The all-electric RAV4 is set to make a comeback. But this time around Tesla Motors is going to provide the electric powerplant, rather than Toyota themselves. In fact, Tesla might even be doing the bulk of the assembling if this CNN Money report is correct.

Toyota announced that the Japanese auto maker planned to invest $50 million into Tesla after a successful initial public offering. That took place a couple weeks back on June 29 and this is the first we’re seeing from the investment.

Company blogs are a good way to post press releases and make staff and product announcements. But they’re always particularly helpful when startups use them to share “lessons learned” from various stages of the entrepreneurial process.

Last month, anonymous neighborhood messaging service BlockChalk announced that it had secured a $1.5 million investment, the company’s first. Today BlockChalk updated its blog today with some of the lessons the founders learned from raising angel investment.

1. Find Early Supporters

BlockChalk points to the importance of securing the support and advocacy of an angel investor, in this case Joshua Schachter, founder of . Schachter was able to play a key role in investor introductions and referrals, product advice, and pitch feedback.

2. AngelList Pwns

AngelList is a service run by VentureHacks that helps put entrepreneurs in touch with angel investors. As BlockChalk describes, the process of honing a pitch for the AngelList was a beneficial act in its own right, but the AngelList helped them cultivate investor interest.

Venture Hacks have also written about the BlockChalk funding today.

3. The Team Is Key

BlockChalk stresses the importance of a sold founding team in being able to attract investment. The founders’ backgrounds in business, their connections within the industry and their history of technical expertise improved their ability to raise funds. And Nivi echoes this in his Venture Hacks post today: “I think the foundation of BlockChalk’s fund-raising story is the pedigree of their team: Stephen Hood is the former head of product at del.icio.us, Dave Baggeroer is part of Stanford’s d.school faculty, and Josh Whiting is a former senior engineer at craigslist and former head of engineering for del.icio.us.”

As the BlockChalk founders write, “It’s hard to go it alone. It’s probably also not smart in most cases. A powerful team is greater than the sum of its parts, and investors know that.”

4. Continue to Tweak Your Pitch

Just because you’ve honed your pitch doesn’t mean you’re done. Continue to solicit feedback and revise and refine your presentation.”This shouldn’t be just a surface exercise. Your pitch is an extension of your product and your business, and any learnings should flow in both directions. “

5. The Blessing and the Curse of the Prototype

While the feedback you receive from investors when they hear your pitch is important, it will never replace the feedback from actual users. BlockChalk describes its “soft launch” of a prototype in the hopes of getting early feedback. However, the prototype had an unintended consequence, as some potential investors thought the prototype was the finished product.

In retrospect, says the blg post, “If we could do it again we might have launched our prototype under a different brand. Or perhaps emblazoned it with the word “beta”, or even “alpha”. But at some level this is the price you pay for having a “product” before you have funding. Prototyping is a double-edged sword. Be prepared for both blades!”

Photo credits: Flickr user dixieroadrash

Picnik just announced that it has been been acquired by Google. While the details surrounding the acquisition are still somewhat murky, the Picnik team just announced the acquisition on the company’s blog. Picnik currently has 20 employees and, according to its own data, “millions of visitors every month.” The company offers a free service as well as paid accounts and a number of third-party services, including Box.net and Flickr, use Picnik’s API to offer the company’s services to their customers. According to the company’s announcement, the service will remain online and unchanged for the time being. The price of the acquisition has not been disclosed.

What Will Happen to Picnik?

For Google, this acquisition would make a lot of sense. After all, with Picasa Web Albums, Google offers one of the most popular online photo sharing sites and while it offers some basic editing features, it doesn’t offer anything close to Picnik’s feature set. Picasa, too, is one of the few Google services that still relies heavily on a desktop client and as Google continues to push its online services, it’s only natural for Google to want to offer a better online photo editor as well. Indeed, according to Google own announcement, the company will work “hard on integration and new features.”

The Picnik team will move to Google’s Seattle offices and judging from the announcement, there will be no changes in the company’s management and engineering time.

What about Picnik’s Relationship with Flickr?

Picnik has a close partnership with Yahoo’s Flickr, where it is the default photo editor. It will be interesting to see if Flickr plans to make any changes to this agreement in the near future. In today’s announcement, Google notes that it plans to continue to support “all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks.”

We contacted Yahoo and Flickr for a statement, but all we got so far was “no comment.”

Remember when Steve Ballmer said that there’s “no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share?” Well, according to Nielsen, the iPhone 3G is currently the number one mobile phone in the U.S., holding 4 percent of the market. Not bad for a smartphone, eh, Steve?

The iPhone 3G is followed by RIM BlackBerry 8300 Series with 3.7 percent and the Motorola RAZR V3 series with 2.3 percent of the market, while the rest of the top ten list consists mainly of LG and RIM devices, with Samsung SPH-M540 snugged into the sixth place. Add the percentages of various LG or RIM devices up, and Apple is no longer number one; but Apple makes only one phone – the iPhone – and one can’t deny they’re doing mighty good.

Nielsen also lists the most popular websites accessed over mobile phones. Leading the pack, of course, is Google Search, but Google’s Gmail takes only the third place, behind Yahoo’s free mail service. The Weather Channel holds the fourth place, proving that many users still access the Internet over the phone only to find out if it’s going to rain, while the ubiquitous Facebook is in the fifth place.

As far as brands on mobiles go, Yahoo is the most popular brand, followed by Google and MSN/WindowsLive/Bing. AOL and the Weather Channel hold the fourth and the fifth place, while Facebook has to settle for being the sixth most popular brand on mobiles.

Check out the complete lists over at Nielsen’s blog.

Tags: blackberry, iphone, Mobile 2.0

The story of Michaele and Tareq Salahi should serve as a lesson in the wrong way to seek fame. The couple, which is being considered by Bravo for the DC version of The Real Housewives series, somehow managed to make it past a security checkpoint to attend the White House state dinner on Tuesday evening, where they proceeded to party with the political elite.

It also just so happens that Michaele Salahi has a public Facebook Page, which she used to post a smattering of photos from the evening, including one of her and her husband with Vice President Joe Biden.

It’s not all glitz and glamor for the limelight seeking couple. According to an update from CBS, the couple may soon face a rude awakening as the Secret Service’s active investigation into the matter could result in criminal chargers.

According to CBS, “Secret Service spokesman Jim Mackin says the agency is moving closer to beginning a criminal investigation. He says that’s one reason the Secret Service hasn’t yet explained what happened when Michaele and Tareq Salahi arrived at the security checkpoint Tuesday for the dinner honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.”

Interestingly enough, as the investigation unfolds, those widely shared Facebook photos from Salahi’s page could prove to be the couple’s worst nightmare, especially should criminal charges be filed.

At today’s Unite Conference, game dev platform provider Unity Technologies announced it will be releasing the latest build of its Unity Platform and making a previous version available at the low, low price of free.

All platforms allow developers to create games for PCs, Macs, Nintendo Wiis, and iPhones. The free version, formerly known as Unity Indie, was previously priced at $199. Broke and/or stingy devs are welcomed to download the platform here. The pro version of Unity’s platform will continue to sell for around $1,500.

The Unity platform is used in games such as EA’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online, LEGO’s Tthe Quest for R2D2, and Cartoon Network’s FusionFall. Since the company’s release of an iPhone game dev platform earlier this year, more than 325 games have been built with the Unity engine. These games include Zombieville USA, one of the top 10 best-selling iPhone games.

In a statement released today, CEO David Helgason said, “With the explosive growth in new platforms and performance improvement in our Unity suite of products, we believe that there are no technical hurdles remaining for high quality interactive content everywhere.

“Now we are removing financial hurdles as well. Unity is mature enough and easy enough to use that it can be the entry point for those developers taking their first steps with the technology.”

With the 2.6 release of the platform, Unity provides full support for external versioning tools such as Subversion, Perforce, or any other version control system. Unity has also added Visual Studio integration and can automatically sync a VS project to source code so all scripts are in the solution and IntelliSense is configured.

This is the second in a series of posts by by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg giving advice to entrepreneurs on building their young businesses. The first post, From Nothing To Something. How To Get There, is here. And make sure to read our recent posts with advice from Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on his advice to entrepreneurs as well (here and here).

The number one question you all asked after reading my last blog post about starting a business from scratch was “how do I find my co-founders?”

Great question – let’s start with a bit of self reflection:

Close your eyes and visualize your group of closest friends.

Now, think specifically about how tall (or short) they all are.

Great, now ask yourself “are all of them roughly the same height?” I’ll bet most of them are – you included.

And therein lies the problem in finding co-founders for that startup you’re dying to launch. It’s most comfortable to hang out with people like ourselves, but those are exactly the folks you probably don’t want to co-found a startup with. Seems a bit unintuitive, right? I’ll explain.

The best founding team for a startup is a group of two or three people who have synergistic – not overlapping – skills. Note that it’s also important your goals and passions be similar. If one of you wants to sell fast and the other wants to build a billion dollar business, that’ll make for pretty serious friction down the road. So too would a team where one person’s more interested in enterprise startups while the other person’s passion lies in consumer experiences. With that out of the way, however, it’s critical that you look for people with complementary skills to your own. In consumer internet, that usually means one front-end user-facing developer, one back-end server-side developer, and ultimately a business person (details will come in a later post).

The reality though, is that we tend to hang out with people who are just like us. Remember that story I told about the three business school students telling me about their tech startup, leaving me to wonder who’d actually build the product? I see that all too frequently – from business folks and techies alike. It’s just easier to hang out with people in your same classes at school, or your same group at work.

If you happen to be in school now, you’re in the most fertile place possible to meet your co-founders. Take advantage of it! How’d I meet Elaine and Sandy? Mutual friends from school. How about some other teams? Larry and Sergey from Google met at Stanford. So did Jerry and David from Yahoo!. The Plaxo founders also met in school, which is also where Mark from Facebook met his co-founders. Having trouble meeting folks you think would be good co-founders? Here are a couple ideas:

1. Join student groups relevant to your interests. If you’re a business major – go check out the Engineering Society’s monthly meeting. If you’re in the CS department, I’ll bet the business school students would kill to meet you at the next Entrepreneurship Club meeting.

2. If your school doesn’t already have a student group designed to foster collaboration between groups of students with the skills necessary to get a startup rolling, start one! BASES at Stanford is a great model to follow. It brings together students from both the undergraduate and graduate levels, across disciplines such as design, computer science and business.

Ok, so most folks reading this are probably out of school. Fortunately, there are a number of examples of successful founding teams that met outside of school. Chad and Steve from YouTube met while working at PayPal. Sean and Shawn from Napster met in an IRC channel. Cisco was a husband and wife team. It helps to be in school, but it’s not an absolute requirement. A few practical ideas applicable to everyone, in school or not:

1. Get out there and find activities that attract diverse groups of people. In Silicon Valley, rock climbing’s a current hot spot for startup folks. So is ultimate frisbee. There’s at least one weekly ultimate frisbee game I’m aware of that’s chock-full of people from the startup industry, on both the business and tech sides.

2. Ask your friends for intros to people in an area you’re trying to learn about. Chances are someone in your group of techies knows someone business oriented. The first folks you meet may not be a fit, but keep asking for referrals and you’ll get there.

3. Join / attend local organizations designed to foster introductions between folks interested in startups. SVASE or Founder Dating in Silicon Valley, First Tuesday in London and Hackers and Founders in New York all come to mind.

4. Team with co-workers at your current job or that internship you did last summer. Just make sure to not violate any non-competes, etc, in the process! Generally speaking, as long as you’re not working on a project your employer would reasonably want to own, you’re probably ok. Of course, do not use any of your employer’s resources. A great friend of mine is scheming, right now, with a co-worker on their next great startup. One’s a PM and the other’s an engineer.

I’m sure some of you are thinking “that’s all great – but I live in the middle of nowhere and none of those resources are available to me.” To be blunt, find a way to move to Silicon Valley. Other cities like New York, Boston, Seattle, LA and Austin TX also have pretty strong startup communities. However, nowhere has as many real estate agents, lawyers, accountants, landlords, employees, co-founders, mentors, and VCs all steeped in startup culture as does Silicon Valley. The ecosystem is just hard to beat. The result is that you’ll be exposed to many more people who can help you get started. In my case, I grew up in Connecticut and spent a fair amount of time in New York – all the while trying to start companies, relatively unsuccessfully. Friends in Silicon Valley kept telling me to move out there for all the reasons I mentioned above. I finally found my ticket in the form of admission to business school in the valley. Find your ticket.

The hardest part of starting from scratch is finding the right co-founders. Ideas, comparatively, are easy. You may spend three years finding your co-founders while you’ll come up with a solid idea every 3 months or so. Luckily, once you settle into a great founding team you’ll be able to execute much faster on that killer idea you all come up with – beating those ten other folks who came up with the same idea at the same time.

Remember, the ultimate goal is to create a founding team that can, within its own skill set, get a working prototype out the door. This means you need to find folks with skills that compensate for your weaknesses. Co-founding a startup is like getting into a marriage – picking the right people is critical. In later posts I’ll get more specific on how to figure out if the folks you’re meeting are the right people to work with, and also how to deal with issues like splitting equity and paying yourselves before raising funding. Feel free to follow me on Twitter to get notifications of later posts on this topic, both here and on the ="http://blog.meebo.com">Meebo Blog.

TweetMeNews is a recently launched Twitter application that will tweet you personalized, relevant news based on your interests and preferences. The app will ask you questions about what genre of news you are interested in (business, technology, advertising, venture capital and health) and what types of publications you’d like news from (blogs, newspapers, video, magazines).

TweetMeNews then analyzes data, including your Twitter feed, and uses a proprietary algorithms to send you stories that match your interests and behavior. TweetMeNews’ co-founder Brett Hellman says that the startup even checks your feed to make sure not to send your news that you’ve already received. You can choose for the service to send you up to ten stories per day.

In theory, the idea sounds great. But as a blogger, I need news fast. I tested the service out and it sent me a Tech news story from yesterday, which isn’t terribly helpful when it comes to receiving breaking news. Other news firehoses, like Techmeme’s are far more valuable to me when it comes to reporting breaking news throughout the day, because it’s fast, comprehensive and varied. But for users who aren’t concerned with the speed of breaking news, TweetMeNews could be a useful Twitter-focused news service to add to the mix.