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Facebook is still huge and growing -- it added another 50 million users this past quarter, and it's about to break the one-billion-humans mark. But it still has to figure out how to survive on mobile. So we're focusing on Facebook and its developer ecosystem at our annual CrunchUp event this Friday in Redwood City, Calif. Our aim is to detail what’s working and what’s not, so entrepreneurs can better strategize how to think about Facebook when building their companies. Get your Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp tickets now! They can be found here. Some mobile-savvy startups are getting big growth from Facebook's platform. One of them is the music game SongPop. It now has more than 2.7 million daily active users and 11.4 million monthly active users via Facebook, and it's also a top free app in the Apple App Store. I'll be trying to get all the secrets to its success out of its creator, Mathieu Nouzareth, this Friday as part of our panel on Facebook's platform.

Facebook is still huge and growing -- it added another 50 million users this past quarter, and it's about to break the one-billion-humans mark. But it still has to figure out how to survive on mobile. So we're focusing on Facebook and its developer ecosystem at our annual CrunchUp event this Friday in Redwood City, Calif. Our aim is to detail what’s working and what’s not, so entrepreneurs can better strategize how to think about Facebook when building their companies. Get your Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp tickets now! They can be found here. Some mobile-savvy startups are getting big growth from Facebook's platform. One of them is the music game SongPop. It now has more than 2.7 million daily active users and 11.4 million monthly active users via Facebook, and it's also a top free app in the Apple App Store. I'll be trying to get all the secrets to its success out of its creator, Mathieu Nouzareth, this Friday as part of our panel on Facebook's platform.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg broke out how one of the company's key new products is doing during the company's first earnings call today. Sponsored Stories ads, which are advertiser actions (like posting a photo) that appear in the news feed, are getting "early results that are encouraging." The product, which has slowly rolled out over the last half- year or so, are on a $1 million a day run-rate, around half of which is mobile. "Sponsored stories and newsfeed are the cornerstone of our mobile monetization strategy," chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg added.

Why did Zynga generate revenue of $332 million versus the analyst-projected $344 million, earning 3 cents per share instead of 5 (and sending the stock off 40% in after-hour trading)? Three big factors, the company said today on the earnings call, in the following order: Facebook platform changes, game launches late in the quarter, and Draw Something's weakening mobile traffic. Facebook began emphasizing new games in its news feed, notifications, bookmarks and other communication channels at the expense of existing games, chief operating officer John Schappert said. This sent existing games down 15% across the platform (not just Zynga games) and live-action genre games down 34%. Because so many users engaged less often, they bought fewer virtual goods, driving down gross bookings by 9% for the quarter.

Mountain View is a quietly intense suburb at the nexus of the San Francisco peninsula and Silicon Valley proper, filled with trees, flowers, and the hum of the highways and office parks off in the distance. It's like Palo Alto without the ego, and about as different from San Francisco as Silicon Valley gets. Quora, the quietly ambitious startup that's creating a smarter, Q&A-style Wikipedia, is going to fit right in.

An explosive day of online and traditional campaigning appears to have worked -- at least for the present. The Washington DC city council was set to approve an amendment to its far-reaching taxi legislation that would have set a floor price for private cars. But now councilwoman Mary Cheh, who had proposed the so-called "Uber Amendment," says this morning that she is shelving it. However, some reports are indicating that it could return this fall as a separate bill. No, TechCrunch has not turned into a DC politics blog (you should check out the DCist for all the gritty local details on the story, actually). This is a big issue for Uber and a wide range of other private car startups.

Uber cannot catch a break in Washington, DC. The city taxi commission tried to shut the private car service down last January over rule violations that it wasn't actually committing. Now the local government is taking another shot, considering a legislative amendment tomorrow that would force sedan car services like Uber to charge at least five times the minimum cost of cabs. To be clear, the overall legislation is great, in that it forces taxi companies to start taking credit card payments and using GPS. But the amendment part does not even bother to hide its intentions. The section's name is literally "Uber Amendments," and comes with a layman's explanation that "[t]hese requirements would ensure that sedan service is a premium class of service with a substantially higher cost that does not directly compete with or undercut taxicab service." (I've obtained the full amendment from Uber, and you can check it out below.)

Our TechCrunch Disrupt event is coming back to San Francisco this September 8 to 12, and the agenda is coming together fast. Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz will open the show, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff will be coming by to share his latest on enterprise disruption. Meanwhile, former New York Schools chancellor Joel Klein is also on the agenda to discuss his work on education technology at News Corp. Just a reminder, the applications deadline for the Startup Battlefield competition is approaching fast. Applicants have until Friday, July 13th, at 11:59pm PT. This a big opportunity. The winner takes home $50,000, bragging rights... and the publicity and connections that can help them get major exits, like Yammer's recent $1.2 billion sale to Microsoft or GoInstant's acquisition by Salesforce today for $70 million. Startups who are ready and meet all of the qualifications can APPLY NOW.

Nike has been quietly transforming itself from an apparel company to an apparel company that builds sensors into everything... blending man and machine so that we'll all be able to track our every move and figure out what we're doing right or wrong on our journey to greater personal fitness. Path to greater fitness, I suppose (har). Because the private social network has a new update out today, that pairs its mobile-only app with the Nike+ Fuelband so that the device on your wrist can use the device in your pocket to tell your close friends just how active you are each day.

Collaborative consumption -- generally, marketplaces for buying and selling access to products and services -- have been defined recently by startups like TaskRabbit and Zaarly for tasks, or short-term rental service Airbnb. But Inspirato is bringing the concept to the luxury vacation market, driving down the cost of renting Tuscan villas, Napa cottages, and even a seaborne yacht coming next July. And it's doing well enough that it decided to raise another $15.5 million this past month from DAG Ventures and Millennium Technology Value Partners, we learned from a regulatory filing that hit this week.