Max Levchin has been many things in his long run in Silicon Valley — PayPal cofounder, Slide founder, angel investor, etc. etc. — but now he’s trying on something more traditional. He’ll be joining Yahoo’s board of directors, in the latest move by the storied web company to reinvigorate itself as a tech leader.

Two current members of the board will be stepping away, Intuit CEO Brad Smith and Weather Channel CEO David Kenny.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who left Google to take over earlier this year, thanks the two in the official statement, noting their help with the Alibaba share repurchase deal. Interestingly, the release also provides a little more detail on Levchin’s stealthy new startup, HVF: “His latest undertaking, HVF, is focused on solving big problems and improving lives by extracting insights from the vast quantities of data around us.”

Meanwhile, as Dealbook notes in its scoop about the changes this morning, this is the fourth director change since activist shareholder Daniel Loeb joined in May. The others are tech and media consultant Michael J. Wolf and Harry Wilson, an investor and company restructuring expert.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

UbueVu tries to go beyond social media monitoring by providing actual suggestions of things for social media managers to do. Today its Signals service, which we covered previously, is out of beta. The service also comes with a completely redesigned interface.

Every analytics company claims to offer “actionable intelligence,” so what does that mean in UberVu’s case? For small companies that don’t get many mentions, it might not be a big deal to stay on top of social media interactions. For large companies, it could be a real problem to sift through thousands of messages to find out which ones actually need a response. The Signals service processes streams of stuff like @ mentions on Twitter and references to specific keywords, and processes it all into something more digestible.

UberVu Founder and Chief Product Officer Vladimir Oane used GM as a sample company, though GM isn’t actually a customer.

The demo monitors for social media mentions relating to GM brands and competitors, as well as messages meant specifically for the GM Twitter account. It then uses machine-learning algorithms to sift through and find messages that a GM employee should actually respond to. For example, tweets with complaints from influential Twitter users, or questions about GM cars. It can also find things like articles that could be flagged for the PR department to review, or independent content that could be shared from official GM social media accounts.

The real question is how good its algorithms really are at prioritizing important tweets and content. That’s hard to gauge from a demo. But I can clearly see the value of this service for big brands if it works as advertised.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Who do you trust most when it comes to recommendations: an algorithm or your friends? Or perhaps a mixture of machine learning and your social graph. That’s something that a lot of startups are trying to figure out right now.

LoveThis.com, which launches out of Beta today, is firmly in the social camp with its ‘black book’ of your friends’ recommendations, from websites and apps, places to eat and go, or something more practical like a good plumber. That may sound like a very general list of recommendations but the site’s premise is that your friends not only know best but also vouch for products and services all of the time, just not necessarily when you actually need those recommendations. LoveThis attempts to solve this problem of recall by encouraging users to store this info as structured and searchable data for later use.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

So it’s been raining for almost two years here on the West Coast and it, for lack of a better term, sucks. But you know what’s making Noah’s Ark part deux just a teensy, eensy bit better? Whtr.in, a newly launched minimalist site that uses geo-location to serve up information about the weather around you.

Built by Artur Kisiolek, the site automatically gives you information for your location coordinates, allows you to search by location name as well plugging your zip code into the URL and also includes a list of top international cities you can immediately drag into your browser bookmarks or iPhone homescreen.

I’ve spent all day refreshing it every five minutes hoping that the incredibly annoying “Weather condition: Showers” in SF will change to something more outdoor exercise friendly like “Weather condition: Scattered clouds” so I can finally go jogging. Apparently I’m going to have to wait until Thursday. Or move.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Need something to do while waiting for your copy of Farmville for Dummies to arrive? Isle of Tune is the latest in viral web distraction, built on the side by London-based interactive director Jim Hall.

Isle of Tune lets you create whole songs by building a little town using objects like streetlamps, houses and trees to make sounds. There is even a collection of pre-built loops for those of us less musically inclined.

Hall also offers a way to customize individual sounds, share your island on Facebook and Twitter as well as vote other people’s islands up or down. iPhone and iPad versions are in the works.

While a pretty amazing digitally landscaped version of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” currently rounds out the Isle of Tune top 50, I dare you to show me something more hipster than MGMT’s “Kids,” built entirely with animated cars, flowerpots and bumps in the road.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Groupon may not turn out to be the next eBay according to our own Mike Arrington, but the social buying site is on a veritable tear. Coincidentally, the latest Internet giant to partner with the ecommerce startup is … eBay.

While arguably symbolic, the deal – which we predicted was going to happen when we covered the Yahoo-Groupon acquisition rumors – doesn’t go as deep as one might suspect.

For now, the agreement spans a co-marketing incentive whereby US-based eBay customers can sign up for Groupon deals on groupon.ebay.com and earn 5% back in eBay Bucks, the ecommerce juggernaut’s free rewards program.

Groupon closed a similar affiliate deal with Ning last week.

We’ll have to wait and see if these disitrbution partnerships grow into something more meaningful over time.

Groupon is currently live in more than 100 North American markets and running nearly 200 deals per day; eBay for one says it will use geolocation to determine the closest deal for each user.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Sunday Times reported yesterday that Samsung’s much-hyped Galaxy Tab would be able to have its Android 2.2 OS “replaced with Chrome, when that arrives, though owners who aren’t tech savvy should have this upgrade carried out by a professional.” This information was supposedly confirmed by Samsung, which has since said that they have no plans to replace the OS on the Galaxy Tab. Typical corporate prevarication, or something more?

This information could be obvious, revealing, or questionable. I’m leaning towards questionable.

Continue reading this article…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Listiki (a portmanteau of the words “list” and “wiki”) lets you crowdsource lists of, well, anything. This could be something as trivial as a list of the ‘top ten horror movies’ or something more self-serving like, I don’t know, ’5 must-read tech bloggers’. Lists can be as short or as long as you like and each item may also include a URL.

But here’s the clever bit: any list can, effectively, be cloned so that you can re-order items to your own taste (via drag ‘n’ drop) or even add, delete and/or replace them. Any changes made are interpreted in real time and ripple through to a ‘master’ list, aggregating the opinions of all contributors but without destroying your own version of the list. You can also, of course, view the original lists of other contributors to that subject. It’s pretty neat.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook launched a Comedy on Facebook Page last week and has since gained about 550 Likes.The Wall is filled with links to funny videos spoofing everything from the World Cup’s vuvuzela horns to North Korea’s Kim Jong-il to Mark Zuckerberg himself.

The Page is apparently in its beginning stages, as the Info tab notes, “Right now, we are just posting hilarious videos, photos, and links we find on our news feeds and around the web, but pretty soon we will have exclusive content, featured user submissions, and more! Stay tuned!”

So far, other than fresh Wall comedy content, the site has a list of eight favorite Pages on Facebook, including popular favorites like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Facebook has launched a variety of other company-run Pages for various entities and concepts, including recent ones for its virtual currency, Credits, and another for the U.S. Congress. The overall point seems to be to help users find interesting information related to anything they might care about, in a more pointed way than having friends and third parties share this information on their own. However, by featuring exclusive content and user submissions, this Page appears to have ambitions to be something more like a comedy web site — the sort of vertical-focused role that Facebook has avoided filling for years.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook