Stealing a page right out of a startup called Aggregift’s playbook, Amazon today launched a new feature called “Amazon Birthday Gift,” which allows a group of Facebook friends to go in on an Amazon.com Gift Card together. That gift isn’t posted to the recipients’ Facebook Timeline until their big day arrives.

To get started with the service, a user buys an Amazon.com gift card, then invites other mutual friends to donate using the Birthday Gift website here. When the birthday arrives, the recipient is tagged in a Facebook Timeline wall post, receiving the digital card and everyone’s birthday greetings.

The new addition is a further expansion of Amazon’s deepening integration with Facebook, as the company last December launched a “Friends and Family Gifting” feature just ahead of the holidays to generate Facebook-enabled gift suggestions, send out reminders, and enable gift list sharing via both email and social networks. Online competitor Walmart, too, had previously launched a similar Facebook-based gift recommendation service in 2011, which was added to the Walmart.com site ahead of the 2012 holiday season.

The world of alternative browsers is littered with also-rans like Rockmelt, but there are also companies that have managed to make a name for themselves in the shadow of Microsoft, Mozilla and Google. One example of this is Maxthon, but another browser that’s quietly gaining a following is Torch, which the company tells us just passed 10 million monthly active users on Mac and Windows after about year on the market.

Torch just launched the latest version of its Chromium-based browser, which now includes a download accelerator and a large update to the Torch Music service, which uses YouTube and Vevo as the basis of its music catalog. Torch Music now offers customized recommendations based on your listening history, location and your Facebook friends’ tastes. Currently, the service has about 5 million songs in its database.

While Torch previously included a version of this service, it has now integrated this service deeper into its user interface with the help of a widget that allows you to search, pause and skip songs.

As startups compete for the best talent, Homejoy is announcing a way for companies to offer employees an additional perk — a clean home.

Home cleanings may not be a standard perk yet, but they’re not an entirely new idea, either. Last fall, The New York Times wrote that in Silicon Valley, “the employee perk is moving from the office to the home,” with both Evernote and the Stanford School of Medicine experimenting with offering housecleaning to their employees. That can be especially appealing when startups ask teams to work long hours, so they don’t have time to clean their homes themselves.

There are, of course, other cleaning services, but Growth Manager Jeffrey Pang said that as with the company’s consumer product, the goal of Homejoy’s perks program is to make the process as convenient as possible. The company works directly with office administrators to set up Homejoy accounts for employees. Then, when an employee logs in, they should see a credit for their monthly cleaning, and they schedule a cleaning just like any other user. They can also see user ratings for their cleaners and offer their own feedback, and all of that data is also fed into Homejoy’s analytics system.

The mobile wave has been cresting for several years now, so when a decade-old web company is only now debuting its first ever native mobile app, it’s a little late to the game. The folks at TheLadders, which is launching its first iOS app this morning, understand that — but they are angling to make their “mobile last” strategy work in their favor in the long run.

It is indeed a beautiful app, and you can see it demonstrated by TheLadders’ co-founder and CEO Alex Douzet in the video embedded above.

First, though, a little bit of a background on TheLadders. The company was founded in New York City ten years ago in the summer of 2003 with the initial aim of being a job search site for professionals earning $100,000 and above. The company enjoyed solid growth in those early years, at one time having more than 300 employees serving an international market.

Second-screen TV app startup GetGlue just keeps on trucking. Originally launched as an app for checking in to your favorite TV shows and collecting stickers, the company has been steadily expanding its business to include content discovery for shows on the iPad or on your TV. Now it’s hoping to better monetize its mobile and tablet apps, and has hired long-time digital media exec Evan Krauss as president to help with that.

Krauss has spent the last 18 years at a variety of entertainment companies, including Yahoo!, AOL, Excite, JumpTap, Looksmart, and Agency.com. His last big position was as EVP of ad sales for Shazam where he helped build out that company’s second screen ad business.

In addition to Krauss, GetGlue also recently hired Shelby Houston Haro as its EVP of sales, coming from Fandango and Flixster. In an email, GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold wrote, “Evan is joining us a President to lead all the aspects of the business, particularly focusing on revenue… With these two hires, we are now serious about building out and scaling our business.”

Filepicker.io, the Y Combinator-backed “filesystem as a service,” is today rebranding itself as “Ink File Picker,” a name that, CEO Brett van Zuiden explains, stands for something much larger than the former, more product-focused title. In addition, the company is announcing a $1.8 million seed round of funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Highland Capital Partners.

Others in the round included SV Angel, Google board member Ram Shriram, Geoff Ralston (La La Media), Aaron Iba (Y Combinator), Pejman Nozad (Amidzad), Facebook VP of Business Development and Monetization Dan Rose, Ullas Naik (Streamlined Ventures), Hamid Barkhordar, Bobby Yazdani (Saba Software), Niall Browne (Workday), and Data Collective.

Founded just last year, Ink File Picker was created by four MIT grads, Anand Dass, Brett Van Zuiden, Liyan David Chang, and Thomas Georgiou, as a way to make cloud services interoperable. With tools for both web and, as of last summer, mobile developers, the company enables applications to connect to over a dozen of the most popular online services, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Box, GitHub, SkyDrive, Gmail, Instagram and more, as well as to the end user’s computer or device, and elsewhere.

iZettle, the mobile payments company that has been described as a European version of Square, is today making a move that places it one national boundary away from the U.S. mobile payment company’s own backyard: iZettle is launching its iOS and Android service in Mexico. This is the Swedish company’s first move outside of Europe, and comes in the wake of a $6.6 million funding round from the Spanish financial services behemoth Banco Santander, announced just last week and made specifically to build out the solution into more markets globally.

Yes, the mobile payments market — like those chilies being sold by the small merchant pictured here, who probably only accepts cash payments today — is heating up.

To coincide with the launch, iZettle is also appointing a new MD for Mexico, Luis Arceo, who had been with Visa.

Toronto-based Whirlscape attracted plenty of attention when it first debuted its innovative Minuum software keyboard, and sought funding for the project on Indiegogo. Now, the project is moving forward with the launch of the Minuum keyboard beta app for Android, which will give Indiegogo supporters their first chance to actually play with the tech and see what it is they’ve helped pay for.

In the video above, you can see the demo of how the software operates designed to help orient new users. The keyboard layout, as you can see, is squeezed down, but still retains a basic QWERTY layout. It then suggests words, based on typing that’s designed to do as much as it can with incredibly imprecise input. You only have to tap on the basic area, and then you can cycle through suggestions if the first one isn’t correct. There isn’t even a space bar by default; it’s designed to be as minimal as possible. Gestures control cycling between different keyboards, too, including all-caps and numeric input.

Whirlscape raised $87,000 from its Indiegogo campaign, and the beta will go out to its nearly 10,000 supporters today. But those who missed out can also request access to the next phase of testing, by signing up at Minuum.com. The startup is also going to be issuing a “wearable development kit” by the end of the year since it smashed through its funding goal, which will allow people to build versions of Minuum which can theoretically work with devices like Thalmic’s MYO, the Leap Motion Controller and more.

Back in August, Lift launched the first rendition of its snappy-looking iPhone app that aims to help people build healthy habits and achieve their goals. Initially incubated and seed funded by Obvious Corp., the hybrid accelerator and seed vehicle created by Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone and early Twitter VP Jason Goldman, the startup added $2.5 million from Spark Capital, SV Angel and Adam Ludwin from RRE, among others, in November.

Today, Tony Stubblebine, Jon Crosby and team are making their goal-tracking app available to everyone by bringing it to the browser. Up until now, Lift has been iPhone-only, but beginning today, users will be able to sign up for an account and use the app across Windows and Android phones.

The browser version of Lift includes many of the same features that have been available on mobile, including tracking, streaks, graphs, progress and community support, as Stubblebine explained in a blog post this morning.

While Pinterest has become a go-to destination for crafting ideas for accessories, parties, home design and more; the pinning giant (and Pinners) doesn’t provide the instructions on how to actually make these creations. Enter DarbySmart, a do-it-yourself crafting startup working with top Pinterest designers of DIY accessories, fashion and home items to Kit, market and sell their projects to consumers, complete with all materials and instructions needed to complete the project.

DarbySmart, which was co-founded by Nicole Shariat Farb, former Head of Emerging Private Companies in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Karl Mendes, a Senior Software Engineer from Eventbrite; wants to take advantage of growing trend of people looking for inspiration and DIY crafts on Pinterest, while also tapping into the $29 billion crafting industry. The challenges many users face, however, is that once they are inspired by crafts on Pinterest, it’s tough to fund the materials and execute.

The startup offers pre-packaged Kits that have been compiled by popular designers on Pinterest. The DarbySmart team works closely with the project designers to test and identify the best possible materials for DIYers to create lasting products. Then, Darby Smart handles sourcing and purchasing the materials, to packaging the Kits and more. These Kits, which range from $25 to $45 each, include all the materials and instructions necessary to successfully complete the project at hand. Designers in turn receive a share of revenue from the kits sold.