared and SnapEngage. All three companies will provide direct support and/or free subscriptions to their services to the program’s participants.

In addition, the team at Advise.me has grown again, and now includes folks from Spotify, Evernote, GetSatisfaction, MTV and more.

With the new LinkedIn partnership, the business social networking service will provide direct support to any Advise.me companies building on top of LinkedIn’s APIs. It will also allow the startups to post up to three jobs on the site for free when it comes time to recruit talent.

Meanwhile, real-time analytics company GoSquared will offer businesses 12 months of its Pro subscription service for free while live chat support company SnapEngage will offer 24 months of their premium offering (its Business subscription service).

The Advise.me team also has new members as of today, including:

• Mikael Krantz, Chief Architect at Spotify
• Philip Dean, VP of Customer Satisfaction at Evernote
• Andrew Dumont, Director of Business Development at SEOmoz
• Daniel Brusilovsky, Founder at Teens in Tech Labs
• Andrew Knapp, Creative Director at Rareview
• Allen Duan, VP of Strategy and Business Development at MTV Networks

The incubator’s team already included dozens of startup founders, engineers and execs from Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Zynga, Microsoft, Twitter, EA, Rackspace and more.

In addition to helping other startups get off the ground, some Advise.me team members are using the incubator’s resources themselves to launch their own startup: Chirpr, a social networking app still in stealth mode.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — talked SOPA, Amazon Fire, FaceBook Borging our data and not letting it out, the end of books, the beginning of Pad magazines, and why Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Starz, Arrested Development, House of Cards, and Comcast cares.

Another Gillmor Gang recorded Monday morning at 9, the show asks the musical question: should we start the week off with a bang or end it with a whimper? In the new world of streaming, nothing is more fitting than messing with the broadcast window from the start. If Congress can only pass bad laws to prop up the content cartel, maybe it’s up to the tech community to turn reality TV into our fantasy of what should happen next.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Monday, November 21, 2011.
@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dsearls, @kevinmarks

Last May at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, Gauri Manglik and her two cofounders launched SpotOn, a mobile recommendation app for bars and restaurants based on where your friends have checked in on Foursquare. The people who ended up using the app used it more as a social network than as a recommendation tool. So Manglik and her team took what they learned and built an entirely new product called Fondu, which they are launching today as an iPhone app.

“We are building a social network for writing bite-sized reviews,” says Manglik. It is a Foursquare for foodies. You can search for places nearby or pull up a list of your recent Foursquare check-ins, and review each place with a short comment and give it a one-to-four petal rating with a swipe of your thumb. The app gives you a feed to follow your friends’ ratings and mini-reviews, or you can see what is popular on a map near you.

Fondu is designed to be an antidote to Yelp. “You write your review on Yelp and it goes to a community directory,” notes Manglik. “There are so many people you don't care about on the service.” With Fondu, you see only reviews from your friends and popular reviews which have been given “cheers” by the community.

The company raised a $575,000 seed round led by ENIAC Ventures. The NYU Innovation Fund, Harbor Road Ventures, Blazer Ventures, Lawrence Lenihan, and Zach Aarons also participated in the round.

I’ve always been something of a fan (a proponent, even) of white phones. Back in another life when I was consulting mobile manufacturers on their phone designs, it was always one of the first questions I’d ask: “This is great! Can you make it in white?”

Back then, everybody acted like I was crazy. “White is too hard to keep clean!” they’d assure me. “The white bezel makes the black screen look smaller!” they’d say. These days, of course, white phones are all the rage.

Sometime before the holidays, another flagship phone is now set to hop on the big list of handsets with snowy variants: the Samsung Galaxy S II.

News of the hue-less model comes straight from Samsung themselves, though the announcement lacks details beyond its launch window of “in time for the holidays”.

The announcement was made in partnership with T-Mobile, and only confirms that T-Mobile will be getting the white model. This is particularly interesting, as pictures of an identical white variant leaked out just days ago… but for AT&T. No official word yet from AT&T on when they might get it, but I’d guess that “in time for the holidays” window is the same across the board.

Intel Capital, the chip maker’s investment arm, this morning provided some details about a recently made investment in Insyde Software, a publicly listed Taiwan company that specializes in system firmware based on Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) as well as customized Android distributions for OEM and ODM customers.

Intel Capital injected NT$300 million, or roughly $10 million, into the company out of its recently announced $100 million AppUp fund.

Intel and Insyde have long been working together, although we should note the software company also counts AMD, NVIDA and Microsoft among its technology partners.

New is that there will be additional collaboration between Intel and Insyde Software on UEFI BIOS firmware and customized Android distributions for tablets, ultrabooks and other portable devices.

The news comes after an announcement, made on September 13, 2011, that Intel had formed an alliance with Google for Android-based smartphones and tablets to be optimized for Intel's chips going forward (read: early 2012).

The investment by Intel Capital is the fourth since Insyde's founding in 1998. The company supplies to OEM and ODM customers – including some of the world's largest computer systems designers and manufacturers – that are deploying Windows and Android on Intel-based platforms.

In addition to UEFI BIOS, working in collaboration with Intel's Software and Services Group and its Netbook and Tablet Group, Insyde says it will provide “Android optimization, customization, and deployment services” for such partners worldwide.

Related: Intel Capital Launches $300M Ultrabook Fund To Invest In Tablet Technologies

Over 10 million people have created artful iPhonography with Instagram, but they’ve never seen their masterpieces any bigger than a Postagram postcard. But now, thanks to a peculiar synergy between the mediums and a secret algorithm, CanvasPop has found a way to blow up Instagrams and print them as beautiful canvas paintings. See, Instagram’s filters reduce graininess and so does the texture of canvas. This means that even at 20″ by 20″, almost 10x their size on the iPhone, $60 CanvasPop prints look wall-worthy.

CanvasPop is an expert at image upsizing, having been spun out of DNA 11 which printed blowups of DNA strands. CanvasPop launched 2 years ago to help emancipate low-resolution photos from mobile devices and social network. It excepts even the tiniest, noisiest images including old Facebook photos and those taken with the iPhone 3G. These are run through its algorithm that smooths pixelated edges, and the canvas they’re printed on further obscures any imperfections.

Co-founder Adrian Salamunovic tells me CanvasPop saw Postagram and Prinstagram developing an Instagram ecosystem, and thought it could contribute something unique. Since those companies don’t have its technology and they print on paper, they’re restricted to producing stickers, small photo books, and posters tiled with little images.

Built on the Instagram API, users can visit the CanvasPop website and authenticate with their Instagram account. They then choose their images, select print sizes ($30 for 12″ by 12″ or $60 for 20″ by 20′), and soon their prints are delivered to their door. The print CanvasPop sent me looked sharp from any farther than a few inches away. My only complaint was that it was packaged so securely to prevent damage in transit that it took me a few minutes to pull it free.

Instagram has unlocked a generation of artists, helping people discover and capture the subtle beauty of the world around them. It seems tragic that once posted, Instagrams disappear down our social media streams and are rarely appreciated again. CanvasPop gives these works of art enduring life, and lets us express ourselves offline as vividly as we can on.

Driving from the Foxconn Factory, down the road from the main gate, we spotted a truck full of pigs in an open-sided container. They were huge, porcine pink, and surprisingly clean. They were still alive – but wouldn’t be for long – and they were, we could only presume, destined for the bellies of some of the company’s 400,000 workers.

As the truck trundled along the well-paved road, I flicked through the pictures I took of the Foxconn kitchen. It was something out of a delicious version of Hieronymus Bosch: huge cauldrons manned by men and women in white smocks, smoke and steam coming out of huge soup pots, the food flipped and tossed using shovels.

There, in the course of the day, nearly 400,000 meals pour out into the campus. There a cooker the size of two truck trailers cleans, cooks, and cools hundreds of pounds of rice, and some of those pigs (slaughtered off campus because that’s one thing the kitchen at Foxconn isn’t allowed to do) are stir-fried or stewed and sent out to one of the many campus cafeterias.

Back at the kitchen I wanted to confirm how many pigs actually went into Foxconn’s mess hall. After a bit of back and forth, the kitchen staff concurred.

“About 90 here and 80 at the other kitchen. Sometimes more,” said our guide.

“90 what?” I asked.

“Pigs. Whole pigs.”

The kitchen at Foxconn is important because, like the company, it is a black box. I saw a model of the facility, carefully laid out on a piece of plastic turf and complete with little LED lights tracing the path of any one of those nearly 200 pigs from loading dock to loading dock. It’s like a circuit diagram or a model of a digestive system.

Raw materials enter at one end, are unloaded, and sorted. Rizomes go on one path while 40 metric tons of vegetables and legumes head a different way. Meats go into the main artery, into a walk-in freezer the size of a U.S.-style grocery store, and then into the main hall where meat is cut, marinated, and prepared. Huge woks, fire belching from below, line one whole row and here the workers, their hats color-coded based on skill and experience, prepare meals.

In the rizome channel, a huge, Japanese-made rice cooker, preparing countless tons of rice per day. A soup kitchen runs formulaically, creating food based on set measurements of ingredients. The food is rarely tasted, said our guide. Most of the recipes were automated.

