Facebook is revising hard and fast in the lead-up to Friday when it is expected to ring in the Nasdaq bell and go public. In short, every revision is continuing to gradually push up the value of the company. Today’s S-1 filing has increased Facebook’s share offering to 421,233,615 shares of Class A common stock – 83,818,263 shares more than yesterday’s S-1, which had 337,415,352 shares of Class A common stock. Meanwhile the amount of Class B stock appears to have gone down.

With the additional shares, the company could now potentially raise up to $16 billion when it goes public, according to Reuters. Facebook is holding on the $34-38 price range. It will be trading on the Nasdaq as FB.

The move to increase the size of the offering could be read in two ways: it’s a way of meeting investor demand, which reports have noted continues to be high.

But it could also be a way of inspiring more confidence and interest in the company to stave off some of the more negative reports we’ve had in the last couple of days: most recently, it was noted that General Motors was pulling its advertising from Facebook. That’s a $10 million deal — not massive in terms of value — but very embarrassing for the social network because of the reason: apparently it was too hard for the car company to quantify the return on the investment.

Among the other increases: it looks like Facebook’s “greenshoe” provision has also gone up: it’s now at 63,185,042 shares compared to 50,612,302 shares yesterday.

The amount of Class A common stock that FB says will be outstanding after its IPO has also gone up: it’s now at 635,881,796 shares compared to 598,396,119 shares yesterday.

The amount of Class B common stock post IPO, however, is down: 1,502,203,241 shares now compared to 1,539,688,918 yesterday.

More to come. Refresh for updates.

The are almost too many tech events in the calendar these days to mark any particular one out as being worthy of note. I say almost because, on the global stage at least, TechCrunch Disrupt (Ok, Ok, but still…) remains up there because of how much other media attend and, well, just it’s general awesomeness. Into this small basket you could also put, for instance, Le Web, Founders Forum in the UK, DLD, The Lobby Conference, the tech elements at Davos and maybe even TED. What few of them are doing however, is celebrating new blood. You tend to see the people who have made it, not the one’s about to make it (apart from Disrupt of course). To that end one rapidly emerging event which is doing a very good job of bringing together the Valley, New York, Asia, Europe and emerging global startups like South America is the simply named “F.ounders“. And it’s coming to New York on June 14/15, and will be attended by our very own editor, Eric Eldon and co-editor Alexia Tsosis.

They’ll make up around 150 of the world’s fastest growing tech company founders gathering in NASDAQ’s Market Site in Times Square. Paddy Cosgrave says he is moving founders to New York to bring together “high growth companies on track to IPO or otherwise in the next 24 months.” There’s that new blood coming through.

Joining them will be tech stars including Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), David Karp (Tumblr), David Goldberg (Survey Monkey), Alexander Ljung (SoundCloud), Roger McNamee (Elevation Partners) Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) and Steve Case (AOL, Revolution).

You might not have heard of F.ounders as it barely has a web site and you can’t apply for an invite. But it’s been described by Bloomberg as “Davos for geeks”. TechCrunch was more to the point: we called it badass. Perhaps because of that we managed to get a special concession: We got them to agree that TechCrunch readers can ‘apply’ to attend by emailing attendees [@] f.ounders.com. No guarantees, but good luck…

Last year’s event was held in Dublin, Ireland. Bono lead a pub crawl, Riverdance put on a private performance and the Irish President hosted drinks in her residence in her last day in office. Rumours that a TechCrunch European editor led a few late party-goers in a 4am guitar-led rendition of Wonderwall in the lobby of the hotel have never been confirmed.

F.ounders Dublin is held annually in October, alongside The Dublin Web Summit.

It’s almost here. The big day. Can you feel the excitement? Yes, if all goes according to plan on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg will ring the Nasdaq bell in a hoodie, the big blue social network will go forward with one of the largest IPOs for an internet company in history, the markets will hit a fever pitch, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse will update their statuses — and the rest of us will just go back to using Twitter.

Nonetheless, Facebook is expected to go public at a valuation between $92 and $103 billion. As such, it’s pretty clear what Facebook is worth to us (really, to the market), but the real question is: How much are you worth to Facebook? Hmm?

Thanks to online privacy company Abine, we now have a simple tool by which we can calculate our monetary value to Facebook. In good old dollars and cents.

To illustrate the potential for Facebook to lose sight of the importance of the individual (and his or her privacy) amidst the pressure to maintain its ridiculously high valuation/metrics, Abine has created a quiz called the “Val-You Calculator,” which, based on your answers to seven questions, determines the dollar value you represent as a user.

These questions ask you where you live (most of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from North American companies), how many friends you have, whether or not you play Zynga games, for example, all in an effort to demonstrate that your personal data comes with an implicit dollar-value.

According to Abine, its Val-You Calculator uses data from Facebook’s S-1 filing, as well as “independent financial and market research analysts, Facebook advertisers, and our own internal modeling and estimates.” A little bit of magic, and presto, you can see how much revenue you generate for Big Blue.

Of course, when it comes to IPOs, with a ton of financial information being disclosed for the first time, naturally the magnifying glasses come out, books are scrutinized, business models molested, etc. For better or for worse. Regardless of the hot air that gusts from pundits, privacy will continue to be a serious concern for Facebook users going forward. In fact, just last week, Facebook launched a major update to its privacy policies in compliance with an audit by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner.

Among those changes, Facebook one-upped Google and created the “Facebook Terms and Policies Hub” to bring its 10 critical privacy policy documents under one roof. As the social network explained in a blog post, the changes are being made in an effort to increase the level of transparency around its handling of users’ personal data. And, as Josh details, for the most part, these changes seem logical, user friendly, and anything but suspicious, as some might have you believe.

That being said, with a scary-big user base creating even scarier amounts of big data, and considering that its model revolves around revenue derived from targeted, personalized ads, privacy advocates believe that the coming pressure to beat projections in the public markets leaves our personal data in a precarious position. The shortest line between A and big quarterly gains is a straight line to selling our private data to marketers.

In a recent survey, Abine found that 75 percent of its users wouldn’t leave Facebook alone in a dark room with their data, a sentiment that was confirmed by an independent AP-ABC poll in which nearly 60 percent of respondents had “little to no trust in Facebook to keep their information private.”

By updating its privacy policies, Facebook is working to allay those concerns, and its made progress. Yet, as Josh points out, privacy policy won’t be its only concern. Beyond making moves to stay on the right side of the law, down the road Facebook may face government regulation in regard to privacy. If a governing body were to place restrictions on how the company launches products, or displays features, for example, it could become increasingly vulnerable to the competition.

As it feels the pressure to drive big returns, Facebook may be forced to devise more clever ways to utilize data. It can think bigger, and will, but then it has to worry about mobile. As it has itself admitted, mobile is a big threat, and the company’s growth may be impeded as it works to keep up adequate transparency and has to show fewer ads per user as a result.

Whether or not this will significantly affect revenue in the long-term remains to be seen, however, thanks to Abine and Val-You, at the very least, Facebook will know exactly how much ad revenue each of its users represent. And that, my friends, is priceless.

Sadly, I was only worth a little over $50 to Facebook. Clearly, I’m not a good customer. What about you?

For more on Abine, find them here, or get your own Val-You appraisal here.

Sign of a maturing marketing flattening out, a lack of compelling devices, or a contraction in the economy? Gartner today released figures that note that worldwide sales of mobile phones were actually down by two percent this quarter, to reach a total of 419.1 million units — the first time the market has declined since the second quarter of 2009, the analysts say.

