Spotify has been busy over the last few months, launching brand apps , adding more social functionality through a partnership with Turntable.fm competitor Soundrop , overhauling its Android app, adding a Play button , and more. And it seems that the company has hit a few more scaling milestones recently: According to AppData , there are more than 18 million monthly active users now on the Spotify platform. While Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wouldn’t confirm the AppData number, he did say that the company was at 17 million tracks and 700 million playlists across the platform

Online private sales burst onto the scene a few years ago in the shape of Vente Privee in Europe and, later, Gilt in the US. It’s a model we all know and love – and it’s rapidly proving a model with which emerging economies are, well, rather obsessed. I was just recently in Istanbul where where you can almost throw a stone and be sure of hit a private sales startup entrepreneur

Editor’s note:  Scott Weiss is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. He blogs at http://scott.a16z.com and you can follow him on Twitter @W_ScottWeiss

Sprint plans to offer unlimited data on the next iPhone even if it’s LTE. This would make the carrier the only one in the U.S

In the grand tradition of industry barons — but not so much venture capitalists — the six general partners at Andreessen Horowitz are donating at least half of the income from their investing activities to philanthropy. The firm has already been turning heads up and down Sand Hill Road, but this move might cause some whiplash.

Facebook recently relaunched its “Locations” app that allows users to search directly from a company’s page to find business locations near them. The feature, which helps organize corporate and local pages, had to be redesigned to fit the new Timeline layout . The Locations app is only available to select brands working directly with Facebook.

Utah-based genealogy site Ancestry.com just announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Silicon Valley-based startup Inflection to acquire its competitor Archives.com for $100 million in cash and assumed liabilities. Inflection’s other products, people search site PeopleSmart and Identity.com , are not part of this acquisition. A number of Archive.com’s employees, including some of its key product and engineering executives, will join the Ancestry.com team after the acquisition closes

Rosetta Stone , for those unfamiliar, are the makers of the oft-advertised language learning software of the same name. The 20-year-old Virginia-based company went public in 2009, and today makes learning software for over 30 languages that is used in over 150 countries.

“The series A is essentially dying. If I can get an amazing valuation at a seed round, not give up a board seat, and keep complete control of the company, why not?” This is Ark co-founder Patrick Riley’s reasoning for why instead of raising a Series A round, his people search engine just locked down a jaw-droppingly massive $4.2 million seed round . Ark will use the money from Andreessen Horowitz , Greylock Partners , SV Angel and more to build out its mobile and search teams, and do a big marketing push when it opens to the public.

YouTube is the largest source of mobile video traffic, according to a new report from Sandvine , and now accounts for as much as 25% of network data, and no less than 12% at any given time. The report examined traffic across a selection of Sandvine’s 200+ customers in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific