There have been few startups that have gotten as hot as quickly as Instagram. The photo-sharing application for the iPhone surged past 100,000 users less than a week after they first launched. In less than three months, they hit a million users. Now they’re well north of 1.5 million users. Not surprisingly, that kind of growth has attracted a lot of interest from investors. In fact, many of the big players were fighting for a chance to get in on the startup’s Series A, we’ve heard. And now, we have a winner.

Benchmark Capital is leading Instagram’s $7 million Series A round. Also participating is initial investor Baseline Ventures and angels: Square’s Jack Dorsey, Chris Sacca (through his Lowercase Capital fund), and Quora’s Adam D’Angelo.

In case you weren’t aware, Microsoft and Google aren’t exactly seeing eye-to-eye right now. In fact, they really seem to hate one another in a public manner not normally exposed. So it should be no surprise that the two are also opposed to one another when it comes to their views of web video. Yes, it’s the H.264 versus WebM debate once again. But while Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and others have had their say, Microsoft has remained largely quiet. Until today.

Dean Hachamovitch, the man in charge of Internet Explorer for Microsoft, has taken the time to write a nearly 3,000 word piece about the situation today. It’s a long, great post well worth the read (link coming shortly). But just in case you can’t make it through the entire post, I’m summarize it simply: Microsoft is fully behind H.264 as the codec for web video going forward. Why? Because they have just as many reservations about WebM as Google all of a sudden seems to have about H.264.

IAC’s Match.com is continuing its acquisition strategy today with the purchase of online dating site OkCupid for $50 million in cash. The deal also includes future earnouts contingent upon performance.

While Match.com has a significant userbase, OkCupid singles tend to be younger, which is why Match found it to be a useful acquisition. The site, which is free, apparently generates revenue via advertising and according to IAC, has “been the fastest growing dating site in the advertising-based category.”

Our parent company AOL just reported its Q4 2010 earnings, so let’s take a look.

Total revenues for the quarter were down 26 percent (the exact same drop witnessed in Q3), from $806.7 million in Q4 2009 to $596 million last quarter.

The company was expected to earn $0.42 per share on revenues of $587.37 million, so the results handily beat expectations.

A friend just said I should sign up for WooMe with a picture of a horse instead of my own handsome face, just to see what happens next. Wow.

I know there’s a lot of fierce competition in the online dating industry, but I’ve rarely seen a site with tactics as aggressive as WooMe’s, which I should point out was a TechCrunch40 finalist back in 2007 (albeit with a slightly different positioning than today).

Since I’ve signed up for the site, again with a horse as my picture and in the middle of the night in the United States, I’ve been receiving a ton of unsolicited emails, direct messages, pop-ups, live chat sessions and alleged visits to my obviously fake profile by hot women.

And I only signed up about 15 minutes ago.

Yahoo’s Flickr may have another PR nightmare on their hands. IT architect and Flickr user Mirco Wilhelm couldn’t log on to his 5-year old account yesterday, and when he asked the Flickr team about this issue they flat out told him they had accidentally flushed his entire account, and the 4,000 photos that were in it, straight down the drain.

Apparently Wilhelm reported a Flickr user with an account that held ‘obviously stolen material’ to the company last weekend, but a staff member erroneously incinerated his account instead of the culprit’s.

I have a thing for money-making, simple solutions to obvious problems, and GeoSurf sure is one of those.

This may come as a surprise to some, but even though it’s 2011, if you’re a media buyer, you pretty much work in the dark. I mean this in the sense of media buyers’ ability to actually see their ads on the properties they bought digital real estate on, as well as the ability to see which advertisers are bidding against them.

To tackle this issue—a paradox caused by IP and geo-targeting employed by media professionals themselves—proxies have to be used. These, however, tend to be tricky to use and are often plain unreliable. GeoSurf’s solution fills this void.

When Salesforce bought personal relationship manager Etacts last year, it subsequently shut it down, which angered many of its loyal users. Today, Connected is launching to fill the gap that Etacts left.

Connected is similar in a lot of ways to Gist, except that it hyper-focuses on your relationships within Gmail. Via a web app, Connected integrates with Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and Google Voice to become a personal relationship manager.

If you’re an independent game developer on Facebook it’s hard to compete with Zynga, particularly because Zynga does such a good job of cross promoting its various games. A lot of game developers are simply hoping they get bought by Zynga at this point. But a brave few are trying to compete.

Applifier, a Finnish startup, helps those developers compete by creating a network of independent games, and then cross promoting them.

It works a little bit like LinkExchange did back in the 90s. You allow other apps to be promoted around your game, and you get the favor returned. See this article from last year for a good overview of the service.

Facebook marketing platform GraphEffect has raised $2 million in financing from LowerMyBills founder Matt Coffin and x+1 president Stephano Kim as well as VC firms Thrive Capital, CrossCut Ventures, Rincon Venture Partners, Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures and Baroda Ventures.

GraphEffect helps brands and agencies leverage Facebook for advertising and lead generation purposes. The company, formerly Focused Labs, relies on social performance algorithms to target Facebook ad campaigns, increase user engagement with Facebook fan pages and increase downstream conversions through the Facebook feed.

Japan’s leading social games company, DeNA (listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with a $5.4 billion market cap), is running from one record to the other. The company, whose mobile social gaming platform Mobage-town boasts over 22 million users in Japan, issued its operating results reported [PDF] for the third financial quarter today.

There a plethora of recipe search sites on the web available to cooks, including AllRecipes, Epicurious, FoodTV and many others. Foodily is attempting to make recipe search more social today with an in-depth Facebook integration, menu planning, and more.

Foodily aggregates recipes from big name chefs on sites like FoodTV to up and coming bloggers. Results are actually presented side-by-side, which makes comparing recipes and ingredients side by side. It also makes searching for a recipe more like browsing through your latest Food&Wine magazine.

On the Web, we have links, which makes all media trackable. But on TV there are no links. So how do you track the audience response to a TV show or an ad? It’s all guesswork, panels, and surveys pretty much. But Deb Roy thinks he has a better answer: treat social media as a realtime “focus group in the wild” and tie that commentary back to TV. He wants to infer links from what people are talking about. In the video above, he explains his approach with Bluefin Labs.

“Think about a switchboard that links realtime TV with social media,” he says. Roy is the founder and CEO of Bluefin Labs, a video and language analytics startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bluefin is creating a console for advertisers and TV programmers to measure the social resonance of their content. Using sophisticated semantic analysis, Bluefin can determine what peopel are saying about a particular TV show or commercial across various social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.

Not to be outdone by Zipcar, Hertz recently launched Connect by Hertz, a car sharing service. In order to stay hip, they’ve started renting out electric cars like the wee Smart fourtwo and they want to send you and your SO on a wild ride through the streets of New York.

First, and this is the bad part, you have to be an NYC resident and you have to have a driver’s license. Here’s what you can win:

· Year-long membership to Connect by Hertz ($50 value)
· $100 drive-time credit
· $100 gift card to either Graffiti or Caracas Arepa Bar here in NY

By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard the news. Google set up a sting operation (how cool is that?) in an attempt to catch Microsoft red-handed stealing their search results. And according to them, they did just that — and made it known. Microsoft has seemingly both sidestepped and denied the claim — and then has sent accusations back Google’s way. The whole thing is amazing, and to be honest, I’m still trying to parse it all. But you can get the whole gist by reading what’s on Techmeme, starting with Danny Sullivan’s original post on the topic.

But what’s most interesting right now is that Google and Microsoft are engaged in a full-on war. Yes, they’ve more or less been at war for many years. But it’s mainly been a quiet war, that takes place behind the scenes and only occasionally includes quick jabs at the other one in public. But now they’re straight-up calling each other liars on Twitter, and their own very popular blogs!

Geo-location has come to this: After three weeks in review, Wheretheladies.at, a web app that aggregates Foursquare checkins by the female gender, is now available on the iPhone. The concept OF A BIG COMPASS POINTING YOU IN THE DIRECTION OF LADIES is so unprecedented that Apple actually called co-founder Jeff Hodsdon on his cellphone to ask about the app during the review process.

Co-founded by Path’s Danny Trinh and Hodsdon, Wheretheladies.at the iPhone app ranks locations by the amount of females who have checked in as well as helpfully points you in the direction of the critical mass of ladies in your vicinity. We previously called this evolutionary advantage, but it really boils down to nerds using technology to circumvent Darwinism. The fittest now includes those who have smarts, or at least smartphones.

Well, you have to give AT&T some credit. They are trying really hard to make sure they don’t succumb to a massive hemorrhage of users when the Verizon iPhone hits in a couple of days. Today, they’ve been sending out emails to current customers with the following subject line: Feel free to make a call while reading this email.

Very clever. This, of course, plays up the fact that while the AT&T iPhone can support both data and voice at the same time, the Verizon iPhone can’t (due to current CDMA limitations).

I recently watched, like many of our readers, the interview (1, 2) with Mike Daisey regarding the conditions under which Apple products are made in China. And at the risk of fomenting conflict with Mr. Daisey, I would like to editorialize on the topic in slightly broader and harsher terms.

Actually, it’s not that I disagree with the man, exactly. It’s that he doesn’t go far enough, and in doing so conveniently avoids requiring himself or anyone else from doing anything but being concerned. If you’re going to take on ideas like globalism, corporate responsibility, and cross-cultural morality, you don’t get off that easy. You can’t establish a predicate like “the way our lifestyle is made possible is immoral” and somehow avoid unpleasant conclusions.

The “great sin” isn’t Apple’s, or any one of the other major international corporations that use Foxconn or similar megafactories. And it isn’t Foxconn’s either. It’s clearly, inescapably, ours.

Tomorrow, all eyes will be on the launch of News Corp’s iPad newspaper The Daily, but huddled away in a downtown loft in New York City’s meatpacking district a team from betaworks and the New York Times are busy putting together their answer to what an iPad news app should be. The collaboration will be called News.me, and it won’t look anything like The Daily. I know because I’ve been playing with an early version of the app, which I will describe in detail below along with the first-ever published screenshots of the app.

News.me is a social news reading app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall. It pulls in data from not only Twitter but also bit.ly, the betaworks company that shortens billions of shared links every month. In contrast, The Daily will produce its own articles and videos with a staff of 100 journalists. It is not clear how many social features will be included in The Daily, but the emphasis seems to be more on the original content. We’ll find out more tomorrow (I’ll be covering the launch).

San Francisco-based Path, a mobile social network, has raised a Series A Round of funding. The $8.5 million round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. New investor Digital Garage Japan also joined the round, as did previous investor First Round Capital.

Chi-Hua Chien and Mike Volpi from Kleiner and Index, respectively, joined the board of directors. Co-founder Dustin Mierau also joined the board as part of the round.

The company has now raised a total of $11.2 million.