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Marissa Mayer, please build us all a better Gmail over at Yahoo. Gmail is a disaster. That's right, I said it. There's an undercurrent of frustration surrounding Google's webmail service, which is still growing like crazy (likely due to Android activations), but is now widely known to be "painfully slow." The more you use it, the worse it gets. Even Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham called out Gmail as painfully slow in a recent essay detailing ambitious startup ideas, saying that if someone were to build a service that was only as good as Gmail, but fast, that alone would allow them to pull away users from Google's service. Despite this, what does Google do? It keeps adding bells and whistles to Gmail. Video hangouts? I don't want video hangouts in my Gmail. I want to read my email messages. Or rather, feel free to add video hangouts to Gmail, after you fix the damned thing.

Jury selection is starting today for the patent trial between Apple and Samsung that has already resulted in the release of tons of early Apple iPhone and iPad prototypes designs. But one design holds particular interest: an iPhone concept called "Purple." The phone isn't actually purple (it's white), but the big news is not the color - it's the date of the creation. To counter Samsung's charge that Apple copied Sony's smartphone and Walkman designs when it created the iPhone, Apple filed a motion with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California which shows the Purple concept was from 2005 - before Sony's Nishibori Design, developed in March 2006.

In April, news broke that Aileen Lee, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, was starting a venture fund that would be focused on smaller, "seed-stage" investments. The fund is separate from KPCB, however, KPCB will be the anchored investor, Lee said. At the time of the original report, many of the details beyond the "why" were still being worked out, including the fund's size and name. Today we know a little more: it's a $40 million fund and it's being called "Cowboy Ventures."

Because we're in need of some brighter NFC-related news today, Flomio, a TechStars-backed startup, and makers a platform for building NFC and RFID enabled applications, has closed a seed round of $525,000. The round was led by RMR Capital, and included participation from TechStars, the Cloud Power Fund, Matthew Lally (Augme, Pickflair), and Clint Watson (FASO). Based in Miami, Florida ("Silicon Beach!"), Flomio has a different approach to NFC, which will be reflected in a website redesign going out next week. In short, it wants to humanize the technology. Originally a side project from founder Richard Grundy, Flomio was recently accepted into TechStars Cloud, the cloud computing-focused incubator which held its first demo day in April.

App store analytics firm App Annie released a report on mobile gaming this week, which focused on the earnings potential of what it defined as "long-term" versus "short-term" games. That is to say, it found that mobile app superstars with media buzz were not necessarily outperforming the slow and steady games that flew under the radar  - meaning, those that never cracked the top 25 grossing ranking, for example. Long-term games earned an average of $920,000 versus $549,000 for short-term games, App Annie says. And the top-earning long-term game earned $3.9 million versus $1.4 million for short-term.

Pranav Dharma, a former IBM engineer, self-described "fashionable" geek, and founder of new women's apparel startup Modington, thinks that today's online e-commerce sites don't reflect how women really shop for clothes and accessories. So he decided to create one. Enter, Modington. "I was inspired by observing how my wife shops," says Dharma, "she would get a dress, then started hunting for accessories. I thought there's room for improvement there [with online shopping], because the current websites don't seem to capture this natural manner in which women tend to shop," he explains.

ViVOtech, a near field communication (NFC) software and systems company, is shutting down operations due to cash-flow problems. This, despite having raised nearly $100 million in outside funding over the past decade. The company is planning to announce the news to employees later today via conference call, according to a report emerging today from NFC Times.

Wonderville, an education-focused technology startup built by eToys vets from the dotcom era, is today making its public debut. You might, at first glance, think of the company as something like a "Khan Academy" for the younger crowd, given that its goal is to augment a child's education (K-8) with additional materials and teachings. But the similarities end there. Where Khan Academy focuses on delivering video tutorials to students, Wonderville sources third-party content from a number of places all over the web. This includes not only YouTube, but also Amazon and iTunes, among other things.

Twitter's having problems today! Oh, what's that, you knew already? Well fine then. But we've just gotten our hands on some additional data related to today's outage courtesy of application monitoring platform Compuware APM. The company pulled measurements from its backbone data centers, Last Mile network (actual end users) and mobile devices, and has basically documented the problem by examining response times across these sources. We're told that the current speculation is that the Twitter outage may have to do with the increased activity due to Olympics-related traffic.

Wondering about which words are the most commonly used in mobile app titles? So was Appsfire, apparently. The company just shot us over the results of a study it ran to determine the top words developers are using in app titles today. While some of the results are obvious ("app" clocks in at number 8 - kind of redundant, don't you think?), there are still some interesting trends to be discovered in list.