For some inexplicable reason, Nintendo and Toyota have teamed up to turn the Nintendo DS into a navigational remote control, thereby allowing drivers (although I hope passengers do most of the fiddling) to set their routes using their game consoles.

The service, called Kuruma de DS lets you see map and destination info as well as tour information as you drive through town. The service slightly gamifies the experience by adding a POI saving option.

The compatible Toyota Smart Navi system costs about $3,000 while the game itself costs $92 – quite a bit of cash to simulate the map screens in Super Mario World. The DS connects to the car via Bluetooth and includes quiz games and delightful Mii characters who show you around town.

via 4gamer via Kotaku

Almost 115 million households in the U.S. currently own at least one TV set and 36 million own four or more. That’s a huge market and as Apple, Google and Microsoft try to wrestle more of this business away from the traditional content and hardware players, the old-school cable and satellite providers now suddenly have to content with this new group of challengers that, until now, barely registered on their radars. According to Forrester analyst James McQuivey, it’s Microsoft that’s winning this platform war so far.

Why? Microsoft, MCquivey argues, currently has a massive lead over its competitors thanks to its Xbox360. According to a new report by Forrester, the number of U.S. households that watch online video on a TV set is now up to 32.1 million, up from just 24.8 million a year ago. The majority of these households use their game consoles to do so. The adoption of connected TVs is also moving ahead quickly. Forrester estimates that 18.5 million households now use them to stream online video in the living room. Over-the-top set-top boxes like the Apple TV, Boxee and Roku, however, are still niche products, with just 4% of U.S. online households owning one at the end of 2011.

Looking ahead, Forrester estimates that by 2016, 66.8 million U.S. households will have connected their TV sets to the Internet and 89% of HDTVs sold will be connectable.

In this quickly growing market, McQuivey argues, it’s all about who owns the platform. Microsoft is in the lead right now, but still, only 49% of Xbox 360 owners currently connect their consoles to the net. McQuivey argues that in order keep its lead, Microsoft has to push this number to 75% and highlight the numerous video options beyond Netflix it already offers.

Google, says McQuivey in his blog post today, “has to push Android onto every TV device, including the Motorola set-top-boxes it is about to own.”

Apple, of course, is widely rumored to be working on a TV set as well. McQuivey and his colleagues, however, think that Apple shouldn’t just sell a replacement TV. Instead, the company should focus on something more akin to a smaller, 32-inch screen iHub that could be used in the dining room or kitchen to create a central hub for the family to gather around and use a shared calendar, Facetime, and view photos and videos.

[image credit: stevestein1982]

Verizon Wireless has been working on bringing shared data plans to market for months now, but it turns out not everyone may enjoy making that transition.

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said at an investor conference earlier today that users on those wonderful old grandfathered unlimited data plans will soon have to give them up if they want to move into a 4G device.

“A lot of our 3G base is unlimited,” Shammo remarked. “As they start to migrate onto 4G, they will have to come off of unlimited and go onto the data share plan. That’s beneficial for us for many reasons.”

Though the move doesn’t come as a surprise — they’ve been running promotions to incentivize migration to their LTE network for a while now — but hearing their intentions actually spelled out like that probably won’t please many long-standing Verizon customers. The carrier is aiming to roll out their shared data plans “mid-summer,” though I expect more new details to trickle out soon.

But let’s back up a bit here — how will these things actually work? Though most of the details are still hush-hush, customers will be able to pay a set rate for tiered data plan that can be shared by all the devices on the account. Even though these new data plans are set to make their debut sooner rather than later, there’s still no information available on what they’ll actually cost. Verizon isn’t exactly known for being the most price-conscious wireless carrier (don’t get me started on the rise of $299 smartphones), but we’ll have to wait and see what they’ve come up with.

The concept of shared data plans would is wonderful for families and other multi-line accounts, but it doesn’t do any favors for the individual customers who don’t need more than one device. The status of existing customers who have had their unlimited data plans grandfathered over to their new 4G devices is also unclear — Shammo makes it sound like only customers who upgrade after the change takes place will have to pick a new data plan (for better or worse), and with any luck they’ll leave the lucky souls who have already locked their old data plans alone for now.

Independent online video company Funny Or Die is about to get a lot of help from a traditional TV company, as it’s struck a strategic partnership with Turner Broadcasting to collaborate on multiplatform video content. As part of the deal, Turner is taking a small minority stake in Funny Or Die — terms of which have not been disclosed.

“We’re at an inflection point with digitally distributed video,” Funny Or Die CEO Dick Glover told me by phone. He says that as a result, the timing of the deal is poised to coincide with that inflection point and catalyze further growth for Funny Or Die.

For 2012, Funny Or Die is averaging around 14-16 million uniques per month, and has seen 60 percent growth year over year. But it’ll likely get a big boost once it starts leverage Turner properties, but especially TBS and Adult Swim. Internet distribution is nice, but it still doesn’t match the reach that a content creator can get from TV. According to Glover, the partnership will “provide a microphone to reach a much larger audience.”

While the Internet video company will get some help in promotion, Glover said there’ll be no real change in how the company is run or what kind of content it puts out. It’ll still develop for a multiplatform audience, which includes online, mobile, and TV — where appropriate.

This isn’t the first partnership that Funny Or Die has struck with a TV network. It also has a deal with HBO (which, like Turner, is also part of Time Warner) for its original series Funny Or Die Presents, now in its third season. That deal remains in place and isn’t affected by the Turner partnership, Glover said.

As viewership — especially among young people — moves away from traditional TV and to other channels, broadcast and cable networks are starting to look at online video distributors for help in this new, multiplatform environment. The Turner partnership was announced about two weeks after Discover acquired indie video producer Revision3 for a reported $30-$40 million. We’ll probably see more deals like this as time goes on.

