As mentioned in yesterday’s earnings call, Zynga revealed that the company’s zCloud, its private cloud infrastructure has been scaling significantly in the past year. At the start of 2011, only 20% of Zynga’s daily active users (DAU) were in the zCloud. A year later, nearly 80% of Zynga games’ DAU reside in zCloud, and 20% in the public cloud (powered by AWS). Today the company is revealing additional information about the zCloud and how much data is being transmitted through its infrastructure.

Zynga has been quietly investing in powering up the zCloud over the past few years, explains Allan Leinwand, Zynga’s CTO of Infrastructure. As Leinwand explains, the infrastructure looks, feels, and operates similar to the AWS public cloud, but allows for greater performance, scale and reliability. zCloud physically resides in Zynga’s private datacenters and is designed specifically for social games in terms of availability and performance. And Zynga has created tailored automation tools for large server environments and built custom monitoring and management tools.

As GigaOm reported last year, xCloud was built using Cloud.com’s CloudStack software. And startup RightScale provides a management console for Zynga’s public cloud (powered by AWS) and the private cloud.

Between 2009 and 2011, Zynga says that it doubled down on increasing physical server capacity in order to move games over to the private cloud. For Zynga, this increased not only the ability to scale but also reliability. For social games specifically, zCloud offers 3x the efficiency of standard public cloud infrastructure. For example, games in the public cloud would require three physical servers, zCloud only uses one.

Last year, Zynga began to launch games directly in zCloud instead of in the public cloud. The first new Zynga game to launch in zCloud was CityVille Hometown in June 2011. Since then, every Zynga game has launched in zCloud. For example, CastleVille, which holds the record for the fastest growing Zynga game was launched and scaled in zCloud.

Currently, Zynga stores 1.4 Petabytes of data at any time and has the ability to deploy up to 1,000 servers in a 24 hour period. The company says the power they deployed for zCloud alone during the second half of 2011 could’ve kept 166 international space stations in orbit. 36 billion gifts were gifted during the holiday season in 2011, and Zynga has increased its server capacity by a 100 times over the past year (see infographic below).

For now, Zynga has no plans to eliminate public cloud powered by AWS. But clearly, this infrastructure is being used sparingly.

Local Response, a social advertising platform that allows local businesses to respond to the “check-in” with marketing campaigns, is launching a pro version of its analytics and action platform for marketers.

LocalResponse’s DirectResponse product aggregates real-­time social media check-­‐ins from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and dozens of other services to provide a simple interface for local businesses to directly respond to their most influential and valuable customers. What makes LocalResponse compelling is that it analyzes massive amounts of data in addition to check-ins from the Twitter firehose, photo sharing sites and more to find other forms of check-ins. These could be posting a picture on Instagram of a dish from a restaurant or Tweeting that you are visiting a particular bar.

LocalResponse’s proprietary technology collects and prioritizes social data both explicitly (i.e. check-ins on Foursquare) and implicitly (by analyzing natural language on Facebook, Twitter, etc.; e.g. “I’m headed to ShakeShack”).

For example, in a recent campaign, Walgreens used Direct Response to respond to customers in-store to disseminate store promotions, such as flu shots and HALLS coupons. Average click-through-rates for LocalResponse’s Direct Response product are greater than 50%, says the company.

Another LocalResponse product is Intent Retargeting allows marketers to deliver mobile display ads against various real-time intent data points. The product can serve ads to explicit check-ins, implicit check-ins, competitive check-ins, as well as relevant sentiment. For example, Intuit’s TurboTax uses Intent Retargeting to serve TurboTax banner ads to people who have expressed challenges in doing their taxes on Twitter. Average clickthrough-rates for LocalResponse’s Intent Retargeting are 1%.

The PRO Dashboard provides real-time analysis for brand’s and brand’s competitor’s consumer foot traffic, intent, and sentiment. The PRO version basically allows marketers to access this in-depth data and then activate contextual and targeted advertising easily.

To date, LocalResponse has worked with a number of high-profile advertisers including Audi, Coca-Cola, Dell, Estee Lauder, FedEx, General Electric, General Mills, General Motors, H&M, Hersheys, Kmart, Lowes, McDonald’s, NBC-Universal, Pepsi, Pizza Hut, Verizon, and Walgreens.

LocalResponse has raised $6.5 million Cava Capital, Vodafone Ventures, Progress Ventures, Verizon Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, Extreme Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, BOLDstart Ventures, Jim Pallotta, Greycroft Partners, and others. The startup also recently acquired social TV check-in and advertising platform Philo.

After announcing a licensing deal with Hasbro last week, Zynga is debuting another licensing agreement. The social gaming giant is teaming up with game developer Slingo to license casual game Slingo; and launch a social Facebook title Zynga Slingo today. This is the first time Zynga has licensed a game title to date, as the company has been churning out original titles over the past few years.

Created in 1995, Slingo is played by over 55 million people across free online games, retail, mobile, casino slots and other platforms. Additionally, over 50 million Slingo games have been downloaded and almost five billion games of Slingo have been played online. In case you aren’t familiar with Slingo, players spin and match numbers to fill the card to win the game. The goal, similar to Bingo, is to create Slingos which include five matched numbers in a row, column, or even diagonal.

Available on Facebook, Zynga Slingo is best described as a slots-meets bingo game. When opening Zynga Slingo, you’ll be able to pick the ‘world’ for your game, and then complete a number of stages within each world. Currently, Slingo has 5 worlds with 9 stages each. Once you pick your world, you’ll be presented with what looks like a Bingo card. You simply press the spin button and match the numbers that appear with each spin with the numbers on the card. As mentioned above, the goal is to complete matched numbers in a row, and earn points for each row.

One of the distinctive aspects of the game, says Rich Sawel, Product Manager for Zynga Slingo; is the high production value, animations and sound effects. And as Sawel explains, the game is meant as a recess for adults.

Like most Zynga games, Slingo features a cast of characters to make the game more interactive. This cast was actually taken from the original Slingo game. The Friend Joker will spin up the face of one of your friends on Facebook, and let them make a free match for you. If you spin and land on the Slingo Devil, you’ll lose your points, but if you get the Slingo Cherub, your score will skyrocket.

As you successfully complete the game, you’ll collect medals to complete levels and unlock additional experiences. In terms of social, you see a leaderboard of the scores of your friends in real-time. You can also send your friends power-ups to help them in the game. For example, Slingo Vision will help you find matches and Instant Slingo will explode for more points.

Players will also soon be able to challenge friends and compete to see who can get the highest score in three rounds.

“Slingo has been a leader in the casual game space for over 15 years, and our partnership with Zynga will bring the Slingo brand to a whole new audience in a fresh, new way,” said Rich Roberts, CEO of Slingo, Inc. “We are excited to partner with the world’s leading social game developer to deliver the social experience Slingo fans across the world have asked for.”

The game is available in 14 languages, including: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Japanese and English.

The obvious comparison that I made when hearing about Zynga Slingo is to the social gaming giant’s recent game Zynga Bingo. But Zynga says that the two are quite different and it’s like comparing chess to checkers. Sawel tells me that while both games combine the elements of luck, Zynga Slingo combines the serendipity of slots with bingo, while Zynga Bingo is the more traditional take on the local bingo hall. He says the two games are complimentary.

As for licensing games in the future, Sawel says Zynga will do this when it makes sense. “We are trying to bring quality production and fresh new experiences to the gaming market” he adds. Perhaps licensing could be a good alternative for Zynga, who has been accused of ripping off games. NimbleBit (makers of iOS Game of the Year, Tiny Tower) accused Zynga of copying them with its new game, Dream Heights. And Buffalo Studios says that the gaming giant copied its flagship title Bingo Blitz with its launch of Zynga Bingo.

Zynga also just reported better than expected earnings for the fourth quarter of 2011, the gaming giant’s first quarter as a public company.

Kabbage, which provides working capital to online merchants, is announcing a big deal today. The Atlanta-based startup is debuting a partnership with shipping giant UPS where for the first time ever, they will allow and facilitate customers offering their shipping and transportation data to Kabbage for use in the capital underwriting process.

Kabbage is essentially a way for online merchants and sellers on marketplaces like eBay, Etsy and Amazon to get capital they otherwise wouldn’t qualify for at a bank. Kabbage uses technology to analyze online merchants’ sales and credit history; customer traffic and reviews; and prices and inventory compared to competitors. And merchants can proactively add information to their Kabbage account to immediately increase their access to capital. Kabbage makes cash advances available to eBay and other online marketplace sellers fairly quickly and is available in the U.S.

Basically Kabbage will now use UPS data from merchants, including volume and transactional information, to decide whether a merchant qualifies for working capital. The startup says that this is the first time in the almost 130 year history of UPS that they have partnered with a company to share transactional shipping data for something besides tracking packages.

As co-founder Marc Gorlin explains, the data relationship between Kabbage and UPS will enable Kabbage to potentially increase working capital lines based on a small business’ UPS transaction data, which includes information related to the number and frequency of packages shipped.

Additionally, UPS Capital will also offer Kabbage an undisclosed amount of additional debt financing to fund more small businesses who sell online. Kabbage, which currently has a customer base of more than 10,000 e-commerce companies recently raised an additional $12 million in debt financing and $17 million in equity funding.

FileTrek, a new cloud storage and file-sharing platform launching today, has raised $10 million in Series B funding led by Anthem Venture Partners, Telesystem, and Ontario Emerging Technologies Funds.

Filetrek is designed to allow enterprises to add secure file sharing, project collaboration, and the ability for managers to track content and data across thousands of desktops and mobile devices. Using the application, consumers can share files directly from their desktop and access data anywhere from any device, whether they are online or offline.

Filetrek will also tell you the location of a file, who has worked on it, the various changes that have been made to it, and how files are related. All versions of documents and files automatically backup and sync between multiple devices in real-time. Additionally Filetrek aims to solve compliance issues for large businesses by providing audit trail reporting that gives management and IT visibility of all sharing, syncing and versioning activities of a file or its contents.

For larger enterprises, the startup offers an internal FileTrek storage option that allows enterprises to utilize their own internal servers as the host rather than utilize the public cloud.

As we mentioned in our coverage of Zynga’s fourth quarter earnings, mobile has been one of the fast-growing parts of Zynga’s business. On the company’s earnings call, CEO and founder Marc Pincus revealed that mobile users have grown five-fold to 15 million daily active users in 2011. That’s up from 13 million in December.

That’s an addition of 2 million users in the past month, and an addition of over 5 million users over the course of the quarter. In the third quarter, Zynga had 9.9 million daily active users for its mobile games.

The company launched five mobile games in the fourth quarter, including Mafia Wars and ForestVille. The company’s mobile game titles Dream Zoo, Words with Friends and Zynga Poker were all among the top 10 grossing games on the iOS platform during the quarter (Zynga launched 8 mobile games over the course of the entire year). On average, Zynga’s mobile apps have an average of 4.3 stars in App Store, says the company. Zynga says that the company saw a record amount of mobile bookings (revenue) in the quarter as well and mobile payers (those who are paying during games) are growing.

Zynga CFO Dave Wehner says that while the company is gaining more revenue from advertising online, there has also been healthy growth in ad revenue from mobile as well. In terms of monetization, some mobile games are being monetized at a higher rate than even web games. “As devices become more powerful, this is yet another canvas to grow,” said COO John Schappert on the call. “We’re seeing mobile as a big opportunity…we’re going to see more games coming.”

Considering the growth Zynga is seeing from mobile, it’s a good bet that mobile will be a key focus for Zynga in 2012.

Social gaming giant Zynga just released its fourth quarter earnings, the company’s first earnings release as a public company. Analysts expected earnings of $0.03 per share on revenue of $302 million. Zynga beat the street, with revenue coming in at $311.2 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 59% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. In terms of Diluted EPS, Zynga took s a loss ($1.22) for the fourth quarter of 2011 compared to $0.05 for the fourth quarter of 2010. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.05 for the fourth quarter of 2011 compared to $0.09 for the fourth quarter of 2010.

CEO and Founder Mark Pincus said in a release, “2011 was another milestone year for Zynga’s mission of connecting the world through games. We are seeing social games and more broadly play become one of the most popular pastimes on web and mobile. Zynga set new records in the year in terms of audience size, revenues and bookings. We saw great momentum in mobile and advertising and ended the year with a strong pipeline of new games. We are excited about the opportunities in front of us to continue delighting our current players and to bring play to millions of new people.”

In terms of income, the company took a net loss of $435 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, which included $510 million of stock-based compensation expense for restricted stock units issued to employees that, in accordance with GAAP, was previously unrecognized until triggered by our initial public offering.

Zynga says bookings, which are its non-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) measure, were at a record level of $306.5 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 26% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 and an increase of 7% compared to the third quarter of 2011. Online game revenue was $283.9 million, an increase of 51% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. Advertising revenue was $27.3 million, an increase of 230% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010.

In terms of traffic and user stats, Daily active users increased from 48 million in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 54 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 13%. Monthly active users increased from 195 million in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 240 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 23%.

Monthly unique users increased from 111 million in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 153 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 38%. And average daily bookings per average DAU increased from $0.055 in the fourth quarter of 2010 to $0.061 in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 11%. Monthly unique payers, which is a key stat for revenue, increased marginally from 2.6 million in the third quarter of 2011 to 2.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 13%.

The company also reported a growth in usage of mobile games in Q4 primarily from titles Dream Zoo, Words with Friends and Zynga Poker, which were among the top 10 grossing games on the iOS platform during the quarter.

For the full year, Zynga says bookings were at a record level of $1.16 billion in 2011, an increase of 38% on a year-over-year basis. Revenue came in at $1.14 billion in 2011, an increase of 91% on a year-over-year basis. Online game revenue was $1.07 billion, an increase of 85% on a year-over-year basis. Advertising revenue was $74.5 million, an increase of 226% on a year-over-year basis.

Non-GAAP net income was $182.5 million in 2011, a decrease of 24% year-over-year, which was due to the increased investment in developing new games.

In terms of projections for the full year, bookings are projected to be in the range of $1.35 billion to $1.45 billion. Zynga also warns that growth will be weighted towards the back-half of the year with slower sequential growth in the first half of the year.

As we’ve reported in the past, Zynga has had a bit of a rough start on the public markets, as investors are a little unsure what to make of the company considering it’s the first Facebook-oriented virtual goods business to be publicly traded. The stock has fluctuated below its $10 initial share price since the company went public in the middle of December amid concerns over a heavy reliance on Facebook for traffic, over the small number of paying users for most of its revenue, as well as its mostly flat traffic.

But in late January, Zynga’s stock rating got a boost, and traffic numbers are up. New game launches such as Hidden Chronicles and Scramble With Friends, as well as a resurgence in usage of older games like Zynga Poker have helped boost traffic numbers for Zynga.

Additionally, the news that Zynga will be introducing legal gambling to its games portfolio also helped drive the stock value up.

And with the release of Facebook’s S-1, we learned that Zynga accounted for 12 percent of the social network’s revenue in 2011, through a combination of virtual goods payments and advertising (you can see more information on Zynga and Facebook’s agreement here). And clearly, Facebook’s payments business is growing. Investors are more bullish on Zynga and these earnings should help.

It’s clear Zynga is looking for other revenue streams and recently struck a big licensing deal with Hasbro to turn games like FarmVille, CityVille, and its other hit titles into real world products and toys.

You can follow the earnings call, which is set to take place at 2 pm PT, below.

Lover.ly, an inspiration engine and Pinterest-like startup for weddings, has raised $500,000 from Joanne Wilson, Michael Edwards, Michael Yavonditte, Charles Smith, Anu Duggal, Jordan Levy, and Rick Webb.

Launched in the Fall of 2011, Lover.ly is a centralized place that helps brides discover and save wedding ideas. The site is designed to help brides, vendors, and wedding enthusiasts find inspiration (from wedding blogs), people to hire, and things to buy. Similar to Pinterest, the site allows users to curate board of ideas and make them public for users to view and draw inspiration. Currently, the site has an archive of over 130,000 images organized by editors and its community of users. Lover.ly offers both editor-curated inspiration boards (i.e. bridesmaid dresses for beach weddings, honeymoon ideas) as well as user-generated boards.

