Gregarius » TechCrunch » January 2009

Breasts and the iPhone have had a tumultuous relationship. Last month, an application that allowed users to shake a pair (possibly NSFW) of 3D breasts was banned from the App Store for being apparently too risque for its audience.

A few weeks later an application called Wobble made it into the App Store using something of a loophole - instead of offering pre-rendered mammary shaking, it allowed users to add their own ‘wobble points’ to any picture, which could conceivably have more tame applications (of course, the site made the designed purpose very clear in its demo video, which can be seen below).

Now it looks like Apple is having second thoughts. After hitting the top spot on the Japanese App Store and seeing 20,000 downloads over ten days, Wobble has been asked by Apple to remove anything having to do with ‘Boobs’ and ‘Booty’ from their marketing text. Developer Jon Atherton writes that he tried to point out that this was outright censorship, only to (unsurprisingly) be told that it was Apple’s way or the highway.

But ‘Boobs’ and ‘Booty’ are used many times elsewhere on iTunes, so why can’t they appear on the App Store? Atherton writes:

Doing a search for “Boobs” in iTunes returns 143 results – many of them marked explicit, a search for “Booty” returns 150 items. Not surprisingly Wobble appears at the top of the list in both search terms. there are hundreds of songs in the charts that use the words Booty and Boobies. I asked “Why are Apps different?” – [Apple's] response, I’m only here to talk to you about the Appstore and can’t comment on iTunes.

Apple has also asked that Wobble modify its YouTube video (seen below), though it sounds like they aren’t mandating a change. Atherton also notes that Apple doesn’t have an issue with the app itself; only with its marketing.

The ban on “sexy” words isn’t particularly surprising given how new the App Store is. Apple is still experimenting with new policies - for months it didn’t allow any ‘burp’ or ‘fart’ apps, which have grown to become disturbingly popular, and it only recently began allowing for developers to build their own web browsers. But the store has a rating system for a reason, and the arbitrary restrictions are tough on developers, who are left wondering what they’re allowed to write about and what they can show.

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After not being acquired by Google last year and announcing some cutbacks last week, Digg is rolling up its sleeves and getting to work. The company has hired Tom Shin as its new head of sales from Yahoo, where he was one of the top sales people and head of the Northwest sales region. His job is to build a sales team at Digg go after advertising dollars more directly., something CEO Jay Adelson recently underscored as a big goal of the company in 2009.

Shin will also be in charge of overall advertising strategy and managing the relationship with Microsoft, which serves the bulk of the ads on Digg. At Yahoo, Shin was also a director of product marketing for Yahoo Mail. According to his bio, Yahoo Mail grew from $20 million in revenues to $300 million during his seven-year tenure.

Digg needs all the help it can get. Last year, the company lost an estimated $5 million on revenues of $8.5 million. There are also rumors that Digg is working on an automated, self-serve advertising product that consumers will be able to vote up or down.

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This morning Google opened up registration for its annual Google I/O conference, a two-day event focused on developer topics that will feature Android, App Engine, Chrome, GWT, and AJAX APIs. According to Tom Stocky, Director of Product Management at Google, the event has a broad appeal for both small startups and large, established companies. He says that this year’s event will emphasize demonstrations from companies that have successfully implemented some of Google’s technology.

Last year’s event saw one of the first demonstrations of Google’s Android mobile phone OS, as well as the public launch of App Engine. Google also handed out T-shirts cleverly meant to spell out “Google IO” in binary, except they actually said Google KO.

Tickets for the conference are $300 before May 1st, when they’ll rise to $400 (students get in for $50). As an added bonus for early birds, anyone who buys a ticket before May 1st will get a hard copy of the Google Chrome comic book, which was used to introduce the browser last September.

We’re giving away two free tickets to the conference today, and will have more as we get closer to the event. For the first two, tell us in the comments why you need to head to Google I/O and we’ll pick out the best two answers (be sure to use your real Email address, and a sense of humor is encouraged).

For more on the conference, check out Google’s blog post.

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Until today, one of the biggest drawbacks of Gmail is that you could not go through your emails when you were offline. Today, that changes. Gmail is finally going offline. Google is rolling out a Google Gears version of Gmail that will be available to users starting today in Gmail Labs. (If you don’t see it, keep checking, the rollout to all users should be complete by the end of the week).

After installing the Google Gears plug-in to your browser, Gmail detects when you are offline. It caches your e-mail so that you can read it, respond to it, search it, star it, or label it. When you are connected to the Internet again, it sends all the messages. You can even open attachments. This is exactly the way Gmail already works on mobile phones such as the Android and those that support Gears. In fact, according to Gmail product manager Todd Jackson, who briefed me earlier today:

The underlying sync engine is exactly the same for Android and offline Gmail.

Some features, however, won’t work. Anything that requires an Internet connection, such as spellcheck, won’t work offline. And while you can open attachments, you won’t be able to add attachments at launch (that feature will be added soon, however).

Google Gears is a key part of the company’s Web app strategy. An Gears version of Google Docs was introduced in March, 2008. And an offline version of Google Calendar will soon be offered to enterprise customers. Jackson explains:

Our long term vision is that the browser is the ideal platform for deploying all types of applications. We think the most powerful applications should run inside the browser. Historically it has been constrained by the connection.

Throw off those chains, Gmail users.

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Yahoo released its fourth quarter 2008 earnings today. Its non-GAAP EPS came in at $0.17 a share, above the $0.13 consensus. (Yahoo lost $0.22 a share on a GAAP basis due to restructuring and impairment charges). Total revenues came in at $1.8 billion, with net revenues (after what Yahoo pays to network partners) coming in at $1.375 billion.

Overall revenues were down one percent. In comparison, Google’s fourth quarter revenues were up 18 percent. Search revenues on Yahoo’s own sites were up 11 percent in the quarter to $436 million, while display advertising revenues was down 2 percent to $506 million. (See chart below). That is pretty much in line with industry trends. Affiliate, listings, and other marketing revenues were also down.

New CEO Carol Bartz finally addressed some questions on everyone’s mind. Addressing Wall Street analysts on the call, she said preemptively before taking questions:

Did I come to Yahoo to sell the company? No. . . . Am I planning on immediately selling the search business? I did not come here with preconceived notions. It is very easy from the outside to have preconceived notions of what Yahoo should do. Now as an insider and CEO it is my job and responsibility to do what is best for customers, shareholders, and employees.

Later on in the call she reiterated:

This is not a company that needs to be pulled apart for the chickens.

Asked about rumors that Yahoo has been meeting with Microsoft, she replied:

We don’t have comments on press reports that come from nowhere.

That would be a reference to Valleywag.

She is basically signaling to investors that they should let her do her job. Her general message on the call is that outsiders cannot really know what is the best course of action for Yahoo. Fair enough. She has only been on the job for eight days. But she also isn’t communicating where she wants to take the company. What’s the plan, Carol?

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Website security software company Websense has acquired Defensio, a comment spam blocker used by blogs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Defensio competes with Akismet, the spam blocker that comes with Wordpress, and Mollom. One of Defensio’s features is that it can sort blocked comments by spamminess and also offers an API for use on Websites other than blogs.

Websense will incorporate Defensio into its ThreatSeeker Network, where it will help detect comment spam on blogs, forums, and social networks. Websense also plans on extending Defensio so that it works on broadly distributed Web applications.

The company recently used Defensio technology to detect malicious hackers on BarackObama.com. Moreover, Websense claims to have research showing that:

. . . more than 95 percent of all Web posts on blogs, forums and other sites are unwanted content such as spam and malicious content. Additionally, more than 70 percent of all Web spam and unwanted content is hosted on legitimate sites that allow user-generated content.

That sounds inflated to me, but comment spam definitely is a problem that needs to be squashed. So the more technologies out there trying to squash it, the better.

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iLife ‘09 is finally available on store shelves, and while most of the attention will probably go to iPhoto’s spiffy new face-recognition, there’s a feature tucked into GarageBand that might be making headlines very soon: premium lessons for piano and guitar, presented by the artists themselves. Dubbed ‘Lesson Store’, Apple’s online marketplace for music lessons has all the makings of a revolution in music learning that could prove to be incredibly popular and lucrative. We’ve known about it since its unveiling at Macworld, but only after trying it out can I confirm what many initially suspected: this thing is going to rock.

I’ve played guitar on-and-off for the last six years (I am mildly talented, at best) and have been exposed to a wide range of the learning tools available. The most popular by far are online ‘tabs’ - text based files that are easier to read than traditional music and are readily available. Unfortunately, the vast majority of tabs available on the web are laughably incorrect. Tab sites also have to deal with constant copyright infringement threats from record labels and publishers, who allege that the user-created tabs violate their IP. But the ‘tab books’ published with the consent of these labels are often just as inaccurate as the ones on the web (they’re rarely written by the original artist), and tend to be ridiculously overpriced.

Another alternative are DVDs and VHS tapes that feature artists showing off how to play their songs. Besides being pricey, these can be frustrating because DVD doesn’t lend itself well to repeatedly playing the same segment or slowing down a song without altering its pitch. The artist makes it look easy (and it’s always fun to watch them), but you’re never able to keep up.

Apple’s Lesson Store is the perfect compromise. Each lesson offers a lengthy video of the artist discussing how to play their song section by section, which is displayed alongside the music being played (either in tab or traditional notation) and a diagram of where your fingers should be on your instrument. And because you’re dealing with the original artist, you know you’re learning the song as it was meant to be played.

True to Apple tradition, the interface shines. You can quickly jump between sections, slow down video playback to half speed without distorting the notes, and can easily set the program to loop any segment of music until you’ve got it down. I honestly can’t think of anything that would make it any better. Update: Tabs in GarageBand don’t have any indicators for bends or hammer-ons, which really should be shown.

But the Lesson Store still has a ways to go. At launch there are only four songs available for each instrument, and while they include artists like Sting, Ben Folds, and John Fogerty, I can’t help but want more. Much More. Give me Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Billy Joel (for you piano fans out there). At $5 a piece, these lessons are much cheaper than any DVD or Tab book, and they are much more helpful.

My other major gripe with the Lesson Store is that its interface for actually buying a song is awful, considering this is the company that built the iTunes Store. Buying a song involves leaving the GarageBand application, getting redirected to a webpage that apparently asks you to verify your credit card number every time you buy a song, and then having your browser ask what application should be used to open the incoming file. Seriously Apple? I know this is probably something of an experiment for you, but this seems a little absurd given the streamlined process in iTunes.

Depending on how many artists sign on, the Lesson Store could do more than drive $5 song sales. The Mac could become the computer of choice for fledgling musicians (if it wasn’t already), driving the company’s PC market share even higher. For those about to rock, I salute you.

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When Apple hired away Mark Papermaster from IBM as its new senior vice president of hardware engineering for devices, IBM struck back with a lawsuit attempting to bar him from switching jobs. Citing his non-compete clause, IBM convinced a judge to order Papermaster to stop working at Apple until the dispute was resolved. IBM even brought Papermaster’s children into it.

Well, now he can finally go make future iPhones and iPods for Apple. The two companies have settled out of court. It kind of makes you wonder why companies even bother with non-compete clauses in employment contracts, especially when they are overly broad. More often than not, they are not worth the paper they are written on.

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I didn’t quite believe it when one of my most trusted sources told me that AOL was seriously considering selling Bebo, the social network it acquired for $850 million only a year ago. But I have now confirmed the rumor with three other sources intimately acquainted with the company. AOL is indeed quietly pondering a sale after watching Bebo perform much worse than it had hoped. That, combined with an advertising market buffeted by the waves of the economic downturn, means Bebo’s days at AOL could be numbered. Selling Bebo after only a year would be an astounding about-face. How did this happen?

[UPDATES: As a result of this story, more sources are coming forward. One I trust says Bebo is being pitched at $200 million. Update 2: Sources inside AOL are denying that it is exploring a sale. Bebo also denies a sale. Update 3: We have been in contact with corp communications at AOL, they say on the record: "There is no truth to this rumor." Four of our sources, including former and current Bebo insiders and a well-placed VC, say otherwise. Last December Gigam published "Is Time Warner Having Second Thoughts About Bebo?". I'm not saying Bebo is formally on the block, but I am saying that a sale is something under consideration].

My sources paint a picture of a startup which cleverly went about wooing advertising agencies, their clients, and - in the end - a media company that was prepared to jump on the social networking bandwagon during late 2007. There is absolutely no suggestion that anyone was dishonest or misrepresented the situation. But a year on it’s clear that AOL itself projected more growth onto Bebo that the network could deliver.

Here’s the scenario my sources paint as to why Bebo may now be for sale.

The story starts two years ago in January 15 2007. Bebo is riding a wave of growth and to control this and pitch the company in the right direction, founders Michael And Xochi Birch hire Joanna Shields, managing director of strategic partnerships for Google EMEA, as international President, based in London.

You have to cast your mind back to that era. Social networking was still a very new phenomenon, especially in the mainstream media. Facebook had only just opened up in the six months prior. Selling social networks as media platforms was a new field. What advertising agencies wanted was someone to explain to them, in simple terms, where the value lay. And that’s exactly what Shields did.

As one of my sources says: “Shields was extremely really good at getting the slightly dim media buying agencies to automatically tell their clients that they just had to be on Bebo.”

It would be fair to say that many advertising agencies then - and even to some extent even now - don’t have a clue about the Web.

A senior media planner at a major agency spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. She confirmed that Bebo’s 2007 offensive on the agencies was planned with military precision: “Among all the social networks that pitched to us at the time Bebo had the best packages and approach to sell to agencies. It was VERY easy to buy from them. Joanna’s approach was excellent. Her experience was evident. When they presented the packages it was presented as a one-stop shop.”

Media agencies found other social networks at the time far more complex to deal with. But “dealing with Bebo was very similar to traditional online buys. They got into agencies easily because of that. They just pitched exactly what you wanted to hear: audience, growth, traffic, costs, and branding/textlinks packages. Simple.”

By the time other social networks came calling at the agencies’ doors, Bebo had almost sown up the market.

But in particular, Bebo did very well targeting the completely Web-clueless TV planning agencies, largely responsible for buying TV shows, not running the ROI numbers on a PPC web campaign.

Bebo was pitched as a kind of new-era TV network. The creation of the Kate Modern series. The partnership with media companies. All of it was cleverly designed to pull fat, undiscriminating ad budgets out of TV agencies.

In fact, it’s almost arguable that hit Web shows like Kate Modern were created specifically to target these agencies and generate PR in the media, prior to the sale. As a media agency source tells me £100,000 is nothing in TV. “Communication planners have big budgets for this kind of TV-style buying - it’s easy to justify to clients.”

Bebo also found a way to spin off its shows to traditional TV. Bebo’s “Sofia’s Diary” drama, for instance, was acquired by Channel Five in April last year.

Thus, once the agencies had been coaxed into singing the praises of Bebo to clients, brands started to join in with the choir. The bandwagon started rolling. Bebo went on a media-savvy PR offensive the like of which has rarely been seen from a tech startup.

The rest as they say is history. Thinking Bebo was going to rank as “Facebook Mark 2″, AOL (the place where, as Jeff Jarvis famously put it, innovations go to die) Bebo was bought by AOL on March 13, 2008 for $850 million (£417m).

However, in 2009, in an advertising recession, all is not working so well. Digital agencies - not TV planners - have since found that Bebo has not been performing anywhere near the ROI level it was pitched at a year ago. Apparently the dwell time in particular is not as good as first thought, and the young demographic has not proved valuable.

Should Bebo be blamed? My agency contact thinks not. “I don’t blame Bebo as much as the agencies who don’t know how to engage with Bebo users, and made bad decisions. We are now moving away from a walled garden in social networks anyway. You don’t just have to be on one social network in the way we thought we did two years ago.”

They say: “Bebo was great at the time but no we are disappointed because socnets [social networks]are not about sending loads of traffic to a profile page. At the time it was fine, but people are now disappointed. You don’t get ‘friended’ much as a brand. It’s not just about being inside one socnet but about being everywhere.”

Furthermore, the fallout from the Bebo sale amongst the VCs who backed other social networks has also been tough to take. Although Balderton made $140m from the Bebo sale, I understand Index Ventures, which backed European social network Netlog to the tune of €5 million was not best pleased when Bebo was picked instead. Netlog has plenty of figures to match or even better Bebo, but it was Bebo that AOL picked, not Netlog. And my sources say it is largely because of the stellar performance Shields gave to the media agencies, and thus their brand clients.

And AOL has not handled Bebo well since either. Its integration of Bebo with the AIM/ICQ instant messaging platform has happened, but the advertising sales opportunity that this would imply has not been properly executed. The wider integration - Bebo’s Social InBox - only appeared in October December and is only now being sold into agencies. Meanwhile ComScore has Bebo at 22.6 million uniques worldwide in December, down from 25.8m in October.

Now, no one is saying that Bebo lied about its figures. It’s merely that the people who were singing its praises just prior to the sale - the agencies, the media and the brands - did not have any kind of handle on Bebo’s key metrics like dwell time, engagement, demographics, you name it. So effectively AOL bought it for its agency and brand relationships, not the metrics, thinking that the metrics would get sorted out by Bebo’s growth.

And let’s not forget that many thought this was a good buy for AOL. Fred Destin, a VC with Atlas, blogged that AOL was not overpaying in its acquisition of Bebo. At the time he blogged: “Bebo is well worth what it got bought for both because of its current scale and more importantly because of the incredible quality of its user engagement.” He estimated monthly revenue €6 million per month which could hit €50M per month if fully maximized, which could reach €300M. It’s fair to say those figures are not now going to be reached.

So, if Bebo is for sale, how much would it go for? My sources say AOL would be happy with two-times revenue which would be a huge reduction on the $850m AOL paid. But as one of my sources says “In those crazy days these were numbers that bared no relevance to revenue.”

A more obvious reason AOL is contemplating a Bebo sale is that it’s main business model has clearly switched to niche editorial sites, not social networks. Niche editorial is a direct driver for decent relationships with advertisers to offer close conversation with a core user group. It means you need to be really good at managing a portfolio of niches across a broad spectrum.

This month AOL launched MediaGlow, a formal business unit to organize the 75 sites in its publishing portfolio, which will grow to over 100 in the coming year.

The unit will join AOL’s digital-advertising offering and Platform-A and the AIM instant-messaging service, as the company’s third core business. AOL says its social-media unit will also be a part of that. But will Bebo?

My sources say not.

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If you want to track the most popular fan pages on Facebook, AllFacebook pushed out a new Facebook Pages Tracker last night that keeps stats on 611,213 fan pages on the social network. Only about 57,000 of those pages have more than 1,000 fans. The top five fan pages are:

1. Barack Obama (4,544,050 fans)
2. Coca-Cola 2,286,085 (fans)
3. Homer J Simpson (2,230,644 (fans)
4. Nutella (2,109,429 fans)
5. Pizza (2,050,050 fans)

Wow, Nutella has more fans than pizza. Who knew?

The tracker also shows the fastest-growing fan pages. A fan page dedicated to masturbation grew 11,900 percent in the last week and is the No. 8 fastest-growing page (see first chart below). Now we know why social networks are overtaking porn sites in popularity. (I didn’t link to it here, but that fan page on Facebook is NSFW).

The least popular fan pages (in terms of daily growth) are included as well. On top of that sad list is Buddy’s Shamrock Tavern in New Jersey.

Looking at the stats also shows how big events can add to your fanbase. The New York Times, for instance, had a big jump of 135,000 fans from the ad they ran on Facebook’s homepage during the Presidential Inauguration. (See second chart below).

AllFacebook also now tracks more than 50,000 applications on Facebook (see previous coverage).

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Mobile VoIP and IM service fring, one of the more popular mobile communication services around, is experimenting with porting a bunch of third-party apps to the fring client and will be announcing a number of those in the course of this year. Today, fring is launching a custom mobile-optimized Last.fm music radio add-on that brings a lot of the music recommendation service to the fring client but also integrates with the latter’s social and communication features.

Fring users (also referred to as fringsters) are now able to fire up streamed music radio channels, including their own Last.fm library, tag favourites, ban disliked tracks, view album artwork and basically take their Last.fm music account mobile. In addition to getting those features into the client, fringsters can also opt to view in real-time what their contacts are currently listening to, with the help of a friends list embedded into the Last.fm add-on.

Like Last.fm’s own Android application, which it introduced just last week, the add-on can be run in the background enabling users to listen to streamed music channels while they’re using other fring features.

Third parties can built add-ons on top of fring using its API, for which you can find more information here.

The Israeli company, which recently laid off 20% of its workforce but continues to surge with on average 400,000 new downloads per month, has made it public that they’ve raised 3 rounds of financing so far, although they’re only disclosing two rounds of funding amounting up to $13 million for now. Although they’ve recently started showing ads to mobile users, the jury is still out if there’s enough sustainability in the business model for the service to keep them alive.

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With yesterday’s release of IE8 RC, I was reminded of an annoyance my partner had when I first installed Google Chrome because she was unable to use her Hotmail (short for the official name Windows Live Hotmail and not to be confused with Windows Live Mail) account properly using the new browser. I checked if the e-mail service - among the most popular webmail services in the world - was working better now that Chrome is a couple of months old, out of beta and - admittedly slowly - taking bits of market share on a daily basis.

No such luck. Apparently, with Microsoft’s latest upgrade of the Windows Live Mail service, things got really broken, causing users to be unable to write, reply to or forward e-mail messages. Evidently, these are essential functionalities that shouldn’t take a company of that size to fix within a day or two. So why doesn’t it still work after weeks and weeks of complaints (see here also) by Google Chrome users who still make use of their old Hotmail accounts for sending and forwarding messages to their friends?

How many engineers and how much time does it really take to fix this?

And yes, there’s a workaround by making Hotmail think you’re using a compatible browser, but no, that’s not an adequate solution. And I don’t believe this is proof that Microsoft is deliberately refraining Chrome users to use Hotmail either, it’s just about making it clear they’re not officially supporting the browser yet.

I asked Microsoft for an official stance on this lingering problem, and they swiftly got back to me, pointing out that Windows Live Mail works properly with a variety of browsers and platforms (good), but not the way it should with Chrome (bad) and that they’re “actively working on making the service compatible with other PC browsers and they’ll let me know when they have more to share” (ugly).

For the record: this isn’t a conspiracy theory. I’m confident Microsoft wants to make Windows Live Hotmail work for Google Chrome users, but my gripe is that they’re dreadfully slow to respond to complaints about a service that’s quite essential to their whole online strategy.

Meanwhile, Gmail is steadily rising and on its way to overtake Windows Live Hotmail.

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SkyGrid, a new aggregation startup that is preparing to launch a free version of its product, has an angry ex-employee on its hands named Sara Parker.

Parker, a “Process and Documentation Specialist” at the company from August 2008 to December 2008 according to her LinkedIn Profile, says via Twitter that “after discovering baaad things about management team, i gave notice.” The next day, she says, she was fired without severance.

Some of the Twitter messages she wrote are more of a rant than anything. But she does trash her boss, the VP Engineering, as a “notoriously poor communicator” and that his “challenges directly interfered with the quality of the product.”

Normally when we see this stuff, we contact the company and hear a different side of the story. This time, though, the company didn’t return our request for comment, but shortly afterward Parker’s Twitter account went private.

We’re not too concerned about the specifics of Parker’s situation, but this may be a sign that the upcoming product isn’t what it could have been, or that it is being delayed. If anyone has details, let us know.

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Mobile video service Kyte is trying hard these days to please its biggest (paying) customers: music labels and their artists, primarily. Performers such as 50 Cent and John Legend use Kyte to record behind-the-scenes moments on their cell phones and then share them over the web immediately with their fans. To help its customers manage their mobile video channels just as they would any other Web property, Kyte will introduce a new dashboard and management console on Tuesday at a conference in Las Vegas.

The Kyte Dashboard is a bit like Google Analytics for cell-phone video. It is filled with charts showing the number of views for each show, ad impressions, bandwidth usage, most watched shows, and the sites where the embeddable videos are watched the most.

A content view lets users see the individual video lineup for each upcoming show and change it aroubd by dragging and dropping . And the moderation tab lets users accept or reject new videos into their channel from their audience.

Below are screenshots:

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Fox Interactive Media is eliminating more than just free lunches. News Corp’s digital arm is trimming nearly 100 jobs across several business units, including Photobucket, MySpace, Scout Media, Rotten Tomatoes, and corporate. The total comes to a little under 5 percent of FIM’s domestic U.S. workforce, and about 3 percent of its global workforce of 2,900. We have added the amount to our Layoff Tracker.

Although MySpace employs 1,600 of those workers, a check with sources close to FIM suggests that the vast majority of job cuts (80 to 90 percent) are happening elsewhere. One of the hardest hit business units is Photobucket, where 22 people are losing their jobs. The corporate offices are also absorbing a substantial portion of the layoffs.

In an official statement, FIM acknowledges:

Several of the groups within FIM are eliminating some jobs and repurposing others. It is important to note that we continue to hire in many areas.

Separately, a spokesperson for MySpace notes that, on a net basis, MySpace plans on ending its fiscal year with more people than it currently employs. And other sources confirm that MySpace is still hiring in key positions such as business development, whereas the other FIM business units are not hiring as much or have actual hiring freezes.

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Cubic Telecom, the TechCrunch40 company behind the traveler-friendly SIM card MAXroam, has partnered with Dopplr to sell the card through its online store. The Dopplr-branded SIM card will be available for a reduced rate of €45 (down five euro from its normal price).

Both companies have a strong travel focus: Cubic Telecom’s MAXroam allows users to use their unlocked cell phones in over 180 countries, saving around 60-80% on roaming charges. Dopplr offers a social network for travelers looking to meet up with their friends. The site will use your travel schedule to determine when you’ll be in the same area as a friend, and then help you set up a get-together.

While the new partnership may not sound like much, this is actually a big win for MAXroam, which likely has a hard time connecting with business travelers (try doing a Google search for ‘cheap SIM travel’ - there are countless competitors, though most of them work differently). Dopplr’s userbase consists largely of frequent travelers who are likely to show interest in the special SIM cards. They still might be turned off by the specifics of MAXroam’s program (the site offers video tutorials, but it can be a little confusing), but the prospect of saving big bucks is a strong motivator.

We should note that Offbeat Guides, which we covered last night, also has a partnership with Dopplr and is available on the Dopplr store.

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Perhaps it’s because I’m stuck in a Munich hotel with the flu, but this most recent round of rumors about Steve Jobs undergoing surgery today is annoying me more than normal. The entire report is based on something someone heard someone else say at a party. That kind of stuff is fine when it’s a funding rumor and the flimsiness of it is disclosed. But we’re talking about someone’s very personal life here - someone who has repeatedly requested privacy. The fact that CNET, taking a few moments away from their Pulitzer Prize winning effort to determine the most hated person on the Internet, jumped on this so eagerly is particularly disappointing.

Our own source, who is significantly more believable than some person at some party, says Jobs is in the office today in meetings and most definitely not undergoing surgery. Does that mean he might go under the knife tomorrow instead? Do we really need to know?

Let Steve Jobs do his job and live his life. Just because you can write a story doesn’t mean you have to.

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While Internet slang and abbreviations have become second nature for some technophiles, many of us have trouble converting our words into the pseudo-gibberish sometimes required to make long messages fit into the 140 character limit set by Twitter. 140it, a new service put together over the weekend by the guys behind Yipit, is looking to help. The site will instantly convert whole sentences into condensed text, making common substitutions (like ‘r’ instead of ‘are’), using bit.ly to shorten links, and swapping company names for their StockTwits symbol. The service does its best to retain coherence, cutting extra spaces first and only cutting vowels as a last resort, according to one of its founders.

While there are a few other services like TweetShrink and Twonvert that do the same thing, those sites require you to visit their homepages - something that is easy to forget and usually more trouble than it’s worth. 140it offers a bookmarklet that will immediately make the conversion as you enter your Tweet on the Twitter homepage (see the video below for a demo).

I personally detest using abbreviations unless they’re absolutely necessary (they make my head hurt). But in those cases when I just can’t make everything fit, 140it will come in handy.

140it Demo from Vinicius Vacanti on Vimeo.

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The Mozilla Foundation is putting its weight behind an effort to create an open video format on the Web. It is doing this by giving $100,000 in grant money, to be administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, towards the development and support of Theora, an open-source video codec. More importantly, it is also building support into the Firefox Web browser for both Theora and Vorbis, an open source audio codec.

Many other video codecs and encoders require licensing fees or come with restrictions. Mozilla hopes to change this over time. Although I suspect the Theora video codec is inferior to other technologies, as long as it can improve over time, it could eventually become a serious contender to MPEG-4 or Windows Media Video (WMV).

Evangelist Christopher Blizzard explains why Mozilla is backing open video in a long and windy post:

Although videos are available on the web via sites like youtube, they don’t share the same democratized characteristics that have made the web vibrant and distributed. And it shows. That centralization has created some interesting problems that have symptoms like censorship via abuse of the DMCA and an overly-concentrated audience on a few sites that have the resources and technology to host video. I believe that problems like the ones we see with youtube are a symptom of the larger problem of the lack of decentralization and competition in video technology - very different than where the rest of the web is today.

In my mind there are two things that help drive that kind of decentralization:

* You should be able to easily understand how something moves from a computer-readable format to something that is presented to a user. For example, turning HTML into a document, turning a JPEG file into a picture on the screen or using HTTP to download a file.
* You must be able to implement and deliver that technology without requiring anyone’s permission or license. In reality this means that it should be available on a royalty-free basis and without encumbered documentation.

In the video world, there are some formats that fit the first quality: Some formats are documented, understood and even widely deployed. But more often than not they are subject to to per-unit royalties, large up-front fees and creating content in those formats (the encoders) are often so expensive as to be prohibitive to all but only the deepest-pocketed corporations or well-funded startups. And there are very few video formats that meet the second. This is not the kind of decentralization that made the web thrive. It is quite the opposite.

Beyond the compression algorithms, what is especially exciting about Theora is that as an open-source project it might be easier for it to eventually evolve into a format that can more easily interact directly with other documents and data types on the Web. Videos should include more hyperlinks, for instance, and become part of the very fabric of the Web rather than an exception, which is still how it is treated today.

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German mind mapping application builder MeisterLabs, the startup behind brainstorm & planning tool MindMeister, has acquired MindMaker, to our knowledge the third iPhone application to get sold after the sale of Where To and Tapulous buying Tweetsville.

MindMaker, on sale for €3.99 (or $4.99), allows you to structure your ideas and concepts visually using a fairly intuitive program even when you’re on the go. The app is relatively limited in functionality but offers an experience that suits Apple’s mobile phone perfectly. You can find a good review of the app over here.

Seems like a match made in heaven, with MindMeister being one of the most authorative and open collaborative mind mapping tools available on the web today but lacking an equally decent mobile version. Ouriel Ohayon, our TechCrunch France editor, was first to report the acquisition news on his blog and has actually tested MindMeister for one of his own (top secret) projects; he calls it a “a masterpiece of execution at any single level”. You can sign up for a basic version free of charge, or pay for more robust editions ranging from $4 to $15 per month.

MindMeister, backed by an undisclosed amount of angel funding, is not sharing the price it paid for the iPhone application, but I concur with Ouriel who thinks the deal was small in size yet bodes well for the future of truly compelling iPhone apps developed by independent developers.

If you’re interested in checking out more mind mapping tools, you might want to take a closer look at Mindomo and MindJet, too.

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After watching your share of this year’s Oscar nominees, you might find yourself following the time-honored tradition of renting every tangentially related film in the hopes of finding something else just as good. Type in Slumdog Millionaire or The Wrestler, and Netflix will offer up recommendations that are “more like this.” But if you are looking for quirkier recommendations, the kind that you’d find at your local independent video store, then head on over to Clerkdogs. The human-curated movie recommendation site has an OscarMatch feature that suggests 400 films similar to this year’s crop of Oscar nominees.

On Netflix, if you are looking for movies that are like The Wrestler, for instance, it comes up with Requiem For a Dream (same director), Slums of Beverly Hills, Sideways, and Sin City (also starred Mickey Rourke). On Clerkdogs, it comes up with a bunch of down-on-their-luck fighter films: Raging Bull, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and Fat City, a 1972 boxing movie described as “equally downbeat.” The Mickey Rourke pick is the classic Barfly, which seems more appropriate, and the sleeper pick is a 2008 movie called Ballast, a movie about a poor family in Mississippi described as having a “similar style” as The Wrestler. I doubt any computerized recommendation engine would make that match unless it saw an overlap in people who rented both movies.

Take a look at the other nominees and you’ll find the same type of serendipitous recommendations. For Slumdog Millionaire , you get Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay! Those make more sense to me than Netflix’s suggestions of Little Miss Sunshine, Trainspotting, and Thank You For Smoking. I’m not sure Clerkdogs’ OscarMatch always comes up with better recommendations, but it does come up with ones you won’t find elsewhere.

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Microsoft has just pushed live its Release Candidate for Internet Explorer 8, the latest update to the world’s most widely used web browser. You can download it here. Unfortunately the release is only for Windows Vista, XP, and Server - if you’re trying out Windows 7 you’ll have to wait for the next OS update to try out the RC.

The new version, which comes after two public beta releases, is now considered “platform complete” - the product is “effectively complete and done” writes IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch. Unless there are major critical issues that arise, the final version of the browser should be identical. Other changes between Beta 2 and the Release Candidate include improved reliability, performance, and compatibility, as well as ‘clickjacking‘ protection.

In his blog post detailing the release, Hachamovitch writes that IE8 is focused on “how people really use the web”, explaining that while many of the people who are interested in Release Candidates and technology blogs may be interested in details and performance issues, most people are concerned with usability and an intuitive experience.

We sat down with Hachamovitch earlier this month and he showed us a number of the new features that are being incorporated into IE8 to reflect this emphasis on usability (note that these have been known about for some time, but may not be common knowledge for those who don’t follow IE’s beta schedule). Among my favorite is the ability to see a list of your recently closed tabs whenever you open a browser window, which makes it easy to reopen pages that you may have accidentally closed without having to resort to your web history. Also new are Accelerators, which let you act on snippits of text using shortcuts found under the right-click menu (for example, you could right click on an address and look it up on Live Maps).

And of course, the browser’s new “porn mode” (dubbed InPrivate), which lets users browse the web without having to worry about leaving any history or cookies behind. Apple’s Safari offers a similar feature, though I like the execution of InPrivate better - it has strong visual indicators to let you know when you’re in the private mode, while Safari just has a check mark under a menu listing.

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Sometimes the easiest way to convey an argument is with a diagram. UK-startup Team Rubber has come out with a nifty embeddable widget called aMap that lets you make a diagram of any argument with supporting logic in an interactive mindmap. The widget lets you flit from one point to another.

For instance, in the aMap below an argument is made that Apple will flourish without Steve Jobs (because he “turned his personality traits into business processes” and Pixar does fine without him). You can argue anything. Blog or Twitter? Cat or Dog? (see below).

You can also reply to make a counterargument (”Apple Will Be Set Adrift Without A Strong Leader”). But here is where aMap breaks down. Instead of incorporating the reply into the original mindmap, it creates a new one at a new URL, with a link below the original one in the list of replies. That will just encourage forking arguments. It would also be better if you could vote the best aMaps up.

Right now, aMap only lets users map out their own arguments rather than see the relationships between arguments, although that is a direction the company may go in the future. It is also planning to add geo-data to map out arguments around the world. Team Rubber plans to showcase its themed maps at the SXSW conference this year.

The company is using these widgets to sell printed aMaps. Someone please make an aMap explaining why relying on print revenues may be quaint, but is not a good idea.

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Mobile World Congress spins up in a couple of weeks time but like any good event, the real action takes place “Off Broadway” at the fringe events. And that’s not just because TechCrunch is running a meetup event: TechCrunchTalk Mobile 2.0. In addition one of the other ones this year is The Mobile Peer Awards from the Mobile Monday global non-profit network. They have picked their finalists for the awards from a list which started at 162, went to 42 and is now down to the final 20. It’s necessarily from a wide cross-section of countries because each MM chapter picks ‘their’ winner. Hence why there is only one finalist from Silicon Valley - Soonr - but that means you also get to hear about Aradiom from a place like Istanbul, among others. Some of the trends are clear: location-based services, events, social networking, producivity apps, app stores, enterprise and VOIP. The full list of finalists appears after the jump.

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TripIt, the helpful travel site that lets you generate an itinerary by simply forwarding the service your Email confirmations from hotels and airlines, has opened up an API for outside developers. The API will give third party applications access to TripIt’s itinerary sysytem, which now accepts data from 350 travel sites. Developers can find all the details for joining the program here.

A number of applications have already used the API to implement new features. Expensd, an online service that helps business travelers manage their expenses, will use TripIt to automatically import your transit and hotel expenses. Popular iPhone application FlightTrack will use TripIt to automatically look up your flights to see if they’re on time. And Where I’ve Been, a social network application that plots your travels on a map for your friends to see, will use the API to automatically look up your destinations. Other potential uses for the API include an ‘Add To TripIt’ button that would allow travel sites to transmit your booking data to TripIt so you won’t have to forward your confirmation Email.

TripIt is a great service, especially for frequent travelers (it has been on Michael’s list of products he can’t live without for two years running). I’m excited to see what developers can come up with - hopefully some major travel booking sites will get a clue too, and start offering that ‘add to TripIt’ button so we can skip the Email forwarding.

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YouTube has always been infamous for the amount of useless comments that videos hosted on the site tend to generate (which is not unusual when it comes to user-generated services that appeal to a massive audience). But those with comment remorse now at least have the option of deleting their dumb and irrelevant responses in just a heartbeat.

YouTube users can now go back and delete any comment they have published in the past by clicking a new button that appears in the “Text Comments” section below the video. Unfortunately, you can only delete your own comments.

To all YouTube users who are reading: please schedule a couple of hours to do this. It will make the world a better place, just a little.

On a related note: Mahalo engineer Christopher Finke has created a Firefox extension called YouTube Comment Snob that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads.

Here’s to hoping the extension will soon prove obsolete.

(Cartoon from the awesome xkcd)

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Calcalist is reporting (Hebrew only) that Modu has brought in another $7M in funding courtesy of Qualcomm which as part of the agreement will also manufacture the Modu “core”.

Modu has had a whirlwind of a year, first debuting to much fanfare at last year’s Mobile World Congress, where we had a chance to sit with the company’s CEO, Dov Moran, for a 1-on-1 for a demo. The company then went on to raise a whopping $100M round. Then in November Modu announced a 33%, 88-employee downsizing in November.

Clearly things are not all rosy at Modu, but the company now has some more cash to pursue its very risky mobile play. If anyone has any further info, please post it in the comments below.

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You’d think that someone who sells tshirts with slogans like “It’s not gay if you beat them up afterwards” and “Arrest Black Babies Before They Become Criminals” would not only be prepared for a tidal wave of hate email, but would be able to handle it as well. Some people just won’t find these shirts funny, or understand the social messaging behind it.

But that doesn’t appear to be the case. After 8 years, the owner of T-Shirt Hell, Sunshine Megatron (formerly Aaron Landau Schwarz according to Wikipedia), says he is shutting down the site on February 10, 2009:

I’m done. I’m finished. I can’t take the stupidity anymore, so I’m leaving and I’m taking my website with me. As of Tuesday, Feb 10, 2009, T-Shirt Hell will be no more.

No, I’m not selling out to some douchebag corporate entity. No, we’re not being sued by any of the over 40 companies that have sent us cease and desists over the years. No, I’m not going to jail (yet) and no, it’s not because of the economy. Although, the recent dip in sales certainly does make the idea easier to accept, even though we still sell over 3000 shirts a week.

I started this company in June of 2001, nearly 8 years ago, with the intention of producing the best satirical, the most controversial, the funniest t-shirts on the internet. Generally speaking, I feel I’ve accomplished that and am satisfied with what we’ve put out. I made a shitload of dough along the way. I’ve done cocaine off the better body parts of supermodels. I’ve even raped and killed a mountain panda in the hills of Shaanxi. But these perks are besides the point.

I just don’t feel like dealing with idiots anymore. I’ll give you an example of the kind of misguided morons we deal with on a regular basis at T-Shirt Hell. We released a new shirt a couple weeks ago that says “It’s not gay if you beat them up afterwards”. I will not explain the irony or the social commentary of the slogan because anyone with half a brain should be able to handle that on their own. Problem is, we’ve been besieged with emails from angry people complaining about the “fact” that the shirt is hate speech or that we’re promoting gay bashing and should take it down immediately.

Comments like:

Now, I can’t say I’m surprised we’re getting hate mail from people who have nothing better to do than to start half-assed campaigns because of their lazy, just enough passion for an email, ideals towards a misguided cause. It happened when we did our first really controversial shirt, “The School Shootings Tour”, it happened when we did our “What About All The Good Things Hitler Did” shirt, it happened when we did our “Arrest Black Babies Before They Become Criminals” shirt (boy did it happen then). It used to happen all the time when we did more social commentary and didn’t give a fuck about what anyone thought and did shirts that did not leave anyone out. Unfortunately, as a concern for the safety of my employees, we don’t push the envelope as much anymore…and I can’t say I feel good about having caved in.

Anyway, rather than cater to the masses, I’m just going to stop making shirts. It’s not enjoyable anymore and I have enough money to move on to something more rewarding. Maybe I’ll start my own hooker farm or maybe I’ll practice sleeping. Whatever I decide to do, it will be better than this.

Attention any venture capitalists or independent investors/business assholes who are about to inquire about purchasing T-Shirt Hell. Don’t. You won’t do the company justice and I won’t take that chance. I’m putting it to sleep. It’s over.

That’s right, I’m crazy. I’m pulling the plug on a company I could have sold for millions. Why in the fucking world would I do something so stupid? Because I can. I don’t care about money. This is the way I’ve always done things…my way.

So, to all the kickass motherfuckers who supported us and REALLY got what we were trying to do, thank you (no, not you, you racist idiots who thought we actually had racist intentions and no, not you, you dumb as a stump fucks who just think any shirt with the word “fuck” on it is as right as rain). Thanks to all the people who contributed to my vice fund and at the same time helped make a funny statement about the world today.

As a final farewell, I’m going to bring back some of the top selling Worse Than Hell shirts as a fuck you to those who forced me to remove them. To those who are offended by them and to those who think I’m racist, promoting rape, a nazi, homophobic or just the world’s biggest asshole…well, at least you think I’m something, which means I’ve achieved what I wanted.

Thanks to Gary, Mika, Jacob, Greg, Bob, the black lady who writes our newsletter, and to everyone else who was part of T-Shirt Hell. Time to move on to even greater things. I’ll miss you (by miss, I mean, it’s going to suck not being able to give you my excellent reach arounds when you least expect them).

Fuck you,

-Sunshine Megatron

All I can say is that I now have a great template to use when we eventually shut down TechCrunch. Thanks for the tip, Steve.

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When technology focused video blog WebbAlert, hosted by the lovely Morgan Webb, launched in August 2007, we said it could be a winner. Almost a year and half further down the road, we have to come back on that now that Webb is shutting the vlog down.

Webb will be focusing her efforts on her TV show X-Play, which has expanded to five weekly episodes instead of three, and “make a little time for life itself”.

I really appreciate all the support you’ve shown me over the past year and a half, and I’ve had a great time making WebbAlert and sharing my love of technology. When I started WebbAlert, my TV show X-Play only taped three episodes a week so I had the time to dedicate my video blog. At the beginning of the year, X-Play expanded to five episodes, and the last year has been a lot of work trying to keep up with both projects. I finally decided that I need to make a little time for other opportunities, as well as make a little time for life itself. Thanks for understanding and I hope to bring you a number of new projects in the future!

I’ve embedded the very first and last WebbAlert video below for your nostalgic viewing pleasure.

WebbAlert was one of the few podcasts I ever subscribed too, although I didn’t watch every episode religiously and it would be a stretch to say I’ll actually miss it.

How about you?

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Open source data integration software maker Talend has raised $12 million in Series C financing from Balderton Capital and previous investor AGF Private Equity. Balderton’s Bernard Liautaud is joining their Board of Directors.

The company says its flagship product, Talend Open Studio (demo video), has seen over 3.3 million downloads so far, and Talend boasts about having 400 paying customers (an increase of more than 300 percent over the past 12 months) and over 100 partners. Talend intends to use the funds (which according to the blog post announcing the deal, were “no small feat” to raise in these economic times) to expand global operations into the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific, and introduce a number of new products in the course of this year.

Talend had previously raised two rounds of funding, so this investment brings its total financing to close to $20 million.

Talend is not the only venture-backed company trying to disrupt the data integration software market with an open-source product; SnapLogic has raised over $2.5 million for a similar service.

London-based Balderton Capital has done a couple of notable investments so far, such as Bebo (the social networking site that was sold to AOL for $850m) and MySQL (the open-source database business, sold to Sun for $1 billion). This is their first investment since they raised a new fund to the tune of $430 million two weeks ago.

(Thanks to Marc Brandsma for the tip)

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Offbeat Guides, the travel site launched last summer by Technorati founder Dave Sifry, has launched a new affiliate program. Affiliates will make an 8% commission on every purchase driven from their sites; to help get the program started, Offbeat Guides is increasing this commission to 15% through June 30th for affiliates that sign up by January 31st. To join the affiliate program, you can fill out an application here.

Offbeat Guides are similar to traditional books like Lonely Planet or Frommers, but are flexible and customizable because they’re built on the fly. After prompting users for their destination and the dates they’ll be visiting, the site scours the web, using a variety of sources to generate travel guides for nearly any city (it also supports regions). The site also has a leg up on traditional guides because it can include time-sensitive information like event listings and find activities based on your interests. Guides can be previewed in the browser for free, downloaded as a PDF for $10, or printed into a full-color guide and shipped within a few days for $25.

To mark the launch of the new affiliate program, Offbeat Guides is offering $10 off printed guides and free PDF guides to the first 50 TechCrunch readers who enter the promo code ‘techcrunch10off’.

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ChaCha, the human-powered answers service we’ve written about quite a bit here on TechCrunch, is raising a Series C round of $30 million, of which close to $11 million has already been secured according to a regulatory filing, reports peHUB. The filing doesn’t list any new shareholders.

The company raised $6 million in Series A financing exactly two years ago from Jeff Bezos and Bezos Expeditions, followed by a $10 million round by Morton Meyerson and 21st Century Technology Fund. If ChaCha closes the $30 million Series C round, the total capital invested in the company will amount up to a whopping $46 million.

In case you’ve never heard of ChaCha, it’s essentially a search engine that lets users ask questions to a real person, called a “search guide”, via a chat interface both on the web and mobile. We’ve called it a dumb idea in the past, and unscalable on numerous occasions, but it’s not the only startup that’s taking a crack at a human-powered Q&A service (Mahalo launched a similar service last month, Answerly is another one).

We’ve reached out to the company to confirm that they’re raising more venture capital, as well as the names of the investors.

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ChaCha, the human-powered answers service we’ve written about quite a bit here on TechCrunch, is raising a Series C round of $30 million, of which close to $11 million has already been secured according to a regulatory filing, reports peHUB. The filing doesn’t list any new shareholders.

Update: we exchanged e-mails with a company representative, who informed us that this is actually “old news” and that the Series C round of $30 million has actually closed a couple of months ago.

The company raised $6 million in Series A financing exactly two years ago from Jeff Bezos and Bezos Expeditions, followed by a $10 million round by Morton Meyerson and 21st Century Technology Fund. If ChaCha closes the $30 million Series C round (see update above), the total capital invested in the company will amount up to a whopping $46 million.

In case you’ve never heard of ChaCha, it’s essentially a search engine that lets users ask questions to a real person, called a “search guide”, via the web, text message or a mobile website (answers are only provided by mobile). We’ve called it a dumb idea in the past, and unscalable on numerous occasions, but it’s not the only startup that’s taking a crack at a human-powered Q&A service (Mahalo launched a similar service last month, Answerly is another one).

We’ve reached out to the company to confirm that they’re raising more venture capital, as well as the names of the investors. (see update above)

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Davos Video Submission - Rebecca M.

The separate YouTube and MySpace competitions to send one very lucky videoblogger to the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland are over.

Rebecca McQuigg from Los Angeles was chosen to represent the MySpace community. 24 year old Pablo Camacho from Bogotá, Colombia chosen to represent the YouTube community. Their video submissions are embedded above.

Rebecca and Pablo receive an all expense paid trip to the conference, where they will video blog their experience.

These are brilliant promotions by the two companies. MySpace is new to the event this year, but YouTube’s Davos room at last year’s event was the place to be.

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This guest post is written by Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and the cofounder of Revision3 and Pownce. Kevin, who has over 88,000 followers on Twitter (making him the second most followed after President Obama), also “bloggs” at kevinrose.com. He is an investor in Twitter.

Ten Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers:

1. Explain to your followers what retweeting is and encourage them to retweet your links. Retweeting pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, resulting in clicks back to your profile. Track your retweets using retweetist.
2. Fill out your bio. Your latest tweets and @replies don’t mean much to someone that doesn’t know you. Your bio is the only place you have to tell people who you are. Also, your bio is displayed on Twitter’s Suggested Users page. Leaving it blank or non-descriptive doesn’t encourage people to add you.
3. As @garyvee says, “link it up.” Put links to your Twitter profile everywhere. Link it on your Digg, LinkedIn, Facebook, blog, email signature, and everywhere else you live online. Also, check out the great feedburner-like badges from TwitterCounter for your blog.
4. Tweet about your passions in life and #hash tag them. Quality content coupled with an easy way to find it never fails. If others enjoy your content, they’ll add you. Learn more about #hash tagging here.
5. Bring your twitter account into the physical world. Every time I give a talk, speak on a panel, shoot a podcast, present slides, or hand out business cards, I figure out a way to broadcast or display my twitter account.
6. Take pictures. Pictures are heavily retweeted/spread around. This one from US Airways Flight 1549 has been viewed 350,000+ times. For mobile pics use iPhone apps such as Tweetie or Twitterific, both which support on the go uploading.
7. Start a contest. @jasoncalacanis offered a free macbook air if he reached the #1 most followed spot. That never happened, but Jason added thousands of followers…brilliant.
8. Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet. Pay attention to the type of content they sent out and how they address their audiences.
9. Reply to/get involved in #hash tag memes. search.twitter.com lists the hot ‘trending topics. Look for the #hash topics and jump in on the conversation (see #4 for links to #hash instructions).
10. Track your results. TwitterCounter will show you how many new users you’re adding per day and Qwitter will email you when someone unfollows you after a tweet.

If you enjoy this content, add me at twitter.com/kevinrose, thank you.

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This is only one data point. But at least the Wikipedia entry on TechCrunch doesn’t state that we sell corn and oat cereal, and it wasn’t written by someone whose bio simply reads “Troll“. Other than that, it’s pretty accurate.

So much for units of knowledge.

Update: Googler Matt Cutts weighs in on the discussion of Knol’s quality, saying that the service is doing fine and that it’s still aspiring to “contain high-quality, authoritative, very informative articles”. Ok then.

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It’s not the first social network that caters to wealthy people only, and it won’t be the last: Affluence is the latest company to take a crack at building a community site exclusively for the rich and famous among us instead of the petty riff-raff that make up the bulk of internet users.

Unlike its most famous competitor aSmallWorld (there’s also Diamond Lounge and Qube), Affluence doesn’t require you to be invited in order to be eligible to become a member. No, you can simply register, free of charge. That is, if you can demonstrate you have a minimum household net worth of $3 million or a minimum annual household income of $300,000. Or if you have 5 other people who qualify tell Affluence that you are upper class enough to become a member of the virtual country club; that should do the trick as well.

Once you get into the network, Affluence promises to make your wealthy lifestyle even better, offering you access to a dedicated “Concierge” who will assist you in spending your money on the right luxury hotels, restaurants and nightclubs, make sure you attend the most exclusive parties and events across the globe, and gives you access to a proprietary luxury print magazine called Affluence Magazine. It’s a social network, so you also get to mingle with other millionaires and billionaires. I didn’t get in, but I’m pretty sure you can’t attack other socially elite people with virtual zombies (I’m still digging for confirmation on that).

All kidding aside, I’m convinced there’s a genuine need for this type of service, and ultimately it’s the personal experience of the members that counts. Some day, I hope to tell you what that personal experience feels like. Until then, you can take a look at the screenshot below, which shows the profile of Affluence’s President and CEO Scott Mitchell.

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We’ve already seen that Twitter is turning into a source of breaking news. But it’s also clearly turning into a way of organizing social movements extremely quickly. “Tweetup” (as in a meetup facilitated by Twitter) has passed into common parlance amongst regular users but now the concept has spawned a global event for charity which will involve nearly 50 U.S. cities among over 100 worldwide, including Beijing, Tel Aviv and Beirut. Twestival, on Thursday 12 February, will happen over a 24 hour period in a kind of tweetathon - except it is Twitter-organised meetups that people will be hitting, not phone lines. And the whole thing came together over Twitter inside 24 hours.

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While 2008 was Twitter’s hockey-stick year, Twitter’s little brother FriendFeed is also beginning to show hockey-stick tendencies in its growth. According to comScore, FriendFeed attracted 950,000 unique visitors worldwide in December. That’s a tenfold increase since June, when comScore counted only 93,000 unique visitors worldwide (and nearly double since September, when it was 550,000).

Twitter.com, by comparison, which is raising money at a $250 million valuation, has four times as many visitors (4.35 million worldwide in December). While recently there was some debate about whether Twitter has passed Digg, the real question might be whether FriendFeed can ever catch up to Twitter.

At the very least, these numbers suggest that FriendFeed has global appeal. ComScore counts only 172,000 unique U.S. visitors in December.

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While 2008 was Twitter’s hockey-stick year, Twitter’s little brother FriendFeed is also beginning to show hockey-stick tendencies in its growth. According to comScore, FriendFeed attracted 950,000 unique visitors worldwide in December. That’s a tenfold increase since June, when comScore counted only 93,000 unique visitors worldwide (and nearly double since September, when it was 550,000).

Twitter.com, by comparison, which is raising money at a $250 million valuation, has four times as many visitors (4.35 million worldwide in December). While recently there was some debate about whether Twitter has passed Digg, the real question might be whether FriendFeed can ever catch up to Twitter.

At the very least, these numbers suggest that FriendFeed has global appeal. ComScore counts only 172,000 unique U.S. visitors in December.

Update: Two counterarguments.

1. A large percentage of the content on FriendFeed are merely repostings from Twitter (see comments). So you could argue, and many do, that FriendFeed is simply riding on the coattails of Twitter and will never actually catch up.

2. This comScore data merely measures unique visitors and does not necessarily correlate with the number of users on FriendFeed. If FriendFeed gets a lot of its traffic from Google and other search engines, for instance, then those visitors would not necessarily be registered users (although they might become users once they discover the site).

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A good analogy is the trial antivirus software that is bundled with computer. Imagine if networking hardware came with bundled security features you could activate for a trial and subscribe to remotely, rather than being a new single function box you had to buy just for this purpose.

A good analogy is the trial antivirus software that is bundled with computer. Imagine if networking hardware came with bundled security features you could activate for a trial and subscribe to remotely, rather than being a new single function box you had to buy just for this purpose.

Twitter, which just recently turned down a half billion dollar acquisition offer from Facebook (albeit to be paid mostly with Facebook stock), is dipping back into the venture capital market, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. They’ve signed a term sheet with at least one venture fund to raise a new round at a $250 million valuation. We are still gathering information on how much they’re raising and from whom.

It’s likely they’ll raise more than the $20 million in capital they’ve taken in over two previous rounds. Their last round, raised in June 2008, was a $15 million raise from new investors Spark Capital and Bezos Expeditions. Union Square Ventures and Digital Garage increased their previous investment.

Rumor is Twitter hit up more than a few venture firms to pitch the $250 million valuation, and got more than one “no.” But someone’s bit, perhaps encouraged by Twitter’s breakneck growth and the interest from Facebook. That means Twitter gets a new cash injection and time to figure out its business model at an even more leisurely pace.

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Wall Street Journal editor Julia Angwin’s tell-all book about MySpace is set for official publication on March 17, 2009. We’ve got our hands on a draft of the 268 page book. Some of the more interesting stories are below (you can pre-order it here).

The book, which is really being published a year too late, goes into excruciating detail about the history of MySpace, its founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, and others involved in the business. Most of the details are already public knowledge, but there are a handful of facts that I didn’t previously know about. Or mere rumors that Angwin presents as facts.

MySpace is quick to point out that they had no involvement in the book at all. All they’re officially saying is “This book received zero participation, zero access, and zero fact-checking from MySpace.” It’s clear from the tone of the book that Angwin’s sources are primarily or solely people who’ve left the company, many of whom have a bone to pick with MySpace or parent company News Corp.

The first half of the book highlights some of the shady practices of the MySpace founders in the early days. The site launched at 5:37 p.m. on August 15, 2003 on a lark - DeWolfe was looking for a new business to replace revenue from ResponseBase, an advertising company that is alternately described as peddling spyware and spam. The original idea was to copy Friendster but let users create any online persona they chose (Friendster was deleting fake profiles as fast as they could). That freedom, combined with reasonable load times on MySpace (1-2 seconds v. 20 seconds for Friendster), allowed the nascent site to get a foothold that it is yet to relinquish. These days, Friendster has been pushed to Asia and has little U.S. presence.

Tom Anderson’s real age and youthful hacker activities are well documented in the book. Anguin talks about an obsession Anderson had with “an attractive Asian-American in the finance department” that led to a request that Anderson work from home for months. She also says Anderson was involved in an Asian-focused porn site even after MySpace was acquired by News Corp., a potential PR nightmare, but that Rupert Murdoch (CEO) and Peter Chernin (COO) brushed aside concerns and swept the incident under the rug.

Dewolfe is portrayed as a charismatic big picture executive who focused on growth and keeping MySpace in the Hollywood limelight. He made a crucial mistake in 2003 to start MySpace as an internal project for the company he worked for, Intermix, which cost him tens of millions of dollars down the road. But he was able to create significant independence for MySpace and the team within Intermix, including having separate offices in Santa Monica and a separate board of directors. He is portrayed as fiercely independent and unmanageable, mowing through four bosses since launching MySpace. Greenspan, Rosenblatt and Ross Levinsohn all eventually left eUniverse/Intermix/FIM. Peter Levinsohn, his current boss, has managed to keep his job.

The MySpace corporate structure prior to its 2005 acquisition by News Corp. is described in detail. Ross Levinsohn, the former President of Fox Interactive Media, is given most of the credit for identifying and closing the deal from News Corp.’s side. A key part of the story is how little DeWolfe and Anderson made from that sale. The story tracks back to 2003 when they (along with other execs like Josh Berman) were owed a few hundred thousand dollars from parent company eUniverse for an earnout in connection with the earlier acquisition of ResponseBase. In the hope of getting those dollars, the team didn’t leave to start MySpace as a new startup. Instead, they launched it within a company they owned very little of. That decision would cost them tens of millions of dollars in 2005.

One of the most interesting stories, however, is a report that MySpace could have acquired Facebook for just $75 million in early 2004, but passed on the deal as too expensive.

Other key tidbits from the book:

Tom Anderson didn’t sign up for MySpace until September 2, 2003, more than two weeks after it launched.

A key competitive advantage of MySpace in the early days, the ability for users to change the html of the site, was originally a mistake. When execs saw how much people liked to fully personalize the site, they left it alone.

eUniverse founder Brad Greenspan’s alleged follies and unbalanced personality are well documented, particularly his ouster by the board of directors in late 2003. Greenspan has launched a litany of unsuccessful lawsuits against various parties in the years since then.

April 2004 - MySpace opens the site so that any member page could be viewed publicly (before that it could only be seen by friends). Traffic skyrockets.

January 2004 - Richard Rosenblatt becomes CEO of MySpace parent company eUniverse. Has to immediately deal with an eUniverse spyware investigation by NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer.

March 2004 - Six month old MySpace surpasses Friendster as most trafficked social networking site. Revenues were $135,000/month. MatchNet makes offer to buy MySpace for $40 million. Rosenblatt renames eUniverse to Intermix Media.

August 2004 - MySpace adding 23,000 new users/day and had as many as 90,000 users logged on simultaneously

October 2004 - Friendster offers 50/50 merger, MySpace offers 80/20. Deal never happens.

November 2004 - MySpace has 5 millionth registered account and turns its first monthly profit.

November 2004 - Viacom shows interest in acquiring MySpace for $30 million - $40 million.

December 2004: Intermix raises $11.5 million from Redpoint for 25% of company, valuing MySpace at $46 million. DeWolfe and other founders cash out $3 million. Unusual option put in place that defines the future of MySpace: If Intermix sells to another company, MySpace must come along and would receive a fixed price of $125 million. MySpace founders DeWolfe, Anderson and others owned 1/3 of MySpace at that time. Angwin says “In fact, it can be argued that DeWolfe’s decision to accept the fixed price of $125 million was the biggest mistake of [DeWolfe's] career.” DelWolfe negotiates separate provision giving him the right to try to sell MySpace independently from Intermix if the price was more than $125 million or if MySpace filed to go public.

December 2004: NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer prepares lawsuit against Intermix for spyware and privacy claims. Separate case against Greenspan initiated.

February 2005 - MySpace traffic growing 6% per week. DeWolfe meets with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to talk about a merger, but Zuckerberg wants $75 million. DeWolfe passes.

April 2005: MySpace has 13.5 million monthly visitors. In an interview with BusinessWeek, DeWolfe says “We’re crushing it.”

April 2005: Spitzer demands $50 million settlement for claims and files lawsuit. Intermix has $7.5 million in cash. Rosenblatt realizes he has to sell Intermix fast. Hires Michael Montgomery as investment banker. AOL’s Jim Bankoff expresses interest in acquiring MySpace.

June 2005 - Intermix settles with Spitzer for $7.5 million to be paid over three years. Greenspan later agreed to pay $740,000 in separate settlement plus $50,000 conation to antispyware efforts.

June 2005: Viacom and News Corp vie for acquisition of MySpace. Viacom too slow, News Corp. does marathon weekend deal to buy company for $580 million. Ross Levinsohn from News Corp. leads deal from their side. Tom Freston leads from Viacom. MySpace hits 17.7 million unique visitors.

June 2005: Intermix agrees to be bought by News Corp. for $580 million. MySpace founders share just $21.4 million. DeWolfe also gets $1.5 million for Intermix shares. Redpoint’s Yang, angry about not being told until after the deal was done, makes $65 million on $15 million investment. Angwin gives Rosenblatt huge credit for selling the company just a year and a half after taking the CEO role.

July 2005: DeWolfe signs employment agreement giving him $30 million over next two years. Anderson also gets $30 million for two years. Josh Berman, Aber Whitcomb, Colin Diagiaro and Kyle Brinkman share another $15 million over two years. But biggest winner of deal is Brad Greenspan, who makes $48 million on the deal. Rosenblatt makes $23 million.

Fall 2005: Viacom again loses to News Corp. in IGN acquisition. News Corp. adds 50 million unique visitors in six months of acquisitions.

Fall 2005: Greenspan launches counter-bid for MySpace before deal officially closes. No one listens.

Fall 2005: Levinsohn and DeWolfe meet with Zuckerberg again, who now wants at least $750 million for Facebook. No deal.

November 2005: Christos Cotsakos reviews FIM as News Corp. consultant, suggests FIM isn’t a good fit for Rosenblatt.“It’s just that your future lies in another way,” he says. Rosenblatt was “crushed,” stays on as a consultant for months. (I’ve heard very different versions of how Rosenblatt left the company).

