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John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, the well-known Silicon Valley venture capital fund, says that social businesses are the ‘third wave’ of internet startups and says this is the reason the venture capital firm launched its $250m fund for startups called sFund. Doerr says that the fund will invest in companies – figures can expect to start from $100,000 to $100 million, focusing on companies that offer social applications.

A number of big-name businesses have committed money to the fund, including Amazon, Zynga, Comcast and Allen & Co. The fund is interested in investing in social startups across industry sectors ranging from enterprise to health to mobile and consumer. The fund has already made its first $5 million investment in Cafebots, a startup still under wraps but which says it plans to establish FRM – friendship relationship management.

Doerr told TechCrunch that even though the rise of Facebook is clearly important the internet revolving around social interaction is only getting started, saying that there may be a number of social networks. He says that social is the most important social platform to focus on, saying that Facebook has a range of options when considering where to spend its resources.

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, an investor in the fund, says that the web is being rebuilt around people and that at this point any app, website or device can be designed around people from the ground up. Zuckerberg says that the fund has the aim of investing in companies who can disrupt their industries.

Money spent on lobbying efforts by major internet companies run in the millions per annum, with Google spending $ 1.2million in the third quarter of 2010. In fact Google is on track to spend over $5 million on lobbying efforts in 2010.

Google pushes to influence government policy in a number of areas, including immigration, patent reform, online consumer protection, privacy, advertising regulation and so on. Congressional rules on internet service usage and broadband access is also in the line of fire.

The search giant is also putting efforts into lobbying for openness and competition in the online services market, which came into play especially when the company acquired travel software company ITA. However this deal is still under investigation by the US Department of Justice.

It is not only Google that spends substantial sums of money on lobbying. Facebook is also increasingly spending money on efforts to push its interests on cyber security policy, internet privacy regulations as well as FCC regulations on internet neutrality. Internet privacy in particular is a big topic of concern for the social networking company who has run into trouble about its privacy policies.

The sum Facebook is spending is much smaller than that of Google, but it is likely to increase over time. In the second quarter of 2010 Facebook dedicated $60,000 to lobbying efforts which increased to $120,000 in the third quarter.

The US Senate publishes a database of the quantity of money companies spend on lobbying online, companies are required to log their spending with US officials.

Traditionally, it’s been considered a 50-50 gamble to predict the stock market’s fluctuations with any accuracy.  Some traders have made a name for themselves by consistently getting slightly better odds than this, but few can claim an 87% or better prediction rate.  Except for Twitter.

Yep, Twitter.  Well, more accurately, the Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) can.  That is, if some people at Indiana University are right – and their study of over 10 million tweets from 2008 shows that they might be.

GPOMS has six “mood states” it pulls from the live Twitter stream: happiness, kindness, alertness, sureness, vitality, and calmness.  What Johan Bollen and friends at Indiana University were interested in was the “calmness” stream.

Going through 9.7 million tweets from March to December of 2008, extracting the moods, and correlating that with the stock market, these researchers found that the calmness index matches a change in the market between 2 and 6 days later.  They were able to predict changes (up or down) in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with an 87.6% accuracy.

Let’s see Merrill Lynch pull that off.

There are some questions about the data used by the team, however.  First, Bollen’s team used global tweets instead of filtering down to U.S.-only tweets.  This may, however, mean that they could be even more accurate rather than less so; and, as most people should be aware, the stock market isn’t really local anyway.

The big one, though, is how this mechanism actually works.  What is the reasoning behind the apparent correlation between Twitter moods and the market?  There’s no hard-and-fast answer, but I have a suggestion.

Most people who trade stocks are, in all likelihood, also socially connected through sites like Twitter.  Since it’s been well-established by economists and even sociologists that the public mood often dictates the movement of the market more than any other factor, it would make sense that these moods, as translated to social media, would go along with market changes.

What I can’t understand is the long delay between the Twitter mood and the market itself.  2 to 6 days is an eternity in Wall Street, where the average stock is held for a whopping total of 11 seconds.

So who’s to know, really?

Angry Birds, the most popular game on mobile right now, was released on the Android phone platform and did something unprecedented: it made the 1 million download mark in only a day.

Angry Birds launched on Saturday and by Sunday afternoon, it had reached one million downloads.  The game being free probably helped, of course, but GetJar, the game’s distributor, had site outages as the demand got heavy Saturday afternoon, but despite the setbacks, the number of downloads is staggering.

It’s apparently still being downloaded at a fast clip, according to the latest tweets from GetJar’s Twitter account (thanks to the Boy Genius Report for that one).

The game is highly addictive, obviously very popular, and available on most smart phone platforms now, including iPhone, Android, and more.

Android users can find it both directly from GetJar as well as in the Android Marketplace.  iPhone users will find it in the App Store, of course.

Google is getting more and more friendly with Twitter, and the Twitterverse is awash with rumors of a Google Twitter buy-out. This is very strongly denied by Twitter-bosses but it is fair to say that Google is trying to become more social. Now, Google is running a new experiment where for a select number of users, a twitter integration box will be revealed.

Google often runs small experiments where they ask small groups of people to trial test features to gather more feedback and in this case users are being asked to connect their Twitter accounts. After a user does this, Google trawls their Twitter friends for any links and display any related news in a column in Google News. Twitter has said that Google could do this as Google has unfettered access to Twitters deluge of data. This output should inject a bit of dynamism into the relatively static Google news output and make the results more relevant and personal.

Google’s Live search, which indexes and displays tweets in real-time, has been somewhat popular if sometimes a bit overwhelming. It’s going to be interesting to see if this feature ever sees the light of day but it does affirm one of Google’s new directions and is probably the vanguard for even more social web integration. Let’s hope that if the feature does get released it performs better than Google Buzz which has yet to find a user base that represents critical mass.

Recently, the browser wars have begun to get interesting. For example, the launch of Google Instant and Bing’s guided search to name but a few features. Results are now being displayed in very useful boxes instead of dumbed-down single-purpose information.

Google search onebox has been going for a while and aggregates movie names, theatres and times pulling in locations of nearest films, times and even certificates. Not to be outdone, Bing went with the Bing Box which works in a similar fashion. Now Yahoo! has gone one step further and is now pulling data from its many partners.

One of them is Songkick.com and it’s all done via their API. Songkick, a UK based start-up, merges and presents gig listings with a whole host of related information such as fan buzz, ticketing and even tweets sent by fans while they are at. Searching for an artist in Yahoo! will now include Songkick links which show the latest gigs and crucially, the ones located near the user using geo-IP.

Oddly enough for a UK startup, it’s only handling gig info from the US but should be rolled out to other areas soon. Since 2007, Songkick has been working on its database and has been relatively niche and used by a hard core of concert goers. Now, with the Yahoo! tie-in, traffic is soaring which is certainly welcome news for investors.

Although rivals have location-based gig alerts, with Last.fm one such popular service, Songkick is one of the first to jump into bed with a big search engine. Now, the Facebook app is in the pipeline the future looks bright for Songkick.com