Even the waste disposal systems are massive. The waste water – 3,000 tons daily – that comes from the kitchen is treated and reused in the sewage system, thereby reducing the load on the surrounding infrastructure. The oil used in the cooking facility is converted to biofuel to power some of the facilities, including many of the systems inside the kitchen.

After preparation, the workers portion out the food or send it in huge pots to one of the many cafes on campus. There are two bakeries – Chinese and a Western bakery – where almond cookies and black bean buns are prepared alongside kaiser rolls and white bread. The system is massively efficient from beginning to end, designed to feed an army on a daily basis.

How does it taste?

“The noodle shop near the circle is great,” said one frequent visitor. “The roast beef sandwich only has one thin slice of beef. The tuna melt was my preference for lunch, but it didn’t sell, I guess, because it was off the menu last week.” The lunch I had – fish, rice, a few slices of savory beef – was quite delicious and well-prepared.

Another important center is the safety monitoring system, a stem to stern view of everything that goes on in the kitchen. In what looks like the lair of an evil mastermind, a few dozen screens are connected to cameras trained on various spots around the campus. In one ominous feed you see the nets in sharp focus over a parking lot. The rest of the video considerably less nefarious. Workers in while smocks prep vegetables. The soup men ladle out sour melon into a huge pot.

If an army marches on its stomach, so does Foxconn. This kitchen, and the cafes around the campus, are what differentiates this campus from any other factory I’ve seen. Most factories have cafeterias, usually run by a caterer like Sodexho, but except for a few licensed purveyors in the factory most of the food comes through this efficient kitchen. Food is, for the most part, subsidized if not free and the employees get room and board as part of their work plan. With few expenses the little money they make can go back to parents at home or into savings. On the whole it’s a patriarchal system that had worked for decades, ensuring loyalty at the price of ten hour workdays and around-the-clock work when major orders come through.

On a macro scale, Foxconn, like the kitchen, is also a black box. Products go in, products come out, and along the way waste and effort is conserved by the watchful eye of thousands of managers. Is it completely efficient? Absolutely not, but it’s efficient enough to get the job done quickly and cheaply. The checks placed on many of Foxconn’s systems mirror the security system in the kitchen. Someone is always watch. There’s even a bathroom on the first floor that doesn’t let you out until you wash your hands. A sensor in the door shuts and locks until you’ve spent a little time under the tap. Again, read into this panopticon of control what you will. To many it’s just strong management.

Companies trust Foxconn with their secrets, which is why many journalists have never been allowed inside. Testing offices are marked with various warnings and each manufacturer has their own area, with no overlap. Industrial espionage is mostly impossible, except in rare cases, and the rumors that often come out of Foxconn and other factories are planted by folks in the upper echelon in order to increase the stock price for a brief moment.

Manufacturers trust Foxconn to offer a tight, well-run ship. Those who claim that the company is essentially trafficking in modern slavery are ignoring the fact that the company exists in order to serve a Western audience. The slightest hint of anything untoward – take the suicides as one example – and the company would lose contracts. Money can cause bad behavior as much as it can cause good behavior.

Food goes in, food goes out. Silicon goes in, silicon goes out. It’s an endless flow, a river of revenue that keeps this factory in business. The poetic among us would see some parallel in the hapless pigs being led to slaughter and then stir-fry to the lives of workers “trapped” on the assembly lines, but I see little more than folks eating lunch and, as Foxconn changes, those people may not have to eat at the company cafe much longer.

Tomorrow I’ll address the things Foxconn does for clients and, finally, we’ll look at the future of Foxconn as a sales channel and how this massive organization – an organization that can process 40 tons of vegetables on a single day – is trying to save itself.

This is part one of a four part series that will run this week about Foxconn. You can read the whole series here.

Tomorrow: Problem
Click to view slideshow.

Socialize, makers of a “Social SDK” for mobile developers, is today launching version 1.0 of its “Social Action Bar.” This action bar is an easy-to-install mobile toolbar of sorts, which allows an app’s users to view the popularity of the app’s content, “like” and comment on items, and share content via SMS, email, Facebook or Twitter.

In addition to the Social Action Bar SDK v. 1.0, the company is also offering an API for HTML5 developers with similar functionality.

Socialize grew out of the app-making service AppMakr, which had previously built apps for brands like Disney, The Washington Post, Newsweek and Politico. In 2010, the company raised $1 million from Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, Bill Lee, Rich Chen, Charles River Ventures, and others.

Shortly after, the company rebranded as “Socialize,” with the intent to provide mobile app developers with a customizable software development kit (SDK) that lets them quickly add social features to their apps. Says CEO Daniel R. Odio, the SDK can be installed in 5 minutes or less.

