Last fall, ex-Googlers Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga launched a new mobile travel platform called Triposo , which aimed to bring a little PageRank order to an unruly ocean of travel content in service of a greater good: Giving we, the end user, more relevant, personalized travel recommendations. Because there’s already a mess of public destination and travel information in databases like Wikitravel and Open Street Maps, rather than become another player in the brimming social travel space , Triposo took an algorithmic approach to travel recs. This approach allows it to come up with relevant suggestions no matter where you are, with little effort require from the end users, making for what the founders call a “lean-back” travel experience

“Look for Jetpack 2 in 1995.” The message carried on the 1993 2D video game “Jetpack,” created by 16-year old Adam Pedersen and distributed by Software Creations on floppy disk, pledged an updated sequel to fans in a couple of years. 19 years later, Pedersen, now a single dad, is belatedly working to deliver on that promise.

A good source tells me that Twitter is set to make its sixth acquisition of 2012 with NY-based Sense Networks . Terms of the deal are still under wraps but it is expected to go through this month.

Vanity Fair is one of my all-time favorite magazines — it publishes loads of incredibly well-written stories about fascinating topics and people.

Last week, developer Tom Waddington uncovered Facebook code that points to the creation of a “Want” button — a plugin that potentially points to a new kind of commercial innovation being developed by Facebook itself, different from “want” buttons already being developed by third parties (one example here ), and partially working but only within Facebook’s Graph API tester.

You may have noticed some new bylines popping up these past couple of days. You’re not hallucinating! We’ve quietly made several new additions to the TechCrunch roster this summer and hiring continues to be our first priority across all departments. In addition to specialist writers like Alex Williams and Greg Ferenstein, we’ve added a couple of interns and a rockstar product manager to our team

Watch out for exploding prices! Verizon Wireless just stopped subsidizing tablets, which naturally results in a lot higher advertised prices . Want a 16GB Motorola XYZBoard? That will be $629.

Redux has been through a couple of iterations over the years: Originally launched as a platform for social discovery of video , the startup bet big on building an app for Google TV to create a “lean back” experience for navigating channels of online video.

Google is continuing to shut down services which aren’t core to its business – something it has been actively doing ever since Google co-founder Larry Page took over as CEO. Today, the tradition continues as Google is announcing the shuttering of  five more services, the most notable of which are Google Video and iGoogle, its personalized homepage offering.

Facebook today made two changes that will help page owners understand the true reach of their posts. The reach metric in page insights will now include mobile data and the desktop News Feed will no longer count reach until a user scrolls and loads the page’s story, the company tells us