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).