“Bezos, an avid reader of the site, is making his first investment in the company and brings the startup’s total funding to $18.3 million,” Bloomberg reports, citing BI’s internal figures. The site’s earlier backers included star VC Marc Andreessen and Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer. As one source tells Bloomberg, BI had about $10 million in sales last year, and a net loss of $3 million. 

Following Twitter’s lead, Facebook on Thursday is expected to unveil a sleeker version of its Android app, along with the first phone to run the app out of the box. “The phone, by HTC, is appropriately named ‘First’  -- appropriate because of its status as the première phone to undergo Facebookification and its similarity to the name of HTC’s newest flagship, the One,” 9to5google.com reports. 

Twitter on Wednesday updated its Android, iOS, and mobile Web apps. Yet, “Android [has undergone] the most significant changes,” The Verge reports. “For those running Android 4.0 or greater, the app now is now native, and it has a new visual design that more closely follows the ‘holo’ Android style guidelines.” Of particular note, the app has improved tweet detail pages that fill the entire screen with content, The Verge writes. 

Stateside and in the UK, movie and TV rental and purchase service Vdio just soft-launched, this week. “The service, which is the fruits of Skype and Rdio co-founder Janus Friis, launches with a host of social features like sharing, collecting, favoriting and collaborative listing,” The Next Web reports. “The service is launching in only two countries, but there will be an iPad app released later today and unlimited Rdio subscribers will get a $25 credit for the service.” 

On average, U.S. smartphone- and tablet-owners spend 2 hours and 38 minutes "glued" to their devices everyday, according to the latest research from Flurry Analytics. That's based on the activity of more than 1 billion active mobile iOS and Android devices. “Only 20% (31 minutes) of that time is spent on a mobile browser -- which as far as Flurry is concerned is now just another app,” Fortune notes. Meanwhile, “more than 50 of those minutes are spent playing games -- the single largest category of apps.” 

Marketo Files $75M IPO Marketing automation software firm Marketo filed for a $75 million IPO, on Monday. From 2010 to 2012, Marketo’s revenue grew from $14 million to $58.4 million, the company revealed in a statement. Yet, “the company experienced net losses of $11.8 million, $22.6 million, and $34.4 million for the years 2010-2012 respectively,” VentureBeat reports. In its S1 filing, Marketo also revealed a heavy dependence its relationship with Salesforce.com. http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/02/marketing-software-company-marketo-files-for-a-75m-ipo/

Since 2011, Apple has discouraged app developers from targeting ads based on a mobile device’s Universal Device Identifier (UDID). In its place, Apple has asked that developers rely on Advertising IDs, which device owners can ostensibly turn off if they don’t want to be tracked by advertisers. Nick Arnott, an engineer at iPhone app consultancy Double Encore, explores the policy and its impact on advertisers, developers, and users. Overall, he writes: “Apple’s move away from UDIDs is a good thing.” 

In March, Apple's iOS browser commanded 61.79% of all mobile browser Web traffic, according to new Net Applications data. “That was a healthy rise from the 55.41% tracked in February,” CNet notes. Meanwhile, the default Android browser came in second place with a 21.86% share, and Opera Mini ranked third with 8.4%. 

Facebook has tapped Emily White -- most recently director of mobile partnerships at the social network -- to take on the new role of director of business operations at Instagram. “In this capacity, she will work with Instagram head and co-founder Kevin Systrom to scale nascent efforts to expand partnerships, improve user operations and, presumably, come up with ways to make some money,” AllThingsD reports.  

Supporting the theory that one’s name and destiny are often linked, Amazon has hired Charlie Kindel to head up a secret project, which many suspect will hinge on the company’s Kindle tablet. Formerly general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Phone unit, Kindel wrote on his LinkedIn profile on Monday: “I’m building a new team going after a totally new area for Amazon.”