Perhaps you’ve heard: social games maker Playdom was acquired by Disney a few days ago for a deal potentially worth north of $750 million . Playdom CEO John Pleasants took the stage today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, to talk a bit about the deal and the future. Pleasants says that he’s not exactly sure what his title at Disney will be yet, but he thinks he’ll be the General Manager of Playdom

Smart window startup Soladigm announced today its plans to build a factory in Olive Branch, Mississippi. The Khosla Ventures and Sigma Partners backed company makes dynamic glass windows that can be tinted on demand to block excess light and heat. Founded in 2007, Soladigm had been operating in “stealth mode.” The company employs about 50 people in its Milpitas, California headquarters, and plans to hire about 300 employees over the next few years for the Mississippi plant.

Criticising Valleywag in 2010 is something of a pointless exercise, like offering diplomatic counsel to the Ottoman Empire ten years after the Treaty of Lausanne .

Online monetization platform gWallet , which offers social gaming developers a variety of ways to monetize their apps and boost engagement, is looking to put its money where its mouth is: the company is launching a $20,000 cash guarantee to any social gaming publishers that don’t generate more revenue when they switch from their current monetization platform to gWallet. To participate, publishers are being asked to implement a simultaneous, head-to-head test over the span of thirty days (you can sign up starting today, with the 30 day window beginning August 1). At the end of that time period, if your revenues from gWallet aren’t higher than they are on you original implementation, then the service will pay out the guarantee

Today at TechCrunch’s CrunchUp conference, PlacePop officially launched its loyalty card iPhone app and social service. Instead of businesses offering deals to customers checking in to a centralized location-based service, users check-in directly to a business’ custom PlacePop loyalty card, digitally punching the card, earning rewards, and sharing their actions

Tomorrow night, July 31, Twitter has announced they are having some planned downtime. Beginning at 11 PM PT, Twitter will likely be down on and off for up to 5 hours, Twitter warns.

It’s takes a certain type of person to get excited about a work productivity tool. Mark Nielsen and Patrick Carmitchel , unsatisfied with 37Signals ‘ Basecamp, have decided to disrupt the productivity software industry (see their incredibly twee video above). Says Nielsen “We decided we’d rather not see the light of day for awhile than have to live with knowing that with just a little bit of creative, a pinch of logic and a dash of sexy, we could revive the productivity software world with a tool that would even make Apple cry.” Previously unknown to the blogosphere, Nielsen and Carmitchel emailed us at 2am last night and emphasized that they were out for 37Signals’ blood (we’ll get more into why we actually listened in a later post)

Today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, CA, James Lamberti, VP of Global Research and Marketing for InMobi , sat down with our Michael Arrington to tell us a bit about mobile advertising. InMobi is the largest

Today during our Social Currency CrunchUp , Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and John Hanke, a

Facebook’s in-house business incubator and mini financier, fbFund, appears to be mothballed. After two years of funding companies building on Facebook’s developer platform, the program’s success has been dwarfed by the massive new social gaming market, and by the growing ecosystem of marketing service companies around its performance advertising and Page products. After noticing that the company has been completely quiet about fbFund plans so far this year, we asked it about its plans.