1. Raising of crowd-moving startups like Groupon
Social commerce startup LivingSocial this morning announced that it has acquired a majority stake in Europe’s Let’s Bonus (which sounds an awful lot like “let’s bone us”, but I digress). The partnership brings LivingSocial operations to a total of ten countries, with the addition of Let’s Bonus’ Spain, Italy, Portugal, Argentina and Mexico presences. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

LivingSocial says it now boasts more than 16 million subscribers, is live in more than 170 markets, and is projected to book in excess of $500 million in revenue in 2011.

Launched in September 2009 in Barcelona, Let’s Bonus was one of the first European companies to ride the group buying wave. The startup offers daily deals with discounts of up to 70% on activities like gourmet dinners, luxury spas and romantic escapes.

Let’s Bonus has a team of more than 200 employees and now has offices in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Rome, Milan, Lisbon, Buenos Aires and Mexico.

Last year, LivingSocial acquired adventure company Urban Escapes, and launched three new verticals including LivingSocial Escapes, a travel site that offers savings on curated adventures, LivingSocial Family Edition and Campus Deals. In addition, LivingSocial has expanded its reach in Australia with a controlling stake in Jump On It.

Expansion though acquisition or entire companies and majority stakes of course mirrors the way rival Groupon is planting its flags all over the world as well, so this move takes the competition between both group buying sites global.

LivingSocial has raised $232 million in funding to date, most recently securing a $175 million round from Amazon.

2. Witology - works in the field of collective intelligence / mind.
A blog on Slon.ru Sergei Karelov write about the theory and practice.

It is known that many of the most groundbreaking information technology somehow emerged from the development the Pentagon. The most famous example - creating the Internet. But it was a long time. And what about now? What a surprise future technologies being developed today by the U.S. military?

Everyone has heard all sorts of military robots and other Hollywood horror. And who heard of Network Centric Warfare - being developed by the Pentagon doctrine of warfare in an era when the most effective weapon - it is information and knowledge of the warring parties?

It all began with the famous scientist Millenium Challenge in 2000 and Gen. Paul Van Riper, who headed the armed forces play rival the U.S. (the story is explained in detail in the book, Gladwell "Illumination" in the chapter "The great victory of Paul Van Riper: structuring spontaneity", which is cited below ).

The purpose of these the most expensive in the history of military exercises (their budget - $ 250 million) was to prove the superiority of the new U.S. military doctrine. The essence of the doctrine, in short, that if the U.S. has the most modern means of information support of military operations (satellite surveillance, communications, guidance and interception, supercomputer modeling of the theater of operations, online databases and expert systems to support operations, etc. ), they can easily win any war.

U.S. military exercise led by the so-called Unified Command of the Armed Forces (Joint Forces Command - JFCOM). Planning military exercises Millenium Challenge began in the summer of 2000. JFCOM attracted to the work of hundreds of military analysts, experts and programmers. During the exercises in the U.S. "your" is always referred to as "blue", and the enemy - "red". Click the "Reds" was asked to lead the said Paul Van Riper. The choice of dwell on it for many reasons, but mainly because Van Riper is the exact opposite of this new doctrine. He did not believe that we can dispel the fog enveloping the battlefields.

Not that Van Riper hated any rational analysis, he just thought he was useless in the heat of battle, when the unpredictable logic of war and an acute shortage of time, no possibility for a careful and calm analysis of options.

People are taught to make decisions in a rational manner and verified the procedure. But in real life is not enough time. In fact, nurses and firefighters assessed the situation almost immediately and are based on experience, intuition and a kind of rough interior styling. To Van Riper was a very accurate description of how people make decisions on the battlefield.

Van Riper was convinced that war is inherently unpredictable, messy and non-linear, and redundant information - not an advantage, enough to know very little to distinguish the main feature of a phenomenon.

Van Riper during these exercises had fought against the U.S. army, equipped with all of these systems, satellite observations, communications, targeting and interception, the supercomputer simulation of the theater of operations, online databases and expert systems to support operations, etc. etc.

But in the end exercises Van Riper soundly defeated "the U.S. troops, oppose them with just two principles:

1. truly successful solutions based on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking;

2. to make good decisions to a limited number of initial information.

Taken together, these two principles, according to Van Riper, create an environment optimal for rapid cognition. Knowledge needed for a collective solution to the problem in conditions of limited information available and the time available for its solution.

"The defeat of U.S. forces on maneuvers Millenium Challenge was taken into account when creating the ad hoc expert group of the Pentagon's Information Superiority Metrics Working Group. Research Report of the Center Understanding Information Age Warfare, among the authors who, in addition to troops from JFCOM, were representatives of the U.S. government, DARPA and several other national research centers, allowed to review approaches to planning and conducting military operations.

In place of approaches based only on the dull technological superiority over the enemy, have proposed a new doctrine - Network Centric Warfare. It includes a control circuit warfare human beings, organized and interacting in network-centric principles. This creates an environment that is optimal for rapid cognition.

And is it possible to apply the Network Centric approach (and architecturally, and methodologically) to the solution is not military but civilian tasks? Of course, you can: on the one hand, the structuring of knowledge network communities and the search of solutions to the complex inter-and trans-disciplinary problems, on the other - structuring spontaneity and intuition, encouraging members online communities. So it is not possible that Network-Centric approach, rather than fighting robots, will become the new breakthrough technology areas, the birth of whom had a direct bearing on the Pentagon's experts.


3. For The First Time, Android Surpasses iOS Mobile

This has been a significant few weeks for Millennial Media. The ad network just closed a $27.5 million investment round, announced that the company had tripled its revenue in 2010, and today, is releasing one of its more noteworthy monthly reports. Millennial, whose ads reach 63 million of a total of 77 million mobile web users in the U.S., or 81 percent of the U.S. mobile web; is reporting that for the first time in the company’s history Android surpassed iOS as the largest Smartphone OS on the Millennial network in terms of impression share.

Android OS impression share saw an 8% increase month-over-month and a 46% impression share on the network in December, compared to iOS’ 32% share (which is down by 6% from November). RIM followed with a 16% impression share for December, down by 3 percent from last month.