Investment giant Fidelity is getting into the mobile game with a new iPhone app. Fidelity's free app allows you to monitor your portfolio, trades, research investments, and follow daily market news on the go. With the app, you can track your portfolio and monitor positions, balances, and intraday valuations of accounts. The app also lets you trade stocks, mutual funds, ETFs and options from within the app and lets you check the status of your orders.

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We've been getting a number of tips about the Google App Engine API being down hard, causing a good number of third-party services who depend on it to fail or be downright inaccessible. A quick check on API-status, which tracks that sort of thing, confirmed the service disruption. The outage was also confirmed by the App Engine team in a Google Groups discussion, making it clear this wasn't a scheduled event.

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Looking at blogs and news sites across the web, it's clear that many have robust communities with eager, intelligent people looking to contribute. But up until recently, the only way most sites (particularly blogs) allow users to share their thoughts is through comments, which work well enough, but certainly aren't always perfect. Grogger is a new service that looks to help sites tap into this community knowledge, allowing you to build a site that includes posts written by both you and your audience. At its core, Grogger is an easy-to-use blogging platform, but rather than only exposing its editing tools to a handful of site administrators, they're shown to everyone. When a user comes to your Grogger site and writes an entry (called a Grog), you can have it directly posted to your blog, or added to a moderation queue, where your site administrators can approve it.

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Two law firms, Beck & Lee from Miami and The Weston Firm in San Diego, have filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court alleging unfair business practices by local business review and rating website operator Yelp. The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review.

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Every entrepreneur is familiar with the moment. The moment when you stumble across an annoying problem - a problem that you'd pay money to solve - and suddenly a synapse fires in your brain. "Holy crap, if I'd pay money to solve this, so would other people. There's a business here!". It's the moment that has kick started a million businesses and generated billions of dollars over the decades. And on Sunday evening, not for the first time in what I laughingly call my career, I experienced it.

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Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9, the day Buzz launched. This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on more than 600,000 Websites and gives you the option to share content through more than 200 services. So it is only a proxy for total sharing on Google Reader, but a decent one. Google Reader still barely registers when compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31 percent and 8 percent of all sharing via AddThis, respectively. But Buzz is definitely giving it a boost.

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What the deuce? It seems that the new iPad SDK 3.2 Beta 3 has some very interesting bits of code and UI components that point to a front facing camera - a boolean called hasFrontCamera - and a boolean for a flash LED (not Adobe Flash) called hasFlash. There are also two buttons in the interface for accepting and declining video chats. Now remember: the iPad has a little spot for a front-facing camera in it already but all signs point to the fact that it won't be implemented in this first version. Unless there's some amazing October surprise that pops up when they ship final hardware, don't expect to be comm-screening with J.F. Sebastian using your futuristic videophone this time around.

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It's the type of scenario that keeps even the most seasoned entrepreneurs up at night. Your startup toils away for months on a new product or feature and - boom - a giant like Google comes along and walks all over it. That appears to be the case for Dublin-based music video site, Muzu TV (see previous TCEU coverage), which today launched its new music video jukebox feature. A sort of Spotify-for-video, it's not too dissimilar from Google-owned YouTube's recent disco beta or 'Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool' to give it its full name.

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IT software giant CA is acquiring cloud computing startup 3Tera. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 3Tera's product, AppLogic, helps enterprises build and deploy cloud-bases applications both to public and private clouds. CA is opening up the purse strings to boost its presence in the cloud. The company recently acquired Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore. 3Tera allows companies to provision, deploy and scale public and private cloud computing environments. 3Tera also makes it easy for service providers to offer application stacks on demand. 3Tera's client base includes 80 enterprises and service providers globally, which use the cloud computing technology to provide services to users

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Mobile question and answer startup ChaCha is on a roll, possibly achieving profitability, raising boatloads of money, and even venturing into social media with a Facebook app. Today, ChaCha is getting into the business listings game with local business search company Localeze. Localeze will provide ChaCha's website with in-depth information about more than 15 million businesses across the country. ChaCha.com visitors can access the local business listings in a search bar and through a direct listings page. In both cases, they will be served a full content page that includes Google maps, directions, phone, and other contact information. And of course, any questions and answers related to the business can be found on the content pages. Business listings can also be viewed by category and or state and city. Eventually, ChaCha's listings will be integrated with its chachacoupons.com site.

