The mobile wave has been cresting for several years now, so when a decade-old web company is only now debuting its first ever native mobile app, it’s a little late to the game. The folks at TheLadders, which is launching its first iOS app this morning, understand that — but they are angling to make their “mobile last” strategy work in their favor in the long run.

It is indeed a beautiful app, and you can see it demonstrated by TheLadders’ co-founder and CEO Alex Douzet in the video embedded above.

First, though, a little bit of a background on TheLadders. The company was founded in New York City ten years ago in the summer of 2003 with the initial aim of being a job search site for professionals earning $100,000 and above. The company enjoyed solid growth in those early years, at one time having more than 300 employees serving an international market.

But TheLadders hit a few stumbling blocks amid a more competitive job search landscape, and has since expanded its purview beyond the six-figure salary market while cutting staff and axing its international businesses. And in the past 18 months, TheLadders, which had thus far been focused completely on the traditional web, has decided to shift much of its energy into rebuilding itself as a force on mobile devices.

The journey of TheLadders has been a varied one, and if anything it’s a testament to the benefits of how keeping some power and autonomy as a business allows you to be more flexible to change course. TheLadders is currently profitable, and has taken on only one round of venture capital funding, a $7.25 million series A back in 2004. If the company had taken on more investors or not focused on profitability, things might have come to a different end by now — it’s refreshing in a way to see a company that’s taken some hits to be still standing independent and adapting to changes on its own terms.

That leads us to today. The new app really re-thinks the way that people search for jobs in several interesting ways: There is no option for entering text, for example, and the “scout” feature that allows you to see details about who else has applied for the same position really plays nicely on the smaller screen. Once again, you can see a full demo in the video embedded above, as well as in a video produced by the company here.

TheLadders is certainly late to the mobile game, but Douzet says that has allowed it to really observe the landscape and create an offering that’s truly different. That argument makes sense, once you see the app. There is something to be said for getting something right the first time, rather than coming out of the gate with a mobile app early and then making users wait through several initial iterations. It’ll be interesting to see how this strategy ultimately plays out, and what kind of traction TheLadders is able to pick up in the crowded mobile space.

The tech industry has been buzzing about “big data” for years now. And according to venture capital firm Accel Partners, the excitement around the big data space is not set to die down any time soon — it’s just about to enter into a new phase.

Accel is announcing tonight that it has dedicated $100 million for a new investment fund called Big Data Fund 2. The fund is the same size as Accel’s first big data focused fund, which launched with $100 million back in November 2011.

As part of the new fund, Accel is also adding QlikView CTO Anthony Deighton and Imperva CEO Shlomo Kramer to its Big Data Fund Advisory Council, which Accel has said is meant to serve as a “guiding light” to help think through investments and track entrepreneurs doing interesting things in the space.

Despite the nearly identical name, Accel’s Big Data Fund 2 will mark a definite shift in focus from the firm’s first big data fund, partner Jake Flomenberg said in a phone call today. “Over the past few years, we’ve focused a tremendous amount of attention on what people like to call the ‘three Vs’ of big data: variety, volume and velocity,” he said. “We now believe there is a fourth V, which is end user value, and that hasn’t been addressed to the same extent,” and that is where Big Data Fund 2 will be focusing the bulk of its investment and attention.

Specifically, Accel believes that “last mile” for big data will be served largely by startups focused on data-driven software, or “DDS.” These startups have largely been made possible through the hardware and infrastructure technology innovations that defined big data’s first wave, Flomenberg says. In a prepared statement from Accel, Facebook engineering VP Jay Parikh, who also serves on Accel’s Big Data Advisory Council, explained it like this:

“The last mile of big data will be built by a new class of software applications that enable everyday users to get real value out of all the data being created. Today’s entrepreneurs are now able to innovate on top of a technology stack that has grown increasingly powerful in the last few years – enabling product and analytical experiences that are more personalized and more valuable than ever.”

One example Flombenberg pointed to as an example of a “fourth V” DDS startup is RelateIQ, the “next generation relationship manager” software startup which launched out of stealth last week with some $29 million in funding from Accel and others.

Accel’s existing portfolio of big data investments also includes Cloudera, Couchbase, Lookout, Nimble Storage, Opower, Prismatic, QlikView, Sumo Logic, and Trifacta.

