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I like to go to events here in Silicon Valley, and meet new people, but sometimes actually finding those events in your city is hard to do—especially for entrepreneurs. There are sites like Plancast, and Upcoming that let you plan ahead, but there are also many other solutions. Startup Digest is hoping to be one of those solutions. Startup Digest isn’t a complicated web service or anything—it’s an email list. An email list that has attracted over 12,000 subscribers in the last 90 days.

Plain and simple, you just subscribe to an email list, and then once a week, you get an email with five events that you should go to in your city. Currently, Startup Digest only has lists in Silicon Valley and New York City, but today, they are launching lists in three other cites; Tokyo, Atlanta and Vancouver.

In each of those cities, there are curators that come up with the events and talk to event organizers and make sure their events are on the list. The business model side of things is pretty simple too. In Silicon Valley, which has the most subscribers, there is an ad in each of the emails at the top. Each ad spot in one email is $1,000 to $5,000. Not bad for an email list! The only costs Startup Digest has is sending the email out through Mail Chimp, and hosting their web site.

It seems like a pretty smart idea to me, and it’s attracted folks like Guy Kawasaki, Dave McClure and a few other Silicon Valley heavyweights to subscribe to the list as well.

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Graphic.ly, a content delivery system and community platform for the publishing world, today announced that they have raised $1.2 million in funding. Graphic.ly was originally named Take Comics, and was part of the 2009 TechStars program in Boulder, Co.

Graphic.ly raised $1 million.  The round was led by DFJ Mercury, and included Starz Media, LLC, as well as, Northstar Equity Investors. Individual investments as well came from David Cohen, Chris Sacca, Jake Nickell, Paige Craig and Dave McClure.

Graphic.ly’s first product, which focuses on comic publishers, creators and enthusiasts, provides an immersive social experience and marketplace around digital comics and associated merchandise. The company looks to expand its community and content platform and become the de facto solution for print media.

Graphic.ly also has announced a partnership with Marvel Comics, one of the leaders in comics, allowing Graphic.ly users to read Marvel comics on the go, exactly like what Panelfly did on the iPhone.

The company has brought in Micah Baldwin as the CEO of Graphic.ly. Previously, Micah was the Vice President of Business Development and Chief Evangelist at Lijit. Micah is also an advisor at TechStars, which explains the relationship between Graphic.ly and Micah.

Graphic.ly is going to use the funds to expand development and marketing efforts and begin work on content partnerships.

Also, the first 1,000 to use the code TECHCRUNCH will be able sign up immediately.

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AdNectar, a word-of-mouth marketing service for agencies and brands fielding campaigns on social networks, announced today that it has reached 2 billion virtual goods served from its platform. AdNectar has clients ranging from Gillette and Funny or Die to Jelly Belly and Snapple/Dr. Pepper. Also, over 10 million virtual goods have been sent between friends on social networks.

According to data from AdNectar, campaigns reach scale fast. For example, over 1 million Malibu Rum branded drinks were sent in two weeks; and over 1 million Nestle Toll House cookies were sent for the “Bake some Love” campaign.

Engagement rates are also reportedly high for companies. Rates are anywhere from 2% to 6% because the campaigns tap into the implicit trust between your friends on these social networks. Also, brand impact is exceptionally high; 16% lift in purchase intent for Nestle Toll House, and 9% increase in brand favorability for Malibu Rum.

AdNectar and virtual goods are definitely taking off, and brands are starting to realize that, and AdNectar is using that to their advantage. AdNectar is based in Palo Alto, has 9 employees and has starting turning a profit. The company has only taken an angel round of funding from Larry Braitman, Tom Cole, Kevin Hartz, Brian O’Kelley, Jon Perlow, Russell Siegelman and David Shen.

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Foursquare, the geo-location based check-in game, just announced its first venue that is combining badges and promotions. On Foursquare you get badges for checking into places. The person who checks into a place the most becomes the “Mayor.” You also get promotions from restaurants and bars nearby based on your location. Now those two elements are being tied together. For instance, Blynk Organic a restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina is the first venue to offer this promotion:

Mayor eats for free! Just show us your phone after checking in to validate. 25% off egg sandwiches for all Gym Rats (Foursquare badge required)

A promotion like this is clever since it is also tied to something other than checkins and mayorships. The idea is that it will not only give other customers an incentive to compete and become the mayor, but also motivate customers to complete interesting tasks before redemption.

In the past, Foursquare has done check-in and mayorship promotions, but in a more ad-hoc manor. Now the promos are presented as actual ads in the app. I spoke with Foursquare’s Director of Business Development Tristan Walker, who also spoke at our RealTime CrunchUp in November, and he mentioned that there are close to 400 businesses to this date that are running regular geo-triggered promos with Foursquare.

It is not clear how Foursquare will get paid for these badge promotions. Walker says, “Right now we’re just focused on getting as many venues running promos on the platform as possible before we think about monetizing. We’d like to understand a bit more about how venue owners would like to leverage our platform in interesting ways first.”

Foursquare has been one of the main startups in the geo-location market along with recently funded Gowalla.

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I’ve been using a Macintosh computer for a few years now, but just a few a weeks ago, I decided to look in my Utilities folder—one of those spur of the moment kind of things.

I found the regular utilities like Activity Monitor, Airport Utility, Console, and Migration Assistant, but what I just stumbled on was something that has saved me so many times from that point on. DigitalColor Meter. Apple likes to secretly tuck away their best utilities in folders that people will most likely never end up using.

So what makes DigitalColor Meter so special? The app does a lot of things, but what I found most useful was the ability for me to hover over any pixel on my screen, and to find out the exact RGB value (read up on RGB here).

This is a great tool that I’ve used in many scenarios with great success. For example, my Twitter background was all done through DigitalColor Meter, since I knew the colors I liked, but I just needed their RGB values. So, I whipped open DigitalColor Meter, it told me the RGB values, and bam — I have a new custom-colored Twitter background.

If you want check out DigitalColor Meter in action, check out the video I did below detecting TechCrunch’s RGB colors all over the site.

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I typically use the Weather iPhone app once a week, at most. The only reason I would ever use the application is if a friend asked me the weather for a certain day of the week. Outside is trying to change the way we see weather applications on the iPhone with their new iPhone app developed by Robocat.

Outside combines current weather and local forecasts with custom push notifications on the iPhone. With Outside, you can setup push notifications to for various weather conditions and get alerts when the weather matches your criteria, even when the app isn’t running. To get the notifications, you have to sign up for a subscription service. You get 30 days of push notifications when you purchase Outside, and then for $1, you get another 90 days of notifications. A yearly plan is in works as well.

Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >>

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We knew that the holidays were going to be super busy for iPhone developers — in a good way. Gaming community platform PlayHaven and mobile ad exchange Mobclix released data yesterday saying that iPhone game usage is likely to set record in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, called a “Game Rush,” with usage 28 times greater than the same weekly period last year.

One developer, Oliver Cameron of Taptivate, the developer of Voices (an application that morphs your voice into different sounds like Darth Vader, Chipmunks, etc), sent me an email saying that sales have been through the roof for them, and their app is now in the 44th spot because of the “Game Rush” as they’re calling it. It’s one of those “it’s stupid but fun” kind of apps that usually move well when people are looking for quick apps to download.

Cameron mentioned that sales were as high as 18,769 downloads of the $0.99 app on December 25th. So if you do the math, that’s $18,581.31 in sales, not including Apple’s 30% cut. If you included Apple’s cut, the app made $12,688 in one day. Those are some pretty crazy numbers, regardless. Check out a graph of Voice’s sales numbers below as well.

The app in total has made a little more then $250,000 sales, which got me thinking: If this app is #44 on the App Store, imagine what the number one and two apps were doing (Skee-Ball and Live Cams). We also just spoke with Colin Smith, Vice President of Freeverse, which said that their application, Skee-Ball sold 47,926 units — which is about 10x what it did the previous Friday. Another one of their apps, Flick Fishing, sold 31,741 units on Christmas day.

We’re also hearing that an app which has been one of the most popular since the launch of the App Store 18 months ago, saw its downloads on Christmas Day double its previous record for a single day.

All of this could well point to the possibility that Apple itself set a record in the amount of iPhones and iPod Touches sold during the holiday season.

Update: More numbers are coming in. Lima Sky’s Doodle Jump, which just hit the 1 million download mark about a week ago, managed to sell 80,000 units on Christmas day alone. Two days prior, they were pushing around 15,000 per day; two days later, they were hovering around 35,000. All in all, they sold 197,821 copies between 12/23 and 12/27 – at .99c a pop, we’re calculating that they took in just shy of $139,000 after Apple’s cut.

Update: Even more numbers to report as Tapulous, developers of the popular Tap Tap Revenge series, check in with good news. They’ve pulled down over 2 million installs of Tap Tap Revenge 3 since going free last Wednesday, 700,000 of which came on Christmas day. Between Tap Tap Revenge 1/2/3 and the Metallica/Lady GaGa editions, Tapulous now has 5 applications in the Top 100 grossing apps.

Update: SGN reports that last week, their best selling game F.A.S.T. hit the 1 million download mark and doubled its install rate since launching the free version, “The New War”. It also got up to #22 App Rank only 5 days after launch. You can check out our coverage of F.A.S.T. here.

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If you’re on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We’ve added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks, including three jobs here at TechCrunch. Here’s a quick sample:

• Conferences & Events Producer
  TechCrunch – Palo Alto, CA

• Director of Technology
  Dictionary.com – Oakland, CA

• Senior Product Manager
  Playdom – Mountain View, CA

• Senior Product Manager
  GetGlue.com – New York, NY

• Rockstar Senior PHP Developer
  KickApps – San Francisco, CA

As Mike just noted as well, Apple has also posted a job posting for their iWork team.

Also, don’t forget that we’re looking for a Conferences & Events Producer, Account Executive and CrunchBase interns here at TechCrunch!

For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard.

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Looks like Amazon has decided to go on holiday vacation early, and invited all of its customers to go along with it. Amazon and Amazon Web Services seem to be down, and people are noticing it.

This is bad news for any companies relying on Amazon’s cloud services. Many startups use Amazon Web Services to host files in the cloud including images and other key content. And it isn’t the first time this has happened (though its competition isn’t much better).

And, of course, those looking for extremely last minute holiday gifts are out of luck.

We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment, and we’ll update you on the status of Amazon.

Update: Amazon looks to be back up from here. Is it up for you?

Update 2 CNET is reporting that the problem stemmed from a large denial of service attack on Amazon’s DNS provider UltraDNS, which also affected other sites such as Salesforce and Walmart.

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Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced on the company blog that they have acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI. In a nutshell, GeoAPI provides developers with the ability to query the world through services which include a reverse geocoder; deep data about 16 million businesses and tens of thousands of points of interest; a writable layer for developers to annotate the world and do complex geo-queries; and location-enabled media layers (e.g., Twitter and Flickr). Just recently, they added an iPhone SDK to speed up mobile development as well.

GeoAPI will be integrated directly into the Twitter API, speeding up Twitter’s efforts in the geo-location space. In August 2009, Twitter first announced that they’re getting into the geo-location game as well. And, in September, a lot of you started seeing the Geo API in action through apps like Tweetie, Birdfeed, etc. Twitter formally turned on the functionality in November, but only through its API (not on the site itself).

Geo-location has been a hot topic these last few months with contenders including Foursquare, Gowalla (which recently took a hefty amount of funding in), Stalqer, Seesmic Web, and many more applications. Loopt and Whrrl have both pivoted their companies recently to stay relevant in the space too.

It’ll be interesting to see how companies like SimpleGeo will thrive in the space now, especially since a lot of SimpleGeo’s data is Twitter and social network-based.

Mixer Labs actually started out as TownMe, a site that is a comprehensive guide to pretty much everything that’s relevant at the local level, from restaurant reviews to the best schools and hospitals in town.

It’s worth noting that Mixer Labs largely ex-Google employees. Also worth noting is that Mixer Labs CEO Elad Gil and Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver were both on the Geo panel at our Real Time Crunchup in November. That was clearly the start of a very good friendship.

GeoAPI has more details on their blog too. The financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.

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