Facebook has just acquired mobile commerce startup Karma, which makes apps for gifting friends and family. The terms of the deal are undisclosed but 16 employees of the startup will be joining Facebook. The purchase will help Facebook build up monetization prowess on mobile platforms — an area that it had said it’s admittedly weak in. The price was not disclosed.

With the deal, Facebook gets two extremely experienced leaders in building and monetizing mobile apps. Karma’s chief executive Lee Linden and its co-founder Ben Lewis were behind Tapjoy, a company that became a huge force in distributing and making money from mobile games. Both he and Lewis were product managers at Google and Microsoft. Linden and Lewis have known each other since they were kids and have been building companies together for a couple years.

Note: This was a real product acquisition, not a lower-priced, talent-based one. Karma had done one venture round with Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Felicis Ventures and the CrunchFund. The sense that we’re hearing from social product industry sources is that Karma will get Facebook’s 901 million users at its feet and more power behind building partnerships with other brands.  It’s not clear whether Karma will be left alone to run autonomously like Instagram or whether it will become a Facebook-branded product. Last year, Facebook acquired an early group messaging app called Beluga and turned it into Facebook Messenger.

This acquisition makes sense for a couple of reasons. Facebook needs all the help it can get in making its mobile platform produce revenue. Linden and Lewis built Tapjoy into what became a $100 million annual runrate business for app distribution and monetization. Now they’ve turned their attention toward mobile commerce. Facebook hasn’t figured out how to make money from mobile apps quite yet. It’s starting to show sponsored stories in the mobile news feed, but it doesn’t have that many opportunities to make payments revenue from third-party mobile developers because it’s blocked from taking a revenue share on iOS. Android offers some possibilities but it’s quite complicated to build a rival app ecosystem like Amazon has done over the past few years with the Kindle.

Facebook has tried its hand at gifting before, although it was the virtual kind. It abandoned its gifts store in favor of working on a more broad-based virtual currency offering called Credits that would power purchases of virtual gifts and goods from other developers. It also has tried direct commerce with its Groupon competitor Deals, but obviously that is a very expensive model to operate and scale if you look at Groupon’s margins.

But the physical good gifting that Karma specialized in could be a perfect fit. Facebook already knows who your friends, when they have birthdays, and their interests. It could suggest gifts to give and who to give them too, let users pay with their credit card or credits, and take a healthy cut.

We had heard a few weeks ago that Lewis was considering taking personal time to travel the world and step down from running Karma with Linden, but apparently we were wrong. He is definitely joining Facebook with the rest of the team.

Facebook said in a statement: “We’ve been really impressed with the Karma team and all they accomplished in such a short time. This acquisition combines Karma’s passion and innovative mobile app with Facebook’s platform to help people connect and share in new and meaningful ways.”

Karma also had a post on its own blog:

We founded Karma with the goal of adding the sentiment and meaning back into gift giving. That’s what Karma is all about. That’s what the Karma team set out to achieve.

Over the last year, we’ve built a new e-commerce platform from the ground up. We’ve been honored to partner with amazing brands to create a curated catalog of products. We made those products instantly giftable in a brand new way. And we harnessed the power of Facebook’s social network to ensure you never miss a chance to show someone you care. The phenomenal response and feedback we’ve heard from customers has more than exceeded our expectations. And we’re just getting started — today we take social gifting to the next level.

We’re thrilled to announce that Karma has been acquired by Facebook. The service that Karma provides will continue to operate in full force. By combining the incredible passion of our community with Facebook’s platform we can delight users in new and meaningful ways. As we say … only good things will follow.

Simply put, together we can celebrate life’s important moments in ways we could not before. A word of heartfelt thanks to our partners, customers, and our incredible team for helping us share Karma with so many people.

Sincerely,
Karma Co-founders Lee & Ben

In addition, TechCrunch interviewed Karma co-founder Lee Linden at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas back in March. You can watch a video of that interview, and see him walk us through a demonstration of the Karma app in person, in the clip embedded below:

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My set ritual before going to bed each night is as follows — turn out the lights, plug in my iPhone, take off my glasses and attempt vainly to nod off. Step two in that process can be a bit of a crapshoot in the dark, but the folks at Scrap Pile Labs have recently kicked off a new Kickstarter campaign for a product called the CordLite that just may come in handy.

As the name sort of implies, the CordLite is a dock connector cable for iDevices that, well, lights up thanks to a pair of forward-facing LEDs. It’s a very simple concept, but the thoughtful execution is what make this project worth keeping an eye on.

Perhaps the niftiest thing about the CordLite is how you actually fire up those lights — the dock connector’s aluminum body is entirely touch-sensitive, so the lights engage whenever someone goes to plug in the cable. Meanwhile, a pair of indicator lights run along the top of the dock connector so there’s never any confusion as to which side is up.

Pledging $25 locks you in for one of the first CordLites to roll off of the assembly line, so you’d best shell out the dough if you’re interested — after the Kickstarter campaign ends, the price will jump up to $35. Not a bad deal for night owls, especially considering that Apple’s own dock connector cable is nearly $20 without a single frill to go with it.

Though the CordLite is Apple-only for now, Android users shouldn’t feel too left out. The team also has a light-up micro-USB cable in the works, though I suspect we won’t be seeing those out in the wild for a little while yet.

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With soft lullaby tunes playing in the background…

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T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm noted during their last earning call that their prepaid users helped make up for the loss of 510,000 postpaid subscribers, and now it seems that they’ve got another bone to throw to the their legions of contract-averse customers.

Starting on May 20, T-Mobile will be rolling out a slew of new, no-contract data plans to go with their line of mobile broadband modems, hotspots, and tablets.

The plans aren’t too shabby — longer term users can shell out $25 for 1.5GB of access per month, while paying $35 and $50 will net them 3.5GB and 5GB of sweet sweet wireless data per month respectively. On the other hand, if a user really doesn’t need to lean on an HSPA+ connection for very long, there’s also a 300MB pass that lasts one week that’ll set you back $15. Without that contract in tow though, expect to pay a bit more for the corresponding hardware (unless you’ve already got said gadgets laying around).

It goes without saying that T-Mobile offers slightly better deals to people willing to sign their wireless allegiance over the for the long term, but that’s the game you play when you don’t want a bill sitting in your mailbox every month for two years. At the very least, these new plans make their older prepaid counterparts look lousy in comparison — I wouldn’t be too thrilled if I had to pay $30 for one measly gigabyte of monthly bandwidth.

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INTRO, the ambient location app whose claim-to-fame is how it’s angling to become the “LinkedIn” of the social/local people-stalking space, is now increasing its business-oriented focus. With the iOS app‘s most recent update, due to roll out any day (minute?) now, INTRO is adding features that will allow members of groups to connect with each other, even going so far as to shut off networking with people outside of their preferred groups.

The company, which was already focused on professional (not social) networking, is integrating Meetup, Eventbrite, and LinkedIn groups for improved matching in the new app, as well as support for private groups, like membership clubs and entrepreneur networks, for example.

Explains INTRO Labs founder Anthony Erwin, “some people - particularly the power players, maybe’s it’s a top VC in New York, for example – still potentially want to network, but don’t want everyone jumping at them,” he says. “When they add themselves to a private network [in INTRO], they can switch off all other types of people connected to them.” In other words, INTRO will now help the big-time players do the networking on their own terms. That’s not a bad idea, actually.

The interesting thing about the introduction of this private networking feature is how it’s being rolled out. Instead of putting the burden on the user to configure this stuff in the settings, INTRO works with the network in question to automatically add INTRO users to the networks they’re a member of. Although seemingly a simple idea, doing so involves matching the user’s name, LinkedIn profile, email and location to the network’s private membership roster. Once a match has been made, a new section appears in the user’s profile section showing the badges of the networks they belong to.

(Note: if you’re interested in having a network set up for your organization, Anthony says he’s taking requests via email here:  ant@introlabs.net.)

Upon its initial launch, there are already 40 private networks available, mainly in New York and Londdon, which have the potential to reach to some 1.5 million members.

Also new with the app’s update is support for Twitter SSO, and, just in case the ambient location crown goes to another app (if such a crown ever exists), the company is working on an API, too. This could give INTRO more room to grow – for example, companies and organizations building their own apps for events or conferences could integrate ambient location features to connect attendees.

The update isn’t live in the App Store at the time of writing, but should be rolling out soon. In the meantime, you can grab  the current version of INTRO here.

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Here’s an iPhone app for those moments when you’re wondering, “Okay, I’ve got some free time right now — what should I do?”

Weotta Go is actually the latest product from Weotta, a startup that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last year. At the time, the company had built a website that helped people make plans, such as figuring out where to eat dinner tonight. The iPhone app, on the other hand, is more focused on spontaneity — say you’re at work and want to find somewhere nearby to grab a sandwich, or you’ve just met up with some friends and don’t know where to head next.

So when you open up Weotta Go, the results are tailored to the time and location. For example, when Grant Wernick came by the TechCrunch office on Tuesday afternoon, the app showed us lots of nearby lunch spots. Then he changed the clock on his iPhone to later in the day, and we started to see happy hour recommendations. When I opened the app this morning, it listed coffee shops near my apartment in Noe Valley. You can also filter the results based on how far you’re willing to go (the narrowest filter is “2 blocks”), the price, the category (activities, attractions, coffees and sweets, food, and sporting events), and the context (is this just for guys, girls, kids, or a couple on a date?).

Even better, the app changes the results on-the-fly. Its recommendations are delivered as a stack of photos, which you can tap on for more information, drag down to save in a list, or swipe across to say that you’re not interested. As you do that, the list will change to show you more items in the categories that you’re interested in and less of everything else. After you’ve created a list of things you find promising, you can also share it with your friends via email.

Wernick says Weotta Go is built on top of the same platform that powers the company’s earlier products. (Eric Chin, a partner at Weotta investor Crosslink Capital, describes the company as sitting “at the intersection of a large and growing market…mobile, local, real-time, and big-data algorithms.”) The platform pulls unstructured data from across the Web, allowing it to create a more complete and accurate picture of a location. For example, Yelp can give you a star rating, plus a few basic descriptions and facts about a restaurant, but after that you have to just read through all the reviews and draw your own conclusions. Weotta, on the other hand, can look at the reviews and generalize about what type of restaurant it is and what kind of person/event it’s appropriate for.

The app also offers integrations with other services, like purchasing tickets from StubHub for a sporting event or from Fandango for a movie. However, Wernick says the affiliate model probably won’t be a big moneymaker. Instead, he sees partnering with enterprises who want access to Weotta’s data as the real business model.

You can download Weotta Go here. As for the planning product, Weotta Make Plans, Wernick says it has been taken temporarily offline in advance of the launch of a new version.

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Everyme, the Y Combinator-backed mobile startup that helps users create groups for private sharing, is launching a whole bunch of new stuff today.

For starters, it’s releasing apps for both Android and the Web. Co-founder Vibhu Norby says both products have the same features as the iPhone app. On the Android side, Norby says “worked really hard” to create an app that was designed for the platform, rather than just porting over the iPhone app.

On the Web side, Norby notes that it’s unusual for “mobile-first companies like ours” to build more than a bare bones website pointing to the mobile app. But Everyme isn’t a normal mobile company — even though its initial product was a mobile app, it also allowed users to participate in groups through text messaging and emails. Norby says it was important that someone who got an Everyme email on their desktop or laptop computer could follow the link and join the conversation right now.

The company also made some improvements to the iPhone app too. Groups on Everyme are called Circles, and Norby says the process for creating them was “pretty bad.” Now the process has been streamlined, so you can add or remove people from circles with just a couple of taps. The invite process has been too. Previously, if you added someone to a circle who wasn’t already a member of Everyme, they wouldn’t know about it until they joined the app, or until someone shared a story in the circle. Now if you add a non-member to a circle, you can turn invites on to notify them by email or text.

One of the cooler features is something called Magic Stories, where the app automatically generates Everyme updates based on updates from your other social networks. Today it’s adding Instagram integration, so if you post a popular photo on Instagram, it will be shared in Everyme too.

Last month, Everyme’s team said that there were 200,000 people in Everyme circles. Now Norby tells me there 400,000. You don’t need to be a registered user to be added to a circle, so that doesn’t necessarily reflect the app’s current activity levels. In fact, I was a little skeptical since the circles I’ve created or joined are pretty barren, but Norby says it’s more designed for “non-tech folks” who don’t want to share everything on public social networks. For those users, Everyme seems to take the place of texting or calling. And they’ve shared 100,000 stories and 30,000 photos.

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Verizon CFO Fran Shammo ruffled a few feathers yesterday when he mentioned at an investor conference that every one of their customers would be on one of the carrier’s new data share plans.

In an effort to clarify his meaning, Verizon sent a statement to a handful of news outlets today that shines a bit more light on how they plan to make this situation work.

First thing’s first — Verizon still intends to make those pesky (for them, anyway) unlimited data plans a thing of the past, they’ll just be doing it more gradually than originally anticipated.

That said, subscribers currently clinging to their unlimited data plans can actually keep them in certain cases. If you’re a customer who just upgraded from a 3G to a 4G device with that older data plan intact, congratulations — you’ll be able to hang on to it until the next time you waltz into a Verizon store to upgrade your smartphone.

Furthermore, customers who pay the full outright price for their handsets will be able to keep their unlimited plans as well, though that’s hardly anything new for them — by buying the device outright, you’re able to dodge another multi-year contract extension. As far as Verizon seems to be concerned, you’re fine unless you take them up on the offer of a discounted device (and the contract that goes with it):

“When we introduce our new shared data plans, Unlimited Data will no longer be available to customers when purchasing handsets at discounted pricing.”

That little “discounted pricing” proviso is an interesting one — does that mean customers would be able to hold onto those unlimited plans if they opted to pay full price for devices from now on? It certainly seems that way, though I can’t imagine too many people would be eager to take them up on that deal considering how damned expensive smartphones are without that nifty little subsidy to help out. Still, the option seems to be there for anyone who doesn’t mind spending gobs of money to prove a point.

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