According to Twitter, it was hacked and 250K accounts were affected, so they received emails from the company to change their password. This is not the first time this has happened, but this time it was a real hack, rather than a blend of real hacks and “false alarm” blast of emails like last time. Way to start off our weekends, Twitter. Who knows if you’ll even get the email from Twitter about it, I know that I filter all of those things out. You can read all of the details about the hack and the company response here. I find it really confusing when anything like this happens, because it feels like companies try to diminish the perception of the impact of the situation. Fact of the matter is, its users are seeing sad tweets from their friends about how they got hacked. I even had one person tell me that they felt like they weren’t cool enough because they didn’t get hacked. Instead, or in addition to, just go change your password. We’re all cool enough to get hacked. The number, 250K affected, seems a bit too tidy to me, and I’m not saying that Twitter is lying, I’m just saying that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Twitter also suggests this course of action, which is way too much for most people’s brains to process on a Friday: We also echo the advisory from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and security experts to encourage users to disable Java on their computers in their browsers. Sure, OK. Happy Tweeting (Maybe)! While you’re at it, change all of your passwords for everything. It’s a good thing to do once in a while, especially if you use the same one for every single site you log into. [Photo credit: Flickr]

Twitter is sending out emails to 250,000 users it says may have had their accounts compromised in the last week as the site experienced “unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data.” Twitter tells TechCrunch that this is “not related” to the widespread, but intermittent, outage the site saw yesterday.

For this week’s Ask A VC episode, we sat down with Foundation Capital’s newest partner Anamitra Banerji, who was just promoted from entrepreneur in residence to investment partner at the firm. We chatted about Banerji’s decision to become a VC vs. founding a startup, and how being an entrepreneur in residence helped him come to that decision.

It’s Super Bowl week so it’s time to talk about chips – the ones that go in “smart” things, not the ones eaten by Americans. This week’s headlines have been dominated by Facebook. I hear they are quite big with the college kids. But, Qualcomm really is crushing it. They deserve a little attention. They are bigger than Facebook at $108 billion. Today, Qualcomm added approximately $5 billion to their market capitalization, thanks to a blowout quarter of sales ($6 billion) and profits ($2 billion).

Google continues its push to bring its web-centric Chromebooks into schools and it looks as if the fact that Google is in this project for the long haul is starting to pay off. According to Google, 2,000 schools now use Chromebooks for Education. That, by itself, isn’t a massive number, but what’s important to note is that there are now twice as many schools that use Chromebooks compared to just three months ago.

CrowdFlower, a startup that helps businesses manage crowdsourced labor for tasks like image moderation, is looking to expand the types of jobs it can tackle with the launch of new Skill Tests — which, as you probably guessed, are online tests used to measurement workers’ proficiency in various skills.

Until now, anyone doing work on CrowdFlower had been able to access any job. As people do the work, the company performs automatic and human checks to ensure that the results are up to par — if someone’s work isn’t adequate, then all of their results are removed.

San Francisco’s Flurry initially got its reach through offering a basic package of analytics that more than 95,000 different developers snapped up.

But as the iOS and Android ecosystems have matured, app makers are getting more sophisticated. The biggest ones often juggle 30 to 40 ad networks and marketing channels, and need to understand which ones perform the best.