Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter, has secured $1.5 million in Series A funding from a number of investors, including Allen Morgan of Mayfield Fund, Nova Spivack of Lucid Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, Paige Craig, Tom McInerney, Michael Yavonditte of Quigo Technologies, and Ofer Ronan.

Klout, which recently released a new API, evaluates Twitter users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals and topics around the web. Since the company’s launch in 2008, Klout has registered over 250,000 users and over 300 API partners, including CoTweet, HootSuite, and the newly-launched Tweetup, and is handling millions of API calls a day.

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So you bought your child an iPhone and you gave him or her an iTunes account and password and told them that they can simply download as many apps as they want, 24 hours a day, even if they cost money. But what’s this? Junior or Julia has started downloading saucy sex sensors and card games containing images of ladies in various states of undress? How did this happen?

It’s Apple’s fault. The Parents Television Council (also known as Parents Against Adults) believe that Apple isn’t doing enough to prevent underage children from downloading apps even though each app download requires a password to be tapped in and parental controls can prevent certain apps from appearing on the phone. After all, it’s Apple’s responsibility to ensure that kids don’t see boobs, not yours.

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Online media company Internet Brands (aka INET) today announced the acquisition of ExpertHub, a network of websites that connects consumers with attorneys and other professionals. The network will get folded into the company’s Money and Business vertical.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it is perfectly in line with Internet Brands’ growth-through-acquisition strategy. The INET CrunchBase profile lists 10 small purchases in the last 3 years alone, and its portfolio of brands is currently 100+ strong.

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Late last month, a number of sites noted that a very early build of Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, was available to download for Android phones. However, that build was unofficial as it was put together by an individual and optimized for the Droid device. Today, Mozilla has itself put out a pre-Alpha build of Fennec that should work at the very least on Droid and the Nexus One.

Mozilla is quick to note that this is a pre-Alpha build of the browser, and is only for testing purposes. But that isn’t stopping Mozilla’s Vladimir Vukićević from announcing it on his blog. “There also aren’t yet any automated nightly developer builds or automated updates to this build; it’s even more of a pre-nightly build (even earlier than pre-alpha). But, it’s usable enough that we wanted to get some feedback on it as we continue to develop,” he notes.

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Last week, Facebook launched some major new products, including social plugins, its Like button for the web, and its Open Graph API. It also launched a product that has some serious privacy issues: “Instant Personalization”, which automatically hands over some of your data to certain third-party sites as soon as you visit them, without any action required on your part. I’ve previously discussed at length why I think this could lead to a major backlash. And now four Democratic US Senators — Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich and Al Franken — are calling on Facebook to change its policies.

This morning the Senators sent a letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg that details these issues (they’ve also separately reached out to the FTC, urging it to establish more rules around social networks). Here are the Senators’ three main concerns, along with my own commentary:

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We always keep the list of launching startups and products at our big events strictly confidential until the day of launch. But we’re finalizing the list of launching companies at TechCrunch Disrupt this week, and we usually give out a single teaser prior to the event. We’re excited that Comcast will be launching a new product called Tunerfish on May 24 in New York at Disrupt.

What’s Tunerfish? We’re not saying, but we think you will be suitably impressed. The Plaxo team (Comcast acquired Plaxo in 2008) is behind the new product, led by former Plaxo VP of Marketing John McCrea (John’s blog is here). Tunerfish may or may not have something to do with Comcast’s ambitious Fancast plans.

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Every year, like the swallows returning from Capistrano or the tourists returning to Disneyworld Paris, Nokia releases a flagship phone. Sadly, the boatwrights at Nokia haven’t dropped a winner in nigh on three years now and, if early reports are to believed, their new N8 is not looking seaworthy.

The N8 looks like the Motorola Devour and has a 3.5-inch OLED, capacative touch screen, and all of the fun things you expect like compass and accelerometer. On paper, it seems great. It also uses Symbian^3 which, again, according to early reports, its just like Symbian^1 and Symbian^2. In other words, the more things change at Nokia, the more they stay the same.

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Mobile Ad Network AdMob has released its monthly mobile metrics report for March, which takes a close look at Android OS traffic. In March 2010, there were 34 Android devices from 12 manufacturers available to consumers. In AdMob’s network in March 2010, 11 devices accounted for 96 percent of Android traffic, up from two devices in September 2009. The three primary versions of the Android OS all drove significant traffic in March 2010 – Android 1.5 (38 percent), Android 2.0/2.1 (35 percent) and Android 1.6 (26 percent). Motorola and HTC were the leading Android device manufacturers with 44 percent and 43 percent of respective traffic.

According to AdMob, Motorola Droid was the leading Android handset in March 2010 generating 32 percent of Android traffic, while the Google Nexus One drove only two percent of Android traffic. It’s surprising that Google’s Nexus one generates so little traffic, considering Google’s claims of profitability and success from the device.

