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If there's a prize for best infographic, ever, then Randall Munroe has won. Hands down. The winner? His Money infographic posted Monday. This monster infographic comes with full sources in CSV format and covers everything from Barenaked Ladies to 2012 presidential fundraising.

If you ever wanted to see money put into very detailed perspective, this will do it for you. Munroe starts with visualizations based on the dollar, like a Starbucks Coffee ($2.00) to a comparison of hourly worker and CEO pay between 1965 and 2007.

Speed Geeking is a high-energy event where startups and established tech companies that we've selected give quick presentations to conference attendees. Every five minutes attendees switch to a new startup. It's loud, it's a little chaotic and it's a lot of fun. Over the years Speed Geeking has become a fixture at ReadWriteWeb conferences, but this is the first year we've had so many international companies participating.

A team of developers from a garage in France launched a location-based question and answer site today called Gootip. The service uses Google Places API tied with its own algorithm to specify where a question is being asked and tries to increase the relevance of the answer with users IP location from Foursquare and the Facebook Graph.

Gootip emerged in beta today without having any buzz ahead of time and no funding from any venture capitalists. It has been bootstrapped by three founders who worked at e-merchant Price Minister - Mathieu Bidart, Eric Gagnaire and Thierry Sebba - who claim to have shut themselves in a garage with bottles of wine for the last six months to push out the product.

Ericsson, the world's largest mobile telecom equipment maker, has today launched its own mobile banking system called Ericsson Money Services. This business is designed to make mobile money transactions both easier and more available to those without access to traditional brick-and-mortar banks. Initially, it plans to rival established money transfer services like Western Union and MoneyGram, but over the next few years, it may end up competing with credit cards as well.

Mark Suster is one of those unique venture capitalists in that he has experience as an entrepreneur prior to joining the VC world (or the "dark side" as he calls it). Twice, in fact. That's why he calls his blog "Both Sides of the Table," because he has literally sat at both sides of the negotiating table. It's this experience as both an entrepreneur and a VC that provides him a fresh perspective on startups and the investment market, so what does Suster think are the most important factors to securing investment? Apparently, it comes down to four M's.

Anthony Tjan is a venture capitalist at the Boston-based VC firm Cue Ball, but he also blogs for The Harvard Business Review where last week he posted an article about packaged pricing deals in business. The article, The Pros and Cons of Bundled Pricing, points out the differences between bundles and "à la carte" pricing as well as benefits to both customers and businesses. Most Web startups offering an array of services will often bundle features into tiered pricing plans rather than an "à la carte" selection, and here's why.

While the government in Washington slowly inches their way toward a bill to create jobs for Americans, tech corporations and venture capital firms across the nation are teaming up in a private sector effort to create more companies and more jobs in the tech space. Led by Intel, the Invest in America Alliance, consisting of 17 companies and 24 VC firms, announced Tuesday that it has pledged to provide $3.5 billion in tech startup funding and jobs for over 10,000 new grads in the next two years.

Privacy is a touchy subject. In almost all cases, the more fame and fortune a person or company acquires, the more scrutiny they receive. And, out comes the trolls, worms and paparazzi.

Twitter and Facebook are the beacon examples of this issue. People like being famous, and we want followers! And the evidence shows, the more personal information we put out there, the more people consume it. Today, on International Data Privacy Day, we explore the social and technical norms and issues of privacy in the network and the cloud.

Aptly-named consumer trend blog TrendsSpotting just released its poll from more than 30 social media influencers. The market research presentation identifies six trends that will change social media in 2010. In accordance with Ustrategy co-founder Ravit Lichtenberg's predictions, the experts believe that 2010 will be the year that social media ROI is effectively measured. The question is, how do you measure a dollar value from Tweets and status updates?

From CircleUp, a group messaging service for membership websites, comes a new service called SmartPay which lets small groups and teams collect money via email. This can easily replace the old method of payment collection used by most groups today: passing around an envelope and stuffing it full of cash and checks. The new SmartPay service uses Amazon Payments on the backend, providing members with a familiar experience that will hopefully ease their security concerns about paying online.