Dylan Collins of Fight My Monster spoke to us at the recent F.ounders conference in New York to explain why he think Fight My Monster is becoming a hit with the 1.3 million young boys the game is aimed at.

StrikeAd , a startup that helps advertisers and agencies manage their mobile campaigns, has raised another $500,000 in funding. The round is an addition to the $3 million Series A led by DFJ Esprit that the startup announced in January

Like so many things that go on to have big success, Yammer , the enterprise social networking company that was just officially acquired by Microsoft for a cool $1.2 billion, had an inauspicious start.

The VoD service Netflix has been leading a charge for consumers to watch more on-demand, digital video — with its service aggregating TV and film content from a number of media players now attracting more than 25 million subscribers, and bringing new audiences to that content. But just how much of an impact on traditional, physical sales are digital companies like Netflix making if they were to grow even further

“Explore: photos taken nearby”.  Instagram may be looking to follow in Foursquare’s footsteps and give you more to do than just post and browse the main feed with today’s iOS app update that merges Popular with search to create its own Explore tab. It also added new Facebook sharing controls, visual and speed improvements, better commenting, autocomplete for search, and revamped profiles. For now you can only search for users and hashtags, but I envision Explore blossoming to let you home in on photos from specific times or locations

A dozen years ago, when I went from techno-dilettante to technophile, one of my living heroes was Jon “maddog” Hall, the 61-year-old writer for Linux Magazine and an early proponent for free and open source software.

Thinkfuse , a Seattle-based startup that allows companies to send regular progress reports to managers, executives and other stakeholders, just announced that it has been acquired by Salesforce.com. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. Thinkfuse describes itself as “an enterprise software-as-a-service provider that turns status reports into a powerful business tool.” The service is shutting down completely on July 25, 2012 and current users will have to export all their data by that time

Facebook announced today that Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg has joined the company’s board of directors. As COO, Sandberg is already instrumental in leading Facebook, particularly in areas of sales, marketing, business development, legal, human resources, public policy and communications. She has become a trusted partner of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and played a crucial role in helping Facebook better monetize since joining the company in 2008

We now have more information about the changes to Apple’s App Store search algorithm, thanks to a blog post from Ian Sefferman at MobileDevHQ .

When Microsoft announced their intentions to jump into the hardware space with the unveiling of their new Surface tablet, the next logical question seemed to be whether or not the folks at Redmond would do the same for smartphones. After all, the model seemed to be doing well enough for Apple — was Microsoft considering adopting a similar approach to help give their Windows Phones a new leg up? The answer, it would seem, is no