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In case you were wondering: Ron Conway says he will not be running for mayor of San Francisco.

Apparently that was on Mike Arrington’s mind when he interviewed Conway and SV Angel partner David Lee on-stage at Disrupt today. He said he heard from more than one source that Conway is considering a run “somewhere down the line,” and asked flat-out if that’s true.

“That’s a rumor I can assure you is false,” Conway replied. “There’s an old saying: ‘Never say never.’ I actually believe in that saying, but I will never run for mayor of San Francisco.” Had he explored it at all? “Not for a nanosecond.”

The idea isn’t quite as out-of-left-field as it sounds. Conway has been visibly involved in civic issues recently — apparently he met with Senator Chuck Schumer recently to discuss SOPA/PIPA and immigration issues, and along with current Mayor Ed Lee and former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, he recently helped launch a program called sfCITI aimed at helping the tech industry and the city work together. (In fact, Conway’s relationship with Mayor Lee seemed close enough to prompt a largely critical Bay Citizen article printed in The New York Times.) When grilled about how much of his time he’s “throwing away on government work” (Arrington’s words), Conway estimated that it was 20 percent.

On the mayoral question, Conway’s response might seem pretty definitive, but Arrington wasn’t satisfied. He asked if Conway might be lying. (Conway: “I would never lie to you about this.”) Later, he asked again Conway was running.

“Last time I checked 10 minutes ago, I was not running for mayor,” Conway said.

What good is a Foursquare check-in if it doesn’t lead to a coupon or freebie? Why bother tweeting about a brand you like if they don’t acknowledge your undying love and loyalty? With TechCrunch Disrupt finalist SocialStock, those types of actions may now be rewarded…or at least that’s the company’s vision. The service, founded by Subbu Rama, aims to be a stock market for people and places which assigns a point value to users’ social networking actions. Mimicking the framework of a real stock market, those actions become shares and then those shares can turn into real-world rewards from participating business or brands.

What’s interesting about the concept behind SocialStock, is that it makes the idea of someone’s social capital – their “worth” in terms of their social networking actions, check-ins, Foursquare mayorships, tweets, etc. – portable. If you lose your Starbucks mayorship after moving away, for example, you could just turn around and buy “shares” of another local coffee shop that doles out rewards. All your hard work in being a loyal coffee-drinking local doesn’t have to go to waste.

In addition to earning shares for your activity, users are assigned a share value of their own, too. The system is based on someone’s social capital, which is determined using algorithms that measure things like the number of friends and followers you have, your history of check-ins, as well as the influence and importance of those who you’re connected to.

It’s a bit of a simpler computation than Klout’s Kscore, perhaps, which measures your reach and influence in more sophisticated ways, but then again, it’s a different system than Klout, too. Instead of handing out special “perks” only to those who have mastered gathering “influence,” SocialStock has users building up their virtual shares through their actions – a tweet, a Facebook post, or a check-in as related to a business or venue. Further down the road, other actions will be rewarded, too, like a Yelp review or even an Instagram photo.

By aggregating the actions, businesses and brands would have better insight into who their most loyal customers really are. In other words, SocialStock is taking a more holistic view of the social networking ecosystem.

There aren’t any launch partners teamed up with SocialStock for today’s debut – only the framework itself is going live. But, if the concept proves successful, participating brands could use the system to set the conversion rate on translating these stock market-like “shares” to real-world rewards. For example, 1,000 shares could be exchanged for a free latte or a free meal. And then, to earn the same reward again, the customer would have to remain loyal by tweeting, Facebooking and checking in some more.

Based in Sunnyvale, SocialStock is basically in bootstrapping mode with under $100,000 in funding from a few friends. The website is launching today as is the mobile app, which lets you discover people and places nearby that have spikes in social activity.

Disrupt Q&A

Judges: Michael Abbott (KPCB), Soraya Darabi (Foodspotting), Patrick Gallagher (CrunchFund) & Charlie O’Donnell (Brooklyn Bridge Ventures)

You’re crazy with your friends, serious with your co-workers, and sweet with your parents. Now you can share those distinct personalities with their matching audiences thanks to Hmmm, a mobile app launching today that aims to let you be yourself online, whoever that is.

Facebook friend lists and Google Circles have proven too clumsy for selective sharing. They’ve led to the rise of Path, which eliminates the decision making by creating a social micronetwork of your closest friends, but all your favorite people aren’t there, and not every post is appropriate for everyone you love. Hmmm lets you create separate avatars for each of your identities, and publish to pre-made sets of Hmmm and Facebook friends. Plus, Hmmm will soon be able to notify a friend that says they’re bored when you post that you want to see a movie.

Sol Studios just launched Hmmm at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, with an iOS app available now and an Android version coming in two weeks.

Hmmm’s co-founder Archana Patchirajan tells me “I’m a daughter, I’m a student, I’m a co-founder.We all have nicknames and social groups. It’s unrealistic to have one profile. We wanted to give users a flexible platform to express themselves the way the do in real life.”

Hmmm doesn’t just structure who you share to, but what you share. There’s categories like activities, emotions, places, music, and photos, but also tags like “happy” or “inspired” for emotions, or “working” or “celebrating” for activities. The next version of Hmmm will include its “inference engine” that can match people with complementary posts. Like two people who are shopping nearby each other, or someone doing something exciting with someone bored.

The bootstrapped Sol Studios plans to monetize Hmmm with Sponsored Stories-style social ads, where small businesses, record companies, and consumer packaged goods companies pay to increase the presence of posts that mention them. It originally considered sponsored gamification, but I persuaded the team that would clutter the app and make it confusing, so they stripped it out.

Hmmm’s biggest challenge will be convincing users to endure the friction of choosing an audience, content type, and sub-tags just to publish something to friends. Path’s near decision-less publishing is a pleasure and I fear Hmmm could be a pain. But those who want to share their split-personality but are serious about privacy should give Hmmm some thought.

Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt makes for a pretty grueling experience when so many companies are pitching every passer-by. But Jordan Crook and I went in feet first to check out some of the startups there.

In scenes more reminiscent of tag-team pro-wrestling, or perhaps a sort of Startup relay race, we tag-teamed around and interviewed a bunch of them including Jaxx, Screach, Fanitics, Edaman, SnapCrowd, ColourDNA, Atticous and BuzzCard. Check all of Tuesday’s startups out here.

We also took a trip over to the Israeli Pavilion to check out the likes of Drippler and Vodio among others. Enjoy!

It’s incredibly easy to love Sonos.  Their wireless music system is virtually unrivaled and don’t even try and through the word Airplay around as if it’s a retort.  It’s more like a last resort if you can’t afford the awesomeness that Sonos has to offer.  That said, we really didn’t think the wireless speaker solution could get much better.  Boy were we wrong.

Today, the company introduced SUB.  That’s right, a stand alone subwoofer that is said to deliver thundering bass and lows so deep you’ll want a seismic counter on hand to determine if it’s an actual Earthquake or Sonos rattling the pictures off your walls.

To be totally candid Sonos hasn’t told us if the SUB’s specs, but we do know that it will only work with their amplified offerings ( CONNECT:AMP; PLAY:5; PLAY:3), which is to say it’s not compatible with their  non-amplified Sonos CONNECT.  A slight disappointment, but a caveat we’re willing to accept.  There are also “two force-cancelling speakers positioned face-to-face,” which is said to negate any of that pesky cabinet rattling you’ve probably come to expect from most speakers of this ilk.  And much like their Sonos speakers, you’ll be able to set up the SUB with a single button push and a pairing walk through on your iOS or Android device.

The Sonos SUB will launch this June in a high-gloss black lacquer finish for $699.  Expect a black matte version to arrive sometime in September.

Stan Lee, titan of the comic book industry, will be interviewed by Mashable‘s Sam Laird on Thursday.

For those unfamiliar, Stan Lee is one of the creative forces behind Marvel Comics. He took part in the creation and development of some of the most famous superheroes and comic book series, such as the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, and X-Men.

Without the vision and talent of Lee, the Marvel Comics franchise would not have grown to become the great success it is today. The company has converted many of the original comic book franchises into movies, including most recently The Avengers movie, which set a record for the highest grossing film on opening weekend.

Even at 89 years of age, Lee is taking full advantage of digital media. He is currently in the process of launching his own comic convention and plans to bring all sorts of social engagement for those attending and following online.

Lee has a showcase of awards and honors for his achievements including a member of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame as well as receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

We’re taking questions for Stan from you, our Mashable readers. We want to know: what would you like to be able to ask the comic book visionary?

We’ll choose some of the most unique, poignant, or just plain interesting reader-submitted questions to ask him. Submit your question in the comments below by Wednesday, May 23 at 8:00 P.M. EDT, and be sure to check back to read our interview with Stan Lee.

Image courtesy Gage Skidmore, Flickr.

More About: comic books, interviews, Marvel, Stan Lee

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Guest post written by Aswath Damodaran

In Tuesday’s Forbes Markets Desk video, Investing Editor Matt Schifrin and I talked about the fallout from Facebook’s post-IPO flop and where the stock may go from here:

Business software giant SAP announced today that it will acquire Ariba’s cloud -based business commerce network for approximately $4.3 billion. SAP’s subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., is offering $45 per share for the platform, and plans to close the deal during the third quarter, pending Ariba shareholder approval of the sale. Ariba had 100.2 million shares on the market, as of March 31st, according to an AP report citing FactSet data.

The Ariba board of directors has already unanimously approved the transaction. The per share purchase price represents a 20% premium over the May 21 closing price and a 19% premium over the one month volume weighted average price per share, says SAP.

The deal will be  funded from SAP’s free cash and a €2.4 billion term loan facility and is expected to be accretive to SAP’s non-IFRS earnings per share in 2013. SAP says the acquisition will combine Ariba’s successful buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP’s own customer base and solutions in order to create new models for business-to-business collaboration in the cloud.

Sunnyvale-based Ariba has approximately 2,600 employees, $444 million in total revenue, and experienced 38.5 percent annual growth in 2011. Its business network recorded 62 percent organic growth in the same period. With the addition of Ariba, SAP will acquire the leader in cloud-based collaborative business commerce.

The focus of Ariba’s business is in procurement, spend management, and supplier discovery, and is partnered with major ERP suppliers, including SAP, as well as Salesforce, IBM and Oracle.

“The cloud has profoundly changed the way people interact. The impact will be even greater as enterprises connect and collaborate in new ways with their global networks of customers and partners,” SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe said in a statement. “Cloud-based collaboration is redefining business network innovation, and we are catching this wave in the early stage of its evolution. The addition of Ariba will create the business network of the future, deliver immediate value to our customers and provide another solid engine for driving SAP’s growth in the cloud.”

Most people simply opt for Brita, or some sort of cheap H2O water filtration system.  It’s a laborious process, requiring you to fill a tank via your kitchen’s tap and then watch it slowly trickle out water that has supposedly been cleansed of its impurities.  We prefer the under the counter filter systems that are complemented by a standalone tap.  But if that still isn’t good enough for you, you’ll probably really dig Tyent’s UCE 9000 Turbo Water Ionizer.

This is by no means your garden variety water filter.  In addition to being complete with its own touchscreen and audio cues, there are two taps.  One tap spits out alkaline water, which is highly oxygenated, antioxidant rich water great for drinking and cooking; while the other can produce strongly acidic water good for cleaning and sterilization.  We’d just be worried we’d confuse the two taps, since consuming acidic water can’t be very good for you.

From a tech standpoint, there is, yes, a touchscreen that displays current pH level, filter replacement status, temperature and filter life remaining.  No it doesn’t run Android or some variation there of, but it does have its own CPU that “automatically control and find the optimal operating condition of the unit, using flow rates and water quality”.  Meanwhile a .01 micron ultra double filtration system, the same level of filtration as found in a kidney dialysis machine, features both a carbon and ceramic filter to separate unwanted and wanted minerals, producing what is purported to be optimal water.  And if that isn’t enough, there is also an antibacterial system and automatic cleaning.

Want one?  You’ll need to drop about $3,000 and that doesn’t even include install.

Silicon Valley is full of unsung heroes: Mike Krieger, Arash Ferdowsi, interns, the TechCrunch sales team, Heather Harde and the countless engineers that keep the products we love from failing to be the products we love. One of these unsung heroes is SV Angel’s David Lee, who has served as a mentor and sounding board for almost every smart person in the Valley as far as I can tell.

But as of today Lee is a little more “sung”; In a discussion with Michael Arrington on stage at TC Disrupt New York, investor Ron Conway made it even more clear that SV Angel is actually managing partner David Lee’s fund.

The fact that Lee, who used to work at StumbleUpon and Google before co-founding SV Angel, runs the fund is perhaps the Valley’s best-kept not-secret. While Conway actually is listed as investor and not partner on the firm’s Crunchbase profile, it doesn’t stop press and others from constantly writing stuff like, “Ron Conway’s SV Angel fund,” paying scant or no attention to the man actually behind the curtain.

“This is David’s fund,” Conway said to Arrington in response to questioning about financing rumors. “But I have a huge vested interest.” Conway is still the largest investor in SVAngel, which also loops in Arrington himself as a Limited Partner, Kevin Carter, Robert Pollak and Conway’s middle son Topher Conway. “I get to come in and help entrepreneurs, I get to do what I enjoy,” Conway went on.

Interestingly enough, LP Arrington pressed Lee and Conway to comment on the “rumors” that the fund might be raising $400 million, “We are exploring all options …” Lee responded, saying that they are indeed looking for investment but refusing to give more detail.

When asked what startups were particularly interesting to SV Angel, the dynamic duo listed Pinterest (of course), Airbnb, Stripe, Square and Boku. When asked the same question of VC firms, Lee and Conway singled out Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Greylock, Accel and General Catalyst as top choices.

In terms of where he saw the fund’s investment trajectory headed, Lee said that he read somewhere on TechCrunch that the way people are shopping is drastically changing (I’m going to hope he was talking about this post) and that he is most excited about companies like Warby Parker and Pinterest that are transforming the way people consume content, create relationships, and well buy stuff.

“The sharing economy,”"the open graph distributed economy,” and the “P2P sharing” model all got shout out as ecommerce movements that could soon see an influx of (new?) SV Angel cash. SV Angel’s last raise of $20 million happened a year ago last April and, with a rapidly expanding portfolio, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the “rumors” Arrington alluded onstage to are indeed true.

In an effort to expand Hellmann’s relevancy beyond the sandwich, the company and ad agency Ogilvy Brazil recently launched a campaign that told consumers how the groceries they had just purchased could be used to make a new mayonnaise-intensive dish.

They partnered with a large supermarket chain called St Marche to install software in cash registers at about 100 stores. When customers purchased Hellmann’s mayo at these stores, the software automatically looked at the other ingredients in their cart and compiled a recipe that used them. The recipe, complete with preparation instructions, was then printed on the customer’s receipt.

Within the first month, sales of Hellmann’s mayonnaise increased by 44% at stores with recipe receipts, according to a video about the campaign.

“We needed to take advantage of the moment when customers had all of the right ingredients at hand,” explains the same video.

More About: Advertising, Hellmann's, Marketing, retail

For SaaS companies, whose customers are usually signed up on recurring monthly billing cycles, the art of retaining customers is just as important as winning them over in the first place. In fact, it’s probably more important, since customers aren’t tied in to long-term deals. It’s also a lot cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. So they need to better understand them and work harder to keep them coming back, which is where Apptegic comes in.

The startup, which is being launched as part of TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, uses big data to provide detailed analytics that companies can use to better engage with their customers. To do so, Apptegic is introducing what it calls a “customer guidance system” (CGS) to identify trends among customer usage and to give them tools to message users in real time and suggest new features that they can use.

Founders Karl Wirth and Greg Hinkle worked together at Red Hat, where they built operations management tools for SaaS companies. What they found was that there weren’t a lot of tools out there to help those businesses understand their customers and retain them. So they set out to build those tools.

Apptegic provides a cloud-based platform that essentially uses big data to analyze behavioral click-through data from customer interactions, then scores the engagement so that businesses can know which features customers find important, and which aren’t. What’s sticky, and what keeps customers coming back. Once a business recognizes that, it can build tools to improve the way that it interacts with those customers.

They can customize those reports based on the data that they find important. Apptegic customers can also use the platform to set rules around certain types of customer usage and message their users in real time. That can help guide them to features that they might not be aware of, or to help upsell them on features they haven’t yet bought.

Currently Apptegic is focused on web applications, but Wirth told me that it’s looking to extend onto other platforms, and could optimize for mobile applications. It’s currently working with 30 beta customers, but will be launching the cloud-based service this week to add more trial users.

Apptegic has five employees now, and has raised $2 million from Point Judith Capital, Advanced Technology Ventures, Jit Saxena, and other angel investors.

Disrupt Q&A

Q: What do you include that current systems don’t?

A: We combine real-time click-stream data and real-time messaging.

Q: What was the Ah-ha moment that told you the world needs this?

A: We were working with a lot of customers and realized that there were a lot of people building this themselves.

Q: How is this more than Google Analytics?

A: This gives you information down to the user and offer the opportunity to reach them in real-time.

Q: Where are you in terms of launching, and what’s the revenue model?

A: We’re launching today and starting to charge today. We charged based on the number of end users that our customers reach.

The winner of the Audience Choice Award during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, CardFlick launched with an application for building digital business cards on your mobile device and sharing them with new contacts. Rather than bumping to share those cards, users “flick” them to other users who have downloaded the app.

After that, the next step was refining things. To do that, CardFlick has joined the most recent 500 Startups Accelerator class and is working on the next big transition in its evolution. To start, it’s adding more features and functionality around its core card product.

While CardFlick initially launched with a limited number of themes, it has been working on providing more customization for its users. The startup is currently doing that through its Instacards site. The next version of the CardFlick app — which will be released over the next few weeks — will bring similar customization features available to the app itself.

But CardFlick founder Ketan Anjaria sees an even bigger opportunity ahead. The team brought on Jared Kopf, cofounder and CEO of deals company HomeRun (acquired by Rearden Commerce last September), as an adviser. And as part of its 500 Startups experience, it’s begun working on expanding beyond just business cards and the way people present themselves to others. It’s all part of a pivot toward the introduction of a new product that will be introduced at 500 Startups Accelerator demo days on July 17-18 in Mountain View and July 23 in New York City.

Take-Two Interactive shares are trading higher after hours Tuesday following the video game publisher's financial results for the fiscal fourth quater ended March 31.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the blue-chip Silicon Valley venture capital firm known for its early investments in Google, is being sued by an investment partner.

Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog synthesizer, will be honored by Google tomorrow on his 78th birthday with a special Google Doodle. The doodle is a recordable and playable Moog synthesizer. It’s one of the more elaborate doodles we’ve seen from Google, with a whole bunch of little knobs and switches to play around with.

The doodle features a keyboard, mixer, oscillators, filters, and envelope adjustment options. Once you’ve tweaked out your own funky tune, you can record it for sharing on Google+ or sending a link to it to your friends. If you’re curious to give it a try early, you can check out Google’s homepage for Australia, where the doodle is already up.

As for Moog, he was born on May 23, 1934 and created the synthesizer in 1964. His synthesizer was developed using transistors, something still quite new during that era. It has since had a tremendous impact on modern music and has been used by numerous musicians.

Google Doodle honors Moog with playable synthesizer is written by Rue Liu & originally posted on SlashGear. © 2005 - 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

One of the very pair of real-life Google Glasses from Google’s own Project Glass has appeared in England on the face of none other than CEO Larry Page. This pair of glasses is showing its lovely pre-release hardware to the world in brief on the brim of London at Google Zeitgeist. The “Beyond Talk” shared with the world via Google’s Zeitgeist Minds page showed Page speaking a bit about the glasses as well, saying how happy he was to have a pair of the glasses and that they’re working great already.

Page didn’t do a whole heck of a lot with the glasses – or just “glass” as he put it since there is only one, not one for each eye – but the after-talk had him snapping a photo. This move required Page to press a button at the top of the device near his temple, wait for it to be processed, move his head down and to his left, and tap the side of the glasses to “share that with the whole company.” This indicates that there is a physical camera button on the current iteration of the project and that the larger flat area on the side of the device is a touch-sensitive interface.

“These are obviously Google Glass, it’s only Glass because it’s only on one side. It’s still in a bit of an early stage but I’m really excited to be able to have one. And to have it working. … It doesn’t yet show me all of your names, but I’m really glad that you’re all here.” – Page

Have a peek at the video of Page wearing and using the glasses here, then head to the timeline below to get all the heavy coverage we’ve got on the project from the past few weeks as well!

Larry Page sports Project Glass in England is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear. © 2005 - 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The days of AOL treating Patch like a garbage disposal for money are officially over.

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. Tuesday's selection includes researchers who say today's teenagers' have concerns like those of earlier generations, despite new technology, cities recruiting Apple Stores to move in and free Wi-Fi (sort of) from a group of cable companies.