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Zoodles, which creates a browser designed for kids, has taken its child-friendly technology mobile today with a free app for Android smartphones. The Zoodles app aggregates hundreds of educational games, videos and puzzles into the app. The app also automatically locks the child into the app, so curious children cannot accidentally make calls, erase emails or access other applications on the phone.

Similar to Zoodle’s web-based app, the mobile app adapts content to each child based on age, skills, the device they are using, and custom parental controls so they can play without needing help from an adult. For example, if a child is not yet able to read, Zoodles will only present content where no reading is required.

Zoodles for Android allows users to create an account, or log in using an existing Zoodles account. Once the app is launched, a child logs in by tapping their picture (no reading required), and selects from a scrolling menu of activities. Zoodles automatically recognizes the Android device and presents the right content for that phone. For example, Android users with Flash installed will have access to games built in Flash, plus videos and more. For those without Flash, Zoodles will videos and others non-Flash content.

The brainchild of Mark Williamson, Zoodles aims to allows children to play and interact with the web through games, puzzles and videos. The inspiration for Zoodles came from Williamson’s four year old daughter, who was having trouble interacting with a mainstream browser. Zoodles is free for all but also offers a premium membership that allows parents the ability to customize and restrict their child’s online learning experience based on their age, interests, educational needs and skills.

Zoodles is steadily gaining traction as parents are looking for kid-friendly ways to introduce computing to young children. The startup has just crossed over 1 million hours of playtime on its products. And Zoodles plans to launch an iPad app soon.

TechCrunch

One of the challenges of running a social commerce site these days is that there is just too much demand, from both local merchants wanting to give out deals and consumers who want to try them. There are only 365 days in a year, and the daily deal format limits each city to 365 deals a year.

Sites like GroupOn and LivingSocial are hitting those limits. GroupOn is expanding its inventory by “personalizing” deals, essentially showing different deals to different people. LivingSocial is handling the issue by going hyperlocal. It will now start offering deals by neighborhood and city districts.

LivingSocial will start bringing daily deals to the hood out in Washington, D.C. and New York City. In Washington, D.C., there will be deals for The District, Montgomery County and Northern Virginia (not exactly neighborhoods, but why get bogged down in details). In New York City, you can sign up for deals Uptown (soul food), Midtown (cupcakes), Downtown (facials) and in Brooklyn (dance lessons). Again, these aren’t really neighborhoods—Brooklyn on its own is bigger than most cities in America—but they do break up the city into more manageable zones and open up the site to more deals.

This is something, in fact, that Groupon does as well in a couple cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. In fact, it breaks down Washington, D.C. the exact same way: the District, Montgomery County and Northern Virginia.

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It’s over a year ago when we covered the launch of 6rounds, a consumer-facing video chat platform with a couple of interesting twists that made it a lot of fun to use.

Henceforth, the startup and service will be called Rounds – they’re now leasing the domain name rounds.com, which is far more memorable.

The company is today also debuting a cool video chat application on the Facebook platform that I’m pretty sure will be appreciated by many.

The app, which is called Video Chat Rounds, lets you interact with Facebook users over video, not only to chat but also to play games, enhance conversations with effects in real-time, share Flickr photos, watch YouTube videos, exchange virtual gifts and much more.

Essentially, it’s video chat on steroids.

For now, effects and gifts that users can pull from the interactive menus inside the application interface are free of charge – you can simply earn ‘coins’ by being active in various ways – but in time Rounds will start charging for a subset of them.

The startup also hopes to generate revenue from letting advertisers plug branded experiences (check the Heineken-sponsored Truth Or Dare game to see how that would work).

Rounds is also keen on letting third-party developers build stuff around the platform, both the regular Web app and the Facebook Platform application.

Check it out and tell us what you think.

Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Rounds was founded back in 2008 and has to date raised $2 million in venture capital funding from investment groups Rhodium and Startup Factory.

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It used to be that folks overseas would get their mass pop culture fix from old episodes of “Baywatch” and “Friends. Now that the Internet has replaced television as culture’s primary mode of discourse, our currently most prevalent cultural artifacts (the “Like” button, LOLcats, @oldspice) have also permeated the arts on a global scale, most recently in the shockingly slick “N’Importe Comment” music video from French rappers Orelsan and The Toxic Avenger.

Watch as the artists walk down the Venice Beach boardwalk “adding” attractive members of the opposite sex as “Friends,” real life “Poking” people and eventually ending up in something ominously called “Danceroulette.”

[h/t Europopped]

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Online learning startup Knewton has a new chief operating officer. David Liu, the former senior VP at AOL who spearheaded its Lifestreaming efforts and is also an angel investor (SimpleGeo, BlockChalk), is joining Knewton as COO and a member of the board of directors.

Knewton is an adaptive learning platform which raised a $12.5 million B round last April from Accel, Bessemer, First Round, and Reid Hoffman. Knewton currently offers online test prep and tutorials for the SAT, LSAT, and GMAT using adaptive learning algorithms which progressively make the questions harder or easier depending on each student’s knowledge and ability.

Liu’s charge is to help turn Knewton into a platform for textbook publishers and schools to create their own adaptive learning tools. Knewton proved itself with its test prep products, but now wants to move into the center of the education market, an approach other education startups like Grockit are also pursuing.

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Last year, Aurora Feint launched a comprehensive social gaming platform dubbed OpenFeint that has seen success in attracting independent iPhone game developers to its rapidly growing community. But Android also has potential as a vibrant social gaming platform with its growing community of gaming developers. Today, OpenFeint is announcing a soon to be released platform for Android apps.

OpenFeint’s mobile social platform and application for smartphones includes a set of online game services such as leaderboards and achievements running in a cloud-based Web environment. Launching later this summer, the company’s Android developed community will include a standard SDK, a game discovery store and mobile payment options. Aurora Feint has also incorporated Google Checkout into the developer SDK.

The platform, which currently has a presence in over 2,200 live games for the iPhone, will include content from publishers such as Astraware, Digital Chocolate, Glu Mobile, Hudson Soft and others.

Of course, AuroraFeint is quick to assure developers that it has no intentions of abandoning its iPhone platform and stated that it will continue to add new features to that community. The existing OpenFeint platform is quite popular amongst developers and already powers social gaming services for 28 million users and is growing at a monthly pace of 25 percent. The platform is growing at a nice clip and is even getting into the social gaming arena as well.

It’s wise for Aurora Feint to offer communities for a variety of platforms. Not only will it generate more revenue for the company, but it also generates more user exposure. And while the Android gaming system is still young and not nearly as large as the iPhone platform, we know Google will soon get into the gaming space.

Aurora Feint also just announced a $4 million investment from Chinese game developer The9.

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The iPad is undoubtedly a compelling device for consuming media, whether it be reading a magazine, online news site, or a book. Fwix, a news site that offers a stream of hyperlocal, realtime news by location, is launching a free iPad app to allows users to access local news from their communities.

Fwix aggregates news articles and blog posts that are relevant to a certain region (the site now features support for over 80 cities in the United States and Canada). To do this, the Fwix team selects news sources and blogs that it thinks are related to each city, and also uses automated algorithms to determine when other content might also be relevant. Fwix has also recently tweaked its algorithm and offerings to include “nearby” local content features. So content on Fwix displays relationships between both topics and nearby location. For example, after reading a story about a robbery that took place in the Mission district of San Francisco, you’ll be able to find any other crime and or stories about the Mission neighborhood.

The app aims to simulate reading your local newspaper. Fwix’s app allows you to view news stories in a map format, showing you the exact geographic location of news. You can access news by your location and then filter stories by subject (i.e. sports, arts, politics, crime). And you can share all content on Facebook, Twitter or via email.

While the app itself could be useful for finding local news, Fwix’s realtime API is being actively used to incorporate hyperlocal news streams into content. For example, Fwix recently struck a deal with The New York Times to license its feed to the publishing company’s 15 regional news papers.

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