Over the last few years, we’ve seen technology start to play an increasingly disruptive role in both primary and secondary education. There’s still a long, long way to go, but schools are becoming more receptive to integrating mobile, web, and cloud technologies as a means to improve the learning experience in and out of the classroom. As more and more startups jump into the game, we’ve seen a rise in “blended learning,” which aims to increase the productivity of teachers and students through the strategic integration of technology into the classroom.

If you attended a university with large classes, you may be familiar with those hand-held clickers that professors use to take polls from students during class discussions. One Canadian startup, called Top Hat Monocle has been using the old clicker model as an entry point into university classrooms, as it attempts to bring that model a serious dose of more modern technology — with some gamification to boot.

To do so, the startup is capitalizing on the profusion of laptops and mobile devices among university students, having built a web and mobile-based classroom response solution that looks to give students a more engaging in-class experience while giving professors realtime feedback on the degree to which their students are understanding the material. For those unfamiliar, Top Hat lets professors take advantage of polls, quizzes, and interactive demonstrations in class, while allowing students to participate on any device they own, whether it’s a smart phone, a feature phone, an iPad or a laptop.

For those with feature phones, Top Hat offers an SMS-based response system, while all others access its platform through the Web. Students can ask questions during lectures without interrupting teachers and get instant feedback from other students. Those answers are then saved, allowing them to monitor their own progress, study past work, etc. That’s where Top Hat is looking to go beyond just being a simple polling mechanism for higher education.

Professors can offer interactive demos that students can watch on their laptops or smartphones in class, or save for homework, choosing for a library of pre-existing demos or designing their own. They can ask open-ended questions and reward students for participating or helping each other out, upload and share files (course notes, lab materials, etc.), and take advantage of the fact that Top Hat automatically grades and tracks all answers submitted in its “Gradebook.” Professors can access the tool on their desktops, integrating the system into their presentations to display poll results, demos, etc. as they lecture.

This means that there’s no hardware to buy or install, and the on-boarding process is fairly simple. And this is how Top Hat is gaining entry into higher ed classrooms: Rather than selling its product to universities themselves, they’ve been using a direct sales force to go straight to teachers, side-stepping the software pricing model by offering the solution for free to teachers, while charging students to use it. In a sense it’s an alternative (or replacement) to text books, and it’s pretty affordable for students at $20 a semester or $38 for five years.

And it seems to be working. While the startup initially launched in 2009, it’s largely flown under the radar, in spite of finding some decent traction over the last year. After raising over $1 million in early angel funding, the startup now has over 60K paying customers in over 75 universities. It grew it’s team to 22, while managing to remain profitable, as it saw $1.4 million in revenues for 2011, which represented 500 percent year-over-year growth. The executive team said they expect to hit $4 million in revenues by 2013, and are currently raising a second round of venture capital to support that growth.

But, perhaps more important than that, is the fact that professors are loving the tool because it replaces “clickers” with a much more useful suite of tools that make their jobs easier, while the startup reports that classes have seen a 3 to 5 percent improvement in their average grades.

In the big picture, higher education is an easier market for Top Hat to target, with shorter sales cycles as universities largely operate on the semester system — as compared to high school and K-12, where classes tend to run over longer periods of time. What’s more, at the university level, professors have a bit more freedom in choosing the material, setting curriculum, and choosing what types of technologies to integrate into the classroom experience. There Top Hat can have a greater influence on the learning experience: “All told, we really want to own the relationship between the teacher and the student,” said CEO Mike Silagadze and CRO Andrew D’Souza.

Providing classrooms with an easy-to-integrate solution that makes learning more interactive, more fun, and more social, the startup has opened the door, and there’s obviously a lot more it can add to that experience once it has the trust of students and professors and has truly shown that its model is effective in hiking engagement levels.

That’s why, just as we’ve seen so many other consumer-facing startups and companies do — across verticals — Top Hat is looking to introduce some game-ification into the mix. The team has developed a feature called the “Tournament Homework Module,” which it’s testing in beta now and hopes to launch publicly in the next month. As the name suggests, it turns homework into a week-long competition, or tournament, in the hopes that bringing game dynamics to problem sets and workbooks will increase the retention of material, raise grades, and maybe make homework a little more fun.

It works like this: Professors set up a question bank and a tournament question bank, and leading up the tournament (let’s say at the end of the week), students practice questions from the first set and receive practice scores. On the day of the tournament, students login and are automatically paired with other students at their level of ability, proceeding through rounds of problem solving, until there’s a winner. The top five are publicly displayed.

While this may irk some, the idea is that knowing that they will be publicly competing with winenrs to be displayed on a class scoreboard incentivizes students to actually practice problem sets and learn the material. So far, the executives say, the response has been “remarkable,” and apparently students and professors are going for it. It will be interesting to see how classrooms across the country react to this kind of game-ification. If the way the rest of the Web is going is any indication, it may not be long before tournaments are popping up at your alma mater.

For more, check out Top Hat at home here, or check out the video below:

The success of Airbnb may have unleashed a wave of attention on companies using social media and the internet to disrupt how travel is planned and booked: today, “social” hostel booking site inBed.me is announcing that it has raised a seed round of $1.2 million, from a list of investors including Ventech, Quotidian Ventures, CAP Ventures and founders Fabrice Grinda (OLX, Zingy) and Dave Lerner (Columbia Venture Labs, Venture Studio), among others.

While Airbnb’s main focus is on offering rooms in private houses, inBed.me has turned its attention to the budget/student travel market, specifically the hostels that are the mainstay accommodation in that sector. Users can use the site to book rooms, share their bookings with others, and see who else is staying in the same place to plan a meetup in advance.

And when you think about it, this is a great idea, considering that in many cases student travelers are on the lookout to meet other people to explore new places together, and in some cases even coordinate their travels to end up in one place at the same time. (I know I could have used something like this when I did my own backpacking stint…)

In addition to its backers, the company has a nice pedigree: launched in Startup Weekend New York, it took part of Startup Chile; and participated of NXTP Labs, an Argentinian startup accelerator that is part of the TechStars Network. All that helped to catch the attention of a group of advisors that include Viator Travel founder Rod Cuthbert.

InBed.me says it will be using the funding to expand the usefulness of its service by integrating it with other social networks — currently a user can sign in with only Facebook — and developing iOS and Android apps. It also plans to initiate a strategy of growing out its business in targeted geographical locations.

First up will be South America — sensible since the company is co-headquartered in Bogota, Colombia and New York; but also because of the imminent arrival of the World Cup in Brazil, and the fact that this is a popular destination among students and young backpacking travelers at the moment.

Founded only last year, right now there are only 1,200 hostels on inBed.me, but as part of its expansion, it is also announcing a partnership with Hostelworld, an Ireland-based company that is currently the market leader in booking hostels online.

That will see the integration of Hostelworld’s database into inBed.me’s system to allow people to book beds in some 25,000 hostels. This was a smart move on the part of inBed.me, because in a sense Hostelworld is probably its biggest competitor. (Crazily enough, that still accounts for only half the hostels in the world: the company says there are some 50,000 in operation today.)

Ultimately, the company’s CEO, Diego Saez-Gil, tells me that the goal is to widen out to include other kinds of places to stay, and to focus on more regional expansion. Europe will probably be next up for the company, he says.

Predictive analytics company Medio Systems is debuting a brand new product suite for businesses, called inGenius Suite. Basically, the inGenius processes massive amounts of big data to identify possible revenue opportunities in customer usage patterns on connected devices.

inGenius uses a set of predictive analytics algorithms to gather and analyze real-time information, such as location, device type, and application usage, with customer propensities and interest. Using an SDK, developers can begin collecting user events and usage data.

Medio then uses this data to identify unique user segments that can be analyzed and tracked
by application, geography and other relevant application metrics, depending on industry,
across multiple connected devices. Basically, Medio wants to show developers and publishers how customers are interacting with every aspect of an application or service.

The company is targeting developers and publishers in gaming, retail, finance, mobile and entertainment. Medio, which has raised $30 million from Accel Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures and others, has more than 105 million unique users, and currently tracks 550 million daily events.

GREE, the $5.9 billion Japanese mobile gaming company making a big push in international markets, debuted its first-ever title designed by U.S. talent for Western audiences today.

Taking the evergreen zombie theme that has fueled countless mobile gaming hits, GREE’s game “Zombie Jombie” is designed from the perspective of zombies who must battle humans. In the game, players become a “Jombie,” which has the power to raise and control zombies. It’s a trading card game where players must build a deck of cards representing different zombies to compete with friends. They can battle each other, bosses, or do quests in different U.S. cities.

This game is a big test for GREE. Compared to U.S. gaming companies like Zynga, the company is almost absurdly profitable. GREE has triple the profit margins that Zynga does. (Crazy.) The company made 12.7 billion yen ($152.7 million) on 41.5 billion yen ($497.8 million) in revenue in the last quarter alone. And those numbers were about triple what they were a year earlier. Zynga in contrast did $37.2 million in net income excluding a massive, one-time charge related to its IPO on $311.2 million in revenue in the same period.

The question is: can it grow outside of its home market of Japan?

GREE has a very distinct model in which it is both a platform for other games and a game producer in its own right. In the U.S., companies that support gaming platforms like Apple and Facebook would never produce their own in-house titles. It’s just not clear yet whether the company has the right understanding of U.S. tastes and culture to succeed. That’s why it has hired so aggressively in Silicon Valley, going so far as buying a billboard in the hope that local talent will help the company find its way. It also recently opened a 40,000 square foot gaming studio in San Francisco.

On top of that, GREE wants to earn revenue from more than just its own games. It wants to build a global platform where it can take an additional 15 percent cut of revenues from third-party games after Apple’s or Google Android’s 30 percent share. It plans to roll out a global mobile gaming platform last year, on the back of its $104 million acquisition of mobile-gaming network OpenFeint last year.

Google will be rolling out major updates to its Google Search engine in the coming months, if an article in today’s WSJ is to be believed. According to statements from Amit Singhal, SVP of Search at Google, the changes primarily involve the introduction of semantic search capabilities and instant answers – yes, two things that Microsoft is already doing (and has been doing for some time) with Bing.

However, to some extent, Google has been doing these things, too. Also, none of this is fresh news. So what’s going on here?

To get both sides of the story, you’ll have to also read Danny Sullivan’s takedown of the WSJ article over on Search Engine Land, where he also points out that this news is not actually new news. Stories about Google’s changes have been making the rounds for weeks now.

To sum up, Sullivan basically says that the WSJ missed an opportunity to clarify what’s actually new, versus which technology, already in action, is simply being expanded upon or improved and by how much. That’s a fair criticism, but then again, when you think of the audience the paper has to address, minutiae like this has to be dumbed down a bit, and explained in lengthy, layman’s terms to a more mainstream audience. An audience for whom product names like “Google OneBox,” “Google Squared,” “Freebase,” and “Metaweb” don’t roll off their tongues as they do for him.

Case in point: a good portion of the WSJ piece has to explain what semantic search even is and examples of how it would work. I think the majority of the TechCrunch audience has a better grip on the technology, but to put it simply for those who don’t: it’s a system that would identify the people, places and things being referenced within webpages and use that understanding to better rank them. In short, semantic technology makes search smarter.

But let’s not get carried away. The semantic search engine Powerset, acquired by Microsoft in 2008, was later used to augment Bing’s search capabilities. And here it is 2012, and we all use Bing now, right? Hmm? No, as Sullivan rightly points out semantic technology alone doesn’t make one engine “significantly better” than another.

According to the original article, semantic search won’t replace keyword-based search, it will be used alongside it. So where’s the big change? What’s going on?

The key bit to understanding the whole thing is the part where the article mentions that Google’s Metaweb team (a semantic search company called Metaweb was acquired by Google in 2010) has expanded its index to 200 million entities, up from the 50 million it had back in 2010. Not to downplay that news – good job guys! – but 200 million entities != entire web.

And semanticizing (yes, I just verbed it) 200 million entities isn’t going to radically change Google as we know it. It’s merely a progress report on the state of semantic search. Carry on.

[In other news, it also sounds like Google will be doing more of those direct answers things, where queries with a simple answer (e.g., flight times, package tracking, weather, etc.) will be displayed at the top of results in a very Bing-like fashion.]

Bottom line here with the big, major, OMG GOOGLE SEARCH IS CHANGING news: Google Search is always changing. The company is constantly tweaking the signals it uses to rank webpages across the Internet. Sometimes, enough of these signals are tweaked in a short enough period of time that Google gives the rollout of the new algorithms a name, like Google Panda, for example.

But what’s going on here with semantic search is a carefully timed push to put some other news out there for you to read about besides Google “Search Plus Your World,” the truly radical revamp to Google Search that incorporates Google+ search results – even favoring them – over its list of blue links, previously core to the Google search experience.

There has been a lot of pushback from the tech community over the changes, the most recent example of which came from former Google+ engineering director James Whittaker who became so disillusioned with Google’s cultural shift that he jumped ship and headed back to…Microsoft. (Yeah, them).

In case you missed it, the damning quote from Whittaker, shortened:

Officially, Google declared that "sharing is broken on the web" and nothing but the full force of our collective minds around Google+ could fix it….

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn't part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn't even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, "social isn't a product," she told me after I gave her a demo, "social is people and the people are on Facebook." Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn't invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google's party became the elephant in the room.

One of the best things about pre-Google+ Google is that it would experiment and fail fast, like when it shut down the “future of communication” Google Wave after lagging adoption. Google+, like Wave, isn’t feeling the love – the touted growth is inorganic, a function of deep integrations with nearly all of Google’s products and services, down to Google’s once stark, now social homepage. But Google+ will not be shut down – Google is going social at all costs. Even if the cost is finally giving a bold enough entrepreneur a doorway to create search dominance disruption. (Yes, it can be done.)

The irony of the whole situation is that Google actually had several winning formulas for social on its hands: Google Voice + Google Talk + Google Hangouts could have turned into a truly disruptive “Skype killer,” especially if Google was to give the service away for free, where Skype charged for its premium features. Google+ also has technology that could have transformed Picasa into a Flickr killer, especially considering its integration with Android and its instant upload feature. (Instead Google+ and Picasa still bizarrely co-exist).

But alas, Google is pushing Google+ as an all-encompassing Facebook competitor, since neither of the above routes to social would have been “big” enough to make Google a third name in social networking alongside Facebook and Twitter (and maybe even Foursquare).

And yes, some of us out there aren’t thrilled with the results of the push. And we blog about it.

That’s why you get news like this: semantic search, improvements to instant answers – things that remind you that elsewhere in Google, engineers are working on incredible technology that made you fall in love with Google in the first place.

In other words, Internet: won’t you please, please stop talking about how we ruined search with SPYW? Thanks, love Google. 

Programers should spend their time crushing code, not on setting up domains and configuring editors. San Francisco startup Koding has raised a $2 million Series A from RTP Ventures and Greycroft to eradicate friction for programmers with its browser-based cloud development platform and developer community.

As of today Koding lets you program remotely in a wide variety of languages, quickly configure WordPress, Joomla, and web servers, and meet other developers who can be instantly authorized to work on your environment. Developers can even ditch localhost and get a free hosted server to work on.

Koding was founded in mid-2011 when co-founder & CEO Devrim Yasar discovered how tedious it was to get a development project started. When he launched the first iteration of Koding that handled basic tasks like domain and FTP setup, 10,000 developers jumped on board in the first two weeks. Now over 40,000 have signed up.

Today Koding releases a big expansion, allowing for full software development from the browser in ruby, python, C++, php, perl, & node.js. Developers can code from a functional Terminal in their browsers that connect to a free hosted server. It’s got proper security, and doesn’t discriminate between languages or hosts. Programmers can bro out and collaborate through the development community, and authorizing each other to work on products is as easy as friending someone on Facebook.

While competitors like Cloud9 IDE address development individual issues, the Koding team tells me their company aims to “look holistically at all the biggest problems developers face and knock them off.” With the time and new office it’s paying for with this new funding, Koding will be able to continue smoothing out pain points and become even more integral. Yasar tells me Koding wants to “become the next GitHub. You’ll share code on GitHub and work on it over here on Koding.”

What happens when Korea's biggest wireless carriers and Korea's biggest phone manufacturers get caught offering bogus wireless phone deals to their customers? Well, according to the Yonhap News Agency, Korea's Fair Trade Commission gets pissed off and slaps those companies with a huge fine — 45.3 billion won ($40.2 million) — for "price fixing and consumer fraud."

If the fines are any indication, then carrier SK Telecom and Samsung Electronics were the biggest offenders here — they netted themselves a 20.2 billion won ($17.9 million) and 14.2 billion won ($12.6 million) penalty respectively.

Here's how it all went down. Samsung, LG, and Pantech marked up the prices of a total of 209 phone models before handing them over to the carrier partners that would actually sell them. Then, those carriers would advertise those phones and try to sweeten the deal with price incentives and discounts. The phones that got the price fixing treatment ended up looking like great deals compared to ones that weren't since their original price tags were inflated.

Of course, the consumer actually buying the phone isn't actually getting a good deal — they're paying the same price (or possibly more) for something "that should not have been so expensive in the first place." What’s really earned the FTC's ire is that the companies involved essentially lied to their customers about how good the price was in order to build momentum around certain products and services.

Yonhap's report doesn't mention which phones in particular were affected by the price-fixing scheme, nor does it mention the time span over which these practices occurred. That information could soon be made public though, as the Fair Trade Commission has ordered each of the companies involved to release a report that lays out how much they've shelled out in incentives. In addition to the fines, the Fair Trade Commission has also taken steps to bar these companies from pulling the same stunt again.

Sad to say, but this isn't the first time that consumer electronics titans Samsung and LG have been caught fiddling with prices. The Korean Fair Trade Commission hit them and four smaller manufacturers with a hefty 194 billion won ($172.7 million) fine last year for colluding to fix prices on their TFT-LCDs. Not long afterward, an antitrust lawsuit was filed against said companies here in the States, to which they eventually settled.

OpenTable for hair stylists and other salon professionals StyleSeat is announcing a raise of $775K this morning, from enviable angel investors Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s A-Grade, Founders Fund (!) and actress Sophia Bush.

The round will be added on to the company’s previous $700K from another Valley “Who’s Who?” list of  investors including Jeff Clavier, Chris Sacca, Dave Morin, Travis Kalanick, Garrett Camp, Paige Craig, Alfred Lin, Christoph Janz, Joe Stump and 500 Startups.

The company, which offers beauty and haircare professionals free tools to build and manage their online businesses, has booked over $17 million in salon appointments since its launch last spring, and now serves over 40,000 users. It monetizes through a freemium model, charging users a $25 fee for expanded booking, CRM and marketing features.

The online reservations platform is yet another outgrowth of the “OpenTable for X” trend, which encompasses everything from “OpenTable for Doctors” ZocDoc to StyleSeat competitor Pencil You In.

There are one or two apps which allow you to ‘plant’ virtual objects in a location allowing others to pick them up later on (Pinterest for location anyone?). Everplaces literally just launched, Stikinotes and Pinwheel have yet to launch. But CircleMe comes out of a six months closed beta today to try and prove it’s different than the others.

Launching with a website, an iPhone app and $2.5 million in funding from VC firm Innogest Capital, this social network lets users geo-tag a city to trigger alerts when you are near something you’ve said you already like on another social network.

Users “plant” a song, a book, a movie, a venue, a famous person, you name it, along with an associated message for others to enjoy. CircleMe has also pre-populated the database with close to 1 million items to “like”, and another 11 million to access via API connections with other networks. They just want you to put all these things on a map.

Other users then explore what’s been planted around them, or get automatically alerted when they walk by a ‘plant’ from someone in their trusted network. It sounds a lot like the way Highlight and Glancee work for people, but CircleMe is about things.

CircleMe's founder and Executive Chairman, Erik Lumer thinks being able to discover the things people like in the real world is better than other kinds of sharing. We’ll see. What I don’t think any of these apps quite address is what happens if the thing attached to the location MOVES, like a show closing at a theatre.

Whatever the case, the team looks strong. Lumer is a former researcher with Xerox Parc and Stanford University turned serial entrepreneur, and a former co-founder and CEO of Babelgum. Giuseppe D'Antonio, CEO, has been with Google, Dada and Manhattan Associates.

D'Antonio says CircleMe is similar to Pinterest but is “not just image collection, but the collection of ‘passions’ that you can do on CircleMe has ‘smarts’ behind it that lets you find out about similar items to the ones you like and much more content related to these interests (articles, audio, video, etc…).” You can be the judge of that.

The company has a staff of 11, with offices in London and Milan.

This morning, Amazon announced its mobile app marketplace, the Amazon Appstore for Android, is celebrating its first birthday with a week-long sale on some of its most popular apps.

The company also took the time to share some figures about the Appstore’s growth over the past year, including the size of its selection, which grew from 4,000 apps at launch to 31,000+ apps today. In addition, Amazon released lists of its best-selling apps of all time, both paid and free.

The week-long sale will offer deals on some of Amazon’s top-selling apps, including Fruit Ninja, Wolfram Alpha, Splashtop Remote Desktop, Dr. Seuss's The Shape of Me and Other Stuff, TuneIn Radio Pro, TETRIS, PAC-MAN, The Lost City, MONOPOLY, AccuWeather Platinum and Jamie Oliver's 20 Minute Meals.

Today, Plants vs. Zombies will go on sale at 67% off. Tomorrow, two apps will go on  sale. On day three, three apps will go on sale, and so on for the remainder of the week-long event.

In conjunction with the sale, Amazon will be running a contest to give away a Kindle Fire to eight winners who enter the sweepstakes by March 31st. (More on that here).

Amazon also revealed a few facts about the Amazon Appstore’s growth, but it was notable that the company didn’t release an exact download number. Perhaps not looking forward to the Apple comparisons, where some lucky customer recently downloaded the 25 billionth iOS app, Amazon’s director of Amazon Appstore for Android, Aaron Rubenson, hedged exact figures by referring to “millions of apps and games” instead.

A few more tidbits:

• In its first year, the most downloaded paid app in the Amazon Appstore was Cut the Rope, followed by Angry Birds (Ad-Free) and Where's My Water?; the most downloaded free app was Angry Birds Free, followed by Netflix and Solitaire by MobilityWare.
• Amazon Appstore offers a paid app for free every day. If a customer had downloaded every Free App of the Day since launch, they would have saved nearly $1,000.
• The paid app with the most 5-star reviews in the first year of the Amazon Appstore was Where's My Water?, with over 3,000; the free app with the most 5-star reviews was Blood & Glory, with over 4,000.
• In the Amazon Appstore's first year, customers spent more than 7.7 million minutes test driving apps; Bubble Buster was the most test-driven app, followed by Amazon MP3 for Android with Cloud Player and Memory Trainer.
• Over the past year, the most popular app category for customers is games, followed by entertainment and productivity. Some of the most popular apps include Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, QuickOffice Pro, CalenGoo and Exchange by TouchDown.

With the Appstore’s first year wrapped up, Amazon released its all-time top selling app lists, both of which show a clear bias for games over apps. Note that even on the free apps list, games dominate – something which implies most users still download their staples (think Facebook, Twitter, etc.) from the Android Market.

Top Paid Apps (over the last 12 months)

1. Cut the Rope

2. Angry Birds (Ad-Free)

3. Where's My Water?

4. Angry Birds Rio (Ad-Free)

5. Angry Birds Seasons (Ad-Free)

6. Plants vs. Zombies (Kindle Fire Edition)

7. Fruit Ninja

8. SCRABBLE (Kindle Fire Edition)

9. UNO (Kindle Fire Edition)

10. TETRIS

Top Free Apps (over the last 12 months)

1. Angry Birds Free

2. Netflix

3. Solitaire

4. Fruit Ninja Free

5. Angry Birds Seasons Free

6. Bubble Buster

7. Little Piano Free

8. Roller Lite

9. Jewels

10. Hangman Free

The company has launched a dedicated portal where you can find all the deals, contests and more at www.amazon.com/appstorebirthday.

We’ve long been used to book marking web pages, then ‘adding to favourites’ and more, but there is plenty more to be done in this space where location is concerned. Gogobot and Foursquare are doing it in travel and venues respectively. But try going back and finding where you’ve been on Foursquare for instance. There are plenty of location apps, but where’s the utility?

Everplaces is aiming to sort out this mess by making location more more useful. A closed stealth-mode beta has been out since December but now it’s open. You can download the iPhone app here.

Everplaces helps people keep track of places that are relevant and interesting to them, like a personal wish list or to-do list. You can save places directly from websites, import from the now defunct Gowalla and your Google MyMaps history. More integrations are planned.

PinDrop launched recently to let you create that map of places you have been or want to go. But Everplaces is aiming to move that conversation on with greater customization and the ability to categorise. They are the first out of the door while we wait for the likes of Katerina Fake’s Pinwheel to come out of beta, and a couple of others (as you can tell this space is hot).

Discovery is a big part of EverPlaces www.everplaces.com/explore) and you can follow people who interest you, Twitter-like.

CEO Tine Thygesensays: “We’re almost more Pinterest for places… we just don’t use those terms yet since we have more to build on the social and discovery side. Most people now use is as a personal tool. For example, I have a chef friend in NYC I follow for food, and a designer I admire I follow for art.”

Users can set places to private when they save them, or later on so their places don’t appear public. People checking a profile cannot see that person’s places unless they are friends.

It’s beating PinDrop to public sharing, but watch this space. As I said, it’s a hot one.

If you were thinking that the Lumia 800 would somehow go for less than it is at Microsoft stores — $899 with Nokia Play 360 Bluetooth speakers, Nokia Purity HD headphones and a Luna Bluetooth headset — let me just do you a favor and burst that bubble right here and now. Amazon has just joined Microsoft retail stores in offering the Windows Phone device, and unfortunately the 800 won’t be any cheaper on virtual shelves.

Worth noting that this isn’t an awful deal considering what you’re actually getting for the $900, but here in the States we’re really not used to paying more than $300-$400 for a premium phone (thanks to carrier contract subsidies). The phone will play nicely with AT&T’s network, though T-Mo subs should expect EDGE speeds.

Also, move quickly. Last I checked there were only six units left, with “more on the way.”

As a quick refresher, the Lumia 800 packs almost the same specs as big brother 900, including a 1.4GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and an 8-megapixel camera. However, unlike the 900, you’ll find a smaller 3.7-inch WVGA display and a lack of 4G LTE connectivity.

I’m kind of disappointed in Nokia and Microsoft for pricing this the way that they did. The brilliance of the partnership is the fact that both companies can afford to keep prices low and let the Windows Phone ecosystem evolve into something more permeating. A $900 price point does nothing to accomplish that.

At the same time, I find Windows Phone, especially in the form of a Nokia Lumia, to be an incredibly compelling platform that I’m excited to see grow and compete. So while I wouldn’t necessarily recommend shelling out almost $1,000 for this package (unless you absolutely want all of those accessories and require a smaller screen), I would definitely suggest looking into 4G LTE-equipped the Lumia 900.

[via IntoMobile]

Identity theft protection company LifeLock has raised $100 million in new equity funding from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Goldman, Sachs & Co., Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Symantec Corporation and River Street Management. Additional investors included Industry Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, Keating Capital, Inc. and Wasatch Advisors' venture capital arm CrossCreek Capital. This brings LifeLock’s total funding to $178 million.

LifeLock says that the new funding has been used towards the acquisition of ID Analytics, which develops a technology that predicts the likelihood of identity risk associated with an application for credit. Not only does the company evaluate for risk, but similar to LifeLock, also provides consumer protection services against identity theft. The company partners with financial organizations and telecommunications companies.

The company says that LifeLock and ID Analytics generated combined revenue in excess of $200 million in 2011. ID Analytics will continue to operate independently as a wholly owned subsidiary of LifeLock.

Todd Davis, LifeLock Chairman and CEO said in a statement: "This acquisition will further strengthen our core consumer identity theft protection business and gives us a unique opportunity to deliver the next generation of identity risk management solutions…This acquisition materially strengthens LifeLock's market positioning…By combining ID Analytics' enterprise solutions and proprietary data capabilities with LifeLock's brand leadership and consumer expertise, we see a company poised for significant long-term growth."

You may remember Davis from LifeLock’s ad campaign, which displayed his Social Security number on the company’s website and billboards, as a way to promote LifeLock’s service. His identity was then stolen 13 times and the company was slapped with a $12 million fine for deceptive advertising.

As developers hunker down and get into the business of trying to work out how to get consumers to buy more of their product on mobile devices, some revealing numbers out from Nielsen on what people are willing to pay for on tablets already.

The upshot: paid content, it seems, is alive and well, but some media categories are doing a lot better than others.

Taking just the use of paid content on tablets in Q4 2011, Nielsen found that in the U.S., a majority of tablet owners have already paid for downloaded music, books and movies, with 62 percent, 58 percent and 51 percent respectively saying they have already made such purchases. The one area that really fell down in the U.S. was news, where only 19 percent said they had ever paid to read news on their tablets.

Given how popular news is as a general category for consuming on tablets, why the big difference? It’s likely because there are many more ways of getting news content for free via apps and the web, while those other, higher ranking categories are viewed as chargeable, “premium” content — both by the industry and by users.

What’s interesting is that when Nielsen asked the U.S. participants of its survey about what they would be willing to pay for on their tablet, those high percentages went down. Only 46 percent said they would pay for music; books became 45 percent and movies 38 percent: this suggests that although people have been willing to give things a try, they’re not necessarily going to come back for more.

In contrast, those categories that scored lower for paid content to date actually went up when people were asked if they would ever consider paying for that content in future. (See table below.)

Nielsen also incorporated some stats on how paid content is doing in some European markets, specifically Italy, Germany and the U.K.

News, ironically, is doing a lot better in Europe than it is in the New World. A whopping 44 percent of Italians surveyed said they had paid for news content on their tablets. That probably points to fewer instances of “free” apps and more of a drive to premium subscriptions in that market.

Italy, in fact, seems to have paid content-friendly consumers in general. The country also outscored Germany and the U.K. in every other category, from music and books, to streaming radio, magazines and sports.

Following its acquisition by SAY Media, ReadWriteWeb’s COO Sean Ammirati is leaving the company to join Birchmere Ventures, an early-stage VC firm with investments in cleantech, medical, and technology startups. Ammirati will be added to Birchmere’s investment team and will serve as the lead partner for a new fund within the company called Birchmere Labs. Similar to betaworks, Birchmere Labs will be a studio fund where the firm will develop its own startups, however it will also serve as a seed fund, investing in early stage startups, and specifically those in the “community driven commerce” space.

Prior to serving as COO at ReadWriteWeb, Ammirati was the co-founder and CEO at mSpoke, LinkedIn’s first acquisition. He’s also an Adjunct of Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.

The decision to exit SAY Media post-acquisition shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, Ammirati tells us, as there aren’t a lot of people who do what he did for ReadWriteWeb at his new company. Moving to Birchmere felt like a good next step, he says.

For background, Birchmere is home to a fairly good-sized VC fund run by Ned Renzi and Sean Sebastian which has invested $160 million in companies that have gone on to achieve a total market valuation of over $14 billion. The firm has offices in both Pittsburgh and Palo Alto, but Ammirati expects to be spending a lot of time in New York in search of startups.

Until now, Birchmere’s focus has been on IP-heavy companies addressing engineering-heavy problems – not web companies. Birchmere Labs, as a combination studio and seed fund will be structurally different from something like betaworks, but from a model perspective it will be similar in that it both invests in companies and tries to create companies in-house. ”Structurally, we’ll actually be a fund, where betaworks is a holding company,” Ammirati explains.

As for the newly formed Birchmere Labs, the focus is on “community driven commerce startups,” which means that the businesses it funds need to have a network effect to them. That is, the first users should get value from them, but the startups will become increasingly valuable as new users sign on. As for “commerce,” that just means companies will have transaction-based, rather than advertising-based, revenue models.

For example, a company like Birchbox is the kind of startup that the fund would invest in. (But that’s just an example – Birchbox is actually too far along to be in need of seed funding, of course).

Ammirati tells us that there’s no set number of startups Birchmere Labs will invest in, as it wants to remain agile, investing in both studio or seed stage companies, as need be. “We have flexibility in the documents to do either of those,” says Ammirati, “but we definitely have in mind to do at least a couple of seed deals and make a couple of investments in studio companies in the next year.”

Birchmere is not disclosing the size of the fund, but Ammirati confirms they’ve “closed on millions” so far.

More details about the fund are available on Birchmere’s site here. And Ammirati’s personal announcement is here on his Tumblr blog.

People search site MyLife has purchased the technology from recently shuttered all-in-one social communications manager Threadsy. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As we’ve written in the past, MyLife is a full-fledged search engine which not only finds people—thanks to aggregated search across social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace—but also helps visitors connect with them all on the same site. MyLife pulls information from public records and also allows users to subscribe to the search site to connect with others, track their searches and more.

Threadsy, which was a TechCrunch 50 (2009) finalist, allows users to access a single interface to retrieve and respond to updates from their contacts by email, Facebook, Twitter and other social services. Threadsy announced in October that it would be shutting down in November 2011.

While MyLife allows its 60 million registered users to connect to their social and email accounts for free, the Threadsy technology will allow MyLife to further bolster its Personal Relationship Manager offerings even further.

Users will be now be able to create a 'social inbox' on MyLife that combines email and direct messaging from all social networks, and Photo and audio sharing. MyLife is also announcing a new iPhone app today, which allows users to access social network communications from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and soon, Google+.

Back in December, Salesforce announced the acquisition of social performance platform Rypple, and revealed that it will be entering the human capital management (a.k.a. employee and talent management software) market with the launch of a new product Successforce. Today, the CRM giant is launching the newly integrated product; however, Salesforce is keeping Rypple’s name. The company is also debuting Site.com, which offers marketers and businesses a simple, cloud-based content management system.

Salesforce Rypple

For background, Rypple is a social performance management platform that helps managers and employees improve performance. Essentially, Rypple replaces the traditional performance review with a more social and collaborative approach. The software has been compared to a "Zynga for the enterprise," and allows managers to track projects, guide their team and give kudos to deserving staff for others to see within its online application.

The new Salesforce Rypple basically achieves the same goals, except within Salesforce’s interface and with more integrations with platforms like Chatter. Basically employees and administrators can set goals, manage objectives, and provide feedback and recognition all from within their employee social network.

What makes Salesforce Rypple unique is that Salesforce customers will be able to motivate their teams by giving them Thanks directly from within Salesforce on leads, accounts and more. For example, a salesperson will able to give Thanks to a customer service agent for providing great service to a customer, or a sales manager will be able to give Thanks to a sales rep for closing a deal. These Thanks will appear in a person's Chatter (Salesforce’s social network) feed. And all recognition a person receives will become part of their social profile in Salesforce.

Managers and teams will also be able to create custom badges to recognize team and individual achievements. Appearing in the Chatter feed, these actions can be seen my other employees, commented on, or liked.

Salesforce Rypple, which is available today, starts at $5 per user, per month. Salesforce says that already, Facebook, LivingSocial and Spotify are using Salesforce Rypple.

As Salesforce’s John Wookey explains to us, the company decided against rebranding Rypple after hearing that customers identified with talent management platform’s brand.

Site.com

The company is debuting Site.com as a simple way for marketers to manage content across websites, portals, landing pages, public social networks like Facebook as well as mobile sites. Salesforce says the new platform is built for the social enterprise, allowing users to create content once and publish it in seconds across a company's corporate sites, landing pages and to Facebook.

From a data integration standpoint, Salesforce Site.com integrates into existing Salesforce environments including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Force.com custom apps and Database.com. So users will be able to pull information from these other products into the CRM.

As Salesforce’s Mike Rosenbaum says, Site.com was launched to allow marketers to create websites create once and publish anywhere. And it’s simple to use so that users with non-technical background can publish and update sites without having to learn HTML or other programming languages.

Site.com users can access templates to create sites, drag and drop forms, and collaboration with Chatter. Site.com users can connect with R&D, sales, Web developers and even external entities such as creative agencies and design firms using Chatter. Site.com also allows users to localize and publish websites and content in multiple languages, and publish HTML mobile sites.

Companies such as FICO, The Häagen-Dazs Shoppe Company and Hewlett-Packard are already publishing sites using Site.com.

"Salesforce.com is seeing unstoppable demand for the social enterprise as companies see their customers and employees become more social and mobile by the day," said CEO and founder Marc Benioff. "With Salesforce Rypple and Salesforce Site.com, we're excited that companies will now be able to extend their social enterprise to reach every employee and every customer."

Site.com charges per site and per website developer user. The price of a site is $1,500 per month. Salesforce Site.com can be purchased stand-alone or added to existing salesforce.com installations. Publisher and contributor users are an additional $125 and $20, respectively, per month.

Salesforce has added a number of new products to its SaaS family of late. The company recently launched a help desk SaaS for small businesses, Desk.com and a task management app Do.com.

Another sign of the significant investment and attention going into the mobile payments market and the competition that is heating up among the bigger players: BOKU is today announcing a significant new round of funding totaling $35 million, to be used to continue building out its payments business.

Of that amount, TechCrunch understands that $30 million will be coming from VCs and angels led by new investor NEA, with participation also from existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Dag Ventures, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. And $5 million will be coming from a new strategic investor, the carrier Telefonica.

This brings the total amount invested in the company to $75 million. Previous rounds saw BOKU raise $13 million in June 2009 and $25 million in December 2009.

The new funding will be used to help build out BOKU’s new products beyond the virtual goods business that has been its bread and butter up to now. That includes services along the lines of a new NFC payments system BOKU announced last month with MasterCard, which will see the company move into enabling purchases of physical goods.

Before today, BOKU already had an extensive business in the mobile payments space. It currently works in 66 countries and with 40 currencies, and has deals with more than 250 carriers covering some 3.2 billion consumers. While it does not disclose exact revenue figures, BOKU says it processes “hundreds of millions of dollars in mobile payments.”

Building up that scale, and its customer base, are significant mandates for BOKU as the mobile payments market continues to grow — and competitors continue to crop up. PayPal just this week announced a new mobile wallet service; Google is making further inroads into how its Wallet works across its spectrum of services, and companies like Square continue to add new ways to use its little dongle to pay for this (the latest: taxis). And companies like Bango, enabling payments for existing BOKU customers like Facebook, perhaps hit closer to home.

Meanwhile, the explosion in smartphone use has driven a lot of consumers to become more amenable to the idea of using their devices to pay for things, not just mobile content but goods in the world beyond the device.

As for the strategic investor, it makes sense that of all the companies that would make a strategic investment in a company like BOKU, it is Telefonica.

The two have been working together since August 2011, when BOKU signed a deal to provide backend mobile payments services for Telefonica’s in-house API program, BlueVia, to create apps for Telefonica’s 231-million subscriber base across Europe and Latin America (nearly 300 million counting fixed-line customers). That deal gave developers the ability to integrate carrier billing directly into their apps.

That relationship will now extend to BOKU becoming the preferred payment provider a mobile wallet service that Telefonica is currently preparing to roll out across the whole of its footprint. That will include access to BOKU's merchant network and the ability to make both online and offline payments, and enhancements to Telefonica’s carrier billing service.

Telefonica says that the first of its mobile wallet services will be coming out in the first half of this year.

BOKU’s co-founder and president, Ron Hirson, tells me that the Telefonica investment will not mean exclusivity for the carrier: “It's the first investment from a carrier, yes, but because we are a platform for billing, there is no exclusivity in what we do,” he said. “We welcome as many folks into the fold as possible.”

Indeed, the company continues to work with Facebook — it processes payments for Facebook Credits via mobile devices — and other carriers like Vodafone for its carrier billing service.

Telefonica has made a number of strategic investments over the years, including, most recently, participation in an $85 milion round of funding for cloud computing company Joyent, and it has lately also established a European incubator program called Wayra.

China is already a significant market for companies like Apple, with CEO Tim Cook describing “staggering” and “off the charts” sales of the iPhone in China last quarter. But according to IDC the opportunity is just beginning for Apple and others working in the smartphone world: China is set to become the world’s largest smartphone market this year, overtaking the U.S., which has led in years past.

IDC says this is part of a larger trend of emerging countries getting up to speed with developed nations: by 2016, China will be joined by Brazil and India in the top-five countries in terms of smartphone shipments. Countries like the U.S., U.K. and Japan will continue to see growth, but not at the rate of these other, more populated countries.

The growth of China is something that IDC had already started to track in 2011: China had already overtaken the U.S. in terms of shipments in the last two quarters of that year, it said today.

The shift raises questions about pricing and what we might expect in these devices as they roll out to bigger markets.

IDC notes that so far, in China, it has been the rush of sub-$200 Android devices that have benefited most from the surge in smartphone demand. But it believes that the trend will be for smartphones to cost less than $50.

The big names so far have been domestic handset makers like Huawei, ZTE, and Lenovo, but Samsung and Nokia (which had once led the smartphone market in China before the Android onslaught) are also playing a part with the launch of cheap devices. Nokia’s first Windows Phone handset China — one of its less expensive Lumia devices — is expected to launch by the end of this month.

That drive for domestic handset makers is not only being played out in China. In India, names like Micromax, Spice, Karbonn and Lava — also developing low-cost devices — are trying to set the agenda for what consumers demand and expect out of their smartphones. However, up to now more global brands like HTC and Samsung have been leading the pack.

Brazil, meanwhile, seems to be facing a still-high cost for devices, and it is only this year that average prices have come down to below $300 for a smartphone. Whether Apple chooses to try to create devices to better target users in markets like this one, rather than continue to aim for the high-end consumer, still remains to be seen.

IDC notes that it will not just be about cheap devices, however: it says that carriers will have to step up with innovative data plans, and probable handset subsidies, to get people using smartphones to their full effect.

Some good headway seems to already have been made in that area in some emerging markets:

Some statistics out yesterday from OnDevice Research found that in China, some 38 percent of consumers are only accessing the Internet from their mobile devices. In comparison, countries like the UK registered at 25 percent; while countries with less fixed infrastructure registered with even higher percentages: Nigeria’s figure was 56 percent, and Kenya’s was 51 percent. In effect, that means the opportunity is there not just for device makers, but for carriers and the many companies developing content as well.