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HyTrust, which helps companies manage and control virtual infrastructure, has secured $10.5 million in Series B funding from Granite Ventures and Cisco Systems. Existing investors Trident Capital and Epic Ventures also participated in the round. The latest round of funding brings the HyTrust's total funding to $16 million. HyTrust says it will use the new funding to drive product development and to fuel sales and marketing efforts. HyTrust has developed a policy management system specifically for virtualization, enabling IT departments to control and virtualize servers.

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Passlogix, an enterprise software company focused on simplifying access to company resources, is announcing an authentication product which will allow users to log on to Windows with any type of identification device--including national ID badges, access cards, one-time password tokens, and biometrics. The product, v-GO Universal Authentication Manager, utilizes the customers' existing infrastructure while also leveraging corporate directories; thus lowering the total cost of ownership from an average of $150 per user to $15.

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A new website launches in the UK today that uses "the power of group-buying to save consumers up to 90% off the best things to do, see, eat and buy." Sounds familiar? Yep folks, it's yet another Groupon clone. Only this time, Groupola.com is already making claims to be biggest group buying site in the UK. That's because it's launching simultaneously in 8 of the largest cities across the UK, including London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff and Edinburgh. This makes it immediately standout from rivals such as Berlin-based MyCityDeal and Groupon itself, both of which have a UK reach currently limited to London.

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KODA.us, a social recruitment service for employers to recruit young professionals, has received an additional $1.5 million injection of private angel funding. Back in August last year it raised $1 million in angel funding on top of an existing $2 million, so it now has, you guessed it, $4.5m in capital. KODA wants to bring social networking and job recruiting together into one unified service, claiming that it is "more professional than Facebook but more personal than LinkedIn". The jury is out on whether this market space actually exists.

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Sometimes I despair of Europe, even though I'm proud of what can be achieved here. But really, guys, can we get it together? At the same time the European Union is investigating a pretty flimsy anti-trust complaint against Google, it's conspiciously ignoring a case in Italy where three Google executives have been found guilty on a ridiculous charge. Here is the bizarre story. An Italian court yesterday convicted three (ex) Google executives in a trial over a video showing a teenager being bullied. The Google Italy employees were accused of breaking Italian law by allowing the video of bullying of a teenager with Down's Syndrome to be posted on YouTube in late 2006. Despite the fact that Google removed the video within hours of being notified of its existence, Judge Oscar Magi (pictured) absolved the three of defamation but convicted them of privacy violations. The three executives have received a suspended six-month sentence, while a fourth defendant was acquitted. Google has responded in a justifiably vociferous blog post calling this a "serious threat to the web in Italy". Frankly they are right.

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Former CEO of CBS Interactive Quincy Smith has joined with CBS Interactive EVP Michael Marquez and music industry veteran dealmaker Fred Davis to launch CODE Advisors, a new Silicon Valley and New York based investment bank. As with all investment banks, CODE Advisors will look to advise companies on mergers and acquisitions and capital raising, for a fee. But the company also wants to be a long term partner for buyers and sellers, acting as a sort of outsourced business and corporate development group. This is something most banks promise, but few deliver on. Unless you're a high velocity buyer like Google or Microsoft, in which case you get all the attention you want and more.

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Paris-based Semiocast, which helps brands understand and interact with real-time Web services, has performed a semantic and quantitative study of Twitter based on an analysis of 2.8 million tweets. Turns out roughly half the tweets posted on the micro-sharing service are in English, down 25% from last year, even though the company is based in the U.S. and has more users and momentum in English-speaking countries than anywhere else on the planet.

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Twones started life as a FriendFeed-type service that aggregated various music services into a single stream, which we dubbed a social music feed when we first caught wind of it. Problem was, the startup says, since users generally couldn't play the music on their site and were constantly being directed to third-party websites and apps for streaming, people never really got that FriendFeed experience that would compel them to come back. The Dutch company figured they needed to do something else, and the result of their overhauled strategy will be going live in alpha mode this morning. The short version: it's Delicious-type bookmarking meets StumbleUpon-type discovery for online music.

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Citrix Online has announced the acquisition of Paglo Labs. The deal was completed in early 2010 and no financial terms have been disclosed. Paglo's entire team has joined Citrix Online; Paglo CEO Brian de Haaff is now senior product director, IT Services for Citrix Online. The deal was announced concurrently with the launch of GoToManage, a new Citrix Online Product based on Paglo's software. Citrix Online is a market leader in SaaS web-based technical solutions. Its GoToAssist software allows customers to interact directly with a clients computer, resolving issues remotely. Paglo Labs is a leader in IT Management SaaS. Customers are able to monitor, analyze and manage their devices, networks, server, logs and more.

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Sharpcast’s SugarSync,, an application that synchronizes data across desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, and even televisions, is making it easier for users to backup their data via email. The startup is launching an "Upload by Email" feature that lets users store email attachments in their SugarSync account with the ease of sending an email. The new feature allows a SugarSync user to sync any email attachment to a dedicated folder in their SugarSync account by simply forwarding it to a special email address. Instantly, the file(s) is available on all synced devices and accounts. For example, if a user receives an email with many attachments, they can simply forward it to their SugarSync email address (comprised of random numbers and letters for spam protection). All attachments will transfer to their SugarSync account.For added security, SugarSync will scan all file attachments for viruses prior to syncing, and certain file types are not accepted (e.g., .exe, .cmd, .bat) to prevent malicious files from landing in an account.

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We've gotten word of another departure from MySpace in the wake of CEO Owen Van Natta's firing two weeks ago. The latest to leave is Chris Bissell, MySpace's Chief Software Architect, who has been with the company for over four years. Bissell was one of the few remaining members of MySpace's old guard, which has gradually left (or been fired) from the company since the executive shakeup last spring that removed long-time CEO Chris DeWolfe. Bissell was charged with maintaining MySpace's backend architecture and ensuring that the site scaled to meet demand. MySpace has confirmed that he is leaving the company. The news comes on the heels of the departure of SVP of User Experience and Design Kate Geminder and stream architect Monica Keller, who both left within a week of Van Natta's firing.

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For the past two days, Yahoo has been trying to get me to agree to an embargo on some piece of news they had for tonight. As you probably know, we hate embargoes, so I wasn't about to accept it. Good thing. Not only did the news leak out almost 5 hours early, but actually, Yahoo itself was giving people hints on Twitter all day, and encouraging people to take guesses to break the embargo on Twitter. And yes, the news is a deal with Twitter. So first, the news: Yahoo and Twitter have reached an agreement to share data between their properties. That's great. Yahoo is only a few months behind Google and Microsoft (Bing) doing the same thing. And really, I'm not entirely sure why some kind of special deal was needed. For search, Bing is about to take over the data aspect for Yahoo, and that will very likely include the Twitter data. Meanwhile, Yahoo's frontend elements and services already include Twitter integration, including Flickr. Plus, isn't Facebook Connect handling all the social stuff for Yahoo soon anyway?

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The European Union has opened an antitrust investigation into Google to look into claims made by three European-based Internet companies. Not surprisingly, this key part of the investigation is said to be about search, which is dominated by Google is most of the EU markets. The Telegraph and WSJ have more details. It's important to note that this probe is just a preliminary one, and nothing may come of it. But at least three companies have filed complaints against Google — and notably, one of them is owned by Microsoft. And another one is a member of a group that is partially funded by Microsoft. This is, of course, quite interesting since Microsoft has famously been involved in antitrust investigations for over a decade now in Europe (and previously, of course, the U.S. too). In fact, this whole browser ballot thing is a result of the ongoing EU attempt to make sure Microsoft is playing fairly.

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This is has not been confirmed by either party, but we've heard from multiple sources that European music startup Spotify has closed a venture investment from Founders Fund. Managing Partner Sean Parker, who was a cofounder of Napster and President of Facebook, led the round for Founders Fund, and we believe he may have take a board of directors seat. We do not know the size of the investement; however, we believe it may have been a token amount to get Parker's involvement in the company. The investment was likely done at the same €200 million valuation as the round Spotify raised in late 2009. This is the first U.S. investor in Spotify, and the service is only available in some European countries. A U.S. launch has been broadly anticipated for months.

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Proof that the software that matches ads to content still needs a lot of work: Omaha Steaks pays good money to link their product to heart attacks. Free shipping! Thanks to Jon Finegold at Thinking Screen Media for sending this in.

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