We all know social games are hot right now, and that’s as true in Russia – a large and growing market – as anywhere else. Now Russian online game developer Nival Network has closed a $5 million round from an undisclosed investor but will use the funds to develop Prime World, its online strategy game with social networking features aimed at the Russia and former Soviet countries.

Nival Network is currently majority owned by founder and CEO Sergey Orlovskiy. Software vendor 1C Group owns a 30% stake in Nival Network, reports Quintura.

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This is one of the high flying startups that had a lot of buzz the last couple of years. They’ve raised at least $85 million in venture capital with the help of an investment bank, Financial Technology Partners. Their most recent round, a reported $62.5 million, was funded by Spectrum Equity Investors.

Canopy debuted on the 2009 Inc. 500 List at #12 in terms of the fastest growing private companies in America.

In 2008 CEO Vikram Kashyap said his company had 2007 revenues of $9 million. More recently, we’ve heard, the company was saying they’d hit $60 million in revenue and $9 million or so in EBITDA.

All of this may have been lies.

Until recently all the venture capitalists involved proudly placed Canopy Financial on their portfolio pages. Now all trace of the company have been erased from the portfolio pages of investors GGV Capital, Spectrum Equity and Foundation Capital. And their investment bank has erased them from their trophy page as well. But here’s what these pages looked like very recently:

So what happened? Multiple sources have told us that Canopy was absolutely making up their financial statements, even forging audited statements with fake KMPG letterhead. And somehow the investment bank and all the investors never figured it out.

A call to KPMG before investing tens of millions of dollars would have been a good start, although I have the benefit of hindsight here.

Spectrum took the biggest hit, with their recent $62.5 million investment in the company. And we’re hearing that they’re now suing to try to recover some of that money. One of the early investors, GGVP, may have taken as much as $25 million of the recent round “off the table” from the Spectrum investment, and they’re now a defendant in the lawsuit, says one source.

Canopy’s website right now is a simple information page. All deep links are broken, and the old site has been taken down (we have a screenshot here from a few months ago).

We’ve reached out to just about everyone involved with the company for comment.

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To be fair, Gowalla has had a sort of sub-game based around the dropping and picking up of items (basically, virtual goods) since the beginning. But in the latest build of its iPhone app which hit the App Store today, version 1.3, there are some new gaming aspects. The first is that items now have histories attached to them. This allows you to see who has had an item before you in a city. Looking over some of my items now, it’s actually pretty interesting to see that I know some people who have some of them before me.

While at first the idea behind including items in Gowalla didn’t make sense to me, after meeting with (Gowalla parent) Alamofire CEO Josh Williams, it makes a lot more sense. Aside from this history element, which is interesting, and that different items are of varying scarcities, there is also a plan in place to allow for the items you pick up to be exchanged in real life for actual goods, Williams says. He wasn’t ready to share any specifics just yet, but notes that there are already some interesting proposals on the table to do this. And Gowalla 1.3 is a “bit of a Trojan Horse right now,” for that, he says.

Obviously, the eventual idea behind this is that Gowalla could monetize these transactions. The core concept is similar to what Foursquare is doing with its Mayor Deals, but they too haven’t yet started to monetizing those. With location-based services still in their infancy, all of these services are simply focused on gaining users.

Williams also noted that Gowalla could eventually take a page from Alamofire’s first project, the Facebook app PackRat, and start selling certain items in Gowalla as virtual goods. Williams says they’re just thinking about the idea now, but with the iPhone’s new in-app purchases for free apps, it’s certainly possible.

And there’s another gaming element that Gowalla has added to the latest version of its iPhone app. Now, when you click on a venue, and click on the people tab for it, you can see a list of the top 10 people for that location. This is a list of the users who have checked into that venue the most amount of times over the past 90 days. In Foursquare terms, the top person would be the “mayor,” but again, this is a full top 10 list so more than just the top dog gets recognition.

Perhaps more importantly, with version 1.3, Gowalla has eased some of the GPS restrictions that curbed cheating but made it hard to check-in at certain indoor places. This should be much, much better, Williams tells us. The service is also hard at work on its native Android app, though they recently released a mobile web version that works with Android.

Gowalla is a free download in the App Store, find it here.

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A couple of weeks ago we posted a harried email written by a reader looking for legal help (see No, Don’t Sue Facebook. Yes, Do Get A New Boyfriend).

Now we’ve got another one. Hachette Filipacchi Media, which publishes notable magazines like Elle, Car and Driver and Road & Track, wants a little help with their search engine rankings.

The company’s Digital Outreach Coordinator, Automotive Group sent us an email telling us how much they loved a recent CrunchGear post about Ford. They offered to “link to your site on our microblogs to improve your pagerank.”

Hey, great! We love links. But this link requires a little payback. They want us to link two pages on CarAndDriver.com to the anchor text “Ford Vehicle Buying Guide and/or Ford Flex Buying Guide.”

We get reciprocal link spam emails all the time (all sites do), but it’s rare for a large brand to engage in link farming so boldly. For that, we salute them (and we passed it on to Google’s Matt Cutts).

The full email is below, with the links as they suggest them. We’ve added nofollow tags, but since the email doesn’t specify that we can’t do this, we’ll expect our links back shortly.

From: [removed]@hfmus.com>
Date: November 18, 2009 4:18:11 PM EST
To: “‘tips@crunchgear.com’”
Subject: Question for Matt

Matt,

I read your article on Ford’s efforts to cut down on petroleum usage by using wheatgrass as an alternative in its third row storage container. This concept is extremely interesting and I would love to be able to either refer your post on one of my microblogs or link to your site on our microblogs to improve your pagerank.

What I would need from you is to place either in the article or really anywhere you think on your site that makes sense: Ford Vehicle Buying Guide and/or Ford Flex Buying Guide.

Let me know what you think!

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The new site features a list of top deals, as voted on by the community and chosen by the Deals.Woot algorithm. This will be going head to head against other deal sites like SlickDeals and FatWallet, which have well established communities. Woot already has plenty of fans, but it may take some time to build out a base of deal hunters.

But the very top of the site actually isn’t dictated by users. Instead, it’s dedicated to “Sponsored Deals”. Woot explains that these deals are paid for by advertisers, but that they’re still bargains:

OK, yes, companies pay a little something to be Sponsored Deals. But we don’t allow just any old crap in this section. Sponsored Deals are proposed to us by other retailers, manufacturers, and even other daily deal sites. If we find the deal compelling enough that our members will appreciate us bringing it to their attention, we’ll feature it here. Believe it or not, we have a reputation to uphold.

The site has been available for weeks before now, but was only available until members up until a few hours ago.

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This time they’re reconstructed the Declaration of Independence, complete with edits and comments from the founding fathers. My US History is a bit fuzzy, but there are plenty of obvious jokes nestled in here, and I’m sure the Googlers have included a few more subtle ones as well. Unfortunately, it looks like you’ll have to have a Wave account if you want to witness the creation of one of the United States’ most important documents. But we’ve tried to grab a few of the key moments in the screenshots below.

As a demonstration of what you can do with Wave, the document succeeds in some respects. But frankly it can still be confusing to tell what’s going on. For example, when the founding fathers are casting their votes, the Wave only says something vague like “Thomas Jefferson edited this message” — it’s up to you to figure out what he did.

According to a tweet a few minutes ago from Wave team member Lars Rasmussen, the idea to create famous documents came from Tim O’Reilly. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more of these soon.

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At a time when publications targeting small business owners are in decline or dying (R.I.P. Fortune Small Business), the Web is thriving with experimentation. One effort that is just getting off its feet is Bizmore, a site backed by former junk bond king Michael Milken and executive-coaching firm Vistage International. Bizmore launched last summer as a Q&A site for business advice. Today, it unveiled a new design with more magazine-like content, including a network of eight blogs, ranging from the Social Business to Workplace Trends and Creative Finance.

