Author: Eliza Kern

Instagram wants to be clear: it’s not losing users. The company announced Tuesday that it’s hit 100 million monthly active users, a figure intended to rebut claims it was harmed by a terms of service kerfluffle in December, and to show the app is still growing and building traction.

100 million monthly active users is a decent statistic that puts Instgram’s traffic at about half that of Twitter, which most recently announced 200 million monthly actives, and close to Google+ with 135 million (although neither comes close to Facebook’s behemoth 1 billion .)

Instagram wrote in a blog post Tuesday about the milestone, noting how far the company has come:

“For the first time, we understood why Instagram was going to be different. We understood the power of images to connect people to what was happening in the world around them. And, although Instagram had a fraction of the user base it does today, that night we saw a preview of what Instagram would enable at a much larger scale down the road.

Now, nearly two and a half years later, over 100 million people use Instagram every month. It’s easy to see this as an accomplishment for a company, but I think the truth is that it’s an accomplishment for our community. Now, more than ever, people are capturing the world in real-time using Instagram—sharing images from the farthest corners of the globe. What we see as a result is a world more connected and understood through photographs.”

Co-founder Kevin Systrom explained Instagram’s growth at GigaOM’s Roadmap event in November, saying its focus on speed and reliability let the company continually refine one product rather than spread itself too thin. The company launched in October 2010 and sold to Facebook in May 2012. In November Systrom said he wasn’t worried about challenges from Twitter’s photo filters product or a video product, since Instagram was built to be something different:

“Instagram is a community, not a filters app,” he said at the event.

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Keith Rabois, the longtime Silicon Valley tech executive who most recently left Square as COO in January after sexual harassment allegations, plans to announce Tuesday morning that he’s joining Khosla Ventures in March as an investor.

“We’re known for big bets and bold swings, and not being like a traditional venture investment firm,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of the firm and who Om feels is one of the Valley’s “super VCs,” in an interview discussing Rabois’ addition.

“We look for people who’ve earned the right to advise entrepreneurs. So we look for people who entereperneurs look out for and who say, ‘I want you on my board, I want you as a mentor,’” Khosla said. “And Keith, as I did my reference checks in the Valley, he was really at the top of every CEO’s list.”

Rabois’ next move has been a topic of interest among the technology community, considering his past expertise at companies like PayPay, LinkedIn, Slide, and others. His addition to Khosla was suggested by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD this past weekend, after The Wall Street Journal wrote that he might join Airbnb.

“I love Khosla Ventures’ vision and passion for assisting the next generation of entrepreneurs,” Rabois said in a statement. “The Khosla team encourages entrepreneurs to be bold. And the team’s legendary work ethic ensures that entrepreneurs will receive the best possible assistance.”

In January Rabois stepped down from Square, where he was COO, after allegations of sexual harassment by a fellow employee. Square strongly backed Rabois, and the executive wrote in a personal blog post that he had engaged in a relationship with that employee but that it had been mutual. Khosla Ventures did not comment on Rabois’ legal issues. Khosla serves on Square’s board, as Square is one of the firm’s portfolio companies.

“I couldn’t be more excited to see two of the top entrepreneurs I know, join forces at Khosla Ventures to support and coach the next generation of entrepreneurs the world over,” said Square founder Jack Dorsey in a released statement.

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Maybe now we’ll find out exactly how many people are really  using Google+.

On Tuesday, the company plans to announce the launch of the Google+ sign-in for apps and websites, letting developers use Google’s credentials to allow users to log in to their services, just as Facebook Connect and Twitter login have been doing for years. The move is a critical one for Google if it wants to remain competitive with its social peers, as it could allow Google+ to become one of the currencies for user data and apps.

Google is rolling out the program at first with a few partners, including The Fancy, Flixster, OpenTable, USA Today, and a few others. But it will be available for any developer who wants to build it into an app, whether that app is on Android, iOS, or desktop. The Google+ sign-in looks very much like Facebook Connect — users can choose which info to share publicly private versus public), and will see which of their Google data will be shared with the app. And obviously Google will encourage users to post their information to Google+, clearly a move to increase engagement on the company’s best attempt yet at cracking the social code

Google+ most recently announced that it had 135 million active users on the platform, although how they calculate that number is still in question, and it comes in behind Twitter’s 200 million monthly active users and Facebook’s more than one billion.

Facebook launched Facebook Connect back in 2008, which feels like eons in modern internet years, but has shown just how quickly the company has been able to put its services at the heart of a good number of apps across the web. (In fact, when the service went down recently, it showed consumers just how many sites they actually use with a Facebook login.) So it’s easy to see why Google+ wants to chip away at that lead, and why it could be an attractive option for users of Google servies and developers of apps wary about Facebook and Twitter.

Users will be able to share select data and activities from particular apps with certain people. For instance, if you wanted to share the music you were listening to with just your friends who were interested in music, you could make the data available for just a particular circle of people (the Google+ version of groups.)

However, there are always privacy and data concerns when it comes to spreading personal data connected with one company out to several more. In an interview, Seth Sternberg, the product management director for Google+, emphasized the company’s commitment to privacy and trust among users, and explained that they hoped to reflect that in the Google+ sign-in. The company is clearly hoping to draw a contrast to Facebook, which has had issues with privacy in the past.

The company also emphasized that it would never automatically share activity collected through Google+ sign-ins and then publish that data to a feed unless you specifically indicate that it should (in contrast to Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” which has seen criticism.)

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Spark Capital plans to announce Monday evening that it’s closed an oversubscribed $450 million fourth fund, countering earlier reports that put the number slightly lower, and bringing the firm’s total management close to $1.4 billion.

Spark Capital was founded in 2005 in Boston by Todd Dagres, Santo Politi and Paul Conway, and has invested in some well-known tech companies like Twitter, Tumblr, OMGPOP, and Warby Parker. An oversubscribed fund is one where the size of the fund is smaller than interest from potential investors.

General partner Bijan Sabet said the firm plans to continue its current investment strategy for the new fund, looking at mostly early stage deals but some larger growth stage deals as well. A recent report looking at venture capital trends overall for 2012 found that a good number of firms were moving more toward early stage investing.

“We like early-stage investing in companies that we can then be supportive of over time,” Sabet said. “And we’re going to stay with this strategy.”

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Since he hit his fundraising target and launched App.net back in August, there have been few more vocal advocates for paid social networks and products than entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell. You and your data are not the product we’re selling to advertisers, he promised his backers and audience, as part of an experiment to see if users will pay for quality and ownership.

But when Caldwell’s “audacious proposal” of a paid social network opens its doors on Monday at no cost to users who receive invites from existing members for a freemium membership, it will no doubt raise questions as to whether Caldwell’s notion has failed. Critics will surely point to low membership numbers as evidence that Caldwell simply had to open his doors to stay relevant, and might say that providing the service for free totally invalidates Caldwell’s central premise.

However, Caldwell argues that companies like Dropbox and Github have proven that you can grow a successful financial model based on a freemium membership tier, and adding those free users won’t ruin his central premise that users want pay for quality (users will still need to upgrade when they hit storage limits on free accounts). His primary reasoning behind the decision to introduce a free tier is that he’s built a decent-sized network of developers and apps so far, and now it’s time to introduce users to those apps and grow the scale of the entire thing.

“In terms of the grand experiment there was a huge chicken and egg problem. The question is, do you get users first or do you get apps first? So I think the apps ecosystem is really nice and really healthy,” he said. “What’s exciting is that that part of the experiment has worked nicely. So now, let’s start seeing what happens when we ramp up distribution.”

Central to the App.net premise was that developers of the most popular apps would then make money by taking a cut of the membership fees based on the popularity of their products. But the problem is that there aren’t enough paying members so far to support the developers in any meaningful way. As developer David Smith pointed out in a prescient blog post on App.net pricing, it’s not that realistic that an App.net developer would make money off the system — a fact that Caldwell said he understands at the moment.

“The current size that we are at is not enough to sustain the developers building for it. We are aware of that. But we are working on it, and we have been working on it,” he said. “I’m not sure a one hundred percent paid thing would ever get monstrously large. And the paid services that work tend to either do lots of advertising to promote it like Netflix or they have a free tier and they don’t do advertising.”

So on Monday, existing users of App.net will be able to send invitations to potential new users, who will be able to check it out without paying. (The full details of the changes and new plan are explained on the company’s blog.) And as for Caldwell? He’s excited to see how it’s received.

