As smartphone adoption rises and technology companies embrace the technology, QR Codes are becoming more of a mainstream product for businesses, products and brands. QR Codes, which is short for Quick Response, are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone – this can be links, videos, text, photos and more. Today, Y Combinator-backed Paperlinks is launching a new way for businesses to engage consumers with QR codes.

Essentially, Paperlinks creates QR codes for businesses and brands but with a particular focus on the design of the code itself. The actual code can show incorporate the logo of a brand or business.

Next week, I’ll proudly be attending the first Digital Agenda assembly, hosted by the European Commission, in Brussels, Belgium. The purpose of the two-day event is to discuss Europe’s strategy for a strong digital economy by 2020.

Oh man was that a lot of gaming. John, Devin and I just spent the last week deep in the bowels of the massive gaming convention that is E3. We went to the press conferences, played the demos, and livestreamed the show floor thanks to Ustream and John and Jon from TechCrunch TV. It was a bit overwhelming, and, as viewers of our livestream quickly realized, gaming isn’t exactly our niche. But we trudged on, forced to play unreleased games, eat free food and hit on booth babes.

Nintendo and Sony brought their A Games this year with the Wii U and the PS Vita. Both will no doubt be hits in their respective markets. The Wii U will finally usher Nintendo into the age of HD while freeing gaming from a dedicated TV. The Sony PlayStation Vita is a wonder of technology. The graphics pumped out of the small handheld are simply astounding, but the novel control schemes of the back buttons, touchscreen and gyroscope opens up portable gaming to newfound experiences. Oh, yeah, Microsoft added Bing to Kinect proving you can’t win E3 every year.

Any third-party Twitter app developer can currently ask you to authorize software using OAuth under the pretense that they will not be able to access any of your private – both sent and received – messages, while in fact they easily can. TechCrunch was contacted by developer Simon Colijn, who hopes to make as many people aware of this privacy issue – or disaster, if you will – as possible.

Colijn created this test application to prove that the anomaly with the authorization process actually exists. You can use a dummy account if you’re not comfortable clicking anything on that page, but I just ran a test with my personal Twitter account. Sure enough, I was shown an authorization screen that explicitly told me that the app would not be able to access my private messages … after which it swiftly did in mere seconds.

Similar to a move made in Illinois a few months ago, Amazon has shut down its Associates program in Connecticut after the state imposed a sales tax measure that would tax any purchases made online starting July 1. We’ve embedded the note sent to participants in the Amazon Associates Program below.

As you may know, the program allows website owners to earn money from advertising and linking to Amazon product on their sites. Connecticut has not been able to collect local sales tax on online purchases because these online retailers don’t have an actual brick and mortar presence in the state. But states like Illinois and Connecticut are maintaining that large e-commerce sites like Amazon and Overstock.com, who both run affiliate programs, have a presence because of these local affiliates.

OnLive did E3 big this year. The remote gaming company launched a ton of new games, a universal controller, and displayed their tablet apps. In fact more than a few of our commenters disagreed with our dueling assertion that the Wii U and the Vita won E3 this year; they thought OnLive deserved our meaningless nod. That’s why we made sure we spent sometime at OnLive’s rocking E3 booth.

There’s no questioning the platform’s huge potential. The company seems ready to embed their system in nearly any relevant device and it’s already found in select HDTVs, tablets, computers, and set-top boxes. While I firmly believe it’s not as good as the real thing, OnLive certainly brings proper gaming to systems and devices that would otherwise be left out of the fun. Want to play Duke Nukem Forever using just your Vizio HDTV or Macbook? No problem with Onlive.

On Monday, Steve Jobs introduced iCloud to the Apple developers at WWDC, and we’ve been absorbing what it means ever since. John Biggs and I devote this entire episode of Fly or Die to iCloud, explaining what it is, why it’s important, and where it falls short. Watch the video above.

At it’s heart, iCloud demotes your computer as your digital hub and moves that hub online. This is not just for your music or photos, but potentially for all apps. And that is one of the biggest shifts for apps that run on iOS since it got started.

JouleX– an Atlanta tech startup promising a way to cut energy consumption and reduce costs at large data centers by about half– closed a $17 million round of financing, the company announced today. Investors included: Sigma Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners and Intel Capital, along with earlier investors Target Partners and TechOperators.

The U.S. EPA has not updated national statistics about how much power data centers are using in the country, in years. However, in 2007 the agency estimated that in a year, the nation’s servers and data centers consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) or 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity, costing around $4.5 billion for electricity alone. The EPA at that time, predicted national energy consumption by servers and data centers would double by 2011 to more than 100 billion kWh, representing a $7.4 billion annual electricity cost.

A more recent survey by The Uptime Institute found 36 percent of data center operators and owners…

Music streaming service Pandora has just filed a new version of its S-1 that indicates the company will be upping the price range of its stock to $10 to $12 per share, giving the company a valuation of $1.9 billion. That’s up from Pandora’s recently pricing of its stock at $7 to $9 per share, at a market cap of $1.3 billion. Pandora’s stock will be traded on The New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “P.”

According to the filing, Pandora aims to raise as much as $202.6 million in the offerring (up from $141.6 million), and will offer 6,000,682 shares of its common stock with the selling stockholders are offering 8,683,318 shares of common stock in the IPO.

I am in Chicago where I was supposed to be having dinner with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason last night, a dinner planned more than a month ago when I bought my plane ticket. Instead, he has suddenly decided to go to China.

It was bad news for me, but good news for anyone looking to buy shares in the company. Also good news: TechCrunch has learned that Groupon’s sprawling, costly international operations have recently been brought back under control of Groupon’s more rigorous US management team.

This all matters greatly for potential investors, because as the S1 showed, much of Groupon’s warchest of venture capital has gone to its aggressive international expansion. As we reported last week, Groupon’s U.S operations lost only $10.4 million last year, whereas the international operations lost $170.6 million.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) this morning announced intentions to debut the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in an additional 16 markets over the next 30 days, including the UK, Hong Kong, France, India, Spain and Australia.

So far, RIM’s iPad competitor has only been available to customers in North America (since April 19, 2011), and has drawn mixed reviews.

Digital media company Evolve Media has acquired Crowd Ignite, a content exchange engine that contextually connects audiences of similar interests, the company announced this morning. The price it paid was not disclosed, with TechCrunch has learned that the deal value was low: $1 million in cash, equity and earn-out.

Crowd Ignite enables publishers within defined audience verticals to share their content within a closed network, thereby exposing their content to relevant users on other sites and allowing them to acquire new users and grow their audience.

The European Commission yesterday granted French entertainment and telecommunication services conglomerate Vivendi approval for its acquisition of Vodafone’s 44% stake in SFR, the company announced this morning. The transaction, which is valued at 7.95 billion euros (roughly $11.5 billion), should be completed in the next few days.

Vivendi henceforth owns 100 percent of SFR, a French mobile phone and Internet services company with over 20 million customers and more than 12,6 billion euros in revenue for 2010.

Kinnernet in Israel did a lipdub. DLD in Germany did a lipdub.

But at Founders Forum, the annual meeting of European startups CEOs who’ve (for want of a better phrase) “made it”, they like to go one better.

Last night attendees were treated to “On Her Founder’s Secret Service”, which features; Jason Gissing (co-founder of Ocado), Tessa Jowell (MP), Irra K (model & entrepreneur), Marc Worth (WGSN), Gerorge Milford Haven, Eliz Watson, Ola Ahlvarsson, Charlie Muirhead, Lisa Bilton, Jonnie Goodwin, Brent Hoberman, Jimmy Wales and the whole thing was cast by Poppy Gaye. It was produced by Magma Group.

It’s pretty awesome.

“How much is your average sale here?”

“It’s about five dollars.”

That one question told me Jessie Burke had been sold an unsuitable product. Her average sale was $5 and her Groupon rep had convinced her to run a Groupon for $13.

I already knew how the story ended. Jessie had posted about her experience running a Groupon for Posies Cafe on her blog. She calls running a Groupon “the single worst decision I have ever made as a business owner thus far.” You can read the story in Jessie’s own words.

I wanted to drill deeper and get at the why. I sat with her for an extended conversation. This is only one business owner’s experience, but it is a story worth retelling.

When we first broke the news that iOS 5 would come with Twitter integration, I wasn’t thinking big enough. Based on the fairly vague (but credible) information I had, I figured it was mainly based around the Twitter Photos product which Twitter was rushing to get out in time. Turns out it goes much, much deeper. Apple has essentially baked a “Twitter Connect” into iOS 5. It’s something that all iOS apps will be able to easily use.

And they should. And they likely will.

It’s a massive win for Twitter. And a smart move by Apple. Social is not at their core, and they know it (*cough* Ping *cough*). So they partnered with a company that gets it. But what does it mean for the Twitter ecosystem? After days of dodging my questions, I finally got a chance to talk with Twitter’s head of platform, Ryan Sarver, about it this afternoon.

At E3, we had the opportunity to talk with Martin Rae, who is the President of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, an industry group akin to the more well-known Academy that puts on the Oscars. The idea is the same, but the industry is younger, and although their conventions and yearly awards are less well-known, they are gaining popularity and are part of the growing movement towards integrating games with more mainstream media.

I was curious to see how Rae and the Academy think the industry is changing, since we’ve gone from a time of far more straightforward gaming (i.e. the well-crafted ride of Half-Life) to things like Foursquare and Farmville, which blend with real life. I also wanted to hear what he thought of the success of indie hits like Minecraft and Limbo. When games with teams numbering in the single digits can outsell $40 million titles, what does that say?

Check out the whole interview video inside.

Just in time for the impending Silicon Valley talent apocalypse, CodeEval, a platform that uses coding challenges to help recruiters find and filter the best programming candidates for the job, is launching today to the public.

Google announced its new beta music service, “Google Music”, at I/O 2011 last month. The service, as it stands right now, is basically just cloud storage for all your music files that users can access through the web app. Users can stream their cloud-based music libraries to any device via a web browser. It even technically works on iOS, though the experience (especially on Safari) is pretty clunky. It’s also still missing discovery and purchasing power, though there’s no doubt that these features are on the way. After all, this is Google, and iTunes is heading to the iCloud.

In the meantime, Google is quietly unveiling the features to its music service, building a full-scale iTunes competitor piece-by-piece (or maybe hastily, it depends who you ask). And yesterday, Google Research officially congratulated itself for making some drastic improvements to “Instant Mix” — the playlist generator that is getting closer to being Google’s equivalent of iTunes Genius.

The talent acquisitions continue for Facebook. The social network has just bought the software design company Sofa, we’ve learned.

The Amsterdam-based company was founded in 2006 and is known for its Mac applications and e-commerce products on the web. Notably they do all their own designs including art, icons, and interfaces for other high-profile clients (Mozilla, Tom Tom, etc). Not surprisingly, the team will be joining Facebook’s design team.