“I’ll have 25 blogs before the end of the year,” says editor in chief Jeffrey Davis, who used to work with me as an editor at Business 2.0 before he went on to help run Bnet. Earlier this year, Davis left Bnet to join Bizmore founder Alice Hill to try to build an online publication for small businesses from scratch. Each blog, he says, tackles “some important facet of running a small business (finance, social media, managing, etc), each written not by name journalists, but true experts who speak and consult professionally on their topic.”

Bizmore already has about 30 or so consultants, business professors and other business experts who answer readers’ questions in Q&A part of the site. The blogs expand that network of experts and give some of them a larger soapbox. They will start giving Webinars and live events as well, which is Vistage’s specialty. The original idea of the site was to have an online gathering place with real content for the tens of thousands of people who attend Vistage executive coaching seminars every year, but then lost touch in between events. It’s reaching way beyond that now, but Bizmore’s core audience still comes from this pre-existing community.

In addition to the blogs, the site has regular features, interviews, and advice on methods and tactics for running a small business. Davis is taking a page from the old Business 2.0 here by sending his journalists to find out what management tactics work in real companies and then package them up into easy steps any entrepreneur can follow. Bizmore spits out features such as “3 Essentials for Landing a Business Loan,” “CEOs: Careful Who ‘Owns’ Your Facebook Business Page,” and “The $100K Referral Bonus.”

Bizmore is not about breaking news or great narratives. Its aspiration is to be filled with tons of practical advice on how to run a business, and a network of experts and readers who help each other as well. Getting the right mix between community and content is tricky. But service journalism makes a lot more sense on the Web than in a print magazine. Features and posts can be whipped up on the fly in response to the immediate needs and questions of readers, who can also give each other advice.

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FlightCaster’s goal is simple: it wants to let you know when your flight is delayed as early as possible. Using a variety of data sources and complex algorithms, the service will alert you whenever it thinks one of your flights will be delayed, along with an explantation of the factors that contributed to its prediction. And so far, it seems to be working — co-founder Jason Freedman says that four hours below takeoff, Flightcaster manages to predict ten times as many delays as the airlines do. And they manage to stay 90% accurate (which is on par with the airlines).

Back when I first wrote about the startup, I questioned how helpful knowing about a delay in advance really was. After all, FlightCaster’s notifications state that a flight will probably be delayed. But sometimes they’re not, so it isn’t wise to show up at the airport a few hours late. Freedman says the FlightCaster team had the same concerns, but that there are two discrete sets of users who value the service. The first group of users (which is where most people fall) just like having a heads up that their flight is delayed, mostly so that they can warn friends and co-workers that they might be late.

The second group loves FlightCaster for a different reason: they will change their plans if there’s a possibility of a delay. Freedman says these tend to be frequent fliers (likely business travelers) who don’t want to get caught in delay limbo and are willing to pay to swap flights even if a delay isn’t certain.

It’s this second group that will likely prove most valuable to FlightCaster. The company is currently in talks with a number of major travel sites (and even some airlines) to integrate their predictions. Freedman won’t get into specifics yet, but he says some of these partners are interested in helping frequent fliers rebook their flights as soon as there’s a delay alert.

Along with the parters FlightCaster is already talking with, other developers will be able to tap into the Flightcaster API for a fee.

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Life360 offers a suite of services related to safety and security, which are designed to help prevent everything from losing your phone to losing your personal identity. One example is the site’s Emergency ID service, which provides parents with cards/bracelets for their children that instructs first responders to call a designated phone number in the event of an emergency. Calling that number will activate the service and automatically blast a message to any emergency contacts.

Other services include a Lost & Found product (you put physical tags on your valuables with with instructions on how to return the item to you) and identity protection. Life360 also offers an Android app appropriately called ‘Tracker’ which can be used to keep tabs on children during the day, though founder Chris Hulls acknowledges this isn’t all that practical yet because many children don’t have smart phones.

The company’s goal isn’t necessarily to provide all of these services itself. Rather, it wants to offer a set of core products built in-house, alongside services that are offered by third parties. Life360 works to integrate these services into their dashboard, and makes it easy to sign up for them because it can pre-populate key information. This seems like a smart play given how fragmented/confusing the privacy and security market can be, though I’m wondering if Life360 might have some trouble convincing well established services to play ball (especially if they’re going to be listed alongside competitors).

We’ve briefly covered Life360 a couple times before, when the company won the first Android Developer Challenge (good for a $300,000 award) and then again when it was part of this summer’s fbFund REV.

Life360 Introduction Cartoon from Life360 on Vimeo.

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If you are a developer working on an extension, you can simply agree to Google’s terms and upload your extension to the gallery right now. One of those terms is that Google has the right to review your extension before it’s published, but they are saying they will only do that if it includes “include an NPAPI component and all content scripts that affect “file://” URLs.” Google goes on to note that “For security reasons, developers of these types of extensions will need to provide some additional information before they can post them in the gallery.” Fair enough.

As we noted a few days ago, there are already some Google-made extensions that are working in Chrome now, such as a Gmail Checker, which is handy. These were mainly made to be examples in helping walk developers through the extension creation process. You can find their documentation on that here. Google promises the whole process (both creating and updating extensions) is simple.

Extensions are important to the growth of Chrome as they are one of the most popular features of Firefox, the browser that has been able to best combat Microsoft’s Internet Explorer over the past several years. Of course, Google is the biggest backer of Firefox-maker Mozilla, so the growing rivalry between the two is interesting.

Last Thursday, Google also showed off Chrome OS, it’s operating system based on the Chrome browser, for the first time. And in the next few weeks, a beta version of Chrome for Mac is slated to launch. It’s worth noting that the test extensions already work in the dev builds of Chrome for Mac.

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Launching today, Vidly Express is a way to use Vidly’s video platform on any site for visitors to add video comments or responses with the click of a button. And using celebrities like Chamillionaire is an obvious example to get the service some traction. As you can see on his own site, he’s already using it to good effect. But Chamillionaire isn’t just any celebrity endorser, as we learned first hand during this year’s TechCrunch50, he’s actually in tune with a lot of interesting things going on in tech — and uses the stuff, so his endorsement is a solid one.

Adding the Vidly Express widget to your site is as easy as copying a short script and pasting it in your code. Or if you have the Disqus commenting system implemented on your site, Vidly Express can be turned on with the flip of a switch. Disqus has actually tried video commenting before, with Seesmic, but since they’ve shifted away from the video space, Vidly is a more natural partner. And it’s better.

“While Vidy Express in DISQUS retains the familiarity of the Seesmic implementation, the major difference is that it takes advantage of distribution channels and network effects. Video responses may appear in the user’s Twitter stream and soon on Facebook,” Vidly founder Chrys Bader tells us.

Back in August, Vidly changed its name (from Twitvid.io) and decided to shift its focus towards all kind of video and away from simply being a “video Twitter” service. But Twitter remains an important element of the service, and they recently launched the first HD video option for it.

Both Vidly and Disqus are Y Combinator startups.

[photo: flickr/anuj biyani]

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Online video ad rates keep coming down, but that could be a good thing. BrightRoll, a large video ad network, is reporting that cost-per-thousand (CPM) rates for pre-roll video ads across its network are down on average by 37 percent from a year ago, but total revenues across its network are up 84 percent. Cheaper ads are leading to more spending by advertisers overall.

The chart above shows average CPMs on BrightRoll’s network indexed to 100 at the beginning of 2008. The average CPMs are now in the mid-teens, and seem to be leveling off. They were down 4.5 percent from last quarter.

BrightRoll says online video advertising started a rapid post-recession comeback in the first quarter of 2009 (which is about when video platform company Brightcove starting seeing an uptick in business also).

The third quarter saw an acceleration video advertising. BrightRoll tracked a 46 percent increase in the number of video ad campaigns, compared to the previous quarter, 31 percent more advertisers, and a 64 percent increase in requests for proposals (RFPs). If BrightRoll’s data is indicative of the industry as a whole, online video advertising should remain a bright spot this year.

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A year ago, Swype launched a new way to type on a touchscreen phone at TechCrunch50. Swype was created by the inventor of the T9 predictive typing system used on most phones today because he felt that new text input methods for small touchscreens are sorely needed. Today, the startup announced the first phone to use the technology will be the Samsung Omnia II on Verizon.

As you can see in the video above, which shows a side-by-side comparison of typing on the Omnia II versus on an iPhone, the way you type with Swype is you literally swipe your finger from one letter to the next as fast as you can. In the video, the Swypist beats the iPhone typist hands down, so to speak. But the comparison is more illustrative than definitive. A practiced iPhone typer can bang out a few sentences just as fast. I tried it myself and was able to basically tie the Swype user on the video. Still, I’ll withhold judgment until I can actually try a Swype phone myself.

More phones with Swype built in will be launched next year. The Omnia II is a Windows Mobile phone. But Swype will be included in a new Android phone in the first quarter of 2010.

Will Swype give Android an edge over the iPhone?

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Yes, that means anyone with an Android device can now use this awesome new feature. This even includes users with the original Android phone, the G1. But apparently not all of the features found in Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 will work in the 1.6 version. The one example Google gives is that you can’t use the “navigate to” voice command.

This new version of Maps Navigation also includes a new feature included called “Layers” which allows you to put various information such as Wikipedia articles on top of your map as an overaly.

The update is available in the Android Market today, obviously for free. Sadly, the service is still U.S.-only, and Google warns that it’s still in beta, something which we’ve come to ignore the meaning of thanks to Google’s own Gmail.

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While LinkedIn is releasing 11 different APIs, they fall into three distinct categories. First, developers will be able to let users easily access their information, profiles, connections and messages via oAuth login. The second functionality is to give users the ability to make actionable decisions about information, but letting them message their LinkedIn contacts, post updates, accept contacts and more. And the third piece of the puzzle is search. So developers will now be able to embed LinkedIn search in other applications.

Although the API is now available for all, LinkedIn has already partnered with a select group of developers. Here are a few examples of their integrations.

TweetDeck

Twitter, MySpace and Facebook client TweetDeck will be integrated with LinkedIn in its next version. You will be able to add a LinkedIn column to your TweetDeck, showing all the updates from your network that would normally be visible on the LinkedIn web page. From the client, you’ll be able to see a stream of updates from your contacts, view profiles of contacts and comment and message contacts directly from TweetDeck. If you want to filter the LinkedIn column to only show certain types of update (e.g. status updates, connections or profile changes), you will be able to manage this from the new filter panel which will appear when you click the column header.

Posterous

You can now add LinkedIn as an autopost site on Posterous. So when you update to Posterous, you’ll be able to update directly to your Status Message on LinkedIn. It doesn’t appear that it works the other way around.

Ribbit

Through Knx.to’s recently launched technology, cloud-based VoIP telephony service Ribbit Mobile will pull in the LinkedIn contact info and status updates from anyone who calls you on Ribbit. It will also pull in info from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other social media sites. The idea is to give a social context to all of your contacts, which is definitely useful information for both professional and personal contacts.

JobDASH

From the developers of TwitterJobSearch, comes JobDASH, which is an Adobe Air-powered Twitter and LinkedIn client that serves as a career management tool for IT professionals.t can be used to Track colleagues via LinkedIn, and track industry news. JobDASH also features real-time job listings that are posted on Twitter and cross posted from LinkedIn. You’ll be able to filter listings based on type of job.

Box.net

While Box.net co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie is not yet sure of eventual scope of the integration, it will enable users to take content from Box.net and share it with LinkedIn contacts and on their LinkedIn profiles. Box.net is doing this via its OpenBox platform. The long-term approach is to include LinkedIn data and details on our own users’ profiles (on Box.net) to make a richer experience.

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A little over a year ago, Swype announced at TechCrunch50 2008 that they were going to “change how the world inputs text on screens”. By allowing the user to type words by tracing a path between its letters rather than tapping them out one-by-one, Swype claims to speed up typing on a mobile handset while doing away with accuracy annoyances. Swype is the brainchild of Randy Marsden, developer of the Windows Mobile onscreen keyboard, and Cliff Kushler, co-inventor of the T9 input method.

Early next month, Swype will make the jump from the demo stage to a real world product as it debuts on the Verizon Samsung Omnia II.

Read the rest of this post >>

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Google’s on a bit of a shopping spree this holiday season. The search giant just acquired AdMob for $750 million a few weeks ago. Today, Google has acquired display advertising company Teracent for an undisclosed amount of money. The deal is expected to close this quarter.

Teracent’s Intelligent Display Advertising technology creates display ads entirely customized to the specific consumer and site. The startup’s proprietary alogirthims automatically pick the creative parts of a display ad (images, colors, text) in real-time determined by like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.

To date, Teracent has only raised $5.8 million in funding. Google says that Teracent’s technology will now be offered to its display advertising clients who run campaigns in Google’s Content Network and to DoubleClick clients. Google had been rumored to be in talks with Teracent about a possible acquisition a few weeks ago. Earlier this year, Yahoo announced a partnership with Teracent as part of its “Smart Ads” program for PC and mobile advertisers. With Teracent’s acquisition by Google, I’m assuming this partnership is nullified.

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As AOL prepares to spin off from Time Warner early next month, it is going through a slight rebranding. The AOL logo is changing to lowercase with a period (Aol.). The new branding campaign that is about to launch features the logo revealed as white space inside different images and pictures (see below).

The video above is a sneak peak of AOL’s brand advertising campaign, which again reveals the new AOL logo over different images that the company wants to associate the brand with. The attempt here is to try to portray AOL as trendy, vibrant, and interesting—as far as artsy splashes, a headbanger and an acrobatic trio doing flips off one of their own manages to do that. The point is that AOL wants to reveal itself in unexpected ways.

It does need to reboot its image, I’ll give it that much.

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A new commercial company called appendTo has launched recently with the goal of providing commercial support, training and development solutions exclusively around jQuery. The company was founded by members of the jQuery development team, and is lead by co-founder and CEO Mike Hostetler, who is both a jQuery core team member and previously a freelance developer/consultant. John Resig is not involved or affiliated with the company, and is employed by Mozilla as a developer.

The website for the new company does not reveal much other than the announcement press release and a contact form. What is more interesting is that the fast-paced rise in popularity of Javascript and frameworks such as jQuery has now lead to companies being setup to support them. It wasn’t too long ago, before Ajax and before the tidal wave of rich internet applications, that Javascript was considered nothing more than a hackish scripting environment for web pages. Frameworks such as jQuery solve many of the traditional pain-points with Javascript development – issues such as cross-browser support and separating code from markup and style. The growing popularity of web based applications and the rising number of web application developers owe a lot to Javascript frameworks and to jQuery. They provide an abstract layer and drastically lower the barrier of entry for developers to build rich web applications.

jQuery is well known because of its simple yet elegant approach to Javascript development. The library is small and modular, and has a very active developer community providing support, plugins and other resources online. JQuery is MIT licensed, meaning that it can be applied in commercial environments and within commercial applications with no intellectual property implications. It was for these reasons that Microsoft decided to support jQuery within the .NET MVC framework – a huge vote of confidence in both the framework and its community (Scott Guthrie, VP of the Microsoft Dev division, was full of praise for jQuery in his blog post announcing the support).

appendTo has sensed the opportunity with jQuery, and with the rising number of rich web applications being built are looking to capitalize on supporting and implementing one of the best and most popular Javascript libraries. It is the first company, that we know of, specifically setup around supporting and commercializing a single Javascript library.

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As rumors continue to swirl around LinkedIn’s possible IPO, the professional social network is steadily adding useful features that help transcend the platform’s technology into other applications.

LinkedIn recently launched two-way integration with Twitter and also rolled out a plug-in to pull in your LinkedIn contacts within Microsoft Outlook. And today, LinkedIn is opening up its API to start letting developers make applications that tap into LinkedIn’s social network.

While LinkedIn is releasing 11 different APIs, they fall into three distinct categories. First, developers will be able to let users easily access their information, profiles, connections and messages via oAuth login. The second functionality is to give users the ability to make actionable decisions about information, but letting them message their LinkedIn contacts, post updates, accept contacts and more. And the third piece of the puzzle is search. So developers will now be able to embed LinkedIn search in other applications. The social network’s search engine was re-launched last year and has done over one billion queries in this year alone.

Over the past year, LinkedIn has made select business development partnerships with technology companies for integrations, such as IBM, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Twitter. While these partnerships created additional channels for LinkedIn’s platform, the opening up of the social network’s API is no doubt going to expand its presence across the web, perhaps representing a new level of growth for the social network.

LinkedIn has already tested the API with several developers and applications are already going to be launching in the near future. Twitter, MySpace and Facebook client TweetDeck will be integrated with LinkedIn in its next version. From the client, you’ll be able to see a stream of updates from your contacts, view profiles of contacts and comment and message contacts directly from TweetDeck. Posterous, Box.net, and Ribbit will all launch LinkedIn integrations in the near future as well.

LinkedIn’s VP of search and platform products, Adam Nash, told me that over the past year, the network has received 4,000 requests from developers to integrate LinkedIn with their applications. Nash says that this is the first step for LinkedIn to become an open ecosystem and there are future plans for additional APIs to be released down the line.

50 million users strong, LinkedIn could expand its already powerful growth with development of third-party applications. It’s a no-brainer for LinkedIn to open up its API. As Twitter’s platform has shown, an open ecosystem produces innovative and sometimes, extremely popular, products around a product. And it doesn’t hurt to have a loyal developer community as well.

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To be clear, the communication problems run the other way too. Sometimes companies would love a better way to talk to journalists before they publish a story. Plato’s Forms would offer that communication pipeline. The idea is to make it easier for the two sides to communicate on any given story, so the correct information is shared with the readers.

And this communication isn’t meant to be necessarily be filtered through a PR agency (unless the company wants it that way), it’s more about direct interaction. This is meant to cut out all possible noise and just get to the signal of what trying to be communicated, in a timely manner.

Plato’s Forms would charge the companies a subscription fee to use this service, but it would be free to journalists. And this isn’t just meant for big enterprises, they envision that startups would use a tool like this as well.

Since the product won’t launch until next Spring, co-founders Darryl Siry and Ben Metcalfe didn’t have a demo to show just yet. But I’m told that the method of communication will not just be another email or IM tool. And the core of the product is the communication platform, so it will work with a number of different applications, presumably.

The company’s name is derived from the philosopher Plato’s Theory of Forms, Siry tells us. Basically, the thought is that humans can’t understand the true nature of things, but can only interpret it. And different humans have different interpretations. Plato’s Forms (the company) wants to get those more in sync.

Plato’s Forms has just closed a seed round of funding to the tune of $545,000 (but the note has been left open to accept up to $750,000). The round was led by a group of angels (including Siry) and Zelkova VC.

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