While Google waits for the United States Department of Justice to sign off on their proposal to merge with handset maker Motorola Mobility, the European Commission has officially given the deal their approval.

The decision is a welcome one for the folks in Mountain View, as the European Commission initially showed some hesitance about the matter. When first tasked with reviewing the $12.5 billion transaction, members of the commission called to Google to provide additional information to support their cause. What’s more, a U.S. consumer advocacy group publicly called on the commission to strike the merger, citing fears of a Google-dominated mobile space.

According to Commission Vice President Joaquín Almunia, the acquisition was approved because “upon careful examination, this transaction does not itself raise competition issues.” That isn’t to say that the commission can now wash their hands of the matter, as they still plan to keep their eyes on the actions of major wireless players.

“Of course, the Commission will continue to keep a close eye on the behaviour of all market players in the sector,” he went on to say. “Particularly the increasingly strategic use of patents.”

That last bit is terribly important given the fierce patents wars that Google, Apple, and other mobile companies are waging the world over. Should the Google-Motorola deal go through, the folks in Mountain View will find themselves in possession of Motorola’s 17,000 patents and nearly 8,000 pending applications — a considerable addition to their existing arsenal that could allow them to more vigorously defend against lawsuits from companies like Oracle.

Google could use those patents for more than just defending themselves, and that still has the commission on edge. Almunia expressed concern to reporters that Google could abuse their new treasure trove of patents, and noted that while their concerns weren’t enough to warrant block the merger, they would be “vigilant” going forward.

Meanwhile, Google VP and Deputy General Counsel Don Harrison took to the official Google Blog today to celebrate the commission’s decision, and to remind users that closing the deal will “supercharge Android.”

“The combination of Google and Motorola Mobility will help supercharge Android,” he said. “It will also enhance competition and offer consumers faster innovation, greater choice and wonderful user experiences.”

With Europe signing off on the deal, and legislators in the United States expected to do the same in short order, Google must wait for official approval from China, Israel, and Taiwan before everything can be finalized.

Developing…

The professional networking space has been heating up over the last few years, with a number of players vying for control of our digital resumes, job and employment searches, and career buildings. For all intents and purposes, LinkedIn controls the mindshare, but a couple of newcomers are beginning to give the leader a run for its money. The first is BranchOut, the professional networking service built on top of Facebook, which, like everything Facebook, has been growing like gangbusters since its inception in 2010.

Then there’s San Francisco-based Identified.com, a professed “data and analytics company” that development its eponymous “Identified Score” to measure how “in demand” users’ professional backgrounds are to companies — right now. Of course, both companies have a long way to go before they catch up to LinkedIn, which, going on Q4 numbers has a membership of 150 million-plus registered users. (Not to mention that Viadeo has over 40 million.)

LinkedIn, though, has been the prime mover and professional networking platform of record, surprising many with its continuing, steady growth (and beating Wall Street’s expectations) as a public company.

Of course, in comparison, BranchOut has the benefit of the behemoth that is the 850 million-strong Facebook network to help bring to its professional networking service to the masses (now at 300 million profiles and 10 million registered users). But Identified Co-founder Brendan Wallace is asking questions: Do we really want to use Facebook for professional networking? Do Facebook profiles make for good resumes? According to Wallace, only 8 percent of Facebook profiles have enough information to make them valuable sources of recruitment.

Using Facebook profiles as a launchpad is important, but the Identified Co-founder wants to leverage Facebook data to turn its profiles into more complete professional profiles by adding the educational, employment, and demographic data Facebook is inherently missing. By using Facebook Connect, Identified has been scaling its own roster of profiles very quickly.

The co-founder says that the startup’s database has been growing at three to five percent per day and is doubling in size every three weeks (and they’ve recently grown their staff from 30 to 65), today standing at about 180+ million profiles. Of course, it’s one thing to pull Facebook metadata and turn those into Identified professional profiles that are largely static, it’s another to be drawing active, engaged users — these users have to be adding the kind of educational, employment, and demographic data that turns them into something more.

While still small compared to LinkedIn and now even BranchOut standards, Identified today claims to have 1.5 million+ active users. Which, in contrast, is something considering the startup launched 5 months ago.

What’s also of note? Competitive interest. Wallace says that the company has seen more than a few LinkedIn employees sign up for and become active on the site. In fact, according to its data, 165 LinkedIn employees have logged into Identified and created profiles in the last 30-days (81 in the last week). This includes Founder Reid Hoffman, CEO Jeff Weiner, Robby Kwock Head of Corporate Development, and Steve Cadigan, Head of Talent.

For the uninitiated, Identified analyzes the work history, education, and demographic data of Facebook users, tracking the hiring behaviors of a slew of companies to measure what’s currently “in demand” through its ranking system, which gives a unique score to every user based on how appealing their metaprofile will be to employers.

It can be reductive in a way familiar to Klout, but the intent is to bring an element of gamification to the site, allowing people to pit themselves against their friends to become the top ranked engineer or blogger in their respective categories, for example. That’s how they encourage people to come to Identified and get excited about maintaining their profiles, adding data, and using it as a true hiring platform.

