Fast Company may have said it best, when it described Dailybooth as a micro-blog, like Twitter, “based on photos.” So far the user base appears to be dominated by tech-savvy teenagers with photo-capable smartphones. Could the iPad 2 crowd provide yet further growth?

Rovio has recently been crowned the leading mobile game apps developer, popular (or soon to be) on all mobile platforms [More...] – iPhone, Android, Microsoft and Nokia. Its most famous production, Angry Birds, was downloaded 50 million times across a handful of mobile platforms, making it one of the most popular mobile games of 2010.

StackExchange is a network of social Q&A websites (currently 46 and growing) on a variety of topics. The thing that makes StackExchange’s Q&A sites stand out [More...] from the rest is that they are targeted to technical areas that require knowledgeable experts, if not knowledgeable users. So far so good. The site’s strict rules on “just fact” answers has built credibility with its 19 million unique visitors (as of January 2011).

When Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures and Salesforce.com invested $32 million in Hubspot, the deal made history. This is the first time this trio has ever teamed up to invest in the same company. What exactly is the big attraction?

By any measure, last week was a mega funding week for the social media sector. Last week we tallied $126 in venture capital funding deals for social start-ups as of press time. This week the big story is the social funding deal that hasn’t yet happened: LivingSocial is reported to be in talks with investors to raise $500 milion to take on GroupOn. Yes, $500 million. Moving back to reality… what deals were inked? We have them here.

Syncapse is somewhat of an all-encompassing social media resource for brands. Its platforms offers state-of-the-art social media monitoring technology, and it offers consulting services to help build and maintain a vibrant branded social media presence across various channels.

In changing its name from Widgetbox to Flite, the company has gone from a widget tools developer to an ad delivery (erm, “branded experience”) specialist. It calls its ad-serving breakthrough “cloud-based advertising” that advertisers can update on the fly and integrate with social networking tools.

How much is a single, glowing Facebook recommendation worth to a marketer? Just how valuable is a strong endorsement from a blogger in determining future sales? And just how engaged is the average TV viewer with a popular show with all these distracting networked gadgets, tablets and laptops in the room? Syncapse answers some of these questions in a new piece of research out this week.

One of the more controversial pieces of research we’d come across recently was one that showed the phenomenal recent success here in Europe of daily deals sites such as Groupon. Little surprise there. But the researchers concluded that their rise comes at a big cost – the sudden demise of business at eBay and online auctioneers. So we took the question straight to Rajen Ruparell, Director of Groupon UK: are you already writing the obituary of eBay here in Europe?

It would be remiss of us not to publish each week a tally of the big funding deals in the social media sector. Yesterday in particular was a busy day, highlighted by Angry Birds developers Rovio Mobile scoring a $42 million. We are seeing also a lot of interest in socially-targeted ad serving technologies with two big investments in that area this week. Here’s the full rundown: