Imgur has built a massive audience for the sometimes amusing, sometimes adorable images and memes that it hosts. Now it faces another challenge: Making money.

With 2 billion monthly page views, advertising seems like an obvious business plan. The problem, says CEO Alan Schaaf, is that “the Imgur audience has always hated ads.” So yes, the company runs a banner ad on each page, but the audience probably sees it as a necessary evil. They probably won’t be happy with a second ad, Schaaf says, so a different approach was needed.

That was the impetus for a new ad that’s running today, prepared by creative agency Mekanism for Brisk iced tea. Instead of just running another ad, Mekanism and Brisk created an image that borrows from the Scumbag Steve meme. It looks pretty similar to other Scumbag Steve images, with a photo of Steve accompanied by a dick-ish message — except this time, the message is promoting Brisk (you can see the ad above). Mekanism even got approval from the “real” Scumbag Steve (i.e., Blake Boston, the guy in the photo) to use the picture.

This is going to be Imgur’s first experiment with a new Promoted Image ad unit, where the Brisk ad will be featured in Imgur’s image gallery. The hope is to run campaigns that don’t feel like ads to the Imgur community, but rather just other pieces of content. And even though it may look like a whipped together image, Mekanism Brendan Gahan’s says the look and message was carefully considered, going through round after round of revisions.

The edginess of user-generated content sites can sometimes scare brand advertisers away, but Chris Oates, who manages the Brisk brand for owner PepsiCo, says this kind of ad made sense, since meme-style content seems to resonate with Brisk fans. Schaff admits that there’s some controversial or offensive content on the site, but he says Imgur works hard to make sure that the images featured in the gallery are advertiser-friendly.

“Most viral content is not offensive content, it’s not pornography,” he says. “It’s really good, quality content.”

Brisk plans to follow the Scumbag Steve ad with another ad, with a new meme, in a few weeks.

Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg took the stage today at Disrupt, he laid out a grand vision for the site. Backing up that vision, he noted that Fab launched less than a year ago, and it already has 4.5 million members.

“That’s not an e-commerce site, that’s a movement,” he said.

If Fab.com is a movement, what are its goals? That goes back to the site’s beginnings, when the company was still working on gay social network Fabulis. “We just couldn’t get enough people to use it,” Goldberg said (it had about 150,000 users), so he and his co-founders sat down to discuss a new direction. He recalled drawing circles on a napkin showing their passions, the untapped opportunities, and what the team could be “best in the world at.” Those circles intersected in one area: Design.

And “everything design” is what Goldberg wants Fab to be known for. More concretely, he says that if you know exactly what you want, you should probably go to Amazon.com. But if you think, “I need a lamp,” or “I need jewelry,” and you don’t have a specific product in mind, Fab should be your first stop for “discovering things I didn’t know existed.”

As for turning that mission into a big business, Alexia Tsotsis, who was interviewing Goldberg, said she’d heard that Fab is raising a nine-figure round that values the company in the billions of dollars. Goldberg didn’t deny it, but he said he wasn’t going to “comment on a fundraising round that we haven’t closed.” He also said he doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about valuation.

Goldberg added that he doesn’t care whether Fab makes $100 million or $200 million in revenue this year, because it’s all about “building a brand” around design: “We care more about making people smile than making money from them.”

He also talked about Fab’s recent redesign, which downplayed the flash sales angle in favor of social shopping.

“From day one, we never said Fab is a flash sale site,” Goldberg said. “We said Fab is design.”

Alexia compared the redesign to Pinterest. She meant that in a complimentary way, while also asking: What happens to Fab is if Pinterest starts to compete on the shopping front? Goldberg replied that he doesn’t use Pinterest regularly (he tried it out), but argued that the two products might be complementary: “We’d like to work with them.”

In very sad news, Michael Moritz, who has helped lead top-tier venture firm Sequoia Capital through the very beginnings of the web until now, is stepping back because of an incurable disease. His firm has backed many of the home runs of the last two decades including Google, Yahoo and PayPal.

He’ll still be involved in Sequoia, but less so in the day-to-day workings of the firm. Moritz is a journalist-turned-investor who chronicled the beginnings of Apple for Time Magazine and in his book, “The Little Kingdom: the Private Story of Apple Computer.” Not long after, he crossed over into investing and shepherded Sequoia through some of the biggest seismic shifts in the technology industry over the last two decades. He got the firm into the initial $25 million venture investment into Google back in 1999. He has also seen its expansion overseas into Israel and China.

This is a huge shift for one of the Valley’s most storied firms. Sequoia will be looking to its next generation of venture investors including Doug Leone, PayPal mafia member Roelof Botha, Bryan Schreier, who sits on Dropbox’s board, and Neil Shen, who represents Sequoia in China to lead it forward.

Attached is a letter he sent to limited partners this morning:

Dear …,

We have always tried to be straightforward with you and, in that spirt, I need to share something. Unfortunately, I have been diagnosed with a rare medical condition which can be managed but is incurable.  I’ve been told that in the next five to ten years the quality of my life is quite likely to decline.  Right now I feel fitter than ever and I hope that I’ll be one of the lucky ones who can live a full life and defy the statisticians.  But there is no way of predicting this with certainty and thus for me, life has assumed a different meaning and I am making some adjustments.

I am going to extract myself from the daily management of Sequoia Capital, a task that has consumed a large part of my time for the past sixteen years.  I will become Chairman of Sequoia Capital and will be deeply involved with nurturing the fresh investments, ideas and relationships that can be of significant long-term benefit for all of us.  I will also work very closely with some of our younger and newer members, will continue my role as Managing Member of existing funds and maintain all my current company responsibilities.  I will use twelve to fourteen weeks – sprinkled throughout the course of each year – for various pursuits, diversions and trivial indulgences.

Nothing about this should cause much of a change because everything that has been achieved at Sequoia Capital has resulted from the teamwork and contribution of many people.   Our overall business is in the best shape it has ever been and we are better positioned than at any time in our forty year history.  Doug Leone will assume full responsibility for coordinating the business we have gradually developed over the past couple of decades and almost everything else remains entirely the same.

Thanks for your support,

Michael Moritz

About.Me is set to get a bit more social. The AOL-owned property just released a public API and SDK into the wild in partnership with Reputation.com, Smarterer, Forkly, Kred and Showyou. While the online profile site already worked with most popular social platforms, today’s announcement is huge for both about.me and their legions of users. Plus, for attendees of Disrupt NYC this week, the company is celebrating the news by having a professional photographer on hand to help create free killer profile pics.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. About.me collects a user’s various online identifies and puts them in a single (and beautiful) location. Think of it a splash page for your identity online. Instead of directing people to various locations like LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram, the idea is to just send them to your about.me page, which neatly collates the rest of your accounts. Here’s mine. I think it’s lovely and only took about five minutes to make.

Today’s news makes the first time that about.me has opened up for outside development. Tony Conrad, Ryan Freitas and Tim Young launched the company in 2010, which was then acquired by AOL, TechCrunch’s parent company, a mere four days later. Since then, the company had reserved its API for internal use only.

The company foresees its API to be used as an alternative to the traditionally painful task of creating user profiles. For example, if a particular service implements this system, with just one click, the profile will be created automatically from pulling the info from about.me. With the SDK, platforms can add their badge to about.me’s profile pages. As about.me’s Ryan Fuiji explained to me at Disrupt, Smarterer, a launch partner, will integrate test scores on the about.me badge and Kred will display their influence data as well.

But there’s still a fundamental problem with the gorgeous about.me layouts: A lot of potential users might not have access to a high-quality user profile images. I only have the one. Thankfully it shows my good side. However, for attendees of Disrupt NYC 2012, about.me is here to help. The company hired a professional photographer that will be around the show Monday through Wednesday. Stop by and get a great looking pic for your about.me profile page.

Google got the chance to buy Twitter, but the search giant passed, says Michael Arrington. “Google hasn't been interested in buying Twitter since they committed themselves to Google+" says Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures founder and former Twitter board member, in his fireside chat this morning with Arrington at the TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference. Now Google+ is widely seen as a ghost town, and not buying Twitter could be a mistake that haunts Mountain View for years to come.

Wilson has one of the most envied portfolios in venture capital, with Union Square Ventures getting in early on Twitter, Zynga, Etsy, and Tumblr. But the future might not be as bright. “I don’t think I’m going to be very good at investing in the next big thing. I don’t come from it. I didn’t work in it. The next thing isn’t going to be evolutionary. It’s going to be something completely different.”

Arrington poked Wilson about writing “Silicon Valley could become the next Detroit” in a recent AVC blog post. Wilson explains “I didn’t mean to say [that]. Silicon Valley is the center of the digital revolution. But if there’s another revolution, [like] the teleportation revolution, and teleportation is invented in Mumbai, Silicon Valley might not be the locus of the next big thing.”

Google Lost The Flock

On the war for the future of social, Arrington asked “Do you think Facebook is overvalued?” Despite the newly public company’s share price dropping over 10% from its Friday close price, Wilson defend Mark Zuckerberg’s creation. “Markets come and go, good companies survive. The price of Facebook stock is not that important. Mark built an incredible platform and organization. I don’t think it matters that much if it’s trading at $25 or $50.” But Arrington pressed “is it going to be a half-trillion dollar company?” Wilson admitted “They’re going to have to grow into that.”

Google had a big opportunity to compete with Facebook, but that's passed. Arrington cites a rumor that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo took the company to Google saying it was raising this big a round at this valuation, and gave the search giant a chance to acquire Twitter, but  "Google pooh-poohed it". After the chat, Arrington told me this was when Twitter ended up raising $200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation, so the price Google would have had to pay could have been around there.

Wilson, who’s Twitter investment and former board seat must have made him familiar with the discussion, said Google decided to build social, and hasn’t considered buying something as big as Twitter in the space ever since. Google+ is off to a slow start, at least in terms of people actually using it, not just signing up. But Twitter might not have been the right fit. Google needed a social layer that could integrate into all its product, not just a micro-blogging platform. Still, Google is now a distant third in social, and Twitter’s off the table. Wilson says Twitter’s founders and board are now deadset on it staying independent.

What’s The Value Of Angels?

“I’ve never seen angels being lazy” says Wilson , refuting Ben Horowitz’s claim that angel investors make too much money for too little work. Wilson released a flood of insights into Facebook’s valuation, and the future of Silicon Valley

“Venture capital is not the most risk-taking part of the equation. We wait until things are more developed” says Wilson. He trusts angels and the early legwork and diligence they do. “I don’t know where ‘lazy’ comes from. They’re probably the most important part of the capital stack because they believe in entrepreneurs before VCs do.”

[Image Credit: Joi Ito]

In late 2010, the European Commission launched an investigation into allegations that Google was abusing its dominant position in the search engine market. Today, Joaquín Almunia, the vice president of the European Commission responsible for competition policy, sent a letter to Google chairman Eric Schmidt with an update about its finding. The Commission, writes Almunia, identified four specific concerns that Google needs to address quickly to avoid formal antitrust charges. In the letter to Schmidt, Almunia offers “Google the possibility to come up in a matter of weeks with first proposals of remedies to address each of these points.”

Specifically, the European Commission is concerned about Google linking “differently” to its own vertical services, “which focus on specific topics, such as for example restaurants, news or products.” Google is, says the EU, giving preferential treatment to its own services compared to those of its competitors.

The Commission also “worries” about how Google “copies content from competing vertical search services and uses it in its own offerings.” This, Almunia says, could stifle innovation in the long run, as it could reduce competitors’ incentives to create their own original content.

As for Google’s advertising business, the Commission worries that Google is “shutting out competing providers of search advertising intermediation services” and is making it too hard for advertisers to port their campaigns to other services. The Commission seems to be especially concerned about Google shutting out intermediate service providers that could offer services around Google’s AdWords platform.

Almunia told Google that it has a few weeks to come up with proposals for remedies that will address these concerns. This way, Google could avoid a full-blown Microsoft-like antitrust case.

Google says that it disagrees with the EU’s findings, but that it is “happy to discuss any concerns they might have.”

After months of prepping, countless run-throughs and all nighters, it’s time to get this party started. Welcome to TechCrunch Disrupt New York City 2012. I have a feeling this is going to be the best one to date.

Follow the team’s coverage here. If you’re unable to attend don’t worry, you can join the conversation on Twitter by following #TCDisrupt.

So here’s how the day breaks down:

Monday, May 21st

8:50am – 9:00am
Register for TechCrunch TechRecs

9:00am – 9:10am
Opening Remarks

9:10am – 9:20am
Welcome

9:20am – 9:40am
Fireside Chat with Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures)

9:40am – 10:00am
Founders Stories with Jason Goldberg (Fab)

10:00am – 10:30am
Building the NY Startup Ecosystem: Brooke Hammerling (BrewPR), Josh Miller (Branch), Alexis Ohanian (Y Combinator), David Tisch (Tech Stars), Jake Schwartz (General Assembly),

10:30am – 10:35am
A Special Product Announcement

10:35am – 10:50am
BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY

10:50am – 11:15am
When Will Fashion Tech Just Be Fashion?: Neil Blumenthal (Warby Parker), Ashley Granata (Fashism), Jennifer Hyman (Rent the Runway), Alexis Maybank (Gilt Groupe)

11:15am – 11:35am
Power Play with Tom Katis (Voxer)

11:35am – 11:55am
Fireside Chat with David Karp (Tumblr)

11:55am – 12:15pm
Fireside Chat with Brad Garlinghouse (YouSendIt)

12:15pm – 12:30pm
Power Play with Andrew Keen

12:30pm – 2:00pm
LUNCH and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY

2:00pm – 2:25pm
Engineering on the Best Coast with Harry Heyman (Foursquare), Jason Pearlman (Zynga), Serkan Piantino (Facebook)

2:25pm – 2:30pm
How the Battlefield Works

2:30pm – 3:30pm
Startup Battlefield: Session 1: Disrupting Learning and Decision Making

Judges:
Josh Kopelman
David Lee
David Tisch
Spencer Wang

3:30pm – 3:45pm
BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY

3:45pm – 4:45pm
Startup Battlefield: Session 2: Disrupting Processes

Judges:
Adrian Aoun
Fritz Lanman
Dave Samuel
Michelle Zatlyn

4:45pm – 5:00pm
BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY

5:00pm – 6:00pm
Startup Battlefield: Session 3: Disrupting Media

Judges:
Chris Fralic
Shana Fisher
MC Hammer
Ron Palmeri

6:00pm – 7:30pm
Browse Startup Alley

9:00pm – midnight
After Party hosted by Getaround
Greenhouse
150 Varick Street
Conference badge required for admission

Well, it’s official. Or at least it’s official if you believe in StatCounter’s data. Google’s Chrome web browser has overtaken Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. For real this time. Maybe. The stat-counting firm compiled data for the week of May 14th through May 20th, showing that Chrome had a market share of 32.76%, compared with IE’s 31.94%. This isn’t the first time that Chrome has gotten ahead, however. And the race itself is close – perhaps too close to call.

At the start of this week, Chrome dipped back down to 31.88% market share, which was only a bit ahead of IE’s 31.47%. There’s also the big concern regarding StatCounter’s data. As Microsoft (of course) has pointed out before, these aren’t necessarily numbers you can take to the bank. Last month, when Chrome briefly won the weekend battle, Microsoft downright ranted about the quality of StatCounter’s data on its official blog. (It appeared, at the time, that Chrome usage surged on weekends, proving that users liked Chrome better when they had a choice – outside of I.T. control at work, that is).

Microsoft noted that StatCounter doesn't adjust for pre-rendering (loading pages in the background which the user never sees and may never even click on), nor does it "geoweight" the data to paint a more accurate picture of worldwide usage. Instead, with StatCounter, it's just raw data. Microsoft also said that if browser share had been weighted appropriately, it wouldn't have been such a close race.

But StatCounter says that, as of May 1st, it has been adjusting its browser stats to remove the effect of pre-rendering in Google Chrome. From that point on, pre-rendered pages (which are not actually viewed) have not included in its stats. Say what now, Microsoft?

While those discrepancies are notable, it’s still worth mentioning that IE's share has been steadily dropping for some time. StatCounter may just be the canary in the coal mine indicting the bigger shift ahead.

via GlobalNerdy

Lately we’ve seen the rise of e-commerce and online retailer stertups disrupting the relationship between distributors and the consumer. Etsy comes to mind of course. Meanwhile, Made.com in the UK is leading the charge, and lately Llustre (also UK) has hit on a model of re-connecting designers with consumers.

That trend continues today as Urbanara, an online retailer for “high quality home textiles and home wares” supplied direct from the people who make them, secures a significant funding round. TA Venture, together with a group of international investors, including Blumberg Capital and Brain-to-Ventures, has participated in a €3.5 million series A investment round in the startup.

Urbanara cuts out the usual costs such as wholesaler margins and warehousing that traditional retailers add on. Originally launched in Germany and Austria last year, Urbanara has broken out to offices in Shanghai and Berlin and now services the UK.

TA Venture has a $50 million venture capital fund focusing on seed-stage and early-stage Web companies in Ukraine, Russia and other CIS countries (former Soviet states).

Google has reached the final regulatory hurdle to its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility, with China approving the transaction over the weekend, and today Motorola Mobility filed an 8-K form that notes that it will close in the next two business days.

So what happens next? A "listening tour," a source tells us, with new management visiting the whole of the operation, "seeing what everyone does, then making decisions." One decision that may be close at hand has to do with headcount: we have heard that there will be layoffs coming imminently. At the same time, more details are emerging about the conditions that China put on the deal: they include a guarantee that Android would remain free and open source for the next five years.

Motorola’s statement today noted that the approval from the Anti-Monopoly Bureau of the Ministry of Commerce of China came on May 19, 2012, as we reported earlier.  ”As the transaction has now received all required regulatory approvals, the companies are moving to close the transaction within two business days,” it notes.

However, there is a precedent. When Google bought DoubleClick, which had a mere 1,600 employees, it had a mandate to cut 40 percent of that staff. Motorola Mobility, at the time of the Google acquisition announcement last year, had 19,000 employees. It has, however, been going through restructuring already that has been reducing that number, laying off 800 people at the end of October 2011. At the time, Motorola said this was part of a wider restructuring not related to the Google deal but ongoing cost-cutting plans.

Motorola and Google have not confirmed who will be heading up its Motorola operations. In February, Google put its head of Americas, Dennis Woodside, to oversee the merger, and so he is being tipped to head the whole operation after the deal closes, although others have tipped Nikesh Arora, Google’s Chief Business Officer, to lead the operation.

China’s approval of the deal and the inclusion of the Android guarantee points to how central that operating system has become to Chinese smartphone market. In both official Android and forked forms, it has become the most popular platform — in part because its free licensing allows for companies to make devices as cheap as possible.

Comcast announced Monday that it will make its newest set-top box available in Boston over the coming weeks, with a rollout planned across the entire country later this year. It’s also introducing a mobile app to control the set-top box from the iPhone or iPad.

The new set-top box comes after several years of development. Comcast has been working hard to develop a new set-top box that would take all of the smarts out of the box and put it in the network, essentially allowing the cable provider to launch new services and update the new features without having to totally rewrite applications or push out new firmware.

With the X1, all the processing is done in the network. That will give Comcast the flexibility to quickly test and create new apps for customers, without having to worry about how outdated its set-top boxes are. It will also provide more personalized features, such as allowing customers to see which shows their Facebook friends are watching.

The new X1 iOS app will improve navigation on the set-top box, allowing subscribers to use the virtual keyboard to search through all the live and on-demand channels more efficiently than using a traditional remote control. Users can also filter by genre and interact with other social media apps.

Anyway, here’s how cool I think this thing is: I haven’t been a cable subscriber for at least a year and a half, but I might just have to sign up again, just to try out the X1. So bring this thing to San Francisco, Comcast, and I’ll pay for cable TV again.

This morning AnchorFree, the makers of the popular virtual private network Hotspot Shield, is announcing that it has raised $52 million in series C financing from Goldman Sachs. All in all, this brings the Mountain View-based startup to over $63 million, following the $11 million the company raised in series A and B rounds, dating back to 2006.

As part of its whopping series C round, Goldman is joined by existing investors former chairman and CEO of MCI Bert Roberts, RENN Capital President Russell Cleveland, angel investor Esther Dyson, former president of the Huffington Post Greg Coleman, Doug Maine, the former CFO of IBM, Rick Roth, and Kevin Cook, to name a few.

For those unfamiliar, AnchorFree was founded back in 2005 with a simple mission: Provide secure, anonymous, and private browsing to internet users the world over. Over the years, the company has become best known for its flagship software, Hotspot Shield, an ad-supported virtual private network (VPN), which enables users to protect their privacy and identity while surfing the Web.

Securing each page one visits by turning all HTTP traffic into HTTPS, creates what is essentially a personal, secure tunnel for each user, allowing activity, sites visited, and personally identifiable information, for example, to stay private.

The software, which is available for PC, mac, and on mobile platforms, has also become widely used in regions and countries that censor web activity, as Hotspot enables users (both for those traveling abroad and for locals living amidst censorship) to circumvent that censorship and gain free, uninterrupted access to information.

Hotspot has become one of the most popular security tools for public WiFi hotspots, having been downloaded by more than 60 million people across the globe. Since being released 6 months ago, its iOS apps have crossed 1 million users, and Hotspot is tracking over 100 million monthly user sessions and more than two billion page views per month.

Hotspot has become increasingly relevant in countries where government tracking and crackdowns have become the norm, like when Libya flipped its kill switch last year, taking the entire country offline. The software offered the world a better sense of the breadth of that government intervention, and has become increasingly appealing to both first and third worlders accessing public hotspots.

For those using AnchorFree’s mobile apps, Hotspot also offers data compression, allowing users to decide between low, medium, or high compression — especially relevant to image quality — to help users save money on mobile data plans. (AnchorFree claims that it can help users cut data usage by as much as half.)

As to Goldman Sachs, the investment bank has been busy of late, dumping $500 million into Facebook as well as a more recent $35 investment in BeachMint, the popular social commerce startup.

For more on AnchorFree, check ‘em out at home here.

Xfire, which offers social networking tools for gamers, just announced that it has raised $3 million in new funding.

The round was led by Singapore-based IDM Venture Capital. It’s apparently targeted specifically at expanding Xfire’s presence in Asia — the company recently announced that it’s partnering with China Youth Goyor Technology company to bring its services into the Chinese market.

The company’s services include a gamer profile, in-game voice and instant messaging, and live broadcasting. It has changed hands several times in the past few years, getting acquired by Viacom in 2006, then by Titan Gaming in 2010. Xfire became independent again last fall. At that time it also raised $4 million from Intel Capital and others.

Xfire says this funding will probably be part of a larger round.

This is kind of handy – and just in time for TechCrunch Disrupt. The team at Lemon Labs just launched a new app called “Hashtag App,” which lets you follow Twitter hashtags on your iPhone or iPad. But there are a bunch of apps for that, including Twitter itself, you say? Very true. That’s why Hashtag App kicks things up a notch and supports Instagram hashtags as well. Fun!

The app was designed for events and conferences (like #tcdisrupt, of course). However, you can use it to follow any hashtag of interest – not just those related to an event. Another nice thing about the app is that you don’t have to login to either Twitter or Instagram to use it. You just launch the app, enter a hashtag and go. The app uses the conventional “pull-to-refresh” feature, allowing you to update your hashtag-filled stream whenever you choose. It would be nice if there was a real-time option, like Streamboard, though. (Maybe in a later version?) When you want to change hashtags, you just click the “X” to head back to the homescreen. Nice. I’m going to give it a go today from Disrupt and see how it holds up.

The app creators are Lemon Labs, a self-described “funky app production house” working in startup mode from Vilnius, Lithuania, of all places. They presented the prototype last month at a tech startups conference for the most promising entrepreneurs of the Baltics and Scandinavia. The app’s creators include Monika Katkute, Mindaugas Kuprionis, Marius Kazemekaitis, and Jonas Lekevicius.

Katkute says they have not received outside funding, as the company has generated revenue from commercial projects they’ve done before. However, they’re currently talking to potential investors in the Nordics.

You can grab the app from iTunes here.

Google always pitched Google Drive, which launched in April after a considerable period of hype, as a replacement for Google Docs. What many users didn’t realize, it seems, is that Google will indeed completely replace Google Docs with Drive later this year. While Drive is still opt-in at this time, it looks like the forced transition is coming soon, as Google has started to alert users that their Google Docs account will soon be “upgraded to Google Drive.”

What’s coming next, according to Google’s official transition documents, is an opt-out phase similar to what the company has done when it transitioned to the new Gmail interface recently. Judging from the messages that many users are now seeing in Google Docs, this phase is going to start soon.

Finally, Google says, “users will be fully transitioned to Google Drive, with no ability to opt out.” Overall, Google expects the transition from what it calls the “Google Documents List” to Google Drive by late summer 2012.

Given that Google Drive is essentially an upgrade to Google Docs with more storage and functionality, chances are most users won’t mind the transition. Unlike the rather controversial Gmail design changes lately (and Google’s move to add Google+ to each and every one of its products), Google Drive is generally perceived to be a genuine upgrade to Docs. Still, there will always be a contingent of users who would prefer the status quo.

Facebook shares dropped nearly 12 percent to $33.76 — below the company’s final $38 price in the company’s highly anticipated initial public offering last week. Today is an interesting test for Facebook’s worth because the company’s shares will no longer be supported by the IPO’s lead underwriter Morgan Stanley.

Facebook’s performance today may further stoke the debate over whether its IPO was priced well. To save face on Friday, Morgan Stanley had to step in to make sure that Facebook shares didn’t close below their opening price. There were also irregularities in trading on NASDAQ as some buyers had to wait hours to know whether their orders had been filled. The company’s market cap is now around $92.7 billion, down from the $104 billion valuation the company opened with last week.

That said, the real test will be over the long haul. Can Facebook prove its worth over the many years to come with more display ad and payments revenue? At Friday’s closing market cap of $104.8 billion, Facebook is worth more than one hundred times last year’s net income. Plus its revenue dipped quarter-over-quarter for the first time in the beginning of this year.

Over the weekend, there was a raging debate about whether the banks underwriting Facebook’s IPO pushed the offer price too high to $38. The financial press including The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg (and yes, even some earlier reporting from me on TechCrunch) focused on the fact that Morgan Stanley had to support Facebook’s shares above the $38 line.

Fortune’s Dan Primack and others VC’s like Benchmark’s Bill Gurley and the guest post on TechCrunch this morning from Trinity’s Dan Scholnick argue that the IPO went off fantastically well for Facebook. Because shares didn’t pop dramatically higher than the $38 offer price, it’s a sign that the company got the most capital it could out of the IPO and didn’t leave any money on the table. They also savvily negotiated the underwriters’ fees down to about 1 percent.

These are all essentially shades of gray. Facebook’s performance today will be fascinating to watch. But again, it’s just one day in the long life of a company. It’s up to Facebook to show that it is worth a lot more.

That’s a sentiment that was echoed by Union Square Ventures’ managing partner Fred Wilson this morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. He said, “The price of Facebook isn’t that important. Mark built an incredible organization. I don’t care whether it’s trading at $25 or 35.”

Facebook’s performance is probably affecting tech stocks across the board. This morning, Zynga’s shares are off 7 percent to $6.65 and LinkedIn is down 6.4 percent to $92.65.

Hulu announced a new slate of original and exclusive programming Monday morning, as the video site ventures further into creating its own content. For Hulu, it’s a way to begin controlling its own destiny and distinguishing itself from all the content produced by parents and part-owners Fox, NBC and Disney.

For its originals, Hulu is teaming up with Hollywood big shots like Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater. Smith will work on a show called Spoilers, which will invite movie fans to discuss all the biggest movies being released. Linklater’s Up To Speed is a travel show built around Speed Levitch (you might remember him from Linklater’s Waking Life, if you’re into that sort of thing) and his travels around the world. And We Got Next, a bro-mantic comedy set in a basketball gym? Ok, maybe I’m kind of interested.

That’s it for the originals… Hulu is also getting an exclusive set of series that were produced by others. Its summer exclusives include:

• Rev. – Follows the Rev. Adam Smallbone, who moved from a sleepy, rural parish to the busy, inner-city world of St. Saviour’s in East London.
• The Yard – A mockumentary miniseries that juxtaposes two rival cliques of elementary school children. Originally appeared on HBO Canada.
• Derren Brown: Inside Your Mind – Follows Derren Brown, a performer who uses psychology, magic, showmanship and suggestion to mess with people.
• The Booth at the End – All about an enigmatic character played by Xander Berkeley, who occupies the corner booth of a diner. Riveting.
• Pramface – Follows the lives of Jamie and Laura, two young, free and single teenagers who hook up at a party and end up getting Laura pregnant. Like Knocked Up for teenagers.
• The Promise – A four-part political thriller and love story that examines the origins of the Middle East conflict in events that took place under British rule sixty years ago.
• Little Mosque – A light-hearted, comedic fish-out-of-water tale about a small Muslim community that rents the parish hall of a small town church to use as a mosque.

The new original and exclusive programming will debut during the summer, a time when TV programming from the broadcast networks begins to slow down. That might be able to help Hulu, which tends to see a seasonal dip in viewership.

Of course, Hulu isn’t the only one signing up new original content and exclusive access to series online. Netflix also is making a big push for original content with series from the likes of David Fincher, horror master Eli Roth, Weeds creator Jenji Kohan, and the triumphant return of Arrested Development. YouTube is also spending more than $100 million on about 100 channels of new, original programming. Yahoo and AOL have also announced their own slates of original programming, hoping to cash in on growing interest for streaming video.

Apple’s Siri has been transforming how people interact with their phones. It taught us that it’s not just OK to talk to our phones, but that, in many cases, it’s actually a more useful way to get things done. Along those same lines, a company called Saygent is launching a mobile feedback solution which developers can insert into their application to collect feedback from the app’s users. Available as an SDK for easy integration, the toolkit can be used within any type of application. But Saygent is specifically targeting the emerging mobile wallet space to start.

The idea with mSay, as it’s being called, is that mobile wallet providers (think, companies like Visa, MasterCard, Google Wallet, Intuit, etc.) could use Saygent’s solution to collect instant feedback about the merchant immediately following a mobile payment/mobile wallet transaction.

The app’s developers – that is, the mobile wallet providers – can integrate the mSay in-app voice feedback solution into their app and then configure the types of questions the app would prompt users to answer, as well as when and where they would appear (e.g., pre- or post-checkout, on a product page, etc.). Some app makers may also want to make it so that consumers can launch the feedback option at any time.

In a real-world scenario, you can imagine how a consumer might launch the app to give feedback about the service at a restaurant, or tell a clothing retailer that they were unable to find a dress in the right size or color. Or maybe they just had trouble using the app itself, and had run into bugs.

“All they have to do is push a button and talk to the app, like they’re using Siri, and say whatever’s on their mind,” says Saygent creator Guy Hirsch. “And then our technology collects that feedback and analyzes it.”

The interesting thing about Saygent’s solution, explains Hirsch, is that on the backend, the system can process the feedback, including what was said as well as the sentiment behind the words (angry, happy, etc.) and then route that response to the correct department for handling. That means a bug report or feature request about the mobile wallet may be directed to the app’s dev team or product manger, but a customer’s response would be sent over to the merchant instead. In addition to routing the voice messages appropriately, the system also provides metrics surrounding what customers are saying.

Hirsch says mobile wallets are the perfect venue for the mSay technology. “We know you just purchased something,” he says, “so you might have something to say. And it’s critical for merchants and retailers to know that in near real-time, so if you had an issue they could take care of it right away.”

(You know, before you post how pissed off you are on Twitter and Facebook.)