April 2006: Levinsohn receives anonymous tip that Anderson is running a porn site called teamasian.com. Private investigators confirm that Anderson was involved in it and had received checks from it. Chernin confronts Anderson, who says he never cashed the checks. Levinsohn suggests moving Anderson to China. Chernin and Murdoch disagree and sweep it under the rug.

July 2006: MySpace has 54 million unique visitors. MySpace buts search out to bidding, gets $450 from Microsoft, $750 from Yahoo, nothing from Google. FIM exec Jim Heckman leads negotiations, Angwin says. He gets Microsoft up to $1.12 billion but too many string attached. Accepts revised Google bid of $900 million

November 2006: Chernin moves to oust Ross Levinsohn, who leaves later that month. Peter Levinsohn, Ross’ cousin, replaces him and is DeWolfe’s fourth boss since 2003. MySpace dethrones Yahoo as most trafficked website on Internet.

Mid 2007: Rosenblatt buys back most of Intermix’s assets, other than MySpace and a wrinkle cream business, for $18 million for Demand Media.

October 2007: DeWolfe and Anderson agree to extend employment agreements for $30 million total over next two years.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Two things are clear in the YouTube/Warner Music scuffle. First, neither side is 100% right. And second, users are very, very angry that their videos are being pulled down or muted when they contain background music owned by Warner Music.

Those users aren’t being quiet about it, either. And scores of them are uploading protest videos to say exactly what they think. All are angry at Warner Music. And most express disappointment at Google, too, for reportedly walking away from the deal that allowed Warner’s music to be used legally on the site. I’ve embedded the “best of” below. More are being uploaded in real time, and this has the feel of a situation that is just now starting to boil over.

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Twenty five years ago today, on January 24, 1984, Steve Jobs gave the first on-stage demonstration of the Macintosh computer to a packed auditorium. The technology was much different then, but it was the same Steve Jobs: a masterful showman able to make the latest jumble of electronics seem like it was capable of magic. Enjoy.

(Via Dave Winer).

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Here’s an innovative approach to defending a trademark. Vancouver, Canada based SmashLAB is an online design and marketing firm that launched in 2000. Everything was going fine, they say, until Discovery Channel launched a television show with the same name.

The problem isn’t the use of the SmashLAB name, but rather that the show is so bad that people are complaining, and that now their company “sucks by association” when people search on the name. So they’ve written one of the funnier open letters I’ve ever read, asking Discovery Channel to simply “suck less.”

Here’s the letter:

Dear Discovery Channel,

Since 2000 we’ve had a nice little design studio called smashLAB and we work hard on it every day. People (generally) say nice things about us, and we were starting to make a good name for ourselves.

Then along you came with your fucking awful television program with the same fucking name. Surely you researched this before airing the program. I can only suppose that you felt we were so small that you could just poach it. Fine enough–I guess that’s life.

The problem is that your program seems to suck. So now when someone does a Google search for “smashLAB”, they find endless posts about how badly “smash lab sucks”. Great. Now we suck by association, just because you lifted our name.

We know there’s no way you’ll change your name, but maybe you could make your show suck a little less? (We’d really appreciate it.)

Yours truly,

Eric and Eric

Two guys named Eric
(whose company used to have a fine name)

Well done, SmashLAB (the company, not the TV show).

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Editor’s Note: The following guest post was written by Kevin Merritt, the CEO and founder of blist, a Web-based list manager and spreadsheet that was used on Change.gov, the Obama Administration’s transition Website.

President Barack Obama was sworn into office this week as our nation’s 44th president.  Despite running into a few technical challenges in the first few days at the White House, the Obama Administration will embrace technology in unprecedented ways. Led by forward thinking, web savvy technologists, President Obama’s new media team looks poised and ready to fulfill President Obama’s vision of open-source democracy.

Coincident with Mr. Obama being sworn in, the Obama Administration’s new media team assumed control of WhiteHouse.gov at 12:01 PM EST on Tuesday.  This is the official website of the sitting administration. The new media team has identified three top priorities of the new administration – communication, transparency and participation. Let’s examine how the new administration has been leveraging web technologies to meet these priorities.

Communication. This administration’s use of Google’s YouTube during both the campaign and after winning the election leverages Internet video to reach a generation of Americans and global citizens who no longer tune in to AM radio on a regular basis. President Obama has vowed to continue video recording his fireside chats and publishing them via YouTube and other video sites. With the transition of WhiteHouse.gov to the new administration, for the first time ever an official White House blog came online. You can sign up for email updates from the president. Through the blog, Mr. Obama is the first U.S. president to have an RSS feed!

During the campaign President Obama relied heavily on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter to build support, communicate with constituents and develop a core audience. By far, Mr. Obama has more followers on Twitter than anyone else (168,000). His fan page on Facebook has more than 4 million fans.

Transparency. Mr. Obama promises to run the most open, honest and transparent administration to date. Through the Your Seat at The Table section on the CHANGE.GOV transition site, the Obama transition team posted the minutes of hundreds of private meetings with then President-Elect Obama.

Even all of the content on the CHANGE.GOV site, unless otherwise noted, is licensed to the public at large via a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

The Obama-Biden Transition Team used my company, blist, to disclose the names of all donors to the transition project. Two key points of note are that the disclosure was entirely voluntary and the tool they chose to use made the data itself much more consumable by the mainstream public. Compared to a plain HTML table, which is bulky, cumbersome and hard to work with, by publishing the data via a blist widget the data can easily be sorted, searched, filtered, downloaded, printed, emailed and even republished – all capabilities not previously enjoyed by most consumers of public data sets.

Participation. The Obama Administration has been conducting bold experiments in interactive government. The Citizen’s Briefing Book, powered by Salesforce.com, has allowed citizens to suggest topics Mr. Obama should consider upon taking office. Once a topic was submitted, other visitors to the Citizen’s Briefing Book could vote the topic up or down and comment on it. Voting, ranking and commenting are hallmark features of web-based, social media applications.

The new Administration has brought forth a new era of honest, open, participatory and transparent government by creatively employing web-based software from innovative companies like Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com and blist. We’re eager to see the use of these technologies extended to WhiteHouse.gov initially and from there we’d love to see more government agencies quickly embrace web technologies to promote communication, transparency and participation.

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Tim Jackson has had a colorful career. He is a former journalist (Financial Times, Independent, Economist and Red Herring) and was the managing director of the $700 million Carlyle Internet Partners Europe Fund. He founded QXL in 1997, a UK-based eBay-like online auction site that went public in 1999 at a valuation of around $400 million. And he’s also written three books. In other words, he seems to keep busy.

Now he’s on to his next challenge, launching and growing a UK based DVD swapping site called LendAround. The core idea of swapping DVDs isn’t new - services like Peerflix gave in an honest try and eventually gave up. Another service we’ve covered is Swaptree, which is still going and recently raised a fresh round of funding.

LendAround is taking a slightly different approach. First, the site is focusing on loaners, not outright permanent trades. And The goal is to let your friends browse your DVD collection and borrow what they want, and LendAround keeps track of who has what. That removes the issue of people forgetting who borrowed what.

There are 2 billion DVDs in U.S. homes, Jackson says, and 80% of those are watched just twice a year. Jackson envisions people swapping DVDs with neighbors, work colleagues, church members and sports clubs, where people already know and trust each other and for the most part can hand over the DVDs in person, skipping the mail.

Eventually Jackson wants to expand the service to include other items.

LendAround is currently in private beta but you can sign up for it on the home page. Users are given fifty invites each, and we’ll be adding it to inviteshare tomorrow to help users get into the service. I’ve tried it out - it’s still a little rough around the edges but I found it easy to add titles via a title search or bar code. And I can now peruse Jackson’s 234 DVDs (I’ve requested a loaner of Fight Club).

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Tim Jackson has had a colorful career. He is a former journalist (Financial Times, Independent, Economist and Red Herring) and was the managing director of the $700 million Carlyle Internet Partners Europe Fund. He founded QXL in 1997, a UK-based eBay-like online auction site that went public in 1999 at a valuation of around $400 million. And he’s also written three books. In other words, he seems to keep busy.

Now he’s on to his next challenge, launching and growing a U.S. based DVD lending site called LendAround. The core idea of swapping DVDs isn’t new - services like Peerflix gave in an honest try and eventually gave up. Another service we’ve covered is Swaptree, which is still going and recently raised a fresh round of funding.

LendAround is taking a slightly different approach. First, the site is focusing on loaners, not outright permanent trades. And the goal is to let your friends browse your DVD collection and borrow what they want, and LendAround keeps track of who has what. That removes the issue of people forgetting who borrowed what.

Jackson also believes that the quality of available movies will be much higher with a lending service vs. a swap/barter site. When people consider what DVDs they are willing to swap, they tend to choose the worst 10% on their shelves, he says. That explains why services like Peerflix tended to have masses of unwanted titles and few popular ones. When you are lending to friends, you’ll include all of your DVDs, knowing you’ll get them back.

There are 2 billion DVDs in U.S. homes, Jackson says, and 80% of those are watched just twice a year. Jackson envisions people swapping DVDs with neighbors, work colleagues, church members and sports clubs, where people already know and trust each other and for the most part can hand over the DVDs in person, skipping the mail.

Eventually Jackson wants to expand the service to include other items.

LendAround is currently in private beta but you can sign up for it on the home page. Users are given fifty invites each, and we’ll be adding it to inviteshare tomorrow to help users get into the service. I’ve tried it out - it’s still a little rough around the edges but I found it easy to add titles via a title search or bar code. And I can now peruse Jackson’s 234 DVDs (I’ve requested a loaner of Fight Club). The service is free to use, and the company hopes to make revenue from DVD purchases and future paid services.

Update: If you don’t want to wait for inviteshare, you can get into LendAround right away. The first few hundred people that email techcrunch@lendaround.com will get immediate invitations.

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Venture capital firms tightened their purse strings in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the latest MoneyTree Report released by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The total dollar amount invested in venture financings was $5.4 billion, down 33 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 (when it was $8.09 billion) and down 26 percent from the third quarter of 2008 (when it was $7.3 billion). For the entire year, the total venture capital invested into startups was $28.3 billion, down 8 percent.

The decline in investing mapped the decrease in exit options, even though VCs are supposed to have a 5 to 7 year investment horizon.

More money continued to flow into later stage deals. And broken down by sector, venture dollars going into Internet deals fell 26 percent quarter over quarter as well to $787 million across 170 deals (a 20 percent decline from the third quarter). Even investments in clean tech startups dipped 14 percent sequentially to $909 million across 62 deals. For the year, Internet financings were pretty much flat at $4.9 billion, while the dollars going into clean tech deals increased 52 percent to $4.1 billion.

The ten largest venture fundings in the quarter were:

Solyndra: $219 million
Pocket Communications: $100 million
Silver Spring Networks: $75 million
Bolex Therapuetics: $60 million
i/o Data Centers: $56 million
Boston-Power: $55 million
Pacira Pharmaceuticals: $55 million
Bayhill Therapeutics: $54.3 million
Kosmos Energy: $53.9 million
Calisolar: $51.8 million

Interactive iCharts and the entire slide deck is embedded below:

Venture Capital Investement Data 2008 - Get more Business Plans

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Despite the continuous stream of layoffs, CrunchBoard this week has the most diverse job listings I’ve seen yet. There’s both a range of job types–from marketing to technical–and a wide variety of job locations, from New York to Dallas to San Francisco to Portland, OR.

Want to work as a social media planner in Philadelphia?
Or a product manager at Newsweek Digital in New York?
Or maybe in the online marketing manager with a SEO focus at Match.com in Dallas?

(Here at TechCrunch, we’re looking for a Rails Developer.)

Some other jobs currently on CrunchBoard:

• Software Engineer
  Yelp - San Francisco, CA

• CTO/Lead Programmer to oversee Facebook/MySpace Game Development
  O Negative Media - Los Angeles, CA

• Python Developer (Freelance)
  Stealth Project - Telecommute or New York, NY

• Social Media/Widget Developer
  Tarot.com - Portland, OR
  

International readers can check out our British and French job boards as well.

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How bad is the economy? In an effort to raise money for his rent, one man named Victor is trying to sell his Digg account on Craigslist for $650. It’s not because Victor is a power user on Digg. The name of the account is “youtube” His post on Craigslist reads:

Hello Craigslist community, my name is Victor and I’m a freelance web designer. Due to the current economic crisis I’m facing a lot of financial problems, bills are piling up and I don’t have enough work to cover them.

My rent is due and I don’t have the money to pay for it so I decided to put my Digg account for sale and see if I can make my rent money that way…

The account is somewhat valuable because it’s named YouTube and all of you know what YouTube is.

. . . My rent is $650 per month, hence the asking price.

Unfortunately, it is against Digg’s Terms of Service to:

use as a Digg User ID a name subject to any rights of a person other than you without appropriate authorization, . . . attempt to impersonate another user or person; sell or otherwise transfer your profile.

So I wouldn’t buy that Digg account, but if anyone is looking for a Web designer Victror’s services are available.

Update: Unfortunately, Digg has canceled Victor’s account. But I’ve set up a TipJoy account for him below. Give him a dollar to help him with his rent, if you’ve got the spare change. All proceeds will go to Victor.

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Conspiracy theorists, start your engines.

Right now if you run a Google search for “palm pre” from a mobile phone, you’ll be shown that there are 0 pages related to Palm’s upcoming smartphone, which will soon faceoff with Google’s Android, Blackberry, and the iPhone in the battle for touch-screen supremacy.

In fact, a number of searches with the world “Palm” in it are turning up zero results (even “palm tree”), though many searches still work just fine. The bug seems to have existed for at least the last two days according to recent tweets.

The issue seems to only be affecting Google’s mobile site, which is used for both the iPhone and the G1 (as well as a number of other phones).

Thanks to Brian Krausz for the tip.

Update: Looks like the problem has been fixed.

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DailyFill, a gossip site in the same vein as TMZ and Perez Hilton, is off to an impressive start. Less than two months after launch, Quantcast is already reporting 1.7 million unique visitors - a figure on par with PopSugar’s traffic numbers (though we should note that the Sugar network as a whole sees much more traffic).

The site first grabbed attention because it was created by Slingshot Labs, a startup incubator owned by News Corp. The incubator also has ties to MySpace (also a News Corp property), though it is a separate company. At launch many wrote off DailyFill for being yet another gossip site destined to flounder in the shadow of the likes of TMZ and Yahoo’s OMG, which generate huge volumes of traffic and have devout followings. DailyFill still trails these by a large margin, but it clearly isn’t bombing.

It’s still too early to tell if the site will be successful in the long term - much of the traffic may be coming from curious gossip fans looking to check out the newest kid on the block. But for now, News Corp and MySpace’s experiment with its new startup incubator seems to be paying off.

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If you know a boy between 6 and 12 who likes cars, check out the beta for a new virtual world designed by Ridemakerz, the build-your-own-car toy store. We have invites here.

The toy store commissioned the Electric Sheep Co. to build a browser-based virtual world for boys based on its Webflock platform. When I wrote about Ridemakerz back in December, here is how I described the project:

The virtual world is a combination of a social network, video games, and a complex inventory system. Boys can design their own virtual cars online just like they can in the store. . . . Depending on what parts a boy picks, it will affect the performance of his ride.

Alternatively, a child who buys a car at a store can enter the unique Ridez Identification Number (RIN) number printed on each one at checkout and he will get a virtual replica of that exact design. So he can play with the same car at home and online.

Inside the virtual world, each child’s avatar is his car. He can drive around and see the cars of other members who are online. There is no text chatting (for child safety reasons), but each car has different “Zmotes” that get cooler the more points that are acquired. The Zmotes start with things like puffs and smiley faces and graduate to explosions and lightening bolts. The roads in the virtual world lead to different activities, including a junkyard crane video game and a pitstop crew game that teaches time management.

A lot of readers were excited about actually checking it out. Just remember, this is for kids (so don’t take an invite if you are not going to share it with someone under 12). And here’s a hint: use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move around.

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The number of people on the Internet surpassed one billion in December, according to comScore. The actual number is probably higher than that (Internet World Stats counted nearly 1.5 billion Web surfers worldwide as of June 30, 2008). In any case, only between 15 and 22 percent of the world’s population is on the Internet. We have a long way to go.

Using the comScore numbers, here is the breakdown by country and region (in unique visitors as of December, 2008; some of the numbers are rounded):

Top 15 countries, by Internet population:

1. China: 179.7 million
2. United States: 163.3 million
3. Japan: 60.0 million
4. Germany: 37.0 million
5. United Kingdom: 36.7 million
6. France: 34.0 million
7. India: 32.1 million
8. Russia: 29.0 million
9. Brazil: 27.7 million
10. South Korea: 27.3 million
11. Canada: 21.8 million
12. Italy: 20.8 million
13. Spain: 17.9 million
14. Mexico: 12.5 million
15. Netherlands: 11.8 million

Worldwide Internet Audience

• Asia Pacific: 416 million (41.3%)
• Europe: 283 million (28.0%)
• North America: 185 million (18.4%)
• Latin America: 75 million (7.4%)
• Middle East & Africa: 49 million (4.8%)

(Photo by Joe Shlabotnik).

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After layoff activity in the tech industry quieted down around the holidays, it’s come back with a vengeance in January. According to our Layoff Tracker, 80,076 job eliminations have been announced or completed since the beginning of the year. The total number of tech layoffs since we began tracking in late August is now 195,856.

This past week alone, substantial layoffs were announced by Ericsson (5,000), Intel (6,000), and Microsoft (5,000). The biggest job loss by far is the 34,000 employees of Circuit City, which announced it is going out of business last week.

Among startups, layoffs hit Digg, Federated Media, and O”Reilly Media. Even Google was not immune, with 100 internal recruiters losing their jobs, many more contractors, and rumors swirling that more cuts may be on the way.

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article. (For who is hiring, check out our job board).

Below is the list of January layoffs from our tracker.

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Music recommendation engine / social network Last.fm has launched an official, feature-rich application for the Android platform that enables users to stream radio stations (including personalized streaming radio), consult up-to-date concert information and also offers the ability to track users’ listening habits based on their Last.fm profile.

The company says the application should be available here, but I’m not seeing anything there yet so maybe we should just be patient until they get around to effectively have the app up for download on Android Market. (It’s also nowhere to be found when you actually search from the G1).

Update: it’s available from the phone now.
Update 2: app is listed online now too.

First impressions: music quality is fine but not staggering, the streaming speed is ok, the tagging process is seamless and it’s really cool to discover similar artists when you’re listening to a song from your mobile phone. Also, you get to purchase songs straight away via the Amazon MP3 store on Android.

The application enables users to access their Last.fm profile and millions of streaming tracks on Android-powered phones, and supports ‘background playback’ so you can listen to music while you access other programs. Last.fm has been offering an application for the iPhone / iPod Touch for about 6 months now with the same feature set apart from the background playback functionality.

Last.fm, which was acquired by CBS in May 2007 for $280 million, was recently forced to reduce its headcount by 20 percent but continues to report impressive growth figures.

One of their competitors, social music network Imeem, has been available on the Android platform since October 2008 (get it here), and their mobile application also took home the award for Best Mobile Application at the recent Crunchies ceremony. Now all we need is an Android application for Pandora and the race is on.

It’s also worth noting that we could find 3 unofficial Last.fm-related apps on the Android platform (Last.fm: Android Edition, Last.fm Player and Last.fm Client) although these generally received poor ratings and reviews, so there was an apparent need for a better, official one.

Co-Editor’s Update (Erck Schonfeld): I’ve been testing out the Last.fm app today. It works great, and I especially like the ability to create stations by tags or artist. But the stream just doesn’t sound as good as imeem’s, even though Last.fm is streaming at 128 kb/sec and imeem is streaming at 64 kb/sec. The reason for this is that imeem streams in AAC format, whereas Last.fm streams in MP3 format. As a result, the imeem app sounds twice as good at half the bit rate. Last.fm should consider switching to AAC as well.

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One of my favorite startups in Silicon Valley is Rearden Commerce. Few people have heard of it despite the fact that the company has been around since before the first Internet bust in 2000 and has raised $200 million in capital, most of it recently.

The reason few people have heard of Rearden is because they are a behind-the-scene service. They offer a sort of automated assistant that helps people organize travel needs. In 2007 I called it “mashups for adults:”

Their strategy to date has been to sign large corporate customers and create customized websites for their employees. The service acts very much like a personal assistant. Set your profile up with the types of restaurants you like, whether you like aisle or window seats, and your preferred car provider, and Rearden will book all aspects of your trip for you.

See restaurants within a certain distance from your hotel via a Google Maps mashup (and based on Zagat ratings and cuisine), pick one, and the software will make a reservation for you through OpenTable. Then they’ll sync up with your calendar and your mobile device, and send you messages if anything goes wrong, like a flight delay. You can also access their mobile client to make changes to your itinerary. The interface is orders of magnitude beyond what Orbitz and other travel sites offer (click the screen shot for a larger view), and they’ll also book your restaurant and find you tickets to the Lakers game that night if you like.

Rearden will also keep track of reward miles and points from airlines, hotels, rental cars, etc., and lets users use those points to book additional travel and other services. Cancel a flight? No problem. Rearden keeps track of the credit in its system and suggests you use it the next time you travel.

The company had just 92 corporate customers a couple of years ago. Last year in May (when they released a mobile version of the service) they hit 1,700. Now they have 4,000 corporate customers and more than 2 million total users.

At some point the company will offer a consumer version of the service, something they’ve been promising for over a year. It’s one service that I’d gladly pay for.

In 2008 the company made two acquisitions - Global Ground Automation to assist with limousine and other ground transportation reservations, and ExpenseWire to simplify expense reporting for users. And they added two key executives - Ammiel Kamon (head of worldwide marketing) from Emptoris and Netscape and Dan Pritchett (Chief Platform Architect), a former technology fellow at eBay. CEO Patrick Grady named to the list of 25 most influential executives by Business Travel News along with CEO of Delta Airlines, CEO of American Airlines and John Chambers of Cisco.

Investors include JPMorgan Chase & Co. and American Express, and both of those companies offer the solution to customers.

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MyFolio is a brand new social network in public beta that takes another crack at building an online community service for artists and creatives looking to share their art and converse about it with like-minded people. The startup quietly launched the website a month ago and is entirely bootstrapped by its founder Mustafa Lazkani.

In terms of features, MyFolio covers every basic need for a social network to be useful for its creative audience. Artists can upload and tag media or files for a variety of categories ranging from animation, concept art, films, paintings to music and photography, create a portfolio, manage bookmarks and keep on top of internal messages from other users. Registered users can indicate of their work can be viewed in public or kept private, if it is work in progress or not, and which copyright applies to the work.

Public portfolios (here’s mine) look rather spartan even if they can be personalized with custom colors, header and text, so I suggest MyFolio to do something about if they want to make artists want to show off their work by spreading links to those pages.

MyFolio is free up to 1 GB of storage, which I imagine will quickly prove insufficient for many artists, but offers a paid version at $2/month which removes ads from the portfolios and comes with 2 GB of storage (more isn’t possible at the moment).

I’m generally skeptical when it comes to niche social networks. I think the large majority of new community sites have too much of an uphill battle to fight against established social platforms - particularly when you need to create yet another account for your profile - and I also believe that if there isn’t a proven social network for a certain niche by now, there probably never will be. And if there is already one, it’s going to prove very difficult for a new entrant to get a piece of the action.

That said, MyFolio looks and feels nice and offers all the whistles and bells that are to be expected for this type of service, so who knows if it will hit the sweet spot with its target audience. MyFolio will have to compete with other art-related social networks like deviantART, Carbonmade and FoundMyself but also with traditional photo sharing services like Flickr, which can also easily be used for social networking within an artist community.

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Google says the vast majority of the 1 million businesses that use Google Apps opt for the free advertising supported version. To make the free option less attractive they’ve been quietly lowering the number of user accounts that can be associated with a free account. Now as businesses grow, they’ll be forced to move to the paid version much more quickly than before.

Google Apps is a suite of online applications like gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, etc. that are packaged and tailored for business use. It’s growing fast - in a recent post where Google announced the opening of a reseller program, the company said that more than 1 million businesses and 10 million users use Google Apps today, and 3,000 new businesses sign up daily. The largest business user, Genentech, has 20,000 employees on Google Apps.

When Google Apps first launched in August 2006 it was free and described as “a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.”

Free for everyone lasted until February 2007, when Google announced a premier edition of the service with more storage and an uptime guarantee. The cost was (and is) $50 per user per year.

When Google Apps first launched up to 200 user accounts could be created for each business under the free version. But that limit was quietly reduced to just 100 user accounts. And then when the reseller program was announced earlier this month, the limit was cut in half again, to just 50 accounts.

Google also changed the sign up page for Google Apps. The page used to show (screenshot) a comparison between the free and premium versions. Now it only shows the premium version and offers a free trial. To see the comparison chart you have to click the link “compare to standard edition” to see the free and premium versions compared.

The goal is clear - to get more premium accounts that pay $50/user/year. Income growth has slowed considerably at Google and the company is looking for more ways to ramp revenue, particularly newer revenue streams, and control costs. And it’s more than fine that Google experiments with pricing on these products. But they have to remember that they’re not just competing with Microsoft and its expensive exchange server product; they also have cheaper competitors like Zoho and Yahoo’s Zimbra to deal with as well. They may not have as much pricing flexibility as they think.

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Google says the vast majority of the 1 million businesses that use Google Apps opt for the free advertising supported version. To make the free option less attractive they’ve been quietly lowering the number of user accounts that can be associated with a free account. Now as businesses grow, they’ll be forced to move to the paid version much more quickly than before.

Google Apps is a suite of online applications like gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, etc. that are packaged and tailored for business use. It’s growing fast - in a recent post where Google announced the opening of a reseller program, the company said that more than 1 million businesses and 10 million users use Google Apps today, and 3,000 new businesses sign up daily. The largest business user, Genentech, has 20,000 employees on Google Apps.

When Google Apps first launched in August 2006 it was free and described as “a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.”

Free for everyone lasted until February 2007, when Google announced a premier edition of the service with more storage and an uptime guarantee. The cost was (and is) $50 per user per year.

When Google Apps first launched up to 200 user accounts could be created for each business under the free version. But that limit was quietly reduced to just 100 user accounts. And then when the reseller program was announced earlier this month, the limit was cut in half again, to just 50 accounts.

Google also changed the sign up page for Google Apps. The page used to show (screenshot) a comparison between the free and premium versions. Now it only shows the premium version and offers a free trial. To see the comparison chart you have to click the link “compare to standard edition” to see the free and premium versions compared.

The goal is clear - to get more premium accounts that pay $50/user/year. Income growth has slowed considerably at Google and the company is looking for more ways to ramp revenue, particularly newer revenue streams, and control costs. And it’s more than fine that Google experiments with pricing on these products. But they have to remember that they’re not just competing with Microsoft and its expensive exchange server product; they also have cheaper competitors like Zoho and Yahoo’s Zimbra to deal with as well. They may not have as much pricing flexibility as they think.

Update: Dave Girouard, Google’s President of Enterprise, emails to say that before the recent change to limit free accounts to 50 users, admins could request additional users without upgrading. The recent limitation was set to encourage reseller enthusiasm. He also says Google has no plans to further decrease the limit:

I run the enterprise/apps division at Google - we met a couple of years ago at the Apps launch. I read your story this AM on Techcrunch. Just a bit of clarification and explanation for our change. Until just now, we actually had no caps whatsoever on # of users on Apps Standard (ie free version). The 100 and 200 user “limits” you saw were actually just the defaults that showed up there - admins could request any additional number they wanted.

As to the question of our motivation, the reality is a little more subtle. If it weren’t for the reseller program, I can say for sure that we wouldn’t have put the cap on the free edition. The reality pre-reseller is that the vast majority of larger businesses opt for the paid version for all the reasons you can guess (support, api access, ldap synch, etc). So the mere imposition of the cap has a trivial direct impact on our revs. However, with the new channel program designed to attract a big ecosystem of resellers, it’s hard to convince them that this isn’t really an issue - eg that they shouldn’t worry about competing with a free product. Indirectly, we think the cap will help us grow revenues more quickly, because it makes it easier to attract high-quality partners.

We started 2 years ago with the belief that we needed a huge installled base first . . . and that subscription monetization would happen mostly in companies of larger than 25-50 employees. And also that we had a very viable ad-supported product for very small businesses, who tend to think more like consumers (free is good). We designed our approach to get a massive user base, and then to get increased monetization as more bigger companies adopt. This isn’t the same as saying that we want to get companies started on “free” and get them to pay later - that’s a relatively small effect in my view. Both user growth and revenue is in fact accelerating. Maturity of the product accounts for that, though we still have a ways to go.

There’s no reason to believe that the cap will continue to “move down” - we have no plans whatsoever to do that.

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New startup Ohai has been getting big cocktail party buzz over the last few months. The company won’t disclose much about what they’re doing, except that they’re building a Flash-based massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). And they certainly have the team to do it.

Susan Wu, the founder and CEO, is a former principal at Charles River Ventures and the former CMO of the Apache Software Foundation, and has experience with MMOGs. She’s also a self-confessed World Of Warcraft addict. Her team includes Blake Commagere (CTO), a cofounder of Mogad (acquired by iSkoot); Don Neufeld (VP Engineering), the former technical director at Sony Online Entertainment where he shipped Everquest II, Planetside and 13 other products; and Scott Harsman (VP Production), the former executive producer and creative director at Sony Online Entertainment where he led development of Everquest II, Everquest and other projects.

Neufeld and Harsman both worked at Sony Online Entertainment and brought a team with them. Wu says via email “There are very few teams that have shipped multiple MMOs across different generations of products. We are very fortunate to have Scott, Don and the team they brought over from Sony. There is a significant amount of learning that comes from having gone through dozens of MMO launches that we are applying to our products. Also, while at Sony, our team was involved in the design and implementation of their virtual goods platform.”

The company won’t yet give details on what type of game or platform they’re building, but they’ve convinced the venture capitalists that the idea and technology is sound. In the Fall of 2008 the company raised an undisclosed round of financing with August Capital and Rustic Canyon Partners, rumored to be in the $6 million range.

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With tax season rapidly approaching, the prospect of digging through receipts for business expenses and tax deductions is looming large. Shoeboxed, a site that helps manage your purchases by scanning your receipts and posting them to the web, is looking to make the process a little easier.

We last covered the site back in November 2007, when it experimented with a social shopping feature that the company abandoned after about a week. Now it’s concentrating on helping users mange their receipts online. To get started, users mail in their receipts which Shoeboxed then scans and enters into its web-based software (the company can handle multiple receipts at once, with an estimated wait time of 2-3 days to get a boxful online). The site also recently began accepting business cards. The service runs around $10/month, with more expensive plans for heavy users (over 50 receipts a month).

Once the receipts are online, users can easily assign them into different catagories (for example, labeling which ones are company expenditures). Mint does something similar, but it only lists your transactions based on their location, and you can’t see an itemized list of what you’ve purchased. Of course, Shoeboxed is only useful if you’re diligent about sending in your receipts - if you’re the kind of person who loses them frequently, it won’t do you much good.

The company has forged a deal with TaxACT, a popular online tax filing company that will be promoting Shoeboxed as an effective way to minimize sifting through paperwork. It also just announced a partnership with ScanDigital, a company that converts media like photos slides to digital formats (the two companies will cross-promote eachothers’ services).

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Netvibes founder Tariq Krim sent me a new screenshot of Jolicloud, the Linux-based Netbook-optimized operating system he’s building (we first covered Jolicloud last December).

The screen shot, which is significantly evolved from what we saw in Paris, shows a set of featured applications that mixes desktop and cloud software - Facebook, Skype, Meebo and Youtube, among others, are shown with large icons that make it easier on Netbook users, who have to make do with smallish screens.

Jolicloud will eventually support touchscreens, Krim told me. We’re trying to get a copy and install it on our CrunchPad prototype to see how it does, and share video.

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Tripwolf, an online travel guide that also offers some social features, has closed a $2.5 million funding round led by European travel publisher MairDumont Group along with investor Dieter von Holtzbrinck, a German entrepreneur who headed the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group for over 20 years.

Tripwolf offers comprehensive travel guides comprised of a mix of professionally written material and user submissions (the site lets members keep travel blogs, upload photos, and leave reviews for individual attractions). Since launching in June 2008 the site has grown to 15,000 members; a modest number but one that will probably grow as the site’s repository of information does.

Tripwolf is also planning to release an iPhone application soon that will include content from published guidebooks. Users will be able to chart out their interary online while still at home, and then can sync their customized travel guides to their phones so they don’t have to worry about data charges abroad. The site is also planning to release versions of the site in French, Spanish, and Italian over the next few months (it is currently available in English and German).

I’m still a little skeptical about Tripwolf - there’s already a plethora of travel information available on the web. But the site’s collection of content from professional guidebooks along with its partnership with the MairDumont Group (which Tripwolf says is the biggest European publisher of travel guides) may give it a leg up on other sites that are primarily user-generated.

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Santa Monica, California based Zag, an auto-buying service that lets people buy cars at a discount through affinity organizations like AAA, has raised a monster round of financing - $32.4 million. The round was led by USAA, a financial organization for U.S. military personnel with 6.4 million members. Existing investors Anthem Venture Partners, GRP Partners and the Skoll Fund co-invested in the funding round.

USAA has been an affinity partner of Zag’s since 2007 - 22,000 USAA members have purchased cars through the Zag service, the company says, saving them $115 million v. MSRP.

Zag was founded by Scott Painter, a long time auto-industry guy. Painter also founded True Car, which launched at TechCrunch50 in 2008.

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In November 2008 Facebook drew 200 million unique worldwide visitors; more than 1 in 5 people who accessed the Internet that month visited the site. When sites are that big growth generally stagnates, but in Facebook’s case it’s still skyrocketing. In December, 222 million people visited the site says newly released Comscore stats, a 10.8% month over month growth rate. 22% of the total Internet audience went to Facebook in December.

Facebook now has nearly 100 million more worldwide users than MySpace, which added 4 million new users in December to 125 million total. The page view difference is more dramatic - Facebook had 80 billion monthly page views in December v. 43 billion for MySpace. Just six months ago the sites were about the same size.

Facebook, still a private company, is the world’s default social network. MySpace is still the king in the U.S., but trends suggest that 2009 is its last year on top. By January 2010, at current relative growth rates, Facebook will overtake MySpace as the largest U.S. social network as well.

We reached out to MySpace for a comment on the growth trends. They say “We are laser focused on building a sustainable global business which we measure by profits and revenue - not just eyeballs. In a tough economic climate, our international revenue is up 35 percent year over year and we continue to focus on those markets with the strong monetization opportunities. Additionally, MySpace continues to dominate the U.S. market–where the bulk of online advertising revenues reside–both in terms of monetization and user engagement with more than 76 million unique users and a 40% spike in engagement year over year.”

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Google just released fourth quarter earnings. Net Income was down a whopping 68 percent to $382 million (compared to $1.2 billion a year ago), primarily because of a $1 billion impairment charge related Google’s ownership stakes in AOL (for which it took a $726 million writedown) and Clearwire ($355 million writedown). We all know why the AOL stake is worth less than what Google paid for it (just look at Time Warner’s stock.) Instead of the $20 billion that Google’s five percent stake valued AOL at the time of its original investment, its new writedown now values AOL at $5.5 billion.

The Clearwire writedown isn’t surprising either. That is the Wimax company that had disaster written all over it.

Google is also allowing employees with underwater options to swap them for new ones. That is going to cost Google another estimated $460 million over the course of the new vesting period.

Investors will likely ignore the $1 billion charge because they tend to see these sorts of things as one-time events (even when they occur on a regular basis). The charge does not effect Google’s cash flow or cash position. On a non-GAAP basis, Google beat Wall Street estimates, with non-GAAP earnings of $5.10 a share, compared to consensus estimates of $4.96.

Total revenues (including what it pays out to AdSense publishers and other partners) came in at $5.7 billion for the quarter, up 18 percent. For the year, total revenues were $21.8 billion, up 31 percent. Operating income for the quarter (before the impairment charge) was $1.86 billion, up 29 percent. The company had $8.6 billion in cash at the end of the quarter

I am waiting for the earnings call to start. My notes from the conference call (Sergey and Larry are not on the call).

Eric Schmidt: We had strong search query growth year on year, kept lid on costs. 4th Q advertisers invetsted where ROI was the highest, online. took significant writedowns with AOL and Clearwire. Both deals made sense to us then and make sense to us now.

Last Q we said we were in uncharted territory. We don’t know how long this period will last, certainly prepared to get through it no problem.

At least 85% of employees have stock under water. A voluntary stock swap program. Total options expected to make up 3% of total shares outstanding. Employees who swap will discontinued products will low impact. We will continue to review that. [mentions Wiki search]. Will continue to focus on search and advertising. Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your query? We are looking into things like that.

Android, already billions of page impressions through G1 phone. [Talks about enterprise, resellers].

Patrick Pichette (CFO):

We had another solid quarter,

gross revenue up 18% to $5.7B

Google.com up 22% to $3.8B
AdSense up 4% yoy to $1.7B (partially offset by cleanup efforts on Adsense for search
Paid click growth up 18% yoy, up 10% QoQ

UK soft because of currency, rest of EMEA did better, driven by Germany, France, Netherlands.

Also relative good experience in Brazil

TAC was $1.5B, 27% of advertising revenues
Cost of revenue $707M, up slightly because of data center costs.

Non-GAAP operating profit, $2.4B, 34.6% margin

Approximately 20,000 full time employees in Q4.

Impairment charges excluded from Non-GAAP results.

Capex $386M
Free cash flow, $1.8B, up 73 percent.

Jonathan Rosenberg:

We launched 330 search quality improvements, most significantly the size of our index. Worked hard on latency across the board. We tripled the number of queries that triggered Universal search across images, blogs, books. Adding more books and expanding our index are very important efforts.

More people are searching from mobile phones. Our objective is to make search from a mobile phone as fast and easy as possible.

Android phone has done very well. More phones in the works.

On the ad side, this was one of our strongest quarters for ad quality improvement. We will continue to get smarter about which queries should have ads to show users. We are now only back to where were back in 2008 from a coverage perspective.

beta launched keyword tool, helps advertisers find keywords on which they are not running ads. Most advertisers not maxing out daily budgets, so opportunity there. Launched Display Ad builder to create nice looking display ads straight from AdSense.

YouTube emerging as a key component of display strategy. People browsing for videos hundreds of millions of times a day.

Also launched 100 feature releases to Web-based apps, like chat in Gmail. Momentum is strong in apps, 1 million businesses, 10M users, 3M users in schools [Google apps stats].

Chrome has gotten great user momentum since launch.

Q&A:

Q: Why not more video ad

Eric: We have introduced 2 to 3 new formats for video advertising. All having some traction, have not found anything that drives revenues wildly. Virtually all the new device manufacturers have the ability to display Internet and Youtube content.

Jonathan: We have down quite a few experiments. Hard to match the right format with the right content. We have the in-video ads, also sponsored videos, contest platform, homepage sponsorship, click to buy. We have to come up with a standardized format. a significant constraint.

Q (Imran Khan): If you look at partner revenue growth rate, significantly underperforming Google.com growth rate. Why?

Patrick: On the mix issue, it is true the Adsense revenue was weaker. but Adsense for content had relatively strong quarter. In case of AdSense for search we did a lot of cleanup.

Omid Kordestan: On network, we did a number of quality measures to clean up. in terms of CPC we don’t break those out, but impact from Euro and Pound exchange rates. growth rates in emerging markets that have lower prices so downward pressure.

Jonathan: also consumers are doing more comparison shopping, so clicking through but not buying. or buying lower priced products.

Q: Capex was down significantly for the quarter. Is this a normalized level? Looking at the cost structure of Google, can you give us a sense of how flexible it is?

Patrick: I just want to reiterate we are investing. It just happens we are benefiting from economies of scale and greater efficiencies of our infrastructure. Moore’s law, better utilization. also big data centers are lumpy in the way they are invested. I’d be careful at looking at one quarter for purposes of forward modeling. We are a labor intensive business, so we have a lot of flexibility.

Q (Mark Mahaney): How much more opportunity is there for cost control? On CPC, can you help us think how deflationary CPC trends might be in an environment where lots of businesses might be going out of business.

Patrick: On the first Q, you ave to keep in mind the mindset of the company is to be a growth company. We are just managing responsibly given the environment.

Omid: If recession caused fewer purchases that would hurt us, but I don’t think you’d see CPC rates come down. CPC is really driven by users, not the number of advertisers coming in and out at any given time.

Q: Why is TAC down?

Patrick: The reason for TAC down QoQ is due to mix reasons mostly.

Q (Doug Anmuth): How has philosophy changed on distribution deals with Dell, etc. Why did you not continue to win those deals? And where is ad coverage going?

Omid: On the distribution deals, we are engaged in all of these discussions. We have a number of opportunities, from PC manufacturers to software toolbars that bundle our products like Chrome.

Jonathan: On coverage, we don’t know what the optimal mix is. depends on commercial versus noncommercial queries. We’d like to show fewer ads on queries that do not warrant them, and fewer, better ads on the ones that do.

Q: about advertising environment

Omid: Big customers especially are evaluating online marketing. they continue to take advantage of this, but maybe lower CPCs or size of campaign budgets.

Jonathan: Small and medium advertisers tend to cut their ad budgets less than large advertisers. We think that large advertisers do more across the board cut. Most advertisers do not max out their budgets.

Q: Can you give us an idea for strategy for display advertising (doubleclick, Youtube, etc)?

Omid: we are doing very well with Doubelclick integration. We are getting more inventory because doing a good job integrating. We optimize with AdSense only if they can’t get the higher price, so that is working out well. We feel this is a fragmented market ready for better measurements. Getting more traction here.

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On a day when Microsoft announced 5,000 layoffs, the 7 or so people losing their jobs at Digg may seem like a drop in the bucket. But that represents about about 10 percent of Digg’s 75-person workforce, whereas the 5,000 at Microsoft represents 5 percent. We have added Digg to our Layoff Tracker.

This move follows layoffs last October at sister company Revision3, which was also founded by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson. Adelson writes in a blog post that his goal is to become profitable in 2009, and he is hiring a salesforce to sell ads directly, in addition to trying to make Digg’s advertising partnership with Microsoft more fruitful.