One of the most memorable moments of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last year was office hours with Paul Graham, who is the heart and co-founder of Y Combinator. We are doing it again this year. But because Graham is back in Silicon Valley with a newborn baby, we’re doing it in a slightly different way.

Over the past few years, we’ve heard that it’s not only hard to find engineers. It’s hard to find great design talent. And if Apple’s still unbelievable and mind-boggling rise over the last 15 years shows anything, it’s that design matters. Design and simplicity made the difference between Instagram and every other photo-sharing app. It revived Path. It made Square stand out among all of the other credit card readers.

So we’re changing Office Hours to focus on design. Design Office Hours will be held on-stage at Disrupt NYC on Wednesday, May 22nd, from 11:55am to 12:30pm. Just like we did last year at New York during Disrupt, six companies will be chosen from the completed applications below to spend time on-stage with some talented design experts. Startups will get to go up on stage, show our experts their designs, and receive advice and feedback.

Our on-stage design experts include Leland Rechis, who is a director of mobile product at Etsy and was a lead mobile product manager at Twitter. He was also a user experience designer on the launch team for Android OS.

We also have Jamie Divine, who was director of user experience at Boxee, a senior visual designer at Google and a head of user experience at AVOS Systems, the company led by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

Jason Morrow is a lead product designer at betaworks and has led design teams at Google on products like News, Finance and Search.

Finally, we have Mimi Chun, who is the design director for General Assembly, a co-working space and startup education institute near Union Square. She was the communication design lead at Ideo before that for several years.

If you’re interested, apply below!

One trend we’ve been tracking is the “Internet of Things” — the idea that at some point, all devices will be intelligent and connected, allowing for things like whole home automation. The problem is that most new systems equipped to connect to the Internet are reliant on proprietary software and hardware tacked on by the vendor. So whatever devices do come to market Internet-ready tend to be overly expensive, and don’t play well with others.

That’s where Electric Imp comes in. The startup was founded on the premise of decoupling all the connectivity and intelligence for these connected systems from the devices themselves, and instead, letting those applications be powered by a single tiny chip, lovingly called an “Imp.”

The startup was founded by CEO Hugo Fiennes, who was engineering manager on the first four iPhones, along with former Gmail designer Kevin Fox and software architect Peter Hartley. The Los Altos-based company has seven employees currently, but is looking to expand to 20 within the next six months. To spur that growth, it’s raised a $7.9 million round of financing from Redpoint Ventures and Lowercase Capital.

The Imp looks like an SD card, but is much more powerful — it contains Wi-Fi and an embedded processor — and can be programmed to control or measure any matter of things, based on the type of device it’s inserted into. For consumers, Imp cards will cost about $25 a piece, but can be put in or taken out of compatible devices at any time, depending on how the consumer wants to use them. There will also be a very small monthly subscription fee for consumers who take advantage of Imp-enabled services. While final pricing hasn’t been quite worked out yet, the founders are thinking about a fee that is “less than the cost of a latte” for use of up to 20 Imps in one home.

But before the Imp becomes a mainstream consumer product, hardware vendors need to actually adopt the platform and start adding Imp-compatible slots into their devices. The pitch to them is that, for less than a dollar they will be able to add a slot and create powerful new applications for otherwise dumb devices.

And they can do so without having to worry about hiring specialists to integrate connectivity into the device or increasing the cost of their products by adding Wi-Fi or processors that are otherwise unnecessary. Electric Imp will provide the enabling hardware — the Imp card — and it also will manage the back end service which connects all of the devices. Imp-enabled devices can be controlled either from a web browser or on a smartphone, either through Electric Imp’s own application, or through third-party apps that are developed to take advantage of the new platform.

Fiennes demoed a number of applications to me yesterday, all of which take advantage of the mix-and-match nature of the Imp cards. Users can remotely control lights, or set energy-hogging devices like washing machines to run at times when the cost of power is lowest. You could hook up a monitor to measure moisture in your garden, which could then be wired to the Internet and connected to weather reports to ensure that all your plants are watered appropriately. Or you could set up motion sensors which not only turn on the lights and other devices, but also to monitor when people enter a room and can send alerts if there’s unusual activity — say, someone walking in when no one is usually home, or if an elderly relative hasn’t gotten up and gone to the kitchen by a certain time.

The possibilities really are endless, especially when you consider the number of devices which don’t have connectivity now, because it’s too expensive, but could benefit from some smarts and the ability to monitor and control them from afar. Just as importantly, the Imp could enable hardware from multiple manufacturers to work together, rather than having to rely on a single vendor for a home automation system that requires a major upfront investment and, frankly, probably won’t be updated or age well with time. And because the smarts of the device can be updated from the cloud, manufacturers will be able to remotely monitor and update their products seamlessly, without consumers even knowing.

Electric Imp is already talking to some vendors about integrating its Imp slots onto upcoming hardware devices, and will be shipping a developer preview bundle in late June to give manufacturers all they need to prototype and test out new applications.

Today, Google is launching one of its most ambitious and interesting updates to its search engine in recent months. Starting in a few days, you will start to see large panels with additional factual information about the topic you were searching for take over the right side of Google’s search result pages. The panels are powered by what Google calls its new “Knowledge Graph” and they will serve two different functions. Google will use this space to show you a summary of relevant information about your queries (think biographical data about celebrities and historical figures, tour dates for artists, information about books, works of art, buildings, animals etc.) as well as a list of related topics. In addition, Google will now allow you to clarify what exactly you are looking for and will use these boxes for disambiguation. Thanks to this, you will soon be able to tell Google you were looking for the L.A. Kings ice hockey team and not the Sacramento Kings when you searched for ‘kings.’

The company has actually been working on the semantic technology that drives this knowledge graph for quite a few years. This specific project, Google told me earlier this week, has been in the works for about the last two years. During this time, the company has been working hard on creating the vast database of structured knowledge that powers the features it is launching today (though Google’s acquisition of Freebase . Today, the knowledge graph database currently holds information about 500 million people, places and things. More importantly, though, it also indexes over 3.5 billion defining attributes and connections between these items.

“Strings to Things”

As Google Fellow Ben Gomes told me yesterday, the company really wants to move beyond just understanding the characters you are typing into its search engine to getting a better understanding of what it is you are really looking for (“strings to thing” is what Gomes likes to call it). To do this, Google is using both its own and other freely available sources like Wikipedia, the World CIA Factbook, its own Freebase product, Google Books, online event listings and other data it crawls, but it is also using some commercial datasets (though Google wouldn’t reveal which companies specifically it is working with here).

Here is what this will look like in practice. Google is currently pretty good at understanding general search queries, but some terms are just too ambiguous. When you search for ‘andromeda,’ for example, it just can’t know if you are searching for the TV series, galaxy, or this Swedish progressive metal band. Now, whenever you type in one of these queries, Google will show you a box on the right side of the screen that lets you tell it which one of these topics you were really looking for. Once you pick the topic, the search result page will reload and show you the results related to what you were really looking for.

So if you were looking for the TV show Kings, the search result page will show you images related to the show, the right Wikipedia entry and links to episodes that are available for online streaming. If you were looking for the Sacramento Kings, though, you will get the latest box scores and other information related to the basketball team.

That’s only one part of what the Knowledge Graph now allows Google to do. The second part involves Google’s new automatically created topic summaries that will appear when you look for a topic that’s well defined by the Knowledge Graph. Say you search for the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, for example. Instead of having to click through to Wikipedia to find out when he was born, you will now see his biographical data right there on the search result page. As Gomes told me, Google, of course, knows what kind of facts around a certain person, place or event people usually search for, so it these summaries will also highlight these topics.

According to Gomes, you will see these summaries about as often as you currently see Google Maps in your search results. To put this into perspective (and sadly we couldn’t get Google to give us more concrete numbers), this launch is significantly bigger than the entire launch of Universal Search combined – and that was one of the company’s largest launches in this field.

What makes these summaries even more interesting, though, is the fact that they also highlight other relevant information. For Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, the summary will give you links to some of his most famous projects, as well as a short list of related people Google’s users tend to search for. Click on these, and you will get to their respective summaries. Inside the summaries, Google will also highlight other entries that you can use to dig deeper (family members, band members, albums, schools, a TV show’s director etc.). This, says Google, will allow you to search more naturally across a topic.

Google is aggregating this data from a large variety of sources. It will typically feature a short summary from Wikipedia or a similar service at the top of the summary and specifically link to the source. For the rest of the data, though, it will often just draw upon its own Knowledge Graph database and not specifically link to where it found a person’s birth date, for example.

In case Google gets something wrong, by the way, you can report errors with just a few clicks.

Looking Ahead

Google, of course, has been adding bits and pieces of semantic search smarts to its search engine over the last few years (and so has Microsoft after its acquisition of Powerset). With Google Squared, one of its recently shelved experiments, it also once launched a pretty ambitious project to understand information on the web and then display it in a table (some of this technology likely lives on in the Knowledge Graph now). Today’s launch, however, represents Google’s most ambitious move in this direction.

As Gomes as told me, now that Google’s algorithms have access to this structured data and can understand it better, the next step will be to understand more complex questions like “Where can I attend a Lady Gaga concert in warm outdoor weather?” For now, though, it is worth noting that this update isn’t about natural language processing and answering questions so much as about displaying relevant data in

It’ll be interesting to see how this new feature will influence how people search and what links they click on. I wouldn’t be surprised if this had quite a negative influence on traffic to Wikipedia, for example. At the same time, though, the disambiguation feature may just help drive more relevant traffic to the sites Google links to as well.

Disrupt alumni never cease to impress. TC50 finalist Perpetually and its web archiving technology have been acquired by Portland, Ore.- based Smarsh.

Though the news hit the Web yesterday, we’re told the acquisition occurred earlier this year. Given Smarsh’s pedigree – which also specializes in archiving digital content, including IM conversations, social media interactions, and email – archiving sites as they change and update is only a natural step forward for the company. Details of the transaction were not disclosed.

“Smarsh provides a much more stable environment in which the product will really thrive,” Darrell Silver, Founder of Perpetually, told TechCrunch. “While profitable when it was acquired, with investors and stockholders turning a profit on the acquisition, we’ll be able to do much more, much faster as part of Smarsh.”

In a blog post that was published and then subsequently deleted yesterday, Silver thanked the New York tech scene:

The Perpetually story proves how beneficial it is to be a tech startup in NYC right now. After many coffees, dinners, drinks, calls and emails in December, it became clear just how much of a support system we now have here. The people who helped make this deal work were VCs, entrepreneurs, family, salespeople, engineers, students and even an ex-Goldman banker. Most had no financial incentive to do so. Many other friends from SF helped for sure, but NYC offered a diversity of talent unavailable anywhere else.

He also mentioned that an acquisition wasn’t necessarily on his to-do list when Perpetually launched back in 2009 at Disrupt. “Frankly, we were so young and bright-eyed when launching at TechCrunch50 — only six months after Perpetually was first conceived — that of course acquisition wasn’t the goal,” said Silver. “All we knew was that it was shocking there was no easy way to have a DVR-like way of looking at your website. It seemed like a huge opportunity for something that should exist, so we went for it.”

Silver is the only Perpetually employee moving over to the Smarsh team, as he was the only full-time employee at the time of acquisition.

Silver originally published the aforementioned blog post yesterday titled “Perpetually Is Now Smarsh Web Archiving.” When asked why he removed the post, though he didn’t give a clear answer, Silver did provide the original copy.

After an incredible roller-coaster of three short years, I’m extremely proud to announce that Perpetually has been acquired by Smarsh! The technology as we envisioned it — perfect, interactive archives of any website — is already thriving under its new name: Smarsh Web Archiving.

I’ve also joined Smarsh to grow web archiving across its 15,000 customers.

We’ve all been sprinting to make today’s announcement possible. Our success today is as much due to the passion of the Smarsh team as it was the Perpetually team and our investors’ risk appetite over the years — all of which paid off nicely.

But there’s one group whose impact cannot be overstated: The NYC tech community.

The Perpetually story proves how beneficial it is to be a tech startup in NYC right now. After many coffees, dinners, drinks, calls and emails in December, it became clear just how much of a support system we now have here. The people who helped make this deal work were VCs, entrepreneurs, family, salespeople, engineers, students and even an ex-Goldman banker. Most had no financial incentive to do so. Many other friends from SF helped for sure, but NYC offered a diversity of talent unavailable anywhere else.

The last three years have been a wild ride, and perseverance has paid off. Next time at 1000x!

Both companies are keeping a relatively low-profile with regards to the acquisition. Even the release sent out by Smarsh kept things vague and short:

Smarsh Web Archiving leverages the technology acquisition of Perpetually, LLC, the market leader in enterprise Web archiving.

Perpetually will hereafter be referred to as Smarsh Web Archiving (clever, huh?) and according to the release it will allow users to “capture, search, preserve, produce and supervise complete websites, individual Web pages, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, audio and video files and other content on the Web.” This includes all interactive elements like YouTube videos and Flash content, and even the links between various pages will remain intact.

Pearson, the educational publisher, today made a move to beef up its international professional IT testing business: it announced that it is buying Certiport, a developer, marketer and distributor of certification exams and practice tests for IT and digital literacy skills, for $140 million in cash from the private equity firm Spire Capital Partners.

The deal will give Pearson’s VUE unit, where Certiport will sit, much further reach into the retail distribution of testing services in markets outside of the U.S. and UK: Certiport currently sells its certifications and assessments through a network of 12,000 testing centers operated by 70 partners in 150 countries, serving the range of skills in the world of IT. In all, it delivers 225,000 exams in 27 languages every month, and generated revenues of $48 million in 2011.

Certiport, which was founded in 1997 in Utah, creates certification programs for software from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, HP and Intuit. With Certiport having 60 percent of its business currently outside of the U.S., the deal will mean not only a stronger profile in IT educational services for Pearson, but a window on to a wider geographic footprint, especially in Asia and the Middle East. The existing testing network will also become a channel that Pearson can use to distribute testing and certification content already in its portfolio.

“Certiport is a high-quality company serving the significant demand for foundation IT skills. That need is growing fast and is truly international,” said Rona Fairhead, chief executive of Pearson’s professional education businesses, in a statement.”The combination of Pearson VUE and Certiport will strengthen both businesses and will give us a unique portfolio of technology assessments and certification, serving everyone from a basic word-processing users to technology experts.”

Pearson notes that Certiport’s revenues have been growing at a compound annual rate of 20 percent in the last three years, with the integration costs for Certiport expensed in 2012 and the acquisition showing up in Pearson’s earnings from 2013.

Facebook’s eight year history is famously speckled with a number of buyout offers from the likes of Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. But each time, founder Mark Zuckerberg opted to keep his company independent — against the advice of many. Now, with Facebook gearing up to hold an initial public offering that will value the company at some $100 billion, it’s pretty apparent that Zuckerberg was right all along.

And according to new data out of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), others are opting to go the same route. Merger and acquisition (M&A) deals are taking a backseat at the moment, as more web companies are setting their sights on the possibility of an IPO.

Tech M&A Dips, Web M&A Dives

There were just nine M&A deals in the Internet sector during the first three months of 2012, compared to the 20 M&A deals that the sector saw during the first quarter of 2011, according to PwC’s latest U.S. technology M&A Insights report. Internet M&A deals also dipped on a sequential quarterly basis, as the sector saw 10 deals in the fourth quarter of 2011.

The larger technology sector overall, which in PwC’s report includes hardware, software, semiconductor, IT services and Internet companies, saw a dip in M&A deal volume as well. There were 64 tech M&A deals during Q1 2012, down ten percent from the 76 tech M&A deals that occurred in Q1 2011. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, deal volume declined by seven percent from the 69 deals that closed in Q4 2011.

Quantity Down, But Per-Deal Price Tags High

It’s also important to note that while the number of M&A deals is down, the cumulative transaction value is up — indicating that the companies who do opt for M&A transactions are seeing higher price tags. Cumulatively, Q1 2012′s tech M&A deals were worth $28.9 billion, an increase over Q1 2011 which saw $25.1 billion in deals.

Since deal volume was so low, the average deal value for Q1 2012 was $452 million, up significantly from Q1 2011 when average deal value was $330 million. There were nine billion dollar-plus tech M&A deals during Q1 2012, which PwC said represents the second highest volume of quarterly “mega deals” since 2008.

IPOs Up — Driving Valuations Up

Meanwhile, tech IPO activity is surging. There were 13 tech IPOs and 14 IPO registrations during the first quarter of 2012, continuing the trend from 2011 which saw 65 tech IPO listings overall, which itself was a 27 percent boost over 2010.

That public market frothiness is what’s mostly driving up M&A deal prices, PwC said in its report, which read in part: “Lofty IPO valuations have many companies pursuing a dual track to liquidity, preparing for both a sale and IPO, with attendant increases in valuation expectations.” With Facebook’s blockbuster IPO, which is widely expected to occur later this week, it looks like the current trends in tech M&A will only intensify — perhaps with Facebook itself emerging more as another low volume, big money acquirer.

Here are some key graphs from PwC’s latest tech M&A report (click on images to enlarge):

Startup Prismatic claims to show you news related to “what you’re actually interested in.” Starting today, users can to reveal those interests to others with newly launched profiles.

When I first heard about Prismatic, my kneejerk reaction was, “Oh God, another Flipboard competitor.” Making matters worse, the company is building a website first and doesn’t have a smartphone or tablet app yet, which is awfully unsexy. But co-founder and CEO Bradford Cross says the company’s is pursuing a genuinely new approach to the problem, which is why it’s sticking to the Web for now and remains invite-only.

So what does the bit about “actually interested in” mean? Cross says that if you look at Flipboard and the hordes of competitors, they’re mostly showing you content that’s already in your social stream — on Twitter, that means you’re just seeing headlines from people and publications that you already follow. Some startups claim to take a broader view, but Cross says that if you look at the content that gets highlighted, it’s still stuff from your Twitter feed. (I haven’t taken a close enough look at other apps to back this up, but I can say that the content usually isn’t different enough or better enough to lure me away from Flipboard.) In large part, he says that’s because they’re trying to bolt social discovery onto existing products. Prismatic’s technology, on the other hand, is more topic-based — it looks at what you’ve been sharing on social networks to determine your interests, then recommends topics and publications for you to follow. Hopefully, you’ll start finding content that you would have missed otherwise.

The new profiles provide a way to share and find that content. Each profile includes a visualization of all your different interests. You can see co-founder Aria’s visualization Haghighi above — the more you interact with a topic, the larger the bubble. There’s also a stream of stories showing the news that you’ve interacted with recently.

This creates a more social way to find new interests to follow and stories to read. It can also tell you something new about your friends. For example, Haghighi and I were acquaintances back when we were both undergraduates at Stanford, but his Prismatic profile was almost a revelation. Given his interest in science fiction and comic books, including a giant profile image of Batman and highlighting content about author China Mieville, I realized that we should totally be best friends. (I’m not sure about that whole computer science thing though.) Some of this information could probably be inferred via Facebook profile and likes, but Prismatic is putting interest information and news-sharing front-and-center — which should also make you feel more comfortable sharing news in a context where you don’t have to worry about annoying your friends.

Prismatic profiles have just gone live for every user with more than 10 interests (so I need a few more interests to activate mine).

The company has raised $1.2 million in funding from Battery Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, and undisclosed angels. You can request an invite here.

Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin is joining the board of the event ticketing startup Eventbrite, the company is announcing today. The news of the appointment follows what has been, so far, quite a busy year for the startup, which has now sold 60 million tickets, and is expanding globally with websites in eight different languages.

Morin, whose background includes time as the former head of the Facebook Platform and several years at Apple, will bring his knowledge of social to the ticketing company, says Eventbrite.

Morin joins Barry McCarthy, former CFO of Netflix, Sean Moriarty, former CEO of Ticketmaster, Roelof Botha, former CFO of PayPal and Partner at Sequoia Capital, among others serving on Eventbrite’s Board of Directors.

“Eventbrite has long been a believer in the impact of the social graph, and the work that Dave did while at Facebook has had a profound impact on our business,” Kevin Hartz, CEO of Eventbrite says. “Our integration with Facebook Connect in 2008 predicated an exponential increase in traffic and engagement among event attendees,” he added.

Eventbrite is heavily benefiting from Facebook integration. In 2011, the company reported that every time an event was shared on Facebook, it generated an additional $2.52 on average in ticket sales for event organizers and 11 clicks back to the Eventbrite page. And this was before the launch of Facebook’s Open Graph in early 2012, and the introduction of “actions” like “bought,” or “want” or “watch,” etc.

Notably, Eventbrite was one of the Facebook Open Graph launch partners, but it’s not yet using “actions.” According to Tamara Mendelsohn, VP of Marketing at Eventbrite, however, they’re “working on something now” on that front, and we should see the results of that soon.

Facebook is also the number one driver of Eventbrite’s traffic, says Mendelsohn, but the company won’t share how much.

As for engagement levels, you can see in the chart below what the impact of Facebook integrations have already had on the company’s business. With Morin’s guidance on deeper integrations, those numbers should jump yet again.

Outside of social integrations and global expansion, the company has also been pushing itself forward in the mobile payments space. In March, Eventbrite launched a complimentary credit card reader to go along with its iPad ticketing app “Eventbrite at the Door,” which attaches to the iPad’s dock connector, allowing users to swipe credit cards. Just prior to this, the company had announced a product called “Endurance,” specifically for selling tickets to races and walks, like marathons and fundraising events. And only last week, Eventbrite announced integrations with SponsorHub for connecting event organizers with sponsors.

“Eventbrite is fundamentally changing the way people create, promote and find events and gatherings in their local communities,” said Morin in a statement. “I’ve been more than impressed by their level of innovation, their commitment to their users, and by their long term focus. The decision to join the board as they forge into making event discovery more mobile and social was an easy one. At the end of the day, we all live for great events.”

Eventbrite has been making a huge push towards reaching $1 billion in gross ticket sales this year, about doubling the number of events on the platform in 2011 (458,207 events in 2011) and tickets sold (20,798,509 tickets in 2011). In 2011, Eventbrite sold $400 million worth of tickets, up from $207 million in 2010.

Back in in 1999, just as Ebay was coming into bloom, William Gibson wrote a piece on his experiences buying expensive watches online. He called the article My Obsession and it details his youth as a picker in the 1970s.

He writes:

This “job,” if it can be called a job, is all but dead these days because of some of the basic properties of the new market. Barring those folks on American Pickers who find items that will eventually hang in a TGI Friday’s, the potential for making a lucrative trade in a post-Internet world by finding and selling odd items is nearly nil. First, a picker depends on arbitrage. Arbitrage depends on incomplete information on someone’s part or, in the case of collectable, desire.

Second, a picker is facing down an army of folks who, in a sense, refuse to allow their items to be picked for fear that somewhere, somehow they will find out that their Garbage Pail Kid collection is worth something. After all, a listing on eBay is nearly free and a listing on Craigslist is free. The cost, then, in finding someone to take your items off of your hands at a premium price is only time. And obviously no one has any of that. So the cards moulder and the old watches sit in drawers and the Beanie Babies slump over themselves like rotten potatoes and pickers are stuck sifting through detritus at best.

The golden geek example of this impetus is the Mile High Comics story. In 1977, a friend called the owner of Mile High Comics to explain that a realtor had contacted him about getting rid of some junk at the home of Edgar Church in Boulder. After a bit of back and forth, the owner went to see the comics and found a trove – literally a house full – of old books, posters, magazines, and comics that spanned back to the birth of Superman and the Golden Age of comics. In short, he picked his way into a long and happy career.

All that is gone now, and there is definitely a side effect that, for better or worse. The Internet is changing the way we look at nostalgia and history. Take for example the recent efforts by George Mason University professor T. Mills Kelly’s class, Lying About The Past. Kelly and his students essentially propagate hoaxes, using the tools of social media to spread lies about history. They have, in fact, successfully posted fake listings in Wikipedia and by faking primary material they were able to fool a number of people over the years.

Kelly and his class recently tried to fool Reddit with some fake newspaper clippings about murders in New York, suggesting that Jack the Ripper visited New York to do his dirty work. The resulting post – bolstered by some ginned up newspaper clippings and a short backstory, was quickly dismantled. The same impetus to hunt for the best price for a piece of nostalgia has been reversed here to slam the lid on a piece of flim-flammery.

Rob Beschizza notes on BoingBoing that Reddit is specifically tuned to sense when information is, perhaps, too good. He wrote:

They are, in a way, like collectors who can see through a 20th century Chinese reproduction of a Spanish conquistador sword simply based on immersion in the market. They are intrinsically skeptical and, as such, can’t be taken easily.

Sure, things slip through just as they might at an antiques shop where a rare painting is hanging next to a mangy deer’s head or when an entire crate of early Archie comics lies next to a box of romance novels at a yard sale. But the Internet has killed the casual picker and created a new breed of meta-curators – folks who are able to see through and comment upon the collections of others without, often, having first hand experience on the topic. Some would call them trolls and others would call them obsessives. I’d just call them Internet users.

Harnessing this instinct is what all of these social creation sites are about. A market cannot exist without a group of people interested in selling and an equal number – or more – interested in buying. Sites like Reddit are the last refuge of the intellectual picker and, while there is no way for us to find a #1 issue of Mad Magazine at the thrift shop anymore, there is a way to separate the intellectual wheat from the chaff using the picker’s instinct online.

Mobile payments and identity verification company Jumio is introducing its Netswipe Mobile SDK today, which allows developers to add credit card scanning functionality to their mobile applications. The SDK (software development kit), is available now for iOS, but an Android version is coming soon, the company says.

To jump-start usage, Jumio is also waiving transaction fees for the SDK’s first users for a temporary period of time.

The company is calling this a “$5 million fund,” but it’s not really a fund – it’s a just a discount to developers who choose to implement the solution. They’ll be able to try out the Jumio SDK in their apps before committing to paying the extra cost of doing so. Jumio says it will cover the cost of the first 1,000 scans every month, but did not announce an end date for this promotion just yet. (Until the $5M runs out, it seems).

The SDK allows developers to integrate the card-scanning technology into their app, which means users can hold up a credit card to their smartphone’s camera in order to have the card “read” by the app and the numbers automatically entered into the correct fields. To confirm the purchase, the 3-digit CVV still has to be entered, however.

The technology is similar to what a lesser-funded competitor Card.io already has in place. In fact, while both companies have operated in the same space – “computer vision” for speeding up mobile payments – they’ve been coming at it from different angles. While Card.io started with SDKs for iOS and Android, then moved into web support for e-commerce sites, Jumio has been going the opposite direction. As of March, Card.io already had some 200 developers using its SDK.

The Jumio SDK for iOS is available for download here.

If you are looking for Piano or Rhodes-like feel for serious playing, Samson’s Carbon 49 USB MIDI Controller may not be right for you.

However, if you need a keyboard for some light playing or sample triggering, why not keep the expensive Kronos at home and bring the Carbon 49 out for the dangerous outdoor gigs that require expendable equipment? (I have seen many an expensive keyboard dragged end over end behind a golf cart after a show, or dropped or had beer spilled all over it while it was being underutilized at a gig as a mere MIDI controller).

Don’t get me wrong, the Carbon 49 — originally announced at NAMM but available May 15 — is a decently constructed keyboard controller and it comes complete with the usual on-board tools of the MIDI trade (modulation wheel, pitch wheel, data knob). Most importantly, it’s fairly portable and can use a laptop or even an iPad (not included) for both its MIDI brain and complete power supply (which makes for light travel). That’s a pretty great feature actually!

