Schireson joined New York-based 10gen in 2011, and previously served as COO at MarkLogic. Before that he spent nearly a decade at Oracle where he was chief applications architect and vice president for eCommerce and Self-Service Applications.

MongoDB has certainly got a lot of momentum behind it. It has been downloaded 3.8 million times. 10gen’s commercial customers include Cisco Systems, Disney, eBay, Salesforce.com and FourSquare. It has raised more than $81 million in funding from investors including Flybridge Capital Partners, In-Q-Tel, Intel Capital, NEA, Red Hat, Sequoia Capital and Union Square Ventures.

Merriman, a former CTO at DoubleClick, the Web advertising company that Google acquired for $3.1 billion, started MongoDB in 2007 with current CTO Eliot Horowitz.

The London-based company is poised to close a $30 million in Series B funding, according to multiple sources close to the situation, with the likely lead investor being Fred Wilson of NYC-based Union Square Ventures.

Hailo has been hailed as one of the most promising European start-ups, and had raised $17 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners, Atomico and Wellington Partners earlier this year. The app helps iPhone and Android users secure yellow cab rides on the go, and pay for them automatically with a credit card.

The new round values Hailo at about $140 million, sources said. That’s a discount from competitor Uber, which was valued at more than double that amount when it raised funding a year ago.

After finding early success in Dublin, London and Toronto, Hailo launched its first U.S. city, Boston, in October, and then hit Chicago in November. Now, like many other smartphone ride apps, it’s gearing up to address the New York City market once e-hailing becomes legal there.

New York regulators cleared the way for e-hailing with a vote in December, and their revised policies are expected to hit the streets in February 2013. That makes it crunch time for Hailo, Uber, Flywheel (formerly Cabulous), GetTaxi, and other competitors, especially considering that drivers are likely to be permitted to work with only one provider. Plus, given that there’s so much competition, the cost of marketing has become significant.

Hailo is already spending heavily in that effort. Said one competitor: “In New York, at the regulatory meetings at the end of November, there were probably 50 people there, and 25 of them were in Hailo T-shirts.”

Hailo did not return requests for comment.

But, for once, as part of announcing its fourth round of capital today, Flurry is talking about how well its own business is doing — and things aren’t too shabby.

In an interview, Simon Khalaf, Flurry’s president and CEO, said the company’s revenue is on track to hit $80 million to $100 million this year, up 300 percent over 2011. The company is also cash-flow positive, and is on track to go public as soon as next year.

Crosslink Capital led the $25 million round, with participation from existing investors, including Menlo Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, InterWest Partners, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and Draper Richards.

Khalaf said Flurry selected Crosslink, in part, because of the firm’s experience in taking companies like Pandora and Omniture public. In all, the company has raised $51.6 million.

While many people may not have heard of Flurry because it is not a consumer-facing product, it is crunching numbers behind the scenes of some of the most popular apps running across Android, iOS and a number of other platforms. Today, 250,000 apps use its analytics tools for free, or are tapping into its ad network, called AppCircle, which helps developers acquire new users.

Khalaf said that two things are driving the company’s growth right now: The adoption of smartphones and tablets on a global scale, and a growing number of applications that need its services. In more mature markets, like the U.S., it’s mostly the growth of tablets. “It’s the trend that’s replacing laptops and 13-inch TVs and the gaming console and the magazine rack — all at the same time. It’s infinite growth,” he said.

Today, 65 percent of the company’s revenue comes from the U.S., with the bulk of international revenue coming from Europe. Next, Flurry plans to expand to Asia and Latin America. Its advertising platform reaches more than 700 million monthly unique visitors, and with the adoption of more devices, Khalaf estimates it will soon hit more than one billion.

Currently, the bulk of the apps using Flurry’s platform include gaming, social networking and dating, but increasingly, he expects that to change, with more interest coming from the traditional entertainment industry.

While there are many opportunities for growth, the CEO admits that there are still challenges ahead — the primary one being what kind of ad formats will be dominant on mobile. Since smartphones have smaller screens, banner advertisements don’t always work as well. Khalaf said Flurry is having some luck with video advertisements, but a lot of work still has to be done in figuring out the best way to catch a user’s attention.

“We can find really cool ad units that can engage consumers,” he promises.

Here’s the full release:

Flurry Raises $25 Million Series D to Solidify Mobile App Measurement and Advertising Leadership

San Francisco, CA — November 2, 2012 — Flurry, a leading mobile app measurement and advertising platform, today announced that it has received $25 million in an oversubscribed Series D round of financing led by Crosslink Capital. The round of funding, which included full participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, InterWest Partners, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and Draper Richards, brings the company’s total funding to $51.6 million.  Nick Mignano, Partner at Crosslink Capital, will join Flurry’s board of directors.

Flurry will use the financing to accelerate the adoption of newly introduced platform products Flurry AppSpot, its supply-side platform, and Flurry Ad Analytics, its advertising effectiveness solution. Flurry will also use funds to grow its team and expand internationally.

“Flurry is powering a new wave of digital advertising with big data for the mobile app economy in an exciting way,” said Nick Mignano, Partner of Crosslink Capital.  “The scale at which the company is operating in terms of data volume, ad serving and revenue generation impressed our team. This enables one of the most innovative uses of data for business customers since our private investment in Omniture in 2006.”

Flurry has grown significantly over the past year, quadrupling the number of data points it measures, now over 32 billion per day.  Each day, the company measures 1.9 billion application sessions across more than 250 million unique smartphone and tablet devices. Over the last year, Flurry has doubled the number of applications using its services from 120,000 to more than 250,000.  In total, more than 80,000 companies now use Flurry services across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, HTML5 and JavaME platforms.

Flurry AppCircle, the company’s data-driven ad network, has grown by more than 3 times in volume over the last year. AppCircle now delivers over 120 million completed monthly advertising conversions, including first-time app downloads, user app re-engagements and completed video views.

“Flurry is excited to welcome Crosslink to our board as we expand the reach and adoption of the Flurry platform,” said Simon Khalaf, Flurry president and chief executive officer.  “Flurry is a unique, mobile-first company playing at the intersection of big data, mobile applications and digital advertising. We look forward to using this new round of funding to significantly accelerate our growth in one of the fastest growing technology markets in history.”

Yesterday, the Times closed its deal to sell About.com to IAC for $300 million. Today, the paper announced that it would net $100 million on a seven-year-old investment in Indeed.com.

Indeed, a Connecticut-based job site, is selling to Japan’s Recruit.com; reports peg the price at around $1 billion. In 2005, the Times was part of Indeed’s $5 million Series A round, along with Allen & Co. and Union Square Ventures; Indeed doesn’t appear to have raised any additional funds since then.

The Pittsburgh-based company’s Series B round was led by New Enterprise Associates and included return backer Union Square Ventures.

If it works, Duolingo could be one of the best examples ever of a win-win scenario. The site teaches languages (English, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese, and soon Italian and Chinese) for free, and aims to use the combined power of those language learners to deliver fast and accurate translations for paying customers.

Duolingo now has 250,000 weekly active users, who visit the site for an average of half an hour per day. It’s about to start taking translation work in October, and is working on pilots with news organizations now.

The big questions are: Will Duolingo get language learners to stick around, and will people who have just learned a language be able to do professional-grade translations?

Von Ahn told me he thinks the answer to the first question is definitely yes, and the answer to the second question is preliminarily yes.

The earliest users of Duolingo, who have been on the site since March, are already testing at the equivalent proficiency of students who have taken four semesters of college language classes, von Ahn said. He has said his team is currently turning that pilot test into a full study.

The New York City-based company behind the app had previously been under the radar, while hiring 15 people and attracting funding from top NYC venture capitalist Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures.

It had a coming-out party today, with a story in the New York Times and a glowing write-up by Wilson.

The Brewster app merges various versions of contact info about each person in a user’s address book, from sources like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and the phone/address book. Brewster also delivers a feed of reasons to get in contact with people — birthdays, new jobs, and personal analytics that determine when people are falling out of touch.

And then the whole index is searchable, including not just names, but information drawn from Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, email and more.

I was intrigued, and spent some time chatting with founder Steve Greenwood today about how Brewster might break through to become a personal utility. Here’s an edited transcript:

Liz Gannes: What’s the big goal of your start-up?

Steve Greenwood: This is a service about understanding the relationships in your life. Relationships are complicated, and more so over time, and w’re aiming to make that complexity of relationship awesome for you. To me, relationship complexity is the number of people we know, the number of contexts we know people through, and the number of ways we communicate with them.

I just got my personal analysis back from Brewster, and apparently there are 7,000 people I know.

The average broadly is like a thousand, so you are a super connector. If you think about it, if there’s 7,000 people you know, that’s a ton of relationships, a ton of history, a ton of inflection points. It’s a ton of metadata now for each person.

Explain to me when in the course of my daily life I will feel the need to use Brewster.

What we’re aiming to do is focus on who you know. It’s entirely private; it’s just for you. We hope to be the best complement and partner to the social Web. We don’t do any of our own messaging; we don’t do any connecting. The idea is, let’s make your experience even better on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter.

So, if Brewster is complementing other services, help me understand why you are a separate app that I need to use, rather than part of those platforms.

There’s a few core uses around Brewster. The first thing is having quick access to initiate communication with people you’re the closest to. Sometimes I’ll text you, sometimes call, sometimes Facebook, sometimes Twitter — but the thing is, it’s you.

The second thing is around the feed. So you’ll see social discovery within your own relationships — who’s trending in your life, who you should get in touch with, who you should get to know better. It should be an emotional moment when you see in your feed you’re losing touch with Suzie. Or you and I start communicating a lot, and you see, “Wow, Steve Greenwood’s trending in my life.” Or someone new just moved to your city, or even simple things like birthdays. All the things that come through the feed are what I call “inflection points.”

Brewster founder Steve Greenwood

So then I go to Brewster, I see something interesting about someone in my feed, and then click to their profile, and then choose a way to contact them and get launched into that other app?

Yeah. In that sense you could think of it like Google. We’re not focused on time on site; we want to be a great service that helps others do what they do.

I remember you had written a post on why can’t search and social get along, and this is like people search you’ve never seen before. So, for instance, I’m a big fan of the Knicks, I have tickets, and I could ask Brewster which of my friends should I take.

Does this replace my existing phone contacts app?

Yes. There’d be no reason to open up that; we will be as fast as native contact search, and there’s so much more to it.

Will Brewster archive all of my conversations with a certain person, or no?

Not today, and the reason is privacy. I wanted to make sure that we did right around security and privacy controls, and storing all these messages felt like a lot. If it turns out there’s tremendous value in it, we’ll do it.

It seems like you guys took an unusual move in allowing the general public en masse today, rather than metering access, and that’s impacting your performance. It took more than an hour for you guys to build my account, and your recommendations about who my favorite people would be were pretty off. Can you help set people’s expectations?

We had done tremendous load testing and performance testing before this, and the demand is well beyond what we’re expecting. In a clean environment, when we’re back to optimal levels, your account should take six minutes, and the average user should be under three minutes. We have one of the best engineering teams in New York, and a very ambitious project.

There was a lot of attention recently around various social apps retaining users’ contacts without making that clear. Obviously, you guys have to retain contacts, store them and keep them updated. How do you do it respectfully?

We’re pretty far from not just mentioning this — we put a whole page about it in the sign-up. First, part of the whole spirit around this is we’re solving our own problem, what would we want. And the second thing is the whole service is for you; it’s private, we will not sell user data.

But it’s not just my data, it’s an address book — so it’s all my contacts’ data, as well.

You and I have a relationship, and I have an understanding of that relationship. The physical world version of the address book is my mom’s version, where she had all the information and notes about each person, including some stuff that just my mom knew, and that’s what we’re trying to reflect here.

How do you plan to make money, and how are you going to introduce monetization in a way that doesn’t piss off existing users who are using your service for free?

This is a free service. The only focus we have right now is providing this cool beautiful app. Over time, there’s a lot of ways you could imagine we could make money. We’re never going to share your personal information with other parties, but the thing is that marketing in its purest form is actually wonderful, because it delivers things that are interesting to you.

Other people have also tried to put context around contacts; for instance, some of the better ones have been Xobni and Rapportive and the new Cue from Greplin. How are you different?

I think it’s an amazing time to be thinking about and working on this type of technology. This phase is really about personalizing technology and making it relevant to people. There’s a lot of great companies, including the ones you named. We have a very particular view of what we’re focused on, which is this idea of who you know, and it’s about creating a service that’s powerful, and something that’s really personalized — something that gets you, that understands you.

Check out that growth chart on the right. The site now hosts five million stories, with 500,000 added per month. It has eight million monthly unique users who spent 1.7 billion minutes on the site in May.

Some 70 percent of Wattpad users are women, and 70 percent of usage is on mobile devices, according to CEO Allen Lau.

Who wants to read e-books by unpublished authors? A whole lot of people. For instance, a book by teen author Jordan Lynde (a.k.a. XxSkater2Girl16xX on Wattpad) about a relationship between a teacher and a student, has been read nearly 20 million times. And some Wattpad writers are now signing big publishing deals.

Wattpad is based in Toronto and has 15 employees, about half of whom are on its community management team. It had just raised a previous round of funding in August, much of which it has yet to spend, but took more money now, because “our growth blew away our most optimistic projections,” Lau said.

That brings Simulmedia’s total raise to some $27 million over three years. That money is going into Morgan’s take on “targeted” TV advertising, which promises to merge Web-style targeting with traditional TV ads.

There are lots of people chasing targeted TV ads, and to date none of them have gotten very far. Canoe Ventures, a consortium led by Comcast, Time Warner Cable and the rest of the cable industry, just imploded earlier this year.

The TV guys will probably get there, someday. But in the meantime, Morgan is trying a slightly less ambitious version that he says can work now.

Rather than trying to deliver customized ads to every TV viewer based on their individual set-top-box data, Simulmedia uses some set-top-box data (which it gets from providers like DirecTV, TiVo and AT&T) to try to find undervalued ad inventory. So, in theory, it can help an advertiser find a cheaper way to get in front of a specific audience it wants to reach.

If that sounds a bit like Web advertising, that makes sense. Morgan built two pioneering Internet ad companies — 24/7 Real Media and Tacoda, which were acquired by WPP and AOL — before tackling TV.

Simulmedia says it has run 200 campaigns for 24 brands since it pivoted to its current model (it had originally tried using the same technology to target TV advertising for TV programming), and Morgan says he is “very close to profitability.” This is the second time Morgan has funded the company with an inside round: The same group of investors put in about $9 million a year ago.

This creates curious opportunities for fun. When Twilio was in the process of raising its most recent funding round — a $17 million series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures — Bessemer partner Byron Deeter created a Twilio-connected number and asked CEO Jeff Lawson to call it. As recounted by VentureBeat, when Lawson called, he heard automated voice messages asking him to press 1 for $5 million, 2 for $10 million and 3 for $15 million.

Hijinks like this say a lot about the culture that surrounds Twilio, but it’s not well known outside the developer community. Addressing that will be job one for Lynda Smith, its new chief marketing officer, who joined the company on April 23.

Smith is joining Twilio from Jive, the social enterprise software concern, where she was senior vice president of marketing until last fall. As CMO, she’ll be responsible for Twilio’s marketing strategy around the world.

“I think the Twilio brand is huge among developers because it gives that community a chance to play with something they haven’t had before,” Smith told me. “But it’s also getting a lot of traction within the telephony industry. … Voice and messaging are still a big part of the worlds that we live in, but they’ve been difficult to bring into new-world software applications because it’s still tied to some old-world things like hardware and protocols.” First priority, she says, is making sure that people outside the developer world know what Twilio is and what they can do with it.

Before Jive, Smith held a number executive slots at Genpact, Nuance, Genesys and Lockheed Martin. She’s a graduate of Simpson College, and has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. She’s also on the faculty at Stanford University, where she lectures on global entrepreneurial marketing.

Twilio is definitely on the move: It landed $17 million in that C round late last year, bringing its total capital raised to about $34 million. It also just announced its second conference in San Francisco, in October. Time to get serious about marketing.

Now, Kik Interactive, the company that introduced super-simple mobile messaging (and became the target of a lawsuit filed by RIM), is joining the multiscreen video party.

Kik’s new app, called Clik, allows you to view video that’s on your smartphone on a bigger connected screen.

Unlike Apple’s AirPlay, which requires users to be on a Wi-Fi network, or Movl’s apps for Samsung TVs, which in some cases require Wi-Fi, Clik uses the 3G capabilities of your phone and doesn’t require access to a special device on the receiving end — just any screen that is connected to the Internet and can run a browser.

For users concerned about the app burning up your phone data, Clik explains this by saying the app doesn’t stream the content to your TV or computer; it just instructs the browser to play video.

Once a user has downloaded the free Clik app to an iOS or Android device, he or she can navigate to ClikThis.com through a Web browser and scan the giant QR code that appears on the home page. The Web page then becomes a video viewing platform for the videos that appear on the smartphone. The interactivity between the two is pretty seamless, with the videos starting, stopping and switching as soon as a command is received from the smartphone.

One of the initially apparent drawbacks is that ClikThis.com is just a bare-bones host page of the video, with no command buttons on it, so you can’t start and stop the video from the browser — it has to be done through the phone.

In terms of video quality, it’s determined by the quality of the Web video and not the video as it appears on the phone.

Kik is launching Clik today, along with a software kit for developers to get cracking on different applications for the Clik platform. For now, it’s rolling out with a YouTube app. Creator Ted Livingston sees the potential for multi-user, multiscreen sharing: You’re at a party, say, and everyone’s using Clik on their phones, so they can all share and control the game, video or music playlists.

Kik’s battle with RIM over the messaging app is still continuing, though last fall Kik said it was working on a new version of its messenger that would work on RIM BlackBerry devices. Despite the legal fracas, Kik managed to nab $8 million in Series A funding last year from RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures. Wilson and Adam Ludwin from RRE also joined Kik’s board.

Here to rectify that is Charlie O’Donnell, who is rounding up investors for Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, which he’s describing as “the first venture capital fund to be based out of Brooklyn.” (Google points to a Brooklyn Ventures, whose logo alludes to the borough’s famous bridge. But the company appears to be Dutch, just like Brooklyn’s early residents.)

O’Donnell is a former principal at First Round Capital; his resume also includes a stint as an analyst at Union Square Ventures, as well as at Path 101, an unsuccessful “career discovery” start-up.

He says he’s closed a first funding round, but won’t identify his backers or say how much they’ve put in; people familiar with O’Donnell’s plan say he’s trying to raise a total of $7 million to $10 million.

You could argue that focusing on a single slice of New York is a bit narrow, but O’Donnell’s kickoff announcement explains that he “will generally invest in the Greater Brooklyn Area.” So even if you’re based in Hoboken or Yonkers, pitch away.

Bigger picture: A slew of zippy start-ups have cropped up in New York over the past five years or so, including some that have quickly made money for their investors (see: Invite, GroupMe, etc.) and some that haven’t exited yet but may eventually do so at a very big price if things go right (see: Tumblr, Foursquare, perhaps AppNexus, etc.). So it’s easy to see why some people would be willing to make a bet or two on the city.

(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)

But here’s a picture of the Union Square Ventures partner watching the New York-Toronto game on his big screen, after all. He was able to get a feed of the game from a pirate aggregator called atdhe, he explained on Twitter. “Worked great for me. #screwcable”

The fact that it’s easy to get pirated TV, delivered over the Internet, isn’t new. It’s certainly not a revelation for Wilson, one of tech’s most prominent and successful venture capitalists, or his 199,000 Twitter followers.

Still, it’s always worth pointing out just how easy it has become. It’s particularly important when it comes to live sports, because that’s supposed to be the one thing that keeps everyone — or many people, at least — paying (a lot) for cable.

I’d be surprised if the Knicks game looked very good on Wilson’s Panasonic — when I tried it on my MacBook, it was pretty blurry.

But it’s better than nothing, which is your only alternative if you’re a Time Warner Cable subscriber in New York City right now (the NBA’s League Pass subscription service, which is supposed to give you access to every game in the league, has a regional blackout).

It’s also worth noting that while Wilson is directing his anger at the cable guys, who are easy and deserving targets, the NBA itself is a supporter of ProtectIP and SOPA, which are designed to make sites like atdhe harder to search for on Google, Twitter, etc.

I’m quite sure that Wilson would say he’s not advocating piracy, but simply trying to access something he’s already paying for (or in other cases, grabbing something he isn’t allowed to buy for unfathomable reasons).

Still, I can imagine a Big Media lobbyist using Wilson’s tweets (or, I suppose, this post) to help explain why the legislation should pass. And I’m certain that’s not what Wilson was aiming for.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based Edmodo has one of those growth curves that grab investors’ attention. It’s now at five million users, up from 500,000 a year ago.

Edmodo supports a range of classroom-specific activity, from internal message boards to online quizzes and grading, both on the Web and mobile devices. The Edmodo interface looks a lot like Facebook — or especially an enterprise collaboration tool like Yammer.

At the moment the service is completely free. Edmodo Chairman Rob Hutter told AllThingsD the company doesn’t have any immediate plans to bring in revenue. The VC funding is meant to fuel continued growth and hiring.

This is the first joint investment for Hoffman and Cohler, who are both newly minted hotshot venture capital partners, and who previously worked together at LinkedIn and in some capacity at Facebook (where Hoffman was an early investor and Cohler was an early employee). Other Edmodo investors include Union Square Ventures and Learn Capital.

Earlier this morning, Zynga announced it would price its stock between $8.50 and $10 a share when it goes public later this month.

That’s at the high end of the range that values the four-year-old company at as much as $7 billion. But that’s much lower than than what some investors paid as recently as February, according to documents filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

In fact, some of its investors are already underwater.

One of those investors is Morgan Stanley, which is also one of the company’s underwriters in its IPO. In February, 11 mutual funds associated with Morgan Stanley purchased 5.3 million shares at $14 apiece for a total of $75 million. Four other investors, which were unnamed, also contributed to the round totaling $490 million, according to the document.

At $14 a share, the company’s value in February totaled nearly $10 billion, or roughly 43 percent greater than today’s high-end of the range.

Zynga justified the higher stock price back in February, stating that the U.S. economy had improved and that the public markets were being receptive to Internet stocks, including generous valuations for privately held companies such as Facebook and Groupon.

Furthermore, in March, the company used that valuation as a guide to purchase shares back from five of its early investors and its CEO Mark Pincus at $13.96 a share.

While the market conditions have likely changed since then, it’s important to note that things are still in flux. If the company drums up enough demand for the 115 million shares being sold over the next two weeks, the price could move even higher.

As Kara Swisher previously reported, Pincus will not sell any shares in the offering, and no other executives at Zynga have plans to sell stock, either.

But a number of the company’s early investors will be cashing in. Institutional Venture Partners, Avalon Ventures and Foundry Venture Capital will sell 2.5 million shares apiece for up to $25 million each. Union Square Ventures will sell 2.2 million for roughly $22 million.  Google and Silver Lake Partners will also both sell 1.7 million shares for a proceed of $17 million each.

Google was originally not listed as an investor when Zynga filed documents with the SEC to go public, but it showed up in subsequent filings. Google, which was rumored to have invested as much as $100 million in Zynga, has an interest in social gaming because of its Google+ network. Following the offering, it will continue to own 21 million shares, or about 3.8 percent of the company.

One notable shareholder that won’t be selling shares is venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, an early investor in the company. Its partner Bing Gordon, who personally owns a 10.7 percent stake in the company, also does not plan to sell any shares.

According to sources close to the situation, neither CEO Mark Pincus nor one of its principal venture shareholders, Kleiner Perkins, will be selling any shares in its upcoming initial public offering.

While big investors often divest stock in IPOs, not all do. It is a carefully watched number by investors, who are always wary of insiders who unload a lot of shares in an offering.

But such activity by the fast-growing San Francisco online gaming company will be watched carefully since Pincus has recently been painted in a number of press reports as the greedy Mr. Potter of Silicon Valley.

Among the allegations is that he runs a poisonously tough culture that tracks its employees’ output and performance via elaborate data models that require extraordinary amounts of work, along with nefarious list-making of who’s naughty and who’s not.

That big-brother behavior has reportedly included taking away high-ranking jobs and the sweet stock options that go along with them from those execs found wanting.

While there is no doubt Pincus is a hard-charging personality, his defenders note that it’s due to a belief that life at Zynga is a meritocracy and that his practices are not any more heavy-handed than those at other firms.

Indeed, Pincus has a lot of competition in the tough-guy tech CEO category from longtime legends such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who set the gold standard for mean, as well as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and now Google CEO Larry Page.

Pincus does not even rate in this pantheon, which is more typical of tech companies than anyone would care to admit or, to be fair, care to care about. With big benefits, vast wealth and much latitude, many in tech don’t mind the grueling work schedules.

After all, it’s not exactly ditch-digging, now is it?

In any case, sources said the coverage has hit Zynga staff hard, as well as Pincus, who has not responded due to the IPO’s quiet period. That’s in contrast to Groupon, the daily-deals site whose own rough process was rife with highly negative stories about the company’s prospects.

While those media accounts were more aimed at the business itself and less personal, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason vociferously defended the company in a controversial letter that was then leaked and published (to me and by me!).

Pincus will doubtlessly have a lot to say to investors who ask about the company’s culture and its possible negative impact on attrition, as some stories have charged.

His decision not to sell, sources said, was inspired by Zynga investor and close friend Reid Hoffman, who has sold very little of the stock of LinkedIn, where he serves as chairman.

The action all begins next week, according to multiple reports, when Zynga takes its show on the road in preparation for an IPO that is expected to value the company at $15 to $20 billion and will take place before the new year.

It will debut under the ZNGA ticker on the Nasdaq market.

While some have been worried about Zynga’s future growth, its past performance has been a lot stronger than other Internet offerings. In the first nine months of the year, the company posted $828.9 million in revenue, double the amount from a year ago, with net income of $30.7 million.

Pincus’s holding onto shares will be seen as a plus, of course, although he has sold a large amount of stock in Zynga’s history.

According to its S-1 filing:

“From our inception in October 2007 to date, Mr. Pincus, our Chief Executive Officer, Chief Product Officer and the Chairman of our Board of Directors, has purchased an aggregate of 149,197,328 shares of our common stock. To date, Mr. Pincus has sold an aggregate of 43,629,310 shares of our common stock at prices ranging from $0.42 to $13.96.”

Pincus now holds 91.4 million of Class B shares, 16 percent of the total, as well as 20.5 million of Class C shares, 38 percent of that group. Kleiner holds 65.2 million shares, or 11.2 percent, of Class B shares.

Other big Zynga owners, who might or might not sell at the IPO, include Institutional Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Venture Capital and Avalon Ventures.

Here’s a panel I did last week at the Privacy Identity Innovation conference on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley.

The panel was called “Social Sharing and the Data-Driven Economy.” And while that sounds a little dry, it was a lively session that included: Jim Adler, Chief Privacy Officer and GM, Data Systems at Intelius; David Glazer, director of engineering for Google+; Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners; and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures.

All have deep experience in the social networking space and insights into its implications, so it’s a good video to watch if you’re interested in where it’s all going.

Enjoy:

Social Sharing and the Data-Driven Economy from Marc Licciardi on Vimeo.

Introducing the SoundCloud iPad app from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

“Company X has an iPad app” isn’t an inherently interesting story, but for music start-ups, moving to the tablet isn’t a foregone conclusion. Music services absolutely must be available on the iPhone and Android handsets, but they aren’t necessarily rushing to the iPad.

Spotify, for instance, has yet to show up on Apple’s tablet. And when it does, I have a hunch it will function more like a remote control than a full-fledged client version. And while Pandora’s move to the iPhone hypercharged its growth and allowed it to eventually go public, iPad use isn’t a core part of the story the company pitches to investors.

SoundCloud makes a lot of sense on the iPad, though, because it’s not a pure-play music service: It’s partly a utility that allows people to easily post sound files anywhere they want on the Web, and it’s partly a social service designed to let people discover those files. This app lets you do all of that, and seems to put the iPad’s screen space to good use while it does.

Meanwhile, the Berlin-based start-up, which raised $10 million from Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures last year, seems to be a on a tear. It says it now has eight million people creating files for the freemium service, up from seven million less than two months ago, and up from 2.6 million when I spoke to CEO Alex Ljung in January. Here’s a video of that conversation: