MavenSay, a social recommendation app, just got a surge of unplanned downloads coming from Indonesia, and its founders are moving quickly to include Southeast Asia in its expansion plans, as a result. The company’s Toronto-based co-founder, Jesse Dallal, said the two-month old app got 100,000 downloads over the past fortnight. It has a total of 130,000 downloads so far, and the sudden surge was tracked back to a power user based in Indonesia. They’re not sure which one it is, but the source of traffic points to the country, he said. The way the app works is similar to Pinterest, in that users follow other users’ recommendations. These could cover places they’ve eaten at or music they’re listening to, for example. For its launch, MavenSay roped in what it called “influencers”—featured brands to follow such as Momofuku and Refinery29. The Indonesian user that triggered the downloads isn’t a celebrity that MavenSay had canvassed, but was clearly influential enough over his or her social network to move the downloads, said Dallal. “It’s been an unanticipated consequence of our [social] strategy,” he said, referring to the way things get viral on these recommendation platforms where people reblog items from influencers. “We’ve reached out to influencers in North America, but we’re also going to reach out to influencers in Asia now. We’re thinking of coming out there and talking to users to understand what the differences in culture and usage might be,” he said. MavenSay has seven people, including its three co-founders Dallal, Mike Wagman and Bryan Friedman. The small company can’t be expected to have concrete plans for Asia yet, but seeding interest in one of the world’s fastest-growing, mobile-hungry countries may pay off eventually. According to mobiThinking, Indonesia has 260 million mobile subscribers, although those with data connections make up just 47.6 million, or 18 percent of that. And Indonesians have been quick to embrace social networking sites, with fierce loyalties once something sticks. Aged social network, Friendster started to pivot towards Asia around 2008, when it realised that 90 percent of its user base was coming from the region. While it was, by that time, lagging behind Facebook globally, some markets like Indonesia stayed loyal to Friendster. MavenSay has raised funding of $890,000 so far.

Real-time parking startup ParkMe wants to help find you parking -- in real-time. The company, which originally started out on the Web, has been making a big push behind mobile apps, which is really smart, because most times when you're looking for parking, you're not on a PC, but you have a smartphone nearby. And it just launched on Android.

HasOffers, a startup that helps mobile app developers see which ad efforts are actually paying off, is announcing that it has raised a $9.4 million round of funding led by Accel Partners. The company was founded in 2009 — the product that it initially built, and the one that's still highlighted on the HasOffers website, is a system that helps ad networks and agencies manage their performance-based programs. (Those agencies and ad networks include Bucksense, Tapjoy, and Sponsorpay.)

Google Checkout is being sunsetted as the company focuses on shaping Google Wallet into a viable PayPal rival. Google Commerce announced today that Google Checkouts will be retired on November 20.

Founders Fund, the firm founded by Peter Thiel and other PayPal executives, famously declared that it wants to back companies with big, ambitious visions (not just dinky web startups). And that description certainly fits Hampton Creek Foods, a startup that wants to move the world from animal-based foods by creating alternatives that are genuinely tastier, healthier, and cheaper. Founder and CEO Josh Tetrick told me that he just closed a $1 million round from the firm. It's Founders Fund's first food tech investment, he said — which seems to be true, judging from the portfolio companies listed on the firm's website. Hampton Creek previously raised $2 million from Khosla Ventures.

Does my music do better on Facebook or Twitter? Where should my next tour be? Is my new song too repetitive? Musicians can get free answers to these questions and more from BeatDeck, a Y Combinator analytics company launching today. BeatDeck plans to license this data to labels and music stores to help them sign and recommend tomorrow's superstars. Yep, BeatDeck is an enterprise music startup.

Automated Insights, a startup that translates raw data into plain English, is launching a new product could make analytics data a lot more accessible. The new product, called Site Ai, pulls data from existing systems (it started with Google Analytics and Clicky, and the company is currently taking votes on which service to integrate next), then it summarizes that data in normal sentences. For example, it can crete a daily or weekly report that will tell you how current traffic compares to past patterns, what referring sites are driving the most searches, what keywords are driving the most searches, and so on. (You can see a sample report near the end of this post.)

The bookend to Yahoo's Big News Day -- a major refresh of its photo sharing site Flickr -- will see the company drop is Flickr Pro pricing tiers as part of a bid to compete better with Facebook/Instagram and the rest of the crowded market in the online photo space. But it is not getting rid of paid tiers altogether: it's keeping an ad-free tier, called Ad Free, as well as a tier for power users, doublr, respectively priced at $49.99 and $499.99 for a year of use.

It's easy to forget that Yahoo has had a long on-again-off-again love affair with online video. But you might not remember that, because other online video platforms long ago left Yahoo in the proverbial dust. Today, as Yahoo streamed its Flickr product and Tumblr acquisition announcements, we were given a demonstration of why Yahoo has been left in the dust -- and why it's had to turn to acquisitions for help in, well, nearly every department.

Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing service is now offering one full terabyte for users, enough storage space to hold whole swathes of the world’s photos. The service is offering this benefit in addition to its full resolution photo storage service. While the average user will probably not touch the outer limits of this storage space in a lifetime, this alone is probably enough to draw dedicated photographers to the service and, more important, bring lapsed users back to the Yahoo fold. This move is important. Given the odd nature of most photo sharing services, you are either limited to a few dozen gigabytes or, in the case of Instagram and other mobile services, an unstated upper limit that is not part of the marketing collateral. While I don’t doubt that Google or Facebook could make the terabyte claim in the near future, being first to market with this particular feature is an important milestone. This move is quite clearly a play by Yahoo to make its wares relevant. The long-beleaguered Flickr has at once enthralled and frustrated pro users with claims of abandonment by the web giant. As Marissa Mayer noted in her presentation, this is about “bringing lifetimes of beauty into Flickr.” It’s also about convincing casual photographers to trust Flickr as a universal shoebox for their old snaps – a lucrative and surprisingly important thing to be.

The new Flickr is live. Smack-dab in the middle of Yahoo-Tumblr aqcuisition day, Yahoo is holding a major press event here in NYC. But announcements coming out of this event aren't related to Tumblr as much as Flickr, the photo-sharing database and social network acquired by Yahoo in March of 2005 for $35 million. Today, Flickr gets a huge revamp including a totally new look and feel, focused on three different things. First, there are no more bits of text or blue links, but rather a grid layout of huge pictures in full resolution.

Dell has decided not to build out its public cloud and will instead rely on partners such as Joyent to provide infrastructure services. A source close to the matter said layoff notices at the company went out on Friday. The group had more than 300 people in it. It is not known who was laid off or offered other jobs in the company. A spokesperson said Dell would not comment about personnel issues.

Today has been quite a roller coaster ride for Yahoo -- the company put days of reports and rumors to rest this morning when it confirmed that it would acquire the social blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion, and now CEO Marissa Mayer has confirmed that Yahoo's New York employees will now be moving. They'll all soon be working right around the corner from Times Square in the same building that used to house the New York Times (229 West 43rd Street, to be more specific).

The tech-dominated San Francisco Bay Area isn't exactly known as a hub for high fashion -- Facebook's new James Perse staff hoodies are about as fancy as things get around here -- and fashion shows aren't typically in our purview here at TechCrunch TV. So when we were invited to attend the Geek 2 Chic fashion show, an event hosted by Microsoft benefiting the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE, which is pronounced "nifty") which mentors at-risk youth and teaches them business basics and encourages technology careers, we had to check it out.

This week on TechCrunch TV's Ask A VC show, we have Mayfield Fund Managing Director Navin Chaddha in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.

The valley has a bit of a thing for drones lately — have you noticed? Airware, which builds brains for commercial unmanned aircrafts, just raised $10.7M. Longtime Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson left his position to go fulltime on his DIY drone company, having raised $5M. Later this week at the AngelPad demo day, another drone-centric company will make its debut: DroneDeploy. Unlike the rest of the lot, DroneDeploy doesn't want to build drones, or even the parts that go inside. They want to make the software that companies use to control their drones.

Square's not just for businesses apparently, as an invite-only page for a product called "Square Cash" has popped up. Not many details are known about it, but we've reached out to the company for comment.

Dude, you got a Linux-powered Dell! In all the years I've reviewed laptops I've never been as pleasantly surprised by an Ultrabook as I was with the Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition. This ultrathin, ultralight SSD laptop originally came in Windows flavor but, much to my surprise, I far prefer the Ubuntu edition of this device. It is solidly built, acceptably priced given the solid state drive, and surprisingly powerful.

Laptops are the new desktops. While you can buy a solid tower PC for about $500, this price represents how little manufacturers care about the desktop world. Barring a few huge gaming rigs, laptops are where it's at. We have been arguably remiss in avoiding formal laptop reviews and so we're trying to remedy that with a series we're calling Laptop Week. This week we will focus on some of the best laptops available today alongside a few gems that popped up over the past year or so. We will run the gamut from Chromebooks to Windows 8 and take a few detours on the way.

10 days, people! TechCrunch invades Austin in just ten days from now, with our legendary Meetup + Pitch-off series. The magic started in New York this year, with a hugely successful pitch-off, an amazing turn-out and lots of fun memories. So we're heading out on the open road with the event, which includes a networking meetup as well as a 60-second pitch-off competition with awesome prizes. Over the course of the year, we'll be hitting up Boston, San Diego, and Seattle, but the first stop on our journey is in the great state of Texas.

As AT&T comes under the gun for blocking Google's new video chat app Hangouts on its cellular network, the company is today hoping to put a better spin on the news by offering a new statement detailing its changing position on support for pre-loaded video chat apps. During the second half of 2013, AT&T says it will begin to enable pre-loaded video chat applications over cellular for all its customers, regardless of the customer's data plan.

Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week's I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts. The Android version has all of that, and one new feature -- a new location section.

Last week, representatives of many of the world's leading cities - including London, Boston, Mexico City, Barcelona and Christchurch - came to San Francisco to learn from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs about how to make their cities smarter. One of the people behind this LLGA Cities Summit was the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, formerly the chairman of Technorati and now one of the world's leading pioneers of smart cities.

