FanSnap is a web startup that focuses on ticket searches.  Earlier this week, the company announced $5.2 million in funding led by Highland Capital Partners.  Richard de Silva of Highland will be joining the FanSnap Board of Directors as a result of the funding.

Thus far FanSnap has raised about $15.7 million after receiving $10 million in Series A from General Catalyst Partners last year.

To find the best deals on tickets, FanSnap searches through StubHub, eBay, and RazorGator.  FanSnap claims to have over 13 million tickets indexed in their search engine across over 30,000 events.

One of the cool features FanSnap has to offer is that there is an image of the venue, such as a stadium with different hot spot images that correlate with the tickets that are selling.  Below is an image of how it works.

[via TechCrunch]

In mid June, Facebook gave users the chance to register vanity URLs.  I grabbed the URL: http://www.facebook.com/achowdhry during the rush.  About 200,000 URLs were claimed within 3 minutes and 500,000 were claimed within 15 minutes.  Within one hour, one million vanity URLs were claimed.

In about 2 months, about 50 million registered vanity URLs have taken place.  This also includes the fake user names that have been registered.  Facebook engineer Srinivas Narayan detailed how Facebook was able to handle the rush in a blog post.

“Since we didn’t have accurate estimates on the traffic that the launch would generate, we put together contingency plans to decrease the load on various parts of the site to give us extra capacity in core services at the expense of less essential services. Also affectionately referred to as ‘nuclear options,’ some of these levers included disabling chat notifications, showing fewer stories in the home page and profile page and completely turning off other parts of the site such as the People You May Know service, the entire chat bar, etc.,” stated Narayan.

[via Mashable]

Former Google executive Sukhinder Singh Cassidy was one of the candidates for replacing Tim Armstrong after he quit Google and became the AOL CEO.  Now Cassidy is a CEO-in-Residence at Accel Partners and has just been appointed to become a board member at retail company J. Crew.

When Cassidy was at Google, she was responsible fr the search engine company’s Asia-Pacific and Latin American operations.  Before Google Cassidy worked at Yodlee, Amazon.com and OpenTV.  Below is a full press release about the new position.

The eBay Mobile iPhone application has just received a major update.  The iPhone app allows you to bid on items, search for items, and answer customer questions.  This is especially useful for those that like to power sell on eBay.

There will even be push notifications to bidders that have been outbid.  To respond to being outbid, there is a “View” button that appears in the message which will take you to the item so you can up the offer.  There is also a “Close” button if you choose to ignore it.

There is also PayPal integration in the new eBay iPhone application.  This makes it easier to pay for items within eBay Mobile without having to go directly to the eBay and PayPal websites.

Another great upcoming feature in eBay Mobile will be the ability to easily sell items that you have taken a picture of on your iPhone.

[via PCW]

Riya.com is a facial recognition service that was able to find similar images around the web.  Riya founder Munjal Shah wrote an e-mail to their users this morning saying that they are shutting down the service on August 21st.

The service launched about four years ago and almost sold themselves to Google but the deal fell through.  After the deal did not clear, Shah and his team decided to focus on a new service called Like.com.  Like.com can detect accessories that people are wearing and find similar accessories (if not the same) for sale across the web.

Below is the full e-mail that was sent out.

[via TechCrunch]

These playing cards display an iPhone picture around the border.  Surely this would make you look nerdy in front of all of your Poker buddies, but it sure beats regular looking cards.  The iPhone-themed card deck costs $25.

[via BBG]

Razer has announced that they are designed a new headset, keyboard, and mouse intended for StarCraft II gamers.  Razer even collaborated with Blizzard to develop the peripherals.  Although there is no release date known, the devices are suspected to launch at Blizzcon 2009.

[via Engadget/HotHardware]

Nintendo has patented an inflatable soft pillow controller.  The controller is supposed to let gamers ride on horses and other potential sitting games.  When riding on a horse in a game, the controllers would be held like nunchucks that would simulate the act of holding reins.

[via Kotaku]