Gartner’s explanation is a slowdown in demand from Asia-Pacific, because of a lack of compelling new devices getting launched in the period: users are simply holding out until something better comes along. Nevertheless, of the vendors that are doing well, Samsung is riding at the top of the list, with 20.7 percent of all mobile sales globally, and among smartphones, it is the only Android vendor to have more than 10 percent market share — with Android now accounting for 56 percent of all smartphone sales in the quarter.

This will be the quarter that people remember as the one when Samsung swapped places with Nokia, with others like Strategy Analytics also showing a similar shift. In Gartner’s calculations of mobile sales, Nokia has now slipped down to second position with 19.8 percent of all mobile sales to Samsung’s 20.7 percent, equivalent to 86.6 million units.

Nokia, Gartner notes, had been in the number-one position since 1998 — but from the looks of its earnings for the last few quarters, it doesn’t appear that Nokia will be regaining the lead any time soon.

(Don’t rule it out yet, though. Nokia just yesterday launched two more low-cost, souped up feature phones that play to the developing markets where it has continued to do alright, despite its market share losses in more advanced countries.)

Among the other trends that Gartner noted, it pointed out that white-box vendors — the long tail of device makers that fill in the “others” category seemed to have been hit the hardest.

It notes that while companies like Nokia may have been selling in less at the retail level, white-box vendors have a supply issue in that they overproduced and now have a build-up of inventory. That will mean very cheap devices will be hitting stores in the next couple of quarters as they try to shift their stock for the next generation of devices. (This by the way was a similar problem Nokia had in Q2 2011, when Gartner suspected this might have made Nokia appear to have a bigger share of sales than it actually had.)

Overall, Samsung and Apple were the only two vendors in the top 1o mobile rankings to have gained market share: the rest all declined, as you can see from the list below.

In smartphones the power of the two is even more pronounced. Samsung and Apple now represent 49.3 percent of all smartphones sold — a sure sign of the consolidation being that a year ago the pair only accounted for 29.3 percent. Nokia’s smartphone share is down to 9.2 percent, Gartner says.

Samsung also managed to wrest the leading smartphone maker crown from Apple this quarter: it sold 38 million units to Apple’s 33 million.

Among Android makers, Samsung is also proving once again that it is the brand to beat: it accounted for 40 percent of all Android smartphone sales. (In that respect, Google’s Motorola buy seems less and less like a device play, or that it can realistically be one.)

But even with Apple in second, its actual growth was hugely impressive, at 96.2 percent over the year. China, Gartner notes, is now Apple’s second-largest market after the U.S. It looks like those sales were 8 million in total: 5 million from Apple’s official sales channges, and another 3 million from “transshipments” from Hong Kong.

More worryingly, RIM sold only 9.9 million units in the quarter and its global mobile share declined down to a mere 2.4 percent (in smartphone-only, that share is 6.9 percent, roughly half of what it was a year ago). BlackBerry 10, its new OS, will hopefully be the knight in shining armor that RIM desperately needs. Also, while Windows Phone actually grew in real terms, with 2.7 million sales in the quarter compared to 2.6 million a year ago, it’s not at all keeping pace with overall growth, and its share is now down to 1.9 percent from 2.6 percent a year ago.

Overall, smartphone sales accounted for just over one-quarter of all mobile sales: they stood at 144.4 million units, out of total mobile sales of 428 million units. That represented growth in smartphone sales of 44.7 percent, Gartner says.

Samsung’s Galaxy S III, the follow up to its best-selling Galaxy S II, was launched only last month and is now gradually getting rolled out worldwide — although it has seen mixed reviews and so it remains to be seen whether it will prove to be a similar blockbuster for the Korean company. In the meantime, we all continue to guess when Apple might release its next iPhone — with many suspecting it will not be until the later half of this year.

With Square yet to reveal when or where it might offer its mobile payment service in Europe, and PayPal apparently still only talking with would-be partners, the door is wide open for more local players to jump in and pick up some market share. Sweden’s iZettle, which often gets compared to Square, is now doing just that: today it is launching its iOS, dongle-based mobile payment service to the UK, four months after its pan-nordic live launch, and as it is preparing to launch an Android version of its product later this year.

iZettle kicking off its service by giving away 3,000 card readers to small businesses and sole traders in the country as part of its invitation-only beta, which it is running in cooperation with MasterCard, American Express and Diners Club. In its still brief life, it has seen some decent traction in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, where it now has 50,000 active merchants on its network.

iZettle is filling a practical need in the current market. The initial aim of the service, according to Jacob de Geer, the founder and CEO, is to target not those merchants that already take card payments, but those who have never signed on to using anything other than checks, cash and invoices to accept payments. There are roughly 20 million small businesses in Europe that fall into this category, he says, with the “uncarded” ranging from sole traders like carpenters to small independent cafes. “We’re not trying to go after those with existing infrastructure because switching costs are too high,” he says.

De Geer will not yet reveal the total number or value of transactions or how many consumers that have used the service to date, except to say that the company is building out its infrastructure to keep up with the demand and has grown by 10 percent in recent months. What’s interesting is that, for now at least, the service seems to be attracting high-value transactions: De Geer says the average value of a transaction is €60 ($76), compared to between €10 and €15 for the average NFC transaction in the Nordic region. (In comparison, he notes that Square transacts between $8-10 per day on any given reader, but that’s an average number and it has picked up a huge number of merchants now.)

The iZettle service works similar to PayPal’s Here and Square, in that a merchant plugs a card-reading dongle into an iOS device to process a card payment using an app downloaded to the device. Instead of reading the magnetic strip on the back of the card, iZettle reads the chip — these are now near-ubiquitous in Europe and tend to be more secure. Like other card payment services, you sign on the device screen to complete a payment, and the funds are deposited in a merchant account the next day.

Similar to other payment services iZettle works on a commission basis — in its case a percentage on each transaction, with that percentage varying by country. It actually dropped a transaction fee it used to take only days ago — perhaps a sign of how the area is heating up and so offering more competitive offerings is essential.

For now, the service is only on iOS but De Geer says that Android is coming soon, “this year for sure.” He says that the delay was due to (surprise!) fragmentation across too many versions of the platform, and too many devices. But the evolution to Ice Cream Sandwich — the latest OS — is definitely making things more standardized, he notes.

One expansion that is not coming soon is to the U.S. Not only do companies like Square and Here have a lot of early business sewn up, but he also notes that “The U.S. is not too interesting for us given that they use the mag stripe and we focus on chip-and-PIN services.”

More interesting, he says, are markets like Asia and Latin America, where there is good chip-card penetration but card payment facilities are still relatively low among smaller businesses. Still, the next launches are likely to be in Europe, with Germany, France, Italy and Spain all on De Geer’s roadmap, with “one or two of those” expected to come online this summer. To date, iZettle has received venture funding of $16.4 million from Index, Creandum and others to fund that expansion.

Interested companies can either register a request through iZettle’s web site, or via its iTunes app, and the first 3,000 will get a free card reader to get started.

In the white heat of the current tech market it’s sometimes easy to forget that some companies, although taking their time, simply become viable businesses – instead of waiting for a call from Facebook or Twitter that may never come. I’ve been covering web site and shop builder Moonfruit for longer than I care to remember (they launched in 2000), but along the way husband and wife team Joe and Wendy White kept on pushing the company until it was one of the most innovative of its kind out there. Today that hard work is rewarded in Moonfruit’s acquisition by directories giant Yell for $29 million (£18m) in cash.

Unusually for a UK acquisition announcement, Yell has also made the golden hand-cuffs explicit for the founders. Retention bonuses of £5.2m (£2.7m grossed up) will be paid to Moonfruit’s executive management team of Joe White, Eirik Pettersen and Wendy Tan-White after two years, provided that they remain exclusively employed by Yell.

Most people know Yell as a yellow pages directory for its 1.3 million SME customers. Clearly what it must become to survive in the era of Google is a online marketplace providing not just listings but business tools for that market.

Over 5 million sites and 230,000 shops have been built using Moonfruit, which is now the no. 1 hosted site builder in the UK, and has seen over 1.5 million sites built in the US. It’s also build a very sticky Facebook integration.

While the competition includes Weebly and Yola (rebranded from Synthasite) in the US Moonfruit has been profitable on a subscription model, these competitors have entered the market more recently and are focused on a free, no ads model. There is also the German-born Jimdo which has since concentrated on Asia. Moonfruit has moved towards a freemium model, with a premium upgrade path for users, but with a new advanced HTML5 engine that build not just sites but shops and mobile versions.

Moonfruit’s engine will be a key component of Yell’s new “eMarketplace” strategy comprising a platform and portal where consumers and SMEs can connect and transact.

Yell already has an enterprise commerce solution in the form of Znode, an Ohio company it acquired last year for $19.2 million (£12 million).

What Yell did not have however was the ability for customer to create “light” commerce and web presence services in the way Moonfruit had.

Both parties seem to win out of this deal. Yell gets a much better offering for SMEs which pulls them out of the pit of just being a classifieds provider, while it accelerates Moonfruit’s own expansion worldwide, building on its growth in the UK and US.

Mike Pocock, Chief Executive Officer of Yell, said: “The addition of Moonfruit’s services and team helps us provide competitive advantage to our global SME customers in connecting with consumers through digital, mobile and social.”

Moonfruit took £1.57 million in funding in 2010 from US investment bank Stephens and Silicon Valley based angels including Dave McClure of 500 Startups, Robbie Van-Adibe and Theorem.

The value of the assets, which are the subject of the transaction, as reflected on Moonfruit’s balance sheet as at 31 December 2011, is £4.88 million. For the year ended 31 December 2011, Sitemaker Software Limited, Moonfruit’s wholly-owned subsidiary, made a loss before tax of £1.26 million.

As Wendy Tan White told us: “All the partnership conversations we had in the US became acquisition conversations, we had several players on the table but Yell’s offer was the best, all cash, clean exit for all our investors and they’ve incentivised us to stay and help them turn a very cash generative, global directory and print business into a global digital services player.

“Basically it seemed like a fun, challenge for at least the next 2 years. They feel like a ‘corporate startup’, lot’s of resources but taking the risks to turnaround their business. They feel in a similar space to Prudential which disrupted UK retail banking with Egg, the first UK internet bank – that was my first taste of a startup project.”

“We were also swayed by the fact they are British headquartered but 50% of their customers are in the US. I felt like we weren’t selling out to the US but we will get the US and global distribution we were looking for. We like a challenge! We may well be hanging out in Seattle for a while so we’ll get more US tech experience. And who knows what we’ll do next!”

Last year Yell had had 1.3m SME customers, £2bn in revenue, £500m EBITDA and £250m free cash flow on top of £200m reserves. But they need to move from their old directory and print business to digital services like Moonfruit’s.

Yell now has a new Chief Digital Officer who was ex-president of MSN and Yahoo Media based in Seattle, where the Whites will report into.

It’s all a long way from giving away MacBooks Airs on Twitter in 2009, but it looks like the plan came together in the end.

Cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio has made significant inroads into VoIP and other carrier services like SMS by launching products that work on the web and in iOS apps, supporting 90,000 registered developer accounts in the process. Today it’s widening that net considerably with the launch of a new Android client, the first SDK from the company to work on Google’s platform. And it hints that Windows Phone may be next in line.

Considering that Android is currently the most popular smartphone platform globally, this potentially gives Twilio a much bigger opportunity to deliver services to the wider smartphone market — with Android and iOS together accounting for 75 percent of the existing smartphone market, according to Gartner.

Twilio is kicking off its Android service with features to integrate voice features into Android apps: as with Twilio’s existing APIs for iOS apps and websites, the Android VoIP APIs effectively let developers incorporate VoIP features directly into apps, to create features like in-app calling that work without needing to launch any additional apps or services. Other features in the SDK include real-time presence, with developers able to build buddy lists to let users know who is online, and who can voice chat; and app backgrounding, which lets users receive voice calls even if the relevant app is not being used.

But what’s potentially most interesting about the launch of the Android SDK is that it could lead to some interesting bridges built between Android apps, iOS apps, web apps and traditional voice calls.

“We now support the vast majority of smartphones globally,” Thomas Schiavone, director of product management for Twilio, noted in a statement. “With this many developers and our proven success on iOS, we know we’ll see some incredible and innovative cross-platform communication apps in the months to come.”

Schiavone further said that there will be SDKs for other platforms coming soon — and hints that the next SDK to come might be for the Windows Phone platform. “We are looking at what will be next,” he told TechCrunch. “Android and iOS are the leaders, but at this time there is no clear number three. However, we are watching all the other platforms and are particularly interested in Window’s Phone.”

That would also make sense, given the strategic partnership Twilio already has with Microsoft. That partnership was announced earlier this month and means that Microsoft now offers Twilio’s APIs to tens of thousands of Microsoft Azure cloud developers.

In addition to that development, Twilio has been releasing a steady stream of other news in the last month that points to the company looking to expand quickly and make good use of its $33 million in funding to date. Its services are now available in 12 countries — 10 in Europe and the U.S. and Canada — and in April, Twilio hired a full-time executive in Europe, James Parton, poached from Telefonica. But it has also seen one significant executive departure, too: Danielle Morrill, an early employee who headed up marketing, just this week left to work on her own startup, the Y Combinator-backed Refer.ly.

The Android SDK has been running in a private beta, the company tells me, and from today it will be available to all Android developers.

When I was younger, my parents liked to listen to the big soft rock stations in Los Angeles. Once in a while, the sappy love songs would be interrupted by an emotional dedication from a boy/girlfriend to their significant other. It was awkward, but also kind of beautiful. But mostly awkward.

Now it sounds like Pandora has made an impressive gesture toward keeping that tradition alive, while also demonstrating the power of its ad targeting.

So yeah, this happened: Someone, specifically someone named Kyle Taylor, used a Pandora ad to propose marriage to his girlfriend of almost six years. You can read the full account in his blog post, but the Pandora-relevant bit begins after Taylor has decided that this is a great idea, and has sent off a customer support request:

I started to work with the team at Pandora and they told me this has never been done before, so they would be more than happy to help… that’s when I knew this was going to be it. After working with the creative and technical teams to figure out the best medium, getting passed to their audio advertising team to get a script together and recorded by an awesome voice actress, and once it was finalized it went back to ad trafficking to test out my ad and see if it worked. Of course, it worked out perfectly. (Throughout this whole process, I had to lock down my email account and step out for “unexpected” phone calls a lot – luckily I’m a planning ninja.)

That’s the set-up. As for popping the question itself, Taylor decided to do it on the night of his graduation dinner from University of North Texas. It was carefully planned — he picked a restaurant whose driving distance would create the perfect timing for the ad. So he turned on Pandora (which was built in to his girlfriend’s Hyundai Veloster), and as he pulled onto a service road, the marriage proposal started to play.

