AdStage, a startup aiming to make it easy for small businesses and other advertisers to run cross-network ad campaigns, launched today at the Launch conference in San Francisco.

The company also announced that it has raised $1.4 million in funding, with an investor list that includes Freestyle Capital, Quest Venture Partners, Dave McClure/500 Startups, Digital Garage, XG Ventures, Mark Mullen, former Facebook/Myspace/Zynga executive Owen Van Natta, Jim Patterson, Stewart Alsop, Federated Media founder John Battelle, Rich LeFurgy, and Doug Barry.

You can watch co-founder and CEO Sahil Jain’s presentation here, where you can see the ad creator in action (and listen as Robert Scoble declares “This is the hottest idea I’ve seen so far”). The company offers a single, self-serve dashboard for creating ads that run across Google, Bing, Facebook and LinkedIn. Every feature seems designed to create an optimized campaign with as little work as possible. Most notably, AdStage provides recommendations throughout the process based on data from similar and competitive companies.

Those recommendations can help businesses write the ads and select keywords, as well as figure out the best way to spend across all four networks. And after the campaign has been launched, AdStage can look at the results in realtime and alter how much money goes into each network to deliver the best return.

Prior to AdStage, Jain co-founded mobile development startup Trigger.io. The company launched in private beta last week, and plans to add 50 more advertisers soon. Jain said that AdStage will be adding other ad formats, too.

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Scringo offers an SDK for mobile app developers who want to add community building features like activity feeds and in-app messaging to their apps with just a few lines of code. After several months of closed beta testing, the company just announced the launch of its platform for all iOS and Android developers. In addition to the launch, the company also announced that it has raised a $700,000 seed round led by Israeli venture fund Inimiti and other angel investors.

The focus of this new version is on the new dashboard that gives developers full control over the user experience and also provides them with the opportunity to monetize their apps through Scringo’s contextual app discover service (this is completely optional). The improved interface, Scringo co-founder Ran Avrahamy told me earlier this week, was largely designed based on the feedback the company got from the roughly 1,000 developers who are currently using the service. So far, these developers have published more than 250 apps that are currently available in Apple’s App Store and through Google Play.

Most apps, the Scringo team believes, are built with a “built it and they will come” mentality. In reality, however, getting people to try an app is only half the battle and developers need to figure out new ways to increase retention now that users are becoming increasingly fickle about the apps they use.

Apps that already use the service’s activity streams and other social features, Avrahamy told me, saw their average retention increase by almost 90% and the average time users spent in the app increased by almost 100%. As Avrahamy told me, the record for implementing the free service is currently under two minutes.

Another feature that is helping developers to retain users is the in-app messaging tool, which Avrahamy told me, most of the company’s customers are also using to receive feedback from their users and to communicate with them.

In the mobile apps, Scringo lives in a fully customizable sidebar that is opened by swiping to the left or right. This, the company says, provides an unobtrusive interface that gives developers the flexibility to keep all of their apps’ feature intact while still adding new real estate to their apps through the sidebar. The service does not interfere with the existing app and developers can choose whether they want to show Scringo’s logo in the sidebar or not.

As Avrahamy noted, the sidebar is fully customizable. Indeed, the center piece of today’s launch is the new “Developer Zone” which makes it extremely easy to make changes to how the sidebar looks in the app. All of these tweaks are automatically reflected in the app itself, so developers don’t have to make any changes to the code and don’t have to send an update to Apple or Android.

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Chamath Palihapitiya, the early Facebook executive who left the company in 2011 to launch The Social+Capital Partnership, said today that he has raised a second fund.

Palihapitiya, who was speaking at the Launch conference in San Francisco, didn’t specify the fund size or the limited partners who invested. (The fund was earlier revealed in a regulatory filing that pegged its size as $325 million, but the firm hadn’t commented.) He did say that it was “more than $275 million” (the size of his first fund), and that it came from “the same folks,” as well as some “really amazing” additions. He also mentioned the Mayo Clinic as an LP, and he talked proudly about how his investment returns can fund improvements in the hospital.

That tied into one of the broader themes of the interview, namely Palihapitiya’s interest in making a social impact. In fact, he said, “If I burn through all the money I make through Facebook doing that, I don’t care.”

“The point is, what’s the value?” he added. “The value isn’t when you exit and you get the check. The legacy is, what’s the value and what’s the tale that’s left over?”

