All of us have made a collage at some point in our lives – probably at school, where we patiently cut out cool pictures from a magazine, applied elmer’s white glue or rubber cement, and then took it home to mom and dad to put up on the refrigerator.

Just think how much fun it would have been to pinch or expand those images, copy parts of collages from friends, and skip the paper cuts. And do it all on an iPad.

That’s Mixel, a new startup that is launching now. They’re also announcing a $600,000 first funding round that CrunchFund is participating in along with Polaris Venture Partners, Betaworks and Allen & Company. The company also took $100,000 from a TechFellow Award in 2010.

See TechCrunch for more details, and check out the overview video on the Mixel home page.

Grab images from a search, or from Mixels created by others, or your gallery, crop them (with your finger), rearrange and resize it, and then add more images on top of or below it (or anywhere). Then publish and share.

It’s a ton of fun.

The company behind Mixel, Lascaux Co, was founded by Khoi Vinh (former Design Director for The New York Times) and Scott Ostler (dump.fm).

Update: See more stories about Mixel on GigaOm and NYTimes.

It looks like Simple Geo may have made a solid bet after all. Last week the company was acquired by Urban Airship. That transaction – all stock – was actually part of a much larger financing, Urban Airshp’s Series C round of funding.

The new round brings in $15.1 million from new strategic investors Salesforce and Verizon and existing investors Foundry Group and True Ventures. That brings the total capital raised by Urban Airship to $21.6 million.

Urban Airship also issued Series C stock to Simple Geo stockholders as part of the acquisition. That stock was issued in addition to the $15.1 million on cash raised by Urban Airship, CEO Scott Kveton told me today in a phone interview.

Urban Airship helps mobile developers send notifications to users, and they’re now sending a billion notifications per month to users on 300 million devices. They also assist developers with virtual good sales and app subscriptions. They charge a modest fee for all of these services.

Simple Geo will add location awareness to the process, helping developers send more relevant notifications. “We’ll tell ESPN that Sunday afternoon is a great time to send users a fantasy football message,” says Kveton, “but we’ll also tell Groupon to perhaps hold off during that period.” Both ESPN and Groupon are Urban Airship customers.

Knowing where a user is at any given time will help them refine messages further. Kveton says that the company will offer products including Simple Geo’s services early next year.

Former SimpleGeo CEO Jay Adelson was also on the call and seems enthusiastic about Urban Airship’s business going forward. “We considered raising new venture money to grow the company, or selling SimpleGeo for cash, but the biggest opportunity for shareholders was through a merger with Urban Airship,” he said.

I’m very happy to announce today that CrunchFund has invested in Gogobot, the innovative travel recommendation startup that launched in 2010.

The new round – $15 million from Redpoint Ventures, CrunchFund and previous investor Battery Ventures – will let Gogobot hire more people (they’ve done an incredible amount with just 6 engineers and designers to date). Gogobot also gets access to Redpoint’s Satish Dharmaraj, who’s joining the Gogobot board of directors. See TechCrunch for more details.

Researching travel online remains a mess, and Gogobot wants to fix that. There is a lot of data on Tripadvisor, and that’s the de facto place people go to write and read travel reviews today. But TripAdvisor is extremely old school, there’s no social component, and their extreme focus on monetization and SEO leads to a terrible user experience.

Gogobot lets you see recommendations based on your social graph, from people you know, or people who know people who you know. Like many other industries being disrupted, travel recommendations is one of those things that is just a perfect fit with social.

Gogobot is also just a lot more fun to browse than TripAdvisor or other sites. Everything’s packaged nicely and photos are always front and center. And I love how the site automatically picks up Foursquare checkins (with my permission) and then asks me later to leave a review about the places I’ve been. They also have an excellent mobile application, just released for iPhone.

The site is growing rapidly – more than 10x user growth in the last six months – but it has a long way to go. I’m excited to be part of this journey with them.

Advice from friends and mentors has been clear: just stop talking. And yet the tweets, emails and other messages just keep rolling in, featuring some of the most hateful stuff I’ve ever read. They range from the fascinating “I don’t think you’re a racist!” to “I don’t think you’re a racist, you’re just stupid,” to “yeah, you’re a racist, so shut up.” Plus, the CNN documentary that is the source of all this mess hasn’t been aired yet, and I haven’t seen it, and all of this is going to pop up again then.