Now, you might be thinking that while this is pretty damn impressive, it was incredibly awkward for anyone else listening. In fact, CTO Tom Conrad says that’s “very, very unlikely” that anyone else heard the ad, thanks to the targeting that’s powering Pandora’s efforts to steal local advertisers from terrestrial radio. In this case, the ad was targeted at “very old listeners” in a “sparsely populated zip code,” Conrad says. So Taylor entered some fake demographic information to put himself, and no one else, in the target. The result? He used Pandora’s advertising to deliver a genuinely personal message.

Oh, and by the way: She said yes.

Facebook is nearing a billion users, but what could topple the big blue giant? Government intervention, the shift to mobile, and a loss of “cool” all have the power to violently disrupt the social network, or at least cause it to lose its strong grip on the market.

Here’s a look at the four things that could ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a single site that connects the world.

The thread that runs between all these pitfalls is their potential to make Facebook irrelevant. If you can’t access it, its overrun by ads, there’s something better, or it’s simply uncool, Facebook could fade away.

It’s size, network effect, and wise leadership could protect it from these threats, and honestly, I think Facebook has the potential to be successful for a long, long time. But if you had to bet against Facebook, here’s what you’d be betting on.

Big Brother

Facebook is banned in China and access is or has been restricted in several countries including Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Right now this is limiting the social network’s growth potential. But if disputes with governments over what content is appropriate cause it to be shut out of more countries, these roadblocks could divert users to other local social networks. That would fracture the value that comes with having such a high percentage of internet users in one place. For example, Singapore is a valuable market with a strict government that could drop the ban hammer on Facebook.

Regulation around privacy could also slow Facebook down and make it more vulnerable to competition. Facebook narrowly escaped privacy audits from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Union. If the government of a core market put restrictions on how Facebook can launch new products or what features it can show where, it could create opportunities for startups to eat Facebook’s lunch. Imagine how much bigger a threat Foursquare would be if Facebook had been restricted from launching its Places location service.

Competition From The Next Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook doesn’t actually need to worry much about Twitter, Google+, or international players. They’ve failed to offer something revolutionary enough to make early adopters ditch Facebook, or mainstream enough to appeal to everyone. What big blue needs to worry about is the next social product visionary, the next Mark Zuckerberg that could turn Facebook into the next Myspace.

While acquiring and acq-hiring top talent from companies like Instagram was easy when it had pre-IPO stock to throw around, recruiting that next Zuck to side with Facebook rather than wage war against it is about to get tougher. Same goes for keeping its current rockstars from leaving to start a true competitor.

It might take a big hardware change like eyewear computers, holograms, or apps you download straight to your brain to finally make Facebook obsolete. Even then that upstart would have quite the uphill battle, but so did Facebook when it launched.

Smaller Screens, Small Ad Revenue

Staying afloat on display ads won’t cut it if the social network wants to live up to or surpass its ~$100 billion valuation, as Chris Dixon writes. It will have to think bigger. But for now, it has to worry about mobile.

Handheld devices have less room for ads and Facebook’s long list of features. Currently, Facebook only shows a few mobile news feed ads per user per day, while it shows as many as four to seven ads per page on the web. But if Facebook chokes mobile with too many ads, usage could plummet. As more users shift the time they spend on Facebook from the web to mobile, it will make less of the money that keeps the lights on for the whole service.

To counteract this Facebook is aggressively acquiring and hiring from mobile companies like Instagram in hopes of getting its mobile site and apps up to draw more eyeballs. However, while it has a huge footprint of over 500 million mobile users, there’s widespread discontent with the speed of its mobile apps. Many people think they’re cluttered, and complain of slow loading speeds.

Mobile is the biggest threat to Facebook, and the company admits it. If it can’t make more compelling mobile apps and earn more money from these small screens, the shift to mobile will see Facebook lowered into its own grave.

Losing Its Cool

Facebook doesn’t want to be cool. It wants to be a utility. It wants to be the cell phone or the television, not Virgin Mobile or HBO. But the fact is that a big reason Facebook is so popular is because it started by being accessible to only the most envied demographic in the world: Ivy League college students like those at Harvard. It used that prestige to spread like wildfire on every American college campus, and the sexiness of young adulthood to capture the teenage market. Its popularity in the trendsetting United States soon pulled in the rest of the world.

But now your mom is on Facebook. You grandma, professor, little cousins, and plumber are too. It’s not exclusive anymore. Usefulness is what keeps it afloat, but cold, dry, utility for everyone is vulnerable. And soon Zuckerberg will be 30, and he might no longer be seen as the geeky boy genius challenging the adults. He’ll be one of those adults. There are already signs that apathy and distrust for Facebook are setting in.

The slick destroyer of today’s social network would be something that starts elite but that gradually opens up like Facebook did. It would be designed specifically for the hip and young in-crowd. It would recruit big celebrities and carve out an influential niche from which to grow its power. This could be what makes Facebook seem old and boring. And the average Facebook user doesn’t want to go somewhere boring every day. That’s what their jobs are for.

[Image Credit: WaterySoul, TheFW, E:TB.]

Ask a VC is back this month (finally!) after a long hiatus. This week we have a freshly-minted VC, Nabeel Hyatt, of Spark Capital. Hyatt just joined Spark after 15 years of starting and building companies. His most recent company was social gaming outfit Conduit, which became Zynga Boston after it was acquired.

We have a couple of questions from readers — one from Nicky, who asks whether the VC model is “broken”, and another from a reader Alex, who asks about how the landscape for user acquisition is changing.

User acquisition is Hyatt’s home turf. As a general manager at Zynga, which is the most data-driven company on the Facebook platform, he had to know the arc and decline of social games like the back of his hand. This is super-useful in light of the explosive growth that apps like SocialCam and Viddy are seeing on Facebook and iOS.

What’s happening right now is that Facebook is finally becoming a potent force in mobile app distribution, as Hyatt explains in the video. A year ago, if I talked to top free or grossing developers, hardly any of them said Facebook was an important channel for acquiring users. They were too addicted to paid channels like Free App A Day, offer walls or even download bots. Several of these channels are now banned by Apple, which is making more room for apps that are genuinely engaging or are getting users virally.

Secondly, Facebook is realizing that if it wants to stay relevant in a mobile era, it has to step up its ability to push traffic to mobile apps, Hyatt says. A year ago, they were bent on bypassing the native app route and pushing the ecosystem toward building with HTML5 instead. But over the last few months, they’ve stepped away from that rhetoric and are now driving traffic to both native and HTML5-based apps.

With the new mobile platform, Facebook is now able to single-handedly drive apps to the top of the free charts on iOS — something it didn’t do a year ago. That pushed apps like Viddy and Socialcam to the top of the charts over the past month. Now the question is what does this mean? How should these companies be valued? Are investors being sophisticated enough about how to value them?

Hyatt says working at Zynga has given him many insights about what to look for. Namely, downloads and even daily active users aren’t sufficient enough metrics for judging apps.

You have to ask for other numbers. For example, he’ll look at one-day retention: how many users come back the second day? And he’ll look at seven-day retention: how many users come back seven days later? He also looks at DAU/MAU, which is the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users. It’s a measure of stickiness: out of all the users that touch an app every month, how many come back every day?

If you look at Viddy and Socialcam, this DAU/MAU metric is looking troubling on both of them, according to AppData. (Though, keep in mind, there have been some reporting errors over the past week.) He said that very few games can thrive if they fall below 12 percent on this metric. Even though Farmville is about three years old, it’s still hovering at around 19 percent. Viddy has been below 10 percent for more than a week and SocialCam just dipped below that key level. This is a negative sign.

That said, when an app gets a slug of growth like this, the peak number of users is not actually that important. It’s the number of users that it keeps engaged for the following several months.

Today, the Banters social experiment has officially come to a close, as the startup’s co-founder Lauren Leto said via blog post today that the team will be no longer actively working on the site beginning June 1st. However, in spite of its tumultuous road and final splash into the deadpool, the news came with a silver lining. Both Leto and her co-founder, Patrick Moberg, will be taking up residence at Betaworks, the New York accelerator that has incubated or funded startups like bitly, Chartbeat, SocialFlow, News.me, Kickstarter, TweetDeck, and many more.

As for some background, it was a little under two years ago that Texts From Last Night co-founder Lauren Leto and partner-in-crime Patrick Moberg launched Bnter, a simple way for people to share text, IM, and chat messages with their friends on the web — for all to see.

The startup was backed by a cast of well-known angel investors, including Founder Collective (Chris Dixon), SV Angel (David Lee), High Line Venture Partners (Shana Fisher), and more. It later was the subject of some founder-VC drama along with Spark Capital and Tumblr, but came out alive and continued to iterate.

While it initially focused on SMS, it later broadened its scope to let users share any sort of conversation, including GChat, in-person chat, email and more, and launched both iPhone and Android apps, a bookmarklet, in-depth Twitter integration, and supported Facebook Chat, Foursquare comments, GroupMe, etc.

In spite of its full roster of available integrations and cross-platform functionality, Banters suffered from a clunky user experience, as its original model required users to launch the app or visit its home page, open a new post, attribute another user to bring them into the conversation, filling out various message boxes, adding tags — and then, at long last, posting. It had become too much like a CMS and had lost the lightweight feel of an SMS tool.

Recognizing this process was arduous for users, Banters launched a new version of its iPhone app in January, which leveraged Siri’s technology to input conversations and quotes. The idea was to make adding a conversation to the app as easy as snapping a mobile photo. Along with its new iPhone app, the startup added more functionality, including a “like” button, activity stream and an ‘Explore’ tab to help surface the best conversations.

And because it’s original name “Bnter” was tough for some to pronounce, Leto and Moberg changed the startup’s name to “Banters.”

Unfortunately, try as they might, Banters ran its course. Leto said in a blog post today that, although its user base has been passionate, the platform simply hadn’t gained the traction, or user base, the co-founders had hoped it would find.

As a result, beginning June 1st, the team will no longer be actively working on Banters. “We’re not outright closing the site down any time in the foreseeable future,” Leto says in her post, “but, for the sake of prudence, we’re encouraging our users to export their data here.”

Although Banters is hitting the deadpool, its co-founders are moving on to new projects. Leto says that she had long been a fan of “Findings,” Betaworks’ tool that offers “a straightforward, intuitive way to share and discuss quotes from books and the web.” Seeing that Findings and Banters share similar goals, Leto and Moberg will be joining Betaworks this summer.

Leto will become the General Manager at Findings, while Moberg will become Betaworks’ “Hacker-in-Residence.”

Of the new move, Leto says:

It’s never easy to stop working on an idea after having invested so much into it, but I’m thankful that we’ll have the opportunity to keep working on a product that closely aligns with the mission we set out with at Banters: to harness the timeless power of quotes and words, and share them in ways that have only recently been made possible by technology.

It’s unclear to what extent the kerfuffle with Spark Capital handicapped the team’s ability to raise another round of capital, but as Sarah points out in the post, by the time of the botched funding, Leto had “reportedly cut her salary to zero to help the make the company’s ends meet.”

Regardless, the experience didn’t end positively for either side, and it seems that Banters never found that new round of capital it needed to keep its fires lit. It’s tough, too, considering the fact that Banters seemed like it was onto a potentially big idea. Nevertheless, it’s great to see that the two co-founders have landed in a great spot and will, in some capacity, get to continue working on the idea.

For more, see Leto’s blog post on the shuttering of Banters here.

“Social magazine” Flipboard may have to think up a new tagline for itself, as tonight the company is rolling out an update which greatly expands its focus beyond text-based content to also include audio. The rollout features integrations from NPR, PRI (Public Radio International) and social sound platform, SoundCloud.

Also of note, Flipboard is launching its third localized edition with the debut of a Flipboard app for Japan, following its previous launches in China and France. And there’s an update which will matter a lot to a smaller number of users: integration of Apple’s VoiceOver controls to provide better access for the visually impaired.

Unless you’re based in Japan, the biggest news today is the introduction of the audio content to what’s primarily been a text-focused, magazine-like platform for reading news, blogs and updates from your social networks. But when you think about it, the addition makes sense – news is often delivered through multiple formats, not just text. And Flipboard already has a video section, we should point out.

The audio integrations will be highlighted in a newly added category, simply called “audio,” which will appear after the Flipboard app update (version 1.9) gets pushed out tonight. The section will showcase the curated selections from NPR and PRI including content like NPR’s “Fresh Air” and PRI’s “The World,” for example, as well as content from SoundCloud. However, a search option will also be available so users can find any audio content that Flipboard might now host. SoundCloud users will be able to listen to their sets, favorites, and people or artists they follow, but you won’t need to have a SoundCloud account to take advantage of the new offering.

Audio is background-enabled, too, allowing you to exit the app while continuing to listen, or while continuing to browse through Flipboard.

In speaking with the company earlier today, it becomes clear that the new audio integrations are only the start of what’s next for Flipboard, which is aiming to move from “magazine” to more of a digital entertainment hub. While the company won’t go on record with detailed plans to integrate more audio sources, it does intend to “do more with audio,” given that there are already “lots of great services to work with” out there right now, including on-demand streaming music and radio offerings like Spotify, Rdio, MOG and Pandora, for example.

While deals with those would help Flipboard beef up its music selections, another obvious focus for the company would be the integration of more podcasts – a part of iTunes which today is somewhat of a sub-par experience. (There’s a reason why iTunes/Apple users often turn to third-party apps, like Instacast, e.g).

Further down the road, Flipboard will look into other ways it can do more with video, too, which could mean that it one day will compete with social video services like Twitvid, Showyou, Shelby.tv and others.

As for all that buzz about the Flipboard Android app, which is arriving on the Samsung Galaxy S III and already available as a hacked version, the company would only say that it’s currently working on a broader Android release. But the unintentional beta Flipboard found itself in is somewhat of a blessing and curse for the company. On the one hand, it’s getting much-needed feedback on how Flipboard works on unsupported phones and tablets, but on the other hand, for many Android users, their first experience with the app may be one that’s less than ideal.

Flipboard says it plans to officially come to market this summer on Android, but doesn’t have a date to announce yet.

The Japanese version, audio integrations and voiceover controls are all rolling out tonight on iOS. Or, if you’re new to Flipboard, you can grab it from iTunes here.

Editor’s Note: Sales Marketing Manager Leslie Hitchcock is a non-editorial TechCrunch employee. In addition to working at TechCrunch and being super fashionable, she reviews startups and tech products occasionally on her personal blog, Leslie Just Joined.

Two of my favorite things are shoes and tech. That a site exists which combines both…well, where do I sign up?

Shoes of Prey is an Australia-headquartered startup where women (sorry, fellas!) can create shoes of their own design, which are then custom-made to order and delivered within five weeks of conceptualization. Shoes of Prey came to fruition out of the premise that somehow women compromise when searching for the perfect shoe out in the wild; that our ultimate dream shoe lives somewhere inside of us, just waiting to come out. I can get on board with this!

Until recently I hadn’t heard of Shoes Of Prey – most of their business still comes from outside the U.S. But I was given a gift certificate for a free pair of shoes by a friend, and that’s not something I’m going to pass up.

My experience with Shoes of Prey was incredibly positive. While it was slightly overwhelming to begin designing (so many options!), once I settled down and carefully considered the type of footwear I’d want to add to my collection (and it is a collection) the process became easier. What was missing among the shoes I have in rotation was a bright color in a shorter heel than I typically wear. With this in mind, I set about designing.

On Shoes Of Prey, the shoe style possibilities are endless: sandals, pumps, flats, skimmers, brogues (added as an option recently), booties, wedges, platforms. After you decide on the style of shoe, then the true customization begins. Shoes of Prey invites you to consider the details: peep toe, spectator heel, D’Orsay pump, slingback. And more. Heel type and height: stiletto, wedge, block heel. And more. Decorations: bows, trimming, Mary Jane’s. And more. The fabric: patent leather, soft leather, cotton blend, animal hair (sorry I’m not sorry, PETA), snakeskin. And more.

See what I mean by “slightly overwhelmed” and “endless possibilities”? There are lots and lots and lots of choices. Shoes of Prey doesn’t scrimp on options for one’s perfect bespoke shoe. And yet, where there is room for improvement is actually in the details. You might think that’s not possible based on the previous paragraph, but details like grommets, studs, bows, stitching, and different placement of shoe accoutrements are what give non-Shoes of Prey footwear an advantage over these custom-made kicks.

Back to my shoes. After I submitted the order in early April, the reality of bespoke footwear sunk in: “Your shoes will be delivered by May 8, 2012.” For someone significantly lacking in patience, like me, this was depressing news. However! It went really quickly and by the time they were delivered, I had almost forgotten about them. They were even early! But I won’t forget about these shoes any time soon. They are amazing.

When paying between $180-$300 for custom shoes from the site, attention to detail is significantly more important. Where Shoes of Prey excelled was in attentive customer service. I received notice from the site that my “beautiful shoes” (their words) were being delivered and surprisingly the next day DHL waltzed them into my office. (I may or may not have squealed and texted someone that they’d arrived. I get excited about these sorts of things). I’m a discriminating footwear customer and as such I was immediately charmed by the packaging and inclusion of an array of comfort enhancing accessories like cushions for the ball and heel of one’s foot. That Shoes of Prey supplies these items and didn’t force me to buy them myself was a really thoughtful move.

Perfectly timed, my order arrived on the day I was leaving for a vacation. Not one to shy away from a challenge, I immediately put them on and walked them through two airports with nary a blister. For the uninitiated, this is the highest form of a shoe compliment, typically reserved for high-end footwear like Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin. My new shoes also received tons of passing comments on how fabulous they are, naturally.

Revisiting my above disclaimer: a gift certificate may have alerted me to the Shoes of Prey, but I have at least three pairs that I’ve been customizing for my imminent forthcoming order. The only trouble is narrowing down which pair to pull the trigger on. But then again, when have I ever shown restraint in the shoe department? I think I’ll take all three!

Ever since Comcast unveiled its VOD service on the Xbox, it’s come under criticism from those who believe the service violates the spirit of net neutrality, not to mention also violating some of the FCC’s conditions on its big NBC Universal deal from last year. After weeks of staying out of the discussion, the top cable provider in the U.S. explained in a blog post how the content was being delivered within a subscriber’s home.

Comcast had always maintained that the VOD streams were being delivered through its own internal CDN architecture and not over the broader Internet, but the latest blog post gives a little more detail about how those streams get delivered over the last mile. From the post:

“Specifically, we provision a separate, additional bandwidth flow into the home for the use of this service — above and beyond, and distinct from, the bandwidth a customer has for his or her regular Internet access service.”

In short, Comcast is provisioning whatever traffic it’s using to deliver Xbox video separately from whatever traffic is being used by a customer’s Internet connection. So if you pay for a 25 Mb/s broadband connection, for instance, Comcast isn’t sending its Xbox VOD streams through that pipe. Instead, it’s provisioning a whole different connection that handles only the Xbox VOD service.

That’s why VOD streams that go directly to the Xbox don’t count against Comcast’s 250 GB broadband cap, while streams from its iPad app, XfinityTV.com website, or those of NBC.com or other NBC Universal properties do count toward the cap. It’s also why, when someone like Brian Berg floods his Internet connection with synthetic traffic, the Xbox Xfinity VOD stream continues unabated — because it’s not riding on the same pipe as usual Internet traffic.

Of course, that doesn’t really answer the question about whether it’s prioritizing its traffic, or if its streams are being delivered in a non-neutral fashion.

In the sense that Xbox VOD streams are being sent over a whole separate pipe from regular Internet traffic, of course it’s prioritized and of course it’s not neutral — not only does it not count toward bandwidth caps, but it also isn’t subject to all the vagaries of best-effort Internet streaming, including all the hiccups, jitter, buffering and the like.

But that’s the entire point, according to Comcast: This isn’t an Internet video service at all, but a cable TV service that just happens to be delivered via IP. In that sense, it’s no different from similar services being delivered by Verizon and AT&T, both of which provision streams for their IPTV services that are separate from the general broadband traffic that they carry.

That’ll provide little solace to online video publishers and distributors who are streamed over the broader Internet and do actually count against Comcast’s caps. But for policy wonks at the FCC and in Congress, this is probably as good of an answer as any as to why Comcast isn’t discriminating against the traffic of others.

[Image via Flickr/Kevin Burkett]

Last week, Bing began the initial phase of rolling out a major redesign, in fact the “most significant” redesign in its three-year history. Today, the wait is over. This afternoon, Bing officially turned on its new design, and has made it available for everyone in the U.S. You can check it out here.

The new Bing is now integrates search and people in our social networks through a dedicated social “sidebar.” With sidebar, Bing brings together the best of the web, with what experts and your friends know, giving you the confidence to act. This new way to search lets you share, discover, and interact with friends like you do in real life. If you’re on the go, you’ll notice we’ve optimized the layout and placement of the social results on the mobile device for smaller screen sizes and for touch input, so the user experience will be different than what people see on a PC.

The new design is Bing’s answer to the problem of “Search Overload,” something many are familiar with — the feeling of being overwhelmed by the bramble of links, maps, tools, and options that prevail in today’s search model. And, really, it’s a response to the public disapproval over Google integrating social into its search results. Obviously, Google has retained its iron grip on search for some time, but, with its redesign Bing is positioning itself an unbiased, pure alternative.

In this vein, Bing is taking steps to offer a cleaner, pared down experience, in an effort to clean up its search results. As Josh noted at the time, the redesign essentially divides its search results into three groups: Simple, text-based, algorithmic results placed front and center; maps, reviews, and input fields are placed on the right side; and social context from friends and one’s social network in a panel on the far right.

As Bing said in its blog post today, this dedicated social sidebar is a response to Google search’s G+ integration, serving actionable information from friends and experts. Bing now suggests friends on Facebook that might be relevant to your search — based on what they “like,” their Facebook profile information, and the photos they’ve shared.

This will work in varying degrees of effectiveness, meaning that the “right” friends may not always show up, because the search engine is using public Facebook information along with the content you’ve given it permission to access. According to its blog post, it “won’t match friends based on other Facebook content, such as status updates or check-ins,” in an effort to respect privacy settings. Which means that you won’t see information from friends who have opted out of Facebook instant personalization or that have blocked the Bing app.

For those who do choose to opt-in to Bing’s Instant Personalization partnership with Facebook, you will be able to see if friends have “liked” search results. But, an important qualification of this feature is that those “likes” do not alter search rankings, nor do they add to the clutter of results with social identifiers, names, and faces. Instead, you’ll just see that thumbs up icon adjacent to Bing’s algorithmic, center pane, with the ability to hover over the icon to see who liked those results.

Furthermore, its intermediate section, the one that lies between algorithmic results and social, shows stuff like maps, product reviews, restaurant ratings, and allows users to book flights. Bing has struck a number of partnerships with startups like OpenTable and FanSnap to make booking tables and finding tickets easier.

Bing now has a whole lot more social functionality, but the key is that its social integration doesn’t get in the way, the goal being, in Bing’s words, to create a new way to search that “lets you share, discover, and interact with friends like you do in real life.” If Bing is going to be a “decision engine,” as its mission statement declares, boosting its results with the right amount of social influence and direction is paramount.

To address this, Bing’s new social pane includes an “Ask Friends” field, which allows searchers to enlist the service of their friends. Bing posts your submitted questions to your Facebook wall, whereupon you’ll get a notification if a friend swoops in to the rescue, and guides you to the best nightspot for margaritas, or the best hotels to check out when in Los Angeles. You can also go further, requesting help from “Friends Who Might Know” — those who’ve “liked” your search results, but aren’t in your friend list.

Bing has taken some major steps forward to get itself back in the ring with Google, but it’s still got a lot of ground to make up. Don’t be surprised if you find a massive Bing marketing campaign show up on taxis, TVs, and billboards near you.

For more, give the new Bing a try here. Sorry international Bingers, it looks like you’ll have to wait a bit longer.

Over the past six months, the folks at OpenSignalMaps have been keeping tabs on the devices that have been downloading their network monitoring app, and so far they’ve recorded downloads onto 681,900 separate Android devices in 195 countries. Now they’ve taken all that data and splayed it out for all to see, and it highlights rather nicely how big a headache fragmentation can be for developers.

For the most part, the results are as you’d expect — runaway hits like Samsung’s Galaxy S II was the most represented device among the 3,997 distinct models they spotted, and Samsung Android devices were far and away the most widely used. What really gets me is how many other devices and brands fill up the rest of that list. Seriously, if you haven’t yet, go look at it. Mouse-over some of the smaller blocks, see if there are any brands or devices that ring a bell.

It’s pretty crazy to see just how many players are in the field, and nothing against OpenSignalMaps — their app is actually pretty damned useful — but it’s not an immediate must-download for every user.

That there are gobs of Android devices floating around out there isn’t exactly a shocker, but data like this really drives home the issue. With so many devices running so many versions of Android with who knows many carrier- and manufacturer-mandated tweaks onboard, how is a developer supposed to make sure that all of their users gets a consistent experience? They can’t, unless they’re willing to test like crazy.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt famously downplayed the term “fragmentation” at this year’s CES, suggesting instead that people call it “differentiation.” It’s hard not to agree with sentiment on some level — after all, one of Android’s key strengths is how easily it fits into different niches and price points. But according to him, as long as every Android user is able to use the same apps, there’s no problem here.

That strikes me as a rather shortsighted way of looking at it. Downloading and installing apps is one thing, but what I think really counts — the user experience — can still vary from hardware configuration to hardware configuration. Not a day goes by without new Android hardware (or rumors of new Android hardware) making the rounds — hell, just an hour or so ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google will soon be filling out the new Devices section in the Google Play Store with new, unlocked “Nexus” hardware thanks to cooperation from up to five hardware manufacturers.

That’s why developers like Animoca have invested what I can only imagine is a sizable amount of money and effort testing their apps with something like 400 Android devices before pushing them out into the world. And of course, fragmentation isn’t just a hardware issue — the OSM post points out that the two most used versions of Android now only account for 75% of the devices they surveyed, down from 90% last year, yet another issue for developers to grapple with.

Does every developer need to go through a process that outlandish? Certainly not — OpenSignalMaps seems to test on a tiny fraction of that, and smaller developers can cover most of their bases with a handful of carefully chosen devices. At the end of the day though, despite the sheer amount of choice and flexibility that Android has provided users, those developers still have a choice to make — do they want to strive for perfection, or do they want to keep their sanity?

Editor’s note: Joe Kraus is a partner at Google Ventures, focusing on mobile, gaming, and local services. In 1993, he co-founded Excite.com, an early Internet search engine. He also co-founded JotSpot in 2004, a wiki company acquired by Google in 2006. Follow him on his blog, JoeKraus.com, and on Twitter: @jkraus.

One of the things I wish I had done in both of my companies (Excite.com and JotSpot) was to take a piece of advice that I now give most entrepreneurs I meet. That advice is: “Right after you sign your term sheet for your Series A, write the fantasy deck for your Series B (complete with whatever metrics, graphs and customer lists you would love to have).”

I say this because of the way I’ve both done fundraising and seen it done. Whether we like to admit it or not, the way it’s usually done tends to be very haphazard and bottom’s up. It starts with…

“We have about 4 months of cash left, it’s time to raise money”.

With that statement, companies go about trying to weave together a narrative from the various facts that are true at the time. You look at your metrics, your sales, your customer lists and you try to create something cohesive. The problem is that it’s a bottoms up story; it’s composed of whatever facts are lying around. You didn’t set out twelve months before to create an intentional story. Your pitch deck ends up feeling a bit underpowered, a bit awkward. You try to emphasize the facts that look good and gloss over the ones that aren’t so hot.

At the heart of the problem is that startups often get trapped being busy and making general “progress” instead of driving, intentionally, down a path toward a fundable story.

A better approach is to use all the feedback you’re getting during your current fundraising process to create the ideal story for your next round. In the process of raising money (be it seed, series A or B), you hear from potential investors what they’re excited about and what they’re worried about. At the end of the process, you’re in a perfect position to create the fundraising pitch that would be absolute music to any investor’s ears.

So, do it. Write your Series B deck immediately after signing the term sheet for your Series A.

THEN, use this as your plan for how you spend that round of money. Use that presentation as the goal posts for the next 18 months. Begin with that end in mind and that presentation becomes your operating plan. Even if you don’t hit all of it, you will have a story and a company that holds together so much better than if you just run as fast as you can and try to create a story from the random assortment of facts that are lying around when you’re coming close to running out of money.

[image via the New Line Cinema film Glengarry Glen Ross]

Lenovo rolled out its latest notebook today. It is, in a word, spectacular. The Chinese company proves time and time again that Apple isn’t the only company capable of producing class-leading designs. Lenovo’s 14-inch X1 Carbon shown here by Engadget is everything an anti-MacBook Air should be. If there was ever a true MacBook Air competitor, or, if you will, a notebook that lives up to the ultra part of the Ultrabook name, it’s the new Lenovo X1 Carbon.

This Lenovo X1 Carbon is a refresh of last year’s X1, but it’s more than just a spec bump. The computer is mostly all-new and manages to weigh less than the older version even though it packs a larger, 14-inch 1600 x 900 screen. Packed inside the carbon fiber chassis is an Intel Ivy Bridge CPU, optional 3G connectivity, and Lenovo’s Rapid Charge feature that promises to refill the battery to 80% in just 30 minutes. Lenovo has yet to announce the price or release date, but don’t expect this notebook to have a low price tag. The current X1 starts at $1000, but can quickly climb north once options are checked.

Lenovo took the reins of IBM’s personal computer division in 2005. The company wisely changed very little concerning the notebook design. A ThinkPad from 2004 looks very similar to a ThinkPad of today save for a few millimeters trimmed here and there. Everything from the logo placement to the trademark red pointer nipple is in the same spot. Even the casing’s color is the same. But overtime Lenovo’s designers have kept up with the Joneses and added chiclit keyboards, button-less touchpads, and the like. Lenovo changed the minor things while still maintaining the ThinkPad’s trusted identity. Meanwhile the rest of the PC industry seemingly fired their design staff and instead bought a photocopier and a MacBook Pro.

It’s hard to look at the rest of the PC notebook scene and not see Apple’s influence. The latest Dell XPS is a Dell-ified MacBook Pro. Vizio’s first notebooks are exact copies of the MacBook Air. Samsung’s latest ultrabooks might as well say MacBook Air instead of Samsung under the screen; they are nearly the same thing. Toshiba, once a staple in the PC world, is even using Apple’s trademark design cues to attempt to bolster sales. HP is the worst offender though. The original HP Envy was a blatant MacBook Pro ripoff when it debuted in 2009 and several generations later it is still hard to deny the influence. HP’s latest model lines still use the MacBook Pro’s design as a springboard.

Companies often deflect questions concerning similar designs by saying something about how there are only so many ways to design a thin laptop. That’s pure malarkey and they know it. Design is what sets products apart. It’s the great differentiator and often wins out over even price. When Art. Lebedev Studio introduced the Optimus Maxiums keyboard in 2006, it was instantly praised for it’s forward-thinking OLED keys even though it was projected to cost north of $2000. Design wins when done well and first. History does not care about the clones.

While Lenovo is in the minority, the company is not alone at designing notebooks without Apple’s help. Asus knows how to make a good looking kit as well. A designer at Dell clearly managed a sort of coup with the company’s first ultrabook, the XPS 13. Sony does it model after model, seemingly designing its notebooks in a vacuum, void of any external distractions as they look like nothing else.

Right now the new Lenovo X1 Carbon is the only notebook I would get save a MacBook Air. I would opt for this Windows machine over a current gen MacBook Pro. I’m not loyal to either operating system anyway. The Lenovo gets everything right including integrated 3G wireless and high resolution 14-inch screen. But that might change once Apple rolls out its next iteration of the MacBook Pro that’s said to have a thinner design (no optical drive), a super high resolution screen, and an Intel chipset with an Nvidia GPU. That said, even if the next MBP is a sort of wunderkind, Lenovo will continue to find success and fans as long as they stay the course and produce notebooks like the X1 Carbon.

You’ve heard the stories, the rumors, and the speculation. Our recent string of TC Mini Meetups have been staggeringly successful, which is why we’re bringing the fun to some of the most badass cities in the country: Savannah, GA; Atlanta, GA; Raleigh, NC; and Charlotte, NC.

You’re excited already. I can feel it.

These will be social networking events, in the truest sense. Sure, Jordan, Matt and I would love to hear your pitches (and we will), but these meetups extend far beyond that.

Maybe you’re a developer looking for work, or maybe you’re an investor with some cash to throw around, or maybe you just want to learn about the tech scene in your area. And you may just be in the idea phase, but we’d love to give you some feedback, as would just about any of the attendees. In any case, these meetups are can’t-miss.

We’re in the early planning phases, which means we’re still looking for sponsors and spaces, but we have at least nailed down some dates with links to Plancast pages (where you can RSVP).

We would like to focus our North Carolina and Georgia events on LGBT founders, start-ups, and employees and would, in fact, welcome speakers to say a few words. Please contact us with recommendations. We obviously welcome any and all folks who would like to attend or say a few words, although we’re keeping the speechifying to a minimum.

Although I often feel politics has no place in what we do, this is far too big to be kept out of a technology discussion. We would be remiss not to address the problems associated with anti-gay legislation in places like North Carolina (and, arguably, 29 other states in our union) and the effect legislated homophobia has on the startup community and entrepreneurship.

• Savannah, GA: July 5, 6pm-10pm
• Atlanta, GA: July 6, 6pm-10pm
• Raleigh, NC: July 7, 6pm-10pm
• Charlotte, NC: July 8, 6pm-10pm

The idea is that each meetup needs to be even better than the last, which means you and I have quite a bit of work ahead of us if we’re going to top the TC NYC Mini Meetup. But I believe.

If you’re interested in being a sponsor or have location recommendations, email john@techcrunch.com and mention the city of your choice in the subject line.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from TechCrunch Disrupt winner and Getaround co-founder Jessica Scorpio on her experiences at last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt New York.

For those of you who are planning on attending the conference this year, the last remaining tickets are still on sale, and companies who want chance to join the Battleground can apply for a couple of open spots in Startup Alley. Review the full agenda here.

Winning TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011 was an unforgettable experience that will undoubtedly remain a highlight of my entrepreneurial career. After winning the prestigious Disrupt Cup and Audience Choice Award, we signed up thousands of cars, had over 150 news stories published, and closed a $3.4M seed round.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of our win, we’re now operating in 4 major markets with many more on the way. In case you’re wondering what it takes to WIN Disrupt, we’ll let you in on our secrets:

1. Invest in a great press team - Disrupt is packed with journalists looking to uncover the “next big thing” – unfortunately, it can be hard (and time consuming) to stand out. Pitch key journalists in advance and schedule interviews. This will allow you to focus on your presentation while ensuring quality 1:1s with your target outlets. If hiring a press team is out of the question, spend time putting together a media kit with a press release, high-res images and founder bios.

2.  It’s all about the presentation - Great product aside, a poor presentation will take you out of the running. Our advice: even if you’re a good public speaker, hire a speaking coach. Our coach worked with us to make our presentation flow and present  in a clear and engaging way.

3.  Use your time wisely - With only 6 minutes on stage, it is important to skip straight to the good stuff. Instead of spending 2 minutes on the market, outline the problem quickly and start your demo in the first 45 seconds. Focus your presentation on three main points and explain them clearly. In the final minute review the problem, your solution and capture the audience’s imagination with your vision for the future.

4.  Lead your slides - Have someone other than the speaker man the laptop and drive the presentation. Take this role seriously – slide changes should be timed precisely to follow the speaker’s words. If the speaker gets off track, the driver should be prepared to help.

5.  Focus your efforts – If you’re going to invest in a speaking coach, and spend time polishing your script, commit to delivering a perfect presentation. We practiced 6 hours for every minute we were on stage – ensuring at least 36 hours of practice time. This commitment will be hard in the face of a conference like Disrupt. If you plan to have a presence on the conference floor, have a separate team man the booth – you won’t have time to do both.

6.  Don’t give Murphy’s Law a chance – Big moments like Disrupt are the perfect time for your server to crash or the Wi-Fi to go down. Host your demo locally and run iPhone demos through a simulator. Who knows? Maybe your presentation will generate so much traffic that your site will crash mid-presentation – if you’re working locally, it won’t matter.

7.  Be ready for questions – One of the scariest parts of Disrupt is fielding questions from heavy-hitters like Marissa Mayer and Mike Arrington. Have people watch your pitch and drill you with questions several times before your presentation – develop strong talking points. Focus on answering questions without rambling – answer the question and move on to the next one.

8.  Build buzz - While your presentation is the best way to wow the audience, it is important to find creative ways to generate buzz at Disrupt and online. Social media is the obvious place to start but don’t forget to find other ways to get people talking.

9.  Plan to win - If you do well, you will be taking the stage twice – don’t prepare two different presentations, there just isn’t enough time. Capitalize on all your hardwork to kill the second presentation. Besides, while the audience remains the same, the judges are different.

10.  Have fun - If you aren’t having fun, neither is anyone watching. Remember to smile, don’t take yourself too seriously and have a good time.