Graphs displaying the prevalence of World Cup-related keywords in status updates have been posted by Facebook’s own Page to a photo album called Heartbeat of the World Cup . While the charts are entertaining, the lack of a Y-axis detailing the actual volume of status messages featuring a keyword limits interpretation of the data

Piryx , a white-label fundraising platform that helps automate online political contributions is reporting record amounts of money raised in this quarter for political candidates. Piryx says that money raised will exceed $4 billion this political cycle Piryx attributes the surge in online contributions to the strength of Barack Obama’s online campaign that first showed the power of online fundraising in 2008

Aviary , the startup that makes a suite of impressive web-based creative applications, including editors for images, vector graphics, and audio recordings, is targeting a new class of customers: school teachers and their students. Today the company is launching Aviary Education , a product that allows educators to encourage creativity on Aviary in a safer (and easier to manage) environment. Cofounder Michael Galpert says that Aviary has been popular at schools for quite a while

Foursquare is “ growing like a weed ,” co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us. So fast, in fact, that they’ve had to expand their office space

It seems like everyone is up in arms about the iPhone 4 antenna issue.

Screen yellowing.

Facebook recently updated its official company Statistics page with some new data points about how people are using the service.

WordPress developer Automattic has acquired Plinky from Thing Labs, the creators of social media application Brizzly. Plinky essentially aims to inspire content creators. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Sal Dhanani, one of the co-founders of mobile GPS navigation company TeleNav , wants to “bring GPS navigation to the masses through mobile phones.” His company has been pursuing that dream since 1999 when TeleNav was founded. Today, TeleNav is bundled into millions of Sprint phones, and is also available through AT&T (including as an iPhone app ) and other carriers. The company just went public in May, it has 900 employees, and its revenues last quarter were $45 million (with healthy net profits of $12.5 million)

Better batteries may be on the way as lithium-ion battery producer Boston-Power ramps up its manufacturing and R&D with a $60M Series E round from Foundation Asset Management and Oak Investment Partners.  Boston-Power produces Sonata , better known as Hewlett-Packard’s Long Life Battery , as well as Swing , which is used to power electric vehicles including the upcoming ZE Saab 9-3 .