internetbusiness

So you want to keep fit, help the environment, stay on top of your work and make sure your gadgets are always charged. How can you stay productive in business without casting one of these priorities aside?

That’s where WeBike steps in — or should we say pedals in. Created by Belgian company WeWatt, WeBike is a hybrid bicycle desk that requires people to pedal to generate the energy they need to work.

Users are able to charge their laptops, cell phones and other devices by pedaling.

You can place several WeBike desks together to suit the type of work interaction you’re looking for. What the company calls a “straight” desk arrangement allows up to six people to sit side-by-side, while the “snake” arrangement option allows people to face each other as they sit — perfect for meetings and more collaborative work.

A recent study from Australia’s Sax Institute found that those who reported sitting for at least 11 hours a day had a 40% higher risk of dying within the next three years than people who sat for less than four hours a day. Meanwhile, the portion of jobs that require physical activity has declined by about 30% since 1960.

SEE ALSO: Death by Desk Job: How to Fight It [INFOGRAPHIC]

According to the WeBike website, you can both keep track of your physical activity and the power you are generating through an interactive LED display:

“WeBike displays instantly the degree of physical activity you are performing. The more power you deliver, the more LEDs will light up in the LED strip. When WeBike performs enough energy to charge the device initially plugged in, the bottom led strip will light up, indicating WeBike charges the device based on human power.”

The WeBike is partly made out of recycled waste materials, incorporating a sustainable approach toward work even further — its seats are made out of waste leather, and the wood used for the desk comes from waste cedar.

Each desk bicycle also comes with a built-in WiFi hotspot and 110 Volt output.

With all these features, not surprisingly, the product is not a cheap buy — a round table with three seats costs 9,950 euros, or about $12,725.

However, with treadmill desks and standing desks already available as alternative workspaces, perhaps a bicycle desk will soon join the fixture.

Would you work from a WeBike? Sound off in the comments.

More About: fitness, lifestyle

“Klouchebag” can be defined as (how do we put this delicately?) a person who is, frankly, a complete douchebag on social media. As you might infer, the word pertains specifically to Klout, a company that measures analytics to determine a user’s influence across social networks.

Users receive higher Klout scores the more active and engaged they are on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Based on a score from 1-100, Klout influence is also measured by follower count and influence. Many users have taken it upon themselves to achieve the highest possible score by loading their social networks with content and actively trying to raise their follower counts — you can imagine that some people don’t appreciate this “klouchey” behavior.

SEE ALSO: Klout CEO Hints at Redesign, Local Feature, Brand Page Update

At this year’s Mashable Connect conference in Orlando, Fla., Mashable editor in chief Lance Ulanoff caught up backstage with the founder of Klout, Joe Fernandez. Ulanoff asked him what he thought of the term “klouchebag.”

More About: klout, mashable connect, Social Media, Twitter, Video

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Facebook may be Wall Street's new favorite water cooler topic since its historic IPO last Friday, but Google still ranks as the most talked-about IPO in Internet history, according to HighBeam Research. The research firm calculated the number of media mentions garnered by the Internet companies with the largest IPOs. From largest to smallest in dollar amounts, that list looks like this: Facebook, Google, Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn. But in terms of most to fewest media mentions, that list looks more like: Google, Facebook, Groupon, Zynga, LinkedIn. Which is all to say Wall Street goes where the media tells it to: Google, currently valued at more than $200 billion, remains by far the most valuable company on the list.

To keep up with news as it happens, visit our main Fast Feed page during the day.

Gaming-focused video programmer Machinima has received another round of funding, this one valued at $35 million and led by distribution partner Google.

While Google has given what amounts to seed money to its video production partners in the past, this contribution marks the first time the company has offered major capital backing for one of them.

Redpoint Ventures and MK Capital also contributed to the Los Angeles-based production company’s fourth funding round. Through three previous rounds, all led by MK Capital, Machinima raised $14.6 million.

