Since the launch of its first report a year ago, Startup Genome has been doing a great job of combining scientific study of the way startups operate with tools that help entrepreneurs improve their chances of success. Now it’s expanding its offering with a tool to assist investors.

The new Investor Compass follows in the footsteps of the Startup Compass which launched last August. Whereas that used data about 3200 high-growth tech startups to provide tools to help entrepreneurs avoid scaling their businesses too soon, the new product lets investors, advisors and service providers track the progress of the companies they work with.

The Investor Compass is aimed at people who work with startups who are already feeding data about their company into Startup Genome. This is visualized in the new tool in a way that is design to let investors easily see how well their portfolio companies are performing against their key performance indicators. There’s also the ability to run a risk assessment for premature scaling and due diligence tests that promises to “reduce hours of conversation and manual labor to seconds.”

Startup Genome, founded by Bjoern Lasse Herrmann, Max Marmer and Ertan Dogrultan in California in December 2010, doesn’t aim to entirely replace traditional human interaction and intuition with data and dashboards. The team stresses that this more about using key metrics, presented in an easy-to-parse way, to make decision-making processes easier.

Tools like the Investor Compass arguably point to a maturation of the startup market. “This augmented view of a portfolio’s performance enables investors and advisors to quickly see who is doing well and who isn’t, and then decide what actions they need to take,” Startup Genome states in its information package for the new release. “Every new industry that data flows into it seems to disrupt. The game of baseball changed when Billy Beane brought in the quants. Wall Street is now run primarily by high frequency trading algorithms designed by quants.

“We believe this shift to a quantitative alternative with the Investor Compass is a major step towards opening up the data driven business frontier.”

Investor Compass launches today in beta. Meanwhile Startup Genome is set to close a round of funding next week that will bring influential startup theorist Steve Blank among others on board as investors.

➤ Investor Compass

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Yahoo! launches Axis, a combined search and browsing product: Read more

Yahoo disables Axis Chrome extension after developer exposes security vulnerability: Read more

Putting failed AT&T deal behind it, T-Mobile USA rubbishes sales talk and focuses on growth: Read More

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Derwent Capital Markets raised eyebrows when it launched a hedge fund that used analysis of Twitter to predict movements in the stock market. Now the London-based firm is set to open up its technology for anyone to use via what it’s calling the “world’s first social media sentiment analysis trading platform.”

The service, set to launch in late summer, promises to allow investors and stock traders to monitor the global social media sentiment around any stock, commodity or currency in real-time – hopefully giving them an edge when they trade.

Derwent’s technology is based on a 2010 academic paper that showed how information from Twitter could predict how stock would perform. Since then it has been putting the theory to the test via its Derwent Absolute Return Fund. The new platform appears to essentially be ‘Radian6 for traders’, letting anyone put do the same with their own money. It will be available as both a browser-based service and a mobile app.

While the firm isn’t giving any more precise launch details than ‘”late summer,” we’ll be watching this one closely.

You can catch The Daily Dose every Monday through Friday right here on The Next Web. Make sure to hit the subscription button of your choice below to get The Daily Dose as soon as it’s available.

Shareholders sue Facebook, Zuck, Morgan Stanley and banks over ‘untrue statements’ made during IPO marketing: Read more

Amazon launches ‘Never Before on DVD’ store, offers 2000+ titles that never go out of stock: Read more

Arise, Sir Jony Ive: Apple’s design guru collects his Knighthood: Read More

Apple’s Jony Ive – arguably the second most important person at the company after Steve Jobs over the past 15 years or so, has been awarded the title of Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) in London today, giving him the right to be referred to as Sir Jonathan Ive.

The honor for Apple’s British-born SVP of Industrial Design was announced during the Queen’s New Year Honours List in January, and today it was made official in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, as reported by the BBC. It was the Princess Royal, Princess Anne, who awarded Ive his new title rather than the Queen herself. KBE is the second highest honor in Britain, bested only by GBE – a Knight or Dame Grand Cross.

Despite the award, and having classic designs like the iMac, iPod and iPhone under his belt, it doesn’t look like Ive is ready to shut down his CAD software for good just yet. As we reported earlier, Ive has given an interview with the Daily Telegraph newspaper to tie in with the award in which he was asked what product he would be best remembered for. “What we’re working on now feels like the most important and the best work we’ve done, and so it would be what we’re working on right now, which of course I can’t tell you about,” was the reply.

Here’s a video of the BBC’s TV coverage of today’s ceremony, uploaded to YouTube by 9to5mac:

The Guardian‘s n0tice project launched last year as an experimental new way of sharing local news and community events. Now the platform behind it is being opened up as a toolkit that publishers, brands, communities and developers can use as part of their own open journalism projects.

As a recap, n0tice broke cover in October last year as essentially a lean startup within the Guardian. The service is an online community noticeboard, onto which news, details of events, and local special offers can be posted for other users. After a closed beta period, it opened to all in March. We see it as a strong hint at the future of local news, offering a compelling alternative to the slowly dying local newspaper model.

So, what does the new Open Journalism Toolkit offer? Hosted at n0tice.org, the product’s site highlights ways for different groups to put the tools on offer to use.

For publishers and brands, features like crowdmapping, mobile publishing, liveblogging and collaboration are all on offer. Crowdmapping is the process of adding user-sourced data onto a map, an increasingly popular tactic for news organisations, and n0tice offers a step-by-step process to create a crowdmap with any type of data, quickly and easily. Publishers can also tap into n0tice to offer custom content feeds, content moderation features and more.

Communities can use the toolkit to create their own version of n0tice specifically tailored for their specific needs. They can manage the look and feel of the site, who can publish to the noticeboard – and what they can publish. Finally, for developers, there’s an API available that allows them to hook into n0tice content and features to enhance their own apps and services.

While n0tice is very much an experimental ‘intrapreneurial’ project within the Guardian and the toolkit is free to use, there is a business model based on geo-targeted ads behind it. Premium-position ads targeted at specific locales cost £1 per day. While this is a simple model that will probably mature with time, it can’t hurt the Guardian Media Group’s struggling bottom line to draw more publishers, users and developers into the n0tice universe – either via the standard service or this new toolkit.

Next up for n0tice is an iPhone app, due very soon, but we’ll be watching closely to see how third-party adoption of the toolkit comes along.

➤ n0tice Open Journalism Toolkit

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Microsoft would like you to think that So.cl is for students, but don’t be fooled: Read more

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What challenges do the team face? This week, Springboard mentor Salim Virani offers his take on where they’re up to as they approach the half-way mark in this intense accelerator.

The Tears, Tantrums & Tech video series is produced by HAUS Pictures. Many thanks to Springboard and Google for allowing us this regular glimpse into what life inside an accelerator is like. Look out for episode 6 next week.

You can find all the episodes in the series so far here.

You can catch The Daily Dose every Monday through Friday right here on The Next Web. Make sure to hit the subscription button of your choice below to get The Daily Dose as soon as it’s available.

Stock imagery site Shutterstock files for $115 million IPO: Read more

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In actual fact, Friends of the Earth Netherlands is currently campaigning against Shell’s inaction over decades of leaks that have turned the region into what the environmental organization calls “the world’s largest oil spill.”

To highlight the problem, the Worse Than Bad campaign has produced this great ad for a spoof app that Shell has ‘released’ to help the people of the Niger Delta cope with the hazards of oil pollution, gas flares and contaminated water.

The Live With It app solves those pesky problems like ‘surviving in a heavily polluted area’ using the miracles of gamification, QR codes and geolocation. Countdown to an energy company turning this into an actual, serious product – starting… now.