Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

If you’re building apps for phones or tablets, here’s a must-see discussion for you. We were able to corral Greylock’s John Lilly (who recently helped lead an investment in Instagram, right before it was acquired) backstage at Disrupt NYC earlier this week for a more casual conversation about the mobile app ecosystem and hardware. In this short talk, Lilly shared his views about the similarities and differences of building applications for mobile devices, taking care to point out that he sees many great entrepreneurs approaching the phone in a similar manner to how they approach the tablet. While the operating systems are similar on iPhone and iOS, for instance, the use cases, usage by time of day, and monetization opportunities are entirely different. Lilly encourages entrepreneurs to ask how to get their ideas on the homescreens of users’ phones and tablets.

The government of Syria uses made-in-California technology from BlueCoat Systems to censor the Internet and spy on its pro-democracy activists (who are regularly arrested and tortured, not to mention slaughtered wholesale.) McAfee and Nokia Siemens have done the same in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Amesys of France and FinFisher of the UK aided brutal dictators in Egypt and Libya. Sweden’s Teliasonera allegedly took up the same cudgel in Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan.

Meanwhile, back in the USSA, Bain Capital recently bought a Chinese video-surveillance company reportedly “used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents,” and Cisco “has marketed its routers to China specifically as a tool of repression.” You can’t help but be impressed by how globalized the oppression-technology industry has become.

So what privacy/surveillance story caused an eruption of outrage this week? Yes, you guessed it: SceneTap, a startup that uses facial-recognition software to (anonymously)track demographics at bars and clubs in major American cities in real time. Forget the dissidents risking their lives for democracy: what matters is that the hipsters are creeped out!

Needless to say, the companies in question tend to dodge responsibility with bland buck-passing PR patter that knowingly turns a blind eye to oppression and brutality: “Obviously what an individual customer would do with a product once they acquire it is beyond our control.” (Apparently it never crossed their minds that it’s eminently possible to build technical controls into their product, to filter the filters.) “It’s a legal business [...] Ultimately people who use this technology to infringe human rights are responsible for their actions.”

This is of course complete bullshit. Whether you’re a company or a person, there’s really no excuse for helping repressive regimes to track and hunt down their dissidents, and “What? Me? Responsible? All I did was give the AK-47 to the psychotic serial killer, how was I supposed to know how he was going to use it?” is almost worse than no defense at all.

The EFF has proposed a “know your customer” process similar to that used for the Foreign Corrupt Practices act and export regulations. It has largely been ignored. Not a good sign.
The oppression industry is bad enough now … but if nothing happens, it’s going to get a whole lot worse.

There’s a desperate information war going on in Syria right now, between pro-democracy dissidents and their international allies on one side, and a shadowy and remarkably sophisticated group of pro-government hackers on the other. Right now that war’s being fought mostly on the desktop. But wait until Android phones become ubiquitous in oppressed nations. (Not iPhones; too expensive.) Unlike desktops, unless they’re rooted, Androids typically are — or at least can be — essentially controlled from birth by their manufacturers and their national carriers … who will naturally be incredibly susceptible to government pressures to install hidden spyware and malware.

Imagine an authoritation nation where everyone has a phone running a government-customized version of Android — indeed, is required to have one, because every phone is an eye and ear of the national surveillance network. (Meanwhile, SceneTap-like software ensures that dissident groups can’t meet in person.) It’s an Evgeny Morozov dystopia, and a disconcertingly plausible one. Right now, carrier bloatware and device control is just an irritation, but look just a little ways into the future, and it’s worryingly easy to envision it actually becoming a serious human rights problem … especially if Western companies keep on selling their oppression technology to all comers.

The auction house Sotheby’s is selling an official memo from Steve Jobs to Atari about improving the World Cup Football game. The pages – stamped and signed by Jobs himself – describe circuit diagrams and paddle layouts. Delightfully, the stamp says “All-One Farm Design” and features a Buddhist mantra, “gate gate paragate parasangate bodhi svahdl.” As you do.

If you’re thinking of picking this up you’d best have about $10,000 to $15,000 handy – although bidding could get fierce. Quoth MacWorld:

If you’re really feeling spendy, you can plop down $180,000 on an original Apple I circuit board, presumably in mint condition. Get cracking and don’t forget: Sabbe satta sukhi hontu.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Apple and a number of other large U.S. publishers of conspiring to fix eBook prices and filed an antitrust lawsuit. While most of the publishers quickly settled the lawsuit, Apple decided to fight. Earlier this week, as Ars Technica reports today, Apple responded (PDF) to the government’s accusations. Apple doesn’t mince words in its response. The company’s lawyers call the case against Apple “fundamentally flawed as a matter of fact and law” and say that the idea that Apple tried to reduce competition and fix prices is “absurd.”

In its complaint, the U.S. government said Apple and publishers like Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Penguin and Macmillan, who favor the so-called agency model which allows publishers to set their own eBook price, were colluding to fix eBook prices in their fight against Amazon, which favors a wholesale model that gives it the power to set the price of the eBooks it sells. The DoJ alleges that Apple and the other publishers conspired to eliminate competition in the eBook retail market.

Apple, however, argues that the government “sides with monopoly, rather than competition, in bringing this case. The Government starts from the false premise that an eBooks ‘market’ was characterized by ‘robust price competition’ prior to Apple's entry.” Before the iBookstore, Apple says, “there was no real competition, there was only Amazon.”

Apple says its entry in the market benefited consumers, as it brought is challenging Amazon and provided consumers with choice and “innovative features, such as color pictures, audio and video, the read and listen feature, and fixed display.”

The company also argues that it is giving more power to the publishers and especially to self-publishing and smaller publishing houses.

Throughout the document, Apple accuses the government of selectively quoting Steve Jobs from Walter Isaacson’s biography (“The Government's selective citation to hearsay from a small portion of Apple's former CEO's biography is irrelevant and has no place in this litigation.”).

.

TinyTap is a new iPad application designed for kids which introduces a different angle on the “record-your-own-voice” storybooks craze, by offering a playable book or game you and your kids can customize with your own photos, camera shots, music, narration, and more. The resulting creations can then be shared with family and friends. And, for a little inspiration, the built-in TinyTap store offers a collection of pre-made games which kids can customize with their own voice and actions.

The app is targeted at 4+ and up, so I couldn’t really enlist my in-house kid app beta tester (aka my 2-year old kid) to give it a rundown. But in testing it myself, I have to admit that I’m not 100% convinced they’ve nailed it on the user interface. For example, some of things you can add to your story, like photos and questions, are centered as thumbnails within the application’s design dashboard. Meanwhile, the add music option is oddly hovering above next to another add photo button, the sharing option and an edit button. It’s a layout that doesn’t quite make sense.

That’s too bad because if TinyTap’s workflow was more streamlined and simplified, it would be easier for them to add additional elements to the story/game design process.

That being said, TinyTap is still a lot better than much of the kids’ apps crapware out there in the iTunes App Store. And it’s hard not to fall in love with the concept at the very least. Instead of burning up brain cells with the mind-numbing games out there, TinyTap enables kids to become game creators, not just players. 

The idea immediately reminded me of Kodu, Microsoft’s visual programming language for kids, which allows them to create PC and Xbox games – and more importantly, helps them to start thinking like a programmer. But Kodu is not only for different types of platforms, it’s for a slightly older child, too.

The bigger concept with TinyTap is that it could potentially become an entry-level tool for game development, which starts kids young, allowing them to wrap their little minds around the “if/then/else” concepts that go into process of game creation. The building blocks are already there: e.g., if you touch the nose in the picture when asked, you’re right and can go to the next question, but if you get it wrong, the game says “try again.”

There are a ton of DIY app building tools for adults, so it’s great to see someone thinking about building a platform for kids, too.

TinyTap is an Israeli-based company, co-founded in January 2012 by UX designers Yogev Shelly (formerly of Rounds.com) and another (who can’t disclose his name right now, as he’s still employed elsewhere). The team is based in Tel-Aviv and is currently looking to raise.

The app is a free download in iTunes here.

Gillmor Gang – John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.

MoPub, an ad serving startup for smartphone apps, is announcing a new way for its publishers to offer their inventory to advertisers — a private marketplace limited to select publishers and advertisers.

Basically, the market creates a more direct relationship, where publishers get more control and predictable pricing, while advertisers get early access. Advertisers will get first look a publisher’s inventory — MoPub compares the marketplace to a eBay’s Buy It Now model, where buyers can skip the auction process and just purchase an item at a set price (in this case, an ad impression). They also get access to special data like demographics, geography, and in-app purchase history.

