I see it right there, staring me in the face. It’s like a laser beam burning a hole in my retinas. I can’t help but click.

Over the past year, there’s been an apparent trend taking place of Japanese gaming companies acquiring U.S. social game developers.

Facebook is still growing towards 700 million users, having reached 687 million monthly actives by the start of June, according to our Inside Facebook Gold data service. Most of the new users continue to come from countries that are relatively late in adopting Facebook, as has been the trend for the past year. But overall growth has been lower than normal for the second month straight, which is unusual

Usually Apple launches are all about new product, and the WWDC keynote by Steve Jobs and crew was no exception. IOS 5, OS/X Lion, and iCloud were the tech version of a triple play, mainlining the iPad into the Mac and virtualizing the two product lines via the Cloud

So you sold Tell Me,and then presumably had lots of options for as to what to do next? A lot of people will go off on BBCs or angel investors

Editor’s note : We often hear the complaint that “TechCrunch doesn’t cover startups anymore.” Yet we feel like we are covering them more than ever.

Storing heat may be the last thing you think of when turning on an air conditioning unit, but one model takes advantage of the sweltering weather to heat water while cooling the air. The aptly named Air Conditioner Water Heater , or ACWH, from Hotspot Energy has a condenser unit that sits outside of the building, collecting heat that the air conditioner compresses and expels from inside.

The tale of graFighters is one of a Kickstarter project that went wrong and then went oh so right. Last fall founders Eric Cleckner and Dave Chenell tried to raise $20K on Kickstarter for the “first online fighting game for your sketches,” but barely raised $3K.