The reason they’re porting Facebook profiles to their own database (Identified is going to continue until they have all 850+ million, by the way): Again, Facebook is one of the biggest platforms in the world, period, but obviously in terms of professional information, it’s still pretty shallow. It has the largest professional network (in terms of ported profiles), thanks to BranchOut, but most people don’t like the possibility of marketers and employers looking at their information on Facebook, seeing what they’re sharing among friends, etc. Some feel that the two are too intricately connected.

So, while the metadata from Facebook becomes a great foundation for professional information, taking care of the basic stuff, but it doesn’t approximate a resume. Along with accessibility through Facebook’s API, the reason that Identified wanted to start with Facebook, says the co-founder, is that Facebook “had the millennials.” LinkedIn’s professional network tends to have a higher average age (for users), and Wallace said that he wants to go after the young professionals, which, on average, have far more connections and are more diligent about forging those connections than older users.

Of course, while Identified would like to compete toe-to-toe with LinkedIn, it doesn’t want to go too far. Because this business, really the consumer web, is all about data, and LinkedIn has a large and very valuable data set. If Identified is able to gain access to LinkedIn’s data in the same way it has for Facebook, its own resource will increase exponentially in value. Of course, it may have a difficult time convincing LinkedIn that this is a good idea. LinkedIn did just acquire Rapportive … acquisition material, anyone? Better that than stealing more of your employees.

Really, to continue its growth and become an actual competitor, Identified has to provide that extra context around user profiles, and enable users to get feedback from employers on what they’re looking for, and what they think of their profiles. The gamification layer has to go above and beyond the other two, so that engagement stays high, and young people continue competing with their friends to improve their professional footprint, and perceived virtual reputation. Again, it’s a fine line to walk, but certainly possible, and it’s off to a pretty good start 5 months into the race.

For more, check out the company at home here.

Founded just seven and a half years ago, Glam Media is one of Silicon Valley’s few media success stories. Beginning in the women’s interest vertical and expanding to entertainment, health and wellness and now food, Glam acquired Ning last September and is rumored to be preparing an IPO for later this year. Glam’s great achievement, it claims, is to pioneer “vertical media” and thus to “transform the way consumers interact with content”.

But the truth of Glam’s success, its CEO Samir Arora acknowledged when he came into our San Francisco studio last week, is actually more complex than it first appears. Yes, Arora agreed, Glam’s “big haired arsed idea” was to understand that media was no longer simply a hits business and that Internet users want to connect and comment rather than simply consume content. But, as he also revealed, Glam’s strength lies as much as in executing advertising sales as in aggregating vertical media – resulting in a company that not only has successful curated content but has also curated its advertisers.

This is the final section of a two part interview with Arora. Last week, the former Apple executive told me about Glam’s latest vertical play, Foodie.com.

The folks at ThinkGeek, bless their souls, have a knack for taking off-the-wall ideas and turning them into real products. After their tablet-friendly arcade cabinet made the leap from joke to reality last year, ThinkGeek has turned their attention to whipping up a retro gaming accessory for the on-the-go crowd, and the resulting 8-Bitty already looks like a winner.

Oh, and did I mention that it has fake wood-grain trim? Be still my heart!

In fairness, the 8-Bitty (which I’m really enjoying saying, by the way) doesn’t actually exist yet. In typical ThinkGeek fashion, they’ve put the $25 NES-esque Bluetooth controller on their website along with promises that it will eventually ship to the mobile gaming masses. When it does though, it’ll link up to your iOS or Android device of choice so you can relive those halcyon days of old-school gaming.

The forthcoming 8-Bitty is compatible with all of the iCade games currently floating around in the iOS and Android app stores. That list of games is growing at a steady clip, but sadly the gaming input standard hasn’t gotten much love from bigger publishers so far, and that’s a real shame.

Let’s face it — while there are scores of games that are a joy to play on a touchscreen, some gaming experiences require a level of precision you just can’t squeeze out of a capacitive display. Here’s hoping that big names like Capcom and Square-Enix someday bake iCade support into their retro game rehashes, so we can play the games of our youths the way they were meant to be played, regardless of where we do it.

As everyone and their dog moves to online production, podcasters have long hunted for a way to monetize their goods. Apps are available that let you sell podcasts for a set price, but what about aggregation over multiple platforms and using varying monetization models? More important, podcasters don’t want to do all the computerin’ to make these things work. That’s why Libsyn created MyLibsyn, a cross-platform (web, iOS, and Android) system for disseminating free and paid content from a central app.

Libsyn has just created something akin to the Netflix of content syndication. Podcasters who join must offer one piece of premium content per month as well as make their back catalog subscriber-only. Although they already offer standalone Android and iOS apps for certain podcasts, MyLibsyn assists in podcast discovery by putting all the popular podcasts in one place and, by ensuring only quality product appears in the app, it reduces the chance that podcast listeners will be disappointed and move on.

Full disclosure: I recently moved my podcast to Libsyn after Mevio pulled the plug on their general production system, so I’ve been able to see how the products work firsthand. Fellow Mevio sufferers: Libsyn is offering free import from Mevio. I put the instructions here.

That said, the model is fairly interesting, especially considering how hard it is to bring good content to the fore in the crowded podcast marketplace. They’ve started the program with a few popular podcasts including the WTF Podcast with Marc Maron.

“It is a easy way for producers to make premium content available to their audience – and it does not require any special RSS feeds or other tech knowledge by the end users to subscribe and consume content,” said Rob Walch, Libsyn, VP of Podcaster Relations. “You sign up for a subscription to get premium content. And it really helps to support the producers directly.”

“We have a lot of producers with great evergreen content (all the big comedy podcasts) and many were looking for a way to better monetize their content,” he said. “This solution was really driven very strongly by the requirements of Marc Maron for his show and content. He was having an issue with others posting old content – and we needed a way to make sure premium content would be very secure.”

The company is also looking into making the service available for premium users including training customers who need to make video content available to a secure group of subscribers.

Podcasters can sign up here but you have to be a Libsyn customer and meet certain requirements to participate.

New data from app search firm Xyologic released this morning paints a picture of the relative success (or lack thereof) of the Google TV platform. By examining the install base for the apps exclusive to the Google TV platform, it’s clear that the Google media center product is still only attracting a niche crowd of early adopters. Of the nearly 4.8 million installed apps that are exclusive to Google TV, only 352,000 of them represent user downloads – the remaining 4,441,000 are pre-installed applications.

Xyologic, which has been following Google TV since August 2011, notes that there are 64 total apps which are exclusive to the Google TV platform, forming a total install base of 4,793,000. These would be the apps most attractive to the platform’s end users, as they’ve been customized and designed for the big screen. Watching for trends among this group can give you insight into the platform’s overall health and performance as well as Google TV user preferences.

Not surprisingly, the six pre-installed apps account for the top six apps by install base (4,441,000 installs). These include Napster for Google TV, Pandora for Google TV, CNBC for Google TV, TV & Movies for Google TV, Photos for Google TV and Twitter for Google TV.

The remaining exclusive Google TV apps that round out the top 10 include Redux for Google TV, CNNMoney for Google TV, Maps for Google TV, MotorTrend and Thuuz Sports for Google TV. These account for just 58,000 installs last month.

Xyologic also points out that Google TV’s exclusive apps have low ratings – something which seems to confirm “an underwhelming experience for users,” the company says in its report. Meanwhile, non-exclusive Google TV apps are seeing higher ratings but significantly lower number of downloads. The top non-exclusive apps currently include Classy Fireplace, Dragon, Fly! Free, CuevanAndroid, Google Music, aVia Media Player, Solitaire, Fireworks – the Best Free Game,IM+, BuddyTV  and tinyCam Monitor Free.

TL;DR: Google TV is not very popular. 

So far, only LG and Sony have shipped Google TV devices, and despite criticism regarding their looks, pricing and Google TV itself, both have decided to stick with the platform for now. At January’s CES, LG showed off its new Google TV set, for example, but hedged its bets by also rolling out its own Smart TV platform in the event of a total Google TV flop. Sony, meanwhile, launched a new Blu-ray player with Google TV baked in.

Google, too, continues to try and drum up interest for Google TV. Late last week, it teased “big improvements” for Google TV, then proceeded to underwhelm. The big news was an improved YouTube app. Hooray.

In an effort to continue tracking this space, Xyologic has launched an early version of its search service specifically for Google TV apps today which initially includes 170 apps in its index.

But the firm’s conclusion as to what this data means, mirrors that of most industry observers: it may be the early days for Google TV, but the industry is now moving to Smart TVs – those with apps, streaming, browsing, conferencing, etc. built in. Unless Google TV can find a foothold as the preferred Smart TV backend, its chances for success, especially if that rumored Apple “iTV” launches this year – could be slim.

Domain names are important, and some might even say that a premium, memorable domain name is priceless. It’s become increasingly difficult to argue against businesses scooping up those short, relevant, easy-to-remember domain names when they’re available. Doing so can give your business, customers, and search engines a simple and quick way to find your business, along with the bonuses of brand protection and a potential increase in traffic, not unlike prominent placement in the yellow pages or the local shopping mall for brick-and-mortars.

Thus, to some, making a big purchase on a coveted domain name seems ridiculous, while others have dreams of other-worldly click-ability and traffic that enables massive ROI. Whichever side you fall on, companies have become increasingly willing to spend big on premium, recognizable domain names, as evidenced by the Domain Name Journal’s list of the top domain name purchases of 2011. The biggest purchase in 2011 was, unsurprisingly, “social.com,” which was co-brokered by Moniker.com’s John Mauriello and Marksmen’s Cyntia King on behalf of the latter’s new sales division at NameQuiver.com.

