TechCrunch

• Ron Paul, Mitt Romney Leading On Facebook Ahead Of Florida Primary - The Republican presidential candidacy is still far from decided, based on the split primaries and mixed polls so far. So here's another source for trying to figure who's really pulling ahead -- the number of new Facebook fans that each candidate is getting, according to the Inside Facebook Election Tracker. Mitt Romney is finally making some strong gains this month, in contrast to his Facebook performance over December. By "strong gains" I mean he's been attracting a roughly similar number of fans to Ron Paul, the candidate who normally dominates on the web (and the clear leader last month). The two have fought for the daily lead for most of January, except for when Rick Santorum surged around his Iowa primary win on the 3rd.
• Harvard Gets Its First VC Firm: The Experiment Fund - As just about everyone should know by now, the seeds of what grew into Facebook were planted at Harvard. Might there be a bunch of mini-Zucks lurking in the dorms of Cambridge? If so, a new venture capital firm — the first housed right on the Harvard campus — wants to find them.
• Secret Windows 8 Weapon: Kinect Built Into Your Laptop - The Windows release of Kinect is coming up in a couple days, but for most people that won't be a major event: the Kinect they have is sitting on their TV or in a drawer, waiting to be taken out for an impromptu Dance Central 2 party. Of the 10 million Kinects out there, the only ones connected to computers are the ones being fiddled with by the various hackers and students making science projects out the things. But according to the Daily, Microsoft is hoping to remedy this particular situation by building Kinect sensors right into your laptops. TechCrunch alum Matt Hickey got to handle a pair of prototypes, which were confirmed to be official, not just one of the many experiments that hide within Microsoft's various lairs.
• Twitter Puts Its DMCA Takedown Requests Up For All To See - Yesterday's announcement that Twitter would be selectively censoring tweets based on country was not well-received. But part of that announcement was the assurance that the process would at least be transparent. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. They also mentioned that they were working with Chilling Effects to make notices and orders sent to Twitter publicly available. At the time of the post yesterday, the site wasn't up yet, but you can now browse it at chillingeffects.org/twitter.
• Y Combinator Names Seasoned Entrepreneur Geoff Ralston As Its Newest Partner - Y Combinator has just announced the newest partner to join the prestigious firm: Geoff Ralston. Ralston's previous credentials include founding Four11, which was acquired by Yahoo back in 1997 for $96 million and served as the foundation for Yahoo Mail. Ralston spent eight years at Yahoo, eventually becoming Yahoo's Chief Product Officer. Several years after leaving Yahoo he was named CEO of Lala, before it was acquired by Apple in 2009. Most recently he cofounded Imagine K12, a tech incubator for education-related startups, which presented at TechCrunch Disrupt SF (you can find the incubator's first batch of companies here). 
• Gillmor Gang Live 01.27.12 (TCTV) - The Gillmor Gang - Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Doc Searls & Steve Gillmor - is recording live today at 1pm PT. Recording has concluded.
• Flurry: Amazon’s Kindle Fire Is Already Starting To Smoke Samsung’s Galaxy Tab - Wuh oh, Samsung — better watch your tail. While Apple might not be seeing any impact (be it positive or negative) on iPad sales from the launch of the Kindle Fire, Samsung's Galaxy Tab ought to be feeling the heat. Tapping into the data provided by their app analytics platform (which they estimate has found its way onto around 90% of the Android devices out there), Flurry highlights a few surprising numbers.
• Android Smartphone Round-Up: December/January Edition - We took a break from the Android round-up in December because, well, to be honest I was on vacation. But January gave us a few extra smartphones and the holidays are over, so we're back. What we've got for you today leans into more expensive turf, and unfortunately, our favorite Android devices for the past two months are also exclusively at Verizon, so Big Red subscribers should pay attention. Without further ado, these are our favorite December/January releases of the Android persuasion: The Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the LG Spectrum, and the Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx. Enjoy!
• Davos: BraveNewTalent Allows Job Seekers To Follow Their Future Employers - BraveNewTalent is a social recruitment platform operating in the UK and moving into the US. I caught up with CEO and founder Lucia Tarnowski at Davos. The startup is built around the idea that people want to follow companies they might want to work for in the future, and companies in turn want to educate potential hires about how they work. They recently introduced a few new features, which Tarnowski outlines, notably the new feature enabling a user to follow the key employees of a company.
• Davos: Ushahidi Grows Its Global Crowd-sourcing Platform, Slams Twitter Censorship [TCTV] - At Davos I managed to catch Juliana Rotich, Co-Founder of Ushahidi, the incredible crowd sourcing platform which came out of Kenya. Starting with just a handful of countries in 2009, it's main product, Crowdmap, is now used in hundreds of countries for crisis mapping and even crowd sourcing information about nuclear weapons in Iran. I got an update from her about their latest moves. These include news that the Omidyar Network, which put $1.4m towards Ushahidi, and which late last year put in another $1.9m.