Last week we changed the TechCrunch logo for a day to salute Twitter - specifically the first crazy Twitter logo with no vowels. And we had so much fun doing it that we decided to keep doing it. Starting today and for the next 50 days we'll change our logo every day to high five some interesting or important startup. And there will be a few surprises too. If you miss one you'll be able to see the archives on this page, and we've also added a link to the top of TechCrunch so people will know what's going on. And yes, we've allocated a few slots to sponsored logos as well, you can see details on that information page.

This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur who has gone to the Dark Side of VC. He started his first company in 1999 and was headquartered in London, leaving in 2005 and selling to a publicly traded French services company. He founded his second company in Palo Alto in 2005 and sold this company to Salesforce.com, becoming VP Product Management. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner focusing on early-stage technology companies. I've had a post in my head for months - maybe longer - about the role of a CEO.   My primary role was "chief psychologist" and as I've learned over the past few years the same has been true as a VC.  Both are basically people businesses.

Oracle has confirmed that former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd has found a cushy place to land after one of the year's messiest tech scandals. Hurd will be joining the company as Co-President alongside Oracle CEO and close friend Larry Ellison. This comes as no surprise if you believed yesterday's rumors of Hurd's hire or took note of the fact that Ellison came to his defense during the controversy over allegations of harassment by former HP contractor Jodie Fisher.

I've ignored more press releases in my time than I care to remember, but I still scan, and sometimes even read, a bunch of them every single day. Comes with the territory, and I've long accepted that - I'm sure a lot of PR folks think of those as necessary evil almost as much as we do. Almost. But as boring as it is to read the same frickin words over and over and over and over again, there are certain times - albeit very, very few - where we manage to distill some actual useful information from the writings (but please, again, stop using words like "leading" and "award-winning" in the first paragraph all the time. Pretty please?). And then there the rare ones that put a smile on our face. Press releases we actually enjoy reading. Not because they're ballsy (it's easy to provoke and get attention by running your virtual mouth) but because they're whimsy and just the right degree of ballsy, rather.

We’re not going to lie to you—this video may feature the world’s worst Skype connection. And that was after 45 minutes of trouble-shooting. While we have no problems connecting to entrepreneurs in Russia or Kenya, apparently London is the land that Skype forgot, which is pretty ironic given it was funded there. But such old-world telecom connections are the new reality for Monty Munford who moved from uber-telecom connected India back to the UK last month. Munford has worked in two if the industries where India has outdone many other countries: Mobile and Bollywood. (See him above getting pampered.) As we discussed a few weeks ago with mobile in Kenya - and as Munford wrote in his guest post on Somaliland yesterday - India is one of many countries trying to export what it has done well to Africa. Is Bollywood the model?

We'd heard this was a great discussion but haven't been able to get our hands on the footage until now. On July 29th senior corporate development executives from Cisco (Derek Idemoto), Facebook (Michael Brown), Google (Amin Zoufonoun), Microsoft (Fritz Lanman), Twitter (Jessica Verilli) and Yahoo (Taylor Barada) convened at Startup2Startup to talk about what kinds of companies they want to buy, and why. The panel was moderated by CODE Advisors founder Michael Marquez, who was also a former corp dev executive at both Yahoo and CBS. He put together a panel of buyers that will represent most or all of the M&A activity in the online space over the next year or so, with the possible exception of AOL. My favorite part is at 27:30 where each panelist says the top acquisitions that the person to their right should make. Watch everyone's body language - lots of nervousness up there on stage. But the entire hour is worth watching if you're even thinking about selling your company right now.

I've got to admit, the concept of "branded content" on the Web makes me cringe. It is generally used to refer to Web videos created and packaged specifically for an advertiser. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I like my videos created for the audience first, not advertisers. And yet, in the budding Web video industry, branded content is bringing in some serious dollars and even some serious talent. There is a lot more going on here than advertisers bankrolling the production of their own videos because there isn't enough professionally produced Web video to show their ads against (although that is part of it). The rise of advertiser-produced video entertainment is but a sign of a much larger shift that is happening as people consume more video on the Web. Advertisers love broadcast and cable TV because of its massive reach into every home. They are finding it nearly impossible to replicate that reach on the Web. The only way they can do it is by spreading ads across tens of thousand of sites through video ad networks. Many of those video ad networks also create their own content for their own sites, but some are also starting to become broader video distribution networks as well. One of the biggest video ad networks that specializes in creating branded content is Digital Broadcasting Group (DBG). Last week, I met with COO Rick Kleczkowski, who told me about a few of the Web video shows DBG is producing, including the upcoming ControlTV, Built Green, and Family Versus Chef. We also got into a spirited discussion about why branded content seems to be taking over the Web, and whether or not that is a good thing I ask him if guys like him are going to put guys like me out of business (see videos below).

