Last November, TechCrunch’s own Sarah Lacy sat down with Vineet Devaiah from “social streetview” startup, Phototour.in, which, at the time, had just received term sheets from a number of high-profile U.S. investors and had recently been awarded the “Top Emerging Technology Company of 2010″ by Nvidia. The startup was the first international, non-funded, under-20-member company to win the award, according to Devaiah.

Since then, Phototour added Academy Award certificate-winner and entrepreneur Bala S. Manian as an advisor (who was honored for “technical achievement” for his contributions to optical technologies used in films, including Star Wars) and has gained more than 47,000 users for the alpha version of its image and panorama crowdsourcing app, “360″, on Android. Users have logged more than 75,000 panoramas, so considering the rumor that iPhone 5 will have a native panorama app, sources tell us that 360 may well be a candidate for being the app that makes Android competitive in the space.

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Seattle-based PressOK Entertainment, a game development company, launched an interesting new service this week in public beta called PlacePlay, which the startup describes as a “location enablement platform” for games. Location is something that hasn’t really been explored much in gaming as of yet, so simply put, PlacePlay aims to tackle the obstacles that prevent location from becoming a relevant facet of the games we play every day.

For starters, the platform is focused on giving game developers the ability to quickly add local tournaments into gameplay, so that a user can, for example, play a virtual game of Battleship with other players that live on the same block. Though tournaments are the primary feature of the platform at this point, PlacePlay also supports location-based virtual goods, objects, achievements, and more.

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Totango, a realtime platform that allows software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies to better understand their customers, announced today that it has closed a $3.8 million round of Series A funding, led by Pitango Venture Capital and Gemini Ventures. The Israeli startup will use its latest infusion of capital to ramp up hiring and marketing efforts.

The company is also officially announcing the launch of its public beta, which aims to enable sales teams to better understand how current customers or prospective customers are using their service in realtime in order to more effectively manage customer conversations and engagement. For now, the service is completely free. Down the road, Totango plans to scale its platform to address the entire customer lifecycle, and will add pricing tiers, but at this point is primarily focused on optimizing the way sales teams, specifically, are interacting with their customers.

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If you’re anything like me, this scenario may be somewhat familiar: You’re standing in the aisle of your local supermarket, or Walgreens, and you’re looking to buy a particular type of product, be it peanut butter or shaving cream or shampoo, yet you don’t have any particular allegiance to one brand over another.

Confronted with the often overwhelming abundance of choice, you may hold the product up to the light or quickly read the back label, hoping some divine intervention will guide you to the right choice. In the end, you probably make a choice based on appearance, brand familiarity, or something you read somewhere once. (When, really, you have no idea what the difference is between Scope and Listerine, other than minty-ness.)

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Applifier, the cross-promotional network of social game publishers, announced today that it has delivered over 100 million game installs for free on Facebook. Launched in 2010, Applifier has set out on a mission to help game publishers find new users and get their games discovered on the social network. Connecting over 800 games, Applifier gives the publishers the tools to promote their games across their network of over 150 million monthly active users via bookmarks and retargeting.

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The hotel bed that is empty tonight can never be sold again. That insight led Hotwire to create a disruptive model that has given travelers great deals on hotel rooms. It turns out there are “beds” and “suites” of a different variety - Surgical Suites/Beds - that have a similar phenomena. Just as top hotels rarely are 100% booked and can earn incremental revenue from otherwise empty beds, top surgical facilities have a similar dynamic. That insight is what led National Surgery Network to develop a national marketplace for surgical procedures.

Over 1.5 million Americans travel abroad each year for medical procedures in what is called Medical Tourism. Services typically sought by medical tourists include elective procedures as well as complex specialized surgeries such as heart surgery, dental surgery, joint replacement, and cosmetic surgeries. However, virtually every type of health care, including complementary & alternative treatments, psychiatry, and convalescent care are attracting Americans by saving as much as 90% off of medical procedures.

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Oh, I could just watch this all day. We’ve been writing about the growing rivalry between Facebook and Google, with its new Google+ social network. But here you have it in gif form, with the Facebook and Google+ favicons superimposed on the dwarf from Game of Thrones (Google+) slapping the child-king (Facebook) over and over again. I am not sure why Google+ is a dwarf, but it doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of watching.

It kind if sums up visually the whole fight between the two companies. Don’t you think?

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For the past year, Josh Harris has been trying to get funding for his Wired City concept. It’s a crowdsourced Internet TV station where all the viewers are also the broadcasters, multicasting to each other and the World Wide Web. Harris once told me that all he needed was $50 million to build it. I suggested he might want to start with a smaller, less expensive piece of it to prove it out.