Indexing all of these images is done via Loverl.y’s proprietary tagging system that adds anywhere from 4 to 20 tags per image identifying color, style, season, location, and objects in the images (i.e. photographer, planner, dress designer, floral, dessert, rentals, venue). Users can search for ideas by category and subcategory.

The startup was founded by Kellee Khalil, who while helping plan her sister’s wedding was overwhelmed and frustrated that there were no tools search, save, organize, and share visual inspirations for the event. Thus, the idea for Lover.ly was born.

As mentioned above, the site is similar in a lot of ways to Pinterest. But Khalil says that she believes Lover.ly can be distinctive because the site is the reverse of Pinterest. She explains that it can be difficult to sift through all the information and content on Pinterest and Lover.ly is a more niche, centralized place for all things wedding.

Amazon is opening a 1 million-square-foot fulfillment center in Middletown, Delaware, which is the e-commerce giant’s second facility in the state. Amazon says that the new center will create 850 full-time jobs, and will cost $90 million.

Amazon’s fulfillment centers enables the company and third-party merchants to store inventory and fulfill orders. The Middletown center joins Amazon’s New Castle fulfillment facility, which was opened in 1997. Amazon says that the New Castle center currently employs “hundreds of full-time workers,” but it sounds like the new facility will be larger. The Middletown facility is expected to be complete this fall.

In December, the Delaware Economic Development Office awarded the company $3.47 million from the Delaware Strategic Fund to support the expansion, of which $2.12 million will help create new jobs at the site. The fund will also contribute to the company’s infrastructure investment, equal to 3 percent of the total capital expenditures, or a maximum of $1.35 million. A separate grant for up to $4 million from the Delaware New Jobs Infrastructure Fund will be used to build extensions of public roads to serve the project, improve traffic flow and provide access to additional properties for future economic development. Amazon will also benefit from a real estate tax abatement from the town of Middletown for the next 10 years.

Amazon has been ramping up the development of its fulfillment centers over the past year. In 2011, the e-commerce company opened 15 new centers worldwide. As of last July, Amazon had roughly 65 centers worldwide. And this year, the company opened a new center in India and in South Carolina.

Online payments platform and PayPal competitor WePay is announcing its growth data for 2011, and revealing details on the startup’s product strategy for 2012. In case you aren’t familiar, WePay is a Y Combinator backed startup that launched in 2009 to take the hassle out of group paying. Unlike some of its competitors, the service was able to dead simple way to collect, manage and spend money for groups.

On WePay, you can create a unique, FDIC insured account for each group. While the account is still associated with your name, but you can keep each group account totally separate from your personal transactions. Group money can essentially be kept separate from any individual accounts you may have. You can also designate specific individuals to have control over accounts.

But as co-founder Bill Clerico tells me, last year the payments platform evolved into a broader offering, allowing any merchant or user a simple way to accept payments beyond just the group model. “We believe the benefit of using WePay is around simplicity of user experience and great customer service,” says Clerico. He explains that users can sign up with Facebook Connect, and WePay underwrites the risk of these individuals accepting payment by looking at their online presence, and social connections to evaluate risk.

Last year, the startup, which is processing several million dollars in payment volume per month, started listening to customer feedback and launched a number of new products to add to the platform, including WePay Stores. The feature lets any site integrate a payments storefront by inserting an embed code. WePay also launched an API as well.

The company grew nearly ten times in revenue in 2011, and doubled headcount with 20 new employees (the company plans to double employees again this year). WePay also grew revenue generated by its API by 15x in 2011. Partners like GoFundMe, which replaced PayPal with WePay as its primary payment platform, are helping fuel this growth, says the startup.

Social media is a big driver for WePay. About half of all WePay payments were initiated through social media. More than 25,000 people and organizations have collected donations and over 250,000 invoices have been paid through WePay in 2011. And almost $800,000 was collected using WePay from 806 Occupy Wall Street-related accounts.

WePay says that it exited 2011 at a multi-million dollar revenue run rate and a compounded monthly growth rate of 30 percent since launch.

As for what’s next, Clerico says that mobile is an area where WePay has not yet explored and will launch mobile apps in the coming year. And WePay, which has raises $7.5 million in funding, could be on track for raising another round. Clerico tells us that much of the earlier investment in the company is still in the bank, but the company may raise new funds for expansion and growth purposes.

Brazilian social gaming giant Vostu is laying off an undisclosed number of employees, we’ve learned. Vostu, which has raised $46 million from Intel Capital, Accel Partners, General Catalyst, and Tiger Technology Global Management; is one largest social gaming companies in Latin America. The gaming company was founded in 2007 by three Harvard classmates: CEO Daniel Kafie, chief scientist Mario Schlosser, and Joshua Kushner. UPDATE: Vostu has confirmed the layoffs.

It’s unclear what’s caused the layoffs but Vostu is fresh off of a settlement with Zynga over copyright issues. As we’ve reported in the past, Zynga hit Vostu with a massive lawsuit in June of 2011, alleging that the company was copying Zynga’s games. In fact, Zynga alleged that Vostu was copying Zynga’s games so closely that they even inadvertently included the bugs.

Vostu then claimed that Zynga has copied other games repeatedly over the years, including Zynga’s hit game Cityville. Zynga then sued shareholder Google over the dispute, because Orkut, which is popular in Brazil, was hosting the Vostu games that Zynga said were ripoffs.

In December, both companies issued a statement that they had settled the copyright lawsuits and counterclaims against each other in the legal systems in the United States and Brazil. As part of the settlement, Vostu made a monetary payment to Zynga and made changes to four of its games.

Perhaps the layoffs could be a result of the settlement and the legal costs associated with the matter. But Vostu has reportedly been growing in terms of traffic, and launched four mobile games over the past two months (and the company has said that 25 percent of all internet-connected Brazilians play its games). Next month, the company plans to launch two additional games.

UPDATE: Here’s the statement Vostu issued to us on the news: “Vostu grew a significant amount in the last 18 months and is constantly focused on improving efficiency for future growth which includes select and strategic hiring. We are consolidating our game design and development at our new headquarters in Buenos Aires.”

SHAPE Services, the company behind the cross-platform IM+ messaging applications has raised $10 million from Russian investment firm Finam.

IM+ unites all communication needs under a single interface, integrating with Facebook Chat, Twitter, MSN Live Messenger, Skype IM, Google Talk, AOL, ICQ and others. The app currently has 17.5 million users and 800 million mobile ad impressions per month.

As a part of the deal Finam and Shape Services will launch a FinamShape joint venture that will release a special version of plus.im web messenger for the Russian market. And Shape Services’ name will be shortened to Shape. Last year Shape Services acquired CrispApp, the Hong Kong based developer of the fone app for iOS

Apple took the top spot from Google for the highest corporate reputation score, according to the 2012 Harris Poll Reputation Quotient, a survey which measures corporate reputation for brands and companies in the U.S. The poll asks the general public to measure the reputations of the 60 most visible companies in the country. As reported last year, Google was top of the list in 2011′s rankings, followed by Apple and Amazon.

Harris says that Apple took the highest RQ score (85.62 this year, the highest RQ score ever achieved by any company in the 13 years of the RQ study) to secure the top spot in the ranking, with Google and the Coca-Cola Company taking the second and third spots, respectively. Amazon also saw a jump in reputation score, moving up from eighth to fourth place with Kraft Foods ranking fifth.

In terms of year-over-year change, only Toyota, General Motors, BP, and Apple saw significant improvement in their RQ scores while one-quarter of companies saw drastic declines. Among those with the most significant declines, five were financial institutions, including Berkshire Hathaway. HP also saw a major decline and IBM and Intel, who both made the list last year, were absent this year.

RQ actually measures six different factors in reputation that influence consumer behavior. Apple is top-ranked in four of the six dimensions of reputation, says Harris. These factors and the high scorers include Social Responsibility (Whole Foods); Emotional Appeal (Amazon.com), Financial Performance (Apple), Products & Services (Apple), Vision & Leadership (Apple) and Workplace Environment (Apple).

Other interesting results from the survey include purchase and recommendation behavior from consumers. For example, in the future, Americans would “definitely” purchase products & services from Amazon.com (71%), Kraft Foods (70%), and the Coca-Cola Company (64%). Americans would “definitely” invest in stock from Amazon.com (34%), Microsoft (23%), and the Coca-Cola Company (23%).

Bullhorn, which develops a recruitment software and applicant tracking system, is releasing a new Social Recruiting Activity Report, which examines the usage of social media in executive and job recruiting. Bullhorn found that LinkedIn leads among the frequency of usage by recruiters and their effectiveness for sourcing candidates, followed by Twitter, with Facebook coming in third.

It’s important to note that this study examines activity by recruiters as opposed to actual job hunters. Despite the rise of Facebook as a source for job seeking and professional networking, Bullhorn’s data shows that recruiters’ LinkedIn networks still drive more views than their Twitter and Facebook networks combined. Recruiters who post jobs on social networks are likely to receive more applications from LinkedIn, with the social network driving almost nine times more applications than Facebook and three times more than Twitter.

One interesting data point from the report—a Twitter follower is almost three times more likely to apply to a job than a LinkedIn connection, and more than eight times more likely to apply than a Facebook follower, indicating that Twitter might be a highly underutilized social recruiting channel. And Twitter followings drive almost twice as many job views per job as their Facebook fan bases.

According to the report, 48 percent of recruiters use LinkedIn exclusively. These recruiters have an average of 661 connections, and don’t leverage the other two networks for social recruiting. From there, recruiters use Twitter more than Facebook. Despite the fact that recruiters have fewer connections on Twitter (37 followers on average), 19 percent are connected to both LinkedIn and Twitter, while only 10 percent are connected to both LinkedIn and Facebook (245 friends on average).

In terms of adoption, LinkedIn continues to grow at the fastest pace. The average recruiter adds 18.5 LinkedIn connections each week, compared to 3.3 Twitter followers, 1.4 Facebook friends. LinkedIn drives more views per job than Twitter and Facebook, generating three times the amount of views of Twitter and six times the amount of Facebook.

More than ever before, venture capitalists are digging in. To stay competitive and top-of-mind, VC’s are no longer loaning their advice and their capital, but actual “core” services that portfolio companies need. This shift isn’t necessarily new. For example, top VC firms like Kleiner Perkins and Greylock play a hands-on role in helping recruit talent. Recently, we’ve seen firms roll up their sleeves for another core competency: public relations.

More often, I’ll be pitched on a story on a startup by the in-house PR rep for an investment firm that has invested in the said startup. Traditionally, either the startup or an outside PR agency tends to do the outreach when it comes to launches, trend pieces, financings or other news items. And the rise in pitches from the VC firms themselves (as opposed to the startups) got me thinking about the evolution of the role of the VC, specifically in the context of PR. But in the past year or so, we’ve seen a rise in the addition of top PR and communications talent to these firms, specifically to help work with portfolio companies on PR strategy.

One of the first major hires in the industry was the addition of PR honcho Margit Wennmachers, co-founder of one of the largest technology and media PR firms OutCast Communications, to Andreessen Horowitz as a partner. At the time, Marc Andreessen told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher that Wennmachers’ brand building and PR experience would be a valuable asset to the firm and its portfolio. Mind you, Andreessen Horowitz wisely realized only a year after launching the firm that building a VC powerhouse would be more than just writing checks, but also a consultancy of sorts.

David Krane, Google’s former Director of Global Communications and Public Affairs, and one the company’s first PR reps back when it was just a startup, wears two hats at Google Ventures, where he is now a partner. He invests in startups but also helps Google Ventures portfolio companies with PR strategy as well.

in April 2010, Sand Hill VC Kleiner Perkins nabbed former head of communications for Hulu (and previous PR/marketing employee at Amazon and Microsoft) Christina Lee to head marketing and PR for the firm. Last fall, PR guru Kiersten Hollars (formerly of Outcast, Yahoo, Digg, and AOL) joined Wennmachers’ team at Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on scaling the marketing and PR efforts for the then 80 companies in the firm’s portfolio. And most recently we saw Google senior manager in PR Andrew Kovacs jump to Sequoia to help the firm’s marketing partner, Mark Dempster with PR and communications duties for the firm’s companies in the U.S. and Israel.

Clearly some of the brightest and most well-regarded talent in the technology PR industry are no longer just at agencies or in-house. As Emily Mendell, VP of communications for the National Venture Capital Association, tells me, the VC market is extremely competitive for deal flow. “There are a lot of firms chasing for deals in the hottest, early stage startups, and PR representation and communications strategy is just another service these firms can offer while at the negotiating table,” she says.

And technology PR is not an easy task—to do the job well, it requires a technical understanding of the product and the ability to digest and relay this information in a communicable way. Startups realize that having this on-hand at their investment firm is an asset to them, Mendell explains.

And many of the pr execs mentioned above are solely focused on helping portfolio companies as opposed to doing in-house communications for the firms themselves. Lee tells me that part of the trend of more VC firms bringing on PR talent is a reflection of how the role of communications is changing in the tech industry in general.

“Now smart entrepreneurs understand the value in being transparent with consumers, and the role of communications has risen to a strategic level,” she says. “PR is expected to play a big part in building brands and more and more startups are thinking about PR and branding at an earlier stage.”

Kleiner, specifically, is taking a holistic approach to company building, and part of this is providing communications and PR help to startups and companies, she explains.

Of course, there are a range of different ways which VC PR reps can help entrepreneurs and companies from simple tasks such as introductions to technology journalists to actually spearheading PR efforts for a product launch, to coaching companies on branding and messaging strategy to drafting press releases.

Another industry source tells me that while some firms are bringing on PR talent for the use of portfolio companies, others are trying to use PR to boost their own images, and promote their VCs to the press.

One factor that I believe is pushing the trend of building reps and even mini-agencies in-house is the rise in seed stage investing by these VC firms and the competitive market at this level. There are no shortage of VCs and angels that are willing to write checks at the seed level nowadays. Many firms can’t just get deal flow based on reputation alone. But the VC firms ability to be a ‘full-service’ agency can be a factor entrepreneurs consider when sitting down at the table. This is especially important for early-stage companies, who may not have the kind of money to hire a top-tier PR firm to handle PR, says one industry insider.

As mentioned above, part of this full-service package also includes recruiting, which is a trend that has been happening for some time now. Kleiner Perkins partner Juliet de Baubigny has been helping portfolio companies with human capital and recruiting for the past ten years. Greylock recently created a dedicated talent team to help its portfolio companies recruit effectively. Firms like Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia are also aggressively working to help startups network and recruit talent.

Interestingly, this ‘full service’ model has been offered by incubators like Y Combinator, TechStars and 500 Startups though both in-house talent as well as through mentorship. While it’s a stretch to call the VC firms mentioned above incubators, it’s certainly interesting to see the overall functionality of these large firms evolve with the current state of investing.

As firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and others create these full-service VC funds that not only dole out cash but come with in-house PR agencies, marketing resource and talent recruiter, there’s no doubt that this trend will filter down to smaller firms and funds.

SneakPeeq, a social shopping startup that debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, has raised a new round totaling $2.67 million from Bain Capital Ventures; Metamorphic Ventures; Keith Rabois, Tim Kendall, Mike Murphy, and Vikas Gupta.

As we wrote in our initial review of Sneakpeeq, aims to replicate the experience of shopping for items in a retail store. So similar to the way you flip over a price tag to look at the cost of at item at a store, SneakPeeq doesn’t tell you the price instantly when you visit a product’s landing page. You click a “Peeq” button to find the price. The site features daily boutiques that offer discounts on clothes, shoes, home accessories and more from a variety of brands from well-known names like Kate Spade and Puma to smaller designers and purveyors.

At launch in May, Sneakpeeq would actually drop the price everytime you took a “Peeq” at the price of an item, with the discount available only until someone else bought the item. The company has pivoted slightly into more of an action-based shopping network. So basically, by Peeqingm buying, sharing items on Facebook, and more, you earn badges on Sneakpeeq, which can then be applied for discounts on an items.

All items are generally around 10 to 15 percent off, but in order for the price to drop even more, you need to perform some of the actions mentioned above. Founder Henry Kim explains to be that brands and merchants like this action-based system because pricing isn’t dropping for everyone, and is lowered for the people who are actually interacting with and sharing the product. Each boutique has a leaderboard where fans can compete by peeqing, sharing, and buying at products.

Additionally, every member on Sneakpeeq builds a discovery profile through peeqing, sharing and buying things. Users can also see who shares common interests in various product categories including Taste (gourmet foods), Living (home), and Style (fashion and accessories).

Another key differentiator for Sneakpeeq is a new Facebook Open Graph integration with the customized ‘peeq’ button. Basically, as you opt-in to the integration and ‘peeq’ items, this will be show on your Timeline. The integration will also show when a few of your friends are peeqing at a common boutique/product.

Kim says that the startup’s key engagement metric is defined as the sum total of peeqs, loves and shares in a month. When Sneakpeeq launched last year, the startup was at 78,745 engagements per month and in January 2012, saw 600,641 engagements.

In the future, Kim is working to expand gifting options so members will be able to gift products to and share badges with their friends. Video, and mobile technologies will also be introduced in the next few months.

Sneakpeeq is doing something in the social shopping space that could be very important for the next wave e-commerce. The startup is trying to incentivize users to actually engage with products in a social manners, and along the way, express this via Facebook actions.

It looks like Amazon Web Services may be launching a new workflow manager called SWF. First spotted by TechCrunch reader Michael Hood, SWF is listed as a service under AWS’ Free Usage Tier. Unfortunately, clicking on SWF takes you to a ’404′ page.

Upon further digging, it looks like SWF stands for ‘Amazon Simple Workflow Service.’ It basically starts, runs, and retains workflow executions, as well as schedules tasks, adds markers, receives signals, and starts timers for those workflow executions. According to the information listed, with the free usage tier, “1,000 Amazon SWF executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers and 30,000 workflow-days can also be used for free.”

Amazon’s free usage tier allows users to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, and use Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer for free as well. AWS’s free usage tier can be used to run an application in the cloud, including launching new applications, testing existing applications in the cloud, or more. SWF would be included for free in this package.

Obviously, with so little information, it’s hard to determine the exact details of what SWF does or who it will compete with at this point, but it appears to be new. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment and will update when we hear back.

Update: Amazon has taken all mentions of SWF off of the AWS Free Usage Tier Site; and has yet to comment.

We’ve embedded screenshots below:

Professional social network LinkedIn just reported stronger than expected fourth quarter 2011 earnings today. Earnings came in at $0.12 per share. Revenue for the fourth quarter was $167.7 million, an increase of 105% compared to $81.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. Net income for the fourth quarter was $6.9 million, compared to net income of $5.3 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. Analysts expected the company to earn $0.07 per share on revenues of $159.72 million.

Non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $13.3 million, compared to $5.2 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. For the full year 2011, revenue increased 115% to $522.2 million from $243.1 million.

“Q4 once again exceeded our expectations for member engagement and business growth. It was a fitting end to a memorable year in which we reinforced our position as the pre-eminent professional network on the web,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn in a release. “We believe continued focus on our members and technology infrastructure positions us well for accelerated product innovation in 2012.”

In terms of revenue breakdown, sales from Hiring Solutions products totaled $84.9 million, an increase of 136% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. Hiring Solutions revenue represented 50% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 44% in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Revenue from Marketing Solutions products totaled $49.5 million, an increase of 77% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 (and represented 30% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 34% in the fourth quarter of 2010). Premium Subscriptions revenue totaled $33.3 million, an increase of 87% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 (and was 20% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 22% in the fourth quarter of 2010).

By geographic area, revenue from the U.S. totaled $112 million, and represented 67% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011. Revenue from international markets totaled $55.8 million, and represented 33% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011.

LinkedIn is now adding two new members every second, and just hit 150 million members (up from 135 million last November) in over 200 countries and territories.

In terms of guidance, revenue for the first quarter of 2012 is projected to be in the range of $170 million to $175 million and revenue for the full year will be in the range of $840 million to $860 million.

LinkedIn is past the excitement of the public offering and now coming into its own as a public company. As Weiner recently told TechCrunch, “The event itself was memorable, but for us it was really just a stepping stone.” The fourth quarter was relatively quiet with regard to new products compared to past quarters. The network debuted a new version of business card organizer CardMuch (which they acquired in early 2011), and updated Groups with new functionality.

LinkedIn also announced Talent Pipeline, a new product that allows recruiters and hiring managers to manage, track, and stay in touch with active and passive candidates, regardless of source. Talent Pipeline is currently in pilot testing phase with select Hiring Solutions customers, according to the company.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that LinkedIn is slowing down. We hear there’s much more in store for the company for 2012, especially in mobile. Steve Sordello, CFO of LinkedIn, said in the release that the company will “continue to invest in our product, engineering, and sales infrastructure to capitalize on our long-term opportunity” in 2012. It will also be interesting to see how acquisitive LinkedIn is in the coming year. The company just picked up contact manager Rapportive for $15 million.

Here are our notes from the earnings call:

Weiner said that member engagement was at record levels in 2011, and the site passed the 150 million milestone. Member page views grew 77 percent in the fourth quarter and unique member visits to LinkedIn in Q4 grew 67% year over year. 60 percent of LinkedIn members are located outside of the U.S. Mobile account for 15 percent of total visits to the site.

He says there are more than 50,000 developers using LinkedIn APIs to help build and power the professional Web.

In terms of future product strategy, LinkedIn’s approach will focus on simplicity, and we can “expect refreshes of pillar products.” Membership growth is another area the where LinkedIn will focus. And the company will invest in mobile, which Weiner says is the company’s fastest growing service.

LinkedIn ended the year with more than 2,000 employees. In 2012, LinkedIn will be ramping up hiring at the university and college level.

Sordello adds that one-third of members visited LinkedIn during the quarter. The company also added 1,900 enterprises to its premium products client base in 2011.

Q: Jeff-when you think 2-3 three years out what do you see as the future for offering a SaaS platform for recruiting or an ad network, while leveraging data?

A: Our current recruiting process currently already leverages data and is a SaaS product. In terms of marketing solutions, we see similar benefits. Data is one of the most valuable assets for the company. LinkedIn today is doing very well, and 300,000 publishers have the LinkedIn share button on their sites.

Q: How do you monetize mobile?

A: We’re focused on product for now, we’re going to start to run some tests with regard to advertising and marketing in mobile platforms.

Q: Other companies in the hiring space have seen softness in some verticals like finance; can you comment on this? Also can you elaborate on your student growth as well?

A: We haven’t seen any weakness in a particular vertical. The student demographic is our fastest growing demographic. We’re also increasing outreach to university career centers.

Q: Can you talk about hiring solutions internationally?

A: Europe is a year to two behind the U.S. in terms of penetration and Asia is probably 2-3 years behind.

Q: Who are some of your largest hiring solutions companies?

A: We have 70-80 percent of the Fortune 100.

Q: Can you give us additional color on mobile traction? Tablet vs. smartphone vs. iPhone. vs. Android?

A: We announced that CardMuch has generated its 2 millionth card scan a few weeks ago, and growth is accelerating. We’re seeing a sharp rise in activations across iOS platform and Android. Both are growing at healthy rates.

comScore has released its ‘explicit’ U.S. search data for January of this year and while Google and Microsoft Bring’s search share continues to grow, Yahoo’s share dropped both year over year and month over month. This comes after Bing overtook Yahoo in terms of search queries for the first time in December. While Bing grew slightly from December 2011 to January, Google reached its highest share since December 2010 this past month.

Google search queries increased 6% year over year in January, to 66.2%, compared with 65.9% in December 2011 and 65.6% in January 2011. Bing queries increased 21% year over year in January to 15.2%, compared with 15.1% in December 2011 and 13.1% in January 2011. Yahoo queries are on a downward spiral, decreasing 8% year over year in January to 14.1%, compared with 14.5% in December 2011, 15.1% in November 2011 and 16.1% in January 2011. Yikes.

On a combined basis, Bing and Yahoo’s share of searches was 29.3%, compared with 29.6% in December 2011 and 29.2% in January 2011. Clearly, despite the fact that Bing’s technology is now powering Yahoo’s search, the rollup is still not powerful enough to overtake Google search share.

AOL queries declined 6% year over year January to 1.6%, compared with 1.6% in December 2011 and 1.7% in January 2011. And Ask.com queries declined 8% year over year in January to 3%, compared with 2.9% in December 2011 and 3.4% in January 2011.

It’s important to note that this data does not include search queries from mobile devices, which could boost Google’s share further. And these refer to “explicit” US search market share, which includes searches when someone actually types a query into a search box.

comScore also reports that the general search market continued to grow at double-digit rates in 2011, posting an 11-percent increase in 2011. Apparently, this momentum was driven by a 3 percent gain in unique searchers and a 7 percent gain in the number of searches per searcher.

Google’s search query volume grew 10 percent, driven mostly by gains in searches per searcher (up
7 percent). Bing had the highest growth in search query volume in 2011 at 40 percent, propelled by sizeable gains in both unique searchers (up 6 percent) and searches per searcher (up 31 percent).

Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is debuting its newest branded vertical—Foodie.com. As its name indicates, Glam’s newest vertical is aimed at covering all things food, and features a combination of content from food critics, bloggers, chefs, restaurateurs and other “food influentials.”

For background, Glam’s various publishing verticals have a reach of 200 million unique monthly visitors globally, and is particularly popular amongst female audiences. Glam Media has more than 2,500 publishers organized across multiple vertical categories online including Glam.com for Women, Glam Entertainment for Adults, Brash.com for Men and Bliss.com for health and wellness. Glam also announced the acquisition of Ning in September.

As Glam CEO Samir Arora explains, there’s a large opportunity in providing quality content on recipes, restaurant reviews and tends in one place. And food has been one of the fastest growing ad verticals on Glam’s network of sites (Betty Crocker is an advertiser on Foodie.com).

Foodie features content from 100 food authors such as Inspired Taste, Kitchen Confidante and The Bakery Spot and includes more than 1,000 recipes at launch. Foodie also offers a recipe finder app that allows consumers to find and follow top food editors and chefs, and includes vertical recipe search, along with social integrations with Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, Foodie aims to be a social network for food-lovers to post recipes, photos, review other recipes and more.

As a part of the launch, Foodie is also creating a panel of culinary experts, including acclaimed food critics and celebrity chefs to help drive an authoritative perspective on recipes, restaurants, ingredients and cooking techniques. Among the culinary experts who will be a part of the Foodie community include newest Iron Chef winner, top chef Geoffrey Zakarian and the former New York Times and International Herald Tribune food critic and leading food author, Patricia Wells.

Food seems like a logical next play for Glam considering its focus on lifestyle media and content. There are a plethora of food-focused recipe verticals, such as AllRecipes, Food52, Gojee and many others. Glam hopes to differentiate itself by becoming a one-stop-shop for recipes, reviews, quality content and more. Foodie actually resembles more of an online food magazine, but with more social and interactive features.