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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn’t work work, but it’s not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch and watching TV.

That’s where a new startup called Stevie comes in, with a website launching today at Disrupt, along with mobile apps that function as remote controls. Stevie looks at content shared in your social network feeds and elsewhere on the Web, and it assembles that content into TV shows that you can watch, shows with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Celeb TV. Naturally, the shows incorporate video content that your friends have shared, but they also include things like Facebook status updates, tweets, shared headlines, and birthdays, running mostly as tickers under the video. Essentially, it’s a way to watch Facebook and Twitter on your TV.

Co-founder and Chief Creative Technologist Gil Rimon argues that this is the right way to do “social TV.” Apps like GetGlue, which offer check ins and other social interactions around existing TV content, aren’t a good fit for how people watch TV now, because they ignore its essentially passive nature. Stevie takes the opposite tack — instead of trying to encourage new types of behavior, it’s introducing new content into the traditional couch potato experience.

Rimon compares the app to Pandora. In the same way that Pandora learns your musical tastes and preferences, automatically delivering music that’s tailored to your tastes, Stevie uses something that the team calls “The Stevie Factor” to look at your social data (such as Facebook Likes) and automatically stitch together the videos and other content that you’ll probably enjoy.

When Rimon demonstrated Stevie for me, I was particularly impressed by the look and feel. Granted, I don’t watch much TV aside from Game of Thrones and Doctor Who, but the video content struck me as quite bubbly and polished, especially for something that was being algorithmically assembled on-the-fly. Rimon’s experience in TV writing, editing, and presenting probably helps with that. I expect Stevie will become even more appealing when it’s available on connected TV devices.

The company has raised $300,000 in angel funding from investors including Jeff Pulver and Gigi Levy, and it’s participating in the Microsoft Accelerator for Azure program in Tel Aviv. Oh, and if you’re interested in couples who run startups, here’s another one — Rimon is married to his co-founder and CEO Yael Givon.

You can visit the Stevie website here, download the iPhone app here, and download the Android app here. (Again, the apps aren’t standalone experiences, but remote controls for watching on the browser.)

Q: How do you connect the Internet to the TC?

A: We’re not delivering hardware — it’s a web-based experience, with more devices (starting with iPad) coming soon.

Q: Who is your competition?

A: No direct competition, though of course there are other video discovery companies. But they’re not replicating the TV experience. The real competitor might be old-fashioned TV channels.

Q: Why hasn’t connected TV taken off?

A: That’s changing — see, for example, the growth of Apple TV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Independent online video company Funny Or Die is about to get a lot of help from a traditional TV company, as it’s struck a strategic partnership with Turner Broadcasting to collaborate on multiplatform video content. As part of the deal, Turner is taking a small minority stake in Funny Or Die — terms of which have not been disclosed.

“We’re at an inflection point with digitally distributed video,” Funny Or Die CEO Dick Glover told me by phone. He says that as a result, the timing of the deal is poised to coincide with that inflection point and catalyze further growth for Funny Or Die.

For 2012, Funny Or Die is averaging around 14-16 million uniques per month, and has seen 60 percent growth year over year. But it’ll likely get a big boost once it starts leverage Turner properties, but especially TBS and Adult Swim. Internet distribution is nice, but it still doesn’t match the reach that a content creator can get from TV. According to Glover, the partnership will “provide a microphone to reach a much larger audience.”

While the Internet video company will get some help in promotion, Glover said there’ll be no real change in how the company is run or what kind of content it puts out. It’ll still develop for a multiplatform audience, which includes online, mobile, and TV — where appropriate.

This isn’t the first partnership that Funny Or Die has struck with a TV network. It also has a deal with HBO (which, like Turner, is also part of Time Warner) for its original series Funny Or Die Presents, now in its third season. That deal remains in place and isn’t affected by the Turner partnership, Glover said.

As viewership — especially among young people — moves away from traditional TV and to other channels, broadcast and cable networks are starting to look at online video distributors for help in this new, multiplatform environment. The Turner partnership was announced about two weeks after Discover acquired indie video producer Revision3 for a reported $30-$40 million. We’ll probably see more deals like this as time goes on.

It’s almost here. The big day. Can you feel the excitement? Yes, if all goes according to plan on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg will ring the Nasdaq bell in a hoodie, the big blue social network will go forward with one of the largest IPOs for an internet company in history, the markets will hit a fever pitch, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse will update their statuses — and the rest of us will just go back to using Twitter.

Nonetheless, Facebook is expected to go public at a valuation between $92 and $103 billion. As such, it’s pretty clear what Facebook is worth to us (really, to the market), but the real question is: How much are you worth to Facebook? Hmm?

Thanks to online privacy company Abine, we now have a simple tool by which we can calculate our monetary value to Facebook. In good old dollars and cents.

To illustrate the potential for Facebook to lose sight of the importance of the individual (and his or her privacy) amidst the pressure to maintain its ridiculously high valuation/metrics, Abine has created a quiz called the “Val-You Calculator,” which, based on your answers to seven questions, determines the dollar value you represent as a user.

These questions ask you where you live (most of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from North American companies), how many friends you have, whether or not you play Zynga games, for example, all in an effort to demonstrate that your personal data comes with an implicit dollar-value.

According to Abine, its Val-You Calculator uses data from Facebook’s S-1 filing, as well as “independent financial and market research analysts, Facebook advertisers, and our own internal modeling and estimates.” A little bit of magic, and presto, you can see how much revenue you generate for Big Blue.

Of course, when it comes to IPOs, with a ton of financial information being disclosed for the first time, naturally the magnifying glasses come out, books are scrutinized, business models molested, etc. For better or for worse. Regardless of the hot air that gusts from pundits, privacy will continue to be a serious concern for Facebook users going forward. In fact, just last week, Facebook launched a major update to its privacy policies in compliance with an audit by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner.

Among those changes, Facebook one-upped Google and created the “Facebook Terms and Policies Hub” to bring its 10 critical privacy policy documents under one roof. As the social network explained in a blog post, the changes are being made in an effort to increase the level of transparency around its handling of users’ personal data. And, as Josh details, for the most part, these changes seem logical, user friendly, and anything but suspicious, as some might have you believe.

That being said, with a scary-big user base creating even scarier amounts of big data, and considering that its model revolves around revenue derived from targeted, personalized ads, privacy advocates believe that the coming pressure to beat projections in the public markets leaves our personal data in a precarious position. The shortest line between A and big quarterly gains is a straight line to selling our private data to marketers.

In a recent survey, Abine found that 75 percent of its users wouldn’t leave Facebook alone in a dark room with their data, a sentiment that was confirmed by an independent AP-ABC poll in which nearly 60 percent of respondents had “little to no trust in Facebook to keep their information private.”

By updating its privacy policies, Facebook is working to allay those concerns, and its made progress. Yet, as Josh points out, privacy policy won’t be its only concern. Beyond making moves to stay on the right side of the law, down the road Facebook may face government regulation in regard to privacy. If a governing body were to place restrictions on how the company launches products, or displays features, for example, it could become increasingly vulnerable to the competition.

As it feels the pressure to drive big returns, Facebook may be forced to devise more clever ways to utilize data. It can think bigger, and will, but then it has to worry about mobile. As it has itself admitted, mobile is a big threat, and the company’s growth may be impeded as it works to keep up adequate transparency and has to show fewer ads per user as a result.

Whether or not this will significantly affect revenue in the long-term remains to be seen, however, thanks to Abine and Val-You, at the very least, Facebook will know exactly how much ad revenue each of its users represent. And that, my friends, is priceless.

Sadly, I was only worth a little over $50 to Facebook. Clearly, I’m not a good customer. What about you?

For more on Abine, find them here, or get your own Val-You appraisal here.

Today, the Banters social experiment has officially come to a close, as the startup’s co-founder Lauren Leto said via blog post today that the team will be no longer actively working on the site beginning June 1st. However, in spite of its tumultuous road and final splash into the deadpool, the news came with a silver lining. Both Leto and her co-founder, Patrick Moberg, will be taking up residence at Betaworks, the New York accelerator that has incubated or funded startups like bitly, Chartbeat, SocialFlow, News.me, Kickstarter, TweetDeck, and many more.

As for some background, it was a little under two years ago that Texts From Last Night co-founder Lauren Leto and partner-in-crime Patrick Moberg launched Bnter, a simple way for people to share text, IM, and chat messages with their friends in a public forum on the web.

The startup was backed by a cast of well-known angel investors, including Founder Collective (Chris Dixon), SV Angel (David Lee), High Line Venture Partners (Shana Fisher), and more. It later was the subject of some drama with Spark Capital and Tumblr, but came out alive and continued to iterate.

While it initially focused on SMS, it later broadened its scope to let users share any sort of conversation, including GChat, in-person chat, email and more, and launched both iPhone and Android apps, a bookmarklet, in-depth Twitter integration, and supported Facebook Chat, Foursquare comments, GroupMe, etc.

In spite of its full roster of available integrations and cross-platform functionality, Banters suffered from a clunky user experience, as its original model required users to launch the app or visit its home page, open a new post, attribute another user to bring them into the conversation, filling out various message boxes, adding tags — and then, at long last, posting. It had become too much like a CMS and had lost the lightweight feel of an SMS tool.

Recognizing this process was arduous for users, Banters launched a new version of its iPhone app in January, which leveraged Siri’s technology to input conversations and quotes. The idea was to make adding a conversation to the app as easy as snapping a mobile photo. Along with its new iPhone app, the startup added more functionality, including a “like” button, activity stream and an ‘Explore’ tab to help surface the best conversations.

And because it’s original name “Bnter” was tough for some to pronounce, Leto and Moberg changed the startup’s name to “Banters.”

Unfortunately, try as they might, Banters ran its course. Leto said in a blog post today that, although its user base has been passionate, the platform simply hadn’t gained the traction, or user base, the co-founders had hoped it would find.

As a result, beginning June 1st, the team will no longer be actively working on Banters. “We’re not outright closing the site down any time in the foreseeable future,” Leto says in her post, “but, for the sake of prudence, we’re encouraging our users to export their data here.”

Although Banters is hitting the deadpool, its co-founders are moving on to new projects. Leto says that she had long been a fan of “Findings,” Betaworks’ tool that offers “a straightforward, intuitive way to share and discuss quotes from books and the web.” Seeing that Findings and Banters share similar goals, Leto and Moberg will be joining Betaworks this summer.

Leto will become the General Manager at Findings, while Moberg will become Betaworks’ “Hacker-in-Residence.”

Of the new move, Leto says:

It’s never easy to stop working on an idea after having invested so much into it, but I’m thankful that we’ll have the opportunity to keep working on a product that closely aligns with the mission we set out with at Banters: to harness the timeless power of quotes and words, and share them in ways that have only recently been made possible by technology.

It’s unclear to what extent the kerfuffle with Spark Capital handicapped the team’s ability to raise another round of capital, but as Sarah points out in the post, by the time of the botched funding, Leto had “reportedly cut her salary to zero to help the make the company’s ends meet.”

Regardless, the experience didn’t end positively for either side, and it seems that Banters never found that new round of capital it needed to keep the fires lit. Nonetheless, it’s great to see that the two co-founders have landed in a great spot and will, in some capacity, get to continue working on the idea.

For more, see Leto’s blog post on the shuttering of Banters here.

General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook, says The Wall Street Journal according to “people familiar with the matter.” But I spoke to a source close to Facebook that characterize GM’s efforts as “taking one swing and deciding to quit.” My source says GM’s efforts weren’t social enough, focusing on building apps rather than launching social ad campaigns that spread by word-of-mouth.

So what went wrong, and does Facebook need to offer more flexibility to advertisers?

Facebook was reportedly unable to convince GM that its ads are an effective way to reach consumers. GM Marketing Chief Joel Ewanick reportedly told the Journal that the company “is definitely reassessing our advertising on Facebook, although the content is effective and important.”

The auto maker supposedly spends a total of $40 million on Facebook, including $10 million on advertising, so the GM pullout won’t have a significant effect on Facebook’s $3.7 billion in revenue. However, it’s certainly awkward to have this news break just a few days before Facebook’s IPO. (And the timing probably isn’t a coincidence.)

I’m guessing GM doesn’t see things that way, but it’s worth noting that Facebook has highlighted successful auto campaigns in the past. For example, there was a Kia campaign that led to a 13-percent increase in awareness for the Kia Soul, as well as a Mazda check-in deal in the United Kingdom that led to a 34 percent increase in sales of Mazda MX-5 during one of the campaign months. Isolated anecdotes? Sure, but at least they show that Facebook isn’t totally inhospitable to car companies.

If we take my source at their word, the GM news may also point to the fact that even if Facebook can work for large advertisers, there are challenges in bringing those advertisers on-board. Facebook executives themselves have said they’re moving away from traditional advertising to a new model, with ads that are built around stories. It’s a compelling idea, but for some traditional advertisers, it may be more appealing to just show a big, glossy ad — like the one that Ford ran on Facebook’s logout page.

[Additional reporting by Josh Constine]

Last month, Facebook drove 160 million visitors and 1.1 billion visits to third-party apps, an increase of 100 million visitors and 780 million visits from the month prior. Thanks to the size of its user base, and the increasing power of its funnel, Facebook is now able to, in a sense, play kingmaker, choosing what types of apps and content see traffic from its news feed. As Josh points out, this is true for content of all stripes, whether they be photos, games, or news readers — or the most recent and perhaps most-buzzed-about evidence: Open Graph video apps.

Since integrating with Facebook Timeline, the “Instagram for video” competitors, Viddy and Socialcam, have exploded. Viddy’s “Timeline Bump” saw it surpass some big names in its rise to the top of the App Store rankings. Since integrating, Viddy claims to be seeing 500K new users a day, and last week confirmed that it closed a $30 million series B round at a reported $370 million valuation. Viddy’s success could be due to the Instagram Effect, a great product, its celebrity backers, or, perhaps more likely, it’s due in large part to its Timeline integration and Facebook promoting its content. Though some would say it’s a combination thereof.

Either way, Viddy and Socialcam are hardly alone. Flixster has seen referral traffic jump to 480,000 hits a day, up 10-fold from the prior month, while BranchOut’s recently launched, Facebook-integrated mobile app saw traffic leap from one million monthly active users to 12.5 million MAU. Unsurprisingly, app developers and websites are eager not to miss the train — the Open Graph/Timeline Lift. The latest additions to the cavalcade of integrators? The cult favorite community-directed Q&A site Quora and the fast-growing, increasingly popular non-profit educational video repository Khan Academy.

In a blog post last week, Quora announced its integration with Facebook Timeline, allowing users to more easily share their Quora activity with their Facebook friends. Users simply go to the homepage or their their Settings page, connect their Facebook account, and enable Timeline.

Once that’s done, Quora-ers can share questions, answers, posts they upvote, and people they follow to Facebook, with that content aggregated by type in a widget on their Facebook profile. In turn, Facebook friends will see the most interesting stories you’ve interacted with on Quora right in their news feed.

Of course, those who might be hesitant to enable this feature for the sake of avoiding spamming their friends’ feeds with every instance Quora activity, however, users will generally only see the five most recent upvotes, questions followed, etc., a cap that’s intended to keep the integration from overwhelming your profile. Generally speaking, the stories that do show up tend to do so because a number of friends all upvoted the same story.

On top of this, Quora also added a bit of granularity to its sharing options, as users can now share to both Facebook and Twitter when creating new questions, answers, and posts. You can choose whether you want to share a particular answer, for example, by checking/unchecking the Facebook and Twitter options.

The more Facebook is able to filter by relevancy to show stuff that’s created, shared by, and popular among your friends, the more addicting the experience — and this integration — becomes. At least that’s the intent anyway.

In terms of Quora, specifically, from my experience, it really can be a nifty enhancement to discovery. Frequently, we dont have the time to spend hours combing through the database, so Facebook integration provides a great alternative for finding those gems that would otherwise go unseen.

For Facebook, the appeal is transparent. Any mobile app or web platform that has a highly engaged audience becomes a great potential source of ad revenue. Quora, which definitely qualifies in terms of an engaged audience, sends its clickable Q&A content to news feeds and Timelines, whereupon Facebook can serve relevant ads, promoting brands and experiences you and your friends are already interacting with and, as Josh points out, as users move towards mobile, Sponsored Stories can keep the same model and become a big source of revenue.

In turn, Quora just raised $50 million at a reported $400 million valuation, which D’Angelo says will be used to scale and expand its platform. If AppData is to be believed, 20K daily active users and 180K monthly active users log in to the site through Facebook Connect — a small fraction of its total number of users. No doubt with deeper Facebook integration in place, Quora could see this number increase significantly — it’s a win-win for each side.

And considering that, as Josh describes at length, Facebook is controlling the news feed like an editor, curating the content its users see in their feeds and profiles, the close ties Quora’s founders have to Facebook could be a boon for its content on Facebook.

Of course, as mentioned previously, Quora is not alone. Yesterday, Khan Academy joined in on the fun, also announcing via blog post that it has added integration with the new Open Graph protocol to enable users to display their badges on their Facebook profiles.

For a little context for those unfamiliar with Khan, as users work their way through the platform’s repository of 3,200+ micro lecture video tutorials, they can earn badges for becoming proficient in three different skills or by quickly (and correctly) answering five quiz questions in a row, for example.

With its new Facebook integration, users can now click the “Share” button on any badge, and, once permission is granted, the badge will appear on users’ Timelines. (This share functionality also works for Twitter and email.)