The paring back at Digg comes along during a brutal advertising recession, and flattening growth at the site. In the U.S., Digg attracted 6.8 million unique visitors in December, up only 2 percent since its last peak in July (comScore numbers). Worldwide, the site is doing a little better, with 17.7 million unique visitors in December, up 7 percent from July

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A lot of experimentation with video advertising on the Web is going on these days. There are interactive overlays, contextual text ads, video-in-video, ads that take over the whole screen, and little icon bugs that crawl along the bottom. Nevertheless, the plain video pre-roll that mimics a traditional TV commercial remains the most popular, even though everyone knows it sucks.

Today, an Israeli startup called Innovid (see earlier coverage) is doing its part to help advertisers move away from the pre-roll with technology that allows for things like virtual product placements inside videos and turning entire surfaces into clickable canvases. In the demo video above, for instance, you’ll see different advertising effects projected onto the walls of a room, from a Pong game that you can play to a RSS feeds running across the baseboard as a ticker to funny creatures whose eyes you can move with your mouse. (The video above is not interactive, but you can check out the interactive features at Innovid’s homepage).

Innovid also has an ad gallery that shows other types of clickable ads its technology can create, such as interactive product placements, video billboards (basically another video running in a frame on a wall), bugs, overlays, and hotspots. Frankly, I don’t find these quite as exciting as the clickable canvas approach. The product placements just look cheezy and unconvincing, at least in the old 1950s video Innovid chose to demo the feature. But turning an entire surface inside a video into a 3-D interactive canvas could be highly engaging if done properly.

This would definitely work for pure video ads that encourage interaction. It would be harder to pull off for a Web video show, but would be possible if a video was shot with enough blank spaces where ads could be inserted.

The technology could also be used eventually as a way to add an interactive layer to any video. However, the company is focusing on advertising opportunities first. Innovid offers both the ad server to place these ads and a dashboard to allow advertisers to keep track of mouseovers, clicks, and every other interaction. Innovid essentially places a frame over the original video where the interactive ad resides, complete with metadata. That extra layer makes the ad slots reusable and interchangeable, so different ad campaigns can be run in the same video over time, just like on a Webpage.

Innovid raised $3 million last year from Genesis Partners (jeff Pulver is also an investor).

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Overall, Microsoft’s quarterly net profits declined 11 percent to $4.17 billion for the fiscal period ended in December. Operating profits were down 8 percent to $5.94 billion.

If you drill down to the individual operating businesses, every business unit except for Servers and Tools suffered from lower operating profits. The Client division (Windows) took the biggest hit, with operating profits down $440 million to $2.95 billion. (Windows revenues were down 8 percent to $3.98 billion). But Microsoft’s Online Services business (which includes MSN, online advertising, and search) tied for the company’s second biggest loser along with Entertainment and Devices Division (Xbox, Zune)—both saw operating profit declines of $224 million in the quarter.

But at least the Xbox business turned a profit. Microsoft’s Web business nearly doubled its operating loss to $471 million. That loss was on flat revenues of $866 million. Not a good sign for the health of Web advertising.

Update: In the conference call, Microsoft stated that advertising revenues were up 7 percent in the quarter to $664 million and that search advertising grew even faster. But that was not enough to offset the increased expenses in the business.

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I just received a Google Talk chat message from Orli Yakuel that contained an embedded YouTube Video. Turns out Google is testing a feature that automatically turns direct links to YouTube videos copied into the instant messaging application (seems to work only from within Gmail, not the desktop client) into embedded clips.

Update: it also works with direct links to videos hosted on Google Video (which they’re about to shut down).

To make it work, simply paste the direct link. e.g. the URL for the video of Obama’s inaugural address into the conversation screen. The instant messaging client will automatically convert the video and show a preview image. When you play it, the video will open on top of the chat screen in Gmail (see screenshot).

This comes right off the heels of Gmail getting voice and audio video chat built-in. It’s a small feature for sure, but it’s another sign that Google is focused on integrating some of its services (and axing others) in order to become a more unified communication hub.

What would be really cool was if you could view videos from inside your e-mail message when you’re using the web version of Gmail without having to open another tab or window.

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In the midst of declining earnings, Microsoft announced today that it will be laying off up to 5,000 people over the next 18 months, or about five percent of its total workforce. Of that amount, 1,400 are losing their jobs today. Microsoft also says that it will continue to hire and that the net headcount reduction over the next 18 months should amount to between 2,000 and 3,000. The layoffs, along with salary freezes, the elimination of contract workers, lower marketing spending, and other measures are expected to reduce operating expenditures by $1.5 billion this fiscal year.

The company reported revenues of $16.6 billion in the quarter, a two percent increase but $900 million lower than it had expected. The stock is down 7 percent on the news. Also, in an admission of the great economic uncertainty facing all companies, Microsoft is no longer giving guidance for future earnings:

Due to the volatility of market conditions going forward, Microsoft is no longer able to offer quantitative revenue and EPS guidance for the balance of this fiscal year.

Full press release:

Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $16.63 billion for the second quarter ended Dec. 31, 2008, a 2% increase over the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $5.94 billion, $4.17 billion and $0.47, declines of 8%, 11% and 6%, respectively, compared with the prior year.

Client revenue declined 8% as a result of PC market weakness and a continued shift to lower priced netbooks. However, strong annuity licensing drove Server & Tools revenue growth of 15%. Entertainment and Devices revenue grew 3% driven by strong holiday demand for Xbox 360 consoles with a record 6 million units sold in the quarter.

During the quarter, Microsoft showcased significant new product innovations by debuting Windows 7, Windows Azure, Office Web applications, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2. Microsoft also announced general availability of Silverlight 2, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Windows Small Business Server 2008, Windows Essential Business Server 2008 and a new release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

“While we are not immune to the effects of the economy, I am confident in the strength of our product portfolio and soundness of our approach,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer at Microsoft. “We will continue to manage expenses and invest in long-term opportunities to deliver value to customers and shareholders, and we will emerge an even stronger industry leader than we are today.”

In light of the further deterioration of global economic conditions, Microsoft announced additional steps to manage costs, including the reduction of headcount-related expenses, vendors and contingent staff, facilities, capital expenditures and marketing. As part of this plan, Microsoft will eliminate up to 5,000 jobs in R&D, marketing, sales, finance, legal, HR, and IT over the next 18 months, including 1,400 jobs today. These initiatives will reduce the company’s annual operating expense run rate by approximately $1.5 billion and reduce fiscal year 2009 capital expenditures by $700 million.

Business Outlook

“Economic activity and IT spend slowed beyond our expectations in the quarter, and we acted quickly to reduce our cost structure and mitigate its impact,” said Chris Liddell, chief financial officer at Microsoft. “We are planning for economic uncertainty to continue through the remainder of the fiscal year, almost certainly leading to lower revenue and earnings for the second half relative to the previous year. In this environment, we will focus on outperforming our competitors and addressing our cost structure.”

Due to the volatility of market conditions going forward, Microsoft is no longer able to offer quantitative revenue and EPS guidance for the balance of this fiscal year. Microsoft offers operating expense guidance of approximately $27.4 billion for the full year ending June 30, 2009. This information supercedes the fiscal year 2009 guidance that Microsoft provided on Oct. 23, 2008. Management will discuss second-quarter results, and the company’s qualitative business outlook on a conference call and webcast at 8 a.m. PST (11 a.m. EST) today.

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We’ve contacted the company to confirm, but former engineer of the Israeli startup Aviran Mordo is reporting on his blog that the social search company Delver has failed to secure follow-up financing due to the drought in VC activity and will be closing shop in 30 days unless they find a buyer.

The company has raised $4 million from a single investor, Carmel Ventures, and was - according to Mordo’s blog post - unable to raise a second round between $6 and $8 million from the firm or other venture capitalists.

Delver came out of stealth mode only a year ago with an interesting approach to search that aimed to uncover and make accessible knowledge and information that is hidden in users’ social graphs across the web. They opened up to the world about 6 months ago, recently announced a promising search deal with Yahoo BOSS, but apparently discovered that scaling search is very cost-intensive, and that there is plenty of competition and virtually no mass appeal when it comes to alternative search engines.

We’ll update this post as soon as we receive official word back from Delver.

Update: I just got off a call with Delver’s co-founder CEO Liad Agmon, who confirmed all of the above. Unless something miraculous happens, Delver goes into the deadpool.

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Popular video site Veoh has just released a new version of its browser plugin, Veoh Video Compass. The plugin, which is available for Firefox 3 and IE7, presents a selection of videos relevant to your search queries and the pages you browse in an unobtrusive ribbon at the top of your browser. It’s a nifty feature that seems to work pretty well, effectively adding a video search to compliment whatever you’re looking at on the web.

At launch Video Compass works on Google, Yahoo, and most popular search engines, using your search query to suggest videos and related queries. The plugin is also gradually adding support for contextual matching, which tries to identify keywords on the page you’re browsing and offers related videos. Right now the feature works on selected portions of Amazon, Best Buy, WalMart, Wikipedia, and IMDB.com, and the company plans to continually add more.

Users can play each video directly from the ribbon, without having to load a new page. Clips come from a variety of sources, including YouTube and Veoh (with priority apparently given to the latter). Videos appear as popups with a dark overlay, which Veoh plans to use to embed ads.

Aside from occasional bizarre matches (which are to be expected as Veoh builds up its database), my biggest complaint is the fact that the Veoh Compass appears only after the page you’re visiting has finished loading (so your Google search will finish, and only then will the Veoh ribbon pop in, shifting everything down a few centimeters). This might sound like a trivial nitpick, but it gets annoying.

Alongside the new extension, Veoh is launching a new homepage that includes improved navigation and an increased emphasis on recommendations. The site is also now offering a selection of videos that are accessible on the iPhone (just go to the Veoh homepage from Mobile Safari).

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Ask Sponsored Listings, a division of Ask.com (itself a subsidiary to IAC) has acquired Sendori, a startup that introduced interesting advertising exchange technology about two years ago that enabled advertisers to purchase direct navigation traffic generated by top tier domain names, bypassing PPC advertising providers like Google and Yahoo when it comes to monetizing parked domains.

Sendori developed the technology, dubbed PureLeads and patent-pending, to enable both search advertisers and domain owners to benefit from typed-in domain traffic based on the highest auction bids. With rates for PPC (Pay-per-click) dramatically dropping the past few months, Sendori was quickly becoming a nice alternative for domain name owners who traditionally looked no further than the usual suspects offering PPC advertising deals.

Seems like a good match with Ask Sponsored Listings, an Ask.com unit which focuses on keyword targeted advertising on a rather large (+100) network of sites including properties like Match.com, TicketMaster, Ask.com, Evite, CitySearch, CNet, etc. Ask.com has also actively been purchasing valuable domain names and websites like Dictionary.com, Reference.com and Thesaurus.com. Sendori’s client roster includes names like Netflix, GEICO, Hewlett-Packard and other familiar brands.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but we suspect Sendori got a good deal as its model was clearly working: the company said it was providing 130,000 advertisers 33 million page views per month from direct navigation traffic at the time of the acquisition. From the 11 employees (including contractors), 10 will make the move over to IAC.

The startup had raised only $800,000 in Series A financing, from Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital, Maples Investments and Felicis Ventures.

(Source: DNJournal)

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Complaints about Feedburner, a service that helps websites manage their RSS feeds, have been around as long as the company itself. But you’d think that when Google spent $100 million to buy the company, they’d get it together.

But things haven’t gotten better. Instead, the service is becoming unreliable. Feedburner problems plague website owners far more than they should. And while Google is notoriously slow in absorbing its acquisitions, it’s far past time for them to get their act together and turn Feedburner into a grown up service.

Sites like ours rely on our RSS feeds to distribute content widely. Nearly 2 million TechCrunch readers access our content primarily through our RSS feeds, and many of those people never visit the site at all. But even so, they are among our most valuable readers because they’ve taken the action to subscribe to our content feed. For the most part, they don’t stop reading.

But when those feeds don’t work, it’s a terrible experience. The most common problem we’ve seen over the years is a general slowdown in content distribution. For various reasons, Feedburner can delay news for minutes or longer. When news is breaking, that’s a deal killer.

The biggest reason to use Feedburner to manage your RSS feeds is the data you get back on how many people are accessing the feed, what they’re reading, etc. Some of this data can be made public- for example, we’ve included a widget on the site (currently on the bottom right of the page) that displays how many people accessed the RSS feed the previous day. Usually that widget says 1.7 million or so. Today it says zero. Lots of other people are complaining about the same thing (also see the screen shot from Twitter search below).

The main Feedburner blog was shut down in December 2008 and everyone was told to head over to an advertising-focused blog for Feedburner news. I think it’s great that Google wants to do a better job of inserting ads into feeds to make money for publishers. But they have to focus on the quality of the service, too, or the ecosystem won’t work. The message they’re sending to everyone is that the service doesn’t deserve a blog, just the advertising they bolt onto it. Imagine if they did the same thing with search.

Feedburner also has a known issues page that shows what’s currently wrong with the service. It’s clear from that page that the team is having a lot of problems just keeping the lights on. The fact that this most recent issue, broken stats, isn’t reported there yet even though its days old is another red flag.

Feedburner being down is about as acceptable to me as the electricity being turned off at my house. When it happens, nothing else gets done until its fixed, and a lot of other things are directly or indirectly affected.

If Google wants to continue to manage our feeds, we need assurances from them that they want our business. Right now, I don’t believe they do. The people working on Feedburner clearly care about the product and their customers, but they either don’t have enough people or enough resources to take care of business.

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Twitter use is exploding in the UK and, with celebrities there starting to hat-tip the microblogging service, many are predicting it is poised to tip over into mainstream use, much as Facebook did a couple of years ago. UK Internet traffic to Twitter has increased 10-fold over past last 12 months, according to research house Hitwise. For the week ending January 17 2009 Twitter ranked as the 291st most visited site in the UK, up from a ranking of 2,953 for the week ending January 19 2008. UK Internet traffic to the site has increased by a staggering 974% over this period, but that does not even count traffic via third party applications like Tweetdeck or the mobile web. Time spent on the site has trebled and Twitter’s penetration per head is now even deeper in the UK than in the US. It ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, while in the USA it ranked 350th. It is also becoming a big hub for sending traffic to other sites. Meanwhile, Facebook remains Britain’s most popular social network and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK.

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Students from Stanford’s Fall 1008 iPhone class CS193P created a nice crop of apps that are now available or will be soon for the iPhone (see our Stanford Facebook apps posts here and here).

A list of them is here, and some of them I’m going to keep on my phone. My favorite is iDiscover, which gives you random content you think will be interesting (text, videos, apps). You rate them and it teaches the app to refine what it sends you in the future. It’s a sort of StumbleUpon for the iPhone, and its addicting. iDiscover is free. Air Guitar, a $1.99 app, looks like it might be another winner but I’m having issues downloading it.

Among the yet-to-be-approved apps, Site Saver looks like a useful way to store web content locally. I tend to take a screen shot of whatever I’m looking at, but this looks like a better solution if it saves the whole web page rather than just what’s on the screen. And Heydar, a location-based dating application, is being released at the perfect time.

The complete list is below.

Qingwen - Karan Misra

Qingwen is an extremely focused and streamlined Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionary designed with the Chinese reader in mind. Lookup is meant to be fast and easy. There is just one search field which accepts anything you throw at it- Chinese characters, Pinyin, and English - and figures out the most relevant results. Since Qingwen is meant for students of Chinese, you can also easily add words to word lists for future reference and discover relationship between characters by seeing which other words they occur in and which other characters have similar sounds.

Qingwen uses a modified version of CC-CEDICT as its dictionary. Free.

Air Guitar - James Anthony and Edward Marks

Air Guitar provides all the fun of rocking out with none of the talent or commitment required to play a real instrument. Unlike other guitar apps, Air Guitar uses the built-in accelerometer to let you really rock: with your iPhone or iPod touch in hand, just start strumming away at your imaginary axe. $1.99

HaveASec - Nafis Jamal and Andrew He

Do you HaveASec? If so, this is the perfect application for you. You can quickly create a short survey or poll to send out to your friends. You can also ask a public poll to see what our users think. Friends don’t have an iPhone? No problem! We have a fully functional web interface for all mobile phones and computers. Free

iDiscover - Paul Wilson and Nafis Jamal

Do you have a second? Want to read an article of interest to you but don’t have the time to find it? How about a new video to kill some time on the train? Or, what about checking out a new application that isn’t on the Top 25 list? iDiscover lets you easily discover new articles, videos, and applications customized to your interests. You and your friends can also easily share these articles, videos, and applications that you enjoy with each other. Free.

Site Saver - Vikram Oberoi

Site Saver allows you to save websites locally on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Save online references to train schedules, recipes, or product reviews to your device for quick access on the go, or keep your daily fix of online articles just a tap away! $2.99, pending App Store approval.

Abodi - Keyan Salari

Abodi allows you to search listings on Craigslist and save your favorite results for viewing access on the go. You can call or email the ad poster, map out the locations of rental/sale properties and even take notes and photos of the properties you visit. Abodi knows where you are located using the iPhone’s GPS technology, so you can find or rank listings by their distance to your current location or other points of interest! Free, to be submitted by 01/26/09

Heydar - Mark Kieling, Shahryar Khan, Matthew Pease, and Matthew Lawyer

Heydar is a fun new way to meet people. Get started by taking your own headshot. Then view headshots of nearby Heydar users. Tap “Hey” if you find someone attractive. Don’t worry… they will only find out you tapped them if they also tap you. What you decide to do next is up to you… Free, pending App Store approval.

Stress Bust - Greg Wientjes

Stress Buster provides a video of soothing ocean waves. A guiding voice assists the user in relaxing through a progressive muscle squeezing up through the body. $.99, available now.

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Only two days after its release, Ustream’s iPhone Viewing Application has already hit the top spot of the App Store’s Entertainment section, and is ranked the 6th most popular free application overall. Ustream says that its latest figure for number of downloads stands at a whopping 113,000, which only represents the first 24 hours that the application was available (Apple doesn’t update download counts in real time). The application allows users to watch live and archived streams from Ustream.tv directly on their iPhone or iPod Touch, and also features an integrated chat.

Despite its popularity, it looks like users have had a number of gripes. With an average rating of two stars, many of the app’s user reviews complain about crashing, the lack of support for 3G or Edge (you need to use Wi-Fi), and little in the way of mainstream television content. These issues aside, the application is still very cool, and will only get better as the developers push out updates.

We’re still waiting on Ustream’s second application that would allow users to actually broadcast video (the viewing app only lets you stream). While competitors like Qik and Flixwagon have created similar apps that work on jailbroken iPhones, none of these have made their way to the App Store. Ustream’s application was submitted last week and has not yet been approved by Apple.

Update: This post originally said that Ustream saw 113,000 downloads in 48 hours. While it has been around 48 hours since the application launched, Ustream says that the download figure hasn’t been updated to include today’s downloads, so it really only represents the first day that the app was available on the store.

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Big media companies have always had a love-hate relationship with YouTube. They don’t know whether to sue YouTube for abetting copyright infringement or get in bed with it because it is the biggest Web video game in town. YouTube is trying to convince them that love is better than war by giving them a cut of advertising revenues from their videos that appear on YouTube, regardless of who put them there.

So far, most of the ads have been contextual overlay ads sold and served up by YouTube. Currently very few media partners are able to sell their own ads on YouTube, but industry sources expect that this program will soon be expanded to more big media partners, possibly before the end of the first quarter. YouTube confirms that a few big partners, like CBS, can already sell their own ad inventory on both the videos in their YouTube channels and any videos with their content uploaded by users that is picked up by YouTube’s Content ID system. But this group is very limited. (YouTube wouldn’t comment on future plans).

YouTube has thousands of traditional media partners, in addition to its Partners Program targeted at super users. The option to bring your own ads to YouTube most likely will not be offered to the super users who come in through the Partners Program. However, it will apply to any videos caught by the Content ID system. YouTube’s content screening technology identifies copyrighted audio and video that can be claimed by media partners. Ninety percent of claimed videos are monetized with YouTube ads instead of taken down.

The ability to sell their own ads on YouTube is a big deal for larger media companies, especially those which are already selling Web video ads across their own sites. Media companies with lots of video tend to have large advertising sales teams that are typically able to command better ad rates than what YouTube can get. The prospect of selling ads against all of their videos on YouTube at those higher ad rates has them salivating, even if they have to share the spoils with YouTube.

As for YouTube, content from media partners represents maybe only 4 percent of all videos on the site, but it is where nearly all of its advertising dollars are coming from. Anything to make that part of the pie bigger would have an outsized impact on YouTube’s revenues.

While YouTube is now pulling every lever it can to get advertising revenues flowing, this could turn out to be one of the biggest levers of all.

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money this evening to talk about a wide range of issues, from Obama to Steve Jobs.

On Google killing its print ads business: “That particular product didn’t work particularly well and we’re trying other solutions. Print is a hard one because they have declining ad revenue and higher print costs. And so we’re trying other solutions. Ultimately most people will get their information online.”

On Steve Jobs’ health: “Speaking as a board member, we recognized that Steve needed a medical leave and we announced on that. And that’s my only comment on that. Apple’s doing very well, the product’s doing very well.”

On energy: “The part of the stimulus package includes money to modernize the electric grid to make it look more like the Internet. A lot more flexible as it moves power around without this smart grid we won’t make any of this happen.”

On Obama: “I have [spoken with Obama] just a little bit and they’re really, really focused on moving very, very quickly. I think everybody understands that a new president has a honeymoon period in that honeymoon period they can get the most ambitious agendas. In his inauguration speech yesterday you could hear the same things themes in his campaign. The notion of dealing with the way that the country is perceived globally as well as economic stimulus there in a hurry and need to be.”

