Exclusive - When Jason tried out the iPhone app online music streaming startup Grooveshark built and showed off in July 2009, he wrote that it was great but that he “wouldn’t expect this to pop up in the App Store any time soon”. He was right, and last February the company got so fed up with waiting for Apple that they released the app for jailbroken iPhones on app store Cydia.

But last August, Apple suddenly changed its tune and approved Grooveshark for iPhone, which hit the App Store soon after. But less than a week later, Apple received a complaint from Universal Music Group UK about the app, prompting Cupertino to yank it off the store.

Startup 7 Degrees, the developer of social business application PeopleMaps, has raised $6.8 million in Series B funding led by Rho Ventures, vSpring Capital and Parkview Ventures. This investment brings the company’s total funding to $8 million.

Founded in 2007, 7 Degrees has developed a powerful and mature graph database. PeopleMaps is the first application developed by the startup that leverages this technology. PeopleMaps, which launched in October of 2009, aims to give professionals direct visibility into how they are connected to any person or company.

If you’re going to be testing unmarked automated cars in the field, inevitably people will get curious and – because it’s 2010 and all – whip out their video cameras or cellphones to record them in action.

Here’s one that was captured last March at the Googleplex, stopping for a red light, giving the guy who recorded the video (hat tip to Van Tucker) the chance to get some close-ups of the car and the sensor that’s mounted on top.

Grocery shopping comparison site mySupermarket.co.uk has raised a third round of funding, bringing total financing to date to $21.4M. The $7.4 Series C round came courtesy of existing investors Greylock Israel and Pitango Venture Capital.

The company has also brought on-board Allon Bloch, previously President and Co-CEO at Wix, where he will remain on the company’s board.

Today the US Patent and Trademark Office approved a patent Apple filed in 2008, which, get this, prevents users from sending or receiving “objectionable” text messages.  The patent’s official title? “Text-based communication control for personal communication device” which actually doesn’t use the pretty ridiculous noun “Sexting,” but come on, we all know what they mean.

The “Sexting” patent background info states that the problem it solves is that there is currently “No way to monitor and control text communications to make them user appropriate. For example, users such as children may send or receive messages (intentionally or not) with parentally objectionable language.”

One thing you have to respect about Yahoo’s board of directors – no matter how much the press criticizes them for making painfully awful strategic decisions, they keep their chin up and at least maintain some level of basic decorum. The Hewlett Packard board has no such qualms. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard must be turning in their graves.

Clearly the board feels as though they are unjustifiably under fire from the press over the firing of CEO Mark Hurd, and the New York Times in particular. But they’re fighting back in a way that is unbecoming. And the fight seems to be more about making the board of directors feel better about themselves as individuals, rather than acting in the best interest of the company that they have a duty to serve.

The New York Times’ Joe Nocera has been the guy in front of the Anti-HP parade. In this zinger – titled H.P.’s Blundering Board – Nocera doesn’t criticize the H.P. board for firing Hurd, but he does criticize them for suing Hurd joined that company as president.

Tonight, social network platform Ning is giving users a new, more customizable way to interact with their social networks with the launch of Ning Everywhere.

Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal says that network creators were asking for three major improvements in the Ning experience. First, users wanted to be able to take experience of Ning and bring it to any device. Second, creators wanted to take data and content from their networks and use this data outside of Ning. And third, users wanted to be able to write custom apps on top of networks that add functionality and features to networks that Ning doesn’t provide. Thus, Ning Everywhere was born.

I’m here in the i/o Ventures incubator, a.k.a “a really geeky cafe” on Valencia Street where I’ve just wrapped up watching a presentation of six i/o Ventures companies — some that we’ve written about before and some that haven’t yet launched (we’re looking at you Skyara). Because I couldn’t wait, my rough notes on the companies presenting below:

Appbistro — Our coverage —  A marketplace for Facebook business related apps, Appbistro attempts to circumvent some of the challenges around Facebook fan pages. App Bistro gives brands an alternative to spending thousands of dollars to market their apps, through an app store that lets users rate and review apps for businesses, which Facebook does not yet provide. The market is huge: Currently there are 20 million Facebook fan pages and half of them are for local businesses. App Bistro intends to monetize with a 70/30 revenue split with the companies as well as listing fees and sponsored placement.

We are inundated with so many social streams that it is easy to forget where exactly we read something. For instance, there was a story earlier today on Twitter showing better clickthrough rates than Facebook. I know I saw it somewhere, but was it Twitter, Facebook, or in an email? It’s easy enough to search the open Web, but how do you search all of your personal information streams at once?

Introspectr, a personal search engine still in private beta, is part of a new class of startups trying to tackle this problem. (The first 100 people to click on this link will get an invite). You give Introspectr access to your Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail accounts, and it indexes them for you, along with the content of any email attachments or the underlying pages of any links. Then you can just search for any term and up come all the Tweets, emails, and Facebook messages where that might appear.

At least it did me. Touted by co-founder Sachin Agarwal as a one stop shop for all your sharing needs, the Posterous app (now available in the iTunes store) is extremely intuitive to use, and you don’t even need a Posterous to use it to start uploading photos, video and text, which, if you’ve enabled the Posterous “Autopost” feature will also post to your Facebook, Twitter as well as 26 other social sites including Flickr, YouTube, Wordpress, Vimeo and Tumblr.

In the age of location updates, status updates, and tweets, it’s a wonder that more people aren’t out there stalking celebrities. I mean, people were doing that long before any of these services existed, and these new tools make it significantly easier. And now comes another new tool to make celebrity real time tracking even easier: JustSpotted.

Obviously, they’re not positioning the tool to be used for stalking. Instead, it’s meant to give fans an idea of what their favorite celebrities are up to at any given moment. Oh look, George Clooney is in Spain right now. Angelina Jolie is in France. And it’s being billed as a way for celebrities to better connect with their fans.

These days, it seems that every startup worth its salt (or at least, a lot of them) are offering some sort of API — an interface that allows third-party developers to interact with the startup’s data. The benefits to offering an API are clear: a developer community can build cool stuff on top of your service faster than your company can, and you can hopefully build a greater userbase as a result.

Once you have a community building on your API it’s obviously a good idea to showcase the apps they’ve built to users, but this can get tricky — it’s not trivial to manage a directory of apps. TechCrunch Disrupt finalist AppBistro wants to make this easier, and tonight it’s previewing a product called AppBistro AppStores at I/O Ventures Demo Day that may be one solution.

File this under “ask and ye shall receive part two.” Reid Hoffman– uber angel turned Greylock partner– will be my guest on Ask a VC this week.

There are plenty of things to ask Hoffman about. He was an angel investor in some of the most pivotal Web 2.0 companies, including Friendster, Facebook, Six Apart, Digg, Zynga and LinkedIn, which he co-founded.

Hoffman was heavily courted by most top tier VC firms for years, and many people were surprised when he finally capitulated and joined Greylock rather than starting his own firm ala fellow Web mastermind Marc Andreessen. I plan to ask him what was so special about Greylock, and about the new seed fund program launched at Disrupt.

What do you want to know? Email you questions to AskaVC(at)TechCrunch(dot)com.

Gaming startup PlayFirst has raised $9.2 million to expand its casual gaming experience into mobile and social, raising its total funding to $31 million. The Series C round was split into $5.2 million of VC funding from existing investors Mayfield Fund, Trinity Partners, and Rustic Canyon ventures and $4 million in debt financing from Comerica bank.

PlayFirst was founded in 2004 and includes such titles as Diner Dash, Cooking Dash, Wedding Dash, as well as Chocolatier and Dream Chronicles, with the “Dash” triumvirate of games clocking in over 100 million play sessions to date. The company plans on using the financing to bolster its social and mobile gaming thrust, like just about everyone else in the entire sector is doing at the moment.

A month ago, when Google unveiled Instant, their new search-as-you-type feature, I thought it sounded great except for one little thing: I don’t use google.com that often to search anymore. That doesn’t mean I don’t use Google — I do — I just use it in Chrome’s Omnibox (the URL/Search box that’s baked into the browser). And I’m hardly alone there. When asked when Instant would be making it to browsers search boxes, Google stated that it would come “in the next few months“. Luckily for Chrome, that’s happening much quicker.

That really shouldn’t be a surprise considering that Google also makes Chrome. But it was still impressive that just 9 days later, an Instant test started showing up in the Labs area of Chromium (the open source browser behind Chrome). Sadly, it was a Windows-only test for the past several weeks. But as of the most recent nightly builds of Chromium (which is already on version 8), it’s now working on Macs too. And based on the progress on the Windows side of things, it looks as if it’s getting ready to roll into Chrome itself shortly.

Editor’s note: This post is the second part of an analysis of different consumer Internet business models by guest author Steven Carpenter. It is suggested that you first read Part I.

Most consumer Internet startups fall into a baker’s dozen of possible business models. In the first part of this post, I tried to lay out the three main buckets those business models fall into (media, paid service, and physical commerce) and then began to sketch out the first four business models (search, gaming, social networks, and new media). In my analysis, I include a rough financial model showing the key drivers necessary for each different type of business model to generate $10 million in annual revenues.

With more than 60 million Americans considered “underbanked,” meaning they have no access to credit or conventional banks, there have been a plethora of companies that have emerged to help better serve this community through technology. GreenDot, PayNearMe and others all offer banking options to the underbanked. Today, former Google CIO and VP of engineering Douglas Merrill is launching a new product today, called ZestCash, to serve the underbanked that aims to legitimize the payday loan industry.

Payday loans are common amongst consumers who don’t have the credit to take out a standard loan through a bank. Payday loans shops allow users to pay a fee to borrow a certain amount of money. For example, a consumer will on average pay $60 to borrow $300 for 14 days. After 2 weeks, the borrower must pay the entire loan and fee back in one payment. If the borrower cannot pay the loan back, then he or she can get an extension but will need to pay another $60 for the additional time. ZestCash says that the average payday loan gets rolled over 6 times, which means the average borrower pays $420 in fees to borrow $300 in principal. Last year alone, 30 million Americans took out a payday loan.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is mentioned 10 times in Ben McGrath’s much ballyhooed New Yorker profile on blog impressario Nick Denton. The most interesting mention is in the context of a story about Zuckerberg and Denton serving on a panel together at a News Corp. retreat in Monterey, a fact which in and of itself is kind of ominous:

“I actually like the guy,” he said. “Apparently, his original idea for Facebook was this dark Facebook. Like, the idea was that it was going to be a place for people to bitch about each other, and then it evolved. It was interesting how agnostic he was about which approach to take.”

For all the controversy they create with privacy issues, there’s no denying that Facebook has good ideas (well, unless you’re Trent Reznor). The latest feature they’re starting to roll out today is very, very smart: one-time passwords.

We’ve likely all had the situation where we’ve logged into some account at an Internet cafe, library, or friend’s computer and worried that we forgot to log out and/or accidentally saved our passwords on that computer. Facebook’s new feature allows you to simply text “otp” to 32665 from your mobile phone (the one associated with your Facebook account) and you’ll immediately receive a temporary password that can only be used once and will expire in 20 minutes. Brilliant.

If you had to make a list of the most public figures at Google, there’s a good chance that Marissa Mayer would be at the top. Mayer joined Google in 1999 as a very early employee and has been heading its all-important search team for years as Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, where’s she’s played an instrumental role (she also frequently leads Google’s press events). And now, Mayer’s about to take on a new role: Bloomberg is reporting that Mayer is stepping down from her position on the search team to head up Google’s location and local efforts.

This is a big deal, and it hopefully means that there are big changes ahead for these Google products. Google’s location service Latitude is rarely even mentioned in the same conversation as Foursquare, despite the fact that Google is selling Android mobile phones like hotcakes. Likewise, Google’s local results seem to have embraced the company’s spartan aesthetic a bit too much.