After a user shares a couple of badges, just like the Quora Timeline experience, a dedicated section will appear in your Timeline, in this case for Khan “Badges Earned.” Users can, thankfully, edit or remove that view and if you’ve collected and shared more badges than can fit in the view, you can customize which badges appear and change settings for individual badges.

Not unlike Foursquare, if a user clicks on a particular badge (in this case on Facebook), they’ll be taken to a page that describes the steps it takes to earn the badge as well as a complete list of all badges offered by Khan.

Many educational platforms are on a mission to make their content more social and shareable, and this is an action taken by Khan Academy with that goal in mind. The badge experience adds a gamification element to its experience, but what good is collecting badges if you can’t show them off publicly to all your friends? It’s a great way to encourage competition among students, and for Khan, it offers an opportunity for exponentially-increased brand exposure.

Khan’s educational videos have racked up millions of hits on YouTube, but its name still remains relatively unknown outside of tech and educational circles. Now, with users displaying the badges on their Facebook profiles, friends that have no idea what Khan Academy is can click on those totally sweet badges (that’s a bit of snark, Khan definitely needs to work on these) and instantly walk through the process it takes to earn them, and, in turn, they are introduced to the Khan platform.

It would be surprising if content from both Khan and Quora didn’t get big play from Facebook curators. Both sites are fundamentally educational in nature (although perhaps a little more loosely used in Quora’s case), engaging, and have dedicated and active user bases. Badges and Q&A’s may be a little harder for Facebook to monetize that game apps and videos, but they both still provide tons of data on the user’s interests and behaviors during interaction on Facebook, with a peek into those behaviors outside of its network.

All in all, it will be interesting to see how much of a bump Khan and Quora receive from their respective Facebook integrations, and we will try to relay that info if and when they’re willing to share. But if Viddy, Socialcam, BranchOut, Flixster and many more are any indication, the Facebook Lift is coming soon.

For more, find Quora’s blog post here and Khan Academy’s here.

There’s currently a heated battle being waged between three of the biggest on-demand music streaming services — MOG, Spotify, and Rdio — each of which is trying to capture our hearts and ears by offering the best mobile experience for tunes on-the-go. You can check out Josh’s in-depth comparison of the battle for mobile supremacy here. While it wasn’t Josh’s top pick for music streaming on the tablet, Rdio is today taking a big step forward, launching a completely redesigned music listening and discovery experience, starting with the web and its desktop apps.

While the company initially unveiled its plans for its new listening experience at SXSW, today marks the first time the new Rdio will be available to all. Beginning right this very moment, Rdio says in a blog post, the new look is live for you to test, poke, and prod. The new look and feel, the company believes, will make it faster, more social, and easier to use, with notable features and upgrades including better “Collections,” drag and drop playlist creation, personalized “Heavy Rotation” functionality, and private playlists.

The company has been busy extending its service across Europe, launching in Spain and Portugal in February, but all the while, it’s been focused on creating a new, better user experience to keep users engaged in the face of the heightened competition and growing popularity of MOG and Spotify. As Rdio says in its blog post, the site’s new look is meant to transform it into something “more than just a boring spreadsheet of songs.”

That starts with making browsing and discovery in one place — i.e. making navigation something that isn’t quite so time consuming. In the new design, music, playlists, and a user’s network are all now under one view. And, speaking of playlists, one of the most requested features, Rdio says, has been the ability to add whole albums to playlists, so today the startup will begin offering this functionality on both the Web and in its desktop apps.

The new Rdio also allows users to browse a continuous stream of albums, and easily return to the place where they left off. What’s more, a la Facebook and Spotify, users can now access a “People Sidebar” to see what their network is listening to in realtime, with one-click listening. If you want to know why an album or song is appearing in top charts, or why it’s showing up in the new “Heavy Rotation” category, you can find out simply by hovering over photos to see which of your friends listened to the song, and inspired its being served up for you to see. The new People Sidebar also lets users easily find and follow Rdio’s influencers, like top artists, critics, record labels and brands.

Another highlight is Rdio’s new drag and drop functionality, which lets users drop music into playlists or share with their friends on the fly. Of course, with sharing overload becoming the norm, people want to have options beyond their public and collaborative playlists, which is why Rdio is now offering the ability to create private playlists with a few drag-and-drops. And if you feel the need to share those private playlists, you can do that now, too.

As on-demand, streaming music options battle for our ears, staying even with competitors is paramount — just as it is to continue iterating on the experience of social listening. We’re only just beginning to play around with Rdio’s new features, but at first look, this is a big step forward for the Rdio experience.

For more, check out the new look here, and take a peek at the video below:

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: