Bootstrapping founders, Jeremy Greenfield and Kayvon Olomi, have taken a non-traditional route to marketing their new photo aggregation and sharing application, Divvy. They’ve hopped into a 1973 VW camper bus and are on a cross-country road trip to tour colleges around the U.S., in an attempt to get the word out about the privacy options their app allows.

They left April 1st from Tulsa, and are now in the New York tri-state area, with plans to hit up Boston, MIT, Harvard, and more, before heading to Denver in three weeks.

Olomi, who’s also the founder of app development marketplace AppTank, says he built Divvy to scratch a few of his own itches: the hassles of moving between Facebook and Instagram to follow his friends’ photos, the inability to zoom in on Instagram photos, and the inability to save those photos. But he also thinks that more private photo sharing is something today’s younger users want.

Two years ago, I had a terrible experience at the Great Wall when I visited its most popular corridor in Badaling. Trapped between tens of thousands of local tourists for miles upon miles one scorchingly humid August day, I eventually managed to get off by riding a roller coaster down the Great Wall that ended up in a bear park. Really!

I’m not alone. AnyRoad co-founders Daniel and Jonathan Yaffe almost ended up doing the same thing, but they were smarter. They asked around and found out about remote parts of the wall where you could walk for miles without seeing another soul. It took hours to get there, but they got lucky and met a courteous taxi driver who showed them exactly what they wanted — that endless, breathtaking view of the crumbling Wall stretching for hundreds of miles into the distance.

With that as inspiration, they decided to do a startup together that would offer custom tours to people in cities like Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Jerusalem, San Francisco and more.

Charles Darwin’s Galapagos Finches and his book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” are the inspirations for Facebook’s new animated Sticker pack, which begins rolling out today to Chat in Facebook for iOS and Messenger for Android. Designed by UC Berkeley “compassion researcher” Dacher Keltner, the downloadable Finch Sticker set lets friends send each other vivid emotions, not just emoticons.

The new Stickers feature which Facebook launched earlier this month lets people add big, cute illustrated icons to their chat conversations, similar to apps like Line and the most recent version of Path.

Facebook tells me, “Facebook messages help people connect with others everyday, and our goal is to help make those connections as rich as possible. Stickers are a fun, lightweight, and visual way of letting your friend know how you feel. So far, we’ve introduced stickers for Facebook for iOs and Messenger for Android. Soon you’ll be able to send stickers with Messenger for iOs and Facebook for Android too.”

Blink, a new mobile application for ephemeral messaging, is debuting today on the Apple App Store allowing users to text, plus share photos, and soon videos, with other friends as well as with groups. The app represents a spin-off from the same technology which also powers social friend finder, Kismet. Though the company says it has no plans to shut down Kismet at this time, its current focus will be on continuing the development of Blink at present.

You may remember Kismet, founded by ex-Googler Kevin Stephens and Michelle Norgan, as one of the apps which surged in popularity around the time of SXSW 2012, when “ambient location” seemed to be the latest trend. As it turned out, while Kismet saw some pick up on college campuses, and particularly in the Greek community, its user base remained under a million.

Now Blink is repurposing the company’s technology platform to attack mobile social networking from a new angle: disposable messaging.

Social network scheduling startup Buffer continues to grow, and is now on track to make over $1 million in annual revenue with over $100,000 coming in from clients per month. The company now has over 600,000 users, and over 10,000 paying users as of this month, signalling significant growth from December of 2012, when it had 400,000 total users, and a third of its current social shares per month.

The bottom line is that providing a service that makes it easy for brands to schedule and deliver their messages via social networks like Twitter and Facebook is fast becoming big business, especially as social media becomes a more widely accepted and important arm of any company’s public communications. I spoke to Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich, now back in San Francisco after a temporary visa issue sent him and his team back to Austria temporarily last year, about how the market has evolved.

Widrich says that they’re definitely seeing a big increase in the number and range of companies who want to have an active social media presence, and scheduled sharing is a key component of those efforts. The company also recently introduced a brand new integration with Feedly, which makes Buffer the default sharing method for content collected through your feeds. It’s a big integration win for Buffer, especially as Feedly moves into position as one of the top potential replacements for Google Reader, which could result in a very sizable new user pool.

Datalogix’s offline purchase data is the not-so-secret weapon giant publishers use to target their ads and measure whether they boost consumer spending. Businesses like Facebook are becoming dependent on this ROI data, allowing Datalogix to raise a $25 million Series B. Since it’s based in Denver you don’t hear a lot about Datalogix, but the 250 employee startup is crucial to the future of advertising.

Here’s why I would have fought tooth and nail to get in on this round if I were an investor. Huge brands in retail, consumer packaged goods, automotive and more that earn their money offline are pouring money into online ads on publisher’s sites like Google, Facebook and Yahoo. They’d shift even more of their spend away from print and TV if they could be assured they were getting return on investment on their ads. And publishers could charge them more if they could prove they provide ROI, but none of them know what people are buying in the meatspace.

Enter Datalogix. The company collects enormous amounts of offline purchase data straight from stores with customer loyalty cards like grocers, and partners with data brokers to get even more. Datalogix says its treasure trove includes data on almost every household in the U.S. and $1 trillion in consumer spending. The company packages up the data about what you buy into anonymous profiles, and sells access to big publishers, including Google, Facebook and Yahoo, as well as scores of ad exchanges. This lets them target ads based on what you buy offline, and then see how much more of a product you bought after seeing an ad for it. Publishers can then calculate how much more money its advertisers earned than spent, and use this ROI data to convince them to buy more ads.

There are definitely times where I feel like my social life has gotten a bit … not monotonous, but tied to a familiar pattern of bookstores, movie theaters, bars, and karaoke bars. That’s why I’m checking out a new site called SpotOn.it, which tries to break people out of their own personal ruts by recommending different types of events.

There are lots of other activity-recommendation apps out there (the most interesting to me has probably been Weotta). SpotOn.it is different because it integrates with your Google Calendar, from which it can learn two important things — what you like to do, and what your schedule looks like.

“Our tech is based off building statistical models off of how people spend their time,” said co-founder and CEO Smita Saxena. She noted that she and her co-founder and CTO Charles Feng both have a background in machine learning.

There have been many attempts to integrate social media conversations with live TV, often through a “second screen” experience (basically, a smartphone app). But ABC News just announced something that I haven’t seen before — a mobile and web-based app called the Social Soundtracker.

Maya Baratz, ABC News’ head of new products, compared the app to the laugh tracks that accompany TV sitcoms, especially older ones. Most of us probably think that laugh tracks are fake and uncool, but Baratz said they addressed a real need — people like to feel like they’re watching TV with other people. That’s also why there’s so much conversation around TV shows on Facebook and Twitter, and that’s what all these second screen/social TV startups have been trying to capture.

What no one else has been able to do, and what Baratz said she hopes to achieve with Social Soundtracker, is to create “a real, immediate, sensory experience” (or at least the illusion of the same). So when you’re watching a TV show with the app open, you don’t have to think of witty comments, or distract yourself with witty comments from your friends. Instead, you just hit a button that represents how you’re feeling — you can clap, laugh, boo, and more. If there’s a critical mass behind a certain type of emotion, then the Social Soundtracker will translate that emotion into sounds like applause or laughter. Baratz said it can also mix sounds, so if most people are applauding but a few are booing, the app can represent that. And you can update your responses as the show progresses.

Earbits, a free music service where independent musicians and labels can pay to promote their work to fans, is launching its first mobile product today — an Android app.

It’s been more than two years since the Y Combinator-backed startup first launched. That seems like a long time for a music service to go without a mobile app.

However, CEO Joey Flores told me that Earbits isn’t just a regular music app — again, one of the main selling goals is to help musicians promote themselves, and for fans to promote those musicians. So the default mode for other music apps, where you just turn on the app and then let the music play without interacting, isn’t really what Earbits is going for.