Fab is taking social to the next level, but Google+ isn’t coming along for the ride.

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Fab steps up social, dumps Google+ for Pinterest

Would you want your Facebook friends or LinkedIn contacts to help determine your creditworthiness? An emerging crop of companies believe that our online identities – and our social data in particular – are valuable sources for evaluating and even managing credit risk. This week, Lenddo , a New York-based startup that helps the middle class in emerging markets use their online social connections to build credit, announced that it had raised $8 million in new funding . Almost like a Grameen bank for the digital era, Lenddo provides an online microlending platform that uses social dynamics and positive peer pressure to keep people creditworthy and provide capital they might not otherwise be able to access

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Credit scores, with a little help from your friends

Online music startup Thefuture.fm released an iOS app Wednesday morning, bringing mix sets from 5,000 DJs to the iPhone. Thefuture.fm CEO and co-founder David Stein told me during a phone call Tuesday that the mobile app is just a first step for his company’s goal to distribute and monetize music mixed by famous DJs. Key to these plans is Thefuture’s own music recognition technology, which was developed with DJs and live events in mind.

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Thefuture.fm brings its DJ mix platform to the iPhone

Six years after Getty bought iStockPhoto for $50 million, it looks like the microstock photography sector, in which pro-amateur photographers sell their pictures on commission through online marketplaces, is getting a second exposure. Fotolia , which claims to stock 17 million images for re-use by publishers, is taking a $150 million investment from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co

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Microstock’s stock is rising: $265 million for Shutterstock, Fotolia

As the use of cloud computing grows, systems administrators need better and more automated tools to spin up virtual servers to meet demand.  That’s why Opscode boosted the scalability of Private Chef  so that a sysadmin can manage three times as many workloads without adding hardware. Opscode also added support for Microsoft’s Active Directory and Solaris

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Opscode boosts scale, adds Active Directory support to Chef

After online sports broadcast specialist Perform Group went public a year ago, it promised it would succeed its acquisition of Goal.com by buying more sports sites. Now it is making a big one - Perform has offered up to €120 million ($153 million) for sports data provider RunningBall . The company employs match scouts to log over 1,000 in-game events for over 30,000 soccer games annually and is also growing in to logging data for others sports.

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Betting big on live sports data, Perform lays €120 million on RunningBall

Swedish payments startup iZettle is making its most significant since coming out of beta last year, with a pilot program to enter the potentially huge British market. Until now the company, billed as Europe’s equivalent to Square , has so far only made its product — a free plug-in dongle and app that let small merchants accept card payments through their iPhone or iPad — available in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.

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iZettle, Europe’s rival to Square, hits the UK

When Facebook made it easy to share what videos you were watching, companies like  Socialcam , Metacafe , DailyMotion and Viddy rocketed up the app-charts and saw a sharp increase in the usage and downloads of these apps. Of course, with this friction-less sharing actions came howls of complaints from Facebook’s users

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For Facebook-boosted video apps, reality checks in

There’s a principle of application design that beautiful means usable, but a new study out of Google suggests that’s not always the case. Rather, the researchers found, while beauty doesn’t necessarily affect perceived usability, poor usability can negatively affect perceived beauty

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Does function trump form in application design?

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Holy moly: Netflix clocks 42B API requests per month