BuzzFeed, which tracks online topics that have gone viral, is offering a version of the analytical dashboard it uses to monitor the spread of Internet “memes” to any website, brand or publisher that wants to track the popularity of their content. To demonstrate the dashboard’s features, BuzzFeed — which is run by viral marketer and Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti — has opened up its own internal version of the tool to show all its traffic statistics, including the performance of individual stories on the BuzzFeed site and where the traffic came from.

The dashboard tracks what the site calls “seed views” — representing readers who looked at the content on BuzzFeed’s site or on one of its partners’ websites — and “viral views,” which are readers who came from somewhere else, after finding the item on Twitter, Facebook, Digg or some other content-sharing network. While a recent story about the best anti-Glenn-Beck signs at a rally got about 16,000 views on BuzzFeed directly, it got almost five times that many “viral views” from other sources. The dashboard shows the story got over 19,000 pageviews via Huffington Post, more than 18,000 via Reddit, and over 10,000 from Facebook. It was shared 900 times on Facebook and drew more than 1,000 “likes” from readers there, as well as 2,800 clicks.

Peretti said in an email interview that BuzzFeed has been using the viral dashboard to build not just its own site and track the spread of its content, but to put together viral advertising campaigns for clients such as Viacom, GE, and Intel as part of the company’s marketing consulting business. “We decided that it was time to make a big move and make the viral dashboard public, so everyone can see the internal stats we use to grow the company,” the BuzzFeed founder said. The site will be making the dashboard available free of charge to anyone who wants to use it later this month, Peretti said, and sites can also apply for early beta access to the tool.

BuzzFeed’s new offering could find a receptive audience; more and more web publishers are looking to real-time analytical tools to track how their content is performing on a minute-by-minute basis, rather than (or in addition to) using existing tools that look at traffic statistics over a longer time period. Chartbeat, which provides a broader package of overall web traffic analytics for websites, recently raised a funding round of $3 million from Index Ventures and a group of other VCs. BuzzFeed itself raised an $8-million Series B round of financing earlier this year from RRE Ventures, along with Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Chris Dixon’s Founder Collective.

Here’s a presentation that Peretti did on how to make your content go viral by using what he calls the “Bored at Work” network.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): With Caffeine, Google Reveals the Challenges of Real-Time

The World Economic Forum has announced its list of 31 Technology Pioneers for 2011. The Technology Pioneers are its list of up-and-coming startups. Last year’s list included Twitter, Playfish, and Boston Power. The year before, Mint, Etsy, and Brightcove were named.

Joining the pantheon this year are foursquare, Knewton, Layar, Scribd, and Spotify. However, greentech is equally strong on the list, particularly with smartgrid companies such as OPower and Tendril. Below is the full list of infotech companies that made it, with links to their Crunchbase profiles for more information:

Aster Data (big data)
Atlassian (product management)
Foursquare (Geo-location)
GetJar
Knewton (adaptive learning)
Layar (augmented reality)
NetQin Mobile (mobile security)
OpenDNS (domain names)
ReputationDefender (online reputation monitoring)
Scribd (online documents)
SecondMarket (private securities market)
Spotify (streaming music service)
Vortex Engineering (low-power ATMs)

New York City startup BankSimple today disclosed that it raised its first venture funding in a round led by First Round Capital, Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures, and Village Ventures, along with seed investors SV Angel (Ron Conway) and Nauiokas Park (Amy Nauiokas and Sean Parker), and . But it did not disclose how much it raised. I’ve confirmed that the round was $2.9 million, with an additional $190,000 raised last year in convertible debt (which converted to shares with this round), for a total of $3.1 million raised.

BankSimple has not yet launched. It is trying to develop a better interface for banking, working with financial institutions to actually hold the deposits. “Anything the customer sees is what we do,” says CEO Joshua Reich. BankSimple is creating a new front-end experience for bank customers both online and through mobile apps. The service will simplify their accounts into a single account and gives them a dashboard to see how much they are saving, how much they can spend, and how close they are to reaching financial goals.

The whole point is to simplify people’s financial lives by giving them a modern Web interface and realtime data linked to their accounts. So when you are about to reach an overdraft, you might get a notification on your phone. The first customers will be required to own a smartphone so they can download one of BankSimple’s mobile apps (iPhone and Android will probably be first). They will be able to deposit a check by taking a picture of one with their cell phone camera. Customers will also get a bank card tied to their account.

“The way banks work is they shove products down the throats of consumers,” says Reich. The more products you sign up for with your bank, the more fees they can charge. BankSimple will not make money from fees. Instead it will split the net interest margin with its partner banks (the net margin interest is the difference between the rate at which banks lend out money and the rate at which they pay depositors). It is looking to partner with wholesale banks to take care of the back end.

This strategy of focusing solely on the user experience contrasts with Betterment, a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist which also tries to simplify the online banking experience with a single, smarter account, but does hold deposits. Reich acknowledges that “we would certainly get more revenues if we did it ourselves,” but does not want to be distracted by regulatory compliance and managing large pools of money. Plenty of banks do that better than BankSimple could. Instead he wants to focus on what banks don’t do well: building a technology company and making the customer experience less harrowing.

Following is a post on super angels I wrote yesterday for PEHub.

In the beginning, there were angel investors. And it was good. As individual angel investors made more and more investments, they became super angels. One day a super angel woke up and thought to himself, “Gosh, I could do a lot more investments if I had a fund.” And so the super angels became micro-VCs (or “institutionalized super angels”). Everyone was excited and on the seventh day they did another deal instead of resting.

I’m a huge fan of the super angel movement. Some of my best friends are super angels and I’ve put my own money where my mouth is in funds like Chris Sacca’s, Dave McClure’s, Jeff Clavier’s, Roger Ehrenberg’s, and David Cohen’s. Not only am I an investor in these super angels, I love to have them on board with our investments at Foundry Group. And whenever they bring me something they’ve been working on, I always pay attention–as I know they know what I like to invest in.

But recently the super angel mantra of “traditional VCs suck” has reached a fevered pitch. What started out in Silicon Valley as a new wave of angel investors has evolved into a belief that “VCs are lousy seed investors” and “no one needs a VC–just raise your money from super angels and go to town.”

Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures recently wrote an excellent blog post titled “The Expanding Birthrate of Web Startups.” As with many of Fred’s posts, the comment section was as useful as the post, and early-stage investors such as Mark Suster, Charlie O’Donnell, Roger Ehrenberg, and Anonymous Coward weighed in. The comments ranged from the now cliche-ish “VCs suck” to “What happens when super angel-backed companies need a new round” to “Companies will never need more capital. It’s a new world out there.” As I read through the comments, I kept pondering the same thought: “What happens in five years?”

Let’s consider a few situations. Take a typical super angel. Assume success. Investors (LPs and individuals like me) want to invest money with the super angel. The super angel probably creates a fund and raises a lot more money. Now the super angel is a micro-VC. Continue to assume success. More money is able to be raised. Now the micro-VC is a mini-VC. Does this keep scaling, or does the mini-VC succumb to the same challenges that $200 million funds ran into when they turned into $1 billion funds?

Now, take a super angel with a 20-company portfolio. The super angel is hyper-connected and works closely with the entrepreneurs he/she invests in. Suddenly he/she has 100 investments. Are the entrepreneurs getting the same attention from that angel–especially when they enter year three of their life, hit a bunch of speed bumps and need a lot of help? Or does this super angel just turn his/her back and say, “Well, that’s the breaks.”

Finally, take a super angel who is used to making $25,000 to $100,000 per investment. He/she becomes a micro-VC, raises a bigger fund, and now invests $500,000 per deal. Is there a difference in his/her behavior with regard to the $25,000 investments vs. the $500,000 investments?

I think the super angel movement is awesome, but the generalization that all VCs suck at seed investing doesn’t make sense to me. Correspondingly, the idea that entrepreneurs only need super angels doesn’t make sense either. There’s a renewed focus and interest in early-stage investing going on in the United States, and it’s being stimulated by a lot of factors. It’s a powerful thing that will continue to evolve, change and challenge all of the participants.

Apple announced on Wednesday a cornucopia of new hardware and software: sleek iPods, a brand new Internet-enabled video streaming device and new versions of its iOS software and iTunes 10. However, the most impressive to me by far was Ping, the music-only social network that Apple is opening up its 160 million existing iTunes users.

No, I’m not blown away by the 160 million number. What I’m impressed by is the thinking behind Ping.

Ping may function like a cross between Facebook and Twitter for iTunes by allowing you to follow celebrities, create social cliques and get artist updates via an activity stream. I think it could have tremendous impact on social sharing and commerce.

From a content perspective, there are three different types of media we love to talk about: movies we see, music we listen to and books we are reading. These are accepted social norms. In fact, many relationships are made on the basis of collective love of a movie and many friendships have started with mixed tapes.

It makes perfect sense for a music service to be social. I’m not alone: The popularity YouTube, the fast-growing MOG and the sadly defunct iLike and Imeem show that people gravitate towards music as a common, collective experience. A recommendation from friends on Last.fm often resulted in me buying many-a-few music tracks. My friends who listened to Thievery Corporation turned me on to The Broadway Project and Chris Joss, which I ended up buying on the iTunes store or via Amazon’s MP3 store.

This click-and-go-somewhere-to-download model of affiliate links can never match a unified experience. Amazon, for example, encourages bloggers and others to link to things they like and then get a piece of the action. This separates social from commerce and treats them as two discrete activities. On the post-Facebook Internet, I don’t think anyone can afford to keep these two actions distinct.

Ping, from what little I saw during Steve Jobs’ demo, allows a similar level of social interaction. It can tell me who my friends think are cool and the top 10 favorites of people in my social graph. Some of my friends are famous deejays. Others just have eclectic musical tastes. They can collectively sift through over 10 million songs and help with the discovery of music. This social-powered discovery is part of the biggest theme of our times: serendipity. About two years ago, when I wrote about serendipity, I said:

The problem is that there’s too much data coming online too quickly, and the traditional method of search that involves first finding and then consuming the information is not going to work for much longer. There just won’t be enough time for us to do that and still have a life. It’s a problem, and therefore solving it is an opportunity — a very big opportunity.

My belief has only been affirmed by growth in the amount of data available. With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store – aka its shopping experience — is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it’s also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it’s made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought. I wouldn’t be least bit surprised if sales of music on the iTunes store rocket upwards, thanks to social discovery.

Amazon, which recently started experimenting with Facebook Connect, has similar ideas, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. On Amazon, I’m reduced to reading reviews from absolute strangers for music. I have a handful of friends who have impeccable taste in non-fiction business books, are all members of Amazon, and they already use email to share new book suggestions with me.

What if they too could share their likes and dislikes via a social layer inside Amazon.com? Or what if I could follow my favorite authors and get updates on their books? Much like Apple, Amazon owns book-based social service, Shelfari, and should find ways to embed the social layer inside of all Amazon products and connect its tens of millions of users.

Like Apple, Amazon too has a lot more data about its customers and their behaviors and could create a compelling discovery experience. I believe with tens of thousands of products in its store, the retail giant needs to figure out ways to surface content and other offerings smartly.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

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The maintenance for (gs) Grid-Service Cluster.04 Storage Segment 04 is complete. We will continue to monitor the health of the Cluster. If there are no further service interruptions we will provide a postmortem for this incident later today.

The great fad of the last several years is self-serve and the ability to scale the distribution and access to your technology, product, service or data.  The Twitter API, Facebook Connect, Yelp API for reviews, Youtube Embed codes, Google Maps API, you name it.  And everyone knows the APIs out of the media darling’s Foursquare, Zoho and Dropbox.  But, how about little known web services that may have great functionality that you have likely never heard of like Mombo’s Social Movie Review API, Email Yak’s web-based email API, Guitar Cord’s music utility service API, YoLink’s semantic search API and literally thousands of others that have great products, but are rather unknown. 

Business Development 2.0 isn’t a new concept.  Hunch’s Co-Founder, Caterina Fake, talked about Qoop building off of Flickr’s API back in August 2006, while Fred Wilson blogged about how pervasive APIs, embeds, widgets, search and RSS feeds would become to quickly get distribution or access to services.

There’s a difference, however, between responding to inquiries versus begging for the first 1, 2 … 10 sites to use your web service.  Twitter, Facebook, Google and Yelp need an API because they can’t respond to the market fast enough for people seeking access … here self-serve makes a whole lot of sense because the value of these services are well understood and it cuts out expensive teams of sales, business development, account/client management, professional services, etc.  