To be clear, The Social+Capital Partnership isn’t purely focused on doing good. True, Palihapitiya said that with a fund of around $300 million, he’s making “some pretty crazy bets” that could end up “going to zero.” On the other hand, he tries to take $100 million of the fund and “compound the shit” out of it, by investing in more likely bets. In fact, he said that through the firm’s investments and his own activity as an angel investor, Social+Capital “participated in $2 billion in liquidity” last year — which is why it was able to raise another fund.

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In what has ended up being a weird couple weeks for Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX founder should have a better day today after the launch of the Dragon capsule on its second resupply mission to the International Space Station. NASA announced that it had approved the mission back on Valentine’s Day, mentioning that the spacecraft will be packed with over one ton of experiments and supplies on board.

The Dragon Capsule will launch just after 10am Eastern this morning, and the launch is being broadcast live via UStream on NASA’s media channel.

The SpaceX Venture, which eventually aims at making commercial space flight a reality, has had a string of hiccups in the past that shed some pessimism on the whole endeavor. However, a few major wins, including the successful berthing of the Dragon Capsule to the ISS and the Dragon’s first supply mission, has strengthened the company’s position in the newly forged market.

SpaceX has yet to successfully complete a manned flight, but that’s in the pipeline. According to the company, the first manned SpaceX launch will go down in 2015.

It’s been an incredible year for space-centric news. SpaceX isn’t the only company delving into the private space flight game, and though NASA has shuttered parts of its exploration program, the Mars Rover is currently exploring the hell out of Mars thanks to a successful landing on the Martian surface. And who can forget Felix Baumgartner’s amazing jump to earth from the edge of space.

In related news, SpaceX founder Elon Musk recently got in a spat with the New York Times over his other transport-related project, Tesla. After the NYT said the Tesla’s new East Coast Super Charging station didn’t get him as far in the Model S EV as expected, Musk laid out the car’s technical data to disprove the reviewer’s claims.

Free desktop streaming application by Ustream

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Google just announced a major update to its Google+ platform that aims to replace today’s ubiquitous Google sign-ins on third-party sites with Google+ logins. The new Google+ account-based logins, Google argues, offer far more features than the current Google authentication system, though the older version will continue to be available and function.

The new sign-in features will allow users to sign in to web and mobile apps with their Google accounts and bring their Google+ profile info with them so they don’t have to create a new username and password when they sign in to a third-party application (the parallels to Facebook Connect are pretty obvious here).

The new system will continue to offer features like two-factor authentication and also use OAuth 2.0, but in addition, it will allow developers to add a number of new features, including the ability to let users install their mobile apps for Android with just once click and to allow users to share information like their Fitbit data directly to their Google+ profile pages or to selectively share content from services like Shazam directly to their Google+ streams.

To launch these new logins, Google has partnered with Banjo, Beautylish, Fancy, Fitbit, Flixster, The Guardian, OpenTable, Shazam, TuneIn Radio and USA Today.

According to Google, there are a few key user benefits to this new sign-in system, which marks the first major release from the Google+ platform group in quite a while. The main feature, of course, is the login system itself, which will be virtually identical to the current Google logins. Indeed, as Google told me yesterday, this was a major design goal behind the project.

All of these new features will launch on the web, iOS and Android (with the obvious exception of one-click installs, which only work with Android). The rollout is scheduled to take a few days.

The really interesting new features, however, are the ones this login system enables.

Interactive Sharing

Google is also introducing new buttons on Google+ for what it calls “interactive sharing” that will allow developers to direct users to the relevant pages on their web and mobile apps to “buy” or “review” products, “listen” to a song or perform any other action on the site. In total, Google will offer more than 100 actions that developers can add to their Google+ posts.

Selective Sharing

The Google+ team has always said that it didn’t plan to allow developers to just share information to your streams automatically. This, the team always argued, would look like spam. Today’s update stays true to this promise while still opening up the service a bit more for developers who want to share information to your Google+ profile pages automatically.

Google, the team told me, wants to prevent apps and individuals from spamming the news stream on Google+ while still giving users the option to share content with the right people in their circles. In order to do so, it decided that unless users explicitly share any content or other information on their stream, that information will only appear on the users’ profile pages. They can, however, always pick some of this information from their profiles (think songs they listened to or how many steps they took on a given day) and then share it with the rest of their friends on Google+.

Anything a user selectively shares with a specific circle or individual user from a mobile or web app will appear in that user’s notification bar, by the way. This, the team told me, is meant to get as close as possible to ensuring that a message will be seen by the intended recipients.

One of the launch partners, for example, is Fitbit, which will now allow you to automatically share how many steps you take every day to your profile page. Here is what this looks like in practice: You log in to Fitbit with your Google+ account. You then decide which information Fitbit will get access to and which lists and individuals you want to share with the company.

On a service like Fancy, another launch partner, the login will also ask users if they want to install the company’s Android app if it detects that you haven’t installed it yet. For developers, this could obviously lead to more app installs and as Google told me, “it really is like magic.” For now, these one-click app installs are only available for free apps.

Google recommends that developers switch over to the new system, but the old system will continue to work as well. OpenTable, another one of Google’s launch partners, told me that it took its developers a “very short time” to implement the new Google+ sign-ins on its mobile and web apps. Google itself estimates that it will take developers just about an hour to get the basic implementation going and about two weeks for a very deep integration with selective and interactive sharing turned on.

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Over the past few years, YouTube has been dramatically increasing the resources that it provides to the creative community that uploads videos on its platform. Starting with the acquisition of Next New Networks back in TK, the company has been investing in providing tools, equipment, funding, and guidance to its legion of creators, in an effort to help them improve the quality of their content.

Recently, that’s included the opening of production facilities in London ahead of the 2012 Olympics, and in Los Angeles last fall. Those spaces were meant to attract creators in Europe and North America. Now Asia, specifically Japan, is getting its own creator space, with the launch of a production facility in the Roppongi Hills complex in Tokyo.

Like the other YouTube Spaces, the Tokyo facility will be open to select YouTube partners who will be able to use it free of charge to launch ambitious new projects, get their hands on advanced equipment, or just hone their skills while collaborating with other creators.

Typically, creators gain access to the spaces by applying at youtube.com/space. YouTube will begin taking applications on April 1, and will make its choices for those who will participate later in the spring.

Those who are accepted get three months to use the production facilities, including access to sound stages, as well as the use high-quality cameras, lights, production and editing equipment. The Space has three production studios, equipment rooms, screening rooms, and post-production facilities, including edit bays and a foley room.

In addition to providing support for on-demand content uploaded by YouTube creators, the space will host screenings of their content, and will also have live events. That includes live-streamed music sessions and Google Hangouts, including a concert by Japanese singer Juju later this week on February 15.

While YouTube continues to offer guidance and funding to independent creators through the launch of production spaces in places like L.A. and Tokyo, as well as other initiatives, it’s not alone. A number of multichannel networks like Machinima, Maker Studios, and others have emerged to provide marketing and production support to creators looking to increase their audiences.

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The PC market is fast shifting into a touchscreen world, and Apple is leading the charge. Some new numbers from the analysts at Canalys note that in Q4 of 2012, one in every three PCs shipped was a tablet, that Apple’s iPad accounted for about half of them, or one in every six of PCs. By combining PC and tablet figures — a logical thing to do, given that many are substituting tablet purchases and usage for PC purchases and usage — Canalys figures that worldwide PC shipments are actually on the rise — up by 12% to 134 million units. That’s in contrast to figures from Gartner, which in January noted that Q4 PC shipments were down by 5% on last year — without factoring in tablets.

Adding Apple’s iPad sales to its Mac sales gives it a leadership position among PC vendors. The company shipped 27 million units in Q4, giving it a 20.1% share of the market. Number-two vendor was HP, whose market share is based on its PC prowess. It shipped 15 million PCs, for an 11.2% share of the market. That let it edge just ahead of Lenovo, which shipped 200,000 fewer units.

Still, Android continues to make inroads. Canalys points out that this is the first quarter where Apple’s iPad has not accounted for more than 50% of all tablets shipped — it was 49%, as it happens, with Android accounting for 46%.

Apple’s savior was the iPad Mini: “‘Apple timed the launch of the iPad mini well,” writes Pin-Chen Tang, Canalys research analyst. “Its success proves there is a clear demand for pads with smaller screens at a more affordable price. Without the launch, Apple would surely have lost more ground to its competitors.” Indeed, that fact may well encourage Apple to look at more sizes and price points for its iOS devices in the future.

Overall, Canalys points out that the tablet market grew by 75% in Q4 to 46.2 million units, and that full-year shipments were 114.6 million units. Given that trend, Lenovo, which has been making some interesting hybrid models incorporating both touchscreen and keyboard features, could well pull ahead of HP if the latter doesn’t make some significant tablet inroads in the next couple of quarters.

Meanwhile, Samsung is at the other end of the spectrum: its strong performance at number four, with 11.7 million units (9% market share) is based mostly on the success of its line of Galaxy Tab tablets. It shipped 7.6 million of these in Q4, a rise of 226%.

Dell, which is hoping for a turnaround as a private company, rounded out the top five. For now it’s reputation “continues to fade,” Canalys writes, resulting in a 19% drop in shipments in the quarter. “A turnaround in fortunes is likely to take years,” they note — so just as well that Dell will not have to answer so quickly to the markets for its performance.

As other analysts have pointed out Windows 8 has so far had little impact on worldwide PC shipments, and an almost negligible impact on tablets — with only 3% of tablets shipped in the quarter based on Windows 8.  That has had a knock-on effect both for Windows and for those who make devices using the OS. “Microsoft’s involvement in the Dell buyout raises eyebrows in the light of its recent aspirations to become a hardware vendor,” Canalys notes. “But it is not likely to solve Dell’s problems as even Microsoft struggles with pads.” Equally difficult was Windows RT, which failed to break even 1 million units at 720,000 shipped. “The outlook for Windows RT appears bleak,” noted Tim Coulling, Canalys senior analyst. He believes the only way out for this is for Microsoft to drastically reduce the licensing price, cutting further into its margins on the product.

Western Europe’s slow economy also continues to weigh things down.

Amazon, selling only tablets and no PCs (yet?), didn’t make the top five but still managed a substantial volume shift. Its shipments were 4.6 million units, almost mirroring Dell’s decline with growth of 18%. With the Kindle Fire now selling in more markets worldwide, it will be interesting to see if Amazon can see a big boost this year or if it will be stymied by Apple and Samsung. For now, international is doing a good enough job to offset some small declines in the U.S., where the launch of the higher-priced Kindle Fire HD not proving to be a runaway success as the initial launch of the Kindle Fire was a year ago.

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With less than two months before OUYA’s launch, it’s time to tell the truth — its future doesn’t look promising. The OUYA is starting to feel like a gaming console without the games. Publishers and developers aren’t promoting OUYA games because there’s nothing to promote — nothing that was specifically developed for the launch line-up. Even worse, Final Fantasy III will be the flagship launch title, a game that has been available on countless gaming systems for years. OUYA isn’t the gaming revolution that backers expected.

Earlier today, Darrell Etherington reported that the Android-based gaming console would launch in-store in June. The more than 68,000 backers to its Kickstarter campaign will get their consoles in March. While the company is still planning to ship on time, that was only half of the launch challenge.

Gamers buy a new gaming system based on two key elements: launch games and who is making the console. As the OUYA is not coming from an established company, the team is facing an even harder task — selling enough good games to make the console interesting.

You may say that the OUYA is an Android-based console and that many titles will be ported to a TV screen and OUYA’s gaming controller in minutes. Yet, there is no way you could compare an Android game with what gamers expect from a traditional gaming console. Even the Nintendo Wii U with its pretty weak launch line-up could count on ZombiU, Assassin’s Creed 3 or New Super Mario Bros. U. Angry Birds (or an equivalent game) and Final Fantasy III won’t convince an experienced gamer. You don’t need a dedicated device to play Canabalt.

Moreover, Best Buy or Target customers don’t care about Android. When they’ll walk into a store and see the Android logo, it won’t mean anything to them. Normal people, those who don’t usually back projects on Kickstarter, they buy a Samsung phone, not an Android phone made by Samsung. That’s why average consumers do not line up to buy Nexus phones. Without its Kickstarter video, the OUYA is uninteresting.

When it comes to games, even though OUYA claims to launch with 200 games, most of them are just Android ports or come from inexperienced developers. There is no big system-seller that may convince undecided gamers. And if you backed the console for its emulating capacity, you’ll be part of a very tiny minority.

Vevo, XBMC or TuneIn are nice additions, but are already available on most TV boxes or support equivalent apps. The Roku, the Apple TV or even the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 have long been hooked up to everyone’s TV, ready to stream content. The OUYA will not sell en masse for these apps alone.

Before the end of the year, OUYAs will gather dust on store shelves, next to Boxee devices and other products that promised to revolutionize TV or gaming without actually achieving this status. The OUYA won’t be the first to disappoint, and there will certainly be other gaming consoles in the future that will end up in the attic in no time.

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The company formerly known as RIM is holding its first developer event in Europe since launching its new BlackBerry 10 platform last Wednesday. Speaking at the BlackBerry Jam event in Amsterdam, UK MD Stephen Bates said the launch of the first BB10 device — the full touch Z10 — has exceeded expectations, with some U.K. retailers selling out a few days after launch. Bates did not, however, put any concrete figures on early sales. The U.K. was the first market to get the Z10 but the device will launch in Canadian today, and additional European markets this week, including France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands.

“The response we’ve seen exceeded all of our launch partners’ expectations. Customers are choosing to buy the BlackBerry Z10 in large numbers,” said Bates. “In fact some of our partners have told us that they sold out over the weekend in some of their key retail locations.

“The partners’ call centres are also flooded with calls, as people phone to ask for more information about the device, and also where and how to buy it.”

Yesterday, AllthingsD reported on channel checks conducted by Jefferies & Co. –  quoting Jefferies analyst Peter Misek reporting lines outside a number of U.K. retailers selling the device, and describing sell-outs of the white Z10 as widespread.

Asked about early Z10 sales, U.K. carrier EE also declined to share specific figures but told TechCrunch: “We’re really happy with the interest so far.”

Historically, the U.K. has been a strong market for BlackBerry — especially with the youth sector. Orange commissioned research last November suggested close to half of U.K. teens still owned a BlackBerry. But of course the company needs to win over more than just the youth market with BB10 if it is to turn the platform into a sustainable mobile ecosystem and keep developers working for it generating the apps that are, in turn, needed to attract and grow the user-base.

Alec Saunders, VP Developer Relations, BlackBerry, also took to the stage in Amsterdam to talk to BB10 developers (and sing another song – this time a twist on ‘At Last‘). The themes BlackBerry wants to encourage for BB10 apps are “integrated, social and beautiful”, he said. ”Don’t just port the apps you’ve built over — build us applications that are specifically for BlackBerry 10.”

“We launched BB10 with the absolutely largest number of apps for any first generation platform,” he added, referring to the 70,000 apps at launch. ”New apps are roaring into the BlackBerry store at a rate of over 1,000 a day.”

The company also talked about the forthcoming Q10 physical Qwerty touch hybrid BlackBerry — demoing a new ‘type and go’ universal search feature that extends context-aware search to the keyboard, and announcing it has updated the BB10 SDK to enable developers to tailor apps for its smaller screen and physical keyboard.

Writing in blog about the SDK update, the company said: “The focus of these SDK updates is not on net new functionality, but instead around updates needed to support the [Q10's] 1:1 form factor, and screen resolution, allowing you to easily build a single application for both the full touch and physical keyboard devices.”

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Apple’s iPad led the charge as total worldwide tablet shipments hit a record of 52.5 million units in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to IDC’s preliminary data from its Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker, but its market share continued to slide due to competition from Samsung. Meanwhile, PC shipments declined during the quarter for the first time in more than five years. The tablet market grew 75.3% year-over-year, and increased 74.3% from the previous quarter’s total of 30.1 million units, helped along by holiday purchases, lower average selling prices and a wider range of products.

“We expected a very strong fourth quarter, and the market didn’t disappoint. New product launches from the category’s top vendors, as well as new entrant Microsoft, led to a surge in consumer interest and very robust shipments totals during the holiday season,” said Tom Mainelli, tablet research director at IDC.

Apple shipped a total of 22.9 million units, boosted by the launch of the iPad mini, as well as the fourth generation full-sized iPad. But while Apple’s iPad shipments grew 48.1% over the same quarter last year, Apple’s market share slipped for the second quarter in a row (down to 43.6% from 46.4% last quarter) as number two vendor Samsung continued to nip at the Cupertino company’s heels. Samsung enjoyed 263%, shipping nearly 8 million combined Android and Windows 8 tablets durings the quarter. It still holds 15.1% of the market, the same as from the previous quarter.

Competing vendors like Amazon and Barnes and Noble both saw an uptick in their market share thanks to the holiday season. Amazon shipped more than 6 million tablets during the quarter, increasing its share to 11.5% from 8.3% the previous quarter, with year-over-year growth of 26.8%. Barnes and Noble shipped almost a million units, increasing its share up to 1.9% from 0.7%, but its total dropped by 27.7% year-over-year. Microsoft new Surface with Windows RT tablet failed to reach the top five with just short of 900,000 units shipped. IDC said that Microsoft and its partners may need to create smaller devices and lower prices in order to compete because consumers are shying away from more expensive tablets with desktop operating systems.

“There is no question that Microsoft is in this tablet race to compete for the long haul. However, devices based upon its new Windows 8 and Windows RT operating systems failed to gain much ground during their launch quarter, and reaction to the company’s Surface with Windows RT tablet was muted at best,” said Ryan Reith, program manager, Mobile Device Trackers at IDC.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch