RSS News

About.me founder and True Ventures partner Tony Conrad gave a presentation at Web 2.0 Summit today on something called “Echo Chamber Marketing.” Conrad said that his strategy to scale his About.me  online identity platform, which has now reached a million members after 300 days, was to figure out “who [his] entourage [was].”

Counter to the popular notion that you shouldn’t market your startup only to techies, Conrad picked 26 influential members of the technology community — like Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca and Veronica Belmont — to become About.me advisors, which meant 4.5 advisors for every employee at About.me at the time. Turns out Conrad’s plan was ingenious, because in an era where tech influencers have now becomes mainstream influencers, those 26 members pitching the site to their followings played a huge role in the site’s massive scale.

The site later (but not too much later) sold to AOL for seven figures.

Today, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to talk about the current landscape of the cloud for the first time since the public back-and-forth between himself and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. For those unfamiliar, earlier this month, Ellison cancelled Benioff’s keynote talk at The Oracle OpenWorld Conference. Benioff wasn’t particularly psyched about the move, and gave a fiery talk from the St. Regis Hotel across the street instead.

Benioff took a few shots at Oracle during his talk, telling listeners to “beware of the false cloud. It is not efficient, it is not democratic, it is not open”. Obviously, you can guess who was the proponent of this “false cloud”. It rhymes with Boracle.

Naturally, Ellison wasn’t going to take that sitting down, and fired back at Benioff, calling Salesforce “the roach motel of cloud services”. Ouch.

Interestingly, when Tim O’Reilly (who interviewed Benioff onstage today) played a little word association with Benioff and mentioned the name “Oracle”, the Salesforce CEO had nothing negative to say; instead, he said that Oracle was a great company and had a “great strategy”.

While Benioff’s tone has definitely tempered somewhat since OpenWorld in relation to Ellison and Oracle, it has not changed in terms of what the CEO sees as the future of his company and the future of the enterprise industry as a whole. Enterprise has to be, needs to be: Social.

What do I mean by that? Well, unsurprising for anyone who is familiar with Salesforce, Benioff has a big old man crush on Facebook.

“I really think that Facebook is becoming a vision of what the consumer operating system is”, he said. “Everything I want, I’m beginning to see on Facebook”.

The CEO was speaking largely in relation to Spotify, which he says has become his favorite music service, a quicker transition than he’s made to any other platform in the recent future. Having the Facebook UI built into Spotify is incredible, he said, allowing friends and colleagues to what he’s listening to in realtime — was inspiring to him.

“I’d like to be doing as many amazing things as Facebook is”, Benioff said, continuing on to say that Facebook is essentially driving the direction in which the entire industry is going, especially that of enterprise, which Benioff has been selling for some time now. Case in point: Here is a guest post from March 2010, in which Benioff argued that enterprise software should be more like … you guessed it … Facebook.

Benioff is quick to say that the social revolution is coming to enterprise software, that it is inevitable, and that those who don’t get on board are going to fall by the wayside. It is of utmost importance for enterprises (and let’s be honest, every company out there) to listen to their customers. And, as Benioff perceptively surmised, their customers — across the board — are on social networks, which is exactly where they should be interacting with them.

Again, the Salesforce CEO referenced the Arab Spring movement in the Middle East, in which Facebook and Twitter played such an integral role in allowing protestors (and one in all) to communicate with the outside world — and each other.

After these social networks enabled this kind of imperative and essential communication, signs like “Thank you, Facebook” were to be seen across the Middle East. As Benioff sarcastically pointed out today, “We didn’t see signs that said, ‘Thank you, Microsoft,’” Benioff said.

Benioff and O’Reilly both agreed that the cloud, mobility, and the shift to social have been fundamentally changing the Web, and that the same can be said for enterprise as well. In terms of social, Benioff said that the affects of the social media revolution have allowed people to interact and converse with brands and companies in realtime — at a pace unprecedented when looking back as little as five years ago. Thus, it is imperative for enterprise companies to be aware of brand impression, brand share, what people are saying about their company in realtime — because it can have a profound affect on your bottom line.

The most recent example? Netflix. Benioff said that the on-demand video network had a “pristine brand”, but when they made the loud price change to their customers’ accounts, splitting DVD and streaming, 27,000 negative comments popped up on their blog post, and Netflix’s market cap declined precipitously.

“There’s a pretty big connection there”, Benioff said. Enterprise needs to be more aware of what their customers are saying, and the key is tapping into social networks, because that’s where they are.

Thanks to Reuters for the Excerpt image

Kodak, let us admit, is doomed. Founded over a century ago, it has dominated film for as long as film has existed, but now that film is on the verge of ceasing to exist, they have very little to dominate. They’re short on cash and while they deny plans to file for bankruptcy, many question whether they will have the luxury of choice a few years from now.

My first preference for the preservation of this company would be for them to sell off their patents and focus on film until they’re buried by progress. That’d be Kodak going out with its boots on, so to speak. But I doubt that’s going to happen.

What needs to happen instead is Kodak needs to abandon any pretense of being a household word. They’ve had a good run — for an entire century their name has been synonymous with film. But it will never be as recognizable again. So why throw money away on an entire division creating low-margin, unoriginal devices that are going to be obsolete in a few months and duplicated by pirate OEMs anyway? No, Kodak needs to go invisible.

For a long time Kodak was the leader in photographic innovation. They even invented their own destroyer, a la Oedipus Rex: they were among the first producing digital cameras. Why aren’t they now? Why is the sensor inside the iPhone 4S a Sony instead of a Kodak?

Listen, Kodak. I like a couple of your cameras. That’s not the issue. The issue is that you’re selling a product that everyone gets for free when they buy a smartphone, digital picture frames are a joke, and printing is becoming more and more something that happens in a ShutterFly facility, not at home — if it happens at all. Producing products is for companies like Apple and Canon. You don’t want to compete with them.

And you don’t have to. You’ve got top-notch research facilities churning out patents and inventions all over the place. Pick a few niches and become indispensible. I’m not quite saying be a patent troll. I’m saying you should be the ones HTC goes to when they want to get an edge over the rest in the camera department. What will you make? Low-noise sensors? Image compression algorithms? Lens coatings? High-speed imaging interface? I don’t know. Just pick something other than a heap of consumer products in the process of being eliminated by the march of progress. You don’t see IBM trying to compete with Dell.

One thing: in order to keep the Kodak brand alive, you should always be in the business of making real things. But make the printer head, not the printer. Make the sensor, not the camera. Make it clear that if it’s not powered by Kodak, it’s a piece of junk. You’ve already been half-forced to this position, so just go all the way. You don’t need the trappings of a consumer tech company weighing you down. You’re Kodak, for god’s sake. Act like it.

If all goes well, you’ll emerge from these hard times a leaner, more focused company, with a sack full of amazing patents and a stable of clients who wouldn’t be able to compete without your technology. Is it a fantasy? Sure. But it’s better than the dreary, prosaic reality you’re living in now. At least strike out swinging.

While voice control has been part of Android since the dawn of time, Siri came along and ruined the fun with its superior search and understanding capabilities. However, an industrious team of folks from Dexetra.com, led by Narayan Babu, built a Siri-alike in just 8 hours during a hackathon.

Iris allows you to search on various subjects including conversions, art, literature, history, and biology. You can ask it “What is a fish?” and it will reply with a paragraph from Wikipedia focusing on our finned friends.

The app will soon be available soon from the Android Marketplace but I tried it recently and found it a bit sparse but quite cool. It uses Android’s speech-to-text functions to understand basic questions and Narayan and his buddies are improving the app all the time.
The coolest thing? The finished the app in eight hours.

When we started seeing results, everyone got excited and started a high speed coding race. In no time, we added Voice input, Text-to-speech, also a lot of hueristic humor into Iris. Not until late evening we decided on the name “iris.”, which would be Siri in reverse. And we also reverse engineered a crazy expansion – Intelligent Rival Imitator of Siri. We were still in the fun mode, but when we started using it the results were actually good, really good.

You can grab the early, early beta APK here but I recommend waiting for the official version to arrive this week. It just goes to show you that amazing things can pop up everywhere.

In this episode of the TechCrunch Gadgets Webcast we assess the value of camera film, decide that Devin is the 6th Decemberist, and express how much we love Asus’ new ultrabook.

We promise every week that we’ll do these more often and we love doing them. Our questions: is it too short? Too long? What would you like to hear about? Would you like guests? Is the format alright? Would you prefer an audio podcast or should we strip the video for audio consumption? We, as you well know, are at your service.

Sean Parker doesn’t think that Facebook has a privacy problem. Kicking off the Web 2.0 Summit today, when pressed on how Facebook is increasingly becoming creepy in terms of how much of our lives it is tracking, he notes, “There is good creepy, and there is bad creepy.” But from his perspective, the privacy issues are manageable as long as users are able to control what and how they share what they do online.

“I don’t think privacy is Facebook’s biggest problem,” says Parker, who was the company’s founding president. “Facebook’s biggest problem is the glut of information from power users.” With the recent changes announced last month at F8, especially the new Ticker which automates sharing from apps, the stream of status updates is now a deluge. Of course, this brings up new privacy concerns when people are not aware how much they are sharing or how to turn it off, but that is a temporary issue. People will learn how to control their streams.

The bigger issue, Parker suggests, is people who want to share everything and overwhelm their friends on purpose. What do you do with these over-sharers? Facebook can encourage them to move on to Twitter or Google+ (hello, Robert Scoble). But that won’t work in the long term because the power users are the ones who create most of the content on Facebook (or anywhere on the Web, for that matter). The answer, he thinks, is to give the power users more tools like Smart Lists to help them direct their broadcasts to distinct groups. (Sounds a lot like Google+ Circles).

One of the services which is currently inundating people’s Facebook tickers is Spotify, which Parker is involved in as a very active chairman. He acknowledges that there needs to be a better balance between passive and active sharing. But his thoughts on how Facebook is helping to accelerate Spotify’s adoption were more on point

Asked, what the recent integration with Facebook does for Spotify, he replies: “The obvious thing is it gives access to Facebook’s roughly 800 million users and it allows music to go massively viral. The social graph has always been a great promulgator of information. We didn’t see it as a network of profiles, we always saw it as a way to promulgate media. You saw this with videos from Youtube. But because of licensing issues there was no way to enable that same virality with music.”

Although Spotify got stage time at Facebook’s F8 conference, it launched with many other music services on the Facebook platform, including MOG and Rdio. “It would have been better if we had launched solo,” quips Parker, before pointing out that the terms of the partnership is no different for Spotify than for anyone else.

A recent New York Post article recently reported that Parker and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg were seen arguing outside a Hollywood nightclub about Spotify’s lack of exclusivity. “That story is amazing.” says Parker. “I love this story. It shows the potential for one little irrelevant, largely incorrect rumor to spark this large explosion of media. Mark and I were discussing this, but we weren’t having a yelling match on Hollywood Boulevard.”

Reflecting on the difference between Napster (where Parker also was a co-founder more than a decade ago) and Spotify, Parker says, “The potential to dis-intermediate the gatekeepers was there, but first you needed to create the right product” and get the music industry to play ball. “Unfortunately, it took the outright collapse of the music industry to compel them to do deals.” He notes that the size of the music industry dropped from $48 billion at its peak to $12 billion, and it is still going down. And now they are finally talking.

So is it all Spotify’s game to lose now? “The world is changing so quickly that it is very hard to get anything right for long,” cautions Parker. “I never gave up on this dream of a frictionless service that would enable music sharing. The greatest music being made wasn’t being heard by the greatest number of people.” Now, with everyone on Facebook inundating their streams and Tickers with every random tune they happen to hit play on, you can’t say that remains a problem.

Parker didn’t say much about his new startup AirTime, but apparently Marc Benioff, who was onstage after him, just invested in it.

We could all argue until we were blue in the face on the merits of each platform’s update system, but there’s one place where iOS just has them all beat hands down: timing. If your device is going to support a big new update, you’ll pretty much always know as soon as said update is announced — and in most cases, the instant one compatible device gets the update, all compatible devices get the update.

Just 5 days after its official launch, iOS 5 is already up and running on 1 out of every 3 compatible devices.

While it’d be easy to throw these numbers up against those of Android (40% of Android devices used in the last 2 weeks are running either Gingerbread or Honeycomb, the latest builds for mobile phones/tablets respectively), the comparison would be Apples and Oranges: these numbers only include iOS 5 compatible devices (iPad 1/2, iPhone 3GS/4, iPod Touch 3rd/4th gen), where as Google’s running numbers potentially cover handsets reaching all the way back to the original T-Mobile G1.

These numbers come from the guys at Localytics, whose mobile analytics SDK is integrated into many thousands of iOS apps with a sample size they say is in the range of “tens of millions of devices.”

The breakdown:

• 36% of iPad 2s observed are already running iOS 5
• 35% of iPhone 4s
• 33% of original iPads
• 27% of iPhone 3GS
• 23% of iPod Touch 3rd-gen
• 17% of iPod Touch 4th-gen

These numbers do not include the iPhone 4S, as that device ships with iOS 5 out of the box. Having a wildcard sitting at 100% would skew the average a bit.

I see at least two take-aways here, at first glance: A) iPod Touch owners need to plug in their damned handsets more often, and B) While iOS handset owners seem to update absurdly fast, the requirement for backwards compatibility/legacy support isn’t going anywhere.

A group of Iowa National Guard, fresh from a harrowing two-and-a-half-hour firefight in Afghanistan earlier this year, found itself questioning the effectiveness of some of their new equipment. They had been issued M240B light machine guns for support fire, but they found themselves constantly reloading with new 50-round belts, which necessitated a ammo bearer with a bunch of belts at the ready. “The ammunition sacks that came with it made it too cumbersome and heavy to carry over long, dismounted patrols and especially when climbing mountains. Initially, we came up with using 50-round belts and just reloading constantly, which led to lulls of fire and inefficiency,” said Staff Sgt Vincent Winkoski.

While discussing the shortcomings of their setup (as you might do if your lives depended on it), someone mentioned the movie Predator, in which Jesse Ventura’s character had an ammo box for his minigun strapped to his back. They laughed about it, but Winkowski got to thinking, and with a can-do attitude that becomes of a soldier, decided to put something like it together.

He took some modular gear they had lying around (a carrying frame, all-purpose pouch), combined it with some parts from a remote weapons station, and with a little tinkering and glue, he had himself a working ammo backpack.

They tested it on the range, and it worked. And when their squad was ambushed in a valley by a group of enemy fighters, it proved it was more than just an experiment. Winkowski sent pictures and a description to science advisers in the Army’s research division. They loved it.

Within 48 days, they had redeployed a new, lighter, stronger prototype into the theater. “We were able to put everything together very quickly and were able to prove that with a combat load — that’s 43 pounds with 500 rounds, inclusive of the weight of the kit itself — that still gives the Soldier 17 pounds worth of cargo weight to attach to the frame and still be within the design specifications for the MOLLE medium,” said Dave Roy, who received the design and oversaw the prototyping.

I don’t post this just in the “cool new guns” spirit, though it’s certainly a neat gadget from that perspective. I just thought it was fantastic how the spirit of innovation pops up when you least expect it, and it seems that even within the tightly-regulated world of the Army, a good idea occasionally can take root and be on the ground fast enough to save a few lives. The freedom to create and hack is important and powerful, and providing the tools for people to do it (in this case, forward-thinking modular systems and a willingness to experiment) is an advantage in industry as well as battle.

Thanks to the 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, Iowa National Guard for their hard work overseas.

[via TechZwn; images courtesy of the 133rd]

We’re at the Palace Hotel for the 2011 Web 2.0 Summit where the lineup for the next three days consists of  almost everyone on the entire Internet. In case you didn’t get to be a part of the in-person action, you folks at home can follow along from the Livestream above, starting at 2pm PST.

Today’s speaker highlights include Supyo’s Sean Parker, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and About.me’s Tony Conrad.

Full schedule below. 

2:00pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Opening Welcome John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.), Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media, Inc.)
2:10pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Sean Parker, Co-founder, Supyo Sean Parker (Founders Fund), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)
2:35pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
John Donahoe, President & CEO, eBay John Donahoe (eBay Inc.), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)
3:05pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Marc Benioff, CEO, salesforce.com Marc Benioff (salesforce.com), Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media, Inc.)
3:25pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Paul Otellini, CEO, Intel Corporation Paul Otellini (Intel Corporation), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)
3:45pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Pivot Tony Conrad (about.me, True Ventures & Sphere)
3:50pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Ross Levinsohn, EVP of Americas, Yahoo! Ross Levinsohn (Yahoo!), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)
4:20pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
High Order Bit Christopher Poole (4chan & Canvas)
4:30pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
High Order Bit Deb Roy (Bluefin Labs)
4:40pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
High Order Bit Genevieve Bell (Intel Corporation)
4:50pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
High Order Bit Brad Rencher (Adobe Systems Incorporated)
5:00pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, Oregon Ron Wyden (U. S. Senate), John Heilemann (New York Magazine)
5:25pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Closing Remarks
7:00pm Dinner
Room: Grand Ballroom
Web 2.0 Summit Dinner with Special Guest: Dick Costolo Dick Costolo (Twitter), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)

IBM has released its third quarter results today, with non-GAAP diluted earnings coming in at $3.28 per share, compared with operating diluted earnings of $2.85 per share in the third quarter of 2010, an increase of 15 percent. Analysts were expecting $3.22 per share with revenue of $26 billion. The company posted diluted earnings of $3.19 per share, compared with diluted earnings of $2.82 per share in the third quarter of 2010, an increase of 13 percent.

Big Blue’s third-quarter net income was $3.8 billion compared with $3.6 billion in the same quarter in 2010, an increase of 7 percent. Operating (non-GAAP) net income was $4 billion compared with $3.6 billion in the third quarter of 2010, an increase of 9 percent. Total revenue for the third quarter of 2011 of $26.2 billion increased 8 percent from the third quarter of 2010.

IBM chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano said this in a statement: “In the third quarter, we drove revenue growth, margin expansion and increased earnings as a result of our innovation-based strategy and continued investment in growth initiatives…Growth markets delivered outstanding revenue performance across software, hardware, and services and contributed to the company’s expanded margins. We also achieved strong results in Smarter Planet, business analytics and cloud.”

Some of the growth markets he’s referring to are from the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China. Revenues in the BRIC countries increased 17 percent, with total revenues from the company’s growth markets increased 19 percent. Growth markets revenue represents 23 percent of IBM’s total geographic revenue for the third quarter.

Revenues from the Software segment were $5.8 billion, an increase of 13 percent. Hardware revenues totaled $4.5 billion for the quarter, up 4 percent. IBM ended the third-quarter 2011 with $11.3 billion of cash on hand and generated free cash flow of $3.5 billion, up approximately $300 million year over year.

Because of this quarter’s strong earnings, IBM is raising its 2011 full-year operating earnings per share expectations to to at least $12.95 from at least $12.87, and for non-GAAP earnings to at least $13.35, from $13.25 per share.

You can listen and comment on IBM’s third-quarter earnings call, which starts at 4:30 pm ET, below.

Google Wallet continues on its slow (but exciting) march toward letting you pay for things simply by tapping your phone against a special, NFC-enabled credit card reader. Today, in a post on Google’s Official Blog, the wallet team announced that it’s rolling out support for SingleTap — a new feature that lets you both pay and redeem coupons at a given retailer, without having to clip (or print out) and paper coupons. Instead, the phone ‘remembers’ the Offers you’ve saved or purchased, and redeems them automatically.

The feature was first demoed back when Wallet was unveiled in May, but when the service launched in beta last month you could only use it for payments, not offers. Of course, Google Wallet is still only available to consumers that have the Sprint Nexus S 4G (not even the T-Mobile or AT&T variants of the Nexus S work). But that will hopefully change soon — I won’t be surprised if we see some announcements around this at the Android event in Hong Kong this week.

Google’s post also notes that the interface for the Google pre-paid credit card — which lets you preload a virtual card with money, in case your credit card isn’t natively supported by Wallet — will now feature more details about each of your transactions.

And finally, Google Wallet has landed some new retailers that will be integrating the service soon, including: Chevron, D’Agostino, Faber News Now, Gristedes Supermarkets and Pinkberry, who join American Eagle, Macy’s, Jamba Juice, and more (you can see a full listing of the partners here).

From the post:

The Offers tab in Google Wallet has been updated to include a new “Featured Offers” section with discounts that are exclusive to Google Wallet. Today, these include 15% off at American Eagle Outfitters, 10% off at The Container Store, 15% off at Macy’s and an all-fruit smoothie for $2 at Jamba Juice. There are many more Google Wallet exclusive discounts to come, and you can save your favorites in Google Wallet so they’ll be automatically applied to your bill when you check out.

Organizing loyalty cards in your wallet is getting easier too. Today, Foot Locker, Guess, OfficeMax and American Eagle Outfitters are providing loyalty cards for Google Wallet so you can rack up reward points automatically as you shop. More of these are on the way.

Word-of-mouth is the tried and true way to spread the word about your business, news, or product updates. For businesses, allowing your customers to tell their friends about how awesome your product or service is can be a great way to increase your brand recognition and attract new customers to come in and check out what you’re doing. As Basecamp wrote back in September, the web-based project management system has grown increasingly in popularity because customers have been able to tell their friends and colleagues about it and bring them over to the service.

Curebit, an alum of the Y Combinator winter class of 2011, launched at demo day back in March as a way for online stores to increase revenue through referrals by turning existing customers into marketers. Curebit wants to optimize referral systems for eCommerce platforms, and today they’re launching a new product to help do that more effectively. It’s called the “Social Referral Optimizer” and Curebit Co-founder and CEO Allan Grant tells us that his product is essentially like Google Web Optimizer for referral systems: It solves the hard problem of getting high conversion rates from referral systems.

Curebit supports the type of split referral incentivization that has worked so well for companies like Dropbox. For those unfamiliar, this split referral system is when you recommend Dropbox to a friend, and when they sign up, both you and your friend get some kind of reward, be it 5GB of storage for free or a shiny nickel.

According to Grant, Dropbox worked at optimizing their referral system for months before it began to have any real sort of effect on customer acquisition and conversion, so Curebit wants to take this optimization (i.e. pain in the butt) out of the process for any site — even yours.

What the Curebit team came to understand as they tested different form of referral optimization is that conversion depends a great deal on the details of the offer (the language the offer is presented in, the type of incentive, etc.), so their Social Referral Optimizer allows sites to automatically break an offer into its various permutations and test them across Curebit’s partner sites to see which has the highest conversion rate.

The startup’s optimizer enables sites to vary the amount of the discount, the offer text, the message one uses to share it with friends (whether that be via Facebook or Twitter), the landing page, as well as the graphic design of each page. But really the coolest part is the cross-site optimization: For sites that don’t have enough volume to get those statistically significant results, users are able to take advantage of Curebit’s software, which learns as it tests from other sites across the Web (about 700 of these are already available for testing).

Interestingly, from the data the startup has collected so far, they’ve learned that the conversion rate depends not so much on the amount of the discount that one offers friends for their referrals, but more on the text one uses — how the entire offer is expressed. And so far, the results have been encouraging. With Curebit’s optimizations, users are able to get 30 to 60 percent of of the customers that buy to share exclusive offers with their friends, resulting in a direct, measurable life in sales of up to 15 percent.

The startup is also launching an additional two new features today, including “Facebook Sponsored Stories” integration, which is designed to optimized shared messages, turning them into high-conversion social ads, as well as “Social Influencer Tracking”, in which Curebit identifies customers that have shared an offer (and are super influencers) so that merchants can personally thank them.

For example, when Gina Bianchini, co-founder of Ning, shared one of Curebit’s offers, the DODOcase founders got an email about it right away and were able to reach out to say thanks immediately thereafter. Next time the Ning co-founder buys something that uses a Curebit referral, the DODOcase guys will know right away, even if she doesn’t share. Pretty cool.

For more on Curebit, check out the video below:

Gartner just released its worldwide enterprise IT spending estimates, which are projected to total $2.7 trillion in 2012. That’s a 3.9 percent increase from 2011 expected spending of $2.6 trillion, but down from a 5.9 percent expected increase in 2011.

Gartner says this year alone, 350 companies will each invest more than $1 billion in IT. And at the forefront of IT spending are applications in the cloud, social, data warehousing and mobility areas. Gartner says that $74 billion was spent on public cloud services in 2010, which only represented 3 percent of enterprise spending. But, the firm says that public cloud services will grow five times faster than overall IT enterprise spending (19 percent annually through 2015).

By 2014, Gartner says that private app stores will be deployed by 60 percent of IT organizations. And in August, Gartner reported that social customer relationship management (CRM) market is forecast to reach over $1 billion in revenue by year-end 2012, up from approximately $625 million in 2010.

The firm also said that despite the global economic challenges, enterprises will continue to invest in IT, although the rate of spending may slow.

Adobe has just launched a version of its PDF Reader, Adobe Reader for iOS devices, which supports iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The new, free application, available here in iTunes, lets users view PDF files opened via email, on the Web or from within any application that supports iOS’s “Open In” functionality.

The app provides additional features like the ability to search for text in the document itself, plus support for bookmarks, navigation using thumbnails, zooming, sharing via email, copy and paste, single page or continuous scroll modes and even wireless printing via iOS AirPrint.

In addition to standalone PDFs, the app can be used to open ePortfolios (PDF Portfolios), PDF Packages, annotations and drawing markups. Password-protect files, those secured by Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management and files encrypted using AES256, are also supported.

Along with the new iOS app, Adobe released Android Reader for Android 10.1 which includes many of the same features and works on both Android phones and tablets running Android 2.2 or higher.

Update: The responses to news of the Adobe Reader iOS app I’m seeing on Twitter are quite varied. So far, they’ve ranged from “finally!” to “oh god no!” Apparently, there’s no middle ground on this one.

As one of America’s leading environmental thinkers and activists, Jeremy Rifkin has spent the last forty years campaigning to reform and democratize the energy industry. But in his new book The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World, Rifkin merges green technology with the internet. And what Rifkin concludes is that the synthesis of what he calls a new “energy regime” with the distributed intelligence of the internet will create a “third industrial revolution” that will shape the 21st century.

“Great economic revolutions happen when we change energy regimes”, Rifkin told me when I caught up with him on Skype last week. But it’s what he had to say about the emergence of what he called the “mega-technology platform” of the distributed Internet energy regime that will interest both environmental entrepreneurs and thinkers. So is Rifkin correct? Is the fossil fuel revolution exhausted and are we on the brink of a third industrial revolution that will be driven by both the internet and renewable energy?

Following the September launch of Twitter ads in the U.K., Twitter is now bringing its advertising products known as “Promoted Tweets,” “Promoted Trends” and “Promoted Accounts” to its Japanese version of the service Twitter.jp. According to a post on the official Twitter Japan blog, the rollout began earlier this month.

These same products were introduced over a year ago here in the U.S., and provided advertisers access to Twitter’s global audience. However, at the time, the ads were only open to U.S. advertisers. In September that changed when Twitter brought its Promoted Products to the U.K. And now, it’s doing the same for Japan.

One of the U.K.’s first advertisers was Sky, who used the newly available advertising platform to promote the latest season of Glee. (Sorry about that, U.K.) Unfortunately, the U.K. launch was marred by appearance of spammers, who almost immediately jumped onto the promoted hashtag (#gleeonsky) to tweet out malicious links. Tweets supposedly offering “hot photos” of Hollywood celebs like Natalie Portman, Jessica Alba and Selena Gomez appeared on the same day that the first Promoted Products went live. Hopefully Japan will be spared from having to deal with the same problem.

According to this early report, Japanese Promoted Trends are 420 yen per day with an average of 12 million impressions per day. (Those number are unconfirmed, however).

In addition, Digital Garage, the company responsible for Twitter operations in Japan since 2008, continues to offer display ads on the Twitter.jp site. These ads will remain in place, it’s being reported. That means there’s actually four ways to advertise on Twitter Japan, not three.

Short version: Probably the best-looking game I’ve ever played, despite a general lack of imagination. The gameplay itself, though, is (without exaggeration) probably less sophisticated than Doom.

Graphics

Note: open these screenshot links in new tabs to see the full resolution – it’s worth it.

One can’t always begin a review with the graphics, but with Rage the discussion must begin, and in a way end, with them. id’s John Carmack and his team have put together an absolutely astounding world and engine. What it lacks in originality (every visual aspect is either cliche or an FPS standby) it makes up in fidelity and attention to detail. The organic look of the environments, whether frontier town, abandoned refinery, military base, repurposed cave, or ruined city, is unequaled in games as of this review. The only games that come close are Crysis 2 and Battlefield 3, though neither of those has the on-rails gameplay that allows every vista and every hallway to be lavishly decorated, deconstructed, and otherwise visually enhanced.

It really is a feast for the eyes, and small details are everywhere. It’s clear, especially from the paucity of the gameplay, that the focus of this team was on the creation of fully-realized environments, however restrictive and unoriginal they may be. It’s occasionally breathtaking, and rarely anything less than competent.

The game ran extremely well on my mid-range rig, and apparently runs at a steady 60 frames per second on both the 360 and PS3. I had some video configuration problems (v-sync refused to turn on) and the texture pop issues were occasionally present, but it was largely a seamless, quick-loading, and visually consistent trip.

So, that’s the good part.

Gameplay

As I said, I believe the gameplay in Doom, and nearly every FPS since, is more sophisticated than that of Rage. There is absolutely no variation at all, from start to finish. The only thing that changes are the guns you have and the amount of damage the enemies can withstand. Every mission is identical: get in your car, travel to a door in the wasteland, go through the one-way dungeon (there are almost zero forks or open areas), collect an item or kill someone, and then usually take a convenient shortcut back to the start. Rinse, buy ammo, and repeat about 40 times.

The last thing I mentioned always bugged me. You will literally take a mile-long path through dozens of buildings and corridors, and then, reaching your objective, find that it was actually only a flight of steps and a door from where you started. I realize not every game aspires to logical level design, but it felt a little ridiculous. Why not have the player come out the other end, steal an enemy car, and drive back to the entrance?

Progressing through these levels is the exact same every time, as well. Technically you can sneak, but the few times when you can actually take out a few guys without making a noise are scripted, with the dudes starting facing the wrong direction, and your killing them setting off the usual flood of baddies. You advance room by room, hallway by hallway, shooting and grenading these people the same way for hours. There’s no way to vary the combat — you can rush in and use the shotgun, sure, or hang back and snipe, but what if you want to drop down on some enemies below you, use your melee, and so on? Nope. It’s a bit ironic that throughout the whole game you can barely find a straight line (so detailed are the environments), except for the path of your character. There are side quests, but they generally just get you cash and follow the same rules.

With a few exceptions, every enemy in the game falls under two types: run wildly toward you to melee attack, or hide behind cover and lean or pop out to take a few shots. There are big guys, and some sniper types, and so on, but mainly it’s just these two kinds of guys (be they mutant, bandit, soldier, or what have you) with steadily increasing hit points. At the beginning of the game, a guy would drop from a single headshot with the default pistol. Towards the end, there were dudes taking shotgun blasts to the head and not slowing down.

The weapons are standard fare, most with an alternate ammo or two that ups the damage. Pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, crossbow, better assault rifle, rocket launcher, plasma gun. You pull the trigger until the bad guys fall down. You can craft items and ammo, some of which are handy, like the sentry bot. But you’ll probably accrue hundreds of items in your inventory (which is not very easy to manage) that you’ll never use. And useless, sellable stuff (cans of food, “small objects” like mugs that are apparently worth more money than guns) is mixed right in with your ingredients and ammo. Why?

Slight spoiler warning for the next two paragraphs. The end of the game comes abruptly and is extremely unsatisfying. The fate of the free world, it seems, relied on a 20-minute traipse through an anonymous sci-fi headquarters and killing a couple dozen regular guys. Building and decorating this incredible world was too much work to provide a proper third act, I guess. Thought that is a fairly legitimate excuse.

The best part of the game was without a doubt the first trip into the dead city. The process of discovery as you progress deeper into the mutated, pulsating bowels of this genuinely scary and fantastically-rendered ruin is great, even if you’re not actually interacting with anything except to shoot it. There’s even a genuine boss fight! Unfortunately, nothing else in the game comes near this segment.

Driving

I’m not sure why there is driving in this game, except to give the world a little scale and shorten the time spent between dungeons. The actual races, fairly short affairs through familiar areas, with trivial differences, varied between tedious and frustrating. But they’re the only way to win currency to upgrade your car with, so you pretty much have to do it. I found almost no difference between the various cars except the look and the amount of armor they had. And you can only race with two of them. Seriously?

Vehicular combat is a pain. Because you usually encounter enemy vehicles in a largish arena type landscape, you tend to either destroy a guy in one pass or circle around each other, slowing down to a crawl in order to turn faster.

As far as adding size to the world, it’s a mixed bag. Occasionally you drive past some really cool stuff, but of course it’s just set dressing. But most of the destinations you travel to are literally within 30 seconds or a minute away. Need to go collect something from that old factory “up north”? Yeah, they could have walked there in five minutes.

Conclusion

Is it worth playing? Let me put it this way: you’ll get as much out of watching someone else play it as you would if you bought it. What you’re buying is more a cinematic and visual experience than gameplay you’ll value or remember on any level. How much are you willing to pay for a movie ticket? That’s how much you should pay for Rage.

What would you pay to watch me — a bona fide professional blogger — sit in my apartment, whipping up this post amidst a flurry of irritating phone calls, order-in lunch, and dirty laundry? To witness the magic that drives TechCrunch?

Okay, so anyone in their right mind would pass on that offer (and frankly, I don’t want the company). But what about a home-cooked meal prepared by the sou chef of a top restaurant, or graffiti lessons from a pro, or lunch with a former investment banker-turned monk? That’s the promise of SideTour, a startup that lets users showcase (and sell) unique, genuine experiences — things that you can’t buy tickets for normally, but would be very enjoyable all the same.

Today, the startup, which is part of the latest batch of TechStars NYC companies, is announcing that it’s raised a funding round of $1.5 million, led by RRE and Foundry Group.

The service, which is limiting itself to users in NYC for now, launched eight weeks ago. The array of experiences listed on the site include everything from learning about spices, to dance lessons to, yes, playing pinball with the GroupMe team. Each experience lists a day and time, as well as how many slots are left open and the cost. From there, you can book it through Eventbrite — SideTour takes a 20% cut, which has been reduced to 15% for the beta period.

The site is still pretty early on, so a few obvious features are missing. But Vipin Goyal says that there’s a lot on the way: users and hosts will be able to create profiles, and hosts will be able to accept/reject people who want to attend their experiences (a particularly good idea if you’re inviting people into your home). Another obvious addition would be a review system so that attendees can rate how each experience went.

Goyal acknowledges that there are several other startups, like Skyara and  Vayable, setting out to do similar things (I’ve heard the ‘Airbnb for activities’ pitch several times). But he says most of them are using a listing model, where users find something they want to do and then contact the host to arrange it. In contrast, SideTour uses an appointment system — a professional chef, for example, would specify exactly which night they were going to be making that homecooked meal, and then people buy tickets to that event.

This model lends itself well to social experiences — Goyal says that oftentimes the five or ten people at a given experience wind up bonding (they might know each other to start, but they’re all there because they have a shared interest), and will sometimes meet up again after the event. And as a sign that the site is starting to get some traction, he says that a it’s starting to get inbound attention from hosts (like the aforementioned sou chef) who want to offer their skills in a different setting.

Over the weekend, Nokia launched a suite of casual games developed at Nokia Research Center which are meant to demonstrate how NFC can enable new forms of mobile gaming. The three new games include Nokia World Flags, Nokia Shakespeare Shuffle and Nokia Nursery Rhyme Shuffle. All can be played now on any Nokia Symbian NFC-enabled phone including the Nokia C7 Astound, C7-00, 600, 603, 700 and 701.

Nokia calls the games “tangible” mobile games because of the way they interact with physical objects in the real world using NFC tags. The games don’t have to read or write to the tags in order to work – they only need to detect the tags’ presence. That means they will work with blank NFC tags or even “contactless” credit cards, transit cards or ID cards, the company explains.

Frankly, the user interfaces for the games are only so-so, but to be fair, these are more akin to demo apps than “real” games meant to attract thousands of users. Instead, it’s the idea behind these games that’s meant to be the focus of this news.

For example, one game involves NFC-tagged playing cards which are used to play a digitized version of a child’s simple matching game. Traditionally, you would play this game by flipping over cards to find the matched pairs. With the NFC game, however, you tap the card with your phone. While I’m not sure if a game like this is screaming out for NFC, the concept of combining playing cards with NFC in new ways has some appeal. Imagine playing a NFC-enabled version of one of those “Magic: The Gathering” type games where with a tap you could actually see the battles between wizards animated on your phone’s screen, while the mobile app also kept score for you. That might be cool (well, for nerds, wink wink).

The two other Nokia games now available involve tapping cards to mix up either nursery rhymes or Shakespeare quotes. They look pretty boring.

In a video, Nokia shows off a fourth concept (not available) where you tap different parts of a stuffed animal with an NFC phone to launch different games. That could provide toy makers a new avenue for upselling that was previously limited to ads that appear on their toys’ boxes and in their instruction manuals. Still, as much as I personally love technology, the idea that my child’s teddy would simply serve as an avenue to toddler’s first gaming addiction kind of makes me sad. Whatever happened to actually playing with your toys? (Maybe I’m just getting old.)

Nokia, it should be noted, is not the first to have ideas about NFC-enabled gaming. One high-profile example comes from Rovio, which, launched an NFC-enabled version of Angry Birds called Angry Birds Magic earlier this year. That game also works on Symbian.

Widespread NFC adoption is several years out, and is still waiting on Apple’s participation. That means opportunities for NFC-enabled gaming are few and far between today.

Nokia is often early to the smartphone space with innovative concepts, but it’s not until Apple executives upon them do they really reach the mainstream. Something tells me that NFC mobile gaming will be just another example of this ongoing trend.

When it comes to managing search and social marketing campaigns, Clickable is cementing its position across a broad spectrum of marketers, especially small and medium sized businesses. The New York City company just got a big financial vote of confidence from its biggest partner, American Express, which is leading a $12 million series C. Previous investors Union Square, Founders Fund, and FirstMark are also participating. American Express is already a major distribution partner for Clickable, reselling its ad management platform to its small business customers.

The last time Clickable raised money was more than three years ago when it closed a $14.5 million series B. CEO David Kidder confirms that the valuation was significantly higher this time around. Clickable already employs 160 people, and Kidder expects to hit operating profitability next year. The new funds will be used primarily to expand his salesforce and move more aggressively into the nascent social advertising market.

“We want to become the AdWords of social,” says Kidder. Clickable was an early Facebook Ads partner, allowing its users to manage their Facebook ads through Clickable since March, 2010. Clickable lets marketers upload social ads in bulk, track conversions, and compare to their marketing campaigns elsewhere, including search marketing campaigns. “We look at it as one platform across all the networks,” says Kidder. Twitter and LinkedIn will be next.

With the launch of Clickable 3 in the first quarter of next year, search and social marketing campaigns will become more aligned. “We are looking at the inter-relationships between search and social, which is significant. We think those worlds will be closely tied together,” he says.

Back in July, Erick took a trip to a hotel suite in Manhattan to get a demo of BuddyTV’s new iPhone app. You can check it out here. For those unfamiliar, BuddyTV’s iPhone and Android apps turn your smartphones into a smart viewing guide and a remote control with enhanced social features like chat and the ability to broadcast what you’re watching to Facebook and Twitter. At the time, the app was working exclusively with Google TVs, but today BuddyTV is announcing that it has landed another big fish: AT&T.

Beginning today, all AT&T U-verse users can directly control their receivers with the BuddyTV Guide. Using their iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, subscribers can use the smart channel guide to display only the channels that they want to watch. As you “heart and rate shows and channels, the app gives you recommendations based on your personal preferences and what the app thinks users want to watch. And, just like Netflix, the recommendations get smarter the more you “favorite” and the more you watch. (Speaking of Netflix, the app also integrates with Netflix Instant for users who subscribe to the streaming video service.)

Thus, users can create favorite channels to create a personalized TV listings view that displays only those channels that users watch most often (including HD channels), as well as allowing users to set up reminders and receive push notifications so that they’ll never miss another episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos.

For AT&T U-verse users and avid smartphone users, this is an awesome bonus, as it is essentially turning your iPhone into a master TV remote that learns the more you use it.

The BuddyTV Guide app is free to download and is available now in the App Store. Native Android and Google TV versions are coming soon.

For more, check out the video below:

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron recently joined social networking sites LinkedIn and Foursquare in an effort to expand his digital presence and better connect with both citizens and businesses alike. On LinkedIn, Cameron will network with “people and businesses the PM meets regarding U.K. business, enterprise and manufacturing,” according to the official blog post from the PM’s office.

Meanwhile, on Foursquare, the PM will check-in to various venues in order to “illustrate the events the Prime Minister participates in during his day-to-day duties beyond Downing Street.”

Cameron, who has been in the news lately due to his creation of a new “porn filter” for U.K. Internet Service Providers, is already active on social networks including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and even newcomer Google+. Adding Foursquare and LinkedIn to the list highlights the increasing importance those services have in today’s digital landscape.

That said, the LinkedIn effort is a bit odd since most people use the service for as a place to maintain their online resume and look for job opportunities through their business connections. It’s not typically thought of as a communications platform for politicians. However, it should be interesting to see what happens as a result of the PM’s joining. Will other politicians think to do the same? Or will they stick to more social sites like Facebook and Twitter?

At any rate, seeing a LinkedIn profile for someone of Cameron’s caliber does take a step towards humanizing the man, who, like many other high-caliber politicians, is often thought of as more of an abstract figure than an actual person. It’s refreshing to read his resume that begins simply “I became Prime Minister after the General Election in May 2010,” as if he’s just some other guy talking about what he does for a living. (It’s also pretty fun when you find out that you’re a 3rd degree connection with him!)

The PM’s Foursquare account provides a somewhat voyeuristic look at what a politician does, by tracking who Cameron is meeting with, when and why. Over the past few weeks, before the official announcement was posted, the PM was already checking in to venues including New York, Ontario, the House of Commons and more. It would be more helpful, however, if the PM would consistently check into actual venues, instead of city-sized venues like “Ottawa.” (That’s not how you’re supposed to do it, sir.)

In addition, the Foursquare account provides “tips” to its followers (which appear upon their check-in to particular venues like 10 Downing St.) that provide bits of trivia or history about the venue, such as historical facts, ghost stories and links to related resources on the Web. For example, did you know No. 10 has a resident cat called Larry in charge of pest control? Thanks to Foursquare, I do now. Oh, and in case you’re interested, you can see Flickr photos of Larry hanging around the cabinet here on Flickr, too.

We’ve covered Erly, a Kleiner Perkins-backed startup in the social ‘experience’ space that counts founding Hulu CTO and former Kleiner partner Eric Feng as a co-founder. Erly launched a month ago as a way to build and share social content around experiences. And today, the startup is updating its application with a few more features.

As we explained in our initial coverage of Collections, the application is a place to house all the content around a given experience. It’s sort of like a next generation photo album, but with more than just photos. Users can aggregate and share content, build an album of photos, links, updates, and more. You can import content from other social services including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Picasa, Flickr, and Instagram.

Based on user feedback, Erly has released a new version of Collections that are more ‘event’ focused. As Feng explains, it wasn’t clear to sers why and when they should use Collections over let’s say Facebook or Flickr. The startup has also made the service simpler and more user-friendly.

In order to place the focus on creating memories around events and ‘targeted scenarios’, Erly now allows users to create a permanent landing page for any event they want to remember. It’s sort of like creating an event microsite. Users can select a photo to serve as a full-screen cover photo. and Erly will overlay information about the event (title, date, location, an optional description) on top of the photo) and more.

The cover page also includes a few other pieces of information including the number of likes and comments and a guest list of who was there. You can add people to the guest list, or people can add themselves.



Generally, you can now like and comment on both Collections and any item in the Collections and you can email photos into a Collection (but Erly doesn’t require Facebook connect to create and account). You can send an email from your Facebook email to editor@erly.com, put the title or at least one word from the title of the Collection you want to add content to, and put the photo in the body of the email. The photo will be added to the appropriate collection. And Erly has added an Activity feed for every user. The feed includes updates on any Collection you’ve built or liked and any Collection you’re on the guest list for. 

One of the main goals with this update, says Feng, is to lower the bar to actually creating and contributing to this microsites.

And we can expect more from Erly soon, as the startup plans to launch a new product every two months.

Soon you, too, will be able to talk to the hand. A new interface created jointly by Microsoft and the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute allows for interfaces to be displayed on any surface, including notebooks, body parts, and tables. The UI is completely multitouch and the “shoulder-worn” system will locate the surface you’re working on in 3D space, ensuring the UI is always accessible. It uses a picoprojector and a 3D scanner similar to the Kinect.

The product is called OmniTouch and it supports “clicking” with a finger on any surface as well as controls that sense finger position while hovering a hand over a surface. Unlike the Microsoft Surface, the project needs no special, bulky hardware – unless you a consider a little parrot-like Kinect sensor on your shoulder bulky. While obviously obtrusive, the project is a proof-of-concept right now and could be made smaller in the future.

So far the researchers have tested drawing and “crosshair” interaction with the system and it has worked well on arms, hands, notebooks, and tables. We’re obviously looking at a research project here so don’t expect shoulder mounted Xboxes any time soon, but by gum if this isn’t the coolest thing I’ve seen today.

The Youtube video is private right now but I’ve contacted CMU.

Project Page

Late Friday evening, I tweeted out that, for some reason unbeknownst to me, Google’s Web History tracking “feature” (the one that keeps tabs on every search you’ve made for sake of tailoring ads to your tastes and/or creeping you out) had seemingly been enabled on my account. This wouldn’t be too strange in most cases — as an opt-out service, Web History is enabled for everyone by default. The problem? I’d manually disabled it years ago.

Following my tweet, a few people responded in tune; they were certain they’d disabled it long ago — but sure enough, there was all of their history going back anywhere from 6 months to a year and a half. An odd coincidence, I assumed… until I woke up this morning to an inbox full of people all saying the same thing.

In each case, the person is positive they’d disabled it months ago. In each case, it sprang back to life without any conscious effort on their part. Making things all the more strange is the lack of any clear cut pattern: for many, it seems to have been re-enabled around June of this year. For others, it was earlier in the year. For myself and a smaller handful of others, it was way back in 2010. Some are Android users, some aren’t. Some use Chrome, some don’t.

I brought it up in our internal backchannel, and sure enough: other TechCrunch employees had seen the same thing — long ago, in fact. Back in 2010, Jason Kincaid reached out to Google because his Web History had inexplicably popped back on. Google had no explanation, and chalked it up to user error.

I’m not accusing Google of anything nefarious here, just yet; if they wanted to keep tabs on everything everyone searches for in a way that associates it with user accounts, there are far sneakier ways to do it than quietly re-enabling a user facing option. My assumption is that there’s a Google product (or two) that re-enables Web History for one reason or another, and the alert mentioning that fact (if said alert exists) is just a bit too subtle for any of us to remember.

Whatever the cause (I’m looking into it): if you mean to have Google’s Web History disabled, pop on over to the History page and make sure that flip is still switched.

The ink is now dry on term sheets signed by web-design education startup Treehouse. Impressively, those term sheets contain the autographs of Kevin Rose, Reid Hoffman, David Sze, Josh Elman (Greylock Discovery Fund),  Chamath Palihapitiya (The Social+Capital Partnership) and Mark Suster (GRP Partners).

Treehouse uses short videos, quizzes and badges to help subscribers learn web design, development and iOS development. The service is dual tier, at $29 to $49 dollars per month and Treehouse has already signed on blue chip clients like Estée Lauder and Disney to use its wares.

“Our goal is to help millions of people around the world, who can’t afford formal education, get trained in web design, development and iOS,” says founder Ryan Carson. “This will help them get their dream job or launch their own web-based business. I think we could have a big positive impact on the economy and job market.”

Carson says that the company is already profitable, and only decided to raise funding because it wanted a team of rockstar allies to help it reach the next level. He plans on using the funding to expand Treehouse even further and “take the product to the next level.”

One of a key roles of a VC and investor is to help portfolio companies and startups recruit quality talent. Especially with the current competitive hiring climate, recruiting can be a challenging task for companies both big and small. Today, VC firm Greylock is announcing that it has created a dedicated talent team to help its portfolio companies recruit effectively and succeed in the current battle for talent.

Jeff Markowitz, former managing director of the venture capital practice at executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, has joined Greylock as a ‘Talent Partner.’ Markowitz will focused on executive level talent, and will help Greylock’s portfolio companies as well as the VC firm itself to build a network of high-level talent.

Dan Portillo, formerly an HR and recruiting exec at Rypple and Mozilla, has joined as VP of Talent focusing on hiring in product and engineering for Greylock’s portfolio companies.

Clearly, Greylock is taking the battle for technical talent in Silicon Valley and the greater tech world seriously, and is staffing up to help startups wage this war. This is a trend that other top-tier VC firms are also aggressively pursuing. The firm says that it will be working on several initiatives to help companies build recruiting skills, source talent, leverage networks and more.

Greylock also recently added new talent to its own roster; bringing on Howcast co-founder and former Googler Sanjay Raman as a Senior Associate on the consumer team. He joins other recent hires including former Twitter and Facebook product lead Josh Elman and LinkedIn’s former VP of Search and Platform Adam Nash.

One of the biggest Nintendo DS franchises is coming to iOS. Level-5 has announced that Nintendo’s exclusive access to their Professor Layton franchise is ending, and they’ll be releasing a new game called Layton Brothers: Mystery Room for iOS devices.

A developer making the jump from DS to iOS isn’t the biggest news in the world, but Layton is one of the DS’s most successful series, critically and commercially. The three games in the series so far (not counting Professor Layton and the Last Specter, released today in the US) have sold over eleven million copies, and reviewers have embraced the game’s mix of quirky characters and taxing puzzles.

Having played some of the games (the second and third), I can say that they seem a perfectly good match for iOS, and the new one, featuring “crime-scene mystery style gameplay starring the intuitive son of Hershel Layton” likely won’t depart too far from them.

But Nintendo must be fuming. It’s possible they locked in Level-5 to a certain number of titles before anything from the franchise appeared elsewhere, but clearly now they no longer have that hold, if they ever did. The company has always prided itself on taking its own road and more or less ignoring competitors, a strategy that has led to some big wins and catastrophic losses. This independence from trends occasionally gets infected with complacency, and in this case, with the 3DS lagging in sales, they may end up with the iPhone eating their lunch.

No release date has been announced, nor any further information.

Sorry to ruin the surprise, but if you’ve been enjoying the thrill of refreshing Motorola’s teaser page until something happens, you can stop right now. Droid-Life has gotten their hands on a full version of the image that’s still mostly shrouded in mystery on Motorola’s site.

Alright, so it doesn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know. It’s very thin, as Motorola is fond of pointing out, but it’s tough to say if it’s actually thinner than the iPhone 4/S. It actually seems to cop a lot of the Droid X/X2′s design language, which isn’t a surprise considering Motorola’s penchant for running with slight variations on a design for years.

From what we’ve heard, the RAZRSpyder will reportedly pack a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, a 4.3-inch display, and 1GB of RAM. It also manages to squeeze an LTE radio into its svelte frame, which would make it one of (if not the) thinnest LTE phone in Verizon’s line up. If true, the specs are plenty speedy, but here’s hoping the experience runs as smooth as it seems like it should on paper.

There is still one surprise Motorola has left for us: the device’s name. Poking around in the page’s source code reveals a handful of references to the “Spyder,” one of the rumored monikers the phone has been sporting for months now.

Then again, the inclusion of the big ol’ Droid eye seems to confirm that handset will benefit from Droid branding and presumably the big marketing push that comes with it. Could this thing be the Droid RAZR after all? Or perhaps some lexical amalgamation of the two? In any case, we’ll have all the answers these questions come noon tomorrow.

A tipster informs us that UberMedia, the company behind social networking apps like Echofon and UberSocial / Twidroyd, has unintentionally pushed its new iPhone application onto the App Store (iTunes link). This is plausible, because the Chime.in website isn’t accessible yet at the time of writing, although the support pages appear to be live already.

So is Chime.in the oft-rumored challenger to Twitter, which UberMedia has had run-ins with in the past? UberMedia has always denied that it had plans to launch a competing social network, so it’s a question worth asking. And the answer is no, not really.

Chime.in is described on the support pages as an online and mobile network organized around interests, or an ‘interest network’ to keep it brief. Still according to the support pages, Chime.in was “was created for people who are active in social media and looking for a way to engage in conversations and more deeply interact with content related to their interests”.

Basically, it lets people build and maintain communities around their favorite topics.

When you first launch the app, you can actually create an account using either a Facebook or a Twitter profile. That’s where things get interesting (pun intended):

Chime.in’s technology also identifies users who Chime about topics you’re interested in and recommends them, as well. Chime.in’s search function lets you search by person, interest and community so you can choose how you want to engage around a topic you care about.

You can also follow interests, people or a person’s specific interests to make it as streamlined as possible to digest content and engage with other users.

Updates on Chime.in, dubbed Chimes, are rich media-enabled, so you can include photos, videos, polls or links and users can view them directly from your stream. Posts can also be broadcast across other social platforms (Facebook, Google+ and Twitter) or saved for users to read later.

At launch, everything you do within Chime.in is public, although the company says on its support pages that it intends to “start layering in more privacy controls” in the future.

I’ve also found a page that clearly shows applications for Android and Blackberry are also in the works (see screenshot below).

As for the question whether Chime.in competes with other social networks; they try to answer that question themselves, too:

How is Chime.in different from existing social networks?

All other social networks are all about connecting with people. Chime.in is about connecting with interests and people – it’s an interest network. It lets you tailor the content you see and search for to the topics you care about, so you aren’t bogged down sorting through posts you aren’t interested in.

Chime.in is also designed to create a richer social experience by integrating multimedia and making it easy join interest-based communities and to engage in real-time conversation.

Why would someone use Chime.in instead of dominant social networks like Facebook and Twitter?

- One of the great things about social media is that you’re free to use any platform you want. Chime.in was created to address the need for relevance in social media. As such, it wasn’t designed to replace any networks, but to enhance the social media experience with a platform tailored to a clear, specific need.

Given that we allow people to publish Chimes to Facebook, Twitter and Google+, we fully expect not to replace other networks, but to be additive to the ecosystem.

Sounds like they listened to Twitter attentively.

You should be able to give the free app a whirl now if you have an iPhone (iOS 4.0 or later required).

UberMedia was founded in early 2010 as TweetUp (later PostUp) by serial Internet entrepreneur Bill Gross. The company has raised close to $27 million to date.

While the dual-screen Kyocera Echo didn’t do much to tickle my fancy, a couple dual-screen devices on their way to market, including the Sony S2 tablet, show much more promise. As far as handsets go, T-Mobile just announced the Android-powered LG DoublePlay (codenamed Flip II) smartphone — a split-keybord QWERTY slider with not one, but two, capacitive touch screens.

T-Mobile is calling the DoublePlay the “ultimate multi-tasking tool,” as the dual-screens will allow users do two things at once, such as surf the web on the main screen and update their Facebook on the smaller screen. The screens can also be used in tandem, though I’m unsure how something like a web page, for example, would look across one 3.5-inch screen and one 2-inch screen.

Other specs include a 1GHz Snapdragon processor powering Android 2.3 Gingerbread, a 5-megapixel rear camera with LED flash, auto focus, and 720p video capture, along with access to T-Mobile’s Group Text and Cloud Text services. If the split QWERTY keyboard isn’t your style, the phone also comes pre-loaded with Swype for easier text input.

T-Mobile and LG were unclear about pricing and availability, but according to a leaked T-Mobile roadmap, you can probably expect to see the truffle-colored LG DoublePlay on November 2 for $149 on-contract.

As the iPhone 4S hype has peaked and is returning back to stable levels, users from the other school of thought are getting pumped for their own massive event. Ice Cream Sandwich, and the next purely Google phone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, are due to make an appearance in just two short days.

Though we’re sure to get some clarification on already-leaked specs at the debut, we might have access to launch dates and pricing just a bit earlier than that.

According to an anonymously leaked Verizon document published by Engadget, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the HTC Vigor (codenamed Rezound) are going for a minimum advertized price of $299.99 on-contract. Both phones are also slated for a November 10 to May 10 MAP period, suggesting they may launch as early as November 10. But before we go any further, it’s worth practicing a little cynicism in this case, since this leaked document could have been whipped up in Word in about five minutes. Then again, the model numbers seem to make sense, so we’ll just venture forward with caution.

As far as that November 10 launch date goes, nothing’s set in stone. Even if that’s when the Galaxy Nexus and Vigor’s MAP period begins, the actual launch may come a bit later as we’ve already seen Ice Cream Sandwich and the Nexus event get pushed back once. Either way, it should give you a little extra time to start saving up.

Freelancer.com is poised to release a report later today with a list of the 50 fastest-growing outsourcing jobs for the third quarter of 2011, based on 114,455 jobs that were posted on the site during that time.

We got an early peek at the report, which suggests content and AdSense-related jobs are on the rise again after a drop last quarter, following Google’s Panda update. Categories like ‘ghostwriting’ (up 22 percent), ‘blogs’ (up 17 percent) and ‘reviews’ (up 16 percent) showcase that trend.

Product Description and Adsense projects increased by 43 percent and 76 percent, respectively.

Other interesting findings from the report:

- Facebook and Social networking projects were up 32 percent and 36 percent, respectively
- HTML5 projects are up (again) an impressive 38 percent, with Flash jobs declining 10 percent
- After posting 20 percent growth last quarter, Android grew just 8 percent this quarter
- iPhone projects grew only 3 percent; Blackberry and Symbian jobs were both down by 6 percent
- Jobs related to Apple products are in vogue, with Cocoa jobs up 55 percent and Objective C up 23 percent. Meanwhile, Java jobs fell 13 percent, while PHP-related jobs were up 3.3 percent.
- 3D jobs increased 64 percent, the second largest gain in the top 50

Apple just announced that it sold four million iPhone 4S handsets over the last weekend. The phone hit stores on October 14th and it took just three days to move the massive lot. Incredible.

Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior VP of Worlwide Product Markteting notes, “iPhone 4S is off to a great start with more than four million sold in its first weekend—the most ever for a phone and more than double the iPhone 4 launch during its first three days.”

Moreover, Apple just announced that 25 million are already using iOS 5 and over 20 million have signed up for iCloud.

The iPhone 4s will hit even more countries in the coming weeks. It will be available in more than 22 countries after October 28 and more than 70 by the end of the year. Apple previously noted that it was prepared for a massive launch and it seems as if the company delivered. After the busy first weekend, the phone is still on backorder at most carriers and retailers with the Apple Store indicating a 1-2 week shipping delay.

[image credit: Kirsty Wigglesworth, AP]

Wahanda, an online health and beauty marketplace, has secured a £5.5m Series B investment round led by Fidelity Growth Partners Europe (FGPE), a pan-European venture and growth equity investor. As part of the deal Davor Hebel, a partner at FGPE, joins the board of Wahanda. This investment makes Wahanda the 800 pound gorilla of this space in the UK, with the opportunity to now build out what is in effect the Open Table for the health and beauty sector. Wahanda last raised a Series A back in 2008 with $2m from Ambient Sound Investment.

TechCrunch readers may be familiar with Uber, the on-demand cab/private car service that lets users bypass the annoying process of waiting for cabs or expensive prospect of renting a limo — all via your mobile device and SMS.

Today, a car service is launching a new feature in New York City that it hopes will ride on the growing popularity of Uber as well as on-demand mobile reservation and food delivery services like OpenTable or Seamless to make getting a private car even easier. (Because apparently nobody likes ordering over the phone anymore.)

GroundLink, the New York City-based car service that was founded in 2003 as an aggregator and solutions provider to the ground travel industry, is going mobile today to enable users to book a private car whenever they want — either immediately or at a scheduled time — via their smartphone on iOS and Android.

With its new on-demand mobile functionality, GroundLink aims to offer an attractive alternative to other metro car and cab services by offering full transparency into price before a user books their ride, as opposed to getting hit with a daunting bill once the ride is finished.

GroundLink wants to take hidden fees and long waits out of the equation (a big problem for anyone who’s tried using similar services in NYC), and hike up the transparency by offering flat rates solely based on distance rather than competitors which include traffic (via measuring speed) in their pricing schemes, often resulting in sharp price hikes thanks to fun things like gridlock and toll traffic. Is there really any time in transit to or from New York City (or San Francisco for that matter) where one doesn’t have to deal with traffic?

The flat rate prices for hiring a private car via GroundLink are pretty competitive; for hiring a car to New York city airports, for example, the service is currently offering rides for $49, Boston for $60, and San Francisco at $59. Though, of course, these rates do not include waiting time, stops, tolls, and parking, etc., but, compared to yellow cabs, considering you’ll have your own car and won’t have to deal with some cabby’s oppressive B.O., this is a pretty good deal. (Check out more on the service’s prices here.)

What’s more, according to GroundLink CEO, Charlie Fraas, the service has “ten times more cars in their NYC fleet” than other competitors offering this on-demand mobile functionality seeing as it’s already an established name in NYC. And, as availability is generally the top concern when booking a car on-demand via mobile, GroundLink offers a great value proposition seeing as it’s already available in 5,000 cities and 110 countries around the globe.

The service already has its own well-stocked fleet (of 300 dedicated cars) and will also take advantage of affiliates (over 45,000 transportation providers worldwide) as well to make sure there’s a car available when a user needs one. Depending on where one lives, GroundLink can have a car there in 30 minutes. If you live in the middle of the tundra, though, expect it to take more like 12 hours. (They’re not magicians, people.)

Registered GroundLink users can take advantage of its mobile, location-based “Ride Now” function to order cars in realtime (on-demand) via GroundLink’s apps, or book in advance with “Ride Later”, which lets one set a specific date, time, and location for pickup. In each case (like Uber), riders can track their car’s location (in conjunction with its exact arrival time) and communicate directly with drivers at any point during the process. This feature is launching today in New York City, and depending on results, will launch worldwide sometime in the near future.

The mobile service also offers a social sharing tool so that riders can update friends and followers during the duration of their trip, and leave reviews and recommendations for good drivers and not-so-good drivers.

To celebrate the launch of “Ride Now” in NYC, GroundLink is offering customers who book through ots iPhone or Android apps the chance to win more than $15,000 in cash and other prizes. Starting today, GroundLink’s fleet will be stacked with a variety of prizes for five days, including two envelopes containing $1,000 in cash each day. Other prizes include tickets to Yankees, Giants, and Jets games, Momofuku and Peter Luger gift cards, Brooklyn Bowl, Barneys and Tiffany gift cards, etc.

“GroundLink is much more than an app”, said the GroundLink CEO. “We are the first company to deliver access to a global fleet of more than a hundred thousand cars through an app. Until now, business travelers had no way to find a reliable and competitively priced private car service around the country and the globe. With the launch of our mobile apps on iPhone and Android, we’re embracing a multi-platform business model that is unique in our industry”, he said.

For more on GroundLink, check them out at home here.

Polycom, provider of telepresence, video and voice solutions, this morning announced that it has acquired ViVu, a privately- held video collaboration software company. The deal was signed last Friday, for undisclosed cash consideration, and Polycom expects the transaction to be neutral to earnings.

ViVu raised $3 million from Inventus Capital Partners, DFJ and Quest Venture Partners back in October 2009, followed by a strategic investement by chip maker AMD last June.

ViVu has developed software that can be embedded into Web applications such as enterprise, social, and vertical industry applications to enable instant web-based HD video collaboration.

Founded in 2008, the company currently has offices in Cupertino, California and Bangalore, India, and employs about 25 people. Clients include TIBCO and Thomson Reuters.

Here’s how Polycom pitches the acquisition of the company:

ViVu gives Polycom a fast-track to embed HD video into web-based applications through an OEM model, accelerating time-to-market and adoption of Polycom HD video collaboration solutions, and driving awareness of the Polycom brand powering video collaboration inside a wide range of applications.

Polycom will leverage ViVu technology in its RealPresence Platform, a software infrastructure suite for video collaboration.

SohoOS is on a tear. Users are growing at a rate of 30% month-over-month, just recently shooting past 400,000. And soon, the company will make a hard bet on a brand-new design — a complete revamp — aimed at singeing it into the backbone of the small businesses it serves.

Some background: SohoOS offers small businesses a utility suite of applications, for example, invoicing, CRM, and inventory management. The startup, which I’ve been following since its debut, closed a $1.75 million financing round led by Mangrove back in January.

I recently had another chance to sit down with the company, with the revamp being the core of our conversation. It’s a bold bet that is based on insights from the hundreds of thousands of small and micro businesses the company has on-board.

What the SohoOS found out is that small businesses are used to services (think QuickBooks, FreshBooks, InvoiceMachine etc.) that market a particular value proposition, that being, efficient accounting. The premise is that the heart and soul of a small business is its accounting activities. Except SohoOS found that small businesses don’t see it that way at all, and for two main reasons:

First, actual accountants are still very much in the picture. This means that the services such as the ones noted above aren’t a substitute, they’re more like data collection silos. Second, small businesses don’t see ‘accounting’ as the heart and soul of their businesses management activities. Rather, it’s the ‘contact’ they view as the heart and soul. Don’t mistake this as a subtle difference, it’s a holistic difference, and is the one that SohoOS is betting the entire revamp on.

Eran Manor, lead designer at SohoOS walked me through the new design (see screenshots below) where every action is centered around the concept of the contact in question. As Manor put it, they reverse engineered an iPad app to create the new UX for the web application. Sure enough, everything is 1-2 clicks away. The screenshots below aren’t final, but paint a very clear picture of the ‘contact in the center’ approach being bet upon. The new design will be rolled out to all users in the over the next two months.

One other aspect I’ve always like about SohoOS is that unlike the conventional wisdom, of ‘do one thing and do it well,” the company is focusing on several services that are key to the daily management of a small business. These are: invoicing, billing features, CRM, inventory & project management.

The thinking here is that providing these things to a sufficient depth allows SohoOS to appeal to a larger userbase. With the US, UK, and the EU constituting 54% of the userbase, this is a smart move.

Truth be told, I wasn’t very impressed with what electronics makers showed at the CEATEC 2011 tech exhibition – especially because a lot of the new products were “leaked” to the Japanese press before the event started.

However, here are a total of five of the coolest innovations Japanese companies showed at the CEATEC 2011 in video form, delivered from our friends at Diginfo TV (YouTube channel). All the videos were shot directly on location and are in English.

Video 1: Toshiba’s 55-inch, naked-eye 3D TV with facial recognition (our coverage)

Video 2: Sony’s “DEV-3″ binoculars that shoot videos in full HD and 3D

Video 3: Pioneer’s augmentend reality-based car navigation System (our coverage)

Video 4: NTT Docomo’s smartphone jackets that measure body fat, radiation, or alcohol (our coverage)

Video 5: NTT Docomo’s smartphone battery that fully charges in 10 minutes

Digital media companies Inuvo and NYC-based Vertro, both publicly listed, this morning announced a merger agreement whereby Inuvo will acquire Vertro and its ALOT branded consumer applications business in a tax-free exchange of shares at an exchange ratio of 1.546 shares of Inuvo common stock per each share of Vertro common stock.

The combined entity intends to distribute and monetize digital media to millions of consumers across multiple platforms, according to a press statement.

In the combined company, Inuvo CEO Richard K. Howe will serve as Executive Chairman while Vertro CEO Peter Corrao will become president and CEO.

The companies assert that, combined, they can reach over 132 million unique Internet users on a monthly basis, and monetize about 2.5 billion page views per year.

The merger, which has been approved by both companies’ board, is expected to close in Q4 2011 or Q1 2012, subject to satisfaction of the closing conditions.

Research In Motion is on a quest for goodwill after last week’s massive outage that left BlackBerry users without service for three days. The company just took to the wires and announced that over a $100 worth of premium apps will eventually be free for a limited time and enterprise users will also net one month of free technical support. RIM hopes SIM 3, Bejeweled, N.O.V.A. and many more will help calm the nerves those BlackBerry users thinking of jumping ship.

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” said RIM’s co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in a released statement. “We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.”

Enterprise users get a little more compensation in the form of free technical support. If the user already pays for the technical support, one month will be tacked onto the end of subscription. Other enterprise users will be offered a one month trial of RIM’s BlackBerry Technical Support Service – Enhanced Support.

The apps will be free start to appear in the BlackBerry App World starting on Wednesday, October 19th and will be available for download until December 31, 2011. More will be released over the next four weeks.

The initial selection includes:

• SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts
• Bejeweled – Electronic Arts
• N.O.V.A. – Gameloft
• Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft
• Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft
• Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps
• DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org
• iSpeech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
• Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
• Nobex Radio™ Premium – Nobex
• Shazam Encore – Shazam
• Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo

RIM took a major hit with the latest service interruption and it’s really impossible to tell if free apps will prevent BlackBerry users from defecting to other mobile platforms. Carriers worldwide are compensating BlackBerry users with cash and other offers and it’s not clear if RIM is backing some of those payouts. Users smell blood. Prepare yourself, the class action lawsuits are coming.

Today the USA television network has announced a partnership with Yap.TV to power its mobile social application. Yap.TV is one of the hottest social TV apps on the App Store, offering users the chance to chat up television shows in real time. It’s basically a souped-up Twitter client for TV, and now all the same cool functionality will be available for USA programming.

USA’s Yap.TV-powered app won’t debut until November, but it’ll give owners of the Apple iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad a way to discover USA television shows that they might otherwise be unaware of. Plus, you can tweet with your friends in the app, or with other fans who enjoy the programming your watching.

The app will be integrated with USA’s Character Chatter platform, where viewers can discuss the latest shows and plot twists. The app will also integrate with Facebook, and tap into all the other Character Chatter features including instant polls, custom chat groups, cast photos, show rankings, along with an easy-to-navigate show guide.

As I said before, the new USA social TV app won’t be available until November. But once it does pop up in the App Store, it’ll be a free download.

Shanda Interactive Entertainment (Shanda), a major interactive entertainment media company in China, this morning revealed that it has received a non-binding proposal from Tianqiao Chen – Chairman, CEO and President of Shanda – to purchase all outstanding ordinary shares not yet owned by himself, his wife Qianqian Luo (also a non-executive director of Shanda) and his brother, Shanda COO and Director Danian Chen.

As of the end of last month, the trio owned approximately 68.4 percent of the outstanding shares of the company. Chen proposes to acquire the remaining public shares for $41.35 per American Depositary Share (ADS) or $20.675 per ordinary share, in cash.

Shanda, which is listed on NASDAQ, has seen its share price tank in the past six months. On October 14, the price closed at $33.48 per ADS.

Per the buyout proposal letter, a transaction vehicle will be created specifically to facilitate the transaction, which is intended to be financed with debt. JP Morgan is said to be evaluating financing the transaction as financial advisor of the buyer group.

Shanda’s board this morning announced that it has formed a ‘special committee’ of independent directors to consider Chen’s proposal.

Shanda offers a broad array of online entertainment content – ranging from MMORPGs to casual games, literature, film, music, video and whatnot – on an integrated service platform to a large audience mostly based in China. Subsidiaries and affiliates include Shanda Games, Cloudary, Ku6 Media, and a bunch of other online community and business units.

iCloud comes at a good time for those who have skated along on disaster’s edge from theft, pestilence, and rampant stupidity. I could blame my teenaged daughter for rendering her aging MacBookPro useless, but the truth is I’ve never backed up anything in my life until it’s too late. Her penchant for what the kids call music these days has brought the machine to its knees, but my affair with iOS devices is really the culprit.

With a new iPhone 4s arriving Friday and me leaving for the Gartner Symposium Sunday, I had barely a day to make the iOS 5 transition once the overheated servers calmed down enough to let me in. As soon as iOS 5 booted, I heard from my daughter, who’d resurfaced from months of invisibility in her downstairs room/bed and breakfast. Daddy do I get my iPhone 4 back, she queried with a big helpful what can I do to make your life better gleam in her eye.