When most men go out to buy a casual shirt, they think of sizing in terms of small, medium, or large. But a new startup called Trumaker wants men to start expecting more from the fit of their day to day shirts, by bringing personalized made-to-measure fitting to the world of casual men’s shirts — all at a price point that’s in line with the current offerings from mainstream men’s clothing companies.

To help in achieving its mission, Trumaker has raised $1.9 million from a group of seed backers that include Venrock, RRE, and angels including Alex Bard, David Tisch, Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn, Velos Partners, Eniac Ventures, and others.

From top to bottom, Trumaker’s business model is quite unique. Made-to-measure has been done on a more mainstream level for formal clothing such as men’s suits, but Trumaker is focusing on the casual space, with the kinds of button-down shirts that men wear with jeans. In terms of its sales force, the company has no brick and mortar stores: Instead, it employs contractors called “Outfitters” who come to clients wherever they are — at home, work, wherever — and take their measurements to ensure a proper fit.

The Outfitter then programs those measurements into Trumaker’s mobile app along with the customer’s custom order, which allows him to choose the fabric, fit, collar shape, and other details (Trumaker’s shirts are made at a factory in Malaysia that also manufactures high-end shirts for the likes of Brooks Brothers.) Trumaker shirts start at around $100, which is in line with nicer off the rack men’s shirts from stores like J. Crew.

Since Trumaker’s Outfitters collect a commission on each purchase made by their clients during that first fitting and going forward into the future, working for Trumaker can be a lucrative job either in a full or part-time capacity — just like people working for startups such as Lyft and Sidecar. And sales seem to be going quite well: Since Trumaker’s soft launch in San Francisco this past December, the company has sold more than 2,000 shirts simply through word of mouth.

It’s all pretty exciting stuff, so we stopped by Trumaker’s San Francisco headquarters to meet with founder and CEO Mark Lovas and get a look at what the company is doing and what exactly the process of ordering a Trumaker shirt is like. Check all that out in the video embedded above.

In the “ask me anything” format made famous by Reddit, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden returned to the Guardian’s website this morning to answer questions from the general public as part of a live event known as “AskSnowden.”

It was a fascinating exchange, and you can see the whole thing here — and we’ll have a rundown of the full event here soon. But there was one standout bit of good news from Snowden along with the disturbing details of the government’s surveillance of our web activity: Encryption works as a method to keep your personal data private.

A commenter named Mathius1 asked (typos included here), “Is encrypting my email any good at defeating the NSA survelielance? Id my data protected by standard encryption?”

Snowden responded:

“Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.”

Snowden doesn’t add more details, but in general some examples of well-reputed third party crypto systems would be the Gnu Privacy Guard, or “GPG,” and the Pretty Good Privacy program, or “PGP.” And a number of messaging systems even built by companies that have been implicated as part of PRISM have end-to-end encryption, as Apple highlighted in its updated response to the NSA news:

“…we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place. There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.

For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.”

And while these protections are all relatively solid, Snowden makes a good point about endpoint security being a different beast. Here Snowden likely means that there are ways that the government can ultimately read your emails and messages even if they’re not able to intercept them along the way, by accessing them somehow at either end of the delivery process. A real-world analogy would be that even if the entire postal mail system up until a letter is delivered to you is completely impenetrable, someone can still snatch a letter out of your unlocked mailbox — or, say, read it over your shoulder once it’s in your hands.

All of this underscores a larger point being discussed lately, that having any real power to control your privacy may increasingly depend on how tech-savvy you are. The folks at Codecademy are seeing this as a lesson to help encourage more people to become digitally literate, writing in a blog post today:

“Pretty much anybody who knows how code works was prepared for this sort of revelation. Because becoming code fluent is about more than simply knowing enough javascript to get a job. It’s a way to become familiar with the operating system on which the human drama is playing itself out.

Moreover, the better you understand the programs and platforms you use – and the permanence of almost everything you do online – the better equipped you will be to choose what the data watchers know about you, and what they don’t.

May the digitally illiterate proceed at their own risk. Once again, you have been warned.”

Of course, it’s a smart message to make if you’re a company whose business it is to teach as many people to code as possible, like Codecademy is. But even so, it’s hard to argue against the idea that knowledge is power — especially when it comes to technology.

Earlier this month many people were surprised to hear the revelation that a number of major web companies may have granted user data access to the U.S. government through a secret program called PRISM. But it’s fair to say that Andrew Keen was likely not exactly dying of shock as these allegations surfaced — he’s been arguing for years that the social web is not nearly as safe as many people presume, and that we give up important rights and principles when we become lax about our privacy.

Keen talks about a lot of these ideas in his TechCrunch TV interview series “Keen On,” but I thought it’d be good to bring him to the other side of the table to hear a bit more about his thoughts on the NSA and PRISM and how people should view privacy in light of the news that’s just surfaced. Talking with Keen is always interesting, so I’d recommend you check it all out above.

Updated. As the PRISM scandal shows no signs of dying down in the public consciousness, Facebook has just released the fullest account to date of the requests it has received from United States law enforcement and governmental authorities for the data surrounding its users.

To borrow a phrase from local news sizzle reels, the numbers may surprise you.

In a report issued today on Facebook’s company blog, general counsel Ted Ullyot wrote:

“For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000 and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.

With more than 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide, this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S. state, local, or federal U.S. government request (including criminal and national security-related requests) in the past six months. We hope this helps put into perspective the numbers involved, and lays to rest some of the hyperbolic and false assertions in some recent press accounts about the frequency and scope of the data requests that we receive.”

More information can be found here, and we’re updating the story as it develops.

UPDATE: Microsoft has followed suit, releasing its own figures on official U.S. data requests including FISA orders in its own blog post shortly following Facebook’s disclosures, writing:

“For the six months ended December 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from U.S. governmental entities (including local, state and federal).”

But at first blush, those numbers may not seem as scary as the initial reports on governmental surveillance of web activity would imply. Though the government under FISA does have the right to request as much information as it would like in the name of national security, it seems that those requests have affected a relatively tiny fraction of Facebook users.

For a bit of background: Facebook this week joined several other technology giants including Microsoft and Google in publicly asking the government to change the restrictions prohibiting them from being fully transparent about the extent of their cooperation in the U.S. government’s surveillance activities.

Thus far, requests that Facebook has received from the National Security Agency (NSA) have been kept secret because they are by definition confidential orders executed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — the secrecy is mandated in the name of keeping American citizens safe from equally secretive terrorist organizations. In short, anything under FISA is just like Fight Club — the first and most important rule is that it isn’t discussed.

Facebook has said recently that one reason it has refrained from issuing public statements about its involvement with governmental authorities (such as Google does with its Transparency Report) is because the existence of FISA would make such statements incomplete. In many ways, these companies’ hands have been tied if they want to keep complying with the law.

Now, many of us would love to see whistleblowers within these tech firms flout the law and talk about what exactly is going on, as Edward Snowden has — FISA be damned. Michael Arrington, who I personally think has been nailing exactly how the tech industry should be viewing this issue from day one on his Uncrunched blog, has issued a some compelling calls for industry folks to do just that — but up until now, we’ve only had tech companies asking for a bit more leeway and permission to talk.

While staying within the confines of the law, Facebook today has made a significant stride toward really opening up the way that the government handles its information gathering and disclosures — it will be interesting to see how other companies follow suit.

Nextdoor, the company for creating private social networks accessible only to your local neighbors, has had a lot of people join since it first launched in 2011: More than 14,100 neighborhoods have been created on the site, and on average 100 new neighborhoods are being added each day. But today Nextdoor is set to announce a new user that’s special — the Big Apple itself.

Today, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is set to announce a partnership with Nextdoor to adopt the service as a citywide communications tool. At the moment, the Mayor’s office is the first to sign on for using Nextdoor to communicate with NYC citizens about things like neighborhood safety issues, natural disasters, and local events. Other NYC city services are set to roll out use of the site in the coming months.

In a phone call this week, Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia said that no money has changed hands as part of this partnership — it’s been an organic approach much in the same way that a city would opt to create a Twitter or Facebook account. New York is actually just the latest (and largest) of more than 120 cities that have partnered with Nextdoor to use it in an official capacity.

