Earlier today, VentureBeat detailed a major Blippy privacy breach that exposed user credit card information to search engines. The breach appears to have occurred on a small scale — Blippy believes that only four users had their credit cards compromised — but the fact that it happened at all is unsettling. After all, Blippy’s service asks users to entrust it with their credit card information (and in some cases, their credentials for online services) — it is of paramount importance that Blippy keep that data secure.

In an official response, the company says it isn’t as bad as it looks and doesn’t affect current users, explaining that it affected four early beta users, specifically those whose credit cards include their credit card numbers as part of a transaction’s “Raw Data”.

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The story of music search engine SeeqPod may be finally nearing an end. It appears the remaining assets of the troubled startup have been purchased by Bloson, a recently launched social network to raise money for charitable causes. Bloson has specifically acquired SeeqPod’s domain and the contact information of its user base, which equals around 4 million users. Specific terms of the transaction have not been disclosed and the sale is still pending with the bankruptcy court in San Jose, Calif.

Seeqpod has had a tumultuous history over the past year. In February SeeqPod was slapped by lawsuits from EMI and Warner Music, as the record companies looked for billions of dollars in damages. In March, Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy protection and put itself up for sale. Last June, we wrote that the company was looking to sell off its domain name, with reports that it would be acquired by Microsoft (which didn’t happen). Last December, we heard that the technology assets of SeeqPod, which are owned by Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, were being sold to a “large Japanese media company” and the founders of the startup were building another company: the Mikojo music search engine.

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A lot has been written on how the iPhone performs in Japan, the world’s most advanced mobile nation, but the general consensus in this country now is that it sells very well (even though both Apple and provider SoftBank Mobile refuse to break down Japan-specific sales numbers). It’s rumored that the number of iPhones sold in Japan has passed 3 million.

There are reasons for this success (super-low pricing, aggressive marketing, Apple’s pre-iPhone brand popularity in Japan, clever product positioning by SoftBank, etc. etc.), but we’re talking about a country in which basically every cell phone is a smartphone, a country where you’d be hard-pressed to find a handset without a digital TV tuner or e-wallet function, for example.

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Well I bet they didn’t quite expect that. In the wake of Facebook’s F8 conference this week, where it apparently bid to become the new Sheriff of the Internet, Facebook’s plans to effectively put ‘social’ into the very structure of the Web has a few people a little concerned.

The main issue is that there are concerns that Facebook, by default, now opts you in to allowing third party sites like Yelp to ‘personalise’ your experience, and there are questions about how much information is given away.

The result is that lots of geeks are considering leaving Facebook, and perhaps even more interestingly, veritable droves of Google software engineers are among them.

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According to a report based on a source from an Asia-based Reuters correspondent, smartphone maker HTC has decided not to bid for Palm after looking at the company’s numbers. The source, which reportedly has direct knowledge of the talks, said there “weren’t enough synergies to take the deal forward”.

That leaves Palm, which has been struggling to boost sales of its new range of smartphones, running out of options fast.

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In February we reported that legendary angel investor Ron Conway was raising a small seed fund for SV Angel from outside investors – which is notable because for the last decade or so he has only invested his own money in startups.

Today Conway came by our studio for an unscheduled talk and right off the bat announced that the new fund is now closed, and that over demand led the SV Angel team to double the size of the fund to $20 million. Around fifteen investments have now been closed in the new fund.

Conway also spoke about the big trends in tech right now. There are three “megatrends” as he puts it – real time data, the social web and flash marketing. These are all “billion dollar industries” he says.

Video is below.

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I very much like Newsy.com, a news destination website that collects and analyzes perspectives from multiple sources and wraps these views into snack-sized videos.

I particularly dig their iPhone app (iTunes link), which is perfect for quick and easy news consumption on the go.

Since yesterday, you can also check out the fledgling media company’s custom-made iPad application, which suits the device format really well.

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Riding the wave of anonymous randomized chats, Jibblar is a text-only, communal version of Chatroulette.

Taking a cue from the Russian phenom, Jibblar (authored by Peter Nicholls, an Australia-based developer) is a bare-bones site that does one thing well: it allows people in close proximity to anonymously contribute to a chat room. Jibblar grabs your location from the Firefox or iPhone browser and will only facilitate conversation with people in your immediate vicinity (according to Nicholls the range is 0.5 kilometers). The only identifier is your location tag (which you can either pick from the list of options or create a new one if it doesn’t exist) and a randomly assigned number that appears next to your chat.

