Entrepreneurs, please start paying more attention to healthtech. Rather than trying to build the next billion-dollar mobile photo app, go lean and deep into bigger problems. As ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi said recently, healthtech is underrepresented among startups, with many (and founders are not alone) failing to recognize the size of the market (and the corresponding opportunity): Healthcare alone is a $2.7 trillion industry in the U.S., for example.

Yet, healthtech is just as desperate in its need for brain power, entrepreneurial enthusiasm, and a little elbow grease as it was five years ago. Speaking to a crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday, the ZocDoc CEO essentially issued a call-to-action, declaring that access to healthcare “is one of the greatest challenges to face our generation.”

Today, thanks to the increasing number of health-focused startup accelerators, like San Francisco-based Rock Health and New York City-based BluePrint Health, to name a few, lacking intimate familiarity with HIPAA or med school experience is no longer a categorical disqualifier. What’s more, there are plenty of problems to tackle, some of them low-hanging, and there is in fact growth capital to be found for healthtech.

To that point: One of the first graduates of BluePrint’s healthtech accelerator is a startup called Meddik, which wants to give consumers a better way to search for health information and find targeted and personalized support. The startup is still in the early stages, so the fine points are still gelling, but the idea is to build a platform that aggregates user-submitted content, identifying the best advice, articles, and solutions based on the specific conditions and topics of interest of the individual.

Thought it’s still early in the cycle, Meddik is already finding validation from investors, as the startup is today announcing that its has raised $750K in seed funding from a flock of notable angels and early-stage VCs, including Chris Dixon, Nat Turner, Zach Weinberg, Bob Stern, Vivek Garipalli, as well as Collaborative Fund, Founder Collective, Great Oaks, and Silicon Badia.

Co-founder Tim Soo, who’s currently on leave from the University of Pennsylvania as he and co-founder Ben Shyong work towards to launch Meddik later this summer, told us that they had originally set out to build a kind of Google Search for health. Much in the same way that Noodle is currently doing for education.

But the co-founders eventually came to the realization that their scope was too wide, as crawling the entire web resulted in an unfavorable ratio of spam and junk to quality health content. Of course, this touches on a problem that’s fundamental to online health portals. Unless your leg is falling off, thanks to the high cost of health care and doctor/hospital visits, when it comes to basic health questions, our first move is to ask Google. Just as true now as it was then.

Naturally, that Google search then leads to general answers, confusing encyclopedia entries, or long-winded forums. But, what if you find someone just like you (a clone?!), who had experienced the same medical issue, ailment, or had already asked the same question and could tell you what worked — and what didn’t.

Of course, while this is a great start, that information is still anecdotal. Thus, the key, Shoo said, is to scale that experience, adding personalized, aggregated public and academic information, traditional and alternative remedies, in an effort to not just find a good answer to your health questions, but find the right answer. Which is so much easier said than done.

We still haven’t applied Web 2.0 answers where they matter most, the co-founder continued, so a health networking play “doesn’t just mean a better news feed, or a good restaurant recommendation, it means making the right health-related connection can save lives.”

Of course, even though Massoumi reminded us of the fact that health startups are underrepresented in the ecosystem, Meddik has plenty of competition — at least nominally. WebMD and PatientsLikeMe, and Healthline each offer extensive resources for patients, yet the majority of existing health solutions tend to focus on specific conditions (like chronic illnesses), which makes them inherently boxed-in. And in the case of the above examples, the barriers to entry can also be high, requiring users to fill out involved online profiles.

While solutions like Fitbit and Fitocracy are finding adoption among mainstream audiences, there’s a lot of focus on Considering most health attributes are intrinsically interrelated, the co-founders began building out a large ontology table that connects all common health language (via a Wiki and internet scraping) to actual medical code.

Companies such as WebMD, PatientsLikeMe, Healthline and Alliance Health also provide an online heath resource for patients, but Soo said those sites either have higher barriers to entry (in that users have to complete more involved profiles) or target patients with more chronic illnesses. Fitbit, Fitocracy, Nike’s Fuel band and others appeal to a mainstream audience, but they only focus on general fitness, not the larger category of personal health. Meddik wants to play across that spectrum, Soo said.

Based on those codes, Meddik calculates a clinical similarity index between the searcher and every other user connected to the site, with the goal being to create a health network, in which users remain anonymous while being able to connect with those who will be best suited to help you.

At this point, as you may already be able to tell, Meddik is still in the early stages of building its MVP. The service is in closed beta with a limited number of beta testers beginning the process of seeding its content. When the site is up and fully functional, Soo says, it will likely monetize by leveraging its unique data set to serve targeted health advertising — not unlike Facebook’s social data/advertising model.

To give readers a taste of the site, Meddik will be peeling the doors back the foor a opening its doors over the next few days to a few hundred early participants. Check them out at home here, and let us know what you think.

Kony Solutions, the unfortunately named makers of a write once, run everywhere mobile app development platform today announced that it has closed a $15 million series C round of financing. The funding was led by New York City-based venture capital firm, Insight Venture Partners, a 17-year-old firm that has invested in companies like Tumblr, Buddy Media, Wix, Chegg, and Twitter — to name a few.

Insight also led Kony’s $19.1 million series A financing, which it closed in January of last year. With its latest infusion of capital, which brings total funding to nearly $39 million, the startup is looking fund the deployment of new sales and marketing programs, regional expansion, and to ramp up hiring.

For those unfamiliar, Kony is on a mission to develop technologies and apps that both facilitate and accelerate customer engagement on any mobile operating system, device or channel. Through its flagship product, KonyOne, the startup offers a development environment and mobile middleware that allows big businesses to build and launch both enterprise and consumer apps.

As a result, Kony now offers support for nearly every technology and deployment option out there, from native apps on all native OSes, HTML5-capable browsers, single page apps, wrappers, hybrids, and more — even support for BYOD deployments. The agility and scalability of its platform have attracted more than 70 Fortune 500 companies, banks, airlines, as well as automotive and insurance companies.

Kony CEO Raj Koneru says that the startup will use its newest round of funding to continue managing and expanding on its recent growth, which (as of the end of its FY2012) had seen more than 200 percent growth in bookings and has added more than 30 new global customers, including Aetna, CIBC, Independence Blue Cross, Scottrade and Sun Life Financial.

What’s more, the company recently launched a suite of off-the-shelf, vertical-specific apps for banking, healthcare, retail, and travel, while earning the business of more than 30 new customers, including Aetna, CIRC, BlueCrossBlueShield, Scottrade, and Sun Life Financial.

With patents-pending for its flagship product, KonyOne, support of more than a billion user sessions annually, and its being named a “Visionary” startup by Gartner, Kony is really starting to find the kind of traction it will need to compete in a crowded space.

For more, check out Kony at home here.

BodyMedia, one of the growing number of companies that offers wearable body sensors, just announced that it has raised a $12 million funding round led by Comcast Ventures. The company’s products, including its BodyMedia FIT on-body monitoring system, currently focuses on tracking users’ activity level, but the company plans to use the money raised in this round to focus on products related to chronic diseases like diabetes, as well as remote elder care and sleep disorders. BodyMedia is a new investment for Comcast Ventures. Other investors in this round include Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet, Draper Triangle Ventures, Ascension Health Ventures and InCube Ventures.

BodyMedia launched all the way back in 1999. Prior to this round, BodyMedia had raised $37 million. Including this round, the company has now raised $49 million. This new funding round includes $2.7 million the company announced mid-round earlier this year. It’s worth noting that BodyMedia also previously received federal funding for its work on a diabetes prevention and management solution.

Its current line of armband systems tracks and analyzes users’ activity and also measures their sleep patterns. Now, however, as the company’s CEO Christine Robins notes, “the emerging convergence of healthcare, technology and consumerism provides an ideal launching pad for us to build on that heritage by introducing new body monitoring solutions tailored to managing a much broader range of health issues.”

BodyMedia sits at an interesting intersection between the growing health technology space and the self-tracking trend that’s been emerging over the last few years. By pushing deeper in the health space, the company should be able to differentiate itself from others in the self-tracking space like Fitbit and Zeo.

Comcast Venture’s portfolio, it’s worth noting, includes a wide range of companies, including Flipboard, SB Nation and JiWire.

Over the last few years, a number of startups have begun to tackle the musty old industry that surrounds fine art. While approaches vary, they all in some way seek to capitalize on the Web’s ability to level the playing field, leveraging digital technologies to make art more accessible to a broader range of consumers. Paddle8, Artsy, Zazzle, and Art.com, for example, are all taking steps to democratize the purchase, discovery, and enjoyment of art by bringing it online.

In August 2010, Boston-based TurningArt launched its own unique spin on the democratization of art commerce with a Netflix-esque model that allows any and all to “rent” and enjoy contemporary art. To support its mission to transform the way people buy artwork, the startups is today announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in funding from a number of institutional and angel investors.

As a result of its new round, one of its angel investors, Fouad Elnaggar, who is currently an SVP at CBS Interactive (as well as a former VC at Redpoint Ventures) will be joining TurningArt’s board of directors. Elnaggar joins NextView Venture’s David Beisel, who was added to the board when his firm invested in TurningArt’s $750K seed round in May of last year. Niraj Shah, Steve Conine, Thomas Lehrman, and Will Herman also contributed to the startup’s initial seed round.

While TurningArt declined to disclose further information about the participants in its latest financing, we do know that NextView re-upped its investment this time around and that angel investor Andy Rankin joined as a new investor.

All in all, with $2+ million in outside funding raised to date, TurningArt plans to build on the 350 percent increase in its customer base its’ found so far this year, using the capital to expand its artwork collection, build up its core team, and introduce a handful of new delivery options.

As to how it works: TurningArt partners with independent artists from across the country to allow consumers to test out (i.e. rent) prints of their original artwork, without having to commit to purchasing the piece, which in many cases would be far more expensive than one is willing (or able) to afford. For $10 a month, customers can search the startup’s repository of thousands of independent works, with the option to ship whenever a particular piece strikes their fancy.

The print arrives framed and ready to hang on the wall right out of the box (it even includes a nail) and users can keep the piece for as long as they’d like — although, admittedly, this sounds like the same policy that got Blockbuster into trouble with its late fees. However, as you show the piece off to your friends, loved ones, and cats, leaving it to hang on the wall, you earn credit towards a purchase.

If you don’t like the print, you can just head over to your Netflix-like queue and prompt TurningArt to send you the next piece on your list. What’s more, the startup’s handmade frames make switching prints easy — no tools are required — so you don’t even have to send the prints back, as you might with a Netflix DVD.

Obviously, TurningArt’s value proposition is twofold. The thousands of consumers now using the startup’s platform have a simple way to discover cool contemporary art, test those artworks at home, live in 3-D, and then purchase the piece if they’re so inclined. However, on the flip side, the company has already attracted hundreds of artists for the simple reason that TurningArt provides them with an easy way to expose their work to a whole new set of customers — at no cost.

What’s more, since all of the original works that the rentable prints represent are available for purchase directly through the startup’s site (prices for the works tend to frange from $50 to $5,000), artists have the opportunity not only to reach new customers and increase their own brand recognition, but to convert renters into buyers.

TurningArt gives the lion’s share of all sales to the artist, on top of a portion of the subscription revenue that comes from users “renting” their prints.

Going forward, the startup will look to introduce its platform to a broader segment of the $26 billion art market, iterate on its delivery options, and go after more high profile contemporary artists. While companies like Zazzle offer cool AR technologies that allow customers to customize and visualize their products online, the potential market for actual, in-home art test-driving has to be huge.

Applying a Netflix-style rental model to the ways by which consumers experience and purchase art is appealing, of course, it’s all about inventory. Scaling this distribution model, Netflix style, can be expensive, but it all comes back to quality. Too many steps in the process, or art that’s equivalent to something that can be found at Walmart likely won’t result in any significant customer retention.

What do you think?

Also: For readers interested in taking the service for a test drive, TurningArt is offering a TechCrunch sign-up code, which will give the first 100 people to follow this link to try their first month of TurningArt for free.

Quikr, India’s largest online and mobile classifieds portal, announced today that it has raised $32 million in series E financing, led by New York City-based private equity giant Warburg Pincus. The company’s existing investors, which include Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and eBay, also participated in the funding.

The investment is Quikr’s fifth and largest financing to date, following an $8 million raise in May 2011, led by Nokia Growth Partners, Norwest and eBay. The latest capital infusion brings Quikr’s total funding to $46 million.

Quikr was known as Kijiji (of www.kijiji.in) until a re-branding in 2008, when the company decided it wanted to adopt a name that more readily reflected ease of use and speed, with a slightly more universal (and vowel-less Web 2.0) feel. Apparently “Kijiji” didn’t inspire that. No idea why.

Kidding aside, the company was set squarely on the long-term goal of becoming a fast, easy-to-use consumer-focused platform for the Indian community, and in turn providing it with a resource by which to buy, sell and rent in any category. And, since its launch in 2008 (and its re-branding shortly thereafter), the Mumbai-based startup has grown into a sizable platform, which is now used by some 17 million people and businesses each month — across more than 83 cities — and offers listings on everything from real estate to electronics.

Today, more than 50 percent of the Indian population is under the age of 25, which equates to an enormous number of savvy web and mobile adopters. As a result, many see huge opportunity in Indian eCommerce, especially that which is targeted at a younger audience. Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley investors have been paying more and more attention to the startup ecosystem in India, the growing web penetration, and adoption of mobile devices.

What’s more, as demonstrated by this sizable investment in Quikr, not to mention the $40 million round that Bessemer, Nexus and others sank into fast-growing Indian eCommerce and deals company, Snapdeals, American investors aren’t afraid to send their money abroad.

For more, check out Quikr at home here.

Yottaa, the Boston-based startup that offers cloud-based web performance monitoring and optimization services for small businesses, is today announcing that it has closed a $9 million series B financing round. Each of the startup’s existing investors, including General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures, re-upped for Yottaa’s series B, joined by additional undisclosed investors.

Yottaa’s new round brings its total funding to $13 million and will be primarily allocated towards product development and increasing the rapidity of its product release cycle, as Yottaa gears up to add further features and components to its suite of services that aim to optimize, protect, and monotor websites and critical web apps for organizations of all stripes, but particularly the little guys — startups and SMBs.

Certainly, this is no easy task, especially considering that Yottaa is now straddling two continents, with the majority of its near-50 employees based in China while its headquarters are to be found in Boston. Yet, in spite of this — and in spite of the rising star that is the popular and well-funded Cloudflare (nominally, a Yottaa competitor) — the startup has been growing fast.

Led by Coach Wei, the former Chairman of Nexaweb, Yottaa has attracted over 80K businesses, thanks to its affordable software that allows businesses of all sizes to accelerate their websites and critical web apps. What’s more, over the last six months, Yottaa’s Site Speed Optimizer has grown to serve over 100 million unique visitors per month, and, as of last month, five percent of web users have visited sites accelerated by the Yottaa network.

Back in February, the startup announced its Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, which leverages the startup’s patented cloud-routing technology and global infrastructure to automate realtime, front-end optimization for the websites of startups and small businesses.

And speaking of that, adding to its value proposition and giving it a more defensible position in an attractive and growing market, Yottaa has been granted two patents, one being the aforementioned cloud routing technology, with a second granted in web performance and front-end optimization. What’s more, the startup has another eight patents pending approval.

Two months ago, Yottaa added some impressive talent (and experience) to its team, including the addition of former Yahoo CTO Raymie Stata to its board of directors. At Yahoo, Stata helped develop the company’s technology strategy and drive key projects like Hadoop. Prior to joining Yahoo, the CTO founded Stata Labs, which developed content management technology relating to email, leading the company until it was acquired by Yahoo. Along with Stata, the startup also hired Morris Porter as VP of Sales and Business Development, who formerly led sales operations for Citrix Online and served as VP of sales at Intranets.com, which he helped transform into a $600 million business unit within Cisco Systems.

On top of all this, Yottaa has been continuing with what its CEO describes as an aggressive product release cycle, turning its attention to the mobile web, launching a solution that allows users to bring a speed boost to their mobile web sites. Combining its patented front-end optimization service with a global content delivery network (CDN), the mobile acceleration software aims to address the mobile performance bottlenecks that have become endemic to the delivery and execution of the code that drives mobile applications, solving these challenges in an automated fashion.

The startup’s mobile performance solution was developed in partnership with another Boston-based startup, MocoSpace, a social gaming platform that today boasts over 25 million registered users. With MocoSpace in tow, the solution has been developed to help ensure that MocoSpace and other mobile companies can offer a great users experience in both mobile apps and HTML5 games on increasingly speedy mobile devices and networks.

With its growing suite of optimization and performance solutions for websites and web apps, one could see Yottaa as increasingly looking like a small-business-oriented version of Akamai. Either way, there is plenty of talent and competition in the space, but Wei thinks that the scope of the problem is huge and is only getting bigger thanks to the skyrocketing adoption of the mobile web. One could build a big company just by focusing on a particular link in the chain, he says, like mobile.

It’s taken Yottaa a long time to get to a place where the team (and Wei) feel like they’ve developed a steady foundation on which to work. But Wei says that he believes the team has arrived and, instead of taking the lean startup, fast iteration approach to product development, the team is focusing on solving these thorny optimization issues with a bigger team that will focus on rolling out bigger products every three months or so. It may be an alternative approach given the popularity of the lean startup dynamic in Silicon Valley, but with one foot in China already, a handful of patents pending, and more products on the way, Yottaa may very well be following Cloudflare to a lofty valuation.

For more, find Yottaa at home here.

Back in October, GroSocial raised $450K in seed funding from the Kickstart Seed Fund, Monarch Ventures, Rock & Hammer Ventures and a handful of angel investors. The seed funding acted as early validation and fuel for the Utah-based startup, which is on a mission to help SMBs — and organizations that lack the resources to train or hire dedicated social media teams — boost customer engagement and monetization via social media.

Today, the Utah-based social media marketing company has officially received further validation from investors, with the announcement that it has closed an additional $1 million in funding. Each of the investors that participated in the startup’s initial financing have re-upped, along with a handful of newcomers, including HubSpot Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah and HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe.

Thus far, GroSocial has focused its efforts primarily on Facebook, but with the new capital, Co-founder and CEO Zach Mangum tells us that the startup will be expanding its scope to include integrations with other social networks in an effort to become the “Buddy Media for SMBs.”

Since October, GroSocial’s partner list has grown to include Yellow Pages, LegalZoom, SurveyMonkey, and HubSpot, among others, adding to the thousands of businesses (across some 20+ countries) already using its products. The startup is also in the process of working with a number of SMB aggregators to white label its platform and sell it as their own social media marketing product.

For some context, GroSocial has been primarily focused on its flagship “Customizer” platform, which allows brand managers to launch custom-designed promotional tabs on their Facebook partner networks. Partners can use those tabs to run contests, offer promotions, coupons, services, or to add videos. Managers can choose to add a “like gate,” meaning that customers must “like” the company’s brand page in order to access the promotions that live on the tabs, and have the ability to choose which parts of its tabs can be modified by partners and take advantage of engagement statistics.

And, thanks to integrations with services like SurveyMonkey, users can not only use the drag and drop application to design custom content for Facebook pages, but take advantage of social distribution of surveys, collecting feedback from Facebook fans as they visit your brand pages.

As for what’s next, according to David Cohen of AllFacebook, GroSocial will be looking to expand its offerings to small to mid-sized marketing agencies, enabling access to white-label services — something traditionally reserved for larger agencies with more sizable social marketing budgets. Agencies will be able to resell GroSocial services at a price point that begins at $200 per month, making it easy to turn a profit and recoup costs.

This new functionality will allow GroSocial to become both a content and training provider for the many small-to-midsize marketing agencies out there, allowing the startup to monetize as it scales, while reducing the headache agencies find when trying to juggle the implementation of their clients’ social media marketing initiatives while managing their accounts.

Though GroSocial has been targeting SMBs, using Facebook as the foundation for its apps, with its new funding in tow, the startup will be looking to expand to other social networks as well as court larger companies, building on the recent additions of eBay and SkullCandy to its client roster. Mangum said that he expects GroSocial to pass 50,000 paying customers by the end of the year, which, along with the funding, will enable the startup to double its headcount.

For more, find GroSocial at home here, or check out a few of the apps that were created by some of its SMB users. Video on Customizer below:

A double-whammy in the digital video space today: Avail-TVN, a video services provider that works with companies like NBC, Univision, and brands like Mattel, has announced that it has picked up $100 million in financing led by the Carlyle Group, and it is using those funds to make an acquisition outside of the U.S., buying rival video service provider On Demand Group in the UK from its existing owner, SeaChange International, for $27 million. Avail-TVN says that the deal will make it the largest provider of digital video services in the world.

The move is a sign of how the digital TV industry is already fairly large in its geographical reach, but in many cases is still only providing incremental revenue on top of more traditional TV revenue streams — and so companies that work in this space, which can be capital intensive, are best suited to bulk up their scale to survive.

Carlyle is leading the round that also includes existing investors Columbia Capital, Valhalla Partners, Novak Biddle and Pioneer Ventures. With the round of financing Carlyle, which already has an extensive amount of holdings in the media industry, becomes Avail-TVN’s largest investor. Avail-TVN will also use the funds for product development and for wider international expansion targeting content providers and multichannel video service providers.

Avail-TVN already had a customer base extending outside of its U.S. headquarters, but this deal will extend that even further: it will now have customers in 25 countries covering 70 million households. Regions covered will be North America, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

“Our strategy has been to invest in leading players across the digital media ecosystem and incorporate them into one company to build Avail-TVN into the largest provider of advanced digital video services worldwide,” said Ramu Potarazu, Avail-TVN’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. “The Carlyle Group’s investment supports that vision, and provides the capital and global network to build upon this foundation both domestically and internationally.”

Avail-TVN already works with provides to provide enhanced interactive digital TV services: for example, it is powering the multi-platform video coverage that NBC will run during the London 2012 Olympics this summer. Adding ODG to the mix will bump up the kinds of services it can offer to customers: ODG helps broadcasters with a range of things from content acquisition and strategic consulting services, through to powering video-on-demand services for mobile, online and digital TV services. Its customers include Virgin Media in the UK, Disney, Cablevision and others. Its existing CEO, Tony Kelly, will stay on and become a part of the bigger executive management team, and will now report to Avail-TVN’s CEO, Ramu Potarazu.

There is also some debt funding involved in this deal from  Silicon Valley Bank, RBS Citizens, N.A. and Bank of America, N.A.

When you think entrepreneurial ecosystems, you probably think Silicon Valley (and the Bay Area), New York, and London. But Canada has something to say about that. In Startup Genome’s list, one finds three Canadian cities in the top 25. Naturally, startup accelerators have been taking off in Canada of late, with FounderFuel and Year One Labs opening their doors in Montreal, Extreme Startups off and running in Toronto, and last year, Vancouver got its very own accelerator in GrowLab.

GrowLab, which officially launched last May, has been off to a good start, launching 5 companies since its program began. And, today, the accelerator is ready to announce the five companies chosen to participate in its spring 2012 program, its second cohort, which kicks off tomorrow.

For those unfamiliar, GrowLab was founded by Boris Wertz (W media ventures), Lenonard Brody (Clarity Digital), Debbie Landa (DealMaker Media), Jason Bailey (East Side Games), and offers up to $25K in equity investment for its portfolio companies (in exchange for a 5 to 9 percent stake), plus a $150K convertible loan (backed by the Business Development Bank of Canada) upon completion of its 12 week program.

Startups spend 10 weeks at the accelerator’s headquarters in Vancouver, where the accelerator hosts its “Demo Day,” after which the startups travel to San Francisco, where they are led through two weeks of targeted introductions to Bay Area investors. According to co-founder Boris Wertz, the team founded GrowLab to give growing Canadian tech companies a mechanism an opportunity to leverage their extensive network and to help them secure follow-on funding to execute as they grow.

Wertz tells us that the GrowLab founders are each successful entrepreneurs in their own right (Jason Bailey sold SuperRewards to Adknowledge, Len Brody’s NowPublic was acquired by The Examiner, and Wertz sold AbeBooks to Amazon, for example) and are all actively involved in the program as mentors.

The accelerator is also announcing today that it has hired Canadian super angel Mike Edwards as executive director. Since 2010, Edwards has invested in more than 40 technology startups, including Punch’d (sold to Google), Summify (acquired by Twitter), as well as LaunchRock, Wander, and 500 Startups VC fund, to name a few.

But what is the accelerator looking for in its participating startups? Wertz tells us that the accelerator had hundreds of companies from all over the world apply (as far flung as Eastern Europe), but when it came down to it, GrowLab chose four Canadian startups (all of which are from Vancouver) and one San Francisco-based team.

As one might guess, GrowLab gives preference to strong Canadian companies, but is open to startups from all over the map. The accelerator primarily focuses on mobile, social gaming, eCommerce, SaaS, and enabling technologies companies, though, again, there are no set boundaries. Teams can be at any stage of development, but the program centers on agile development processes and building and developing MVPs.

With that in mind, here are the five companies chosen as members of GrowLab’s second cohort:

• BlueBat Games, the team behind BlueBox, an engine that allows game developers to easily build on social platforms
• Cinecoup aims to disrupt how feature films have been created, financed and distributed
• Food.ee, a new product from Invoke Media, the maker of HootSuite, Food.ee simplifies group ordering of delivery food for offices
• Skyscrpr makes it easy for bloggers to sell ads directly to advertisers with a user friendly interface and automated media kits
• Wantering, lets you visually browse, find and buy the latest trends from fashion blogs and curation networks

GrowLab’s program concludes with its invitation-only Demo Day, which kicks off Vancouver’s third annual Grow Conference on August 22nd. That same weekend Edwards will host an Accelerator Symposium, bringing together Executive Directors at accelerators and incubators from all over the globe to discuss best practices and challenges these organizations face in the ever-changing landscape of scaling companies.

For more, find GrowLab at home here.

Google got the chance to buy Twitter, but the search giant passed, says Michael Arrington. “Google hasn’t been interested in buying Twitter since they committed themselves to Google+” says Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures founder and former Twitter board member, in his fireside chat this morning with Arrington at the TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference. [Update: To clarify, I believe Google missed the boat on buying Twitter, while Wilson simply said Google wasn't interested in such a purchase since it committed to Google+. Wilson did not make a value judgement on Google not buying Twitter, nor did he confirm that acquisition discussions ever took place.]

Now Google+ is widely seen as a ghost town, and not buying Twitter could be a mistake that haunts Mountain View for years to come. Wilson has one of the most envied portfolios in venture capital, with Union Square Ventures getting in early on Twitter, Zynga, Etsy, and Tumblr. But the future might not be as bright. “I don’t think I’m going to be very good at investing in the next big thing. I don’t come from it. I didn’t work in it. The next thing isn’t going to be evolutionary. It’s going to be something completely different.”

Arrington poked Wilson about writing “Silicon Valley could become the next Detroit” in a recent AVC blog post. Wilson explains “I didn’t mean to say [that]. Silicon Valley is the center of the digital revolution. But if there’s another revolution, [like] the teleportation revolution, and teleportation is invented in Mumbai, Silicon Valley might not be the locus of the next big thing.”

Google Lost The Flock

On the war for the future of social, Arrington asked “Do you think Facebook is overvalued?” Despite the newly public company’s share price dropping over 10% from its Friday close price, Wilson defend Mark Zuckerberg’s creation. “Markets come and go, good companies survive. The price of Facebook stock is not that important. Mark built an incredible platform and organization. I don’t think it matters that much if it’s trading at $25 or $50.” But Arrington pressed “is it going to be a half-trillion dollar company?” Wilson admitted “They’re going to have to grow into that.”

Google had a big opportunity to compete with Facebook, but that’s passed. Arrington cites a rumor that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo took the company to Google saying it was raising this big a round at this valuation, and gave the search giant a chance to acquire Twitter, but  ”Google pooh-poohed it”. After the chat, Arrington told me this was when Twitter ended up raising $200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation, so the price Google would have had to pay could have been around there.

Wilson, who’s Twitter investment and former board seat must have made him familiar with the discussion, said Google decided to build social, and hasn’t considered buying something as big as Twitter in the space ever since. [Update: Wilson never confirmed Arrington's rumor, nor did he imply that not purchasing Twitter was the wrong move for Google] Google+ is off to a slow start, at least in terms of people actually using it, not just signing up. But Twitter might not have been the right fit. Google needed a social layer that could integrate into all its product, not just a micro-blogging platform. Still, Google is now a distant third in social, and Twitter’s off the table. Wilson says Twitter’s founders and board are now deadset on it staying independent.

Update: Google better hope it doesn’t end up like Yahoo, who famously reduced its bid to buy Facebook in 2006 and then lost the deal. Now Wilson says Yahoo’s former chief, the disgraced Scott Thompson “was a terrible CEO. The first thing he did was sue Facebook as a patent troll, proving he’s clueless about the way the world works. He was one of a terrible string of CEOs for that company.” There’s still a chance for Thompson to redeem himself, though. “Elliot Spitzer recovered” says Wilson, “I think people can rehabilitate themselves, but it’s definitely not a good thing to be lying on your resume.”

What’s The Value Of Angels?

“I’ve never seen angels being lazy” says Wilson , refuting Ben Horowitz’s claim that angel investors make too much money for too little work. Wilson released a flood of insights into Facebook’s valuation, and the future of Silicon Valley

“Venture capital is not the most risk-taking part of the equation. We wait until things are more developed” says Wilson. He trusts angels and the early legwork and diligence they do. “I don’t know where ‘lazy’ comes from. They’re probably the most important part of the capital stack because they believe in entrepreneurs before VCs do.”

[Image Credit: Joi Ito]

This morning AnchorFree, the makers of the popular virtual private network Hotspot Shield, is announcing that it has raised $52 million in series C financing from Goldman Sachs. All in all, this brings the Mountain View-based startup to over $63 million, following the $11 million the company raised in series A and B rounds, dating back to 2006.

As part of its whopping series C round, Goldman is joined by existing investors former chairman and CEO of MCI Bert Roberts, RENN Capital President Russell Cleveland, angel investor Esther Dyson, former president of the Huffington Post Greg Coleman, Doug Maine, the former CFO of IBM, Rick Roth, and Kevin Cook, to name a few.

For those unfamiliar, AnchorFree was founded back in 2005 with a simple mission: Provide secure, anonymous, and private browsing to internet users the world over. Over the years, the company has become best known for its flagship software, Hotspot Shield, an ad-supported virtual private network (VPN), which enables users to protect their privacy and identity while surfing the Web.

Securing each page one visits by turning all HTTP traffic into HTTPS, creates what is essentially a personal, secure tunnel for each user, allowing activity, sites visited, and personally identifiable information, for example, to stay private.

The software, which is available for PC, mac, and on mobile platforms, has also become widely used in regions and countries that censor web activity, as Hotspot enables users (both for those traveling abroad and for locals living amidst censorship) to circumvent that censorship and gain free, uninterrupted access to information.

Hotspot has become one of the most popular security tools for public WiFi hotspots, having been downloaded by more than 60 million people across the globe. Since being released 6 months ago, its iOS apps have crossed 1 million users, and Hotspot is tracking over 100 million monthly user sessions and more than two billion page views per month.

Hotspot has become increasingly relevant in countries where government tracking and crackdowns have become the norm, like when Libya flipped its kill switch last year, taking the entire country offline. The software offered the world a better sense of the breadth of that government intervention, and has become increasingly appealing to both first and third worlders accessing public hotspots.

For those using AnchorFree’s mobile apps, Hotspot also offers data compression, allowing users to decide between low, medium, or high compression — especially relevant to image quality — to help users save money on mobile data plans. (AnchorFree claims that it can help users cut data usage by as much as half.)

As to Goldman Sachs, the investment bank has been busy of late, dumping $500 million into Facebook as well as a more recent $35 investment in BeachMint, the popular social commerce startup.

For more on AnchorFree, check ‘em out at home here.

The underwriters of Facebook’s $16 billion debut on NASDAQ fought to the finish to keep the company’s shares above last night’s final price of $38 a share. Shares closed at $38.23 today. Sources tell us that the syndicate of banks underwriting the deal have been putting in buy orders to keep its price afloat. For Facebook itself, it’s actually a great outcome as the company didn’t leave any money on the table. But bankers on the wealth-management side of the underwriters are sure to be unhappy. Plus, the company’s tepid premiere is killing the performance of tech stocks across the board.

Basically, what we hear is that the underwriters including Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, got too pushy in the final days before the IPO about pricing. Earlier this month, the company was slated to open at a $28 to 35 price range, but that range was pushed up to $34 to 38 a share. Then Facebook priced at the very high end at $38 last night.

“The only thing keeping it at $38 are support mechanisms,” a source tells us. “There just wasn’t the institutional investor demand that people thought there would be.” They added that about 20 percent of buying orders seem to be coming from retail investors (e.g. regular people), which is “unprecedented.”

Reuters estimates that the lead underwriter Morgan Stanley theoretically could have spent up to $2 billion to prop up the stock, if you look at volumes in the last 20 minutes of trading when Facebook was close to breaking under.

Because prices are being held up to avoid a negative finish, shares might dip lower into early next week. Already, we’re seeing the impact on other stocks across the board. Zynga is down 13.4 percent to $7.16. LinkedIn is down 5.9 percent to $99.02. “They’re all in the shitter because now they look expensive since Facebook didn’t go anywhere,” we’re told.

From Facebook’s perspective, the company shouldn’t care. The company and its early shareholders raised $16 billion at the very best price they could, leaving no money on the table for the underwriters’ wealthy clients to scoop up and sell for a quick profit.

Bill Gurley, who is a general partner at Benchmark Capital (which has a take in Facebook through the company’s acquisition of FriendFeed), said that the price was spot on in a tweet.

“This is way better than retail investors buying in an an inflated “pop” price,” he tweeted. Gurley bets that underwriters who propped up the stock will probably make a profit.

Plus, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has warned investors that he won’t be concerned with short-term fluctuations in the stock. From the very beginning, he has said that Facebook was originally not meant to be a company.

He even said today before the market opened, “Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here’s the thing: our mission isn’t to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.”

Facebook shares opened at $42.05, a 10.5 percent increase from its final price last night at $38. Shares are actually currently almost flat at $39.16, which is 3.6 percent higher than $38 the price that underwriters settled on last night. While it may not be as juicy a story, it’s a signal that Facebook’s IPO was priced pretty efficiently and that the company didn’t leave too much money on the table.

Right now, retail investors are getting their hands on the shares. The company’s first trade was actually delayed by 30 minutes on NASDAQ as market makers had issues settling on an opening price. They kept delaying the opening in five-minute increments, which isn’t all that uncommon in popular offerings, according to a conversation we had with Bruce Aust, who is NASDAQ’s executive vice president and head of the global corporate client group, earlier today.

While the price is going to fluctuate a lot today, there’s a crowdsourced bet from Twitter users on FacebookIPOClosingPrice.com that the company will close at a $54 price and a $135.7 billion valuation.

Yesterday, the social networking giant priced its IPO at $38 a share, at the very top end of its revised $34 to $38 price range. That makes it the biggest tech IPO in history. Facebook offered 180,000,000 shares of stock in the offering while early shareholders including Peter Thiel and Accel Partners are selling more than 200 million more shares. This is the biggest recent IPO since Zynga, which saw its shares pop 10 percent on its opening trade of $11, giving the company a $7.7 billion valuation.

Facebook’s opening has impacted the rest of the market though. Zynga’s shares are down by 13.3 percent. We don’t know why but perhaps there was speculation that the shares would pop on Facebook’s IPO and when they didn’t, Zynga came tumbling back down to reality.

Earlier today, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg along with vice president of product Chris Cox, chief operating office Sheryl Sandberg and chief financial officer David Ebersman rang the NASDAQ opening bell remotely from Facebook’s headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park, California.

~The Best Of TechCrunch’s Facebook IPO Coverage~

Video & Photos: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Rings In The NASDAQ Bell

No IPO Pop Here: Facebook Trades Slightly Higher At Around $40

Facebook’s Key Executives And Shareholders: What Is Everyone Worth?

Zuckerberg Receives Hoodie, Says “Our Mission Isn’t To Be A Public Company” In Pre-IPO Remarks

How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button

Zynga Shares Go On Wild Ride During Facebook IPO — Big Fall, Then Recovery

Facebook Says Haters Gonna Hate, Likers Gonna Like

Facebook’s opening trade on NASDAQ has been delayed. We don’t know why, but we’re hearing mixed reports involving both unexpectedly high demand from retail investors and problems with canceling orders. As we explained in a post about 20 minutes ago, the underwriters of the deal are meeting and trying to set an opening price.

But because of unexpected changes in demand, it seems market makers are having issues settling on an opening price. They have the option of delaying the offering in five-minute increments until they can find a final price.

This is not terribly uncommon and it’s happened in very recent, popular IPOs like Splunk, according to Bruce Aust, who is NASDAQ’s executive vice president and head of the global corporate client group. Early word is that we’re looking at a $42 price, or a pop of just over 10.5 percent. That would give Facebook a $115 billion valuation.

~The Best Of TechCrunch’s Facebook IPO Coverage~

Video & Photos: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Rings In The NASDAQ Bell

No IPO Pop Here: Facebook Trades Slightly Higher At Around $40

Facebook’s Key Executives And Shareholders: What Is Everyone Worth?

Zuckerberg Receives Hoodie, Says “Our Mission Isn’t To Be A Public Company” In Pre-IPO Remarks

How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button

Zynga Shares Go On Wild Ride During Facebook IPO — Big Fall, Then Recovery

Facebook Says Haters Gonna Hate, Likers Gonna Like

Trading has now begun on Facebook after a bit of a hiccup with NASDAQ, and while the numbers are nowhere near the heady heights of $70-$100 that some people were murmuring earlier, the $42.05 opening figure is still 10 percent higher than the $38-per-share price set by Facebook yesterday.

At the time of this writing, it is trading a bit lower, at $40.32, which gives the company about a $111 billion valuation. In Facebook’s S-1, the company listed how many shares main players were set to sell at listing time. Based on the originally sale price of $38 and then Facebook’s current price at $40.32, here are how the values are coming out.
The first number is the value of the shares they sold, and the second is the value of their remaining stake in the company:

Zuckerberg and early shareholders like Peter Thiel and Accel Partners sold shares in the offering, but other early employees like chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and co-founder Dustin Moskovitz held onto their current stakes in the company. They may have sold shares earlier in the private secondary markets or when DST invested in Facebook a few years ago, but we don’t know for sure.

No one sold a majority of their holdings, as you can see below.

We will update the value of the remaining shares for the shareholders above based on Facebook’s share price at the close of the market later today.

~The Best Of TechCrunch’s Facebook IPO Coverage~

Video & Photos: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Rings In The NASDAQ Bell

No IPO Pop Here: Facebook Trades Slightly Higher At Around $40

Facebook’s Key Executives And Shareholders: What Is Everyone Worth?

Zuckerberg Receives Hoodie, Says “Our Mission Isn’t To Be A Public Company” In Pre-IPO Remarks

How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button

Zynga Shares Go On Wild Ride During Facebook IPO — Big Fall, Then Recovery

Facebook Says Haters Gonna Hate, Likers Gonna Like

Facebook shares are supposed to go live on the NASDAQ market in about 20 minutes. But what happens in the next crucial 15?

We caught up with NASDAQ’s Bruce Aust, who is the executive vice president and head of the global corporate client group there. After several years of carefully courting the company’s management, NASDAQ beat out rival New York Stock Exchange for Facebook’s hand. NASDAQ is usually is the exchange of choice for most tech companies like Google and Apple, but NYSE has snuck away with a company or two in the last year like LinkedIn.

Companies generally go live after market opening at around 10:30 or 11 a.m. Eastern, he said. About 15 minutes before shares start trading (e.g. right now!), the underwriters of Facebook’s offering like the offering’s lead Morgan Stanley get together and discuss current market orders, he said.

“The market makers have a chance to work on price discovery to find the opening price,” he said. “If there are more orders coming in than they expected, they may choose to delay it in five minute increments.” Update: Yep, it’s delayed by 5 minutes!

This has happened in very recent, popular IPOs like Splunk. So while Facebook is expected to go live at 11 a.m. Eastern, it could get delayed if there is insanely high demand. Over the past few days, the market makers have had a chance to sort out orders at Facebook’s final price of $38 a share. But right around market opening, many new orders often flood in amid the hype.

It can be a little unpredictable. But after that opening price is settled, Facebook will move forward just like any other stock traded on the exchange.

“Once we’ve got the buyers and sellers matched off, it’s off to the races,” he said.

~The Best Of TechCrunch’s Facebook IPO Coverage~

Video & Photos: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Rings In The NASDAQ Bell

No IPO Pop Here: Facebook Trades Slightly Higher At Around $40

Facebook’s Key Executives And Shareholders: What Is Everyone Worth?

Zuckerberg Receives Hoodie, Says “Our Mission Isn’t To Be A Public Company” In Pre-IPO Remarks

How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button

Zynga Shares Go On Wild Ride During Facebook IPO — Big Fall, Then Recovery

Facebook Says Haters Gonna Hate, Likers Gonna Like

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg didn’t travel to New York’s Times Square for the company’s big day. He did it unconventionally like you’d expect a hacker would.  He opened the bell remotely from the company’s Menlo Park Headquarters after Facebook employees had just finished a long, all-night Hackathon — their 31st. They played midnight hockey and worked on extra projects, as you can see from photos we re-posted here.

Just ahead of the 6:30 PST open, the company’s employees got together again in the main headquarters “Hacker Square” in front of a big stage where he rang the bell. A Nasdaq representative gave him an honorary hoodie and trophy. Facebook is the second company ever to ring in NASDAQ’s bell remotely on its IPO day. Zynga was the first back in December.

Zuckerberg gave some brief remarks ahead of the bell opening. He said:

“I just want to say a few things, and then we’ll ring this bell and then we’ll get back to work. Right now this all seems like a big deal. Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here’s the thing: our mission isn’t to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. All of you out there have built the largest community in the history of the world. You’ve done amazing things that we never would have dreamed of and I can’t wait to see what you’re going to be doing as we go forward. So on this special day, on behalf of everyone at Facebook, I just want to say to all the people out there who use our product, thank you.”

He was flanked by chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, vice president of product Chris Cox and Elliot Schrage, who is Facebook’s vice president of public policy and communications.

“Mark and Sheryl wanted to make sure it was about the team that helped grow this company,” said Bruce Aust, who is NASDAQ’s executive vice president and head of the global corporate client group. “They wanted to make it special, but they also wanted to remind everyone that this is just one day in the life in company. They wanted say, ‘Let’s get back to work once we have the IPO opening bell. It’s a company that’s very focused on its mission.”

There were also many long-time Facebookers on-stage like Javier Olivan, who oversees internationalization and growth, Sam Lessin, who oversaw Timeline, another vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer and more. A Facebook engineer named David Garcia had hacked the NASDAQ button to auto-post the bell opening to Zuckerberg’s Timeline (and we have the inside scoop on how he did it!)

It was the culmination of an eight-year journey that began in Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room. But it’s the company first step in what may be a very long life. Facebook is the most anticipated IPO of the last eight years after Google. It’s the largest tech IPO in history because the company stubbornly waited so long to go public. Facebook and its early shareholders are raising $16 billion today, or nearly 10 times what Google raised in its highly-hyped and very unorthodox Dutch Auction-style IPO in 2004.