“I’m excited because, look, this is still a grand expeiremnt. We don’t know if the grand experiemtn will work. But what’s exciting is that in startups it’s all about making it to the next stage. You always have to look one step ahead. And to me this is one step ahead.”

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Want to call up your friends, but don’t have their cell number? Now as long as you both have the updated Facebook app it won’t matter — you’ll be able to talk to each other through Facebook. The social network had previously been testing a feature that would let users place calls to their friends through its Messenger app, and on Friday it updated the main iOS app to support calling functionality.

To access the calling feature, users can tap on the right-hand bar that supports messaging in the iOS app, select a person they want to call, and then check to see if that person has the “free call” feature listed under their profile (that can be found through the “i” information button next to their name).

Facebook’s support for placing calls over Wi-Fi is somewhat of a closed system since it’s limited to people who’ve downloaded the particular app, as my colleague Stacey Higgenbotham pointed out. But Facebook’s adoption of voice communication could have an impact on the current carriers if suddenly 1 billion users have a new way to talk to each other.

The company began testing the idea in Canada in January, and then added voice calling to Messenger in the United States a few weeks later.

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Facebook has uncovered an engineering bug in Page Insights that affected the reporting of analytics on those pages, potentially giving Page managers inaccurate information on how many users were viewing and interacting with their posts and how wide an audience Pages have gathered on the platform.  Engineers are working to fix the Page Insights bug by Monday.

The news is concerning for Facebook, which is making a serious push to get marketers and advertisers to invest in the Facebook platform as a place to reach fans and customers, which Facebook emphasized in its most recent earnings call. The company will be discussing some of the engineering challenges it faces at our upcoming Structure Data conference in New York in March.

Page Insights allow managers to check how many people are viewing or liking their Page and the content that’s associated with or published to that Page. Facebook wrote that Ad Insights (the reports and feedback users recieve after buying an ad or promotion to run on Facebook) were not affected by the same engineering bug that caused misreporting.

The company wrote on its engineering blog Friday that Page managers should continue checking their stats to look for changes, and by next week those numbers should be more accurate. Facebook emphasizes that the bug did not affect actual delivery of information, just the feedback that Page managers might have seen so far:

“As part of our ongoing investment in Page Insights, we recently completed a comprehensive engineering audit of the product. During this audit we uncovered bugs that impacted impression and reach reporting. We have confirmed that these issues impacted reporting only and not delivery. Ad Insights were not impacted by these bugs.

The actual impact of the bugs will vary from Page to Page and day to day based on a number of factors such as when and how frequently you post. To see the overall impact, if any, on your individual Pages, we recommend looking at your organic, paid and viral reach and impressions for your Page and for your posts over the next few weeks, starting on Monday, February 25. Because these bugs impacted our logging systems we won’t be able to backfill Page Insights with historical data.”

Facebook wrote that once the stats are corrected, Page managers could see their total reach stay the same or increase, paid reach increase, and organic reach increase or decrease. That is quite a variety of possible outcomes once the stats are fixed, and is likely to annoy those who are responsible for managing their organization’s Facebook presence.

Upcoming: paidContent Live, Apr. 17, 2013, New York, Save $100, Register by 3/22 More upcoming conferences.

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Snapchat brought video to its iOS app back in December, and now the ability to send video Snaps is hitting Android as well, opening up the new features to Android’s large number of users. The company just recently completed a $13.5 million Series A led by Benchmark, and released the original Android app in October 2012.

Snapchat allows users to send Snaps, which are photos or video clips, to other users who can then view the content for a few seconds before the content sort-of disappears from that person’s phone. The company noted in a blog post Thursday that building video for Android presented unique challenges due to the differences among different Android phones, and Snapchat will keep tweaking the product as it rolls out:

“Making Snapchat video for Android has been exciting, but has also had its fair share of challenges. The Android phones that many of us use were never designed with Snapchat in mind, and that can be tough when developing a hardware-based application. The video feeds and playback behavior can differ greatly – often with no guarantees or warnings.”

A jump to Android is especially interesting in this case, because Instagram, widely seen as the most successful in mobile photo-sharing apps, saw such a jump in usage (and a resulting interest from Facebook) after it went to Android in April 2012.

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Digital health is a hot right now, and when it comes to digital health startups, Rock Health is one of the first places to look. The company held a demo day Wednesday for its fourth class of startups, bringing its total portfolio of companies to 49.

This class, which includes 14 companies, has raised a total of $13.9 million outside of the funding from Rock Health, and all of the accelerator’s portfolio companies have raised $43 million, with an average of $900,000 per startup. Rock Health initially gave startups $20,000 in funding, but was then joined by Kleiner Perkins last August to increase funding per startup by another $100,000.

Among the companies that presented Wednesday at UCSF’s campus in San Francisco, here were some of my favorites that you might want to check out:

• Eligible helps doctors submit forms to insurance companies to make sure they’ll get paid for procedures before performing them and then submit paperwork afterward. Eligible charges a fee for use, and the platform integrates different programming languages and systems through the company’s product. Eligible has raised $1.5 million in funding so far.
• OpenPlacement works to improve the process of pairing up seniors and senior care providers in the Bay Area. The company helps consumers analyze the offerings and costs for each provider, and then pick providers based on their individual needs.
• Wellframe allows doctors to connect with their patients to provide out of office care through mobile apps after patients have been discharged from the hospital. It’s a Boston-based company that lets a doctor monitor patient care from a distance and check in when intervention is necessary. The company says that it uses “mobile technology and artificial intelligence to translate clinical protocols into personalized, adaptive to-do lists.”
• Wildflower Health works to improve the health of pregnant mothers and lower health care costs by flagging potential complications much earlier in pregnancy through real time updates and mobile apps. The company provides a mobile platform for pregnant women, letting them check out their progress toward delivery and alerting them to options existing from their health care providers.
• Zipongo targets consumer diets. The company has created a product called GroceryRx that works with major grocery chains to provide users with both recipes and tips for discounts and deals. The recipes are aimed at helping consumers eat more healthfully, targeting particular diet areas where they can change their habits. The company has raised $2 million in seed funding so far and is looking to raise more.

Other companies from the batch that GigaOM has previously covered (Rock Health announced this current class back in October), include Beam Technologies, which makes connected toothbrushes, Mango Health, which does gamified mobile health apps, Wello, the video platform that lets users work out from home via webcam, and LabDoor, which helps users understand what’s in their supplements and vitamins.

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Pinterest has raised a new funding round of $200 million led by Valiant Capital Management, putting the company’s valuation at $2.5 billion, AllThingsD first reported and Pinterest has now confirmed.

The company said it will use the new funding to develop new technology, continue hiring, expand its user base internationally, and make strategic investments. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital all participated in the round as well.

“Our focus is on helping millions of people discover things they love and get inspiration to go do those things in their life,” said Ben Silbermann, Pinterest co-founder and CEO announced in a statement provided by the company. “This investment gives us more resources to help realize that vision.”

It was reported earlier this month that the company was in funding talks that would raise its valuation above $2 billion. Most recently, Pinterest had raised $100 million in May 2012, putting the company’s valuation at $1.5 billion at the time. The May round was led by Japanese site Rakuten, in addition to Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital.

The company allows users to pin photos to virtual pinboards, collecting them in groups called boards around the web. Pinterest has exploded in recent success, especially with women, and has continued to drive increasing amounts of traffic on the web. CEO Ben Silberman spoke at GigaOM’s Roadmap conference in November, explaining that they didn’t set out to target any specific group in building the site:

“When we built Pinterest, we didn’t build it with a specific demographic in mind,” Silbermann said. “We built it for ourselves.”

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Looking to manage more than a few promoted tweets for your company? The arrival of the Twitter advertising API could spell changes for how you go about that. The company announced the API’s arrival on Wednesday, a product that will allow brands to manage tweets across multiple platforms and on a larger scale than was previously available. The company has initially launched with a select few partners, including Adobe, Hootsuite, Salesforce, SHIFT and TBG Digital.

Twitter explained the release and what it means for brands in a blog post:

“What this means is that as marketers, you’ll soon have the ability to work with our initial set of Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns — and integrate them into your existing cross-channel advertising strategies. Equally important, users will continue to see the most relevant Promoted Tweets from advertisers. With the Ads API, marketers now have more tools in their arsenal to help them deliver the right message, to the right audience, on the desktop and on mobile devices — all at scale.”

