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When Phoenix-based designer Jamie Martin's blog post hit the front page of Hacker News earlier today, he realized what it's like to burn bridges in a connected world. After his company Status.ly and three other startups were dropped from the Bootup Labs program roster due to financial difficulty, Martin blogged about the unfortunate incident and put his site up for auction. While Martin at first claimed that Bootup Labs "had no money", incubator cofounder Danny Robinson fired back with a reply.

The words "fat cats in Washington" have been uttered in every corner of the nation from Texas to the Bay, yet DC's tech scene is anything but sluggish. Companies like AOL, Nextel, MCI and Uunet found early success in the region and since then, a slew of young entrepreneurs have emerged to follow suit. Some of the companies include LivingSocial, Clearspring, CareerBuilder, OPower and iPhone app development service PointAbout.

Adobe is looking to stall falling sales and profit by entering into a new market: analytics. But rather looking to R&D, Adobe is instead coughing up $1.8 billion for analytics leader Omniture. This is the largest acquisition by Adobe since the purchase of Macromedia for $3 billion in 2005.

The acquisition has puzzled many, since Adobe and Omniture products really have no natural cooperation. There have been comments about the measurement capabilities that Omniture will give to content built with Adobe products. But in the end the entire deal revolves around two words: recurring revenue. Adobe's quarterly earnings have fallen due to declining sales of software licenses, and the SaaS model of Omniture will bring the company a recurring stream of revenue.

Google just announced that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, one of the leading providers of CPATCHAs, the hard-to-read puzzles you often have to solve before you can sign up for a new web service. Google, of course, isn't so much interested in owning software that can generate CAPTCHAs - that's an easy problem to solve - but is looking at reCAPTCHA as a way to improve the optical character recognition (OCR) software it uses for large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and the Google News Archive Search.

LaunchBox startup JamLegend began in 2008 as an idea to take Rock Band and Guitar Hero online and make them infinitely more fun for more people with more songs.

While presenting at Twiistup in Los Angeles today, Andrew Lee took a few moments to chat with us about how the product was developed and how they've worked out great incentives for users while providing great value for brands, from major record labels to independent artists. Watch the interview below.

This morning at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Jason Grigsby of Cloud Four, a mobile and web development firm, presented at a session about the mobile web's future. Specifically, he focused on the different types of mobile applications we have today - native apps, mobile web apps, and hybrid apps - and the challenges of developing across multiple platforms.

Amazon announced today that it is bridging two of its web computing services, EC2 and S3, with Hadoop, an open-source project that brings the same distributed data processing power as Google's MapReduce. In fact, it is calling the new service Amazon Elastic MapReduce. The new service will allow its EC2 customers to perform distributed MapReduce queries on enormous datasets stored in S3, paying only for the computation time they need.

OneRiot, a relatively new real-time search engine, launched a new Twitter search engine this morning that takes a very different approach to Twitter search from similar ventures we have seen lately. Instead of surfacing specific tweets, OneRiot focuses on shared links instead of just doing a keyword search on Twitter. While Twitter's own search, for example, will show you the conversation around the leaked copy of Wolverine, OneRiot will actually find the latest shared links about this topic on Twitter.

They say imitation the most sincere form of flattery. If that's true, then Paul Graham must be about to drown from all the praise. His Y Combinator project, which has funded nearly 60 startups since 2005 and has arguably inspired a new emphasis on smaller scale investments at traditional venture capital firms, has collected a cadre of imitators. Lots of them, from all over the world. While Graham may not like it, there are a large number of start up incubators following the model he created with Y Combinator and handing out microinvestments in web startups in return for a small stake.