Gnip is announcing a new product today that provides access to the full database of public tweets from the beginning of time — or rather, the beginning of Twitter. The company says that’s only available to Twitter, the Library of Congress, and now Gnip customers.

President and COO Chris Moody tells me that this kind of historical data has been a big request from customers. After all, it’s nice to track the social impact of a given social campaign or a real-world event, but it would be even better if you could compare that data to a competitor’s campaign a few months ago, or the same event last year. Being able to go back in time like that hasn’t been possible until now, Moody says.

Back in February, Gnip announced that it was the first authorized reseller of historical Twitter data, but the product announced at the time only went back 30 days. The deals for historical data, Moody says, stem from Gnip’s partnership to help deliver tweets for archiving in the Library of Congress.

The new product, called Historical PowerTrack for Twitter, has been in testing with customers including Esri, Brandwatch, PayPal, Brandwatch, Waggener Edstrom, Network Insights, Union Metrics. Moody says this data opens up a number of new use cases. For one thing, financial firms are developing trading algorithms that incorporate Twitter data, and they can now test those algorithms on data from the past — in other words, if they think they can use social network activity to predict of stock market activity, they now have a giant database for seeing whether that’s true. Moody says there are also academic researchers looking at the impact of Twitter activity on the Arab Spring.

Although Gnip is the first company to offer this comprehensive historical data, it probably won’t be the last — something Moody admits.

“We fundamentally believe that social data is going to be in every application,” he says. “We’re only at 1 percent of the journey. Will historical data be available from other sources? Almost certainly. But in the meantime, we’re certainly not standing still.”

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Defining an energy efficiency strategy can be challenging for big organizations with multiple large buildings. The Department of Veterans Affairs announced today that it has installed energy analysis SPARC520 equipment for its Washington, D.C. headquarters.

SPARC, based in Charleston, South Carolina, has a diverse portfolio of products that includes human resources tools for employee engagement and interviewing optimization, as well as an open source private app store solution. Its SPARC520 product, named after the light spectrum wavelength at which the human eye sees green, provides real-time energy usage data monitoring, analysis and forecasting. The company employs close to 200 people, most of whom are software engineers.

“Our goal as a company is to use our talents as software product developers to solve things that suck,” said CEO Eric Bowman.

At the VA’s 11-floor headquarters, SPARC520 installed 107 clamp devices that monitor the building’s electricity, water and natural gas usage. Each clamp goes over the top of a wire to measure flow-through and has 27 data collection points, providing a total of 2,889 data collection points throughout the building. This data is fed to SPARC520′s analytics platform, where real-time energy usage can be viewed on the web or on an iOS device.

In addition to real-time data, SPARC520 offers forecasting based on current and historical data, mapping out various scenarios that make it clear which adjustments will have the greatest energy-saving impact.

There’s also an element of gamification built in, allowing employees to compete against each other to reduce energy usage. When SPARC implemented this in their own building, they saw energy costs decrease by 75%, Bowman said. So far, SPARK520 said they’ve identified over $3.5 million in potential energy savings over 5 years at the VA headquarters.

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A month ago, mobile delivery startup Postmates publicly launched its ‘Get It Now’ on-demand courier service in San Francisco, allowing its users to order pretty much anything from various stores and restaurants around the city. When it introduced the plan, it charged a flat $7.99 fee for all deliveries made within an hour. Now it’s changing things up just a bit, with a new dynamic pricing plan that will range anywhere from $5-$12, based on how difficult the delivery is.

The dynamic pricing plan is based on an algorithm which calculates the fee based on the amount of time spent traveling and distance traveled, how long its couriers spend shopping or waiting in line to pick up an item, and the type of store that the user ordered from. Prices are based on historical data from the last month of operations, and will continue to be adjusted as new deliveries provide more data.

The new pricing recognizes that not all deliveries are created equal: For instance, ordering smoothies from the Jamba Juice down the street — as one Vungle co-founder does pretty much every day — is different from ordering Postmates to pick up some animal style fries from In-N-Out at Fisherman’s Wharf and having them delivered to the Outer Sunset. The former delivery would probably cost $5, while the latter would probably run $12.