According to DN Journal, only two domains were sold for $1 million or more in 2011, with the second being “DomainName.com” for a cool million. However, in early January, Robin reported on the first big domain name purchase of 2012, which went to “dudu.com,” bought by a Dubai-based social networking service provide called DUDU Communications.

Today, we’ve learned that ViSalus Sciences, a direct sales “health transformation company” that distributes weight management and nutritional supplement products, has entered the shortlist of pricey domain name buyers. The creators of the so-called “Body By Vi Challenge,” which (among other things) is a 90-day contest that offers people health products, support, and cash prizes in an effort to incentivize them to achieve their weight loss and fitness goals, announced today that it has acquired “challenge.com” and “vi.com.”

Together, the domain names were purchased by ViSalus for $500,000 and $325,000, respectively. The purchase of “challenge.com” alone is one of the top ten most expensive domain names bought in 2011, through today. At a combined value of $825,000, the two domains together would be the fourth highest purchase over that time, and individually “challenge.com” and “vi.com” are the second and third most expensive buys of domain names this year, behind only the million-dollar “dudu.com.”

So why did ViSalus shell out all this cash for its two new domain names? According to Co-founder and CEO Ryan Blair, the company just announced a seven-fold year-over-year sales increase in 2011 to $231 million, which means that the purchases represent a fraction of a percentage of current sales.

Obviously, this means that, for all intents and purposes, ViSalus now owns the word “challenge” online, and Blair says that with the acquisition of “vi.com,” the company has gained a “simple, multilingual brand architecture” that can help them work towards creating a global, household name.

The company’s goal is to acquire one million customers before the end of 2012, and Blair thinks that putting the new domain names to work will help speed up “the viral nature of the Body By Vi Challenge.” The move is meant to complement the recent launch of The Challenge, a newsstand publication that features Body By Vi success stories and is expanding into Canada this month.

It’s a lot of money to dish out to promote healthier living, but with Americans spending upwards of $50 billion on products and services designed to help them lose weight and stay in shape, there’s certainly plenty of demand for the type of platform ViSalus is building, and owning the word “challenge” on the Web certainly doesn’t hurt.

For more, check out ViSalus at home here, or the list of recent big-ticket domain purchases here.

Austin-based cloud apps startup Spanning, which provides a backup service for Google Apps, just launched a new version of its service (Spanning 3.0) which includes a feature I.T. admins are sure to love: a health monitor for Google Apps. The new dashboard shows the status of a company’s Google Apps system, including problems, errors, possible causes and suggested fixes. Day-by-day reports are available, too.

But Spanning’s most visible change may be the service’s updated style, courtesy of ex-Frog designer BJ Heinley.

The monitoring system is a key new addition to the updated Spanning system, as it allows admins to figure out what went down, how and why. As admins drill down into the problems highlighted, they’re able to either take action to fix the system themselves or alert Google to the problem. Also provided by the dashboard is a complete Google Apps status history, a storage usage panel which shows heaviest users and total data figures, and a license overview that shows how many accounts are protected by Spanning’s licenses.

Other features to the new product include improved email restore functionality, optimized JavaScript, improved progress indicators for backups, and a new “impersonate” function that lets admins pick from a list of users in order to impersonate them for testing and fixes.

However, the most visible new feature, besides the Apps dashboard of course, is the new visual styling. The company recently hired a new VP of Design and User Experience, BJ Heinley, an ex-Frog Design and ex-Yahoo’er, who has been tasked with giving the entire product a UI/UX makeover. See? Enterprise apps can be sexy. (Well, they can look it, at least.)

Spanning, which competes with a similar service from Backupify, previously raised $2 million in funding from the Foundry Group back in April 2010. The app is available from the Google Apps Marketplace here.

Matchbook was founded under the simple belief that mobile technology can make people’s lives easier — not just in the interest of early adopters and tech enthusiasts — but for moms and grandmothers, and the many non-tech-savvy people out there. Once upon a time, if you wanted to remember, say, a restaurant you loved or wanted to try, you went in and grabbed a branded matchbook from that venue. (Those were the days when smoking actually gave people use for those matchbooks.) The rise of mobile devices transferred that behavior into note-taking apps of all varieties. Matchbook then took those mobile notepads and built an app to enhance that experience, allowing users to more easily remember those must-visit places they hear about from friends, blogs, or just in passing by.

Essentially, Matchbook is like Foursquare or Yelp, minus the check-ins, reviews, and social networking — just a simple bookmarking feature for favorite places. While this may sound a bit too pared-down for the taste of tech enthusiasts, you have to remember that there are a lot of people out there who don’t use Foursquare, who aren’t comfortable or used to checking-in at every place they visit, or voraciously social networking while on the go. So Matchbook offers users the ability to organize all of their to-dos by neighborhood on a map layout, search bookmarks for date spots, find the best of those bookmarks, along with top places flagged by other users — to name a few.

The app’s target demographic has been predominantly women, in their late 20s and up, who aren’t particularly interested in social networking inherent to many of today’s apps, or social recommendations, they simply want a more interactive way to bookmark their favorite places.