The site is thin on details (it’s literally one page with a title, chat stream and a sprinkling of text on the right hand side) but it does clarify that a “jib” is their term for chat room and it is most common in schools, universities and pubs. Don’t get me wrong, I love simplicity, but this brand of simplicity breeds confusion by dropping you into several streams of conversation. To quote their site, “WTF?”

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Today to close out its f8 developer conference, Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox took the stage to talk about the evolution of Facebook over the last six years, and how the company’s core principles have largely remained the same.

During his presentation, Cox recounted Facebook’s early days, when the site’s profile photos were often of keg stands, and there weren’t Events, Facebook Chat, or even Photos (though you could see if your friends were logging in from a campus dorm — remember that?).

Cox detailed how the then-small group of around ten engineers would watch how users were abusing existing features — like creating a personal profile for a fraternity, or, later, a Group for an Event — and implemented new features accordingly. Through it all, he says Facebook’s recipe for success was the same:

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If you’re a Windows user, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the concept of bundled software — you download an application you want, launch the installer, hit the “Next” button a few times, and find that you’ve inadvertently installed a spammy app that will haunt you for the rest of your PC’s life. OpenCandy is a startup that’s looking to reverse this trend by offering users bundled apps that they may actually want to use. Today, the company has closed a $5 million Series B funding round led by Google Ventures, with existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and O’Reilly Alpha Tech also participating. The company previously closed a $3.5 million Series A round in 2008.

OpenCandy founder Chester Ng says that the company spent last year shaping the company’s product and showing that its model could actually work — now, they’re looking to scale, developing into new markets and forging more partnerships (along with bolstering hiring efforts).

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Today at f8, Facebook’s Deb Liu walked developers through the future of Facebook’s official currency, Facebook Credits. During this presentation, Liu discussed some of the new features Facebook plans to launch in the near future.

One new feature is called App2user Credits. This is a set of promotions that allow users to earn Facebook Credits in ways that don’t involve paying with their credit card. Liu presented three examples. First, Liu said that users could earn credits through credit card reward programs (she said Chase was already involved in setting up a program). A second example involved Plastic Jungle, the service that lets you sell gift cards you don’t want.

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eBay squeezed past the Street’s expectations, reporting first quarter profits of 42 cents a share (or $554.2 million) on revenues of $2.2 billion, analysts were looking for profits of 41 cents a share. Revenues gained 9% from the year ago, thanks to a jump in sales in the Payments and the Marketplace businesses. Gross margins dropped slightly to 30.6% in the period, down from 30.7%, driven by growth in PayPal (a relatively lower-margin business). “We are improving the fundamentals of our business, strengthening eBay Marketplaces and aggressively growing PayPal to
become the leader in global online payments,” CEO John Donahoe said in the press release.

The company’s Payments division continues to be eBay’s growth driver, achieving a record first quarter as PayPal gained increased traction on eBay. Some key numbers: overall payment volume rose 35% to $21.3 billion, sales advanced 26% to $809.3 million.

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Virtualization provider Media Temple has raised $15 million from a group of investors led by Triangle Capital (also includes GMB Mezzanine Capital). Founded in 1998, Media Temple is a web hosting and software service provider, helping clients host websites, email, and other forms of rich media content. This is the company’s first round of outside investment and the bulk of the proceeds will go towards increasing headcount, enhancing product offerings and yes, new acquisitions. The company’s CEO Demian Sellfors says, “we certainly have a big appetite.”

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When Paul Buchheit was at Google he was credited with coining the company’s unofficial slogan, “don’t be evil.” Now he’s at Facebook. Things change.

Today, at Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, Buchheit’s FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor (both came over to Facebook after the acquisition) took the stage to show off a major new Facebook feature: a Like button for the web. Taylor announced that these buttons were ready to be implemented on sites across the web starting today. But as you’ll notice on this page, there’s a rather interesting option when you’re customizing the button.

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If Google Docs is about sharing documents and spreadsheets, Microsoft is now fighting back by tapping into teh biggest sharing network on the planet: Facebook. Today at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Microsoft is tapping into Facebook to create Docs.com. The app, which was created by Microsoft’s FUSE Labs, is a way for Facebook users to share and collaboratively edit Microsoft Office documents.

Docs.com can be shared with your Facebook friends, and the documents can be switched back and forth between the Web and the desktop. Microsoft, of course, is also moving Office online, but I have a feeling Docs is going to take off faster just through Facebook. Microsoft partnered with Facebook to build Docs.com to show what could be done with Facebook’s new Open Graph API and Social plugins. For instance, Docs.com will begin using Facebook’s new auto-login feature it announced earlier today so that users won’t even need to click on a Facebook Connect button to get started.

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Today at Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made what seemed like a bold prediction. Only he didn’t think it was that bold. According to Zuckerberg, there will be over 1 billion likes across the web in the just first 24 hours of the “Like” button. It launches today.

Zuckerberg can say this because there are already some 30 huge partners Facebook is launching these new features with. And I do mean huge. Huge as in CNN, ESPN, and IMDb, among others. Each of these sites will have Facebook buttons implemented and working today.

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Today at Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, the company have given all attendees a small RFID tag attached to their conference badge. This tag is a part of something called “Facebook Presence” which allows you to “check-in” at various places around the conference simply by swiping your badge. Yes, it’s location.

This is actually the same thing Facebook uses for its infamous keg bot at its headquarters. Employees have been using this for a long time, now they’re letting the rest of us in on the fun. To use it, you go to this page and manually type in your tag number to link it to your Facebook account. Then, everytime you swipe your badge somewhere, it goes right to your profile. Apparently, you can also tag yourself in photos this way.

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The world of fine watches is a benighted place. Strange hang-ups masquerading as tradition are the norm and historically watch companies have looked at every new improvement to their business with trepidation. Consider the quartz movement, for example. Texas Instruments approached a number of Swiss companies when they first created the miniaturized quartz watch but no one wanted it – it was beneath them. China and Japan, however, bought the movements by the truckload and ate old horology’s lunch.

For years, watch companies have only allowed their wares to be sold through authorized dealers. This meant you had to go into a frou-frou shop, get talked down to by a snooty salesperson, and then pay over retail for a watch that was worth, in terms of parts and materials, about half of its sticker price. Pretty nice scam, huh?

The Internet came along and those authorized dealers hit on a nice scam. They’d “sell” their watches to real people – shills, usually – and those real people would resell them online. Swatch Group, for example, is currently fighting this grey market in the Supreme Court. However, another part of the Swatch Group, Longines, is taking to the Internet like a duck to duck sauce and this is amazingly important because it opens a $35 billion part of the economy to an entirely new market.

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Salesforce.com has just announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jigsaw, which provides crowd-sourced data services in the cloud, for approximately $142 million in cash, plus a performance-based earn out of up to 10% of the purchase price.

The deal is expected to close in Q2FY11, subject to customary closing conditions.

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Today at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, a panel of top social gaming executives met to discuss the future of gaming on Facebook. The conversation touched on quite a few issues, including the evolution of social gaming mechanics, monetization, and whether or not the industry would be able to continue its incredible growth over the next few years. One bold prediction: Playdom CEO John Pleasants says that the reach of social games will double in the next 18 months.

The Panelists:
John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
Moderated by Eric Eldon

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Last August, MySpace acquired social music service iLike. As part of the deal iLike founders (and twin brothers) Ali Partovi and Hadi Partovi joined MySpace’s executive team, with Hadi becoming SVP of Technology and Ali taking the role of SVP of Business Development. Today, we’ve confirmed that both men will be stepping down from their executive positions at MySpace. Hadi will be leaving the company entirely to pursue opportunities as an advisor and angel investor (as well as work with tech-related non-profits), while Ali will stay on board as a strategic advisor. iLike cofounder Nat Brown remains at MySpace, where he’s head of Mobile.

Reached for comment, MySpace gave us this statement:

MySpace SVP of Technology Hadi Partovi is stepping down to pursue other opportunities. In addition to continuing his work as an advisor and angel investor to various startups, he will be following his passion for education by working directly with technology focused non-profits. Hadi leaves as a valued friend to the company, and we wish him the best in his future endeavors.

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Twitter’s Fail Whale is a thing of legend at this point. The beast, which appeared so often in years past, now rarely comes out of the water. But today, for a brief moment, the creature reappeared. And behold: he’s prettier than ever!

It looks like at some point last year (hence the out-of-date 2009 copyright at the bottom), Twitter tried to give the Fail Whale error page a bit of a design overhaul (as it did to much of the rest of its site). While the whale itself is the same, the font and styling of the error page has been revamped, as you can see.

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The whole Apple/Google thing continues to get more interesting.

The two tech giant buddies are now clearly at odds with one another (coffee dates and all). The iPhone and Android are already at war. And soon, the two will be at war in ads (AdSense vs. iAds) and portable computing (iPads versus Chrome OS netbooks). And leading up to those wars, both have been making some interesting hires and acquisitions.

The latest is Google, which at some point recently bought the stealth startup Agnilux, according to peHUB. What is Agnilux? No one knows for sure, but the New York Times thought enough of it to profile it a few times — and still wasn’t able to find out any more other than they may be doing something with servers. So why do they matter? Because of who is involved in the company. Agnilux was founded by a few ex-Apple employees. More specifically, it was founded by Apple employees who came over in the PA Semi acquisition.

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Not surprisingly on Apple’s earnings call today, there were a lot of questions about Apple’s newest product, the iPad. And I do mean a lot — it seems that about half of the questions were about the product. Unfortunately, neither Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer nor COO Tim Cook gave many answers about the product. Their standard line was that there wasn’t enough data yet to draw any conclusions. But Cook did slip in a few interesting statements about the device.

When asked about Apple’s recent decision to delay iPad shipments to Europe, Cook candidly said that U.S. demand for the iPad “has shocked us.” He noted that it’s a good problem to have, and that there are no production problems — Apple simply underestimated how popular the device would be right off the bat. Apple announced that first day sales surpassed 300,000 and that first week sales were past 500,000. But since then, they haven’t said much. Some estimates put sales past 1 million already.

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If you’ve seen a teenager in the last two years, then you’ve seen a teenager texting. Seriously, I can’t think of a situation in the last couple of years where I saw a teenager without a cell phone. The teenagers in my extended family send text messages seemingly all day long, every day. Now the Pew Internet and American Life project has released a pretty comprehensive analysis of teen texting behavior.

According to the report, 88% of teenagers with cell phones are texters. “Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month.” I usually send less than 100 texts per month, so these kids are really texting!

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Get ready for something you’re really going to like.

Ok, ready?

Late last year we wrote about The Start Project, a Silicon Valley based business incubator that is putting together new products and companies and then building teams around them. Today they launch their first product, Taggable.

You know how you can tag your Facebook friends in pictures and pages on Facebook? Taggable extends that out to other websites as well. Want to tag a picture of your friend that’s on Flickr? Use the Taggable bookmarklet, sign in via Facebook Connect, and tag away. A link to that photo will then be published in the news stream of those users (just as it does when you are tagged on Facebook directly).

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As Google increasingly faces criticism over privacy practices from governments around the world and faces a possible blockage of its acquisition of AdMob by the FTC, the technology giant has been spending money on lobbying efforts. It’s of no surprise that Google is increasing lobbying spending and, according to a release issued today, lobbying expenses in the first quarter were up by a whopping 57 percent over the previous year as it paid $1.38 million to influence lawmakers and regulators, according to public records filed today. You can access the filing here.

Lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Senate Office of Public Affairs show Google spent $880,000 in the first quarter of 2009. Lobbying expenses for all of 2009 totaled $4.03 million. First quarter spending in 2010 was up 23 percent from the $1.12 million the Internet giant spent in the fourth quarter of 2009.

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Narendra Rocherolle, a hippy-type who lives up in Marin County and lives life to the fullest, had a zen moment today while contemplating his dog’s toilet. Dogs, he realized, have been playing foursquare forever. We’re just trying to catch up to our four legged friends.

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For my money, memes on the Internet don’t get any better than the Hitler one. You know, the one in which you take some current event (the more mundane, the better) and shove it into the scene from the German film Downfall in which Hitler is told in his bunker that he cannot win the war. The key to these (assuming you don’t speak German, of course) is to replace the actual subtitles with ones of your choosing about a different topic. Facebook/FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace — all solid gold stuff. In fact, just this past January, while reviewing the iPad version, Erick called it “the meme that will never die.” But sadly, it looks like it may in fact die, at the hands of the studio behind it.

Earlier today, someone attempted to upload a new version surrounding the massive iPhone 4G (or iPhone HD, whatever) news. Unfortunately, as you can see on YouTube, that video has already been removed with the message, “This video contains content from Constantin Film, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.“

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And you thought tweeting from space was an achievement?

Ukrainian TV journalist Julia Gorodetskaya (@gorodetskaya) has sent the first documented underwater tweet from the floor of a 19-feet deep dolphinarium in Odessa, Ukraine. The scuba tweeting session was broadcasted by local media (see subtitled video below) and documented by regional press.

The tweet was sent via a mobile phone sealed in plastic from the Twitter website, using the Opera Mini browser. Radio waves passed to the surface through an elongated antenna.

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