Greetings from Japan. I’m here looking at some gadgets and would love to see some of our Tokyo readers

Facebook has been busy meeting with large developers on its platform, trying to get them to sign deals to exclusively use its virtual currency, Credits, in their applications. So far, it has CrowdStar and LOLapps using Credits exclusively as the direct payment method, with rivals like Zynga participating but also using alternatives. Now, there’s another big developer joining the exclusive list: RockYou

It’s only been a couple of weeks since Rdio launched in the US and I started using it, and I’m already pretty sure I’ll be hooked for a long, long time – and I’ve tested a bunch of online music buying, sharing and streaming services in the past few years so that’s saying something. Check out Erick’s review if you’re interested in learning more about the service. Anyway, if you’re a music fan and a proud owner of an Android-powered smartphone, today’s a good day

Ford ‘s 2011 Focus Electric will run on Compact Power Inc.’s lithium-ion battery, the company announced today. The batteries will initially be made in South Korea at CPI’s parent company, LG Chem, with plans to start manufacturing at a new $300 million site in Holland, Mich.

Admit it, 99% of your Twitter searches are for vanity purposes. You do it, I do it, we all do it. And such a search revealed a potentially very useful and powerful new feature today.

Scytl , the Internet voting company, has closed a $9.2 million round of funding led by European VC firm Balderton Capital , and supported by Nauta Capital , a previous investor.

Given the amount of coverage about the iPhone 4 antenna issue, you’d think it was the first sign of the apocalypse or something. It’s one thing for tech blogs to talk ourselves in circles about an issue, it’s another when the mainstream media starts leaning on the story in a major way

Long before he was part of the powerful investing duo behind venture fund Andreessen Horowitz , Ben Horowitz was a co-founder and CEO of Opsware (previously known as Loudcloud) a pioneer for cloud computing companies (Opsware was eventually sold to HP in 2007 for $1.6 billion). He’s considered an expert in the cloud so his first investment in a cloud computing startup is something to pay attention to.

Late last week, Facebook said that its profile box deprecation process, which it originally announced a few months ago, would begin this week. According to that post, application profile boxes would no longer be able to be added to user profile pages starting this week, and starting in “early August,” application boxes would be booted from the profile page altogether

As one of the founders of the original Napster and CloudMark (an anti-spam service), Jordan Ritter , has always been fascinated by the idea of combining the power of the cloud and the potential of human capital. Last April, he met up with Alex Edelstein , a former CloudMark executive, to hammer out their next business plan. Over a round of beers, the idea for CloundCrowd was born