MoPub was founded by former AdMob and Google employees, and its investors include AdMob-backer Accel.

When I spoke CEO Jim Payne last year, he compared MoPub’s ad serving technology, which helps publishers manage a mix of advertising from a number of sources, to desktop ad companies like DoubleClick and AdMeld, but dealing with the specific issues of mobile. Similarly, Payne says the private market is similar to marketplaces for desktop ad impressions, but it’s dealing with the specific data points that are interesting to mobile advertisers, like latitude/longitude coordinates. Among MobPub customers, Payne predicts the marketplace this will be of most interest to “large publishers with high-quality inventory.”

The company has been testing the marketplace in private beta mode, but now it’s opening it up to more publishers and advertisers. The next step, Payne says, is to make it more sophisticated about what data gets passed to advertisers.

To find out more, you can email info@mopub.com.

There are plenty of ways to get your flight school kicks with your smartphone or tablet — this missile shooting Griffin chopper comes to mind — but few manage to ooze as much style (or cost as much money) as Parrot's AR.Drone 2.0.

Getting the thing ready to fly is surprisingly simple. Once you've popped the battery into place, and turned the thing on, the Drone creates its own Wi-Fi network that the control device connects to. From there, just fire up the FreeFlight app on your iOS or Android device and you're off to the races.

The big draw for some will be the ability to record the Drone’s aerial journeys. In addition to providing the pilot with an idea of where the drone is going, the small camera pod mounted on the drone's nose is capable of capturing photos as well as 720p video. The camera’s small sensor means that quality tends to take a hit in low light, but the bigger issue for some is the tendency to see a wiggling effect in recorded video because of the four rotors whirring away.

Let's be honest here — it's not the most useful thing to have in your gadget closet (doesn't everyone have one of those?) unless you've got a thing for aerial photography or not-so-covertly spying on people. What it lacks in pure utilitarian functionality it makes up for in sheer fun. There's something terribly fun about tilting your smartphone around and watching this little quad-rotor aircraft dart around in response to it.

It's even surprisingly easy to fly, provided you start out slow and put in a few minutes of fiddling first. Sadly, our Mobile Editor Matt Burns didn't take that rule to heart, as he quickly crashed our own Drone at Disrupt. C'est la vie, but be prepared to do your due diligence if you don't want to screw up a pricy piece of machinery. That said, Parrot has made it terribly easy to wow your friends with some neat aerial tricks — just double tap a button from within the app to make the Drone flip, and take in the applause.

The Drone is a hell of a lot of fun to play with, but there’s always that price tag to consider — it’ll run you a considerable $299. The responsible thing may be to take that money and use it to buy a rock-solid juicer instead, but I think your mental well-being is better served by the ability to explore the skies (or annoy your neighbors).

There’s a growing number of apps based on the idea of sharing between couples: A few months ago, my colleague Eric Eldon wrote about Pair, which launched out of the latest batch of Y Combinator startups and is kind of like Path for couples. Then there’s Cupple, which also lets users share pictures and places and chart memories over the course of their relationships. The latest entrant into the couple-sharing mobile app space is SimplyUs, which launched on the Apple App Store Friday and aims to make couples happier by adding a little organization into their lives.

While other apps built for couples are primarily built for keeping a private collection of photos and memories, and providing private communication tools, SimplyUs takes a whole different approach: It’s focused on improving couples’ lives by helping them to become more organized together. As a result, its main features are built around joint calendaring and list tools.

The idea is that a little organization goes a long way to improving communication and between couples. That idea comes from co-founder Jonathan James’ background in productivity software — formerly at Microsoft, James worked on early versions of its SharePoint application, and found that while he was incredibly organized at work, at home he and his wife had difficulty coordinating schedules and staying on the same page about things they needed to do together.

The app works by keying into users’ existing calendaring systems, allowing them to update and share items either from within the app or from outside applications — like Google Calendar, for instance — and then syncs up all updates between the couples and their calendars of choice. It also has a list function, which enables couples to add To-Dos, as well as grocery or shopping lists. And, of course, it has a photo-sharing capability. All items can be commented on, letting users annotate calendar items or to-do lists as they add or remove items.

James, whose wife just had a baby, says the app has been instrumental in helping the couple get through the typically stressful process. “I’m more convinced than ever that what we’re building is an incredibly useful tool for couples,” he told me by phone. “It brings them closer together, reduces stress, and increases happiness.”

By doing so, James hopes to keep couples engaged and using the app — something which, as a beta user, I’ve actually found to work. While Pair was fun for a few days before I lost interest, SimplyUs is actually a pretty useful tool that I can see myself continuing to use as time goes on.

But there could be a bigger opportunity here: While their first application was built with couples in mind, James says he could see the startup developing similar mobile tools for other groups, such as families, Social Groups, and Small Business Teams, especially as it adds more employees over time.

The SimplyUs team is made up of James and his co-founder, Herman Chan, who are a part of Toronto-based Extreme Startups’ first Accelerator group. The company is in the process of raising money, with the Extreme Startups demo day less than a month away, on June 19.

People don’t want to install and give data permissions to games, they want to play them, so now Facebook is allowing games to be played directly from within news feed or Timeline stories. These previews give gamers a taste and could get them over the install hurdle once they’re already addicted.

Facebook has to keep delivering growth for apps to get developers to stick around, or better yet, build for it first. Feed gaming could be a big selling point that could get devs to prioritize Facebook’s canvas over iOS, Android, Chrome web store, and other platforms that force people to download and install before the fun starts. Some of Facebook’s most popular games are already using this tactic, and you can try it out here for Angry Birds, Bubble Witch Saga, and Idle Worship.

Facebook tested feed gaming with Angry Birds earlier this month, but now any games can publish playable feed stories. They show up with a little play button over a thumbnail image in the feed or timeline, but instead of starting up a video, a flash embed of the game opens up. You can instantly start flinging birds, shooting bubbles, popping penguins or whatever. When the game round finishes, you’re often prompted to click through and install / give permissions to the full version.

You can try out feed gaming here for Angry Birds, Bubble Witch Saga, and Idle Worship.

This is going to work. The friction of having the decide whether a developer deserves your data can’t be understated. It probably drives away a ton of potential gamers. Even though most games are freemium and don’t cost anything to download, the try before you buy option means you don’t have to invest until you’re more sure you’ll actually enjoy a game.

Expect this to become a core part of the growth strategy for Facebook games. Developers will need to decide how to distill their games into a 30-second mini-experience. For some twitch games that will be easy, but for deeper strategy games it will be a challenge. They’ll also need to come up with hooks like “beat your friend’s high score” or “earn extra virtual goods by playing from the feed”.

I think people still feel guilty playing Facebook canvas games. These aren’t mobile where you can justify playing because you’re doing so on the move when you’re unable to be productive. These are web games that may be distracting you from your work, or at least communicating with your friends. When you click a link and the first thing you see is a permissions prompt, that guilt is triggered, and you shy away instead of installing.

By delaying the guilt trip data permission until after you’re already having fun, you’re much more likely to speed through the install process to get your next gaming fix. Even the most studious, serious, buttoned down business men are now going to try Facebook games, and some will end up installing and paying.

Disrupt isn’t just a great launch platform for startups. Earlier this week at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, President Obama’s senior technology advisor, Todd Park and U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel announced five new federal initiatives to get entrepreneurs and other innovators to work on the White House’s new digital road map for open government. Within the 24 hours after the announcement at Disrupt on Wednesday, Park told O’Reilly’s Alexander B. Howard earlier today, the White House received 600 applications for the Presidential Innovation Fellows program and “another several hundred people had expressed interest in following and engaging in the five projects in some other capacity.”

The program is looking for 15 “amazing innovators” who are interested in coming to Washington, DC for 6- to 12-month fellowships. They will work in small teams focused on the five project’s Park and VanRoekel announced earlier this week: MyGov, Open Data Initiatives, Blue Button for America, RFP-EZ and The 20% Campaign. The scope of these projects was chosen so the teams can “deliver significant results within six months.”

Here is how our own Gregory Ferenstein described these initiatives earlier this week:

1. Expand the one-click download program of "Blue Button" to energy, education, security, and the nonprofit sector. Blue Button was an early open data initiative from Park's previous job at HHS to allow federal medical recipients (Department of Defense, Veterans, and Medicare) to access their health information in an easy, one-click process for use with all of their doctors. A relevant recent extension of Blue Button for energy, "Green Button," is already in use by iPhone app makers to give homeowners feedback on their energy use. Additional energy info will be coming soon in the hopes that savvy entrepreneurs can make profitable, socially-beneficial use of the new data.

2. Expand Blue Button itself to private sector insurance companies. Right now, only federal beneficiaries have access to the data, yet many Americans would also like an easy way to track their medical history and share relevant results between doctors.

3. A PayPal for foreign aid, the "20% Campaign." The federal government has a nasty habit of losing crates of cash and foreign aid while paying security forces and contract workers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Park and VanRoekel hope the new system can better track the money trail, and therefore reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. One study suggests that India could save billions with electronic transfers, and the savings could be just as significant for the U.S.

4. A small-business friendly process for securing government contracts, named RFP-EZ. Don't have a DC-bureau or a cushy relationship with a senator? This program aims to give the small guy a shot at big contracts. Park argued in his talk that the government sometimes prefers savvy startups in Silicon Valley, who can save the government a lot more than the typical contractor.

5. MyGov, a user-friendly website to find government services. Currently, government services are organized by government need, not citizen, making many services difficult to find.

PayPal is expanding its in-store payments technology to 15 new national retailers, following its initial brick-and-mortar rollout with Home Depot earlier this year.  At a press conference held yesterday at PayPal’s San Jose HQ, the company confirmed it is now adding new merchants including Abercrombie & Fitch, Advance Auto Parts, Aéropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Guitar Center, Jamba Juice, JC Penney, Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, Nine West, Office Depot, Rooms To Go, Tiger Direct and Toys "R" Us.

The merchants will soon be integrating PayPal technology at their point-of-sale, allowing customers to choose it as an alternative payment option to cash, check or charge.

As with the Home Depot integration, customers can either use a PIN code or a special PayPal credit card that can be swiped, in order to deduct the payment from their PayPal accounts. The solution is appealing to retailers, because it doesn’t require a significant investment in new technology, like replacing POS systems or installing some sort of NFC-based solution, for example. In the future, the vision is to scale the PayPal integration to support more merchant-friendly services, like real-time location-based ads and in-store offers.

PayPal is attempting a massive land grab in the race against buzzy new startups like Square, as well as alternative mobile payments and wallet solutions from startups and established players alike. And time appears to be of essence for PayPal. The company says that it went from a 5-store pilot test with Home Depot to a full rollout to the chain’s nearly 2,000 locations in just two months.

In addition to the new retailers, PayPal also announced deals that will allow it to reach mid-market businesses, which have multiple locations and some sort of point-of-sale solution already in place. PayPal is now making it possible for merchants using POS software providers Leapset, ShopKeep, Vend, and Erply to very quickly enable PayPal within their stores – again, without replacing their current POS infrastructure. PayPal notes that through these customers combined, they reach some 50,000 offline businesses. Some of the POS software vendors’ customers have already switched their PayPal integrations on, though the company did not detail how many or who.

Finally, PayPal also announced deals with VeriFone and Equinox, the #1 and #3 POS terminal manufacturers, respectively. These companies will now integrate PayPal into their payment terminals. PayPal is already working with Ingenico, which means it will now reach nearly 40 million POS terminals worldwide.

PayPal hasn’t always been the most beloved brand in the payments space, but its a well-established player with a significant user base, traction, brand recognition and, as demonstrated, the ability to scale quickly. Last year, the company saw over $118 billion in total payment volume, and expects to top $7 billion in mobile payment volume this year. 2012, says President David Marcus in the official announcement, is about testing and learning what works in the offline retail market.

Despite the competition it faces, it’s impossible to count out PayPal’s potential for success in this arena just yet.

Not everyone loves Facebook enough to give it three, four, or five spots on their homescreen. So yesterday’s launch of Facebook’s third consumer iOS app Facebook Camera could actually end up reducing usage of Facebook’s main app, Messenger, and others by compelling people to consolidate them into a folder. Facebook Camera has shot to the top of the iOS free charts, so lots of people are making the decision of where to put it right now.

This issue isn’t one just for Facebook but for any developer looking to break out specific features of a cluttered omni-app into streamlined standalone apps. Is a lightweight feel worth the risk of app overload?

Facebook’s attempt to cram its entire full-featured web-based social network into a single mobile app hasn’t quite worked out. Many people complain the app feels slow and requires too many clicks to get to core services. Honestly, I think the click friction concerns are blown out of proportion. It takes one click to start uploading a photo and two to reach your messages. It is slow, though, as it has to load a ton of extra features you don’t always use.

Standalone apps don’t have to load anything unnecessary, so at first it makes sense that Facebook would release Messenger and now Camera, its new Instagram-style photo filtering and sharing app.

But where are you going to put them? If you’re not willing to give Facebook three home screen spots, some of them are going to get relegated to your back pages. There could be another terrible fate in store for the apps, though. You might drag their icons on top of each other and create a Facebook app folder.

Suddenly it takes an extra click to get to any of them. Without that big blue F icon reminding me to check my news feed and notifications, I could become a lot less likely to open my main Facebook app so often.

Facebook for iOS app had around 57.5 million daily users growing at 2.5 million per month when Facebook stopped reporting these numbers at the start of 2012, at that rate it would have around 70 million DAU now. Being banished to a folder could stunt this growth.

And what if Facebook doesn’t stop? What if it releases another standalone app for accessing third-party apps on its mobile platform? Or apps for Events or its location service Places? Not to mention Facebook Camera is already competing with Instagram which Facebook has acquired (though the deal still has to close), and it recently launched a separate app for admins to manage their Pages. They could all get buried in the folder too.

[Update: Some like Google's director of product management Hunter Walk think opening a folder and then a standalone app might still be easier than digging through a clutter omni-app for certain features. But there's still the problem of Apple's questionably designed folders. With no featured image, just a grid of teeny tiny icons within the icon, they don't really sing "click me" the way a full-size app icon does. I once put all my photo and camera apps in a folder and found myself clicking on all of them less. People navigate their iPhones visually, and folders don't have the same visual prominence.]

Facebook is reaching standalone app overload — a growing pain of the move to mobile, a medium it wasn’t originally built for. The root of the problem is the sluggish main app. Facebook can’t keep cutting off limbs to make it more lightweight, and it can’t just trim the fat of lesser-used features. It needs to convert fat to muscle so its main app stays the same size, but feels better, faster, stronger.

Sure, UberConference took home the Disrupt Cup and its accompanying $50,000 (giant) check. But it could be argued that Incident, makers of the gTar, had already won. The company’s Kickstarter project skyrocketed from $10,000 in funding before stepping on the Disrupt stage, to a current $220,000.

This is big, considering that Disrupt is a web/software conference and a hardware startup went all the way to the very end. Even Michael Arrington was impressed, which says quite a bit. But none were more impressed or intrigued than myself, which is why I wrangled the Incident guys together backstage and begged and pleaded to play the gTar.

Kindly, they obliged. I have no experience playing the guitar whatsoever, and my greatest claim to musical fame would be completing Free Bird on expert in Guitar Hero. Now, I won’t say my rendition of Blackbird a la gTar is the best in the world, but for having absolutely no practice or experience, my few moments with the hardware should be a testament to the gTar’s potential.

I also spoke with the founders about the difficulties of distribution, and more importantly, music licensing. Eventually the gTar app will come with a content store, from which you can buy different songs. For now however, this is a bare bones iteration that is sure to improve over time.

If you move now, you can get the gTar on Kickstarter for $50 off the expected retail price, at just $399.

Exec, a mobile app that instantly gets people to do your errands, has raised $3.3 million, according to an SEC filing. The company’s co-founder Justin Kan, who is also behind Justin.tv, Twitch.tv and SocialCam, says he’s not ready to disclose investors yet, except to say that there are around 25 different individuals in the round. The filing only shows Exec’s team on it, so it’s hard to tell who the firms or angels in the round are.

What’s Exec? It’s kind of comparable to TaskRabbit, because you can call on people to run your errands from an app. But Exec doesn’t require a bidding process and it calls up ‘Execs,’ or people to do your tasks, instantaneously. It also has a flat rate of $25 an hour. Exec covers all sorts of errands — deliveries, chores, cleaning, even art. One ‘Exec,’ who cleaned my house once, has also coached YC founders on their pitches for Demo Day. Seriously.