However, what happens if you believe you have an amazing service, data, content or technology but nobody really knows about it?  Or nobody knows the benefits of building on top of your API?   You have a classic chicken and egg problem.   The trick is to think of your API, RSS, Embed, etc as a product and a business itself.  And like any product or business, understand how to market it and how to build awareness to drive market adoption.

Building and developing a self-serve API or web service is half the battle and I would argue it’s a lot less than half.  For example, Hunch.com is built entirely on our own API.  A team of clever and ambitious people could access the Hunch API and attempt to re-create Hunch.com from scratch.  The functionality and the value is all there.  But, we will define success when the web embraces the Hunch API in a fully federated fashion, in addition to a well-traveled destination site.

So, the great challenge is how to market your API so that people know a) that it is available, b) how/why to use it and 3) what value they can generate from it.

When I joined Hunch, Chris Dixon asked me what my goal would be and more importantly, how I would know if I achieved success.  My response was to cannibalize my own function by popularizing the Hunch API into the wild.  It was a simple lesson that I learned from Alan Spoon, former President of the Washington Post Company and Managing Partner at Polaris Venture Partners, who once told me that companies don’t move aggressively enough to cannabilize their business, but rather spend too much time trying to defend it. 

We created a blueprint of the goals and process of popularizing an API and generating distribution on our way to a full self-serve platform.  Here are some suggestions:   

Goal of Marketing your API:

1.  Develop Market Awareness for your service and availability of your API
2. Absolutely nail 3 partner use cases that has strong re-use across the market
3. Determine Success Metrics, Analytics (Proof that your API yields Value Impact to 3^rd Party) to preserve future monetization options

The Process of Marketing Your API:

1. Don’t be shy to do hand to hand deals.  The popular misconception is that with an API, I need to be “self-serve”.  Integration self-serve is different than 3^rd party interest.  Remember, the goal is to be self-serve, but the process of getting there can and will likely require doing deals with 3^rd parties and this can be a manual process that takes time.
   • For example, our first set of partners at Hunch took almost 2 months to sign and close, but the deals thereafter have been happening at a much faster clip as you refine the use cases and can refer to other blue-chip brands that have adopted the API.  We have seen an accelerated pace of inbound interest
2. Bowling Pin Strategy – cluster your outreach to a neighborhood of companies within an ecosystem that overtime can share overlapping interests.  The more you specialize in a vertical, the cleaner the story will be for your API and the more repetitive success stories will be to form a brand.
   • For example, at Hunch, our API is fairly flexible and can be used for a number of personalization use cases, but we have been focused on transaction-oriented environments because we want to show continued demonstration of the accuracy of the Hunch algorithms. 
3. Have a crystal clear view of what metric you are trying to solve. Are you increasing conversions, are you decreasing bounce rates, are you increasing time spent on the site, the number of pageviews, reg rates to newsletters, subscription rates, increase in CPM, CPC or CPA rates, etc
4. Once you understand precisely what you are solving, don’t be afraid to trade Revenue for Transparency to Analytics and PR.  It’s a common mistake of the human psyche to begin requiring revenue when you begin fantasizing about “what if I do increase conversion by 10%, then I should get paid NOW for it”.  This is a simple function of needing to “get paid for your time and to feel like you justified your efforts”.  But, try to avoid the temptations here and remember that your primary objective is market validation, PR and analytics.  Revenue will follow if you solve for those three missing variables.
5. Work with your partner, hand in hand, on the initial set of use cases and keep iterating until you are pleased with the outcome
6. Track and Analyze the analytics like a Ninja.  Uncover correlations within a partner and across partners.  Across the partners is the key trick to determine if you have a silo’d partner solution or a networked solution.
7. Secure PR rights upfront, have your partner write up Testimonials and apply the Double-Barrel PR approach (announce partner signings followed by the launch of your API)

Google, the posterboy for a scalable business, with their initial deals with Netscape, AOL and Yahoo is a great example of how them employed a similar strategy.  Shopping.com, Yelp, NYTimes, Weatherbug, BazaarVoice, Salesforce and Meebo invested in a strong business development effort before truly popularizing their self-serve platform to generate mass scale.