The thing about the Carbon 49 I like the best is the price point. At $89 it’s inexpensive and I think it plays pretty well for that price range!

Pros

• Price – $89
• Integrated iPad stand
• Dedicated Transpose and Octave buttons, classic Pitch Bend and Modulation wheels
• Velocity-sensitive keys
• Shift key adjusts up to 14 performance-related control parameters
• Features traditional MIDI out, sustain-pedal input and USB connections

Cons

• Not trully weighted keys, which could make it hard for more serious or sensitive playing
• 49 keys…you would have to balance portability with your playing needs
• iPad Camera Kit connector not included

Bottom Line

I liked it. It’s inexpensive and worked right out of the box for me with both my MacBook and my iPad. It’s a decent option for playing or sample triggering.

More info at http://www.samsontech.com/

The Galaxy S III is likely the most anticipated Android phone in existence. At least, today it is.

Samsung is the king of Android hardware, the Galaxy S II is its most successful phone to date, and a third iteration is only expected to follow in its predecessor’s footsteps.

Plus, we weren’t even comforted by the usual pre-announcement leakapalooza — Samsung reportedly kept early units locked in test boxes, which only made that glorious moment of unveiling all the more wonderful.

But we’re still waiting and wondering about a potential U.S. release date for what is sure to be Samsung’s most popular phone yet, meaning that getting a peek of the device in the wild is near to impossible until “later this summer”. But as is the case with almost any phone, someone has gotten their hands on a unit of the S III and set up the good ol’ handy cam for our viewing pleasure.

Without further ado, check out this unboxing of the Galaxy S III alongside some of its biggest competitors.

If you can’t tell from all the Italian, a full list of cameos in this video includes the Samsung Galaxy Note, the HTC One X, the HTC One S, and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. You’ll notice that the Galaxy S III is running pre-release software, so things should look a bit more refined come launch day.

Unfortunately, there’s no telling how long we’ll be waiting before the GSIII hits stores shelves. It could be in June, or it could be at the end of August to compete with the next iPhone. Luckily, that soothing soundtrack and Italian stallion narration should soothe your anticipatory twitch until launch day, or at least for the next 7 minutes and 34 seconds.

Is the Twitter platform about to get a second wind of dedicated apps?

In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a handful of products that are starting out by filtering out the most relevant news stories, videos and photos from people’s personal streams. Thirst is one of them and it’s coming out with an iPad app today. The company is backed by nearly $1 million from investors including BlueRun Ventures, former Powerset chief operating officer Steve Newcomb and DCM general partner Jason Krikorian. It was started by two recent Berkeley graduates, Anuj Verma and Kunal Modi.

Although Thirst is starting out on the Twitter platform, the company is really more about natural language processing technology. The Twitter iPad app is more of a proof of concept around whether its NLP processor works well. Verma says that it’s really difficult to keep up with information shared through Twitter and there has to be a better way of surfacing the most important news. Thirst uses a custom natural language processor to pick out the most important stories around different keywords or subjects like ‘gay marriage’ (because of this past week’s big announcement from President Barack Obama in support of it).

The issue though, is how big any individual company like this can become. The biggest exits that the Twitter platform has spawned to date are, well, relatively small. Tweetdeck went to Twitter for between $40 to 50 million. Contrast that to the biggest iOS acquisition to date, which is Instagram, or Zynga, the most successful Facebook platform company to date. You could argue that recent M&A deals like Instagram and OMGPOP owe something to the Twitter platform because the social network was a growth channel for both apps, but it’s hard to say how much of their success was derived from the Twitter platform. There are also plenty of iPad-based news readers like Flipboard, Pulse and News.me that serve as competition for Thirst.

Again, Verma says Twitter is just a start. And there are plenty of other places that Thirst could go.

Thirst for Twitter from Thirst on Vimeo.

Contactually, the lightweight CRM solution for email users which launched into private beta at the beginning of this year, is today announcing its public debut with a number of new features in tow, as well as $500,000 in angel funding from YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, co-founder of CapLinked Chris Grey, and a re-up from previous investor, 500 Startups.

As for the new features, there are quite a few, but the major ones include the launch of “Contactually for Teams,” Microsoft Exchange support, a Gmail plugin, and additional integrations with other services and CRM systems.

Before delving into the details of what’s new, a little refresher on how Contactually works. When you sign up for the service, it pulls in information from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Klout, Quora, Flickr, Foursquare, Tumblr, Skype, and dozens of others, and integrates those into your new online address book. The address book tracks how often you and your contacts correspond and their priority. Another key part to the service are “Actions” – which are reminders to follow up with your contacts. These appear on the online dashboard and are sent out via email.

Prior to today, Contactually only supported IMAP-connected email accounts like Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, and AOL, but with its public launch, the service now adds much-needed support for Microsoft Exchange (2007+). Gmail users get an update, too, with the new Gmail plugin which shows reminders and lets you quickly categorize people. (Oh, and I checked – it works alongside Rapportive’s plugin, in case you hate to give that up). 

Team sharing is another new feature that allows users to see who on their team last contacted someone and see their contacts. It’s an interesting concept in making email less of a closed box, private to only the one person with access. Instead, users of the Teams product can share contacts and collaborate on follow-ups with each other.

Contactually is also rolling out more integrations, including support for messaging and contact import from LinkedIn, integration with SugarCRM, and plans to add CapsuleCRM, Producteev, and MailChimp in the next month. (Highrise and Salesforce are already supported).

Company co-founder Tony Cappaert tells us that the service now has 6,000 users, a “large chunk” of whom are paying, as well as a couple of enterprise deals of a couple thousand seats or so.

Interested users can sign up here. The private beta period will end at 12 PM ET, allowing anyone to sign up.

