Google did announce a new Google Wallet API designed to help fight that shopping cart abandonment problem. More on that here.

Since then, we’ve received little else to go on. The project’s focus continues to be shrouded in secrecy, and we really only know that it will be primarily mobile-based, free, and won’t be ready for quite a while. In the meantime, Biz Stone has been revealing team members – including former Twitter employee Ben Finkel (co-founder and CTO), Twitter’s Kevin Thau (COO), and employee #1, designer Austin Sarner.

Today, in a blog post, Stone has announced that Jelly has just closed its Series A funding, lead by Spark Capital with investment from SV Angel. With that, Spark General Partner Bijan Sabet in now on Jelly’s Board of Directors.

Stone has also revealed some of Jelly’s early investors, and it’s an interesting list:

• Jack Dorsey, Co-founder and CEO of Square
• Bono, Musician and Activist
• Reid Hoffman with the Greylock Discovery Fund
• Steven Johnson, Author and Entrepreneur
• Evan Williams and Jason Goldman via Obvious
• Al Gore, Politician, Philanthropist, Nobel Laureate
• Greg Yaitanes, Emmy Winning Director
• Roya Mahboob, Afghan Entrepreneur and Businesswoman

Dorsey and Evan Williams – duh. But Bono and Al Gore? Hmm.

“We chose angels like Al Gore, a Partner at KPCB and Chairman and Co-founder of Generation Investment Management, Greg Yaitanes, a Hollywood director, and Roya Mahboob, an entrepreneur doing amazing work for women in Afghanistan partly because they work in divergent fields. Knowledge diversity is something we prize highly and is also something that will be represented in our product,” says Stone.

When Jelly was first officially announced, Stone said this:

People are basically good – when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it. Jelly is a new company and product named after the jellyfish. We are inspired by this particular animal because neurologically, its brain is more “we” than “me.” Also, for the past 700 million years, this decentralized structure has been wildly successful.

“Help them do good in the world.” Is that the key phrase here? Is Jelly some sort of mobile social good app? Who knows, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, as Stone is quite serious about keeping a tight lid on this thing. But the addition of Bono, Al Gore, and an Afghani activist hints that Jelly will be striving to do some sort of international good at the very least.

1. Checkout Button
2. Sign in or Guest
3. Billing name
4. Credit Card Type
5. Cred Card Number
6. Expiration – MM
7. Expiration – YY
8. Credit Card CSC
9. Billing Address
10. Billing City
11. Billing State
12. Billing Zip
13. Billing Country
14. Shipping Address
15. Shipping City
16. Shipping State
17. Shipping Zip
18. Shipping Country
19. Shipping telephone
20. Contact Email
21. Submit

So yeah, it’s easy to see where Google’s model could be a bit more helpful.

The Verge, liveblogging the event, says, “BIg play from Google to take its payment service to mobile in a subtle way.”

Update: Google has put a blog post out shedding more light on this announcement, which is an invitation to developers in the U.S. to sign up for the Google Wallet Instant Buy Android API.

Google’s Prakash Hariramani explains, “The Instant Buy API is designed for merchants and developers selling physical goods and services, who already have a payment processor and are looking to simplify the checkout experience for their customers. Developers selling digital goods within their apps will continue to use Google Play In-app Billing, which offers full payment processing capability, including support for carrier billing and gift cards.”

More at the blog.

Today, Pinterest is taking steps to make the mobile experience better with updates to their iOS and Android apps. Pinterest for iOS v 2.4 and Pinterest for Android v 1.5 are now available.

First up, Pinterest is unveiling new search suggestions inside the app.

“We’ll now suggest search terms as you type on mobile. You can also see recent searches you made from other places, so if you searched for a soup recipe from your computer, you can do the same search when you’re at the grocery store with just your phone to help you. It’s easy to delete these searches from your settings if you want to,” says Pinterest.

As you can see, searching for something like “apple” now yields suggestions for apple-related content. This also works with user search. It’s a small, but useful improvement.

The other additions to come along with today’s update are a long time coming, quite frankly. With the new versions, you can now @ mention other users. Both iOS and Android users can now get notifications as well.

“Now you can see who commented on your pin or mentioned you whenever you have your phone handy. And if you can’t get enough, we’re also introducing push notifications so you can find out what’s happening without even opening the Pinterest app,” says Pinterest.

The iOS update also brings a couple of new features, including the ability to “pin from more places more easily from the web.” This amounts to a prominent “+” button on the homescreen that lets you enter in the url of the item you wish to pin. Not quite as easy as with the desktop version of Pinterest, with that handy pin button, but it does help. iOS users can also now invite friends to group boards from the app.

BGR cites a “trusted source” who says that sales of the HTC First have been so terrible that AT&T has decided to discontinue the device and return all unsold inventory to HTC.

The source doesn’t have exact figures on the sales, but apparently less than $15,000 units were sold since AT&T slashed the price to $0.99 (with a 2-year contract) last week.

From BGR:

For some perspective, BGR has been informed that sales of the HTC First have been even worse than HTC Chacha sales were back in 2011, when AT&T launched the ill-fated phone as the Status…We’re told that AT&T sales representatives do not like Facebook Home or the First at all, and they are making little if any effort to sell the handset to customers. Right now iPhones and Samsung’s Galaxy S4 are the biggest sellers at AT&T by a substantial margin, our source said.

Ouch.

Facebook and HTC announced the HTC First’s exclusive AT&T launch during their April 4th Facebook Home event.

The HTC First has been referred to as the “Facebook Phone,” because it came pre-installed with Facebook Home. Of course, Home is also available on a handful of other Android devices and has been available for download since April 12th. Home in general has been underperforming – although it just crossed a million installs, it has a terrible 2-star rating in the Google Play Store. The failure of the HTC first, if this report is accurate, simply underscores the fact that the Facebook Home experiment is well on its way to official bomb status.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment and will update this article accordingly.

UPDATE: Facebook is not commenting on the report. We have also contacted AT&T for comment.

UPDATE 2: AT&T had this to say:

“As mentioned previously, we do pricing promotions all the time and have made no decisions on future plans.”

“Think about it. If it’s taking pictures, it’s not a cell phone. If it has, um, a McDonald’s app to tell you where McDonald’s is based on your GPS location, that’s not a cell phone. If you can get Wikipedia or get Google, that’s not a cell phone. If you can watch YouTube, that’s not a cell phone – or Netflix…think about it.”

Apparently, Gingrich wants help in deciding what we should call these futuristic devices. Here’s what he has to say on his YouTube channel:

To call this a “cell phone” or a “handheld computer” fails to capture the change that has taken place. It is a change in kind, not just a change in scale, and just as drivers of the earliest cars called them “horseless carriages”, our language has not caught up. So having failed for several days to come up with an adequate term for the device we call a “cell phone,” we want to open the discussion up to you. Let us know in the comments what you think we should name it, and we’ll feature the best ones in a future newsletter.

It’s a smartphone, Newt. A smartphone. I kind of get what you’re saying, but it’s a smartphone.

Check out the bizarre video below:

In an email, a spokesperson said, “Today Milewise and GoPollGo joined the Yahoo! mobile team. GoPollGo created a cool social polling app. The team has joined our mobile org in Sunnyvale. Milewise created a great app to make travel planning easier and personalized. They have joined our New York mobile team.”

Milewise will be shutting down its own service as it focuses on Yahoo’s mobile efforts. The company posted this message to its homepage:

MileWise began almost four years ago with the goal of creating a simple, powerful product to help people and providers get the most value out of their rewards.

Along the way, we’ve been lucky to connect with an incredible community of fellow travelers, without whom we wouldn’t have made it this far. To everyone who took MileWise for a spin: THANK YOU! You shared our vision of what MileWise could become, and generously donated your time and passion towards making it a reality.

As part of the transition, the MileWise service will be shutting down. It’s tough to say goodbye to something we’ve dedicated so much to. But, we’ve tried to make it easy to take your data with you. We’ll be sending everyone an email with instructions on exporting your data, and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to email us.

The MileWise team will be joining Yahoo! in NYC’s Bryant Park office. We’re thrilled to be joining such a talented group of inventors, and can’t wait to get working on the next big thing coming out of Yahoo.

Again, we’d like to thank everyone who supported us along the way: our investors, our employees, our partners, and most importantly, our fellow travelers.

Likewise, GoPollGo is shutting down support for its own properties, and will focus on Yahoo. The company shared this message on its site:

We are excited to share some big news: We’re joining Yahoo! For two years, we’ve worked incredibly hard to make it as easy as possible to get feedback from friends and followers. It has been so rewarding to build a product that scaled up to millions of people and supported large media properties and diverse brands — all while staying true to promise to deliver fun, engaging, real-time experiences.

We’re so excited to bring the knowledge and experience we’ve gained at GoPollGo to Yahoo!. We share an enthusiasm for building delightful user experiences, and we couldn’t be happier to join forces.

Huge thanks to all our users, partners and customers who helped us realize our vision. As of today, we’ll no longer be supporting GoPollGo’s properties on the site, embeddable widgets or mobile app. If you have any questions or want to get in touch, shoot us an email to hi@gopollgo.com.

Yahoo wasn’t joking when it was talking about its focus on mobile. We’ll see how long it takes for these acquisitions to surface in Yahoo properties. It didn’t take Summly very long.

Last week, Yahoo announced the acquisition of Astrid, another mobile app.

The combined company will be known as simply T-Mobile USA, and will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange today under the ticker “TMUS.”

John Legere will serve as President and CEO, with former MetroPCS Vice Chairman and CFO, J. Braxton Carter, serving as CFO of the combined company. T-Mobile and MetroPCS will continue to operate as separate brands.

“By uniting T-Mobile and MetroPCS, we have created a dynamic new player in the wireless industry that has the right strategy and management team in place to compete successfully in today’s marketplace,” said Tim Höttges, currently Deputy CEO and CFO of Deutsche Telekom, who will serve as Chairman of the Board. “We look forward to realizing the tremendous potential of the new T-Mobile.”

Under the deal’s terms, MetroPCS effected a 1 for 2 reverse stock split, made a cash payment of $1.5 billion to its stockholders (approximately $4.05 per share prior to the reverse stock split), and acquired all of T-Mobile’s capital stock from Deutsche Telekom in exchange for about 74% of MetroPCS’ common stock on a pro forma basis.

The combined company is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. It also maintains a “significant” presence in Richardson, Texas.

The company is readying a mobile product aimed at inspiring “digital creativity in parents and children with physical products that surprise.” Basically, it will focus on family-oriented crafts and DIY. Frye is serving as Chief Creative Officer. Former IAC exec Kara Nortman is CE.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randi Zuckerberg is serving as an advisor, along with Dan Rosensweig, Tim Ferriss, Gina Bianchini, Erik Lammerding and Rick Marini.

The startup builds on the Moonfrye.com online community launched a few years ago. It already has 1.5 million Twitter followers and 500,000 Facebook likes.

“As my most important role in life is being a mom, it was clear to me that parents around the world were looking for cost effective activities where their families could come together and create meaningful experiences both online and off,” said Soleil Moon Frye.

“Our product has a unique, innovative design that is going to be a game-changer for providing parents and children with a shared creative outlet,” said Nortman. “If moms are shutting off passive entertainment in favor of engaging their kids actively on mobile devices then we have made our small dent on society.”

“There’s a restored interest in craftsmanship and DIY. It’s a refreshing change from the reliance on ready-made goods,” said Kevin Rose, General Partner at Google Ventures. “Combining real world experiences with digital tools creates a lot of interesting possibilities when put in the hands of moms and families, and Soleil and Kara have an inspiring vision to bring that to life.”

Those interested can sign up for early access to the app.

“Each day, millions of people visit Facebook Pages – with almost half accessing them from their mobile phones. Today, we’ve developed a new mobile Pages layout tailored to the way people look for information on their mobile devices. It’s now easier for your customers to interact with your Page in a way that’s both efficient and useful,” says Facebook.

Here’s what the new pages design looks like on iOS:

You’ll immediately notice that Facebook has moved many of the action buttons to a single row on the top. This includes “like,” “check-in,” “call,” and “more.” Right below that, you’ll see a map view. That’s followed by directions, hours, and prices (if applicable).

Below that, you’ll see more real estate given to star ratings and user reviews. The “write post” button has been removed from view – and been replaced by a big “write recommendation” button. It’s clear that Facebook wants you to bulk up places’ ratings and reviews, instead of simply writing something like “hey, love the place” on its Timeline.

Below that, you’ll see photos from the page, scrollable from side-to-side. In all, Facebook has not only made mobile pages better looking (a generally improved aesthetic), but they’ve taken all the important information and put it front and center on the page.

For page owners, there are a couple of other benefits from the redesign:

Higher-appearing pinned posts: You can pin important posts (including Facebook Offers or videos) from your desktops.These posts are now front and center when Pages are accessed on mobile devices.

Easier mobile management: You now have the ability to easily switch between public and admin views directly from your mobile Pages/devices.

The mobile pages redesign is visible today on iOS and Facebook on the web. They say that it will be coming to Android devices soon.