ReadWriteWeb

Last week we told you about "lean startups" and how one of their strengths is rapidly collecting customer feedback and implementing changes to their product. With online tools like Get Satisfaction, gathering the opinons of your users is easy, and now with InstantLoop you can even hear what they have to say with automated phone surveys.

InstantLoop is the recent winner of the Twilio Startup Weekend Challenge, a contest for companies utilizing Twilio's API for sending and receiving phone calls. Users enter questions and possible answers, pick the phone numbers to call and then sit back and watch the results come in. The service is subscription-free; instead, users pay as they go at a rate of $.10 per customer feedback with the first 20 at no charge.

In an ironic twist of fate for 2009, Fox's IGN Entertainment, a company known for its game reviews of products like Zombie Apocalypse acquired What They Play. The newest member of Fox Interactive is touted as the "family guide to video games" and offers reviews, warnings and suggested products. Under the umbrella company of What They Like, What They Play uses the "Entertainment Software Rating Board" (ESRB) to warn parents of games containing explicit lyrics, cartoon violence and drug references.

In 2006, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake coined the term "BizDev 2.0" when looking at the phenomenon of supplying commercial API keys to startup partners. Said Fake, traditional business development meant "trying to get hopelessly overbooked people to return your email. And then after the deal was done, squabbling over who dealt with the customer service. [It's] much, much better this way!" Three years later, many are finding that while APIs are great biz dev tools for the larger provider, startups can often suffer under the thumb of their platform keepers.

In an ironic twist of fate for 2009, Fox's IGN Entertainment, a company known for its game reviews of products like Zombie Apocalypse acquired What They Play. The newest member of Fox Interactive is touted as the "family guide to video games" and offers reviews, warnings and suggested products. Under the umbrella company of What They Like, What They Play uses the "Entertainment Software Rating Board" (ESRB) to warn parents of games containing explicit lyrics, cartoon violence and drug references.

Google has just released a mini-site explaining "the facts" about the contentious advertising deal it announced with Yahoo in June. The deal will go live in early October, according to a report on SearchEngineLand, so the mini-site is an attempt to outline how it will work - and why consumers, publishers, competitors (and the US government) have nothing to fear from it.

In a presentation up on the mini-site, which we've embedded below, Google states that one of the benefits of this arrangement is that "Yahoo! remains a vibrant and innovative presence on the Internet". Which is putting Yahoo!'s position rather bluntly. The crux of the deal though is that Yahoo! will be able to better monetize the 'long tail' of their search, using Google's near invincible Adsense.