Last week at Disrupt, Chris Dixon did a version of Founder Stories onstage with Quora founder Charlie Cheever. We learned that Quora is not looking to sell, but we also learned a lot more.

For instance, what convinced Cheever to quit Facebook with co-founder Adam D’Angelo was that tried to “imagine a world where I knew everything that I wanted to know, as long as someone else in the world knew it.” And that’s what Quora wants to build. It’s a pretty outrageous goal, which is what makes the startup so interesting.

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Google is making a bold play to enter mobile payments, and PayPal doesn’t like it one bit. Shortly after Google announced its new mobile wallet for Android phones today, Paypal filed a lawsuit against Google and two former PayPal executives who now are in charge of mobile payments at Google (Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius).

The complaint (embedded below) alleges “misappropriation of trade secrets, and “breach of fiduciary duty.” It revolves around Osama Bedier, who was the VP of Platform, Mobile, and New Ventures at PayPal before he was recruited to work at Google by Android chief Andy Rubin, Google co-founder Larry Page, and Bedier’s former PayPal colleague Stephanie Tilenius (who now heads up Commerce and Payments at Google, and I interviewed yesterday onstage at Disrupt NYC).

The lawsuit reveals that Google was negotiatiating with PayPal for two years to power payments on mobile devices. But just as the deal was about to be signed, Google backed off and instead hired the PayPal executive negotiating the deal—Bedier. The lawsuit lays out the sequence of events:

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That was fast. Just like that Square passed $3 million in transactions processed, on a Saturday no less, according to a Tweet an hour ago by CEO Jack Dorsey.

The mobile payments startup is seeing an acceleration in transaction volume. It took about 10 months from its public launch for Square to reach $1 million a day in payments going through its mobile app. Getting to $2 million a day only took about two months. And now, less than a month later, it is passing $3 million.

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Ever wonder how super angel and man-about-town Chris Sacca spends his Friday nights? Well, right now you can find him at Turntable.fm, a stealthy, you-can-only-get-in-if-you-know-someone online DJ party. I just stumbled onto it by accident. You can only gain entry if you are Facebook friends with someone already inside.

As it happens, I knew some people. Turntable.fm is a project of Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen, the two guys who brought us Stickybits. You enter and there are different DJ rooms to choose from. There are probably 25 people there right now (this is still in private alpha). But in one room called “Let’s rock old-ish hip-hop,” there was Sacca, Goldstein, YouTube’s Hunter Walk, and Mike Marquez of CODE Advisors. Sacca was playing “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa, up on the DJ platform (he gets to wear the space helmet because he has a lot of points, which are awarded to him by other people in the room who like what he plays).

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Google is on a mission to make the Web faster. One thing that slows down pageload times are fat image files. Even JPEG and PNG files can get pretty big. So Google is developing a new image format called WebP (which is a sister format to its WebM project for videos).

The images above, for instance, are from this gallery comparing JPEG to WebP. The WebP images are significantly smaller, but look just as sharp. Can you tell the difference?

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Apple is furiously negotiating with the record labels to finalize deals which will allow it to stream music from the Internet to mobile devices (iPhones, iPads, iPods) and computers. It just came to terms with Sony Music, according to a Bloomberg report, which means that of the four major labels it’s got three down (EMI, Warner, and Sony), and one to go (Universal Music).

Streaming rights are different than digital download rights so Apple had to renegotiate all of its music deals. A cloud music service would allow consumers to keep all of their music online and stream it to any device. Google and Amazon have both recently launched beta versions of cloud music services, but they are limited in features and functionality (watch our Fly or Die review of Google Music for more info). Both decided to push ahead with music lockers that do not require deals with the labels, and in so doing they may have pushed the labels closer to Apple.

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Health care is a mess in this country, especially the payments and insurance side of the equation. But as I mentioned in my last post on Brighter, a new group of startups are attacking the problem by giving consumers better information and tools to take control of their healthcare dollars. Let’s call it DIY health reform.

Another startup launching today in private beta, Simplee, is very much part of this movement. Just like with Mint and your financial accounts, you give Simplee access to your medical insurance accounts. It then brings in all of your medical, dental, and pharmacy bills and presents them in an easy-to-understand dashboard. Simplee tells your total medical costs, how much you’ve paid out-of-pocket, your deductible, and how many doctor’s visits you and your family have had.

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Earlier today, Gilt launched the latest addition to its group-buying sites with Gilt Taste—a very pricey online purveyor of produce, meats, fish, cheese, and other “artisinal” foods. While it’s easy to get distracted by the jaw-dropping prices ($50 steaks anyone?), the part I find interesting is that Gilt Taste is also an online magazine.

Mouth-watering food photography helps to move the merchandise. The entire design of the site started with what it should look like first on a tablet and then worked backwards to the tiled view on the Web. In fact, a companion iPad app is in the works. When you are cooking in the kitchen, a propped-up iPad would be perfect for reading recipes, except that you wouldn’t want to touch it with wet or greasy hands. So instead of swiping, Gilt is prototyping a way to use the camera to create “motion-activated recipes.” You would swipe your hands through the air in front of the screen instead of touching it to go through step-by-step recipes, which could include video and more photography.

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Talk about sinking to a new low. It seems that Comcast and perhaps other ISPs are blocking access to the notorious torrent site, ThePirateBay.org. The word comes from TorrentFreak who reached out to the TPB team that indicated that they can’t confirm if an ISP is blocking the site but “there’s a significant drop in visitors from the U.S.” All I know is I, a Comcast subscriber, cannot access the site.

Comcast isn’t exactly known to be friendly with the downloaders or streamers. In the past they’ve limited and even blocked seeding of torrent files. The term throttling was synonymous with Comcast a few years back. The company eventually entered into a partnership with BitTorrent, Inc and was later asked by the FCC to stop the practices, but perhaps the company just moved to block specific sites in an effort to kill the bandwidth-sucking practice of torrenting.

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When we think of smartphones and geo-location the two main use cases that come to mind are mapping and check-ins. These are fine and dandy, but what if you could use smartphones to keep tabs of where your child is? Footprints lets you do just that.

The new app (iTunes link), available for both iPhone & iPad, tracks the location of the device and shares it with family and friends. These can then know in real-time a person’s exact location. The app can have several use cases, but the parent/child one seems the most compelling.

What about privacy? With more and more parents shelling out the cash to equip their tweens and teenagers with iPhones, I don’t see why a basic requirement couldn’t be running Footprints in the background. As my father put it when I grew up, our household was run as a totalitarian democracy. Ergo, he buys my iPhone, he gets to run whatever app he likes in the background. Parenting rocks.

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The talent wars that were common back in the late 90′s appear to have returned whether it’s using LOLCats or cheeseburgers to recruit talent. While I love the creativity, when it comes down to making a decision to join a new company, the lumbering tech giants (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Zynga, Facebook) which startups compete against for talent have one giant ace up their sleeve — great healthcare benefits.

When I left Microsoft 8 years ago, my wife expressed only one concern — losing health benefits. At the time, I told her that it’s just a matter of paying those costs directly. The reality has been that it’s been a significant hassle and cost that we’d rather not deal with.  The excitement of working with startups has outweighed that hassle, but even to this day it remains a burr in the saddle. Periodically, I will get an offer to join some company and her first question is “how are their health benefits?” Startups have repeatedly shown an ability to outmaneuver the behemoths we compete with but this is one area where the behemoths still have an edge.  It’s time to turn the tables with what I call Do-it-Yourself (DIY) Healthcare Reform.

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As I sit here writing this post, I am on board an American Airlines flight from Chicago to New York City. I consider it a minor miracle that the plane is actually in the air. After two cancelled flights on this trip alone, a seat without a cushion, and some trouble counting the number of people on the plane which made us return to the gate a second time after another minor problem, I’ve lost count of how many errors American Airlines has now made in this comedy that is my travels. Oh, and @AmericanAir also managed to prove that it is an utterly toothless marketing arm of American which fails when it comes to providing actual customer service. I never thought I’d say this as a loyal American Airlines customer who has travelled hundreds of thousands of miles on American over the years, but it may now be worse than Delta.

Yes, this is going to be a rant. If that’s not your thing, avert your eyes. There isn’t any one thing I can point to that makes me never want to fly American again. Rather, it is everything—a succession of flubs and foibles. I like to believe I am a pretty tolerant air traveler, but everyone has a breaking point.

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As I sit here writing this post, I am on board an American Airlines flight from Chicago to New York City. I consider it a minor miracle that the plane is actually in the air. After two cancelled flights on this trip alone, a seat without a cushion, and some trouble counting the number of people on the plane which made us return to the gate a second time after another minor problem, I’ve lost count of how many errors American Airlines has now made in this comedy that is my travels. Oh, and @AmericanAir also managed to prove that it is an utterly toothless marketing arm of American which fails when it comes to providing actual customer service. I never thought I’d say this as a loyal American Airlines customer who has travelled hundreds of thousands of miles on American over the years, but it may now be worse than Delta.