The full transcript is below (please forgive the all caps, it’s what CNBC supplied):

CRAMER: WE’RE ABOUT TO HEAR FROM CRAMER FAVE ERIC SCHMIDT THE CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF GOOGLE BUT HE’S NOT HERE TO TALK ABOUT HIS COMPANY WHICH WAS UP A COOL 20 POINTS TODAY. NO.ERIC IS HERE TO TALK ABOUT THE MOST-IMPORTANT WORRY IN AMERICA,OTHER THAN HOUSE PRICE DEPRECIATION, OUR SKY-ROCKETING RATE OF UNEMPLOYMENT. THE NEED TO PUT PEOPLE TO WORK INCLUDING IN TECHNOLOGY.REMEMBER, ERIC SCHMIDT ISN’T JUST GOOGLE’S CEO. HE’S ALSO BEEN A PRINCIPLE ADVISER TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA SERVING ON OBAMA’S ECONOMIC TRANSITION TEAM. I BELIEVE THE MOST IMPORTANT TRANSITION TEAM TO SERVE ON. WHY DO WE CARE? BECAUSE I DON’T THINK IT’S ENOUGH TO SIMPLY BUILD BRIDGES AND PAVE SOME ROADS WITH THE STIMLUS PACKAGE.A LOT OF WHITE COLLAR PEOPLE WHO LOST THEIR JOBS WHO WOULDN’T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE UNFORTUNATELY BETWEEN PLAYING BRIDGE AND BUILDING ONE. WE NEED TO CREATE WHITE-COLLAR JOBS AND PUT THESE PEOPLE BACK TO WORK. AND WHEN IT COMES TO THAT ISSUE SCHMIDT HAS THE BEST INSIGHT PERHAPS AS ANYONE ON EARTH. HE’S THE MAN THAT PRESIDED OVER GOOGLE’S EXPANSION FROM AN ITTY-BITTY COMPANY IN 2001 WHEN HE BECAME CEO TO A TECH BOHEMITH WITH OVER 20,000 EMPLOYEES. SCHMIDT WAS THE CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER OF SUN MICROSOFTSYSTEMSBACK IN ITS HAYDAY WORKING THERE FROM 1983-1997 WHEN HE BECAME CEO OF NOVELL. IF ANYONE KNOWS HOW TO CREATE WHITE-COLLAR JOBS ESPECIALLY IN THE TECH SECTOR ITS HIM. NOW BARACK OBAMA HAS YET TO APPOINT HAS CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FOR THE NATION.A BRAND-NEW POSITION THAT COULD HAVE A HUGE HAND IN CREATING NUMEROUS WHITE-COLLAR JOBS.BACK IN OCTOBER, ERIC SCHMIDT TOLD US HE WOULDN’T TAKE THEJOB. ONE OF THE LEADING CONTENDERS A MAN NAMED VINCE SURF A MAN WHO IS CONSIDERED TO BE ONE OF THE FATHERS OF THE INTERNET AN IDOL OF MINE WORKS FOR SCHMIDT AT GOOGLE AS THE CHIEF INTERNET EVANGELIST. ED FELDON.ANOTHER CONTENDER FOR OBAMA’S CTO. HE’S A PROMINENT COMPUTER SCIENCE EXPERTAND PUBLIC AFFAIRS PROFESSOR AT PRINCETON. WHERE SCHMIDT IS ON THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES.LET’S HEAR FROM THE MAN HIMSELF.CAN WE GET A BIG BOO-YAH FOR GOOGLE’S ERIC SCHMIDT. HOW HAVE YOU BEEN? NICE TO SEE YOU.

SCHMIDT: NICE TO SEE YOU GUYS.

CRAMER: ERIC, WELCOME BACK

SCHIMIDT: THANK YOU.

CRAMER: FIRST, LET’S GET IT OUT OF WAY.

SCHMIDT: YES.

CRAMER: YOU THOUGHT —

SCHMIDT: WHERE IS YOUR HELMET.

CRAMER: I DON’T NEED A HELMET. WHEN WE ARE EXCITED.I AM VERY EXCITED ABOUT THE NEW ADMINISTRATION.

SCHMIDT: OKAY, GOOD.

CRAMER: AND I WANT TO KNOW FROM YOU WHETHER YOU THOUGHT LONG AND HARD AND I BELIEVE YOU WOULD BE THE BEST CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER THIS COUNTRY COULD HAVE. WHY NOT TAKE IT. WHY NOT HELP OUT.

SCHMIDT: BECAUSE I LIKE WORKING AT GOOGLE.

CRAMER: WELL WE ALL LIKE WHERE WE WORK I LIKE IT HERE.

SCHMIDT: I LIKE WORKING AT GOOGLE. I WILL STATE RIGHT HERE.

CRAMER: AND HAS HE COME BACK AND ASKED YOU, PRESIDENT OBAMA

SCHMIDT: LET ME JUST SAY I WANT TO STAY AT GOOGLE. THAT’S A PRETTY CLEAR ANSWER.

CRAMER: YEAH. I WILL NOT TAKE THAT AS A MAYBE. OKAY.

SCHMIDT: OKAY.

CRAMER: NOW WE NEED TO CREATE JOBS. WE KEEP HEARING ABOUT TERRIFIC BLUE-COLLAR OPPORTUNITIES. YOU’VE BEEN ADVISINGTHE PRESIDENT.I IMAGINE NOT JUST ON INFRASTRUCTURE, BUT ON WAYS TO CREATE CRITICAL WHITE COLLAR JOBS WHICH ARE BEING LOST BY THETHOUSANDS.WHAT ARE THE REAL OPPORTUNITIES TO PUT THESE PEOPLE TO WORK?

SCHMIDT: WELL, LOOK FIRST WE NEED TO CREATEJOBS ARE CREATED BY THE PRIVATE SECTOR WHEN THEY INVENT AND CREATE NEW BUSINESSES. WE ALL UNDERSTAND THAT.WE’VE ARGUED FOR A LONG TIME THAT THE USE OF THE INTERNET, PARTICULARLY THE BROADBAND INTERNET REALLY REALLY DOES PROVIDE THE LEVERAGE THAT EVERYBODY IS LOOKING FOR.GET EVERYBODY CONNECTED.MAKE IT POSSIBLE DO THINGS FROM WHEREVER YOU ARE, BE CREATIVE AND SO FORTH. IN THE BROADBAND STIMULUS PACKAGE. IN THE STIMULUS PACKAGE COMING THROUGH, COMING THROUGH MAYBE IN THE MIDDLE OF FEBRUARY, THERE IS A NEW ORDER OF $10 BILLION OF INFRASTRUCTURE MONEY TO BUILD A BROADBAND INTERNET IN THE RURAL AREA WHERE WE THINK A LOT OF TALENT — DOES NOT HAVE ACCESS TO THE KIND OF THE STUFF THAT THOSE IN THE CITY COULD USE.

CRAMER: NOW WE KNOW THAT CHINA FOR INSTANCE WILL SPEND $40 BILLION UPGRADING ITS TALCO INFRASTRUCTURE WHY CAN’T WE MIMIC THE CHINESE? WE COULD USE ALL NEW TELCO INFRASTRUCTURE

SCHMIDT: IN FACT THAT’S HAPPENING, RIGHT? AND THIS INFRASTRUCTURE IS PART OF THAT AND THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT WE’RE GOING TO THAT.AND I’M QUITE CERTAIN THAT BY THE TIME WE GET THROUGH THE HORSE TRADING AND SO FORTH PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THE INVESTMENTTHAT NEEDS TO GET DONE HERE.

CRAMER: NOW WE HAVE SPENT THE PREVIOUS ADMINISTRATION HAS SPENT HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS TRYING TO SHORE UP A BANK SYSTEM WHICH HAS NOT CREATED ANY JOBS, HAS ACTUALLY LED TO TREMENDOUS UNEMPLOYMENT IN BANKS AND HAS NOT STEMMED THE BANKING CRISIS.DO YOU THINK THAT OBAMA, AGAIN, YOU’RE ON THE ECONOMIC TRANSITION TEAM, UNDERSTANDS THEFLAWS OF THAT AND WON’T — WANTS TO CHANGE THAT.

SCHMIDT: WELL IN FACT GEITNER SPOKE ABOUT THIS IN HIS CONFIRMATION HEARING YOU’VE GOT A JOBS PROBLEM ANDA CREDIT PROBLEM.THE JOBS PRO!LEM IS SOLVED BY STIMULUS SPENDING, HELPING PEOPLE CONTINUE TO HOLD THEIR HOMES AND SO FORTH AND MAKING ALL THAT HAPPEN THE BANKING CREDIT CRISIS.WHERE DID THE MONEY GO? DO YOU WHERE IT WENT.

CRAMER: YES, I DO.

SCHMIDT: $350 BILLION DOLLARS HAVE YOU EVER LOST THAT KIND OF MONEY.

CRAMER: NO I HAVEN’T BUT IF I WERE –LOOK I WILL NOT DEFEND A LOT OF THESE BANKS’ CEOs. MAY MADE A LOT OF MISTAKES AND THEY DESERVE A LOT OF THE APROBEIUM.BUT MOST OF THESE BANKS ARE SHORT OF CAPITAL AND THEY NEED THIS MONEY, IF ONLY JUST TO BE ABLETO TAKE THE CHARGES. I FEEL LIKE THEY WERE BETRAYED BECAUSE THEY WANT — A LOT OF ACQUIRING BANKS BOUGHT BAD MORTGAGES THINKING THEY COULD PUT THEM TO THE GOVERNMENT.

SCHMIDT: WHAT THEY’RE GOING TO DO IN THIS NEXT ROUND IS THEY’RE GOING TO MAKE SURE THAT WE HAVE TRANSPARENCY OFWHERE THIS MONEY GOES. ONE OF THE THINGS THE GOVERNMENTNEEDS TO CHANGE IS HOW IT TALKS ABOUT HOW TO MAKES ITS DECISIONS. WHY DON’T WE SEE THE EARMARKS WHEN THEY COME THROUGH? WHY DON’T WE SEE THE CHANGES? WHY DOESN’T THE GOVERNMENT POST ON OUR WEBSITE, VISIBLE TO YOUR FAVORITE SEARCH ENGINE. WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, NOT HAVE A YOU WOULD KNOW WHERE IT WENT.YOU’D SEE WHERE THE SPECIAL INTEREST REALLY ALIVE. IT WOULD BE A BETTER GOVERNMENT IF MORE TRANSPARENT.

CRAMER: DO YOU THINKIT WOULD BE POSSIBLE EXPLAIN A WAY, BAD DECISIONS, THOUGH, NO MATTER HOW TRANSPARENT.

SCHMIDT: YOU’D GET A BETTER OUTCOME WHEN EVERYBODY SEES WHAT’S GOING INTO THE SOUP.

CRAMER: OKAY.NOW ONE WAS THINGS THAT I’M LOOKING TO YOU INTO A LOT OF OTHER SMART PEOPLE.WE MENTIONED MR. SURF, IS SOMETHING WE HAVEN’T NEVER HEARD OF THE OTHER DAY i WAS HEARING FROM THE CRITICS LISTENED ALL DAY, PEOPLE ARE SAYING THERE IS NO SOLUTION TO THE BANKING CRISIS.ONE OF THE THINGS THAT I LIKE IS THE OUT OF THE BOX, TO USE THAT CLICHE, OBAMA THINK, LARRY SUMMERS’ THINKING, BUTTHE OUT OFTHE BOX THINKING OF WHAT WOULD BE THE GREAT MANHATTAN PROJECT OF THIS ERA?

SCHMIDT: WELL, IT’S OBVIOUS THAT WE NEED TO REBUILD THE ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE OF AMERICA.I DON’T BEEN YOU BUT I’M TIRED ABOUT THE WARS AND WORRYING ABOUT ARAB OIL.I’M TIRED ABOUT ALL OF THIS STUFF.WHY DON’T WE FIGURE OUT A WAY TO USE THE RESOURCES THAT AMERICA HAS. AMERICA HAS LAND, WIND AND SO FORTH AND I KNOW THAT THE OIL IS CHEAP AND YOUR MODEL IS $30 TO $50.

CRAMER: RIGHT.

SCHMIDT: OIL IS NOT GOING TO STAY THAT WAY FOREVER. LETS GET OURSELVES ORGANIZED AROUND JOBS THAT CAN REALLY CREATE SOMENEW INVESTMENTS AND NEW ECONOMIES AND BY THE WAY THE FUNDING THAT’S IN THE STIMULUS PACKAGE A LOT OF IT IS TO TRY TO GET THAT GOING AND THAT’S GOOD LONG-TERM INVESTMENT ON AMERICA.

CRAMER: BUT WHY AREN’T WE USING OUR BRAINS TO MAKE THE ENERGYTHAT WE DO HAVE, COLE, IN ABUNDANCE, NATURAL GAS IN ABUNDANCE, CLEANER AS A BRIDGE FUEL SO WE DON’T SET OURSELVES UP FOR FAILURE.

SCHMIDT: IN FACT, THAT’S HAPPENING. IF LOOKS LIKE CARBON SEQUESTRATION, COAL — BASICALLYTHE PROCESS OF PUTTING CARBON IN THE GROUND AND OTHERS, IT HAS HAD SOME SIGNIFICANCE — SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS.A LOT OF THESE INDUSTRIES GOT NOINVESTMENT THE LAST 30 YEARS. THEY WERE NOT VERY SEXY. THE SORT OF PROFESSORS ARE NOW RETIRING. A NEW GENERATION OF PEOPLE ARE COMING INTO UNIVERSITIES WHO WANT TO SOLVE THE GLOBAL ENERGY PROBLEM.PARTLY BECAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE.

CRAMER: RIGHT.

SCHMIDT: AND ALSO BECAUSE THERE IS JOBS CREATION GROWTH AND THERE ARE ALL THESE ISSUES WE TALK ABOUT THEM ALL THE TIME. IT’S A MUCH BIGGER INDUSTRY BY THE WAY THAN MY INDUSTRY WHICH IS THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY.

CRAMER: YES IT IS.

SCHMIDT: SO LET’S FIX THAT.

CRAMER: NOW WE HAD A GOOD QUESTION ABOUT WHEN WOULD SOLAR COME BACK IN VOGUE?GIVEN THE FACT THAT WE HAVE TO SPEND SO MUCH MONEY TO SHORE UP THE BANKING SYSTEM, HOW WILL WE POSSIBLY HAVE ENOUGH MONEY LEFT OVER TO SUBSIDIZE SOLAR IN AN HERE WHERE OIL IS NO WHERE NEAR WHERE IT WAS A YEAR AGO?

SCHMIDT: YOU GOT LOOK AT THAT FROM THESTANDPOINT OF THE COST OF THE PLANTS.NOT THE COST OF OIL.OIL IS LARGELY A FUNCTION OF TRANSPORTATION. THE BASIC PROBLEM YOU’LL EITHER BUY THIS HUGE EXPENSIVE COAL PLANT OR WIND PLANT OR HUGE EXPENSIVE NATURAL GAS PLANT. RIGHT NOW THERE’S A PROBLEM THAT WIND FARMS ARE BEING BUILT RIGHT NEXT TO BRAND NEW GAS PLANT BECAUSE WIND DOESN’T BLOW ALL OF THE TIME. THE PART OF THE STIMULUS PACKAGE INCLUDES MONEY TO MODERNIZE THE ELECTRIC GRID TO MAKE IT LOOK MORE LIKE THE INTERNET. A LOT MORE FLEXIBLE AS IT MOVES POWER AROUND WITHOUT THIS SMART GRID WE WON’T MAKE ANY OF THIS HAPPEN.

CRAMER: DO YOU THINK THAT THERE IS ANYTHING ON THE HORIZON IN ‘WILL 89, ‘90.INTEL SHRUNK THE SEMICONDUCTORS SO WELL BUT KEPT THE SPEED AND THE INTELLIGENCE OF THEM THAT WE HAD AN EXPLOSION IN PERSONAL COMPUTERS.IN THE MID ‘90S WE HAD AN EXPLOSION FIRST IN E-MAIL AND THEN THE INTERNET TOOK OVER AND THEN THE SEARCH ENGINES.GIVE ME SOMETHING THAT NO ONE’S SEEING THAT YOU’RE PERHAPS NOTICING IN GOOGLE. YOU GUYS HAVE YOUR HANDS IN MANYDIFFERENT THINGS.

SCHMIDT: WELL, WE’VE GOT A COUPLE OF BETS IN THE ENERGY SECTOR WHICH ARE REALLY INTERESTING.PEOPLE ARE WORKING ON VERY, VERY AGGRESSIVE BIOFUEL STRATEGIES. WE MAKE THIS STUFF.LITERALLY GROWING IT FROM SUNLIGHT, RIGHT?AND ALL OF A SUDDEN —

CRAMER: BUT COULD THAT BE MASS EVERYTIME I HEAR ABOUT THESE IDEAS, IDON’T WANT TO SHARE THEM WITH MYVIEWERS IS IF SHOULD NO HOPE.

SCHMIDT: IT’S SCIENCE AND RESEARCH.IT’S NOT THIS YEAR BUT IT’S COMING. ANOTHER EXAMPLE IS IN PHOTO VOLTAICS — THE SEMICONDUCTOR PROCESSES ARE GETTING FASTER. WE CAN GETTHE KIND OF EFFICIENCIES THAT ARE UNHEARD OF BEFORE TO CONVERSE.THESE HERE IN DEVELOPMENT NOW.YOU WON’T SEE THEM THIS YEAR.MAYBE TWO, THREE YEARS FROM NOW.IN THE SHORTER TERM YOU’RE SEEING GREAT TECHNOLOGY IMPROVEMENTS IN BATTERIES AND HYBRIDS WHICH WILLHELP US A LOT IN THE TRANSPORTATION.

CRAMER: YOU’RE OBVIOUSLY AN INTERNET CEO. YOU I TEND TO LOOK AT INTERNET AS SOMEWHAT RAPACIOUS.IT HAS HURT A LOT OF PRODUCERS OF CONTENT BECAUSE OF IT COMMODITIZED IT. WHY SHOULD WE THINK THAT THE INTERNET CAN PUT MORE PEOPLE TO WORK WHEN IF YOU’RE WORKING IN A PRINT PUBLICATION A LOT OF PEOPLE OUT OF WORK.

SCHMIDT: WELL, THEY’RE WINNERS AND LOSERS IN ALL OF THESE TECHNOLOGIES AND THE FACT OF THEMATTER IS THE INTER’ET MAKES THEMARKET MORE EFFICIENT.WHICH OFTEN BRINGS — BRINGS PRICES DOWN WHICH IS A BENEFIT TO END USERS. ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF IT IS PROBABLY IS THE PIE GETS SO MUCH LARGER. AND NOW YOU HAVE A MUCH LARGER GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO MAKE LESS MONEY AND SO FORTH BUT IT’S SUCHA GLOBAL BUSINESS NOW THAT’S SOLUTION. BUILDING — USING THE INTERNET TO BUILD GLOBAL BUSINESSES HOW YOU REALLY WIN.

CRAMER: HAVE YOU SPOKEN TO PRESIDENT OBAMA IN THE LAST WEEK OR TWO ABOUT SOME OF THESE IDEAS THAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT?

SCHMIDT: I HAVE JUST A LITTLE BIT AND THEY’RE REALLY, REALLY FOCUSED ON MOVING VERY, VERY QUICKLY.I THINK EVERYBODY UNDERSTANDS THAT A NEW PRESIDENT HAS A HONEYMOON PERIOD IN THAT HONEYMOON PERIOD THEY CAN GET THEIR MOST AMBITIOUS AGENDAS.IN HIS INAUGURATION SPEECH YESTERDAY YOU COULD HEAR THE SAME THINGS THEMES IN HIS CAMPAIGN.THE NOTION OF DEALING WITH THE WAY THAT THE COUNTRY IS PERCEIVED GLOBALLY AS WELL AS ECONOMIC STIMULUS THERE IN A HURRY AND NEED TO BE.

CRAMER: I KNOW YOU ARE REPORTING TOMORROW AND I’M IN THE TALKING ABOUT EARNINGS BUT IN THE NEWS TODAY, GOOGLE DISCONTINUES ITS PRINT RELATIONSHIP. IS PRINT MEDIA DEAD?

SCHMIDT: NO, NO NOT AT ALL.THAT PARTICULAR PRODUCT DIDN’T WORK PARTICULARLY WELL AND WE’RE TRYING OTHER SOLUTIONS. PRINT IS A HARD ONE BECAUSE THEY HAVE DECLINING AD REVENUE AND HIGHER PRINT COSTS.AND SO WE’RE TRYING OTHER SOLUTIONS.ULTIMATELY MOST PEOPLE WILL GET THEIR INFORMATION ONLINE.

CRAMER: OKAY, APPLE COMPUTER JUST REPORTED.IT REPORTED A MONSTER GOOD QUARTER. IT IS MOVING THINGS UP DRAMATICALLY.ARE WE AT A TIME WHEN THERE’S TREMENDOUS FINANCIAL CHICANERY?WHERE WHOLE BANKS HAVE BEEN DESTROYED.PEOPLE HAVE NO TRANSPARENCY.IS IT RIGHT FOR THE S.E.C. TO SPEND ALL OF ITS TIME TRYING TO INVEST OR AT LEAST A LOT OF ITS TIME TRYING TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER WE KNEW ABOUT THE TRUTH ABOUT THE UNBELIEVABLY GREAT CEO, STEVE JOBS’ HEALTH.

