5:20 PM PDT Wed, Sep 21, 2011 
Google Docs added more functionality to its spreadsheets today by letting users vertically merge cells across several rows of data.
Vertical merges let you easily assign headers to sets of rows. See below (note that instead of 4 rows for the "East" division, there is now only one).
In order to create a vertical merge, first...
5:17 PM PDT Wed, Sep 21, 2011 
Gmail in your mobile browser now allows you to sign in to multiple accounts, a mobile-specific signature and a vacation auto-responder, announced Google on the company's blog.
After you log in to your Gmail account a menu pops up that gives you the option to sign into an additional account at the same time. From the account menu, you can then easily switch between accounts without having to log out of one before signing in to another...
4:14 PM PDT Wed, Sep 21, 2011 
If you need placeholder copy for your current project, may we suggest slipsum.com, a "Pulp Fiction"-inspired take on the classic Lorem Ipsum that generates quotes from Samuel L. Jackson movie characters?
The hilarious NSFW site shows a cartoon version of Jackson -- called Samuel L. Ipsum -- thrusting a gun. On the left-hand side, profane instructions tell you to choose the number of paragraphs you would like, a header tag, and whether you want paragraph breaks inserted.
One of the quotes Slipsum gave us: "You think water moves fast? You should see ice. It moves like it has a mind. Like it knows it killed the world once and got a taste for murder."
The best heading we got: "No man, I don't eat pork."
For those at work, there is a
3:32 PM PDT Wed, Sep 21, 2011 
Twilio, a cloud-based platform for adding voice calls and text messaging to apps, has launched Twilio Connect so that developers can get authorization to make calls, purchase phone numbers and integrate other API functions into their apps without worrying about pricing.
Much like Facebook Connect, Twilio Connect is a new set of features and APIs that lets customers authorize an app to access billing data from their Twilio account, making it easier to directly charge customers.
"One of the most frequent pieces of feedback we've received from our developer community is that maintaining a usage-based billing system requires a significant investment in development resources," says the company blog post.
LAUNCH contacted Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson for comment. We will update when we hear back.
Developers can set their app permissions to read all account data to let the app access call, SMS and other logs for analytics. If developers set...
3:20 PM PDT Wed, Sep 21, 2011 
[ Fred Wilson suggests Homefield Founder Reece Pacheco consider a pivot on Bloomberg's "TechStars." Image courtesy of Bloomberg TV. ]
As the first episode of Bloomberg's "TechStars" reality show closed, TechStars New York Managing Director David Tisch questioned whether they had picked the right companies. But you wouldn't know anyone had doubts based on how euphoric the entrepreneurs were at the beginning of last night's second episode. [ Watch the episode here ].
Onswipe kicked off by announcing $1M in funding from Spark Capital and an article in TechCrunch.
"Hide your developers, hide your designers because we are hiring everybody," Onswipe founder Jason Baptiste tells his fellow TechStars companies.
Tisch immediately pulls Baptiste aside for a friendly you-can't-say-things-like-that talk, after which Baptiste "clarifies" to the television audience he was only joking in the voice of viral-video sensation Antoine Dodson ["Hide your kids, hide your wife..." ]...