Startup Bling Nation has landed a pretty major deal with PayPal, we’ve learned. Bling Nation’s payment systems addresses physical goods in merchant stores and will now allow consumers to use their payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account

Energy efficiency tracking company OPOWER added Hadi Partovi to its Technology Advisory Board and will open new offices in San Francisco next month. The Arlington, VA based company’s 10,000 square foot office in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood will have room for between 75 and 100 employees, a large part of which will be engineers. “We signed a two-year sublease because we hope to grow out of that space,” says CEO Daniel Yates.

Facebook is great for keeping up with friends. And of course brands are using it as marketing tool by creating Fan pages.

After a brief hiatus, the founder of Etsy Rob Kalin reclaimed the CEO title in January of this year. During a brief interview at Etsy’s Brooklyn headquarters, I asked Kalin, “Why do you think you deserve to be back as CEO?…Is  there anything really unique about your vision that will take Etsy to the next stage?” Kalin responded: “Sure, so why do I deserve to be CEO is something that you gotta earn every day, so I definitely don’t take that title for granted.

You often hear about Amazon Web Services having some downtime issues , but it’s rare to see Amazon.com itself have major issues. In fact, I can’t ever remember it happening the past couple of years .

Foursquare , the geo-mobile startup everybody tried to invest in or buy, now has officially closed its Series B funding round. The “wire transfer heard ’round the world,” as board member Bryce Roberts puts it , was for $20 million, giving the company a $95 million pre-money valuation

Big news from Foursquare today.

Unsurprisingly, Salesforce is seeing rapid adoption of its social collaboration platform Chatter among its existing customers after launching to the public last week. In its first week of general availability, Chatter has been integrated by 10,000 of Salesforce’s 77,300 existing customers, or 13 percent of Salesforce’s customer base

Google Social Search is a good idea . You take regular Google search results and intertwine them with related elements that your contacts have shared on various social networks.

Only a few months after the company raised $1 million in funding, Kontagent , an fbFund winner and social analytics platform, has raised $4.5 million in new funding.