He also said this wasn’t a case where the city had to be sold on the utility of technology and the social web. “The city of New York is incredibly innovative, starting with the government itself, which has really embraced the technology revolution,” Tolia said, pointing to Bloomberg and NYC’s chief digital officer Rachel Haot as leaders as particularly tech savvy leaders. “You hear that cities move slowly and have a lot of bureaucracy, but in establishing this partnership the city of New York has been as well-functioning as an organization as any company in Silicon Valley.”

In a prepared statement Bloomberg, who will announce the Nextdoor partnership in person at the company’s San Francisco headquarters today, is quoted as saying:

“Partnering with Nextdoor is another step forward in our adoption of strategic technology that better serves New Yorkers. Nextdoor gives New York neighbors an easy way to connect and communicate with those who live around them. It also provides the City with a direct line of communication to residents about important and often critical updates.”

Some people are afraid that online shopping will lead to the death of brick and mortar retail (and a spate of empty storefronts on our streets.) But Storenvy, the online marketplace that lets independent merchants sell their wares in their own digital storefronts, is one of a number of web companies that’s making a reverse commute of sorts — bringing their web businesses into meatspace.

Storenvy opened its pop-up shop in San Francisco with the intention that it would be a temporary 30-day thing. Four months later, it’s become a pretty popular destination, and the company’s CEO Jon Crawford now says that he is looking at opening more brick and mortar locations elsewhere in the U.S. in the months ahead. In a way, the pop-up store is an extension of the online experience — transactions are still done through the web, not with a traditional register, and each vendor is completely in control of his or her own spot.

It’s a cool thing to see in person, so we brought along the TechCrunch TV cameras to get a look at how Storenvy has translated its online vibe into the real world and talk to Crawford a bit about the company’s strategy. Check it all out in the video above.

There is a very real “crunch” going on at the Series A and Series B levels of funding, as a number of startups that launched to great enthusiasm a few years back are having trouble getting more support from investors nowadays. That’s especially true for companies with a heavy focus on the social web. But Wrapp, the social gifting service, has shown that it is not another victim.

Wrapp is announcing today that it has closed on $15 million in fresh funding to continue to grow its business, which is jointly based in Stockholm, Sweden and San Francisco, California. The round, which serves as Wrapp’s Series B, included participation from existing Wrapp investors Greylock Partners, Atomico and Creandum, along with new investors American Express, Qualcomm Ventures, and SEB Private Equity. This brings the total amount invested in Wrapp to $25.5 million.

Wrapp co-founder and COO Carl Fritjofsson swung by TechCrunch TV on his latest visit to San Francisco this past week to give us a hands-on look at the latest version of Wrapp and discuss the new funding, and you can check it all out in the video embedded above. He said that the fresh money comes after a period of solid growth for Wrapp, which allows people to give their friends presents such as gift certificates to certain stores. More than 1 million users have gifted more than 15 million gift cards through the service, he says, with more than 200 retailers worldwide providing gift cards through the platform as a marketing tool.

Going forward with the new funds, Fritjofsson says that Wrapp is going to focus on more growth in its existing areas — and evolve the product in new ways. “We’re moving slightly beyond the pure friend to friend gifting” to extend its focus onto more comprehensive platforms and tools for the businesses who are catering to those users, he said.

Also in the video, we also talked about how Wrapp compares to other players in the space, most notably Facebook and its Karma acquisition which is now Facebook Gifts (that portion of our chat starts at around the 7:00 minute mark), what the experience in general was like raising a Series B during this general crunch (that starts at 5:30), more about what the future holds for Wrapp (starting at 8:00), and lessons learned from building a multi-national startup (that starts at 9:04.)

The PRISM story has progressed significantly since last week, when Mark Zuckerberg published Facebook’s official response to the reports that it is among a group of tech companies that have been secretly cooperating with the United States government to provide user data. But at Facebook’s annual shareholder meeting held today in Millbrae, California, Zuckerberg said the company continues to stand behind that initial statement.

“I wrote this statement last week that I published on Facebook that I think is basically the fullness of what we believe,” Zuckerberg said in response to a shareholder’s question about the general national security reports in the press. He went on to add more detail:

“We don’t work directly with the NSA, or with any other program. Nor do we proactively give user information to anyone, nor has anyone approached us to do that.”