“This money is for building out the San Francisco Bay Area market,” Kan said.

Belly, the Chicago-based loyalty platform which just closed its $10 million Series B from Andreessen Horowitz earlier this month, is today announcing a pretty significant milestone: its 1 millionth check-in. The startup allows customers to check-in to a location using a physical loyalty card or mobile app which they scan via a consumer-facing iPad installed at point-of-sale. By doing so, customers collect points that can later be redeemed for unique rewards tailored specifically for the business in question.

The company has been growing fast, and CEO Logan LaHive tells us that in some of Belly’s locations, there have been more Belly check-ins within its first month of being up-and-running, than the total number of Foursquare check-ins the business has seen to date.

“I’m not here to make outlandish statements,” says LaHive, referring to this impressive metric. “Some stores are more active and engaged than others, so it would be ridiculous for me to say 100% of locations. But in our active locations, they’re surpassing all-time Foursquare check-ins in their first month.”

For those unfamiliar with Belly’s operations, the now 50 plus-person team works with each business to develop custom and unique digital loyalty programs for retailers’ stores. Merchants pay a monthly subscription, and Belly provides an iPad, physical cards and key chain tags, the consumer-facing mobile apps, marketing materials, and a backend analytics system. For consumers, the idea is that Belly could eventually grow large enough to replace all the different loyalty cards cluttering up customers’ wallets.

Given that the startup works directly with the businesses in question, very much one-on-one, some may wonder if Belly is hard to scale.

“That’s a question we hear often, particularly from folks out in the Valley,” says LaHive. “Look, loyalty in general is not a new concept. There are a lot of competitors out there in the space trying to build an app with three guys in a garage and trying to scale it to all small business owners. But we’ve found that’s not the way this business works,” he says.  ”Loyalty is successful when it’s built on relationships. In order for us to really build and sustain that with a business over time, it takes a hands-on approach. We’re building and staffing a team that can support that.”

The company is currently up-and-running in 1,500 locations across the U.S., including recently added markets of New York and Boston, plus Chicago, Austin, Madison, Milwaukee, D.C., Phoenix and Miami. LaHive says that they’re growing at a rate of about 100 locations per week.

While some new startups are hesitant to reveal their metrics early on, Belly gladly shares practically everything they have on file. The company’s over 200,000 users are delivering 10,000 check-ins on average per day. A third of Belly’s users check in to more than one business, 55% have checked in more than once, and 22% have checked in more than five times.

It took Belly 166 days to reach its first 100,000 check-ins, 27 more days to reach 200,000, and is now seeing around 100,000 check-ins every eight days. Around 2,000 to 3,000 new users are added per day to the service, and customers have redeemed over 14,000 rewards since the company’s launch in August 2011.

Belly has nearly $13 million in total funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightbank, and others. The company is now working to transition to HTML5 for its apps, and is planning aggressive expansions to new markets, thanks to the recent infusion of capital.

In an apparent effort to help its users find more interesting apps in its cavernous digital stores, Apple today made an interesting tweak to its iOS and Mac app stores. Both now feature a “free app of the week” and an “editor’s choice” section. As Apple’s official App Store Twitter account announced yesterday, Cut the Rope: Experiments is Apple’s choice for this week’s free app in the iOS store. Editor’s Choice apps include Extreme Skater and Facebook Camera for iPhone, Sketchbook Ink for iPad, and Cobook and Deus Ex Human Revolution in the Mac App Store.

Other app stores, including Amazon’s Appstore for Android, of course already feature similar free apps programs. The iTunes Store, too, offers a free single of the week.

Even though this isn’t the most original promotion, free apps are always welcome and it’s no secret that Apple’s App Store has a massive problem when it comes to discoverability. Unless an app appears in the various stores’ top 10 or at least top 25 lists, chances are that most users will never see it unless Apple decides to feature the app in its “new and noteworthy” section.

Earlier this year, Apple acquired app store search and discovery service Chomp. Chomp, which is still up and running, allows users to just say what kind of app they are looking for and goes beyond the easily gamed keywords and app names that are the hallmark of Apple’s own limited app store search feature. For the time being, though, Apple hasn’t integrated Chomp’s features into its own app stores and it still remains to be seen if it ever will.