Pearltrees, a company offering a novel interface for sharing and finding content, has raised 5 million euros ($6.7 million US) in new funding.

The basic unit of the Pearltrees service is the pearl, which is basically a bookmark. Users can assemble these pearls into trees based around a topic. Meanwhile, Pearltrees is using that data to determine how different topics and bookmarks are related, and allows users to find new pearls (related to whatever topic they’re exploring) through its “related interests” button.

Following the lead from Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s EdgeRank, Pearltrees has named its technology TreeRank. In essence, it’s offering its own version of the “interest graph”, a goal that many startups are chasing. In the funding press release, CEO Patrice Lamothe says Pearltrees “leveraged social curation to create an open and collaborative interest graph of the Web.”

Pearltrees launched in December 2009, and the company says it has been growing consistently at 15 percent per month, and that users have now created 15 million pearls which were assembled into 2 million trees. The startup reached 1 million unique visitors adding up to 30 million pageviews last month. Lamothe tells me that the company’s goals for 2012 include continued multi-platform development (it’s already available on the Web and for the iPad, with an iPhone app coming soon), an API, and beginning the move to HTML5.

Previous investor Groupe Accueil led the new round.

For Valentine’s Day, Google has created one of its most ambitious Doodles yet. When you click on the Google logo today, you get to watch a one-minute animation showing the highs and lows of young love — and illustrating that Google can’t solve everything.

I’ve embedded a video of the Doodle below, and if you like it, much of the credit goes to Michael Lipman, an animator whose past work includes Happy Tree Friends, and who was hired by the Doodle team to turn their animatic storyboard into a full-length animation. Lipman told me that it was definitely an intense project — an animation of this length would normally him take nine or 10 weeks, but when Google approached him in mid-January, they gave him three.

“When Google calls and says, ‘Drop everything, we want you to create somethign that’s going to be seen by hundreds of millions of people,’ you heed that call,” Lipman said.

The idea of weekends, or of a 9-5 workday, went out the window. Instead, it was constant animating. Lipman said that while Google’s artists (specifically Willie Real) had already come up with the designs and the story, they were also collaborative, allowing him to add his own flourishes. For example, the moment when the balloon animal pops about 30 seconds in? That’s Lipman.

He also pointed out that the song playing underneath the animation is Tony Bennett’s cover of “Cold, Cold Heart” — a nice touch, because Bennett is supposedly a fan of the Doodles and wanted to get involved.

Long-form Doodles from the past include those celebrating John Lennon’s, Freddie Mercury’s, and Charlie Chaplin’s birthdays. (Of course, “long form” is relative, but a 1- or 2-minute video is certainly more ambitious than a standard Doodle.) Lipman said he hopes Google does more like this in the future — and, of course, that they hire him to do the animating. In some ways, he said the job reminded him of the tech scene a decade ago, when there more companies willing to show “patronage” for digital animators.

“The coolest thing, after having worked in online games for the last 10 years, is it was a wonderful return to storytelling,” Lipman said. “It felt like a Valentine for me.”

Online payments platform and PayPal competitor WePay is announcing its growth data for 2011, and revealing details on the startup’s product strategy for 2012. In case you aren’t familiar, WePay is a Y Combinator backed startup that launched in 2009 to take the hassle out of group paying. Unlike some of its competitors, the service was able to dead simple way to collect, manage and spend money for groups.

On WePay, you can create a unique, FDIC insured account for each group. While the account is still associated with your name, but you can keep each group account totally separate from your personal transactions. Group money can essentially be kept separate from any individual accounts you may have. You can also designate specific individuals to have control over accounts.

But as co-founder Bill Clerico tells me, last year the payments platform evolved into a broader offering, allowing any merchant or user a simple way to accept payments beyond just the group model. “We believe the benefit of using WePay is around simplicity of user experience and great customer service,” says Clerico. He explains that users can sign up with Facebook Connect, and WePay underwrites the risk of these individuals accepting payment by looking at their online presence, and social connections to evaluate risk.

Last year, the startup, which is processing several million dollars in payment volume per month, started listening to customer feedback and launched a number of new products to add to the platform, including WePay Stores. The feature lets any site integrate a payments storefront by inserting an embed code. WePay also launched an API as well.

The company grew nearly ten times in revenue in 2011, and doubled headcount with 20 new employees (the company plans to double employees again this year). WePay also grew revenue generated by its API by 15x in 2011. Partners like GoFundMe, which replaced PayPal with WePay as its primary payment platform, are helping fuel this growth, says the startup.

Social media is a big driver for WePay. About half of all WePay payments were initiated through social media. More than 25,000 people and organizations have collected donations and over 250,000 invoices have been paid through WePay in 2011. And almost $800,000 was collected using WePay from 806 Occupy Wall Street-related accounts.

WePay says that it exited 2011 at a multi-million dollar revenue run rate and a compounded monthly growth rate of 30 percent since launch.

As for what’s next, Clerico says that mobile is an area where WePay has not yet explored and will launch mobile apps in the coming year. And WePay, which has raises $7.5 million in funding, could be on track for raising another round. Clerico tells us that much of the earlier investment in the company is still in the bank, but the company may raise new funds for expansion and growth purposes.

Brazilian social gaming giant Vostu is laying off an undisclosed number of employees, we’ve learned. Vostu, which has raised $46 million from Intel Capital, Accel Partners, General Catalyst, and Tiger Technology Global Management; is one largest social gaming companies in Latin America. The gaming company was founded in 2007 by three Harvard classmates: CEO Daniel Kafie, chief scientist Mario Schlosser, and Joshua Kushner.

It’s unclear what’s caused the layoffs but Vostu is fresh off of a settlement with Zynga over copyright issues. As we’ve reported in the past, Zynga hit Vostu with a massive lawsuit in June of 2011, alleging that the company was copying Zynga’s games. In fact, Zynga alleged that Vostu was copying Zynga’s games so closely that they even inadvertently included the bugs.

Vostu then claimed that Zynga has copied other games repeatedly over the years, including Zynga’s hit game Cityville. Zynga then sued shareholder Google over the dispute, because Orkut, which is popular in Brazil, was hosting the Vostu games that Zynga said were ripoffs.

In December, both companies issued a statement that they had settled the copyright lawsuits and counterclaims against each other in the legal systems in the United States and Brazil. As part of the settlement, Vostu made a monetary payment to Zynga and made changes to four of its games.

Perhaps the layoffs could be a result of the settlement and the legal costs associated with the matter. But Vostu has reportedly been growing in terms of traffic, and launched four mobile games over the past two months (and the company has said that 25 percent of all internet-connected Brazilians play its games). Next month, the company plans to launch two additional games.

We’ve reached out to Vostu for confirmation and will update this post when we hear back.

Television is going the way of the dinosaur, and the deadly comet is called BitTorrent Live. Today, Bram Cohen, the author of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer sharing protocol, demoed his latest creation at the SF MusicTech Summit.

BitTorrent Live lets any content owner or publisher stream video to millions of people at good quality and with just a few seconds of latency…for free or cheap. Sports, news events, simulcast TV shows, education, video conferencing, or uncensored war zone broadcasts — this technology will power the future of video.

“My goal is to kill off television” Cohen said during the SF MusicTech demo session I hosted. Afterwards he explained to me in rhyme, “Television’s physical infrastructure is inevitably going to go away, but TV as a mode of content consumption is here to stay.” Essentially, people love what they see on television, but want it accessible from the web.

The shift to online streaming has been stalled, though, because of the cost of set up, bandwidth, and servers compared to television infrastructure like cable wires and satellites that are already bought and paid for.

With BitTorrent Live, soon it won’t just be The White House and the Super Bowl streaming their content. Netflix and Hulu could potentially use BitTorrent Live to reduce their costs. Established streaming vendors like Ustream and Livestream who charge per viewer and have limits should be afraid too. This disruptive P2P tech could blow the doors of streaming open to publishers of any scale.

BitTorrent Live sidesteps the infrastructure cost by having viewers stream the content to each other like they’d torrent a download instead of pulling video from a central source. Cohen tells me he’s spent 3 years hacking on BitTorrent Live, “It’s a difficult engineering problem, and I’ve figured it out.” Now the protocol can offload 99% of the data transfer to users and achieve just a 5-second delay even with millions of viewers.

That’s fast enough to support interactive elements like chat and Twitter feeds. The only catch is that viewing BitTorrent Live content requires a one-time download, and after that is just works quietly through your browser.

Cohen tells me those not looking to profit from their streams will be able to utilize BitTorrent Live at no cost, “It fits the DNA of what BitTorrent is about because it’s open and free.” Meanwhile, those showing ads will pay a cheap licensing fee rather than the “millions of dollars” they pay now.

An SDK to work with the proprietary protocol is in the works.BitTorrent is now asking content publishers to contact them at live-studio@bittorrent.com to help test their tech. Cohen says he’s already been approached by TV studios who want BitTorrent Live to bring their shows online cheaply.

“Sending content over the airwaves excels…if you want space aliens to watch your content.” If you want to cheaply reach humans across the globe, summon BitTorrent Live.

[Image Credit: The hilarious Perry Bible Fellowship]

In what may, in a couple years, be remembered as a telltale remark of overconfidence, Samsung’s AV product manager said today in an interview “TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration.” Pride goeth before a fall, Samsung!

It’s true in a way. But only in the dumbest possible way. Yes, TVs are about picture quality. Because that’s all Samsung and Sony and Sharp have been willing to improve for the last half a century. As soon as someone comes along and changes what TVs are “ultimately about,” it’s going to be a bloodbath. Will it be Apple? I don’t know. But it sure as hell doesn’t look like it’s going to be Samsung.

To be fair, the AV product manager (his name is Chris Moseley) isn’t paid to have a lateral point of view. But his orders do come from on high, and if they say they want twice the contrast ratio of the competition and that’s what they’re selling on, well by god that’s what the AV product manager will arrange. And that’s what on high has been ordering since the TV was invented: make it look better. That’s starting to change a bit now, as we saw at CES, but it’s going to take a while to turn this ship around. The experimental stuff they’re showing off is going to be years behind anything put out by a big, UX-heavy company like Apple or a smaller, more agile one like Boxee.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a good picture. But LCD-based TVs, which will probably remain the standard for at least five or ten more years, are kind of peaking right now. You can buy a TV for under five hundred bucks that’s 90% as good as the five-thousand-dollar one. And furthermore, it’s already ten times better than what you could get for the same price a few years ago.

And add to this the fact that many people don’t understand, recognize, or even care about the difference between 720p and 1080p, to say nothing of 4K or HDR or local dimming or what have you. Moseley teases Apple, saying “they don’t have 10,000 people in R&D in the vision category.” And what have those 10,000 researchers, and their counterparts at Sharp and Toshiba and the rest, done for them lately? TV sales are down, nobody cares about 3D, and everybody wonders why it’s so hard to get content for their big screen.

People are curious about Roku and Boxee Box. Netflix Streaming has reinvented home movies. And the big TV companies are, contrary to Mosely’s suggestion, realizing that the way you interact with the content is becoming as important as the content itself.

And it’s here that Apple (and Google, and Netflix, and Hulu) have a leg up on Samsung. Sure, Samsung has 10,000 researchers putting together slightly better TVs every year. But TVs aren’t ultimately about picture quality, they’re about what that great picture quality is showing. The other guys have been working on that piece for years.

Picture quality is going to take a much-needed break while more important things take its place among the yearly updates and spec points. And as long as Samsung is of the opinion that how things look is the only metric worth considering, they’re going to be paying someone else for those new features.

Shares of Apple (AAPL) closed above $500 today for the first time, ending the day at $502.60. Apple, the world’s most valuable company, now boasts a market capitalization of almost $470 billion. That is up 9 points from yesterday’s close, and up more than 80 from where the stock was the day Apple announced its impressive quarter on January 24th. Everybody was blown away by the numbers.

The $500 mark is a psychological milestone. But many Apple bulls have been predicting it. What you need to look at really is the market cap. And while $470 billion is astounding, it is not unprecedented (during the 1990s boom, companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and GE reached that height). Also, it is important to remember that Apple holds nearly $100 billion in cash. Without that cash, it’s market value presumably would be less.

In fact, Apple’s share price moves in lockstep with its ever-increasing cash position. Horace Dediu at Asymco has plotted out the correlation between the stock price and Apple’s cash. According to Dediu’s calculations, Apple’s stock hit $500 right on schedule.

Just hours after the European Commission announced their approval of Google’s $12.5 billion Motorola purchase, the United States Department of Justice has announced that they too have given the deal their blessing.

With this, Google is one step closer to closing the deal, although they’re still waiting on approval from China, Taiwan, and Israel before the transaction can officially be completed.

According to the DoJ’s Antitrust Division, who conducted the investigation, the purchase was “not likely to significantly change existing market dynamics” or “substantially lessen competition.”

That isn’t to say that they didn’t have their concerns though — like the European Commission, the Justice Department will continue to keep their eyes on Google for any signs of patent abuse. Reuters reports that the DoJ “would not hesitate to take enforcement action” in the case that Google were to manipulate the licensing of standard essential patents to their own advantage.

But let’s back up a minute here: what does that actually mean? Standard essential patents (also known as SEPs) are patents granted for technologies that are required to meet an industry standard. LTE, for example, is a networking standard for the wireless industry, and quite a few patented processes and technologies are required to make it work properly.

Because those standards in question are often ones that rival manufacturers need to make use of, companies that hold SEPs are usually made to license them under what are called RAND (reasonable and nondiscriminatory) or FRAND (fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory) terms by the organizations that create the standards in the first place. As you could probably guess, RAND/FRAND licensing terms are meant to ensure that the companies that have to license those technologies don’t get the shaft because some rival of theirs was originally granted the patent.

Being a major player in the mobile space thanks to the Android operating system, Google stands to pick up roughly 17,000 patents from Motorola Mobility when the purchase is complete. The Justice Department and the European Commission are fully aware that once Google has access to all of Motorola’s SEPs, they’ll be able to effectively screw other companies with unfair licensing costs. With all those new patents, Google has much more ammo they could use to screw rivals like Apple.

Of course, being able to do something and actually doing it are two completely different things. With both the European Commission and the U.S. Justice Department sniffing around, Google would never be able to pull off a feat without raising major eyebrows. Not that they’d want to anyway — for a company that prides itself on not being evil, using patents to stifle innovation seems patently un-Google. Even so, expect the rest of the bodies that Google need approval from to take a similarly tough stance on the patent issue.

Droid 4 reviews are popping up everywhere. We’re doing ours a little different. Instead of posting a “review” after spending just 24 hours with the phone like other sites, we’re living with it for a week, publishing several articles on it and then concluding with a full review after actually living with the phone for a while. But one thing was clear even before the phone launched: Motorola messed up forgoing a removable battery for a meaningless reduction in thickness.

The original Droid started the Android revolution. It was the anti-iPhone: an open OS, sliding QWERTY keyboard, available on Verizon and featured a removable battery and expandable memory. Now many of those advantages are moot points. Android is no longer viewed as open, most people are sold on virtual keyboards, the iPhone is available everywhere, and now, thanks to Motorola, the Droid 4 features a built-in battery. Sorry, power users.

You see, Motorola, like every other phone maker is racing to produce the thinnest phone possible. Apparently they feel thinner phones will result in more sales and/or street cred. I don’t know. But it’s silly. Phones are already thin enough — I know how that sounds. But think about it: The Droid 3 is 12.9mm thick where the Droid 4 is 12.7mm thick. Even the Droid RAZR MAXX, with it’s extra-large battery, is still a slim phone in my opinion. It’s 9mm thick verses 7.1mm of the standard RAZR. The difference is hardly noticeable even when the phones are sitting next to each other. You’ll never notice it when it’s in your pocket.

The Droid 4 does feature a larger battery than its older counterpart. The phone is also more powerful and packs a slightly larger screen. But none of those things counter the mistake of not including a removable battery even if the Droid 4 is a marvelous piece of hardware. The new keypad is fantastic and so is the updated sliding action. It’s completely possible that Moto engineers decided to permanently affix the battery to allow for the improved sliding mechanism or something else critical to the redesigned phone. But in doing so, the phone loses a major selling point even if it’s an under-utilized feature.

I’d venture to say that the vast majority of users never buy extended batteries for their phones. But it’s likely a large portion of owners like the idea, and it’s certainly a nice option to have. There are light users who will probably coast along with the non-removable battery and never experience a problem, while people who lean on their devices more than others could be left in the lurch. I don’t think Motorola made the decision lightly, but the move almost feels like Motorola is trading their power users for wider adoption.

The Android landscape is filled with copycats. Motorola (and others) need to do something to make their phones stand apart. So what are the Droid 4′s selling points? Just the QWERTY keypad and that’s not enough to compete. Sadly the days of the swappable battery are probably numbered. I’d bet my dog Ferrari that the Samsung Galaxy S III and most of 2012′s flagship phones will not have a removable battery.

Bring back the swappable battery for the next Droid, Motorola. A millimeter or two is well worth having a legitimate selling point over the iPhone and other Android phones.

Tools cannot judge of their own use. The hammer does not rebel at striking pavement, the brush recoil at distasteful composition. This is true of the internet and its tools as well. What is bittorrent? A way to easily transfer large files between peers. Used by many people in legitimate ways, by pirates for illicit purposes. Bittorrent can’t choose to allow one and deny the other. If it could, it would no longer be a tool.

What is Reddit? A way for millions of people to collaboratively promote links and discuss them more or less anonymously. Used by many people in legitimate ways, and by pedophiles for illicit purposes. Reddit has decided to be more proactive in their policing of the site. If Reddit ever was truly a tool, it isn’t any longer.

Not that this is a bad thing, exactly. It’s just not going to work. To paraphrase Churchill, this was the worst thing Reddit could do, except for every thing they could have done.

Some people are worried that it’s a slippery slope thing. First, they came for the pedophiles, that kind of thing. Or a free speech thing. Where can I safely discuss the superiority of the Aryan race with a community of like-minded bigots?

Really, though, the practical changes are minimal. Reddit is banning and more carefully enforcing existing bans on child pornography. That’s more or less the entire thing. Reddit is unlikely to break its appeal by “ban creep,” looking for more and more reasons to mow down their community. They’re not like that. They’ll play whack-a-mole with kiddie porn subreddits until either the bad guys stop coming to Reddit or they find some way to exist without being shut down. In either case we’ll stop hearing about it, and in either case it’s just a drop removed from the bucket.

Their other options aren’t any better. Just do the minimum legal required? The world will look at Reddit as a cesspool instead of the vibrant community of communities that it truly is. And they can’t mess with the basic idea of the site by restricting the creation of subreddits or other changes to the mechanics.

The danger to Reddit is a little more subtle than these immediate, practical concerns. The danger is that they will no longer be viewed as a tool, a machine through which people can trade things. Now there is a ghost in the machine, and the ghost is watching. What if the creators of Bittorrent altered the protocol irreversibly so that it would detect child porn being transferred? You’d say good, I’m not a pedophile and this isn’t a problem for me, so no worries. But you’d also view Bittorrent differently, not the organization, but the tool. It would, like Reddit, have changed its aspect in a fundamental way.

In the meantime, the world is not changing. It’s a terrible world and a terrible internet, and no matter what you do, create, or promote, someone will find a way to use it for something awful and hateful. People are like that. And the better the tools, the better with which to commit misdeeds. The greater the edifice, the greater the shadow it casts – and the internet is the greatest edifice of our time.

But the world was built, and will continue to be built, by tools that don’t question their use. It doesn’t mean that something like Reddit (or Twitter, or Facebook, or Flickr) can’t be useful, powerful, and popular. But it’s important to recognize the difference between tools and things that are useful. It’s useful to have a permit, rubber-stamped and recognized by the powers that be, when you’re building a house, but you don’t build a house with a permit. For that, you need a hammer.