Machinima has emerged as Google-owned YouTube’s third most popular video channel, commanding 23.1 million unique viewers in April, according to research company comScore. Notably, Machinima offers better engagement than any other top YouTube channel, with viewers, on average, spending 65 minutes in April viewing it, comScore said.

Machinima said the funding will be invested into its “content and global sales operations, international expansion, distribution strategies, and product and technology initiatives, as the company strives to create a global video programming brand that transforms the way a new generation.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration

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Glenn Beck wants to know what Reverend Wright has on the President, and he's offered him $150,000 to share supposedly damning information. - WATCH VIDEO

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A new social network has an interesting premise: connecting people around the world based on what they want to do before they die.

Called My Last Wish, the app encourages users to post wishes on a ‘Wish Wall’ and then befriend others who might share their dreams.

“I believed in the possibility that there can be two persons in this world with same hopes, dreams and wishes,” Kirtan Thaker, co-founder of the White Lotus Corporation, the group behind the app, told Mashable. “I was confident that if we create a app where this possibility can be turned into reality, people will love this concept and they will get a chance to make friends who are unknown but having just one thing in common which is the last wish.”

When sharing a wish, users can also choose to attach their email address or phone number so others that share their dream can connect with them. Tapping on a person’s contact information within the app will add their information to the contacts list in your phone.

A palm icon appears beside wishes, allowing you to “aLike” a wish you share, or “give a five” to that person to express your support for their wish and become friends.

While definitely a little morbid, and certainly out of the ordinary, the app already has a little bit of a following. Posted wishes range from things such as traveling the world to writing a book. Thaker says that the ultimate goal behind the app is to help people make friends that share similar hopes and dreams, or even help someone potentially find his or her soul mate.

White Lotus plans to add a location-based feature to the app in the future to help you find people located physically around you, and if the iOS version of the app does well the company plans to release an Android version as well.

What do you think about My Last Wish? Is the app cool, or creepy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

More About: App, death, iOS, iphone

In business, size does matter, especially if that size is small. Independent businesses with fewer than 500 employees represent 99.7% of all employer firms, according to the SBA’s Office of Advocacy. They employ about half of all private sector employees, which make up about 43% of the country’s private payroll. And more than half are based out of an owner’s home. Incidentally, don’t knock the domicile as a business incubator. After all, that’s where Apple, Hershey’s, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and Ford started.

With numbers like that, it’s not hard to see why small businesses are often called the “backbone” of the U.S. economy. But did you know that these “little” companies are also responsible for hiring 43% of high-tech workers and produce 16.5 times more patents per employee than large firms? Or that small business accounted for 65% of the 15 million new jobs created between 1993 and 2009? No wonder President Obama is leaning on Congress to pass legislation that would give income tax credits and allow deductions on the full value of investments made this year.

Staggering stats aside, there are plenty of great ideas that don’t ever make it off the table or shutter just beyond the starting gate. Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicates that only about half of small business survive past the five-year mark.

So in the spirit of helping more startups and growing enterprises succeed, Fast Company is kicking off National Small Business Week with a compendium of wisdom we've gleaned over the years. 

Take a Risk

Though his signature style is rife with cynical wit and wry wisdom, novelist Mark Twain offered this tidbit which is helpful for anyone pondering the leap to entrepreneurism: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." 

Kim Jordan, cofounder of New Belgium Brewing Company, says taking the plunge is fine--after you’ve assessed the market. 

[twistage 94290a27d69dd]

Is Your Idea Good Enough?

Adam Goldstein, the 22-year-old founder of Hipmunk’s online air travel booking platform, boldly claimed he was out to build the best travel site on the web. "And by 'best,' I mean the site that helps people find what they're looking for with a minimum of agony." Goldstein had a simple litmus test for launching: "The way that I knew it was good enough to build a company around was that it was built around a problem that I actually had.” 

[twistage 00477ff24e0e8]

And If It Isn’t, Can You Pivot?

