They may have some slight security issues, but Grindr, the infamous gay "social" app that's expanding to straight-town, is finding... some ways to make money.

Data from StatCounter. READ MORE

If you're not following the Carrier IQ story, it's the flip side of the User Agreement Trust Economy. It's the modern tale: Who Secretly Owns Your Data and What Do They Do With It? For background of the story to date, here's a fairly good timeline. Carrier IQ gathers diagnostic information on some phones; it may or may not actually keylog what you type on your phone; it may or may not sometimes or always gather the passwords you enter on your phone; and, according to the FBI's refusal to release information, it may or may not have actually turned over information to law enforcement. (Carrier IQ denies all of this.) Sprint has now disabled it on some or all of their phones. Most interesting is that Carrier IQ came in hot and legal immediately, trying to shut down the fellow who first started posting about the keylogging; then someone wrangled some sense into them about not appearing totally evil. Super-geeks will enjoy reading their recently released report that explains their product. Unfortunately, that document explains that their product sometimes "accidentally" records text messages. To be fair, if our stealth drones had this, we wouldn't have to ask for them back from other countries probably.

"To hear the city’s female entrepreneurs tell it, an ambiguous date-meeting with Charlie O’Donnell is almost a rite of passage—like living on ramen while you launch your first app.... What seemed to grate on many of Mr. O’Donnell’s targets was the sense that they’d been subjected to a romantic version of the bait-and-switch: expecting a meeting, they’d found themselves on a date. " But why are you entrepreneuresses holding out on all this? (I mean, besides, I guess, that he lives in Bay Ridge. Must love R trains!)

The Wirecutter is a new website designed to do one thing: to tell you what the best particular product in a category is at any given moment. It is a project of Brian Lam, late of Gizmodo. Do you want to buy a TV? Great: here are the three TVs we endorse right now. Here's what Brian has to say about the site; here's the best way to use it. READ MORE

1. Naming baby girls "Layla," "Leila" or "Lila." READ MORE

$85 million sounds like a lot of money! That's what Tumblr just raised, on top of the $30 million they raised ten months ago, bringing their investment dollars to a bit north of $120 million. There's a staff of 50 (now only 82% male!), so that's like $5 million a year right there. (Also, they've outsourced tech support (rather poorly; if you ask Tumblr for help with something, you get some dude copying and pasting a manual at you) with some minimal supervision, and that's probably a significant, if user-annoying, cost savings.) But staff costs are surely dwarfed by the cost of doing at the very least 156 billion pageviews a year, particularly when those pageviews are mostly "borrowed" copyrighted high-res images of cats and/or starving girls. (That cost is the joy of being an actual tech company, not a "media company.") By very back-of-the-envelope calculations, Tumblr's adorable own neighborhood in some cute server farm costs a lot more than that. So by necessity, they'll be rolling out the "how we will make money" plan in 2012. Somewhere at Tumblr HQ, there's a graph where a red line of money being spent points down and a blue (or maybe green????) line of "projected revenue" points up. Hmm, hey, HOW ABOUT COUPONS? I hear coupons are hot right now.

Ifttt is pretty close to being the greatest thing in the world. Go explore the preset recipes or make your own.

Oh, no. Coming in September to Bloomberg TV (I think that's channel 547803 in New York?), it's TechStars! A TV show based on the entrepreneurial mentorship bootcamp program! This is formatted as a reality show, and was shot at TechStars' last three-month incubator program in New York. It's all about winning that big check for your hot startup, just like in real life. (Ha.) But it's not just about tech! It's about stars too! Because money = fame, and fame = money, and both of those = validation. This all fits into my theory that the current bubble is more of an emotional bubble, not actually an economic bubble. It's a celebrity industrial complex bubble. So: Who will be the Puck? Who will be the Spencer and Heidi? (Answer: someone who will look back on the experience with regret.) Anyway. YOU KNOW WHO'S REALLY A STAR ENTREPRENEUR IN THE TECHNOLOGY FIELD? THE DRY CLEANERS ON THE CORNER AND THE DUDE WHO RUNS THAT DELI BY YOUR HOUSE AND THE LADY WHO GETS A USURIOUS BANK LOAN FOR A TAXI MEDALLION.