Social video network Twitvid has closed another acquisition today, following its March deal which involved bringing the team from daily deals aggregator Frugalo on board. Today, the company is announcing it has acquired Cull TV, an independent music video sharing site, which CTO John Hurliman describes as a little bit like Pandora mixed with MTV.

Cull TV, founded in early 2011, currently offers a catalog of some 2 to 3 million videos, with 100 brand-new ones appearing per day. The service offers 25 prominent channels devoted to various genres, but gets more specific than just “indie rock” or “hip hop.” Some of the featured channels today, for example, include “Euro Popped,” and “New Chilean Rock,” to give you an idea of how niche some of the content can be.

The company relies on its in-house team of experts to curate the selections to determine what’s trending, but it also relies on the wider web of music bloggers, Hurliman explains. There’s other technology behind the site, too, which involves “a lot of web analysis and continuous crawling” to find out which bands and videos are generally popular. And Cull TV can customize channels to your own interests as well.

“Once you log in with Facebook on the site,” adds Hurliman, “we can get a lot more personalized intelligence by looking at your Facebook posts and your Facebook likes to determine what bands you like and turn those into continuous video playlists,” he says.

As for Twitvid’s interest in the site, it goes far beyond curating music videos. Explains Twitvid CEO Mo Al Adham, “we’re going to use a lot of the know-how and knowledge the [Cull TV] team has acquired to integrate those learnings into Twitvid,” he says.

Cull TV did a lot of work in figuring out how to get really great content out of long tail video, and knows how to use a combination of manual curation and algorithms to surface the most relevant content.

“We hope to bring what we did very well in independent music, and broaden that out to Twitvid’s more generic approach to all of long-tail video,” Hurliman says.

During the transition period, Cull TV will remain up-and-running for at least the next few months, but whether it will remain up indefinitely has yet to be determined. Also of note, Cull TV CEO Katherine de León will not be joining the Twitvid team, but will be moving on to a new project.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the results of the integration will arrive soon after Twitvid’s big product announcement they’re teasing for June (hopefully a new iPad experience).

According to CEO Al Adham, Twitvid has more than doubled the number of video views it serves over the past five to six months, now in the range of 70 million+ views. The last time they talked to press, the Twitvid network was seeing 10 million unique visitors. Today, that’s over 15 million. Stay tuned.

Big mobile plans afoot for Baidu, the Google of China that leads in search and has launched a host of other services in the wake of that business. The company today unveiled the first smartphone to be built on its own platform, the Changhong H5018. And while that device is designed on a “forked” version of Android — forked Android devices being very popular in China — Baidu says that it doesn’t want to stop there: the idea is to take its platform, the Baidu Cloud Smart Terminal, to other operating systems like Windows Phone and iOS.

“We want Baidu’s Cloud Smart Terminal to function as a platform that sits on top of all operating systems, such as Windows Phone and iOS,” Kaiser Kuo, a spokesperson for Baidu, told TechCrunch today.

“We are not yet working on a Windows Phone device but the hope is to make one,” he noted, adding that while Baidu plans to leave no stone unturned in its strategy, “some stones are proving to be more recalcitrant than others.” That is likely a nod to Apple and how Baidu could develop its platform on iOS without completely ruining its relationship with the iPhone giant.

Mobile is a big and growing area for Baidu. In Q1, it noted that 20 percent of all of its search traffic is now coming from mobile — it is already the leading search engine in official Android devices with 80 percent penetration, Kuo noted — and he added that the mobile traffic percentage is “growing rapidly”, almost certainly faster than its more mature traffic on fixed internet devices. At the same time, mobile continues to boom in China, with the country now outstripping the U.S. and the world’s biggest smartphone market.

The Changhong H5018 is Baidu’s big strategy to create a device that will appeal to the less affluent demographic in the country. While the iPhone has proven to be hugely popular in China, it is sold at a premium price and that cuts out large parts of the addressable market that cannot afford it. Kuo notes that at the moment there are some 1 billion mobile users in the country still on feature devices. “It’s a market dominated by feature phones that prevent users from taking full advantage of the internet,” he said. “There is a tremendous market for low-priced but feature-laden smartphones, and this product fits that niche very well.”

It’s understood that while the basic price for the device will be 1,000 yuan (around $159), it will be sold through resellers that will attach data and calling tariffs to the device — the first named carrier is China Unicom — and subsidize the cost of the handset in the process. The phone will start to sell later this year, the company says.

Part of the reason the device will be priced so inexpensively, Kuo said, is because most of the services that Baidu is loading into the device will be cloud-based. That means the device does not need to have as much processing power built into it. “You don’t need a lot of power, just the ability to connect to the internet because we are shifting the computing from the terminal back to the cloud,” he noted.

Among the services will be a cloud-based storage service, location-based services and Baidu Map, voice recognition and handwriting-based search input, Baidu Music and services to recharge your call and data credits on the device.

In other respects the device sounds like it will be very much on par with other basic smartphones: 3.5-inch touch screen; 3G connectivity; 3 megapixel camera and a 1400mAh battery.

The phone is being made by Foxconn and that in itself is an interesting development and shows how the manufacturing giant — partner to Apple for the iPhone and iPad among many others — also has ambitions to position itself as a mobile brand in its own right.

It also follows on from an earlier model that Baidu had released in conjunction with Dell, which Kuo described as the “precursor” to the phone launched today.

Baidu’s plans to extend its circle of partners for the phones was also indirectly confirmed by its VP of engineering Jing Wang, who noted in a company statement that “The Baidu Cloud Smart terminal platform is a crucial step in Baidu’s overall Cloud strategy in the mobile Internet sphere…it will significantly lower manufacturing costs for many mobile manufacturers and cooperating partners. Baidu is joining hands with hardware vendors, terminal manufacturers, developers and others in the industry so that everyone along the whole value chain is a winner.”

Although Baidu certainly has a lot of ambition, for now it looks like most of the mobile plan is limited to China. Although Baidu has “dipped its toe” into other countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and Egypt, there are currently no plans to offer Baidu’s new phone in markets outside of the mainland. “The whole point is that it is supported by Baidu’s cloud services and all of these are currently in Chinese and not supported outside of China,” he noted. “When we have robust cloud offerings outside of China, only then would it make sense to offer terminals there.”

For awhile now “gamification” has largely existed as a buzz word. It’s felt just as ridiculous to write the word as it is to read it. However, as Tim Chang pointed out this weekend, although it’s important to avoid thinking of “gamification as the panacea,” it’s real, it’s moving beyond media and fitness, and it needs to be taken seriously. When it comes to educational tools, gamification has real value in its ability to make learning more fun and engaging. But as with all emerging trends, it can’t be applied willy-nilly.

BenchPrep, a young edtech startup backed by $2.2 million from Lightbank, launched last year to convert content from big educational publishers, like McGraw-Hill, into interactive web and mobile courses. While the startup expanded beyond college admission test prep in January, today it’s announcing that it is teaming up with Princeton Review to contemporize test prep for students, using game mechanics, leaderboards, and social features to make the tedious and teeth-grinding process of test prep more engaging and, hopefully, more effective.

BenchPrep CEO and co-founder Ashish Rangnekar tells us the startup’s core mission is to take the multitude of quality educational content out there — on a host of subjects — and transform it from static, linear material, into an experience that’s engaging, and personalized. Gamification of education is severely undercooked — like entertainment was 15 years ago, the CEO says, as the big publishers are, by and large, hesitant to experiment.

The high cost of education is just one of the industry’s many problems, but the real problem, he says, comes from a dearth of sticky, engaging experiences. Long term, the co-founder tells us, BenchPrep wants to become a platform where any student can go to study for an exam, using material from any publisher on any device. The content is out there, but the rest isn’t.

BenchPrep is already working with Princeton Review, Jon Wiley, McGraw-Hill and others, and the CEO believes it’s among the first to focus on building an interactive learning platform in which students can study on the Web, iOS, Android, and tablets.

So, the startup has teamed up with Princeton Review to launch GRE ScoreQuest, an iOS app that gamifies the study process for students taking the GRE. Obviously, the target audience is fairly limited, as it is intended for those studying to take the standardized test to get into grad school.

But the BenchPrep CEO calls the app “a bold experiment,” which takes the reputable content-heavy world of the Princeton Review and attempts to stretch the boundaries of test prep by bringing in social analytics and gamification. The company wants to use the app to prove that the model works, to validate the idea, and then apply this model to the content from all the big publishers, for all forms of test prep.

And so far, the experiment is showing positive results. In the two weeks since launch, 300+ students signed up, and 99 percent have downloaded the app and are spending more than 30 minutes a day in the app. Those students who used the app regularly over those two weeks have seen a 20 percent rise in performance.

So, how does the app work? Rangnekar, although he hesitates to use the analogy given the implications, likens the experience to that of Angry Birds. The app presents the test prep content through storyboards, like Angry Birds, there are a series of rooms in which there are 9 or 10 quizzes, ordered in level of difficulty.

The average number of questions per quiz is about five, with each quiz taking about 10 minutes to complete. If the student answers four questions correctly, they move onto the next quiz. If they fail to answer four correctly, the app explains the answers, including each part of the multiple choice answers, why each was incorrect, and so on.

Besides this process of leveling-up, BenchPrep wants to give context — something that’s extremely important for a sticky experience. So, the app allows students to see how their test results compare to all those studying for the GRE, as well as to break it down to compare only to those studying for their specific test, like Arts & Humanities, for example.

So the app offers tests in a bunch of different categories, from text completions and sentence equivalence to Algebra and Geometry, with more than 300 practice problems. Students unlock new problems, levels, and boards based on their performance, with this intelligent report card that analyzes each test.

For a free app, the GRE ScoreQuest is off to a great start. There are a huge amount of explanations so that students can understand what they’re getting wrong, they have a valid score card, and then get to compare to local and national leaderboards, which makes the experience that much more engaging. It’s the kind of experience you react to with, “I wish they had this when I was studying for the SATs.” I’m not even studying for the GREs, but I found myself taking the quizzes nonetheless.

Typically, the BenchPrep CEO says, students are opening the app at least twice a day, which he says has been great early validation on this model. Going forward, BenchPrep wants to focus on being the tool, or platform that enables these mobile and web experiences for educational publishers. It’s a complementary gamification service to the approach Inkling and Boundless Learning are taking to eTextbooks, for example.

There’s plenty of opportunity for tools like this in higher education, especially in test prep, and BenchPrep obviously hopes that this is just the beginning.

For more, find the app here, and BenchPrep at home here.

What do you think?

What does it mean when Facebook says it has 901 million monthly active users on its network? According to figures out from the International Telecommunication Union, it effectively signifies that Facebook is the world’s largest social network by a very long shot. The ITU says in a new report that that the number of people using all social media services have passed the 1 billion mark. That is just 100 million shy of Facebook’s usage figure, giving Facebook a 90 percent share of all social networkers.

In contrast to the very biggest players of all — Facebook (900m+ users), Twitter (200m+ users) and LinkedIn (120m+ users) — the rest of the playing field is heavily localized, with services like QQ in China, Vkontakte in Russia, Mixi in Japan, and Google’s Orkut in Brazil, India, and Paraguay among those competing in the space, the ITU notes.

The ITU, which is focused on telecoms regulation, flags social media in its report as an area of growing scrutiny for telecoms regulators: not only are social networks becoming more ubiquitous, but services like Facebook are becoming communications mediums in their own right, with voice and text offerings that go head-to-head against similar services from carriers.

The 2012 “Trends In Telecommunication Reform” report also confirmed something else that Facebook has been telling us: mobile is fast becoming the main way that the vast majority of people are using its service.

That’s partly due to the fact that, although broadband usage continues to grow, the number of fixed broadband subscribers is still nowhere near the majority of households in most countries.

ITU notes in the last five years, the number of fixed broadband users has nearly doubled, and by early 2012 they stood at 591 million — in other words, equivalent to just over half of the number of all social media users.

But broadband growth remains very uneven. Within that 591 million figure, the ITU notes that developing countries have penetration of as low as 4.8 percent of users. Industrialized countries, it says, have average penetration of 26 percent. Part of the problem remains the affordability of broadband services: in Africa, for example, the average monthly price for broadband is still more than three times that of the average household income. Overall, there are still 5 billion people worldwide that have “never experienced even low-speed Internet, or have only experienced it through public or shared access,” the ITU says. And there are some very much on the other side of the digital divide not using broadband, either. (Hello, Steve Wozniak.)

On the mobile side of the equation, Facebook and outside analysts have noted that mobile usage is now outpacing usage from fixed connections on Facebook’s network.

But in developing countries, it looks like Facebook and other social networks will also hit a wall when it comes to picking up mobile users who fully engage with the site.

The ITU notes that only 8.5 percent of the population in developing countries had access to mobile broadband in 2011, with only five percent of global use coming from low-income countries. Effectively, this could mean that the users Facebook is picking up in emerging markets may have people using the site on smartphones, but will probably, more likely, be using something much more pared-down on a feature phone, such as Facebook Zero or something even more basic.

This includes the service launched by Orange in Africa that uses USSD technology — available on even the most basic GSM device — to let people search for friends, invite friends, accept or deny friend requests, write status updates and comment/like/unlike friends’ status updates.

That also suggests that until technology catches up with Facebook, as it continues to get bigger, it may also start to see a growth of less sophisticated usage and engagement on the site as well.

“The minute you tell someone that images on your server disappear, everyone jumps to sexting.”

Evan Spiegel laughed and leaned back into his chair during his first sitdown interview since his iPhone app Snapchat blew up over the last month. Snapchat is #12 on the free iOS photo app charts in the U.S. and just scored some mainstream media attention in The New York Times. Plus, we hear that Snapchat has also impressed Facebook’s internal product leadership and even Zuck himself.

Why? Snapchat is a photo-sharing app that changes privacy norms in a very novel way. The free app allows users to send others photos and control how long receivers can see them. These photos last for up to 10 seconds, before they disappear forever. If you try to take a screenshot, the app will notify the sender.

“It seems odd that at the beginning of the Internet everyone decided everything should stick around forever,” Spiegel said. “I think our application makes communication a lot more human and natural.”

By taking away the part about a photo lasting forever, it actually encourages users to share more (something Mark Zuckerberg would be very happy to see.)

The New York Times happened to cover the more risqué side of the app—its potential use for sexting.  But the Stanford senior isn’t convinced Snapchat will become the must-have app for sexters.

“I’m not convinced that the whole sexting thing is as big as the media makes it out to be,” he said. “I just don’t know people who do that. It doesn’t seem that fun when you can have real sex.”

Spiegel said most user feedback from direct emails and Twitter posts is about sending funny faces and messages, not racy images.

But he added that the app was partially inspired by the Anthony Weiner scandal last spring and a desire to create an app with expiring data.

Snapchat user Marilyn Feldman uses the app to keep in touch with her daughter, who attends college across the country.

“It’s subtly different even from taking a picture on my iPhone and sending that,” Feldman said. “It’s more immediate and even more casual. Almost like, ‘thinking of you.’ Picture of a red rose in the neighborhood. I didn’t even send her a message, just a picture of the red rose, and she knew what that meant.”

Spiegel co-founded Snapchat last spring with Bobby Murphy, who graduated from Stanford in 2010 after studying mathematical and computational science. The pair met in the Kappa Sigma fraternity house at Stanford three years ago. Spiegel would often walk down the hall to Bobby’s room at four in the morning for computer science help.

While living together, they founded Future Freshman, a college guidance site that ultimately failed to attract users and lost out to a rival with more aggressive sales and marketing. They finally gave up on Future Freshman last March, but it wouldn’t be long before the duo moved on to working on Snapchat.

After kicking the idea around for a bit, Spiegel took it to his mechanical engineering class, ‘Design and Business Factors.’

“All the VCs and people who came through we’re like ‘This is the dumbest thing ever,’” Spiegel laughed. “So, obviously, I went back to Bobby and I was like, ‘Oh, they really liked it!’”

After spending the summer together in Los Angeles building a prototype, they were struggling again to attract users. Then something strange happened. The app started going viral in high schools in the Los Angeles area, including at Spiegel’s cousin’s school. Students were using it to pass notes and communicate during the school day.

In March, Barry Eggers, a managing director at the venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners heard from his high-school daughter that the top three apps her friends were using in school were Angry Birds, Instagram, and Snapchat.

“That’s interesting company. Of those, the one we’d never heard of was Snapchat,” said Jeremy Liew, Eggers’ partner, who pursued Spiegel for a meeting.

“We were ignoring them until we couldn’t afford it,” Spiegel said, adding that many VCs had reached out to them about funding.

Just 25 minutes into the meeting, Liew was ready to invest, to the tune of $485,000. The team has wasted no time putting the money to use. They have hired a community manager, as well as two new engineers.

“Honestly I think we’re building a team here but also a family,” Spiegel said. “We’ve identified some absolutely exceptional people who we really want to work with and I think that’s something that’s really important.”

Snapchat still has a small userbase from what we can tell. Spiegel wouldn’t say how large it is, but it seems that the users he does have are insanely engaged. Snapchat currently processes around 25 images every second and the team is focusing on stabilizing their iOS application. (For comparison, Instagram was processing around 25 photos a second seven months ago when it had 10 million users.)

Spiegel is also developing an Android app. And of course, they’re looking for a way to make some money off the app. While he said they don’t currently have a revenue model, Spiegel said they are “having ongoing discussions” about it.

“We didn’t think we were ever going to raise venture capital so we were planning very early on to generate a revenue plan,” he said.

The success of that plan will likely rely on whether Snapchat can convince people that it is a new and useful way to communicate – with or without pants.

They have raised $11.45 million in both Angel and Series B funding since launch, acquired a company called Sensobi, and have been themselves acquired by none other than Skype (which was acquired by Microsoft).

There may not be a wilder tale of a Disrupt success (though plenty of startups would beg to differ), which is why we’ve chosen GroupMe to kick off a series I’m doing on “Disrupt Startups: Where They Are Now.”

We sat down earlier today to chat with co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci to find out their perspective on Disrupt as a launchpad. Try as I might to snip down the interview, the whole thing is basically gold.

GroupMe is one of many Disrupt alumni startups that we’ll be looking at over the next week and a half, so stay tuned for more “Where They Are Now” posts.

And if you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies itching to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

Here’s that interview I promised:

TechCrunch: Tell me how this all started.

GroupMe: We were at the first Disrupt Hackathon in New York. We had group SMS working on Twilio’s API. You could add people to the group using commands on SMS, or you can use an HTML5 webapp. The only problem was that you had to know numbers and type them in. I mean, it kind of sucked. But we added in an offers tab, and in the demo we were talking about the LOST series finale. In the top corner, when you clicked on the offers tab, it took you straight to an actual ad for half-price if you check out the LOST series finale event at Brooklyn Bowl. We basically demoed that we had a working group chat with a funcitonal business model.

Back then it was called Groop.ly.

We had investors interested right on the floor of Disrupt, and we ended up talking about fundraising.

TC: So if you had to quantify it, how would you say that Disrupt affected your company?

GroupMe: 100 percent. We probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Disrupt.

I had won a Hackathon that was an internal contest at Gilt Group, but what was really interesting and intriguing was the chance to build something and show it on a real stage. We had the idea a couple days before, and after we decided to go in we found it was a massive springboard for acceleration and growth.

TC: So, were you guys the first to do group messaging?

GroupMe: People had tried to do it for a long time, even 10 years before us. But we kind of nailed it at the right time and the right place. The service was ripe for adoption once we got the ability to interact with the address book. Mobile had really taking off and with access to the address book, the timing was right to go to the next level.

TC: What’s changed since then?

GroupMe: Honestly, there hasn’t been a ton of change when you’re looking from a very high vantage point. When we think about why we were doing Groop.ly back then, not much has changed from that night at the Hackathon. We were talking about how we can turn Groop.ly into a business and how we would quit our jobs the next week. A lot of those initial thoughts from that night were right on point.

We wanted people to be able to speak with groups that are important to them, buy better, and get together in the real life better. You can still see us excecuting things we talked about that very first night.

At the same time, a lot has changed from then. We built a company, bulit a big team, sold the company. But we’re still trying to accomplish the things we’ve dreamed of on day one. We had a whole discussion on how we can rapidly iterate, and we continue to build an awesome company culture with that great seed as our core. We stay true to why we were building our product and how we were getting it done.

TC: Do you think that being a part of Disrupt gave you a better platform with the media in general?

GroupMe: We think it’s a great story to tell. It was a fortunate sequence of events, fun and relateable. It’s actually a bit of a fairy tale. The fact that this happened at a Hackathon, the TechCrunch Hackathon no less, made it something very easy to talk about and compelling and fun to tell a story about. It’s an even more fun story to hear.

People were aware that we had built it at a Hackathon and they wanted to know how things were going. We kept up our relationship with TechCrunch and Disrupt and went back to later Disrupts and participated in the Hackathon again. That’s where we built our sponsored groups feature. We launched it the very next day on stage.

But it really was the perfect case of timing.

TC: What are your future plans?

GroupMe: We can’t talk too much about that, but we’ve been cooking up some fun features but if you stay tuned you’ll see what we mean.

TC: Would you recommend Disrupt for other startups?

GroupMe: We think Hackathons in general have become crowded places. What we saw is people going in having the same idea. But the Disrupt Hackathon is fun, whether you want to build something or learn it’s a great place to be. Disrupt in general is getting a lot of visibility for startups, and it has this huge impact on getting mind share, which we think is really important.

The Hackathon and Disrupt are great ways to network and meet people, whether you’re focused or having fun. We aren’t the only ones to come out of the Hackathon with a successful business, but what’s great about it is that you can just test out your ideas without much to lose. Once you’ve done that, Disrupt is for visibility.

TC: What have you been up to since the acquisition?

