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]

Mr. Giles. (Bloomberg)

Roboinvest, which lets ordinary folks follow each others' trades in real-time, booted up at the end of January with a partnership with amateur trading clearinghouse E*TRADE. The startup has processed $2.5 million in trades and grown to 1,300 users since then, founder Michael Giles told Betabeat, with only some seed money and a full-time team of two.

The trick to Roboinvest is "one-click copy trading," the feature that launched just over two weeks ago and got the attention of Bloomberg's Businessweek. Broadcast your trades in real-time on Roboinvest, and your followers have 30 minutes to decide if they want to copy your move. "Most people know somebody who trades, and they always want to know what they're doing," he said. "It's trading for the rest of us. Anybody with a trading account can use Roboinvest."

People chat about stock picks on Twitter and the niche site StockTwits, where anyone can claim to beat the Street. Because it's directly connected to a trader's E*TRADE or TradeKing account, Roboinvest only broadcasts "pure signal," Mr. Giles said, because every broadcast is an actual trade. "It's like looking over the shoulder of what another trader is doing," he said. "It's a bit of that voyeurism aspect to it."

Eventually, Roboinvest will automate the trades the way other startups like Covestor have, Mr. Giles said. Covestor, another New York startup, peddles what it calls "mirror trading." Covestor curates a group of model managers and tracks their earnings so ordinary traders can comparison shop. Follow a model manager, and your money automatically follow theirs. The model managers and Covestor then take a cut.

"We want to get to the point where we can add a lot more automation into the service," Mr. Giles said. The delay is in part due to financial regulations that affect automated trading, he said. "We're going to keep it self-directed and learn from that and optimize it, then take it to the next level after we've made the one-click trading super solid."

Within two weeks, Roboinvest will begin supporting the e-broker TradeKing, adding another 300,000 potential customers on top of the 2.8 million on E*TRADE.

Roboinvest plants to release one-click trading on its mobile app soon, rehaul the website, and integrate with more smaller online brokers.

Mr. Giles is from Melbourne, Australia. He studied abroad in upstate New York and traded stocks while in school. His friends were always asking him for advice, which led to the idea for Roboinvest. Ultimately, he believes Roboinvest's appeal will be its community. "Our tagline is 'invest together,'" he said.

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."