When the market finally opened, Zuckerberg had signed a statement to be shown in Times Square. It was a company motto. It read, “to a more open and connected world.”

~The Best Of TechCrunch’s Facebook IPO Coverage~

Video & Photos: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Rings In The NASDAQ Bell

No IPO Pop Here: Facebook Trades Slightly Higher At Around $40

Facebook’s Key Executives And Shareholders: What Is Everyone Worth?

Zuckerberg Receives Hoodie, Says “Our Mission Isn’t To Be A Public Company” In Pre-IPO Remarks

How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button

Zynga Shares Go On Wild Ride During Facebook IPO — Big Fall, Then Recovery

Facebook Says Haters Gonna Hate, Likers Gonna Like

Facebook will be the largest tech IPO in history today as the company and its early shareholders raise about $16 billion at the final price of $38 a share. There is also an allotment for them to sell up to $2.4 billion more in the next 30 days. Here’s how it compares to other historical IPOs, according to NASDAQ data.

Then here’s how it compares to how much Google and Microsoft each raised in their respective IPOs.

We also have historical price data from SecondMarket, which is a private secondary market that became popular among former Facebook employees who wanted to offload part of their stake in the company. Here’s more data from them:

Facebook has outperformed many of the largest tech companies in the world over last few years. (That’s not totally surprising though since they started from a much lower base.)

Here’s how the number of transactions has scaled up on SecondMarket over the last few years.

~The Best Of TechCrunch’s Facebook IPO Coverage~

Video & Photos: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Rings In The NASDAQ Bell

No IPO Pop Here: Facebook Trades Slightly Higher At Around $40

Facebook’s Key Executives And Shareholders: What Is Everyone Worth?

Zuckerberg Receives Hoodie, Says “Our Mission Isn’t To Be A Public Company” In Pre-IPO Remarks

How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button

Zynga Shares Go On Wild Ride During Facebook IPO — Big Fall, Then Recovery

Facebook Says Haters Gonna Hate, Likers Gonna Like

Two years ago, WhiteyBoard founders Saachi Cywinski, Sherwin Kim and Jason Wilk set out to re-think those clunky, inflexible whiteboards found in classrooms and offices around the country. They developed a portable, flexible alternative: An inexpensive, “instant” plastic board that weighs less than two pounds and adheres to any surface without screws.

The idea, and the fact that co-founder Jason Wilk was (at the time) hard at work on a Y Combinator backed startup, attracted offers from people like Bill Liao, the co-founder of Xing.com. The startup turned down the offer but continued developing their whiteboards, along with a new product, called WhiteyBoard Paint, which they launched late last year.

Wilk tells us that WhiteyPaint has since found an eager audience, leading to the fortunate problem of demand quickly outpacing supply. Struggling to finance demand on a bootstrapped budget, the founders reached out to Dallas Mavericks owner, Shark Tank investor, and HDNet Co-founder Mark Cuban. Seeing a billion-dollar market dominated by a few bloated players, Cywinski said, Cuban believed WhiteyBoard was onto something.

So, today, the startup is officially announcing that it has raised an undisclosed round of seed financing from the billionaire entrepreneur. Cywinski tells us that WhiteyBoard has already sold to over 10K businesses, and smaller versions of the product are currently in stores at retailers like Urban Outfitters and ThinkGeek as well as at fulfillment centers around the world. (What’s more, its products are now made exclusively in the U.S. of A.)

Since last November, he says, sales for both its whiteboard and paint have quadrupled, and with the new funding from Cuban, the team is this week launching version 2 of its WhiteyBoard paint, which the founders say not only has better performance and more durability, but is “the best dry-erase product the world has ever seen.

That remains to be seen, but it certainly helps in the validation department to have Cuban on your side. For now, WhitePaint is for sale on the startup’s website here. And, as compared to competitors like IdeaPaint, the startup believes it can gain a leg up because its product is clear, allowing you to keep your wall colors and even have your logo show through. Plus, once painted on, WhiteyBoard paint is ready to go in 24 hours, compared to the competition, which generally takes 7 days to cure and isn’t able to erase things like spray paint.

Hundreds of Facebook employees congregated at ‘Hacker Square’ at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters this evening ahead of the company’s insanely-hyped initial public offering. Now, some of the first photos are starting to trickle in. There was a standing ovation for chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who gave a talk before several long-time engineers bounced in while wearing capes or bringing boomboxes.

Tonight Facebook is having its 31st Hackathon to celebrate the IPO. Hackathons are a company tradition. They’re a place where engineers and other non-technical employees get to stay out all night building concepts into real products that sometimes eventually get shipped. Some of the big products that have come out of earlier Hackathons include Facebook chat and an early version of Timeline.

The company got its employees together around a big yellow crane that’s in the center of their ‘Hacker Square.’ The crane came from their old Palo Alto headquarters where it was originally put in by Agilent Technologies (the company that spun out of Hewlett Packard, which is arguably, the company that made Silicon Valley more than 70 years ago).

Here are some of the photos that have come in so far! The best photos are actually from Facebook product designer Francis Luu. But because we are trying not to be super lame, like various slideshow-addicted blogs that shall not be named, here is the link to his photo album. There are also photo albums from other Facebook employees Brian Zeitler, Jasper Hauser and Chris Kalani here.

If you are a Facebook employee and are not living in ungodly fear of having your RSUs, options, etc. revoked on this special day, feel free to send us more photos at tips@techcrunch.com. 

Here’s the crowd that gathered before Zuckerberg’s talk:

Here’s a photo that YouTube’s Hunter Walk posted of the standing ovation for Zuckerberg:

Here’s the set-up before the event started in a photo from Blake Ross, a director who was brought in through Facebook’s very first acquisition:

Here’s the commemorative T-shirt for the Hackathon:

More people hacking:

~The Best Of TechCrunch’s Facebook IPO Coverage~

Video & Photos: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Rings In The NASDAQ Bell

No IPO Pop Here: Facebook Trades Slightly Higher At Around $40

Facebook’s Key Executives And Shareholders: What Is Everyone Worth?

Zuckerberg Receives Hoodie, Says “Our Mission Isn’t To Be A Public Company” In Pre-IPO Remarks

How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button

Zynga Shares Go On Wild Ride During Facebook IPO — Big Fall, Then Recovery

Facebook Says Haters Gonna Hate, Likers Gonna Like