We’ve confirmed with Twitter that it has rolled out a new part of its #Music service for the web, charts that we were accustomed to from the company We Are Hunted, that it acquired and now powers the service.

The charts are broken up into a few areas: the familiar genre breakdown, as well as some categories like “Superstars” and “Unearthed” that appear to be built based on current Twitter trends and trajectory of artist mentions. This is leveraging all of the data that Twitter is collecting from tweets that include links to tracks from popular and emerging artists.

As you click on each category, the tiles on the page swap out quickly, letting you surf around to find new artists and songs. The categorization was a necessity to be able to find hidden gems, as the original breakdown of Popular and Emerging changed so rapidly:

For this week’s episode of Founder Stories, I sat down with Ilya Sukhar, co-founder and CEO of Parse. The interview was taped days before Parse was acquired by Facebook last month. Parse is a cloud app platform that provides a set of SDKs that enable developers to focus on the execution of their application instead of rebuilding backend functionality for every mobile platform. Sukhar shares his experience of leaving Salesforce and going through Y Combinator.

Sukhar, who entered YC as a solo founder, was connected to co-founder Kevin Lacker through Paul Graham. The duo then joined up with another co-founding team about a month into YC to build Parse.

“It was a big risk,” says Sukhar. “The founding relationship is a really deep one and there’s a lot of ups and downs to go through together.” Having only known his co-founders for a short time before deciding to work together, Ilya explains the risks and reality of starting a company with strangers. “It worked out well for me but I would not recommend it to other folks.”

Another step for Adobe in its bid to become the go-to place in the cloud for those working in design and other creative industries: it is acquiring Thumb Labs, a bootstrapped, New York-based mobile app design agency.

Jared Verdi, one of the co-founders of Thumb Labs along with Rich Kern, tells TechCrunch that financial terms of the Thumb Labs acquisition are not being disclosed.

The news follows on from Adobe’s acquisition of another New York-based design startup, Behance, a platform for designers and others in the creative industries to share their work, which Adobe picked up in December 2012 reportedly for around $150 million. Earlier this month, Adobe put the Behance acquisition into context when it announced a massive push on its Creative Cloud strategy, with social/community features powered by Behance.

Have you ever wished that you could navigate through the apps on the phone as easy as clicking links on the web? Such a thing may now become a real possibility thanks to a new service from Cellogic, called Deeplink.me. In a nutshell, it’s a bit.ly for mobile app deep linking – meaning not necessarily just linking to the app itself, but to a specific page, section or  - in the case of a mobile game – a specific level, within an application.

The link (deeplink.me/yourname), meanwhile, works from anywhere, whether web, mobile web, or any other native mobile application.

It can automatically detect where an end user is coming from and whether or not they have the necessary mobile app installed on their device. If the link is clicked on the web, it would simply point the user to the developer or publisher’s web version of that same content. If on mobile with no app installed, it could be configured to point to the app store or mobile website instead. And if the app is present, it could take you right to the relevant screen.

A brain drain at a big tech company is never a good thing, and when a lot of that departing talent consists of high-level execs moving on in rapid succession it’s bound to look like curtains to outside observers. That appears to be the case at HTC, which is losing a lot of senior execs according to multiple reports today from The Verge, CNET and Engadget, and a source has pointed us to yet another recent high profile departure.

We’ve learned at TechCrunch that HTC Senior Vice President of Global Marketing Greg Fisher departed the company just a few short months ago to Amazon. Fisher is among a growing list of known execs leaving HTC, including people on both the product and marketing sides of the equation. What we’re hearing suggests that the company is facing a lot of internal turmoil and politics, which is frustrating employees across the board.

The Verge reported earlier today that HTC’s Chief Product Office Kouji Kodera has departed as of last week, which is a considerable staff shift given that Kodera probably spearheaded HTC’s recent line of critically well-received devices, including the HTC One X and this year’s HTC One. The company has also seen the departure of Global Communications VP Jason Gordon, Global Retail Marketing Manager Rebecca Rowland, digital marketing chief John Starkweather and Eric Lin, manager of product strategy with the past three months.

Amazon has reportedly submitted plans for a new futuristic headquarters in Seattle that combines a skyscraper and a tri-sphere, bio-dome-like structure. According to the plans, the structure will be able to hold various forms of plant life and become a place where employees can “work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.”

Because, God forbid, employees walk to the park that’s three blocks away.

Runscope launched at the Glue conference today with $1.1 million in seed funding from True Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz for its tools that monitor API traffic and address the problems with broken APIs. Also participating were Lerer Ventures, and a group of prominent angel investors.

The Runscope tools come as software is scaling everywhere. And with software comes APIs, which are just a natural way to connect services. When web services ruled back in the IT glory age, software integrations were complex and expensive. Today REST-based APIs make it easy to connect apps. The problem is in the complexity of the distributed nature of building them.

Distributed apps have their own code. It may work across on-premise servers and a cloud provider’s network and servers. It will also use the API providers’ set of code and servers of their own.

For years, the iPhone has carried a small etching on the back that says ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.’

It’s fueled the stereotype that China is the world’s factory, but hasn’t had a flexible enough education system to produce R&D talent that can also design world-class products for a global audience.

But that’s a stereotype that isn’t exactly true anymore.

Another photo sharing app bites the dust? Or is something with promise getting another chance? Either way you look at it, betaworks is adding more technology and team members to its arsenal, as photo sharing app Piictu has announced that the team will “join forces” with a betaworks company that has yet to launch.

Piictu had raised $1.73 million in seed funding, yet never really took off. The app allowed you to share photos with captions, but Piictu wanted to focus on letting photos start conversations, rather than sit in a stream waiting for likes. The app’s approach was to get you to share photos in context of what you were doing.