She had been making due with a Nexus One for months while waiting for another shot at a third iPhone 4 (don’t ask) and wanted to restore her “music”, apps, and contacts from her backup. Unfortunately her laptop had remained unopened for months during the Nexus One period, and was actually running with 32 megs when I first saw it. In other words, just seconds away from a system panic and a reinstall of the OS. My 24 hour window just went to zero.

The first thing that went was an instance of my identity where I’d parked some old audio and video files. That bought just enough space to let me know I couldn’t update iTunes, a requirement for upgrading to iOS 5. After some difficult negotiations I convinced my daughter to park her picture directory on another machine. 9 gigabytes and 3hours later, I had the teenager on her way.

Suffice it to say, there were other minefields awaiting with the rest of the household’s collection of iPhones and iPads. My younger daughter had done her homework and was loaded with bear with a list of hidden iOS 5 settings and features that she was desperate to try out first on her sister’s phone and then on her own once upgraded. I was beginning to wonder when Comcast was going to start slowing down as each device started uploading to iCloud. With 8 devices to be updated (wife, 2 daughters, me) the WiFi slowed to a crawl as the time ran out.

In the end my wife will wait until I return or we hire a personal IT guy. Same with both daughters whose iPads will wait. But already I’m seeing the outlines of a different future. First, Siri is already changing everything about the way I store data. I’m editing contacts to make them easier to find with voice commands, tossing out duplicates and consolidating information on one master. The Notes app is suddenly useful, as is the Reminders tool and especially the Clock alarm. I’m learning to make sure to specify AM when I schedule an alarm, even though it would be intuitive for it to default that way.

It doesn’t work that way now, but how about opening Spotify and downloading music for offline on the plane with a Siri command. The Concur app knows what time my flight is so it could set the alarm all by itself. With Location turned on, it could check off the Reminder as done when I leave the house and trigger another reminder when I land. Right now this stuff is fun and all, but behind the scenes my workflow is being fundamentally altered.

At the center of this transformation is the notification queue and the integration of the social @mention cloud. Each of us has a series of processes that imply other processes; they all are informed and eventually coordinated by the implications of the social graph. Once you build up enough history and so do your friends, family, and colleagues, the metadata surrounding the decision tree we travel forms patterns that our networks use to make recommendations more intelligent.

The smarts in Siri turn out to be about context, all the more powerful as the service flows through apps. Regular updates will give developers impetus to wire in their app to the notification bus. Shouldn’t a New York times alert also search the major news sites for live video as it happens? I’d pay more for a notification-aware app, and even more for an uber notification routing service that I can teach to personalize my account according to the metadata of me, my cloud of follows, and the followers of those follows.

Already there are a few services that begin to provide various cuts at this kind of media curation: News.me mixed with Techmeme mixed with @mention-curated streams gets very close to a realtime news service that outperforms news aggregation sites and private newsletters. As Gabe Rivera demonstrated this week, an authoritative Twitter conversation swarm emerged around the debunking of a Wall Street Journal article suggesting a possible top in the venture capital markets. Blogs supplemented the event rather than drive it.

It’s easy to laugh off this change as inside baseball. But just as Siri plus iCloud moves us rapidly into an on-demand living document world, so too does the social curation of Tweetmemes accelerate intelligent parsing of multiple notification streams. When we start changing our behavior to accelerate the efficiency of voice prompting, we move away from email and documents to active objects that accept social signals as training hints for a dynamic self-tuning service. More hints, more tuning, more tuning, more hints. Eventually a market develops for the intuitively endowed hinters. Hinter gatherers, so to speak.

We have covered “intelligent” wheelchairs before, but one that can be controlled through facial muscles is new. A team of researchers at Japan’s Miyazaki University developed a system aimed at people paralyzed from the neck down or those who have lost muscular strength in their body for a reason.

The way it works is pretty simple: the wheelchair, which is still in prototype mode, can be turned left or right by blinking the eyes and put into motion (and stopped) by clenching one’s teeth.

Professor Tamura, the mastermind behind the system, says that the hands-free wheelchair will see a commercial version (which won’t require the four electrodes) next year.

This video, shot by Diginfo TV in Tokyo, provides more insight (in English):

Airbnb, the hot online room (and sublet) reservation startup, this morning announced that it has teamed up with business incubator Springstar to define a strategy for international expansion, confirming rumors that kept the German tech blogosphere busy the past weekend.

Springstar was founded in 2007 by German entrepreneurs and angel investors Klaus Hommels and Oliver Jung, and Harish Bahl, who leads the incubator’s operations in India and Asia Pacific.

Springstar in a press statement said it will be providing strategic guidance in the expansion of Airbnb’s international operations in select markets around the world, but did not specify which markets.

It already provides such guidance to a number of companies scattered all over the world, including Russia’s KupiVIP, Turkey’s Markafoni and Brazil’s Brandsclub.

Airbnb competes internationally with the likes of Wimdu, 9flats.com, Crashpadder, iStopOver and CouchSurfing, with new competitors springing up almost daily.

The company recently established its first European office in Hamburg after acquiring a German clone called Accoleo. Expect to see a couple more deals like that in the coming months.

News from the never-ending patent war between Apple and Samsung: the Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Samsung filed for preliminary injunctions in the Tokyo District Court and in the New South Wales Registry, Australia. This time, the goal is to block sales of the iPhone 4S, which launched in both countries last Friday.

According to the report, Samsung also tries to stop sales of the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 in Japan. The company says that Apple – you guessed it – infringes on its technology patents (earlier this month, Samsung made a similar move in Italy and France). Samsung earlier stated it will be more aggressive towards Apple going forward.

It’s not the first time Japan and Australia are in the spotlight of the Apple-Samsung dispute: in Japan, Apple sued Samsung over iPhone and iPad patents just last month. In Australia, Samsung offered a deal to Apple regarding the Galaxy Tab sales ban last month. Last Friday, the Korean company pulled a publicity stunt to counter the iPhone 4S sales start in the country.

Here are some of the past week’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets:

Virgin Atlantic To Recycle Steel Mill Pollution Into Jet Fuel With New Tech

New Beats By Dre Monster Headphones Are Wireless, Colorful: We Go Ears-On

The $4 Retro Computer

Shopping 2.0: Interactive Hangers Used In Japanese Clothes Store (Videos)

Roku Introduces The $49.99 Roku LT Streamer, Adds HBO GO To Channel Offerings

Real-time collaborative platform HALL.com is announcing $580K in seed funding today, from Founder’s Collective, PivotNorth and others. Founder Brett Hellman quit his job at Inuit and joined both Sunfire Offices and AngelPad in order to build what he holds conceptually to be an online assembly hall, a place whether people can get together and share real-time intelligence.

“HALL.com is about collecting knowledge from a group of people to solve real problems,” says Hellman, which is why HALL.com is divided into various topics.  For example a quick visit to the TechCrunch Hall shows realtime rankers around ancillary subjects like, “Rank the Top CEOs in Technology” and polls like “What’s the best app for photo sharing?”

Hellman says he is focused on creating a space where people can assemble and easily participate in discussion, which is why he considers his closest competitor Google+ and NOT something like GoPollGo. While right now the platform is doing that through its two apps, Ranker and Polls, Hellman eventually hopes to release additional apps like To-Do, “In the near future you’ll see us disrupting products including Skype, Survey Monkey, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer and many more.”

Hellman tells me that the fact that you can enter HALL.com frictionlessly, through Facebook Connect, without having to register or create a group is what differentiates it from other services that offer similar products, “The problem we solve is collecting group intelligence … You don’t have to create a group or project, add people, signup. We’ve eliminated all the pains to make it effortless to engage in the hall.”

A week after receiving the funding, Hellman hired,”two of the smartest engineers [he's] ever worked with.” Many more apps that effortlessly collect intelligence are in the platform’s future.

We already know that YouTube is seeing 3 billion videos viewed per day day, but now the online video giant is now seeing a whopping 800 million people per month visiting the site, Google revealed in its third-quarter earnings report last week. And today, YouTube is also announcing the ability to sell merchandise, tickets and more via the site.

Through a feature called the Merch Store, YouTube partners will be able to sell artist merchandise, digital downloads, concert tickets and other experiences to fans and visitors. YouTube has partnered with a number of companies to launch these stores. Topspin is helping power merchandise sales, concert tickets and experiences; SongKick will help sell tickets for concerts; and iTunes and Amazon will power transactions for music downloads.

YouTube says be rolling out the Merch Store to music partners globally over the coming weeks. YouTube declined to reveal the specific nature of the financial split for these sales, but did say that the site takes a small percentage of sales just to cover costs. However, the artist gets the same revenue no matter if they go through the Merch Store or through the affiliate on other channels.

The ability to add merchandise sales, ticket sales, digital downloads and more to an artists YouTube site definitely gives these sites more of an engaging presence for artists with their fans. These destinations will now become more than just a way to discover music videos, but also a way to transact business and actually see the artist and buy their works.

Looking over the web and especially the blogosphere over the past couple of days, it seems there is only one thing everyone wants to talk about: Siri. With the iPhone 4S now in millions of peoples’ hands, as expected, it’s clearly the stand-out feature of the device.

But wait. Voice technology has been around for a long time. Or, as one TechCrunch commenter succinctly put it on Erick’s video demo post of Siri: “4 year old software, 8 year old technology.” This recalls one of my favorite aspects of tech blogging. You write about something, then everyone and their mother rushes out to yell something along the lines of “OLD!”. Or, even better, competitors trip over themselves to yell “FIRST!”. So if the stuff Siri is doing is old, and if others did do it FIRST, then why is everyone so damn excited about the feature?

There are a few reasons. But the simplest answer is one that has played out time and time again over the past several years: Apple did it right.

No, Apple is not the first to implement voice technology. Nor are they the first to do it on a phone. In fact, Siri isn’t even Apple’s first foray into voice controls. But their first attempt on the iPhone, quite frankly, sucked. It’s no surprise that no one used it. As for Siri, it’s a company that Apple acquired — they were actually doing some of the same things as a stand-alone third-party app previously. Credit Apple for having the vision and foresight to realize that their previous voice control offering wasn’t competitive, and that system-level integration of Siri into iOS could be magical.

What about Google? It’s true that they’ve been far ahead of Apple in the voice control space for years now. I recall being at an event that Google held in August 2010 in which they showed off some new voice functionality for Android. As I wrote at the time, “Google Unveils Awesomely Fast And Accurate Voice Actions For Android“. And that was true. At the time.

But Google failed on a few fronts with this functionality. First of all, while on paper and in staged demos Google’s technology looks great, they failed to make it compelling enough to entice everyday users to use it. They had a pre-defined set of instructions as to what you could say to get the system to work, and they were pretty rigid. By comparison, Apple placed an emphasis on natural language usage with Siri. There are a number of ways to say something to trigger a certain action. You don’t have to remember a set of commands.

Put another way, Google’s voice search and Siri may look comparable on paper. But in reality, one is something best used by a robot, the other is something best used by a human. And robots don’t buy phones — at least not yet.

In the bigger picture, this is something that Apple seems to understand time and time again that their rivals do not. Technology is an ever-important part of everyones’ lives, but the only way to make it truly accessible to the vast majority of users is to humanize it. That’s Siri. Google, Microsoft, etc — they all fail miserably at doing this.

I’m sure in a few weeks, we’re going to see Google come out and say, “wait, but look, we can do all of the stuff Siri can do too!” They’ll tweak their voice recognition to pick up more human phrases, etc. But it won’t matter. They already lost the mindshare battle. Yes, Android had better voice controls first, but if you ask anyone on the street right now which is the phone with the awesome voice controls, they’ll tell you it’s the iPhone.

The funny thing is that while Apple are normally brilliant marketers in this regard, they’re actually holding back on Siri right now. Why? Because they consider the product to still be in “beta”. And while every Google product starts in beta, it’s not a tag Apple takes lightly. Talking with them leading up to the launch, they clearly feel that Siri as it stands right now, while a great first step, is nowhere near where they want it to be. It may take six months to get there. It may take a year. But when Apple does get it to where they feel it’s ready, I bet we’ll see a massive marketing push. And we may even see it come to other devices at that point.

Earlier today, Search Engine Land did a nice side-by-side comparison of Siri versus Google voice actions. Again, on paper, they’re similar, but in reality, they’re far apart right now. But the more interesting aspect of the piece to me was when author Greg Sterling goes against the this-will-kill-Google early reactions and notes that Siri should lead to even more Google searches. I totally agree. For now.

But again, this is a beta product. Does anyone really think Apple isn’t going to work quickly to integrate it with other data partners? Imagine it tied to Quora. Imagine it tied to Twitter (and how is it not already?!). Imagine it tied to Foursquare. Imagine it tied to… Facebook. If and when that happens, Google will have a very legitimate reason to be concerned.

Right now, Google is a middle man between us and information. And we love Google for it. There’s simply too much information out there for anyone to find by themselves. There needs to be a middle man. We need Google. Apple has been hinting for a while that mobile applications could change this game. But apps are just a new, perhaps more accesible wrapper of information. There still needs to be a search mechanism powering the discovery of information — that’s why everyone keeps insisting that Apple will eventually get into the search engine business.

Well they have. But not in the way that everyone was thinking. Siri is their entry point. Again, it’s a small step right now, but it has the potential to be massive. (Perhaps the more pressing question: is Apple okay relying heavily on a third party, Nuance, for what may become a core component of their stack?)

And that’s another fundamental reason why people are so excited by Siri where they aren’t by Google voice search. Google voice search, like basically every Google product, is ultimately a way to drive more Google searches. It’s just a new layer. Even if people don’t fully understand that, they sense that it doesn’t point to something totally new. Siri does point to something totally new. With it, Apple wants to change the information search and creation paradigm. It’s an evolution powered by mobile and a new, more powerful input: voice.

This is a vision that has been 24 years in the making at Apple. The video below first re-surfaced around the launch of the iPad. “Apple envisioned their tablet 20+ years ago!,” everyone yelled. But at the time, everyone overlooked the arguably more powerful aspect: natural language voice interaction. Apple was quietly working on that too. And now it’s here. Heralding the future.

Editor’s note: Contributor Dan Kaplan leads Product Marketing for Twilio and writes occasionally about the extrapolation of the present into the future.

With the rise of Google+, the decrease in controversial posting activity by famous tech people and the allure of other shiny new things, the majority of tech press has turned the focus of their gazes away from Quora, my favorite startup of 2010.

Well now that Apple has gone and integrated the most sophisticated piece of AI to ever to see the light of the consumer market into its iPhone 4S, I thought it was time to brush some dirt off of Quora’s shoulder and shine a light on what the future of the company could hold.

What most people who don’t get Quora miss when they write it off as “another Q&A site” (or whatever it is they say then they write it off) is this: When they first launched Quora in the Fall of 2009, Quora’s founders and their first hire—designer Rebekah Cox—created the core of the most impressive “subjective knowledge extraction” machine ever constructed. (Yes, Wikipedia deserves its credit as the first juggernaut of this space, but Quora is positioned to eventually seize its mantle. Meanwhile, you could argue that the whole internet is the most impressive subjective knowledge extraction technology ever constructed, but that’s just semantics).

By combining an answer voting mechanism and a reward addiction loop (upvotes are crack) with a strict identity requirement and a one-to-many follower model, Quora started solving the problem of extracting high-quality experiential knowledge out of humanity’s collective head and getting it into structured form on the internet. What’s more, Quora is also using humanity’s collective wisdom to rank it.

With this engine, Quora is building a database of human experience that could eventually contain the answers to a lot of questions people carrying the iPhones of the future might have.

Which brings me back to Siri.

For those of you who haven’t thought through it yet or haven’t played with the iPhone 4S, Siri is a game-changing technology: The thing knows how to translate the garble of human language into targeted API calls that subsequently pull out the correct information from a potentially ever-expanding set of databases (assuming that Apple one day integrates other databases into Siri, which I’m confident it will). The main thing standing between Siri and the best answer for our likely questions is that the database that contains these answers is still a work in progress.

That work in progress is Quora, which is probably why I heard the rumor that some massive search and advertising company that shall go unnamed until the next paragraph allegedly offered to pay upwards of $1B to acquire it.

If that rumor is true, it means that Google looked at Quora and understood the magnitude of the threat. If it’s not true, it means someone making high-level strategic decisions at Google is not paying attention. As I wrote in a post about Quora and Google in March:

Consider an internet on which the best answers to the majority of our queries come not from the vast, increasingly noisy expanses of the world-wide-web but from the concentrated knowledge and experience of its most articulate experts. Here, you no longer filter through 10 blue links (or hundreds) to find what you seek; you simply input your query and are delivered the top response. Should you find yourself asking a question no one has asked before, you merely add it to the stream, where it makes its way to the people who can answer it best.

Take Siri as the primary interface for these queries and that just about wraps it up: If Quora’s brilliant team successfully navigates the chasm between its passionate early adopters and the rest of the articulate set, their company could eventually, along with Siri, become an existential danger to the core of Google’s business.

Editor’s Note: Brenden Mulligan is an entrepreneur who created Onesheet, ArtistData, MorningPics, and PhotoPile. He’s an mentor for 500 Startups, Advise.me and several startups. You can find him on Twitter at @bmull and blogging at Starting Up.

There has been a reoccurring theme on my mind recently as I’ve advised startups on areas of focus. It revolves around the goal of reducing friction.

Reduced friction in a product leads to less user frustration, high conversion, and overall user happiness. I’d like to use a few examples to illustrate what I mean.

Taxis / Uber

Let’s start with Uber, the startup that lets you order a black car from your mobile phone in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Chicago, and a growing list of cities. Because I know the team, I’ve been following this startup since they launched. I actually took an Uber car to celebrate selling my first startup during one of their first weeks in beta.

When I first heard about the service, I focused on the luxury aspect of traveling in a black town car with a private driver. Who wouldn’t? It’s in their tagline (“Everyone’s Private Driver”) and it sounds awesome. But after my first Uber experience, I found out that while nice, the luxury component is strangely unimportant compared to their much bigger function of reducing the friction of getting a ride somewhere.

Let me elaborate. Friction points are italicized.

Here is generally what you need to do to get a cab:

• Find a Car: Stand on the street waving at taxis as they drive by, hoping one stops (this can take a long time in SF), or call for one, which usually takes 15-30 minutes to arrive.
• Set Destination: Tell the driver where you are going.
• Ride: Many taxis aren’t the most peaceful drivers.
• Pay: Take out your wallet and pay with cash (or credit card if they accept it – many don’t).
• Tip: Calculate a tip to add to the fare.

Here is the Uber experience:

• Find a Car: Open app and hit Pick Me Up. The car usually arrives within 10 minutes, sometimes within 5.
• Set Destination: Tell the driver where you are going (although you can set this ahead of time)
• Ride: Almost always a quiet, peaceful experience.
• Pay: Your credit card is charged automatically.
• Tip: Tip is calculated for you and included in fare.

Uber has reduced all the friction. What was a tedious process before is a seamless, pleasurable interaction. The most important thing Uber provides its users is that frictionless experience. The fact that it’s a black car means it’s generally an aesthetically nicer experience (and with SF Taxis, that can make a big difference), but that’s a small detail compared to the other benefits of using the service.

Zipcar / GetAround

A lot of people are familiar with Zipcar. It’s pretty simple. There are a bunch of Zipcar-owned cars around the city that members can rent on an hourly basis. All reservations are done through their website.

GetAround is a new startup taking on Zipcar by altering the model. Instead of GetAround purchasing a lot of inventory (cars), they built a marketplace for car-owners to list their own vehicles for other people to rent. I love the idea, and so do thousands of car owners looking to make money from their unused cars. The company won best startup at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC and since then has been well funded. I have used the service frequently. I love what they’re doing and think they’re going to build a great company.

However, they face a serious challenge. Zipcar owns its inventory, so they have more control of the friction in the experience:

• Search: Search Zipcar.com
• Reserve: Click on an available car and it’s instantly reserved.
• Get Keys: Unlock with your Zipcar Card
• Find Car: Go to the dedicated Zipcar parking spot
• Drive
• Add Gas: If less than 1/4 tank is left, use provided gas card to fill up tank. Otherwise, just return the car.
• Return Car: Park car in reserved parking space
• Lock and Return Key: Lock with card and walk away

There isn’t really a lot of friction there. Now let’s look at that experience with GetAround:

• Search: Search GetAround.com
• Reserve: Since the cars are personal property, car availability isn’t guaranteed, so this turns to two steps.
• Request several potential rentals.
• Wait to hear from an owner.
• If an owner replies, your booking is reserved. If not, repeat search.
• Get Keys: You can unlock some cars with the mobile app. Most, however, you need to set up a time to exchange the key in person with the owner.
• Find Car: Since GetAround owners don’t necessarily have dedicated parking spots, the car’s location varies, so you need to ask the owner where it is. Sometimes the answer resembles “On 27th between Guerrero and Dolores”.
• Drive
• Add Gas: Before returning every rental, the gas needs to be filled up to where it was at the beginning of the rental, which you pay for. So you need to remember the initial level and try to add just enough gas to return it to that level.
• Return Car: If there’s not a reserved spot, you need to find a place to park it. If this takes longer than expected, you might be late returning it.
• Lock and Return Key: Coordinate with the owner how to return the key and tell them where their car is parked.

Wow. That’s a lot more friction.

Again, I love GetAround, and their team is more aware of these issues than anyone. I’m 100% confident that as they go, they’ll iron this stuff out, just as Zipcar ironed out all the challenges they faced at the beginning. The friction issues GetAround faces are a result of the fact that Zipcar bought cars, while GetAround buys bandwidth. This initial disadvantage will make the company much more nimble and scalable long term.

I think the key to reducing friction quickly is to incentivizing the car owners to reduce the friction points. Give owners the option to guarantee their schedule, so cars can be booked immediately. Push them to install the CarKit, (the device that lets the renter locate and unlock the car from their smartphone). Then, when owners do these things, GetAround should give them a bigger percentage of the rental fee or prioritize those cars in search results. These owner will get more rentals and make more money. Over time, as users choose these cars, other owners will need to add these options to compete in the marketplace, and friction starts to disappear.

Airbnb / Kayak

Even successful startups still work every day on reducing friction. Let’s quickly compare Kayak and Airbnb.

Kayak:

• Search: Search Kayak.com and only available hotels appear.
• Confirmation: You can make a reservation instantly on the hotel website
• Arrival: You go to the front desk, get your key, and go to your room.
• Checkout: You leave your room.

Airbnb:

• Search: Search Airbnb.com and get a list of properties, some available, some booked (since the owners don’t keep their schedules up to date).
• Confirmation: Many times, owner writes back saying the calendar wasn’t updated and you need to search again.
• Arrival: You need to arrange a time to meet to get the key, sign a small contract, etc.
• Checkout: Most of my experiences, you can just leave the key and go.

A lot of times, finding an Airbnb accommodation is a bigger hassle than a booking hotel. But they’ve managed to build a $1 billion company, and continually works to make the process seamless and frictionless. And it’s getting better and better.

So what does all this mean?

Friction is important to consider when creating a product. If your users feel friction using or signing up for your service, you have a problem. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but you should do everything in your power to remove as much friction as possible. And you should pay attention to this constantly as your product and service grow.

When you examine your product, where are the friction points? Are you letting users sign up with Twitter/Facebook, or do they need to register separately? Are you opening popups to get their attention instead of letting them continue on the site? Are you requiring information you don’t need?

Reduce friction, increase happiness.

Excerpt image courtesy of Ian Hampton

Facebook has filed for a trademark on the usage of “Facebook” on business cards and, more curiously, “non-magnetically encoded” ID cards among other things. If granted the trademark would protect using the word Facebook in the specified formats, not any actual invention.

So what if Facebook just wants to stop people from making fake Facebook business cards? Well, it seems like this trademark would cover that and a whole lot more including “business card and identity card design services,” “printing services” and the ominous, “facilitating social and business networking through the provision of data for use on its own business and identity cards.”

It also looks like the trademark would cover QR code and NFC/RFID uses — which work through magnetic induction, NOT the aforementioned magnetic encoding —  much like the Presence cards and photobooths that allowed you to upload and tag photos at F8 (see left).

It’s easy to envision some sort of master Facebook plan where Facebook would give users a cheap physical ID that could be read by smart readers and used for a variety of practical purposes. When asked, people familiar with the Facebook matter had no clue as to whether this was actually in the works. It’s also unclear how often companies like Facebook tradem