Glassdoor has taken a look at how Google and Facebook compare in the eyes of employees and job candidates, and has extracted a number of interesting data points related to CEO approval, benefits, perks and more. For background, Glassdoor is a jobs and career community where employees can anonymously rate companies and CEOs. First, Glassdoor says that so far in 2012, Google has overtaken Facebook in employee satisfaction company ratings

Y Combinator-backed Leftronic is launching a new service allowing companies to create custom dashboards that visualize all of your company’s important data. With Leftronic, you can pull data from a number of services, including Google Analytics, Twitter, Chartbeat, Mixpanel, and Zendesk, and then customize the layout with a drag-and-drop interface. These dashboards are designed for large screens, so companies can set up a display that’s visible to everyone in the office — that way, everyone knows when traffic spikes, or when the website goes down, or whatever

Facebook tells us it purchased patents from IBM, corroborating a report from Bloomberg citing anonymous sources. Facebook did not provide details about the purchase, but according to Bloomberg, the company acquired 750 software and networking patents for an undisclosed sum

Amazon’s Kindle team seems have had their hands full these past few days — a Retina Display-friendly update was just pushed to the iOS App Store last week, and now the Android version is getting a nice little bump too. One of the biggest additions to this build is support for Amazon’s relatively new KF8 ebook file format.

The Crowdfund Act , a bill to reduce restrictions on regular people investing in privately held companies, passed through the United States Senate today with flying colors in a 73-26 vote, having passed through the House of Representatives this past fall. But legislative matters are by definition quite complex (which is, of course, ostensibly why we elect people to deal with them on a full-time basis.) So we talked to Chance Barnett, the founder and CEO of Crowdfunder.com , to get an idea of what this really means for startups, potential investors, and the technology community at large.

The Guardian reached a  new record  of unique visitors and page impressions for  Guardian.co.uk  in February, and the news organization attributes 30 percent of referral traffic to Facebook.

CrowdFlower , a startup that helps businesses manage crowdsourced labor, has named a new CEO — co-founder Lukas Biewald. The company, formerly known as Dolores Labs, launched at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2009

Those of you dutifully carrying around your HTC Vivids have probably already heard AT&T has officially started pushing out the handset’s Ice Cream Sandwich update. For all you other AT&T customers, fear not — the nation’s second largest wireless carrier has also announced which of their other Android handsets will be getting the Ice Cream Sandwich treatment

What if you won prizes for getting Likes on Instagram, listening to songs on Pandora, or making Highlight connections around town? Today Kiip expands its real-world rewards platform to allow giveaways in any type of app, not just games. Since Kiip-client brands pay developers to promote through them, today’s launch will give lots of devs a new way to monetize without traditional display ads. In an exclusive launch with TechCrunch, Kiip is kicking off its utility app rewards by helping Pepsi surprise users of fitness apps including MapMyRUN, Nexercise, LoloFit and Gym-Pact with free Propel Zero Enhanced Water. Soon Kiip will formally support other app verticals, but with its new  self-serve platform  developers of all sorts can start hacking rewards into their apps right now

Editor’s note: Geoff Lewis is an entrepreneur, investor, and business advisor. Most recently, Geoff served as the co-founder and CEO at loyalty and reward startup Topguest . Follow him on Twitter @justGLew