ReadWriteWeb

In December of last year, augmented reality (AR) browser makers Layar chose to pull its iPhone app from the App Store due to frequent crashes reported by users. They thought it was better for their brand to remove the application than to promote a faulty product. As we've mentioned in the past, Layar had hinted that a revamped iPhone app would be out near the end of February, and earlier this week they released just that.

The big news from earlier this week was the announcement that Google would be acquiring online photo editing service Picnik for an undisclosed amount. This marks Google's third acquisition of 2010 after buying Aardvark and reMail in February suggesting that the company could be going on an extended shopping spree much like in 2007 when it picked up 16 separate companies. Merger and acquisition (M&A) spending has floundered among tech companies in the last few years, but Google's early purchases this year could signal a return of this kind of spending.

In our recent discussions of branding for startups and entrepreneurs, we've mentioned that marketing and branding is always harder to do when what you're trying to sell isn't a quality product. Successful startup products tend to fit into an equation involving the ideas and the people who are executing those ideas. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Hunch and previously Flickr, says that it wasn't just the idea that attracted her to Hunch; the people behind it were just as important.

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and his company Tiny Speck have come out today with a game they boldly assert could be "the greatest game there ever was". The massively-multiplayer, Web-based Flash game was unveiled this morning and will be opening for private alpha testing soon.

While the game will not be fully open to the public until late in 2010, the current site not only gives us a preview of what Tiny Speck has been working on, but offers a way for you to keep track of what's new and sign up to be one of the game's testers.

While business plans are a must in this environment, the startup world can hardly be considered predictable. Companies like Flickr, Seemic and Redux were all launched with different original concepts. Nevertheless, the market embraced the new products and each of these companies has done well in carving out a niche. But not every 180 degree shift can be successful, ReadWriteWeb looks at one theory on how to reduce risk while changing focus.

Though we have previously warned startups to tread carefully when building their businesses on third party APIs, there are still plenty of successful businesses that rely on them for their day-to-day operation. For application developers, if you've found yourself repeatedly visiting Downforeveryoneorjustme.com to check on the status of a site or API, one company may just have the perfect solution.

A product of Dutch website monitoring service WatchMouse, API-status is an easily-interpreted heads-up display of 26 popular third party APIs. The big boys like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are all present and accounted for, and other services like Salesforce, and Posterous are supported also.

We love site-building and story-telling applications, and social webizens love sharing their content - particularly multimedia content - in new and compelling ways.

YouTellYou is a fun and simple tool that allows users to grab, annotate, tag and share their pictures in an online magazine-type format. Users can pull in photos from Smugmug, Facebook, Flickr or one's own computer, then go to town in a frenzy of sequences, captions and true pictorial story-weaving.

Looking to spruce up that bland PowerPoint presentation for your next meeting with possible investors? Or do you need high-quality photographs for your product's homepage or blog? Lifehacker recently profiled Sprixi, a free use image search engine, is an excellent source for finding just the right image to add those finishing touches.

Developed by Sydney, Australia-based company Thirsty Minds, Sprixi crawls Flickr and OpenClipArt.org for images licensed under Creative Commons and implements a user-based recommendation system to produce relevant results. While viewing photos, you can tell Sprixi whether or not an image is a useful result. Based on this data, Sprixi displays the most relevant images as rated by users at the top of the results.

If you're like many of us, you're home for the holidays. Rather than complaining about the springs in the pullout couch or watching endless television reruns, consider rediscovering your hometown. Featured on today's Flickr blog, Noticings is a location-based game similar to Foursquare that forces you to discover new gems in your old haunts.

When the former editor-in-chief of JPG Magazine launches a photography startup, budding photojournalists should take note. Laura Brunow Miner just launched Pictory, a site where netizens are offered a chance to contribute their best work to a weekly photo essay. The difference between being featured in Flickr's curated galleries or filling your Tumblr blog with panoramas is that Pictory tells a larger group story. There's only one catch - you only get one shot (literally) to make the cut.