Now he’s taken his idea to Kickstarter, where he is trying to raise $25,000 to build a “net television pilot.” That will probably be enough for the uniforms, and might help him secure some angel money to get a real production going. “More importantly,” he tells me, “it is a litmus of audience interest in the thing.”

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Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Tom Anderson, the former President, founder and first friend on MySpace.

Today at the Facebook news conference, a reporter asked Mark Zuckerberg what he thought of Google+. Zuckerberg responded by saying that lots of companies are going to build things like video chat, but Facebook competitors also have to build up their social graph first. Facebook’s job is to just keep innovating. It’s a perfectly reasonable response, and of course, he’s exactly right—the challenge is to get the user base, and make it easy for them to use your product. Done and done for Facebook. The integration looks great.

Some pundits are complaining that the technology is not new, but that’s besides the point. Case in point: at MySpace we launched what Zuckerberg is announcing in 2007 (try googling “myspace skype partnership”), and MySpace also had one-on-one video chat back in 2004. The point is that people weren’t really ready for it back then—now is the time, and Facebook has the user base.

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Back in Skype’s early days, it was adding users so fast that it liked to boast that it was “the fastest growing, globally available communications tool in history.” Well, by at least one measure (registered users 9 months after launch), mobile video chat service Tango is outpacing Skype. Tango now has 17 million registered users across both Apple and Android devices, only 9 months after it launched. By comparison, Skype celebrated 9 million users on its first birthday back in 2004.

Today, Skype has more than 600 million registered users, so Tango still has a long way to go. But the company wants to reach 100 million users over the next year. (Don’t we all?). If it does that, it will certainly earn the title of fastest growing communications tool.

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If you are part of the Tumblr Nation, and a growing number of you are, then you will want to download Tumblr’s new iPhone app, redesigned from the ground up with a new interface. It loads up your Tumblr Dashboard stream, but the post button brings up six simple icons for each post type: text, photo, link, quote, audio, and video.And then, of course, you can post photos or videos right from your phone.

New features include support for multiple Tumblogs, landscape editing, replying to messages, and saving drafts. It also taps into your address book on your phone to help you find other people to follow on Tumblr. And new users can sign up right from the mobile app.

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It’s official. Jack Dorsey’s Square has joined the billion dollar valuation club. The mobile payments startup closed a $100 million series C led by Kleiner Perkins, a story we broke a few weeks ago. The new round values Square above $1 billion.

Tiger Management is also an investor. And Mary Meeker, the former Morgan Stanley Internet analyst who is now a partner at Kleiner, will get a board seat.

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The world has been waiting for an official Facebook tablet app, and waiting, and waiting. But that app may not appear on the iPad first (although Facebook is working on an iPad app for sure). Instead, Facebook’s first tablet app will appear on the HP TouchPad, which comes out this Friday and runs the WebOS it bought with Palm.  Unless the iPad app also launches this week, the TouchPad will become the first tablet with an official Facebook app.  Given the tension between Apple and Facebook, a concurrent launch on the iPad seems unlikely. Update: Facebook has reached out to clarify that “this app was not built by Facebook but by HP.”

How do I know?  I got my hands on some screenshots of the Facebook app for the TouchPad.  You can see them here.  But what I wonder is if this is also what the app will look like on the iPad.  All I can say for sure is that these pics are from Facebook’s tablet app running on WebOS.

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Ever since Color launched its photo sharing app, the $41 million startup has been having a rough time. John Biggs and I reviewed it on Fly or Die back in March, when CEO Bill Nguyen joined us to defend the app ( you can watch that episode below, we both gave it a “die”). The company continues to struggle, so we decided to revisit our assessment in the new episode above.

Things don’t seem to be getting much better for the company. Nobody is using the app. Co-founder Peter Pham left, or was fired, according to CEO Bill Nguyen, who also told the New York Times that the company is going back to the drawing board. It might scrap its photo app altogether in favor of, well, something big and vague.

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Foursquare is expanding its relationship with American Express to provide local deals to people who sync their cards to their Foursquare accounts. AmEx did a trial at SXSW, and that went well enough that it is rolling out the deals more broadly.

The discounts, such as $20 off a $50 purchase at Sports Authority, are automatically applied to your AmEx account when you check in via Foursquare to a participating merchant before a purchase. Everyone in local commerce is trying to figure out how to close the loop between deals and payments. Once companies can tie mobile ads or deals to payments, they will be able to measure directly the sales generated by these mobile promotions. And one day that could potentially be a huge new business. But for now, it’s making absolutely zilch for Foursquare, which remains a revenue-free zone.

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Pulse is not just for news feeds and Facebook links. Now you can also get nearby daily deals. With the latest update to both the iPhone and Android apps, when you enable location sharing, Pulse will pull nearby Groupon deals.

Pulse lets you subscribe to different deals by city. You can see them as a stream in your Pulse reader, along with deals from nearby cities. If you click through to purchase one, Pulse will get an affiliate fee. It’s certainly a better way to peruse the deals than the daily email. You can also save a deal for later purchase.

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Movie trailers are among the most popular videos on YouTube. A typical movie trailer gets millions of views, but how many of those views are natural and who many are pushed as paid-for ads? Yes, movie trailers are all ads in a sense. But people seek them out just like any other 2-minute video. That is not what I am talking about.

The same movie trailers are also promoted through various means and shown as prerolls before other videos or via paid links and those views can also count towards the total. For instance, this trailer for the new Conan The Barbarian movie has been watched nearly 5.5 million times. If you click on the statistics right next to that number, you will see that 4.98 million of those views come from ads (see also below).

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Editor’s note: Aaron Crayford is the CEO of Mighty whose main product is a smart real-time communication framework. While in high school was prosecuted by the US government for what the DoD called “The most organized systematic attack the Pentagon has seen” and was banned from touching a computer or talking about the story for a decade. You can follow him @aaroncray.

It’s all over the news Lulzsec thumbs nose at CIA, Member of Anonymous captured in Spain.

Heroes, hackers or douchebags? I’ve seen many takes. Mine goes something like:

FBI agent: “Tell us how you got into the satellite control systems at Lawrence Livermore.”

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Editor’s note: Carey Friedman is the proud owner of Grandpa Eddie’s BBQ in Richmond, VA. This post is in response to a guest series on TechCrunch taking a critical look at Groupon’s business model.

I’ve been reading a lot of stories on TechCrunch lately coming down hard on Groupon and, like other happy Groupon merchants, wasn’t going to comment because I thought it was a single story with one author’s thoughts. However, after seeing story after story trying to pick apart every single piece of Groupon, I felt it necessary to write about my experience. I’m also hoping that I’m the first BBQ restaurant owner who to write for TechCrunch.

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Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur.

I know through hard experience that I’m one of the dumbest investors I know. Here are two examples: the time I cost Yasser Arafat $2 million (and lost investors another $100 million in the process) and the worst VC decision ever made (of course, it was made by me). Both happened around the same time period (2000-2001) and solidified my reputation in history as possibly the worst investor ever.

However, I learn from my experiences. After a few successful startups following that period (Stockpickr.com notably, which sold to thestreet.com in 2007) I’ve started to do more angel investing and, in doing so, have figured out a check list to help me avoid my prior mistakes. If you follow this checklist I think you can do well as an angel investor.

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If apps replace the mobile web, and along with it, traditional search, then the search engines need to figure out how to adapt. Yahoo is taking a tiny step towards embracing mobile apps with a few new products for searching apps. It is launching both iPhone and Android apps for app discovery, as well as desktop app search experience.

The iPhone app is called Yahoo! AppSpot, and I’ve been trying it out a little. AppSpot is about app discovery, much like Chomp, Appsfire, or Disrupt startup Do@. It scans your apps so that it won;t show you apps you already have in results, and also takes into account what you own to show related apps. AppSpot gives you daily recommendations in various categories (music, games, news, social networking, travel, utilities) with the now-familiar slot-machine rolling UI. It also lets you search for apps by keyword, and returns results based on title, description, popularity, and other factors.

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TechCrunch turns 6 years old today. Back on June 11, 2005, Michael Arrington wrote his first blog post. Then he started having parties in the backyard of his old house in Atherton, one of the YouTube guys showed up to one of them, there were lots more parties, and the rest is history.

Michael’s come a long way from those backyard parties around a campfire, and so has TechCrunch. We now have millions of readers, dozens of employees, and our gatherings have gotten quite large (2,100 people at the last Disrupt in NYC). Oh, and we are now part of AOL.

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Social advertising is the next hot thing, and startups are starting to come out of the woodworks with different approaches. One to watch is Taykey, a startup we first wrote about a year ago, but which is which is launching today with a fresh $9 million B round from Crescent Point, Sequoia, and Softbank Capital. It previously raised $2 million in June, 2010 from Sequoia Israel.

Taykey tries to determine what topics are trending among different audience groups and then targets them with Facebook ads, promoted trends on Twitter, or search ads. “We think advertising is broken,” says CEO Amit Avner, because it is “based on demographics.”