Contactually was founded by Zvi Band, Tony Cappaert, and Jeff Carbonella, and is based in Washington, DC. In addition to the $50K in seed funding from 500 Startups, Contactually’s previous angel round of $165K included investors Sean Glass and David Steinberg.

Mass Relevance, a startup that helps media companies and brands tap into this crazy Twitter thing, has raised $3.3 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by Austin Ventures, with money from Battery Ventures, Floodgate, Allegro Venture Partners, and Metamorphic Ventures. The startup previously raised $2.2 million in seed funding from most of the same backers — Battery is the only addition.

Mass Relevance pulls content from Twitter and other social networks (it announced a tweet syndication deal with Twitter last year), filters the updates according to a customer’s needs, then creates visualizations that can be embedded on a website or displayed on pretty much any screen, including TVs, billboards, and in-store signs. Founder and CEO Sam Decker says that the company started out doing custom work for each customer, but it has “productized” that work into standard visualizations showing trends, conversations, maps, polls, Q&As, and more.

The company says its clients have included the Big Four television networks, seven of the top 10 cable networks, Target, Cisco, Ford, Pepsi, and Victoria’s Secret. Mass Relevance first caught on with media companies who wanted to pull content from Twitter, Decker says, but brands and advertising agencies are getting interested too. That interest can provide monetization opportunities for publishers (say if a brand wants to sponsor Mass Relevance content on a publisher’s site), but it also a reflects growing brand interest in running social network content on their own properties — for example, the company is helping Pepsi display tweets related to its “Live For Now” campaign.

Decker says one of the main goals for the funding is to “lean in to the demand we’ve experienced from brands and agencies” by building more products designed for their needs. He plans to continue growing the company in Austin, while also hiring a few people in other cities, especially New York.

This is a guest post by Roger Warner of Content and Motion.

Here’s classic example of how badly some companies are screwing up on social media. Back in February this year Coca-Cola Australia invited its fans to some ‘banter’ or chat. Fans obliged. Much fun ensued. Coca-Cola looked stupid.

What’s happening here? Coca Cola has invested tirelessly in its brand for the past 50 years. Now some bright social media spark is conducting inane ‘little experiments’ for social media ‘engagement’ that seem hellbent on killing it. Exactly the same thing can happen when young startups try to engage on social networks and think they have to “engage”.

Sadly, Coca Cola’s approach to engagement is not the exception, it’s the rule. It’s the “Hi, how was your weekend?” approach to brand communications on Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Plenty of tech companies find themselves in this trap, not just consumer brands.

This is classic conversational, open and ‘authentic’ dialogue that seems to satisfy the pervasive ethos of social media (make nice) but at the same time totally messes with any concept of a brand. It can vastly over estimate the average person’s appetite for holding conversations with the products and services they use and follow on Facebook.

Startups, companies and brands that are following this path are getting it very wrong indeed.

• People don’t use Facebook in order to forge a relationship with Coca-Cola (or any other brand). They use it to create and enhance relationships with other people and to tell their own life stories (via sharing).

• People believe in brands. Some folks buy the Burberry label instead of Wallmart own brand and are very happy with the price tag. Bland conversations and banter undermine the strength of a brand (and price) because they’re reductive: they strip out the magic and create a level playing field. Any brand can play the ‘authenticity’ game.

• Whichever way you look at it – entertainment, engagement, acquisition, etc – brand to fan conversations don’t scale well (whereas fan to fan conversations do). Resource runs thin and they revert to standard types. “Hi, how was your weekend?”

• People are tuning out from mundane ‘experiments’ and boring, self-serving brand ‘conversations’. They simply don’t compete in a news stream that includes raunchy pictures from Friday’s drinks at the office. Further, it’s more fun to sabotage them than to play along.

So what else should you be doing on Facebook?

Great ‘social brands’ enhance the ‘personal brands’ of their fans. Put bluntly: You make them look better.

They transform the average stuff of life into something more valuable and meaningful. They create stories to share by giving people great content and experiences that makes them feel smarter, cooler, more generous and generally more heroic. The will to empower creates the will to share.

The winners in this game know that any given Facebook play must be geared to creating (relative) fame and/or thanks for others. And they understand that if they can do this, then good things will follow: shares, Likes, comments and, in turn, brand awareness, traffic and referrals.

In the near term future, these brands will flourish in the Social sphere – they’ll generate a tangible benefit from their spend and their Social Media teams will earn more respect, industry awards and money.

Their work will evolve around a firm but basic understanding of what people really want from their time on Social Media – kudos. They’ll be able to extend the brand in new engaging ways by creating lots of very personal missions on new platforms and devices, in all kinds of day-to-day environments that they don’t currently enjoy a presence – from the breakfast table to desk to couch and back again.

Success – and a more powerful Social brand – comes via an understanding of how, why and where a brand can generate personal kudos in amongst the flux of daily life and leveraging the best technology available to make it easy and support the cause.

Here are some great examples:

• Create an email intervention in the workplace? Sure. I’m a smart working hero, I’m in.

• Deliver a can of personalised chicken soup to a flu-bound spouse? I’m a progressive, caring husband with a sense of humour. Show me how.

• Wage a war against over priced, over specced shave tech (and Roger Federer)? I’ve always thought seven blades was pointless. Where do I sign?

And, for those still bouncing around with the banter, here’s three closing tips for the immediate future:

• Rewire for social. Your biggest ideas must be about them, not you.

• Start trying to make your fans’ life stories more heroic.

• The will to empower creates the will to share.

Do this and you will win on Facebook and most other Social Media channels… and I guarantee it’s a hell of a lot more ‘engaging’ than banter.