He also reiterated his statement that no agency has “direct access” to Facebook’s servers, and acknowledged that that phrase has led to questions as to whether that means that the company is providing some kind of indirect access to its data. “The reality is anyone can go to Facebook.com and get indirect access to our service,” he said. “No agencies have direct access and can plug into our servers and get information… the process that government agencies go through if they want to get a warrant is similar to what police do in any court case, and we basically give the minimum amount of information” necessary to comply with any request, he said.

Of course, these statements don’t come close to addressing the full spectrum of possibilities about what PRISM could actually be. And Google, for one, has stepped forward and issued an updated official statement today about the situation. After Zuckerberg and team return from the shareholder meeting (which included a very drawn-out Q&A session with an interesting batch of investors), perhaps they will take a more serious second look at updating their stance.

Exec, the San Francisco startup that lets you easily hire people online by the hour to run your errands and do your cleaning, will be increasing the flat rate for its flagship errand-running service Exec Errands by 20 percent and more than tripling its surcharge in an apparent bid to beef up its margins.

In an email sent to Exec users today, founder Justin Kan said that the price for errands will now be $30 per hour, up from the $25 hourly rate that it touted when it launched back in the spring of 2012 as part of Y Combinator. Exec Errands is also upping its surcharge from three percent to 10 percent. The changes go into effect later this week, on June 14th.

The official explanation for the price and surcharge hike is straightforward: “We’re making these changes to ensure that we are able to continue to provide the highest level of on-demand personal assistant services to our customers,” Kan wrote in his email to users. We’ve reached out for more details on Exec’s margins and how this will impact them, and will update this with any word we receive.

Notably, the price increases do not effect Exec Cleaning, the standalone house cleaning app that launched in San Francisco in February and has since expanded to Seattle, San Diego, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago And Boston. Cleaning had already accounted for more than 50 percent of Exec’s business before it was spun out as a standalone service, and it’s now the first thing featured on the company’s landing page.

Indeed, Exec is one of several startups that launched with a focus on helping people outsource their errands but has since expanded its purview — or changed it entirely. Zaarly, which launched in 2011 as a “reverse Craigslist” for outsourcing odd jobs to neighbors, has since ditched that business entirely to focus on virtual local storefronts; TaskRabbit, which for years focused solely on errand-running for consumers, now also caters to businesses looking for legitimate temp workers.

Of course, these kinds of changes are natural as startups develop, especially in a brand-new business category (after all, just a few years ago, getting someone else to pick up your dry cleaning was something that could only be afforded by, well, execs.) We can almost certainly expect to see more shifts as the market evolves.

Our own Jordan Crook interviewed Justin Kan a couple months ago just after Exec Cleaning launched in New York City, and it was an in-depth discussion about the company’s growth thus far, future plans, the larger competitive landscape, and more. It’s embedded below:

You may have heard that there was some Apple news today — a lot of it, in fact. So to make sense out of all the news that came out of the WWDC keynote in San Francisco this morning, we brought in Greg Kumparak and Darrell Etherington, two TechCrunch reporters who were at the event in person, to tell us all about the biggest takeaways.

Check out the video above to see Greg and Darrell give us the rundown on OS X Mavericks, iOS 7, Apple moving into Pandora territory with iTunes Radio, that slick-looking new Mac Pro that will be both designed and assembled in the good old U.S. of A, and more.

It’s been a big news day for all things Apple, and a lot of the buzz has been around the company’s renewed focus on American manufacturing. But one feature announced today in Apple’s new iOS 7 mobile operating system shows that Apple’s dedication to China — and specifically, the market of Chinese iPhone users which is growing at a “mind-boggling” rate — is only getting stronger.

Apple said today that a host of new features will be included in iOS 7 that should make the mobile operating system even more useful for the Chinese market, including a Chinese/English bilingual dictionary and handwriting recognition for multiple Chinese characters. But possibly the most significant bit of news in terms of iOS 7 and China is that Tencent Weibo, the microblogging site that essentially functions as a Twitter focused on the Chinese market, will be “supported” in iOS 7.

The integration received just a short mention in Apple’s official iOS 7 announcement, so the extent of the support is not yet clear. But the fact that the service has been accounted for at all puts it in an elite group of third party players given priority on Apple’s mobile operating system — most notably Twitter, which was integrated into iOS 5 back in 2011 (and subsequently saw a huge bump in new user registrations), and Facebook, which was integrated into iOS 6 last year.

Tencent Weibo’s competitor, Chinese social networking giant Sina Weibo, was integrated into iOS 6 last year. Both platforms are massive, with user bases that reportedly exceed 500 million. It will be interesting to see what effect this has Tencent Weibo’s growth going forward.

It’s had to have been an interesting week for the people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The non-profit has been beating the drum about the importance of digital rights, privacy, and metadata for decades now. And in recent years, one of the EFF’s causes has been to shed more light on the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) and specifically its use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to essentially spy on the telecommunications and web activity of millions of innocent Americans under the guise of keeping them safe.

Now those issues have come to the forefront of the mainstream’s consciousness, with a series of revelations this week that the NSA has reportedly been secretly working together with major tech companies to give the government access huge amounts of private user data through a classified project called PRISM.

So it was a massive pleasure to have Peter Eckersley, the EFF’s Technology Projects Director, in TechCrunch TV’s San Francisco studio yesterday afternoon to speak about all that’s going on. It was a relatively long conversation, but I think it could have gone on much longer and continued to be fascinating — Eckersley is an expert on this subject and clearly passionate about the cause, and there were lots of bases to cover.

What’s interesting is that I spoke to Eckersley just one hour before the New York Times’ Claire Cain Miller reported that the technology companies named in the leaked PRISM slides were indeed complicit with the NSA’s data mining, contrary to their cleverly worded public denials. As you’ll see above, he expected that was exactly the case — that the tech companies involved in PRISM have been issuing clever “deniable denials” about what is going on, rather than telling the full truth. The reason they’re doing so, Eckersley said (and the NYT reported), is FISA.

We discussed the history of FISA, how the EFF is fighting for more transparency (and why it matters), why this news of companies like Facebook and Google working with the NSA is a surprising disappointment even to the folks at the EFF, what people who care about their privacy should do now, and much more.

Are you feeling like you’re ready to kick off the weekend, but could just use three more opinions on the biggest tech news stories of the week before you really get the party started? Well you came to the right place, because it’s time for a new episode of CrunchWeek, the weekly show where three of us writers plop ourselves down in the TechCrunch TV studio for some real talk about the most interesting stories from the past seven days.

I’d be amiss if I didn’t acknowledge that this episode is missing a big, huge, massive story. We taped this late Thursday afternoon, one day earlier than normal, so that Leena Rao and I could say our proper CrunchWeek goodbyes sayonara to Drew Olanoff, who is departing TechCrunch for the purple shores of Yahoo. The story that the National Security Agency has been cooperating with some of the web’s most significant Internet companies to mine personal user data — almost certainly the dominant news of the week — broke as we were in the studio.

We did, however, talk about the NSA secretly tapping into all the call data from the Verizon network, which was clearly just the tip of the iceberg of these revelations.

We also talked about Zynga laying off nearly 20 percent of its workforce and its pretty shocking shuttering of Draw Something maker OMGPOP, just a year after it was acquired for some $200 million.

Between the reports this week about that the U.S. National Security Agency has been mining personal user data from some of the world’s biggest Internet players through a project called ‘PRISM’, to the government’s defense of wide scale data collection for security reasons, and finally the outright denials from the web companies named in the leaked documents that they had ever even heard of PRISM let alone cooperated with it, there’s a lot of information out there — and it’s hard to know what’s right and what’s wrong.

So we were pleased today to have the chance to speak with Eugene H. Spafford, aka “Spaf,” a computer science professor at Purdue University and a noted expert in computer security and ethics whose C.V. includes time serving on the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, to help elucidate what’s going on here — and perhaps point us in the direction of the truth here.

It was a wide-ranging conversation, and Spaf is a very thoughtful and knowledgeable source on this, so I’d encourage you to watch the whole thing. But I wanted to pull out one bit of what Dr. Spafford said regarding the timing of this whole situation, starting at about minute 10:18:

“I think there are several things here that are interesting about this. The first is, in the last three days we’ve seen three highly classified bits of information that were at the center of stories broken by the Guardian in England, all involving highly classified U.S. documents. That indicates that there is potentially some very significant leak of someone who is violating their oath, who is disclosing information that is protected by law, and is undoubtedly going to be raising the ire of law enforcement, intelligence, government agents throughout the U.S. because they don’t now what else may be leaked. This is a major problem, it is likely to provoke a significant backlash. It raises some questions about the veracity of the information.