When airlines started cutting commissions, Hipmunk fearlessly took a hard turn toward hotels. All this iterating happened in just two years. That’s the small business advantage, says Bonin Bough, global head of digital at PepsiCo.

“Their ability to launch a product, rapid prototyping, understanding whether it is working or not, and then move directions, but realize they have a great core asset. And so they are not afraid to fail and they are not afraid to change.”

Ditch the Strategic Plan

To stay nimble (and use it as a competitive advantage), Kaihan Krippendorff says new businesses in growth mode need to move away from strategic planning and concentrate on strategic thinking. There isn't enough time or resources for such a small payoff. “This doesn’t mean small-growth companies should fly blind. It means they should adopt an adaptive opportunistic approach to strategy. They should plan in the hallway, not the boardroom.”

Focus on What Matters

Instead of buying a computer to track sales, Jim Koch, founder of Sam Adams Brewing Company, learned it was smarter to spend time making sales calls so he’d have something to track. In an interview with Shawn Parr, Koch said, “When you start a business, you have to do everything and it’s important to focus on the activities that provide the best return on time invested. Yes, our bookkeeping was a mess in our first year, but I decided that if we failed, the IRS wouldn’t care about us, and if we succeeded, we would be able to afford lawyers and accountants to straighten things out. So we focused on the things that did matter: making great beer and working hard to sell it.”

Tap the Wisdom (and Funds) of the Crowd

Platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo have made it possible for small businesses to raise capital for their ideas. They are especially helpful for first-time entrepreneurs who don’t have a track record, professional network, or collateral to get a traditional bank loan or attract venture capital or angel investments. 

But crowdfunding isn’t free money, warns Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble. The concept watch that talks to your smartphone raised a record $10.2 million in 30 days, but Migicovsky explains that the company’s success was four years in the making and during that time, he learned some important lessons. Namely, that entrepreneurs need to be wary of “windfalls” and be sure to factor in taxes, cuts for the platform (Kickstarter takes 5%), manufacturing costs, fulfillment and shipping costs, and attorney’s fees and business licensing fees, which vary by city and state.

Stick to Your Principles

Now that he’s led Facebook through a successful IPO, Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership skills are going to be under closer scrutiny than ever. So far, though, the boy CEO, whose mammoth company started in a dorm room, has demonstrated nearly a decade of unwavering dedication to his overall personal philosophy, which is not just about making money.

Don’t Be Afraid to Fail

Ziad Dalal is currently at the helm of Nestle Toll House Cafe By Chip, but the founder of the global dessert franchise had to rise from the ashes of a previous failure. His smoothie chain Frullati got caught in the real estate crash of 1987. “I lost my shirt. I was too young and too stupid,” he confesses.

Leveraging the two remaining locations and a lot of sweat equity, Dalal eventually created the Nestle Toll House Cafe concept.  “When I was young my dad used to tell me a story about Napoleon burning his ships so his men couldn’t retreat from the enemy. They won. I have nowhere to go but realize my goal to be the premier global dessert cafe. I want to make history and I think we can do it.”

Think You Don't Need a Website? Think Again

Even if the competition is bigger, small businesses shouldn’t be afraid to use available resources to grab market share. That starts with a web presence. Almost all consumers (97%) check the web before buying a product or service, according to a BIA/Kelsey study. So get online to get noticed. That's particularly easy thanks to search giant Google's initiative to go after small businesses websites that are just as slick as the big guys.

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

Even Steve Jobs started small (think his garage) but he understood the value of perseverance. He likened building a company to a marathon, rather than a sprint. "To do anything of magnitude takes at least five years, more likely seven or eight."

Keep on Truckin’

Not everything Thomas Edison invented turned into gold (or light, or phonographs, etc.). Concepts like concrete didn’t take off because of the expense. But Edison’s company was eventually called to build Yankee Stadium. His words of encouragement to those ready to throw in the towel (or the balance sheet): "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." 

Watch 30 Second MBA

For more bite-sized bits of wisdom on leadership and strategies for success, explore our ongoing video series: 30 Second MBA.

[Image: Flickr user Anna Leavitt]

Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and with little notice ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters: it means anyone can be an interpreter. We covered it’s launch back in January but here’s a quick rundown.

Machine translation, as we know, is not reliable. So what we’re looking here is a marketplace for translation.

People practice to interpret and move up through the system, towards being more professional interpreters. Think of it as a sort of Demand Media platform for interpreting languages.

It’s a mobile and web app that lets users benefit from on-the-spot ‘real time’ interpretation, in any of the world’s spoken language.

Skilled amateurs and professional interpreters go on the platform and earn money for their time. Professional interpreters are much more expensive – but this democratises the process.

Competitors include Google Translate Conversation Mode – a feature available on Android, but only for a limited number of languages.

Eventually they want to be able to get to the point where they can do very live translation.

Sprint’s launch plans for the HTC EVO 4G LTE were ruined last week when shipments of their shiny new Android handset were held up by United States Customs, but we’re hearing that they may been hitting doorsteps and store shelves sooner than expected.

According to Sprint, the devices are now currently sitting safely in Sprint’s warehouses and are expected to start trickling out into the world “on or around May 24.” And rest easy, you faithful pre-orderers — the world from on high is that you’ll still be getting your devices first.

In case you’re new to this little shipping snafu, shipments of Sprint’s new EVO (along with those of their AT&T-based cousin, the One X) were prevented form entering the country thanks to an exclusion order handed down by the International Trade Commission. The entire convoluted story started last year, but here’s the tl;dr:

Back in July, HTC was found by ITC judge Carl Charneski to have infringed on one of Apple’s patents — specifically, it involved recognizing a particular structure within a set of data and binding it to a particular action. Sounds pretty dry, I know, but if your phone lets you directly a call a phone number by touching it in an email, you’ve seen the patent in action.

At the time, HTC stated that they were working on fixing the offending UI flourish, and part of the holdup for customers was apparently because the phones were being spot-checked for compliance.

With Sprint’s EVO shipments said to be on the move once more, now the question becomes whether or not shipments of AT&T’s One X are as well. I’ve reached out to AT&T for confirmation one way or the other, and I’ll be updating the post as I hear more.

The second Vimeo Festival + Awards is fast approaching, celebrating the most creative and original films that have premiered exclusively online. Now, Vimeo has announced the 2012 finalists in all categories, including Animation, Action Sports, Documentary, Music Videos, Advertising, Fashion, Experimental and more.

The event, which will take place on June 7-9, 2012 in New York City, gathers together the likes of Mike Figgis, Ted Hope and Lucy Walker to watch the winning films from this year’s submissions. Also featured at ceremony will be the premiere of Limbo, a new film by last year’s grand prize winner, Eliot Rausch. Rausch created the film using grant money from his award.

Check out a handful of this year’s finalists below:

From Jeremy Boxer, Director of the Vimeo Festival + Awards:

There has never been a better time to be creator. The Internet has created a leveled playing field, so that now everyone now can fundraise, shoot, edit, and distribute their projects. What’s next for online video? Well, that’s what we will be exploring at this year’s festival with the help of our awesome speakers. We have designed the festival to have something for everyone from any level of experience. Now that the barrier to entry has come crashing down perhaps we can find new creators with ideas yet to be seen and encourage so many others to start using their imagination so they too can start to create.

To get a better idea of what 2012 will be like, you can check out the recap from Vimeo’s first festival below:

➤ The Vimeo Festival + Awards in NYC

You’ve probably been overwhelmed by enough Instagram shots of this weekend’s annular solar eclipse to think you’ve seen it from every angle and through every filter. But you haven’t seen anything like the video above.

Photographer Cory Poole made the one-minute video by combining 700 still images through a Coronado Solar Max 60 Double Stack telescope, according to his YouTube post. The telescope “has a very narrow bandpass allowing you to see the chromosphere and not the much brighter photosphere below it,” Poole writes. Add in the dramatic, spacey soundtrack, and the video becomes even more of a winner.

What are the coolest annular solar eclipse photos and videos you’ve seen? Let us know in the comments.

More About: space, viral, viral videos, YouTube

By Shannon Brown / current.com Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark who is seen as a rising star in the Democratic party, is usually in the news for his outspoken views and, occasionally, his heroic rescues of neighbors from burning buildings, but after an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday where he criticized the Obama campaign’s focus on Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, Booker finds himself in the unfamiliar hot seat. In fact, as is being discussed in the Current community, Booker and his camp are already walking back some of his comments, but the furor rages on. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein sees the unexpected controversy as part of a larger, context-free political campaign, saying that nothing about Booker’s original remarks struck him as controversial while watching the show live:

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“All people wear clothes!” declared one of Tagbrand’s founders on stage at Disrupt today. That’s true, but let’s review.

DailyBooth was (is still perhaps?) a phenomenon for a time as people became accustomed to sharing their daily lives in a more quirky manner than mere video can afford. (Ok, OK, it’s a bunch of teenagers sharing their zits, but work with me here, people). Now Tagbrand wants to apply that model to fashion, but with a tagging twist.

The model is simple enough. Take and upload photos of what branded clothes you are wearing and tag them. Effectively, it’s a photo check-in for brands, or ‘Foursquare for fashion’, if you will.

The twist is that users are encouraged to tag up pictures with a visual tag of what brand each item of clothing is. Alas, the site does not yet do visual recognition of the clothes. Maybe one day…

TagBrand doesn’t call this check-ins, but – wait for it – “brand-ins”. People can then comment or vote on the brands their friends are wearing. Clearly the opportunity here is to capture a fashion-obsessed audience and provide a platform for advertisers.

Thus, although Tagbrand is like DailyBooth if everyone on DailyBooth was obsessed with fashion, it’s this tagging element which looks pretty viral.

The product combines contains brands, polls and e-commerce. There’s a lot of virality built into the service – every tags has a Twitter or Facebook button on it.

But clearly the people who do this are obsessed with fashion. TagBrand gives them the tools to be obsessive. The polls certainly feature makes the experience more entertaining when you’re trying clothes out.

Now, clothing brands and retail stores are constantly chasing these people. This is one way of delivering them a highly targeted audience. Tagbrand’s business model is based on creating a special marketplace for them which is visible while browsing the brand’s tag on a photo. The stores provide Tagbrand with a price-list and its system attaches them to a “Recommended” block.

So while browsing their friends’ clothes, users see the real-world item beside the image and can purchase from there (click are on a CPC basis). Users also get delivered latest news on brands they such as new collections.

Admittedly they have older competition in the UK operation, WIWT.com, but Tagbrand’s visual tags are a slightly cuter way of doing it.

TagBrand has secured a $100,000 seed investment from Russian investor Glavstart, while founders Ivan Olenchenko and Alexandr Kobozev have been working on startup projects in Russia for a while now. (And we should add they did a pretty good pitch at a TechCrunch meetup in Moscow last year).

Q&A

Judges asked about extending the app into giving users the ability to upload their own home made brands, and that seemed to be on the cards according to the founders.

Currently in Russian and English, the app launches today in the US.

The Judges also had an issue about copyright and the images uploaded, which seems a fair point.

Right now 80% of usage of the product is on the iPhone app versus 20% on the web.

So far they’ve had 15,000 registered users in 2 months with no promotion/marketing just in the Russian market. With about $4.5 billion spent annually on advertising clothes, they reckon there’s plenty of money to be made out there. Da!

London soccer club Chelsea won its first Champions League title on Saturday, defeating German side Bayern Munich to become Europe’s best team. It was a nail-biting close final match that went down to a penalty shoot-out.

But on Twitter, it wasn’t even close — Chelsea was dominant.

The all-star London club gained 73% of team-specific Twitter mentions related to the match, while its star players were buzz magnets as well. The match’s five most-mentioned players — in order, Didier Drogba, John Terry, David Luiz, Ashley Cole and Petr Cech — all suit up for the Blues.

Chelsea’s coach even outpaced his Bayern counterpart by a rate of more than two mentions to one.

And Chelsea’s sponsor, Samsung, was mentioned nine times as often as T-Mobile, which sponsors Bayern.

This is all according to research by the marketing firm ExactTarget, which tracked and analyzed more than 1.1 million match day tweets to see how the Champions League final played out online. ExactTarget’s findings are summarized — in both German and English — in the infographic below.

SEE ALSO: English Premier League: The Social Media Season

Despite soccer’s worldwide appeal, nearly 69% of Champions League chatter took place in English. The chattiest countries? Great Britain, at almost 23%, the U.S. (9.9%), Brazil (9.4%), Germany (8.6%) and Indonesia (5.8%). The rest of the world together, meanwhile, produced just over 43% of Champions League tweets. Spanish was the second most popular language for tweeters, at 15.8%.

This celebratory tweet from Chelsea’s official Twitter account gathered the most match day retweets, with more than 7,000. Congratulatory posts from UEFA and Spanish power FC Barcelona also gathered more than 2,800 retweets apiece. Chelsea, meanwhile, used the weekend’s social media buzz to surge past 1 million Twitter followers.

For the full picture of how this weekend’s Champions League final played out on Twitter, check out the infographic below.

Did you follow the match? What role did Twitter play for you? Let us know in the comments.

Thumbnail image courtesy toksuede, Flickr.

More About: infographics, sports, Twitter

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Everyme attracted nearly half a million users in their first month of operation. Here's why they jumped to the web and Android so quickly--and why Facebook's success is good news for other social networking services.

Everyme, a heavily funded social networking service, made it big last week when they unveiled web and Android versions of their previously iPhone-only app. The social networking service restricts itself to users' friends and families, and has a series of sophisticated algorithms that automatically determine how contacts know Everyme users. Everyme isn't just high-tech: It's also an early peak at the post-Facebook future of specialized social networks.

The California-based social networking service's secret source is a series of algorithms that go through a user's phonebook/contact list and automatically sort contacts into coworkers, family members, friends, neighbors, work contacts and other sublists--with a surprisingly high success rate. In a phone conversation with Fast Company, CEO Oliver Cameron explained that the algorithms were designed to understand the relationships between end users and their contacts. More importantly, Everyme was only able to provide their service with the advent of cloud computing--by using Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company was able to get the computer brainpower their sophisticated algorithms require.

Everyme, of course, is well funded and has prominent backers. The Y Combinator graduate recently raised $1.5 million in seed funding from a team of Silicon Valley A-listers including Andreessen-Horowitz, Crunchfund, and Greylock Partners. Since launching in April 2012, Everyme has attracted over 400,000 users--a staggering growth rate. Everyme's backers hope that the company will continue to attract similar numbers of new users over the next few months.

Social networking in 2012 is an odd game. The old Facebook-MySpace-Friendster (remember those?) wars are over and Mark Zuckerberg's creation is the Internet's de facto user directory in much of the world. Facebook attempts to be all things to all people. But while Facebook is ubiquitous, it also fails at niches. Spotify unites music lovers. Path caters to close circles of friends. Foodspotting caters to foodies. Goodreads is for readers. Instagram's for photo geeks. The list goes on and on--with the notable exception of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Tumblr, the only three truly successful non-Facebook social networking sites that exist in private ecosystems.

Like Spotify, Foodspotting, Goodreads, and Instagram, Everyme is also integrated with Facebook. Users can share Facebook status updates with circles of contacts via Everyme. Interestingly, Everyme has no option at all for public sharing: All content posted through the service goes directly to restricted circles of contacts.

Everyme's default social circles include Family, Friends, Co-workers, and “Sweethearts.” Users can easily customize social circles and all content is self-contained; stories, photos, and files posted to Everyme cannot be republished on sites like Facebook. However, Everyme does allow users to share content from Facebook, Instagram, and others on their site.

Ironically, Facebook's popularity makes it possible for other social networking sites to flourish. Facebook's Achilles heel is their awful mobile product, which makes it possible for smartphone-centric services like Everyme, Path, and Instagram to thrive (and, ironically, competitor Google+). More importantly, Facebook offers a massive list of services it provides to users. Most of these services work well, but none of them work great. This leaves space for more specialized social networking services to operate and, of course, make a profit. And if Everyme doesn't work, hey, at least users will still have one heck of an address book organizer.

For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Email Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, here or find him on Twitter and Google+.

[Image: Everyme]

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 coach 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.)

Back in February we told you about Lady Gaga’s social network “Little Monsters”, which could turn the concept. of how celebrities interact with their fans on its ear.

The site, powered by Palo Alto based Backplane and still in private beta, skips social networks like Twitter and Facebook, allowing Gaga’s fans to interact with her directly.

When celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Lady Gaga joined Twitter, it was a major turning point for the product. A whole new userbase flooded the micro-sharing network, who foam at the mouth for every 140 character update from their favorite singer or movie star.

With her own social network, Gaga is making her fans feel even more special, as well as setting them up for opportunities to sell albums and schwag to them directly:

What’s more intimate than that experience? A mobile one of course. According to one of the designers at Backplane, a “Little Monsters” app is in the works:

Check it out. Little Monsters App on @dribbble: drbl.in/ecRI

— Caleb Ogden (@calebogden) May 21, 2012

In response, Backplane’s CEO said that we might see Gaga on the iPhone mighty soon:

Soon! RT @calebogden: Check it out. Little Monsters App on @dribbble: drbl.in/ecRI

— Matt Michelsen (@MCMichelsen) May 21, 2012

What does the app look like? Take a look at the screenshots that Caleb Ogden shared on Dribble today:

While Little Monsters might not take a huge bite out of Twitter’s usage, it surely will steal eyeballs when it comes to Gaga fanatics. If the musician is posting exclusive updates to her own social network, there’s simply no reason to look elsewhere for the content.

Backplane is a community platform, meaning that the Little Monsters model could be spun out an infinite number of times for other celebrities with massive appeal. Justin Bieber anyone?

Only a couple of weeks after launching its much-awaited iPad app, Spotify has now opened its song-filled doors to Australia and New Zealand. In a couple of blogs that look to be all but copy/pasted, the company runs down its services and the pricing points for each.

Free, Unlimited and Premium are all available. Unlimited will run $6.99 AUD and $7.49 NZD, while the Premium pricing is $11.99 and $12.99 respectively.

The company has been on a tear with new updates lately. We’ve gotten the Spotify+Apps combination, improved search and most recently an update for Playlist Radio. Unfortunately, the company’s implementation of its embeddable Play Button is a bit wanting, as it requires that you have Spotify installed in order to play back a track. But with improved social features and a ridiculous amount of funding underway, it seems Spotify is bent on world domination.

Bradley Mellon

Solar eclipse as seen from El Centro, California

Click here to view this gallery.

Over the weekend, an astounding astronomical phenominon occurred: an annular solar eclipse. This type of eclipse, which happens less than once a year, occurs when the Earth’s moon crosses paths with the sun to create the effect of a spectacular glowing ring. This is due to the size of the moon compared to the size of the sun.

Only people in a certain geographic area get to glimpse each of these rare phenomena. This time, people in Japan, California, Nevada, southern Utah, northern Arizona, and New Mexico were granted the best view.

We asked Mashable readers to submit their best picture of the solar eclipse. We received very inventive photo submissions from across the world.

Check out some of our favorite solar eclipse photos that you sent us, and let us know in the comments what you thought of the eclipse.

More About: photography, Solar eclipse, space