NYC-based startup Dispatch , which just graduated from the latest batch of TechStars NYC, has raised a $965,000 seed funding round.

The initial run of of Nest’s artificial intelligence thermostats will be shipped out to pre-orderers tomorrow, said Nest founder and CEO Tony Fadell at GigaOm’s RoadMap conference today. Previously the company had said the devices wouldn’t ship until the end of November

Valve CEO Gabe Newell has contacted all users of the Steam game distribution platform to let them know that the company has suffered a security breach. The hack was originally thought to be limited to the official Steam forums, but further investigation has revealed that the hackers had access to a database containing “user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information.” That said, they says that they have no evidence that any personally identifiable information was actually taken, and have detected no fraudulent credit card information. Users of the service are advised to change their passwords and be on the watch for suspicious account activity

I couldn’t resist it. When I bumped into Highland Capital General Partner Peter Bell at Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored event last week, I had to slip in a question about the equality of opportunity in Silicon Valley. Bell, who is based in Menlo Park, didn’t shy away from this tricky issue.

Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey took the stage at the GigaOm Roadmap conference to talk about his experience being well, basically a jack of all trades (rimshot). Dorsey revealed that both his own and his family’s experiences with entrepreneurship were inspiration for his two current startups — both of which remove friction from human communication and industry, a process Dorsey described as “getting rid of the ‘conceptual debris’.” Dorsey has long identified with the struggles of entrepreneurs; He brought up the example of his mother, who ran a small coffee shop in St. Louis, “Starbucks came and it didn’t go so well,” he said.

Coming up with new gestures that can be performed with one, two, or three fingers is a surprisingly difficult job. Many are proposed; few actually make it into daily use. Here’s one from Apple entitled “hold and swipe,” in a recent-ish patent application.

Brandstack. Pitched as some sort of haven for designers, it was a marketplace in which creative types could sell off their logo concepts as they came to mind, rather than on “spec work” conjured up by a client

We spoke to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky after his talk onstage at the GigaOM Roadmap conference — during the talk Chesky spoke about many possible avenues for the company’s expansion but didn’t commit himself to any one path. Instead Chesky held that what users want is one of the most important factors in deciding where the company focused their efforts.

Back in September we broke the news that Google was in talks to acquire Katango , a small Kleiner Perkins-backed startup that launched this past summer. Today, they’ve made it official: Katango just announced that it’s been acquired by Google, and that it’ll be joining the Google+ team

Facebook has reached an agreement with the FTC to make all future changes to privacy settings opt-in, presumably including new features with their own privacy controls. The Wall Street Journal wrote that the social network was nearing a settlement on the issue and now its Marketplace editor Dennis K