Tumblr is still shipping. Despite all the noise surrounding the Yahoo-Tumblr acquisition, the company has just pushed out an update to its iOS application introducing a new user interface that now includes the almost Path-like post chooser, previously introduced in the Android version. This interface design is becoming more common today, but it’s most reminiscent of things like Mac’s Fan Stack feature, for example, or social network Path, which popularized the concept on mobile devices. For those unfamiliar, the post chooser is the button you tap to add content to your Tumblr blog, including text, photos, video, quotes, links and more. Now, instead of having a compose button at the bottom right of the screen that launches a page of these options as a starting point for your post, in the updated version of Tumblr’s iOS app, the compose button will fan out the choices overlaid on your current window as small, round tappable buttons. The revamped interface is the most notable change in today’s update, though Tumblr for iOS now also allows for app attribution in posts, according to its description in iTunes. The iOS version of Tumblr’s application was updated just last month, at that time forgoing the then Android-only interface, in favor of a feature that actually made Tumblr’s infamous animated GIFs animate when you scrolled down. (At last!). That release also introduced more social sharing options to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper and Pocket, and more, as well as additional gestures. The updated version of Tumblr for iOS is now live here in iTunes. In case you don’t remember how the iOS app looked before, here’s an earlier version showing the old post screen: (h/t parislemon)

According to a new study, we really don't have to worry too much about the nearly 1 in 4 children without access to FarmVille at home. "Our results indicate that computer ownership alone is unlikely to have much of an impact on short-term schooling outcomes for low-income children," report Robert W. Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson in a new study of a large-scale randomized computer give-away experiment in California. On the one hand, it's good news that doomsday predictions for computer-less children have been exaggerated. However, giving out computers was one of the easier solutions to closing the poverty educational outcome gap, and now we have to go back to the drawing board.

In the wake of releasing eight comedy series pilots into the wild last month, Amazon is starting to make decisions concerning which pilots will be purchased for development and which will get the axe. According to Reuters, the company has chosen to build out Alpha House, a show featuring John Goodman about four Senators in DC who live in a house together, as well as Betas. Betas tells the story of startups trying to make it in the world and stars Ed Begley Jr.

How much of Tumblr is porn, and what is Yahoo going to do about it? On the latter, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer spoke to its plans for addressing content that is not “brand safe” earlier this morning on a call about its $1.1 billion acquisition of the site, saying that Yahoo will need to have “good tools for retargeting,” and will “monetize in a way that is tasteful.” But as for the former, it’s often been something of a black box – there simply wasn’t publicly available data. However, now, we may have some answers. According to an analysis of Tumblr’s 200,000 most-visited domains, 22,775 of them are adult – or 11.4 percent. The analysis was performed by web measurement firm SimilarGroup, a company which raised $2.5 million earlier this year with the intention of competing with Alexa’s stronghold in web rankings. The measurement firm analyzed the volume of visits to these adult subdomains, and found that 16.6 percent of the traffic that visits Tumblr takes place on adult blogs. In addition, 22.37 percent of incoming referral traffic from external sites to Tumblr is from adult websites, making that the leading category for referrals. Meanwhile, 8.02 percent of outbound traffic from Tumblr goes to adult websites. Below are some screenshots from SimilarWeb Pro, which shows Tumblr data from the past year (May 2012 to April 2013), detailing the breakdown of referrals and outgoing links: Neither Tumblr nor Yahoo responded to requests for comment, as of publication time. Tumblr’s secret to successful growth back in the early days, was in fact, its adult content. In some circles (read: mainstream users, typically men), it’s what the site is still known for today. Anecdotally, this is the kind of thing I hear all the time when I bring up Tumblr among members of this not-so-tech-savvy group: “Oh, you mean that porn site?” Uh-huh. To be fair, any site that relies on user-generated content is going to have a porn problem – even Instagram and Pinterest get dirty at times. But Tumblr seems to be better known for it than the others. Still, Mayer is right – it’s a matter of targeting Tumblr’s ads correctly when they do go live, to make sure that porn and brands are not living side-by-side on the same page. All Things D broke down why Tumblr’s porn stash is not a problem for Yahoo, explaining that Tumblr’s ads appear in the sidebar of

Las Vegas-based apparel retailer Zappos rolled out an update to its iOS app today that saw the company fold some neat new features into the mix. Strictly speaking though , it's no drastic overhaul -- the Zappos mobile team instead focused largely on improving the fit and finish of their iOS-centric mobile experience. There are a few new graphical flourishes here and there (users can now change the animal that appears when adding an item to their cart), and user order history is much more visual than it was in days past -- it now integrates images into the mix rather than forcing users to jump into each order.

If the last few years have all been about building compelling mobile-first or mobile-only experiences, the latest trend seems to be bringing those experiences back to the web. (Just look at Instagram!) Anyway, with that in mind, social TV startup Dijit became the latest to follow this lead, with the launch of NextGuide Web.

Last fall, fashion commerce startup Monogram launched an iPad app that was aiming to be kind of like a mobile, shoppable magazine for those hip to fashion. It had all the makings of a great mobile commerce app: It looked good, it was easy to use, and it allowed viewers to buy all the latest fashions really easily.