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Exciting news for startups eager to make a name for themselves while getting a big chunk of change for their effort. In today’s LAUNCH newsletter, Jason Calacanis announced that his LAUNCH competition has raised over $250,000 in prizes thanks to the help of Charles River Ventures. In next month’s LAUNCH festival, Calacanis and the select judges will award one of 10 prizes to some lucky startup within two separate competitions: 1.0 and 2.0. Within each category are five individual prizes, including Best Presentation, Best Business Model, Best Design, Best Technology, and Overall Winner/Best in Show.

What separates 1.0 from 2.0? For those who have never had any press, public demos and if they’re in closed alpha or beta, then you’re in the 1.0 category. However, if you’re experienced and just launching a new product or a significant new version of an existing product, then you’ll want to be in the 2.0 category. Of course, LAUNCH doesn’t want you to feel left out if you’re already been around the block and just want to promote yourself. Unfortunately that means no on-stage theatrics for your company, well not necessarily. You can apply for a spot in the demo pit and if the judges come by and love your stuff, they may select you to jump on stage to pitch the crowd.

With Charles River Ventures supporting LAUNCH, one winner will receive a $100,000 investment in the form of a convertible note without a discount or cap (similar to the notes provided to Y Combinator companies) and will have George Zachary as an advisor.

Other prizes that the LAUNCH festival will have include admission for one fortunate startup into the TechStars program next semester, while another startup will get a $51,000 investment for being the winner of the 1.0 competition. Of course, Calacanis makes us all aware that you could win multiple prizes — if you win the CRV award ($100k) and then get the TechStars prize, then that startup stands to gain a $269k investment just for being at LAUNCH! Who knows what will happen this year at LAUNCH!

You can buy a ticket to the LAUNCH festival at the Design Center Concourse in San Francisco by clicking here. The event is from March 7-8 and features judges like Cyan Banister, Paul Bragiel, David Cohen, Tony Conrad, Don Dodge, Rob Hayes, Dave Goldberg, Tony Hsieh, Dave McClure, Peter Pham, Kara Swisher, Robert Scoble, Andrew Warner, and Bill Warner — and those aren’t all of them!

Startups, get your entries in and good luck in your launch!

If you’re interested in what’s happening in the tech community or even here in Silicon Valley, then most likely you’re on Techmeme checking out the top headlines affecting the community. Just recently the news aggregator website underwent a redesign and now it looks much cleaner and organized, at least in my opinion. And its founder, Gabe Rivera, is slowly adding beneficial services to the site to help the tech industry be better informed. A few months ago, it was a job board that listed the startups and tech companies who are hiring and this list has grown to include Google, Tumblr, Yammer, Amazon, Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, Square, and Foursquare. But now, the next update to the site has been launched: an event calendar for the tech world.

Now I know what you must be thinking…there’s Plancast for that, right? Or wasn’t someone using Facebook or Upcoming for this? What about Meetup? Well those are all well and good, but we’re not talking about one of those one-off meetups or tweetups at an open bar. These events are more for the entire masses and so far include things like seminars, panels, conferences, hackathons, and things not specifically located here in the Silicon Valley. As TechCrunch’s Eric Eldon points out, this move by Techmeme is an attempt to “solidify the site’s position as the watercooler for anyone in tech” and he’s right — nearly anyone in tech will probably refer to a story that has been headlined on Techmeme. And to clarify on what events will be featured on this calendar, anyone can submit an event to Techmeme, but only those events that are “expected to produce the kind of news that appears on Techmeme” will show up (quote courtesy of TechCrunch).

So what you’re getting is a filtered and properly curated event list from Techmeme. This shows promise because while people are trying to get their stories and posts featured on Techmeme, the same will be for the events as well. There are definitely too many tech events happening around the world at any given time – believe me, I’ve tried to keep up with just the San Francisco events on my own calendar, but it became quite an enormous ordeal. So if you want your launch event or your tweetup to be listed, then perhaps Plancast and Facebook might be the best way since Techmeme will probably filter it out. The exceptions? Events involving major announcements or product launches, or conferences including candid interviews with a major industry figure or even earnings announcements, and other kinds of virtual events will be listed on Techmeme.

There’s even a paid option that they’re rolling out with their event calendar if you’re so inclined to go this route. If you pay, they’ll highlight your event and offer more prominence and even add a call to action next to it! And if you pay, you get more leniency on what events you want to have on the calendar.

Regardless of the route, it will be interesting to see what events are featured here and how this progresses. Congratulations to the Techmeme team!

Yesterday, one of the biggest news stories was about one of the tech world’s media darlings: Path. It turned out that within their iPhone application, Path had been importing whole contact address books from users into their system. This lead to a big uproar within the community and has some even raising the issue about user privacy. Of course, this whole conundrum about privacy isn’t lost on me since I penned a post saying that I felt that Path’s saving grace over being “just another Facebook”  was that it was a private social network…only 150 people of my dearest and closest friends would see the photos and thoughts unfiltered. Well if, on one of the biggest platforms out there, Path purposely (or unintentionally) imported contact information into their servers, then that would clearly raise some cause for concern.

How serious has this become? Well so big that one of Path’s investors, CrunchFund’s head and founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, has published a blog post stating that Path’s founders, Dave Morin and Matt Van Horn, should immediately “nuke” the data in the servers. However, one needs to wonder whether all the hoopla was over the fact that Path imported the address book contacts or if it was that they didn’t give users an option to either opt-in or opt-out (I personally would have liked to have seen it be opt-out by default). And I notice that there are some significant differences between Path’s iPhone version and their Android cousin — for one, I’m asked whether I want to add certain people from my address book on Android. There was never this problem for these devices. Nevertheless, now that this error has been done, Path should probably purge the lists and invite people to do so, but only after making it 100% clear what’s going to happen with this data and reassure people as to the benefit.

And they’ve stated that they’ve done so and put their money where their mouth is:

We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path.

TechCrunch writer and CrunchFund partner MG Seigler wrote that while we’re up in arms over the privacy concerns (while totally valid and justified), we might want to step back and analyze the situation to see why Path did what they did–basically we need both sides of the argument:

One thing overshadowed by this situation is that there’s a reason Path was doing this — and it was anything but nefarious: it makes the service more useful. Path is about your personal connections and the best way to establish those connections is for Path to find your true friends also on the network. What’s a great signal if someone is a true friend? If their information is in your address book and if you’re in their’s.

And he’s right…Path is designed to offer us more signal than noise and only those chosen few who we entrust with our phone numbers and reciprocate and place their numbers in our address book are probably more likely to interact with us on a private social network like Path. Nevertheless, Path’s Dave Morin has quickly and publicly apologized for this incident and admitted their mistake.

Whether people accept it or not remains to be seen. Jeremy Toeman from LIVEdigitally thinks Path has betrayed his trust…he didn’t want to publish photos of his kids on Facebook and may have decided to use Path for this, but since this issue arose, privacy fears have come back. When I read his post, he’s right…Path is also at the crossroads and will need to be firm on what their stance on privacy is. With this issue plaguing Path for a while, will people be a bit more timid in using the service? Or does anyone really care and believe that privacy is dead?

No matter the answer to that, Path is learning from its mistakes, getting more users, and chugging forward.

Photo Credit: Balotelli’s clash with Parker went unpunished by referee Howard Webb. Photo: Getty

All Things D is reporting that professional social network powerhouse, LinkedIn, will be buying contact start-up Rapportive. The deal isn’t official (yet) and there’s nothing on either Rapportive or LinkedIn’s blog, but seems there are sources saying that it will happen. Not wanting to comment on the validity of this rumor, I wanted to instead focus on the fact that this would be a great deal in the making for both companies – should this actually happen, that is.

In case you’re not familiar with Rapportive, it’s a service that integrates inside Gmail to provide you helpful information about your contacts right inside your inbox. So if you’re crafting an email to a business colleague, that contact’s information and social graph (as long as it’s public) will be displayed right on the screen where you might normally see Google ads being displayed. This is especially helpful since you’re going to get to apply some more context to your emails to help make it more personal. Since its founding in 2010 by Rahul Vohra, Martin Kleppmann and Sam Stokes, the goal of the service was to allow people to immediately see what people look like (using social media avatars), where they’re based, and they do. And just like the name implies, the service is meant to help people establish a rapport that can lead to more conversations, relationships, and success. There’s no doubt that Rapportive has been successful in this area as over 20 million lookups are being done through their system every month!

So why the sudden interest by LinkedIn? Since LinkedIn is the 800 pound gorilla in the professional social network scene, it makes sense that creating some sort of rapport is essential to getting any business done. Whether you want to connect with a potential business partner, looking to hire someone, or even want to be the one that’s hired, a Rapportive-LinkedIn marriage would be beneficial for the end user. Since Rapportive is right now available on Gmail, one might wonder about it’s limited nature and how good it will be in the long-term. In a report by Return Path, at the end of 2010, Gmail had over 193 million users – granted it’s way less than Yahoo! and Hotmail, but it’s picking up steam at a much faster rate than the other two. In 2011, Comscore estimated it at 260 million users, meaning that it’s drastically catching up to the email leaders. So eventually in the near future, Gmail will be the dominate leader in email service and with Rapportive’s integration, LinkedIn will have a great opportunity to extend professional profiles further out there.

