Just about a month ago, Microsoft announced that it would end free access to its Bing Search API and start charging a minimum of $40 per month for the service. Today, the company is officially launching the Bing Search API on its Windows Azure Marketplace, but unlike its previous announcement, the company has decided to continue to offer a free tier as well. Developers will still be able to make up to 5,000 queries per month for free. This, says the Bing team, will still allow most existing developers to use the service for free.

For developers who need more than 5,000 queries, pricing starts at $20 per month for 10,000 queries and increases all the way up to the top tier of 2.5 million queries for $5,000 month. This API gives developers access to web, image, news and video search results. There is also a cheaper web results-only version of the Bing API that starts at $13 per month for 10,000 queries.

The Bing team also announced that it made some changes to the API’s terms of use. These changes, says Microsoft, “now allow greater flexibility to re-order and blend results so that you have greater control over how Bing data is integrated into services and applications.”

Developers will have to buy access to the API through the company’s Azure Marketplace, which also offers access to various other data sources and applications that can run on the company’s Azure cloud computing platform.

Until now, developers had virtually unrestricted access the Bing Search API. This, is some ways, gave Bing an advantage over Google, which only gives developers a free quota of 100 queries per day.

T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm noted during their last earning call that their prepaid users helped make up for the loss of 510,000 postpaid subscribers, and now it seems that they’ve got another bone to throw to the their legions of contract-averse customers.

Starting on May 20, T-Mobile will be rolling out a slew of new, no-contract data plans to go with their line of mobile broadband modems, hotspots, and tablets.

The plans aren’t too shabby — longer term users can shell out $25 for 1.5GB of access per month, while paying $35 and $50 will net them 3.5GB and 5GB of sweet sweet wireless data per month respectively. On the other hand, if a user really doesn’t need to lean on an HSPA+ connection for very long, there’s also a 300MB pass that lasts one week that’ll set you back $15. Without that contract in tow though, expect to pay a bit more for the corresponding hardware (unless you’ve already got said gadgets laying around).

It goes without saying that T-Mobile offers slightly better deals to people willing to sign their wireless allegiance over the for the long term, but that’s the game you play when you don’t want a bill sitting in your mailbox every month for two years. At the very least, these new plans make their older prepaid counterparts look lousy in comparison — I wouldn’t be too thrilled if I had to pay $30 for one measly gigabyte of monthly bandwidth.

Tiger Pistol, an Australian startup offering social media marketing tools that it describes as both “small business friendly” and “enterprise powerful”, is coming out of its closed beta test today and launching to the public. It’s also announcing that it has raised $1 million in angel funding.

Co-founder and CEO Stephen Hibberd says that the goal was to create something that could take most of the difficulty and uncertainty out of creating marketing campaigns on social networks. You can start off with pre-built campaigns and templates, so you don’t have to create anything from scratch, and you’re tapping into Tiger Pistol’s knowledge about best practices. There’s a drag-and-drop interface, so you can customize those campaigns without any technical knowledge. Then you can track the data about your campaign’s effectiveness and reach, including the number of participants and their conversion rates.

Now, there’s clearly a glut of social media marketing tools out there already, but what caught my attention was the variety of customers that Tiger Pistol serves. Yes, there are many small businesses who participated in the closed beta, but the company says it also worked with larger customers like Expedia, Hotels.com, The Weather Channel, Village Roadshow, Under Armour, and the BBC. Hibberd says he wants Tiger Pistol to be a global product, so it works in any language, and customer support live chat is available 24 hours a day, so companies in any timezone can reach out for help. All told, there were 1,600 participants in the closed beta from more than 100 countries. There was a strong response in the Asia-Pacific region, Hibberd says, but the United States saw the largest number of installs.

Tiger Pistol is currently limited to Facebook, but plans to add Twitter, LinkedIn, Sina Weibo, and Kaixin001 soon.

The funding it was led by Australian investor David Solomon. It sounds like the round was actually raised a little while ago (Hibberd credits it with “getting us where we are now”), so Tiger Pistol may raise more in the not-too-distant future.

As for the company name, it refers to the tiger pistol shrimp, which can apparently make the loudest sound on Earth. I guess that’s intended to illustrate, in a way, the power of social media. The weirder part is the fact that the tiger pistol shrimp uses the noise to stun and eat its prey — whether or not that weakens the metaphor or actually improves it is an exercise I leave for the reader.

The rush of interest around crowdfunding is spawning many variations on the theme, and one of the more original of them — Crowdtilt, part of the most recent crop of Y Combinator startups — is today announcing a funding round of $2.1 million for its platform that lets groups of friends come together to fund an event or project, like a house party or group vacation.

The company tells us that the seed round is coming from SV Angel, Crunch Fund, Y Combinator partners Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar and Garry Tan, and DCM and Felicis Ventures, and it follows on from a very impressive three months of growth. James Beshara, the CEO and co-founder, tells us that it has now seen nearly $1 million of events funded since launching in February 2012.

Apparently, we’ve heard that Crowdtilt had some of the biggest inbound interest of all the startups after the YC Demo Day, and the company caught our eye too: we put it on a list of 10 YC startups to watch — along with Pair, a social network and app for couples (or other groups of two) that announced a seed round of $4.2 million from an equally impressive list of backers.

What makes Crowdtilt interesting is that it is filling a distinct gap in the market: while sites like Kickstarter are good for funding the development of a product or projects on a wide scale where some kind of equity is offered to the backers, they don’t cater as well to small, defined groups based around specific events. At the same time, there aren’t any well-used services out there to help people collaborate on paying for something together: I’ve found that when I plan something like a vacation rental with friends, it’s often done by email with a lot of chasing for payments in the aftermath (that could just be my own flaky friends, of course).

“The main differentiation is that rather these big projects for the whole web you can create funding projects for small groups,” explains Beshara. “Instead of raising money from the crowd you raise money from your crowd.”

He also admits, though, that “It’s just a better way of collecting money, rather than sending out emails, engage interest and all that coordination you can do it in one fell swoop.” And that, he says, could lead to having a more active and social life: “We believe friends can do this more often if they could.”

So far, that seems to be the case, at least as far as Crowdtilt’s own business is concerned. He says that in addition to $1 million being processed through the site since launch (the number was $400k at the end of March, so picking up $600k since then is a sign of momentum picking up); Crowdtilt has been seeing that 34.6 percent of users return to use the service again, suggesting that people are planning more activities, given the tools to do it. In all, the site has picked up 10,000 users in the last 11 weeks, purely through word-of-mouth.

So what happens with the $2.1 million? The funding, Beshara says, will be used to grow out its business with more enhanced services — without the need of worrying about raising money, which he says “can be a drain” when you are a small outfit. Crowdtilt has recently added code that ensures payments within 24 hours of a project closing — Crowdtilt takes a 2.5 percent fee of the transaction only if the deal gets completely funded; otherwise there is no fee.

Other future services include expansion to international markets (currently the project originator has to be in the U.S., although the rest of the group can be based anywhere); building a mobile app; and possibly doing more with more public campaigns open to more than just a select, strictly private group of people. Beshara notes that there are more of these appearing already on the site, and “there was a reason we didn’t call the company ‘Grouptilt’” — another domain they registered, thinking ahead to one day serving more than just small, select groups.

Beshara himself studied development economics in college and comes from the non-profit realm, and his last crowdfunding project was a platform he helped set up while volunteering in Cape Town, South Africa. “I thought about this a lot, the social dynamics of crowdfunding and why it is so effective online, and how it could be applied to campaigns among friends.” So perhaps in future, there may even be some charitable elements to the site.

Mozilla’s Do Not Track feature, which allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt-out of being tracked by third parties, is starting to gain some traction among both users and publishers. According to new data shared by Mozilla today, 8.6% of Firefox desktop users and 19% of mobile users now turn this opt-in feature on. The latest company to announce that it will honor Do Not Track is Twitter.

As Do Not Track isn’t so much a technical solution that just blocks tracking cookies and more like a gentlemen’s agreement between sites and their users, its success completely depends on being supported by publishers and developers.

As for the major browser developers, Microsoft and Apple are already on board (and IE9, it is worth noting, already offers a somewhat more aggressive “tracking protection” tool). Google, too, plans to support Do Not Track later this year and Opera is building it into its upcoming Opera 12 release.

A number of major online companies, including our parent company AOL, as well as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have already pledged support for Do Not Track. For Twitter, which doesn’t rely on tracking and third-party advertising as much as other sites, pledging support for Do Not Track was probably not a very hard decision.

The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT.

— Twitter (@twitter) May 17, 2012

By now, we’re pretty familiar with the term 4G LTE. But that in and of itself is somewhat surprising. It took 12 years for GSM wireless technology to reach one billion connections, and WCDMA took 11 years. But LTE will hit the same mark in just seven years of existence, according to a new report by Strategy Analytics.

If you’re not familiar with the term, a brief explanation would be a faster fourth generation connection using “long term evolution” (LTE) technology, which means operators will be able to build upon the technology faster and more easily than implementing brand new systems.

We’ve already seen a plethora of LTE devices hit the U.S. market, and now that the technology is established in major markets like Korea, Japan, and the U.S., the growth trajectory for LTE will only continue to rise. Strategy Analytics expects over 90 million LTE connections to be activated before the end of 2012, and that figure should reach the 1 billion mark by 2017. This is far and away the fastest implementation of new wireless technology to date.

At the same time, however, previous technologies were born into a world with far fewer overall connections. LTE launched with over 6 billion connections in existence in the world, whereas CDMA was first revealed at a time when less than 1 billion connections had been activated.

“The race is on for mobile operators to reduce cost per GB to match the rate at which revenue per GB is falling,” said director of service provider analysis Sue Rudd, in a prepared statement. “LTE is one of the key tools to deliver this improvement, with the early volume in LTE devices an encouraging sign for operators looking to maximize return on their LTE investments.”

To her point, we certainly wouldn’t mind a reduction in data costs, considering that we’re more data hungry than ever and unlimited data has basically been nixed across the boards.

Eduardo Saverin may no longer be a U.S. citizen. But that’s not stopping him from investing in American companies.

In fact, he just closed a deal. He’s backing Crowdmob, a startup that’s blending app promotion with discounts from local merchants. The startup’s long-term ambition is to play in the mobile wallet space, where phones may eventually become a mainstream way of paying for real-world goods and services. (That is, if they can become easier to use than a credit card or cash.)

The company, which already took some earlier seed investment from Andreessen Horowitz, has a couple products up its sleeves. One is something they’re calling ‘Appy Meals,’ which combine a paid app for free with a discount on a real-world good like the Starbucks Frapuccino below. It kind of mimics the way you’d buy a hamburger and a get token toy, except that toy is now a digital one like a game.

Crowdmob’s co-founders Damon Grow, Alex Han and Matthew Moore, who is an ex-Googler, say that games are a good way to lure in consumers, who are already comfortable with using their phones to pay for apps or virtual currency. Games and social networking apps have the highest engagement on iOS and Android, according to research from mobile analytics companies like Flurry.

They’ve built several variations on the same idea of mixing real-world commerce with virtual goods. With another product, they take the same “appy meal” mechanic and apply it to in-app purchases instead of paid apps. Gamers can buy virtual currency and gift cards for real-world goods like Starbucks or movie tickets inside an app (see below).

Yet another variation on the concept called Loot lets gamers watch video ads in exchange for virtual currency that can be redeemed for gift cards. Loot was built because the team knew that only a small percentage of mobile app users actually pay for things in games. So there had to be a free alternative.

“Not everybody is going to pay because many users have limited budgets,” Grow said. “So we knew that we had to disrupt ourselves  by having a feature where consumers didn’t have to pay and that was Loot.”

All of this goes toward building a payments network. Whenever a user makes a purchase, they’ll be able to pay with their credit card or PayPal. Then they can redeem the deal with their phone, which will show a barcode, confirmation number or send an SMS (whatever the merchants’ preferences are). They’ll have to create a CrowdMob account, so that’s how the company picks up payments information on consumers to grow out a network for a mobile wallet. Users manage their rewards in this mobile wallet and it’s synchronous across all the user’s CrowdMob accounts, whether they earned a gift card through watching ads or purchased it as part of a virtual happy meal in another game.

“We want to win consumer mindshare,” said Moore. “Doling out all of these gift cards will help us get on more phones. When consumers redeem these, we’ll be able to show the merchant that we drove them to the store.”

Then there’s an open API lets any partner create tasks for users to earn credits. Merchants and gift card providers can also create their own rewards for users to redeem. Crowdmob earns a cut whenever they drive installs or purchases for a mobile developer or whenever they drive sales for a merchant.

The race to build a ‘mobile wallet’ is incredibly complicated right now. Google Wallet’s team fell apart over the last several months as the original technical team that built the product chafed with newer middle management brought over from Paypal. The carriers are collaborating on their own wallet offering called Isis, but when have the carriers ever cooperated on a successful consumer product? Then Visa recently introduced V.me and Mastercard launched its PayPass Wallet Services in the last month.

Saverin shied away from doing an interview for this story, but he did pass us this statement: “I really like the team at CrowdMob and their vision to create a mobile wallet that is embedded in an overall social loyalty platform where virtual and real goods can be exchanged; this platform is an important next step in a fully integrated mobile society.”

He did do an interview with The New York Times yesterday where he said his decision to relinquish his U.S. citizenship had nothing to do with the lower tax rates that Singapore has. Saverin has amassed a little bit of a portfolio here in the U.S. with investments in Jumio, ShopSavvy and Qwiki. Since all of these investments have happened in the last year or two, it’s still too early to tell how his deals will pan out. It will be nearly impossible to top the investment that made him a billionaire, but you can never rule anything out in this business..

Last year, YouTube announced the ability for its music partners to begin selling merchandise, digital downloads and event tickets through a new YouTube feature called the Merch Store. Today, the company is expanding that effort and is making the option available to all YouTube partners, not just musicians.

Also rolling out today, is a new merchandise provider, which will help beef up YouTube video producers’ Merch Store offerings: CafePress.

With the initial rollout of the Merch Store in October 2011, YouTube announced partnerships with a number of companies, including Topspin for merchandise sales, concert tickets and experiences, SongKick for concert tickets, plus iTunes and Amazon for music downloads. Google Play is also now involved, of course.

The Merch Store feature was gradually rolled out to YouTube music partners following the announcement, and YouTube then began taking a small, undisclosed cut of merchandise sales. Artists, however, see the same revenue no matter if they went through the Merch Store or through the affiliate on other channels, YouTube said. That same deal holds true today.

Starting now, and again, gradually rolling out over the next few months, the same Merch Store feature will arrive on YouTube partners’ channel pages under a new tab called “Store.” This will become available to partners in good standing, YouTube says – meaning those whose AdSense accounts are properly linked to their YouTube accounts.

You can see the Merch Store live now on the following channels:  Pomplamoose, Geek & Sundry and DeStorm.

The lowly photo slideshow is not dead yet, or at least that’s the hope of the team at Tel Aviv-based EasyHi, which is debuting its new product Slide.ly today, backed by $1 million in seed funding. The company aims to pick up where Slide.com (acquired by Google in 2010) left off. It’s building a slideshow creation tool for the new age, using sources like Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pickplz, and Picasa, as well as Google Images, photos from your friends or those from your computer. You then mix that content with music from SoundCloud and YouTube and add – you guessed it – Instagram-like effects.

Although there’s no space on Facebook to “embed” your glorious creation permanently, as Slide.com’s shows were once pinned on dizzy Myspace pages, the resulting slideshows can be shared to your Facebook Timeline or page, tweeted or emailed.

EasyHi, founded in 2010, is led by CEO Tom More, who has 12+ years experience in building Internet apps, but whose personal passions for music and photography made building something like Slide.ly a good fit. “Creative self-expression is in our DNA,” he says of EasyHi, now a team of ten.

The company’s value proposition, at first glance, sounds a lot like that of instant slideshow tool, Animoto, photo collection-sharing service Erly, or many others competing in the space with DIY or automated tools that let you make jazzier, more social-infused alternatives to PowerPoint presentations and online photo albums.

But More says that his vision extends beyond slideshows. “We look at this space as a mere starting point. What we are here to create is a new way of telling a story, and there’s usually more than one photo for every story,” he explains. “The stories we’d like to help users capture are personal (as many similar services attend to), but are also topical stories that mix your own photos with related media, group stories that combine photos (and soon videos) of you and your friends, fan stories that mesh personal photos and video with your favorite music and local stories or real-time events.”

Ah, so that sounds more like Storify, it seems, even if Slide.ly is starting out focused on the consumer photo-sharing space.

EasyHi, which already has 500,000 installs of its e-card application, plans to grow Slide.ly’s user base by tapping into its current audience. Once established, the eventual business model is to offer a freemium service where things like custom themes and templates could be in-app purchases.

Slide.ly is still in closed beta, but there are 100 invites for TechCrunch readers here. Just use the code “techcrunch” when signing up.

Video curation platform Shortform is launching a few new features that will make it easier for its video jockeys (VJs) to curate and share content with friends and followers. The hope is that by introducing a browser bookmarklet, as well as implementing Facebook Open Graph, the startup will be able to continue its hockey stick-like growth in video minutes consumed.

Shortform is introducing a bookmarklet for adding videos to their channels. The bookmarklet will work with all modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer), making it easier for VJs to instantly update their playlists without having to open a new tab, copy and paste the URL, etc. In addition to adding videos to their channels, the bookmarklet will also find all videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and CollegeHumor that are on a given page so that users can choose between them.

In addition to the new bookmarklet, Shortform is also rolling out Facebook Open Graph integration, which will seamlessly share the channels that users are watching. Shortform already had launched a connection with Facebook that let VJs and viewers to share what they were watching with friends on the social network, but they had to click a share button to do so. The new social feature will automatically share channels and VJs that viewers are watching, so long as they opt in.

According to Shortform CEO Nader Ghaffari, the choice to share channels and not individual videos was not just meant to avoid spamming user news feeds, like some other high-profile video startups have over the past few weeks. It was also because Shortform is, at its core, about curated collections of videos, and it hopes to highlight those collections rather than individual pieces of content.

The goal is to grow its user base, but also to increase engagement — that is, the amount of time that users spend watching videos through Shortform channels. Since the beginning of the year, the startup has seen a 400 percent increase in the time spent per month, with users watching more than 16 million minutes of video in April.

One way it’s currently doing that is by encouraging its VJs fighting for viewers’ attention. The site runs a weekly VJ competition, where it rewards the top 50 VJs, as determined by the total amount of time users spend on each of their channels. Shortform is awarding a total of $2,500 to the top channels every week, with the first-place VJ getting $600, second place getting $400, third place getting $200, and so-on down the line.

While the competition is one way to reward the VJ who are driving users to the service, it’s just one step toward providing them with more money. In the future, Ghaffari says he’d like to have a more formal revenue-sharing agreement with VJs as the startup ramps up its own monetization.