There’s a new product that just came out of Disney Interactive Labs — a video portal for clips, movie trailers, and even a collection of curated YouTube videos, all designed to be watched online or on any of your mobile devices. The new Disney Video site, located at video.disney.com, combines the best of Disney past and present, with a whole lot of content that might not be found anywhere else.

It’s too early for us to know a whole lot about the site — we checked out the portal after it was announced on Twitter by Henry Work, Senior Software Engineer for Disney Interactive Labs. But at first glance, it seems like a pretty cool example of what a major media company can do with a huge library of content that it hopes to bring to multiple platforms and devices.

First of all, let’s talk about the content. The site is broken down into movies, shows, collections and YouTube, and highlights a wide range of content across Disney’s family-oriented media properties. In the movies section, Disney Video features trailers, as well as behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with stars of upcoming and recent feature films like Frankenweenie and The Avengers. Its shows page puts the spotlight on popular clips from the Disney Channel and related cable networks. Collections organizes its video library into themes, like Disney Fairies, for instance, or content available from Disney Theme Parks.

But the most interesting section might be the YouTube channel on the site, which provides a curated page full of kid-friendly content. The YouTube page is the result of a deal that Disney struck with the video site late last year, through which the media companies will cross-promote each other’s content. YouTube will get some original kids programming from Disney, while Disney is making YouTube clips available on its new portal.

As for the multiplatform aspect of the site — as far as we can tell, it’s formatted to work on web browsers, delivered via Flash, as well as on mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Android handsets and tablets. That’s a huge step for Disney, as it seeks to make its content available on whatever device kids are using.

There’s no real long-form content on the site — for now it’s all promotional clips and trailers — but it is designed to keep viewers watching, with an autoplay feature that loops new videos in ten seconds after the last one has been completed.

Interestingly, the Disney online video portal is being launched at the same time that some analysts are questioning the effect that Netflix is having on the ratings for cable TV networks like Nickelodeon and Disney Channel. While the portal isn’t as kid-friendly as Netflix’s Just For Kids implementation online and on some connected devices, Disney no doubt hopes that its large library of content will keep kids coming back.

Search engine ranking startup Positionly has secured $300,000 seed funding from Berlin-based led by seed VC Point Nine Capital and joined by Angels Mariusz Gralewski and Michal Skrzynski.

The idea behind Positionly’s service is that small business owners don’t need to know about SEO. Its clients already include TD Bank Opower, ESPN and TUI. Users can either enter search keywords manually or upload them from .csv files or a Google analytics account. The Poland-based service then tracks search engine rankings over time, generating simple search engine reports. Pricing ranges from $19 to $99 per month.

However, its service proposition is not unique. For example, Link Assistant targets individual users as well as corporations with its desktop software Rank Tracker. The company boasts Microsoft Germany, MasterCard and General Electric amongst its 380,000 clients and is completely bootstrapped.

Positionly enters a crowded market. SEOmoz received $18 million in backing earlier this month and offers Rank Tracker within a broader SEO monitoring service priced at $99 per month. Conductor got $10 million funding back in 2009, and Searchmetrics raised $11 million with a recent found this past January 2012.

Editor’s note: This post is written by contributor Natasha Starkell, CEO of GoalEurope, an outsourcing advisory firm and a publication about outsourcing, innovation and startups in Central and Eastern Europe.

Palantir Technologies, the big data analysis company founded in 2004 by a team of ex-PayPal employees including Peter Thiel, has raised $56 million in new funding, according to a document filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This is by no means Palantir’s first go-round with venture capital investors. This is the company’s 7th round of funding, according to our records — back in October 2011, Palantir closed on a $70 million round of funding that served as its Series F. That raise was held at a $2.5 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch sources.

What Palantir does is not at all easy — or cheap. The company provides high-powered software platforms that let users integrate, visualize, and analyze large quantities of data. Perhaps most importantly, Palantir specifically has targeted its products to two sectors that need to parse large amounts of classified information, and require super solid security: Government and finance. The company counts governmental organizations such as the FBI and financial institutions such as JP Morgan as customers. Palantir has doubled in size each year since it was founded, according to its website.

We’ve reached out for more information from Palantir, and will update this post when we hear back.

Carrying on in the esteemed tradition of Facebook hackathons, there will be an all-nighter on Thursday at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters that culminates with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ringing in the NASDAQ bell ahead of the company’s much, much, much anticipated IPO.

There is an internal event page for the big day that has about a thousand Facebook employees RSVP-ing for the bell ringing early on Friday morning. We can’t tell if there are any other big festivities prepared ahead of time. It’s all up in the air. Some people may dress up though. We don’t know if the gong will be used. Zuck will probably give some remarks as he has ahead of other hackathons.

“We want to get everyone together and remind ourselves that this company is about building things,” a source says.

Facebook has long emphasized the “Hacker Way,” which is about building things fast and constantly iterating on the status quo. Zuckerberg argued in Facebook’s original IPO filing that the word ‘hacker’ has long been misconstrued.

“The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers,” he wrote. “In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.”

In the tradition of other hackathons, expect some interesting product ideas to get fleshed out. Facebook Hackathons are a chance for employees to work on half-baked ideas and turn them into real products that eventually get shipped. Everything from Facebook’s chat system to an early version of Timeline called ‘Memories’ have come out of Hackathons. Even the famous ‘Fax’ button that Facebook once pranked Jason Kincaid with also came out of a hackathon.

In the meantime, while you’re in between reading all of mainstream media and blogosphere’s senseless blathering about what Facebook is really worth, enjoy these photos of Facebook employees sleeping at headquarters.

Update: Facebook engineering manager Pedram Keyani complains in the comments that we are not showing enough people hacking and are perhaps giving a misguided impression that people sleep at Facebook hackathons. So correction: They do not sleep. They rage.

It’s been amazing how technology-enabled aggregation can make certain things in life so much easier — spaces such such as travel planning, real estate searching, and news reading come to mind. But when it comes to the financial space, that disruption hasn’t quite happened yet. Most of us have a retirement account here, a checking and savings account there, a credit card or two somewhere else, and so on. And we still deal with each one on its own. Getting one picture of your entire financial portfolio is not a very common thing.

That’s where Personal Capital wants to come in. The company, which launched last year, provides a suite of software aimed at helping people manage their investments, banking and personal finances — no matter where they are — through one central suite of web and mobile apps. Personal Capital is supported by some real industry weight: Its CEO and founder is Bill Harris, who was the longtime chief exec at Intuit, and thus far the company has taken on $27 million in venture capital funding. Earlier this month Personal Captial was named “Best In Show” at the FinovateSpring, a conference in San Francisco focused on all things financial and technology related, so it certainly seems to be onto something big.

So when Personal Capital put out its first iPhone app last week, we asked Harris and product VP Jim Del Favero to stop by TechCrunch TV and give us a hands-on look at the service. Watch the video above to hear about why it’s a good thing to show your “entire financial life” in one place, how Personal Capital is different from other financial software providers such as Mint and SigFig, why people about to cash in through the Facebook IPO should manage their money in a modern way, and more.

American politics used to be fun: frequent political carnivals in the 19th century would mix parties, parades, and political speeches in an endless stream of local civic life. As a result, America had an astonishingly high turnout, between 70-90%, in presidential and local elections. Yet, the Internet has never quite captured the emotional gravity of real-life engagement, and keeps tripping up multi-million dollar campaigns designed to inject life into an otherwise passive electorate.

For example, take two technology initiatives that were widely predicted to dramatically increase democratic engagement: Obama’s 2008 campaign and Americans Elect. Despite the hype, Barack Obama’s juggernaut of a online campaign only boosted youth turnout by a meager 2%.

Americans Elect, a crowdsourced online platform for a third party presidential candidate, was supposed to be the digital savior of American democracy. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman prophesied, “Americans Elect. What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies, Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated American political life.”

Americans Elect promised to allow citizens to vote directly online for a third party candidate, uncorrupted by corporate donations, and finance the winner’s national campaign. Today, despite massive media attention, the bankroll of a Wall Street billionaire, and the promise of direct democracy, Americans Elect failed to garner its own minimum threshold of 10,000 votes to field a candidate (less than 1% of those who turned out for the Republican primary).

The Obama campaign, Americans Elect, and other election startups all promise empowerment. But, if empowerment inspired voting, female and African American suffrage would have sustained high rates after they were given the right to vote. In Switzerland, arguably the most democratic country on earth, citizens vote directly on every major law, upwards of 7 times a year–yet turnout floats around a very low 30%.

So, what caused super-high voter turnout over a century ago, if not empowerment? Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, explains, in the deliciously informative Why America Stopped Voting, that democracy used to be a part of everyday American life. Frequent carnivals and parades would accompany political debates, as citizen-revelers would schmooze with local politicians, to discuss issues that they had direct control over. As a result, Americans were not only incredibly engaged, but well-read: a higher proportion of people read Thomas Paine’s political philosophy than watch the Superbowl today. They also patiently listened to presidential debates that last 6 or more hours at a time.

Then, technology crashed the party, “By the 1920′s, radio broadcasts had replaced mass meetings and all-day orations,” writes Kornbluh. “As the role of voters became increasingly passive, it is little wonder that their enthusiasm for electoral politics waned.” Attention turned away from local issues, and Americans sat by as government reformers centralized power and held elections less often. Political parties had no incentive to subsidize the good times, given the more efficient ways of mass communication at their disposal. So, with the additional burden of new laws restricting how political parties could directly fund voters (i.e corruption), the big civic party ground to a halt.

Ultimately, the motivation to vote has to overcome one very big problem: voting is irrational, since no one person can make a difference. No democracy in history has ever sustained high levels of engagement on the hope that citizens are willing to sacrifice their free time to make a marginal difference. The Gilded Age party machines overcame this dilemma by intermixing politics with fun (albeit in often unethical ways).

The need for enjoyment in politics is perfectly illustrated in an unlikely pair: Estonia and American Idol. While Estonia became the first country to permit the convenience of voting by both cell phone and over the internet, the moderate boost in turnout rates did not even come close to 19th century America. Yet, American Idol, which also votes through SMS, is one of the largest democracies on earth (and, no one is losing health insurance over the outcome).

Though the Internet promises greater democracy, virtual engagement is every bit as disembodied as the couch potatoes of the 20th century who passively engaged politics through TV and radio. Until someone figures out how to create a rocking good time on Facebook, don’t bet money that the Internet is the savior of elections.

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Apple is currently ordering larger screens for the next iPhone. With the usual nonsense, the WSJ cited people familiar with the matter and stated these screens measure at least 4-inches diagonally. Production is set to begin next month, they say.

The Journal better be right, though. A 3.5-inch screen is just too small now. At this point to say anything to the contrary is pure fanboi nonsense. The standard argument that consumers don’t want a large phone is tired and overused. Besides, it’s effectively proven wrong by the 20 million Galaxy S II phones sold by Samsung last year. It’s time for a larger iPhone.

When Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007 it was a revolutionary device. With a novel interface running on a beautiful 3.5-inch screen, the iPhone rocked the mobile scene. But now, over five years later, the iPhone has changed very little. This is a good thing for the most part. Keep with what works. However, the mobile world has since caught up to the iPhone and started moving forward with risky (read: larger) form factors while Apple kept with the tried and true. This is Apple’s Standard Operating Procedure.

Apple is notorious for keeping products on the market for as long as they’re financially viable. The company’s computers often only get spec bumps twice a year while other makers push the latest hardware every quarter. The Mac Mini once went a full year without an update. But Apple can do this. Consumers often buy Apple products ignoring specs, thus allowing the company to see larger margins on aging devices. Eventually moves need to be made, though.

The iPhone is still the dominant smartphone on the market. Apple could likely keep selling the iPhone 4S at $200 for the next year and still see iOS’s marketshare increase. Consumers want the iPhone that bad. But it’s starting to show its age and consumers are noticing.

There is a new report published nearly every other day proclaiming iOS or Android as the dominant platform. But it doesn’t really matter at this point. Both are winning and Android is doing so with large, attention-grabbing screens that consumers clearly want. Of course Apple will always have its base of loyal fanboys no matter what, but the average consumer is swayed by trend — including the trend of large screens.

The next iPhone will have a 4-inch screen per the common rumor circulating ’round the Internet. This excites me greatly. My daily driver is a Droid X, which also has 4-inch screen. After playing with nearly every new phone, I still find its 4-inch 16:9 screen the sweet spot between the usability of a small screen and the additional real estate associated with a large screen. Of course there are numerous arguments against Apple employing a larger screen, but a user on The Verge’s forum’s elegantly explained how it could be done. In short, by using a 3.99-inch 9:5 screen, iOS would scale nearly perfectly and add an additional row for icons on the homescreen. It would then be up to Apple’s all-star marketing team to convince the world it’s a 4-inch screen rather than 3.99.

There are no doubt blind Apple zealots absolutely appalled at the thought of a larger iPhone. Ignore ‘em. Change is inevitable. In response to MG’s take on the Evo 4G back in 2010, I wrote “Saying that the EVO 4G’s screen is too big is like saying, “No thanks, I would rather ride in the back of a cab than in your limo. I like feeling cramped and restricted.”” (We both were right about the phone’s horrible battery life, though) That still holds true today. A large screen, if done right, is an amazing feature and one Apple will likely employ in the future.

Again, to fulfill its goal of purely making money, Apple does not need to change anything about the iPhone. The iPhone 4S sold like gangbusters on the back of just a trivial spec bump and worthless Siri. However, the iPhone 4 form factor is no longer the single most attractive phone on the market. Other mobile phone companies have caught up with Apple. That can’t sit well with The House Jobs Built. Apple needs to regain its street cred and silence the haters, if only for a moment.

Sometime later this year Apple will introduce the next generation of the iPhone. As proven by previous iPhone rumors, it’s hard to tell what’s on tap. It might have a larger screen and, quite honestly, it might not. The WSJ’s report could be wrong. That said, there will come a time that Apple rolls out a large screen for the iPhone. Hopefully it’s sooner rather than later.

The folks over at Google just love their Google+ social network and more and more Google+ features have been creeping into Gmail lately as well. Today, Google is bringing even more of Google+ to its email client. With this update, Google is especially focusing on adding a deeper integration with Google+ circles. You will now, for example, see profile photos from people in your circles when you select a circle in the left sidebar. You can click on those images to search for email from a specific contact. In addition, if you really take your Google+ circles seriously, you’ll be happy to hear that you can now use circles as search filters in Gmail as well. Say you want to just see emails from your “friends” circle, you can now just type circle:friends to find them.

How useful these features are for you probably depends on how actively you use Google+. We have, however heard from many of our readers that this incessant focus on adding Google+ to just about every aspect of the Google experience is taking a toll on people’s patience. Instead of focusing on the fundamentals of the Gmail experience, for example, it feels as if Google is getting sidetracked left and right by Google+. As Y Combinator’s Paul Graham rightly noted earlier this year, “GMail has become painfully slow.” Adding more Google+ features to it is probably not making it any faster.

At least one new feature today, though, isn’t fully dependent on Google+ and actually quite useful (though it’s also integrated with it). When you search for an email address now, the search results will highlight your contacts’ details as well, including phone numbers, Google Chat status and email address. If you contact has a Google+ profile, this information will stay up to date automatically.

Is link shortener Bitly raising $20 million in new funding? The Verge says it is. In response to my email, a company spokesperson denied The Verge’s story, but in vague enough terms that it could probably turn around and announce a new round in the next few weeks or months.

Here’s what the spokesperson told me:

Want to quickly let you know that they’re always discussing potential funding and stay in touch with potential investors on an ongoing basis. Though, this article is not based on any facts.

I’ll work with the folks at bitly to connect with you for the next funding announcement, whenever that does happen.

Wait, what does that actually mean?! Well, the first sentence is pretty ambiguous, but it hews closely to the standard non-denial denial that comes when a startup is raising money without having closed the round yet. The second sentence could be read as more definitive, but it might also mean, “Hey, the deal isn’t closed yet — technically we’re still just talking, so the funding isn’t a fact.” After all, what does it really mean to be “not based on any facts”? And what’s a “fact” anyway? Tough philosophical questions.

Altogether, the statement suggests that Bitly has at least had discussions with its investors about raising funding. How far those discussions have gone, time will tell. The company raised an $8.9 million Series B in 2010.

The Verge also says that Bit.ly, whose business has been more focused on enterprise services, is about to launch a new product aimed at consumers.

Update: Apparently Bitly execs have been denying The Verge story more forcefully.

Customers of Time Warner Cable have some reason to rejoice today, as the cable company has gotten the go-ahead to add channels like MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central to its live streaming iPad app. The addition comes after the channels’ owner Viacom has settled its differences and resolved litigation with Time Warner Cable.

The legal fight erupted last year, after Time Warner Cable released its iPad app, which lets subscribers stream live shows to tablets inside their homes. While many networks grumbled about the app, Viacom was most vocal in rejecting the app, taking its distribution partner to court over whether or not it had the right to stream to other devices.

Time Warner Cable’s argument was that the iPad was just another TV in the home, while Viacom argued that the tablet was a new device and required additional rights for distribution. Not to mention, the networks were probably annoyed because Nielsen wasn’t able to measure consumption of video delivered to the iPad — which meant there were eyeballs not being counted, and subsequently not being sold to advertisers.

But that’s all over now. Hooray! Although, even with the legal case settled, both are sticking to their original legal positions.

One aspect of the settlement that sticks out is Time Warner Cable’s agreement to carry Viacom’s Country Music Channel (CMT). As is usual with these types of deals, the content provider (in this case, Viacom) tries to get the distributor (Time Warner Cable) to pay for a whole bunch of channels, and often lumps in those that aren’t that highly rated and, in the cable company’s view, doesn’t provide a whole lot of value. CMT was one of those channels, and its carriage was apparently a sticking point in the negotiations.

Official comment below:

Viacom and Time Warner Cable have agreed to resolve their pending litigations. All of Viacom’s programming will now be available to Time Warner Cable subscribers for in-home viewing via internet protocol-enabled devices such as iPads and Time Warner Cable will continue to carry Viacom’s Country Music Television (CMT) programming. In reaching the settlement agreement, Time Warner Cable and Viacom were also able to resolve other unrelated business matters to their mutual satisfaction. Neither side is conceding its original legal position or will have further comment.