Kiip just announced that it has received funding from ad holding company Interpublic.

Brian Wong, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, said the investment was actually included in the $11 million round that he announced last year, and it’s part of a partnership between the two companies. Kiip and IPG were still working out the details of the partnership, so they couldn’t announce it until now.

It’s a great announcement for Kiip, since it gives extra legitimacy to the company’s relatively new model – presenting consumers with rewards from brand advertisers when they reach “moments of achievement” in their mobile apps. (The company was initially focused on games, but it’s expanding into fitness, cooking, and utility apps.)

Apple has started offering users of its Chinese online store the option to buy devices on credit. The option to pay in interest-free monthly installments is detailed on this page of Apple’s Chinese web store. The credit offer can apply to any purchase of more than 300 yuan ($48) but less than 30,000 yuan ($4,800), according to the site, but only applies to holders of credit cards from China Merchants Bank.

It’s not clear how long Apple plans to offer the credit facility — it’s possible the interest-free component is only a new year offer that expires on January 23. A Google translation of the promotion text on the website reads: “Apple Store online store to purchase any of the products to more than 300 yuan, you can apply for instalment service. From now until January 23, 2013, 3-12 can enjoy interest-free service.

We’ve reached out to Apple to clarify the scope and extent of the offer and will update this story with any response.

WhatsApp, Viber, Yuilop, Facebook Messenger/Poke, Snapchat, and many, many others — the list of apps in the mobile social messaging space seems endless. But Finland’s Jongla thinks there’s room for one more. The company, whose legacy is in apps for feature phones, has re-booted with the launch of a youth-oriented and free social messaging app for iOS and Android (along with a HTML5 version), believing that the key to cutting through a noisy marketplace is personalisation. In version one of the app, this manifests itself through the ability to send animated virtual stickers, a fun and beefed up form of emoticons, which is also how the company plans to make money.

Like other mobile social messaging apps, Jongla is designed to circumvent the need to use SMS text messaging by piggybacking a user’s data connection to offer an Instant Messenger-like experience. Along with a nice design/UX, the app offers features such as syncing with the phone’s address book, the ability to send images directly from the phone’s camera roll to any contact, location sharing, and real-time feed back when a recipient is typing.

So far, so ‘me too’.

Another day, another content licensing agreement in the online streaming space. Amazon-owned LOVEFiLM, a European Netflix competitor, has signed a new streaming deal with NBCUniversal International TV Distribution to further bolster its catalogue of content.

LOVEFilm subscribers will now be able to enjoy on-demand access to “hundreds” of episodes of U.S. TV series including recent “premium quality” series and older classics, such as the U.S. version of The Office, and 30 Rock starring Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin.

The deal also covers NBCU science fiction dramas — including Heroes – and for folk who grew up in the 80s there’s David Hasselhoff’s cult TV classic Knight Rider.

Gaana, one of India’s top music streaming services, just launched its app, which is now available on four platforms (iOS, Android, BlackBerry and J2ME for Samsung and Nokia feature phones) to take advantage of India’s vast but fragmented mobile market.

The service, operated by Times Internet, allows listeners to browse through thousands of playlists, save their favorites, and launch radio stations from individual songs to discover similar tunes, based on its proprietary recommendation algorithm. Offerings range from top 20 Hindi songs to Ghazal music, based on an ancient poetic form.

Gaana’s Web site opened 18 months ago. The app was released across four platforms at once in order to grab as many listeners in India as possible. “The multi-platform build is a testament to the device fragmentation prominent in India. Unlike the U.S. where iPhone and Android are dominating the landscape, they still make up a small minority of devices deployed in India,” said Times Internet CEO Satyan Gajwani in an email.

Facebook is a data company. Today’s news about its new search features proves it. So did last week’s news about the company testing what it can charge people to send Mark Zuckerberg a message. And tomorrow at Open Compute Project’s Open Compute Summit, Facebook will again show why becoming the world’s largest data broker depends on the success of its massive data-center buildout.

The Open Compute Summit is Facebook’s creation, really. The company open-sourced its data center designs in 2011. And with that, they and others in the data center world formed Open Compute Project, an organization that promotes open architectures for data center design. All kinds of companies joined in the fun. Intel, Rackspace, Arista Networks — they and dozens of other enterprise companies will show up tomorrow at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Facebook had to open up to be a data broker, and over the long-term, I think it gives them a certain advantage over those who try to invent the data center themselves.

Venture capital database CB Insights is releasing a new report today on the state of the VC industry and investments in 2012. For the year, $28.3 billion was invested by venture capital firms in 3,267 deals in 2012. However, it’s interesting to note that while seed VC funding hit highs during the year, overall investment fell from 2011’s $30+ billion level. And VC funding actually dipped for the second consecutive quarter in Q4 2012.

After Q3 2012’s deal activity levels (these were the highest since the dot-com days), Q4 stayed strong on a number of deals, which dipped slightly from 835 financings to 834 in the quarter. Funding in Q4 fell for the second straight quarter coming in at $6.8 billion. Funding slipped 7.5 percent from 2011 but still remained up 36 percent versus 2009.

Back in May, we shared the unique story of Lynda.com, the veteran, video-based education platform, and how it was able to generate $70 million in revenue in 2011 without taking a penny from outside investors. Since then, it’s continued chugging along, growing revenue to $100 million in 2012.

Founded in 1995 by husband-and-wife team Bruce Heavin and Lynda Weinman, Lynda.com is not your typical tech startup. Compared to its competition, the company is ancient. Not only that, but it’s avoided venture capital, is still led by its happily married co-founders, is subscription based, has been profitable since 1997 and is headquartered in a small town in Southern California — not in Silicon Valley, New York or Los Angeles.

Part of the reason for this is the advantage of being a first mover, as the company started building its library of educational, how-to videos long before YouTube, Khan Academy or the Courseras of the world entered the picture. Today, its library counts over 83,000 videos. By creating professional-quality video courses taught by bona fide industry experts, working professionals and veteran teachers — and by offering full access for $25/month — Lynda.com has been able to attract over two million paying users along with corporate customers, like Sony, Pixar, Disney, Time Warner and HBO, which use it to supplement their corporate learning programs.