GroupMe: We love the culture we have here. Skype wants to foster that and let it grow. We’re working with them on some pretty awesome stuff. It’s been a great process so far. We’re happy and they’re happy and it’s a great thing.

What advice would you give to Hackers and young entrepreneurs in general?

Think about it, but don’t put a lot of pressure on building a company in 24 hours. You should just go and have fun meeting great people and really take advantage of the fact that it’s a big stage.

Don’t try to build too much. It’s hard to focus and get stuff done, but all we wanted was to get to a certain proof of concept. So try to get there and have fun doing it. Stay focused if you can, and think of a goal. Past that, all you have to do is meet the goal you entered with.

But you’re also trying to learn new tools and test things out. If we hadn’t finished Groop.ly we wouldn’t have been upset. We were there to push ourselves.

TC: OK guys, last question. I see a lot of beer at the Hackathon, and I see a lot of Red Bull. What would you recommend as the perfect sustenance.

GroupMe: There are two options. A mix of 2/3 Red Bull and 1/3 beer, or a lot of coffee and water.

Three guys from Provo, Utah set out on a mission to make QR codes, those boring pixellated, black-and-white squares come alive — in other words, to extend their functionality by turning them into realworld “like,” “follow,” and “buy” buttons. And it’s been working. In February, Scan closed a seed funding round from Shervin Pishevar, Google Ventures, CRV, Start Fund, Social + Capital, Ludlow Ventures, and more. The company moved their operations from Utah to San Francisco, and is currently sitting at just over 12 million downloads across iOS devices.

How did it become one of the top downloaded QR code scanner in just over a year? Because, beyond the basic scanning functionality offered by a host of iOS and Android apps, Scan offers a variety of services and features that let SMBs and enterprise companies create mobile optimized QR code, NFC, and other tech experiences to let users can QR codes with their phone and immediately “like” products or businesses on Facebook, follow on Twitter, check in on Foursquare, etc. Check out how businesses are using it here.

As Scan is in the business of creating apps that extend the potential application of QR code tech, Scan is today leveraging the buzz around Instagram to let businesses, organizations, etc. build their Instagram user base via QR codes. The new app, appropriately called Scan-to-gram, lets users scan QR codes and instantly follow a company and its employees.

The company has already lined up a bunch of notable Instagrammers to be part of its initial launch, including Warby Parker, Zooey Deschanel, Nike, Marc Jacobs, GQ, Vevo, Audi, Nat Geo, and the L.A. Lakers — to name a few.

With Instagram’s acquisition by Facebook, the platform is becoming increasingly appealing — beyond what it already had. Brands are excited because it provides early adopter-types and mobile enthusiasts with a simple way to boost their followers, which gives them access to another social media channel and potential branding opportunities.

On top of that, it can be a clever way to draw users into the Scan.me ecosystem, which already allows businesses and individuals to create QR codes that represent their online presence — like an About.me for QR codes. Of course, QR codes have a less-than-terrific reputation, which is why Scan has focused on the content and the experience — in other words, what the person or business is trying to accomplish.

With Scan-to-gram, it’s Instagram, and obviously the potential permutations are numerous. Plus, they’ve expanded to 1-D barcodes, and are preparing for NFC and image recognition, whenever the mainstream becomes ready to adopt.

Currently, Scan is using barcodes as its rev stream, so that when a user scans a barcode, they are taken to a page where there’s a Google button, an Amazon button, and a third for an ad. Scan makes affiliate dollars as well as ad revenue, but the long-term model, CEO Garrett Gee tells us, is to build out more valuable mobile experiences, increasing the depth of its analytics and reporting tools, offering those to businesses at a price.

The barcode revenue is just starting to pick up, Gee says, at over $1K-per-day.

Oh, and even though Scan-to-gram was just pushed live this morning, the Instagram team reached out to them today, and has created their own page as well. Find it here.

For more, here’s Scan-to-gram at home, and an intro video below:

Some slightly conflicting stories zipping across the ether today involving Facebook, its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram and a rumored Federal Trade Commission investigation into the deal: The FT is reporting that this could delay the acquisition. Betabeat is reporting that this could actually delay Facebook’s IPO.

Could it be both? Either? Neither? We reached out to the FTC to get some info straight from the horse’s mouth.

For starters, it should be pointed out that the FTC can’t say one way or the other whether it is investigating the Facebook/Instagram deal. “The commission does not comment on investigations,” Mitch Katz, a public affairs spokesperson, told us. “You would need to check directly with the company.”

However, he did also note that as a matter of course, the FTC investigates all deals with a value greater than $68.2 million. That puts this $1 billion deal firmly into the investigating pile, then.

What next? Once the FTC — or, for that matter, the Department of Justice — does initiate an investigation, it can last for up to 30 days and the merger cannot go ahead until that investigation is terminated. (By the way, although the FTC can’t say when it is investigating someone, it can publicly disclose when it has terminated that investigation. Go figure.)

If, when the preliminary investigation period of 30 days is up and the FTC has not yet come to a decision, it can ask for a second request. This doesn’t necessarily mean something suspicious is going on, Katz told me.

“A lot of people think, if we issue a second request, that means we have problems with a deal. But that’s not true,” he said. “It may be that we just need more information to determine whether there are any competitive concerns. Issuing a second request is not an indicator there is a problem; just that we need more information.”

That information can be about the markets — here, social networks and photo sharing, and mobile — what the companies do, what their operations are, and whether they are competitors in certain markets and how their merger could impact competition.

The investigation can involve other companies also providing feedback — and indeed the FT notes that “at least two” major competitors are providing information to the FTC for this (Twitter and Google perhaps?).

One thing that seems pretty clear is that the FTC’s investigation is squarely about the Facebook and Instagram merger — not Facebook’s IPO, which coincidentally Facebook is preparing for and is scheduled to take place on May 18.

Facebook could always delay the IPO, but that would be its decision — not something related to the FTC.

“Any potential investigation would be done independently [of the IPO plans],” Katz said. “The decision whether [the investigation] would have any impact on the IPO would be up to the company.” Given that Facebook didn’t expect the Instagram deal to close before the end of the second quarter anyway — that is, the end of June — it might not see the FTC nosing around as reason enough to delay its listing plans.

We have also contacted Facebook and will update this post with any further information that we get from them.

When two of the biggest names in venture capital (arguably still the biggest) both invest in a startup, you know it’s probably time to take notice. So yes, take notice: A cross-device ad targeting startup called Drawbridge has raised a $6.5 million Series A from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.

The company was founded in November 2010 by Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, a scientist at AdMob and then, after the acquisition, at Google. Sivaramakrishnan says she started the company because she saw the proliferation of ad targeting technology on the desktop web, while there was “no significant technology innovation” on the mobile side. So she decided to tackle the problem herself, “outside of the big G.”

Since then, Sivaramakrishnan says her team has built “very heavy-duty technology” to link up ad targeting on desktop and mobile. Drawbridge looks at activity on the desktop Web, and on mobile Web and apps. Then it uses “probabilistic and statistical inference models” to suggest which PC and mobile users are likely to be the same person using two different devices.

“Over time, we get enough confidence on the probability of these two activities belonging to the same user that deem it to be a ‘pair’,” she says.

And once a pair has been made, mobile advertisers have access to user data that’s being collected on the desktop, and can target their ads with much more nuance. In addition to the technology disparity between desktop and mobile, Sivaramakrishnan notes that people are usually using their mobile devices for a relatively narrow range of activity, usually entertainment or content consumption, so it’s only by accessing to their desktop activity that advertisers can determine “commercial-grade intent.”

The model also steers clear of any privacy concerns, Sivaramakrishnan says. There’s no personally identifiable information collected — no phone numbers, no email addresses, no Facebook accounts. In the meantime, Apple has started rejecting apps that access UDIDs to identify their users, which Sivaramakrishnan says makes Drawbridge “even more pertinent and significant now than when UDIDs were being lazily used as mobile cookies.”

“You don’t need a device ID to do advertising,” she adds.

Even though Drawbridge is only coming out of stealth today, Sivaramakrishnan says it has already been running campaigns with major advertisers and has significant revenue. The platform is still in beta testing, with plans for general availability in the second half of this year. Sivaramakrishnan also says the model could be expanded to other connected devices, not just desktop PCs and phones.

Drawbridge previously raised a seed round of undisclosed size from Kleiner and Sequoia.

Draw Something, the game that could do no wrong now seems like it can do little right, at least according to the blogosphere. There’s been a string of stories from virtually everyone saying that the OMGPOP acquisition is “haunting” Zynga because Draw Something’s daily active usage is down to 9.1 million daily active users from its peak of 14.6 million daily active users.

It’s funny how the press turns (and we know this too well). On the day we broke the story that Zynga was about to buy OMGPOP for what turned out to be $180 million, Business Insider said that our rumored price range was way too low. When the company sold, they then wrote a story citing Flurry’s CEO that OMGPOP had left $800 million on the table.

But now, the story is totally opposite! “Interest is fading!” The deal was a debacle! This chart below from AppData is getting rehashed over and over again.

It looks dismal. But while Draw Something’s decline seems a little scary (as it should be), there’s a lot of context to keep in mind –

1) Zynga raised its bookings guidance by around $50 to 75 million for the year, mostly on OMGPOP. Zynga said late last month that bookings for the year would come in at between $1.425 billion to $1.5 billion, up from $1.35 to $1.45 billion. They said on the earnings call that the $50 to 75 million bump was mostly because of Draw Something. While that seems high, it’s not out of line if you look at other comparable company monthly revenues. Funzio was making $5 million a month at the time of its sale to GREE. Glu Mobile, a publicly-traded company, did $17 million in Android and iOS gaming revenues in the first quarter.

2) Games usually peak and then taper off in usage. But revenue sometimes goes in the opposite direction with optimization and improvement (like with Farmville). Zynga probably knows the natural lifecycle of freemium game better than most other companies. Games peak early and then taper down over long stretches of time.

Even hit games often contribute the majority of their revenue to the company after they peak. Farmville was still Zynga’s top game by revenue last quarter even though it’s several years old. It made up 29 percent of the company’s online game revenue, followed by Cityville which had a 17 percent share, according to an SEC filing today.

Here’s the life cycle of Cityville, Zynga’s top game on the Facebook canvas by monthly active users:

Here’s what Farmville looked like:

If you zoom out, here’s what Draw Something’s life cycle looks like. Kinda familiar?

True, mobile is a little bit different. The titles that were first to market like Angry Birds and Zeptolab’s Cut The Rope, have managed to last longer than your typical social game on the Facebook. There are also exceptions like Words With Friends, which has a very unusual curve and Zynga Poker. But life cycles for mobile games are getting shorter every quarter.

3) OMGPOP’s price may seem high, but the deal was far from the most aggressively priced one in recent social gaming memory.

Remember when Disney paid up to $763.2 million for social gaming startup Playdom in 2010? At Playdom’s peak, the company had 7.3 million daily active users. When the deal finally closed, they had about 5 million. Even if you exclude the $200 million earnout, Disney paid more than three times as much as Zynga did for one-half of the daily active users. And that’s factoring in Draw Something’s recent declines.

Or how about the time when DeNA paid up to $403 million for Ngmoco in 2010?  When DeNA won the bidding war against Zynga for this company led by former EA execs, they got 12 million registered users. That’s registered, as in people who touched Ngmoco’s Plus+ gaming network maybe one or two times (not people who used it every month or every day).

OMGPOP had peak usage of 14.6 million users every day. Up until now, Ngmoco has mostly been a source of costs for its Japanese parent as it only launched its Android-based mobile gaming network last fall. If they start materially adding to revenues, it won’t be until now or later in the year, two years after they were acquired.

Or how about the time when GREE paid $104 million for mobile-social gaming network OpenFeint even though it lost more than $6 million on $282,500 in revenue the year before? OMGPOP made about that much revenue per day when it sold to Zynga.

4) There are a lot of other conflating factors that have driven the stock downward over the past few months:

The lock-up period for Zynga’s employees ended a week ago, so now the company’s rank-and-file can sell their holdings. Pincus himself sold close to $200 million in stock at the beginning of last month through a secondary offering. Both Pandora and LinkedIn, which went public last year, matched or found new lows when they hit their critical lock-up dates.

Maybe there are some underlying concerns about where Zynga will find new growth as the company’s business on Facebook seems mature. Draw Something might tie a little bit into that as it’s part of Zynga’s mobile strategy, but it’s not just the game itself. It’s hard to envision a gaming business on iOS or Android that has the market share that Zynga has on Facebook. Furthermore, many standalone Android or iOS gaming companies trade or have been sold at somewhere between $200 million and 400 million.

At a $5.89 billion market cap, Zynga is aggressively priced for growth and is worth about four times its projected revenues this year. Meanwhile, Electronic Arts trades at not much more than what it will bring in revenue for this year. Zynga is also changing a lot internally as early employees, many of whom didn’t have a genuine gaming background, phase out. The company is now pulling in a lot of EA’s middle management. That could bring some creative firepower but it could also create internal culture clash.

But OMGPOP? That’s just one game. And the title’s decline, while fast, mirrors what you see with other hit games.