The Socialize open source SDK, which launched earlier this summer, allows for the above-mentioned social activity (likes, comments, and shares), plus an “activity pane” allowing users to see what others have liked, commented on and shared, too. The idea is to add a social layer to all apps, allowing an app’s users to socialize with each other as well as with the brand itself.

AppMakr is currently serving as the testing grounds for the Socialize beta, and the growth there has been massive. The beta channel is up 1 million end users from 30 days ago, with 3,768,381 users now testing the service.

Meanwhile, the externally-implemented SDK is smaller, but also doing well, with 95,743 end users, up grom 45,000 just 30 days ago.

Now the Socialize Action Bar SDK has reached version 1.0, which means it’s stable and ready for more broader testing. Developers interested in making their apps social can grab the new SDK from Socialize’s website here.

You know, I’m beginning to think that Samsung’s factory lines are rigged up like the bus in Speed. If at any time they drop below 50 newly created Android phones per month, bam! Factory falls down and Keanu Reeves never hooks up with Sandra Bullock.

Alternative Intro: Samsung and Verizon are incredibly excited about their latest handset, the Samsung Illusion. You can always tell a company is excited about a product when much of the press release is dedicated to the riveting details, like its Underwriters Laboratory score.

Before I rant on, the details: the Samsung Illusion, launching tomorrow on Verizon’s site for $79.99, is an Android 2.3 handset. It’s got a 1Ghz processor, a 3-megapixel camera, and all the standard goods (like Bluetooth, 802.11a/b/g/n, etc.) inside. And… well, that’s it, really. For the curious, there’s no support for Verizon’s 4G/LTE network.

I mean, I get it. The Underwriters Lab score (and the other eco-focused-ish specs that Samsung chose to talk up this time, like the 70% recycled rear casing) give Samsung’s efforts some degree of “green” factor. But if saving the world was at all a part of Samsung’s goal, wouldn’t they stop releasing junk that they themselves seem to make obsolete the next week? Imagine the waste that goes into researching, developing, prototyping, producing, shipping, storing, and then eventually disposing of a handset that no one will remember in 6 months.

Facebook users are getting more connected to each other as the service grows and matures, according to a new study by the company’s data team and the University of Milan. Instead of the traditional “six degrees of separation” that researchers have historically observed between all people in the world (and Kevin Bacon), the number of degrees has been dropping since 2008 on the site, from 5.28 then to 4.74 now.

This isn’t just an interesting factoid about the modern world, it highlights Facebook’s long-term strategy, and its dominant market position in social networking. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has proclaimed for years that his goal is to make the world more “open and connected.” In practice, that’s meant features across the site that do things like reveal what friends you have in common with any other user, and suggest that you become friends with people you’ve never met in person and have no friends in common with.

Those features have a big impact on the average user. Let’s say you meet a stranger in real life who you want to know more about. For example, you can Google-stalk them to try to find out anything interesting they’ve done over the years, but you’re going to go to Facebook to see if you have any mutual friends. Then, you might friend them. Repeat that process for its 800 million-plus users over the years and all these connections are just getting tighter and tighter.

Facebook’s big goal is to be the social layer for everything in the world — the way you get recommendations for music, news articles, products to buy, and anything else. These closer social connections mean that Facebook is getting more and more information about what you, your friends, your friends of friends, your friend of friends of friends of friends, etc. like or don’t like. It uses all of this information to make smarter recommendations for all of the ads on its site, and to create a more valuable platform for any third-party developer. Any rival that hopes to offer its own separate social layer is going to have to work harder and harder to beat these ever-strengthening connections and the possibilities they create.

It’s a good day for all you Android lovers out there, because today you’re getting a killer app from iOS land: 360 Panorama. The app is from Occipital, the 2008 TechStars grad, also makers of the (now eBay-owned) barcode scanner Red Laser.

This is the first real-time panoramic photo capture app for Android, as the others on the Android Market require manual capture of separate photos followed by stitching. With 360 Panorama, you just move the device around to capture the image.

In case you’re unfamiliar with 360 Panorama, it’s one of the easiest tools to take a 360-degree photo. All you have to do is launch the app and pan your camera around to take the photo. You can then save, email or share your photo to Facebook or Twitter.

If, on the other hand, you previously used 360 Occipital on iOS, you already know that this is one of the better photography apps ever created. And if you were an iOS user who switched to Android, you’ll be happy to know that you can login once again using your same 360 Panorama credentials from before.

For the most part, the Android version is the same as the older iOS app, but there are a couple of differences. For starters, Android users get one new feature that hasn’t made its way to the iPhone yet: an in-app list of saved panoramas. It should also be noted that the Android app doesn’t use gyroscopes at all yet, so it’s not recommended that you pan it against blank walls. (The next update, V1.1, will tap into gyros when it’s more stable).

There’s an interesting side note to the story of this app’s development, too. Occipital had once abandoned Android development when it started back in 2008, citing performance issues. As Co-founder Jeff Powers wrote then:

Objective-C kills the Java implementation on Android.  It's almost exactly 100 times faster.  Note that I'm unsure if the memory allocation is included in the timing, so a more conservative statement is that Objective-C can run a tight loop 50 times faster than the Dalvik JVM.  It's also true that real applications aren't full of tight loops, and a real Android application won't be 50 times slower than an iPhone counterpart.  Nevertheless, all else being equal, it will be slower, and potentially a lot slower.

For now, we're sadly going to put our Android development on hold and switch to iPhone, and keep an eye out for performance improvements.

Today, Android is finally ready for an app like this. “Only now has the OS come around enough to make this even possible (thanks to the NDK and Open GL),” explains Powers.

Android users buying new phones will soon get a built-in panoramic photo capture app of their own with Ice Cream Sandwich’s (Android 4.0) default camera app. But 360 Panorama will work on almost any device made in the last two years, running Gingerbread (Android 2.3) and up.

You can grap the new app this morning for 99 cents from occipital.com/360/app.

Boxee Box owners, get ready for even more content. The SlingPlayer app is available for your downloading (auto-playing video warning) and ready to catch content slung from a SlingBox Solo or Pro-HD.

This simple app allows big things. When paired with the appropriate SlingBox, Boxee Box users will be able to remotely control and access a cable box, DVR or satellite receiver. This turns the Boxee Box into a content consuming monster.

The SlingBox sits alongside a set-top cable or satellite box and essentially captures the video stream. It then allows users to remote access and control the connected box. This stream is then broadcasted online where owners can access it via a web browser, smartphone, tablet, and, just recently, Facebook. The Boxee Box app is just the latest addition.

With a connected SlingBox, a Boxee Box basically turns into a one-stop-shop. The device was already one of the best streamer with access to most online video sources including Netflix and all the media companies. Now, as long as there’s a SlingBox in play, the ‘Box has access to cable content. Put a SlingBox on one of your cable boxes and then install the Boxee Box on a bedroom TV. Or, even better, convince one of your buddies to let you put a SlingBox on one of his cable boxes.

The app was demonstrated over the summer prior to its beta phase. The two companies took to the wire this morning to announce the app is finally ready. Fortunately there doesn’t seem to be a cost for the app or service.

Rocket Ninja, a developer of social 3D entertainment, has raised $7.5 million in Series B funding led by European private investor Marcel Boekhoorn. This brings the company’s total funding to $11 million.

Founded two years ago, Rocket Ninja company enhances third-party games and applications with 3D technology. The company offers a proprietary 3D browser-based, content pipeline engine, Shr3d, is accessible across devices and applications. Shr3d can render complex scenes, features a robust content pipeline and provides a platform for publishing for games in a wide variety of styles and genres.

The beauty of Rocket Ninja’s technology is that the user does not have to download anything in order to view games or apps in 3D. The company plans to develop apps for self expression, communication and other sorts of entertainment.

Rocket Ninja debuted its first social 3D game on Facebook earlier this year, Wrestler Unstoppable. The action-based game simulates the wrestling ring, and allows you to compete against your friends. The new funding will be used towards product development and hiring.

It’s the age old tale. Company makes phone. Company codenames phone (sometimes multiple times). Company dabbles back and forth between a couple names before ultimately choosing the wrong one (*cough* HTC ChaCha *cough*). Carrier changes the name of the phone anyway, usually back to the better name (but sometimes to a ridiculously long and uselessly vague name). Happily ever after.

Today the cycle repeats with none other than the holy grail of Android handsets, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus? Or is it Prime?

You remember back before the leaked press shots and the official announcement, all of the rumors centered around a different name: The Nexus Prime. And what a perfect name it was. But sometime between then and now Samsung won the right to insert their Galaxy moniker into the name, effectively squeezing out the “Prime” bit altogether.

Personally, I think keeping manufacturers’ individual brands out of a phone as sacred as a Nexus should be some sort ancient law, but seeing as the whole smartphone thing is relatively new I’ll settle for Best Buy and Verizon taking things into their own hands. Which is exactly what it looks like they’ve done. Right on the cover of this December catalogue for Best Buy is an ad for the Samsung Nexus Prime for Verizon (above), and if you flip a few pages you’ll see a second ad with a price tag of $299.99 on-contract (below).

What’s odd is that Verizon still has an email sign-up page up on their site for the Galaxy Nexus. It does, however, exclude the word Galaxy in the URL. Perhaps they’ve left that up so as to not spoil the fun Nexus Prime fun (this is, after all, a leaked catalog ad), even if it is simply the Galaxy Nexus dressed in Verizon colors.

