When Facebook first welcomed 3rd party applications, Lending Club caused a stir with its peer-to-peer money exchange. While others like Prosper had paved the way for small online loans, only Lending Club dared to integrate its services into a social network. Today, Facecard aims to improve upon the model by expanding its pre-paid MasterCard service. As of tomorrow, the company will officially emerge from beta with a slew of new features including parental controls, alerts and most importantly, this Facebook application.

With bleary eyes and bellies full of coffee, a roomful of investors, journalists and young entrepreneurs gathered this morning for the Bay Area TechStars Investor day. The Boulder and Boston-based startup incubator pulled out all the stops as 13 companies took to the stage to plead their case for funding. Below are the summaries of each.

After selling VirtualTourist to Expedia, J.R. Johnson launched Lunch to encourage intelligent content and critical dialogue. Today, in expanding his mission for meaningful engagement, Johnson is launching Twitter Lists. This new service asks users to rationalize their Twitter recommendations. While services like Twubble, Mr. Tweet, Chirpio and even Twitter itself offer suggested accounts, Lunch is the only site that also requires a good explanation.

Have you ever wanted to build a better web cam, GPS device or web video pet monitoring service? Well you just might get your chance. Bug Labs recently released their latest BUGbase device module with an embedded WiFi and bluetooth solution. Best known for its Lego-like hardware blocks, BUG offers users a set of programmable modules to develop DIY gadgets. What makes this so groundbreaking is the fact that the company is offering one of the first-ever open source WiFi hardware solutions. This means that both large-scale hardware manufacturers and garage tinkers can utilize the code.

Eight years ago job titles like "social media marketer" and even "community manager" were few and far between. As netizen and social networking populations have grown over the years, so too have the number of opportunities to earn money online. Enter AppBank - the first crowd-sourced paid content service for Facebook. With AppBank, users build quizzes, polls and games and earn money by getting their friends involved in their creations.

There is a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about the recent $100 million investment in Twitter at a $1 billion valuation, but most of it based on speculation. Twitter and Facebook are private companies. You cannot get the facts simply by typing a stock symbol into Yahoo Finance. Our mission at ReadWriteWeb is to add to the facts, not just the speculation. Rather than posting confidential information that someone has leaked to us, we prefer to start with publicly available data. That takes a lot of leg work and crawling through regulatory filings. Luckily, a firm in this industry does that professionally: the VC Experts Valuation and Terms database. It has given us access to and permission to publish the investment facts, as publicly recorded, for both Twitter and Facebook. We could not refrain from a bit of game theory speculation on how this could play out, and we invited a specialist in startup deals to add his speculation as well. But let's start with the facts.

If you've got a case of the Mondays you are not alone. Thousands of weekend warriors have nestled into their cubicles and desks only to be greeted by a two day backlog of spam, invoices and tedious emails. It's easy to focus on all the negative things that make it tough to get out of bed in the morning. But complaining aloud is not going to make you feel better and it's not going to get you a lunch date with your cute coworker. To pull you out of your Monday doldrums, below are a few services to help you share your feelings with your fellow netizens.

When we wrote about the 22 finalists selected to pitch at Seedcamp Week 2009, there were several teams whose ideas excited us in particular.

Three of our eight picks have now been announced as Seedcamp winners and will receive €50.000 and three months of advisement and assistance from the European startup accelerator program. Read on for video and details on who gets the cash, who gets to come to America, and what exactly happened this week in London.

Apartment-dwellers, rejoice. Seattle-based startup Buzzeromatic is letting you take control of your own front door in a way that's smart and flexible.

The premise is simple: Using Twilio's VoIP API, Buzzeromatic allows subscribers to grant access to visitors, allow delivery folks to leave voice messages,and create passwords for frequent guests, all from a web interface with SMS commands for when users are on the go. And yes, there's an app for that: The team told us their fully functional iPhone application is in the hopper.