And it’s not just CNN being CNN any more. I wrote about how CNN interviewed me in July, supposedly about startup accelerators, but really about the lack of minorities in Silicon Valley. And by minorities CNN meant blacks and hispanics, because Asians, who have disproportionate success in Silicon Valley, don’t count.

I wrote about it all here.

The problems with the interview:

– I was told by CNN it was about startup accelerators, not minorites.
– CNN then created a clip that highlighted me saying I didn’t know any black entrepreneurs, even though later in the conversation I corrected myself.
– CNN then wrote two articles, one of which was the top story on CNN last week, focusing on my race problems.
– Only a very few people have seen it. I haven’t, and I’m in the absurd position of not having seen it myself (to know how they edited the long version) and defending myself from people who also haven’t seen my interview.

Soledad O’Brien responded to my post, stating that her team had in fact notified someone at AOL a few days prior to the interview that minorities might be discussed. She presents an email which is almost identical to the first one, but which has an inserted fourth paragraph:

From: “Babbit-Arp, Kimberly”
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:41:10 -0400
To: Kelly Mayes
Subject: CNN Interview on Friday, July 29, 2011
Hey Kelly,

Thank you again for setting up this interview with Michael for Friday July 29th. Soledad has set up her schedule to fly from the east coast to meet and chat with Michael – so we are very much looking forward to this opportunity.

As we indicated in our earlier email for the past several months our team at CNN been working on what we think is the first major broadcast news documentary to focus on the ‘accelerator phenomenon’ and the booming start-up culture in Silicon Valley. In this culture, Michael Arrington is God and TechCrunch is the bible.

The main thread of our story, reported by Soledad O’Brien, will be the experience of a group of digital entrepreneurs who are spending the summer in Silicon Valley chasing their startup dreams.

The group of entrepreneurs we are following are participating in the Newme accelerator. The first accelerator of its kind set up specifically for entrepreneurs of color. Their inspiring stories will be the focus of this CNN Black in America documentary and various profiles produced for Money.CNN.com.

Obviously Michael is extremely knowledgeable about the valley/start up culture and the rise of accelerator programs, as chronicled minute by minute in Tech Crunch. We would like Michael to share some insight into the allure of tech entrepreneurship… Is now a good time to be a tech entrepreneur? What drives people to pour their blood, sweat and tears into these startups? Who succeeds? Who fails? and why?

This CNN documentary is scheduled to air in November.

Any last minute questions – please let us know.

Thank you for everything!!
Kimberly

Kimberly Arp Babbit
Producer

And from that, presumably, I should have known to come prepared for a race war. Despite the fact that the email wasn’t sent to my assistant (the previous one was) and I certainly wasn’t copied on it. I never read it, heard about it, or otherwise knew about it. And even if I had read it, I would not have come prepared to defend myself against an angry interviewer who wanted to throw away 45 minutes of reasonable discussion to grab a few nice out of context soundbites.

But what’s worse, as I said before, is that the one statement I made is now the primary trailer for the documentary. Nothing else I talked about for 45 minutes, including revising that statement.

It was a “gotcha” and that’s that.

No explanation of the broken promise to put up the entire interview and transcript with me on CNN.

No explanation around why, if CNN is as proud of their work as they say, they deleted one of the posts they wrote about me.

What I think I said in the interview

I remain in the unenviable position of not being able to see the interview, or the final clips for the documentary (where they’ll remove anything remotely reasonable I said). However, what I think I talked about was how few black and hispanic entrepreneurs we see in Silicon Valley, and how eagerly we tried to put them on stage (this was pre-CrunchFund, I was just talking about press via TechCrunch). It went a lot like the whole 2010 women in tech debacle

While it’s easy to look around Silicon Valley and see very few (non Asian because they don’t count!) minorities and then conclude “you’re a bunch of racists,” I don’t think that’s productive. What I do think is productive is to get more minorities, and women, and everyone, focusing on math and science and computers in school, as early as possible.

Once they’re here they are welcomed with open arms.

The top ten, or so, reasons I’m a racist”

Unless their ideas suck. And even if they do suck a little, at TechCrunch we’d write about it anyway to give exposure to these entrepreneurs. That’s another source of endless criticism.

Or the coverage wasn’t good enough.

Or that putting people on stage who didn’t strictly deserve it is racist because it makes people think that they’re only on stage because of their race.

But either way, unless we cover more minorities, we’re racist.

And, screw it, we’re all just racists anyway, says white guy Mitch Kapor. “The operation of hidden bias in our cognitive apparatus is a well-documented phenomenon in neuroscience. We may think we are acting rationally and objectively, but our brains deceive us.”

Statements like that, by the way, scare the hell out of me. They can be used to justify almost anything. Like how we’re all racists. I wonder if Kapor could argue that he himself is rational and objective, even though no one else is.

So just to sum up, if I say the race problem in Silicon Valley is caused by too few blacks, hispanics and women showing up to even get in the game, I’m a racist. And if I say that we covered virtually every minority and women founded startup on TechCrunch, I’m a racist. And also, I’m just a racist period, per Kapor’s post.

One critical author wrote about great startups like Bitcasa, which has a black founder and CEO. And somehow didn’t see the irony in calling me out even though the picture used was Bitcasa on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, as a finalist. And they apparently don’t know that I’m an investor in Bitcasa as well.

What I gave Bitcasa is a bear hug. But it had nothing to do with what color the founder is. The young startup could become huge one day.

And also, why am I even talking about this? See “But having someone who is not a woman or a minority make grand pronouncements about how beneficial being a woman or a minority is while raising money is patronizing, disturbing, and insulting.”

There were lots of tweets like this as well, summed up as “How dare Arrington talk about race” …even, I guess, when he’s sitting in front of a camera being asked for nearly an hour about race.

I’d respond that the only reason I dared talk about race was because I was set up, but I’m not sure anyone’s listening any more.

The White Guys Who Get It (And Milk It)

But you know what I find offensive? That fact that I can’t talk about it, unless I say what I’m supposed to say.

And what I’m supposed to say is this. “I’ll assert that racism is alive and well in the U.S. I’ve seen it many times, including in Silicon Valley…When you see racism, don’t tolerate it. Take action. And don’t deny reality.”

This is what investor Brad Feld wrote about all this, while getting his jabs in on me.

To universal high fives as a white guy who gets it, and cares. But wait! Don’t forget white guy Kapor’s universal law that we’re all racists even though we don’t know it because Kapor says we are.

And that includes Feld. The guy who writes the crowd pleasing words, apparently, so that his venture firm can stay more…let’s say racially pure. And the list of mentors at his TechStars accelerator program – well let’s just say they did manage to get a token black man and a token black women on to that list of hundreds of mentors, but it sure doesn’t look like “take action” to me.

There are some hard truths about race in Silicon Valley that none of these people care to address:

– There are very few minorities here. When they are here, they get hired much more easily than their white or asian counterparts. There is no conscious or subconscious desire to keep minorities out, at least not in the groups I run in, which include all major VCs and accelerators. It’s the complete opposite. Kapor may say we’re closet racists, whatever, but out in the real world this bias just isn’t there.

– If more minorities arrive, more minorities will get funded, and a virtuous cycle can be created. This is what’s going on with various successful Asians in Silicon Valley, who help the next generation win too.

– The fact that some minorities are not here may be because certain minorities don’t see Silicon Valley as a place for them, and that is something that we need to change. Which many of us are doing by going a little easier on minority candidates.

– Still, not every black entrepreneur deserves to be funded, or exceed. The vast majority of them should fail, and will fail unless the government starts a program to fund every black entrepreneur and then require public companies to buy each and every one of these startups. If that happens, most of us will be out of here pretty darn quick.

– When a black entrepreneur tries and fails, she should not immediately think that racism was the cause. Since nearly all startups fail, it’s very likely that the startup would have failed no matter what color the person was who started it.

– The way to fix this problem is to try to get more very young minorities interested in business, science and math, and create a culture that celebrates these interests in the same way that being good at sports is celebrated today. All we need is one huge success story to plaster all over news sites and magazines, and the ball will be rolling.

– That will start with people like will.i.am, who’s trying to do exactly this in Los Angeles. I wrote about this in my previous post. As far as I know he’s not in the interview, but the man is doing more to get minorities into tech than anyone on earth, and probably more in a day than O’Brien will do in a lifetime.

– Finally, Asian “minorities” can’t simply be ignored. Many of Silicon Valley’s biggest success stories are from Asian entrepreneurs who came here with nothing, sometimes, illegally, and found a way to win. And back when the early pioneers were doing that, bias was definitely built in to Silicon Valley. They succeeded despite that. To ignore this is to throw away valuable data, and I don’t see any good reason to do that.

I am willing to have a civil discussion about my views on this. I’m open to the idea that I may even be wrong. But the people who see things differently from me on this seem content to either scream at me, or use big words to show that I’m racist no matter what I do to try to hire and promote minorities and women.

If these are the people who truly speak for the underdogs, absolutely nothing is going to change. Feld will keep saying nice politically correct things but won’t be hiring any black people because there’s no pressure on him. Others will follow what he’s doing, because, hell, that worked out great. But there will still be very few black entrepreneurs here to actually fund, or write about.

I, in contrast, don’t say politically correct things. But I have educated ideas about how to begin to fix the problem, and I’m willing to both speak my mind and listen to others (but only if they don’t scream at me, or throw me under the bus to write niceties about doing more while doing absolutely nothing). And in the meantime I’m funding, promoting, hiring and generally doing what I’ve always done to help out women and minority founders.

Many of us are taking solid strides forward in Silicon Valley. I wish that all the people up on their pedestals trying to get credit for saying the right things about race would just get down, get to work, and make things happen, too.

SimpleGeo, the once promising location startup, has been acquired, I’ve heard. The buyer is Urban Airship.

This is an all stock acquisition apparently, totaling around $3.5 million in value. Since SimpleGeo has raised nearly $10 million in venture capital, it’s likely that all or nearly all of the acquisition price would go to the last round investors due to their liquidity preference.

It’s a soft landing for SimpleGeo. But at least the service may live on.

Urban Airship has raised $6.5 million.

After 42 successful weekly auctions of shares of Facebook stock, SecondMarket hit a snag – they weren’t able to make a market between buyers and sellers in the 43rd, and no sales were closed. The same thing happened in the 44th auction, no sales.

Things have changed this week, though. And it was the sellers who folded, not the buyers.

The weighted average offer (sell) price in today’s auction was $32.37 (down from $32.42 last week). The weighted average bid (buy) price was $28.47, unchanged from last week. The clear price was an even $30 per share.

And just 14,000 shares closed ($420,000 in aggregate). About 130,000 shares, nearly 10x the volume, were purchased in Auction 42 three weeks ago.

See also: FACEBOOK WILL PROBABLY BE MORE PROFITABLE THAN AMAZON THIS YEAR

“I don’t think Mike Arrington is a racist” – Angela Benton

It’s never a good day when people you don’t know are having a raging Internet debate about whether or not you’re a racist. But that’s exactly what’s happening, thanks to CNN.

In July CNN reached out to me and AOL to ask if I’d do an on camera interview with Soledad O’Brien. Not A SINGLE WORD about the actual topic of the interview. Here’s their pitch:

We are producing, what we think is the first major broadcast news documentary on the Silicon Valley accelerator phenomenon and start-up culture. In this culture, Michael Arrington is God and TechCrunch is the bible.

The CNN “In America” documentary unit, led by special correspondent and anchor Soledad O’Brien, has produced a number of award winning long form documentaries.

This particular documentary will be told through the experience of a group of digital entrepreneurs who travel to Silicon Valley to chase their dreams.

Obviously Michael is extremely knowledgeable about the valley/start up culture and the rise of accelerator programs, as chronicled minute by minute in Tech Crunch. We would like Michael to share some insight into the allure of tech entrepreneurship… what drives people to pour their blood, sweat and tears into these startups? Who succeeds? Who fails? and why?

We would love to have Soledad conduct a brief interview with Michael when she is in Silicon Valley in July.

This documentary will air in November.

Any questions – please let us know.

Kimberly Arp Babbit
Producer
CNN In America with Soledad O’Brien

I ignored the request as I do most press inquiries. Generally it’s a waste of time.

AOL was excited, though, and pestered me to do it. My internal response was “I really don’t like these things very much. But it may be good to have them at our july event, the party.” I was thinking they’d go to the party, shoot some footage, and go away.

But I was talked into it by AOL. And so I showed up for this thing, thinking that we were talking about accelerators – Y Combinator and the like. Nothing in their first email, or any subsequent email, told me that this was going to be about the lack of minorities in Silicon Valley. I came prepared to talk about Y Combinator stats and how awesome these programs are.

In fact, CNN went to great lengths to hide the truth about the topic of the interview, as you can see from their email above.

So I sit down in the chair, with lights on me from everywhere and Soledad in my face and she starts asking me why there aren’t any black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

It took me a while to catch up.

Very early in the interview she asked me to name my favorite black entrepreneur. I thought about it, and I drew a complete blank. Nothing. So I answered honestly. “I don’t know a single black entrepreneur,” I said.

See, my brain database doesn’t categorize people in terms of skin color. Or hair color. Or sexual orientation. When I queried that database, under stressful circumstances, I got zero results.

The interview went on for 45 minutes or so after that, and I amended my statements. I talked about Clarence Wooten, the CEO of Arrived. Wooten has been my friend since the mid 90’s, and I was his lawyer for his first startup, a wildly successful company that made Wooten rich. I’ve followed his career and I’m now a shareholder in Arrived. And tons of other friends and acquaintances who are black popped into my head as well.

CNN has apparently edited most of that out. Or at least they’re not highlighting it along with the gotcha statement.

But mostly we talked about why there are so few non Asian minorities getting funded in Silicon Valley. My answer is that none are asking, nor are they asking for press on TechCrunch. When we met them, we wrote about them.

The problem, I said, was that there weren’t enough minorities getting computer science degrees, or otherwise finding entryways into Silicon Valley. To fix the problem, we need to fix that.

Soledad was following NewMe, an accelerator for black entrepreneurs, for the documentary. She wanted to know if I’d heard about it.

Nope.

But I said that sounded awesome, just like the accelerators for women entrepreneurs. That we always write about.

And after the interview I asked Alexia at TechCrunch to cover NewMe’s demo day, which we did, enthusiastically.

And I went on with my life, thinking that the interview as a whole would show my true enthusiasm for supporting startups founded by minorities and women.

Nope.

CNN used the quote and nothing else I said (apparently) in a clip of the upcoming documentary. And today they put this “controversy” as the top story on CNN.com, outranking all other world news, with a huge picture of me. Various CNN staff enthusiastically retweeted the story.

It’s been a strange day, dealing with racial hatred coming at me on Twitter from people who have no idea what I said or didn’t say. Having debates with some of the black entrepreneurs I know about why I blanked on them during the interview, and whether or not there is some hidden bias in Silicon Valley against black entrepreneurs. And my statement that there’s actually reverse bias because everyone is falling all over themselves to invest in minorities and women (which sparks new outrage).

Anyway, there are actually some great things going on which can really help solve this problem. At Google Zeitgeist I sat with Will.i.am, Ron Conway, Larry Page, and others over lunch. Will.i.am was proposing an ambitious new idea to help get inner city youth (mostly minorities) to begin to see superstar entrepreneurs as the new role models, instead of NBA stars. He believes that we can effect real societal change by getting young people to learn how to program, and realize that they can start businesses that will change the world.

I said I’d support that in every way I can, and to let me know when, to start things off, I can write about it.

So anyway, I just don’t feel like a racist. Even though many, many people are telling me that I am and that I just don’t know it.

I wish CNN had told me the topic of the interview so that I could come prepared. Maybe check out NewMe beforehand, and some of the amazing black entrepreneur role models that are part of Silicon Valley.

But, really, that isn’t what CNN wanted. Soledad told me afterwards how much she loved that killer question. “Everyone pulls a blank, it’s perfect,” she said. No one she interviewed had any idea that the real topic was about minority entrepreneurs.

“Perfect” meaning she could make hay out of it at other people’s expense.

Because the fact is that it’s awesome that I pulled a blank. It’s awesome that I don’t have a fucking perfect sound bite ready at the tip of my tongue for a question like that. Awesome because I don’t categorize people as black or white or gay or straight in my head. They’re just smart or not smart.

It sounds like a cliche but my reaction on camera proves I’m not just saying that. I know tons of black entrepreneurs and, clearly, it would have been in my best interest to name them (and if I had CNN would have cut that out and never aired it).

I may be the poster child for racial ignorance in Silicon Valley, but my motives are pure and I always have and always will do anything to help out the underdog. Frankly, I’ll invest my time in people like Will.i.am, who are actually trying to fix the problem at the root level. Soledad, not so much. Even the NewMe people are complaining that she turned their very serious effort to promote black entrepreneurs into a circus by lying to people they interviewed about the topic and then hyper editing the footage to grab all the gotcha moments. I feel bad for them, this is all at their expense.

Maybe now some of you can begin to understand why I never wanted to be called a “journalist” at TechCrunch. It is a shameful profession.

I’m turning comments off on this post.

So CrunchFund invested in Codecademy, along with Union Square Ventures and a whole pack of others.

Codecademy teaches people how to code. Starting with the assumption that you know absolutely nothing at all about coding. It eases you in by asking you to type in your name.

And, suddenly, you’re coding.

It gets a lot harder from there. But it walks you through it. Short description of what you want to do, why, and how. Then you do it. Then the next step. There are hints, but sometimes it’s not enough and you have to go back and re-take a previous lesson. The best part are the achievement badges that you get every few steps. Seriously, before you know if you’ve spent two hours on the site and know a smidgen of javascript. And, it was fun.

I also like that Codecademy is asking users to create new lessons. They have a tool for creating it and released it to 50 people. Ten high quality lessons came out of it and Codecademy will be releasing them soon.

There’s a great reason for investing. The service came out of nowhere in the summer Y Combinator class and launched in August.

That’s two months since launch. 750,000 people have used it. It’s growing like crazy every day.

There are hugely obvious business models down the road. Particularly talent spotting and steering those people into the right jobs.

Codecademy says that their goal is to become the way that anyone can learn complex coding concepts, even people who’ve never coded before.

Future of Learning?

What really excites me about Codecademy is that you can learn almost anything this way. The service comes from CEO Zach Sims wanting to learn how to code. Cofounder Ryan Bubinski had been teaching people to code for years as a side job in college, and he found that this approach – short explanation, then go do it, then talk again, with everything in small constantly reinforced increments, really worked.

All I can think of is how if this was around when I was in college I may have actually learned calculus this way. I got a B in that class but I can clearly remember at the time being completely lost, and anything I did learn is now permanently wiped from my brain.

I’d still have gone to college because college was four years of concentrated fun. But who learns anything in college? Not me. I needed something like Codecademy.

I’m very excited to see how this turns out. Meanwhile, I’ve earned two badges on Codecademy – “first lesson” and “ten exercises completed.” I’ve never been so proud of a virtual badge on my screen.

A few months ago Daily Booth CEO Brian Pokorny told me that most of his team was working on a second product. “What is it?” I asked, “A mobile photo sharing app?”

I was joking, because everyone and their mother seemed to launch a mobile photo sharing app in the last year or so, to the point that we groaned whenever we saw a new one.

“Yes. And it’s going to liberate the countless photos that everyone has stuck in their phones.”

“Ha ha. Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“No, you’re not serious.”

“Yes.”

“Hah.”

And so the conversation went. I didn’t believe him until he pulled out his iPhone and showed me an early internal version of Batch, his new mobile photo sharing app.

Batch is now in the iPhone app store.

And it is absolutely amazing.

Batch allows people to create albums, called “Batches,” with photos from an event or whatever. Yeah, not so exciting. But it lets you auto upload them as you take them from the app, and you can mass select photos already stuck on your iPhone as well.

That last sentence is the important one. We all have hundreds or thousands of photos on our phones that we’ve never bothered to upload to Facebook or Flickr. Batch makes it exceptionally easy to do that, dozens at a time.

You sign in via Facebook, so it already knows your friends. Tagging them into Batches is really easy as well. They’ve taken a lot of time with the interface and it’s both beautiful, fast and functional.

It’s the perfect app to add to my new iPhone (with Google Voice!). Android users will have to wait a bit to use it.

Photos can be kept private or shared with others. It’s amazing seeing notifications pop up in real time as new photos are added to a Batch while you’re still at an event.

There are some features I’d like to see them add to Batch soon. Multiple people can’t contribute to a single Batch, they have to create their own. So there will be multiple Batches at a single event when all your friends start using this.

I’d also like to have the ability to tag photos, not just batches. And I’d like to be able to download or bookmark individual photos as well. Right now you can only see a list of all Batches you’ve been tagged in. That’s great, but over time that list will become unmanageable.

But the app as it is today is absolutely great, and I’ll be using it constantly. As I tag friends at events they’ll get notifications on Facebook, so they can see the photos. This will spread fast.

As for Daily Booth – Pokorny says it’s still growing nicely (they just passed 1 million users), and the team will continue to develop both products. The company has raised about $7 million to date. It was originally part of Y Combinator.

Try this. You’ll love it.

If you’ve used Uber, there’s a good chance you love it. The company lets users request an immediate black car service from a mobile app. The car usually arrives in a few minutes and takes you wherever you want to go. The fee is automatically charged to your credit card on file.

The service launched in Summer 2010. By February of this year they’d raised $12.5 million, with Benchmark leading the most recent round. That valued the company at $60 million.

Now, Uber says it’s worth $300 million. At least that’s what it’s telling venture capitalists while pitching a new round of financing. Some have passed. But others are still at the table.