Who’s coming to Disrupt NYC this year, you may ask? Well, we aren’t going to reveal all of the fun surprises we have in store quite yet, but we are excited to announce a couple key speakers who will be joining us this year. This year’s lineup kicks off with a strong set of Silicon Valley greats and New York tech titans.

Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital and is in the business of finding the most disruptive startups out there. As many know, Ron Conway puts the “super” in super angel. Dennis Crowley, the co-founder of Foursquare will also be joining us, along with Square’s Keith Rabois and top investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures.

These five compelling speakers are just a quick preview of all of the guests who will be there. As they stroll through Startup Alley, which companies will catch their eye this year? Stay tuned for more announcements of our guest speakers, ticket giveaways and a few surprises each week as we get closer to the event.

Disrupt NYC kicks off on May 19th with our 24-hour Hackathon, with the main event starting May 21st and going through the 23rd.

As always, Disrupt NYC will be a huge event filled with industry stars, new startups, amazing guest speakers and judges, incredible hackers, after parties, and much more. If you'd like to become a part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jeanne Logozzo for more information. If you are a startup who would like to be considered for the Startup Battlefield, please submit your applications here. Applications will be closed on Sunday, April 1st, at 11:59pm Pacific.

Come join us. Get your tickets now.

Roelof Botha
Partner, Sequoia Capital

Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital focusing on financial services, cloud computing, bioinformatics, consumer internet and mobile companies. Roelof sits on the boards of Aliph, Eventbrite, Mahalo, Meebo, Nimbula, Square, TokBox, Tumblr, Unity and Xoom. Roelof is a champion of consumer Web plays and considers himself as "just another consumer. Roelof's previous investments at Sequoia include Insider Pages and YouTube. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Roelof served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal during its sale to eBay. Earlier, he worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company. Roelof is a certified actuary (Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries).

Ron Conway
Angel Investor, SV Angel

Ronald Conway has been an active angel investor for over 15 years. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds (1998-2005) whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail. Ron was recently named #6 in Forbes Magazine Midas list of top "deal-makers" in 2008 and is actively involved in numerous philanthropic endeavors. Ron is Vice Chairman of the UCSF Medical Foundation in SF, Board Member of The Tiger Woods Foundation, and SF Homeless Connect, and on the Benefit Committee of Ronald McDonald House, College Track, and the Blacked Eyed Peas-PeaPod Academy Foundation.

Dennis Crowley
Co-founder, Foursquare

Dennis Crowley is a co-founder of Foursquare, a location-based social networking service. Previously, he co-founded Dodgeball, a network of the same nature which sold to Google in 2005. He has been named one of the "Top 35 Innovators Under 35" by MIT's Technology Review magazine (2005) and has won the "Fast Money" bonus round on the TV game show Family Feud (2009). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time Magazine, Newsweek, MTV, Slashdot and NBC. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Keith Rabois
COO, Square

Keith is the Chief Operating Officer at Square and a prominent angel investor. Previously, he was the Vice President of Strategy & Business Development for Slide, where he is responsible for Slide's corporate strategy and partnerships. During his tenure, Slide has become the world's leading social entertainment company, offering millions of people worldwide a fun way to communicate and engage on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Prior to Slide, Keith served as Vice President of Business & Corporate Development at LinkedIn. Earlier in his career, Keith served as Executive Vice President of Business Development and Policy for PayPal, and is said to be the only person who owns equity in every VC-financed consumer Internet company founded by former PayPal employees.

Fred Wilson
Partner, Union Square Ventures

Fred Wilson began his career in venture capital in 1987. He has focused exclusively on information technology investments for the past 17 years. In 1996, Fred co-founded Flatiron Partners. While at Flatiron, Fred was responsible for 14 investments including, ITXC, Patagon, Starmedia, TheStreet.com and Yoyodyne. Fred currently serves on the boards of Alacra, Comscore, iBiquity, Return Path, Instant Information and Tacoda Systems.

I must admit I didn’t immediately get Llustre. It looked like another ecommerce play, super-focused on curation and editorial – where was the potential for scale? I looked again. They’d raised £750,000 (just over $1 million) from a host of experienced angel investors, entrepreneurs and venture
capitalists. There must be more to it than meets the eye? Perhaps it was the latest in a new trend of culture-led startups coming out of London right now in the fields of art, design and music? Clutching a camera, I went along to their new offices in Clerkenwell to find out.

The location is significant. London’s Clerkenwell has long been home to a cluster of designers, artist and artisan communities and is well located between the creative/design companies of the West End and the tech startups of the East.

Founded by Vivienne Bearman and Tracy Dorée, their respective CVs offer a hint as to what they might do with Llustre. Bearman was a senior studio producer at Playfish acquired by Electronic Arts. That suggests gaming. Dorée was a former VC with MMC Ventures. That suggests a business that can scale. She would’t do a mere lifestyle business, would she?

Then there was the investors – a nice roster including Oleg Tscheltzo (Founder of Fotolia.com), VCs Hussein Kanji and Rob Kniaz, Tom Hulme (Design Director at IDEO), Kirill Makharinsky (CEO Ostrovok), John Earner (GM Playfish) and Sir Peter Bazalgette (media guru formally with Endemol). None of these guys is a mere pinch hitter, to use a base ball term.

So what is Llustre? On the face of it it’s a “trusted guide” to discovering good design, showcasing designers, curating a daily mix of exclusive products, limited edition pieces and flash-based sales (up to 70% off the recommended retail price). But it’s also content and community.

The designers are well known if you are into your interior design, such as Becky Bauer, Ella Doran, Hoganas, Iittala, Mellorware, Norman Copenhagen, Plumen, Shan Valla, Snow Home and Stelton. Meaningless to my thuggish self but well known in their areas.

Llustre is probably pushing at an open door in Europe, it’s main market. The European homeward and furniture market online is worth £130bn but only 10% of this sector is bought online versus 30-40% in women's fashion. It’s a yawning gap waiting to be filled by new startups.

Certainly in the UK, the magazine stands are bulging with interior design magazines, and yet people’s homes seem largely Ikea-fied. It strikes me that there is a cultural zeitgeist going on here: Llustre and Pinterest are signs that people, especially women, are hungering for more choice of design in the their surroundings, and have a need that can’t be filled by flicking through magazines writing down web addresses.

Llustre certainly plans to get on the social train with its members by merging commerce with social gaming and content around discovering, discussing and buying designer homeware online. The aim is to create a frictionless flow from discovery to purchase.

They’ll do this in a very data driven way driving engagement via game mechanics (in the video below I also interview their CTO).

“The flash sales business is not generating cash because it’s all going into marketing,” Doree tells me. “The trick is to make the customer enjoy the experience and they’ll come back – so integrity is what it’s all about.”

It’s something other sites have struggled with. Gilt has extended to other areas. Perhaps Llustre can crack the magic code with its data-led approach.

Well, you’ll get a flavour for what Llustre is all about in our interview below.

(Apologies for the slight editing fail during part of the main interview).

Google was once satisfied to have its satellite products, like Maps, drive goodwill among startups and create new exposure to their users. But now we’ve heard Google’s new plan is to make these products self-sufficient. It’s begun charging high-volume users of its Maps APIs. Companies like Foursquare and Apple are balking at the price hike and looking to strategically reduce reliance on Google, so they’re switching to OpenStreetMap.

This short-term revenue play could turn into a long-term disaster because OpenStreetMap users have to contribute the improvements they make to its data, so one day it could become better than Google Maps. And who’ll be next to bail on Google’s API? Yelp comes to mind.

The Google Maps API used to be free, as it was trying to gain popularity and displace MapQuest and Yahoo. At the beginning of March it began charging anyone pulling over 25,000 page loads a day $4, $8, or $10 per additional 1,000 loads, and also now offers Premier Tier. Foursquare and Apple jumped ship, plenty of other big companies might do the same. With it now publicly traded, investors could push Yelp to switch to a free alternative.

Digtal Trends published some great background and analysis on the maps industry this morning. It explains how Foursquare is using a company called MapBox to improve data it pulls from OpenStreetMap, while Apple might use acquired companies including C3 Technologies to add 3D graphics.

This is where Google’s long-term problem emerges. OpenStreetMap, or OSM, is totally free at any volume, but if users improve its data on their own, they have to contribute those improvements back to OSM. If someone augments OSM with satellite, street view, reviews, or other mashups, everyone’s maps benefit. As more big maps users switch to it, it will get better and better, creating a snowball effect where it gets more attractive with time.

While Google has the best maps right now, these contributions mean it might not stay that way. Like crowdsourced Wikipedia usurped traditional encyclopedias, the same could happen with maps. One day even low-volume free clients might switch to OpenStreetMap and end users might prefer it. This could hurt Android, which is Google’s future. The search and ads giant has plenty of ways to make money. Charging for the Google Maps API seems like a wrong turn.

PinClout, the analytics service for Pinterest whose name prompted a cease-and-desist letter from Klout, has renamed itself as PinReach.

Shortly after the service launched about two weeks ago, it received a letter from Klout’s attorney demanding that PinClout change its name because it was “confusingly similar.” When I spoke to co-founder Chris Fay last week, he said he would indeed be changing the name, mostly just to avoid a costly legal fight — but he and his co-founder were still settling on their actual choice.

Now Fay tells me that the name has been changed, and the website has been migrated over. (In a blog post, the team says it has been “working like rabid monkeys to ‘pin’ down a good replacement.”) PinReach seems like a good choice. It conveys a similar idea and even has the same number of letters. Meanwhile, the website tagline has been changed from “Discover your Pinterest clout” to “Pinterest Influence & Analytics”.

So there you have it. PinClout is dead. Long live PinReach.

The craze of printing Instagram and Facebook photos is slowly but surely hitting Europe. Roughly a month ago, Nantes-based DarQRoom became one of the first European companies to offer high-quality Instagram printing. Prior to that, local Instagram printing services were somewhat limited to London’s StickyGram, which transforms photos into magnets.

Today, it’s Sincerely’s Postagram that is launching its service on this side of the Atlantic, allowing users to send physical postcards made on iPhone and Android devices to addresses in Europe. And just in time for Spring Break.

Sincerely’s CEO Matt Brezina says that currently 25% of the company’s web traffic is non-US and that the price for sending a card to any non-US address will be $1.99 – a price which includes printing and postage and is only $1 more than sending to a US address. For Europe, all cards will be printed in the UK and then delivered to any European address within 7 days.

This international launch of Postagram comes only a few months after Apple launched a similar service called Cards. However, Apple’s cards are somewhat different to Postagram’s cards (which allow you to pop-out the photo from the rest of the card) and slightly more expensive; Apple’s service costs $2.99 per card delivered in the US and $4.99 for cards delivered overseas.

The company is expecting a big uptake in Europe, particularly in Western European countries like the UK, France and Germany with a strong tradition of sending greeting cards by post.

Sincerely – which closed a $3 million series A round just a few weeks after the Apple announcement – is also behind photo apps PopBooth, Sincerely Ink and Dotti.

DreamIt Ventures is after more eCommerce-focused startups, the company is announcing today, and is preparing to support them with the launch of a new advisory board featuring top execs from across the eCommerce industry. The board, which includes members from Walmart, Amazon/Quidsi, QVC, Bononos, Kate Spade and others, will be available to support the DreamIt NYC Summer 2012 program partipants, including the startups from DreamIt Israel, the newly launched Israel-U.S. accelerator.

The move by DreamIt is meant to better take advantage of its in-house expertise in this space. Mark Wachen, the managing director of DreamIt NYC founded Optimost, while DreamIt Founder David Bookspan is Chairman of Monetate. It seems only natural, then, that DreamIt would want to play up the eCommerce angle when going after new startups.

The organization tells us that the new board members include the following execs:

• Matt Butlein, President, FreshPair
• Jennifer Byrne, VP/Business Development, American Express
• Bryon Colby, SVP/Ecommerce, Cornerstone Brands
• Bryan Eisenberg, Co-Founder, FutureNow
• Josh Himwich, VP/Ecommerce Solutions, Amazon/Quidsi
• Chris McCann, President, 1-800-Flowers
• Alex Miller, VP/Ecommerce & Marketing, QVC
• Johanna Murphy, VP/Ecommerce, Kate Spade
• Bob Myers, CEO, Sheplers
• Elaine Rubin, Founder, Shop.org
• Cliff Sharples, Co-Founder, Shop.org
• Mike Simas, VP/Merchandising, Wal-Mart
• John Tomich, CEO, OneStop
• Andrew Weber, VP/Operations, Bonobos

The board members will hold office hours, conduct seminars, and offer expert advice and mentorship to the companies selected to participate in the programs in NYC and Israel (the latter of which will also spend time in NYC).

DreamIt NYC plans to accept 15 companies this year. Applications close on March 16th.

BetaBait, the startup that helps new apps and services find beta testers, is introducing new features today that should give those testers more control of the experience — and give BetaBait more opportunity to make money.

BetaBait doesn’t quite serve the same function as a service like LaunchRock — it’s less about managing the beta testing process and more about finding the users you need for those tests. So it’s to cultivating an audience of early adopters, who either receive an email with a list of new startups looking for testers or search the site for products that interest them. The company offers startups a chance to receive a more prominent placement on the email by sponsoring it.

Co-founder Cody Barbierri (who is an occasional writer for VentureBeat, and who I used to edit during my time there) tells me that BetaBait just released a number of new features that take help it become more than a “simple email service.” Now, there are some opportunities for those testers to signal their feelings about the apps they’ve tested. That includes a voting mechanism for members to vote the apps the liked to the top of the list, and a new feedback system for testers to provide their thoughts based on their initial experience.

Other new features include an RSS feed of new apps (another alternative to the email), more control over when you receive the email (daily, weekly, or monthly), and a new unit for sponsorship on the right-hand side of the website itself. Barbierri adds BetaBait has been used by 1,000 startups and 5,000 early adopters, collectively driving 25,000 new users to its startups’ apps.

BetaBait is also trying to draw more attention to that early adopter community (and to build its connection with that community) by proposing something called Early Adopters Day — people can go to the website and tweet their support for making Sept. 20 nationwide Early Adopters Day. I was a little skeptical about the idea, but this is how Barbierri defended it:

Without [early adopters], Foursquare would have never reached the masses, same with most startups that are big right now. So, because they are such an important part of the Startup ecosystem, we felt a nationally recognized day would be a nice “thank you.” Plus, entrepreneurs have their own day (Nov. 20), so we thought it was only fair.

Jelli, the user-controlled music streaming service, is releasing a specially curated SXSW-themed station today, which will feature the indie bands playing at the festival. The playlist for the station will be crowdsourced in real-time and made available on both web and mobile.

And speaking of mobile, Jelli has good news on that front, too – it’s finally available on Android.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Jelli, the startup launched back in 2009 as sort of a “Digg for streaming music,” which is how it described itself back then. (That analogy might not work so well today, now that Digg is past its prime. But you get the idea). The core concept, which has been replicated by a number of mobile streaming music startups, is to have listeners vote up or down the tracks they want to hear. Plus, users are also given a limited number of “rockets” and “bombs” which let you send a track to the top of the playing list or destroy its score, respectively.

The service works online and on mobile, and even over the air. If you happen to be away from a web connection (is that possible?), Jelli can be heard on terrestrial FM in 20 markets across the U.S., including Philadelphia (94.5 WPST), Atlanta (96.1 WKLS), Minneapolis (102.1 KEEY), Las Vegas (96.7 KYLI, 94.5 KXLI) and others.

With today’s new release, the company has made a slight change to the user experience – it’s now diminishing users’ ability to collect bombs, dropping the maximum number you can accumulate in your account from 5 to just 1. The company says bombs have “such a disproportionate amount of power compared to rockets,” that it can ruin it for others when too many are flying around. You’ll still be able to use up your collection of bombs before the changes go into effect, though.

For SXSW festival goers, the new SXSW radio station will be a fun way to not just hear which bands are playing at the event, but also get a sense of the crowd’s general opinion on them. For those not into indie music, we should note that it’s joined by another new addition to the Jelli tuner today: Jelli Jazz.

The other big news – and news that will matter long after SXSW fervor dies down – is the newly launched Android app. It’s been a long time coming, given that Jelli arrived on iPhone back in November 2010. As with its iPhone counterpart, the Android app allows for various social radio listening features like Jelli’s Rockometer (where you voice your opinion by tapping “rocks” or “sucks”), rocketing/bombing tracks, live chat with other listeners, favorites, and more.

Jelli founder Michael Dougherty tells us that the Android “rocket” feature will have a different sound effect than the rocket you would hear online.

“Our team spends a lot of time thinking about the ‘listener experience’ and like to do fun things like this with it,” Dougherty says of the tweak.

More importantly, the Android release represents a continuation of Jelli’s strategy to be available everywhere (even on FM).

“Jelli for iPhone was our first mobile experience, and how we’re excited to launch Jelli for Android,” says Dougherty. ”We had also launched Jelli on the Facebook Open Graph last September, as part of the same strategy,”

The Android app went live in the Google Play store (sorry, that still sounds weird) last night.

Virtualization startup Virtustream has raised $15 million in funding from Intel Capital, Columbia Capital, Noro-Moseley Partners, TDF and QuestMark Capital. This brings Virtustream’s total funding raised to $75 million.

Virtustream provides strategy, integration and managed services utilizing virtualization technologies, and xStream, the company's cloud provisioning platform. xStream platform was built to address the exacting requirements of enterprise customers as they move their IT and applications to the cloud.

xStream basically allows enterprise customer to access highly elastic cloud computing resources at a consumption-based pricing model, similar to Amazon EC2. The company aims to help enterprises manage private, virtual private, public and hybrid clouds.

The startup says the additional funding will for product development of xStream as well as to expand Virtustream geographic coverage. Virtustream plans to enhance xStream with cloud federation and cloud exchange capabilities combining private clouds, virtual private clouds and public clouds.

Uber, the SMS/iPhone/Android friendly private car service, has been on a (ahem) roll, with the service expanding out to new cities and picking up ever more passengers. But this week at SXSW it is trying out a little something different while still playing on its strengths in on-demand service:

It is running an on-demand barbecue sandwich service in partnership with Iron Works BBQ, which can be ordered using Uber’s regular app. The BBQ service will be in addition to a revival of the pedicab service that Uber first introduced last year, when it quickly realized that offering lots of big cars during a traffic-choked mega-event (attracting upwards of 20,000 people) was not necessarily the best route to making new friends. Together, the two point to ways you could imagine Uber expanding in the years to come.

Uber tells us that the BBQ ordering service will work like this: you select BBQ as your ordering option at the top of the app screen; you set your location; you get an alert, and then a bag with a sandwich, chips, water, with a maximum of four sandwiches per group. Cost $10 each. Unlike the car service it will only run from 11am to 11pm, and will work until March 14.

The pedicabs, meanwhile, will also work until the 14th but will run for longer hours — “as long as you’re awake, there will be pedicabs,” they say — and those prices get negotiated with the drivers at pickup. Billing for these, too, will work the same way as regular Uber cars and those BBQ sandwiches.

Yes, this is a marketing gimmick. But it also got me thinking: if Uber can work out the logistics of a car service, why couldn’t it apply this to other areas, like BBQ sandwiches, or any other delivery-friendly goods and services, and for more than just the duration of a media/tech/music confab?

As companies like Amazon have so clearly demonstrated, with e-commerce plays, it’s all about logistics. Once those get ironed out, you can distribute anything.  That could mean a whole new line of business (or lines of businesses) for a company like Uber, which as of December had raised $32 million for its growth.

Of course, right now its sights are mainly set on making that car service more ubiquitous (dare we say Uber): the next step in that expansion is a full launch in Toronto next week, a service that had been in trial mode since last month.

With a new class of passive location apps on the rise, failed geo-mobile apps of the past need to cut their losses, so Loopt today announced plans to sell to banking and payment solutions company Green Dot for $43.4 million. Green Dot hopes checkin functionality can help it attain and hold on to customers by expanding from prepaid cards into a mobile wallet. And it needs Loopt’s talent to stick around to make that happen, so $9.8 million of the cash is reserved for a retention pool.

SXSW starts today and no one has been talking about Loopt. Had it waited until after the event and watched younger competitors revel in the spotlight, its valuation could have sunk, so this was wise timing to sell.

While Loopt was once a potential competitor to Foursquare and Gowalla, the checkin app space has thinned out over the last year. Foursquare showed dominance and became the clear leader, while Yobongo was acq-hired by Mixbook and Gowalla sold to Facebook rather than fight a losing battle. Apparently Loopt decided to follow Gowalla’s lead.

$43.4 million in cash is an impressive sum to have sold for compared to what the better-positioned Gowalla managed by many accounts, at least until that Facebook stock goes liquid. Loopt had taken $17 million in funding from Y Combinator, Sequoia, and New Enterprise Associates through its Series B. Green Dot has raised $33 million to date, much from Sequoia as well, [ed. it's a publicly-traded company] which could mean the firm pushed for the acquisition to protect its Loopt investment.

Green Dot will now have the means to let users announce when and where they make payments, which could power rewards systems. Also, Loopt’s mobile marketing messaging patents also made it attractive to Green Dot. They could help the banking and payment solution communicate better with its customers, or let it go on the offensive.

Oh, how Galaxy S II owners’ hearts must have swelled last night! Samsung's Filipino arm let slip on their news portal late yesterday that the long-awaited Ice Cream Sandwich update would be made available to owners of the international Galaxy S II on March 10. Sure, it would be all TouchWiz-ified, but users of Samsung’s one-time flagship handset would finally have access to Google’s latest OS update and all the goodies it entails.

It all sounds great, and it would be if it were actually true.

Hours after the news broke, Samsung reps took to the official Korean Twitter account to disavow the erroneous release date. Instead, they stated that the global release schedule for the Android 4.0 has yet to be finalized, and that they would share the news via Twitter as soon as it was. Sorry (again) Samsung fans, your wait for an official taste of Ice Cream Sandwich is now just as murky as ever.

Still, there's bound to be little love lost if you live in the U.S. and use one of the many Galaxy S II variants currently in circulation. While Samsung can push out their Ice Cream Sandwich update through their Kies software updater whenever they please, the update has to go through additional carrier testing and certification before it'll ever hit your domestic handset.

While Samsung Philippines seems to have pulled the article proclaiming the news, the upgrade FAQ is still live and presumably accurate, so take a gander to see what the GT-I9100 will be in for whenever the update actually hits. Of course, if you’re really impatient and don’t mind a little extra legwork, you could always install one of the TouchWiz ICS ROMs floating around out there, though the squeamish should probably steer clear.

Android has become the world’s best-selling smartphone OS, but with the platform made free to OEMs, it’s perhaps natural for observers to jump on every story that looks like it points to Google suddenly trying to make money out of it in ways that it hasn’t before.

The latest chapter in that story comes from the newsdesk of Reuters, which last night published an article claiming that developers have been getting heat from Google to stop using third-party payment services from the likes of PayPal, Zong (also a part of PayPal) and Boku, and if they don’t — they would get ejected from Google’s app store, formerly known as the Android Market and now being marketed as Google Play. One small problem, though: Google says that nothing has changed in its policy and that the story is a non-starter.

That’s not entirely accurate; a few things have changed: Google rebranded its in-app billing service when it changed the name of the Android Market to Google Play earlier this week. It’s now called “Google Play In-app Billing.” And the company is making a concerted effort to drive more business through that app store.

Reuters’ story suggests that “Google is using its powerful position in the mobile apps market to promote an in-house offering,” and cites an incident from August 2011, when a developer was sent a note from Google ordering it to switch to Google’s own payment services, or else get rejected from the Android Market (now known as Google Play).

The rub is that Google’s service takes a 30 percent cut to Google on all transactions — same as Apple’s in-app payment service — but that some third-party payment services take less.

A Google spokesperson, however, tells us that in fact Google has had the same policies in place for in-app payments — requiring developers to use Google’s own service — since they were launched last March.

The exceptions to these, he notes, have been the same as before: if it’s a good that is not consumed within the app store — for example, a new clock from Amazon — then Google does not require developers to implement in-app billing to pay for it. But when it comes to content for the app itself, that’s when Google’s own billing kicks in.

“If [a developer] had been in breach of that, and we had only just noticed, that’s when we would send out a letter,” he said, explaining the letter that was sent out to a developer in August.

But while Google may not be changing its policies on how in-app payments are supposed to be used by Android developers, one area that does seem to be evolving is Google’s focus on making this into a more-used feature.

Given that the vast majority of app downloads are for free apps, there is always

The company last week expanded the number of currencies that it accepts for in-app payments — there are now eight: U.S. and Canadian Dollars, Euros, Pounds, Yen, and Danish, Norwegian and Swedish Krone. That gives developers who implement the service a wider market for distribution.

And in another incentive specifically for publishers, it looks like it is upgrading One Pass, the other in-app billing service it launched last year.

Unlike the in-app payments in Play, One Pass was Google’s specific offering for publishers, a route to selling editions and subscriptions via the Android platform.

Perhaps in a push to lure more publishers to Google’s own newsstand, Google takes only a 10 percent commission for One Pass transactions. Very little has been heard about One Pass since it launched a year ago, although the Google spokesperson noted that it’s in the process of getting upgraded “in response to publishers’ needs.” (We hope to find out more about what that means soon.)

VEVO launched officially to the world in December 2009, and in the same month became the most visited music site in the U.S. That was just over two years ago, and today VEVO has grown to be the second largest web video property behind YouTube, with some 51.5 million unique viewers tuning in to VEVO’s content in January, according to comScore.

The concept behind VEVO was to make it the Hulu for music videos, and with the company being a joint venture of Sony Music, Universal Music, and Abu Dhabi Media, with EMI licensing its music to VEVO, it has content from three of the “big four” record labels — and, thus, has had the clout to push it to the fore. Its videos are syndicated across the Web, with many of them appearing on YouTube thanks to the company’s deal with Google/YouTube in which the two companies sharing the significant advertising revenue generated from those videos.

Yet, as CNET reported last month, VEVO has reportedly been in talks with Facebook over moving its videos to the social network, as Facebook is interested in arranging a similar deal with VEVO to the one it has with YouTube, but a year remains on VEVO’s contract with YouTube, so those talks are still preliminary.

However, last week, news started to trickle out in the form of emails to VEVO users from management that, going forward, VEVO users would begin logging into the site exclusively through Facebook. The emails included news that a “new VEVO is coming,” which is confirmed today, as VEVO is officially announcing the biggest redesign to its music video platform experience since launching two years ago. And Facebook definitely has a significant place in the new redesign.

In a blog post to VEVO users, the company’s SVP of Product, Michael Cerda, said that he had long been in conversations with CEO Rio Caraeff about turning transforming VEVO from a website into “an experience,” which has come to form in a redesign that looks to boost the site’s personalization features, its social functionality, and make it more of a long-play video destination.

Under the new redesign, when users login to VEVO using Facebook, the site scans your newsfeed and daily Facebook data to create a personalized Facebook playlist. What this means is that if you’ve liked an artist or shared music before on Facebook, for example, VEVO will add that artist’s videos to your playlist automatically. Login, by the way, is limited to Facebook, but users aren’t required to login or register to access unlimited viewing/listening.

VEVO’s iTunes Match will also scan your iTunes library to create a playlist of music videos that matches your most listened-to artists, in addition to the ability to search for a video, watch it, and have VEVO create a “long-play viewing experience based on the stuff you’ve selected,” the SVP said.

The company is also announcing that it has teamed up with music intelligence platform The Echo Nest to help users find and discover music videos personalized to their personal preference. The integration of the Echo Nest’s music data platform into VEVO now lets fans create personalized music video playlists from its catalog of more than 45,000 videos.

Fans can also further customize their listening experience by scanning their audio music collection using a web link, at which point VEVO and Echo Nest turn the site into a sort of thematic music video platform, with content played based on the user’s favorite music.

On top of that, the company has also updated its player, which is now bigger, and (from my brief experience) plays videos faster — and continuously. The other big update to VEVO’s platform comes in its contextual changes. When listening to music, especially when discovering new music, our experience is enhanced significantly by being able to check out more information on the artist, biographical or otherwise.

VEVO’s viewing experience now includes the ability to check out lyrics to the song in the video as you watch, browse news headlines related to the artist, or read the artist’s bio without having to click away from the video. The cool thing is that the company has not only updated VEVO.com, but its iPhone, Android, Facebook, and new Xbox app (U.S. only) as well. (An iPad app is on its way.) So, this means that you can listen to VEVO while at the office, share with your Facebook friends, and continue streaming music videos on your smartphone, and connect it to the TV when you get home.

The new VEVO now gives users a viewing and listening experience that they will actually want to take with them across platforms, and on the go. It makes the experience more competitive with Spotify and Pandora than before, with the added benefit of videos. And, as to ads, always a potential deal-breaker for streaming content, ads on the site continue to be pre-roll, overlay and companion on VEVO.com, and pre-roll on mobile. The pre-roll runs about every 7.5 minutes of viewing time, and not before the first video.

And to clarify, continuous video streaming on site and for iPhone, Android, and Xbox are part of this update.

That being said, the team was clear to point out that this is really a beta launch, and it will be making further updates according to user feedback. Hopefully, as the company is a joint venture of some of the largest bodies that constitute the RIAA, they’ll also be listening to feedback in regard to its somewhat questionable stance on piracy and the events that transpired at Sundance, where Jason found more than a little suspect activity.

Qwilt, the provider of network video-infrastructure technology, is debuting its video delivery solution, which aims to give carriers control over Internet-video traffic in their networks.

For background, Qwilt helps Internet-service providers more efficiently and cost-effectively deliver high-quality video to their customers. That means more consumers can see video from sources like Netflix, YouTube and Hulu in the highest possible quality, when they want.

Qwilt’s video-technology company solves a pretty big problem related to the recent explosion of video being delivered over the Internet (through Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, etc.), on multiple screens. Video now represents up more than two-thirds of all online activity is and expected to grow beyond that. Streaming videos from the Netflix service alone make up 30% of Internet traffic during peak evening hours today. There is an enormous strain all this new content is putting on Internet providers.

The startup’s technology can be used by carriers to identify, monitor, store and deliver Internet video and allows carriers to create a universal video delivery layer that works transparently, without interruption or changes to content provider or network infrastructures.

Qwilt's technology uses patented, video-content classification and analysis technology to detect video content in an operator's Internet-traffic stream. Then, it adds optimized storage
and delivery capabilities to create a more unified appliance offering carrier-grade performance, scalability and reliability. And the startup says that its product is a plug-and-play device that can be dropped easily into existing networks without requiring any infrastructure changes.

The new product, which has been in stealth for the past two years, reportedly has seen a performance gain of at least five times over competing products. And Qwilt is announcing that the Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan is using its product.

Qwilt recently raised $24 million in funding from Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and others.

HP.com is a mess. It has been for years. But I just received word via an internal HP memo that the company plans on launching a new U.S. Home & Home Office consumer store at the end of March. As the memo states, this project, code-named “Atlas”, will be “the foundation of a new HP.com experience with more visual content, more product information and better navigation.” Anything would be better than Hewlett-Packard’s current website.

We’re still trying to dig up screenshots. The leaked memo — reprinted after the jump — links to the employee purchasing program for a special price on a Folio 13. However, the link is to just a landing page and not a preview of its swanky new website that the company so desperately needs.

I could harp on HP.com all day. The homepage is fine but when you click into the meat of the site you’re greeted with an explosion of links, tabs and general chaos. But a major website redesign hints that perhaps Meg Whitman is actually righting the massive HP vessel.

Shortly after Whitman took over in the fall of 2011, the company decided to retain the Personal Systems Group rather than spinning it out to become its own company. Since then, HP debuted several memorable consumer products, cut its loses with the Touchpad and then released webOS to the open source community. The bean counters are still using red pens but up until the beginning of February, the stock price was slowly climbing back up.

A new website won’t stop HP’s downward spiral, but it’s a sign Meg & Co. are trying everything. Besides, sometimes in life, a fresh coat of paint can go a long way.

U.S. HP Employees,

Thanks to the efforts of our colleagues in IT, Operations and the HP Shopping Team, the new U.S. Home & Home Office consumer store is launching. The Employee Purchase Program site is now live and the official launch for general customers will happen later in March.

Code-named "Atlas," it is the foundation of a new HP.com experience with more visual content, more product information and better navigation. The new platform will enable our HP.com teams to bring products to market faster and make it easier to buy from HP.com.

To celebrate our big new HP.com platform we have a special offer for you.

Now through March 14, HP employees in the U.S. can visit the store's remodeled EPP area and purchase the HP Folio 13t-1000 Notebook PC starting at $749.99 (taxes and upgrades not included) through a combination of the normal employee discount and a special coupon. Add the Folio 13t-1000 to your cart—limit of 1 per employee—hit the checkout button and then enter coupon code xxxxx when prompted.

If you already have an EPP account, those credentials will give you access to the new system. Otherwise, you'll need to sign up. Then once you're logged in, type Folio in the search field and select the third and last option from the search results. Remember that the price won't reflect the coupon yet because you still need to apply the code.

On behalf of everyone at HP, we thank the Atlas Team whose long hours and diligent work are about to start paying some big dividends.

Sincerely,

Stephen

[editors note: I removed the coupon code. This deal is for HP employees. If you're reading this email here, then you're not an HP employee and therefore should not get the special price. Sorry, kids. I'm not going to help you game the system.]

Storage startup Space Monkey just took the prize for best new startup at this week’s Launch conference in San Francisco. It’s no surprise, since this is one of the companies that everyone I’ve spoken to here has raved about.

The company is challenging cloud storage services like Dropbox — which seems to be doing pretty damn well, having raised money at a reported $4 billion valuation and also winning the best overall startup award at the most recent Crunchies. However, Space Monkey’s Clint Gordon-Carrol and Alen Peacock (their business cards say “Product Guy” and “Captain Science”, respectively) argue that the cloud approach has its flaws. With people storing more and more videos and images and other multimedia, it becomes increasingly expensive to keep that data in someone else’s cloud, and increasingly slow to push those files through your Internet connection.

Space Monkey, on the other hand, wants to combine the benefits of local storage and the cloud. Customers get a 1 terabyte hard drive, which means you can always access your files without dealing with your Internet connection. At the same time, the drive is connected to a peer-to-peer network, and copies of your files are also distributed in chunks to other devices. (They’re encrypted for security purposes.) The network allows you to access your files remotely, and also provides a backup in case your local storage fails — the company says more than half the network would have to go down before files are lost.

The company plans to start shipping devices this summer. It will charge a subscription fee of $10 a month (no extra charge to rent the hard drive). It’s also accepting pre-orders from 1,000 customers who want to pay for two years upfront — those early adopters get to keep the hard drive outright.

Even before launch, Space Monkey raised a $750,000 seed round of funding, which it didn’t announce until today. Investors include Polaris Ventures, Morado Ventures, Benjamin Ling, Venture51, and B-Squared. As one of the conference’s winners, Space Monkey is also being offered hundreds of thousands more in funding — I’ll update this post when I find out whether they’re taking it

Over the last couple of years, online forum Topix has become increasingly focused on politics. Today at the Launch conference, the site took the next step in that direction — accompanied by a patriotic marching band, CEO Chris Tolles announced a new service called Politix.

There’s no shortage of political websites, but he says there’s “no place for your political profile online.” Sure, you might read a political article on The Huffington Post and even leave a comment, but there’s no centralized location for all that activity. And you might occasionally share those articles on your social network of choice, but “you don’t want to be that guy on Facebook” who’s constantly annoying his friends with political commentary.

With Politix, Tolles has hired a small editorial staff to curate a stream of news articles. You can comment on each article or share it with your friends (including those on Facebook and Twitter). There are issue-based polls such as, “Would same-sex marriage undermine traditional marriage?” And Tolles is recruiting academics, analysts, journalists, and others to create “verified profiles” — you can follow these big names and endorse statements than they make (which is easier than coming up with an insightful comment of your own). Then, when someone looks at your Politix profile, they see all of your activity.

Tolles says he also wanted to create a site that has a different tone than Topix (where commenters can be anonymous, and where the tone can get pretty toxic) — one that’s “less personal and more about the issues.” With this year’s election, there’s a lot more interest in national politics, and more political ad dollars that can be spent on a site like Politix.

The current version of Politix is designed for the mobile web. Tolles says he’ll be launching a desktop version soon, followed by a mobile app. The mobile-centric approach may seem like an odd fit for Topix’s core audience, which is largely suburban/exurban, but Tolles points out that iPhone usage isn’t exactly limited to big cities like San Francisco.

“When it comes down to it, we think that when people interact with media, they want to do it on mobile,” he says.

Editor’s note: Ari Mir is the co-founder and CEO of virtual currency platform Pocket Change. He also co-founded GumGum.com, the world's largest in-image ad-network. This week, Mir is attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

My youth was spent jumping turtles, killing 16-bit Nazis, connecting kickflips with manuals and nube tubing. Haaaaadouken! Like most boys and young men during the ’80s and early ’90s, I loved video games. Our passion for games and our willingness to pay $49.99 to purchase the latest Zelda or Mortal Kombat fueled the industry's growth.

For two decades, selling hard and soft copies of games proved to be a very lucrative business. However, this model is ultimately flawed because the revenue potential per player is capped. In 1998, a game studio by the name of Iron Realms Entertainment became the first to sell virtual goods in their games. A decade later everyone is building virtual economies into their games. Zynga, which recently went public and has a market value of around $10 billion, makes the majority of their revenue by selling items like virtual strawberries.

Virtual goods are purchased with virtual currency, a digital medium of exchange similar to dollars and cents. Virtual currency is in a very nascent stage. Most people think of Scamville, but really that was a misguided start to what will ultimately become one of the more powerful platforms we've seen. Similar to the offline world, virtual currency will be the underlying glue, allowing for a tremendous amount of value creation. Facebook knows this and is doubling down on its FB Credits system. Imagine a day when there are billions of casual gamers looking to buy a virtual good or to unlock a feature. They will need virtual currency and thus have an incentive to interact with a myriad of options placed in front of them to earn that currency. This will become even more prevalent in countries where there are fewer payment methods. Virtual currency will be a very unique platform—one with a built-in incentive mechanism and a large captive user base.

The advertising industry has already seized the opportunity. Currently, if you're playing poker on your iPhone you can earn virtual currency to use in the game by installing an advertiser's mobile app. Advertisers have also begun rewarding consumers with virtual currency if they're willing to watch a video advertisement. In the future advertisers will be able to create any action however simple or sophisticated and tie it to a virtual currency reward. The action could be as passive as watching a BMW commercial or as active as filling out a fashion survey sponsored by Banana Republic. Incentivized advertising will become the dominant form of mobile advertising (excluding search). It drives higher engagement rates than display advertising and is a much better user experience because it's opt-in.

Engaging with advertisers won't be the only way to earn virtual currency. Similar to the real world, gamers will perform jobs to earn currency. Think Mechanical Turk. Someone may want text translated or images of cars identified and they're willing to pay for the task to be completed. Not a novel concept but if built using virtual currency the marketplace becomes a lot more fluid. Tasks can easily be distributed to millions of users via an interface for earning currency. Also, it is a lot more meaningful to a gamer to reward them with 20 denominations of virtual currency versus twenty cents. This is because virtual currency is primarily used for micro-transactions where the gamer wants to buy a machine gun or unlock a level.

As millions of users begin to build liquidity in a system such as FB Credits or other virtual currency providers it becomes possible to disrupt the trillion dollar mobile payments space. Everyone from Apple to Google is running around trying to get more credit cards on file so they can be your "universal wallet." Tomorrow's universal wallet will have credit cards and virtual currency as payment options. Virtual currency offers additional benefits to the wallet provider and the end merchant because there are no inherent fees like credit cards. Consumers will pull out their iPhone or Android one day and buy coffee from Starbucks using virtual currency.

Virtual currency as a mass consumer product may sound far off. But the surge in smartphone use is broadening the player base and everyone from your little sister to your grandfather has a powerful gaming device within reach of them at all times.

As more casual gamers join, gaming becomes less taboo and when this happens the industry will turn into a tsunami. Virtual currency will affect everything from commerce to advertising.

[image via flickr/epSos.de]

It used to cost a lot of money to license a solid Facebook marketing platform, but One Public thinks even small businesses should be able to afford these tools. So today with TechCrunch it launches PageCentrex, a free platform for self-serve management of Pages, ads, Insights, ecommerce, and social CRM from a single interface. For businesses with more money to spend, it offers an enterprise managed service with custom app development.

This disruptive shift to free has been a long time coming.  It’s not just deep pocketed brands doing Facebook marketing anymore. The long-tail of local business, SMBs, and fledgling brands have arrived.

Facebook’s marketing capabilities are getting more powerful but also more complicated. With last week’s launch of Timelime for Pages, brands need to be thinking about which posts to pin and feature. Sponsored Stories can now appear in the news feed on web and mobile, and businesses need to know which posts they should pay to amplify.
Real-time analytics, offsite Facebook integrations, e-commerce — there’s too much to handle effectively without tools. One Public’s PageCentrex might not be perfect, but it will probably be sufficient for many.

Enterprises meanwhile need to stand out. For them, platforms can produce somewhat cookie-cutter apps. One Public’s custom app development can help a brand create experiences unique to their business that can work as a supplement to a top tier social marketing platform.

I admire the zeal of One Public’s founder Fahad Khan. It takes guts to try and release such a range of products through a bootstrapped company with just 15 stateside employees and 50 in Lahore, Pakistan.

I’m a bit skeptical he can pull it off, and I typically advise a “niche to win” strategy. However, One Public has worked with some huge clients including Chrysler, Samsung, NBC, and Digitas. We’ll have to wait and see if the enterprise sales can support the free products. But in the meantime, smaller businesses can use PageCentrex to get serious about social without spending much.