Postmates is really trying to incentivize users to keep using it for really easy local deliveries. And really, it’s about “giving customers the best price possible,” co-founder Bastian Lehmann told me by email.

Another reason it’s willing to move to this model is that, based on its historical data, Postmates is able to forecast the cost of these deliveries before they happen. The new model is also more fair to its couriers, who, you know, actually do the work of delivering things. That said, the new pricing won’t affect early adopters, who will remain at the flat-rate $7.99 model.

In addition to dynamic pricing, Postmates is also pushing its startup discount program, which reduces the cost of deliveries for companies that offer the service to their employees. So far, it’s quietly signed up about 50 startups to the program, including Twitter, Square, Groupon, Yelp, Getaround, Dropbox, Github, and InMobi.

The more employees sign up, the steeper the discount — with average discount running around 25 percent currently. In addition to cheaper deliveries, companies that sign up get tailored newsletters, special offers, and exclusive events through the program.

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Mint competitor HelloWallet is launching on the iPhone today, with an application that provides at-a-glance spending guidance, budget details and your available cash balance.

As a company, HelloWallet aims to differentiate itself from Mint by functioning as a full-service financial advisor, in addition to being a personal finance tracking application. On mobile, this aspect to its service shows up under the “Next Steps” section, which offers users personalized advice and tips.

However, the app’s key differentiator on mobile is its location-based spending guidance feature. This displays how much you have left to spend in the budget category associated with a particular venue.

While certainly it’s certainly a nifty trick to tap into your location via the smartphone’s GPS, the company is touting this unique feature above all else, when really, it’s the access to historical data from that venue that may be the more interesting value-add in terms of location. After all, in Mint’s iPhone application, you can view your budgets by category, too, and it’s not so difficult to figure out (without a GPS), that if you’re buying dinner, that’s to be deducted from the “restaurants” category, for example. Location-based category assignment just simplifies this process.

What’s really neat is to see the bar graph of historical spending for a venue in HelloWallet, something that may give impulse shoppers pause before another big purchase. Think of the advantage for gadget-aholics (ahem) who spend far too much at Best Buy or the Apple Store, for instance. The graph is that much-needed visual reminder to slow down.

There are plenty of other differences between Mint and HelloWallet, too, even if they’re not highlighted that well within the app. For example, while Mint is focused on tracking your money then recommending associated products and services from its partners, HelloWallet doesn’t allow banks to advertise on its service. It also has more of a focus on getting users out of debt and boosting savings, especially those associated with employer-provided 401K’s. These finance management tools are found in HelloWallet’s Web app, as the mobile version is more narrowly focused on spending and budgets.

The distribution models for Mint and HelloWallet are also different. Mint is a consumer-targeted service, but HelloWallet has been selling to enterprise customers who offer HelloWallet as an employee-sponsored benefit. To date, the company has sold over 300,000 memberships to its online service to its Fortune 500 employer partners. And for every 5 subscriptions it sells, HelloWallet gives away one free subscription to a family in need.

Since its founding in 2009, HelloWallet has raised over $9 million in funding, led by Grotech Ventures and Revolution Ventures.

Current HelloWallet customers can grab the new iPhone app from here.

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The Gillmor Gang took advantage of the presence of multiple Android lovers to provide a visceral demonstration of the anti-Jobs reality distortion field. Namely, that no matter how many new Android phones hit the market at 2 week intervals, none is actually better than the iPhone. Michael Arrington went a step further, declaring that Android tablets were destined for instant has-been status once the next iPad ships in February or so. Robert Scoble succeeded in proving Flipboard may be Steve Jobs’ favorite iPad app but still remains useless until they open up. Danny Sullivan wondered how you get into their Tech media section, but why he would care with his iPad sitting unused most of the time.

Gillmor’s theory is that the death of Delicious at the hands of the drowning Yahoo represents capitulation to Twitter’s domination of what once was called bookmarking and now social citation. Kevin Marks saw a lineage between Delicious, Facebook, and Twitter, but Arrington was more interested in details on a story his team was writing about an alleged Salesforce investment in Seesmic. Scoble stepped in with a demo of a new app that pulled historical data from these and other social apps into a timeline. Thanks to those who showed up and especially those who didn’t.

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