E-commerce leviathan Amazon today is taking a step into social gaming: Amazon Coins, its new virtual currency, is now live in the U.S. To kick it off, Amazon announced that it would put $5 worth of the currency — equivalent to 500 Coins — into all Kindle Fire users’ accounts to use on apps and in-app purchases on its platform. The company says that this is equivalent to “tens of millions of dollars” worth of Amazon Coins.

Coins, which were first announced in February, are the company’s move into an area that has been a strong way for app publishers to generate revenue through their apps. In that sense, the launch serves a two-fold purpose for Amazon: a way of encouraging developers to come to its platform (something Amazon has already been working on), and to spur more revenue generation.

A lot of the talk in virtual currency of late has been around the potential for bitcoin and other new monetary instruments fuelled by a network effect. But before bitcoin became the buzz, there were already a number of other virtual currency networks run by Facebook, Zynga and many more, with aim being to spend the “money” on gaming and other apps on their platforms.

Though it’s but a baby in the app world, Vine is already making brands, advertisers, and especially media industry members chomp at the bit for some 6-second looping action.

The latest to join the herd is Marvel, who has posted a six-second teaser trailer for its upcoming “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” TV series. For those who were fans of the Avengers and other Marvel films, this should be a sweet little Sunday afternoon treat. But if it doesn’t satisfy, have no fear. A real teaser, one that lasts longer than 6 seconds, will debut tonight during ABC’s Once Upon A Time.

It’s interesting to see how brands are managing to pack a full trailer, some of which can last up to three minutes or so, into a six-second Vine. Most recently, the producers of the new Wolverine movie released a teaser for the film on Vine. That, just like this Marvel teaser, used the quick-cutting nature of the app to show tons of action and very little plot.

Facebook didn’t realize just how important widgets, docks, and app folders were to Android users, and that leaving them out of Home was a huge mistake. That’s because some of the Facebookers who built and tested Home normally carry iPhones, I’ve confirmed. Lack of “droidfooding” has left Facebook scrambling to add these features, whose absence have led Home to just 1 million downloads since launching a month ago.

As I wrote in November, Facebook has been desperately trying to get more employees “droidfooding” — carrying and testing Android devices. You can see the posters encouraging employees to pick up a droid below. The issue was that Facebook handed out iPhones to employees for years. Facebookers could request an Android handset, but otherwise would basically get an Apple phone by default. That wasn’t as dangerous years ago when the iPhone still had more marketshare and Facebook users, but since then Android has rocketed into the lead. If Facebook wants to reach the largest audience, it needs employees living and breathing Google’s mobile operating system.

The lack of droidfooders didn’t have serious consequences until Home, Facebook’s new “apperating system”. It replaces the lock screen, homescreen, and app launcher of compatible Android phones with a Facebook-centric experience. It offers Cover Feed, a big, beautiful way to browser the news feed the second you bring your phone out of sleep. It’s missing the ability to build real-time information widgets, put your most used apps in a persistently visible dock, or organize your collection of apps into folders.

Woot, the daily deals site that Amazon bought in 2010 for $110 million, built a reputation for its “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” business model for shifting goods. Now, the company is facing up to a shift of a different kind: that of its own talent. In the last week, TechCrunch has learned that five six key employees are parting ways with the company.

They include Darold Rydl, who had been president of the company and one of its very first employees; CTO Luke Duff, who has been the technical lead for all things Woot since 2005; CFO Rene Gonzalez; Dave Rutledge, who had been the creative lead on all of Woot’s editorial content as president of Woot Workshop; and Jay Johnson, leading both the deals and affiliate marketing divisions at the company as director of deals.woot. Rydl and Gonzalez have already left, and the other three have given notice but will be with the company for another week. Update: after publishing, we found out about another departure: lead developer Shawn Miller is also leaving, with his last day May 17.

This comes 11 months after founder and CEO Matt Rutledge (brother of Dave) also left the company.

This Sunday, there’s a lot you can do in honor of the woman who raised you. There’s TheMomtract, a project out of the ad agency Mother New York to give your mother authority back over some part of your life. There are flowers and promises to let fewer of her calls go to voicemail.

But the San Francisco-based startup Samahope hopes that funds usually reserved for cross-state chocolate delivery might be used to finance medical treatments for women in need around the world. Its #HonorYourMom project is soliciting donations for medical treatments for women along with tweet-length anecdotes about participants’ own parents’ uniqueness. And while funding fistula repair surgery may not have been part of some users’ plans this year, the non-profit organization’s founders hope that providing safe birth kits in a mom’s name won’t take much convincing.

Samahope CEO Leila Janah is the founder of Samsource, a company that offers work opportunities on enterprise data projects to poor individuals around the world. Janah said that while she was on a State Department trip to Sierra Leone for women tech leaders recently, she quickly realized that Samasource was unlikely to work in a country with a 60 percent illiteracy rate. But she was also disturbed upon realizing that a systematic failure to provide basic medical care to many Sierra Leonean women had resulted in people like Dr. Darius Maggi, a Texas-based doctor in his 60s, spending their retirements fundraising for and performing surgeries for women who had undergone traumatic childbirths.

Tweetwall, a Twitter display provider for events (you know, for “tweet walls”), which has been used by customers including CNN, PayPal, Yahoo, Intel, eBay, Microsoft, the Obama campaign, Sprint, and more, is today launching a revamped version of its service. The updated version of Tweetwall has been rebuilt from the ground up, and is also accompanied by a new iPad application offering AirPlay support, designed for smaller venues.

If you’ve ever been to a conference or other event where a big-screen TV or monitor was filled with live tweets, then you may have come across Tweetwall’s technology, without realizing it. However, prior to today, the service has only been available to larger organizations who have historically paid thousands of dollars for customized versions of Tweetwall, built to their own needs.