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Yammer, the San Francisco-based enterprise social networking platform, has announced its opening an office in East London’s Tech City area, next to London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’. UK Prime Minister David Cameronannouncedplans last November to transform East London into a major tech hub, one to rival Silicon Valley. And as we reported at the weekend, London’s startup scene is alreadythrivingwith shared working spaces such asTechHubhelping to support fledgling tech firms – and this is the chosen venue for Yammer’s first European base....

Yesterday I spoke with the team behindConvorewho are announcing the launch of their Y Combinator funded website today. Convore is a real-time group chat service. There are three people in the founding team,Eric Florenzano,Eric Maguire, andLeah Culver. Florenzano and Maguire both worked atMochi Mediaand Culver was co founder ofPownce(along with Keving Rose, co-founder of Digg). Florenzano told me that Convore was inspired by Facebook Groups, Yahoo Groups, Friend Feed Groups and Twitter....

When asked at today’sTechcrunch Disruptconference if they thought that there was an uptick in certain types of startups Y-Combinator’s Paul Graham and Harjeet Taggar said that there was absolutely a big upswing in mobile applications being developed over web apps. Graham also had some interesting things to say about Apple and tablets. He said that tablet apps are growing like crazy, as is the tablet market at large. When asked, he said that he meant that Apple specifically was dominating the tablet market....

The world’s most sophisticated commercially available spyware may be being abused, according toan investigationby 17 media organizations in ten countries.Intelligence leaksandforensic phone analysissuggests the surveillance software, calledPegasus, has beenused to targetand spy on the phones of human rights activists, investigative journalists, politicians, researchers and academics. NSO Group, the Israeli cyber intelligence firm behind Pegasus, insists that it only licenses its spyware tovetted government clientsin the name of combating transnational crime and terrorism....

Today, Yelp again took aim at claims that it had blackmailed restaurant owners into purchasing ads. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman addressed the claims brought against the company in a pending class action lawsuit by addressing how the company conducts business. As he explained the situation, though, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to take potshots at the plaintiffs by saying that they had hired,“theOrly Taitzof internet lawyers who may or may not have read about our recentfunding round....