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The biggest story in tech today is the Gizmodo stolen iPhone debacle (note that I use the word “stolen” only to keep the description brief, not in any legal way). An Apple employee with a iPhone prototype left it in a bar. Someone found it and sold it to Gizmodo for $5,000. Gizmodo got a huge scoop, but they are now facing criminal and possibly civil liability issues. John Gruber has a good summary of the first part of the story. How this all plays out is still being decided, but the police have now raided a Gizmodo editor’s home and have seized property.

A number of sites have compared this to the Twitter document scandal that we were in the middle of last year. And we’ve received a number of inquiries about whether or not we would have handled this iPhone situation the same way as Gizmodo did.

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First Apple goes after Taiwanese cell phone maker HTC over infringement of no less than 20 of its patents, and now the man who invented the PDA (personal digital assistant) is targeting the company.

Entrepreneur and inventor Judah Klausner, or rather his company Klausner Technologies, has filed suit against HTC for patent infringement under its U.S. Visual Voicemail patents.

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ItsTrending is a new website that shows popular shared items on Facebook. This isn’t anything magical – Matt Schlicht, a product manager at Ustream, put it together in an evening – “This is a good example of how easy the Facebook plugins are to implement – I’m a product guy not a developer,” says Matt.

But it is a new view into popular links some people may find fascinating, and I’m a sucker for simple mashups. It shows the most shared links on Facebook for a variety of third party sites – news, video, pictures, etc.. It uses the Recommendations social plugin provided by Facebook (like I said, no coding magic is going on here). But the data is great, and like Digg, TweetMeme and other services, it helps people find interesting and relevant content. And given that AllTop and PopUrls still survive, why not ItsTrending, too.

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Facebook took over the Gillmor Gang this week like it threatens to do the Web. Danny Sullivan represented those who fear the unadulterated market power of the social giant. He pressed FriendFeed co-founder and now Facebook platform chief Bret Taylor on the Pandora and Microsoft deals, which push user data to “partners” without user opt in. Taylor said these were carefully defined contracts that respected user privacy.

Robert Scoble represented the happy user, listening to friend-seeded recommendations on Pandora. Andrew Keen represented his own peculiar subset of clueless netizens, entertaining us with a stylized version of Facebook’s onboarding interrogation: Who are you? What’s your favorite cereal? What constitutes an invasion of privacy? Taylor batted the gambit away, only to have Sullivan loop around to it later and give Keen’s schtick more credibility than I thought possible.

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I sat down with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and investor/board member James Slavet to talk about the continued success of the Seattle-based company. Warning in advance – the interview was done at the end of the day and we were drinking beer from our new kegerator, and we rambled at times. Perfect for a Sunday afternoon viewing, in my opinion.

Kelman announced in the video that Redfin is now on a $30 million revenue run rate, up from $15 million last summer (and at that point they were profitable.

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Index Ventures, a European based venture fund that has also invested heavily in U.S. startups, will launch a new seed fund on Monday to focus on early stage deals. Partners Neil Rimer, Danny Rimer, Saul Klein and Mike Volpi will manage Index Seed. The fund is partnering with existing seed fund The Accelerator Group, and TAG founder Robin Klein is joining Index as a venture partner.

The firm plans to make twenty early stage investments over the next 24 months, Klein told me. Investments will range from $50,000 – $1 million in size. And unlike many seed funds that have been carved out of larger venture funds, the partners will take board seats or otherwise be heavily engaged with their startups. With larger venture funds, the partners have time to make the investments but can’t spend a lot of time on them simply because they are managing so much other money. Index Seed is being carved out of Index’s existing $400 million fund.

The decision making process is streamlined, says Klein. “We are optimizing our process for due diligence and legals. We can make decisions quickly, don’t need a board seat, expect rights that are the same as other seed investors and can invest as little as $50k or as much as $1m in a seed round.”

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Two years ago I was on the Charlie Rose show and we talked about, among other startups and trends, Facebook. It wasn’t clear then that Facebook had what it took to become one of the great technology companies. They had conquered the college market and were destroying the hopes and dreams of MySpace. But they were also reeling from the Beacon debacle and hadn’t proven that they could turn those massive reach and page view numbers into sustainable revenue streams.

You can watch the whole discussion about Facebook, which begins at about the 22:00 mark. But the key question I asked then was, “Will Facebook Have their Google moment?” I was referring to Google’s ability to pair awesome search in the late nineties with, later, an amazing business model – a bidding system for text ads. In 2008 it was clear that Facebook had taken the first step and changed our culture, possibly permanently. But it wasn’t at all clear that they would create the massive revenue streams to allow them to effectively dominate tech culture.

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The European Union’s proposed Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive sounds relatively innocuous. But its impact could have far reaching consequences for Europe’s emerging startup tech scene, imposing higher costs, red tape and put off most institutional investors from investing in VC funds. The Directive could – to be blunt – completely shaft VC, and thus venture backed startups in Europe. Here’s how, and here’s what you can do about it.

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As I wrote about back in February, ManageTwitter is easily one of the most useful third-party Twitter services out there. While there are plenty of services that help you find new people to follow, there simply aren’t enough that help you prune those that you already follow. For those of us who have been using the service for years now, and have accumulated a lot of people we follow over that time, this is a problem. ManageTwitter solves it brilliantly. And now Twitter is going to kill them.

As the service posted on its Posterous blog yesterday, Twitter has sent the service an email letting them know that they’re breaking one of their rules. Specifically, this is what Twitter wrote:

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As AOL pours $50 million into its hyperlocal news site Patch.com to expand its sites around the country, smaller competitors are maintaining confidence that their platforms can survive AOL’s aggressive content strategy. Outside.In CEO Mark Josephson told GigaOm recently that he welcomes Patch into the space, because the site provides more content for his hyperlocal news aggregator to source. But what about the future of existing, local news sites in cities, such as the Tribune’s ChicagoNow, which has a similar model to Patch? While Patch hasn’t reached Chicago yet, we hear that it will be arriving soon.

So is there room for a few hyperlocal news sites in one city? Digital VP for the Chicago Tribune Bill Adee says yes. In fact, ChicagoNow has seen considerable success since its launch last August. ChicagoNow, the brainchild of Adee and Editorial DirectorTracy Schmidt, is a network of 350 blogs from individuals all around greater Chicago that report on local happenings trends, events and community news. Bloggers are incentivized to write by earning $5 per 1000 local page views.

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This guest post was written by Alex Ahlund, the CEO of AppVee and AndroidApps, which was recently acquired by mobile app directory Appolicious. He is currently an advisor to Appolicious.

Apple is hailing the iPad as a “magical” and “revolutionary” device. Perhaps, but the feature set accompanying the first version leaves many of us skeptical of that claim. We’ve all seen tablets before and we’re already seeing similar ones coming out soon with better specs. What we need to consider more than the device itself are the effects its release will have on the market.

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Yesterday at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco, Brett Durrett, James Birchler and Timothy Fitz from avatar-based social network and 3D virtual world IMVU took the stage and talked about scaling startups (worth your time).

IMVU CEO Cary Rosenzweig didn’t come speak at the event, but was featured in a video preview on the event website (third video on that page).

In this video – I’m not sure how long it has been online already – Rosenzweig boasts about the company’s profitability and cites its annual revenue run rate, which he says is now at $40 million.

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There are two sides to every story, but this email exchange between Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis and one of his (now former) employees is a lesson in how not to handle a resignation.

Jason says this was a private exchange and that he was just being honest with Evan. Evan says Jason can’t control his emotions.

If you’re going to trash your employee, do it verbally so that there isn’t a record of it on the Internet later. Or, don’t trash them at all and organize drinks with the team to see them off so that the rest of your employees know you care. Read from the bottom up.

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During the Q&A session of their earnings call this week, Apple COO Tim Cook fielded a question that he gets seemingly every earnings call: what’s the deal with Apple TV?

The question is a good one. While Apple is spending plenty of time and money on new products such as the iPad, which at least in part aims to change the way we consume media, Apple has largely neglected the Apple TV (a device, which it seems, would have a similar role). This time, Cook gave a little more insight as to why that is.

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Gilt, the well-funded company that sells high-end luxury goods online at steep discounts in short-term “flash sales”, has its eyes set on a new target: Groupon. At least, it’s launching a new service that has a very similar model. In the last two days, Gilt has been sending some members invitations to ‘Gilt City‘, where they can get “exclusive local deals and offers up to 70% off.” The service is only available in New York City for now, but it’s clear that Gilt intends to expand it elsewhere. As with Gilt’s normal flash-sales, you’ll have to request an account to take part (it looks like existing accounts already work).

Like Groupon, Gilt City offers deals from local businesses (restaurants, beauty salons, etc.) and events. Deals are available in limited quantities and for a limited time.

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About eighteen seconds after word got out that a prototype of Apple’s next iPhone had been lost, found, and then subsequently sold to Gizmodo (for somewhere around $5,000), commenters and pundits everywhere started asking: is all this legal? There are a bunch of complicated laws involving the ownership and selling of lost goods — not to mention lost top-secret intellectual property — and this iPhone seemed to be sitting in a pretty nasty gray area.

Turns out, the people of the Internets aren’t the only ones interested — the Santa Clara County police are curious, as well.

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Location based apps and services are all the rage now, with Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and Twitter leading the space. Startup ChoiceVendor has launched a location based iPhone app and service called MoPho.to that has a different twist. Instead of an emphasis on check-ins, MoPhoto is designed around the idea of capturing a photo. It’s “social photography” with geotagged photos enriched with metadata, comments, and likes. You can download the free app here.

Similar to Foursquare, Gowalla and others, MoPhoto is built around a free app and website. And the service currently allows you to tap into your social graph on Facebook. Here’s how it works. The app is essentially built around the camera, requiring you to first take a photo at an event or place (bar, restaurant, business, work etc). Once you take a photo, you can add a caption and you must pin the photo to a geographic place or event. Places are sources from GeoAPI (which was acquired by Twitter last year) and events are sourced from your Facebook events (although the app will eventually pull events from Last.fm and possibly Plancast). When you take a picture, you’ll be given a list of possible place or events near you according to your geolocation.

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Last January, news broke that YouTube had signed its first international sports streaming deal, gaining multi-year rights to broadcast the Indian Premiere League’s 45-day cricket tournament worldwide. We’re now closing in on the conclusion of the tournament — the finals begin on Sunday morning — and YouTube has shared some initial stats.

Right now, YouTube’s IPL channel has over 49.5 million views. That far exceeds the company’s internal expectations: we’re told that their stretch goal was to get 10 million views over the course of the tournament. Viewers from 200 countries have watched the streams. Unsurprisingly, India has the most views overall, but coming in second is the United States — YouTube had expected that spot to go to the UK or Australia, where cricket gets far more attention.

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Palm has seen better days. Following the departure of senior vice president of software, Michael Abbott (who landed at Twitter), the company has been offering packages to try and keep other executives around. That may not be working so well. Caitlin Spaan, Palm’s vice president of carrier marketing will be leaving the company shortly as well, we’ve learned.

This was likely not an easy decision to make for Spaan, she’s been with the company for 14 years. In fact, she may have been the last of the old school team in place before Jeff Hawkins (Palm founder), Donna Dubinsky (former Palm CEO), and Ed Colligan (also former Palm CEO) left to form Handspring (which merged with Palm in 2003).

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Grab the popcorn. There is a serious nerd fight brewing.

Following Facebook’s big Open Graph announcements at f8 a couple days ago, many of the leaders of the so-called “open web” are taking exception to Facebook’s use of the term “open” for its grandiose plans. While the Open Graph may be a lot of things, it is not open, is the feeling many of them have, as Erick laid out earlier.

Specifically, most of them are targeting the new Like button that is appearing everywhere on the web (including on TechCrunch). It’s an obvious target as it’s the most visible part (at least so far) of the Open Graph protocol. Investor/Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon is leading the effort for a new OpenLike button (though he wants someone else to be in charge). And Google’s Open Web Advocate, Chris Messina, has already ripped apart Facebook’s Like button in a blog post.

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One SEC accountant tried to access porn 1,800 times in two weeks, another tried 16,000 times in one month. In another case, an SEC attorney spent eight hours a day looking at and downloading porn— as reported by the Associated Press and ABC News— when his disk drive was full he resorted to CDs and DVDs. Gross.
Over the last five years, the SEC has launched “33 probes of employees looking at explicit images,” according to an SEC memo obtained by the Associated Press. The bulk of those cases occurred in the last three years (with 16! in 2008—Bernie Madoff was arrested in Dec. 08), as the financial industry teetered on the brink of collapse. More than half, seventeen of the cases, included senior employees. The memo has led to a gaggle of giggle-worthy headlines like: “Did Porn Cause the Financial Crisis?,” “SEC Staffers Watched Porn, Not Wall Street,” “SEC Was Wanking Off While The Economy Crumbled,” etc.— conjuring images of rows upon rows of SEC computers tuned into porn while homeowners received foreclosure notices and Madoff victims wept. It’s certainly disturbing to hear of senior SEC officials perusing porn websites when they had a crisis on their hands, but lets be honest here, are we really that surprised? 70% of all porn access occurs during the 9am to 5pm work day (according to a Messagelabs report), and I’m not just talking about the SEC. The numbers are ugly.

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I love our planet as much as the next person, but I despise efforts by companies and people to get credit for caring about the earth with empty gestures.

Like Pepsi’s ridiculous Aquafina press stunt. Or all this black screen Earth Day nonsense. Or bringing in goats to eat your lawn. Or banning black cars.

But I can’t find anything wrong with Frito Lay’s creation of a 100% biodegradable bag for SunChips. It will completely compost in 14 weeks under ideal conditions. I can imagine a day when most of our trash goes into our own back yard, simply to melt away into the ground.

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