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It was a couple of months ago that BiteHunter.com beta-launched itself as an aggregator for dining deals. Easily described as a “Kayak for restaurants,” BiteHunter is designed to help users locate dining deals, a problem which has been been addressed quite well for verticals such as travel, but quite poorly for dining, at least on an aggregated basis.

Today BiteHunter is announcing a new iPhone app (iTunes Link) that expands its dining deal search across the US, from the initial markets of New York, San Francisco and Chicago.

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Social photo app Instagram pushed out a new update today on the iPhone. The first thing you notice is that uploads are a lot faster. Speed, quite frankly, is one of Instagram’s competitive advantages. But the update also includes some new features, the most important of which is the ability to see all the photos you’ve liked in the past.

It sounds pretty basic—and it is—but up until now Instagram has been a fleeting slideshow. Just like a stream of tweets, the Instagram feed is a realtime stream of photos. You had to launch the app to check it out. If you miss some, no biggie, more will keep filling your feed. But there wasn’t even a way to save photos other than your own. You could “like” someone else’s photo or comment on it, but that was it. Now, all of the photos you’ve ever liked are organized for you in their own album. You can find them under “Photos you’ve liked” in your profile, right under “your photos.”

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Not too long ago—the common perception was that Facebook advertising did not work. Why would a user notice an advertisement with a small image discretely tucked away in the right-hand column? In fact, most users were building up their “banner blindness,” and ignoring the right-hand column altogether.

However, much regarding Facebook ads has changed since then. Changes in profile design encouraged users to provide more complete information and advertisers became educated in the value of hyper-targeting. Facebook’s ad serving algorithm improved dramatically and the launch of the Ads API allowed for an additional layer of intelligence to be built on top of that. Gradually, right-hand column marketplace ads became more effective for all types of advertisers—while Facebook concurrently grew its sales team to push out premium ads to brands and agencies. With all this progress, eMarketer estimated Facebook’s ad revenues at almost $2 Billion in 2010 and over $4 Billion in 2011.

Despite all this success, Facebook’s revenues are still far behind the search giant, and claiming that they will surpass Google is a bold statement. However, there is a very clear path for this to happen and it is simply a question of when.

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Groupon, as everyone knows by now, is growing like crazy. How crazy? CEO Andrew Mason just revealed at the D9 technology conference that he now employs 8,000 people, which is up from 1,500 a year ago. That means it is growing headcount at a 433 percent annual rate.

About half of it’s employees are sales people. Signing up local businesses to offer group discounts requires a lot of hand-holding and sales calls across many local markets. Groupon is now in 46 countries.

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YouTube is now showing approximately 3 billion videos a day. A growing proportion of those are shown with ads—more than 2 billion a week—and YouTube as a business is expected to pass $1 billion in revenue next year.

But when it comes to making money, some videos do better than others. For YouTube, it is all about scale, and networks of loosely aligned online video producers scale better than individual shows and viral-video phenoms. In fact, there is a brand new department inside YouTube called Networks that reports to global head of content Dean Gilbert. The purpose of the department is encourage the formation of these outside networks which then use YouTube as their distribution channel.

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There are literally hundreds of thousands of iPhone, iPad and Android apps to choose from, and yet finding good apps is far from easy. App discovery and recommendations is a fertile niche where a few startups are fighting for mindshare. After being downloaded more than 2 million times, app discovery startup Appsfire closed a $3.6 million series A, led by French VC firm IDinvest. (Appsfire is based in Paris and Tel Aviv, and was co-founded by Ouriel Ohayon, who used to be the editor of TechCrunch France).

Appsfire crossed 1 million downloads in February, and then the 2-million mark in May. Ohayon says its various apps for the iPhone, Android, iPad, and kid’s apps is generating 3 million leads to app developers each month. Appsfire lets you share your favorite apps with your friends via the web, your mobile device, or Facebook.

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Ashton Kutcher started dabbling in tech startups a few years ago, but he is no longer a dabbler, as his his Disrupt interview with Charlie Rose last week made clear. Kutcher is an investor in a dozen tech companies, including Skype, Foursquare, Path, and Kevin Rose’s Milk. In this backstage interview with Sarah Lacy, he reveals that he is also an investor in AirBnB (whose CEO Brian Chesky was also at Disrupt) and why he thinks the company is different.

Kutcher talks about his approach to investing in startups. At first it was very much a leraning process for him. “I became an apprentice” to other tech investors, he says, because “I don’t like to fail.”

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