Don't call it a bubble, but the second quarter of 2011 witnessed the highest levels of VC investment in Web-specific startups since 2001, according to the latest MoneyTree report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. "Venture capital firms pumped $2.3 billion into 275 web-oriented companies during Q2 2011, a 72 percent increase in dollars and a 46 percent increase in such deals from the first quarter of the year," GigaOm points out. "Growth is normally a good thing for the venture capital ecosystem, but it may be starting to get out of hand." As NVCA president Mark …

The mobile app for Google+ just became available for the iPhone, and it's already the top free program in the iTunes App Store. Showing consumers' taste for (curiosity around?) Google's latest social effort, its popularity doesn't seem to have been hurt by the existence of a few initial glitches. "When we launched, the App Store started serving a previous test version of the app which didn't have the stability and fixes that the latest version had," Punit Soni, lead product manager for Google+ Mobile, explained. "It started serving the correct version a little later." Overall, eWeek.com estimates that Google+ …

Ready to expand it online privacy services, Reputation.com has raised a $41 million round of funding, reports The Wall Street Journal. "The round, which (Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik) said was oversubscribed, brings the company's total capital raised to more than $65 million," according to WSJ. "Fertik said Reputation.com decided to raise more money because it is planning a big push into a new line of business." Thus far, the company has offered several services that help consumers manage their privacy, information and reputation online. Now Reputation.com has also built a data-set business -- comprised of collected data on individuals, …

Do you want your Facebook "friends" to tell the world how much they "like" you? Now you can as Page administrators can now send friends invites -- which appear as notifications -- to Like their Page. The change opens "a new viral channel that could assist Page growth," surmises Inside Facebook. Because these invites generate Facebook and email notifications, they are much more noticeable and could have a higher conversion rate than the Page suggestions. That said, accepting an invite still requires friends to click through to a particular Page. Suggests Inside Facebook: "Admins of new …

Does the Web -- and in particular social networks -- actually engender trust? Indeed it does, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. Even more remarkable, Pew found that the more time consumers spend online, the more trusting they become of it. As the report put it, "The typical Internet user is more than twice as likely as others to feel that people can be trusted," with regular Facebook users the most trusting of all. "This has significant implications, because far from being merely a touchy-feely concept tossed around at a Zen retreat, trust goes to the …

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner is openly disparaging Google's boldest social media effort to date. At an industry event this week, Weiner wondered where people will get the free time to use Google+, reports Business Insider. While Weiner acknowledged that Google had no choice but to embrace social, he questioned whether it's coming to late to the party, and whether consumers' social plates are already full. "Nobody has any free time," he said, according to BI. "Unlike social platforms and TV, which can coexist, you don't see people using Twitter while they're using Facebook, or using Facebook while they're …

Pointing the way to a truly paper-less future, Adobe Systems on Monday announced the acquisition of electronic signature technology provider EchoSign. "Electronic signatures have held the promise for years of letting people sign documents without having to resort to the paper-based hassles of scanning, faxing and mailing, but haven't made major inroads," explains CNET. "The move means Adobe will get new abilities for its document-handling software." More broadly, Adobe has been working to embed its products as deeply into business computing as Microsoft Office. "Together, our aim is to make electronic signatures the standard way for people to …

Ties between Twitter and third-party developers are as strained as ever as the Federal Trade Commission investigates Twitter's relationship with the developers. "Although neither Twitter nor the agency would comment, two people briefed on the inquiry said that it questioned whether Twitter had been anti-competitive when it bought or regulated some apps," The New York Times reports. "At the same time, the apps built by third-party developers have become a thriving corner of the tech industry." Indeed, in the past six months, investors poured $500 million into developers of Twitter apps, while companies, including Wal-Mart and Salesforce.com, …

While it already dominates the e-book market, Amazon seems determined to challenge other markets, from full-feature tablets to online textbook renters. To that end, the ecommerce giant has opened a textbook store for its Kindle platform, where it is renting "tens of thousands" of titles for the upcoming school year. Amazon will let students -- and anyone else, for that matter -- buy textbooks at a steep discount to their print list prices, and will charge them based on the amount of time they plan to hang on to the book. Amazon says it will generally require a …

Among consumers planning to buy a smartphone in the next three months, nearly half have their hearts set on an iPhone, according to new findings from ChangeWave Research. The survey found that 46% of consumers who plan to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days prefer a device running Apple's iOS, which powers the iPhone. "That's up 2 points from a poll done in March," notes Appleinsider. Google Android came in second place with 32% of consumers, as Google's share also increased since March, growing by one percentage point. "The gains of Apple and Google came at …