It looks like Amazon Web Services may be launching a new workflow manager called SWF. First spotted by TechCrunch reader Michael Hood, SWF is listed as a service under AWS’ Free Usage Tier. Unfortunately, clicking on SWF takes you to a ’404′ page.

Upon further digging, it looks like SWF stands for ‘Amazon Simple Workflow Service.’ It basically starts, runs, and retains workflow executions, as well as schedules tasks, adds markers, receives signals, and starts timers for those workflow executions. According to the information listed, with the free usage tier, “1,000 Amazon SWF executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers and 30,000 workflow-days can also be used for free.”

Amazon’s free usage tier allows users to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, and use Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer for free as well. AWS’s free usage tier can be used to run an application in the cloud, including launching new applications, testing existing applications in the cloud, or more. SWF would be included for free in this package.

Obviously, with so little information, it’s hard to determine the exact details of what SWF does or who it will compete with at this point, but it appears to be new. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment and will update when we hear back.

We’ve embedded screenshots below:

When you listen, read, or watch through a Facebook Open Graph app, a few of your friends hear about through the news feed, Ticker, or Timeline. Starting this week, Facebook is allowing advertisers to pay for more exposure of listen, read, or watch stories that mention them by turning the stories into a new form of Sponsored Story social ads.

Open Graph action Sponsored Stories could further Facebook’s goal of turn all ads social, and boost revenue by filling the new inventory from Facebook now permitting Sponsored Stories ads in the news feed.

Facebook tells me that for now this is a small pilot program being tested with just a few advertisers, but it could blossom into the ability for advertisers to sponsor any Open Graph action. Above you’ll see a mockup of what the ads could look like in the news feed.

Previously, advertisers could only turn actions taken by users on their own Pages, apps, and local business Places into Sponsored Stories. This excluded plenty of advertisers whose content was being interacted with through apps owned by others. For example, a record label could Sponsor Likes of their artists’ Pages, but not listens of those artists through Spotify.

Now, a band could sponsor listens of their songs, and TV studios could sponsor watches of their episodes on Hulu or Netflix. Catering to a wider range of advertisers, anyone featured in a news article could pay to expose a link to it to the friends of those who’ve already read it. These action Sponsored Story ads complement Open Graph activity ad targeting that lets advertisers reach users who’ve taken a selected action with traditional ads.

Facebook sees Open Graph applications as the soul of its future ads business. Rather than letting advertisers bombard users with irrelevant pitches based on general biographical data, ads show the actions of friends and are targeted by a user’s own behavior. This creates a win trifecta — more relevant ads for users, better - and conversion rates for advertisers, and more money for Facebook and its future investors.

The culture of hacking continues to bloom in New York, evidenced last weekend by Columbia’s DevFest 2012. DevFest is entirely student run, and had workshops and support from local VC firms and startups. The event culminated with presentations of hacks and awards judged by Fred Wilson (USV), Chris Wiggins (HackNY), Dave Jagoda (Andreeson Horowitz), Ryan Bubinski (Codecademy) and myself (Uncommon Projects). A full list of the winners is below.

DevFest and the entire developer scene has really blossomed since I covered last year’s event. To wit: HackNY hosted its successful Raise Cache event, NYHacker organized Game and Music Hackdays, Foursquare hosted its first and second (global) hackathon, we saw our first Art Hackday, New York Tech Meetup launched Hack of the Month, Etsy continued its awesome Code as Craft lecture series, students launched the Hacker league platform, GroupMe (TC Hackathon 2010) got acquired and Docracy (TC Hackathon 2011) got funded just to name a few developments. All this hacking is a huge win for New York because hacking leads to so much innovation – recently Eric Ries argued that the culture hacking and continuous development may be a new way of doing business and the heart of Facebook’s success.

But back to the kids. There were tons of great hacks – from a student presenting her very first hack, a crowd-srouced mobile marketplace for buying parking spots and the winning task manager by Sid Nair. Here’s a list of them all.

Lerner -Best use of the Twilio API - Zhehao (Howie) Mao
Beer Battle - Best game - Augusto Corvalan, Andrew Funcheon, Trevor Marshall, Moses Nakamura, and Andrew Stenvall
ParkAlly – Best pre-existing app - Sid Shanker, Mason Silber, and Zach Reitano
Situity – Best UI design - Alex Golec, Calvin Hu, Simon McGown, George Valdes, Ming Norman Tsui, and David Zhai
CookNooks – Best first hack - Sophie Chou
FreeSeat – Most technically difficult - Aditya Mukerjee and Zach Newman
ResearchMatch – Best business model - Yifan Li, Ryder Moody, Alex Poon, and Rebecca Sealfon
HelpRoom – Overall 3rd - Dina Lamdany and Elie Toubiana
omnified – Overall 2nd - Yufei Liu
Scheduler – Overall 1st - Sid Nair

Yozma Venture Capital is selling its stake in startup Conduit for a massive return. The story was reported in the Israeli publication Globes, but I’ve confirmed the details with a source who has knowledge of the deal, and who also identified the buyer (described by Globes only as “a large foreign investment firm that has tens of billions of dollars under management”) as private equity firm Silver Lake.

Yozma invested $1.5 million for 9 percent ownership of Conduit in 2006. Now it’s selling its stake for $250 million. In other words, it’s seeing a return that’s nearly 200 times the size of the initial investment. According to Globes, the Israeli venture capital industry has never seen a return on that scale.

This deal values Conduit at $2.5 billion — which, incidentally, puts it in the billion-dollar league that Index Ventures partner Saul Klein predicted for it last year. The company started out as a toolbar startup, partnering with both Google and then Microsoft, but it recently rebranded as a wide-ranging service to help publishers engage their users. Conduit says it works with 260,000 publishers to reach 250 million users in 120 companies.

I’ve emailed Silver Lake for comment and will update if I hear back.

The pioneer of vertical media, they call themselves. And Glam Media, the publishing network with more than 220 monthly million uniques, announced today their “logical next play” – a vertical food network called Foodie that will offer a social, interactive network (Portal 2.0?) for food bloggers, critics, chefs and, of course, eaters.

But, as Glam’s co-founder and CEO Samir Arora told me when he came into our San Francisco studio today, Foodie isn’t just another of Glam’s vertical plays. It represents what he calls a “step further” in Glam’s attempt to dominate what Arora calls the “lifestyle” sector. Foodie, Arora indicated, will be more social and more mobile than his company’s other verticals and, I’m guessing, will be a prelude to other Glam offerings in travel and wine.

And that much rumored Glam IPO, I asked Arora. Could be the next next logical play in Glam’s relentless march to verticalize the Internet?

In a few weeks, Apple will unveil the next generation iPad, John Packowski of AllThingsD confirms today. If history (and carrier code) is any indication, it should go on sale shortly after that. Maybe even just a few days later. And that’s interesting because it doesn’t give developers a lot of time to prepare. And they’ll want to prepare for the higher resolution “Retina” display that the device will pack.

The situation is similar to the Summer of 2010. That year at WWDC, Apple unveiled the iPhone 4, the first device to feature a Retina display. That conference took place on June 7. The iPhone 4 first went on sale on June 24 — two and a half weeks later. That timeframe allowed some developers to get their apps Retina-ready, but for many it took quite a bit longer. Again, this year, the window may be even more condensed.

But as Steve Jobs noted at the iPhone 4 unveiling, the Retina display made existing apps “look even better”. One reason for this is that the version of iOS that shipped with the device automatically rendered text to be optimized for the new display. Expect the same for the Retina iPad. But Jobs also noted that apps which updated to higher-resolution artwork would look “stunning”. “We suggest that you do that,” he said at the time.

And that will undoubtedly be the suggestion again. Luckily, because the Retina display iPad has been rumored for a long time and because many developers remember the initial Retina transition, some developers have jumped the gun and prepared the graphics in their iPad apps to be Retina-ready as well.

The first two iPads had a resolution of 1024 x 768 — which actually isn’t all that far from the Retina display iPhone resolution of 960 x 640. The new iPad will have a resolution of 2048 x 1536. Earlier this week, it was revealed that Apple was now requiring developers to submit Retina-level screenshots of their apps to the App Store (for new apps, at least). Some assumed this was related to the gradual fade out of the iPhone 3GS. But it may also be related to this new iPad. Because Apple allows the iPad to run iPhone/iPod touch apps with the option to scale them up 2x, non-Retina iPhone apps (480 × 320) will undoubtedly look pretty bad on the Retina iPad.

Given how many visually-focused apps there are for the iPad, some developers are worried how their apps will look on the new device. Apple, of course, isn’t talking yet. While there may be a handful of larger developers that will get an early peek at (or a heads up on) the Retina iPad, most will get to see the thing the same time the rest of us do — on stage in early March.

Some aren’t just worried about the iPad either. Rumors have been circulating for a few months that Apple may also be on the verge of launching high-resolution Mac displays. It’s looking increasingly likely that Apple will do a one-two high-resolution punch with high-res Macs (probably MacBook Pros or maybe even a new MacBook Air) and Retina iPads in the coming weeks.

Recent code changes in OS X with added HiDPI support suggest the former may be coming very soon.

If you think a 2048 x 1536 iPad sounds great, think about a 2880×1800 MacBook. Unlike resolution changes in the past, elements on the screen wouldn’t get smaller, they’d just get crisper. But to take advantage of all those pixels, Mac developers will also have their work cut out for them updating all the graphical elements in their apps.

My suggestion is that developers get ready. The future is looking crisp.

Ever since Steve Ballmer made that surprise announcement at CES 2011, there has been a lot of speculation about just how Microsoft would be bringing Windows to the ARM architecture. Would it be a whole separate line? Would it be compatible with old applications? Would it be cheaper?

Many of these questions have been answered in a long and technical post on the Building Windows 8 blog today, as Steven Sinofsky explains how they developed (re-developed, really) Windows On ARM, or WOA, and why they made the choices they made.

Some major points, for those unwilling to read: WOA will be totally incompatible with x86/x64-based applications; it will include a desktop only for Office apps and file management; it will be focused on portability, battery life, and “integrated quality,” by which they mean it ships with, in a way, everything you need. On that note, it won’t be available separately as a software purchase; it will only be available pre-installed on devices.

The process of transferring Windows to ARM was not an easy or short one. They’ve been working on it for years; for an indicator of how long, consider that when they started, there was no such thing as an ARM-based tablet. They had to run the OS on ARM phones like the one pictured here from Asus.

As ARM systems are built on a completely different principle from the Intel, AMD, and IBM-led PC-compatible spec, some serious changes had to be made. Device and hardware management would have to be completely rethought. Back compatibility was a fairy tale. And there was no way to stress-test builds on debug rigs the way they’d been doing for 20 years on racks of x86 PCs. At least, there was no way until they built a way, and by next month they plan to have 3200 machines running WOA in stacks (also pictured) to troubleshoot, stress test, and so on.

Yet some things had to stay the same, as well: every ARM device would have to be outfitted with UEFI, ACPI, and the Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer in order to create a basic platform on which Windows would be comfortable. After that, things like DirectX, discrete device inclusion (printers, GPS units, and the like) could be added. And higher-level apps were a piece of cake, apparently, Microsoft having built them in a forward-looking way with allowances for multiple architectures.

The restrictions imposed by this new environment, and some design decisions made along the way, have produced something of a different product from the Windows we all know and some of us love.

For one thing, back-compatibility has been essentially abandoned. A clean break sounds good on the face of it, but consider that part of Microsoft’s success has been its ability to accommodate legacy hardware and software from ridiculously far back. Remember that video about installing every version of Windows on top of the last?

Doom II, installed on Windows 1.0, still ran without problems in Windows 7. That’s amazing. WOA breaks from this tradition with a purpose, though.

Sinofsky describes WOA as “a new member of the Windows family, much like Windows Server, Windows Embedded, or Windows Phone.” It’s not meant to play games installed on operating systems from a quarter of a century ago. It’s meant to be a point of access for the current, and only the current, Windows ecosystem. It is similar to the “full” version of Windows 8 only in those parts that have been developed specifically for Windows 8.

Think of it this way. Windows 8 for x86/x64, in a way, includes Windows 7, Vista, XP, 98, 95, and so on. It is built with compatibility in mind, as part of a venerable line of operating systems. Windows On ARM includes only Windows 8. It’s as if the last ten versions of the OS never happened — though there are echoes.

This breaks the OS for some people — me, for example — but it could be a breath of fresh air for many. This OS is at once bare-bones and all-inclusive: it comes with a familiar version of Office, it will almost certainly be cheap and easy to deploy by the hundred or thousand, and it’s absolutely a known quantity.

Apps for WOA will all come from the Windows Store, and will all be Metro — except for Office (and a few other trusted programs), which will be able to run in the traditional desktop environment for productivity purposes. It’s a bit puzzling, this admission (in a way) that the traditional desktop is superior for productivity, but it’s also the truth: an all-Metro productivity suite would be unfamiliar to Microsoft’s base. They’ll make it optional for now, and drop the other shoe later.

The focus on tablets is made plain: “you don’t turn off a WOA PC.” You don’t have sleep and hibernate modes. Like a phone or tablet, you just hit the button and it goes into a newly-developed low-power mode in which the battery will reportedly last weeks. These tablets, while they won’t run the “real” Windows 8, will be totally functional (it runs “super well”) access points to the Windows ecosystem. And with the increasing focus on cloud storage, web-based apps, and mobility, that limited access may start looking less like a bug and more like feature as time goes on.

There’s still lots to be done, says Sinofsky, but they hope to launch Windows On ARM at the same time as the commercial launch of Windows 8. It’s a real change for Microsoft, which is heartening to those of us who have been disappointed with their willingness to honestly self-evaluate lately. Devices are being tested from NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments; whether a worthy product will be available at launch time is still a mystery, but it’s obvious that everyone involved is deeply invested.

And lastly, here’s the video that accompanies the blog post. It explains some things but generally just shows that WOA will act more or less like x86/x64 Windows 8:

Facebook isn’t the only social network getting ready to monetize its mobile app with advertising. During today’s analyst call to discuss its fourth quarter earnings, LinkedIn executives said they will also be introducing advertising to their mobile apps.

There weren’t many details offered — LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said only that the company has been putting the infrastructure in place, and now it’s ready to “start to introduce advertising in our mobile solutions.”

Even though ads were only mentioned briefly, mobile was definitely a big theme on the call. Weiner noted that the company launched redesigned smartphone apps last August, and he said that mobile is now LinkedIn’s fastest-growing category. Mobile accounts for 15 percent of LinkedIn’s unique member visits, he said, and it will definitely be one of the areas of investment in the coming year.

One of the analysts on the call asked about the performance of CardMunch, the business card-scanning smartphone app that LinkedIn recently acquired, and about whether LinkedIn is performing differently on the various mobile platforms. On CardMunch, Weiner repeated the already-released number that CardMunch has now scanned its 2 millionth business card.

Regarding the different smartphone platforms, he said, “We’re seeing a sharp rise in activations across both the iOS platform and Android. We’re seeing more activations in iOS but both are growing very healthy rates.”

It was just a few days ago that news of a mysterious home-oriented Google device was being prepped for testing in the homes of 252 company employees, but the associated FCC filing left most of the specifics up in the air. Now, if a new report from the Wall Street Journal holds true, Google’s next foray into the hardware space could be all about pumping up those jams.

According to WSJ’s sources, the device in development is a “home entertainment system” that can wirelessly stream music throughout users’ homes. Google has attempted to make inroads into the living room before with initiatives like Google TV, but this would mark the first time the search giant would be developing and selling products under their own name rather than relying on external hardware vendors.

The pieces we have at this point certainly seem to line up. In their FCC application, Google representatives noted that the at-home beta test was meant to accomplishing the following:

Testing throughput and stability of home WiFi networks using an entertainment device. Testing will include functional testing of all subsystems, including WiFi and Bluetooth radio. Users will connect their device to home WiFi networks and use Bluetooth to connect to other home electronics equipment.

WiFi support seems like a no-brainer when it comes to streaming content, but the inclusion of a Bluetooth radio (commonly seen on phones of all stripes) hints at the possibility of a close connection between the box in question and mobile devices.

The mysterious entertainment device is reportedly the result of years of work from Google’s Android team, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. With movies and more recently music being introduced into the Android Market, it was only natural that the device in question would be able to capitalize on all that content. WSJ’s sources acknowledge that notion, as they note that the Google Mystery Box may be able to stream content other than just music.

Still, media/hardware ventures like Google TV haven’t been as strong a performer in the marketplace as Google would have hoped, so it’s a bit surprising to see that another media-oriented device seems so close to fruition. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise though — Google chairman Eric Schmidt reaffirmed himself as being a proponent of a highly-connected home life while at this year’s CES.

One of the bigger questions that this whole situation raises is whether or not the entertainment box will ever actually see the light of day. At first glance, the answer seems obvious — why put a petition for testing that much new hardware outside of the lab in front of a federal body if it’ll never see the light of day? WSJ’s sources seem to confirm that the device isn’t just vaporware and that it will launch later this year, but a lot could happen between now and then.