Yes, this is going to be a rant. If that’s not your thing, avert your eyes. There isn’t any one thing I can point to that makes me never want to fly American again. Rather, it is everything—a succession of flubs and foibles. I like to believe I am a pretty tolerant air traveler, but everyone has a breaking point.

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This Q&A with Survivor host Jeff Probst was conducted by guest writer Narendra Rocherolle, CEO of The Start Project. He and his partners hold the curious distinction of selling their company, Webshots, twice.  Narendra is an occasional contributor to TechCrunch, you can read a Q&A with Lance Armstrong here. He is @narendra on Twitter.

The CBS show Survivor is completing its 22nd season—a run with a business and social impact that are reserved for extraordinarily few productions in Television history. Survivor launched the Reality TV genre and has managed to continue to do well during a decade where the very foundations of TV have been shifting. The show’s host Jeff Probst has been a mainstay and a driving force behind the show’s continued innovation in storytelling.  I recently caught up with him to get some unfiltered thoughts.  If you have questions or comments you can direct them to @jeffprobst on Twitter!

Survivor is a deceptively complex media property because you have multiple narratives: the game, behind the scenes details, and deeper looks into the actual participants. Building on these narratives, you are now live tweeting during Survivor shows (both East and West coast feeds).  Where did you get the idea?  

I am a big Howard Stern fan and one weekend he tweeted while watching a re-run of his movie, Private Parts.  That was the inspiration for me to do the same thing with Survivor fans.  I wanted to continue the conversation and give them more of what they crave, which is behind-the-scenes information and personal insight. In addition, I learn valuable information about what is and is not working for the show.  It’s a very satisfying, albeit time consuming, effort.

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At this year’s overcrowded and overhyped SXSW conference in Austin, one of the few startups to break through the noise was group text messaging app GroupMe. How did GroupMe win SXSW? Grilled cheese. The company rented an outdoor food shack for something like $10,000 and turned it into the GroupMe Grill with free grilled cheese sandwiches and beer. The grilled cheese, says co-founder Steve Martocci in this episode of Founder Stories, was “an homage” to Phish concerts, where grilled cheese sandwiches are consumed in large quantities (watch the video above).

The GroupMe Grill became a meeting point for attendees of SXSW, and it was one of the places everyone was taking photos of on Instagram (one of the other “winners” of SXSW). All in all, two million text messages were sent through SXSW groups during the week of the event.

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Yahoo had another lousy quarter. Revenues were down 6 percent, profits were down 28 percent. What’s more, it’s search partnership with Microsoft isn’t going so great. And the finger pointing is starting.

In a very detailed analysis, Danny Sullivan of SearchEngine Land charts the decline of Yahoo’s search revenues over the past two years. What he calls “net search revenues” (the money Yahoo gets to keep after paying off partners) is down 35 percent from a peak of $551 million two years ago to $357 million.

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On reading today’s report by the Wall Street Journal that Twitter is in talks to buy TweetDeck, I believe the only reason it is doing so is to protect its turf.

Less than a week ago, CNN wrote a piece that UberMedia will be developing a competitor. Ubermedia, is the same company, that was supposed to have bought TweetDeck two months ago. UberMedia is also the same company that has been on an acquiring binge of popular Twitter clients—UberTwitter, Echofon and Twidroyd, namely. Shortly after that, Twitter blocked Ubermedia for violation of many of its terms of service.

Here are 5 reasons why Twitter will kill Tweetdeck:

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It’s big screen week on Fly or Die. This week, John Biggs and I take a look at the HP Touchsmart All-in-One PC, a 14-inch Toshiba portable monitor, and the new Businessweek iPad app. As usual, a surprise guest joins us to defend his company’s product decisions.

HP has been trying to bring touch computing to desktop PCs with its Touchsmart line. The problem has always been that raising your hands to manipulate a touchscreen in front of you from a sitting position is unnatural, uncomfortable, and tiring. To address this issue, the new all-in-one Touchsmart reclines so that you can go from regular keyboard mode to surface computing mode. It is an improvement from past efforts, but to me it’s a mistake to have a device with dual modes. You are going to pick one—keyboard/mouse or touch—and ignore the other. Does everything really need to be a touchscreen?

