On Thanksgiving, Pinterest’s co-founder Ben Silbermann sent an email to his entire user base saying thanks. It was fitting, as Pinterest was born two years ago on Thanksgiving day 2009.  Ben had been working on a website with a few friends, and his girlfriend came up with the name while they were watching TV.

Seeking a way to reduce friction while exchanging contact information, David Lieb and his two co-founders launched Bump – a service that allows users to swap everything from calendar events to music samples by simply tapping their smartphones together. In part II of his Founder Stories interview with host Chris Dixon , Lieb tells Dixon the big picture plan. “There is a lot of time spent figuring out how I interface with this [smartphone] to go access the virtual world, but nobody has really spent a lot of time thinking … how do I want to interact with other people and things in the real world, and that is the problem that we want to solve, we want to build that new UI layer for the real world.” Prior to making this point, Lieb and Dixon discuss Bump’s decision to allow companies like PayPal ( and hundreds of others ) to embed its code into their apps

Editor’s note : Scott Silverman is the co-founder and VP of Marketing for Ifeelgoods, Inc. , a digital goods incentive platform. Prior to Ifeelgoods, Silverman spent more than 10 years as Executive Director of Shop.org and is one of the creators of Cyber Monday.

Mobile is growing as a medium for ecommerce, with users sourcing deals from their phones and tablets before visiting physical stores according to a new study by Usablenet , The company which powers mobile sites for 100 top U.S.

The  Inside Network Job Board  is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week’s highlights from the  Inside Network Job Board , including positions at BLiNQ Media ,  Storm8 ,  Acquinity Interactive , Natural Motion Games ,  Electronic Arts ,  ngmoco:) ,  Kidlandia ,  King.com  and  6 Waves/Lolapps . Media Manager User Relations Associate Recruiter User Acquisition Manager Online Media Buyer Online Marketing Manager Senior Online Web Product Manager Customer Acquisition Manager Lead Programmer Design Lead / Manager Technical Director, Mobile Senior Software Engineer Flash Developer Product Performance Manager, Skillgames – King.com Senior Systems Developer, Skillgames – King.com Front end Developer, Skillgames – King.com Principal Data Analyst UI/UX Designer for 2nd Largest Social Gaming Company Product Manager for Popular Social Gaming Company Support Engineer – Browser and Social Games Listings on the  Inside Network Job Board  are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites.

Over the last month, Charles Stross memorably called the online influence measurer Klout “ the internet equivalent of herpes ,” Rohn Miller of Social Media Today exhorted people to “ Delete your Klout profile now ,” John Scalzi lambasted it as “ sad, and possibly evil ,” the New York Times wrote about parents’ outrage when they discovered Klout was autogenerating accounts for minors,  Flout caustically mocked them with the insincerest form of flattery, and perhaps most damning of all–it’s one thing to be controversial, another and far worse to be irrelevant–our own Alexia Tsotsis convincingly argued that “ Nobody Gives A Damn About Your Klout Score .” Why all the hate?

Editor’s note : TechCrunch contributor  Semil Shah  is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. Shah is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter  @semil We’ve heard endlessly how “social” will eventually disrupt and transform old, stodgy industries, perhaps even reinvent them for the better

Thanksgiving brought record online retail sales for the holiday, with spending up 39.3 percent over Thanksgiving 2010. And today, IBM Coremetrics data shows a 24.3 percent growth in online sales on Black Friday compared to the same period last year.

Editor’s Note: Omar Koudsi is a co-founder and CEO of Amman, Jordan-based Jeeran , the largest review site in the Middle East and North Africa. You can follow him on twitter here @omarfk On my way to attending an Endeavor Summit this summer, I had the following conversation with a customs officer upon arriving in the U.S.: Immigration officer: What do you do for a living? Me: I work at a startup, and I’m here to meet people from my industry.

Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: ScottEVest Introduces The Puffer Jacket 2011 Holiday Gift Guide: Laptops Are A Geek’s Best Friend LuvBook S: Japan Gets Super-Cute “Hello Kitty” Laptop The Kindle Fire, What Is It Good For? They’re Rioting Over BlackBerrys In Indonesia (And Other Black Friday Insanity That’ll Make You Fear For The Future)