Since its launch last summer, Matchbook has collected a hefty amount of data on their users’ intent, what places they plan on visiting, and so on, and as it goes, advertising against intent is inherently more effective, so the startup is today taking the next logical step: Serving users deals from the places they actually plan to patronize.

Matchbook’s new intent-based deals product alerts users when a place they have bookmarked is running a deal on sites like Groupon, LivingSocial, and Gilt City, reminding users of their favorite venues, through user-specific offerings at discounted prices. Naturally, if, for example, LivingSocial happens to run a deal for that new restaurant in your neighborhood you’ve been meaning to try, Matchbook will send users a notification allowing them to buy the coupon. The more venues a user bookmarks, the more useful and targeted the service’s deals become.

Matchbook represents a category of apps that eschews certain aspects of the social revolution, using social features only sparingly to create what Matchbook Founder and CEO Jason Schwartz hopes is a more intimate user experience. Most apps focus on deals that are already around you, or trying to create serendipity by serving you deals in realtime as you walk through your local neighborhood. Of course, when people are out and about, the majority of the time, they’ve already decided where they want to go to eat or shop. By keeping track of the places users want to go in the future, Matchbook is taking somewhat of an alternative approach, by focusing solely on the businesses users already plan to patronize, which just sounds like smart business.

Thus, the value proposition here is that Matchbook is collecting valuable data around venues and user intent, and there’s little that is more valuable to advertisers, brands, and businesses than getting a sense of where people plan to shop and eat in the near future.

The app, which is available on the App Store today (and will be coming to Android and other platforms in the future), has also garnered the attention of investors. Corresponding with its new deals feature, Matchbook is also announcing that it has raised $250,000 in seed funding from Quotidian Ventures and from Percolate, Mashape, Nestio, and Foursquare investor (and Co-founder and former COO of the Barbarian Group), Rick Webb.

The New York City-based startup plans to use its new infusion of capital to help fuel its growth, ramp up hiring, and develop apps for other mobile platforms. Though many of Matchbook’s users aren’t interested in the majority of social features, Matchbook still plans to find the best ways to integrate social functionality to enhance the user experience.

But, no doubt that serving users with a simple bookmarking app that lets users make personal notes and add tags to each places entry, along with being able to do so offline, and serve them with relevant deals to places they already want to go, could be a great way to increase the likelihood of users following-through on intent and, in turn, patronizing those local businesses. Even if this doesn’t solve the problem of creating loyal customers, it does help turn intent into action among a much coveted demographic of mainstream female shoppers.

Matchbook’s app is free to use, so to monetize its new deals feature, the startup will be taking a cut of all daily deals purchased through its app. Each daily deal site has its own affiliate program, but the average is about 10 percent going to referrer. To make a significant chunk of change, Matchbook will have to help sell a lot of deals, but with intent in its favor, the startup thinks that it can get more bang for its buck.

To learn more about Matchbook, check out the startup at home here.

CruiseWise, a new online travel agency dedicated to booking cruises, is opening its doors today. The startup aims to simplify the online cruise booking process, bringing it up to par with what you find now when booking hotels or flights.

With site’s online search engine, customers can compare prices, routes, cabin choices and other options across multiple cruise lines and see the full amount for the cruise by total number of passengers, including tax.

The startup was founded in 2010 by CEO Amit Aharoni, CTO Nicolas Meunier and COO Steve Davis after realizing that online 10% of total online bookings for cruises happened online, compared with 85% for cars and 75% for hotels. This isn’t because more cruise ship passengers are “old” and unaccustomed to using a computer to book travel, they say. The average age of a cruiser is 49, versus 46 as the average age of a hotel stayer. It’s not the 3-year age gap that’s the problem – it’s the user interface. “It’s really bad,” says Davis.

Due to the complexities of options with a cruise ship – there can be up to 40 different cabin options alone, for example – being walked through the process through an online travel search site like Expedia takes multiple steps. In fact, cruise bookings go through 8 webpages on Expedia, versus 3 for flights, Davis notes.

To cater to the needs of potential cruise passengers, the team decided to build a vertical  designed just for booking cruises. The search process is simplified, allowing you to easily compare different packages side-by-side, while also seeing the real prices. Since cruise prices are by person, that ad for a $300 discounted cruise is really $600 for a couple, plus tax. CruiseWise lets you see the full rate when you’re searching, so you can make better decisions.

For now, the service is only tracking four top lines: Carnival, Celebrity, Princess and Royal Caribbean, but combined they account for 60% of the market. Six more lines will be added in the next several months, bringing that total up to 80%+ of the market.

CruiseWise also includes information that helps you pick the cruise line of choice, like ship layouts with interactive deck maps, lists of amenities, photos, route information, in-depth port guides and more. The startup even employs half a dozen travel writers who create editorial content about the destinations and submit photos. Other features in the works include an improved cabin selection guide that will help you determine which cabin best suits your needs (quiet or loud? windows? sunrise or sunset view?, etc.) In the future, the service will allow for crowdsourced content and user reviews, too.

Overall, the goal with CruiseWise is not only to improve the booking process, but also to offer better prices for cruises, too. “We’re trying to offer people lower prices and more credit back because we spend so much less money to serve them,” explains Davis. So it’s cheaper? “Cheaper is actually a tricky word in cruising. Cruise lines have very strict policies about the prices you can advertise to people,” Davis explains. What they do allow is letting you return the savings to customers in the form of credit, not discounts on the initial package price. But don’t worry, you’ll spend the credit – after all, what’s a vacation without a pina colada and souvenir t-shirt?

CruiseWise, which was the first team to emerge from StartupChile and is funded by SV Angel, NEA, Index Ventures, PROfounders Capital and various angels.

As you’ll notice quite quickly from this infographic, we’re pitting the Droid 4 against its predecessor, the Droid 3, along with the iPhone 4S. For anyone who isn’t a die-hard Android fan, the iPhone 4S usually comes into the equation when it comes time to upgrade hardware. Since many of our reviews will be of Android devices (and Windows Phone) rather than iOS, we wanted to make sure to let you visualize the differences between the handset we’re reviewing and its biggest competitors.

Sorry for the announcement, but the boring part is over. Onward!

As you can see from our infographic, the Droid 4 is a solid step up from the Droid 3. It packs LTE, touts 1GB of RAM, has a bigger battery, and a front-facing camera. You’ll also see that Moto (awesomely) made the Droid 4 bigger than the Droid 3, while being lighter all at the same time.

As far as the iPhone 4S vs. Droid 4 comparison goes, these are two very different beasts. Obviously the Droid 4′s claim to fame is its physical QWERTY, which is fantastic, while the iPhone 4S’s big name feature is Siri. Clearly, these are two very different methods of interaction with your phone, so it’ll come down to what you need most.

Both the Droid 3 and the Droid 4 retail for $199.99 on-contract, though you can pick up the Droid 4 from Amazon for a cool $99. The iPhone 4S can be had for $200 on-contract, but that’ll only get you the 16GB version, while the $199 Droid 4 packs an extra 32GB of memory via a microSD card.

Following the attack on Microsoft’s online store in India, in which a team of (purportedly) Chinese hackers defaced the site and stole user credentials, the company is now alerting users via email that their passwords will be automatically reset on their behalf.

According to the email, Microsoft also says the databases storing credit card details and payment information were not compromised, but customer account information, including email address, passwords, order details and shipping addresses may have been affected.

The attack, confirmed by Reuters today following this initial report, involved a group of hackers calling themselves the Evil Shadow Team. The group took the Microsoft Store website down and posted screenshots that they said were customers’ obscured usernames and passwords found unencrypted on the site. The store was maintained by an India company called Quasar Media – apparently easy target due to the way it was storing this account information in plain text.

At the time, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the hack via the following statement sent to Reuters:

“Microsoft is investigating a limited compromise of the company’s online store in India. The store customers have already been sent guidance on the issue and suggested immediate actions. We are diligently working to remedy the issue and keep our customers protected.”

Now Microsoft is alerting customers to the attack via the following email message, below:

Microsoft Store Customer Update

We are writing to inform you that there may have been unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Microsoft Store India (http://www.microsoftstore.co.in/). We have confirmed that databases storing credit card details and payment information were not affected during this compromise. However, exposed account details may include non-financial related information including e-mail address, password, order details and shipping address.

Microsoft Store takes this situation very seriously, and the company is diligently working to remedy the issue and keep our customers protected. We need your help in this regard and we ask that you please take the following steps to prohibit any further unauthorized access to your information.

Precautions You Should Take

In order to secure your account information, Microsoft Store will take the action to re-set your password. Please follow these steps to ensure your privacy is protected:

1. If you use the same e-mail and password combination on any other sites, including non-Microsoft websites or services, you should proactively change the password immediately to ensure your personal information is protected.

2. You will receive an e-mail with a temporary password and a prompt to create a new password. Please note, the password reset relates only to Microsoft Store India.

3. Once you receive the e-mail you should immediately create a new password, one that is both secure and familiar to you.

Microsoft Store is Here to Help

We understand that you may have additional questions and Microsoft Store is here to help. If you have specific questions about your Microsoft Store account or want more information about computing and personal security please contact us at 1800-102-1100.

We apologize for any inconvenience this incident might cause.

Thank you,
Microsoft Store India

We’ve reached out to Microsoft to confirm this email’s authenticity, which is also available online here.

Thanks Amit Bhawani

Samsung is no slouch when it comes to producing smaller tablets — their first foray into the Android tab market was the 7-inch Galaxy Tab, and they recently revisited that form factor with the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. In fact, Samsung seems to love the concept of a 7-inch tablet so much that they have announced their first Ice Cream Sandwich-powered tablet will be the (take a guess!) 7-inch Galaxy Tab 2.

While the news of a new Android 4.0 tablet is enough to get some gadget fans all hot and bothered, the Galaxy Tab 2′s spec sheet doesn’t illustrate much technical improvement over its forebears. It features the same sort of 7-inch PLS display and 4,000 mAh battery as the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, not to mention that they both sport a 3-megapixel rear camera and a VGA front-facer.

What’s more, the processor actually looks like a bit of a step down on paper: the Galaxy Tab 2 touts a 1 GHz dual-core processor, as opposed to the 1.2 GHz processor in the 7.0 Plus. I’m sure Samsung had their reasons for running with a different chipset — better battery life, or perhaps improved performance thanks to a new SoC — but it’s still a bit odd to see a major player kick off their new line of Android 4.0 tablets without something more flashy.

And maybe that’s part of the plan. More than a few people have pointed out that Amazon’s own wallet-friendly 7-inch tablet has been immensely popular, which may be putting pressure on other companies to try and strike a precarious balance between price and performance. I’m looking forward to seeing how exactly Samsung will try and position their the little bugger, and the wait shouldn’t be too bad. The Galaxy Tab will officially debut first in the UK next month, and will presumably begin its world tour not too long afterwards.

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

British video search company Blinkx saw its stock spike briefly this morning, following an announcement that it will power AOL’s video search. AOL is one of the largest video destinations on the Web, with about 450 million video views per month according to comScore.

Blinkx will also incorporate AOL’s premium videos in its own search engine. (Presumably, that will include TCTV videos, since we are owned by AOL). Blinkx itself attracts 55 million U.S. video searchers a month. AOL’s video properties are watched by about 40 million unique viewers (comScore), so the deal could significantly expand blinkx’s reach.

But doesn’t AOL already have its own video search technology? Back in 2006 it acquired a video search engine called Truveo. Up until recently, Truveo was powering all of AOL’s video search. But it’s been on life support for months, and now with this deal the plug is being pulled on Truveo. (Update: To be clear, it is the Truveo video search platform that is being retired. The engineering team is being redeployed to work on content creation and distribution tools. Also, the blinkx deal is only for video search on AOL.com).

Failed acquisitions aside, AOL wants its videos to reach the broadest audience. An internal-only video search engine doesn’t do much to reach new audiences. Of course, most people search for videos on Google, not blinkx. And somehow YouTube always seems to turn up as the top video results on Google. If your videos aren’t on YouTube, they are sort of invisible. But if they are on YouTube, you have to cut them in on the ad revenues. So media companies are trying to push video viewers to their own sites through deals like the one AOL just did with blinkx.

I was walking home last week and the entire street – and some of the sidewalk – was blocked by large fire trucks and a gaggle of firemen in full regalia. The ladder truck was already planted firmly on the asphalt, ready to send a stream of water soaring over nearby apartment buildings and more trucks were coming, clogging the one-way street further.

Convinced I was about to see an inferno, I tentatively crossed the street. I assumed I’d be stopped and turned away. Instead, the firemen joked and jostled on the sidewalk and I saw a contractor arguing with someone I assumed to be a building resident. The contractor must have been welding – you could still smell the flux and the smoke – and the resident was clearly concerned.

“I was working,” yelled the contractor.

“I was worried,” said the resident.

I bring this story up because that block is now faced with a dilemma. It’s good that the fire was averted by beagle-nosed residents and it’s bad in that it tied up an entire fire department for an hour while a miscommunication was sorted out. The next time the resident won’t be so quick to phone the fire brigade and the contractor will do a better job of hiding the smoke.

That’s what’s about to happen at Foxconn.

Tim Cook just announced that a blue ribbon panel of fair labor experts will tour the grounds at Foxconn City where they will see all the horrors I saw a few months ago: a huge rice cooker big enough to feed 400,000 people, cramped but not squalid dorms, a handsome cybercafe with couples’ booths, and pools where exhausted line workers can enjoy a few laps before slumping into their loft beds.

What they won’t see are disfigured workers toiling in Dickensian sweatshops, infants crawling through metal stamping machines, and workers chained to their stations until the millionth widget is shipped or they die of exhaustion. Why? Because Foxconn has been working with major manufacturers for long enough to know what they expect and they’ve seen enough European and American plants to know that squalid conditions beget squalid paychecks.

The FLA, without a doubt, will return with a report citing a few underage workers, the recommendation to build bigger dorms, and an overall rating of, say B- in terms of safety and worker quality-of-life. It’s not perfect, they’ll say, but it’s not horrible, especially when compared to garment shops.

What will happen next? Apple will announce an all clear, the FLA will be less likely to attack Apple on rights violations, and Foxconn (and, more importantly, its competitors) will go back to business as usual. And we’ll forget about this whole thing, our fingers worrying our Foxconn-made iPhones like a set of prayer beads.

Then, quietly, the factories that are really running under horrible conditions, hiring workers without checking the particulars, and offering conditions that I wouldn’t wish on any man, woman, or child, will go back to churning out smoke, albeit with a bit more secrecy. By focusing on the biggest Chinese (actually Taiwanese) manufacturer, we inspect the canopy of the tree while ignoring the disease-infested trunk.

If you want to know what is happening in China, listen to this. It tells the story of a mill town South Carolina, Greenville, that has evolved, just as Foxconn is evolving. Back in its heyday the bars were buckets of blood, youngsters quit school at sixteen and clocked in for a great paycheck, and many lived far more comfortably than their agrarian fore-bearers. Now that mill town is shutting down, the last bar housing a pair of jokers who used to travel the world on a factory paycheck, and the real industry is down the road in clean, high-tech buildings where there are a hundred robots per human making widgets no 16-year-old drop-out could piece together, let alone understand.

In the end, Greenville died and was reborn. So, too, will Shenzhen. The good companies in China, for years, supplied a better life for countless post-agrarian workers. They were not drafted into service. Instead, they walked up to the gates and applied for a job. Children were not pulled from their cribs to work in the darkness and noise, they were told they’d have a better life if they sat in chairs and assembled cellphones for fat Americans. This hand-waving by Apple won’t make the bad factories go away and it will encourage the good factories to automate much more. Why hire 400,000 complainers when you can hire 1,000 Chinese PhDs to run the line? Follow the arc of manufacturing in the US and you’ll see the same arc repeated in Shenzhen.

I’m not here to defend Apple or Foxconn nor am I about to sing folksongs about the exploited, migrant electronics assemblers. This is about economics. China’s economy is booming, their unemployment rate was near 4.1% in 2010 (ours is 8.3% now and 9.1% in 2010), and what Shenzhen makes, the world takes. Apple doesn’t like negative publicity, so they’re sending a third party to pick up some talking points and when that third party comes back, all smiles, we’ll forget about real sweatshops in real places. Focusing on two huge companies in the pantheon of Asian manufacturing is like sending the entire firehouse after a little smoke. The real fires go right on blazing while the contractor gesticulates on the sidewalk, yelling “I was working. I was working.”

[Image: Inga Nielsen/Shutterstock]

Because I am going to be an awesome Mom, I will totally keep my ears open to the best possible options for my kids, because I’ve totally set my sights on that, focusing on family instead of career and all. Obviously.

Until hell freezes over then, I will be buying my more reproduction-friendly friends subscriptions to Wittlebee (rhymes with “little bee”), a Science-backed “get random stuff sent to you” startup run by my old friend and former Myspace marketing exec Sean Percival.

Wittlebee is like a Birchbox for kids clothes, where parents can get recurring/one-time shipments of children’s clothing for $39.99 a month — 8 items in total from brands like American Apparel and Cottonseed.

And yes, you can pick gender, age style and color preferences in the on-boarding process.

Percival tells me that the appeal of Wittlebee — in the same space as Tredup – is essentially the money saved by new parents, as the startup essentially packs about $80 of clothing in to each $40 box of clothing sent.

“Kids go through clothes fast and in today’s modern world it’s especially hard to keep up,” says Percival, “By auto shipping a few items each month, with sizes that grow along with your child, you can always stay one step ahead.”

A new father himself (that’s a picture of his daughter Charlotte below), he is sensitive to the needs of time-strapped parents, “The shopping experience with young kids can also be very challenging. With Wittlebee we save parents time, money and reduce those ‘mall meltdown’ moments.”

Knowing he wanted to do his own thing post Myspace, Percival tried out a few startup concepts before he settled on the Wittlebee model, operating the business out of an old server room at the Science offices until it grew enough to warrant a bigger office space.

Percival was sure he wanted to do a subscription e-commerce play — and his decision payed off — at about 100 subscribers Wittlebee moved out of the server room and the company is now at about 500 ($20K in revenue) in a month’s time.

“The business and much of what I do is inspired by [his wife] Laurie,” says Percival, “After getting a bit disenchanted by social media and online marketing I could only focus on solving problems for the most important people out there, moms.”

His future plans include testing out additional verticals and expanding to other age groups and kid-friendly items like books. “In most cases I’m trying to disrupt the existing and well established channels of retail so I’ve gotten a few funny looks along the way,” he says, “However clothing brands and some industry insiders have been genuinely excited about the model.”

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.

Pops, maker of an application that adds another dimension to the mobile notifications people receive on their Android smartphones, has raised $1.5 million from Mangrove Capital Partners, who were early investors in companies like Skype, Rdio, OpenX, Kupivip.ru, Nimbuzz and Wix.

Pops basically enables mobile users to customize smartphone alerts, including new email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and whatnot in a more creative way than you’re used to.

Pops’ technology essentially captures incoming notifications and personalizes them according to a user’s needs and wishes, including animations or video clips that wrap the alerts in question.

Not something for power users who receive such mobile notifications every other minute or worse, or rely on instant delivery of alerts for their professions or whatever, but it’s nice to know you can at least customize those typically bland phone notifications.

The startup behind the application plans to monetize the service by offering premium content. Since we last wrote about Pops, the app has garnered close to 500,000 downloads.