Good morning, sunshine! (Photo: flickr.com/globochem)

Before bitching about anything tech-related today, please remember that 670 million people are currently without power in India. [Reuters]

The iPhone almost didn't make it out of development hell, says Sir Jonathan Ive. [Telegraph]

Twitter has launched clickable stock tickers called Cashtags. The CEO of Stocktwits is not happy with this "hijacking" of his idea. [Howard Lindzon]

Facebook is reportedly introducing a "Save for Later" feature. All of a sudden it's awful crowded on the bottom of your status update.  [The Verge]

Social media is the new focus group. [New York Times]

The Obama campaign now has an app. So far, it is only available for iPhone. Naturally. [All Things D]

$$$ in you inbox

65 percent of women are the CFOs in their household, meaning they make the principal financial decisions. When serial entrpreneur Amanda Steinberg was looking to create an email business, she fixated on improving women's financial smarts, something she had struggled with as a new mother buying a new home. And so DailyWorth, a sort of DailyCandy for money, was born.

The company has just raised $2 million from a group of angel investors led by Joanne Wilson and Stocktwits founder Howard Lindzon. Other investors include 500 Startups Dave McClure, TechStars Dave Cohen, networking artiste Peter Shankman and Eric Schmidt's TomorrowVentures. That brings its total funding to just over $3 million. "Amanda is an experienced entrepreneur and web developer. She's got a great set of skills and is tapping into a big market," said Ms. Wilson.

DailyWorth now has over 200,000 subscribers. "I've started 6 businesses, some of which lasted six weeks, some six years," said Ms. Steinberg. "Nothing I've done has worked like this. I spent a decade as an engineer building VC backed companies for other people, and I saw what made a company fail. I wanted to simplify, and the Daily Candy model just works really, really well." Andrew Russell, formerly of Pilot Group, who has invested in email companies like Daily Candy and Thrillist, is an independent board member at DailyWorth.

The convergence of women, finance and careers is quite a hot market in New York right now. The Daily Muse (no relation) has been seeing big traffic growth as it heads to Y Combinator. And Abrams Media, apparently discovering that people were not as interested in super rich jerks as they imagined, rebranded Mogulite as Jane Dough, a site aimed at women in business with the terrible tagline, "the business new we knead".

The biggest player in the space, at least in terms of cash raised, is LearnVest, which has piled up $24.5 million for its personal finance tool aimed at women that teaches user to tackle life events like getting out of debt, budgeting for a wedding, buying your first stock, or applying for a student loan. Today that company announced it was launching a new service offering a year of financial planning with email and phone support.

The start-up already boasts 12 senior engineers. But to attract more, Scopely is taking an advertiser's approach to recruiting, with slogans and images that  call to mind DosXX's fawning "Most Interesting Man in the World" campaign and the absurdity of Old Spice's man-on-a-horse spiel. It's no surprise, really, some of its existing staff hails from storied ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi and Hollywood via Warner Brothers. At the top of the page, the tag line changes from "Was your autobiography written in Node.Js... before it was invented?" to "Were you able to handle 100,000 requests/second at your high school prom?" Below that, people who refer new hires are promised prizes like beard grooming oil, sex partner panther [Ed note: we'd be into either] cologne, and $11k cash wrapped in bacon. Mmm.

Think of it as the employer equivalent of the best cover letter ever.

Mr. Elbaz wouldn't say exactly what Scopely will focus on just yet, but according to TechCrunch, he did disclose that:

"The startup will disrupt the social space that is 'ripe for innovation.'  He says that social networks have grown up quickly and Scopely’s product, which is being programmed in Node.js, will play in this arena. He adds that online advertising will play a part in Scopely as well."

There. Doesn't that (not at all) clear things up?

Back in 2003, Mr. Elbaz sold what would become AdSense (then called Applied Semantics) to Google for $1000 million. But beyond the industry experience and the fresh funding, we'd say the next best thing going Scopely has to be its unique recruiting strategy.

via thestreet.com

There comes a time in every start-up's life when they have to move beyond, "If we build it, they will come," and start focusing on guap. For StockTwits co-founder and investor Howard Lindzon, that time is nigh. But rather than the typical advertising or premium membership route, Lindzon's New York- and San Diego-based Twitter-based financial network for traders and investors has opted to disrupt the staid field of corporate investor relations. Betabeat talked to StockTwits investor and executive editor Phil Pearlman today to find out why.

Mr. Pearlman said it wasn't a hard choice to go after investor relations departments who want to use the StockTwits platform to disseminate company information. Because it's easier to get corporations to pony up for the service than investors that have a wealth of other ways to find out about potential investments? "That's a great point," said Mr. Pearlman.

It was also a natural fit. "It was very organic. We found companies coming onto our platform and sharing information. Our network is really the place where traders and investors convene to share information in real time. I’m biased. But I think it’s a very smart move to do." For public companies like Dell, Hewlett Packard, and NetApp, who are beta testing the service (free, with $99/month for compliance costs), it's a way to "even the playing field" by getting the word out about earnings, new developments, or new partnerships.

Betabeat took that to mean evening the field with positive information—a leveling force against whatever is being said against them online. In effect that makes StockTwits more of a promotional tool than just investor relations for existing shareholders with a social media twist.

Mr. Pearlman said he didn't have exact metrics on how many StockTwits users would see this corporate-sponsored information a day. But he did note, "We’re growing like crazy, thousands and thousands of messages come through our site everyday." The S&P futures section of the dashboard, he volunteered, had multiple messages a minute. "And that's just one asset." Private companies can also join in the social media fun. "The conversation related to Groupon and Pandora is also heavy."

With all the new hedge funds looking to Twitter sentiment instead of actual human analysts, won't this skew the system? "We didn’t invent it," said Mr. Pearlman, "We just made it incredibly easy for people to access information more quickly. We’re very much in the spirit of that—they call it the information age or whatever. I’m not into slogans, but information is moving much more quickly now."

The hype around this kind of trading is so far based largely on academic analysis. A study out of Indiana University from last year, which claimed to predict market moves days in advance, provided the underpinning for Derwent fund. That work was put together by an associate professor. A new study, highlighted yesterday by Matthew Ingram on GigaOm, comes from a PhD student, who claims investors that followed his model would have seen a 15 percent return in the first half of 2010, compared to a drop of 8.5 percent for the S&P over the same period.

The fact that a single academic paper tested over just six months could justify a $100 million investment shows the level of froth surrounding social media right now. Stock Twits, the mashup of Twitter's real time follow model with financial advice, has doubled it's monthly visitors since December.  The service recently rolled out a new discovery tool, so that users don't have to be familiar with a trader to follow their advice, but can simply pick from a curated list that seems to match their risk profile.

Ingram points out that it won't be long till someone starts trying to game this system, much as Google's search algorithms led to an explosion in black hat SEO. But it wouldn't even require an automated spam bot to juice sentiment in the wrong direction. As Betabeat has written before, Twitter is a powerful platform for snowballing sentiment, given the outsized influence of celebrities. Take for example, 50 Cent pumping a penny stock up 1000% with just a few tweets. Or that mentions of Anne Hathaway may drive up shares of Berkshire Hathaway.