If it is real though, and Google can churn out reliable — and preferably cheap — units, they stand a chance at yanking the rug out from under a major competitor: Apple and its $99 Apple TV.

If you played PC games in the 90s, chances are you played some of Tim Schafer’s work. He worked on the Monkey Island Series and Day of the Tentacle, later going on to create such classics as Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. He recently took to Kickstarter to try and score some funding for a new point-and-click adventure game, as most publishers would consider the genre more or less untouchable these days.

He figured there were enough people out there who wanted a new adventure game that they could scrape together $400,000. That was last night. They hit their goal in 8 hours, and are likely to break a million dollars before the end of the day. In fact, just since I started this post, I’ve had to adjust the headline to reflect an additional $50,000 $70,000 $100,000 that has been pledged.

Kickstarter confirmed to Joystiq that “there’s not been a project that has raised as much as this one in such a short timeframe.” Not even the Elevation Dock, which has made something of a splash. It’s easy to understand, considering the deal Double Fine is offering.

In addition to the game, for which $300,000 of the money was to be earmarked, they are partnering with 2 Player Productions to make a video documentary about the development of the game. A $15 donation gets you both the game and the documentary, which accounts partially for the massive uptake, but thousands more opted to give $30 or $100. It’s really quite a festival — over 23,000 backers as of this writing.

That’s understandable: Tim Schafer is something of a cult figure in gaming, and is really an optimal rallying point for a Kickstarter project. Thousands upon thousands have enjoyed his games and have been itching for a way to get involved and make another happen — but petitioning publishers and complaining on forums doesn’t do much. Pledging a few bucks does.

There are a number of these crowd-sourced games in the works, and some smaller sites catering to that audience, like 8 Bit Funding, have popped up. The age of the independent developer is upon us; there’s enough money going around and enough methods for funding that soon, no one will have to go hungry, least of all legendary developers with quiet but fervent global fan bases.

(Update: fixed video embed and changed headline to reflect that mil)

This might just be the sweetest Valentine’s Day story I’ve ever heard. It’s definitely the sweetest Valentine’s Day story I’ve ever written.

Kaitlyn Trigger is a marketing director at Rally.org. She also happens to be Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger’s girlfriend of two and a half years (The 26 year old Krieger and 27 year old Trigger met at a friend’s house in October of 2009 and moved in together in October 2010). And my hero.

Last December, Trigger decided she wanted to be able to talk to her boyfriend in depth about the stuff he was working on. So the Yale political science major who “never took any computer classes” covertly downloaded “Learn Python the Hard Way” and began the Odyssey into programming, deadline Valentines’ Day.

Her goal? To create what is now Lovestagram, a way to take the Instagram photos you’ve shared with a specific person and turn them into an e-Valentine. “Several months ago, I was brainstorming a gift for two friends who had recently gotten engaged. I wanted to find Instagram photos they had in common, and it was tough!”

After she learned Python, Trigger then had to complete a Django tutorial in order to bring the Python online — she used Heroku to push stuff to a webserver. She spent marathon weekends building the site, leaving the apartment for a total of three hours on the Martin Luther King holiday in order to finish by February 14th.

“Learning to program isn’t the hard part. The biggest challenge is figuring out how all the moving parts of a web application fit together. There’s no book for that,” she said.

To use Lovestagram simply sign in with your Instagram account, enter the name of your beloved and choose from one of three adorable designs, Lovestagram Rainbow, Mr. Pink Camera and Cinnamon Heart Candy (I’ve been constantly ‘Awwing’ the entire time I’ve been writing this, by the way.). You can then customize the message and send off to your beau.

Here’s a Lovestagram that Kaitlyn sent to Mike and yes, she actually wrote, “Like an Instagram filter, you make my world more beautiful.” And yes she also had to learn Photoshop to come up with the the three different designs, “It’s almost harder than Python,” she told me.

While the service ended up looking amazing, her plan to keep it a secret from Krieger didn’t work, mainly because of her frustration with working out bugs, “Something would take me an hour and a half and I knew that ten feet away is someone who could fix the same bug in ten seconds.” So she spilled the beans.

“Mike was really touched,” she said. “His support throughout this whole process has really been a gift. Tolerating me when I’ve been cranky.” Trigger views both the physical manifestation of her skills and the skills themselves as the V-Day gifts, “[But] the fact that we have one more thing in common is the bigger gift.”

As someone who might have dated a programmer at some point, I feel Trigger’s pain when she described the state of Krieger sitting in front of computer as “not knowing what he was doing.” “It’s hard in a city where most of the men are software engineers and most of the women are not,” she says (for the record I also tried and failed to learn Python – more on that later).

Trigger suggests creating classes specifically for women who want to code as a possible solution to this particular digital divide, the trick is to not be intimidated ,“[Code] is something that nobody should be afraid of. “

It’s also something that you don’t need a significant other for necessarily. The best V-Day gift of coding skills you can give, is the V-Day gift of coding skills you give to yourself.

Professional social network LinkedIn just reported stronger than expected fourth quarter 2011 earnings today. Earnings came in at $0.12 per share. Revenue for the fourth quarter was $167.7 million, an increase of 105% compared to $81.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. Net income for the fourth quarter was $6.9 million, compared to net income of $5.3 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. Analysts expected the company to earn $0.07 per share on revenues of $159.72 million.

Non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $13.3 million, compared to $5.2 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. For the full year 2011, revenue increased 115% to $522.2 million from $243.1 million.

“Q4 once again exceeded our expectations for member engagement and business growth. It was a fitting end to a memorable year in which we reinforced our position as the pre-eminent professional network on the web,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn in a release. “We believe continued focus on our members and technology infrastructure positions us well for accelerated product innovation in 2012.”

