Koozoo this week closed a $2.5 million seed funding round led by New Enterprise Associates and Tugboat Ventures. What does Koozoo do? The startup “wants to help its users answers questions like ‘how big is the lineup at my favorite restaurant?’ or ‘how crowded is the beach?’ by crowdsourcing live video feeds of the world’s public places,” Betakit explains. Koozoo plans to officially debut in 2013. 

Coming on the heels of Yahoo’s Mail refresh, the company just debuted a new version of its Flickr iOS app, which critics are calling very Instagram-like. Along with “confirming [Yahoo CEO] Marissa Mayer’s commitment to a mobile-first strategy,” The Next Web notes that: “The app takes cues from other image-sharing apps -- particularly Instagram -- but it also borrows heavily from its Android app.”  

Like most mega-platforms, Facebook has released a “Year in Review” featuring all the things users couldn’t get enough of in 2012. Not content to stop there, however, the roundup will also be personalized for each of Facebook’s more than 800 million members, VentureBeat reports. “Posts and pictures that you are tagged in that have a lot of likes and comments are the most likely candidates for big moments.” 

What were consumers searching for this year? South Korean pop sensations, North Eastern natural disasters, and the latest Apple gadgets were big -- but no topic piqued more curiosity than Whitney Houston’s untimely death at the beginning of the year, reports Bloomberg, citing Google’s annual “Zeitgeist” report. 

So, is Storyboard -- Tumblr’s behind-the-scenes look at various users and their personal stories -- journalism or marketing? There’s some debate among industry insiders. Setting the record straight, Joe Pompeo writes in Capital New York: “It certainly is next-generation marketing.” Yes, Tumblr is “creating content that speaks to the value of [its brand].” There you have it.

Microsoft isn’t dishing on the success (or failure) of its new Surface tablet -- but that can’t keep company watchers from prying. Case in point, ad network Chitika did a comparison of traffic being generated by Nexus tablets compared with Microsoft Surface. “The results of the study show that the Nexus tablets (mostly Nexus 7) are generating considerably more traffic than the Microsoft Surface tablet,” Marketing Land writes. 

Facebook this week is officially rolling out its new ecommerce platform, Facebook Gifts, to all U.S. consumers. And, “just in time for gift-giving season,” WebProNews notes. Initial gift categories include Food & Drink, Wine, Home & Kitchen, and Baby & Kids. The service, which was soft-launched in late September, features about 100 retail partners, as well as virtual subscriptions from Hulu and Pandora. 

The latest year-end roundup comes from Twitter, which says it now has 140 million active users (yes, same as the number of characters a tweet can include), all of whom send 1 billion tweets every two and a half days. Highlights, as reported by ABCNews.com, included the most “retweeted” tweet of the year -- President Obama’s election night note: “Four more years.” -- and Pope Benedict XVI getting his own Twitter handle. 

In an exhaustive interview, Fortune’s Miguel Helft goes one-on-one with Google’s press-wary CEO Larry Page. Among other subjects, Page admits that he isn’t satisfied with the search giant’s social strategy, and stresses the importance of maintaining an edge in search, as well as keeping employees happy in an incredibly competitive tech market.      

In the UK at least, Barnes & Noble has signed deals with a number major studios to support the launch its new Nook Video service. The service, which will be available on Barnes & Noble’s recently launched Nook HD and Nook HD+ tablets in the UK, will feature content from BBC Worldwide, HBO, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, STARZ, and Warner Bros. Entertainment.