This morning, Microsoft held its European BizSpark Summit in Brussels, marking an excellent opportunity to catch up with Microsoft VP and globetrotter Dan’l Lewin.

The man’s official title is corporate vice president for Strategic and Emerging Business Development, which is quite a mouthful, but in a nutshell he manages Microsoft’s relationships with startup and investment communities all around the world in addition to business relationships with the likes of Adobe, IBM, Apple and Google (he actually went to college with the latter’s chairman, Eric Schmidt).

Did I mention he’s also the lead executive of Microsoft’s Silicon Valley offices (2,500 people today and growing) and a corporate board member of the National Venture Capital Association?

At WWDC 2011, Apple announced that there are now more than 400K apps in its app store (and that more than 500K have been approved). The Android Marketplace has around 300K apps and is growing fast. The point is: There are a lot apps out there already, and more hit app stores every day. They’re going like hotcakes. But finding and discovering new apps that you actually care about? Eh, not so easy. Of course, it’s not for lack of trying. There are some awesome tools out there already trying to direct the fire hose and filter the noise.

Chomp, for example, is trying to become the Google search for apps. Zwapp, Frenzapp, and Appsfire are all bringing social to app discovery, while Heyzap is busy trying to kill game discovery. Today, Discovr adds a dy-no-mite app discovery tool to the crowd, going after the user experience problem in an awesome, though somewhat mathematical way: Interactive graphs.

Peter Pham, the president and a cofounder of mobile social startup Color, is no longer with the company, we’ve heard from multiple sources. The company launched publicly less than three months ago.

Color has been controversial because it raised so much venture capital – some $41 million – and had such a lousy launch reception. The service creates proximity based social networks based on who’s around you, a promising idea. But one that Color has so far failed to execute on.

In late April I criticized Color for making misstep after misstep and asked “How many do-overs does a startup get before users give up on it for good?”

In less than a month after its nationwide launch on May 14th, peer to peer marketplace Zaarly has crossed $1 million in posted transactions, and commemorated them with a colorful infographic depicting the break down of the early days of Zaarly.

Zaarly, which has raised more than $1 million in seed funding, boasts an impressive list of investors including Aydin Senkut‘s Felicis Ventures, SV Angel, Lightbank, Gmail creator Paul Bucheit, movie star Ashton Kutcher and Angelist founder Naval Rivikant. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington also invested in the company recently.

As we reported earlier, Pandora will start trading tomorrow on the New York Stock Exchange under the single letter symbol “P”. By doing so, it becomes the first Silicon Valley consumer Internet company to join the exclusive one-letter stock ticker symbol club.

That club was once reserved for the big blue-chip industrial companies: Chrysler (C), Ford (F), Sears (S), U.S. Steel (X), and Woolworth (Z). Of that list, only Ford and U.S. Steel remain. Chrysler was acquired by Daimler and lost the C to Citibank. Sears lost the S to Sprint Nextel. Woolworth went out of business.

Of course, there are already several tech companies in the single letter club. Agilent Technologies (A), NetSuite (N), Sprint Nextel (S), AT&T (T). But none are pure consumer-based Internet companies.

Exclusive - TechCrunch has just learned that Wimdu, a recently launched Airbnb clone that has already managed to irk the latter, has raised a whopping $90 million round.

The capital injection comes from European investors Kinnevik and the infamous Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet.

Music streaming service Pandora has priced its IPO at $16 per share, valuing the company at $2.6 billion. The company originally set the range of its IPO at $7 to $9 per share, at a market cap of $1.3 billion; but upped the range last week to $10 to $12 per share, giving the company a valuation of $1.9 billion.

Pandora’s stock will begin trading tomorrow morning on The New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “P.” The company expects to raise as much as $235 million in the offerring 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.

Grace Chu Lee from Twitter’s Business Development team earlier tweeted out and then deleted an as of yet unheard of beyond a select few Twitter feature, “Follow Recommendations.” “Follow Recommendations,” which lets you create lists of people you think others should follow, has been around for months we’re hearing but hasn’t been publicized much outside of Twitter itself (Lee calls it a “hidden” feature in the tweet).

Sometimes, it’s all about the experience.

Without its finely tuned user experience, Yelp would be just another reviews site. Tivo would be just another DVR. Twitter would just be a fancy status broadcaster. Their user experiences, though — that feeling that things “just work” — keep people coming back. A simple idea grows, the product evolves, and eventually they become the names we all recognize.

Photogram isn’t a complicated idea. You take 4 photos, slap a title on the whole lot, pick a cutesy little theme, and blast it out to e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter — and that’s it. But something about the experience has me hooked.

On Tuesday, ClearEdge Power— a cleantech startup that makes 5-kilowatt stationary fuel cells— announced that it won a $2.8 million grant from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to gets its technology out to the market more quickly.

Targeted customers for ClearEdge Power include the owners and operators of hotels, groceries, schools, medical centers and fast food restaurants.

Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter and Facebook, is expanding its product today with the addition of LinkedIn. With the launch of Klout scoring for LinkedIn, you’ll be able to add your LinkedIn account to your Klout score and see your influence on the professional social network network itself.

For background, Klout evaluates users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals on social networks.

As of yesterday, Twitter is the new owner of the domain name re-tweet.com (placeholder webpage) although it doesn’t yet own retweet.com (currently used for some shady video monetization platform).

Hat tip goes to Fusible, which thinks Twitter might be plotting to ‘take on’ Tweetmeme, a conclusion I believe is misguided.

Re-tweet.com was sold through a Flippa auction a few months ago, ultimately selling for only $150.

Some people have been asking me why I’ve spent the last 10 days writing about Groupon. What’s my hidden agenda?

I’m tired of seeing small businesses get screwed.

I’ve been working on local products in some form since 1995. And I’ve seen a lot of small businesses get screwed by horrible online products.

Day One of Disrupt NYC was packed with all-star speakers and Day Two was just as memorable. All of the photos and videos can be found here and here, but here is a quick breakdown of our favorite moments from Day Two.

The second day kicked off with a bang. With Charlie Rose scheduled to interview Paul Graham and Ashton Kutcher, people from all over were watching in anticipation, quickly waiting for the interviews to start. When Charlie Rose sat down with Paul Graham, the topic of conversation went towards what Graham looks for when picking the people who are most likely to succeed. What is the first thing Graham asks when he is approached by people with a great idea? “Tell me about your co-founders.” To Graham the idea isn’t the most important, the people behind the idea are.

If you’re running a website, you’ve probably tried a lot of things to optimize the experience for users: tools like A/B tests, analytics trackers, and feedback forms. But even with these tools, it can still be tricky to figure exactly how people are using a site. And most companies can’t afford an eye-tracking lab.

Now Mixpanel, the real-time analytics startup that just raised $1.25 million from Sequoia and top angels, has a solution. Today it’s launching a new feature called Streams that will let you visualize exactly how people are navigating through a site in real-time. Pick a user, and you can see a history of which pages they’ve visited, and where they went next.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, Eli Pariser’s New York Times best-selling new book, has been applauded by net skeptics like Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov as well as digital optimists like Clay Shirky and Craig Newmark. It’s an important book which argues that leading websites like Google and Facebook are delivering personalized information to us, thereby shielding Internet users from the broad news and ideas that traditional newspapers delivered to us.

Pariser, who is the President of the Board of MoveOn.org is concerned that the Internet isn’t living up to its original promise. And the Filter Bubble is a passionate polemic against Facebook and Google algorithms that simply serves up information that it believes the user wants to see. For Pariser, this is creating a less and less well informed public and compounding the ghettoization of contemporary intellectual and political life.

Google’s launch of Google Instant last year was limited in its scope. At today’s event Google’s Amit Singhal went through some recent developments in Instant Search, which currently saves users 2-5 seconds in search. Google Instant namely that it was now available in 32 languages and over 62 domains.

The Instant Search feature is also now available on Google “Image Search,” working by changing the images as you enter search queries.

Last night at the Webby awards, two little birds told me some interesting news about Angry Birds. Okay, it was actually a Mighty Eagle, founder Peter Vestebacka, and one of his product managers, Ramine Darabiha. The Angry Birds games now have been downloaded 250 million times across all mobile platforms.

So what’s next for Angry Birds? Vestebecka says that they are working on a new game called Wine and Dine, which is more about the pigs, and a cookbook which will feature egg recipes. But the most what piqued my ears the most was Angry Birds Magic, a location-based platform which will be built into all Angry Birds games.

Today at its ‘Inside Search’ event, Google announced several new features, including desktop support for voice search and a new mobile interface. And they’ve just shown off a new way to actually create queries: Google Search By Image.

I haven’t gotten to try it out yet, but the feature looks quite nifty. Drag an image from your desktop into the search box, and Google will attempt to identify what it is and bring up relevant results. Google showed how this could be used to identify a mountain in a snapshot, or the origins of an icon.

Google’s Mike Cohen took the stage at the search giant’s search event today, updating us on how voice search is performing. Cohen, who leads all of Google’s speech technology efforts, says that voice search is now available in 27 languages and dialects, and he estimates that voice search covers around 5 billion people or two-thirds of world’s population. Cohen also said that speech input grown by six times; and everyday, Google processes more than two years of non-stop speech.

Google also revealed a new feature in web search today—voice search for desktop. Basically the feature performs similarly to voice search on mobile. You click an audio microphone button in the search box, and speak your search into the computer.