The companies will use Twitter’s API to let brands manage Twitter advertising on a larger scale through existing analytics products from companies like Adobe or Salesforce, letting the brands manage promoted tweets and target them at specific audiences. Some of the companies that Twitter is launching with have already been experimenting with the product, and unsurprisingly appear to be satisfied so far, like Adobe, which wrote a blog post pointing to improvements in advertising coming from the API integration:

“Our work has inte­grated Twitter’s Pro­moted Prod­uct Ads APIs into Adobe Media Opti­mizer, the only cross-channel dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing plat­form in the indus­try that manages, optimizes and accurately fore­casts the per­for­mance of ad cam­paigns across social, search and display.

By using gran­u­lar tar­get­ing, test­ing dif­fer­ent bid lev­els and seg­ment­ing cam­paigns by regions, Media Opti­mizer was able to increase our fol­lower base by 63%. At the same time, we saw the total Cost Per Fol­low (CPF) decrease by close to 60%, or approx­i­mately $2.00. Two key com­po­nents of our CPF improve­ment were access­ing less expen­sive impres­sions as well as achiev­ing bet­ter con­ver­sion rates from those impressions.”

Twitter has previously let companies manage promoted Tweets, but giving them the ability to target specific audiences and locations makes sense as Twitter makes it easier to advertise on its platform generating revenue as it aims for an expected IPO later this year or next year.

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Square plans to sell a “Business in a Box” package that includes two Square Readers, an iPad stand, a cash drawer, and an optional receipt printer, it announced Wednesday. The items will all work together to allow business owners to accept credit card purchases, furthering the company’s mission of simplifying payments.

“Square Register serves as the full point-of-sale system for businesses to accept payments, track sales, and share item and location information,” the company wrote in the press release. “Historically, business owners were forced to piece together multiple hardware components from various manufacturers, manage complicated contracts and pricing structures, and pay for expensive software licensing and service plans. Now, they can be up and running with Square Register in minutes.”

The paperless package that includes just the Square Readers, iPad stand and cash drawer starts at $299, and the package that includes the receipt printer starts at $599. Full purchasing information is available on the company’s website.

Square has grown substantially as one of the companies attempting to bring credit card and mobile payments to small businesses, and in 2012 it grew its merchant base from 1 million to 3 million and its annualized processing rate — the total value of transactions processed through Square — from $2 billion to now $10 billion. It also signed a deal with Starbucks that will integrate Square payments into the coffee stores across the country.

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Twitter announced a variety of improvements for the Tweetdeck apps for web and Chrome on Tuesday, adding new options for users to filter the content appearing in Tweetdeck columns. The news demonstrates that Twitter is still interested in supporting updates and changes to Tweetdeck, rather than shutting it down or discouraging growth as it’s done with many other third-party Twitter clients.

Twitter confirmed its acquisition of Tweetdeck in May 2011, but it was unclear if the company would continue to update Tweetdeck or kill it altogether, as my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote at the time of the deal. Twitter’s relationship with third-party client developers has been become fairly fraught, as those clients attempt to replicate the Twitter experience outside of the web, which has only gained importance as Twitter has worked to make money on the web experience through advertising. This past summer, Twitter issued a warning to developers that third-party clients would be forced to adhere to a new system of rules for using tweets that could limit their growth.

Tweetdeck users of both the Chrome and web apps will now have more options to change the content they view and filters they apply. A Tweetdeck blog post explained the updates:

“Today we’re releasing a powerful set of column filters for the TweetDeck web and Chrome apps. These allow you to show or exclude specific words and phrases from a TweetDeck column –– especially useful when you want to focus on a particular element of a column. You can also choose to view only Tweets that contain media (images and/or video). This turns any of your existing columns into a media column, making it very easy to scan content and find what you’re looking for.”

The company notes in the blog post that it’s introduced a variety of updates to Tweetdeck recently, including real-time updating of tweets in columns, keyboard shortcuts and search improvements, among others. In October 2012, Tweetdeck released visual updates to its product, including updated colors and fonts for a variety of platforms including web, Chrome, Mac and Windows.

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It’s a scene that often plays out in tech, but still causes a firestorm every time: A tiny, beloved, early-adopter startup gets some traction and funding, and suddenly it has to grow up and add more users to become a real business and please its investors. But when it makes those moves to grow, it pisses off the early adopters, and the startup is stuck in a no-win situation.

The issue came up Wednesday evening when engineer and former professor Scott Hanselman wrote a post titled, “I’d like to use the web my way, thank you very much Quora.” The post pointed out that the company has started redirecting mobile users who end up on Quora webpages to download the company’s mobile app before reading answers.

And indeed, it’s an incredibly annoying tactic. Search for any topic (like, “best Star Wars movie“) and include “Quora” in the query, and try to read the resulting page on your mobile device. You can’t. The page tells you to download the app to read further, and will only let you see the first answer until you do so. On desktop, you’re asked to create an account and log in before reading. Not such a great user experience.

And then Y Combinator founder and startup legend Paul Graham weighed in on Hacker News, writing that Quora co-founder and ex-Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo is trying too hard to gain new users the way he learned at Facebook, not understanding that Quora users are a different breed. He argued against the company’s policy of making users create accounts to read answers and comment on the site:

It may be a mistake to alienate the sort of people Quora has been alienating by doing this, even if they end up numerically ahead in the short term. I’m one of them. Quora has now spent several years training me to be bummed out every time I click on a link to their site.

Quora hasn’t responded with any comment yet as to how long the “download the app” screen has been in place, or why they require users to make accounts. But it’s not too hard to see why they’re doing this: the company has raised a lot of funding ($50 million just this past summer), and it needs to see growth. While it saw early success from its high quality questions and answers on the site, it can’t become a profitable business with just a handful of readers.

A similar thing happened last summer with Twitter and its developers over API restrictions. It happened in December with Instagram and its terms of service debacle after joining up with Facebook. And now, Quora is in the limelight.

“We want to get to be 100 times bigger than we are today,” D’Angelo told Om in a January interview. So how does the company get there?

Quora has tried a lot of different tactics in its quest for growth in the past year: adding a standalone blogging platform, rewarding users who write the best and most plentiful answers, letting people embed quotes across the web, and adding an Android app.

So getting people to download the company’s app and requiring account? Not too surprising. But at some point, Quora needs to make sure that it strikes the best balance possible between demanding investors and loyal users.

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Between downloading the archive of all your tweets ever and entering search queries to bring up more-than-a-few-days-old tweets, it would seem like the world, or the historical twittersphere at least, is your oyster. But in reality? It’s a little more complicated, and a little less complete than that.

Twitter announced last week that historical tweets would now be included in search archives, whereas in the past only tweets from the last few days would appear in results. Twitter has been unfolding its search ambitions over the past year, figuring out how to surface relevant information in a search product that for a long time, hasn’t been all that relevant.

“Now we’re able to look back at old tweets and think about how they should look and how people can relive past moments on Twitter,” said Sam Luckenbill, a senior engineering manager in charge of search at Twitter. “So you can find specific events in the past that weren’t previously available.”

Most of the company’s opportunities in search lie with real-time search, since companies like Oreo want to take advantage of current trends, like the Super Bowl, rather than old news, and Twitter’s clearly betting on the service’s value as a second screen to television with the Bluefin acquisition. But a more complete, historical search provides serious opportunities for the company around monetization (marketers can purchase promoted tweets for specific search terms) and intent (knowing that someone is looking certain information is more valuable than passively viewing something, even if you obviously intended to follow that brand or person.)

But even as the company is now including historical tweets in search results, it’s not all tweets ever that you can uncover — it’s really only a small percentage. The company has worked to develop an algorithm that will figure out which are the most interesting tweets that people would want to revisit, and then ranks those higher than potentially less interesting tweets.

While the company naturally wouldn’t disclose exactly how the algorithm was put together, they said Twitter is attempting to figure out both the most relevant tweets for a specific person and search term (so likely based on your interest and friend graph) and the most engaging tweets overall (which could be reasonably understood as those with lots of retweets, replies, etc.)

“You’ll see tweets from people you care about about and topics that you care about even if the word you chose was a bit vague,” Luckenbill said.

And the filtering doesn’t just apply to tweets that come up in your specific search results — it goes for the tweets Twitter chooses to make available to all searchers as well.

“We’ve started with a small percentage of tweets, looking at the ones that have been engaged with most. And then we plan to steadily increase the size of the index over time to capture more and more,” Luckenbill said. “We’re going to make more and more tweets available that are older, but it’s not necessarily that we want all the tweets ever to be in the index. Because we don’t want to put tweets that get no engagement ever in the index.”

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Snapchat, the hot startup that allows you to send and receive photos or videos that sort-of-maybe disappear afterward, has raised a $13.5 million Series A funding round led by Benchmark Capital’s Mitch Lasky, putting the company’s valuation at $60 million to $70 million. The company’s growth hasn’t exactly been controversy-free, but has demonstrated the intense interest right now surrounding messaging apps that transcend the basic SMS.

The funding news was first reported by The New York Times and TechCrunch and was confirmed to us by CEO Evan Spiegel on Friday evening. Om Malik reported in December that Snapchat was getting funded by Benchmark, the firm that was also one of the early backers of Instagram.

“People are looking to communicate in a real way,” Lasky told the New York Times on decision to invest.

The Times reported that Snapchat is now seeing 60 million photos or videos sent per day. Snapchat added video to its product in December, when it was seeing 50 million photos sent per day. Facebook has since rolled out Poke, its obvious competitor to the popular startup in December, but it’s unclear that Poke has really challenged Snapchat’s dominance in the disappearing content realm.

Update: On Saturday, Lasky published a blog post explaining that he’s joined the board of Snapchat and believes the company has real staying power among mobile users:

“We believe that Snapchat can become one of the most important mobile companies in the world, and Snapchat’s initial momentum — 60 million shared “snaps” per day, over 5 billion sent through the service to date — supports that belief. Snapchat’s ramp reminded us of another mobile app Benchmark had the good fortune to back at an early stage: Instagram.”

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Getting local businesses on board with any kind of digital marketing or payment service can be a tough sales nut to crack. But how many people really want to call up a local hairdresser or nail salon to book an appointment if an online booking option existed? In our increasingly phone-averse society, online is usually far more popular.

Which is why one entrepreneur has launched MyTime, a site that lets small businesses create profiles and sync their bookings calendars to allow customers to discover their sites and book appointments through the website, escehwing the potential pitfalls of local deal sites like Groupon.

Entrepreneur Ethan Anderson, who was previously a product manger with Google and then sold his last startup Redbeacon to Home Depot in January 2012, started working on MyTime  about a year ago and just launched the site this week. MyTime has about $3 million in funding from GRP Partners’ Mark Suster, 500 Startups, Brian Lee, Jason Calacanis, David Tisch, and others.

The site, which is starting out with businesses in L.A. but looking to expand, allows businesses to create a page for their company, sync up with Yelp reviews and ratings, sync appointment calendars, and set deals for particular slots to entice customers to less popular times. The service is free to join, but companies that let MyTime promote their offers through dynamic pricing, Google AdWords, Twitter ads, and other solutions give up 40 percent of revenue from bookings that come through the promotions (excluding existing customers). Anderson said about half the businesses so far have taken advantage of the marketing option.

The site exists right now as primarily a desktop website that’s optimized for mobile, but Anderson said developing native apps is up next. He points out that while local review and ratings sites are common (think Yelp, Foursquare, etc.), the actual booking component is well widespread.

“Our vision for the bsuinesses is that you connect your calendar once and then everything is taken care of. We bring your customers back, and we allow you to later connect with your consumers. And for the customer, it’s the ultimate convenience,” he said. “I feel like no one else has brought together the calendar and the pricing and the actual e-commerce experience. “

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Hunter Walk, formerly of Google and Satya Patel, formerly of Twitter, are in the process of fundraising for their new VC firm to be called Homebrew, Fortune’s Dan Primack reported Wednesday. Walk wrote in a blog post Wednesday that he has left Google for “new adventures,” although he did not specify what those were.

Fortune has reported that the two are raising $25 million for their fund, which will look to back companies that “enable the people-based economy.” It supposedly would include less than a dozen companies, with half managed as an incubator might and half given seed funding. That’s not a huge fund, or certainly not in comparison to some more established funds, like Greylock’s $1 billion  or Andreessen Horowitz’s $1.5 billion, but the two have experience in investing and product experience in the Valley, and it’s certainly larger than blogger Ben Parr’s #DominateFund, which was supposedly in the single digits.

Walk was most recently head of product management at YouTube with Google, and is an active angel investor. He was previously a founder with Linden Labs. Patel left Twitter in June 2012 after serving as the company’s VP of product. He was previously a partner with Battery Ventures and before that a product manager at Google working on AdSense.

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In the accelerator’s typically light-hearted and casual style, 500 Startups launched another crop of companies on Wednesday, welcoming its fifth batch of startups down in Mountain View along with press and investors.

Dave McClure’s startup program has been rocking along for three years now, and is targeted to hit its namesake investment number some time this year. The group’s investment philosophy is well-documented, and involves making a larger number of bets on a variety of companies, particularly international ones, in hopes of finding some winners. Wednesday’s demo day didn’t rival the zany scope of Y Combinator demo days, but 500 Startups is building a different brand than its older rival. The newest 500 Startups companies have an international bent and clearly focus on practical things like traction and revenue — they all included slides on growth and profits in addition to Top 40 music intros.

30 startups presented at Wednesday’s accelerator demo, with a good number of companies focusing on 500 Startups’ core investment interests (parenting, marketing and analytics, and e-commerce, to name a few). Here were my five favorites from the day:

Waygo

Waygo is a pretty cool-looking app built for international travelers. It allows a user to hover their phone over foreign text and get instant translations, almost like scanning a barcode or QR code. The app works in real time, preventing any kind of delay in translation, and most importantly has offline capabilities so users don’t rack up roaming charges. The company said the average active user in China uses the app to perform translations up to 140 times per week. The company has a tiered pricing model, allowing people who want more translations per week to up their subscriptions.

Babylist

When software developer Natalie Gordon was pregnant, she was dismayed to discover that baby registries, like wedding registries, only allowed a consumer to pick wish lists on individual company sites and didn’t allow new parents to list items that were outside of traditional e-commerce (dog-walking, lasagna-baking, etc.) So while pregnant, she coded the beginnings of Babylist, a company that now allows new parents to create their own baby registries. The site, which works like Pinterest and allows parents to create wish boards (taking 4 percent of transactions on average), has more than 11,000 sign-ups so far, and saw $2.4 million in gifts purchased through the site this past year.

Curious Hat

Curious Hat is one of several companies targeting the market of high-tech parents and kids to build educational content for tablets and iPhones that the two can enjoy. Co-founders CEO Luca Prasso and CTO Erwan Maigret both worked at Dreamworks on films including Shrek and Madagascar. “His generation plays, learns, and creates content in new ways,” Prasso said of his young son’s generation. “We want to further engage curious minds.” The company builds iPhone and iPad apps that allow users to send photos and games to their children, post to Facebook, and choose when and where to engage kids in the app. They have a cool feature called “eye paint” that allows children to take photos of real life things and then “paint” using those captured colors or textures. The Curious Hat founders join other tech people who went from large entertainment companies to kids-oriented startups, like Fingerprint’s Nancy MacIntyre or Toy Talk’s Oren Jacob (see disclosure).

CompStak

CompStak is on online marketplace for commercial real estate, aggregating difficult to find information about real estate prices and availabilities in major cities including New York and San Francisco. “Our data is used by institutional owners to compare properties, hedge funds to make investments, and provides meaningful data for brokers, investors, appraisers, asset managers, economists and more,” as the company explains on its website. The company reports that it has all comps, or records of completed lease transactions, from New York over the past year and 50 percent of comps from the past 10 years. The company has free and premium subscription levels.

SupplyHog

Targeting an unusual market for Silicon Valley startups but one that’s actually quite large, SupplyHog works with contractors to let them purchase building supplies online, price out different options, and have them shipped. “It’s tough to find a technology team that’s passionate about building supplies,” said CEO and co-founder Nathan Derrick (a veteran of the construction industry from Chattanooga), but his company has built an interface that allows contractors to find and purchase supplies, working to create a more reliable supply system.

Disclosure: Toy Talk is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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