Still no official word on availability, but it can’t be too far from now. Samsung absolutely wouldn’t miss out on the Holiday rush, especially with such fierce competition this season.

There may be no greater gift than a quality piece of home entertainment equipment. I mean that, too. Forget train sets, diamonds and puppies. Everyone wants entertainment this holiday season and we’ve rounded up six solid bets ranging in price from $40 to $600. There’s something here for everyone including your great aunt or boyfriend that already has everything.

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Bose CineMate Series II

The last thing anyone wants is a hassle. Don’t gift a box of wires. The Bose CineMate Series II is not a hassle. And, if you give it a listen, the system defies the classic Bose saying of “No highs? No lows? It must be Bose.” The system sounds just fine but at $600, the CineMate is a tad on the expensive side. The added cost over another home theater in a box is obvious during set-up. This AV system is as easy to set up as an iMac. Just plug in a couple cables and you’re done. The 2.1 setup (two speakers and a sub) simulates surround sound and is a dramatic improvement over just TV speakers. Sure, there are “better” systems available for less (and more) but only gift those if you’re willing to donate your time to their setup process Christmas morning.

Boxee Box

There isn’t a more satisfying home media streamer than the Boxee Box. Not only does it love locally-stored files, but the ‘Box offers hundreds of legal streaming sources including Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, and all the media networks. If something is online, the Boxee Box can stream it. Best yet, the interface is designed around bringing content to the user as easily as possible. It’s brilliant. With a street price of of around $180, it’s not as cheap as, say, a Roku or Apple TV, but the feature set easily compensates for the additional price. Your significant other will love it even if they are not a cable-cutting hipster.

Roku 2 XD

Boxee Box a little expensive? Fair enough, the latest Roku boxes are still very capable and half the price. These tiny boxes — they’re really small — stream content from Netflix, Amazon, Blockbuster and over a hundred other stations. The smart money is on the $79 Roku 2 XD that outputs at 1080p and features a wireless connection. However, if the budget allows it, you may want to opt for the $99 Roku 2 XS that comes loaded with Angry Birds and ships with a motion controller. It’s a fun gaming experience, but sort of needless for anyone that’s already played through Angry Birds. But your parents might love it.

Logitech Harmony Link

So your significant other loves their iPad, eh? Well, the Logitech Harmony Link can turn the tablet into the ultimate couch potato tool. This little $100 device sits alongside audio/video equipment such as a TV, cable box, and AV receiver. The iPad can then control all these devices through the magic of an iPad app and the local WiFi network. But it’s the app that’s the real magic.

Logitech designed the Harmony Link app to rethink the TV browsing experience. Think of it as a cable box guide designed for the iPad. It works well and is particularly useful on a TV that doesn’t already have access to a cable box — like a bedroom. If nothing else, this device is very unique and would be a great gift for that person that seemingly has everything. They don’t have anything like this. Promise.

Logitech Harmony Remote

Nothing can replace a dedicated universal remote — not even an iPad app. If the love of your life is overloaded with remotes, consider a Logitech Harmony remote. There is one available at nearly every price point with the 300i costing $30 and the 900 running $350. To choose the right one, consider the amount of equipment under the TV. The 300 can control just four devices. The $70 650 controls five and also has clever one-touch macro controls (you want this). From there, the Harmony One features a rechargeable battery, a sleek touchscreen and the ability to control 15 devices. The $350 900 is the top dog Harmony right now and features everything as the One but can control devices through walls and floors. This would allow your signifacant other to pack up all the ugly boxes and tuck them away in a closet.

Star Wars on Blu-Ray

Hot news: Star Wars is now available on Blu-ray. This is a no-brainer. But shop around. The complete six movie set has an MSRP of $139 but can be found for a lot less online. Better yet, save some cash and just get the original trilogy: Amazon has it for $40.

Back in January, Yuri Milner and SV Angel partnered to offer every startup that was part of Y Combinator’s winter batch (some 40 startups) $150K each in convertible debt. In September, national startup accelerator, TechStars, followed suit, upping its investment in each startup to $100K in convertible notes.

Providence, Rhode Island may not be the first city that pops into your head when you think of burgeoning startup ecosystems, but it looks like the city and one of its prominent young incubators is looking to change that. This week, Betaspring, the Providence-headquartered startup accelerator, announced that all startups that complete its 12-week accelerator program will be automatically eligible for a $50K equity investment from Rhode Island’s capital city.

