A new app called Pinion from a Philadelphia-based developer is making its official debut with a soft launch today, taking a new approach to the concept of an app that uses location services to remotely track your activity and give you insight on how you spend your time. Unlike past entrants, including Chronos and Saga, however, Pinion wants to keep things as simple as possible, and hopefully make the software more generally usable for the average consumer, too.

Pinion provides a way to see how your day breaks down, like a “Mint for money,” according to founder Stephen Caldwell. That means that rather than take into account everything you do during the day, Pinion tracks time spent at only the locations you choose, grouping everything else into a bucket “other” category. So you can set it to monitor when you’re at the office, when you’re at home, and when you’re at the gym, but ignore everything else. That would give you a fairly good breakdown of your work/life balance, without getting more granular than necessary.

“The app only aggregates the places you care about – everything else is Other,” Caldwell explained in an interview. “If you only want to know how many hours you spend at work, then that’s the only location you plug in. As such, the app doesn’t check in as frequently as Saga/Chronos and it uses the device’s internal sensors to limit battery usage. There’s a lot that can be done on the phone before the GPS needs to be activated.” Caldwell paid a lot of attention to energy consumption, which has been a concern for apps that monitor activity in the background on the iPhone in the past.

Livrada, a company developing new types of e-book gift cards, has raised a seed round of funding. Combined with earlier support from friends and family, the company has now raised a total of $1 million.

The startup’s first products were gift cards for specific e-book titles sold in Target and other stores. So if you want to buy something for a bookworm friend who’s embraced e-reading, you can essentially give them a specific book, not just a generic gift card to Amazon or the iBookstore.

“We all know there is a strong culture around book gift giving that has persisted for centuries,” CEO Leonard Chen told me via email. “Most of this experience is lost in e-books.”

Nomi, a startup led by former executives from Salesforce.com and Buddy Media, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by First Round Capital.

Additional investors in the round include Greycroft Partners, SV Angel, Forerunner Ventures, Ralph Mack, Dave Tisch, Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn, and Mass Relevance CEO Sam Decker.

Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer Wesley Barrow was formerly the director of Eastern sales for Buddy Media, which was acquired by Salesforce last year. Barrow told me that he’s experiencing a bit of déjà vu from the early days of Buddy, because “omni channel retail” (i.e., retail that tries to bridge the online and offline worlds) is at the same stage now as social marketing was a few years ago: “It’s very much still like the Wild West.”

We all love the idea of being able to connect and work with people in our always-online day and age, but ironically, when it comes to document collaboration, a lot of the software designed to aid in that — WebEx, GoToMeeting and the rest — is actually more geared to presenting rather than actually letting people work together on things, in real time, or focused on documents within a particular platform, like Google Docs.

Enter Screenhero. Part of the current batch of Y-Combinator startups, Screenhero is launching with a way of letting two (and potentially more) people work on documents, or even each other’s computer desktops, in possibly the easiest way to date, by simultaneously giving each collaborator an independent cursor and mouse, and complete control over a document, as if it were his or her own.

Below is an example of what I saw when co-founder J Sherwani shared his desktop with me. We were chatting in Screenhero’s own messaging service, as well as in a PowerPoint document. (note: I don’t have PowerPoint software installed on my own computer; in that sense it’s also a way of sharing apps.)

Dublin and San Francisco-based Swrve, which offers an in-app direct marketing platform aimed at mobile games developers or anybody making or responsible for marketing an app, has launched SwrveTalk to enable in-app marketing messages to be sent to users on a targeted and measurable basis. It can be employed to do things like cross-promote other titles in a portfolio or to improve conversion of time-limited in-app purchase offers, and so on.

The problem Swrve is setting out to solve is that in-app messages traditionally involve broadcasting in bulk to a large group of users and therefore don’t discriminate and aren’t targeted on the basis of their likelihood to convert. This, it’s claimed, creates wasted inventory, low response rates, and “increased customer churn due to the over-promotion of irrelevant offers”. In contrast, SwrveTalk messages use behavioural and demographic targeting in an attempt to ensure that only relevant messages are delivered to users, thus improving click-through rates, ROI on cross-promotional campaigns, and in-app purchase conversions.

SwrveTalk enables campaigns to be defined across multiple games/apps in a portfolio, specifying when messages are shown, frequency, and exactly which player types they’ll be sent to. How this functionality might be utilised in practice, Swrve gives the example of a player who has monetized well in the past, but is now less engaged, who could be encouraged to try another title/app. Or for users yet to be monetized, they might be shown a time-limited in-app purchase offer to encourage conversion.

Israeli early stage high-tech startup VC fund Magma Venture Partners, whose current portfolio includes online video-editing software developer Magisto, mobile analytics company Onavo, and navigation app maker Waze to name three, has completed fundraising on its third fund — Magma III — exceeding its target of $100 million (it did not specify by exactly how much).

Magma said it manages more than $300 million to-date. Its investments typically focus on digital media, SaaS and fabless semiconductors.  The fund is managed by partners  Yahal Zilka and Modi Rosen.

Commenting in a statement, Yahal Zilka, co-managing partner, said Magma III would be “an important source of encouragement and funding for Israeli-related entrepreneurs in their initial phases; pre-seed, seed and A-rounds”.

As Facebook’s growth began to accelerate exponentially in 2009 and 2010 and its platform began to emerge, the opportunities for businesses to leverage and apply its social graph in other industries seemed endless. In particular, many saw the social graph as having a fundamentally disruptive influence on eCommerce and it was about that time that investors and entrepreneurs began dumping lots of time and money into building new online storefronts on top of and around Facebook’s burgeoning platform.

One of the many startups playing in this space was Yardsellr, a startup created by former eBay executives, which aspired to become the “eBay for Facebook” — without the auctions. In 2010, the startup raised $5 million from Accel and when TechCrunch caught up with Yardsellr in the fall of 2011, things seemed to be looking up.

At the time, the social commerce platform claimed that it had grown into a community of over 5 million users, its local sellers were listing 6K new items for sale each day and the platform listed over 120K items for sale in total. However, at the time, only 175K of its 5 million users were active on the site each month — usage or stickiness, which, in retrospect, might have rung a bell.

After a couple early stumbles in building out a mobile gaming platform in the West, GREE did a bit of a pivot with its San Francisco office over the last year. Initially set up after the $104 million acquisition of mobile gaming network OpenFeint, the office is now entirely geared toward building first-party games.

It’s a turnabout for the $3.5 billion Japanese gaming company, which built its business in astonishingly short eight years through being a major feature phone gaming platform. (Yes, eight years is short in Japan where the culture can be averse to risky, new entrepreneurial ventures.) They aimed to replicate that success as a dual game developer and platform in the West with a few big-ticket acquisitions. But now it appears that the U.S. arm is just doing games for now.

“We’re pretty singularly focused on content,” said Anil Dharni, GREE’s senior vice president of studio operations, in an interview from the company’s Mission Bay offices. “The platform — whenever it’s ready for the U.S. market — will get integrated later. The produce spirit and guidance had to happen from Japan.” Dharni was one of the co-founders of Funzio, which GREE bought last year for $210 million.