StartX, the startup accelerator for Stanford University students, held its Spring 2012 Demo Day this past week at AOL headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Seven very diverse startups presented to a room of investors, media, and tech industry folks — the latest batch of StartX startups range from a new method of doing DNA sequencing, to truly educational children’s toys, to a new way for women to buy jewelry, and more.

TechCrunch TV was there, and in the video embedded above you can see the general scene and also our interview with StartX’s founder Cameron Teitelman. We also got six of the presenting companies to give TechCrunch their pitches directly, along with two other companies that were in StartX’s spring session but opted not to present on-stage since they were not raising funding. You can watch those in the video embedded below.

A bit more about StartX: The program, which was started in 2010 (it was then known as SSE Ventures) to give entrepreneurially-minded Stanford students tools and advice they need to actually get businesses off the ground, has seen some impressive growth in the past two years: More than 160 founders have started 60 companies with StartX, and 80 percent of them are funded and still growing.

StartX is unique in a few ways: It’s not exactly a student group, as it’s financially and legally completely separate from Stanford University. But it’s not an incubator in the Y Combinator sense, since it’s a non-profit and takes no stake in the startups that participate in the program. It is a very smart set-up, and it would not be surprising to me if it expanded to other regions or universities in the months and years ahead.

In the order in which they appear in the above video, here are the StartX Spring 2012 companies:

Appfluence (co-founders Hai Nguyen, Pablo Diaz-Gutierrez, and Luis Adarve): Productivity software for the iPad

Genapsys (co-founders Hesaam Esfandyarpour and Leila Restegar): Aiming to facilitate ultra-low cost and fully-integrated DNA sequencing on a mass scale

Gauss (co-founders Siddarth Satish, Milt McColl, and Mark Gonzalgo): An iPad-based mobile platform for monitoring blood loss during surgical procedures

Roominate (co-founders Bettina Chen, Alice Brooks, and Jennifer Kessler): The first product from Maykah, a company aimed at creating toys for young girls that will foster their interest in science, technology, engineering and math

Crowd Jewel (co-founders Courtney McColgan, Janelle Tiulentino, and Deborah van Dam): A community-driven jewelry design platform that brings to market the jewelry designs that win a crowd vote

LessThan3 (co-founders Ari Evans, Bryant Williams, and Josh Bennett): A social website where people can show off and share their music collections

Watchup (co-founders Adriano Farano, Jonathan Lundell and Jessi Rymill): Making an iPad app specifically for watching video news content

Vergence Labs(founders Jon Rodriguez and Erick Miller): Creating “smart, stylish, computer-enabled eyewear” aimed at bringing online content into our everyday lives. We were not able to pull these guys aside for a pitch — they were swarmed by investors wanting to try on the glasses themselves — but you can read TechCrunch’s coverage on them from earlier this month right here.

If you’re a fan of the iPhone and Android photo sharing app Picplz, you only have one more month to enjoy its pleasures. In a blog post and email late Friday, developer Mixed Media Labs announced the demise of the app:

On July 3, 2012, picplz will shut down permanently and all photos and data will be deleted. We have provided download links for existing users to save their photos. Thank you for your support of picplz and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. Login before July 3, 2012 to download your photos.

Picplz was competitive with market leader Instagram when both were new, especially since Picplz was available on both the Android and iPhone platforms while Instagram was only available on the iPhone. In February, 2011, when both Picplz and Instagram launched their APIs, Picplz seemed to gain an edge when it added analytics for its users at the same time, as well as the ability to add Creative Commons licensing to photos.

Both apps have the ability to add filters and edges to photos, and can share photos with their own networks as well as friends on Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. But Instagram gained all-important buzz, thus experiencing explosive network growth, making it more desirable than all its competitors.

On Saturday, Picplz was no longer available on the Apple App Store.

More About: apps, instagram, Mixed Media Labs, photo sharing, picplz

What’s the holdup with the new version 4.0 of Android, affectionately known as Ice Cream Sandwich? Announced on October 19, 2011, the new version so far only accounts for 7.1% of active Android devices according to Android Developers — nearly eight months later.

Take a look at this video where we examine why this is happening. Even though Android dominates smartphones with an overwhelming 65% market share, it’s a shame it’s not capable of putting its best foot forward on a wider scale — at least not yet.

How long do you think it will take before Android 4.0 is installed on a majority of Android handsets? Why do you think this has happened?

More About: android, ice cream sandwich, mashable video, smartphones

PicPlz, the mobile photo sharing app that is perhaps known best for being an early and direct competitor with Instagram, will shut down permanently on July 3.

PicPlz delivered the news through a short post on its company blog as well as in a brief email to users that read:

“On July 3, 2012, picplz will shut down permanently and all photos and data will be deleted.

Until then, you can log in and download your photos by clicking on the download link next to each photo in your photo feed.

Thank you for your support of picplz and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.”

Visitors to PicPlz’s website now see the following message on the homepage:

This is not a completely surprise move. Instagram began pulling ahead in the filtered mobile photo sharing space more than a year ago and in 2011, PicPlz pivoted into being part of Mixed Media Labs, a broader smartphone app development company. Mixed Media Labs went on to spin out PicPlz as its own independent entity and has since spawned new products such as mobile platform App.net.

When Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion back in April, some used it as a time to rehash the story of how PicPlz and its investors “lost” the battle for mobile photo sharing. This chatter prompted PicPlz co-founder Dalton Caldwell to take to the Internet and defend his company’s track record.

We’ve reached out for more comment on the shutdown and details on what the future may hold. We will update this post with any information we receive.

UPDATE:

Dalton Caldwell, who remains on the board of directors at PicPlz, said in an email that the team that is operating PicPlz still has other projects in operation:

“As a board member I have been supportive of the strategic decisions they have been making.

In terms of this specific move, as has been stated before, the team that is operating picplz has been bootstrapping (ie not raising money). As part of this bootstapping effort, they recently launched a a paid iPad app for Pinterest users called pinflip: https://app.net/pinflip

pinflip has been doing very well and is currently the #5 paid iPad app in social networking in the US.”

This article has also been updated to clarify the relationship between Mixed Media Labs and PicPlz. Last year PicPlz was spun out of Mixed Media Labs entirely, and it has since operated as its own standalone company led by Ali Aydar.

A couple weeks ago I ran this post showing how one Hong Kong developer, Animoca, tests its Android games. The company, which has had more than 70 million downloads, tests every one of their apps on about 400 different devices. The photo above is from their headquarters and is just a taste of all the Android phones and tablets they use.

Needless to say, that post pissed Android supporters off. Some commenters said it intimidated would-be developers, who might get scared off by Android fragmentation and the perception that you have to support hundreds of devices, screen sizes and densities and versions of the OS.

So, I asked around to see how other mobile game developers do quality assurance testing for Android. This is what I got:

Red Robot Labs: (Backed by Benchmark Capital. Veteran founding team from EA, Playdom and Crowdstar. More than 3.5 million downloads. They currently have the #27 top-grossing game in the Google Play store.)

Red Robot uses about 12 devices in-house and has a quality assurance team of two people. They then use a U.K.-based company called Testology to get further coverage with 35 handsets.

“I applied a common sense filter,” says co-founder Pete Hawley, who hails from EA and has more than 15 years’ experience in the gaming industry. He goes by an 80/20 rule in trying to identify a low number of devices that will cover the widest amount of users. They start with the basic data from Google that shows overall distribution of different versions of Android and screen size densities. Then they look at their analytics to find which devices are most widely used by their players. Finally, they’ll look at player requests and support tickets.

He says it’s good to be selective about which devices to support, especially with all sorts of lower-end handsets coming in from Asia.

“Saying no to players with small, poor, outdated phones or old OSs is important too,” he says. ”Overall, I’d say the process of staying on top of all the handsets, carriers, OS’s and carriers wasn’t as hard as I expected. It’s not a great deal of work to keep the 80 percent well-covered.”

Here’s a snapshot of how Red Robot’s device distribution looked last fall. (It’s a very fragmented pie!)

Pocket Gems: (Backed by Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures. More than 70 million downloads. Newer to Android, but they had two of the top 10 grossing iOS games for all of last year according to Apple’s iTunes Rewind. #35 top-grossing game in Google Play.)

So Pocket Gems’ QA testing is actually run by a former Air Force colonel(!) named Ray Vizzone. They use a little more than 40 devices evaluated in a matrix they explain in the video below. They make sure they include both tablets and phones and then high-resolution and low-resolution devices. They also make sure to include all five major graphic processing units (GPUs) including Adreno, PowerVR, Tegra, Mali and Vivante.

Their QA process is designed to be hyper-speedy as the gaming industry has changed in some fundamental ways over the last few years. Like what Zynga has done in the social gaming industry, today’s mobile games are more like services rather than finished products you pick up off the shelf. So they require constant updates with fresh content every few days.

For the San Francisco-based startup, quality assurance testing is a 24-7 process that involves teams both in the U.S. and abroad. After the U.S. team designs and performs tests during the day, they hand their work to an offshore team that has all of the exact same 40 or so Android devices. This team does extra compatibility testing overnight and files all of the bugs into a defect tracking system, which go back to the U.S. team in the morning.

Pocket Gems tests all features in three phases. They have 1) new features testing 2) integration testing and 3) release candidate testing. Even as developers design new features for their games, Pocket Gems’ QA teams are already at work designing tests for them so they can be checked the moment they’re ready. Once those features are stabilized, they’re integrated into the games and tested a second time.

“As the bugs are found and fixed during integration testing, the product managers and test leads begin their risk assessment as to when to freeze the code base in preparation for shipping,” co-founder Harlan Crystal explains. “Once this decision is made, a full regression test pass is started.”

That final pass involves a full suit of tests that examine memory, performance and device compatibility. “If we don’t find any new or critical bugs during this RC test pass, we bless the bits and ship it!” he says.

Storm8: (More than 300 million downloads. Totally bootstrapped. Four games in Android’s top-grossing 50. Founders are early Facebook alums.)

Storm8 uses between 30 and 50 devices, which they divide into groups of high-end, mid-range and low-end devices.  They intentionally buy devices for each category. After they launch games, they have the apps send back different KPIs (key performance indicators) back to the company’s servers.

“This way, we can tell if we need to further fine-tune a certain class of devices, or even specific devices, to squeeze the last bit of performance from the devices,” says chief executive Perry Tam.

Animoca: (More then 70 million downloads. Backed by IDG-Accel and Intel Capital).

After the original post ran, Animoca ran a longer piece explaining why it does quality assurance testing with so many devices. The main reason is because the company has a huge user base in mainland China and other parts of Asia where there is a plethora of lower-end and non-compatible Android devices (meaning phones that are based on the OS but aren’t certified to run Google applications or the official Android app store).

“If we had taken the approach that 90 percent compatibility is good enough, we’d be lacking support for 7 million of [our] downloads,” the company explains. “Several millions of consumers would have had a bad experience as a result of our decision, and our app revenues would probably be short by around 10 percent.”

Keep in mind that Animoca is not exactly a young company. It’s a mobile gaming-centric arm of a more than 10-year-old company called Outblaze that has focused on digital media and apps for years. So they have lots of experience in doing compatibility and quality assurance testing.

The company’s chief executive Yat Siu feels that their comprehensiveness is a part of why they perform decently on the platform, with “double-digit” millions of dollars in revenue per year from Android. Animoca doesn’t have any games in the top-grossing 50 right now, but they make up for it in the sheer number of apps they publish per year.

Conclusion: If this still freaks you out, just remember that it was way worse in the days of feature phones. (At least, that’s what Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka tells us. Rovio says compared to the J2ME/Brew era, Android is actually easy! They had to make more than 50 games before they created uber-hit Angry Birds.)

Just for reminders about how hard it was then, here are two slides from JAMDAT’s original IPO slidedeck in 2005. JAMDAT was the seminal mobile gaming acquisition of the feature phone era when they were bought by Electronic Arts for $680 million. The company had to spend five years building relationships with more than 90 carriers in about 40 countries and it was standard to support about 400 devices.

So while Android fragmentation seems like a headache, your dad’s mobile app maker was trudging seven miles uphill in the snow QA testing with 400 different phones and dealing with business development people from a hundred carriers.

It’s also easier now with specialty shops handle mobile QA testing now like Testology, which Red Robot uses, and uTest. That said, the very biggest developers still want to do most everything in-house.

Looking for a unique piece of jewelry? Designer David Bizer creates necklaces that are customized to the sound of your voice.

The waveform necklace is designed from a personal audio recording, sent via email. Depending on the material, which ranges from acrylic to silver, the necklaces are actually fairly affordable, starting at 10 to 20 euros ($12 to $24).

SEE ALSO: Turn Your Foursquare Check-ins Into Jewelry

If you’re really into D.I.Y., Bizer’s created a tutorial on how to make your own at home.

[via Laughing Squid]

More About: audio, jewelry, pics, viral

Zombie Swipeout

Zynga’s newest mobile game Zombie Swipeout became available in the United States this week. A followup to the game Zombie Smash, the zombies take flight in the game requiring you to slash them with an assortment of weapons.

Click here to view this gallery.

It can be tough to keep up with all the new apps that are released each week. But you’re in luck: We take care of a lot of that for you, creating a roundup each weekend of some of our own highlights from the week.

This week we found an app that will help you read with your kids, and another by a presidential candidate that shows it wasn’t really proofread before it was published to the masses.

Another app helps keep you safe when you’re headed out on a first date or into the unknown, and yet another will let you pinpoint what the weather will be like while you’re out on your adventure to make sure you’re prepared accordingly.

If you’re staying in for the night, Zynga’s newest mobile game was released in the U.S. this week and can help keep you occupied.

Check out the gallery for a look at some of the highlights from the week, and let us know about some of your own app highlights in the comments.

Still looking for more? See one last week’s Apps to Check Out for some other interesting mobile apps worth a look.

More About: apps, trending, Zynga

TomTom, the maker of in-car location and navigation products and services, launched a digital campaign for its summer promotions this week. The videos — like the one above, produced especially for Mashable readers — remind us of the style of the popular Old Spice videos: a single man delivering a monologue in a stilted accent directly into the camera.

The campaign from TomTom includes a competition for five families or groups of friends to win the chance to spend two weeks mapping a paradise island, as well as 10,000 euros to spend.

The “Great Summer Journeys Start with TomTom” integrated marketing campaign includes radio, online, PR and social media elements during the summer months.

“This campaign shows how TomTom helps get summer journeys off to a great start,” Corinne Vigreux, managing director at TomTom, said in a statement. “With our fuel offer and Map Paradise Project, we hope to engage with people on lots of different levels and via different touch points.”

SEE ALSO: YouTube’s 10 Most-Shared Ads in May

Check out the other official videos for the campaign below.

“TomTom’s Map Paradise Project”

Please click on the CC button for subtitles in your own language.

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: ads, TomTom, YouTube

1. @JDShapiro

Click here to view this gallery.

Molly McAleer, writer for 2 Broke Girls and HelloGiggles co-founder, curates this week’s Twitter comedy, and she’s taking a less-traditional approach.

Do they sell Spanx that cover your entire life?

— Molly McAleer (@molls) April 21, 2012

“My favorite Tweets this week are — for the most part — nontraditional,” says McAleer. “You’d never hear them in a stand-up act or see them printed on a bumper sticker, but they’re hilarious to me just the same.”

McAleer is a Twitter veteran, having joined the site in 2006. Back then, she says, it was a small community of her “favorite Internet-types, uber dorks and a bunch of random folks from Godknowswhere.” Before hashtags, retweeting and “@” replies, it was a random directory of users you stumbled upon without interaction.

“People would quite literally answer Twitter’s prompt question of ‘What’s going on?’ with things like, ‘Driving home from work and passing a candy factory. The highway smells like Butterfingers,’” says McAleer. “I found that to be very charming.”

But Twitter has evolved into something else completely now. Social media has altered traditional journalism. One of the most profound examples of the shift within news organizations on Twitter came after the Iran election, and since then, Twitter’s become the primary source for breaking news and celebrity deaths.

It’s also a great source of entertainment, especially for comedians.

“Over the last couple of years, Twitter (or at least my feed) has become a place to read and share jokes and quips,” says McAleer. “While I enjoy humor as much as the next person, this has been my least favorite era of Twitter. I find it to be the least interesting.”

What McAleer does like about Twitter, and the Internet altogether, is that she has control over what she wants to see and can ignore the rest. Her favorite people on Twitter are the ones who make her laugh without trying.

“I mean, save trying for your paycheck or your family or something legitimate, right? Let’s maybe just bask in the ordinary, the silly, the unique ways that people naturally share their voice,” says McAleer. “Do I sound like a hater? I don’t mean to be a hater.”

Looking for more funny tweets? You can check out last week’s roundup here.

More About: comedy, humor, trending, tweets, Twitter, viral

Oprah Winfrey’s book club is coming back, now in a lively new version 2.0 that’s all digital. Starting next week, she’ll upgrade her wildly popular club, adding interactive features that encourage members to chat about the books on Facebook and Twitter.

The move happens just in time for Winfrey, whose cable-based Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) has been met with flagging ratings that are nowhere near those of her immensely popular television show, last broadcast in 2011.

It’s been a couple of years since Winfrey selected a book for her original club, which was a favorite of authors who loved the promotion the club gave them. According to The New York Times, if an author’s book was chosen as one of Oprah’s selections, sales would regularly soar to well above 1 million copies.

Do you think this updated version of the book club will be able to match the success of Oprah’s first book club?

More About: book club, mashable video, oprah