In terms of revenue breakdown, sales from Hiring Solutions products totaled $84.9 million, an increase of 136% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. Hiring Solutions revenue represented 50% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 44% in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Revenue from Marketing Solutions products totaled $49.5 million, an increase of 77% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 (and represented 30% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 34% in the fourth quarter of 2010). Premium Subscriptions revenue totaled $33.3 million, an increase of 87% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 (and was 20% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 22% in the fourth quarter of 2010).

By geographic area, revenue from the U.S. totaled $112 million, and represented 67% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011. Revenue from international markets totaled $55.8 million, and represented 33% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011.

LinkedIn is now adding two new members every second, and just hit 150 million members (up from 135 million last November) in over 200 countries and territories.

In terms of guidance, revenue for the first quarter of 2012 is projected to be in the range of $170 million to $175 million and revenue for the full year will be in the range of $840 million to $860 million.

LinkedIn is past the excitement of the public offering and now coming into its own as a public company. As Weiner recently told TechCrunch, “The event itself was memorable, but for us it was really just a stepping stone.” The fourth quarter was relatively quiet with regard to new products compared to past quarters. The network debuted a new version of business card organizer CardMuch (which they acquired in early 2011), and updated Groups with new functionality.

LinkedIn also announced Talent Pipeline, a new product that allows recruiters and hiring managers to manage, track, and stay in touch with active and passive candidates, regardless of source. Talent Pipeline is currently in pilot testing phase with select Hiring Solutions customers, according to the company.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that LinkedIn is slowing down. We hear there’s much more in store for the company for 2012, especially in mobile. Steve Sordello, CFO of LinkedIn, said in the release that the company will “continue to invest in our product, engineering, and sales infrastructure to capitalize on our long-term opportunity” in 2012. It will also be interesting to see how acquisitive LinkedIn is in the coming year. The company just picked up contact manager Rapportive for $15 million.

Here are our notes from the earnings call:

Weiner said that member engagement was at record levels in 2011, and the site passed the 150 million milestone. Member page views grew 77 percent in the fourth quarter and unique member visits to LinkedIn in Q4 grew 67% year over year. 60 percent of LinkedIn members are located outside of the U.S. Mobile account for 15 percent of total visits to the site.

He says there are more than 50,000 developers using LinkedIn APIs to help build and power the professional Web.

In terms of future product strategy, LinkedIn’s approach will focus on simplicity, and we can “expect refreshes of pillar products.” Membership growth is another area the where LinkedIn will focus. And the company will invest in mobile, which Weiner says is the company’s fastest growing service.

LinkedIn ended the year with more than 2,000 employees. In 2012, LinkedIn will be ramping up hiring at the university and college level.

Sordello adds that one-third of members visited LinkedIn during the quarter. The company also added 1,900 enterprises to its premium products client base in 2011.

Q: Jeff-when you think 2-3 three years out what do you see as the future for offering a SaaS platform for recruiting or an ad network, while leveraging data?

A: Our current recruiting process currently already leverages data and is a SaaS product. In terms of marketing solutions, we see similar benefits. Data is one of the most valuable assets for the company. LinkedIn today is doing very well, and 300,000 publishers have the LinkedIn share button on their sites.

Q: How do you monetize mobile?

A: We’re focused on product for now, we’re going to start to run some tests with regard to advertising and marketing in mobile platforms.

Q: Other companies in the hiring space have seen softness in some verticals like finance; can you comment on this? Also can you elaborate on your student growth as well?

A: We haven’t seen any weakness in a particular vertical. The student demographic is our fastest growing demographic. We’re also increasing outreach to university career centers.

Q: Can you talk about hiring solutions internationally?

A: Europe is a year to two behind the U.S. in terms of penetration and Asia is probably 2-3 years behind.

Q: Who are some of your largest hiring solutions companies?

A: We have 70-80 percent of the Fortune 100.

Q: Can you give us additional color on mobile traction? Tablet vs. smartphone vs. iPhone. vs. Android?

A: We announced that CardMuch has generated its 2 millionth card scan a few weeks ago, and growth is accelerating. We’re seeing a sharp rise in activations across iOS platform and Android. Both are growing at healthy rates.

Editor’s note: TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and lives in Palo Alto; you can follow him on twitter @semil

“In the Studio” at TechCrunch TV this week welcomes a former California resident and current investor back to the west coast, where he and his partners have embarked on a new journey to build out a physical presence in Silicon Valley and San Francisco for one of the most dynamic business groups in the world.

Ajay Agarwal, a managing director with Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), is leading the charge of building his firm’s west coast offices and unveiling a brand new $600m fund, announced a few weeks ago in The New York Times. That’s a whole lot of money to invest in new consumer, enterprise, and mobile opportunities. This is sort of a personal homecoming for Agarwal, who went to Stanford years ago as a undergraduate computer science student and founded a company while he was in school. Now, after nearly ten years with Bain Capital in Boston, he’s leading his team here in California, comprised of Sahil Gupta, Indy Guha, and Adam Marchick, as it it were a startup, too.

In this short conversation, Agarwal discusses how BCV fits in within all of Bain’s diversified business units, and most importantly explains how founders can expect to leverage that very unique platform. He also discusses what the firm’s investment strategy will be, in terms of preferences for early vs. late stage opportunities, as well as why the firm chose the Valley over San Francisco, and downtown Palo Alto over Sand Hill Road.

Like other top-tier firms, BCV has also invested financial and human resources in order to help portfolio companies recruit technical talent nationwide, specifically by creating Startup Academy (led by Shannon Harrington) and going so far as to incubate companies. Even though Bain Capital Ventures has been around since 1984, both in Boston and New York, they have been investing in California and nationwide for years, so this move cements that long-term commitment to the west coast. With a group like Bain and their expansive, diverse portfolio, you’d have to expect when they make a concerted move out west, they mean business, and that will be a very good exciting development for a startup ecosystem that is constantly evolving.

Mobile app developer Rovio has famously turned its Angry Birds game into a popular toy franchise, but most other new-fangled gaming companies haven’t spent much energy going this route. But now social gaming leader Zynga is, per a big licensing deal with Hasbro.

The long-time toy and board game maker is paying Zynga to turn games like FarmVille, CityVille, and its other hit titles into real world products. Details on what this will look like are scant in the press release, so I’m left guessing what this is going to mean. Fluffy pink FarmVille tractors? Lego-style CityVille buildings? Although actually, Zynga has already been selling plush toys for FarmVille characters at Best Buy and other locations, although it’s unclear who the manufacturer is. Apparently that effort has been going well.

Here’s something else for the new partners to figure out: many of Zynga’s games are based off of existing physical games like poker (Zynga Poker) and scrabble (Words With Friends). What’s the point of playing the Zynga-branded version of poker in real life?

A bit more, from the content-light press release:

“It’s exciting to partner with Hasbro as we share a common vision for play and a mission to connect the world through games,” said Mark Pincus, founder, CEO and chief product officer of Zynga. “This partnership is so special because it represents an exciting leap forward in enabling people to connect their virtual and real worlds. Hasbro has inspired play through their famous toys, games and action figures and we look forward to working with a company that continually creates meaningful and fun brands.”

Of course, this move will create a new revenue stream, which will make Zynga’s currently bullish investors happy. For reference, merchandising can be a huge part of entertainment businesses. Disney, for example, made an estimated $28.6 billion from toys, t-shirts and other products in 2010. So look for other developers to go in the real-world direction, too. Casual game developer Big Fish, for one, recently hired the guy who had led Rovio’s push into merchandise.

[Headline courtesy of TechCrunch reader Martin Maslo.]

Over the last decade the major music labels — and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America — have established a repeated pattern of attacking consumers in the name of squelching illegal file-sharing. Piracy, they claim, has been the industry’s undoing, accounting for an over 50% drop in sales since 1999 (the industry likes to discount the impact of legal per-song music downloads via services like iTunes, and the myriad other changes facilitated by the rise of high-speed Internet connections).

Their efforts to combat piracy are often draconian: threatening tens of thousands of people with lawsuits claiming obscenely high damages; attempting to coordinate their threats with consumers’ ISPs; and, most recently, supporting legislation like SOPA and PIPA that would undermine the fabric of the Internet. Hell, Universal once pulled down a 30 second YouTube video of a dancing baby because the baby had the audacity to dance to a Prince song.

Which is why my jaw dropped when I saw that VEVO, a property jointly owned by some of the biggest record labels in the world, was showing a pirated stream of an ESPN football game at its Sundance PowerStation venue last month — on no fewer than two televisions, and a pair of laptops.

First, some background. VEVO is a sort of ‘Hulu for music videos’ that’s owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and the Abu Dhabi Media Group. EMI (which Universal and Sony are in the process of acquiring chunks of) has licensed its content to the site. Together, these labels comprise three of America’s ‘Big Four’ music labels — Warner Music being the lone holdout. And these Big Four make up the vast majority of the RIAA.

So when you hear about the record labels suing people, or trying to get ISPs to clamp down on users, or trying to pass legislation that could destroy the web as we know it — a lot of these people are behind it.

Back to the story.

The scene at the VEVO PowerStation was fairly typical for a Sundance event. VEVO and a pair of other companies had taken over a local venue, emblazoning their logos on the wall in bright red and replacing the normal drink menu with an array of cleverly-named concoctions designed to help you forget you were sipping liquor at three in the afternoon. Celebrities strolled through at regular intervals, making rounds through the bar before they headed over to a room set aside to pick out their gift of furry Sorel boots.

The event’s redeeming factors, at least as far as this reporter was concerned, were the tasty hamburger sliders and the Patriots v. Ravens playoff game on ESPN that was playing throughout the venue. That is, until the game was rudely interrupted — not by a commercial break, but by a bizarre buffering warning.

In hindsight, I should have noticed it immediately. The shoddy video quality and jitters clearly didn’t belong to an HD feed, despite the ESPN America HD logo in the lower right hand corner. And then there’s the fact that ESPN America isn’t even available in US markets (it’s a UK-based station).

But between the blaring music and having James Marsden (Cyclops!) standing three feet in front of me, it wasn’t until the pirate flags were fully unfurled that I finally noticed them. First the buffering message appeared, then a mouse cursor — controlled by forces unseen — flew onto the TV to exit out of full-screen mode and refresh the page. I think it may have also closed a few popover ads.

At this point I tried to figure out the origins of the feed. As far as I could tell, the stream itself was coming from a Spanish-language live-streaming site called TuTele.tv. But that feed had apparently been accessed via a site called Frontrow.tv, which is itself an aggregator of live sports streams. At first glance, neither site looked particularly trustworthy.

But copyright on the web is a notoriously complex issue, so I went to the source to verify my suspicions: ESPN. Which confirmed that neither site has the rights to stream its content. In other words, yes — that game was indeed being pirated. In fact, Frontrow.tv has since apparently gone dark, likely as a result of a recent crackdown by federal authorities on sports sites with pirated content.

Given that the venue probably had access to a cable subscription (or perhaps an antenna, given that this was broadcast over the air), I’m not sure why it would decide to go the piracy route. But I do have a strong suspicion that it was done primarily as a matter of convenience.

The next day, when I made a return visit to the VEVO PowerStation, the football game obviously wasn’t on. This time the TV screens were playing VEVO music videos, which were being coordinated to match whatever celebrity was currently in the room — Tommy Lee walked in, and his music video serendipitously started playing, then the same thing happened when Deadmau5 made an appearance.

My hunch is that the team hooked up a computer to the TVs throughout the venue so that they could accomplish this synchronized star-caressing — then, rather than rework their entire setup just to play the football game for a few hours, they opted for the easier route and looked for a stream on the web.

Which perfectly underscores everything wrong with the media industry’s approach to piracy. They’ve long made out pirates to be lawless thieves who think they’re entitled to receive everything for free.

But the reality is far less black-and-white. Sure, there are some people who will duck the bill when they can — but many of them were never going to buy the content they downloaded in the first place. And a huge swath of ‘pirates’ are driven to their ways because it’s easier to stream or download something via an illegal site, not because they’re averse to paying for content. Stick a bunch of DRM and ads in front of the media they’ve already paid for, and they may opt to go with the path of least resistance next time.

Oh, and if the venue had wanted to stream that football game online legally, they would have had a tough time doing it: the only NFL licensee that offers streaming games is DirectTV, which requires you to purchase an entire season of ‘NFL Sunday Ticket’ in order to stream a game from the web. For a mere $350.

Reached for comment, VEVO unsurprisingly tried to shift any blame: it says that the event was produced by a creative agency called Continuum Entertainment, and that there were several other companies involved. However, the venue was broken into different sections, and the televisions in question were clearly those belonging to VEVO’s PowerStation — and VEVO confirms that the televisions were supposed to be used to showcase VEVO videos and “original content”. VEVO also claims it wasn’t aware the game was being streamed and that it turned it off once it realized that it was (though it was on the entire time I was there, a period of at least thirty minutes).

As for who actually decided to play the stream, or why, VEVO says the public had access to the computer being used so they can’t say for sure who exactly was responsible. Which is dubious (and almost certainly spin) — there was clearly someone actively controlling the computer, because they refreshed it when the connection stalled, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a random attendee who was taking the helm. Must have been one of those nasty pirates.

In any case, were it the music industry that was on the other side of this, you can be sure they’d dismiss all of the aforementioned explanations without a second thought. And then they’d probably assess damages in the realm of $20,000 per down.

We’ve reached out to ESPN to ask if it will be pursuing legal action against VEVO, Continuum, or any of the other companies involved with the event.

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and the majority of us are likely scrambling to find that special gift. (The rest of us, meanwhile, are cursing couples.) A Valentine’s Day gift is usually more important than others because it’s a one-on-one situation, unlike Christmas or birthdays. Just one gift, to just one person — and it better be good.

With that in mind, I’d like to address an article out of AllThingsD this morning that sourced information from PriceGrabber’s Valentine’s Day Dashboard Report. The report took information from February 4 through February 5, finding that various tablets, TVs and phones are hot items for gift-crazed Valentines.

The information itself isn’t that intriguing, but it did get me thinking about handing out gadgetry as a gift.

What makes gift-giving so special to us — and such a huge part of our culture — is the fact that it’s proof of one person’s thought for another person. We’re naturally very self-centered, all of us. But by going out and thinking of, finding, buying, and wrapping a gift, we give that special someone proof that we’ve been thinking about them — proof that they’re important to us.

Of course, expensive gifts are often seen as better gifts, but that’s just a product of our consumer-driven lifestyles. To spend more on someone is nice, if thought is also a large part of the equation, but without thought the gift becomes empty. For example, last year I bought my girlfriend a pretty expensive necklace from her favorite jewelry store. I figured that since the store was her favorite, and that particular necklace was one of their most expensive, I’d be good to go.

Wrong.

She said the necklace wasn’t her style, which made a lot of sense after we went through her jewelry box and found that she only owned silver jewelry. The necklace I bought was gold.

Unfortunately, most gadgetry falls into this category. Just because it’s expensive and flashy and has an Apple on it doesn’t mean that it’s the most meaningful gift. Especially considering the fact that our gadgetry is so very personal.

The type of phone you own and enjoy using says a lot about you, and it is inevitably a part of your daily life for about two years. For some of us, it’s a more steadfast, stable relationship than the one we have with our Valentine. Why would anyone ever want someone else to pick it out for them?

The same is true for tablets and PCs. Just think of how many configurations your laptop could have come in. But you thought about it, knew your needs, knew your price range, and configured your notebook accordingly. Chances are, no one else could’ve done that for you.

Of course, there are exceptions to both of the points I’ve made — that expensive gifts are empty and that gadgets need to be chosen by the owner.

Ever since I was 16, Christmas changed at my house. There were no longer a dozen small gifts under the tree. Instead, my dad asked me in October if there was anything that I really, really wanted, and that one gift is what I’d get on Christmas. This is how I got my first car, help with the down payment on my apartment, and almost every piece of gadgetry I’ve ever owned, including the iPhone 4S.

So, according to my earlier logic, my dad would be an awful gift-giver. But that’s not necessarily the case. See, in the instance of my family Christmas, my dad always asked me what I wanted, and in turn I was as specific as possible. I was getting the end-all, be-all of potential Christmas gifts because it’s exactly what I had chosen.

Plus, we’re talking about my dad and Christmas, not your lover and Valentine’s Day.

So do your Valentine a favor this year: Unless he or she has asked very specifically for this or that gadget, take an extra minute to think what would truly make this person happy, and do your very best to make it happen for them.

Tablets and phones are great, but knowing that someone has spent time thinking about you… that’s priceless.

[Img credit: Lasse Kristensen, ShutterStock]

It won’t stop with Google Search Plus Your World. When asked if we should expect more integrations of Google+ into Google products, G+ director of engineering David Glazer said at today’s Inside Social Apps 2012 conference, ”Yes, where it’s good for the user. I think there’s more places to make people happy by showing them content they care about.” At the first major speaking engagement about its social network, Glazer also discussed user acquisition, monetization, and support for brands.

Regarding Google+ expanding into more Google properties, Glazer said “I don’t think of it in the sense of cross-promotion or the importance of the product to the company. It’s the importance of users to users. People care about other people, and that should be baked in to what you do online. With Google+, we  don’t want another product, but we can make everything you do online better if we have some idea of your identity, your connections, and have some mechanism to have conversations.

Glazer explained the slow roll out of the apps platform as a desire to “find the balance between people saying ‘I hope they never let anyone make a game on Google+’ and people saying ‘I can’t wait for games on Google+’. Google is taking this controlled approach to avoid the influx of spam that hit Facebook when it opened viral channels after its platform launched. Glazer said “If too many [developers] jump in, it could change the character of the platform.”

Plans for helping developers gain users will for now center around organic discovery. Glazer noted that Google+ games can also be accessed from the Chrome Web Store, and when launched will open an experience in Google+. Google has also created a “Play Now” button that developers can embed on their own sites to promote their Google+ apps.

Brands shouldn’t expect the equivalent of Facebook Page tab applications any time soon, unfortunately. During the Q&A I asked Glazer how brands will be able to drive their brand Page visitors to branded apps, for instance if Google will add the ability to feature links to apps on Pages. Glazer responded “We’re considering it. It’s a reasonable request but not one we’re prioritizing right now.”

The most exciting thing to developers about Google in 2012 may be video. Glazer said “The Hangouts API is under the radar in beta, [but it will offer] a lot of opportunities for people to do cool things.  The trend is that now you can, then you couldn’t. There no cognitive friction, no technical friction, and there’s huge scale. What could I build if I assume I have cheap, interactive, easy-to-embed video, that lets me do silly things where everyone who tries it smiles.”

As part of its 2012 US Digital Future in Focus whitepaper, comScore looked at the online ad landscape and found a mix of old and new names. The report includes a list of the top 10 display advertisers in the United States (all of this data is US-only), as measured by impressions. AT&T topped the list, as it has in previous years, but there’s a newcomer — Google, which delivered 40.4 billion ads for products like Chrome, Google Offers, and Google+.

Large brand advertising on the Internet is growing in general, comScore says. To quantify that, it measured the number of advertisers delivering at least 1 billion impressions per quarter. There were 145 advertisers in that league during the final quarter of 2011, up 38 percent from the same period in 2010.

As for where these ads are actually running, Facebook remains the leader in display advertising, with 1.3 trillion impressions adding up to 27.9 percent market share. Following Facebook, in descending order, were Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. (Remember that display advertising is a relatively new area for Google, which has traditionally focused on search ads.)

The report also includes the results of a December study looking at ad measurement. comScore calls the results “eye-opening”, arguing that visibility, geographic validation, brand safety, and audience targeting are all going to be big issues in 2012. For example, comScore found that 31 percent of ads in the study were delivered but never seen by consumers, presumably because people scrolled past before the ad loaded, or because they never scrolled down to see the at in the first place. comScore also found that 72 percent of campaigns ran at least some ads next to content that the advertisers said was not “brand safe”.

Advertising is just one area covered in the new whitepaper. We’ve also covered the findings related to online video.

At long last, HTC fans can finally stop holding their collective breath. After months of relative quiet, the Taiwanese company has taken to their Facebook page to spread the word: the Ice Cream Sandwich is coming, and it’s coming soon. For owners of certain HTC devices, the long-awaited Android 4.0 update will begin hitting handsets next month.

HTC originally promised that Ice Cream Sandwich would be hitting most of their top-tier devices in “early 2012,” but that doesn’t seem to the case anymore unless you own one of their numerous Sensation devices. If anything, it should make owners of T-Mobile USA’s Sensation 4G feel a little better about their phone being stripped of flagship status in just a few months. The international-spec Sensation will be updated as well, along with the flashier special edition XE and XL models.

Some of HTC’s U.S. devices will be getting the update not long afterward, although their note on Facebook lept understandably mum when it came to specific dates. That said, owners of the following devices can rest easy knowing that HTC is still slaving away on ICS updates meant for their handsets:

• Rezound (Verizon)
• Vivid (AT&T)
• Amaze 4G (T-Mobile)
• EVO 3D (Sprint)
• EVO Design 4G (Sprint)
• Incredible S
• Desire S
• Desire HD

Meanwhile, other hardware vendors have taken up different approaches to keeping their users abreast of the update situation. To wit: LG offered up a list of devices getting the update along with a tentative timeline, while companies like Sony and Motorola have been a bit less forthcoming when it comes to forecasting an update schedule.

Television is in trouble. Americans streamed 43.5 billion videos in December 2011, up 44% since December 2010, according to comScore’s 2012 US Digital Future In Focus report released today.  The study also showed that 105.1 million Americans now watch videos online each day, up 43% from 73.7 million in 2010.

comScore says YouTube is largely driving this, and that average minutes per video view, average videos watched per user, and total ads streamed are way up as well. TV and film studios should take notice and consider how they can create companion content to engage this growing audience and promote their traditional offerings.

Note that these stats are from an independent measurement service, and other measurements and internal traffic stats from the companies discussed may vary.

Other key statistics on American video watching habits in December 2011 compared to December 2010 include:

• The average video view length is up from 5 minutes to 5.8 minutes, showing an increasing willingness to watch longer form content
• The average viewer watches 239 videos per month
• Video advertising volume is rising faster than total videos streamed. The ratio of the number of video ads to total videos grew from 12.8 percent to 14.1 percent, with video ad volume up 20% to 7.1 billion ads served this year

• YouTube and other Google sites account for 21.9 billion of the 43.5 billion video view in December –50.4% of the total market. VEVO ranked 2nd with 801 million (1.8%), Hulu was 3rd with 777 million (1.8%), and Netflix was 4th with 431 million (1%)
• YouTube’s partner channel program has been a success, pushing more professionally developed content to viewers. In December, VEVO’s channel had 53.5 million viewers, Warner Music had 31.7 million viewers, and Machinima had 22.7 million viewers, indicating strong interest in Justin Bieber and watching people kill each other in Call of Duty