The company is currently in talks with several mobile wallet makers now and plans to announce partnerships soon. Although Hirsch couldn’t disclose more details, it would make sense that one potential client could be Intuit. Given that Intuit is already a customer of Saygent’s other solutions in its online products, and is a notable player in the mobile payments space, it makes for a good fit.

As for the revenue model, it will be on a per-response basis. An app maker gets 50 responses upon signing up in order to try it out, then pays 99 cents per response afterwards. There’s also a money-back guarantee on each response – if it’s not useful (spam, someone talking nonsense, or whatever else), the app publisher can flag it and not have to pay.

San Mateo-based Saygent raised $1 million in seed funding from 500 Startups, Innovation Endeavors, Juvo Capital, Kapor Capital, Kima Ventures, Orefa Investment, PG Ventures, Ty Danco and Matthew Grodin, in May 2011.

Until recently, mobile video ads have mostly been pretty boring. That’s because, frankly, they’re difficult to make and scale across all the different devices that brands, agencies and marketers want to serve them in. So instead, they serve up boring old display ads, or maybe pre-rolls, against mobile video.

Ad network Tremor Video is hoping to change all that, with the release of a new platform that will make it easier for agencies to create and serve up more interactive mobile video ads. With Tremor’s Mobile Creative Platform, agencies can avoid the problem of device fragmentation.

While online ads have pretty much standardized on Adobe Flash, there are multiple operating systems, manufacturers, processors and form factors to worry about. So there’s no real one-size-fits-all solution. That is, until now.

The Mobile Creative Platform came about in part due to Tremor’s acquisition of Transpera last year. Transpera had developed a platform for automatically recognizing the form factor of various mobile devices, and then customizing websites and video players to suit them. And hey, if you think device fragmentation is bad now, just thinking about how many thousands of different feature phones Transpera had to work with before iOS and Android took over.

Tremor is using that technology now to help marketers create ads that can play on any mobile device. Creative teams can now build ads without having to worry about the particular intricacies of one mobile operating system or another, or how different devices might have different versions of the same OS (*cough* Android *cough*) Instead, they create ads with a WYSIWYG-type editor and let the Tremor platform do the heavy lifting of formatting and delivering the correct ad for whichever device.

The platform is only available to Tremor customers, but the startup is considering opening it up and making the tool available for use with other ad networks and ad management platforms. Until then, it’ll count its mobile platform as a key differentiator in the fast-growing mobile video market.

With a wedding ring on his finger and his company public, is Mark Zuckerberg ready to make Facebook produce more profits, not just more social connections?

His fanfare-less marriage to long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan this weekend would seem to indicate he won’t be getting too distracted by family life. But just before Facebook IPO’d on Friday, he announced on stage that “Our mission isn’t to be a public company.”

As the young CEO enters this next phase of his life, he faces perhaps his greatest challenge yet: building something that betters our lives while still bringing home the bacon.

The business of social networking has never been Zuckerberg’s strongest suit. In fact, beyond his backyard wedding ceremony and a town hall discussion with President Barack Obama, you’re unlikely to see the CEO in a suit. That’s partly why one of his smartest moves was bringing on Google biz wiz Sheryl Sandberg as his COO.

But no one understands the future of social quite like Zuckerberg. His uncanny ability to figure out what we want from Facebook before we do has spawned the news feed and other features critical to the site’s enduring success. What Facebook the public company needs now is for Zuckerberg to aim that foresight toward making money.

Honestly, that’s the saddest part of Facebook’s IPO — that such a pioneer of human connection would have to fracture his attention to pore over profit-loss statements.

This is the man who brought us ambient intimacy, the feeling of being closer to everyone we know thanks to indirect communication. Facebook and its promising new auto-translation features, is fostering friendships between countries with deep cultural divides. These are the kinds of things the world needs Mark Zuckerberg working on.

But now Facebook has shareholders it’s responsible to. They’ll want him looking for aggressive new ways to monetize that come to fruition fast. Don’t expect Zuckerberg to strangle users with ads, though.

With any luck, you’ll hardly be able to tell what he’s up to when it comes to increasing revenue. It will be a natural side effect of how Facebook works. Such as that all those news stories, songs, and videos you auto-share to the news feed aren’t just content to show your friends. They’re going to power ad targeting based on what you do, not just what you Like.

Mark and Priscilla have just forged one of the strongest connections of all (congratulations, seriously). They’re starting the Zuckerberg family, a lifelong journey.

And the journey to Facebook’s earnings growing to reflect its valuation will be a long one too. It will take the visionary’s focus, but investors, press, employees, and the rest should be patient. Just because you don’t see the future of Facebook’s business right now doesn’t mean it hasn’t been dreamed up. This is Mr. Zuckerberg we’re talking about, after all.

[Image Credit: AP Photo]