Listia, the Y Combinator- and Andreessen Horowitz-backed site where people can exchange free goods, is unveiling a new feature called Listia Local in four cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.

In a lot of ways, this seems like a natural extension of Listia’s basic concept, where people can earn points by giving away items or participating on the site, then use those points to claim free goods. (You can also pay for points, which is Listia’s business model.) Co-founder Gee Chuang says that the team initially thought of Listia as more of a local marketplace, but right now, “almost every single transaction occurs via shipping.”

Nonetheless, having to put something in the mail (and in some cases to pay for the shipping) is obviously “a big point of friction,” as Chuang says. So residents of the four cities mentioned above can now say that they only want to make goods available for local pickup, and users can browse the giveaways in their area using the Listia Local pages. People are doing this kind of thing already on Craigslist (I’ve definitely collected some free furniture that way), but now it’s combined with Listia’s point system.

Chuang says that a good comparison between the existing Listia model and the new Local one is “eBay versus Craigslist”: “We’re trying to do both.”

In early testing, the Local feature has already resulted in an average of 15 percent more sharing per user. This also seems like a good fit for Listia’s increasingly mobile audience. Chuang says that since January, the percentage of listings on Listia that come in via mobile phones has increased from 2 percent to 10 percent. He also says more than 5 million items have been traded and that users spend an average of 20 minutes per session on the site.

It’s been just over a month since on-demand car service Uber announced that they had soft launched in Philadelphia, and as usual that time has been spent in quiet contemplation while they worked out the specifics like pricing and local fleet operations.

Today, Uber officially exits their stealthy “research phase” in Philadelphia, so users in need of a classy way to cruise from Fishtown to Fairmount Park need look no further than their mobile devices.

“People think about New York and D.C., but they don’t think about Philly,” Kalanick said of Uber’s newest market. “The core of the city of Philly is the same as the core of New York in terms of number of people.”

While the number of people may sound good, there was some early skepticism as to whether or not Philadelphians would take kindly to the roughly 50% premium that Uber rides entail.

When asked about some of the struggles that Uber faced in bringing their on-demand black car service to the City of Brotherly Love, founder and Kalanick noted that he and the team will be keeping their ears open for feedback on pricing. One of the arguments against Uber’s proliferation in Philadelphia is that per capita income is lower there than in many of the other cities the service has launched in, but Kalanick doesn’t believe that will be a dealbreaker.

He reiterated the fact that Uber is working on lower-cost methods of providing on-demand car service, though it could mean that some of frills the service is known for may have to be left out.

The company’s cost-conscious efforts in Chicago come to mind — Uber played with the concept of roping in yellow cabs instead of their pricier black Town Cars to ferry their users around, though there’s still no word on whether that program will find its way to other cities. Kalanick also intimated that some interesting things would soon emerge from their Garage concept testing program, though he sadly declined to elaborate.

Still, he and others noted that the reach of Philadelphia’s test launch was about on par with those seen in other cities, and with any luck their Philadelphia fleet will only continue to pick up steam (and customers).

And we’re off.

The Southeast meetup tour is officially a go. We’ll be hitting up Savannah, Atlanta, Raleigh, Charlotte and Greenville on a quest to uncover hidden technological gems that may or may not get pitched with a southern drawl. I’m from Texas, which is a different kind of “south” but I’m jazzed all the same.

If you plan on attending, you should expect lots of beer, lots of geeks, lots of pitches, and a helluva good time. That’s the only way we know how to do things here.

The idea is that we keep it as informal as possible, lots of food and booze and happy conversation about the state of the industry, the state of your startup, and the state of gay rights legislation for good measure. So it makes no difference if you’ve been around for six years and have X million users or if you’re just now getting into brainstorming mode. In either case you should learn something invaluable and have a damn good time while you’re at it.

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for — a look at our wonderful sponsors:

Honda has long viewed itself as a mobility company, focused on creating new value for its customers and society through innovations developed from the initiative and original thinking of Honda associates around the world. The willingness to pursue new dreams for the customer, which Honda expresses as "The Power of Dreams," has been at the core of the company's success and comes not only from new ideas but also from the determination of Honda associates to make these ideas come true for the customer. By creating new value for its customers — and by focusing on areas of critical social concern, such as the environment — Honda hopes to gain recognition throughout the world as a company that society wants to exist.

Savannah:

Rails Machine is a full-service web operations and hosting company. We’re a small team of experienced, dedicated, and focused people who have a genuine interest in technology and enjoy working with and giving back to the Ruby on Rails community. We founded Rails Machine in 2006 to create the ultimate hosting environment for Rails applications.

Atlanta:

Total Server Solutions was founded in 2005 with the goal of providing unsurpassed support and technical services to the web hosting community. Over the years, Total Server Solutions has grown to offer some of the finest colocation facilities in the world as well as fully managed dedicated server offerings, custom solutions, and cloud computing services.

Thumb Friendly helps local businesses and national brands acquire new customers with powerful mobile marketing strategies. With web access at their fingertips, mobile users are ready to learn, ready to interact, and ready to buy; but a mobile optimized website is only the beginning. Our m360 Strategy Plan is a complete management program proven to drive new visitors to your site, retain them with a great user experience, and convert them into revenue generating customers. Our solution tracks and records visitor engagement through a sophisticated monitoring program. The real power behind m360 is our consultative approach to building a mobile marketing strategy. We provide detailed reports and analysis of your campaign’s performance which we use to refine your strategy to its optimal state. No contracts, just results!

Yovia is a People Engine – a technology that monetizes social media. Yovia enables individuals and businesses to spread the word® profitably and organically throughout Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+.

PrivateDocs is the first enterprise social network with a core emphasis of document management and collaboration among internal teams, personal and business relationships. Secure, fast and beautiful- PrivateDocs is the next generation of business collaboration. Come share with us- we’re Awesome!

Atlanta Capital is an SEC registered investment advisory firm that specializes in managing high quality stock and bond portfolios on behalf of institutional and individual investors. For over 40 years, Atlanta Capital has remained dedicated to a single investment philosophy which has been successfully executed over a variety of market conditions. Today, our philosophy is consistently applied across a broad range of traditional equity and fixed income investment strategies. We believe the experience and stability of our investment professionals are the hallmarks of our organization.

Levitate Media develops video for the tech market. We help companies explain their offerings more effectively through animation, 3D, motion graphics, live video capture, testimonials, and more. Our productions help simplify complex ideas and are viewed on websites, during sales presentations, at trade shows, and anywhere else video can be played.

The StartupChicks mission is to build a world-wide community of like-minded female founders, to educate, coach and mentor entrepreneurs to help accelerate their businesses, and to inspire aspiring female entrepreneurs to take the leap.

The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) is a startup accelerator that helps technology entrepreneurs in Georgia launch and build successful companies. Founded in 1980, ATDC has helped create millions of dollars in tax revenues by graduating more than 130 companies, which together have raised over a billion dollars in outside financing. Headquartered in Atlanta's Technology Square, ATDC serves as the hub for technology entrepreneurship in Georgia. ATDC provides business incubation and acceleration services to hundreds of startups through coaching, connecting and community. Membership is open to all technology startup companies in Georgia, from those at the earliest conception stage to revenue generating, venture-fundable companies.


Pardot is a B2B cloud marketing automation software provider that increases revenue and maximizes efficiency for companies with multi-touch sales cycles. Pardot's platform features CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and ROI reporting to help marketing and sales teams work together to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles, and demonstrate marketing accountability. Pardot offers affordable pricing for the SMB market.

Social Fortress is data security and information privacy reinvented. Backed by the people who originally invented it. For both the enterprise and the consumer.

Badgy delivers “SEO for Social” for major brands, increasing the reach of their content on Facebook and Twitter. It’s the fastest and most seamless way for a brand to operate a social loyalty program. Most recently, we’ve made it dead simple to get any Facebook app page using the extremely effective Facebook Timeline Actions.

CodeGuard provides automatic cloud website backup and restore built upon Amazon Web Services: WordPress, MySQL, and FTP/SFTP. Restore files or entire sites whenever your want, and be notified when content on the site changes. Launched May 2011 at TechCrunch Disrupt – NYC, CodeGuard received the Audience Choice Award. Since then over 4 billion files have been examined and they recently announced the closure of a 1.3M Series A financing.

Collectors are the best consumers…crazy and passionate. CollectorDASH gives collectors a community-based experience making collecting more fun and affordable. With an innovative and integrated solution, the CollectorDASH platform is set to disrupt this multi-billion dollar market.

In the growing e-commerce market, small and medium businesses with online stores often choose to drop-ship products direct from supplier to customer to compete with the big players. eCommHub is a drop shipping platform that integrates with your online store to automate inventory management and order fulfillment through a third-party, effectively allowing you to expand product offerings, route orders intelligently, and minimize backorders. With its easy setup process and pay as you grow™ pricing, eCommHub can serve smaller online retailers, allowing them to grow their business, increase their margin and improve customer retention.

Employees today are publishing and sharing their valuable product and process optimization ideas almost everywhere except where they are needed the most – inside their own companies. What we do at IdeaString is help companies capture the innovation and genius of their employees, customers and partners —then efficiently identify the best ideas so they can put them to work in their own business – instead of having to read about it on the internet, in the media or even from a direct competitor. IdeaString's patent-pending technology puts the human spirit at the center of innovation – every employee's unique talents and behaviors are intelligently leveraged to optimize the innovation process for richer, more creative Ideas that equals more valuable outcomes for business.

We're fans of innovation and we're completely sold on startups. It's in iFusion‘s DNA. In addition to providing chief marketing officer counsel on a fractional basis, we also provide a full-range of marketing services to emerging growth companies. We've been in the trenches and understand the unique demands of taking a start up from idea to market. Ours is a customer-centric approach to marketing that raises awareness, nurtures leads and generates revenues.

TAG educates, promotes, influences and unites Georgia’s technology community to foster an innovative and connected marketplace that stimulates and enhances Georgia’s tech-based economy.

Raleigh-Durham

StrikeIron is the leader in Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), delivering data quality and communications solutions via our cloud platform IronCloud. We provide address verification, email verification, phone validation, phone append, SMS text messaging, and sales tax solutions to customers in a variety of markets. Our solutions are delivered as Web services that can be easily integrated into any application or system. Additionally, our solutions are pre-integrated into leading platforms like: Magento, Eloqua, Salesforce.com, Informatica, Oracle CRM On-Demand and more.

Charlotte

NexTable started with an idea to make reservations better and more affordable to our restaurant community. NexTable was founded by a group of dedicated entrepreneurs, restaurateurs and developers. Together with the assistance of local restaurateurs and mentors, we are committed to serving the restaurant industry by creating a revolutionary iPad real-time reservation, table management and marketing system that simply excels in value, innovation, features, and ease of use. Our objective is to liberate restaurants from using manual booking systems and costly competitors.

Virtual Race Bags provides a fully-integrated online platform for Event Directors to efficiently and cost-effectively deliver sponsor messages to event participants. Much more than a simple "virtual goody bag," Virtual Race Bags delivers sponsor deals, offers and messages to event participants using an online platform that is customized for each event. In addition, through our network of events, national brands can reach over 1.5MM participants in 2012. Virtual Race Bags was founded in 2010 by a team seeking to leverage their professional experience in the Endurance industry and as Athletes to help significantly improve upon the iconic race bag.

Founded by a team of compassionate doctors, WeRx.org believes that all patients deserve the right to be fully informed about their healthcare. WeRx.org provides a community of caring advocates and patients a platform to share and compare the most up-to-date prescription drug costs between their local and online pharmacies. If you believe that every American deserves the right to have access to their needed medications, join us!

Greenville:

Umatch combines cutting edge technology, proven research and retention principles, and dynamic machine learning into a proactive, holistic approach to improving enrollment yields, student retention rates, and graduation rates.

NEXT is an economic development program of the Greenville Chamber uniquely focused on the growth and attraction of early-stage knowledge-based companies in Greenville, South Carolina.

The Iron Yard provides innovation, education, coworking, mentorship, capital, and events for the technology and design communities.

The Upstate Carolina Angel Network, LLC (UCAN) is a group of accredited investors located in Upstate South Carolina who invest in and support start-up and early-stage, high-growth businesses in the Southeastern United States. Since its inception in 2008, UCAN has invested more than $5.6 million in 22 companies.

The mission of the Arthur M. Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership is to support educational, research and outreach programs that promote entrepreneurial activity and economic development of the region, state and nation. The focus is on wealth creation through entrepreneurial activity.

Dealer Ignition is the fastest, easiest, most effective way for brands and dealers to market online.

Servosity's Mission is to: Deliver Mission-Critical Backup and Disaster Recovery to MSPs and IT Resellers in a way that makes their brain do the happy-dance.

Mailprotector provides a suite of SaaS based email security and management solutions to over 3,000 organizations across six continents.

Foxfire specializes in Warehouse Management Software solutions and services. Our warehousing software is available as Level 1: Inventory Management, Level 2: WMS Express, and Level 3: WMS Enterprise. Foxfire warehousing software is ideal for start-up to mid-sized warehouses that want to optimize production and processes. Foxfire WMS provides the flexibility to use the system as is or to configure to exact specifications.

RAP Index is a key contacts software service, developed by advocacy experts for advocacy professionals, that uses a patent-pending scoring process to decisively identify and measure the Relationships, Advocability and Political Capital of an organization's stakeholders, to find their key contacts and activate their best messengers. RAP Index is an indispensable service that helps organizations Know Who They Know℠ from the Capital to Main Street.

Fusion Web Clinic is the smartest Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system in therapy. It is the first and only system that automatically keeps track of daily, required tasks for each staff member, and graphs patient progress. Fusion allows you to work smarter, not harder.

Vigilix helps companies improve the value of their technical support services through PCI validated proactive monitoring and remote access. Currently over 20,000 systems are supported by companies using Vigilix's POS Monitoring & Management solution.

ProActive Technology delivers dynamic solutions to help clients identify what data is necessary for improved business performance and then to develop the most efficient software for that purpose. Specializations include SharePoint Development, Custom Programming, and Database Management. ProActive provides fully-managed, worry-free custom software development that’s sensitive to your budget, schedule, and business model.

Loc Engine: You are here. They are there. Let's share. Real-time tracking and location management.

tribr is taking the hassle out getting together with a group of your friends. More fun with your tribe, and less hassle!

Pathwright is a platform for creating, teaching, and selling beautiful online courses.

Eleos Technologies is on a mission to eradicate fax machines from the face of the earth. Our cloud- based mobile platform enables businesses to capture documents and photos from remote workers and customers.

If you’re still looking to RSVP, hit up one of the links below.

---

Savannah is happening on July 6th at the offices of The Creative Coast, 15 West York Street. It’s going to be a smaller crowd, I suspect, but considering we found Vinylmint at the Norfolk mini-meetup, I’m excited to see what Savannah has to offer. You can RSVP here.

Special thanks to Packard Place for hosting the event.

The Creative Coast is a non-profit organization supported by The City of Savannah and SEDA. We exist to nurture the members of our community engaged in creative or innovative endeavors and to cultivate an environment in which they can thrive.

---

Atlanta is happening on July 9. We’re holding it at Sweetwater Brewery

You can RSVP here.

---

Raleigh-Durham is happening on July 10th at the Tyler’s Taproom in the American Tobacco Historic District. We will be taking over most of the restaurant and garden so roll on over. You can RSVP here.

Special thanks to the fellows at GBW Strategies who helped us organize the event.

GBW Strategies is a new era, Triangle-based public relations and marketing firm serving clients such as Facebook and the Cherokee Challenge.

---

Charlotte is happening on July 11th. We are still looking for a location although we’ll finalize it by Monday. You can RSVP here.

Special thanks to Packard Place for hosting the event.

Packard Place is the hub for entrepreneurship and innovation in Charlotte. Our mission is to develop fast-growth businesses and the professional community to drive them.

It’s 2012, you’re a small business, and you know you need a web presence — but where do you turn? Maybe a Facebook Page or Twitter account if you want something social and very simple. But maybe you need a fuller set of features, where you can control the look and feel, and offer functionality like blogging and e-commerce purchasing. Enter Weebly and the big update it’s pushing today.

The web site creator is adding 25 more themes to its site editor interface, as well as four new customizable page layouts, and a range of smaller updates. The overall goal, cofounder David Rusenko tells me, is to make each Weebly-run site feel as if a professional designer put it together.

The new editor subtly narrows the range of features to help users keep the polished style, to keep users from hurting themselves with poor customizations. The themes and layouts come with a limited set of font options, for example, making it so you can’t butcher your site with 20 different variations of serif and sans serif.

You can also now do things like add a phone number to the header of your page, social media buttons like Facebook Likes, or remove the header or interface elements. If you try to type in a long header, the text will automatically wrap to the next line. And buttons, for actions like online purchases or survey submissions, can now be easily adjusted within the publishing editor for size, location on the page, and color.

These changes may all feel a little simple, but they’ll have a big impact. Weebly already has 12 million people who have created their own free sites since it first launched back in 2007. But the potential market here could be relatively untapped. Here’s one data point: We recently covered an industry study showing that only 40%  of independent restaurants have online menus.

The company is growing traffic fast, and rolling out a range of new products, like the mobile app it launched last month. It’s also profitable, from what I hear, via a variety of premium services (like e-commerce). Other competitors, like Wix, have also been focusing on easy web site creation, and other companies, like WordPress, are also making it easier for users to create and manage their own sites.

So, it’s the subtle experiences like the Weebly updates today that will make a difference in this market. People who want a great-looking site with minimal fuss won’t only be users, but will evangelists. Weebly already seems to have this nailed. Its net promoter score, an industry calculation of how likely users are to recommend a service to others, is an unusually high 80%.

Pandora founder Tim Westergren testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology this morning. His big message: That the same guidelines should be used to determine the royalty rates for all forms of radio.

I didn’t see Westergren’s testimony, but Pandora has sent up a summary and some quotes from his remarks, and I also interviewed him yesterday about what he planned to say. As an example of the disparity, Westergren told the House subcommittee that last year, Pandora paid $137 million in performance fees on $274 million in revenue (50 percent), compared to Sirius, which paid $205 million in performance fees on $2.74 billion in revenue (7 percent).

“It is time for Congress to level the playing field and to approach radio royalties in a technology neutral manner,” he said.

Why the difference? According to the account that Westergren gave me, the criteria for setting royalty rates in broadcast, satellite, and Internet radio were all determined at different times. So when Pandora is making the case for lower loyalty rates, even the arguments that it can use are limited. For example, he says even though Pandora is “a massive driver of sales” for iTunes and Amazon (suggesting that hey, maybe artists get more benefits from Pandora than just the direct payments), it’s not allowed to offer that data as evidence. Satellite radio companies, on the other hand, can.

“It may lead to different rates, who knows?” Westergren told me. “But it all needs to start from the same place.”

This isn’t a one-off appearance. Westergren has testified in front of Congress before, and Pandora has spent $50,000 on lobbying this year, according to OpenSecrets.org. As you can see from the numbers that Westergren provided, these rates can have a huge effect on Pandora’s bottom line — in fact, the company famously said that a royalty decision in 2007 could kill online radio. Eventually, royalties were lowered, and Westergren the current debate isn’t as much of a “hair-on-fire moment.” Nor does he expect anything to happen soon — instead, he wants to make sure the issue is on Congress’ radar, and that it’s familiar with his perspective when the time comes to make a decision.

In Westergren’s view, there’s one big change in Washington that may help with Pandora’s case: “Most members on the Hill use Pandora or some form of Internet radio.”

It’s that time again. Well, who are we kidding? It’s always time for iPhone rumors. This one, however, seems to be the rumor that just won’t quit. So will the next-gen iPhone have a larger display? According to AppleInsider‘s supply chain source, Mingchi Kuo (an analyst with KGI), all signs point to yes.

He expects the iPhone to be taller, and switch from a 3.5-inch 4:3 display to a “4.08-inch in-cell IPS panel screen with a display resolution of 1,136 x 640 and 500-nit brightness,” at an aspect ratio of 16:9. If this is true, Apple will actually be lowering the bar for its Retina display status. The pixel density for the rumored display is 320 ppi, whereas current iPhone models sport a ppi of 326. Obviously this isn’t a huge drop, but I think it’s worth noting the concessions Apple may or may not be making to keep up with the competition (read: Android phones).

This stands to be the biggest change to the iPhone’s design to date, rivaled only by the jump between the 3GS and the iPhone 4, if it turns out to be real. That said, there’s quite a bit Apple will have to consider.

The company insists on ease-of-use as a cornerstone of every product. The major complaints with large screens is that they kill battery life and make one-handed actions more difficult. Apple won’t have this, which is why a 4-inch display is somewhat believable. It rubs right up against that “too big” line, which in my opinion sits at 4.3-inches. And even a 4.3-inch display is too big for some, but 4 inches should be comfortable to everyone from teenage girls to Occupy Wall Street protestors to lumberjacks. (You know, Apple’s core demographic.)

Now, Apple already gets an earful when it comes to battery life. Competitors are kind of kicking ass in the battery department when weighed against the iPhone (at least, lately). The Droid Razr Maxx: 3300mAh battery. The HTC Evo 4G LTE: 2000mAh battery. The Samsung Galaxy S III: 2100mAh battery. Granted, the Evo 4G LTE and the Galaxy S III are much larger devices, with 4.7-inch displays.

But the iPhone 4S? 1420mAh battery. And this report suggests the same story for the iPhone 5: ~1400mAh.

According to Kuo, there’s a point at which a display requires a “visibly larger” battery capacity, and that point is around 4.3-inches. However, if we assume that Apple will toss in a 4G LTE radio this time (which makes sense considering it’s now a proven technology, within the iPad no less) then Apple sticking to a ~1400mAh battery seems a bit off. Obviously a compromise between size and usability must be made, but battery life is one of the most important specs on a phone, so it’s at this point that I feel the research may be a bit misguided.

But let’s move on anyways.

Kuo also mentioned that the horizontal resolution would stay the same, at 640 pixels. This is to make sure legacy apps are still usable on the display, and also help app developers save on adapting their apps for a different aspect ratio. So, according to Kuo, legacy apps would be pillar-boxed if they aren’t optimized for the longer display, but if developers want to refine the apps for the new display they won’t have to tamper much with horizontal resolution, just vertical.

Just take a look at this image pulled from the research note:

Finally, Kuo made the somewhat unrelated point that he finds it “not likely” that the purported leaked cases we saw last week, the ones with microUSB ports instead of 30-pin ports, are real.

Kuo has been spot-on before, so I’m swallowing this report with only a moderate serving of salt. Plus, we’ve seen this rumor sprout up just about everywhere. But it’s also worth noting that Jobs swore against any display larger than 3.5-inches.

We won’t know anything for sure until Apple unveils the next iPhone, but we’ve seen this “bigger display” rumor pop up over and over again, so I suggest you go ahead and brace yourself for it.

NYC-based Adore Me, yet another player in the subscription-based e-commerce business, has raised a second round of funding totaling $2.5 million. Investors in the new round included Redhills Ventures, U.S. angels, plus Jaina Capital and Ventech Capital, two funds that specialize in Internet, information technology, communications technology, and green startups.

Since its start in November 2011, Adore Me has generated monthly sales increases approaching 50% with its personalized “showrooms” of lingerie. According to co-founder and CEO Morgan Hermand-Waiche, the site is now on track to generate between $1 million and $2 million in revenue this year, with 20% of total sales projected to be swimwear, a newly added category.

In addition to Hermand-Waiche, Fabrice Grinda and Jose Marin are Adore Me’s other co-founders. All are serial entrepreneurs – Grinda previously founded Olx.com, an online classified site, and Marin is CEO of Latin America-focused DeRemate.com, for example.

Hermand-Waiche says that the company was initially angel funded while he was in Harvard Business School studying. Adore Me is now actively looking for partnerships with publishers or other ecommerce sites addressing U.S. women, he adds.

With Adore Me, the idea is to create a personalized online lingerie club, which offers designer lingerie, and now swimwear, at affordable prices. After a user signs up, they’re given a complimentary consultation and one-on-one attention from experts, who then create monthly customized showrooms tailored to each site member. Each set, manufactured by Hermand-Waiche’s family owned business, is sold for $39.95, and includes free shipping and returns.

Included in user showrooms are bras, briefs, babydolls, slips, underwear, corsets, bustiers, shapewear,  legwear and swimwear. (Hey guys, betcha didn’t know girls buy all that stuff, huh?) Members can also choose to skip a month if they don’t like the current collection. For commitment-phobes, there’s a free level of service where users can just buy at will from their showrooms. However, paying members get their 6th set free.

Adore Me now has 50,000 members and around 100,000 visits per month. In terms of sales growth, “it is too early to talk about absolute figures of sales per month,” says Hermand-Waiche, “but what we can say is that month on month revenues growth has been 40% since January.”

Believe it or not, Adore Me isn’t the first startup we’ve seen this year aimed at helping women find better underthings. True&Co and Brayola have also received funding to do the same, but with more emphasis on fit than on discount pricing.

Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster on his Startup Advice blog: Both Sides of the Table

Chris Anderson wrote a really influential book some years ago called “The Long Tail” that shaped how many people think about emerging Internet markets. If you haven’t read it you should consider adding it to you library.

It was especially influential in my mind in thinking about media.

At the simplest level you can think about markets in terms of the number of times media is consumed and/or purchased by people plotted against the total number of content of that media type that is available.

At the left of the graph is the “head end” of the market, where the “hits” are produced for mass audiences. This was how companies who produced media became big before the Internet.

Why is that?

When you have limited distribution, the costs of distributing media are so prohibitive that only the largest of media producers (and distributors) are relevant.

The book profiles markets like those for books. When you had physical stores selling books, the bookseller would have to stock the shelves with those books most likely to sell so consumer choice was more limited. It was by definition a hits-driven business.

This changed with Amazon because you could stock books in warehouses and ship them when ordered greatly reducing the costs of housing books and thus you could stock a much greater variety.

Now as an author you can actually publish and be able to sell only a thousand books. Even a hundred. That couldn’t happen without the advent of lower cost production & distribution. And as we know the book industry is moving fully electronic with the advent of the Kindle making the costs of production & distribution nearly zero.

Think about music as another example.

In the early days of music you had to produce records, which was expensive. You had to promote them via music venues by playing across the country to get your albums purchased. And with the rise of radio you then had to get airplay on radios to promote your music (leading to payola).

If audiences liked your music then you had to sell them physically at Tower Records or similar. That was the only way. And you would promote your music through expensive and limited media channels (radio, who had a strangle hold on market) and retail shops (who could control placement and promotion).

In the “head end” market you can make a lot of money if you’re a content producer. Mostly everybody else languishes. You also can make a lot of money if you’re a distributor to head-end markets, mostly these are monopolies, oligopolies or sometimes even mafia run businesses (for a great book on the emergence of these businesses read Lew Wasserman, The Last Mogul. Sadly, no Kindle edition).

In the “long tail” you can become enormously valuable if you’re a platform. Less so if you’re a content producer. It seems appealing at first since you can “ring the cash register quickly” and it feels good. But as every blogger, musician, novelist or YouTube emerging talent knows … it doesn’t add up to much unless you go big time.

TV was the same. You first had broadcast TV through local terrestrial broadcasting towers. The spectrum was so limited that as a child of the 1970′s we only got 4 TV stations. There were no physical forms to store the media – VHS, DVDs then DVRs have obviously changed this. Distribution strangleholds have dramatically decreased with cable & satellite (and now fiber) but distribution until recently has been very limited.

And then there’s film. It has been expensive to produce film on celluloid reels and then these had to physically be shipped to theaters (which were also, obviously, limited). When you think about “time windows” of film distribution you literally need to think about the fact that you would open a film in the US and later ship the physical reels to London then Europe to open overseas.

Physical limitations on both production AND distribution produced the hits driven business that many people associate with the media industry: Film, TV & Music.

We all know what happened with music when production costs went down (ProTools) and distribution costs went to zero (Napster). It had the effect of greatly reducing the industry size but also of allowing some less known artists to reach audiences that previously would be unthinkable due to cost constraints.

To some extent this lowering of production & distribution costs has been part of the YouTube phenomenon and more broadly of UGC (user-generated content) itself. YouTube has done a phenomenal job in aggregating audiences, which is why I have taken to calling YouTube the new Comcast and believe it will be a huge disruptor in the TV market .

To give you a sense of scale: 800 million people visit YouTube.com every month. 4 billion videos are watched daily. In 2011 YouTube had 1 trillion views, which is the equivalent of every human watching 140 videos. Put simply: YouTube OWNS the long tail. They own the audience and that is enormous asset to leverage, but more on that in a moment.

Netflix, Hulu & HBO Go are coming from the opposite direction – the Head End. Yes, it’s true that their deep libraries are virtual and therefore fit the long-tail properties. But their core asset (other than great tech & management) has been exclusive windowing of premium content that people want to consume.

They had to negotiate these rights with the major content owners – the studios. And this makes them definitionally more vulnerable than having control over a massive audience that turns up every month regardless of “hits.”

That is why Hulu has invested so much in building its Hulu Plus subscription service. With what is rumored to be around 2 million consumers paying $8 / month that is now a $200 million per year not including their ad revenue business.

Very smart people are running these online video businesses and they know that they need to diversify by either creating or sponsoring the development of new content. Hulu announced $500 million to fund new content and Netflix has, for example, resurrected the hit / cult show Arrested Development.

Interestingly Netflix plans to release the entire season all at once. Take that traditional time windows!

So to some extent I believe it will be a race in video will eventually be to the middle. The Torso. I know the big players still think of the next mega hit. But the fact that Netflix focused on Arrested Development tells me they are likely thinking more like me.

And I believe the torso is much more valuable than people perceive because it is growing rapidly with globalization and with the breakdown of physical distribution barriers.

Several years ago I became fascinated in the “torso” part of the media market.

I became more aware of it by my friends at Viki. The company started out in South Korea by making South Korean drama available on the Internet. I have to admit I couldn’t have named a single SK drama so the team pointed me at the popularity of the show “Boys Over Flowers” in the US. Who knew?

Viki had come up with a concept of loading drama shows onto their website and built tools for “fan-subbers” to translate the show into other languages. At the time (several years ago) they were translating a 30-minute drama to something like 20 languages in less than 48 hours. Turns our there are armies of people who enjoy building status amongst their friends by translating shows better / faster.

At first this was hard to believe – that thousands of people engaged in translation as a sport / for fun. But then thinking about Wikipedia, Yelp and other UGC sites I realized that people build a sense of community through knowledge and accomplishments with like-minded people online.

Hard for most older (non digital native) people to understand. A bit easier of a leap for bloggers, Tweeters, Quora contributors.

In the early days of Viki (I don’t have current data) more than 50% of their views were NON ASIAN US viewers. That was impressive. In talking with the founding team I started to realize that this was a global phenomenon. Think about even the most obvious genre of global fans for “niche” international video media:

• Bollywood
• Anime & Manga
• Spanish Novelas
• South Korean Drama
• British Comedy (The Office, the original version, Ab Fab) / Period Pieces (Upstairs / Downstairs), Sci Fi (Dr. Who)
• Japanese shows (ultraman, super sentai aka power rangers, speed racer / mach go go go, godzilla)

And these are just the obvious ones I know about. I’m sure there are dozens of very large niches of content types that are particular to parts of the world that have developed followings in other parts.

You learn this in particular when you get involved with YouTube networks and find out that much of your traffic is coming from international sources – even when your videos haven’t been subtitled or dubbed. In fact, 70% of YouTube’s audience is non US and this is mirrored in most of the big YouTube networks.

But as you can tell from the graph above, I believe that total consumption of these torso shows will go up as well as the total number of these shows being created will increase – creating a much bigger market opportunity.

Why?

1. Production costs have plummeted. You can produce very high quality & compelling video for around $500 / minute versus more than $50,000 / minute for network television.

2. Distribution limitations (and thus time windows & geographic windows) are disappearing. You no longer need local broadcasters, cable companies, DVDs sold in retail shops.

3. People are developing global tastes. The freeing up of media itself is leading people to discover new content forms that they couldn’t have even realized existed before.

4. Translation is getting better. It’s clear that global audiences will consume English. For now. Innovations such as Viki are getting better at delivering sub-titled shows.

5. Revenue models are emerging. With Google building global sales forces that will over the next few years be capable of selling brand advertising in many countries around the world it will become economically viable for content producers to dub their shows from day 1. Many content producers I’m speaking with are already building this into their models. Content types such as children shows, animation, cooking & fashion are easy genre to dub.

There will always be big-budget, big-bet production and as a consumer I love this. But it’s not sustainable for most content production and it’s not economically rewarding for most creative content producers.

So I believe it’s a race to the middle and the beneficiaries will be citizens that will increasingly have access to the world’s best content at increasingly cheaper prices due to deflationary economics. And this time the winners won’t just be the platforms – I see great opportunities for torso content producers.

TV image courtesy of Fotolia.com

ShareThis wants to give publishers more insight into how their social sharing strategy stacks up, so it’s launching two new tools — the SQI Analytics Dashboard and SQI Lookup.

SQI stands for Social Quality Index, a measurement that ShareThis announced last fall. Using data from any page that has embedded the ShareThis social sharing widget (the company says there are 1.4 million sites in its publisher network), the SQI is a score from 1 to 10 that shows how a publisher’s social traffic compares to other sites in the same category.

Until now, however, the SQI was more of a general concept — today, ShareThis has turned it into two products for publishers. The dashboard shows publishers their own social sharing data, such as shares, clicks, and traffic. Then, if they want to browse the top sites in each of the SQI’s 27 categories (such as technology, travel, and sports) and maybe crib some ideas about how to become share-able, they can visit SQI Lookup.

When I spoke to CEO Kurt Abrahamson about the SQI back in March, he said it’s not just about driving traffic. He argued that socially engaged audiences are the most likely to engage with advertising too — so a publisher with a high SQI should be extremely valuable to advertisers, even if it doesn’t have the biggest audience.

To test that idea out, ShareThis ran two campaigns with Wendy’s, one that ran on sites that weren’t rated with the SQI, and another on sites with a high SQI. The SQI-targeted campaign saw a 209 percent higher clickthrough rate and 234 percent more sign-ups.

Fab.com’s international expansion continues, and this morning, the social shopping site is arriving in its 20th market: Canada. The additional market follows Fab’s European expansion 13 more countries across Europe last month, which then brought Fab to 16 countries worldwide. Since then, it has also added Sweden, Poland and Cyrus to the list.

According to Fab CEO Jason Goldberg, customer demand for Canada was already fairly high, and Fab expects the region to soon account for at least 5% of revenue. Currently, 3%-5% of Fab.com traffic is from that Canada, despite Fab not having shipped there until now.

At launch, over 80% of Fab’s products will ship to Canada at a $10 flat rate. The new Canadian members will use the Fab.com domain. Meanwhile, overseas, customers are still directed to Fab.de. This, however, will change in August, when all of Fab is brought under the “Fab.com” umbrella.

Given Fab’s rapid expansion – launching in country #20 in less than a year – it was a good time to take a look at some of its other data. This morning, Goldberg also gave us pulled up some new data to highlight Fab’s growth, noting that the company now has 3.8 million members worldwide, up from 1.5 million at the beginning of the year. 1 million of its members are now outside of the U.S.

Fab.com customers have purchased 1.8 million products so far this year, equal to 3.5 products per minute. And Fab.de is now doing $75,000-$80,000 sales per day, up from $10, 000 following its entry in the market through its acquisition of Cassacanda.

Fab also just launched a major site redesign this month to focus users’ attention more on social shopping and less on the flash sales elements. Early indications are that it’s working, with more orders per day following the changes. The number one indication that someone will buy from Fab is their engagement with the site’s social features, says Goldberg. iPhone users are 2 times more likely to buy than others, iPad users are 4 times more likely to buy, but Fab social users are nearly 10 times more likely to buy. They also explore deeper into the site than before, when 75% of sales came from daily sales – now just 50% do.

Goldberg also says that Fab is now on track to reach $140 million in sales worldwide by year-end (up from $100M in March) but that calculation didn’t take into account the addition of Canada or Fab’s further growth in Europe.

Who says reading is dead? It’s certainly doing just fine for social publishing startup Wattpad, which just raised a $17.3 million Series B.

The funding was led by Khosla Ventures, with Khosla’s Andrew Chung joining the Wattpad board. (In the press release, Chung says the publishing industry has being transformed by mobile and social technology, making it “ripe for digital-native disruption.”) Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang also invested. The startup previously raised a $3.5 million Series A. Previous backers Union Square Ventures and Golden Venture Partners participated in the new round.

On Wattpad, writers can share their novels for free, a chapter at a time, interacting with readers and even taking feedback that shapes the story.

In February, I wrote about the startup’s impressive stats, like the fact that users were collectively spending 1 billion minutes per month on the site. In the four months since, it looks like Wattpad’s growth has, if anything, accelerated. Users are now uploading 500,000 new stories per month, with 5 million already on the site. It claims to have more than 8 million monthly visitors, who now spend 1.7 billion minutes per month on Wattpad. And more than 70 percent of that usage is mobile.

In a blog post announcing the funding, co-founder and CEO Allen Lau outlines some of his bigger vision:

We don't determine who or what gets published – again, it's about the network instead of the traditional hierarchy. So, while Wattpad sometimes gets pegged as operating within the traditional publishing industry we are not a publisher. We don't see ourselves playing in this space at all. Wattpad is actually creating a completely new digital entertainment category, one that hasn't existed before.

Here's my favourite example: a traditional publishing house like Penguin published 5000 books in the last 12 months, while Wattpad users uploaded 10,000 stories in just the last 12 hours! We have something for everyone – every sub-genre and every specialized interest. The diversity of human creativity is what makes Wattpad so great.

Despite its little security incident last week, CloudFlare has been on a roll lately. The service, which as its CEO Matthew Prince likes to call it, provides something akin to “operations as a service” for website owners, now has more than half a million customers. CloudFlare is a mix between a content delivery network that speeds up website load times and an online security service. It’s currently being used by a number of major sites and even various U.S. and international government agencies. For these large business customers, CloudFlare now offers two new service plans that go beyond its current free and $20/month offerings.

Business customers can now subscribe to a $200/month service that provides them with dedicated customer support and a DDoS mitigation service, as well as all the features included in the $20/month pro account (as well as two new image optimization features the company released earlier this month).

Larger organizations like enterprise companies, banks and government agencies with additional needs can now also subscribe to the company’s enterprise plan which starts at around $3,000/month. This service comes with dedicated account managers and 24/7 phone support.

For both services, CloudFlare is also offering a service level agreement (SLA) that will reimburse paying users for any downtime. Enterprise users will, as Prince told me earlier this week, get an even more generous SLA that will basically reimburse them for 25x the downtime they suffered.

We Were Promised Railguns

One other interesting new feature that we will likely write more about in the future is CloudFlare’s “Railgun optimization,” which is currently only available with the business and enterprise plans.

CloudFlare currently operates 14 data centers around the world. As it gets closer to the end user, though, its data centers also get further away from the server where the data actually originates from. To speed up and optimize the data transport between server and data center, CloudFlare developed what is basically a replacement for HTTP. HTTP, however, says CloudFlare, “only allows for limited object caching and adds unnecessary latency to communications with your server.”

Railgun works more like the codecs used for streaming online video, as it caches the whole site in the data center and just looks at and downloads the few lines of code that changed from the last time it pinged the server. This, says CloudFlare, “allows for up to 99.6% compression of content that passes between the origin server and CloudFlare's global network, including among previously uncachable web objects, resulting in performance gains for a site's visitors of up to 730%.”

Installing Railgun on a server isn’t quite trivial yet, Prince told me, but the company is also making this service available to its long list of hosting partners.

Growing To 50 Billion Pageviews/Month By Word Of Mouth

Until now, Prince told me, CloudFlare offered these services on a one-by-one basis and worked with these companies to understand their needs and gather data about how its services are being used in different business segments. Some of the services that are already using CloudFlare include StumbleUpon, StockTwits.com, Slideshare and Clicky. According to StockTwits CTO Chris Corriveau, his company decided to subscribe to the enterprise service “for security during an attack on StockTwits.com. We were back online within an hour. Since joining CloudFlare, we’ve seen performance benefits, too, and added CloudFlare to several more sites.”

Interestingly enough, CloudFlare still doesn’t have any dedicated sales force. Instead, it’s been growing mostly based on word of mouth. To underline this point, Prince told me an interesting anecdote involving Turkish escort services that often came under cyberattacks from conservative hackers. After one of them switched to CloudFlare to mitigate these issues, virtually the whole industry switched to using the company’s systems. After that, more Turkish e-commerce sites switched and then media sites and even some branches of the Turkish government.

Today, CloudFlare, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2010, has just under 500,000 customers and serves close to 50 billion pages per month. Overall, about 475 million unique users pass through its network every month.

Also New: Polish and Mirage

In addition, CloudFlare launched two services for all of its paying customers over the last two days. With Polish, CloudFlare can now automatically optimize the file size of your images. Polish comes in two modes: lossless and lossy. Almost half of the size of an average website today is made up of images, so by reducing the size of these files by up to 50% with the lossy setting and about 21% in lossless mode, CloudFlare is able to significantly speed up the average download time for the sites in its network.

Mirage, the second of these services, is a bit more complex. It doesn’t just optimize images for download, but also optimizes them for the device you are downloading them to, as well as the speed of your network connection. In addition, it lazy loads images that aren’t currently in your browser window, which should speed up the time until a page first appears in your browser.

If you’re a LinkedIn user, do yourself a favor and change your password right now — according to a new report from Dagens IT, nearly 6.5 million encrypted LinkedIn passwords were recently dumped onto a Russian hacker forum.

The news comes right on the heels of yet another user security kerfuffle, as the most recent LinkedIn for iOS update was found to transmit users’ meeting notes back to LinkedIn servers without their permission.

Of the millions of passwords dumped, Dagen IT claims that nearly 300,000 of them have been decrypted so far and that number seems sure to grow as users spread that hefty file around.

The passwords are stored as unsalted SHA-1 hashes, and multiple reports on Twitter indicate that users have found their own hashes buried in the massive text dump. While unsalted hashes are much less secure than their salted brethren, it still takes a non-trivial amount of time to decrypt unless a user opted to use a common dictionary word as their password. It’s currently unknown whether or not the email addresses that correspond to those passwords have also been dumped, though if they are in someone’s possession, they apparently don’t feel like sharing.

Considering that LinkedIn reported back in February that 150 million people use the professional networking service (a number that has certainly grown since then), the breach represents a relatively small number of users. Though chances are slim that you yourself are personally affected — 6.5 million people makes up less than 5% of LinkedIn’s userbase — those odds seem unlikely to assuage the concerns of people who are.

For what it’s worth, LinkedIn has just acknowledged that they are aware of these reports, though their most recent tweet doesn’t offer up any additional information:

Our team is currently looking into reports of stolen passwords. Stay tuned for more.

—
  (@LinkedIn) June 06, 2012

UPDATE: LinkedIn has just taken to Twitter again to say that after a bit of investigation, they are “still unable to confirm that any security breach has occurred.” Stay tuned for further updates.

The phrase “AdSense for Images” is sometimes used to describe Google Ventures- and Nokia-backed startup Luminate, but a new integration with FoxSports.com shows that the platform is broader than that.

Starting this morning, when visitors browse NBA, MLB, and NFL photo galleries on the FoxSports site, they’ll begin to see a small banner of sorts under the picture showing a player’s stats. If they mouse over the image, the “player card” will expand to show more detailed stats about the player and how they compare to others in the league.

As any of my friends will tell you, I’m not a huge sports fan myself, but I can see that this makes the images more engaging. Instead of simply looking at a photo, you can now interact with it and get more context about the people in it portrayed. And that, in turn, might lead to FoxSports visitors spending more time on the site.

This is a pretty far cry from what Luminate was doing originally, which was automatically tagging fashion and entertainment images with relevant e-commerce links (so that you could see a photo of snazzy red coat, then click to buy it). The company hasn’t abandoned that idea, but it’s thinking bigger than that — last year it launched a platform for a variety of different image apps. That’s the same platform that Luminate and FoxSports used to build their current integration.

As for monetizing, Chief Revenue Officer and Head of Publisher Development Chas Edwards says:

Luminate delivers value to publishers in three ways: increasing audience engagement, growing traffic by plugging images into their social strategies, and boosting revenue through advertising around the image apps. An important part of our philosophy, though, is that we always prioritize the consumer experience first, which is why the initial focus here is the stats content. The best ad-supported businesses are ones built around high-quality, deeply engaging content experiences. Opportunities for brands will follow shortly.

Surf Air, a new membership-based air service providing short jaunts between California hot spots like Palo Alto, Monterey, Santa Barbara and L.A., has just closed its Series A. And look who invested: Jared Leto, noted actor/musician/entrepreneur. Leto has already launched three businesses – The Hive, The One and Only Golden Tickets, and Vyrt – so he’s no stranger to the startup scene at this point. But his investment in this potentially disruptive new airline should turn some heads. (Actor/investor is the new actor/director, apparently.)

The round was led by Anthem Venture Partners, and saw participation from NEA, TriplePoint Capital, Siemer Ventures, Baroda Ventures, Gilad and Eytan Elbaz, Rick Caruso, Jeffrey Stibel and early Uber investor Mike Walsh.

Surf Air also has angel funding from Paige Craig, Aviv Grill and Bill Woodward. The company is not officially disclosing the size of the round, but co-founder Wade Eyerly says it’s less than the $14 million reported recently. He says they don’t want to “disappoint anybody” by revealing the actual number.

The startup is the first non-tech company to emerge from MuckerLab, the L.A.-based incubator which celebrated its Demo Day back in April. Surf Air is targeting frequent business and leisure travelers by offering them luxurious private air travel on a Pilatus PC-12NG as an alternative to having to make an hours-long drive. Members don’t pay per flight, but get “all-you-can-fly” benefits for $1,000 per month. At launch, a fixed schedule will have 3 planes making 10 or more flights per day at 72 to 84 minutes apiece. (More details are in the FAQ here).

Says Wade, there are 29 over-burdened airports in the U.S., 480 screened by the TSA, but over 19,000 places to land a plane. The infrastructure is already there, it’s just not being used. And currently, the TSA doesn’t typically screen aircraft of this size – although they could if they chose to, of course. Surf Air hopes to fly (ha!) under TSA’s radar.

Wade, who co-founded Surf Air with his brother David, has an interesting background. He previously worked in the intelligence business, including time spent with the National Security Agency, four years as an intelligence officer with the Department of Defense, and time spent on two Presidential campaigns, including work as a Press Advance Representative for former VP of the U.S. Dick Cheney. He also served in Iraq from 2009 to 2010, where he built quantitative models to predict conflict, and received the Secretary of Defense’s medal for the Global War on Terror and the Civilian Joint Service Commendation for his work there. It’s an impressive resume. But how did that lead to a desire to create a new type of airline?

For starters, his work made him familiar with air travel of all sorts, from commercial air to private jets. But it was his brother David for whom flying was a first love. David studied to be a commercial pilot and later ran Frontier Airlines’ Dallas-Fort Worth operations. He was the one who suggested that the two should buy a plane, and start an airline. (Yes, just like that. No big deal, right?). But Wade says that his background actually prepared him for the challenge. “I don’t know if there’s a better experience for a first-time entrepreneur to have, than to have worked in the intelligence community,” he says, “because you spend your time making impossible things happen with very limited resources.”

“Every day there’s some impossible reason why this doesn’t work,” Wade adds, “and you find a way over it, under it, around it and make it happen. And the next day, you solve the next problem.”

Among the impossibilities so far? Figuring out pricing, finding airports, finding a credit card processor (those that handle airlines have to deal with the highest rate of chargebacks in the industry – so they’re few and far between), finding a company to handle benefits (pilots have to get checked out by doctors more often, so again, not all insurers want to handle them), and getting FAA and Department of Transportation approvals (Surf Air is still waiting on those last two, expected this summer). Plus, there’s the small matter of…oh, you know….getting planes.

“How do you lease an aircraft when you’re an early stage startup?” asks Wade. (Hint: you get funded.)

The plan with the Series A round is to prove the model works, but there are 25 markets in the U.S. that Surf Air has identified as future targets. The goal is to have 6 planes per market, reaching 150 planes in the air within the next 5 to 7 years. ”This is a jobs engine,” Wade says of Surf Air’s potential in hiring – for every 2 planes, the company hires about 30 people. At launch, they’ll have around 45 people. They plan to have 100 people by year-end. In five years, they’ll have close to 2,500, if all goes well.

One problem they’re not having? Finding pilots. The company has seen hundreds of applications, including many from former military, hungry for a job that allows them to come home to their family at night. Wade says he’s “genuinely proud” that Surf Air is able to hire former military and those who have dedicated their lives to serving the country (including their Director of Training, who used to fly Airforce One).

The company is accepting sign-ups now, but is not charging customers until their FAA and DoT approvals come through. Interested frequent fliers can join the waitlist here.

GetTaxi, an app aimed at letting people order taxis from their smartphones or via the web, has already gained significant traction in the UK, Russia and Israel. But now it has its sights set on conquering the United States — and New York City is the first on its list. So, the company is announcing today, it has raised $20 million in brand new funding to help fund its expansion efforts.

The $20 million serves as a follow-on funding round for GetTaxi, and it was led by previous investors Len Blavatnik's Access Industries with participation by company founders Shahar Waiser and Roi More. GetTaxi, which was founded in 2010, had previously raised $11 million in outside venture capital, so this round brings its total outside funding to approximately $30 million.

In the video embedded at the bottom of this post, you can see our interview with Jing Wang Herman, who joined GetTaxi last month to serve as its CEO of US operations. Herman has had a long career in the financial space as a banker, but she has a unique twist: She is also licensed to work as a New York City taxi driver. Herman told us that the taxi industry has long been a passion of hers, and that ordering a cab from a smartphone has been something she’s envisioned for years, so the opportunity to expand GetTaxi’s platform was one she had to jump at.

Of course, GetTaxi isn’t without its competitors. In the higher-end personal transportation realm Uber has of course taken the space by storm in recent months, and in the cab market apps such as Cabulous have cracked other cities such as San Francisco, and apps such as Hailo have stated aims to get into the NYC market. With its experience growing in the international space, GetTaxi is positioning itself as a reliable and scalable new option — and one that New York City should choose as its officially recommended taxi-hailing smartphone app.

Right now, GetTaxi has 100 employees, with Herman the only full-timer in the United States. The company plans to add to its U.S. headcount as it grows in the months ahead. Its New York launch date is still not set, but it will occur sometime in the coming months, Herman says.

Everloop, the social network for children under 13, is planning to launch a mobile application, making it one of the first companies to attempt a mobile, social network just for kids. The app, arriving in the third week of June, will translate the desktop experience to the small screen, beginning with iOS (iPhone & iPod Touch) before heading to other platforms like Android.

The company, which closed a seed round of $3.1 million last year, is also in the process of raising its Series A and is in search of a strategic investor to help it expand.

Although Everloop is now three and half years old, the company’s slow growth has been by design, explains CEO Hilary DeCesare. “Something like this takes time to build up,” she says, “you don’t just come out and say, ‘hey, we’re a safe site for kids.’”

Today, the company reports that 200,000 children and around 75,000 parents are using its service on the web, and it has been growing around 10% to 15% month-over-month during the past year.

It’s hard to operate in the social networking space without the inevitable Facebook comparison, but news of Everloop’s expansion to mobile comes at an interesting time. Facebook is reportedly now mulling over whether or not it can allow children under 13 to join its network, according to a recent report from the WSJ. If that were to happen, it goes without saying that Everloop would soon be facing some steep competition. So the question is not whether or not Everloop can exist outside of Facebook’s shadow – Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram have proven it’s possible to establish a social audience beyond Facebook’s gates. The question is whether or not kids would ever willingly choose Everloop if Facebook officially opened up to them.

For what it’s worth, Everloop is structured differently than Facebook – it’s focused more around children’s interests, which it calls “loops.” These can be based on anything at all, whether entertainment (think Justin Bieber, Twilight), sports, animals (golden retrievers, kittens), etc. And the interests are supplemented by content provided by Everloop’s now 25 brand partners, a group which includes big names like National Geographic, Mattel, Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, and others. (Many are listed on the company’s homepage).

In addition – and key to Everloop’s value proposition to parents – is its ability to teach children about what’s appropriate on social networking services. If a child posts using swear words, attempts cyberbullying, or engages in any other inappropriate behavior, Everloop doesn’t allow the content to be posted and tells the child why. “All kids try to push the envelope,” says DeCesare, “but when they do, we want to notify them.”

The in-house moderation team consists of a staff of three plus a community manager, but the company has been scaling its moderation with assistance from Metaverse Mod Squad, which assists in reviewing the site’s content.

As for the kids, there a number of features they might enjoy, including games, music, videos, the aforementioned “loops,” as well as an incredibly goofy (and therefore, popular) feature called “Goobs.” These are something like harmless pranks, explains DeCesare. They let you toilet paper someone’s screen, for example, throw food or squash bugs on the screen. There’s also one with a puppy that throws up on the screen then licks it. (I know, gross. But apparently, this is really hilarious to kids). “We want to bring out kids’ whimsical side,” says DeCesare, “kids grow up way too fast.”

These “Goobs” will translate to the mobile app, which also aims to “help kids stay kids,” DeCesare says. Kids text all the time, and Everloop on mobile will feel something like texting combined with graphics. And it will allow kids to keep up with their “loops” (interests), post to their loops, and stay in touch with friends in a safe, moderated, cyberbully-free environment.

Another plus for kids, is that, even though parents are kept informed of what kids are doing on Everloop through notifications, they can’t embarrass kids by actually commenting on their posts. (That’s a lesson which more parents should take heed of on Facebook, too.)

Perhaps Facebook will soon figure out how to bring in kids to its network and keep them safe, but DeCesare has her doubts. “The way we’ve developed Everloop is that we’ve thought of the kids first,” she says. “If you look at Facebook, they’re really had bad corporate governance around identity with adults. Our attitude is that if they can’t keep adults’ information safe, how are they planning on doing that with kids? If you look at their open architecture that they have set their business on – which is ‘let everyone see everything you have to say about everything’ – it goes against their structure to have something like a closed environment for kids.”

It’s true that Facebook’s general agenda and many parents’ agenda for their children don’t necessarily match up. But Everloop faces a problem that a kid-friendly Facebook would not – its audience keeps growing up, and is then forced to leave the site.

Indiegogo, the website that allows people to contribute money to the causes, artistic projects, and small companies they support, has attracted a good amount of success in the four years since it was founded in early 2008: 100,000 projects have been funded in more than 196 countries through the site. In the process, it’s even helped to put the concept of “crowdfunding” well into the mainstream. But Indiegogo is officially making it clear that it’s aiming to make an even bigger impact — and the company has closed on $15 million in brand new funding to do so.

Indiegogo’s new $15 million round, which serves as the company’s Series A, was led by Insight Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, with the participation of existing Indiegogo investors Metamorphic Ventures, MHS Capital, ffVenture Capital, and Steve Schoettler. According to the company, this is the largest funding round of a crowdfunding platform to date. Prior to this, Indiegogo’s only outside funding was a $1.5 million seed round it raised about one year ago.

We talked to Indiegogo’s co-founder and CEO Slava Rubin to hear about the new funding from the horse’s mouth, and you can watch our interview with him in the TechCrunch TV video embedded above. Indiegogo is based in San Francisco, but Rubin was doing some business in New York this week, so we were happy to have him join us via Skype.

Making a wide scope wider

In many ways Indiegogo’s most well-known and visible competitor is Kickstarter, but the company is keen to point out what sets it apart from other players in the space. For one thing, Indiegogo is active globally in 196 countries and accepts all types of projects, whereas Kickstarter is focused only in the United States and aims to keep its project limited to the creative space. “We’re completely open to any idea, any campaign, and any idea in the world without any judgement,” Rubin said. With the new funding, it will just work on expanding that reach further.

Equity-based crowdfunding is a definite option

Another option for expansion is the equity-based crowdfunding that will soon be made possible by the JOBS Act signed into law by President Obama this past spring, which makes it possible for non-accredited investors to receive equity for investing money into private companies.

Up until now, only accredited investors have been able to receive financial stakes in companies that they funded — so today sites like Indiegogo only allow for non-equity based funding. Once the crowdfunding portion of the JOBS Act is approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is expected to occur in late 2012 or early 2013, equity-based funding will be legal for all investors. According to Rubin, Indiegogo could very well opt to open itself up to those kinds of transactions when the time comes.

Growing in numbers, too

The new funding will be put toward general growth initiatives, too. Right now Indiegogo has about 20 employees — up from 5 people just a year ago — and it expects that headcount to grow in the weeks and months ahead, Rubin said. The company has been generating revenue from Day One, so that stands to grow in the future as well; so it will be exciting to see what it does with this new, big influx of outside capital.

Two years ago, HBO introduced HBO GO, giving fans a way to access all of their favorite programming online, on tablets and mobile devices, and increasingly on connected TV platforms. For those of us who have had a chance to use it, HBO GO is nothing short of a revelation, as viewers can watch pretty much every episode of every HBO original series ever made, as well as a pretty good selection of new release movies.

The problem is that access to the services is limited to those who have HBO as part of their pay TV subscription: There’s currently no way to purchase the HBO GO component without spending upwards of $100 on cable or satellite. That’s led many to argue that HBO is leaving money on the table, by not trying to appeal to some of the cord cutter set. Worse, lack of access is driving some of its biggest fans to piracy, with Game of Thrones far and away the most pirated TV show this season.

But how much would people actually pay for HBO GO, if it were an option? Earlier this evening, web designer Jake Caputo tried to find out, by creating a website called takemymoneyhbo.com. The site implored users to tell it just how much they would pay for a standalone subscription to HBO GO, tweeting out whatever dollar value you said that you’d pay.

(For what it’s worth, I said that I’d pay $19.95 a month for a standalone subscription, even though I currently borrow access on my family’s cable account.)

Caputo’s site received more than 12,000 visits in just the first two hours, and it set off a string of tweets declaring just how much users would pay for a standalone HBO GO subscription. But there was just one problem — while Caputo’s site was built to attract the attention of HBO execs watching Twitter, he wasn’t actually capturing any of the data associated with what people said they’d pay.

Thankfully, someone else figured out a way to do so: Coder Dominic Balasuriya created a script to capture and analyze the amounts being tweeted out by users.

Using the Twitter API, his script grabbed the most recent 1,500 tweets that mentioned the #takemymoneyhbo hashtag. It ignored retweets, and grabbed the dollar amount given. Any tweets that said they’d pay more than $50 were also ignored, since some were obviously intentionally high to skew the results.

What’d he find? The script was run twice, fifteen minutes apart, and the results were remarkably similar:

• Wednesday 5:10AM GMT/UTC +0:00 – $12.06, from 1063 data points.
• Wednesday 5:24AM GMT/UTC +0:00 – $12.30, from 1071 data points.

The average person would pay $12 a month, or about $145 a year, for online-only access to HBO content. But is that something HBO would be interested in? And is it really leaving money on the table?

HBO currently has about 29 million subscribers, and reportedly receives around $7 or $8 per subscriber per month. So HBO could, theoretically, get more per subscriber than it’s currently making. But that doesn’t include the cost of infrastructure needed to support delivery of all those streams, including all the CDN delivery and other costs that would come with rolling out a broader online-only service.

More importantly, it wouldn’t include the cost of sales, marketing, and support — and this is where HBO would really get screwed. Going direct to online customers by pitching HBO GO over-the-top would mean losing the support of its cable, satellite, and IPTV distributors. And since the Comcasts and the Time Warner Cables of the world are the top marketing channel for premium networks like HBO, it would be nearly impossible for HBO to make up for the loss of the cable provider’s marketing team or promotions.

Think about it: Every time someone signs up for cable or satellite service, one of the inevitable perks is a free six- or 12-month subscription to HBO. And those free subscriptions are rarely, if ever, cancelled once the trial period ends.

What would happen if HBO no longer had the pay TV industry’s marketing team propping it up all the time? The results would be disastrous, and there’s no way that HBO could make up in online volume the number of subscribers it would lose from cable. Which is why, even though some users would actually pay more for access to HBO GO without all the other cable channels, you won’t see it show up as a standalone service anytime soon.

MOG, the popular streaming music service, today announced that it is partnering with Ford to bring its service to the car manufacturer’s SYNC AppLink platform. This will allow Ford drivers with compatible cars, including the 2012 Fiesta, Fusion, F-150, Super Duty, E-Series, Mustang and Expedition, to use their voice and in-dash controls to control the MOG app on their USB-connected smartphones.

Through AppLink, drivers will be able to access MOG’s on-demand radio features, program radio station presets based on artists they like, select playlists and play songs from Billboard’s Top 50 by using voice commands like “similar artists,” “list playlists” and “top songs.”

Despite rumors earlier this year that MOG was getting acquired by HTC, this acquisition hasn’t materialized yet. The service currently offer users access to about 15 million songs on its iOS and Android app. The arrival of Spotify has obviously put some pressure on MOG, but the service, which was founded in 2005, continues to hum along nicely. To use MOG’s mobile apps, users have to subscribe to the service’s $9.99/month plan.

Other music-related apps currently supported by AppLink include Pandora, iHeartRadio, Stitcher SmartRadio, Slacker and NPR. Twitter fans who can’t bear to drive without knowing that they’re still connected to their favorite social network can also use OpenBeak to have AppLink read incoming tweets to you. I had a chance to test Pandora and AppLink in a 2012 Mustang earlier this year and it worked surprisingly well. It takes a moment to learn the voice commands, but once you have those down, the voice recognition system tends to work very well.

While Ford makes a developer kit for AppLink available to developers, though, the program is still invite-only and the company is only working with a few select developers right now. Eventually, though, the company hopes to expand this program significantly.

Earlier this week, by the way, Ford also announced that it is bringing AppLink to markets across Asia Pacific and Africa. SYNC, Ford also announced, is coming to Taiwan soon.