Of course, there is a small catch. For startups to be eligible, they must complete Betaspring’s Spring (or Summer) Programs, and they must agree to locate their companies in Providence for at least a year. Though this seems a small price to pay to begin putting the city on the map as a technology incubator and for grabbing $50K in convertible notes. Plus, in contrast to Y Combinator and TechStars, which fund companies upon entry into their programs, Betaspring will be seeding its startups with investment once the program is completed. Not a bad graduation present.

Betaspring, which is itself a charter member of the TechStars network, provides mentorship, seed funding, office space, and exposure to a startup community of focused entrepreneurs. The accelerator focuses on startups in the web/mobile, physical technology, and gaming arenas.

As to the background of this investment: The City of Providence is partnering not only with Betaspring but with other local angel and venture investors as well, including Slater Technology Fund and Cherrystone Angel Group to found the so-called Innovation Investment Program (IIP), which will be managed by the city and funded under the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The fund will use these federal dollars to provide startups with capital to get them off the ground and begin spurring innovation, growth, and job creation in Providence.

The Betaspring team said that this new equity investment program is “the first of its kind for Providence and was championed by Providence Mayor Angel Taveras”. Together, the parties are working to support early stage ventures in Providence, which we love to see.

Betaspring has also extended its application deadline to midnight on Tuesday, November 22. And for all companies reading this who want a shot at application, you will have the opportunity to apply to Betaspring’s program through midnight on Wednesday, November 23rd — just be sure to reference this post using “TechCrunch” in your application. Applications can be found and submitted here.

The spring session kicks-off on February 6th in Providence.

For more, check out Betaspring’s blog post here.

We’ve all built up a ton of connections through networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now there’s a way to greedily exchange that social capital for real-world dollars. Shopcade is a new affiliate ecommerce platform where users create a personal store and feature products from a catalog of 40 million item. They can then blast store links to their social networks and earn affiliate kick-backs when their products sell. When used for good, Shopcade helps people structure the shopping recommendations they give friends to aid product discovery, and give to charity. But when used for evil, Shopcade incentivizes social network users to spam their friends.

Facebook has been trying to keep social spammers out. It banned Ad.ly, which connected brands wishing to advertise with celebrities willing to post ads to their fans as status updates. This is because social spam pollutes the user experience at Facebook’s expense. Most people know and loathes someone who uses the news feed to market their small business or promotes events, but most people don’t have anything shill. Paid tweeting services let users earn money for publishing ads, but require tens of thousands of followers to be lucrative.

Shopcade has the potential to give everyone an incentive to spam. Maybe it will help cash-strapped teens avoid crappy summer jobs. But more likely it will degrade the social network experience if it gets popular.

The way the model works is Shopcade aggregates all the affiliate product feeds it can. Users create and customize a personal store and feature products they’d recommend — i.e. that they think their friends will want to buy. When someone buys a product, Shopcade gets an affiliate fee, but then rewards both the store owner and the purchaser by adding a small cash reward to their accounts. Users can cash out through PayPal or by donating their reward to charity. In addition to keeping a portion of the affiliate fees, Shopcade will monetize by selling custom themes and virtual goods that users can display on their stores.

The redeeming property of Shopcade is the product recommendation feed on its home page. When shoppers visit, they’re shown what products their friends are adding to their stores or buying, as well as products based on their own activity and Facebook Likes. These could become a good way to discover relevant products if enough friends are on-board.

From a business standpoint, Shopcade has potential. The 20-person London team was founded by Nathalie Gaveau, who started PriceMinister.com, a French ecommerce site which sold to Rakuten, the French eBay. It also includes an ex-PayPal employee that spearheaded that company’s global expansion.  Investors include Ian Livingstone, founder of Eidos Games, and Lord John Birt, Director-General of the BBC.

Unfortunately, from a social good perspective, Shopcade may lower the barrier to affiliate marketing and assist the greedy to exploit the news feed and Twitter stream for low-effort financial gain.

Editor's note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a health technology company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture's healthcare practice and was the founder of Microsoft's Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

Startups thrive on discontinuities and disruption. NPR and Kaiser Health News broke a major story that Walmart intends to become the largest provider of primary care in the country. While Walmart backed away from some of what was reported in their Request for Information, there’s enough wiggle room in their statement to drive a truck through. In my view, this is the biggest news in healthcare since health reform. Regardless of how one feels about Walmart, it’s indisputable that they have a massive footprint and ripple effect that is good news for healthtech companies.

With 1.4 million employees and hundreds of millions of customer visits every month, Wal-Mart's impact is without parallel. It's one reason that the Sierra Club partnered with Walmart on its Sustainability Program. At one time, Walmart would have been a target of scorn by the Sierra Club but they saw the impact they could have. The effect of Sierra Club's partnership with Walmart may have had a more positive outcome on the environment than just about any other Sierra Club initiative.

I believe the fundamental reason that the HealthIT systems in place are so abysmal (speaking from experience of having implemented dozens of these systems – many of which are developed on late 60's technology) has been that decision-making in healthcare is incredibly convoluted, consensus-driven and drawn out.

Let me give you one personal example of hospital decision-making when I was implementing a patient accounting system at a highly respected Seattle hospital. When I arrived, they were in year seven(!) of debating the unique patient identifier for the system to be implemented. While that isn't a seven minute decision, it certainly shouldn't be a seven year decision process. Consequently countless promising technology companies have died on the vine during these interminable decision processes.

The byproduct is the market leader in EMRs has a great design…for 1997. Until healthcare providers realize the impact of their decision lethargy, they will be relegating themselves to sub-par technology. For healthtech companies, they should be longing for a jolt to this sort of slow decision-making.

Enter Walmart

It's indisputable that Walmart plays to win and has the ability to bring huge efficiencies to supply chains. The way many aspects of the U.S. healthcare system works can best be described as a Gordian Knot designed by Rube Goldberg so fresh perspectives can drive breakthrough thinking. Until large health systems feel the pain from disruptive innovators, they will continue to be stuck in sub-optimal processes and have brutally long and convoluted decision processes that will severely impair the opportunity for healthtech startups.

On the other hand, traditional healthcare providers should recognize the cautionary tale of newspaper companies as was outlined in an earlier TechCrunch piece – Providers are Making Newspaper Industry Mistakes. Competition that crushes flawed business models comes from unexpected places. As we've seen countless times in technology, a competitive threat can inspire a jolt of creativity. Look no further than how Google's pace of innovation has increased with heightened threats from Bing and Facebook.

Imagine if Walmart validates the model that The Most Important Company in Silicon Valley No One Has Heard About utilizes by adopting the emerging Direct Primary Care (DPC) model. The DPC pioneers such as Qliance and WhiteGlove had to custom develop their own software. By definition, legacy HealthIT is designed for the current, flaw models. Entire new categories of software will develop to serve this market that is set to explode in 2014. [See Health Insurance's Bunker Buster for more on the effect of the DPC Model that is a little-known item in the new health law. ]

The reporting on Walmart's entering the primary care has posited that is about driving foot traffic to their retail business. With 138 million Americans visiting their store every week, I don't think that's their primary motivation – it's more indirect. First, after the federal government, no other organization spends more on healthcare (likely ~$5 billion/year). One would assume that they are frustrated like every other corporation that they get less for more every year with their health expenditures. Second, it's well documented that healthcare costs are causing people to spend less on retail which impairs their bottomline.

Everyone realizes that healthcare's hyperinflation is unsustainable and D.C. has proven itself incapable addressing the healthcare cost crisis. One of the last major crises in the U.S. was the response to Hurricane Katrina. Walmart was at the forefront of hurricane relief while the government struggled to respond. This is a different kind of crisis, but Walmart might just demonstrate that they can be more effective than the federal government once again.

In the U.S., we tackle healthcare in a way that would be the equivalent of having the best firefighters and firefighting equipment in the world that can respond to any imaginable fire. Further, we would pay firefighters more if there were more fires. Thus, you might find firefighters implicitly encouraging kids to play with fireworks on dry hillsides and build buildings with only one exit. Many hospitals are stuck measuring their occupancy like a hotel. That is, higher occupancy is positively perceived similar to the fictional firefighter hoping for more fires so they get paid more. Instead, the key is to view hospitalization as a failure (other than child birth) rather than something to be optimized.

By making primary care more accessible (whether it's from Walmart or one of the low cost DPC providers), we'd take the lessons learned from IBM's study of their $2 billion annual healthcare spend. Their findings came to a surprisingly simple conclusion when comparing costs, satisfaction and outcomes in various countries – more primary care = healthier population = less money spent. In other words, an ounce of prevention is indeed worth a pound of cure.

Healthcare remains a paradox of cutting edge medical technology while being an information technology backwater. While the kneejerk reaction to many has been to see the downsides of Walmart's entry, there's a clear upside to jumpstarting disruptive innovation. For healthtech innovators, this should be viewed as an early Christmas gift that will bring cheer to those seeking positive change in healthcare.

According to Israeli businesspaper Calcalist (in Hebrew), Microsoft has acquired San Mateo, California-based video search technology company VideoSurf for about $70 million.

We’ve confirmed the acquisition with multiple sources, although we haven’t been able to nail down the exact price (yet). One source who requested anonymity pegged it at $70 million too, though.

VideoSurf raised $28 million from a couple of tech heavyweights, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg, along with Al Gore and Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt and other investors, including Pitango VC and Verizon Ventures.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.