SCHMIDT: SPEAKING AS A BOARD MEMBER, WE RECOGNIZED THAT STEVE NEEDED A MEDICAL LEAVE AND WE ANNOUNCED ON THAT.AND THAT’S MY ONLY COMMENT ON THAT. APPLE’S DOING VERY WELL, THE PRODUCT’S DOING VERY WELL.

CRAMER: ONE LAST THOUGHT, IF WHERE WOULD THE MOST UNEXPECTED THING THAT OBAMA CAN DO RIGHT NOW TO FIX THIS ECONOMY?THE ONE THAT — LOOK, WE BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB IN THE 1940s.NO ONE SAW THAT COMING.WE’VE HAD TREMENDOUS ADVANCES PUT A MAN ON THE MOON.WHAT’S OUR MAN ON THE MOON?

SCHMIDT: WELL, THE BEST WAY TO DO THIS WOULD TO BE DO SOMETHING EVERY MONTH AND TRACK IT ON A WEBSITE.

CRAMER: DO YOU THINK THAT WE CAN DO THAT.

SCHMIDT: ABSOLUTELY.OUR ONLY JOB IS TO GET PEOPLE BACK TO WORTHWORK AND WE’RE GOING TO CHANGE.OH THAT WORKED?OR THAT DIDN’T WORK? OH MY GOD THE GOVERNMENT MAY BE FLEXIBLE.

CRAMER: EXCELLENT. ERIC SCHMIDT. CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF GOOGLE. GREAT SEE YOU.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

In September 2008 Facebook application developer and advertising network RockYou sent a standard notice to all of their potential and existing advertising partners - which is virtually everyone that creates Facebook Applications. The problem was that they cc’d everyone, creating a firestorm of angry (and sometimes funny) feedback. RockYou basically published a complete list of advertisers and developers working on the Facebook platform.

RockYou VP Business Development Ro Choy apologized in the comments to our previous post, saying “We take privacy of all our partners very seriously and have reviewed and corrected the process that enabled this.”

Despite Choy’s assurance that the problem had been fixed, they did the same thing on November 25 (we gave them a pass that time). And now they’ve done it a third time. In a thinly veiled mass mailing advertisement, RockYou asks scores of developers to buy some of the “600 million impressions that we deliver each day.” And once again, they cc’d everyone, which annoys the recipients to no end. The message is below.

On an unrelated note, if you are looking for advertisers for your Facebook application, I’ve got a very high quality list for sale.

Subject: RockYou Ad campaign

Hi,

Thank you so much for working with us as a pub and/or advertiser. I
wanted to check in and find out if you need help reaching new users to
install your app or engage with your site.

As our long-term partner, we want you to have access to the over 600
million impressions that we deliver each day across our network. We’ve
been running ad campaigns consistently with most of the top 20 app
developers on Facebook and MySpace– driving over 30,000 installs per
day for several clients– so there’s no reason why we can’t help you
grow your application or site through an ad campaign.

If you’d like to find out more about setting up an ad campaign with us
to drive thousands of new users to your site in a matter of hours,
please shoot me a response email or feel free to give me a call. Thanks
a lot!

Regards,

Danielle

—
Danielle [removed]
Ad Sales, RockYou
Email: [removed]@rockyou.com
Office: 650-421-[removed]
Website: rockyouads.com

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

At the tail end of Apple’s quarterly earnings conference call today, COO Tim Cook (CEO Steve Jobs, who is taking a medical leave of absence, was not on the call) noted that 17 million iPhones have been sold to date. When he was asked about the rising competition from Android, Blackberry, and Palm, Cook made an oblique threat:

We approach this business as a software platform business. We are watching the landscape. We like competition as long as they don’t rip off our IP. And if they do, we will go after anyone who does.

This threat seems directed squarely at Palm, which recently launched it’s own answer to the iPhone: the Palm Pre. The Pre has a multi-touch interface, something which Apple holds patents on, and from which other competitors have steered clear. When Cook was asked if he was talking about Palm, he demurred:

I don’t want to talk about any specific company. We are ready to suit up and go against anyone. However, we will not stand for having our IP ripped off.

What makes this veiled threat even more personal is that Palm’s executive chairman is former Apple product chief Jon Rubinstein, who was installed by Elevation Partners. Elevation Partners is Palm’s biggest investor. They believe so much in the Pre that they just sunk another $100 million into the company, on their initial $325 million investment a year ago.

Maybe Rubinstein can use that cash to pay Apple a licensing fee.

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mEgo, a startup that lets you create a portable Flash-based avatar that includes aggregated content from your social network profiles, has closed a $2.5 million funding round. The site has also announced that it has reached its 1 millionth registered user since launching at 2007’s TechCrunch40 conference, with a 20% growth rate month over month.

mEgo’s widgets allow users to import information from sites like Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter, which are then presented alongside customizable avatars (you can see an example below). Each source of information can be associated with a different button on the widget that users can place themselves. For example, in the widget below music buttons are positioned on the avatar’s ears and display the user’s Last.fm profile when clicked. mEgo widgets can be placed on blogs and most social networks, and see around 30 million impressions per month.

There are a number of other companies working on embeddable avatars, including Gizmoz and Voki, but mEgo differentiates itself by acting as a hub for a user’s photos and network profiles rather than just a fancy self-portrait.

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We’re just minutes into Apple’s quarterly earnings call, and the iPhones sales numbers for the first fiscal quarter of 2009 (which ran from Oct. 1, 2008 to Dec. 31st, 2008) are already in. Over the past 3 months, Apple has sold over 4,363,000 iphones.

Compared to the 2.3 million iPhones sold in Q1 of last year, this number is astronomical. Compared to the 6.9 million iPhones sold in the previous quarter, however, it seems relatively low. While it may be that the demand caused by the 3G model of the iPhone may be wearing off, I’d expected Christmas purchases to pull sales on par or above Q4 of 2008, along the lines of the sudden App Store sales boost we saw in December.

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OneSeason, the stock market for sports that lets users invest real money into their favorite athletes, has closed a $3.5 million Series A funding round led by Charles River Ventures. To coincide with the funding, OneSeason has also announced that CRV’s George Zachary will join the company’s Board of Directors. Hot or Not founder James Hong and 49er superstar Ronnie Lott will also be joining the company’s Advisory Board.

The site mimics traditional stock markets, substituting famous athletes in place of large companies (they even have their own ticker symbols; KING, currently the top-trading stock, stands for LeBron James). Users can purchase ‘Synthetic Ownership Interests’ in each player, which rise in value depending on their demand. Since launching in October the site has traded over one million of these SOIs.

The site could be very appealing to sports fanatics looking to convert their fantasy sports skills into real cash, but as we wrote when the site launched, it’s a system that seems ripe for abuse. Because you aren’t actually buying any real asset and there isn’t any official regulation, users could potentially team up with friends to ‘pump and dump’ a stock. To combat this OneSeason has a dedicated team of staffers looking to curb abuse and an automated fraud detection engine, but I’d still be wary of investing large sums of cash in this still-nascent market. That said, if the site can prove the legitimacy of the market it could gain a massive following - predictions are always more fun when there’s some risk involved.

Thanks to Scott Harper for the tip.

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New York City has just launched a revamped webportal at NYCgo, which now offers an extensive database of events, restaurants, hotels, and other points of interest. All of these are tied into the Google Maps API, making it easier for visitors to quickly find things to do in their vicinity without having to hunt down their hotel’s concierge. The site will also include a listing of promotions and discounts, like the incredibly popular Restaurant Week, during which upscale restaurants offer meals at a flat (and heavily discounted) rate.

The city has also teamed with Google to create its new Information Center at 810 Seventh Avenue, which includes Surface-like map tables powered by the Google Maps API . Users will be able to browse through attractions and create travel plans which they can print on the spot, and can also apparently embed their travel itinerary into small tokens which they can use to virtually ‘fly’ through a rendered 3D version of New York City taken from Google Earth. For tech geeks this might be the first city where the visitor center is going to double as an attraction.

New York City isn’t the first city to go hi-tech - major cities like Washington DC and San Francisco also offer interactive maps and visitor guides.

For more details, check out the post from NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg here.

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Yesterday was supposed to be the day that live Web video streaming took on TV broadcasting.  CNN.com alone served a record 21.3 million streams, with a peak of 1.3 million simultaneous streams. And Akamai reported a peak of 5.4 million simultaneous visitors per minute to the various news sites for which it hosts video, and more than 7 million simultaneous streams.

With millions tuning in from their PCs to watch President Obama’s Inauguration speech, it was one of the biggest tests yet for live video streaming.  But live streaming failed. CNN.com kept bumping viewers into virtual waiting rooms. This happened to me in the middle of Obama’s speech. I had to keep hitting refresh, but missed half the speech. The stream on Hulu was even worse, with the video frozen and the audio coming in and out. And forget about Ustream. I couldn’t even get any audio. This seemed to be the general experience out there, based on other reports.

When it comes to big live events with millions of people watching at the same time, traditional TV broadcasters have nothing to worry about. Right now, the Internet breaks at about one million simultaneous streams. That is nothing when it comes to the audience size for historic events, or even a big football game. The Internet simply does not shine when it is used as a broadcast medium. And yesterday proved it.

Will it get better? Yes. Akamai and others can always put up more proxy streaming servers at the edge of the network to meet demand. But that is an expensive proposition for infrequent events. Perhaps a better solution for live streaming is a peer-to-peer model where streaming quality improves as more people watch. (Check out RayV, which does this). That would require everyone to download extra add-on software for their browsers. I’d do it in a second if that would solve the live stream stuttering problem.

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Couldn’t make it to Washington DC yesterday for the inauguration, or didn’t get hold of a front row seat? Nobody needs to know.

Just go to MyInauguralPhoto.com, powered by online photo editing software provider FotoFlexer, and pretend you were there, right behind the new president of the United States as he was sworn in.

Can you spot Mike Arrington?

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Until today, we weren’t even aware of the fact that San Francisco startup Fuzz operated a social network / music discovery destination website besides its (awesome) spin-off Blip.fm, the “Twitter for music“. We only found out about that now that we’ve learned that the service, Fuzz.com, will apparently cease to exist shortly.

Here’s the notice, which can be found on their blog and was also e-mailed to its registered users:

Sadly, we are contacting you to announce that Fuzz.com is shutting down on February 13, 2009. Between now and then you may want to take the opportunity to post your forwarding information to fellow Fuzz users. It was with a heavy heart that we finally made the decision to turn off the lights, but because of increasing operating costs and flat revenues it simply no longer makes sense for us to keep Fuzz.com running. We offer our heartfelt thanks for being a part of it, and we’d like to give a special added thanks our avid, core users — true music fans who made Fuzz their home-base, and created a real sense of community.

Please note that once the site is shut down on February 13, 2009, the band and user accounts, and all other content on Fuzz.com, will no longer be accessible. For artists who have used the site to sell music, we plan to make a final payout within 60 days of the shut down.

Fuzz is pointing to its own Blip.fm, JamBase and Nimbit as alternatives.

Update: Arin Sarkissian, former lead engineer for Blip.fm, outlines the story in detail on his blog.

The company raised funding from angel investors in February 2008; we have an e-mail in with the company to learn how much and from whom, and also to confirm our logical assumption that the startup likely wants to dedicate its resources in developing the Blip.fm service.

(Hat tip to Tanya Breshears for the heads up)

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Israeli startup Jogli, the music search engine we previously covered, is now making all of the 12M albums it streams easily embeddable, even on MySpace (example).

Beyond albums, the widget (embedded at the end of the post) also allows the embedding of playlists, artists’ best hits and radio stations. It’s color customizable (think YouTube’s player) and if you want to play with the embed parameters, its size can also be altered. Jogli makes heavy use of YouTube’s API to power its service.

I asked the for company’s perspective about all that has gone about lately with Project Playlist getting banned (here and here) and Warner pulling out of YouTube.

David Schwartz, Jogli’s CEO:

Our position is simple – all sides should do their best to solve the issue: Project Playlist should either pay royalties or find creative ways to find legal content around the web. It is possible although it is hard; once they do that – MySpace and Facebook should decease the blocking – as this blocking hurts their users eventually.

But - most importantly - content owners should be flexible in their negotiations with various web sites – as an example – Warner canceled their agreement with YouTube – why? In this time of financial crisis demanding more money is absurd, and, the users’ community uploaded all the popular music to Youtube hours after it being removed anyways, so nothing really changed – the offering in Jogli, as an example, was hardly effected at all. Trying to remove the sound is yet another futile effort as users will upload replacements.

Jogli’s experience with the sound muting underscores the futility of tactics on the part of record labels. Schwartz claims that alternatives to most muted videos were uploaded within days. Jogli also uses other music sources, and says the muting delivered a negligible effect on the service itself.

Tweepler is a brand new application for Twitter users who are finding it difficult to sort through new followers and decide if they should follow back or not. The application offers an interface that divides your followers into ‘unprocessed followers’ and two sidebars that give you an overview of people you are following back and users you are ignoring.

When you first sign up, you register for an account using your Twitter credentials and Tweepler will automatically import users you are following and who are following you (this part is a little buggy). Once the import is finished, the latter group is thrown into the bucket of unprocessed followers along with bits of information which make it easier for you to decide if you should follow them back or not.

Tweepler will show a list of users along with their avatar and bio, which you can sort by newest follower or alphabetically by name or Twitter username (there’s also a decent search engine built in). If the person doesn’t protect his or her updates, you can view more details about the user, such as the average amount of tweets per day, total number of tweets so far, how many people the user is following and how many are following back as well as the last 3 messages. You can easily move users into your ‘Follow’ or ‘Ignore’ list by clicking arrows on either side of the middle column. You also have the option to follow or ignore the lot of them by clicking the bulk processing buttons.

Tweepler is definitely a time saver and an easier way of managing followers on Twitter than the currently available apps and Twitter.com, but it’s also something that you’ll likely use only once or twice, unless you’re really popular and gain dozens of new followers a day.

Tweepler was built by Jessy Ouellette (@JessyO) and Cory Schop (@coryschop), who believe they have a way of generating revenue from the application. Essentially they would give people the option of advertising their account so they’d show up on top of the interface and/or as a ’suggested follow’ and pay up per follower they gain through Tweepler.

As much as I like the application and the people who built it, I can’t imagine that this business model will work, and frankly I hope they’re not expecting too much from it.

But if you’re on Twitter, make sure you give it a spin and see if it’s a better way for you to manage your Twitter social graph (and follow @tweepler for updates).

Scred, a Finnish startup that lets friends track and manage their shared expenses and debts, has come up with a new twist to its app which may also help out young startups. With its MiniCorps app (as in ‘mini-corporation’) you can track the income and expenses for a whole group, work out if you are making a profit or loss, and know how much revenue you’ve made. Via a lightweight storefront MiniCorps can also receive money and sell items online, with all of it tracked by Scred without anyone having to touch an Excel document. All the cash is handled via Paypal, which seems limiting for now but at least it makes it pretty accessible. Suddenly amateur rock bands everywhere can rejoice. The question is whether Scred’s apps will get any traction against US competitors BillMonk, Buxfer, and Obopay.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Yahoo needs all the revenue help it can get these days, which is why it’s odd that subsidiary Flickr hasn’t been serving ads properly for a day or so and apparently no one at the company has noticed. A reader writes in to point out that if you click on any of the ads that appear on the site when you do a search (try this one for Apple), the user sees the linked page in an iframe instead of being taken to the advertisers site.

That’s handy, because the advertiser is charged but the user never leaves the Flickr site (something only Facebook seems able to pull off). My guess is this is fixed by morning.

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Hubspot’s Facebook Grader will tell you your “reach and authority” on Facebook. My score is 90/100.

The tool works by analyzing the number of friends you have, how important those friends are (whatever that means), how complete your profile is, how many wall posts you have and how many groups you belong to. It turns out I haven’t filled out much of my profile and there are some other things I’ve neglected to attend to, so I only get an A-.

I can live with that, but there are others out there who seem to take issue with how the site ranks people. French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur is “outraged” that it doesn’t take into account that he has a fan page, for example (I find fan pages obnoxious myself), and gave him a score of only 97.6. C’est la vie.

To sum up my opinion of this tool, it’s beyond useless. Not that I ever planned to, but the last thing I’ll ever do now is fill in more of my profile or join more groups. Maybe I can get that 90 down to 0.

The company has a similar tool for Twitter.

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Pixsy, a company that specializes in licensing its image and video search platform to other businesses, has launched a new product called “Premium Feed” that allows publishers to embed clips that can be easily monetized into their sites.

While there are a number of search engines that offer free video clips for embedding, it can be difficult for publishers to monetize these. Using Pixsy’s Premium Feed, publishers can search through video content that already has ads embedded (either as pre-rolls or overlays). Whenever they embed these clips into their websites, they will get a share of the revenues (the actual percentage varies depending on the publisher). All publishers looking to participate in the program have to go through Pixsy’s approval process, but CEO Chase Norlin says it takes as little as a week for new publishers to qualify.

Norlin says that the Pixsy catalog now includes over 2 million clips in its Premium Feed, about half of which come from user generated content. To monetize this user generated content, Pixsy has partnered with a third-party company to perform image and audio transcription which can then be used to embed relevant AdSense Ads. The remaining portion of the Premium Feed comes from ‘professionally generated video’ - content providers who have already included advertising in their clips and are looking for a means to syndicate them.

At launch Pixsy’s Premium Feed partners include Cooliris, a 3D-media browser plugin, as well as Ego TV.

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Fifty thousand dollars will only go so far. As the winner of last year’s TechCrunch50, that’s how much workgroup micro-messaging service Yammer received in prize money. But Yammer has now raised a $5 million series A financing from the Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures, according to founder David Sacks. Yammer is a spinoff from genealogy site Geni, which also just received another $5 million from the same investors in a series C financing.

The Founders Fund is a $220 million seed fund whose partners are mostly former execs from PayPal, where Sacks himself was the COO.

The A round should help Yammer make more inroads into companies big and small. Yammer is an enterprise version of Twitter that helps people in companies keep up with what everyone else is doing. It works especially well with far-flung employees (we use it every day at TechCrunch). But many competitors have already sprung up, including Present.ly and WizeHive. And Twitter itself could easily move into the enterprise market simply by launching a groups feature, as it has done in Japan.

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Ustream has received approval from Apple for its iPhone live video viewing application just in time to watch the Obama inauguration live from wherever you are.

…as long as you have a wifi connection that is. The application requires an open wifi connection to show video, but it works very well. Audio is solid, picture quality is good but with a low frame rate. And users can both read and leave comments in the chat stream. Get it here (iTunes link).

We eagerly await the fraternal twin Ustream app that will let users broadcast their own video from the device as well.

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PEHub has reported a handful of new unannounced funding rounds based on recent SEC filings. Included among them are ancestry site Geni, which raised $5 million in Series C funding with investors including Charles River Ventures and Founders Fund. Geni’s team, which includes former PayPal exec David Sacks, is also behind TechCrunch50 winner Yammer, a Twitter-like service for businesses. We’ve reached out to Geni to confirm the news and will update this post once we do.

Update: Sacks has confirmed that Geni raised the $5 million round, and has also told us that Yammer has raised a $5 million Series A round.

Also included in the report is GoodGuide’s Series A round of $3.73 million with investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and New Enterprise Associates. GoodGuide, another TechCrunch50 company, is building a database of consumer products that gauges how ‘good’ they are with respect to safety, the environment, and the community. The news was confirmed by VentureBeat.

Other investments reported include a $6 million round for Return Path with investors including Union Square Ventures, Mobius Venture Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Western Technology Investments. For more, check out the PEHub story.

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One thing we need is better search for microblogging sites like Twitter, Friendfeed and their competitors.

Swedish search engine Twingly is launching just that - a new microblogging search tool - today. Use it to search a variety of sites - Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Bleeper.de, Bloggy.se and Pownce archives (since the service is now dead). They’re calling it the worlds first federated microblog search.

This is a one stop shop to do searches across multiple microblogging sites at once, not just Twitter or other individual services via their own search products.

Friendfeed integration is “on the way” says CEO Martin Källström. Users can also create keyword alerts accessed via RSS or email.

We previously covered Twingly a year ago when they previewed a Europe-focused blog search engine. The company has raised €1 million in funding.

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It was inevitable that sooner or later someone would create a virtual girl that lonely men can download to their iPhones and call their own. Today, the iGirl app (iTunes link) from Resistor Productions debuted in the iTunes Store. After recently passing 15,000 apps and 500 million downloads, what’s left?

The iGirl is a female avatar trapped in your iPhone. You can make her dance or shake, change her clothes, ethnicity, and even what language she speaks. (No, she doesn’t take her clothes off—this is Apple). The app doesn’t exactly rise to the level of a Tamagotchi experience (no virtual care or feeding required). It’s just a dumb app for guys that costs $1.99 a pop. I’m sure it will quickly become a best seller.

If you want to save your money, you can watch a video demo here. Seems like it would get old after the second or third time. A much better app is Wobble, which lets you take a photo and make any body part wobble (NSFW video embedded below). The $0.99 app sold 3,420 copies its first two days in the App Store, according to its developer.