Watching the battle of words, blog posts, term sheets and Tweets unfold over the last few weeks between VCs and Super Angels has been a little surreal. I've spent a career convincing editors that the internal workings of Venture Capital are more interesting than they sound, but even I can't muster the passion to declare convertible debt AWESOME while equity TOTALLY SUCKS. Clearly, this cultural explosion of tension is about more than just terms and who does what deal. After all, in theory, both these group need each other to thrive. Rather than commission yet another guest post on the subject, we figured let's just invite Super Angel rabble-rouser David McClure and early stage VC defender David Hornik into the studio for a no-holds-barred Smackdown. This is a five-part series tackling five wedge issues of the debate, and we'll post one every day this week-- consider it a primer on what you missed if you took August off, Mr. Old School VC. Today's topic: Why the hate? Don't you two need each other? As always when Dave McClure is involved, the language is NSFW. There, you've been warned.

It's been about a month since Twitter turned on its people recommendation engine, a set of algorithms that enables the service to automagically suggest people you don’t currently follow but may find interesting. Twitter has indicated that these suggestions are based on a variety of factors, including the people you already follow and the people they follow. They are, for now, only visible on Twitter.com and the Find People section. And based on my experience, the algorithms seem to be doing their job just fine indeed - I have most certainly discovered a lot of new interesting people on Twitter who I wasn't following yet, and my own follower count has increased significantly in the past few weeks. So for fun, I decided to use TwitterCounter to look up the counts for a couple of accounts I follow, to see if this is a general trend of something I'm noticing for my account only.

Is Facebook testing its location based service Places for imminent rollout in the UK? Notes on Twitter started to surface over the weekend indicating that might be the case. And as you can see from this screengrab from @kierondonoghue on Saturday, it did work for a short time. However, we've checked with Twitter's official spokespeople and they say "We weren't testing it this weekend contrary to reports." And a simple check of the iPhone app reveals that even if some people can access their location via mobile in the UK, most can't. So there you go. But, the imminent arrival of Facebook Places in the UK and across the rest of Europe is clearly going to have an interesting impact not least on local location-based startups who already compete with Foursquare and Gowalla, to name the two main US players whose services have migrated to Europe.

"He’s a classic Aussie in the sense that he’s a bit of a male chauvinist.” That quote comes at the end of a piece on the recent escapades of Julian Assange, founder and chief spokesman for Wikileaks. It seems apt, because it's becoming increasingly clear that an organisation which aspiries to transparency and the high ideals of open information is going to have problems going forward if it continues to entertain an individual who lacks transparency and whose private life is alleged by his female accuses to be be riddled with low ideals. Because let's be clear, delicate diplomancy and skirting the choppy waters of international issues which involve thousands of lives - like releasing highly sensitive government information about the Iraq war - is not the kind of thing you want someone who is careless about their personal life to take charge of. How would you react if you heard this story: A guy sleeps with two women in quick succession, annoys both with his sexual habits, they talk but he dismisses their concerns. When they go to the Police he calls it an "international conspiracy". Uh... what?

A trusted source has confirmed that French-blogging platform, Overblog, will soon be part of the Wikio family. Rumor has it that the growing Luxembourg-based news portal is apparently trying to develop European Google News for blogs. For anyone who isn't familiar with Wikio, all you really have to know is that it's a news portal founded by Pierre Chappaz in 2005 after his previous company, Kelkoo, was acquired by Yahoo in 2004 for some 475 million euros. For acquisitions à la Française, that's not too shabby.

If ever a trailer did not depict what a movie is actually about it's this trailer for Universal Pictures' "Catfish", a movie about Facebook the subject matter of which could not be further from that other movie about Facebook. I'd like to use this sentence to say "Spoiler Alert" about fifteen times because the next couple paragraphs are going to be full of them. If you hate spoilers do yourself a favor and stop reading now. That said, the following exposition shouldn't prevent you from seeing the movie, I've seen it twice and enjoyed both times. "Catfish" is a movie about Nev Schulman, a 24-year-old New York photographer and his relationship with eight year old Abby Pierce and her 19-year-old sister Megan Faccio whom he meets on Facebook in 2007. I'm sure all of you can see this coming, but Megan isn't who she claims to be and neither is Abby. Nev and Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost and the viewer get taken for a wild and well-documented ride, especially for the last 40 minutes of the movie.

Online publishing company Wetpaint has been undergoing a strategic shift in its business model over the past year. Wetpaint began as a simple wiki/social publishing tool but then started to build entertainment sites for big brands, including MSN. And the heavily funded startup succumbed to layoffs last July and December. But today, Wetpaint is taking the company in a new direction: original content. The startup is launching Wetpaint Entertainment; a TV news site that covers news and gossip from over 15 major TV shows, such as Glee, Grey's Anatomy, and Gossip Girl. Each show has a dedicated online channel (the site is launching with 15 channels), and will compile the most popular photos, videos, fashion gossip, and headlines to provide one place for all the information about fans’ favorite shows.

Adam Penenberg. If you call yourself an online journalist, and yet that name doesn’t immediately prompt a nod of recognition - a smile, even - then it’s time to close your laptop and bow your head in shame. Or at least head over to Netflix. It was Adam Penenberg who, back in 1998, first forced traditional journalists to sit up and take online reporting seriously. And he did so with a double whammy: scooping them on a big story - a scandal that went to the heart of one of America’s journalistic institutions - while also exposing a rising star of print journalism as a hack and a liar. The lying hack was New Republic wunderkind Stephen Glass and the story of how Penenberg - then a reporter for ‘Forbes Digital Tool’ (now sadly swallowed by the execrable Forbes.com) - exposed Glass’ fabricated reporting was subsequently made into a movie. (Penenberg was portrayed in the movie by Steve Zahn while Glass was played by Hayden Christensen. Weirdly, Jonathan Chait was played by Chloë Sevigny.)

This weekend, I've been catching up on some reading. One post that was of particular interest to me was David Beach's article from last week about developing for Android. Beach, who is a product manager at eBay Mobile and a co-founder of 12seconds, basically says that the experience sucks for a number of reasons (all of which Google can fix, but will take quite a bit of work and time). But one quote in particular stuck out to me:

Android has succeeded despite Google. In fact it's safe to say that Android is successful for one primary reason. The iPhone is only available on AT&T. If the iPhone was on Verizon a year ago. Android would be no where near as popular.

Obviously, Beach isn't the first person to bring this idea up. But he brings it up in a way that he's able to back-up his feelings from a developers' perspective, while at the same time roping in what isn't ideal from a consumer perspective about Android as well.

Bob Dylan once said that 'money doesn't talk, it swears', but in Hargeisa the capital of Africa's Somaliland it stinks. It literally stinks, reeking of rotten paper, like a leaky library in a monsoon. That's because there's so much of it. For every dollar there are almost 17,000 Somaliland Shillings and the highest-denomination note is 500 Shillings, which is by no means the most common note in circulation. Money-changers sit within self-built stacks of money (picture left, video below) and children take wheelbarrows of it from one place to another, reminiscent of 1930s Weimar Germany when the Deutsch Mark became worthless. By all criteria, cash doesn't work here. Could tiny, unknown Somaliland become the first nation to become a cashless society? It is not only possible, it is almost certain. There is already a surprisingly strong base for this to happen. Thanks to a cobbled together-by-necessity system of money-transfer posts from Somaliland's diaspora and a surging mobile banking industry, the country has to do away with cash. But first some background...

If I ever write another book it will probably be about one of three topics. The first is the truth about how the press and journalism really works - the sausage making - to show just how much of a beautiful, subjective and chaotic mess it all is. The second idea is to talk about how perfect blogging is, with its constant feedback loop, as a training ground for mass psychology and manipulation. The third idea I'm keeping to myself for now, but it's more startup focused. It's the second one that's been on my mind lately. Mostly because it's become pretty clear to me that any blogger worth her salt could start, say, an extremely successful militant religious cult. Any blogger will tell you how frustrating the early days are. Getting someone, anyone, to link to you. Your first comment! etc. And as your audience grows you are introduced to the first rule of anonymous human behavior - it's dark and brutal, and reminds me how thin the veil of civilized behavior really is. If there is something nasty that can be said, someone will say it. Over and over.

Stealth Mode Watch, a searchable data spider of often very revealing SEC form D filings, is the brain child of Denis Papathanasiou, who came up with the idea while researching funding options (a.k.a spying) for his ebooks startup Fifobooks, "I was just using it to keep tabs on specific investors and other competitors in the ebook space, but I mentioned it to a few people, and they were interested enough to want to use it themselves." Papathanasiou then added a public API and launched it in beta under its own domain. Right now the site allows a simple search mode which shows results for the past four weeks and then an extended API mode which allows results past that date as well as filtering parameters like "people,""companies" and "places" (Humans beware: The data is delivered in XML files).

The term "social network" is of course synonymous with online networks like Facebook. But think about what you're actual social life is like for a second. Are you really closest to the people whose items you "like" the most on Facebook? What about the people you @reply or retweet on Twitter? The people you reblog the most on Tumblr? If you're anything like me, probably not. Instead, the best indicator of who I actually interact with socially the most in real life are the calls I make and the texts I send -- it's all mobile interaction. I've written before that I think location is the bridge between social networks and actual social life. But why do we even need that bridge? Why are so many startups content to build on top of the Facebook or Twitter social graph, when a lot of them can access your actual social graph in your mobile contact book? We're seeing more and more apps go "mobile first, web second" these days, and that's likely to increase going forward. This means that they start as services on mobile devices. So again I ask, why not just get to your actual social graph through your contacts there?

A couple weeks ago, Facebook officially opened their new office in Seattle, WA. At the time, Facebook's Ari Steinberg (the main engineer in charge up there) wrote a post and shared a few pictures of what it looks like. But those pictures sort of made it look like a dismal, dreary version of Office Space (I know Seattle is cloudy all the time, but come on). So we've got a few better ones that show actual signs of life. Just as when Facebook opened their new Bay Area office, and when Twitter opened their office, I think it's sort of neat to see pictures inside these offices -- to see where the sausage is made. We've been thinking about doing something like this for TechCrunch TV as well -- think: Cribs for tech startups. We'll expose ridiculous murals and raid startups' fridges. Would that interest you?

According to new research from Pew Internet, 82% of American adults own a cell phone, Blackberry, iPhone or other similar devices. And 65% of adults who own them say they have slept with their cell phones on or right next to their beds. Yet consumers don’t know what these devices are made of exactly, and what their environmental and health impact may be. Phone manufacturers aren't required to share all the details. Some do anyway. Not Apple, though...

Editor's note: The following guest post is by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, the CEO of WatchMojo, a producer and distributor of premium video content. Read his other posts here, or follow him on Twitter @ashkan My cohort at Revision 3, CEO Jim Louderback, recently wrote an article called "Screw Viral Videos." Why? Because according to Louderback, “viral videos deliver little or no value to anyone.” Which led me to wonder: what about content farms? The Definition of Content Farms While no official description exists yet, a content farm is the term given to a website or media organization that

• seeks to maximize content production output
• while minimizing production costs
• to acquire as much organic search traffic as possible
• with the main intent of converting that traffic into revenue, generally from advertising.

You'll forgive me for sneaking in some pop culture in the mix because it's Saturday and all, right? Rapper Kanye West is having a bit of a moment on Twitter the past few hours, apologizing for the Taylor Swift incident from last year when he stormed the stage during the artist's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards to complain that Beyonce should have won the Best Female Video award instead. But not just that. He's also making it crystal clear, as others have before him admittedly, that Twitter has changed the way celebrities interact with their fans and anyone who's interested in what they have to say really. And slamming mainstream media in the process.

When I was ready to transition from computer programmer to project manager, my employer, Xerox Corporation, sent me to its huge training center in Leesburg, Virginia. Over two weeks, the people there taught me some of the skills I needed in order to succeed in my new role: managing projects, motivating people, complying with employment regulations, and preparing status reports and presentations. The company also encouraged me to complete an MBA, on a part-time basis, at New York University. It gave me lots of time off and paid for the tuition. Tech companies in the internet era offer their employees some great perks. But do you think that Facebook, Groupon, or Zynga provide budding professionals with any serious management training? Not at all. Given the way tech companies grow and the HR challenges they face, management training and career development are more important than ever. But few have the time—they are too busy surviving.