I find the timing interesting that all of this is being released on the days that the president is meeting with the Chinese premier and the major topic of discussion was supposed to be the us complaining about surveillance and cyber attacks by the Chinese.

One of the things in security is that there are no coincidences. So one can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some political motive, and who’s really behind this, if in fact there is a real story.”

There’s so much more where that came from, and you can see it all in the video embedded above.

President Obama’s official schedule indicates that he is currently aboard Air Force One and en route to the San Francisco Bay Area for private events being held tonight with some of Silicon Valley’s most elite players.

The president’s visit comes within hours of massive new revelations about the United States National Security Agency’s reported collection of personal user data from Verizon as well as from the servers of Internet giants including Facebook, Google, Apple, and others (a number of those companies are denying any involvement in providing data.)

The trip to the Bay Area, which will last less than 24 hours and was apparently scheduled long before the NSA news broke, is primarily a fundraising junket (on Friday, President Obama will head to Southern California to meet with the President of China.) Local ABC affiliate KGO reported this morning that the president’s first stop after his plane touches down at approximately 6:00 PM Pacific Time will be the home of Flipboard CEO Mike McCue and his wife Marci:

“The McCues are hosting a $5,000 per person cocktail reception. VIP seating runs up to $15,000 a couple. The guest list has not been released, although it’s expected to include people from the tech and venture capital world.”

After that, the president will go to Vinod Khosla’s home in Portola Valley, where a $32,400 per person dinner will be held. Topics there will reportedly include “things like immigration, climate change and gun violence prevention,” according to the plans laid out in arranging the event.

But given the latest news and how it’s absolutely dominating the discussions in the tech world right now, it seems inevitable that tonight’s conversations will go a bit off-topic from those planned talking points.

Image of Air Force One at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California via NASA.gov

It may seem counter-intuitive for an apparel and accessories company to encourage women to buy fewer things, but that’s exactly what a new startup called Cuyana is doing.

Cuyana, a San Francisco startup that makes responsibly sourced, high-end apparel and accessories sold only online, is announcing today that it’s closed on $1.7 million in seed funding from Canaan Partners to scale out its company. Cuyana currently has a full-time staff of five along with 10 part-timers, which will likely grow in the months ahead.

Also today, Cuyana is kicking off what it’s calling the “Lean Closet” movement: Customers who buy Cuyana items will also receive a bag in which to put unwanted items from their own closets to send back to the company in exchange for store credit. Cuyana will then donate those items to nonprofits.

The idea, Cuyana co-founders Karla Gallardo and Shilpa Shah told me in an interview this week, is to encourage women to pare down their closets to only include well-made things that they actually love — such as the things Cuyana makes (of course.) “We create premium quality collections from around the world with a minimalist design that will last forever, and pieces you can wear every day,” Gallardo said. “The result is having a lean closet, which allows you to have a life free of clutter.”

It’s an idea that is not exactly new — wealthy women have stocked their closets with timeless classics from the likes of Alaia and The Row and Celine for years — but Cuyana says it’s bringing well-made ethically produced items from places like Peru and Argentina to a new price point, with bags that cost around $160 instead of around $900.

That’s enabled by, you guessed it, technology — Cuyana is online only, and has structured its own supply chain to be much faster than typical luxury retail brands. “We are able to pass those savings on to the customer,” Gallardo says.

The strategy so far is working quite well. Since launching last year, Cuyana has seen 30 percent of its customers return for a second or third purchase, with only a one percent rate of returning items. Pinterest has been a huge marketing channel for the brand. “Often when you see a beautiful product on Pinterest, you click through and you end up on a really expensive luxury brand,” Gallardo said. “With us, people click through and see a price they can actually afford.”

Another nice thing is how Cuyana focuses on the story behind where each product is made. The company’s website can be browsed by region, and the visitor can really delve into the process behind the manufacturing of each object, whether it’s a pair of earrings in Turkey or a scarf made in Peru. It’s refreshing to see this kind of transparency from e-commerce brands such as Cuyana and Everlane, after years of traditional retailers often trying their best to hide the often shameful details on how their products are made.

Since it was founded way back in 2000, TripAdvisor has established itself as one of the web’s top go-to places for travel reviews — but its booking capabilities for hotels have notably lagged behind. The site has historically adhered to showing hotel prices in a series of early aughts-style pop-up windows from partner sites, rather than on one page alone à la Kayak hotel search.

That’s finally all changed. TripAdvisor announced today the worldwide launch of its all-in-one hotel price comparison search, putting an end to those pop-ups for good. The new one-page display is currently live for hotels all around the world, and active across all of TripAdvisor’s mobile apps and websites. TripAdvisor is still not a hotel booking provider itself, but it has now put price results from all of its booking partners on one page — you still click through to another site to ultimately purchase a room.

The company acknowledged how late to the game it’s been with a cheeky press release entitled “TripAdvisor Apologizes To Travelers Around The World.” It’s a pretty refreshing way to handle the launch, and frankly a bit unexpected coming from a 13-year-old publicly traded company worth some $8.8 billion.

Here’s one bit:

“‘Our bad,’ said Steve Kaufer, co-founder and CEO of TripAdvisor. ‘We want to help travelers plan and have the perfect trip, not drive them crazy with endless annoying pop-ups before they’ve booked it. We are excited to offer real-time hotel prices and availability in one convenient display.’”

Amid the jokes, though, TripAdvisor is also keen to point out that even though the launch is late, it is still powerful. That’s because the one-page price comparison is tied in automatically with the 100 million user reviews that are currently on the site. TripAdvisor’s size and scope may be part of why it’s been so slow to roll out this feature, but it could also work to its advantage going forward.

Ultimately, this launch could have a nice impact on TripAdvisor’s sales — helping the company capture more of a cut from the hotel stays that it has been guiding people towards for years now. Time will tell as the quarterly reports continue to roll in.

When many people hear “wealth management,” they think of elite advisors meeting old money clients at the country club, or decades-old firms with big names such as Fidelity or Schwab. But in the years ahead, one Silicon Valley startup is aiming to shake up that establishment — and just has raised a nice chunk of new funding to help.

Personal Capital, the online-oriented personal wealth management platform company, has taken on $25 million in a new round of funding led by Crosslink Capital with the participation of asset management giant BlackRock and previous investors Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and Venrock. The round, which serves as Personal Capital’s Series C, brings the total amount invested in the nearly four year old company to $52.3 million.

In an interview this week, Personal Capital’s CEO Bill Harris, whose history in the financial software space includes time as CEO of both Intuit and PayPal, said that the funding comes after some solid growth on both sides of Personal Capital’s business. The online side, which provides free asset management tools through the web, currently has more than 200,000 users with in excess of $20 billion assets being tracked on the platform. The financial advisory services side, which charge a commission and are provided on the phone or via email through Personal Capital’s team of full-time advisors, currently reaches more than 700 clients with nearly $200 million being managed.

Those numbers are encouraging for an upstart player in a space like wealth management. But Harris says he sees the opportunity in front of Personal Capital as much, much bigger. He said:

“This is the largest market I’ve ever encountered. Individually managed investable assets is a $32 trillion dollar market in the United States… that’s twice the GDP of the entire country. And nobody is dominating it. Even the biggest guys in the space — Fidelity, Schwab — they all have low single digit shares of the market.

What we’re building, consumer technology with customer-centric and holistic advice, I think this represents where the industry will go over next 10 to 15 years.”

In that same vein, when asked about whether Personal Capital has courted M&A offers along the way from bigger tech or finance firms, Harris says he’s focused on staying independent for the time being. “A lot of companies in Silicon Valley are not companies, they’re products. And once they’ve demonstrated the abilities of that product it’s time to be acquired,” he said. “I believe that the service we’re offering is broad and deep enough and the market we’re selling into is large enough that we have the opportunity to be a true company rather than just a product.”

In the near-term, the funding will also be put toward growing Personal Capital’s staff, which currently consists of some 70 full-time employees. The company is also set to open its first new satellite office outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, in Denver.

Overall, though, Harris said the plan is to stay the course. “We have built built the personal advisory piece and technology piece, and proven the economics of acquiring users and converting them to clients. At this point we have a formula which is working. The most important thing for us for the next year is to rinse and repeat.”