One of the most prestigious startup awards in the world is the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers Program. Winners are chosen by a group of global technolology experts. Just to be nominated is an achievement, and this year 26 companies were selected from over 300 applications and nominations.Past Tech Pioneers include 23andme (2008), Amyris Biotechnologies (2006), Dr Reddy Laboratories (2001), Google (2001), Gridpoint (2008), Kaspersky Lab (2001), Mozilla Corporation (2007), Nanosolar (2007), Recyclebank (2009) and Silver Spring Networks (2008).The 2010 WEF Tech Pioneers: Amiando, Amobee, Aura Biosciences, BioFuelBox, Bloom Energy Corporation, Boston-Power, Care Electric Energia, CollabNet, Corventis, Dilithium Networks, Epuramat, eSolar, Innovid, Lehigh Technologies, Metabolix, MicroCHIPS, Obopay, Pacific Biosciences, Playfish, Proteon Therapeutics, RingCentral, Serious Materials, StreamBase, Twitter, Ushahidi and VNL.

  Log on to Friendster today and you'll see a background image that says 'Watch this face! ... on December 4'. Turns out the pioneering social network is in for a major revamp tomorrow, including a new logo, tagline ("Connecting Smiles") and an entirely fresh look.Friendster outlines some of the changes in a video (embedded below), in which it calls out other social networks (*cough* Facebook and *cough* MySpace) for being plain and boring. My absolute favorite part of the video: "I mean, if everyone's there, woop de doo".

  The day you got your brand new iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre, or Motorola Droid, there's a fair chance you thought your days of endless loading screens was behind you. After all, each of these comes equipped with a high-powered processor capable of running 3D games and multitasking. Yet the loading screens persist. Operating system shortcomings aside, one of the biggest culprits is actually out of your phone's hands entirely: the fault lies with backend server calls, as the apps you're using request data from online servers. Sonoa Systems, the company behind Apigee, thinks it has the answer. It has built a cloud based service designed to helps companies optimize the data being sent to their mobile apps. And it says it can make these load times up to ten times faster.Sonoa's Mobile App Accelerator is based off of Amazon's EC2. Developers send data through Sonoa as a proxy, which is in turn routed to mobile apps requesting the data. The proxy service optomizes using advanced caching and by automatically paginating data. In other words the company says it can send data to phones "drip by drip", rather than as a large download that can be time consuming to fetch.

  Comcast and General Electric announced early this morning that they agreed to form a joint venture that will be 51 percent owned by Comcast and 49 percent by GE. The joint venture, which will consist of the NBC Universal businesses and Comcast’s cable networks, regional sports networks and more, will be managed by the newly formed Comcast Entertainment Group (CEG).GE will contribute to the joint venture NBCU’s businesses valued at $30 billion, including its cable networks, filmed entertainment, televised entertainment, theme parks, and unconsolidated investments, subject to $9.1 billion in debt. Comcast will put in its cable networks (including E!, Versus and the Golf Channel), its ten regional sports networks, and certain digital media properties, collectively valued at $7.25 billion. Comcast has also agreed to pay GE approximately $6.5 billion in cash.

  Twitter's Retweet functionality, which has caused so much consternation appears to have disappeared not long after it was introduced last month.The Retweets area in the right side bar has gone and the RT function button on people's profiles has gone as well. The design of the Retweet feature created huge confusion over how RTs were attributed, plus different client applications treated RTs differently. Retweets of these retweets were even worse.

  Just before Thanksgiving we broke the news that Canopy Financial was cooking its books. Everyone involved tried to point the finger to someone else. Well, now the SEC has weighed in with lawsuit alleging fraud on the part of Canopy and one of its co-founders Jeremy Blackburn, who was the COO. He misled investors about Canopy's financial condition when raising a $75 million round. When the fund-raising was complete, he paid off existing investors to the tune of $40 million, and took about $1.7 million for himself, according to the complaint (embedded below).

  The whole idea of using your mobile phone's camera view as a screen on top of which to add geo-specific information (also known as augmented reality) is one of the more exciting areas in the world of mobile apps. Amsterdam-based Layar, one of the companies at pushing the boundaries of this growing movement, just released Layar 3.0, which offers a whole slew of new ways to layer data onto the real world as seen through your phone.The company opened up its augmented reality browser to developers last summer and more recently added 3D capabilities. In a blog post, the company details how developers are using its augmented reality platform.

  Somedays, it seems like Facebook Connect is slowly taking over the web. It's becoming so ubiquitous that it's more surprising now to find a site that doesn't allow you to log-in with your Facebook credentials. Seeing this, Google has been taking steps to make its own similar platform, Friend Connect, more social. And today they've quietly launched a pretty big feature: Twitter integration.Starting immediately, if a site has Friend Connect installed, a user can log-in using either their Google account or their Twitter account. And if they've logged in with their Twitter credentials, their username and profile picture are passed through OAuth back to Friend Connect. More importantly, it means that you can easily tweet with the click of a button (to invite friends to check out the site). And any comment they leave on that site can be automatically tweeted out.

  MOG may well be hitting a sweet spot with its All Access service, but it's only available in the United States for now. Its most obvious competitor, MySpace Music, was too (apart from Australia and New Zealand) until a minute ago when the company made its official debut in the United Kingdom just over a year and two months after it was launched stateside.Looks like the Telegraph's sources were only a couple of months off, ultimately.Anyway, MySpace users in the UK can now enjoy the same free, ad-supported service our American, Australian and Kiwi friends have had for a while: fully licensed audio and video content from major and indie artists that can be streamed on the social network for free, personalized music players and user & artist playlisting features, in addition to monetization opportunities and access to analytics and charts tools for all artists.

  We've been tracking the progress of Meebo's Community IM bar for a long time now: it was announced back in July 2008, started rolling out in October 2008, and is now exposed to nearly 100 million people worldwide on dozens of partner sites. Clearly it's making good progress, but since launch the options available to publishers for customizing the bar have been quite limited — you basically had to use Meebo's default layout and buttons, and couldn't include any custom links. Today Meebo is a launching a new Programming API that changes this, allowing publishers to make significant changes to the community bar.Up until now, the Meebo bar has always consisted of a Chat area in the far right (similar to Facebook Chat), a share button in the far left, and occasionally an ad on the left as well. Now, publishers will be able to introduce their own menus and buttons. For example, I could include a button that listed the top five most popular posts on TechCrunch. Publishers have full control over what they show in their menus or widgets, so there's plenty of room for creativity.

  Today at their Bing Fall Release event, Microsoft showed off some nice updates to their search engine, including further information about how the much anticipated Twitter and Facebook data integration will work. But by far the most interesting thing they showed was the new beta version of Bing Maps. While it looked very nice, the real reason why it was so interesting is what it requires: Silverlight.This news comes just days after Google's revelation (thanks, in part, to our story on the upcoming Chrome for Mac beta) that they were backing away from supporting Gears in the future, in favor of HTML5. Gears is the software that Google created to allow users to use their applications while not connected to the web. But it's also a plug-in (for all browsers except Google's own Chrome for the PC). This is a big barrier to entry for many users. And it's something that creates problems developing apps around it if say,a user doesn't have Gears installed.So it's good to see Google step away from a plug-in even if it's no longer proprietary (originally called "Google Gears," they have since open-sourced it). And it makes what Microsoft is doing even more frustrating.

  As mobile platform makers grant more and more system functionality to their browsers, the once distinct lines between native applications and web applications are beginning to blur. Over the past few months, HTML5 and other advances in web technology have allowed developers on various smartphone platforms to access to GPS coordinates, accelerometer data, and more. Plenty of limitations still exist (it's still mostly impossible to access the microphone/camera on most smartphones from the browser, for example), but one big hurdle might be on the way out: hardware-based acceleration, otherwise known as the goods required for graphic-heavy gaming.

  Back in October, we reported on a new design Google was testing out for its homepage. In short, the design takes Google's minimalist approach to an extreme, removing everything from the homepage except for the Google logo, the search box, and the two buttons beneath it. Upon moving your mouse the rest of the site's UI elements fade back into view. At the time I thought it was just one of Google's many experiments that never get launched to the public, but it seems like they're taking this one seriously: Google has just announced that they're rolling out the fade-in design to everyone.

  TechStars startup ReTel Technologies just raised $1 million in seed funding from SoftTech VC, Hyde Park Angels, FF Angel, Maples Investments, eonBusiness and Zelkova Ventures. The funds will be used for product development and to expand ReTel’s engineering and sales teams.ReTel's flagship product, ConstantAudit, provides video surveillance analysis for stores and restaurants. The startup uses security camera feeds to deliver interesting metrics and data such as table cleanliness, service times, and employee activities. ReTel delivers human tested analytics using paid micro-tasks on services like Mechanical Turk to break down data from the videos. This enables the company to deliver sophisticated reports that include data points such as male vs. female ratios, instances of theft by employees, and other actions that only humans can get right.