The other question that I often receive is what’s the right background for someone to employ this business development strategy.  When you are considering the right person or team to employ your efforts here, its important to recruit around product-focused business development talent.  Typically people who have had a hand in developing products, establishing creative use cases, analytics and certainly, a strong understanding of web technologies.  The new business development strategy to popularize a self-serve tool needs to move away from a sales-orientation and more towards product-orientation.

At a future date, we will also write on how to embed monetization into your API and how self-service has spawned true performance-driven business models based on value compared to licensing models based on cost structures.

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Are you addicted to Twitter? Do you have an iPad? Even if the answer to both is “no” right now, after you see Twitter for iPad, those answers are going to change — quickly.

Yes, the wait is over. Launching tonight in the App Store is Twitter for iPad — the first official native iPad app from the company. We all knew it was coming (Twitter even said so a few months ago), but it has been a long wait. It was definitely worth it.

Like most people, I wander into hyperbole from time to time. But it has now been a few days since I first played with Twitter for iPad, and I still think it is hands-down the best iPad app out there. It’s that good. With all due respect to Reeder, Instapaper, Flipboard, and Pulse, this is now going to be my go-to app for just about everything related to reading news. It’s simply such a great experience for reading tweets — and more importantly, reading the links your friends share.

What Twitter has done is create an amazing user experience for reading information. This is thanks to an intuitive user interface that layers on top of itself. So, for example, if I click on a link in my tweet stream, I’ll have a new layer that rolls over to show that webpage in a customized browser window. If you’ve used Flipboard, it’s somewhat similar, but better because it’s much easier to go back to where ever you previously were before you clicked the link. You simply swipe something to the side to move it temporarily or swipe it again to get it off the screen (in portrait mode anyway, where there’s less space).

Something else that’s awesome: when you highlight a tweet by clicking on it, it’s now pinned to the top or bottom of the screen as you scroll through your stream. This is great if it’s something you want to reference. A lot of thought has been put into these type of saving state actions within this app. It’s simple to save a draft and go back to it, for example (much easier than with Twitter for iPhone). Or to reference one of these pinned tweets in your own tweet.

There are also some great new gestures that Twitter came up with for this app. For example, if you pinch-outward on a tweet, it will unfold to show you more information about the Twitter user. Better may be the way you can swipe down with two fingers on any tweet to see a full conversation in context. It’s the little things like this that make the app great — Apple-like, even.

Overall, the app looks and feels quite a bit different from Twitter for iPhone (which Twitter built from Tweetie — developer Loren Brichter’s client that they acquired earlier this year). But Twitter’s Leland Rechis assures me it’s using all the same stuff on the backend. In fact, Twitter is now a universal app — meaning it’s one app that will work on both the iPhone and iPad, it will just look different depending on which device you’re using it on.

Rechis also says Twitter started experimenting with some newer things on the iPad version that haven’t yet been brought to the iPhone version, but undoubtedly will. A great example here is that when you click through to a user’s profile page, you’ll see at the bottom a list of users similar to that user that you may like to follow.

Rechis also notes the importance of the logged-out view — something Twitter worked on before the iPhone version launch. Twitter wants to make the service as useful as possible to people even if they don’t have an account. The idea, of course, is that they’ll hopefully sign up for one — and this app may give them the most reason to yet. When logged out, you’ll be able to see tweet streams based on hot topics.

“Tweets in general are not just what I’m doing, they have an incredible amount of metadata,” Rechis says speaking to why they created this layering idea for the app. Almost 25 percent of all tweets now have a link in them, he says. This app is perfect for those tweets, and content consumption and exploration in general.

Rechis notes that one of his favorite things about tablets is how they eliminate window management. At the same time, you need some way to manage all this information. He notes that Brichter’s original concept was stacks of sheets of paper that you quickly shuffle through. Other members of Twitter including Rechis refined that idea and the end result is Twitter for iPad.

That’s roughly 750 words about the app — but you really just need to see it, and use it. It will definitely be my go-to way to browse Twitter from now on. It’s that good.

Look for it in the App Store shortly. It will be a free download.

Update: I should note that for some of these more advanced gestures, there is a slight learning curve. That said, you can do everything without using those gestures, so it’s not a big deal — it’s just icing on the cake. And yes, Twitter is trying to come up with the best way to teach users about these new gestures.