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During today’s Google earnings call, one analyst asked for some color on Google’s mobile business. CFO Patrick Pichette didn’t give much more in terms of specifics, but he did offer up some color. “Without any radical effort, we already announced at end of Q3 this is a $1 billion run-rate business,” says Pichette. Mobile is “growing at an amazingly blazing pace,” he says. “We tripped into $1 billion.”

Mobile search is definitely something Google is keenly focussed on. Senior VP of Local Jeff Huber noted on the call: ” In terms of where it trends over time, the smartphone is becoming an extension of the person, and how they do everything.”

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Google announced earnings today slightly lower than expected. Earnings per share came in at $8.08, below the $8.11 consensus estimate of Wall Street estimates. Revenues, however rose by 27 percent in the quarter to $8.6 billion.

Larry Page started off the call, blandly stating that everything is working “as expected” with the management transition. He is “very excited about Google and our momentum” and gave shout-outs to Eric Schmidt and exiting product chief Jonathan Rosenberg who “we will clearly miss.” And then he handed the call over to CFO Patrick Pichete.

Operating expenses were up, largely because of increased payroll. The talent wars seem to be taking their toll on Google.

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So many companies have tried to topple Craigslist, and they have all failed. Ethan Wegener thinks they’ve all done it the wrong way. Today at Techstars Demo Day, he introduced Friendslist, a listing service that taps into your social network without requiring the middelmen (your friends who connect buyers and sellers) to do any work. “Craigslist obliterated the classifieds newspaper industry,” he acknowledges, but Craigslist is now “a scary place.” In between the the legitimate listings, there are “lots of scam listings and half of the postings are duplicates.”

Friendslist offers a cleaner interface to start, but that’s nothing new. What it does is connect buyers and sellers, or people who are looking for jobs and people who are hiring, through the people they know. Yes, Oodle does this to some extent on Facebook Marketplace, but Friendslist takes a slightly different approach. If you know your friend Mark is a great designer and you are looking to hire a designer for your startup, you would post your jobs listing to his Friendslist, which shows the listing to all of his Facebook friends. Mark acts as the middleman, but he doesn’t have to do anything.

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For the past four years, TubeMogul has built itself up as one of the premier tools for online video producers to syndicate and analyze their online videos across the Web. Last year, it launched a video ad network called PlayTime that took advantage of all the video viewership data it was collecting, and on the strength of that product it raised $10 million last October. The company has been busy putting that money to work building on top of PlayTime to create a soup-to-nuts video ad platform around which it is relaunching the entire company today.

TubeMogul is now completely focussed on brand advertisers and their digital ad agencies. CEO Brett Wilson says it is “one place they can buy, place, track and optimize their video ads.” He calls it a demand-side platform (DSP) for video ads, much like Google-owned Invite Media is a DSP for ad agencies. It’s not just an ad network, it’s a whole lot more, folding in analytics and the ability to selectively place video ads on specific sites, or even to tie into existing advertising relationships.

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Bloomberg Businessweek now has an iPad version of the magazine available as an iTunes subscription for $2.99 a month. You get the same articles as in print, but in a decent, but dutiful iPad app. Bloomberg’s head of mobile Oke Okaro gave me a demo of the app (see video).

As far as magazine apps go, Businesweek’s app is fine. You get the entire issue, save articles to your personal archive, read in portrait or landscape mode, share articles via Twitter, Facebook, or email, and search through current and back issues. The best part of the app is that it pulls in market data and headlines from Bloomberg whenever you click on a bold-faced company name. It is a perfectly serviceable magazine app. But it is underwhelming

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Mike Walrath “was supposed to write novels.” Instead, he got int digital ad sales, started Right Media, which became an online ad exchange that he sold to Yahoo in 2007 for $850 million. In this Founder Stories video, he answers some rapid fire questions from host Chris Dixon about startup advice, hiring, and investing.

“Don’t try to solve a problem that you don’t fully understand,” he warns would-be entrepreneurs. He speaks from experience, having dabbled in the broken independent film industry after he left Yahoo. Now, the startup world is pulling him back in. He recently became the chairman of Yext, and is involved with some smaller projects as well.

Walrath admits, “I was never qualified for any job I got in my life.” But the most important thing is to keep on learning. His No. 1 piece of hiring advice for startup CEOs is to figure put how fast a candidate can learn new things.

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When Christopher Poole (aka Moot) started 4chan, it was a very basic image board that attracted an incredibly active and vibrant community. But 4chan itself is not a pretty site. It is almost Craisglist-like in its barrenness. That is why Poole is re-imagining the image board with his latest startup, Canvas, which just launched in private beta a couple months ago. Demand to get in is so high, that he’s had to throttle back the number of people he is letting in even on a private basis.

In the Founder Stories video above, which is Part II of this interview, Poole explains how Canvas works and how his goal is to make it much easier for anyone to manipulate and share images. You can already see how much better it looks. The video includes a few live screenshots, and here are some open threads. One of the breakout features in Canvas is remixing images. The image editor on the site lets users do simple photo and image editing in the browser, which is awesome for meme propagation.

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So AT&T wants to buy T-Mobile and some are screaming it will reduce competition and hurt the consumer. Sprint is now going to court to try and stop the merger. I am in the mobile communications industry and, to be honest, I couldn’t care less. This isn’t going to affect the companies pushing the real growth and innovation and it’s not going to affect the consumer. The consumer has plenty of options that have nothing to do with carriers and that list is growing daily.

For the legal fees it will take for these two giants to merge, ten new startups could be funded. The companies creating new business models for mobile communications are iterating out of sight of the big carriers, away from calling plans, contracts and traditional views of how people communicate. The Internet and the emergence of a robust mobile application layer have changed things forever.

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When Christopher Poole (aka Moot) was 15 years old, he founder of the 4chan image board on an IRC channel with 20 people. Today, the site attracts about 12 million people a month and is the font of many of the Internet’s most pervasive memes, from Lolcats to Rickrolling. Moot doesn’t like to do video interviews, but after much pestering, Chris Dixon got him to come on Founder Stories for a rare video appearance. We’ll be running the entire conversation throughout the week, including a sneak peak at what he’s doing with his latest startup, Canvas. (Disclosure: Dixon is also an investor in Canvas through Founder Collective) .

In this first part, Moot explains the origins of 4Chan in the video above. Both the idea and software was borrowed from a Japanese site called Futaba channel, but 4chan took on a life of its own—a completely anonymous site where community members felt free to express themselves in all sorts of ways.

One of the unique characteristics of the site is that there are no archives. The most popular images, gifs, and comments bubble up to the top, and cascade through the site like a waterfall. Every so often, a meme will develop on the site and be picked up elsewhere. In the video below, Moot talks about the evolution of memes, how they start as one thing and change over time.

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If you meet a lot of CEOs and startup founders, you will notice a personality trait that many of them share. No matter how many people tell them they are wrong or stupid, they remain unusually optimistic, almost blindingly so. In the Founder Stories video above, which is an outtake from last week’s interview with Bnter CEO Lauren Leto, host Chris Dixon talks about the importance of rejection. “Every day, I try to get rejected,” he tells Leto. Sometimes this requires him sending emails to Steve Jobs that never get a response.

But being able to handle rejection, and even seek it out, is a crucial skill for entrepreneurs. The flip side of getting rejected over and over again, of course, is perseverance. It doesn’t matter if 49 VCs pass on your startup if the 50th one hands you a check for $1 million, or if 24 engineers say No, but the 25th is a rockstar who says Yes. Getting to yes means letting the negativity wash over you.

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This is not a joke. The Onion, “America’s Finest News Source” (TM), released its iPad app fittingly enough on April Fools Day. IPad apps are serious stuff. This one delivers fake news stories, videos,and images from the parody site in both vertical and landscape modes.

It’s a pretty basic fake-news reading app, but it gets the job done. You can swipe through stories, watch videos, check out funny charts. Articles can be shared via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Google Reader or saved to read later via Instapaper or Pinboard. All pretty standard stuff. From the press release:

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On Thursday, I used Yobongo all day, which helped me find a new lunch spot, run into an old friend, and meet a Yobongo co-founder. That afternoon, I thought it would be a good time to write about the new group and mobile messaging wars for TechCrunch. A few hours later, Color Labs launched, to put it mildly. And, as I was editing this post on Friday night, Disco appeared, the new group messaging client from Google. Along with SxSW and the NCAA basketball tournament, this is surely March Madness.

What does this explosion in mobile social apps mean. We’re witnessing an entirely new class of companies that are being built primarily for the mobile phone and tablet experience, not PCs or laptops. These companies are using basic social activities and leveraging smartphone capabilities to provide consumers with cooler features in exchange for the chance to construct more intimate networks. Just within the last year, larger forces like Facebook and Foursquare have released new mobile features to allow users to combine check-ins with location-based picture-sharing. Perhaps messaging, broadly defined, is converging toward more context-specific communications that leverage and combine bits of information our mobile devices already are aware of.

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