Even ReadWriteWeb agrees that LinkedIn and Rapportive would be a match made in heaven. And with LinkedIn’s last acquisition of business card scanning technology Cardmunch, LinkedIn would be able to bolster its offering and create a warehouse of professional contact information. I’ve always wanted to find a way to take all the business cards that I get from conferences and events and mesh them into a contact relationship management system and have it all linked to a professional bio that is updated and associated with my email address book so all I have to do is type in that email address: john@johndoe.com and find out how I know him, how things have been since we last talked, and make the email more meaningful. No longer will I need to waste unnecessary emails chit-chatting…it can all be personal again.

Jon Mitchell from ReadWriteWeb probably puts its best:

LinkedIn is already the go-to network for work contacts. It’s the most comprehensive professional profile most people have. Plus, it’s already openly making moves to be a more extensible service, bringing its human resources know-how to other sites that need it.

Ideally, it would be a great move for both teams and the hope is that this isn’t one of Silicon Valley’s most famous “acqui-hires” where they go for just the talent and not the technology. It is definitely a compatible service and will be a boon for people using LinkedIn.

Photo Credit: “Don’t you come a step closer” by Ed Yourdon/Flickr

Event managers and planners have something to celebrate today. I’m sure you can ask any event planner how long they take to struggle to find the right place for your party or event. Not only do they have to navigate around the city, quotes, and specs, but it’s all time consuming. And often times, there’s not a website around that features photos of the event space — just how efficient is this? Well not very. But now, thanks to Los Angeles’s newest and hottest tech incubator, Eventup is here to help make your event planning much easier.

LA’s tech scene has definitely been heating up over the past few months and one of its main contributors has been the new incubator Science, the brainchild of former MySpace CEO Mike Jones and Color co-founder Peter Pham. After the latest collapse by MySpace, the LA tech scene took a hit and needed to find a solid foot hold in which they could bring back the success of days past. And with the recent release of Eventup, it looks like the incubator is onto something. And it’s not surprising since they have some of the best minds in the LA tech scenes, such as Mike Macadaan and Sean Percival, two former MySpace execs who have gone or are going through the fires of entrepreneurship and have created something great. And you might wonder why are all MySpace colleagues working in the same incubator? It seems to be perfectly normal, especially when you consider that MySpace encompassed a large portion of the existing talent pool in the city. VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell has a great interview about Science that you can read here.

But back to Eventup…we know that it’s a product of Science, but now that it’s launched, just what does it do? Well in a nutshell, it’s the AirBnB of event planning. As TheNextWeb’s Courney Boyd Myers writes, “just Googling ‘event spaces’ brings up a load of miserable options…” So why don’t you save youself some time and just go to Eventup’s website and do a search of what you want, easily. Right now it looks like only Los Angeles and Southern California venues are available in their database, although they’re doing a bit of a grassroots approach and crowdsourcing for venue information — so if you want to make sure your city is represented in here and help bring in more business, then share your venue with Eventup! But enough of the San Francisco plug, let’s talk about specifics in what event planners will get as a result of this experience: a pretty good results page that shows a lot of promise, I must say…let’s take a look at one in particular:

What event planners will get is a helpful screen with a description of the venue, the types of parties that can be held there, maximum capacity, photos, location and calendar of availability. And the fact that there’s a “verified listing” badge also adds a measure of security knowing that you’re looking at something legitimate.  And no longer will you need to trouble yourself into wondering whether it’s available or not — the calendar will allow you to easily look and book! It’s easy, right? I couldn’t have put it better than what they have on their site:

Simply, search by location, filter down by event type, your budget, how many people are attending, and find venues that are available for the date you have your heart set on. You’ll have high-resolution images, maps to show you what part of town it’s in, and ratings and reviews that help you not get ripped off. All of this, without having to spend hours, if not days, searching through various websites and making phone calls.

The cost? It’s probably all set up by the homeowners and venue managers, just like you’d expect when trying to find a place to stay outside of a hotel. Eventup will take 10% of each booking and will manage all financial transactions and bookings. And for your safety, they also offer venue owners insurance options just in case (we all know what happened to AirBnB, right?).

In one of my former lives, I used to work in tourism and each city has unique spaces that you could rent, like a museum or hotel conference room or even a restaurant back-room. Eventup is the replacement for that and very much the yellow pages of event space. Imagine being able to find some ridiculously awesome venues like Jim Morrison’s former residence or even one of Entourage’s actor’s home just to have an event — that’ll give your attendees something to remember, right? Right now they have over 350 venues in LA and I’m sure that it’s only going to grow.

Eventup is out in the wild now for you to check out. It’s also one of six products to come out of Science and is headed by former MySpace exec Tony Adam.