Dashlane, a stealth start-up out of Paris, is still a few weeks away from unveiling its product, but the company is happily talking up its flush financial situation. The company announced Wednesday it has raised million from Rho Ventures, FirstMark Capital and Bernard Liautaud, the co-founder and former CEO of Business Objects.

Dashlane, which launched 18 months ago and is now opening a U.S. office in New York, is not explaining what it does exactly But it has provided some general details about its technology which purportedly tackles the growing problem of inputting information, passwords and payment data into websites from desktop and mobile devices.

Dashlane will offer an application that allows users to quickly and securely enter credit card details, names, addresses and login details for commerce, social and other websites. The company is focusing on the opportunity in mobile as more users struggle to repeatedly enter in information from devices that often don’t have traditional keyboards.

Emmanuel Schalit, Dashlane’s CEO, told me the application will be helpful particularly in transactions. He said 2/3 of people who begin a mobile transaction online abandon it before checkout. The startup’s new money will go toward accelerating development of the product, which will go into private beta in a few weeks. Habib Kairouz, managing partner at Rho Ventures, and Rick Heitzmann, managing director at FirstMark will join private Liautaud on the board.

I’m curious to see what Dashlane can do. As we shift to a “post-PC” world, it makes sense to focus on some of the friction people encounter as they rely more on tablets and smartphones. Particular in the case of mobile commerce and mobile payments, it’s good to streamline the process of entering in payment information while still maintaining security. Apple’s App Store and iTunes are good examples of how simplicity can spur on a lot of transactions. So we’ll have to see if Dashlane can actually deliver something that’s worth using — but I think the opportunity is big if it can.

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Stitcher, the Pandora of Internet talk radio, has raised million as it capitalizes on the opportunity in non-music streaming radio. The San Francisco company raised the money from New Enterprise Associates, which led the round, along with money from existing investors Benchmark Capital, New Atlantic Ventures, and other individual investors, including Ron Conway.

Stitcher, which has raised a total of million, allows users to build personalized talk radio stations drawn from 6,000 different shows that cover news, entertainment, sports, comedy. The service in the last year has quadrupled listening time, more than doubled registered users and is now up to 3.4 million registered users. The company more recently launched on Sonos and the iPad  and struck a deal to be included on new Buick cars .

Noah Shanok, CEO of Stitcher, said the company will use the money to improve the product, enhance the platform for content providers and build out a direct ad sales force. Stitcher has been running display ads and is in the process of testing in-stream audio ads similar to what Pandora has run. Shanok said to expect more audio ads later this year as the sales team gets hired.

Shanok said talk radio represents 35 percent of the terrestrial radio market and generates billion in annual advertising revenue. While Pandora and Spotify are exploiting the music side of Internet radio, he said Stitcher has much less competition on the talk side. It’s too early to talk about a Pandora style IPO, said Shanok. But with the way things are going, it could be on the horizon.

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When you think about looking for someone for free on the internet then you should know that the methods of search require you to have at least one searchable piece of data about the person. A name is most of the time enough to conduct a search. If you have a phone number you can find someone for free using their cell phone number as well.

The first problem that arises when dealing with cell phone numbers is that they are private numbers and so linking them to their owners is a bit of challenge. These numbers are not kept in any directory that you can search from. There is no official directory at least. The available directories where you can locate a person using their cell phone number are all hosted people locator websites.

www.cellphonenumber.com is one of the places that have come together with a couple of the service providers to think of a dependable directory from which cell phone numbers can be looked up. That is one place where you can try to find someone for free using their cell phone number.

Considering that almost every phone that is manufactured now has GPS technology then you can try and locate someone using sat-gps-locate.com. All you have to do is type in the cell phone number that you want searched and using the GPS it will locate the location of the user to within a distance ranging from 10m to 50m depending on the location of the search.

It won’t be long before you can locate a person using their cell phone number because new search methods are always being designed and made. The current methods are quite capable of locating cell phone owners but they are not guaranteed.

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TransferJet is a close-proximity wireless transfer technology Sony introduced in 2008. The idea is to let two electronic devices quickly exchange data (theoretically at up to 560 Mbps) just by bringing them close together (touch is possible, too). By way of comparison: The data transfer rate for Bluetooth Version 2.0 + EDR stands at just 3 Mbps.

Toshiba announced during IFA in Berlin last year they are planning to use the technology in their products soon. And now Sony made its move, too (if you don’t count the TransferJet-compatible LSI Sony announced in November).

The company is preparing a number of computers and digital cameras that support TransferJet, enabling users to transfer data between these devices as long as they are no more than 3cm apart (Bluetooth: about 10m). Sony made several big product announcements yesterday in Tokyo, but Sony’s American website shows that some devices featuring Transferjet actually will be available in the US earlier than in Japan.

Sony already lists the DSC-TX7 (pictured above) in their American online store for $400 (to be shipped on January 25), while the DSC-HX5V will set you back $350 and will be available from March 15 in the US (in Japan, both models will go on sale next month). An 8GB Memory Stick with TransferJet is listed in Sony’s American online store for $100 (release date in the US: February 8).

America will also get TransferJet-compatible Sony notebooks (Vaio F series) soon, it seems. This model, the VPCF11MFX, for example, is already listed and has a price tag of $1,720 but lacks a release date as of this writing (in Japan, a total of three Vaio F computers will hit stores as early as this Saturday).

Japanese toymaker Takara Tomy claims it has developed a device that can translate what a dog “says” into human language and emoticons in real time. And the so-called “Bowlingual” [JP] isn’t being marketed as a (pure) gag product.

Jointly developed with an acoustics research laboratory and a veterinarian, the Bowlingual works wirelessly (your dog must wear a wireless mic around the neck). Let the device catch noises made by your dog (transmission range: 10m) and it will analyze the “animal language” with a special algorithm before telling you on the LCD screen what was being “said”.

The Bowlingual displays text (in Japanese) and a range of graphics to show what your dog feels, in real-time (there is also speech output). There are around 200 text blocks and icons that illustrate a total of six moods: frustration, joy, sadness etc.

Data can be saved for later analysis. And Takara Tomy even threw in a answering machine function that makes it possible to monitor your dog’s feelings when you’re away.

The Bowlingual will hit Japanese stores on August 23 with a $220 price tag. It’s Japan-only for the time being.

Here is the official promo video: