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For the past two years we've been keeping an eye on real-time search engine Collecta, watching as it's inked some big deals, widgetized its real-time feeds and raised some funding. Today, however, it looks like the company has decided to change directions. Collecta announced to developers today that "Collecta is changing over the coming months" and that the API will be unavailable as of February 11.

The home page, once the home of a series of trending topics, now features a real-time feed of images from the likes of Flickr and TwitPic, in an overt hint at the company's likely next move.

As one of the leaders in the group-buying space, LivingSocial has had a great year, ending the year with $175 million in investment from Amazon earlier this month. But like many success stories, LivingSocial didn't suddenly spring up wholly formed. Indeed, the company has had to pivot several times before landing on their current form - and success.

In the video below, LivingSocial co-founder and CTO Aaron Batalion talks about the company's previous manifestations - consultants, Facebook app developers, and so on - and the principles that helped motivate the company to change direction like this.

2010 is over half over, which makes it a good time to reflect on the year so far and revise your startup's plans - if necessary, of course - for the year ahead. Are you on target? Have your targets changed? And if so, have you adjusted course to compensate?

Mark MacLeod posted his thoughts on the midyear point on the Startup CFO blog today, noting that it can be difficult for startups to establish accurate targets. Even so, he notes, there are two schools of thoughts when it comes to targets. The first: you set the targets, now stick with them. The second: if you can't meet the targets, it only makes sense to adjust.

Last week during my stint at Boulder Startup Week, Occipital co-founder Vikas Reddy was gracious enough to let me stay with him rather than in a hotel. Oddly enough it wasn't until one of the late night mixers a few days into the event that I got a chance to talk with Reddy about Occipital and the company's history and evolution. As it turns out, barcode scanning, which the company is now well known for with its RedLaser application, was not their original plan, but rather a pivot made to take the company in a more profitable direction.

Microsoft Live Labs' latest creation has just launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks impressive and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information.

Microsoft's Live Labs has been the source of a few interesting projects: a 3D photo-stitcher called PhotoSynth, a bookmarking service called Thumbtack (which was shuttered just this month). Typically, the UIs have been slick, but user adoption has lagged.

The Telegraph is reporting that social networking giant Facebook has new plans for generating revenue; offering its 150 million user database as a market research tool to corporations.

Starting this spring, companies will be able to selectively target Facebook's members in order to research the appeal of new products through a polling system called Engagement Ads as demonstrated at the World Economic Forum in Davos.